Read House of Many Gods Online

Authors: Kiana Davenport

Tags: #Hawaii, #Historical Fiction

House of Many Gods (4 page)

BOOK: House of Many Gods
10.18Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

She remembers that she did not wave. There was no one to wave to. She had simply stood on deck watching as the harbor faded, then the land. Then she had closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, a woman running. She had run away. She had left suddenly, taking nothing, not even her child
.

Now, in the ethers of morning she wakes, feeling the city outside waiting to offer itself to her as raw material from which she continually constructs her new identity. She hears a man in the bathroom rinsing his razor, calmly encasing it, then gently slapping his cheeks with cologne. She starts to rise, to greet the day, and the past comes rushing in. As if it has been lying in wait, as if it were not behind but in front of her
.

A gauntlet of sunlight on her arm inflames an old surfing scar. Even now she feels the surfboard crack, waves taking her down, the mean, contentless undertow. Someone humming in the kitchen below, slapping around in amphibian slippers, summons up old sweet-faced aunties with a buttery caste to the whites of their eyes. Memories persist with relish, with ingenuity
.

Sometimes near the wharves of San Francisco, old fishermen with crooked gaits conjure old tū

men back home dragging their rotting nets out of a sunset. Urchin street dogs bring memories of Digger and Squid, brave hunting
hounds with long, rough tongues. Winds blow and it is still the sea she inhales, tossing her dreams of an arid coast, a child’s plaintive calling
.

Some nights she feels that the man asleep beside her—the whole city—sees right through her. In a flash of insight people see she is a woman who has run, who has shed everything, and so she has no background and no worth. Sometimes she hates the city, hates the people born there, who are part of its history. And she hates how the city made her pay before it allowed her entry
.

She lies back in her bed recalling those early days, though she never quite remembered the first sight of the bridge, or the
Lurline
entering the harbor, or the skyline of San Francisco. What she remembered was how, at that moment, she had felt grateful for not having had a happy childhood. Whatever happened next, she was not a lamb being led to slaughter
 …

W
HEN THE
L
URLINE
HAD DOCKED, SHE FOUND HER WAY TO
C
HINATOWN
, the only place she could afford until she got her bearings. Down narrow streets of sterile, asphalt frightfulness, she saw people cupped in the shadows like effigies. Then gold shops, pagoda’ed temples. An old woman in slippers dragged a promethean handbag while beside her a barefoot child thriftily carried new pink rubber boots. Ana stepped from a bus into a slippery tide of discarded shrimp heads, the sound of wind chimes, odor of burning incense. Then she had relaxed somewhat: Things looked so familiar she could have been in Honolulu.

In broken English, a vendor had offered her a mushroom big and virile as a steak. Or, dried camel eye from some doomed caravan traversing ancient spice routes. Dong Quai for “happy womb.” She moved on, struck by the smell of singed ducks hanging in doorways, the offal of rabbits being disemboweled on-site. An amber hand waving the blue meat of monkey.

Streets were almost suffocating, but with a redemptive squalor, a sense of hustle, of focus, immigrants struggling toward better lives. Here and there the old and the new world meshed, the 1960s moving in. Young Asians in blue jeans slapped fresh paint on storefronts. A couple flew by on a Harley. But then across the street, old men squatted, throwing dice, and in an alley a child emptied its bladder into an abandoned shoe.

She bought a slithery square of barbecued mock meat and a bag of moist, pink
li hing mui
, and gazed at cheap curios and smiled. Even litter on the ground seemed beautiful. Even tiny women in doorways, hurling bright balls of spittle into open drains. Passing a barrel of fresh pig’s feet,
Ana had suddenly slowed down, remembering midwives bringing bouquets of pig’s feet with which they had made soup to shrink her womb. She remembered how, after childbirth, they had tenderly kneaded her belly. She put those thoughts away.

Light rains began to fall, undyeing Chinatown as colors ran from posters and clothes on racks. Down Fifteen Cent Alley she had found Tung Lok, the Happy Together Hotel. The lobby smelled rancid, and she heard people coughing in their rooms. Her walls were flocked with dead roaches, but there were no bloodstains on her mattress, and her sheets were clean.

At dusk she had walked the streets again, asking for work in several shops. People passed her arm in arm. Even the gods had company: icons of Buddha, Jesus, and Confucius lined up abreast for sale. She felt the fog curl up her sleeves, a chilly sense of loneliness, the sense of one who has crossed frontiers and sees that what was left behind is already fading into flashbacks. There was only now, the aftermath.

