Comfort Woman (21 page)

My husband and the minister wives who come to the party do not care for the rice cake. My husband says, Tastes like Styrofoam. What blasphemous waste. The neighbor ladies say, No, no, it's not so bad, but they wrap their pieces in a napkin and leave it on the table. Then they take pictures of my Beccah-chan, a tiny face lost in voluminous clouds of color, and leave.

When my husband takes the newspaper into the bathroom, I carry the baby and the platters of rice cake to the porch. I settle my daughter into her basket, then crumble each cake, precious in its own way as salt, until she is surrounded by miniature mountains of crumbs.

I place a bit of rice in my baby's mouth and throw a handful high over the railing. When birds fly in for the feast, my daughter flaps her arms and crows as the bravest swoop over her basket and into the piles of rice cake surrounding her. Faster and faster, I scatter crumbs by the fistful, calling more and still more birds to come and join us, until there must be well over one hundred pecking in a frenzy at the ground and at their tails, flapping along the porch railing, hopping next to the basket where my baby girl laughs and I sing over and over, into the ball of flurry and heat made by their beating wings: Thank you, thank you for coming, thank you for coming to my party.

Since my mother died, I dream the dream from my childhood.

I am swimming in water so blue that even when you're dreaming you think nothing this pure exists in real life, a blue so translucent you can almost breathe it. I hunt black-and-white fish as they dart through red coral reef, when suddenly I am wrenched from behind. I try to kick away but cannot move my feet. Something pulls me under. I begin to feel dizzy with the effort of not breathing, and when I know I will drown, I wake up, gasping for air.

I found my mother after she had been dead a night and a day and another night. I usually stopped by to check on her before and after work and during the day on the weekends, to see if she was lucid, eating, sleeping, combing her hair. Since moving into my own apartment last year, I missed only one day, and on that one day she chose to die. I think she did it on purpose, to punish me. Or, maybe, to release me.

I brought doughnuts that morning, my usual peace offering of maple bars, planning on having breakfast with her on the lanai. The lanai was the main reason my mother bought the house when we first saw it, almost two decades ago. When Auntie Reno badgered the realtor for a list of homes in our price range, this house was last on her list and so the first one we visited; Auntie Reno believed in saving the best for last.

The ten-year-old, white-with-blue-trim two-bedroom home in Manoa was relatively inexpensive but did not convey the image of spirituality Reno felt a prominent fortune-teller's home should. “You need a cottage in Kahala or, better yet, Nu‘uanu—you know how many ghosts stay in Nu'uanu?” Auntie Reno sniffed. “Manoa not bad, but dis house, jeesh!” She snorted loud enough for the realtor to wince. “Jus' like one
Leave It to Beaver
house wit one open port garage, gimme a break.”

“I like it, Auntie Reno.” I hung on to my mother's arm and sniffed the air. I remember that the air was so fresh and alive it stung my nose, like I was smelling the rain through the sun. I think I thought that we could run away from Saja with his stench of Red Disaster, that the Death Messenger would never find us in this clean-smelling house that sang of green things. Now I think that it was just the first house I smelled that didn't stink of roaches. “It smells like my dream home,” I said.

Auntie Reno ignored me, as she did—and still does—when what I say isn't useful to her. “Let me pick dah right house, okay? Image stay nine-tenths dah battle,” she told my mother. “And dat's my job. You jus' predict dah future, and we goin' make it.”

My mother drifted behind our realtor, a large, long-necked ostrich of a woman. As the realtor strutted through the kitchen and bedrooms of the house, swiveling her head toward the home's highlights—the “refurbished cabinetry” and “economic use of space” and “quaint powder rooms,” all of which had Reno harumphing and rolling her eyes—my mother nodded her head and smiled politely. But when my mother peeked behind the pea-green curtains that hid the sliding glass doors of the master bedroom, she stopped smiling and nodding.

