Dear Dad,
You probably aren’t even reading this, considering how we ended up (on such a bad note), yet I am writing you anyway from Hawaii, where I am doing research on ornithology. The reason I’m writing is not to apologize, since there is nothing to apologize for, or to ask you to apologize to me, since you’d never do that anyway, apologies not being in your vocabulary. The reason is to tell you I’m OK. I feel you have a right to hear that and not find out I was drowned through some third party—all of a sudden getting a telegram after a shipwreck in the northwest Hawaiian islands and therefore the shock of your life, that your one daughter is gone. You think I’m gone now. Yet being gone far away is one thing and being dead would be another. And I’m saying that because I almost did die—which made me realize you have a right to hear I’m OK—especially since we were not on good terms. Having bad blood would be a weight on your conscience if I were killed. Then you would have to live with that.
You were not the kind of dad who I could talk to since you were off doing your own thing or else hurting me. You were not exactly easy to communicate with since you were so busy yelling and ordering and putting me down throughout my life. You have to admit, the major thing you have done to me is punish me, from kicking me out of your house to kicking me out of school. It was because you are restrictive—that is who you are. Yet restrictions caused a lot of my behavior, e.g., the house party, the dealing, the thing in the swimming pool, the exposé of you in the student paper. If restrictions had not been your way of life and punishing the central part of your vocabulary then maybe I would not have felt compeled to do some of the things that I did to you and to your property. You thought you could treat me like something less than a human being, Probably you would have locked me up if it was legal. Yet stifling can only excaberate one’s feelings.
Therefore, it was tempting to never write or speak to you again, but I am. You are my father. You cannot and I cannot change that. Nothing can. That is why now that I have lost almost all my belongings on the ship (and almost my life) I am writing to you. Despite you forcing me to leave college and actually denying me an education—even though you are an educator!—I have been working my way through college attempting on my own to slowly get my BA. My plan was to go back to school in California where I was doing my research at Berkeley. However, my plane ticket is gone and the semester will be starting without me. If I do not find the money to return, then I will lose my chance and my registration at the school. I am not asking for tuition, only for $500 (one way) ticket money to return. I do not want to lose the thread of learning. I do not want to forgoe my second chance I had worked so hard on. $500 would only be a LOAN. I would pay INTEREST. I would promise to pay that from the first paychecks of my first job as soon as I got back there. This amount of money which is not a lot to you if you think about it would be huge to me. It would be not just money but the chance to regain my education. I hope you can see what that would mean. I am sure you could, being, that, after all you are a Dean of a university yourself. $500 can be wired straight to Honolulu through Western Union. All the instructions are on the back. Please turn the paper over. Please do not stop reading….
I wrote the letter and took it to the post office and mailed it. Then I waited and waited. I figured on five days for the letter to get to Boston. Then, five more days for a response. Rationally speaking, I knew Dad would never send me any money, yet my heart said you have to try, because who knows? There are lotteries all the time, and people struck by lightning. The chances are infinitesimal, yet somewhere right now lightning might strike, and people might be transformed. They might fall on their heads and turn into someone else. They might discover something, like a letter from their daughter, and then a feeling would awaken in them, something they have never felt before (or maybe that had lain dormant) like love or sorrow, or even a paternalistic instinct. So how can you not try?
At last, a good nineteen days after I’d mailed my letter, this typed note came from my father.
Dear Sharon,
I have received and duly noted the news that you are “OK.” If you are indeed OK after your ordeal at sea, I’ll assume you have the strength to find your own money for a one-way plane ticket from Honolulu to San Francisco, which I’m sure you know costs less than $500.
You might also be interested to hear that the registrar’s office at Berkeley does not have any record of your enrollment. In fact, there is no record of your enrollment in any college in the UC system.
As so often in the past, I might have found your activities more compelling had you not felt it necessary to lie about them.
I won’t comment on the rest of your letter, except to say that before you make any other accusations, you should learn to spell.
Sincerely,
Dad
I probably read that letter two hundred times. It stung my eyes, but I kept rereading, and rereading, and all I wanted to do was race to Berkeley and take every class offered in the place. I wanted to work double time and graduate and give a speech at graduation in the stadium. I wanted to fly to Berkeley and become valedictorian of my class. I wanted to take my dad on Gaia in a storm and see him toss his cookies out at sea. Well, I wanted a lot of things, but without money I couldn’t even begin to get them. That was always Dad’s main point—and his trump card, being an economist. Since I had to work, and since I was always hungry, I started working full time at the Manoa Zippy’s.
My uniform, which needed tender care at the Laundromat and air drying, was an orange short-sleeved polyester, flame-retardant dress with a brown full-body apron and matching brown hat. And I had a badge: HOW MAY I HELP YOU? SHARON. I worked the counter registers, took orders for yakitori chicken and rice, tempura shrimp, saimin, and all the local fast-food specialties. I called the numbers back to the kitchen with a mike.
