You should speak today, she says, nodding. That mannequin was the beginning.
He wasn’t supposed to die.
He wasn’t supposed to die in a hospital, she says. That’s true.
You shouldn’t have thrown him away.
That’s a different story.
Maybe the unfinished story is the story.
We hold the funeral at the Sands Club, in the town of Lawrence, Long Island, where my father had his senior prom. Just last month, he told me about this place, the music—Be my little baby—the arm wrestling and bottle fights in the parking lot. I’ll know it when I’m going to die.
I’m buzzed on the cinnamon whiskey my brothers and I shared behind the stage curtain. My thumbnail is pressing moons into my lei orchids as people speak. I take inventory of who shows up—my father’s doormen and chauffeurs, ex-business partners, Clarissa—as I hear Gambling Man / Mad Man / Father / always the Jokes / Even Money from the microphone. I sit on my hands. I chew on my hair. Dad, you would have liked this crowd. Everyone’s dressed sharp for you. I count chandeliers. I think about sea monkeys and those mannequin legs in the corner of our first apartment and Dai Vernon shuffling cards, the weather. Cheated on a math test / his First Wife / because that’s how it Was in the Army / Ha Ha Ha Ha! / How he did it / Bet on Life / thought Invincible. I think about the carpet of this place and my shoes are too fucking tight and that little red wagon I had as a kid, how he’d helped me paint it blue and we glued it all over with cotton balls until it was a Time Machine, and lobsters, the way he used to bring them home on Sundays, that was before I really knew my dad, when he was just a man who carried thrashing paper bags on his shoulders, when he was just a man who said, I caught us some lobsters, and I smashed them and I ate them.
Photographs are projected to the song “Free Bird.” A tissue box is passed down our row. I don’t know when the slideshow started, but it’s ending. Dad, you loved this part of the song. You pumped the gas and brake pedals of your convertible in time with this guitar solo until my seatbelt locked and dug into my shoulder and the whole thing made me sick. The sun is in your eyes. There we are.
We release my father’s ashes the next day.
WINTER, 1972
KAILUA, OAHU, HAWAI‘I
See the encyclopedia over my grandfather’s knee, in the study of their house, his finger finding the golden notch of the letter F. My mother, Tao, and the boys sitting in a semicircle at my grandfather’s feet. Florida, he says. He stretches the syllables as if it’s a healing word. Florida—it’s on the Mainland. It looks like a sock, or a gun maybe. He points to the state on a map. In Florida, people plug straws right into oranges, and everyone has blonde hair, and alligators sunbathe, and kids wear shoes to school.
Shoes to school? My mother cannot believe this. She will remember it as long as she lives: shoes to school. What would it be like on the Mainland, away from Tūtū, away from Paulele Street, Hanauma Bay, the sweet thick pull of haupia between her teeth? Yes, she has always been curious about life somewhere else, but what gods or friends would she have in this Florida?
Why are we leaving? Tao wants to know, but there is no answer.
Yeah, why? asks my mother. She has a better chance.
We leave next week, says my grandfather, so you’ll need to pack your things and start cleaning.
My Grandma Mei Mei stands in the corner of the room. She considers this conversation, this rush. Her husband—her first love, ulua—who had picked her up from the soda stand at the beach. She worked there, watched old mokes move chess pieces in the trade winds. One day, Al showed up. A Native Hawaiian man, through and through; he was gentle, akamai, older, a talker. Always in a sailor’s cap, he was worldly, and so she said yes, and so she agreed, and so she married him three days after her sixteenth birthday. They exchanged vows at the Mormon Church where they would soon work—he, as a priest, and she, a Sunday school teacher. Yes, she loved this man. In this part of the story, she still does.
But here’s the first moment Mei Mei questions her husband: His body leaning forward in the living room chair—this encyclopedia, open on his lap—Florida.
The diamond ring. She knows.
