Her mother’s house. Her house. On the walls of the
lanai were tableaux painted in the 1930s of natives beating
kapa
, hauling in nets of fish, planting
taro
. The men had strong jaws and powerful arms and thighs and feet. The long-haired women, wrapped in red and yellow
pareus
, pulled bananas from trees with thick, lovely arms. The eyes of the men and women were slightly bulbous and the tips of their fingers were broad and flat. In their pale and faded stillness, the figures in the murals were like ancestors moving quietly along the walls. Clio used to talk to them when she was a child. They had been good companions to her and she nodded to them.
Burta came toward the house. Mr. Hama, stiff with age, waved his arms awkwardly to frighten the birds away from the mangoes. He looked as if he were dancing in the Bon festival.
“You want a drink?” Burta shouted from the bar. The bar had beer on tap and pub signs that Burta had collected in England. She came onto the lanai and sat down, taking a puzzle book from a basket of magazines next to her chair. She opened a cloth-covered pencil box she’d made from a pattern in
Woman’s Day
and chose a pen.
“Your father was going to pick up cold cuts. If you want to stay for dinner.”
Emma used to say teasingly that there were certain words that island people did not use. “Cold cuts” was not an island expression. “Debutante,” “cardigan,” and “pasta” were mainland words. It was not that these words did not apply—nonapplicable words was another category, with entries like “basement” and “galoshes.”
Burta enjoyed games of a competitive nature. She could zip right through a puzzle book. Dix and Clio used to sit in Clio’s room and listen to their father and Burta argue violently over a badly played bridge hand, and Clio once
saw Lynott shove Burta for suggesting that he had surreptitiously turned a backgammon cube.
Happily, Burta was adamant about working on her puzzles unassisted. Clio watched her. As it grew dark, the figures on the walls disappeared. Clio whispered good night to them.
“Steamy’s been in his studio all day,” Burta said. “I’m not allowed in, of course. He’s taking pictures. For some museum.”
Burta had given her son, Steamy, the rooms where Dix and Clio had once lived, and Steamy had turned them into a darkroom and a photography studio. He was taking photographs of the volcano, Kilauea, in eruption, in the hope of publishing a book. He also took pictures of Oriental girls. Although Steamy’s nude photographs were used on calendars in Japan and Korea and Hong Kong, Burta did not know about his lucrative sideline. Clio could not imagine any objection that Burta might have, but Steamy wished to keep it a secret. Burta thought Steamy spent all his time locked in his studio shooting stuffed Hawaiian honeycreepers in artificial flight. Steamy had told Clio that he hoped to get into live filming soon. Live honeycreepers.
Burta reached to turn on a lamp. “Emma Fitzroy let that old house of hers downtown get that way just to show she was better than anyone else, didn’t she? But, of course, you lived there with her. I guess you thought you were better, too.”
“Better?” Clio felt a little cold. She wondered if it were about to rain. The wind often rose before the coming of rain, fluttering in a show of its own importance.
“She could of fixed up that old house, but she wouldn’t. No. She refused to move. She could of made a fortune selling it. Where she gets her arrogance, I don’t know. The nerve of her. Who does she think she is? No one cares
about that old Hawaiian stuff! Who your ancestors are. Who the hell cares? It hasn’t done them any good that I can see. She and your nutty grandmother used to give that luau every New Year. People talk, talk, talked about it for weeks. They used to kill a pig. Do they still have it?” Burta looked up from the puzzle book. “Everyone says she’s broke, but I don’t believe it. And now it’s too late to sell. That house should have burned down years ago. When your grandmother ran off with the yardman.”
“I’ll say hello to Steamy before I go,” Clio said, turning away.
“He won’t see you,” Burta said as she bent over to fill in the letters of a word. “He’s got turtles in there.”
As Clio thought he might be, Steamy was arranging a very pretty naked girl against an enlarged backdrop of Changkyungwon Park in Seoul. She held a branch of plastic cherry blossoms and a stone lantern.
Steamy was very happy to see Clio. He jumped up to kiss her. “This is great! This is really, really ‘
ono
! Here, hold this!” He took the heavy lantern from the girl and handed it to Clio. “It makes her perspire and then her body gets all shiny and I have to do it again, because she can’t reach certain spots and, well, it’s a nightmare.” He fussed around the girl.
