Diamond Head (11 page)

Theresa tries again, her voice full of collected air, as steady as she can.

“The odds of this family, they’re horrifying. There’s a punishment for every doubt, a humiliation for every weakness. Look at you, look at Maku. Where does it end?”

Behind her, Theresa hears her mother’s heels click against the wood of the corridor, growing more pronounced with each step. She breathes, pressing a hand to the underside of her stomach.

“What I’m trying to say is,” Theresa whispers to the woman, leaning toward her as Amy appears in the archway, “what I’m trying to say is that I think I understand what happened to you. I think I can understand a piece of how you feel.”

Amy walks across the room and Theresa straightens. Her mother holds a hanger with a crisp, white collared shirt. It’s a man’s shirt, and almost instantly, Theresa recognizes its style.

“It’s Maku’s,” she says instinctually.

“It is,” Amy replies. “I knew he had some shirts still in his old closet. I think this might work.”

Amy squats and shows Mrs. Leong the shirt, holding it to her side.

“This is Bohai’s shirt,” Amy tells her. “He wants you to wear it today. What do you think?”

Mrs. Leong extends her hand, cautiously, and takes a bit of material between her fingers, rubbing them gently together.

“Here, let me help you up so you can put it on.”

“Bohai,” Mrs. Leong says, nodding once.

“Yes,” Amy replies, taking the woman’s hand and helping her slowly from the ground. Mrs. Leong’s eyes stay on the shirt. Her fingers have yet to release the piece of sleeve that she holds.

“Theresa,” Amy calls. “Help her with that sleeve. Like that, but bend her elbow. Exactly. Okay, now just hold her arm and I’ll do this one. Mrs. Leong,” she says, taking the hand that clasps the second sleeve, “I need this part, okay?” Amy peels the woman’s fingers from the shirt and helps her into it. She tightens the drawstring at Mrs. Leong’s waist and ties it into a bow.

“There,” Amy says, stepping backward. “You’re perfect. Just one last thing.”

Amy reaches both hands behind her neck to unfasten the double strand of pearls she wears. The necklace is connected by a thick jade clasp, edged in gold; a wedding present. She wraps it around Mrs. Leong’s neck and the effect is immediate. Mrs. Leong looks dignified. In her son’s shirt, in Amy’s pearls, it seems entirely possible that this woman was once the head of an illustrious family.

How strange, Theresa thinks. How remarkable, how terrifying that a lifetime can hold this much change, can stretch to this level of distortion. Theresa watches her mother with Mrs. Leong and suddenly she hears the photographs begin to chatter. She hears a whisper between her ears, rising in volume, growing from a single voice to five, to ten, to a chorus of mouths from within the silver frames, all of them sounding their horror, echoing their suspicion.

The photographs and all their memories, they can’t believe it either.
A fraud,
they chatter,
a waste
.
A terrible, catastrophic mistake.
And right away, Theresa knows; these bitter words, this fiery lament, they’re speaking of her mother.

1922–1942

K
ANEOHE
, H
AWAII

A is for Amy, my mother, the first letter of the alphabet and the oldest child of her family. My mom’s sisters, Beverly, Camilla, Denise, Eileen, Francine, and Grace, all followed, born in alphabetical order. Her three brothers, arriving with the second half of the girls, were not named with the same precision. It didn’t matter, my mom would say; there weren’t nearly enough of them to lose track. They lived in Kaneohe, on the windward side, in the country.
Poor
is a word that my mom dislikes, but that’s exactly what they were. Poor, cramped, simple people, twelve of them under a single roof.

She grew up beneath banana trees, plagued with discomfort. The fruit from the banyan made her sneeze; the sugarcane, with its long, untidy stalks, gave her a rash; the dense, coarse crabgrass made her eyes water, her lids swell, her vision blur. My mom learned of allergies in the sixth grade and swiftly she bundled all her grievances under the safety of that word. Octopus trees, palm grass, club moss, ferns of any color, size, or texture. She had a brush with each of them, and she was allergic to them all.

It was always stories with my mom—believable ones too, which made my job as her daughter so much more difficult. She told them with the conviction of a man on death row, confident in his plea of innocence. With her words, my mom rewrote years of her life, tampering with her experiences, altering her motives. It was easy for her to live in her mind, I see that now. No one bothered her there; no one could tell her that it wasn’t true.

It’s safe to say that the nature of my mother’s stories altered over time; that with each new stage of life came a different purpose for
narration. In her youth, she used her words to avoid things she disliked. A bad bicycle accident would prevent her from ever having to race the neighborhood kids—so she stole her mother’s eyebrow pencil and drew perfect scars along her elbow. I wish I could, she told her friends,
but look
. Her face gave nothing away; her eyes sloped with genuine regret. Her lies came easily because in her mind, in the balances that weighed her right and her wrong, they were not considered lies. My mom spent and saved her words like gold, like precious stones, playing them strategically, saving some for difficult times to secure a certain outcome. The modification of words, of feelings and experiences, were simply tools that she hoped might pry her from the life that she was born into.

