And she prayed to her dead sister. “Emma,
Ē ‘olu ‘olu!
” Please. “Don’t let those gripping cuttlefish of Honolulu get our girl.”
Next morning, Ana started down Keola Road. Their house sat on a rise half a mile up from the highway, in the distance, the leaping morning sea. As she descended, she passed a yellow house that looked blown sideways, socks stuck in rusty window screens. Outside the house, a heavily tattooed man in a purple sarong sat polishing his rifle, then tilted the barrels up to the light so that they glittered blue and became an extension of his tattooed arms. Seeing Ana, he jumped up, aimed his rifle at the sky and shot off a round, giving her the Shaka sign. “Ey, Ana! … Geev’um at dat university!”
She smiled and waved. Just past the blue’s man yellow house, from atop a Quonset hut, a goat magisterially surveyed his domain, observing her passage from her old life.
At the bottom of the road, even the intersection looked condemned—abandoned cars, a malfunctioning stoplight that seemed to hang by a single thread. Tow trucks screeched to a stop as ragged kids shot into traffic on skateboards. Then life, the highway, waiting to consume her. Near the shopping strip, surfers and druggers crawled half-awake from their pickups,
draping themselves across the fenders. The young muscled turks of Nanakuli.
They called out as she passed by. “Ey, Ana! Hear you going university. Going hang out wit all dem … homolectuals.”
“What you trying prove wit all dem books? No fo’get, you one Nanakuli girl. Only good fo’ do one t’ing.”
She turned and lashed out with a country mouth. “Suck rocks, you
mokes!
Don’t fuck wit’ me. My uncles going broke yo’ ugly faces.”
Yet they were not ugly; most of them were beautiful, with the beauty of mixed “chop suey” blood. Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Scotch, Irish, Filipino. Half a dozen other bloods. Their skin tones ran the gamut from sun-tinted white to gold to deep dark brown, their almond-shaped eyes sometimes blue, or green. They were muscular and fit from surfing, but their hair hung long and greasy. Some heads were garishly shaved with only topknots. Their arms and legs a grid of scars and tribal tattoos. She saw their drug-shot eyes and shook her head, their future written all over them.
Shifting her heavy book bag and lunch bag, she walked on. Five mornings a week she would make the two-hour bus trip to the university up in Manoa Valley, and in the evenings, the two-hour trip back to Nanakuli. Stepping into the bus, Ana glanced at faces heading into the city, folks looking anxious and alert. It was not her first trip off the Wai‘anae Coast, but apprehension made her feel it was.
Her dress was homemade. Her shoes were new and pinched. She was not beautiful, nor was she brilliant or accomplished. But she carried herself as if she were. Crossing her legs, she opened a textbook and thoughtfully smoothed down a page, ignoring the sea paralleling the highway. Now and then she looked up at the ruby-strung necklace of taillights bound for Honolulu.
K
NOWLEDGE DID NOT ENTER HER WITH UNWAVERING LIGHT
. A
T
first it glanced over her. She could not keep up, even in basic chemistry, in which she had excelled. Called upon in class, she stood dumb and shy. Sometimes she thought of killing herself. Nights at the kitchen table, she pressed her forehead to the pages of a book, trying to literally absorb convoluted equations. Comprehension did not come.
“The problem,” Rosie said, “is that right now you’re stuck in that place where you know too much and not enough. Why not just
pretend
you know? Memorize, keep repeating it, and see what happens next.”
Slowly, miraculously, things began to coalesce. Ana memorized every lesson, every assignment, repeating and repeating it, until comprehension approached like a buzzing in her brain, and then a midnight Eureka. Once deciphered, certain equations became brilliant in their simplicity. Thereafter, each time she was mired in confusion, she remembered Rosie’s words: Sometimes life was just about holding on, waiting to see what happened next.
She also learned that an honor student from Nanakuli High was not held in the same regard as a student from an elite private school in Honolulu. Each night she scrubbed red dust from her clothes and shoes, and from her book bag. Still, on campus, people knew. They knew from the giveaway pink of her cuticles and nails, and sometimes a faint pink tinge to her hair, that she was from the Wai‘anae Coast. Students walking behind her rolled their eyes, even their bookmarks stuck out at her like tongues. She hid her hands between her knees in class. She dropped behind and fell into depressions. Then she snapped out of it, running to catch up. The rest of life fell by the wayside.
