Comfort Woman (22 page)

Later, after my mother tried to drown herself the second time, I realized that our roles had reversed. Even at ten, I knew that I had become the guardian of her life and she the tenuous sleeper. I trained myself to wake at abrupt snorts, unusual breathing patterns. Part of me was aware of each time she turned over in bed, dreaming dreams like mini-trances where she traveled into worlds and times I could not follow to protect her. The most I could do was wait, holding the thin blue thread of her life while her spirit tunneled into the darkness of the earth to swim the dark red river toward hell. Each night, I went to bed praying that I would not let go in my own sleep. And in the morning, before I even opened my eyes, I'd jerk my still clenched, aching hand to my chest, yanking my mother back to me.

The part of me that watched my mother sleep, the part of me that still lives within my dreams, believes that if I had been home with my mother, holding on to her life with my bare hands, she would not have died. I would have been able to save her. Even now I wonder why I didn't know my mother was dying; after so many years of training myself to listen, why didn't I hear that she had stopped breathing?

And then I realize I was with Sanford that night.

The last time I sat with my mother in her garden, she told me she wanted to wait to die but wasn't sure she could. She said something about bathing in blessed water and rolling in ashes, preparing for the final transition. Something about how when she lay down to die, her body marked and open for Saja, she felt my hands pulling at her feet, holding her back. As she spoke, I squatted next to her and watched her prune the vines of the wedelia. I watched the sharp tugs of her hands ripping and tearing the reaching fingers of the plant, and, watching, I lost her voice. Now the only thing about her death talk that I can recall with clarity is the image of the sickle curve of her back bending toward the earth. And the way her bare hands tore at the wedelia, then massaged the black ground, as if she cared for it, as if she loved it.

Patting the earth, caressing the leaves of the plants she had worked on—saying “goodbye” and “thank you” for the day—my mother announced, “I been waiting a long time to see you settle down.” She brushed a small wedelia flower against the side of her face, dabbing yellow pollen on the underside of her chin. “You need a good man to give you babies. Someone to take care of you.”

I remember thinking how ironic and how convenient that my mother thought of taking care of me only when I was a grown woman. And even then, to delegate the responsibility of that care. But accustomed to nurturing my mother's bouts of coherency, I drowned the memories of myself as a child that rose to the surface: huddling under the bridge at the Ala Wai, waiting for a fish to take me to an underwater kingdom where I would find my true mother, a mother who would make me dinner so I wouldn't have to buy Ho Hos and cheese nachos at the 7-Eleven; forging my mother's signature on school report cards filled with E's for excellence that she never saw because she was looking into another world; rocking my mother, cradling her head and upper body in my lap, her legs dangling over the bed, when she cried out for my father, for Saja the Death Soldier, for the spirits that teased her with their cacklings, for anyone who cared, to kill her.

I swallowed words soaked in anger. Instead of saying, “Why are you worried about me now, Mother?” or, “Where were you when I needed you?” I said, “This is the nineties, Mom.” And: “Women need men like fish need bicycles.”

My mother straightened, then arched her back, exposing her throat to the sun. I watched her hands come to the small of her back, kneading black dirt into a faded flower print. Her head dropped forward. “Fish?” she said, scowling. “You're talking crazy. Women need men for children. God listens to men, Beccah. It was your father, praying for forgiveness, wishing for a miracle, who finally pressured God into giving you to us. And when at last you came, your father fell to his knees, held your red body above his head, and thanked his Father in Heaven.”

I pictured my father as an aging Charlton Heston in the role of Abraham, holding a black-haired Asian-eyed Isaac above the altar in heavenly sacrifice to a God who looked like my mother.

I laughed. Thinking of how I grew up—in a household of spirits, not one of them my father or the Christian God—I thought my mother was joking.

“What's so funny?” My mother reached into her bag of cuttings and flung a handful of nut grass, mud still clinging in clumps amidst the intricate tangle of roots, at me.

“Nothing,” I said, brushing flecks of dirt off my shirt as I swallowed my laughter. “I just don't think I'll ever have children. I don't want the responsibility of having someone need me that much.”

My mother dropped her weeds and turned to face me. “What? Don't you know that babies are the only way you know you're alive?” She gripped my hand, pressing dirt and flesh into my palm. I could see fine red welts from the wedelia across the back of her hand. “Beccah, how will you know how much I love you if you don't have your own children?”

When my mother moved us from The Shacks to Manoa, I changed school districts, leaving Ala Wai for Robert Louis Stevenson Intermediate. I was not upset about this but instead thought of it as a rebirth. I fantasized that by moving out of the orbit of Toots Tutivena and her Entourage, I would no longer be persecuted. In a way, I was right; I was now ignored. I drifted from class to class, sitting in the back row so quiet and hunched into myself that even the teachers forgot I was there. At Stevenson and then at Franklin D. Roosevelt High, except for the other misfits—the unpaired girls with concave breasts or thick granny glasses or hair that frizzed like the Bride of Frankenstein‘s—I was invisible. Safe.