As my mom got older, she’d make her own clothes and swear they were a gift from a rich relative, hand-sewn and monogrammed in foreign silks that felt more like polyester. In high school, she wrote an essay called “My Other Sister,” in which she told the story of her identical twin sister, born two minutes after her with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. Her teachers, unwilling to verify the details of a stillborn child, didn’t know what to make of it so they gave her an A. They passed the story among the staff and by the end of the semester they all looked at her differently, sympathetically.

I never inherited my mother’s penchant for stories. In a way, there wasn’t space. I was the vessel, the holding tank for hers, and for the longest time I didn’t mind. She fell into these moods; I’d find her on the couch after school, drinking a glass of wine, waiting for me to come home. If I had a sibling, this would be something we’d both understand, that when you walked through the door and saw her sitting there, when you heard her call your name before you even removed your shoes, she was deep within her mind. She was feeling sorry for herself, I realize that now. For hours, she had been playing the reel on repeat, waiting for something to pull her from the depth, and usually it was me.

Theresa
, she’d say, and I would think of my homework, what was
due the next day. These afternoons, they didn’t happen all the time. Months would pass, happy months where wine was saved for dinner and I came home to an empty house, my mom out grocery shopping or playing mah-jongg with my aunties. These afternoons, they didn’t disrupt my life. It was an obligation I was happy to indulge because listening to her stories was the only thing my mom ever asked of me.

I remember one afternoon now, clearer than the rest. It was a Monday after a weekend in Maui, after three days at the beach. I was eleven and my mom had bought me a new swimsuit, a magenta two-piece with nylon fringe that sailed as I ran along the water. Maku was shore fishing—an activity that was made for him. He could stand there for hours, his khaki hat tight to his head, his back perfectly straight, effortlessly still as the ocean surged before him, as the sky broke from orange to lavender.

Maku never caught a lot of fish, but he always hooked something: a snapper, a goatfish, something brilliantly gold or tiled red and white, shiny like a kitchen floor. When he felt a bite, he’d yell for me. Until recently this was the loudest I’d ever heard his voice—my name from across the beach.
Come quick!
And I’d run as fast as I could, tassels whipping against my skin, my father’s gentle call like a sergeant’s command. He positioned me in front of him, my hands on the pole, his hands wrapped around mine, and we slowly reeled in the most dazzling fish I’d ever seen. It was small, barely longer than the length of Maku’s hand, but its scales were like jewels, emerald and sapphire, glinting from the water that ran down its surface. It was a fluke, Maku said, and I thought that’s what we’d caught. But it was a mahimahi, a deepwater fish, a baby, an accidental catch. We had to throw it back, Maku told me. Before it died, before it shed its brilliance for a murky grey.

The Monday after, when I returned from school, my mother told me about a boy she knew as a child, a young boy from the North Shore who was the small town’s expert on fish. She led into her story as she always did, with a loose connection, as if the story were really
for me.
Seeing as you’re interested in fish now
, she’d begin, and I’d take my place beside her on the couch, nodding. The boy’s uncle was a local fisherman, she told me, and he taught his nephew all he knew. But soon enough, the boy surpassed his uncle, spending all his time in the ocean searching for new fish, memorizing them below the water so that he could draw them when he surfaced. With a notebook of lined pages and a set of colored pencils, he drew dozens of fish. Bigeye ahi with its long, yellow fin; ruby-colored snappers; flat, silver papio; powder-blue parrot fish; pancake-faced stingrays; rainbow schools of ta’ape; scarlet, venomous menpachi; snakelike o’opu; electric-orange a’awa; razor-toothed ono. My mom listed these species with remarkable ease, sipping her wine between descriptions. The boy’s uncle would look at his drawings and identify the fish until the boy knew them himself, could match his findings with his homemade encyclopedia. And it wasn’t just fish he gathered, wasn’t just drawings he made. The boy was an expert on coral, diving deep into the reefs to study their formations, gathering the dead pieces from the shoreline. He made art with the odd, blooming figures of calcium, securing them against lengths of driftwood and selling them alongside his uncle’s daily catch. My mom got lost in that story, more so than she usually did, remembering the name of a fish mid-sentence and derailing entirely, forgetting where she’d left off. As she spoke, barely looking at me, I realized that on these afternoons she simply needed a body to sit beside her. I could have been anyone, anyone who loved her enough to listen; anyone but Maku.

