Paradise Park

by Allegra Goodman

  Kekui’s sister Lani always wore at least a bathing suit, and most often a Hawaiian-style pareo wrapped around her and tied at the waist. She had thick hair she wore loose and purposely roughed up when she brushed it, because she liked it to look thick and Hawaiian, being so proud of her heritage. A lot of the reason she and Joseph had come out to Molokai in the first place was to live a purer Hawaiian life, in nature, without having to deal with haole civilization. She and Joseph were both half Hawaiian, and since their culture was in danger, they wanted to raise their kids to know who they were. When I first met them they had two little ones, and then the next year they had a third, and they had natural births every time. Lani birthed all her kids at home—actually outside. Those kids had the longest, most poetic names I’d ever heard, but, of course, they went by nicknames. The youngest baby was called Kananipuamaeole, which meant beautiful flower of something or other. But she went by Kanani.

  Since Lani and Joseph were trying to raise their kids pure, I was worried at first about what they’d think of me, but actually they didn’t mind my living with Kekui so much, since we weren’t having children or anything, and I used to baby-sit for them, and Kekui and I both tended the crops, so they liked having us help out. The area was pretty sparse as far as people went, and this was on an island that was rural to begin with—a place where if you were running for public office a good campaign tactic would be to paint your name on the side of a cow.

  The strings of my guitar rusted out so badly I couldn’t play anymore, and there wasn’t anyplace to get new strings. I missed playing, but for music we could always sing. On Sundays we sang hymns, which Kekui taught me, like “We Gather Together,” and other nights we’d sit back with Joseph and Lani, who had a lovely alto. Just hymns or rounds or newish local music, like “Brown Eyes” or sometimes Peter, Paul and Mary, like “Puff the Magic Dragon” or old songs such as “Good Night Irene,” in harmony like the Weavers. Joseph didn’t sing, but he beat time, clapping. Our music was our voices, and our hands and feet, and at night the rain concertizing on our metal roof. Kekui and I would lie awake listening, and the rain would be drumming and thrumming, and nothing was better—unless the rain blew so hard it came in those cracks between the sheet metal and the walls and we got wet. Sleeping in wet sleeping bags tended to ruin the experience.

  We had no clocks, just a radio that was broken half the time. I still had Grandpa Irving’s watch, but I didn’t bother winding it. You could look around you and tell the time of day, and you didn’t have to be so precise, making hours and fractions of hours. You could take your mornings and your afternoons and nights all in one piece. Apart from Lani’s Bible, the only book we had was my Norton anthology, which got wet and swelled up so it wouldn’t close, and its thin white pages turned puffy. I skipped around among all the authors, but the one I loved was John Keats. His writings were so vivid to me, the “Nightingale” and the “Urn.” What blew my mind was John Keats had created all this poetry when he was my age, and then he died, and his whole voice was lost to the world like Buddy Holly, and Richie Valens and the Big Bopper. He was just an unbelievable talent. I used to walk around with his lines humming in my head, like “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” I used to say to Kekui, “Where did he get the gift?” We’d be sitting in our rusty old lawn chairs, which we dragged outside in the afternoons, and I’d have my book open on my lap and I would say, “Oh, my God!”

  “What?” Kekui would ask.

  “Oh, my God, listen!

  And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,

  In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,

  While he from forth the closet brought a heap

  Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;

  With jellies soother than the creamy curd,

  And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;

  Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d

  From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,

  From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.

  “Doesn’t that make you hungry?”

  The Eve of St. Agnes. I used to read it all the time. The page got ripped. I used to walk around chanting it: “St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!” That poem had everything I didn’t have out there on Molokai, not that I missed it in real life, but I got a charge from the idea of those things: bitter chills, and gargoyles, and all this repressed sensuality. Repression was something I was definitely lacking. And the words just made my mouth water. I mean, lucent syrops! Kekui didn’t really see it, though. Poetry wasn’t his thing. If he were hungry he’d rather do something about it.

