Comfort Woman (27 page)

I waited under the angels. In fat splendor, they lounged along the eaves of Reno's house in Kahala, peered over copper gutters turning green from rain and humidity, peeked out from behind marble columns imported from Italy. Toward the center of the courtyard, one of the heavenly imps—who Reno claims was modeled after her youngest grandson—frolicked in a fountain, spitting water at the koi that trembled at his feet.

I never pictured angels as carefree children, naked in their happiness. While my mother and I still lived in The Shacks, I had always imagined the angels in heaven as stern-faced men draped in beards and clothed in the voice of my father. In the dimness preceding sleep, they often visited me, looming over my bed to threaten me with the end of the world.

“Read this,” an angel would say, shoving a stone tablet into my face.

I would try to open my eyes wide, try to focus on the tablet that melted even as I tried to read it. “Aaagh,” I croaked, wanting to say something, anything, to delay heavenly retribution. But I was always too late, the tablet turning to water and the words hopping off the page like little black frogs before I could decipher even the first letter.

“Daddy, Daddy,” I would call out as my bed was ferried down the river toward hell. “Save me.” But the angel would only laugh, opening his mouth as wide as Saja's before a meal.

By my mother's stories, too, I knew angels sometimes came into the world as changelings: testing the worthiness of men's souls, they visited the world dressed in the skins of frogs, toads, and bums.

“Angels,” my mother explained, when I asked her whether angels were good or bad, “come to collect the dead, carrying them off to either heaven or hell. This is what your father told me: if they're good depends on whether you are good.” She stopped talking for a moment, considering, then added, “I have seen them, Beccah-chan. They are everywhere and could be anything, watching you, often disguised as the ugliest creatures on earth. If they ever catch the opportunity, angels will jump into the skin of humans, so remember to keep watch, keep track, take care. Never clip your nails at night. Burn the hair that falls from your head—don't leave any part of yourself laying around for an angel to absorb.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, sorry I had asked my mother anything. “You already told me.”

My mother cocked her eyebrows at me. “Beccah,” she said, “remember the Heavenly Toad.”

I was always reminded about the Heavenly Toad whenever I questioned my mother's wisdom, resisted her orders. “Tell your teachers to open all the north-facing windows,” my mother would say at the start of every school year, and when I would balk, she'd add: “Remember the Heavenly Toad.” Or when I was sent to demand payment for the yearly blessing my mother performed for neighbors who never asked to be blessed: “Remember the Heavenly Toad.” Each time I heard the reminder I jumped, ready if not willing to do the dreaded task. The threat of the Heavenly Toad suc tioning his arms around my body and propelling me away from my mother was enough to spur me into action.

The Heavenly Toad meant deception and separation. Although the dead often remained with the living, sharing the same home as their loving descendants, the Heavenly Toad sometimes tricked and kidnapped the unwary, spiriting them toward heaven or hell and away from the family.

“I am telling you this,” my mother said, “so that you will know what to do when I am dead.”

“Mommy,” I said, running to her, as I did when I was younger and she talked of her death, “don't leave me, don't die.” My arms circled her hips, my body a weight anchoring her to life.

My mother placed her hand on my head. “When I die, I will become your
momju,
guarding and guiding you. I will not leave you. Unless.”

I clung harder. “Unless what?” I breathed, almost afraid to ask.

“Unless you forget about the Heavenly Toad,” she said. “When I die, you must prepare my body and protect my spirit before the Heavenly Toad angel grabs me and jumps to heaven.”

When I groaned, she said, “Remember what happened to the parents in the story? Remember what happened to the daughter?”

I had heard the story many times, but I still circled it carefully, as I would a real road. Though the story remained consistent, I could not decide what it meant.

In the story, a poor fisherman pulled a giant toad from a dying river, and instead of killing it, the man brought the toad home, where he and his wife raised it as the son they never had. The toad grew and grew, and when it was as large as a man, he decided to marry one of the daughters of the richest man in the village. “Make a deal with her father,” the toad son urged his parents.

But they hemmed and hawed. “How can poor people like us propose marriage to such a great family?” they said and, though they felt guilty for mentioning it, added, “And you know, you are not even a human being.”

The toad persisted until his father shuffled off to the rich man's house to ask for a marriage arrangement. The rich man and his family refused, of course, and beat the father.

When the father returned home broken and bloody, saying, “See? What did I tell you?” the toad son apologized and said that he would take care of everything.

That day he caught a hawk, and that night he carried the bird to the rich man's house. Sneaking into the courtyard, the toad climbed the tallest persimmon tree in the garden. Once settled in the branches, hidden by leaves and shadows, he tied a lighted lantern to the hawk's foot and released it into the air.

