Comfort Woman (23 page)

I sat down when Mr. Van Dyke pushed a tight thank-you out of pursed lips and instructed Cordelia to read. Without bothering to stand or even look up, Cordelia wilted over her notebook, mumbling into its pages:

While Mr. Van Dyke warbled over Cordelia's poem, her sophisticated structure and clever use of rhyme, and while the rest of the class rolled their eyes at Van Dick's pet, Max continued to stare at me. Every day for the next week, he looked at me. And every day the week after, he'd comment on what he saw. “You have a sensitive-looking nose,” he told me once. Another time, he noticed how my fingers matched my voice: quick and soft, breathless as a bird's wings. Each time he pointed to something about me, it was as if it fell away from me, foreign and unrecognizable. For days after he mentioned my nose, I could feel it ballooning from and shrinking into my face, quivering as if sentient. And even now, when I remember what he said about my hands and voice, my throat closes and my hands fall heavy to my sides, as if afraid they will fly away without me if I speak. By the end of the third week of Max's attention, I was in pieces, waiting for him to make me whole again.

The last time I sat with my mother in her garden, I wished to tell her that there was only one time in my life I wanted children. I was a child myself then, sixteen, and held together by the glue of Max Lee's love. I remember the way Max's fingers tapped his music on my body, until I sang the song he taught me. The nights my mother flew into her trances, Max would pick me up on the corner and we would chase the sound of Manoa Stream through winding streets until we dead-ended at Aku Ponds.

Recently, just before I moved away from Manoa, I drove in search of Aku Ponds. After several wrong turns, I let my mind wander and found myself on the dead-end street, in front of the chained bridge that led to the pond. I let my motor idle as I debated testing the picket that held the chain. When I went there with Max, we would wriggle the first picket of the bridge's railing like a loose tooth until it slipped, releasing the chain.

Now, as an adult, I am too conscious of the eyes of the neighbors, of the law, of the Kapu sign warning off trespassers. I am too aware that that is what I am now, a trespasser out of place and time.

In high school, I felt Aku Ponds belonged to Max and me, consecrated through our bodies. As we pressed ourselves against each other, we also pressed into the damp earth of the water's banks. When we joined, thick blades of sweet Manoa grass and liliko‘i vines would tangle in our hair and limbs, urging and binding us tighter. And when we opened our mouths, deep enough to taste the heart of the other, we also tasted the water of the pond. Aku Ponds was the place where we learned about our bodies. Where I learned the sudden, blind animal taste of a man and the tart taste of myself from his lips.

After making love, we would sometimes slip naked into the water, lunging through the hip-high water toward the “surf spot,” a place where the pond seemed to double back upon itself. Water from the stream pooled briefly on a shallow shelf before spilling into Aku Ponds. Max would pull me under that cascade, into a gap between rock and rushing water. Pressed against my body, he would say, “This is what it's like in the tube, like looking through an ice-blue diamond with the sounds so pure you don't care you're about to get smashed.” We'd hold on to each other, looking through water-spun glass and hearing nothing but our own breathing and the hollow sound of breaking water, until our lips turned blue.

I remember the time he told me that the tube was magical, that the water which poured in front of us would carry our wishes in its song, forever and ever until they came true. Shoulder-to-shoulder, we held hands and sang out our dreams. “I love you,” I yelled into the sheet of water. “I'll care for you forever!”

And Max echoed, “I'll love you forever. We're gonna get married and have five children!”

When Max took me home that night, I let myself into the house, my hair still dripping the water of the stream. My body smelled clean, electric like a rainstorm on the Ko‘olaus. But when I walked through the door, my mother yelled, “Stink
poji-cunt!”
and charged forward with a knife. I backed into the door and cringed, flinging a hand across my face as she sliced the air above my head.

“Mom!” I yelled. “It's me! Beccah, Beccah-chan!”

My mother waved the knife and shaved strips of air away from my body. “It's me, it's me,” she mimicked, and I knew then she could not really hear me. “You cannot use my daughter as your puppet, Saja! Evil spirit, the stink of pus and men's waste!” She jabbed at my head and then lowered her hand until the point of the knife touched my crotch.