Clio said hello, but the girl took no notice of her. Steamy blotted the backs of her knees with a tiny powder puff.
“You might invest in better supplies,” Clio said, looking around.
“I’m free-lance, you know.” He sounded hurt. “Here, you do it.” He put the puff in Clio’s hand and stopped to look at her. “I’ve missed you, Clio.”
Clio put down the lantern and smoothed the girl’s back with the greasy powder puff. “Did you steal this from
Burta’s handbag?” The girl turned obediently. Clio felt as if she were basting her.
“Where’s Tommy?” Steamy asked, winding film into a camera. “I thought you’d be gone for months. Years.”
“You sound like your mother,” Clio said.
“Thank you very much. Could you get her down on her knees, no, sitting on the back of her heels, there, legs a little apart. Just a hint. There’s sweat just pouring between her bosoms.”
“Breasts.”
“What?”
“Not bosoms.”
The girl helpfully held apart her breasts. She understands English, Clio thought.
“Oh, sorry,” Steamy said. “I forget these distinctions when you’re not around to remind me. You leave town for six months and I say ‘bosoms’ again. You see how I need you? Breasts. This is Tae Jing, Clio. These are her breasts. Her American name is Tammy.” He looked again at Clio. “What’s wrong with your face?”
“Car accident.” She stood back to study the girl. “There. It’s the best I can do.”
Tammy kneeled in front of the backdrop. She was already wet with perspiration.
“Let’s go swimming,” Clio said.
Steamy looked up from his camera.
“If Burta asks about Tammy, you can say that she came to pick up the turtles.”
He frowned, not understanding.
“The turtles that Burta thinks you’re photographing.”
He had forgotten his own lie.
Steamy, who grew up doing almost anything that Clio wanted him to do, short of setting Burta on fire, a request Clio always denied making, handed Tammy a towel. She looked worried. She, too, was free-lance. “That’s it?” she
asked angrily, speaking for the first time. “If I do swimming, I get paid extra.” To their astonishment, she did a very competent backflip.
“I’m going to the forest,” Clio said with a smile.
It had been no consolation to Clio that her stepmother’s lack of maternal feeling had extended to her own son. Steamy was so glum and so eager to please that Clio had allowed him, little by little, to follow her into the forest. If Clio was not gratified by Burta’s coldness to her own child, she was interested that her stepmother, who so clearly hated her, would entrust her son to her. But perhaps Burta did not even notice that Steamy spent his days at Clio’s side.
When they climbed a slippery green hill, the air suddenly cool in a clearing of
‘ōhi‘a
trees, his new eyeglasses would become opaque with condensation and he would not be able to see. Clio gave him the name Steamy. By the time he began school, his friends called him Steamy, too, and he no longer minded wearing glasses.
The forest was full of the tall tree fern
hapu‘u
. At the base of the stem grew a fine wool called
pulu
. When Steamy tripped one afternoon on a coralberry root and cut his forehead, Clio bandaged the cut in strands of
pulu
and they continued on their way, proud of their work.
That night, Burta screamed when she saw Steamy. There was dried blood on his T-shirt and filaments of
pulu
dangled around his face like tendons. Steamy had to put his hand to his head to remind himself of just what had happened, so effective was Clio’s dressing.
Burta hit Clio with a ruler.
Steamy, suddenly terrified that he was going to die, allowed Burta to comfort him.
His shame lasted a long time, far longer than the small
white scar on his forehead. Clio explained to him that Burta would have blamed her regardless of any explanation he might have given, but since he believed himself, even early on, to be already in Clio’s debt, he regretted not having had the courage to return a small portion of what he felt he owed her. He did not owe her anything, of course, because she loved him, but he always believed that he had betrayed her for one of Burta’s awkward embraces.
He sneaked into Clio’s room that night and sat in a corner with his back against the stone wall. There were centipedes in Nu‘uanu, some of them six inches long, and he kept a constant watch for them. As Clio tried to read
The Wilder Shores of Love
, a book she’d borrowed at the school librarian’s urging, Steamy scanned the floor and asked questions: But why did your own mother leave? Where did she go? Why didn’t she take you? What did she look like? Is my blood different from your blood? Your blood is better, isn’t it? How many women has my father married?
