Honolulu (13 page)

I had heard similar sounds at the pleasure house in Taegu, so I was hardly shocked. As it droned on like some lewd drinking song endlessly repeating its blushing refrain, I was reminded that there is nothing quite so amusing as the sound of other people having sexual relations. At long last a man cried out in pleasure, and less than a minute later a disheveled sailor-though not the one with wheat-colored hair-was spat out of the bedroom like some finished product on a conveyor belt. I shyly retreated under the blanket as he left, peeking out in time to see the next customer, an eager Chinese, sprint into the bedroom and shut the door behind him. In moments the bedsprings began singing tenor again.

I felt almost as if I was back in that little house beneath the paulownia tree, and it was not an unpleasant feeling. I closed my eyes and drifted asleep to the strains of this bawdy lullaby.

When I woke again, bright sunlight was now gilding the edges of the drawn shade. I sat up, my head still a little woozy. A clock announced it was half past nine in the morning, and the house was now silent but for the faint snoring of May in the bedroom, and a kind of wheezing purr from the vicious little cat who still dozed atop the back of the couch. I went to the window and pulled up the shade: the street outside was deserted, the houses all silent, with no sign of their occupants, all presumably resting after a long night’s work.

I went back to the couch, wondering where to go from here, when I noticed that some of the clothes that had been draped across the couch the night before had been stuffed into a trash basket in a corner of the room. I picked from the trash a red silk evening dress with a ripped seam and a blue satin slip with torn, brocaded trim. They were damaged, certainly, but it seemed wasteful to simply throw them away. And it now occurred to me I could also repay in some small way this woman’s kindness in rescuing me. I took my sewing kit from my travel bag, settled down on the couch again, and carefully started taking the seam of the dress apart. Finding some red cotton thread in my kit that was a close match to the color of the dress, I began to restitch the seam.

As always, sewing had a calming effect on me, and for the next hour or two I felt relaxed and happy, almost as if I were back in Mother’s room, sharing our thimble time. Oh, how I wished that I were! I did not look once at the clock, and in what seemed like no time at all I heard:

“Hey. Toots. You still here?”

I looked up. May, wearing only a flimsy pink camisole, stood in the doorway between bedroom and parlor. She appeared surprised to see me. “Figured you’d have been on your way by now,” she said, somewhat pointedly.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” I said. “I … lost track of time.”

“Yeah, makes two of us. I kinda went into extra innings last night myself.” Indelicately, she rubbed the inside of her thigh. “Geez, is my pussy sore.”

I nodded.

“Yes,” I agreed. “He is ill-tempered.”

May stared at me-then roared with laughter. Once again I had apparently misread her meaning. Pidgin was easier to grasp than the strange English this woman spoke!

When she finished laughing she said, “Sit tight. Lemme put some water on.” As it turns out she meant this quite literally. She disappeared into the kitchenette, and emerged a few minutes later with two cups out of which steam was rising. “Here, have some,” she said, handing me a cup.

I took a sip, expecting perhaps some sort of tea, but blanched at its acrid taste. “What is it?”

“Hot water with a teaspoon of limestone phosphate. I read in the paper you ought to drink some every day before breakfast-cleans out the kidneys and bowels, purifies the blood.”

I put the cup down unfinished, content with the purity of my blood as it was. May drank the ghastly concoction quickly, then noticed for the first time what I had been working on. She picked up the red silk dress, examining it with surprise, if not outright amazement: “Did you fix this?”

“Yes, but I’m sorry, I did a very poor job,” I said with requisite Korean humility.

“Sakumoto the tailor fixed this once, but the seam busted open again. Told me it couldn’t be repaired.”

“That is because he used silk thread to repair the seam. Silk is too strong, it cuts the fabric. With a dress made of Chinese silk, better to use a weaker, softer thread, like cotton.”

May picked up the night slip, examining that as well. “Damned if these don’t look good as new.”

“You are too kind, but thank you.”

