Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (44 page)

I stepped into the bathtub, one leg first, then the other. I bent my knees to descend into the water, slowly, so I wouldn’t scald her skin. There, there, Abuelita, I said, cradling her, smoothing her as we descended, I heard you. Her hair fell back and spread across the water like eagle’s wings. The water in the tub overflowed and poured onto the tile of the floor. Then the moths came. Small, gray ones that came from her soul and out through her mouth fluttering to light, circling the single dull light bulb of the bathroom. Dying is lonely and I wanted to go to where the moths were, stay with her and plant chayotes whose vines would crawl up her fingers and into the clouds; I wanted to rest my head on her chest with her stroking my hair, telling me about the moths that lay within the soul and slowly eat the spirit up; I wanted to return to the waters of the womb with her so that we would never be alone again. I wanted. I wanted my Amá. I removed a few strands of hair from Abuelita’s face and held her small light head within the hollow of my neck. The bathroom was filled with moths, and for the first time in a long time I cried, rocking us, crying for her, for me, for Amá, the sobs emerging from the depths of anguish, the misery of feeling half born, sobbing until finally the sobs rippled into circles and circles of sadness and relief. There, there, I said to Abuelita, rocking us gently, there, there.

SYLVIA A. WATANABE

We spoke of her in whispers as Aunty Talking to the Dead, the half-Hawaiian kahuna lady. But whenever there was a death in the village, she was the first to be sent for—the priest came second. For it was she who understood the wholeness of things—the significance of directions and colors. Prayers to appease the hungry ghosts. Elixirs for grief. Most times, she’d be out on her front porch, already waiting—her boy, Clinton, standing behind with her basket of spells—when the messenger arrived. People said she could smell a death from clear on the other side of the island, even as the dying person breathed his last. And if she fixed her eyes on you and named a day, you were already as good as six feet under.

I went to work as her apprentice when I was eighteen. That was in ‘48—the year Clinton graduated from mortician school on the G.I. Bill. It was the talk for weeks—how he returned to open the Paradise Mortuary in the very heart of the village and brought the scientific spirit of free enterprise to the doorstep of the hereafter. I remember the advertisements for the Grand Opening—promising to modernize the funeral trade with Lifelike Artistic Techniques and Stringent Standards of Sanitation. The old woman, who had waited out the war for her son’s return, stoically took his defection in stride and began looking for someone else to help out with her business.

At the time, I didn’t have many prospects—more schooling didn’t interest me, and my mother’s attempts at marrying
me off inevitably failed when I stood to shake hands with a prospective bridegroom and ended up towering a foot above him. “It’s bad enough she has the face of a horse,” I heard one of them complain.

My mother dressed me in navy blue, on the theory that dark colors make everything look smaller: “Yuri, sit down,” she’d hiss, tugging at my skirt as the decisive moment approached. I’d nod, sip my tea, smile through the introductions and small talk, till the time came for sealing the bargain with handshakes all around. Then, nothing on earth could keep me from getting to my feet. The go-between finally suggested that I consider taking up a trade. “After all, marriage isn’t for everyone,” she said. My mother said that that was a fact which remained to be proven, but meanwhile, it wouldn’t hurt if I took in sewing or learned to cut hair. I made up my mind to apprentice myself to Aunty Talking to the Dead.

The old woman’s house was on the hill behind the village, just off the road to Chicken Fight Camp. She lived in an old plantation worker’s bungalow with peeling green and white paint and a large, well-tended garden out front—mostly of flowering bushes and strong-smelling herbs.

“Aren’t you a big one,” a voice behind me said.

I started, then turned. It was the first time I had ever seen the old woman up close.

“Hello, uh, Mrs., Mrs., Dead,” I stammered.

She was little—way under five feet—and wrinkled, and everything about her seemed the same color—her skin, her lips, her dress—everything just a slightly different shade of the same brown-gray, except her hair, which was absolutely white, and her tiny eyes, which glinted like metal. For a minute, those eyes looked me up and down.

“Here,” she said finally, thrusting an empty rice sack into my hands. “For collecting salt.” And she started down the road to the beach.

In the next few months, we walked every inch of the hills and beaches around the village.

