Redefining Realness (3 page)

When Aaron arrived at my place—a ground-floor studio fitting my full-size bed, desk, and TV—he came bearing gifts:
The Artist’s Way
by Julia Cameron and two red tension balls. “I figure they’ll help you relax and write,” he said.

We watched my favorite relationship movie,
The Way We Were
, and discussed my love of Katie and my longing to be with someone who’d push me as much as Katie pushed Hubbell. Eventually, we kissed our way into my bed, and these kisses were freedom kisses—uninhibited by my self-conscious, overthinking tendencies. We gradually bared our bodies to each other, with my legs spread, my body yielding to him. He touched me like I had never been touched before, and I trusted him to see me. Just as I let my guard down, I put it back up, like a reflex, and he returned to the pillow beside me.

After a moment’s pause, I studied his face: His eyelashes crowded the edges of his lids, creating a sweeping, almost epic frame on his
knowing brown eyes. I wondered if this man next to me, the one I had let touch, taste, and smell me, was ready to really know me. What does it mean to truly know someone, to claim that you’re ready, ready to love a human being, not just a sketch of all your fantasies come to life? I wanted him to see
me
. My internal utterances must’ve manifested themselves into movable energy, because he smiled, widening the scar beneath his right eye like a pencil mark I would make in a book to note something significant. I moved my middle and index fingers across the jagged line.

“I got that when I was twelve or thirteen,” he said, reaching back two decades to tell me a story about a boy running away from someone without care or caution. He’d snagged his face on a low-lying tree branch. The remnant of that carefree moment was forever on his face. “You know, I’ve never told anyone that before,” Aaron said, traveling back to bed from that North Dakota emergency room.

I felt privileged but wondered why he’d chosen to tell me, out of all the people he’d known in his life, all the people he had loved and those he thought he had loved. Why was I worthy? And wasn’t that the question I’d asked myself the entire time:
Why me? Why did you choose me in that bar? Why did you take me to that coffee shop and not just fuck me and discard me? Why did you tell me in dozens of little ways that I am special?

He couldn’t answer those questions because he didn’t really know me, just like I did not really know him. But he was trying to be known, offering many of his life’s stories and memories since our meeting. It’s in these moments, in bed, in the dark, when you share and create new memories, that a relationship is built. I was holding on to everything I had not to be fully known; if he knew me, then this would end. The mere thought of it ending overwhelmed me, and he saw it, using his fingers to wipe away my tears.

Days later, I listened to a message from Aaron: “Hey, just calling to see what you’re up to tonight. Nothing? Great. Come over. I want to talk to you.”

My stomach ached when I heard the message. I felt past the lightness of his message to its weight. His call was in reaction to my crying in bed. I scolded myself for being vulnerable in front of him. Something in his voice told me that he knew. He
had
to know.

When I arrived at his apartment—a three-bedroom share without a living room—I sat on his bed as he closed the door behind him. Aaron’s bedroom was a ten-by-ten space, softly lit by a lantern that illuminated remnants from our three-week courtship: a flyer from the exhibit; two pairs of movie stubs; and a photo of us from one of our dates. In it, my curls were a harsh yellow, shocked as a result of the previous day’s highlighting session. Despite the frizz, I appeared pleased standing next to Aaron, who looked just over the photographer’s shoulder. “You make a perfect pair,” the man had said after fanning our Polaroid to dry. I remember Aaron thanking me with a kiss for indulging him in the touristy act.

Now I placed one of his pillows between my legs to shield myself. I knew from his expression that I was the one who was going to talk tonight. I looked into his eyes one last time and saw that he was anxious: He didn’t sit down in his own room. I realized then that he had something to lose, too, with what I had to say. There was a dream in him that could be wrecked by my revelation.

I had presented Aaron a distorted me, and I couldn’t give him me while wrapped in secrets—stories I’ve never told. They trap you, and you become so wound up in your own story, in the pain inflicted on you in the past that you’ve worked hard to keep at bay, and the people and actions and all the things you’ve been running away from, that you don’t know what to believe anymore. Most important, you lose touch with yourself: The self you know, the you deep inside, is
obscured by a stack of untold stories. And I had been groomed to believe that they were all I had in this world, and the keeping of them was vital to my survival.

I felt I had endured enough. From some cavernous place, I reached inside myself and grabbed the courage to take a long trip back to a place I never thought I’d revisit. I took a deep breath and exhaled. “I have to tell you something.”

The world’s definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor can one’s family, friends, or lovers—to say nothing of one’s children—to live according to the world’s definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.

—JAMES BALDWIN

HONOLULU
, 1989

I
was certain the sun’s rays would filter through the legs of the table under which I slept and Grandma Pearl would wake me from my fold-up mattress with the scents of margarine-drenched toast and hot chocolate. I knew my sister Cheraine and her best friend Rene, a towering Samoan girl with waves flowing down her broad back like lava, would walk me to school, the heels of our rubber slippers smacking the warm cement. I was certain my first-grade teacher would part her coral-lacquered lips to greet me with a smile as I carefully placed my slippers in the blue cubbyhole labeled
Charles
. I was certain that when it was time for recess or bathroom breaks, we would divide into two lines: one for boys, the other for girls.

I was certain I was a boy, just as I was certain of the winding texture of my hair and the deep bronze of my skin. It was the first thing I’d learned about myself as I grew aware that I existed. There was evidence proving it: the pronouns, the penis, the Ninja Turtle pajamas, the pictures of hours-old me wrapped in a blue blanket with my eyes closed to the world. When they opened and I began learning
the world, my desire to step across the chasm that separated me from the girls—the ones who put their sandals in the red cubbyholes labeled
Kawehi
,
Darlene
, and
Sasha
—rose inside of me. The stature of this faint desire, whose origins I can’t pinpoint to a pivotal
aha!
moment, grew taller and bolder despite the cues, rebuttals, and certainties of those around me, who told me through a slightly furrowed brow or a shake of the head that even attempting to cross that void was wrong.

