What I missed most was solitude. I had not minded being cut off from my past — in fact, one of my first pleasures in Hawaii was that my past did not matter. But somehow I had taken hold and become involved with these strangers, who seemed as ferocious and simple and unreadable as savages, and in time I had learned that they had unguessable, improbable histories. I had attached myself to them, attached myself to another past. So their history mattered, and I had to listen to its details, even if it was not mine.
"After you had a kid, it's real important for meet your fitness goals," Sweetie was saying.
"You got one awesome little cakey," Kalani said.
Thinking about my history, I heard this on a low frequency. From the silence, which seemed to oppress me like an airless hole I wore like a hat over my ears, I realized that Kalani had spoken to me.
"Thanks very much," I said.
The table had gone quiet and was part of that airlessness, until Puamana said, "The word is waipuhilani. Waterspout."
Now I had an image for my wordless feeling. It was as though a tall column of energy had passed over the table, scoured it of every sound, turned it over, and dropped it. Something within me had been stirred. I gave it the name jealousy, but it wasn't really that. It was a more complex emotion, the feeling of having looked into the window of a house I would never be able to enter. And looking through the window was no good. I had to wait until a waterspout tore the roof off to see the naked people
inside.
After Kalani checked out of the Hotel Honolulu, I felt subdued, and Sweetie was quiet too. The wind had dropped. Rose kept begging me for a motorcycle, my seven-year-old crying, "I want a dirt bike!"
Once when I mentioned Kalani, Sweetie said, "I think he's funny."
"I don't," I said, with a "Take that" tone.
"Then you got a problem."
And another time, out of the blue, she said, "What was I doing before I met you?" But I hadn't asked. "I was in a room. Alone. Just watching TV. Reruns of Gilligan's Island. Waiting for you to show up, yah?"
58 First Love
Sometimes this woman, my wife, surprised me with flashes of intelligence, appraising me like an unsentimental stranger, reminding me that I had to be careful of what I said. It made being married to her difficult at times, as though she weren't deaf but just hard of hearing, not blind but nearsighted. In other places I had lived, people had just enough language to make demands on me but not enough to comprehend when I told them why their demands were unreasonable.
Sweetie and Puamana said I had offended Kalani, so they were hosting a makeup meal. Their suspicion that I disliked him made them think I disliked them, too. Their identification with this oaf made me uneasy. I could not make them understand my objections to him, and so I was in the wrong. I had to appease them, pay for the meal as a sort of ho'o ponopono, a peacemaking ritual.
"Kalani was poor. We was stay poor." Sweetie said. "If you poor, with clothes all broke, sometimes you don't know what happening to youself in the world. And you go make mistakes."
What was this goddamned woman talking about?
"How you know — you never went poor."
"That's crap. I've been in hell. Have you ever been in hell?" I told her that I had known hard times in strange countries that would have terrified her. The worst fate was that of being miserable and distant, and not just distant but out of the known world, which was like being buried alive. She had never left home, where there was always someone to help.
"I don't mean helpless, I mean misunderstood."
This fine distinction, in her uneducated voice, threw me, like the sight of a dog walking on its hind legs. But she could not explain further.
"Or maybe I could talk story."
There was a young girl in Honolulu who wanted to look older,
Sweetie said. She thought she might succeed at it by dressing up. All she had was the little money her mother gave her, so she went to thrift shops and picked through clothes racks, looking for stylish clothes that had been expensive when new. Some places sold secondhand designer clothes — wealthy women in Honolulu brought their dresses and shoes for the store to sell on consignment, at a fraction of what they had originally cost.
From this scavenging the young girl put together a lovely combination: a short skirt, a silk blouse and patent leather shoes with chunky heels and a buckle. It had taken weeks to find the right clothes at these prices. The shoes alone would have cost several hundred dollars. They made her taller, and she looked much older than she was.
"How old was she?"
"Say, fifteen."
Dressed this way and wishing to be seen, she sat at a bus stop one afternoon near Ward Warehouse, legs crossed, kicking her foot up and down, listening to her Walkman. She realized that the man next to her was talking to her. He touched her shoe to get her attention. She plucked off her earphones and smoothed her skirt.
He was about twenty-two or a little more, a "howlie." He worked at a car dealership, Hoku Honda, on Ala Moana. She was flattered when he said that he wasn't waiting for a bus but had stopped because he had seen her and wanted to talk to her. She hadn't been waiting for a bus either, but she didn't tell him that. He invited her to the Starbuck's around the corner, where — she didn't drink coffee but had a guava-honey smoothie — the man suggested they go to a movie the next day.
There was nothing safer than a movie — all those other people around. She even told her mother that she was going "with a friend."
Friend meant boy, though she didn't mention his age.
She wore her special outfit. In the theater, the Cinerama on King Street, across from Gas N Go (the movie was Seven, starring Brad Pitt), the haole guy did a nice thing. He said, "Put your feet here." He lifted them to his lap, making her squirm sideways, and he clasped her shoes. He didn't kiss her, or touch her in any private places. All he did was hold her shoes, his fingers around them, stroking the shiny patent leather. He did not touch her feet. They sat that way through the scary movie for two hours. She was happy; it was a real date. She liked this man and he seemed to like her. Most of all, she thought, He's a gentleman.
Walking her back to the bus stop where they had met — she didn't want to tell him where she lived — he asked whether he could see her again. She said yes. I got a friend, this howlie guy, she said to herself, smiling in the darkness of her bedroom just before she went to sleep.
The next time, he picked her up in a car he had borrowed from the dealership. "I told my boss I'm taking it to Lex Brodie's for a wheel alignment." But even saying this, something plaintive in his voice expressed disappointment.
"You're wearing slippers," he said, frowning at her rubber sandals. She was also wearing shorts and a T-shirt.
"I thought maybe we go to the beach, yah?"
He wasn't huhu, angry; he seemed frustrated and moody. So she hurried home and dressed up, and because she wasn't able to run in them, she put on the shoes in his car. The man was happy — more than happy.
He agreed to take her to Hanauma Bay. She agreed to stop at Zippy's for a shake on the way. "You look nicer like that," he said in a grateful voice.
She felt for the first time in her girlhood that she could ask anything of him, that she had power over him.
They sat on the grassy edge of the bay, under the palms, and he held her feet in his lap. She wanted to take off her shoes to walk on the sand.
"Don't bother. We'll be going soon."
He drove her to a place that sold shave ice. When they finished eating the ices he seemed surprised, saying he lived right nearby.