As a child, Clio had understood that her mother, Kitty, and her father had little interest in her. But she also believed, mistakenly, in the child’s confusion of act and will,
that it was she who had somehow caused the people in whose care she lay to turn away from her.
She had found refuge in the rain forest. Only there did she have form and substance. On the damp, aromatic banks, under the dripping vines, sitting among the trees at night, she became visible to herself. She had arms and legs; she could feel them. Hands. She became invisible the moment that she left the forest. Until the day that she left Nu‘uanu, the bottoms of her feet, wrinkled and white from the dampness of the forest paths, were proof, had she known it, that she did exist, after all.
Her proud, bewildered refusal to explain to Burta just how she’d lost her new pen made Clio seem sullen and stupid. She knew that her inability to defend herself allowed Burta to treat her with more contempt than she would have shown a child who could defend herself, who could justify a melancholy but harmless existence, but Clio could not help herself. Because Clio found it almost impossible to speak in the presence of her stepmother and father, Burta Yamada was able to convince Clio’s father that there was something wrong, something backward and perhaps even damaged, about Clio. And because Clio was powerless to prove Burta wrong, her father really did lose sight of her.
John Lynott never once heard Clio whistle through her front teeth so piercingly loud that she could be heard a quarter of a mile away. He never saw her take apart the engine of a car and put it together again. He did not know that she could string a large hunting bow, and he would not have believed it had he been told. Clio really could do these things. She had learned them in hope of being admitted to the Squids, a club formed one summer by her brother, Dix, and his rough, handsome friends. She had learned these things in the hope of becoming a boy.
The Squids had understood that while it would be unfair
to forbid Clio membership, they could set her tasks so difficult to accomplish, one after another, that they would all be old before she fulfilled her membership requirements. They were as untiring in their creation of tasks as Clio was in the execution of them. Once she’d finally finished assembling the ham radio they needed for the clubhouse, they gave her the task of mending the big net that had washed up at the point. When she had repaired the net, having learned from an old-time fisherman how to weave the difficult knots, they told her she would have to throw the giant boomerang.
She wanted to be in the club because it would give her companionship during the long summer days; even though the Squids’ motto, To Poke Squid Forever, was a local expression that referred to the female body and what they hoped to do to it. She had learned how to whistle like a longshoreman in the hope of loitering around the clubhouse with Dix and his friends, smoking Kools and eating Fritos, and she had felt lucky even to be considered for membership.
She was on the waiting list for eight years and she didn’t regret one minute of it, even though she never was inducted into the Squids, even though the boys had never intended to let her into the club, she later realized, despite the fact, or perhaps because of it, that when she eventually mastered the boomerang, she could throw it farther than any of them.
Clio stood in the sunlight in the center of the lawn, the lawn where she and Dix used to hold Love Contests, and looked at the forest with pleasure and sadness, to greet it and to thank it for remaining, despite time and the world, as she’d remembered. The smell of it made her smile with relief. She pulled a guava from a tree and bit into it. As
she stood there, and plucked a worm from the center of the fruit, she had the feeling for a moment that the things that Emma had sought and that she herself had been taught to seek—the spirits of trees and springs and winds—were complicitous, more availing and more sacred than she had ever wished to admit.
Clio looked at the birdhouses nailed to the sides of the poinciana tree. There were birdhouses on the
mamane
and
plumeria
tree. The thick-waisted monkeypod tree, with its feathery seeds, had two birdhouses, one on each side. There were delicate birchbark houses made by Ojibway Indians, conical Zulu huts with thatched roofs, chalets that looked like clocks, and half-timbered Tudor-style bird manors. Burta had turned the garden into a miniature golf course. In a large blue mosaic birdbath in the shape of a pagoda, two cardinals flailed loudly as if they were fighting rather than bathing.
Burta called from the edge of the lawn. She had had an operation to make her eyes rounder and it had left her with an expression of constant surprise. Her thin black hair was pulled tightly into a ponytail, which did not lessen the effect of startlement. She held a glass of vodka, the bottom half of the glass in a knitted holder, like a tiny sock, that she called her snuggy. It kept her fingers from getting cold, or wet with condensation.