“This is
a’ali’i
to bring sleep—it must be dried in the shade on a hot day.” Aunty was always three steps ahead, chanting, while I struggled behind, laden with strips of bark and leafy twigs, my head buzzing with names.

“This is
awa
for every kind of grief, and
uhaloa
with the deep roots—if you are like that, death cannot easily take you.” Her voice came from the stones, the trees, and the earth.

“This is where you gather salt to preserve a corpse,” I hear her still. “This is where you cut to insert the salt.” Her words have marked the places on my body, one by one.

That whole first year, not a single day passed when I didn’t think of quitting. I tried to figure out a way of moving back home without making it seem like I was admitting anything.

“You know what people are saying, don’t you?” my mother said, lifting the lid of the bamboo steamer and setting a tray of freshly steamed meat buns on the already crowded table before me. It was one of my few visits home since my apprenticeship—though I’d never been more than a couple of miles away—and she had stayed up the whole night before, cooking. She’d prepared a canned ham with yellow sweet potatoes, wing beans with pork, sweet and sour mustard cabbage, fresh raw yellow-fin, pickled eggplant, and rice with red beans. I had not seen so much food since the night she’d tried to persuade her younger brother, my Uncle
Mongoose, not to volunteer for the army. He’d gone anyway, and on the last day of training, just before he was shipped to Italy, he shot himself in the head when he was cleaning his gun. “I always knew that boy would come to no good,” was all Mama said when she heard the news.

“What do you mean you can’t eat another bite,” she fussed now. “Look at you, nothing but a bag of bones.”

I allowed myself to be persuaded to another helping, though I’d lost my appetite.

The truth was, there didn’t seem to be much of a future in my apprenticeship. In eleven and a half months, I had memorized most of the minor rituals of mourning and learned to identify a couple of dozen herbs and all their medicinal uses, but I had not seen—much less gotten to practice on—a single honest-to-goodness corpse.

“People live longer these days,” Aunty claimed.

But I knew it was because everyone—even from villages across the bay—had begun taking their business to the Paradise Mortuary. The single event which had established Clinton’s monopoly once and for all had been the untimely death of old Mrs. Pomadour, the plantation owner’s mother-in-law, who’d choked on a fishbone during a fundraising luncheon of the Famine Relief Society. Clinton had been chosen to be in charge of the funeral. He’d taken to wearing three-piece suits—even during the humid Kona season—as a symbol of his new respectability, and had recently been nominated as a Republican candidate to run for the village council.

“So, what are people saying, Mama?” I asked, finally pushing my plate away.

This was the cue she had been waiting for. “They’re saying that That Woman has gotten herself a new donkey”; she paused dramatically.

I began remembering things about being in my mother’s house. The navy blue dresses. The humiliating weekly tea ceremony lessons at the Buddhist Temple.

“Give up this foolishness,” she wheedled. “Mrs. Koyama tells me the Barber Shop Lady is looking for help.”

“I think I’ll stay right where I am,” I said.

My mother drew herself up. “Here, have another meat bun,” she said, jabbing one through the center with her serving fork and lifting it onto my plate.

A few weeks later, Aunty and I were called just outside the village to perform a laying-out. It was early afternoon when Sheriff Kanoi came by to tell us that the body of Mustard Hayashi, the eldest of the Hayashi boys, had just been pulled from an irrigation ditch by a team of field workers. He had apparently fallen in the night before, stone drunk, on his way home from Hula Rose’s Dance Emporium.

I began hurrying around, assembling Aunty’s tools and bottles of potions, and checking that everything was in working order, but the old woman didn’t turn a hair; she just sat calmly rocking back and forth and puffing on her skinny, long-stemmed pipe.

“Yuri, you stop that rattling around back there!” she snapped, then turned to the sheriff. “My son Clinton could probably handle this. Why don’t you ask him?”

Sheriff Kanoi hesitated. “This looks like a tough case that’s going to need some real expertise.”

“Mmmm.” The old woman stopped rocking. “It’s true, it was a bad death,” she mused.

“Very bad,” the sheriff agreed.

“The spirit is going to require some talking to.”

“Besides, the family asked special for you,” he said.