One day she looked up from her books in shock. Younger cousins seemed taller. Spring had come and gone and it was autumn, the wet season. Ana felt she had given life the slip, that she was moving through it like a shadow. She worked summer jobs but would not remember them. She forgot the name of her favorite boar-hound, the one with almost human eyes.
Rosie waved checks at her from San Francisco. “Silly girl. With this money you wouldn’t have to work your way. You could live in the dorm, not have to commute.”
Ana stared at her, pupils enlarged to an anthracite gleam.
Some mornings she left the house so early it was dark, stars still hard and bright, the moon dropping blue notes on her shoulders. Wearing her rubber thongs, she grabbed her heavy book bag and her lunch and set off down the road, carrying her good shoes in a plastic bag. At night, walking home from the bus stop, she found her rubber slippers where she left them in the weeds, removed her good shoes and put them in the plastic bag. Then she started the steep climb up Keola Road. In
malo‘o
season, when red Wai‘anae dust blanketed the valley, she wore a kerchief across her face like a bandit. Neighbors watering their yards stepped out to the road and hosed it down so Ana could breathe on her long walk home.
Some nights, halfway up the road, she sat down, so mentally and physically exhausted, her eyes ached, moonlight on her head like a concussion. She looked up the badly lit road, saw the outlines of houses impossibly
distant, and imagined her form trudging upwards like a crone. She imagined her tired face in conversation over supper, her half-conscious body laying itself down. She saw all this in a dream.
Later she woke, still curled up in the weeds beside the road, and heard them calling her name. They bent over her, Noah and Ben, faces like dark angels leaning out of paintings. They gently scolded her, lifted and half carried her, while youngsters dragged along her books and shoes. She smelled their perspiration, their clean uncle-smell and she was all right then. She knew where she was in the world.
“… waiting fo’ you, worried half to death …”
Barking dogs fell silent as they passed. So did two men fistfighting in their underwear. The silhouette of a woman in a doorway. Then, their house ablaze with lights. Rosie washing Ana’s face, her hands, her feet. A clean, fragrant sheet beneath her, and one billowing out over her. And then, the ecstasy of letting go.
By the end of her first year at university, she had refined her life almost to a point. Her studies, sleep, and food. A life of such unrelenting focus, it was like the workings of a clock. Ana looked down at textbook illustrations, the machinations of the human anatomy. Respiration. Digestion. Reproduction. Where was the illustration for the need to laugh, to touch and be touched? How did one illustrate longing, or loneliness? She dreamed of Tommy Two-Gods and woke up missing him, wondering where life had taken him. She slept curved inward, like a child.
P
ERHAPS BECAUSE SHE WAS READY, ONE DAY IN HER SOPHOMORE
year a young man wandered out of the rain and into her life. He was drenched but his hair was perfectly intact, so sleekly gelled it looked bulletproof. His wet skin glowed like chrome. His name was Pak Morelli. Mother Korean, father Italian American.
“Is that hard for you?” she asked.
He laughed. “You know anyone that’s pure-blood? I grew up on
kim-chee
and lasagna.”
They spent their first nights fused together in the backseat of his car, making love with such abandon the car shimmied and bounced on its springs. Passing street dogs paused, listening to their cries. Then, a friend loaned him an apartment where they began meeting between classes twice a week.
On late bus rides back to Nanakuli, Ana crossed one leg over the other, still smelling their yeasty coupling. She felt a different kind of
exhaustion then, her body fulfilled, aglow. Most days they didn’t talk much; what they physically gave each other seemed enough. Yet she was struck by his scrupulous lack of curiosity about her life, her aspirations. They saw each other several months before he broke it off.
“This girl found out about you … she’s Chinese.”
Ana shook her head confused. “And?”
“She says it’s you or her.”
“Why? Because I’m ‘country,’ from Nanakuli?” She sat up slowly. “Or because I’m
kanaka?
”
His hesitation set up a keen attentiveness in her.
“… Both. I guess.”
She rose from the bed and dressed, keeping her tongue still in her head, swallowing back profanities. Sighing, he half stood, pulling on his shirt and pants.
“No. Take
off
your clothes.” Her voice was suddenly different. It wasn’t kidding.
