House of Many Gods (25 page)

She shook her head. “I never claimed to be sure of every move I made …”

“Look, I’m very tired. I wish you’d go. There’s nothing left to say.”

Anahola moved forward, as close as she dared. “There’s a lot to say. Let me do the talking, tell you how proud I am of you. How …”

“No. All you had to tell me you said years ago. On your way out the door.”

Ana was suddenly aware of the silent house. As if each room, and each thing in that room were holding its breath. She pictured her aunties and uncles listening, poised like strung marionettes. She heard the
ticking of a clock, a boar-hound’s labored breathing. Through the window she saw a rusty van drive past, letters painted on its side. NOW SELLING FRESH PORK. What had they been selling before? She swayed and sat down in a chair.

“Don’t you understand? In the end, you’re not that interesting to me. I don’t love you. I don’t hate you either. I don’t really think about you.”

Anahola tried to hold herself together. “Of course you do. As a mother, I did not fulfill my obligation. I lacked a moral sense of indebtedness, and I have influenced you incredibly by my absence. Forgive my immodesty, but I’m probably the most important person in your life.”

She sat shaking till the woman left, then locked the door behind her. That night she wept so hard, her chest ached deep inside where tissues were still mending. Finally, she sank into a half sleep remembering how, as a child, she learned to swim with her eyes open, looking for her mother’s body on the ocean floor. Aunties said she had crossed the ocean on a ship, and since she never sent for Ana, the girl thought maybe she had fallen overboard.

Then letters came, and she waited to be sent for. Each day she swam underwater, listening to the clicking of the reef. Maybe her mother was Morse-coding her from California. Months had passed. She and Rosie eavesdropped as their elders discussed her mother.

“Big city … many folks … she’ll have to beg for work …”

She had pictured her mother kneeling, and begging. Her face eye level with the waists of white men.

She heard her aunties whispering again, “Buggah is keeping her … 
haole
hands all over her …”

She had imagined her mother with white man’s fingerprints all over her body. The first time she came back to visit, Ana had glanced at her arms and legs looking for telltale prints like dabs of flour. Each month letters came, and in time, postcards from foreign countries. Through the years, the myth of her mother grew, embellished and hung like tapestries. And as they grew older, Rosie’s attitude to Ana’s mother changed.

“Not easy for her, on the mainland all alone. Who rubs her back with
kukui
oil in that spot between the shoulder blades you cannot reach? Who
lomis
her feet, and scalp? And brushes coconut oil through her hair? This man, he probably don’t care if she lives or dies.”

“She made her choice,” Ana said. “She’s free.”

“Free? She’s a brown woman in a white man’s world.”

Now Ana stayed locked in her room, waiting for her mother to be
gone. Through the walls, she heard her in conversation with the family. Heard how she had erased herself, her origins, speaking island Pidgin like someone who had learned it as a foreign language. Days passed, but the woman did not leave. One night Ana packed her bags and drove back to Honolulu.

S
HE FOUND THAT HER ILLNESS ENGENDERED A RATHER WARPED
but healthy sense of humor.

“Cancer’s very liberating,” she told friends. “Except for dying, there’s not much more life can do to you.”

She began to be aware of each thing she ate, how deeply she slept. She policed her thoughts, blocking out the negatives so that by sheer force of will she did not think about renegade cancer cells. She did not think of her mother. Each morning she met the day serenely. She meditated, watered her flowers. She went back on duty part-time.

Knowing her hair would fall out with radiation and chemo, Ana cut it short, then bought a wig. She began to reexamine her life, how narrow it had become, how each day, each hour had been circumscribed by her work. She looked at rigid pantsuits in her closet, all hung with hysterical precision. She tried on the wig and cried. It looked like a helmet. She threw it out, threw out half her wardrobe.

One night she came home and cautiously opened her front door. Her mother barefoot, in a suit, vacuuming the rug. Ana stood paralyzed then half ran across the room.

“What … are you doing here?”

Anahola shook her head. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I just know I’ve got to be here. I want to help you, show you how to be …”

“What? Disfigured?”

She reached down and pulled the plug on the vacuum cleaner, then grabbed and shook her mother’s arm. “You cannot do this. Get out. Get … out!”