Al sold jewels to Hawaiian retailers out of the trunk of his Lincoln. Pink coral carefully arranged in velvet boxes—so expensive kine—all of it shipped from the Mainland. He had mentioned the ring when it went missing from his collection last month, an emphasis on his words: Missing. The diamond ring has gone Missing. She had noticed other leftover stock that came home with him lately—worthless, not for sale—out of their cases. But the diamond ring, she’d remembered that most. The value of it; he was too careful with the words. His wife had to know the exact time and day it happened, his pockets and drawers flipped, emptied—the diamond ring has gone missing, he’d repeated.
That red boat appeared two days later.
Yes, she knows why it’s time to go.
Al and Mei Mei, 1960
WINTER, 2015
VOORHEESVILLE, NEW YORK
Here’s what happens after death: Every object changes shape. All the little objects of hope, innocuous, gentle things: the bottles of Diet Coke saved for when he would get better, the stacks of New York Posts, the wedges of pineapple, the warmer socks, the protein powders, the Chinese herbs, the electro-acupuncture pens, the pictures—all the pictures, removed and naked of their frames, brighter in the corners, the pictures, gum-tacked to the hospital bed for when he would remember, he would, he would—these objects, every last one of them, become the most unbearable of all, the most acutely garish, the splintered underside of the table on which you have tried to smoothly splay out the map of your new life without this person, whom you just so happen to love most.
I am spending the holidays with Hannah and her family before I leave for New Hampshire. Someone else’s family, I repeat, because your father is dead. This year, there will be no Hanukkah candles, no botched Hebrew prayers, no wads of cash, no marathon of Michael Corleone. Dead.
Hannah is gentle with me, and sometimes I wish she were not so gentle. That’s the way other people have been treating me, the way they look at me as they quietly stir their coffee spoons, the way they creep around the facts. Hannah changes my clothes when I’ve been crying too hard to keep my balance. She pins my arms down when I have night terrors of tubes and machines, reminds me of where I am. When we have sex, I ask her to choke me. I want to hurt. I want flashes behind my eyes. We go on like this for weeks.
On Christmas Eve day, Hannah tacks up the mares in her yard and wraps my calves with horse polos. She weaves her hands together for my knee, lifting me into the saddle.
Up, up. Let’s move, she says.
Hannah, who brought me back to horses. Hannah, who kissed me for an hour straight the first time it happened—in a dark bar full of drag queens and popcorn, her palms cradling my face—the way she called me Thunder Snow.
We ride through the mountains of her hometown, she and I. We spend the day like this—the yellow, protracted light of a frozen noon. Cattails, swaying. It’s been fifty-two days, and this is the first time I feel like I might live.
The next morning, she kneels beside her family’s tree, handing over boxes of gifts, beautiful gifts, books and scarves and blenders and stockings full of gifts. Pity gifts, I think. She keeps her arm wrapped around me as I open each one, kissing the temple of my head. It makes me sad—the degree of love I feel for her, the lifesaving power of this purity of purpose—now that I know what it feels like to lose.
Hannah’s mother hands me a box no bigger than a diary. I peel open the paper. A bright-green DNA test. You mentioned you wanted one, she says. Remember? At the funeral.
For the family tree, yes, I say. I try to smile. Thanks.
I stack the gifts in my arms and totter up the stairs to Hannah’s bedroom. I clack the blinds closed.
I am twelve years old on Christmas morning in Las Vegas. My father takes me, my mother, and the boys to Denny’s, where he asks for
his eggs runny—extra rye. He slides a one-hundred-dollar-bill tip to our waitress, something he will make a tradition, and the woman thanks us, wipes her cheeks, holds the bill up to the light of the window to make sure it’s real.
Here is a Hawaiian legend once told to me:
Sometimes the dead don’t want to be dead. Sometimes souls go flitting around in the air, particles of light, drifting, until a mortal crams the soul back inside its body. The kino wailua, or spirits, can be spotted anywhere, the face of a rock, a mountainside—a Hawaiian should always look for facial features. It is the mortal’s job to perform the kāpuku, or resuscitation process. It is our duty to sneak the soul beneath the toenail of a body, let the body rise up like a newly watered plant.
