Sleeping Beauties (21 page)

“I distrust history,” Clio said. “I always have.”

Emma took Clio’s chin in her hand. “The bruises are almost gone.” She lightly touched the pale scar that ran down Clio’s cheek. “What happened to you, Clio? I haven’t wanted to ask. I suppose I haven’t wanted to know.”

“You have never asked questions, Emma. Even when I was a child. The day that I arrived at Wisteria House, so ungainly as you say, you never even asked why I’d come.” Clio smiled. “And you didn’t ask why I left.”

“I was moved by your reticence. I used to look at you and think:
‘onipa‘a
. Be steadfast. I was so moved by you. You needn’t tell me anything, even now.”

Clio took a breath, and nodded slowly, as if she knew that she did not have to explain herself to Emma. She looked at the pearl in her hand, as luminous and mysterious as a moon, and she began to speak.

“They wouldn’t take me to a hospital because they were afraid the work permits would be taken away. A doctor came to the hotel. There was a boy guarding me, the boy from the movie crew, Rob, the same boy who’d spent all those weeks looking for the donkey. He sat at the door. Can you imagine?” She looked up at Emma. “First the donkey, then me. He’ll think he has a career.” She smiled.

“I said that I would jump off the balcony if they allowed Tommy into the room. He sent bouquets of roses, Marrakech roses, every day and the room was so full of the smell of them that I could not stop sneezing. I told the boy that I was afraid I would break open my stitches, and when he carried the flowers to the porter’s room, I ran away. You know how good I am at that. I had hidden a bag under the bed, waiting for my chance.

“One of my cuts opened again when I hit my head on the door of the taxi. I was in pain, holding my forehead, frightened because I was sure they would come after me. They had to stop filming for a few days because Tommy had broken his hand and they were very worried about scandal. But I was calm as the soldiers at the airport went through my lingerie, most of it soiled. I hadn’t been allowed to send my things to the laundry, lest a maid run straight to the king with my bloodstained clothes. And then the soldier who was going through my suitcase pulled a pair of handcuffs from beneath my clothes.” Clio laughed nervously, and she saw that Emma was startled.

“I’d told Tommy that my life with him was a kind of torture. He said that he’d rather be unhappy with me than unhappy without me, and as a joke, he called it a joke, he gave me the handcuffs in Morocco. He got them from the propman. They were in the bottom of my suitcase, where I’d put them to keep from seeing them, and I had forgotten about them until the soldier found them.”

Clio looked down at the pearl in her hand. It shone with the dampness of her wet palm.

“You might wonder why I hadn’t just thrown them away,” she said. “We never used them, although I would sometimes get excited thinking about them. But even if I had understood it better, just why the thought of them was exciting, it wouldn’t have done me any good, because I couldn’t have done it for him.”

She looked at Emma to see if she understood. To her relief, Emma did understand and she nodded to tell her so.

“The soldier held the handcuffs on the end of his machine gun and called over another man, and they passed the handcuffs back and forth, holding them with the tips of their fingers, as if the handcuffs might bite them. And they might have. I offered to let the soldiers keep them. It
sounded flippant and the first soldier looked at the cuts on my face and asked to see my papers again and I said suddenly in French, ‘The handcuffs are a gift from my husband,’ which was the truth, and which in some awful, astonishing way worked. Although it is hard to imagine a Muslim woman wearing handcuffs under her burnous, and unnerving to realize that one had been naive enough to think that the pleasure of binding a woman was a delight limited to the West, the soldiers nodded in understanding and even sympathy with my husband and dropped the handcuffs, which I didn’t want and had never wanted, into my suitcase and let me go.”

Clio lowered her head. “When I told him that I was leaving, it was so easy for him to hurt me, he was so without guilt or shame, that I thought I must have been very bad or he could not have felt so justified. It was only when I pretended to lose consciousness that he stopped. No more fun. It was wrong, and careless, not to have been afraid of him. My mother would have known how to handle him. And ‘handle’ is the word she’d have used. You see, I thought that if I made a pact with the devil, the devil was at least bound to hold up his end. But the devil doesn’t have to pay. He’s the devil.” She held out her open hands.

