This Is Paradise (12 page)

9) Approach the podium. Look out at your family tucked into neat rows. The mortuary has upholstered the pews in a warm beige color. The walls are sand-hued. You want to disappear into this uniformity. In your nervousness, forget to introduce yourself. During the eulogy, drink each time you say the words “family,” “faith,” or “the.” Drink for every family member who gets teary during your speech. Drink for reading through the introduction and body paragraphs without taking a breath.

Conclude with a description of your grandmother seated at her kitchen table, the Bible in her hand, her illness not yet evident. Notice your dad wiping his eyes and realize you are seeing him cry for the first time in three years, since his favorite dog passed away. Lose your place
in the speech. Forget, momentarily, your grandmother’s name. Recall how squeezing her hand in yours felt like holding a fragile bird, and then feel your throat tighten, and tears threaten, and the steadiness of your voice wavering. Emma. Her name was Emma.

Feel angry that your family is making you deliver the eulogy. Rescind this. You are angry they are witnessing your grief. Drink.

10) Ask the family to share their memories of your grandmother. Rush back to your seat and search nervously for your father’s hand. Hold it. Hold it as you did when you were eight—desperately, with need and fear. Down the rest of your beer.

11) During the hour of sharing, take a drink each time a family member avoids using the word “Alzheimer’s.”

12) An eighth cousin four times removed comes to the podium and expresses surprise at having just learned your grandmother was ill. Respond by sneaking a drink for each year your grandmother lived in the dementia wing of Hale Kūpuna (two), the years before that during which your auntie cared for her (three), and the year when the family first noticed your grandmother’s memory slipping, her feet unsteady, her weight dropping because she could never remember to eat.

13) Take a drink when this eighth cousin four times removed promises that she, like your grandmother, has denied the sins of the flesh. She does not want to go to hell. She has been saved.

14) Take a drink each time she runs from the podium to the casket, drapes herself over your grandmother, and loudly sobs.

15) Take a drink when she has to be dragged away from the body.

16) Take a drink when both your uncle and dad ask, “Who dat?”

17) Sneak a sip when the cousin who fights MMA takes the podium. He describes how your grandma cared for him after he returned from Desert Storm with shrapnel in his knee, and how she made him attend church with her in hopes of giving him hope. Lean in when your cousin relates how, once, he brought his girlfriend to visit, and Grandma made him sleep in the living room. Late that night, he quietly knocked on the door to his girlfriend’s bedroom, and Grandma appeared in the hall to scold him. “Get back to da couch, boy.”

Laugh with the rest of the family when your cousin pouts, reliving this moment. When he says his grandmother lived her faith both inside and outside of the home, and she wanted the same of her family, understand that the small mercies your cousin has given in his life, he has given because of her.

18) Take a drink for each male cousin you see cry for the first time:

Kea, who once begged your mom to take him to California with her; who was for so many years your mom’s favorite, even if she never admitted to it; of whom your
grandmother made a hānai grandson because Kea’s dad, her neighbor’s son, was a mean alcoholic and Kea’s body proved it. During the viewing, he whispers, “Tūtū, my Tūtū,” as he gazes down at the body. He sobs when they close the casket. He is a pallbearer, one gloved hand lifting the casket, the other wiping his eyes, hidden behind dark glasses.

Your older cousin, Jason, who was the only person you trusted to teach you to ride a bike. You were seven. He was thirteen and beautiful. A ringer for King Kamehameha. He touches the casket gently, lets his fingers rest on its glossed wood. Like Kea, he is wearing sunglasses. His shoulders tremble with emotion. Later, in the evening, he teases you about buying your first surfboard at twenty-eight, and you tell him that you would have bought one sooner if he gave surf lessons. He laughs at that, and his laughter is a balm.

Finally, your baby cousin Ryan, who is no longer a baby, but a sophomore in high school. He is one of the great-grandchildren. He’s lost weight since he was jumped at the end of his freshman year, got mean lickins, his arm broken. He is six foot one and, despite the weight loss, still muscled in a way that belies his teenage scrawniness. You forget how young he is sometimes. He says he doesn’t remember how he got home last night. You want to tell him not to end up like some of his friends. You want to tell him he’s smarter and better at baseball and masculine in a way no fifteen-year-old boy has any business being. He
has that calm rage about him that scares you, that makes you want to hug him, that makes you respect him.