Her mother struggled to pull away. “Whether you like it or not, I’m here to see you through your treatments. And everything else, until you’re healed.”

Ana’s voice turned deadly and calm. “I could kill you for invading me like this.”

“Go ahead. Hit me if it makes you feel good.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you. That would validate you. Maybe you’d even slap me back. A little mother-daughter confrontation.”

They stood paralyzed, afraid of where the next few words might take them. Anahola leaned against the wall, feeling her lip where she had accidentally bit it in the struggle. She carelessly wiped at the blood, blurring her mouth so it looked as if she had two mouths.

“You want me to grovel. Say I’m sorry. I can’t. I don’t possess the ‘sorry’ gene. Neither did my mother. Neither do you. I’m not sorry that I left. But I’m here
now
because I don’t want you to die.”

Ana sank into a chair. “I’m too exhausted to die.”

Her mother sat down on the rug, hugging her knees. “How many letters did I write you through the years, trying to explain it? That not every woman is meant to be a mother.”

“Oh, I remember them. Interesting reading for a ten-year-old girl.”

“…  how some of us don’t have that drive, that urge. I never had …”

“…  a role model.”

“That’s right. I didn’t know who
my
real mother was until …”

“…  you were sixteen. They had lied to you.”

She knew her mother’s history by heart.

“Ana, do you think my life has been easy?”

“Yes. And irresponsible. You’re smart. You have a college degree. What did you do with it? Besides become some white man’s mistress.”

Anahola smiled. “Such a quaint, outmoded word. In fact, he was a brilliant man, a researcher in immunology. He put me through university, made me his lab assistant. It was fascinating, a job that gave me dignity and income. To most of his colleagues I was just his ‘brown girl.’ Sometimes they mistook me for the maid. But he was honorable, he loved me. And in the end, I married him.”

Ana stared, taking her full measure. “That’s how you could afford to send those monthly checks. So, where is your … generous husband now?”

“He died, several years ago.”

She had always predicted that her mother would pay. Yet Ana did not feel the bitter rapture she had anticipated. She got to her feet and moved to the kitchen, pausing in the doorway, struck by the figure of her mother on the rug. Barefoot like an island girl, her curly hair undone. The sun lay on her back and cast her face in shadow; in that moment she looked fragile and bewildered. Something caught in Ana’s chest. She felt the tug of her fresh scars. She came back carrying cups of tea, and placed one on the rug beside her mother.

Anahola sighed. “You know, it could have been much worse. At
least I left you with
‘ohana
 … folks who loved you, and doted on you. That’s why you’ve remained intact.”

“Of course. And, because of having been abandoned, I’m now somewhat cynical and hard. Which, I suppose, is good. It will help me make it in medicine, which is so competitive.”

“And make it out in the world.”

“I’m not going out into the world. I
know
where I belong. And who my people are. And who I am.”

Anahola sipped her tea. “I see. You’re going to play the martyr. I’m the fall guy, the one who warped you. So you will always cling to this safe and limited island life.”

Ana put her cup down. “I’m fighting cancer. How fucking
safe
is that?”

In the silence she stood. “Well, we’ve had our little chat. Our cup of tea. Now, why don’t you go back to wherever you call home. However empty it may be.”

“On the contrary, Ana, my life is full. I have friends, a career, projects for the future. But right now my only concern is you. I’m not going anywhere.”

Ana closed her eyes, her lids fluttered with exhaustion. “Then, it’s too bad I didn’t get cancer when I was four years old.”

Her mother finished her tea and slowly stood. “I see I was wrong. You don’t want your childhood back, you want a better version of it back. Your childhood is over, Ana. So is mine.”

She carefully dabbed on lipstick, pinned back her hair, and stepped into her high heels. At the front door, she squared her shoulders and stood straighter, looking somewhat formidable.

“You’ve told me I don’t interest you that much, so this might cheer you up. In time I will become even less important to you. It’s called ‘cell fatigue.’ The brain slowly flushes out the pain of hurtful memories so you remember things, without the pain. And after a while, you even stop remembering them. So, why not use me while I’m here? While you still remember me.”