“I don’t know where to begin,” Emma said slowly. “Many people marry without love, child, but they are not beaten for it. Nor do they deserve to be.”

“I’ve thought for the longest time that it was my fault. Even before Morocco.”

“None of it has been your fault. We might start with that. Surely you know that.” She took Clio’s hand and curled Clio’s fingers around the pearl. “You’re an island girl,” she said. “Why didn’t you just throw him out the window?”

Clio smiled. “Most of my life has been about not disappointing you. I sometimes think that this whole notion
of being an island girl, this whole code of female honor, needs to be looked at a little more carefully. I sometimes think it has caused me a great deal of trouble. You taught me that an island girl is resilient, courageous, kind, generous. Island girls do not indulge in self-pity, or alimony, or pain-killers. Well, I suppose an aspirin now and then is all right. But it is a very hard thing to be, Aunt Emma.” She sighed heavily. “I wanted to be an island girl, more than anything else. I wanted to please you.”

To Clio’s surprise, Emma looked at her with tears in her eyes. She took Clio in her arms, and for the first time that Emma could remember, that Clio could remember, Clio wept.

F
or four hundred dollars a month, Clio rented a small wooden house on the east end of the island of Moloka‘i. It was in the district known as Kainalu, which was under the guardianship of the shark god. “I know it very well,” Emma said when Clio told her. “And the god will look after you. I myself have seen it.”

A few miles out of town, the red dirt and cactus and rough-barked cottonwood gave way to vine-draped valleys fragrant with guava and rose apple. Great forests of tree ferns, and
kukui
planted in remembrance of sacrificed chiefs, filled the valleys. Green streams ran over the
palis
that separated Kainalu from the isolated leper colony on the windward coast.

The cottage sat in a grove of banana and mango trees. From the front porch, Clio could see across Pailolo Channel to the island of Maui, the long ascent of sacred Haleakala, blue and lavender, lifting from the sea, rising into the clouds. Through the
plumeria
trees and milky plumbago was a small, rocky beach.

Deer came down from the mountain at night, seeking warmth in the eucalyptus behind the house, and she was awakened by their mournful barks. They sounded like melancholy dogs. The cry of the deer reminded her of a
poem by Izumi Shikibu that Mabel used to recite to her when Clio was unable to sleep.

She swam in the morning and again in the early afternoon. She swam at sunset. She climbed to the
heiau
, a long twelve-mile hike, and she often walked upstream to the waterfall at Halawa, but it was in the ocean that she felt as if she were, each time and at last, the self her heart would have chosen had it been asked.

She would swim until she was tired, although not too tired to get back to the beach. She found a hole in the reef into the deep water at the edge of the channel. If she swam out far enough, she could see the big rock on the side of the mountain that marked the site of the shark god’s burial place. Sometimes she was overcome by an inexplicable feeling of panic, as if there were too much beneath and around her. She feared that the ocean might suddenly curl her into a wave and fling her from the loneliness of earth into the loneliness of space, and she would hurry back through the reef as if the ocean were trying to catch her.

Although Clio had gone to Moloka‘i, the isle of sorcery, because she loved it best of all the islands, the knowledge that Henry Kilohana, the man she had taken to the pond, was on the island made her feel elated and expectant, as if she had a secret. She did not try to find him, nor did she look for him in the small groups of men sitting on cars outside the firehouse, or at the feedstore, or at the basketball court at the public high school. She knew that on an island
so small, where most people were either related or had known one another all their lives, she would find him.

And she did, one afternoon at Obayashi’s store. She was buying cone sushi and Evian water. It had surprised her to find mineral water in a place where it was difficult to find a good lamb chop, and she had just asked Mr. Obayashi how it was that he came to stock the water when a man behind her put a packet of twenty-test fishing line and a jar of kimchee onto the wooden counter and said, “We use kimchee for fish bait here, if you want to come fishing one day.”

“I have an order for your auntie,” Mr. Obayashi said abruptly to him. “This is last-time credit.”

“I’ll take it to her,” Henry said calmly.