The guys in the kitchen turned out to be great friends to me. They were all local and loved to tease me, since I was what they called a “haole,” which was an affectionate way of saying intruder and outsider and interloper. Actually, I didn’t understand a lot of what these guys said, because they liked to talk in pidgin English, putting on these accents that tilted all their sentences into questions. One of the cooks was named Kekui, and he was twenty-one—a couple of years younger than me—and also stopping out of school for a few years. It turned out before he left, he’d been a star football player at St. Louis High School in Kaimuki, but was kicked off the team for a combination of too many failing grades and a bowie knife. He was heavy, and half Hawaiian. He had black eyes and a broad nose and a barrel chest. Big shoulders, and big arms, but this was what blew me away—his voice. Kekui had this pure sweet tenor voice, and he was so musical he could sing anything—pop, gospel, Hawaiian songs. He used to sing in the kitchen, and we were all in awe of him. A lot of times, after the customers had gone, we used to beg him to sing, and he would sit up on one of the wood-grain laminate tables, and sing Hawaiian music, like early Beamer stuff, or even covers of Cecilio and Kapono. And I started bringing my guitar and accompanying him, and if the time was right, he’d do a whole act, this pidgin Elvis imitation he’d dreamed up, and everyone would shriek and squeal, even the manager. I’d hit the chords, and he’d start crooning: “I get some t’rill/On blueberry hill….”
Kekui had an uncle who owned a Find-a-Pearl stand down in Waikiki at the International Marketplace right near my old hotel, and Kekui would help out there on Saturdays. A Find-a-Pearl stand is a booth with a cash register and a barrel filled with pebbles and briny water, and a plastic tube bubbling—an aerator, as in a fish tank—and then, in a big heap on top of all this, a pile of black-and-gray oysters, all different sizes. Your customer comes up and picks an oyster out and pays for it, and then you take a knife and split the poor animal open. You take your knife blade and turn the oyster’s flesh, and ta dah! your customer finds his pearl sitting there, shiny and new, where it had been planted back at the aqua farm as a grain of sand. The customers take the pearls home in li
ttle white boxes along with the clean oyster shells.
I started going down on Saturdays to keep Kekui company while he worked the morning shift at the booth. We sat on stools and opened oysters for the customers. Sometimes the pearls were white, and sometimes pink, or silvery gray, or even green. You never knew if you would get one or two or even three pearls. That was supposed to be the fun part, although, obviously, for the oyster it wasn’t. Kekui had a garbage bag in the booth, which was where he dumped the bodies.
The International Marketplace was fringed with booths selling pukashell necklaces and bracelets, and Hawaiian dolls that did the hula. The central court was filled with a giant banyan tree strung with lights. Day and night there was music blaring on loudspeakers. Tourists strolling through. Couples and teenagers red from the sun, old ladies in their pastel double-knit pantsuits, would-be hippies, who may not have been hip but were shaggy for sure, probably a lot like Gary and I had looked a couple of years before. I said to Kekui almost in a pidgin tone, “Look at all them—”
And Kekui teased me, “Eh, Sharon, you gon’ be local now?” He was like Corinne with her southern accent. He could turn his pidgin up or down. He was such a sweet guy, and he was out of school like me, out of the mainstream and just drifting in his own little eddy. He had a baby son his old girlfriend Janelle’s mom was raising, and who he used to visit and bring presents. His wallet was full of pictures of his baby and his brothers and his sisters and his thirteen nieces and nephews, not to mention photos of his mom and dad. His wad of pictures was thicker than a pack of cards.
Kekui turned me on to what was happening in Hawaii—and not just what was happening to the birds, but what was going on with the native Hawaiians who really owned the land by rights, because they’d been there first. Hanging with Kekui at Find-a-Pearl I could see Waikiki and the whole city through his eyes, all those servicemen and honeymooners, and I saw that the place wasn’t real to haoles at all. It was another Disneyland, as far as they were concerned, and not an actual Land that belonged to a People. All these visitors treated Waikiki as if it were some amusement park, some campy tame adventure, just a little over the top. And they liked it that way. That was the scary part. That’s what they wanted. You know how the famous line goes: “There’s no there there.” You gotta know it was a tourist who said that, a tourist just loving the surface of some vacation spot and then denigrating the place for being shallow!
So while we split those oysters open, I told Kekui all about the northwest islands, and the quiet there except for the birds, and the way the sun rose, and how you sat up and watched, because that was the great event of the day—the sky being all the art in that place, the light changing and the moon rising. The stars pouring down. And I said I felt like those islands were some of the last good places left, but they were restricted and they were owned by the government. And that was when Kekui told me about his sister Lani and her boyfriend Joseph, who were actually living and farming out on Molokai all hidden in the rain forest on U.S. Government land.
“Did you ever go out there?” I asked. “Just to visit?”
“Nah,” said Kekui.
“Why not?”
“’Cause it’s not too easy to get in and out, and Joseph and Lani don’t have phones, so you can’t warn them when you’re coming.” “Oh, I get it,” I said. But I didn’t really.