  In a lot of ways our life was what I would define as paradisiacal. There wasn’t even a single serpent, because there are no snakes on Molokai or on any of the Hawaiian Islands. There was just one thing. One bad thing. That was Joseph’s gun. I was against having a weapon from the beginning, but there wasn’t any choice. Every once in a while, even though we were remote, people would come through and try to steal from us. We actually had a lot of money growing there in those green plants.

  I hated that shotgun. There was a special box for it under the floorboards in the field station, and I always stepped over that spot on the floor, like I was superstitious. It just seemed like an evil thing to me, harboring a firearm. I mean, there were some things that were illegal, like growing pakalolo, and homesteading on government lands, and being illegal wasn’t bad, and a lot of times it was good, since laws were all about artificial rules being imposed on people’s freedoms, and imperialist feds appropriating the Hawaiian way of life and locking people into lot lines. But then there were some things that were actually just wrong, like weapons. I just felt people should live and let live, so having a gun in the house alarmed me, especially since our lifestyle was otherwise so edenic, and in general we had such a good time. Whenever Kekui or Joseph had to go out and chase someone off the land, usually just a lost hiker, and they had to intimidate these people and act like they were trespassing onto our property, I got upset. I didn’t want there to be any property at all or any ownership getting in the way. I didn’t even want the money for our crops, I wished we could be subsistence farmers and wouldn’t need a distributor at all—but wishing didn’t change anything. We lived a pastoral life with capitalist interruptions.

  We were in our second year out there when the intruders got to be more of a problem. One morning when Kekui and I got up we went out to one of the patches and found all our plants stripped down, and the leaves stolen. They were so badly trampled I thought at first some animals had got into them, but Kekui said no, it was people. We were just shocked. It was like the plants had been raped. Some had been brutalized so badly that their main stems were broken. Kekui and Joseph started taking turns watching at night. Kekui would go out on patrol with the heavy-duty emergency flashlight and the gun and I would lie awake inside. I couldn’t sleep, I was so nervous. I felt like we were all turning into members of the police state we were supposedly here to get away from! “Z, Y, X, W, V, U, T,” I recited in my bed. That was a trick my brother had taught me when I was little. Sing the ABCs backwards if you’re trying to get to sleep. “S, R, Q, P, O, N, M, L.”

  I said to Kekui in the morning, “Can’t you stop all this guarding?”

  And he said, “Those folks’ll come back now they know where to get their stuff from.”

  And I said, “I feel like we’re turning into the whole system we were running away from.”

  But he said, “Eh, I wasn’t running away.”

  That hurt. Looking back, I can see Kekui was simply pointing out that ultimately, despite being his girlfriend, when you came down to it I was a white interloper trying to impose my pacifist ideology on him and his sister, when they, who were truly embattled, and truly endangered by my own dominant culture, did not have the luxury of giving up guns. And I guess he was suggesting that I should get real rather than continually try to turn our lives into a formal utopia that would have to be not only for things—like livin
g the mellow life—but also against things, e.g., violence. But at the time it just hurt.

  Life was better when Kekui and I didn’t reflect too much on the differences between us. Life was better when we just focused on the matters at hand, singing, sleeping, smoking, making love. Our tolerance for pleasure was really quite high. Our pleasure threshold was way up there.

  One day we were outside sitting in our chairs with a couple of joints. The sun was setting so the green forest was rosy and warm, and in my lap I had my book, so puffed out its pages were exploding all over my legs, and I was reading to myself this very sad yet lovely poem about getting high—“The Lotus-Eaters.” I was just feeling the words, just getting a little bit numb and feeling the syllables riding up inside of me, and repeating them to myself like they were a mantra: “Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below. Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.” And every time I said it I saw different things, like big white sheets blowing in the wind, and giant rolling pins beating the white sheets, and beaches foaming and panting to meet you.

  Night came, and I had to stop and put the book away because I couldn’t see. Still, for a while we sat in the warm darkness. You couldn’t help it, the way it melted around you—sweet and sticky like melted chocolate. Then all of a sudden we heard a noise. Footsteps. Breaking branches. Maybe the trespassers were coming back. Maybe even the police. Someone was moving out by our pakalolo patches. Kekui went and got the gun. He called, “Who’s there?”