The saleslady fidgeted. “Well, sure, the back's not in the best shape now,” she said. My mother unlatched the door and pushed until the doors screeched apart. As my mother stepped onto the faded wood deck, just avoiding a jutting nail, the saleslady hopped forward to lead her away from the termite-hollowed railing. “But, ah, notice the potential. It, uh, it leads right into the garden.” We all looked into the backyard, where yellow-flowered vines of wedelia swelled in waves to drown out a border of fly-specked hibiscus bushes, where the heads of overgrown red ti shook on thin stalks above the roof. Banana trees dropped their rotting fruit, which lay one on top of the other, dying in layers. Pom-poms of white-and-blue ‘uki 'uki lilies swayed on wiry necks above nut grass that grew as high as my knees. The realtor stammered, then, trying to distract us once more, pointed toward the sky. “Look up!” she almost shouted. “The mountains! Now isn't that a beautiful view of the Ko‘olaus!”

Auntie Reno pressed her lips together. “Mmm-hmm,” she said. “I tink we seen enough.” She turned to go, but my mother continued to stand there, her eyes intense and far away, as if she were listening to something carried on the air.

“Can you hear it, Beccah?” my mother whispered as she moved down the steps and into the yard. She forded through the grass, the wedelia, and the banana patch, all the way up to the rusty chicken-wire fence that marked the boundary.

“Mommy?” I ran after her, brushing from my face and hair the mist of fruit flies that sucked on the rotting sweet bananas. “Do you hear Saja? Is he coming to get us?”

“Hush,” my mother told me. She bowed her head, resting her forehead against the fence. Loops of wire pressed octagons into her face, just below the hairline, imprinting a headdress of chains.

Auntie Reno, trampling a banana sapling as she clambered up to the fence next to us, asked, her face sweaty and excited, “Is the girl right—you see spirits here?”

“Shh,” my mother told Reno without looking up. “Listen.”

Auntie Reno and I scowled at each other, but we quieted, trying to hear what my mother heard, trying to catch the wails of the restless dead carried by the wind.

“There! Do you hear that?” my mother whispered. “The song of the river?”

Although I was wrong in thinking that Saja the Soldier of Death would not find us in that clean-smelling house, I am glad that my mother did not die in our damp and dark apartment in The Shacks before she could know what it was like to live in a house with shiny wood floors and walls instead of mildewed carpet and peeling plastic wall paneling. Before she could forget about washing clothes by hand in a rust-stained bathtub and hanging laundry to dry out of windows that sucked in the sound and soot of street traffic. In the Manoa home, she marveled at the luxury of throwing laundry into an automatic washing machine and hanging it on a clothesline in the backyard to catch the smell of the sun among the banana trees and heliconia, the ‘uki 'uki and hibiscus.

My mother loved the expanse of her yard, her wild garden; except for weeding and pruning the wedelia and nut grass whenever they threatened to choke the other plants, she let things grow how and where they would. In the late mornings, when the traffic died down, my mother would set up a lawn chair in that jungle and listen. She said that on quiet days she could hear the Manoa River and would dream of riding it to the ocean.

When I walked into her room, shaking the bag of doughnuts, I thought she was sleeping off a trance. After a two-week trance, my mother would sleep for days; even after a brief spell, she would sleep so deeply I'd have to pinch her nose to make her wake up.

“Hey, Mom,” I said. “Got maple bars.” She lay on her stomach, tangled in sheets, eyes closed and mouth open. I walked to her bed to fix her covers, planning to let her sleep, but when I saw her face, I knew she was dead. My mother was an expressive sleeper, quick to frown or smile in her dreams. When I found her body, its face was empty.

I am both terrified and comforted whenever I remember this emptiness. Because of it, I can hope that my mother did not die caught in a dream as binding as Saja's arms, gasping and afraid, unable to wake up.

People tell me it's a blessing she died in her sleep, at peace. But these are the things said by people who do not dream.

My mother said she would watch me sleep at night when I was very young, afraid that I would suddenly stop breathing. The rhythm of my sleep was odd, she explained, unsteady as the steps of an old man. The long nights of my infancy were, for my mother, measured by my breaths.