May seemed to regard me with new eyes. “C’mon, let’s rustle up some grub.” I followed her through the bedroom-past a canopied bed in considerable disarray, a chest of drawers, a vanity table-and into the kitchenette, where she heated up a skillet, cracked four eggs into it alongside several strips of bacon, and put on a pot of coffee. In a few minutes we were sitting down at the little kitchen table to eat. Her cat wandered in, quickly sniffed out the food, and let out a small but demanding Nyep. He went to May’s chair, raised himself up on his hind legs, and reached up with a paw, which fell a few inches short of May’s plate. She fed him a strip of bacon, then lifted him into her lap and began massaging his neck. In her hands he purred contentedly, though oddly it sounded more like a bird’s trill.

“So,” May said as she took a swallow of coffee, “I take it you’re looking for a place to hang your hat?”

“A what?”

“A place to live.”

“Oh. Yes.”

“Maybe here in Iwilei?”

This would certainly be the last place my husband would think to look for me. “Yes, perhaps.”

Casually she said, “So who you running from?”

My heart skipped a beat. “What do you mean?”

“Honey, nobody jumps at the chance to live in a place like this unless she’s on the lam from somebody. And Oriental gals like you can’t even enter the country if they don’t have somebody lined up to marry ‘em. You’re here all alone, so you gotta be running from somebody. Who is it? Husband? Pimp?”

I did not know this second word, but I sighed and admitted, “My husband.”

“He try to sell you on the street?”

I was shocked. “No! Is that-does that happen?”

“How do you think most of these Japanese gals wound up here? They came as, whatayoucall it, picture brides? Their husbands either put ‘em to work, or sold ‘em to someone who did.”

I felt cold inside, wondering if this fate had befallen any of my friends from the Nippon Mara, praying it had not.

“Is that how … you got here?” I asked. “Someone sold you?”

“Hell no. Nobody sells me but me. I’m strictly an independent contractor.”

“No one sold me, either,” I said quietly. “My husband merely beat me.”

Soberly she took that in, then nodded.

“Okay. Just so long as we’re being square with each other.”

“‘Square’?”

“Honest.” She broke open the cellophane from a small package labeled
LUCKY
STRIKES
. “So … you laying low till you can file for divorce?”

I did not know this “laying low,” but I understood, and was shocked by, the latter half of her statement. “Women here may divorce their husbands?”

“Yeah, sure. They can’t in your country?”

I shook my head. “In Korea only men can ask for ki-cho. It means ‘abandoned wife.’”

“Honey, I’m starting to see why you left home.” She lit a cigarette, which further astonished me: aside from Grandmother’s pipe I had never seen a woman smoke before. “Okay,” she said after inhaling and releasing a noxious plume. “So me and the other gals here, we might be able to use somebody like you-somebody good with a needle and thread. This job’s hell on your wardrobe, all that groping and pawing …”

“Yes, I could help with that,” I said eagerly.

“In exchange, I can give you room and board here, with me-not for long, mind you, just till you can get on your feet.”

It was unlikely Mr. Noh would find me here, and the truth was I had precious little money to spend on lodging. “I would be most grateful for that.”

“Just remember: this is a business, like any other. That’s my office in there”
she indicated the bedroom
“and I keep regular hours, four P.M. to two A.M. You can sleep on the couch, like you did last night, but if you’ve got a problem with the acoustics-the noise-then go check into the Y instead.”

“I was not bothered by the … noise,” I replied honestly.

Her laugh was coarse but genial. “Good. Because I like a lot of noise.”

The did not mislead me on that score. In fact, may Thompson was easily one of the most popular women in Iwilei-“entertainers,” the government called them, here as in Korea. Prostitution in Honolulu was tacitly sanctioned by the authorities as a necessary evil, but restricted to this “red light” district. The hundred-odd women who worked here were supposedly examined for venereal disease on a weekly basis-in practice far less often, though Chief of Detectives Arthur McDuffie came each week to collect their “health certificates,” along with something May called “kickbacks,” cash payments to the police that assured the stockade would not be closed down.

That first day May introduced me to some of our neighbors, told them I was a seamstress, and within the hour I found myself knee-deep in a pile of dresses, skirts, blouses, and lingerie. I immediately went to work mending tears, patching linings, and raising hemlines far above what might be generally considered a respectable length. One woman, Lehua, asked me to repair something called a sarong, which I found fascinating in its brevity. From Lehua I also learned that iwilei is Hawaiian for a unit of measurement roughly equal to the length of an arm-to which May added cynically, “Yeah, and that’s just how the decent, God-fearing folk of Honolulu like to keep us: at arm’s length!”

