House of Many Gods (28 page)

In the silence Gena asked, “What about children? That kind of love.”

“I’m happy to deliver them, but I don’t feel that mythical imperative to ‘give birth.’ I believe there are women with not much need for men, or kids. The type driven to, oh … erase boundaries, strain the limits. Renegades with a certain hungriness of spirit.”

Gena laughed. “Well, I’m afraid my ‘hungriness of spirit’ has been hijacked. I’m just a uterus in
love
.”

Something in Ana turned, she spoke with vicious intonation. “It’s not just your spirit, Gena. Every time you use that word, you sound brain-damaged. Your horizons have definitely sunk down to your genitals.”

She sat very still, then unsteadily rose to her feet. “You know, Ana, you were always too critical, always …”

“Polymorphously insensitive?”

“…  something of a bitch. Your sickness didn’t change that. You should know that I pray for you, for your complete recovery. But right now I need to get away from you. Good night.”

Alone, Ana stared at the choirlike arrangement of liquor bottles behind the bar. They gleamed, as if about to burst into hymns.

S
OME DAYS SHE SAT LIKE AN OLD LADY ON THE EDGE OF HER BED
, studying a calendar. The weeks, the months that would add up to a year. And then another. Her phone rang. She stared at it until it stopped. She looked in the mirror, amazed to find a face there. Amazed when she felt hunger, thirst. In bed her fingers gently walked her scars. It was the
absence
that always took her by surprise. The surgeon had suggested leaving a “skin flap” in case Ana wanted a breast implant in the future.

She declined. “No leftovers. Please. Just a nice, neat scar.”

In fact, there were two scars, each five inches long. Rather like an upside-down T-bar on a slant leaning toward her underarm where they had removed certain lymph nodes to be sure. Stitch marks made the scars appear as luminous white railroad tracks that intersected. The tautness of stretched silk, no surface feeling when she touched them. And there was still discomfort, a vague pain deep within where tissues had been cauterized.

She watched her hair grow into a wavy crew cut which she nervously coasted her hands through before each checkup with her surgeon. Each time she tested negative she experienced exhaustion, a downsurge of adrenaline, and then guilt, because surviving had somehow put her on a lower plane. Lower than that of women who had died. She was learning that the truth of cancer was never told by the living. The truth was what was finally apprehended by those who did not beat it.

W
HEN SHE MENTIONED THE INCIDENT WITH
G
ENA
, R
OSIE SIGHED
. “Try to be kinder. That girl lost a baby couple months ago. She keeps it from Lopaka.”

“Why didn’t someone tell me?”

“Oh, Ana. Look what you’ve been through. But, maybe you should drive out soon. ‘Park boys’ beating up soldiers. Another killing over drugs. Lopaka’s got his hands full. And Makali‘i—that girl’s suddenly got eyes for older boys.”

She promised to visit, then put it off, exhausted by a double workload. Then she read of more arrests in Nanakuli. More drug busts. She thought of oxidizing Quonset huts deep in the valley where no one dared
to venture. Huts where drugs were bought and sold, where gangs kept their arsenal of guns, and where they took their girls. Thinking of Makali‘i, Ana called Rosie and drove out for the weekend.

No high-rise buildings, she often forgot how on the coast the sky was everywhere, sunlight so blinding folks could not think. They just lived stunned. She saw children leaping in the sea that paralleled the highway, their skin so coppery and shimmering they seemed to be covered with mirrors. She felt herself unwind, reentering a world that required no effort of her. Yet, it required everything.

She passed big, husky road workers wearing yellow hard hats, sweat pasting their shirts to their massive dark backs. She thought how beautiful Hawaiians were, then almost hit the brakes in shock. It had been a long time since she looked at men sexually, studying the shape of their bodies, reflecting on how they each smelled differently yet the same, with the same underlying odor of maleness. She had almost forgotten the warmth and roughness of male skin, the texture and density of male hair. Yet the idea of making love, of baring her chest to a man, appalled her. She did not want that intimacy in her life again.

As she turned up Keola Road, the house, her touchstone, came out to meet her. In broad daylight all the lamps lit, every room aglow. Noah blasting Louis Armstrong across the fields, so the house seemed a big, pulsing jukebox. Sitting with Rosie, Ana realized how much she had missed in the past few years. How little attention she had paid. An aunt had died. Two cousins had married and moved to the mainland. Another cousin in prison.

