Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(60)

I am writing my lists today. It is the year of the monkey. When I get the call from my mother, it’s snowing. The whole world is the thin color of skim milk.

Hello?

A siren whines out behind her voice. A scream.

The house, she says. It’s gone.

What house? What do you mean?

I lit the candle, says my mother. The one by his urn. For the New Year.

The flame caught the drapes, she says, or the match caught the basket. I don’t know.

I am standing in the center of a parking lot. I am wearing red, for luck. It’s the new year, after all. I force myself to remember the facts: I am standing in a parking lot in New Hampshire. I am alive. My mother is alive. My father is dead. My mother is in Florida. She is right here, on the phone. Something has happened.

What’s happened? I say.

Grandma Mei Mei and I are fine, she says. Just burned some hair. It’s just hair.

That’s good, I say.

But the house, she says. It’s gone. I need you to understand that.

Later that day, I begin a mental catalog of everything in that house. Boxes of photographs, yellowed horse ribbons, diaries, magic kits, dried-up nail polishes. My homecoming crown. My stuffed tiger, Tia. My mother’s wedding dress. My father’s leather loafers. His couch—my father’s couch. His sports jackets, his backscratchers, his Yankees cap, that couch. My father. My mother’s Hawaiian blanket, her crystal bonsai trees, her childhood jeans. The Spot on the floor—The Spot will be gone. This brings me some relief. I will never have to see The Spot again.

I tell my mother to get on a plane. Come meet me here, I say. No fires here.

Okay, she says. I have nowhere else to go.

That night, I prop wood in a pyramid in my fireplace. I stuff papers underneath—old manuscripts, receipts, napkins—before grinding the match. I watch the flames flick purple, then gold.

Home, I write on my Chinese New Year list. I circle it three times. Wad it up and toss it.

SPRING, 1971

KAILUA, OAHU, HAWAI‘I

I’m not here.

My mother, Lokelani, is the oldest of four children. She’s a good girl, eleven years old, punahele of the family, hiapo, the tiniest frame. Her sister Tao, my Auntie T, is one year younger than my mother, a stocky little thing, and the two sisters don’t like each other much—not yet. My mother is the favorite—bright in the eyes, she works hard in school—and little Tao steals her jeans to hem them several inches so that they hit my mother above the ankle; she’s jealous of her older sister. The two of them tend to two younger brothers, Makoa and Kai, but brothers are not a part of this story. Not yet, anyway. First, I want to tell you a story about sisters.

The children live on Puolo Street in Kailua, Oahu. They wear bathing suits beneath their clothing to school—Enchanted Lakes Elementary—no shoes, never. They learn to hula with the proper bend at the knees. They roast pigs with their tūtū and toss hunks of meat into the mouths of volcanoes—an offering to Pele, the fire goddess. The only house on the block with a pool and a slide, a boat out back, the children swing on banyan vines and play Gilligan’s Island in the red fizz of late afternoons, throwing the rocks from their yard at the neighbor’s fence.

They perform their own Hawaiian Partridge Family songs at night. Scraped knees, matching floral prints; they harmonize. Their parents applaud them, proud, beautiful, this family act, the American dream.

Sure, there are fights. Whose idea was it to wax their father’s boat? Whose idea was it to push so hard, to use the wrong kind of wax, that white putty that clouded the boat a permanent pink? A Pepto-Bismol pink, my mother thinks, she is obsessed with the thought—It was Tao’s fault—and so she feeds the chalky tablets to her younger sister—It’s candy, good for you!—until the whole bottle is empty, until Tao’s stomach must be pumped.

When the children scream at one another, they are hung in burlap potato sacks from the mango trees in the yard. Their skin matches the color of the sacks, and the snaggly fabric tears at their armpits. Their whole bodies itch. The siblings swing there until the sun comes up, until they make good on what they’ve done.

Or, let’s move to the father. My grandfather, Al, who bought what he has named the Frustration Release paddle, a sleek leather body to it, a rope on the end. The children line up outside the bathroom door, oldest to youngest, waiting for their turn. Al sits on the toilet seat, pulls each of them over his lap, thwacking them until they understand. My mother apologizes right away, she is the punahele, after all, she is always let go, but her sister will not cry, will not budge, will not be sorry, not ever, I don’t even feel it, and so the boys rarely ever get their turn.

In one of my earliest memories of my grandfather, he is about to drive me and my cousins, Tao’s children—Teagan and Tanya—to dinner in Plantation, Florida. We’re in matching sunflower dresses; it’s the weekend of his birthday. I like it when we match like this, because people are less likely to point me out as the child who does not fit with these two beautiful girls—the cousin, not a sister. My grandfather slams the car door once we’re all buckled in, but Tanya’s hand is not inside the car yet, not all the way, and her finger crunches in the aluminum jaw of it. She screams out, Please! Help!, her face a raisin, tears and spit and a pitch so high it vibrates the air inside, but my grandfather does not move, there is no release, his face is stern outside the car window, his silver ponytail shining. Embrace your pain, he says, and stop crying. Teagan and I hold her other hand. By now, we are almost crying, too. Calm down, we say, or think—I can’t be sure now—keep it together. Tanya tugs in her lip. Gasps for deeper breaths. She steadies her face, somehow, she does, before my grandfather opens the door.