  There was no answer.

  “Who’s there?” he called out again.

  Then out of the trees came Kekui’s sister Roslind, and her husband, Michael.

  Kekui threw down the gun. He said, “What you guys doing here?”

  They’d flown in and then taken the bus as far as the line went, which in those days was Kualapu’u. When the paved road ended, they’d hiked in, and we’d had rain, so they had to wade some muddy gullies where you never know when a flash flood might come up, just a wall of white water that can rise and carry anyone, crush you in an instant, or suck you all the way down to a roaring runoff stream and out to sea. But they’d made it out to Lani and Joseph’s place, and now to ours, and Roslind said, “Dad is dead.”

  NO one could take it in at first, and especially not Lani and Kekui, since their dad was such a young guy, only fifty-four. It was true he was diabetic and he had a heart condition, but he’d had all that for years. No one ever thought about him dying. I put my arms around Kekui. I tried to comfort him, but he shrugged me off. He wouldn’t even look at me, let alone touch me.

  Early the next morning we all washed ourselves in the stream. We brushed out our hair and we dressed in clean clothes, and the grownups put on sandals. And Joseph got our money, and we hiked all the way out to the road, which took half a day, and we got up to the dirt road, which was just a track cut from the velvety red earth, and we followed the road cleft out of the forest, so on either side you could see the banana plants and the tangled vines and the great trees sinking under the weight of all the greenery they carried. We each had a bag of some sort, and I had my backpack on my back, but since it was too much to carry, not my guitar, and we walked, this sad yet clean little procession, until we got to the paved asphalt. We took turns carrying the baby.

  We rode the bus into town, and then we waited for the bus out to what you would call a one-horse, or maybe single-engine, airport. No one was too surprised there in the terminal when Joseph went to the ticket counter and peeled off our fares from this wad of twenty-dollar bills. I guess they could see we were country people, so that was how we had to travel.

  THE next morning we were standing at the funeral service at Makiki Gospel. We were all gathered at the cemetery, and Kekui and his sisters and his brothers were the coffin bearers. The minister spoke and spoke, and Mr. Eldridge’s children lifted that coffin and eased it down gently into the freshly dug earth. It was baking hot, and there was hardly any breeze. I think it was the hottest fall day they’d had in years. But we stood there, it seemed like hours—all the relatives, and Mr. Eldridge’s descendants, eight children and fourteen grandchildren. In front of everyone, and not crying, probably just willing herself not to cry, stood Mrs. Eldridge—such a big woman, not fat, big like an opera singer, big like the photos of Princess Ruth when she sat at the Summer Palace on her throne.

  At the end of the service, when everyone else just about collapsed weeping and embracing and falling onto one another, Mrs. Eldridge still stood strong, and she lifted up all the grown children caving in on her, and she looked each one in the eye, from the oldest, who was named Minnie, down to the youngest, who was Kekui, and when she looked at Kekui she said the first words I’d heard her speak all day. “KK, you’re coming home.”

  “What?” he said.

  “Roslind and Michael have the back room, Minnie and her kids are in front, Earl and Matthew have Minnie’s room, Leilan and Mitchell are upstairs,” she said.

  Kekui just looked at her, just all hollowed out with grief and guilt.

  “We cleaned out your room,” Mrs. Eldridge told him.

  “Excuse me?” I ventured.

  “Keep quiet, girl,” she said, but she kept her eyes fixed on her son.

  In a funeral caravan we drove up to the Eldridges’ house in Aina Haina with its two plumeria trees in front. Mrs. Eldridge had six of her eight kids living in the house and, one way or another, a whole bunch of the grandchildren. There were add-ons in back of the house, and a second story above the garage. Mr. Eldridge had been a contractor. And there were something like seven cars in the driveway, plus a boat and a tour van. We sat down inside, everyone low from the funeral, not to mention bathed in sweat, and some of the babies were crying. Mrs. Eldridge took a couple of them on her knee. She looked around like she was ready to take everyone on her knee. But for what? To rock us? To hit us? “KK,” she said, “you’ve come back home to stay.”