“Changes not just in our family,” Rosie said. “But up and down the road. Panama Chang married an Italian girl. Now only three nights a week are rice nights, other nights she cooks him pasta. Ho! the fights. He throws her pasta to the chickens.”

“Where did he find an Italian girl?”

“Ana. Pick up your eyes. We got all kinds here, always did have. Look at your father, the handsome cop—Hawaiian/Chinese/
haole
.”

Rather dreamily, Ana recalled her first love, Tommy Two-Gods. “His father was Jewish, from New Jersey. His mother, Catholic, a local Hawaiian-Japanese girl. He wore a Star of David and a Christian cross.”

“He’s back, you know, in Nanakuli.”

In the silence, the falsetto plaint of a mosquito.

“Been halfway round the world,” Rosie said. “Places like Libya. Beirut. I don’t know why, but that boy came home a radical.”

“What do you mean?”

“Said he hated the military, saw too much what he called ‘racism.’ Against him as a mix-blood, and a Jew. When he heard you were a doctor he was proud, said you were always two steps ahead of him.”

She swallowed twice before she asked, “Did you tell him about … my surgery?”

“No, Ana. That’s for you to tell. Now he’s hooked up with that group Mālama Mākua, trying to force the military to stop bombing up the coast. He’s working with Lopaka.”

She thought of his eyelashes, long as a mule’s, while Rosie chattered on.

“Everybody talking bombs, radiation. Nobody paying attention to our kids. They’re not dying from bombs. But from drugs and bullets. Too many gangs rumbling out here, even in the schools.”

Ana came alert now. “How is Makali‘i?”

“Never home. I feel like I’m losing her.”

In those moments, Ana saw how her cousin had aged somewhat. Now midthirties, she was still unmarried, still devoting herself to holding the family together, keeping peace between elders and their kids. She had become the vessel of wisdom and patience in the family, the one who dispensed forgiveness and love. Tall and husky as a man, Rosie’s face was still beautiful, and when she entered a room folks felt an immense and sudden calm that seemed to shelter them. But something had faded from her eyes. The gleam of youth, expectation.

Ana, put her arms around her. “Tell me, cousin. How are
you?
”

“Oh, a little lonely. No time to meet a good, serious man.”

“Now, listen to me, Rosie. Bye and bye, you’re going to meet someone. You’re going to be happy.”

“Oh, Ana. Do you think so?”

She paused, then granted her cousin the precious amnesty of lies.

“Of course. I have seen this in my dreams.”

In the yard a peacock spread its brilliant tail. Ana yawned and stretched out on a mat, feeling a yogic completeness. When she woke, shadows were long, rectangles of light on linoleum lengthening perceptibly, measuring out the afternoon. Doves warbling in guava trees. The piping voices of children playing in the yard.
Pau hana
folks shooting the breeze as they walked up the road. All sounds that spoke with sweet recall of childhood.

She heard the soft rumble of a rolling pin on dough. The rich, solid sounds of plates being set on a table. The rattle of chopsticks, the clattering splash of spoons. Then the throaty waterfall of milk being poured
from a pitcher. She smelled stew bubbling on the stove. A meal that would be full of starch, and good, good grease. She sighed, feeling safe, back in that small-kid time that kitchen sounds recaptured.

I
T WAS AFTER 2:00 A.M. WHEN SHE HEARD A DOOR SLAM
. T
HROUGH
her window, she saw a truck painted with skull and bones slowly pull away. Then, soft footsteps on the
lānai
.

She moved to her doorway. “Makali‘i. It’s Aunty Ana …”

She drew her into her room, and when she switched the light on, the girl flinched, her eyes not quite focusing.

“Have you been smoking dope?” Ana asked.

“Only one puff. Everybody smokes at school.”

“You’re absolutely stoned! Maka, you’re still a minor. You can’t be doing this.”

She backed up and sat on Ana’s bed, her face so lovely Ana’s heart broke. “Doing … what?”

“Hanging out with ‘gang boys.’ At the huts.”

With effort, Makali‘i focused her eyes. “I … never did.”

Ana grabbed her arm, fighting to keep her voice down. “I know who owns that truck. He’s one of them.”

“I … only went there once.”

“Everything is once with you. Meanwhile, you’re breaking your mother’s heart.”

The girl suddenly stood up. “She doesn’t care. I’m just another mouth to feed, another kid to yell at. Who ever notice when my grades were good? When I fought off boys to stay a virgin. Nobody! So I think, what for? May as well be like the rest of this … house of illegitimates.”