As the bird hovered just above the house, tethered to its master's arm, the toad called out, “The head of this household shall listen to this message from the Heavenly King. Today you rejected a proposal of marriage, and now you shall be punished for your arrogance. I shall give you one day to reconsider your decision. As the Heavenly Messenger, I advise you to accept the toad's proposal, for if you do not, you, your brothers, and all your sons will be killed. Your family name will be destroyed and you and your ancestors condemned to an afterlife as
yongson.
”

The people in the house, startled by the booming voice coming from the sky, opened their windows and saw a dim light hovering overhead, like the tip of an accusatory finger. Right at this moment, the toad released the string, letting the hawk soar skyward, with the lantern still tied to its foot.

After seeing with his own eyes the Heavenly Messenger fly back to heaven, the rich man ran into the courtyard and pressed his forehead into the dirt, promising eternal obedience. He asked each of his older girls to sacrifice herself for the family. The girls cried, fought among themselves, pleaded and begged, until, finally, the youngest daughter—who was still considered too young for marriage—offered to give herself to the toad.

The next morning, after the wedding ceremony, the toad told his bride to plunge a knife into his back. At first she hesitated, but when the toad urged her once again, the girl stabbed him. When the skin of the toad split open, a young man as handsome as an angel and truly one of heaven's messengers jumped out. Before they could react with joy, the toad angel embraced his bride and his parents and leaped up to heaven, with the three bound tightly to his chest.

When I think of this story now, as an adult, I realize that the Heavenly Toad is meant to be a benevolent character, rewarding his adoptive parents for their kindness and his bride for either her sacrifice in marrying him or her obedience in stabbing him. But when I was a child, the toad—in his ability to transform himself, to hide in the skin of others—seemed more frightening to me even than Saja, who at least appeared as himself.

Whenever I walked along the Ala Wai, I searched for frogs and toads hiding in the damp mulch, in stagnant pools along the water. Spotting them squatting in bright-green slime, with only their heads showing, I'd grow dizzy, overwhelmed at the possibility that I was looking at an angel. But I'd always turn and hurry away, repulsed and panicked: what if they turned and saw that in my heart of hearts I found them disgusting? Or worse, what if one of them turned and saw something it liked in me? I kept my face averted and still, neither grimacing nor smiling—not wanting to give insult or false encouragement to any possible toad angel that might want to marry me, kill me, or take me to heaven.

It was Auntie Reno who gave my mother her first frog. “Heah,” Reno said when she came to our apartment to give us our share of money from the first month of fortune-telling. She dug through her handbag, a Gucci knockoff from the swap meet, and pulled out the small jade piece hanging from a thin gold chain. “Took dis to Vegas—dah city, not my daughtah—but dah money no jump back to me like one frog. Shit, what those Japs”—here Reno flicked her wrist above her head—“eh, scuze me, Great-Auntie Asami, may you rest in peace—talkin' about?” She jiggled the chain, and the frog jumped in front of my mother's face.

The spirits accepted the frog and allowed my mother to wear it during her trips into their world. The customers who visited my mother while she was in a trance, waiting for her to read their lives, saw the frog swinging from her neck. The next time they came, they brought a frog of their own to her, thinking she collected them. Ceramic frogs, pewter frogs, stone frogs, wood frogs—enough frogs to give bodies to however many angels wanted to spy on us—soon infested our home.

“Whatchu goin' do wit all them frogs?” Reno had asked when I told her I planned to sell my mother's house.

“I dunno,” I told her. “Goodwill, I guess.”

“Girlie,” Reno said, “let me have em. I sell em, fifty-fifty. All the old customers goin' want a souvenir from your maddah, the famous frog psychic. I find all the frogs good homes.” Reno laughed like she'd said something funny, then said the same thing she told me when it came time to make funeral arrangements: “Your maddah woulda wanted it dis way.”

I visited Reno at her old apartment off Punahou only once. It was before we thought of installing the double locks on our apartment, and my mother had wandered away while in one of her trances. I buzzed Reno from the lobby and waited by the intercom for her to come down and help me. Then Reno moved to Hawaii Kai, and the few times I drove over to drop off money for her to deposit, I waited on the porch, watching the long-haired cats she had tried breeding watch me through the large picture windows.

In my first visit to the house that loops off Kahala Avenue, I circled the courtyard of the angels, waiting for her to come and help me dress my mother's body. In all the years I have known Reno, I have never been past the entrances of any of her homes, though I suppose she would have invited me in had I asked.

“Sorry, sorry, girlie!” Reno called out as she wrestled empty boxes and several glittering dresses cellophaned in Hakuyosha Dry Cleaning wrap out the front doors of her home. “Eh, come help!”