Indeed, the women of Iwilei were even legally constrained from visiting certain sections of the city, and May would often send me out on errands for her into the “respectable” neighborhoods she was prohibited from visiting.

In my first few days at Iwilei I returned from one such shopping trip-to purchase silk underwear, May’s one indulgence, at Gump’s Department Store downtown-to find that she had installed the oddest-looking device in the corner of the sitting room. It looked vaguely like a mechanical bird with a needlelike beak, perched atop a wooden table standing on metal legs; below the table were a series of gears and levers the function of which I could hardly guess.

“Hey, kiddo, we’re in luck,” May told me with enthusiasm. “One of the gals is shipping out to San Francisco and she didn’t want to lug this back with her, so I picked it up for a ten-spot. It’s a few years old, but it’s a genuine Singer.”

“It sings?” I said. “Is it some kind of phonograph?”

“No, no, no! Christ. It’s for you, it’s a sewing machine.”

“For me? But I have no use for such a thing.”

“If you’re going to be a seamstress, you need a sewing machine. Go on, give it the once-over, it won’t bite.”

I had heard of such machinery, of course, but I had never seen one, and as I approached it I noted that it was aesthetically quite pleasing to the eye. The “head” of the machine was painted black and decorated with ornate gold and red adornments, or “decals.” The “beak” of the bird was in fact a needle, and instead of tail feathers it sprouted a silver metal wheel of some unfathomable purpose.

“But I have no idea how to operate such a device,” I protested.

“It’s a snap,” May assured me. “I’ll teach you.”

“You? ”

I must have betrayed my shock at this: May looked a bit indignant. “Hell, yes. What kind of lousy mother wouldn’t teach her daughter how to sew? You think when I was ten I said to her, `Sorry, Ma, I don’t need to learn to sew, I’m gonna fuck for a living’?”

I blushed. “I’m sorry. I did not mean to suggest-”

“I had a mother, too.” With wounded pride, May shouldered me aside, sat down, and proceeded to demonstrate the operation of the Singer, starting with the treadle-a foot pedal which, when pumped, moved a series of gears that made the sewing needle go up and down. “Trick is,” May explained, “you’ve gotta alternate your heel and your toe till you get a steady rhythm going … otherwise you can spin the balance wheel in the wrong direction, see?”

She tutored me in the proper use of this treadle until I was proficient, then showed me how to set and thread the needle. I was surprised to discover that where I would hand-stitch two pieces of fabric together by weaving the needle and thread in and out of both pieces, the machine’s needle actually created stitches on both sides simultaneously. When May pumped the pedal slowly, the machine made a dozen stitches in a matter of seconds; when she pumped faster, it stitched even more. “And this is an old foot-operated model. The new ones have an electric motor that really goes to town.”

I could scarcely believe it: This device could sew more stitches in a few minutes than I could in half an hour! My initial aversion was quickly forgotten; the machine won me over with its remarkable speed and consistency. By the end of the day I was comfortably doing these new “lock-stitches,” amazed at how much more quickly I could work with this Singer.

This was fortunate, as sewing jobs continued to come at a steady pace. Much of my labor here was spent letting out dresses by another inch or two or three, which I considered an enormous waste of time. Korean clothes, both men’s trousers and women’s skirts, were of one size, with waistbands that could be tightened or loosened as needed. Koreans know that the human body is always changing-so why try to make one’s body fit into some garment of arbitrary size? But Americans seemed quick to bow to the tyranny of a fitted garment-and just as quick to cheat that fit when they could not live up to its restrictions.

Many of the fabrics I worked on were satins, silk, or this new “artificial silk,” soon to be called rayon, so they required delicate handling; but I was used to working with such fabrics, as my mother’s wrapping cloths often utilized silk and ramie. With some of these I relied on my hand sewing, as I was not yet confident enough that I could make machine stitches without tearing them. But immodestly I must admit that the ladies of Iwilei seemed quite happy with my handiwork and regularly gave me “tips” in the form of sweets and potables-the latter of which I would usually pass along to May.