WINTER–SPRING, 1972
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
In Los Angeles, Mei Mei and Al use the cash from a second mortgage to purchase a motor home. The family will drive for the rest of the school year, five months on the road, visiting every state capital, billboard attraction, the Petrified Forest, the children’s first snow. My mother and her siblings are homeschooled by Mei Mei. They visit the Grand Canyon, the gaping marble monuments of Washington, D.C., badlands of red, and Mei Mei uses the encyclopedias to tell them all about it. State bird, state fruit, state capital, state terrain—You must learn about your world. There is no plan, no exact destination. As long as they stay on the move.
Where you headed? a man at a gas station in Memphis asks one night. Moving house like that, all those kids.
Florida, says my grandfather.
Nice ’n’ sunny. Where ’bouts? asks the man.
My grandfather looks at Mei Mei as if she might have the answer, as if she’d have the perfect city in mind, a star penned to the map. He had never thought of it before this moment, no, all he knew was far away. All he knew was Florida.
What do you recommend? asks my grandfather. You have a favorite place down there?
This stranger takes a long, hard look at my grandfather. When you get there, just keep driving south, he says. Go far enough ’n’ you’ll disappear.
SUMMER, 1999
BOCA RATON, FLORIDA
I’m watching the Miss Florida pageant on television with my mother and Misty. In one week, I’ll turn eleven. We are judging the contestants—Misty and I—in our own point system of colored penciled tallies pressed into legal pads. We give each girl a score for every round of the pageant, but we also ask our own questions: Does the contestant seem smart? Does the contestant seem funny? Does the contestant seem like she would be nice to dogs? Would the contestant be our friend, or enemy? Does the contestant look like either one of us? If given the choice, would we choose to swap lives with the contestant forever?
I wouldn’t put your money against me, says my mother, because today is July 11.
My mother’s favorite number combination is 7-11. She has always played it on the roulette tables in Vegas, punched it in for alarm and banking passcodes, sworn by the magic of 7:11 on a clock. When these three numbers are arranged in this order, they become charged, lucky. Contestant number two is my favorite of the beauty queens. I have her name written at the top of my pageant chart—Marjorie, #2, Hollywood—but Misty likes a blonde flute player from Miami Lakes. We bet our allowance money on the girls—usually ten dollars.
Here’s why I’m invested: My cousin Teagan is a pageant girl. Chinese and Hawaiian, like me. She’s three years older and we look alike in the eyes, but Teagan’s hair is long, her bangs trimmed ruler straight. Her adult teeth grew in perfectly and her cheeks shine like Baoding balls on the covers of magazines. In an ad for J. C. Penney, Teagan swings on a hammock with three other kids. She is the thirteen-year-old ethnic friend, licking chocolate cake from the prongs of a big fork, and this ad is enlarged on poster board in the corner of her room. Whenever I sleep over, I fall asleep staring at her.
Contestant number two looks related to Teagan, I say.
She’s got a good walk, says my mother. Look at her go.
My mother, too, was once a model. After high school. She tells us about it right now, in this living room, how she modeled clothing through the lobbies of Waikiki beach hotels, tying and untying tropical wraps around her hips for haole men.
Now, she catwalks in her pajamas across the living room steady, open-lipped. She pushes her palms into her hips, each foot landing directly in front of the other. It looks a bit like hula—this grace, the exact point of her toes—before she gets to the kitchen counter, strikes a pose looking left, then right, and marches her way back to the couch.
Still got it?
How could you be a model when you’re a mom? asks Misty.
You’re even better than Contestant number two, I say.
We watch the contestants on television strut through several more rounds. Go, Hapa Haole, Go! I scream. I wonder if my mother once looked like Marjorie, number two, from Hollywood, if she once dreamed of being this very girl—her butter-colored bikini, her braid.
Contestant number two does not win the crown. Instead, she hugs the two contestants by her side, mouths Good luck! before smiling and waving her way offstage.
Shocker, says my mother. Imagine that. A world that chooses white girls!
I guess your number’s off, I say.
No, it’s just that Miss USA could never be a mixy mutt, says Misty. She says this sweetly. She crosses out Contestant number two on her chart.
Misty’s flute player does not win either. None of us take the cash.
The world is so unfair, I say.
More than you know, says my mother.