At times we, the Unacceptables, would gather at the bottom of the library steps as if by accident, as if pulled by an innate instinct for self-preservation to see if we still existed. And there, perched on the lowest step, partially sheltered by the splotchy shade of a plume ria tree, we would practice at adolescence, filling our mouths with the names of boys we loved.

“Isn't Shaun Cassidy fantabulous?” one of the girls said. It was probably Cordelia, whom I remember as a giant of a girl with large red knuckles, who could never grasp the “in” lingo. After our high school's ten-year reunion, which neither Cordelia nor I attended, I heard a rumor that she worked as a scriptwriter for the children's show
Barney.

“Totally cool,” the rest of us agreed, pretending that we did not consider Cordelia—or ourselves—geeky.

“He's the utmost,” Edith sighed. “Let's add your names together to see if they match.” Edith, who was—at least in the uninspiring academic atmosphere of Stevenson Intermediate and Roosevelt High—considered a math genius, devised a system to establish the compatibility of prospective couples. Based on some numerical values assigned to consonants—vowels were worth zero—Edith would add and divide and multiply our names with those of the boys we loved, crossing out letters and mumbling to herself. The rest of us never quite understood the whys and hows of Edith's matchmaking rules but were content to wait until she produced the answer, because—no matter which name we gave her—it'd always come out right. An invariable perfect match.

If Edith was not at the stairs when we wanted to confirm that the boy we loved was our truest match, despite his not knowing of our existence, we would cast our fortunes with cards, the king of hearts representing the boy we loved. And we would read the sides of our fists to see how many children we would bear. My fist dimpled five times or zero times, depending on whether the reader was generous in defining the bumps. I chose to see five, one bump for each of the children who I knew would look like their father, the one I always named as the king of hearts, the only one I matched my name with: Maximilian Lee.

All through junior high and the first two years of high school, I watched him. Through eight semesters of advanced English classes, I watched the way he slumped in the chair nearest the door, as if to make an escape at the earliest possible moment. I watched how the shag of his black hair, the part that wasn't shaved to his skull, fell into his face like a dog's tail, wagging as he tapped a staccato beat on the desktop with the long, lean drumsticks of his fingers. While the teachers cast frowns at him during their lectures on Milton and Chaucer, Max played his music—ratatatat rataiatat—and smiled. When he smiled I would watch the three moles that framed his mouth dance around his lips, a connect-the-dots invitation.

Sometimes he would even close his eyes as if he were sleeping, and the teacher, if she was new, would finally slam the chalk down and yell, “Maybe Mr. Maximilian Lee can tell us about palindromes,” or whatever topic she had chosen. And without opening his eyes, he would say something like: “Palindromes are like, you know, when you're in the tube, yeah? And you're jammin' down to the left, and whoom! it shuts down on you. So you maneuver to the right, yeah, but whoom! that shuts down too. Both sides are comin' in on you, like you're the candy twisted inside those cellophane wrappers—you know the kind I mean, yeah? Those butterscotch or peppermint-stripe ones. And it's totally cool being wrapped in the tube like that, even though you know you're gonna eat it, backward or forward. Like, that's my metaphor for palindrome, man: you're gonna wind up in the same place, eating sand, no matter which way you read that wave.”

Max knew poetry.

And I knew Max.

I knew that he saw music on the inside of his eyelids and that he carried a notepad in his plaid flannel shirts so that, when he opened his eyes, he could capture the lyrics and notes with his black-ink Pentel fine writer pen. I knew that the music he wrote for his band, the Too Toned, all sounded like variations of “Stairway to Heaven.” I knew his class schedule, and knew which water fountain to hang out at when his PE class let out. I knew that he brought sprout and eggplant sandwiches from home for lunch, then bought manapua and Fat Boy ice cream sandwiches from the lunch wagon. I knew he called his Ford Mustang “The Frog,” not because of its color—which was a dull gray—but because of the way it hopped, its timing off. And I knew when he started watching me back.

It was toward the end of our sophomore year, when the Am Lit teacher's wife filed for divorce. Rumor had it that Van Dyke—whom his students called Van Dick because his zipper often slipped to half-mast—molested his daughter. From the time we heard that his wife had left him, taking the kids to the Mainland, until the end of the year, Van Dyke told us to write poetry in the “Man vs.” series. On the board each week, Van Dyke scribbled either “Man vs. Man,” “Man vs. God,” “Man vs. Machine,” “Man vs. Himself,” or “Man vs. Nature,” and underneath: “Write about it.” Our final assignment—in the “Man vs. Man” category—was to create a tribute to fathers. The poems would be shared in class and the best selected for the special Father's Day issue of the school newspaper, printed just before summer vacation. I think Van Dyke planned to send a copy to his own children.

This, or something close to it, was the poem I read aloud:

When I looked up from my notebook, it was to find everyone staring at me, including Mr. Van Dyke. Including Max. After almost four years of loving the way his eyes looked when closed, after innumerable fantasies in which I touched his flickering lids and heard the music they shielded, he opened his eyes and looked at me. And I didn't like it.