When Ryan helps carry the casket to the bed of the truck where the gravediggers are waiting, he, too, is crying. He, too, is using those clean white gloves to wipe his face. He comes to stand near you, and because you want to cry each time you see a man like that crying, you wrap your arms around his waist and lean into him. You let him be a man. You let yourself be a woman who needs his strength.

19) Take a drink for each cousin who brings his fighting cocks to the burial. Be thankful the birds remain in their cages, left in the shade of so many tarp-covered F-150 truck beds.

20) Return to the mortuary for lunch and notice that the crowd of 200 has dwindled to a more manageable 125. Take a sip each time an auntie urges her homemade dessert on you: sweet potato manju, strawberry layer cake, chocolate mochi, guava Jell-O squares.

21) For the remainder of the day, take a drink every time a distant cousin asks how you’re related to the deceased. Why didn’t you remember to introduce yourself? Now three-quarters of the guests think you work for the mortuary and keep asking you where extra toilet paper is kept. (Point them to the hall cupboard.)

22) Take a drink when your uncles pull their trucks up to the side of the mortuary and haul out the big plastic coolers filled with beer.

23) Take a drink for each boy cousin who, upon finishing his lunch, drifts out to join the uncles. The men are leaning against the side of a warehouse adjacent to the mortuary, trying to squeeze into the sliver of shadow the building provides. Their wives/girlfriends/baby-mamas are still inside, talking story. Your aunties are cleaning, placing fresh foil over the aluminum trays of kālua pig and laulau, and carefully loading paper plates with food for each neighbor or friend to take home.

Your uncles and aunties have so many friends—from high school, work, the old neighborhood where they grew up—who have come to support them. A few of the friends didn’t even know your grandmother, but they are still here for your family. They are hugging your aunties, pressing your uncles’ hands, kissing your cousins on the cheek. They are hānai.

Call them uncle, auntie. Kiss them. When they ask whose girl you are, say, “Kanoa’s. You know, Emma’s eldest boy.”

When they say, “Ho, I neva see ’im fo’ long time,” point your dad out to them. He’s with the other men. They leave you, as if in a trance, to go to him, hug him, press his hand in theirs. “Look jus’ like you, da daughta,” they tell your dad, and he nods proudly.

24) Follow your cousins out to the mortuary parking lot. The sliver of shade from the neighboring warehouse has widened. The men are louder now, teasing each other. Take a drink for every story that ends with your
dad’s younger brother, Junior, getting lickins. And for the one that involved a homemade bomb and a telephone booth. “I like get all dat change,” your uncle says, defending himself.

Another uncle, the one who will lose his job when the G&R Sugar Mill closes in six months, busts up. “Jus’ like you. Find plenny ways fo’ get paid.” Laugh with all of them.

25) Take a drink for all the stories that compare Junior to his father, your grandfather. Take a drink for every car they restored, every beer they drank together, every football game where your grandpa cheered on Junior.

26) Take a drink when you realize your dad is not part of these stories.

27) Take a drink each time an auntie tells you your dad was not like your uncle. He was not like
any
of your uncles. He was the quiet one. The sweet one. The one who never made pilikia. He was the one who left.

28) Take a drink when they say you take after him.

29) Understand your dad was different from the outset. Hand him a beer. After all, to be a boy and to diverge; to watch football but not play it; to keep the books for your grandpa’s market instead of unloading the trucks; to leave the island for boarding school; to want to go to college on the mainland; to want to stay there, on the mainland, with only one child to his name, and a girl at that, is to cease to want what men want. Your father is absent from your uncles’ stories not because he left, but because
he was never of Kauaʻi in the first place. Because he was in his own world. Because he is Hawaiian, but no local.

30) Take a drink because it’s dark now and you didn’t even notice. You have been awake since before dawn, at the mortuary by 7:30 a.m. You have been in mourning for two weeks, and now the funeral is over. The burial is done. Junior, the son whom everyone knows, has opened up his backyard to the family and extended families, and because it’s Kauaʻi, this could include more than a third of the island. Rachel, his wife, has put out the plastic card tables in one long row. The uncles sit beside the tables. A second row of chairs provides seating for the adult cousins. Junior’s daughter and her husband sit in the outer circle. Auntie Miki, a real tita, like her mom—your grandmother’s sister—is there, too. She sits with the men, in that inner circle.

