This Is Paradise

Midmorning the lifeguards fan across the beach and push signposts into the sand. The same picture is on all of them: a stick figure, its arms aloft, its circle head drowning in a set of triangle waves.
CAUTION
, the signs read.
DANGEROUS UNDERTOW
.

We ignore it. We’ve gone out at Mākaha and Makapuʻu before. We’ve felt Yokes pull us under. We are not afraid of the beaches and breaks here in Waikīkī. We are careless, in fact, brazen. So when we see her studying the warning, chewing the right side of her lip, we laugh.
Jus’ like da kine, scared of da water. Haoles, yeah
.

The tourist girl is white. They’re all white to us unless they’re black. She has light brown hair, a pointed nose, eyebrows neatly plucked into a firm line. She wears a white bikini with red polka dots. Triangle-cut top, ruffled bottom. We shake our heads at her. Our ʻehu hair, pulled into ponytails, bounces against our necks. Our bikinis
are carefully cut pieces with cross-back straps and lean bottoms. We surf in these, sista. We don’t have time for ruffles and ruching. But she does, like every other tourist. Her blue-and-white-striped hotel towel labels her for what she is.

So why do we look at her as we pass? Why do we notice her out of the hundreds of others? Do we already know she’s marked, special in some way?

At the high tide line Cora Jones and Kaila Kaʻawa pull on rashguards to protect against the trade winds, which are wailing this morning. The rest of us pretend we don’t have chicken skin. We strap our leashes to our ankles, careful to piece the Velcro together, and then we jump on our boards and feel them skim across the surface of the water. Arching our backs, our hips pressed into hard fiberglass, we dig the water with our hands. We raise one foot for balance, and because we know we are silhouetted against the horizon, we hold our heads high, we point our toes. Our bodies curve upward, like smiles, beckoning those on shore to follow.

When we look back, the tourist girl is approaching the ocean’s edge. She walks into the water, the small waves lapping at her feet, ankles, knees, chest. We see her dip her shoulders into the whitewash. We don’t tell her to stay away from the retaining wall in front of Baby Queens or that today the current is moving from ʻEwa to Diamond Head. We paddle, and in a moment, we’ve left her behind.

Only local folks leave us money, placing it on top of the television in an envelope with the word “Housekeeping” printed across the front. We split the cash, tucking it into our shoes where management won’t look for it.

We, the women of Housekeeping, get left other things, too, but by accident. The Japanese leave behind useful items: tubes of sunscreen, beach floaties, snorkel gear, unopened boxes of cereal, half-filled bottles of American whiskey, brand-new packets of travel tissues decorated with Choco-Cat and Hello Kitty, which our youngest girls love. The tissues we take. Even when management checks the pockets of our uniforms, they never think to confiscate packets of tissues. We don’t get in trouble for bringing those home. The rest we throw into trash bags or hide on the bottom shelf of our carts to leave at the loading dock for night security. Management doesn’t check their pockets.

What mainland Americans leave behind makes us blush: used condoms under the bed, a turquoise bra with thick cups like soup bowls, pornographic magazines. We find a single blue sandal, a hairbrush tangled with yellow hair, a vibrating toothbrush, a stuffed bear with a missing arm and glass eyes. Such intimate pieces to forget.

Today we have been cleaning rooms for five hours, since six in the morning. Tucking the bottom sheets at least eight times, disinfecting the sinks and bathtubs, vacuuming the
dark brown carpets. We have cleaned twelve rooms and have eight more to go. We pause in the hallway. We don’t have time to rest, but we do anyway, just for a moment. The door to room 254 is open, and we watch a young woman tie a white wrap around her waist. Her polka-dot bathing suit is damp and turns the white fabric sheer, the red dots shining through like mosquito bites. She catches us watching her. “You don’t need to replace the towels,” she says, smiling. “Conserve water.” Her teeth are coins, flat and shiny. We want to tell her to wear a thicker skirt, but it’s not our place to speak to guests.

A young man appears from behind the wall and walks around the foot of the bed: “I already left mine on the floor.”

The girl rolls her eyes. “Then pick it up,” she scolds. She turns to give us an exasperated smile, and we are reminded of our eldest daughters: impatient with nonsense, bossing their brothers, keeping the house. This girl, like our girls, is the type a mother can depend on to
do
things: drive Grandmother to a doctor’s appointment, cook breakfast for Papa, dress and feed the babies before school. We smile back at her. We feel as if we can trust her.

The young man finally emerges from the bedroom—shoelaces untied, hat pulled low over his eyes—and she smacks him lightly on the arm. “You take longer than a girl,” she says. She laughs, a light, tinkling giggle. He laughs. They look at us, so we laugh. At the end of the
hall, she turns and waves at us. We nod, small smiles tightening our lips, and then we enter the room to make the beds.

We think of her for the rest of our shift, chuckling at her bossiness and cheer. When we return our carts, the manager doesn’t bother to check our pockets, which makes this a good day, and we decide the American girl has brought us luck.

The hotel is strict about a great number of our activities. They have rules on how to store the carts, what time to punch in, what time to punch out, how to answer the phone (always start with “Aloha”), how to arrange the pillows on the bed, how to report suspicious activity. The last rule was created to fight terrorism, though we wonder what kind of terrorists would stay in Waikīkī. In fact, we don’t entirely understand this rule or trust it. It seems designed only to make trouble for us. We’ve heard stories, after all, stories about workers like us who tried to obey the rule. Stories like the one about Janora Cabrera, who saw a man pressing a woman against a wall and reaching up her skirt on the penthouse floor. Janora told her shift manager about what she had seen. The shift manager reported it to the night auditor, who deferred to the daytime manager. Together, they reprimanded Janora. “You are only to report suspicious behavior,” they told her. “You are not to involve yourself with our guests’ lives.”

Our shift ends at two in the afternoon, and we exit the hotel from the basement, a hot tunnel that smells of dryer
sheets. This is where the housekeeping office is located and where we are kept, tucked away from the visitors who wander in and out of the front lobby. From here we cannot hear their sandals clap against the polished marble floors nor see their eyes widen as they first glimpse the Pacific through the glass windows of the lanai. We exit onto a sidewalk spotted with old gum stains and the faint red splatter of a spilled shave ice.

At the bus stop, waiting to go home, we laugh with one another. We talk of our husbands and our children. How fast they grow, our little ones, how quickly they move through school, through friends, through clothes. Already the youngest speak more English than we do, and the eldest make plans to go to college. We’re proud of them, scared for them. We want them to go. We want them to stay in the house to help us. We even want, in some small part of our hearts, to send them back home to Pohnpei or Yap or Kosrae so they can really learn what it means to be one of us. Already they are American.

On the ride home, our shoulders ache and our shoes feel tight around our swollen feet. We close our eyes and let the bus’s air-conditioning wash over us like a wave.