Clio would have been happy to answer his questions. Her hesitance to answer was not lack of interest or resentment, but ignorance. She, too, was eager to learn about the world and that smaller, more worrisome thing, the family, but she was as confused as he was about these things. That she didn’t know the answers to his questions was more reassuring to Steamy than if she had been able to tell him what he wanted to know. It confirmed that they were in the same mess. When she knew, she’d tell him, and he believed her.
Years later, she would suddenly say, “Because she didn’t want us, and Rory Armacost wasn’t strong enough to insist.” Then Steamy would have to guess which question, after all those years, Clio was finally able to answer. If they were not alone, he was not able to shout out the old question in triumph, but his expression told Clio that he, too, now
understood, both the question and the answer, and she would nod in dignified alliance.
Clio could smell the resin of the turpentine trees. The sky seemed always to be just ahead of her, the color of a wet abalone shell. She had often noticed that at the moment of nightfall the wind held itself back, a considerate wind, reluctant to disturb the trees. She heard Steamy behind her on the path and she walked faster, dropping down the path to the swimming hole.
Clio took off her linen dress and lay it across the branch of a
pua kenikeni
tree. With the scent of the small white flowers, she thought of Emma.
Emma proudly claimed that she did not swim in still water because the water did not want her. She believed that the ocean was a water god that, given the slightest chance, would seize her and drag her back to her rightful place. “We come from the ocean and it has never forgiven us for escaping. It has claimed my father and my brother, McCully. When I swim, I feel the water god trying to take me, reminding me that I have forsaken him, pulling me back to him. That is why the ocean is so dangerous.” Clio understood, but she liked swimming in still water for the very reason that she was not ready to be reclaimed. The ocean was implacable, but the pond bore no grudge.
She gasped as she eased herself into the cold water.
“You might have waited,” Steamy said. “You always get to go first.” He took off his jeans and shirt, but left on his underclothes.
He jumped noisily into the water. Tall stalks of wild ginger grew around the pond. The stalks swayed with the sudden movement of the water, and their fragrance was stronger for a moment.
He swam to her and put his hands on top of her head, trying to hold her underwater.
Trying to drown me, she thought. She pulled away from him and floated on her back and her long braid streamed behind her like a water snake.
“I haven’t been here since the last time I came with you,” he said, splashing her.
“I’m ashamed of you.”
He stopped splashing water at her. “You’ve always been ashamed of me.”
“Well, maybe when you feel sorry for yourself.”
“It’s easy for you, Clio. You somehow find a way to disappear when you don’t like something. You left Nu‘uanu. You left Emma.” He paused. “You left me.”
She turned over in the dark water, moving her legs beneath her to keep warm. She did not answer him, her mouth in the water.
“You look like a crocodile,” he said. “Your eyes are so big.”
“And my teeth.”
“Coming to eat me.”
“That is your idea of easy?”
“Coming to eat me?”
“You think that I disappear when I don’t like something?”
“You’re not here, are you?”
“I think it’s about time that
you
left.”
“Where would I go?”
She blew bubbles in the water with her nose. “It doesn’t matter. It’s the going.”
“It’s different for you, Clio. You’re a woman.”
“This is going to be an interesting argument, I can tell.”
He spun around in the water. “Stop confusing me, Clio. What I mean is that you know things. You aren’t half of anything, the way I am. Half-Japanese. Half-brother.”
She watched him twirl in the water, around and around, making himself dizzy. “What is it that you are trying to say?”
He stopped. “No one ever told the truth. Or even knew the truth. Except maybe you. Maybe you knew. And you went away. I was left with Burta and our father. I find it hard to call him ‘our father,’ don’t you? It’s as if we were praying.”
She laughed.
“You fell out of a mango tree when you were ten and I sneaked inside and called for help because Burta wouldn’t take you to the hospital. I asked Burta about it once, why she wouldn’t take you, and she had no memory of it. She said I made it up.”