Burta had been a legal secretary in John Lynott’s office. She was the widow of a fireman who had been killed on duty, not in a fire but in a firehouse accident in Eugene, Oregon, and she had wisely used her insurance and pension benefits to move to Honolulu and to put herself through business school. One Saturday evening after a round of golf, John had introduced her to Dix and Clio. Clio had stepped forward shyly, and held out her hand. Mrs. Yamada took Clio’s hand in her fingertips as if to mock Clio’s
politeness, and stared at her with such shrewd malevolence that Clio understood that not only had her measure been taken but that Burta had seen, in a matter of seconds, that Clio would be no trouble at all. Clio could tell by the cool, careful look that Burta gave Dix that Burta suspected Dix might be another matter altogether. But Dix did not have any more of a chance than Clio, even with the advantage of his charm. Burta did not intend to be the least inconvenienced by them. They would not get in her way, any more than the rare trees she planned to cut down in the garden. She could snap them in two, like
kiawe
saplings.
“Mrs. Yamada and I are going away for a few weeks, and when we return we will be married,” Lynott said, winking at the children as he handed Burta a martini.
“Will Mrs. Yamada be living with us?” Clio asked, confused by the wink.
Lynott had laughed, but Burta had not been amused. She turned to him and asked, “Is she for real?”
It was, unfortunately for Clio, a reasonable question. She wondered how Burta had discovered her secret so quickly. Clio looked at Dix. He was winding his yo-yo so tightly that she was sure the string would break.
“Are you for real?” Burta asked again.
“May I be excused?” Clio whispered to her father.
Burta tapped Clio’s chin with her finger. “I asked you a question, missy. Are you for real?”
“Where do you think you’re going?” Lynott called as Clio began to run. “I don’t believe you’ve been excused,” he shouted.
Clio did not need to glance at Burta to know that Burta would not help her.
“What?” Lynott asked. “I can’t hear you, Clio.”
“May I be excused, please?” She was trembling. “And Dix, too?”
“Dix can speak for himself,” Lynott said, making himself another drink. “You didn’t answer Mrs. Yamada’s question.”
Clio looked across at Dix, who was doing a rather good walk-the-dog. “No,” she said carefully. “I don’t think that I’m real.” And because she believed it, she turned away from them and walked into a plate glass door.
It was Dix who picked her up, holding her under her arms, his fingers entwined with string.
“Your yo-yo,” she said, reaching for it. “It stopped.” She clasped the yo-yo in her hand, and fainted.
Although Clio knew that Burta could no longer harm her, the very sight of her in her plaid shorts and her red shoes, her bowlegs pale and scabbed, conjured up such memories that Clio caught her breath. She had always thought, perhaps unwisely, that it was in a practical and even in an abstract way very difficult to hate someone in person. But as she watched her stepmother standing there, she was suddenly full of doubt.
“Did the old
kamani
die?” Clio asked, coming across the lawn. The
kamani
was one of the few plants brought to Hawai‘i by the mysterious Polynesians and it was thought to be very good luck to have one. She realized too late that it was an awkward greeting. It would be useless to start anew; Burta did not allow amends.
“It was fifty feet tall and filthy dirty,” Burta said. “I keep cutting it and it keeps growing back.”
“It would, wouldn’t it,” Clio said vaguely.
“Your father’s not home yet. He’s working on some case where two Hawaiian men got in some lighthouse and wouldn’t come out. Hawaiian activists, they call themselves. As if there’s anything to activate. They claim it is on sacred burial ground or something. So what? So stupid.”
“Father? Or the boys?”
Burta squinted at Clio over the top of her glass. The ice slid noisily to the bottom of the glass as she slowly lowered her hand. Pre-Burta, as Dix used to say, dividing their lives into two shogunates, Clio had believed that the Japanese race was in possession of all the refinement and elegance in the world. As a girl, she had read
The Tale of Genji
as a primer of aesthetics. Clio would have learned sooner or later that there were all kinds of Japanese, but Burta had hastened her loss of innocence.