Because all these years, there was one story my mother kept to herself. The most fantastic, the most unbelievable of all her tales was the one she never told me, not until Maku died. It linked too closely to her reality; it stained her storytelling with significance, her cast of characters pulled from a genuine past.

The story of her life, the story of my family, of its ghosts, of its magnificent rise and decline—she locked it all away. She tried so hard to erase it, and in my mind, in the part that still believes I know
something about my mother, that little fact changes everything. It’s what I can’t shake; it’s what makes me believe it might be true, might have happened exactly the way she finally told it.

My mom grew up in the basement of a shared duplex. There was a single bedroom where my Grandma and Grandpa Chan kept their mattress on the floor, surrounded by boxes that rose to the ceiling, crumpled and misshapen, too full to close. The living room, the only other habitable space, was separated in two by a sheet. Three boys slept on one side, the seven girls on the other. Geckos were ushered through the screen door as if they were guests, twelve pairs of dirty slippers tracked through the hall and into the bathroom, which itself was used as a storage space—broken toys and rusty tools stacked higher than the toilet tank. When my mom was younger, when there were fewer of them, she attempted to organize the developing clutter. She remembered the clean spaces of her youth; she wanted them back. But as more and more siblings appeared, year after year for more than a decade, my mom gave up. Her thoughts began to wander beyond the needs of her struggling family. Her home shrank and her ambition grew. On the rare occasion she was forced into the fields to work with her siblings, my mother made daisy chains. She wrapped them around her head and fanned herself in the shade.

It was a neighborhood joke that the Chan family was run like a caste system. My mom filled in the highest ranks with my Grandpa and Grandma Chan. Next came Beverly, Camilla, and Denise, always in the middle. They trailed three years behind my mother, separated by eleven months each; it was just enough space to be counted differently, apart from my mother, after the honeymoon. The boys came next, climbing the family ladder as they got older and older. When they were boys, my Grandpa Chan was reluctant to see their value. He had hoped for sons early in his marriage, but after the arrival of four girls, I suppose the thought of sons lost its romance. The boys were merely mouths, bigger and louder, but as they grew older, my
Grandpa Chan embraced them. He began to see their value—not in the traditional sense, as heirs or guardians of the family. His pride was more selfish than that. They were proof my grandpa’s seed could produce
men
.

The last of the girls, Denise to Francine, were known around Kaneohe as the Raggedy Chans, each of them dressed in ill-fitting clothes, passed from one sibling to the next. So it was not strange to pass my grandparents’ house and see my youngest aunties on their hands and knees, weeding the crabgrass from the edge of the yard as my mother sat on the sidewalk, cutting up mangoes and watching them dry in the sun.

I like to think that, because of her favored position, my mom was beautiful, but it’s difficult to say after meeting her sisters. My Auntie Camilla, my mom’s middle sister, could not go anywhere without some loudmouthed moke chasing after her. Camilla was gorgeous, which became clear at the age of eight when her hair turned a honey color. Her eyes followed in turn, lending her the appearance of a mixed girl, an exotic hapa haole. For years she was the talk of the neighborhood. Where did her looks come from? Most days, my Grandma Chan looked crazy at best. Her clothes were never her own, she cut her hair herself, rarely wore a bra. The neighbors agreed that an affair did not fit into her lifestyle—or her temperament for that matter, which was harried, almost desperate in the way she moved from task to task. Then Eileen was born and she looked so much like Camilla. By the time she turned six she was fair and tall, her legs longer than most of the boys’ at school. The rumors stopped after that, because what kind of woman bore ten children in ten years and went searching for more?

If Camilla and Eileen were beautiful, then my mom was not. Her hair was dark, her features decidedly Chinese, her waist thin but mostly square, almost boyish. She had no hips, barely any breasts, but unlike her sisters, unlike her mother, my mom took pride in her appearance. She grew her hair long, she kept up on fashion, she
painted her nails, rubbed cream into her elbows and knees. She still does these things. She’s never stopped caring about what people think.

While her friends drank beer and smoked menthols on the beach, my mom spent most of her teenage days in Diamond Head. She was cleaning the estates of families with names like Miller and Moore, Warren and Robinson. She hated it, but there was a certain understanding between my mom and her parents that quitting would devastate them. Most of her earnings my mom spent herself, but she always replaced the milk when it ran out. She could always be asked for a few dollars to turn the electricity back on.

Those big, shaded houses in Diamond Head, sitting up against the water with their open lanais and wooden floors, made my mom sick with envy. She would pace the length of the entryways. She would spread her arms as wide as they could go, basking in the sheer amount of space that two people could afford. She opened the double windows and let in the breeze, allowing the wind to whip against her face, taking in the smells of plumeria and salty ocean, basking in the luxury of elevation.

“It smells different in Kahala,” she once told Camilla.