“I call you out!” my mother yelled, and threw the knife across the room. The blade stuck in the carpet, caught vertically for just a moment, and then fell, pointing toward me.
“E-yah!”
My mother screamed, and rushed to retrieve the knife. “Stubborn ghost,” she muttered. She scratched the knife along the zipper of my jeans and threw the blade again. This time it landed pointing away from me. She left the knife as it lay and went into her bedroom.

That night I dreamed I drowned in blood, unable to fight the arms that pulled me under, while the fins of sharks sliced the water like knives.

My mother slept through the next day, and when Max came to pick me up that night, she still slept. We drove to Aku Ponds, and for the first time, I noticed the sign nailed to the bridge as we drove up to it: “Kapu! Violators will be prosecuted!” When I slipped out of the car to undo the chain, the picket stuck. “Someone must have fixed the bridge,” I hissed to Max. I pounded on the railing until the chain swung like a jump rope.

Max opened his door, the light from inside the car creating an aura around his body until he stepped into the dark toward me. He lifted my hands from the bridge. “You all right?” he asked. When he tapped the top of the picket, it creaked sideways and the chain popped loose. He turned back to the car, leaving me to replace the chain after he drove over it, and I answered, “Are you?”

Though my voice seemed especially loud to me, Max didn't answer, only continued driving as if he didn't hear.

That night as we made love, I kept asking, “Are you all right?” sometimes not even waiting for an answer before asking again. At least I think I asked; I might have just been thinking it, beginning for the first time to doubt that he was “all right” for me. I remember thinking that this was supposed to be spiritual, but what I was most aware of was that his knees kept getting in the way, knocking against mine, and that the insides of his elbows seemed very white, very feminine in the dark. And that a mosquito kept buzzing in my ear, louder even than Max's fevered “I love you”s.

I held Max tighter, telling him I loved him even more than he loved me, and all the while I thought: What's wrong? and wondered if I had imagined the previous times, when I seemed to leave my body and float through a universe of colored sound. Now, after my subsequent experiences with sex, I am almost positive I am mistaken about the intensity I thought I felt when he slipped inside me, the way all sound and sight spiraled into blackness so that the only thing I knew was the rhythm of our bodies, elemental as the river's song.

After my mother sliced the air around me, cutting me loose from the demons she thought were holding me, I began to watch Max again. I discovered little things—the way he licked his top teeth before he smiled, the way his head lolled as if unanchored by his spine when he played the drums, the way his jaw slackened, then gaped when he slept—that started to bother me. And I began watching the two of us making love, the way we groped and lunged, as if from another's eyes. As if from my mother's eyes.

When I finally told him it was over, I could not bear to look at him; his face, hovering so close to mine, seemed grotesque. “Why, Beccah, why?” he cried, not caring that his nose had begun to run. “What did I do?”

Sickened, I hugged him so I would not have to see his blotchy, swollen face. “Nothing,” I mumbled. “It's just time to move on.” I held him, letting him cry, and it was like holding a stranger. I felt pity, uncomfortable about the pain I had no connection to, but also I was irritated, as if he were wasting my time.

I heard from someone who knew us as a couple that Max now sells electric guitars and drum sets at Harry's Music in Kaimuki, that he has a small place in Palolo, a wife, and three children under the age of five. In fact, the person who told me said he had heard a rumor that I was that wife. I laughed, joking, “Me with three kids? God forbid! I can barely take care of myself!” but I clenched my hand, thinking of the dimples on my fist that I once tried to count.

Years ago, I was the one who told Max that it was time to move on, yet it seems he is the one who has done so. He composed his life in steady measures, fulfilling with someone else the plans we made at Aku Ponds. And I am the one who is stuck, envious of the normalcy of his unexceptional life.

Auntie Reno, who has long since given up on pairing me with eligible bachelors, has come to the conclusion that I am “that way.” She has now started hinting that Sweet Mary's daughter Precious—whom I sometimes baby-sat when we lived at The Shacks—is also “that way.” I laugh, letting her think what she wants, then tell her I'll find someone on my own when I'm ready.

“Not supposed to live alone,” she scolds me, trying to sound biblical, ominous. “Or die alone.”

My latest lover, Sanford, will not die alone. I am sure that when Saja calls for him, he will be surrounded by his family: his boy and two girls and the tennis-playing wife with the lipo‘ed thighs and Sun-In hair. But he will be looking out the window, waiting for me.