S
HE WATCHED CHEMICALS DRIP INTO HER BODY, KNOWING THEY
were weakening her immune system, killing good cells as well as bad. She felt they should have been taking things
out
of her body, not putting them in. Feeling sudden affection for what now seemed endangered, Ana cupped her right breast thoughtfully. Then she remembered it was
all endangered, her brain, her liver, her lungs. Sometimes she lost all sense of herself. No longer remarkable, or unremarkable, she was a simple organ fighting for its life.

Her mother didn’t bother her again. Ana hoped she had gone back to San Francisco. Then she began to hallucinate, seeing women everywhere who resembled her. A woman in sunglasses on a bus, a woman under an umbrella. One day she realized the woman approaching her
was
her mother.

“I rented a studio nearby.”

Ana watched cars passing in the street. “How can you humiliate yourself like this?”

“Humiliation is healthy. It keeps us realists.”

After her third chemo treatment, her hair began to fall out. Now she was wearing a baseball hat, but her mother could see thin wisps protruding round her ears.

“How are the treatments? Is there much nausea?”

“Not bad. I’m back on duty working light shifts.”

“Well, do you … want to have a drink, and chat?”

Ana stared at her. “What in the world would we ‘chat’ about?”

“The to-and-fro of life. The in-between.”

With no sense of it, she reached out and touched her mother’s arm. “I know you’re concerned. But, please, go back to San Francisco. Rosie will keep you up to date.”

On the phone, Rosie tried to smooth things out. “Ana. Let her help you.”

“It’s too late. I’m a full-grown woman, not some doll she can play with when she feels maternal. She makes me want to scream.”

“Maybe you folks should drive back to the house, sit down with the family. Maybe it’s time for
ho‘oponopono
, talk things out. How else you going to cleanse yourself of rage?”

She felt the skin on her head retract. “It’s
my
rage. I’ll do what I want with it. Maybe it’s what keeps me going.”

Her cousin answered thoughtfully. “Have you considered that maybe your rage is what caused the cancer?”

For the first time in her life, she hung up on Rosie. Then she sat in the dark, her fingers tenderly walking her scars, thinking how angry she had been as a child, then as a woman. She thought of her meager store of lovers who had come and gone and hardly left their prints. Feeling terribly alone, cut off from her own intelligence, she stood on a fire escape
looking down, imagining the pavement against her sudden cheek. She wanted whatever was coming to be quicker.

E
ACH TIME THEY SHOT HER WITH LETHAL BOLTS, SHE THOUGHT
how she was ingesting the same particles that had leveled Hiroshima. The same stuff that made the military call her coast “Death Row.” She began to imagine she smelled scorched, began approaching people timidly. She thought if she survived, she would have to live downwind of other humans.

Now there were clumps of hair on her pillow. She felt with her hand to see if her spine was curving inward. She began to chew delicately, afraid her teeth were coming loose.
Vision will go. Then speech
. She heard her future approaching. The dry cough of tablets in bottles, miniature tides in encapsulated liquids. She began to think of herself as ash.

Waiting for her treatment, Ana sat next to a woman whose vocal cords and most of her lungs had been surgically removed. She would never talk again, even if she lived. Ana’s hand inadvertently went to her chest.

One can live without a breast
, she thought.
But how to live without ever hearing your voice again. No words to light the darkness
.

She leaned over, whispering, “These treatments … do you think they’re worth it?”

The woman smiled and wrote down on a pad. “Every extra day is worth it.”

“I still have pain,” Ana said. “Do you?”

The woman nodded, bending to her pad again. “Pain is good. It means we’re still alive.”

Something in her swerved then, if only a little. She felt a rush of shame, humility. That night for the first time since her surgery, she stood naked before a mirror. She held her hands across her chest, hearing the drumroll of her heartbeat. When she was ready, she moved her hands away and stared. Then she cried out. Not a loud cry, but a long, lingering, and quiet dirge.

Finally, all of her hair fell out, even her eyebrows disappeared. Her face looked void of all expression. During a rainstorm, she pulled off her baseball hat and stepped out onto her
lānai
, wanting to be drenched, to melt away. Then she looked down. Her mother, standing in the street, in rain and lightning. In strobelike flashes she saw her mother looking up,
her face lacquered with shock and grief. Ana’s hands flew to her head, trying to cover her baldness. The next morning her doorbell rang.