For weeks she labored in a sweatshop, stitching pockets into cheap dungarees. Around her in palpitant, moist heat were Mexicans, Asians, and Latins—robust, velvet-eyed women nursing their infants as they bent at ancient Singers. Ana stood the heat until one day, exhausted, she fainted between blue pyramids of dungarees. The owner woke her by pinching her, punching her with his fist between her shoulder blades.

After that, she served dim sum in a restaurant where four-generation families ate, holding each other in their laps. Each day, in the abrupt turbulence of beaded drapes, she exploded from the kitchen, pushing carts loaded with metal and bamboo steamers, lifting and replacing the scalding lids hour after hour until whole constellations of blisters lined her palms. Skin peeled from her fingertips, which bled.

When Chinese customers were rude, she had the manifest advantage of being an “immigrant” not understanding their language, pretending not to understand English. They cursed her, waving her away, and she reflected on how, at home in her islands, she had never thought of Chinese as rude or cruel. She had only thought of whites that way.

At night she swept up hair in a beauty shop, then sat with the owner sewing hair-pillows which women bought to cushion their elbows in the sweatshops. They sewed till dawn, when the sun lit little rainbows in a toothbrush glass. Years later, she would remember those nights as luminous—two women gloved in human hair, lost in hanging strips of brilliant silks, a small rotating fan lazily wafting the silk this way, and then that way. Long hours drew them close, coaxing out confessions,
their life stories knotted up in bits of thread they bit off with their teeth. And in the mornings, a roomful of brilliant pillows that often they fell asleep upon, waking at noon like concubines.

Still, in the permanent twilight of exhaustion, Ana could not seem to make progress, to save enough money for proper clothes, a better job. She began to see how lack of money engendered shame, how without it people allowed themselves to disappear. She lost the dim sum job. The hair-pillow woman moved back to Hong Kong. She tutored English in the back room of a laundry. She waitressed, washed dishes. Graveyard. Swing shift. One job rinsing into another.

One night a sailor offered her a fifty-dollar bill. Balanced on the girders of indecision, Ana reached out and thoughtfully touched the bill before she walked away. She was beginning to know hunger, what it was to lie awake and hear her insides working on almost nothing. She began to learn how far she could go on water and air, how far she could divest herself of herself without collapsing. She avoided open markets and food stalls. She began to despise food a little.

In a mirror her face was becoming narrow; she imagined it all frontal like a cat’s. Increasingly she felt weak, intimations of how easily her system could fail, her organs ignore the chain of command, how hunger could drive verbal and motor skills back in evolution so that movements suggested a human being learning to walk upright. It was not quite starvation, which had manners. Starvation just walked up to folks and knocked them down.

Hunger, near hunger, was sly. It allowed her to get up and move around, gave her a sense of mission: pay rent, find food. Hunger became her escort, walking her through the antique pungency of Chinatown, through viruses germinating in puddles under streetlights. Through a succession of jobs in little holes-in-the-wall, until she began to lose track of what it was she wanted, of what might be worth having.

And she began to recognize certain women like her who had run away. Women of every color and hue who had tried to reinvent themselves, shedding their names, their languages, their backgrounds, everything but their skins. Women worn down, their edges blurred, on the verge of sinking out of sight. Ana began to find these women essential, their tragic incoherence proof that there were others worse off than she. She began to see how life could be brought to a standstill.

She pored over discarded newspapers looking for odd jobs, even blood banks. And one day she saw the picture of a man she recognized. She stared at his face, etched with lines like an outdoorsman, a rugged,
rather handsome face. An older man, a strong, straight nose giving him an unperturbed and rather noble profile. He had sailed on the
Lurline
out of Honolulu, bound for San Francisco.

She sat back remembering how she had hastened to the ship, remembered it as huge and regal, yet something feminine and graceful in its lines. She remembered how, as she drew near, the ship seemed to look at her, to focus on her. Seeing the full size of it up close, she had felt everything around her drop away.

Her first night on board, in the ship’s boutique she had bought one good dress and a pair of leather shoes. Later she stood on deck with her tattered suitcase full of island clothes, then stepped back and heaved it overboard. She had forty-eight dollars to her name.