No doubt because they didn’t have any other choice, I thought. That morning, I’d run into Chinky Malloy, the assistant mortician at the Paradise, so I happened to know that Clinton was at a morticians’ conference in the city and wouldn’t be back for several days. But I didn’t say a word.

Mustard’s remains had been laid out on a green Formica table in the kitchen. It was the only room in the house with a door that faced north. Aunty claimed that you should always choose a north-facing room for a laying-out so the spirit could find its way home to the land of the dead without getting lost.

Mustard’s mother was leaning over his corpse, wailing, and her husband stood behind her, looking white-faced, and absently patting her on the back. The tiny kitchen was jammed with sobbing, nose-blowing relatives and neighbors. The air was thick with the smells of grief—perspiration, ladies’ cologne, last night’s cooking, and the faintest whiff of putrefying flesh. Aunty gripped me by the wrist and pushed her way to the front. The air pressed close—like someone’s hot, wet breath on my face. My head reeled, and the room broke apart into dots of color. From far away I heard somebody say, “It’s Aunty Talking to the Dead.”

“Make room, make room,” another voice called.

I looked down at Mustard, lying on the table in front of me—his eyes half open in that swollen, purple face. The smell was much stronger close up, and there were flies everywhere.

“We’re going to have to get rid of some of this bloat,” Aunty said, thrusting a metal object into my hand.

People were leaving the room.

She went around to the other side of the table. “I’ll start here,” she said. “You work over there. Do just like I told you.”

I nodded. This was the long-awaited moment. My moment. But it was already the beginning of the end. My knees buckled and everything went dark.

Aunty performed the laying-out alone and never mentioned the episode again. But it was the talk of the village for weeks—how Yuri Shimabukuro, assistant to Aunty Talking
to the Dead, passed out under the Hayashis’ kitchen table and had to be tended by the grief-stricken mother of the dead boy.

My mother took to catching the bus to the plantation store three villages away whenever she needed to stock up on necessaries. “You’re my daughter—how could I
not
be on your side?” was the way she put it, but the air buzzed with her unspoken recriminations. And whenever I went into the village, I was aware of the sly laughter behind my back, and Chinky Malloy smirking at me from behind the shutters of the Paradise Mortuary.

“She’s giving the business a bad name,” Clinton said, carefully removing his jacket and draping it across the back of the rickety wooden chair. He dusted the seat, looked at his hand with distaste before wiping it off on his handkerchief, then drew up the legs of his trousers, and sat.

Aunty picked up her pipe from the smoking tray next to her rocker and filled the tiny brass bowl from a pouch of Bull Durham. “I’m glad you found time to drop by,” she said. “You still going out with that skinny white girl?”

“You mean Marsha?” Clinton sounded defensive. “Sure, I see her sometimes. But I didn’t come here to talk about that.” He glanced over at where I was sitting on the sofa. “You think we could have some privacy?”

Aunty lit her pipe and puffed. “There’s nobody here but us…. Yuri’s my right hand. Couldn’t do without her.”

“The Hayashis probably have their own opinion about that.”

Aunty waved her hand in dismissal. “There’s no pleasing some people. Yuri’s just young; she’ll learn.” She reached over and patted me on the knee, then looked him straight in the face. “Like we all did.”

Clinton turned red. “Damn it, Mama! You’re making yourself a laughingstock!” His voice became soft, persuasive.
“Look, you’ve worked hard all your life, but now, I’ve got my business—it’ll be a while before I’m really on my feet—but you don’t have to do this,” he gestured around the room. “I’ll help you out. You’ll see. I’m only thinking about you.”

“About the election to village council, you mean!” I burst out.

Aunty was unperturbed. “You considering going into politics, son?”

“Mama, wake up!” Clinton hollered, like he’d wanted to all along. “The old spirits have had it. We’re part of progress now, and the world is going to roll right over us and keep on rolling, unless we get out there and grab our share.”

His words rained down like stones, shattering the air around us.

For a long time after he left, Aunty sat in her rocking chair next to the window, rocking and smoking, without saying a word, just rocking and smoking, as the afternoon shadows flickered beneath the trees and turned to night.

Then, she began to sing—quietly, at first, but very sure. She sang the naming chants and the healing chants. She sang the stones, and trees, and stars back into their rightful places. Louder and louder she sang—making whole what had been broken.