Stay with the rest of the women, hovering around the exterior row of chairs, coming and going through the kitchen. Outside the house, the men have their food. Inside the house, your younger cousins are watching the Tupac biopic.

31) Drink a beer to wash down the raw crab in chili pepper sauce, the dried ahi, the tripe stew, the squid in coconut milk, the sashimi your uncle made from a filet of ono one of his friends gave him. Poi, chicken long rice, mochi, and lilikoi cake from the neighbors are placed in front of the men. One tray of Chinese noodles has spoiled.
It doesn’t matter. Food covers three dining tables, and these are just the leftovers from lunch.

Junior is holding his Shih Tzu in his lap. Her leather collar has “Baby” printed on it in rhinestones. He is snagging a piece of pork katsu with his chopsticks and feeding bits of fried meat to the dog.

32) Take a shot of Crown Royal because someone found it in Junior’s refrigerator and someone else has brought a second bottle and they’re starting to run low on Bud Light, though there’s still plenty of Heineken left. “Da Napilis, yoa grandma’s side, neva drink, dem,” your dad tells you. “But da Pakeles. Ho!”

“I know I one Pakele den,” Junior says, laughing. He hands your dad a beer.

33) Drink, but do not call your mom. Do not call her even though you know she is missing everyone and wants to know what is happening. Do not call her, all the way in California, even though you said you would. When your auntie calls her, do not ask for the phone, but help pass it around so the other uncles and aunties can say something. Tomorrow you will talk to your mother. Tomorrow you will describe everything. But tonight this is yours. Do not share it. She should have come if she wanted to be a part of it so badly. She would have come if she had been thinking like a Hawaiian and not a haole.

34) Seek out your female cousins, the ones who used to pile onto that rattan chair with you. Squeeze next to
Johnell and her husband on the wooden bench, its blue paint peeling on the edges. Accept the beer Johnell hands you. Across from you sits Emmy, the one named for your grandmother, and her husband.

Your cousin Ryan hovers behind the bench. Scoot to make room for him to sit even though he refuses. He busies himself with his phone, but he remains behind you, waiting. Understand he has come to listen to you talk. After all, who knows what you might say? Who knows what someone like you thinks of all this?

Johnell and her husband start to poke fun at the pastor, but Emmy’s husband stops them. He says the sermon was good. He liked it. “That sermon was serious,” he says, and Ryan nods. His lean face is thoughtful.

But Johnell will have none of it. She’s a teacher at Sacred Hearts Academy in Honolulu, so she knows something about sermons, and this one, she says, was crap. “I didn’t need to think about hell. I was in it!”

Start to laugh—you couldn’t agree more—but then notice Ryan watching you, like he expects an answer from you. Take a sip from your bottle to stall. Try to say something about the goodness of God, about forgiveness, about the pastors you’ve known who have given their own income to help support their parish. Instead, blurt out: “I don’t trust men with manicures.”

Everybody laughs, even Emmy and her husband, and Ryan most of all. He looks at you with a hint of admiration. Suspect that you, too, are leading him astray.

35) When your auntie calls you inside to see photos of your grandparents, take a long pull from the beer bottle. You did not know your grandfather. He died almost forty years ago, when your dad was twenty. Your dad kept no photographs of his father. In fact, you have never seen a picture of your grandfather. Now, the black-and-whites reveal a man with broad shoulders, a puffy face. He pulls more Chinese than you expected. In one picture he is laughing, and his eyes are tight and small. This is how your father laughs. This is how you laugh.

36) Take a shot when one of the women gets so drunk she announces her husband is screwing a Korean. Take another shot when the woman calls the mistress a yobo. Find out the drunk woman is a distant cousin. Her husband is a cousin, too, but from the other side of the family. No one claims the yobo.

37) Drink when the fighting cocks start crowing in their truck beds. Hear their cries echo throughout the neighborhood and a dozen dogs howl in sympathy. No one else seems to notice the commotion. The men still talk story, the women still pack plates of food. You are alone in your listening.