“Where are you staying?” Burta asked, taking something from under a fingernail.
“With my grandmother.”
“You can stay here with us,” Burta said smoothly, full of conventional propriety.
For a moment, Clio rashly considered jumping the chasm of falsehood that separated them, that had always separated them, but she stopped herself. She wished to remain separate from Burta, but she was infuriated by the vast distance between what she understood and what she could say.
“Where’s Tommy?” Burta was an admirer of Clio’s husband.
“I don’t know,” Clio said.
“You don’t know? Ha! I wouldn’t let that guy out of my sight.”
Burta had been surprised, as she constantly said to everyone, that a movie star as famous as Tommy Haywood would be interested in her stepdaughter.
“I think he is in Morocco.”
“I read about it in
Parade
. You
think
he’s in Morocco?”
“Yes. I think he’s in Morocco.”
People who did not know Burta well, people she and Lynott met in the Peninsula bar in Hong Kong or the Athens Hilton, thought that Burta was wonderful. She was
so boisterous, especially for a Japanese. She could go on all night and start again at lunch the next day, they said in admiration. Clio knew that it was only bullying—whether of tired restaurant musicians who just wanted to take their tips and go home to bed, or of her husband, who just wanted to win enough flamboyant cases to run for the Senate, or of her son and stepchildren, who only wished to be left alone. Dix and Clio had spent much of their childhood slinking noiselessly on bare feet from shadow to shadow to avoid arousing Burta’s attention. And if she spotted them, flattened against a wall in an attempt to pass unseen, she would scream, “What are you doing, you little sneaks, always creeping behind my back!” Of course they were.
Despite Burta’s appearance, she was nervous. Her nervousness did not come from any sensitivity or delicacy of response, but from impatience. She was jumpy because she was waiting, and she did not like to wait. Because she was impervious to the needs of anyone else, she eventually got what she wanted. It is possible that, at least unconsciously, she would have preferred that Dix and Clio had perished in childhood, but since she had not been capable of actually seeing to their deaths, she had done the next most effective thing: she had behaved as if they did not exist.
That is one of the reasons why they were always hungry as children. Until Burta’s son, Steamy, was born, when Clio was eight and Dix was seven, there had been no food in the house that could be considered edible by a child. There were bottled green olives, vodka and sherry, hot peppers, anchovies, pickled herring, rye
brot
from Sweden, chutneys, flat tins of kippers, many kinds of mustard and marmalade, capers, boudin, and tongue. This was deliberate on Burta’s part. She boasted, rather illogically, that she liked to eat as if she were in Denmark, one of her favorite cold countries.
Fortunately, Burta was not interested in the fruit in her garden. Had she known that Dix and Clio were eating the lichee and strawberry guavas and mangoes, she would have sawed down the old trees herself. Once Dix had a rash around his mouth from eating green mangoes and he told Burta that it was impetigo he’d caught at school from one of the scholarship kids. Clio was shocked at the lie, not because of the implied prejudice but because she was sure that Burta would know that he was lying. But Burta believed him, or pretended that she did, and as punishment for getting the rash, Dix had to quit the baseball team. The scholarship students, with all their supposed contagions, tended to be good at sports.
“What’s wrong with your eyes?”
“My eyes?” Clio asked, lifting a hand to her forehead.
Burta laughed. “You’ve become quite the actress. Must rub off when you live in Hollywood.”
The gardener, an old Japanese man with white hair, was trying to pick mangoes with a homemade pole. A net bag had been tied to a metal clothes hanger wound around the top of a wooden pole. The man was so old and his eyesight so frail that it was difficult for him to hold the pole. The birds waited querulously for a mango to fall from the tree. They flew to the fallen fruit, shrieking with excitement.
Burta smiled coyly. “Well, what happened? You look bad. It takes two to tangle. Mr. Hama!” Burta yelled. When the old man did not answer, she yelled again in Japanese, and he began to whimper.
Clio threw her half-eaten guava into the bright English border. Behind her, she heard a mango fall noisily through leaves. The sound of the mango hitting the earth and splitting open was soothing in its sudden finality. “Two to tango,” she said, walking to the house.