In the morning she had strolled the decks, studying passengers in third class and second class. Then she had ventured to the top deck, observing those in first class, how they dressed, how they talked. The way they seemed to move in slow motion. That was when she first saw him, a solitary stroller, a tall man lost in thought. He moved with the natural grace of someone privileged, and as he passed she felt the clean male scent of lime cologne settle over her. For a moment their eyes had met, he slowed his pace, but then she looked away. He appeared to be somewhere in his midforties. She was twenty-three.

Day after day she had watched him stroll the decks, perhaps because she had sensed he was watching her. Yet, as if by tacit agreement, they never introduced themselves.

What would we have said? What would we have had in common?

At night as couples floated past her dying upward into fog, she had stared at the sea, wondering where she would go when they reached San Francisco. What she would do. The morning they docked, she had glimpsed him at Immigrations, then lost him.

That night at Tung Lok Hotel she scanned the newspaper article under his picture. “…  Recent relaxation of immigrant restrictions in Chinatown … 50,000 people congesting the area … alarming rise of syphilis, tuberculosis …” She studied his photograph, his features, hoping he would be kind. In the morning she bathed, and washed her hair, then oiled it into a smooth French twist and slipped on her one good dress, now frayed and rusty at the seams. Then she made her way to a local clinic.

The line was long, the sun intense. The old man ahead of her removed his shirt, his back so thin he seemed to be wearing a larger man’s skin. She wiped her face, then stood counting the long jade vertebrae of
his backbone. Inside there was such a mob, the nurses looked in need of nursing.

One of them regarded Ana disdainfully. “We don’t buy blood. Unless you’re here for TB examination.”

Ana shook her head, then pointed to the newspaper she was carrying. “I’m here to see him, Dr. McCormick.”

The woman frowned. “For what? He’s very busy. Look how long these lines. You understand? We have bad problem now in Chinatown.”

She was about to retreat when she saw him in the corridor. He was wearing a white lab coat, holding the hand of a mortally thin Chinese woman, talking softly, as if she were a child about whose future he knew a sad story.

“I know him,” Ana told the nurse.

“So? You go now, or wait for other doctor to see you.”

She remembered the way he had looked at her aboard the ship—as if she were beautiful—and knew that somehow he would help her. He
must
help her. A man shouldn’t look at a woman that way if not prepared to perform a kind of exorcism over her loneliness and desperation.

People coughed. She smelled their fragile, humid bodies, the condensation of sweat on amber arms. She felt her owns arms, so thin. In that moment she was no one. She had nothing to lose.

“Look, it’s highly personal. Please tell Dr. McCormick I need to see him. Tell him … it’s the girl from the ship, the
Lurline
.”

The nurse studied her as if she were both novel and absurd.

But minutes later he peered out from an examination room, smiled faintly, and came forward.

Timidly, she took his hand. “I’m Ana. I hope you remember me. I used to watch you stroll the decks …”

“Of course I remember. I should have introduced myself then. How can I help you? Are you ill?”

She shook her head. “I’m here because I saw your picture in the paper. I came to ask if possibly you knew of an opening here, receptionist or anything. I’m afraid I haven’t been able to get my bearings since I arrived.”

In a glance he took in her dress, her worn-down shoes. He sat her down in a corner. “Ana, I don’t officially work here. I’m with a lab outside the city. My field is immunology, and they’ve called several of us in for consultation. It’s pretty serious.”

She had never felt so desperate. “Well … do you know someone
who could hire me? I had two years of university at home, a science major. It’s just … I left the islands quickly, with no forethought.”

“And it’s your first time in San Francisco.”

“My first time anywhere.”

Months later he would tell her how he had seen her coming up the gangway of the
Lurline
in her island clothes. He had watched her stand alone on deck, waving to no one as the ship’s bow slowly turned and headed out to sea. She had looked so brave and lonely, something touched him. During the crossing he had thought to introduce himself, but she was young and he felt he had already thrown his life away.

BOOK: House of Many Gods
10.18Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Otherwise by John Crowley
Crown of Vengeance (Dragon Prophecy) by Mercedes Lackey, James Mallory
Cold Pursuit by Carla Neggers
The Siren Project by Renneberg, Stephen
Rock Bottom by Canosa, Jamie
Tempted by Evil by Morton, Shannon, Natusch, Amber Lynn
Mail Order Menage by Abel, Leota M
Texas Ranger Dad by Clopton, Debra
Naked Sushi by Bacarr, Jina
Pulling the Moves by Margaret Clark