Ana sat back stunned, as if the girl had slapped her. “Maka. Life is something very dear. I’m
begging
you, don’t throw yours away. Finish high school, you’ve only got two years. Then come and live with me in Honolulu.”

Makali‘i’s voice grew small. “You promised that before. You never called.”

“This time I swear to God I will. Just promise me you won’t go near the Quonsets anymore.”

“Okay. I promise …”

Ana made a promise to herself, as well. She would call the girl each week, come home more often. The next day Makali‘i seemed so easy and
affectionate, Ana had an awful feeling that she did not remember her promise. That she did not remember their conversation at all.

S
HE FINISHED THAT YEAR NEAR THE TOP OF HER CLASS, PASSED
the board exams, and was certified. Feeling she needed a rest before starting an OB-GYN specialty, Ana joined the staff of Queen’s Hospital as a general physician. On her thirty-first birthday she looked in a mirror, amazed. She had passed another postsurgery year, her test results negative.

In a celebratory mood, she drove out to the house, and as she pulled into the driveway she saw a man take off across the field, riding a piebald with a quirky trot. A storm was due, the sky becoming lead. Huge drops fell, biting sudden webs into her windshield. She made a run for it and found Rosie on the porch swing, her lovely face aglow, as if she were sitting in brilliant sunlight. Seeing Ana, she dropped her head like a woman waiting for sentencing.

Puzzled, Ana moved into the house. Ben dozed on the couch, where a gecko with a livid blue tongue lolled on his forehead. He woke up startled and brushed the gecko off.

“Uncle Ben. What’s up?”

His lips parted and hung there. He looked out toward the
lānai
. Ana turned to Tito in his wheelchair. He nervously shuffled a deck of cards while flipping through an old
National Geographic
. Rain poured in the windows, newspapers blew round the room. Cousins sat dead still, avoiding Ana’s eyes.

“What’s going on?” she asked. “What’s wrong with you folks?”

“Whooo, da rain.” Ben closed his eyes, inviting sleep.

She slammed down windows, then checked on Noah, who sat behind his nicotine-yellowed curtains.

“Uncle. What’s going on? Rain pouring in the house, folks sitting there like dolls …”

He turned and smiled, showing teeth ambered from tobacco, the scorched satin of their sides. He pointed out the window. Wishbones of lightning were suddenly shot with sunlight, turning the day berserk. Rain thundered hard for several minutes, then began to slow until the valley was bathed in liquid sun, fat drops evaporating as they fell.

He put his arm round her shoulder, his smile radiant.

Rosie … 
hāpai!
We going celebrate. With
hulihuli
chicken.”

She started to ask who the father was. Then she saw the human head bouncing in and out of tall grasses. The man on the piebald with a quirky trot coming back across the fields. High in the saddle, he held his arms out to his sides, each hand gripping the legs of an upside-down chicken. Each chicken’s wings outstretched and beating, trying frantically to break free.

As Ana watched, the horse leapt a narrow stream, momentarily airborne, so that the rider holding the outstretched wings appeared to be flying. That’s how Ana would remember it.

“Tommy … Suzuki … Goldberg …”

“Yeah!” Noah grinned. “Tommy Two-Gods.”

Days later she and Rosie sat side by side on the porch swing.

“You don’t hate me?” Rosie asked.

Ana slid her arms around her. “Rosie. Tommy and I were kids. It was puppy love back then.”

Rosie sighed with relief. “When he first came to visit we talked about you. He said what I told you, that you were always two steps ahead of him. You were meant for better things. He came again with flowers. Conversations so natural, everything as it should be. Oh, I fought my feelings! How I fought them. Two months we talked, and never touched. Then, Tommy said he loved me.”

In her eyes, a resurrected glow. Rosie looked like a girl again, caught at that perfect moment of combustion when beauty and youth burn hardest.

“Rosie.
He’s
the man you’ve been waiting for. Remember when I used to bring him home? Tommy always stared at you. You were the one he was in love with.”

And, looking back, Ana realized that what she said was true.

T
HREE WEEKS AFTER THEY MARRIED THEIR BABY WAS BORN, A DATE
Ana would remember because, that night while the family celebrated, Makali‘i came home very late. She moved in slow motion, as if she were stoned, her eyes not quite focusing. Ignoring her instincts, Ana held her tongue. For the rest of her life she would feel that, had she spoken out, she could have saved Makali‘i.