I decided early on with Kekui that I wasn’t going to be his girlfriend, since I liked our relationship just the way it was: work buddies. There I was all ready to fend him off, but it turned out Kekui was actually a very straight, restrained kind of guy. In fact, apart from Geoffrey, he was the most religious person I’d ever known. I mean, I came from a background of staunch secularism. Nominally my family was Jewish, but we didn’t belong to anything, or do anything. For holidays we went by the decorations in the stores. We did Halloween and trick-or-treating, and then Thanksgiving at a restaurant, before Mom had her first breakdown, then Christmas—but not as a religious festival or anything, just presents and a tree—then New Year’s Eve, which, after the divorce was kind of cozy, with Mom drinking quietly at home, curled up with me and my brother, Andrew, on the couch, and giving us sips and watching old movies, especially An Affair to Remember, on TV, which was how I learned the word corny. “That’s corny,” Mom would say, toasting the television screen. Later on, Mom couldn’t hack New Year’s Eve anymore—actually none of us could—since that was the holiday Andrew got killed on, drunk driving and not wearing seat belts and the whole deal. And when it was just me and Mom, I guess it was too sad for her, which is one of the reasons when I was thirteen she had to take off. And she was in MacLean, and I had to live with my dad and Joanne, my stepmom, and had feelings of abandonment, which was the genius insight of Mr. Firefag (né Frietag), the shrink of Brookline’s Runkle Middle School.
After New Year’s, in my family, that was pretty much it for the rest of the year as far as holidays. I never did Easter baskets or egg decorating, except at my friends’ houses—and that was sort of Jewish, that we didn’t do that stuff at home, but it was also because, to put it mildly, Mom did not do arts and crafts. As for religious services, we never ever went to a temple or a church of any stripe. But now, here was Kekui, and every single Sunday he went to Makiki Gospel Church. He and his whole family went and sat there for four hours and sang hymns, and Kekui sang in the choir, and then they all went home and celebrated the Sabbath, which meant no one worked all day. No one in the family could even smoke on Sunday. And, in fact, Kekui and his brothers and sisters weren’t supposed to smoke or drink at all, or have children out of wedlock, except sometimes they did. Still, Kekui didn’t sleep around, and even after we were buddies he was reserved with me. He would look at me, but that was all. A lot of what made him so wary of me was our religious differences, I being from out in left field and never baptized, which more than once he asked me about—if I was nervous. Since if anything happened to me and I died, I’d be stuck in limbo at best, and in the worst case, I’d plunge straight down to hell. But I had to say I wasn’t nervous. I could say this for my family, despite being its own little version of hell, none of us ever had a hang-up about the hereafter. To me the whole idea of God watching over you and caring about all the little things you did seemed like something from the old days, or actually from some Hollywood movie of the old days where there were clouds and heavenly music, and the Lord turned out to be this white Republican male like Charlton Heston.
BEING so religious and devoted to his family, Kekui wanted to introduce me to his parents. And this was when we were still just friends. My gosh, I thought, this family is tight knit. He hadn’t even kissed me yet. And actually, we’d been buddies for so long, I was starting to kind of want him to kiss me. So what did this mean? Was he intending something? If this had been Gary we would have beaten the whole subject to death, and if it were Rich, we’d have been done by now with the whole relationship, but Kekui was somebody totally different, and he didn’t explain anything. He just mentioned that his niece Kehili was having her one-year-old luau, and he wanted to bring me to meet his family.
I still remember when Kekui and two of his brothers drove up outside the Y. It was Saturday, early in the morning, and they had a beat-up station wagon, the kind they used to make with fake wood-grain panels on the sides, an imitation woody. I squeezed in between them on the bench seat in front. The entire back of the car was piled with food. Picnic coolers and foil trays and about three thousand paper napkins, and jumbo Tupperwares. It turned out for this one-year-old birthday luau, Kekui’s family was having two hundred people.
We drove to the other side of the island, the North Shore, where the flanks of the volcano were wet and craggy, and covered in some places with green fern, and in other places with tangled forest. There were steep patches of banana plants on the mountain slopes, and wet valleys planted with taro, and hardly any buildings at all. Only in the distance you could see the occasional apartment building or old-age home, like a watchtower of th
e enemy.
When we got to Makaha, there were still tents up from some of the family camping the night before, and there were cars rolling in, and people bringing and fetching and carrying, and there was music, a whole band with ukuleles and guitars and hollow gourds, some big and some small, to thump with your palm. The sand was white powder, and the view was blue as far as you could see. Just blue waves in front of you, and at your back, those tall green cliffs.
There was swimming all day, and the guys surfing in the waves, and there was food spread out over the picnic tables at the beach park near the shore. Trays of lomi lomi salmon with sea salt on top, and a whole pig, pink and juicy from cooking all night wrapped in ti leaves and buried underground. There was rice, and also huli huli chicken, which Kekui’s aunt Georgiana brought from a fund-raiser for the Kaneohe High School Band. The chicken had been marinated and then roasted on spits over an open flame in steel drums, so it had this special bitter-burnt-sweet flavor.
In the beach park Kekui’s parents sat in chairs in the shade of the ironwood trees that grew there. So when you approached them you walked up from the ocean onto this thick carpet of green pine needles—and the occasional tiny prickly pinecone that stabbed your bare feet. I was yelping, “Ouch!” when Kekui brought me up to his parents. But they did not smile.