  “Excuse me?” I began again. I was trying to be polite.

  “Quiet, girl. I have an application for you,” she told Kekui, and she reached down in front of her over the babies to the coffee table, and picked up a bunch of white forms. “West Oahu College,” she said. “I brought up all my children to go to college. Okay?”

  Kekui looked down totally crushed. His entire immediate family, which was at least forty people, was sitting there in his mom’s living room and out on the lanai. He couldn’t even look his mother in the eye.

  “Everyone in this family is a worker,” Mrs. Eldridge said. “You filling this out?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  She just waited.

  “Yeah,” he said to his own callused feet. “Goddammit, Kekui!” I burst out.

  Then Mrs. Eldridge turned on me. “Get your mouth out of my house,” she declared, standing up in her full dimensions. “Hippie girl, just ’cause you washed up here on Oahu you don’t need to come invading my family. Go back to where you started—California, England, Holland, or whatever nationality you are. And don’t you dare walk around taking the Lord’s name in vain blaspheming my husband’s funeral. Get your pakalolo face away or Earl’ll take his badge out and arrest you!”

  6

  Civilization

  I never got my guitar back. I used to dream about it lying there in the field station in the trees on Molokai. I dreamed termites were marching on the guitar case, chewing the black cardboard away. I dreamed mynahs came and plucked tufts of the guitar case lining, which was fake fur the color of papaya, and the birds carried off all the fur for their nests. Rats sniffed to see if the guitar was dead. They scrabbled over the top and thrummed the rusty strings.

  Kekui, however, was studying at West Oahu College and working nights as a fire-eater at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. He was busy being a father to his son—returning to his values he’d ditched two years before. I used to come sometimes to the Hilton to see him in his loincloth and grass anklets after his act, when he was packing up his jar of fire-retardant jelly and his three torches, w
hich he used to juggle when they were aflame. At first when I came by we’d have conversations and arguments, and sometimes tears. But even then we both knew, although it took us a few months to admit it, that this wasn’t a short visit, or even a couple of years at home for college; Kekui was home for good. And I missed him; it made me sad, because he had been my best friend. I was just a little bit hurt to realize that in the eyes of his family I had been his wild oats and his fling. Back there on Molokai I’d kind of assumed we’d been sowing our oats together, and flinging each other. But no. To his mother I’d just been a bad influence all along.

  Kekui was that one hundredth sheep returning to the fold, the one that everyone loved even more than the other ninety-nine. He had his whole life there around him, his mother and all his relatives and his church. He actually started a children’s choir there. He loved children. He ended up having two more sons by his new girlfriend. But as for me, not being a sheep from a fold, I came back to Corinne’s sofa. And I had my backpack, and my, by this time, kind of minimalist clothes, and my puffed-out book of English literature, and Grandpa’s silver watch, which I have to admit, more than once I thought about selling.

  After Corinne I stayed with Rich and his girlfriend, Kathryn, for a while. Then I came back to Corinne’s couch, and stayed so long, and lavished so much attention on the cat, that Rae accused me of driving a wedge between her and Jane, and Corinne said she threw up her hands. So I found a job at the concession stand at Sea Life Park, and moved back to the Y.

  Every morning I took the bus down the short gray freeway past Kahala and past Wailupe, just rattling down Kalanianiole Highway, on the left all the little valleys full of tract houses like ticks on the furry flanks of the volcano, and on the right, the ocean shining. I just stayed on the bus till I got all the way to Sea Life Park right on the rocks by the shore, with its open-air paths running past outdoor tanks, its seal pens, its pretend lagoon, where twice a day a local damsel in an aloha print skirt and bikini top paddled in a canoe to a cement-and-lava-rock island covered with sea grapes and exactly three coconut palms, so she could throw fish prizes to the dolphins when they did their synchronized swimming and leaping. I worked in a little store with a roof thatched, Hawaiian style, with pili grass, and I sold film and candy and killer-whale key chains, and various plastic windup toys and clear plastic snow globes, except these were tropical so they had glitter that swirled around miniature palm trees.