Mr. Obayashi, wrinkled with age, walked with outstretched arms to guide and steady him. He bumped into a dusty cardboard advertisement for Coppertone tanning lotion that had been there since Clio was a child. There were not many tourists on Moloka‘i; not much local call for skin-darkening products. With some effort, Mr. Obayashi lifted a box to the counter and pushed it toward Henry. The box contained canned food and soda. “For your auntie,” said Mr. Obayashi. “Last time.”

Henry nodded slowly, undismayed, his hands in his back pockets. “You going somewhere?” he asked Clio as he lifted the carton to his shoulder. He had a small black tattoo of a cross between his thumb and forefinger.

She had been hoping to stop at the library before it closed.

“No,” she said.

Henry’s aunt, Ginger Kilohana, lived with her grandson, Earl, in a rusted yellow school bus in the middle of a field. On the side of the bus someone had written in spray paint,
Stay Out of This Bus! Ginger had lived in the bus for twenty years. The tires of the bus, long flat, were hidden in weeds. Nearby was a muddy stream and a wooden outhouse with a roof of palm fronds. Ginger owned a fourteen-eightieths share of the land.

An outrigger canoe was pulled up under the palms at the mouth of the stream. No one had bothered to turn the canoe, and the hull was warped. The wood was so porous that rainwater seeped out before the boat could fill with water, and the mosquitoes had long since moved to the truck tires along the shallow streambed. The broken
ama
, the outrigger, lay buried in fallen palm branches and rotting coconuts.

The front door of the bus was broken, held open with a block of wood. Henry carried the box of food into the bus. Clio looked at the door. She was no longer called upon much to repair vehicles. Dix’s roommate at school, fellow Squid-Mon Dicky Herbert, had been given an old Army tank by his father for his fifteenth birthday, and its restoration had been one of Clio’s more interesting initiation requirements by the Squids.

Clio went to work. Ginger did not have a toolbox, so Clio had to use Henry’s penknife and a can of oil.

“My father refuses to take Hawaiians as clients,” Clio said, wiping her oily hands on the grass when she had finished. “But, as you can see, I do.”

He laughed. “Hawaiians don’t pay their lawyers. We promise you a pig, then we forget it’s yours and eat it. We bring you a fish and then stay for dinner. That canoe has been lying there since I was in high school, rotting in the sun because the Kaanaipos said it was Mack’s responsibility, and Mack said it was theirs.”

He took two cans of beer from a dirty Styrofoam cooler under the bus and handed one to her.

This is a new idea, she thought. There is no romance
or longing in this view of the past. No nostalgia here. No sadness. No broken heart.

Clio came from a family whose lines of descent were scrupulously documented. Her husband, Tommy Haywood, had no family. But Henry Kilohana was related to almost everyone on the island in an easy, unrecorded way, sometimes without benefit of marriage, sometimes without benefit of blood-distance. It was impossible to keep track of Henry’s relatives, and what is more, no one would think it very important to do so.

“How did you get that?” she asked, pointing to a line of white scar tissue across his knuckles. The backs of his hands were marked with hook punctures. Clio could see a piece of coral growing under the brown skin.

“My cousins and I used to pick fights with sailors in Waikiki.”

It was Henry’s cousins, Clio knew, whom her father was prosecuting in Honolulu.

He began to strip a palm branch. His black hair was held at the back of his neck with a rubber band. His nose did not broaden at the nostril, but was narrow, and even haughty. “You can’t even call us the working class,” he said. He began to weave the palm into a lariat. “The working class wants satellite dishes and motorboats, but Hawaiians don’t want anything. Well, maybe a case of beer. Maybe a new pony.” He smiled at her. “There used to be Hawaiian-language newspapers, and the women made mulberry bark cloth and quilts, the designs inspired by their dreams. But there was a turning away from everything. From the beautiful as well as the practical. They even stopped learning to read and write. My great-great-grandfather was an interpreter of omens for a chief, but my grandfather couldn’t speak Hawaiian.” He knotted the end of the palm lariat. “They began to die.”

“One of the reasons I liked being married was that I didn’t have to think,” she said.

He laughed.

“About these things, I mean. About these islands.”