Puzzled, he stripped down to his underwear and sat on the bed. “Lie down. Turn your face to the wall.”
He thought she wanted to lie behind him, and hold him. Maybe beg him.
He lay down, facing the wall. “Ana, I’m really sorry that …”
“Shut up. Don’t turn around until I’m gone. And don’t
ever
look at me again. Not on campus. Not anywhere.”
She picked up his shoes and shirt and pants, flung them from the eighth-floor window, and walked out the door.
This breakup hurt more than losing Tommy Two-Gods. It was a hurt that went deeper than her pride, striking her psyche and her very soul. The family saw her pain and tried to distract her, make her a girl again, their Nanakuli girl.
Noah sat her beside him at his window, the nights so humid termites drowned in the creases of his neck.
“Horse races,” he whispered, pointing at the sky.
And she saw how the clouds did look like horses, huge, winged piebalds racing up the stars. They sat looking up for hours. He taught her how to smoke, to purse her lips and form smoke rings which, as they lazily expanded, field bats flew in and out of. Ben taught her how to torch-fish, how to play the
‘uli‘uli
, and how to open a bottle of Primo with her teeth.
Some nights she and her older cousin, Lopaka, sat silent in his truck. He had come home from Vietnam a bitter man, his right leg shattered by shrapnel. For several years, he was a dropout, ignoring Ana, drugging
and drinking with older gangs who hung out in the Quonsets at the end of Keola Road. Then he grew bored, tired of rehashing combat every night. He took stock of his life and went into rehab, and learned to walk again with a leg brace.
Then he had shocked the family by entering university on the GI Bill. Now he was preparing for law school, but he was still a loner, angry and bitter. The war and constant pain had bent him down, leaving his big, muscled shoulders weighted with that burden. He talked mostly with other vets and now and then with Ana, but cautiously.
Until he left for Vietnam, he had been the center of her life, and while he was gone, she remembered everything he taught her. In those years she had stood in fields flying her kites, watching their shoulders rub against the sky. And she had prayed, “Bring him home. Bring him home.” Until one day he was carried off a plane with wounded vets.
Now she was a full-grown woman sitting in Lopaka’s truck. He had become bookish, his Pidgin less pronounced. He spoke “proper” English now, but carefully, like someone new to it.
“So this guy put you down for being Wai‘anae?”
“And for being …
kanaka
.”
He shook his head. “These people … they don’t see that Hawaiians are slowly rising … One day when they’re finally ready to treat us with ‘fairness’ … they might find we are prepared for violence.”
She reacted slowly, because he had spoken slowly, in the old slow tribal rhythms.
“We’re not a violent people,” she said.
“No one is … till violence is done to them.”
He shaved every day now, and kept his nails and toenails clean, so parts of him looked new. But his face was the same, still so rugged and
kanaka
handsome, she found it hard to look him in the eye. Instead, while they talked, she looked at his muscular brown arms, the blue veins bulging and forking. She looked at his hair, so thick and curly she wanted to put her hand there. Wanted to tell him that he was still her hero, that she would always love him, that life would be okay.
S
HE AND
R
OSIE SAT UNDER A SICKLE MOON, CONTEMPLATING MEN
.
“Not worth the trouble,” Rosie said. “All little boys. Handsome, rich, ugly, poor … still the same, all looking for their mamas.”
Ana laughed. “Then how’s come you can’t get enough of them?”
Rosie was in love again. Her third, or fourth, or seventh lover. This one wanted marriage.
“What for?” she asked. “I belong here, with ‘
ohana
. A husband would take me away, make me his slave. Or else live here, and put his two cents worth in.”
She nodded toward their elders, dozing in the shadows. “How could I leave them? They saved me from my mother.”
“I think of that, too,” Ana said. “This old place is falling down. The termites own it, really. But, how could I ever leave? Maybe when I’m older, when they’re gone. I’ll be nursing in the city then. You can come and live with me.”
Rosie studied her. “Nursing?
He lalau!
Nonsense! You want to count syringes the rest of your life? You’re going to medical school, and you know it.”
“I don’t know that. I’m not sure I have …”
“Ey! You remember that night you promised on my belly? On my baby’s head. You had a dream, to be a doctor. You promised you would try. You break that promise, you will kill me.”