1973–1974
PLANTATION, FLORIDA
My mother is wearing shoes to her first day of public school. Mary Janes, to be exact, with high-ribbed socks, a pale-green baby doll dress, and a lacy beige bib tucked over her chest. The Mainland. This school is all indoors. There are no picnics outside, no bathing suits in sight. She is the malihini in these halls, new blood, and everyone takes notice. The other students wear Peanut bell-bottoms, three buttons at the crotch, their stomachs bare and oiled. Their hair shines the color of driftwood. For the first time in her life, nobody looks like my mother.
A boy wads a spitball and pushes it into a straw. He shoots it at her. My mother spins in circles, rubbing her forehead, her dress fanning out.
Fucking Chink, says the boy, though my mother does not know what this means, and her parents do not tell her.
They called me that, too, I tell her now. Growing up.
My mother laughs. Of course they did. Almost thirty years, and they can’t think of something better.
She meets him in her science class. Let’s call him Samuel. My mother has always looked forward to science class—the gurgling chemicals, the slick cool of test tubes, her teacher, Mr. Jackson, who looks like the Michael Jackson if you squint hard enough—but now science is her absolute favorite subject since Samuel came around. He sits behind her, and he stinks of Marlboros and pot. A haole boy with blonde hair in long waves—sometimes she swears she can feel him breathing on her shoulders.
Samuel wears rock T-shirts torn at the stomach. Bare knees through the tears of his jeans. And his eyes, seriously, his eyes, she says, can turn a girl into a puddle. She tells Carla this, the only girl who will talk to her, her lab partner. Do you think he would ever …?
He’s from the other side of the parking lot, she says. You’re so bad!
It’s true—there are two sides of the school parking lot. On one side, Ned Cohen and the rest of the baseball team, the football team, their rows of matching jackets, plaids and collars, shining bowls of hair, arms hooked around calendar girls. They lean back on the hoods of their cars, flared khakis crossed at the knees, none of them ever talking very much.
On the other side, the hippies. The Afros. The braids. Radios spun up. Tongues on necks. This is where Samuel has been smoking his cigarettes before and after classes, where he stubs them out in meticulous piles, the place from which he has been watching my mother
for months—the way her hair flicks over her shoulders, her whinny laugh—waiting for her.
Carla scratches something into her notebook. Mr. Jackson is talking about the elegance of the periodic table when the paper is balled up, passed back and then forward, back and forward, until my mother receives it on her desk, smooths out the crinkles, squints at the smeared graphite shine of words.
Would you ever go out with Loki? Yes or No.
Samuel did not circle either word. Instead, he has written Sure.
My mother presses her hands into the desk until there’s a pale halo of steam.
Have you heard about the shark movie with lines wrapped around the plaza? Samuel asks my mother. I imagine it was he who’d suggested it; my mother is afraid of sharks. The two of them are sitting on a bridge walkway, legs dangling.
It’s impossible to get in.
My sister and I can get into any movie, any time, says my mother. We know Ronald, the ticket guy. We’re his favorites.
The local movie theater exists inside a strip mall nearby, next door to a bookstore with carts of shriveled pages. My mother spends her summer days reading through them all, looking for the sexiest scenes. Recently, she opened up to a page describing a woman making love to a snake. She squeezed the book between her forearms, spreading the pages just enough to read the scene in that dark, electric inch.
But really, it’s the movie theater that matters most to my mother. How they take her away to that numbing realm outside herself, that Other Place that she will return to, in different ways, for the rest of her life. Sometimes Ronald the ticket man will let my mother stay inside for the entire day, where she’ll watch and rewatch the same scenes, hum along to the same score, the same crescendos, mouthing each word of dialogue until the words sound like something she might say.
My mother, Samuel, Tao, and her own Boy decide to try the movie. It’s Friday night, and it’s true—the line for Jaws snakes around the parking lot. My mother and her sister pull their boys by the belt loops, past the crowds of smoke and denim, all the way to Ronald. Ronald’s wearing his usual blue Adidas sneakers and sagging T-shirt. He pulls my mother and Tao in for a hug—My girls—and tilts his head to signal them in.
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls Page 20