When I look back at my childhood, I often say
I always knew I was a girl
since the age of three or four, a time when I began cataloging memories. No one—not my mother, my grandmother, my father, or my siblings—gave me any reason to believe I was anything other than my parents’ firstborn son, my father’s namesake. But it was my very first conviction, the first thing I grew certain of as a young person. When I say
I always knew I was a girl
with such certainty, I erase all the nuances, the work, the process of self-discovery. I’ve adapted to saying
I always knew I was a girl
as a defense against the louder world, which has told me—ever since I left Mom’s body in that pink hospital atop a hill in Honolulu—that my girlhood was imaginary, something made up that needed to be fixed. I wielded this ever-knowing, all-encompassing certainty to protect my identity. I’ve since sacrificed it in an effort to stand firmly in the murkiness of my shifting self-truths.

I grew to be certain about who I was, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a time when I was learning the world, unsure, unstable, wobbly, living somewhere between confusion, discovery, and conviction. The fact that I admit to being uncertain doesn’t discount my womanhood. It adds value to it.

The first person I ever valued outside of my family was Marilyn, whom I met in kindergarten. She lived in the same two-story building as Grandma Pearl, in Ka’ahumanu Housing, the public
subsidized complex in Kalihi that was the setting of all my early memories in Oahu. Marilyn had a stick-straight bowl haircut and a wide gap between her front two teeth that didn’t prevent her from smiling. She was the first person with whom I had things in common: We were the same kind of brown—like whole wheat bread—because we both came from brown people (I was Hawaiian and black, while Marilyn was Hawaiian and Filipino); we both lived with our maternal grandmothers; and we both loved playing jacks, hopscotch, and tag. We were always barefoot, the khaki-colored bottoms of our wide, flat feet turned black from the earth. When we wore ourselves out, we’d rinse our feet with the hose in her grandmother’s front yard and rest on the ground under the clothesline, the moist grass pressed into our backs. The wind blew around us, making the floral dresses that hung above us dance, swaying like hula dancers. Humidity was in the air, and so was fragrance: Tide detergent and gardenias and lunchtime rice. The sun’s rays filtered through the clothes and touched our skin in shifting patterns. Marilyn looked unblinkingly at the sun, glowing and dark, like a shiny copper penny I’d pick up on my way to school.

“Truth or dare,” Marilyn said as I lifted my back from the grass. I see myself in my favorite McDonald’s T-shirt, the light-blue one I wore in my first-grade school photo.

“Dare!” I said over Grandma’s birds of paradise that peeked over her bushel of tea leaves.

“Okay, you see dat dress ova dea?” Marilyn boasted in her Hawaiian pidgin, pointing at a pink muumuu with a mustard and white hibiscus pattern that hung on her grandmother’s clothesline. I nodded. “I dare you for put dat on,” she said.

“Ho, that’s so easy!” I said, standing up, reaching for the dress.

“No, I not done!” Marilyn scolded. “You gotta put it on, den run across the park, all a way to da rubbish cans and back.”

The dress flowed forward in the wind toward my destination. I half contemplated the trouble I could get into for dirtying a clean dress, but chickening out on a dare was not an option. Truth or dare was more than a game; it was our way as kids to learn intimacy and trust. I trusted that Marilyn wouldn’t ask me to do anything drastic, and she trusted that I wouldn’t tell any of her truths, like the time she’d told me she had a crush on Keoni, the husky boy who smelled like Uncle Toma’s dirty socks.

I pulled the dress down by its ruffled trim, producing a synchronized snap of wooden clothespins. As I slipped it over my small frame, the puffed shoulders rested at my elbows, and the hem circled me like a puddle of water.

“Ho, your grandma this big?” I laughed in fuchsia-clad hysteria, and Marilyn’s gap-toothed grin joined mine.

Hiking up the dress, I looked diagonally above us at Grandma Pearl’s front porch. She wasn’t in the yard or in the kitchen, so I figured she wouldn’t see me. I clenched the fabric in my fists. Stepping out from Marilyn’s yard, I felt the warmth of the cement on my bare feet as the heat of the early-afternoon sun spread across my body.

Checking Grandma’s front door one last time, I sprinted across the sidewalk. I felt lovely in the muumuu, which flirted with my skin as the Oahu trades blew moist kisses at me. At the trash bin, I did a little Paula Abdul move to my inner DJ’s spin of “Straight Up” for Marilyn’s delight. She mimicked me from across the parking lot and waved for me to hurry back. Running toward her lawn, I galloped and grinned with the glee of soon-to-be achievement. Just as my feet touched the grass, I heard my eldest sister, Cori, cackling from the balcony. “Grandma! Come look at Charles,” she screamed teasingly, her long, straight black hair and blunt bangs blowing in the wind.

A bit ruffled, I picked up the pace and prayed that if God let me get the muumuu back on the line without Grandma seeing me, then I
would never wear a dress again. With each step, the fabric felt heavier, confining my ability to get out of the dress swiftly. I felt silly under Cori’s gaze. The joy that I had experienced mutated into transgression.

“Charles, getcha fuckin’ ass ova hea!” Grandma shouted at me, though my sister’s laughs lightened her bark. “Now!”

Grandma Pearl was the first woman to make an impression on me, my first example of what a woman was supposed to be: strong, dutiful, and outspoken. Her voice was harsh from years of talking to her own six children and her children’s children. She didn’t edit her language for anyone and was unapologetic about cursing regardless of the age of her company. Grandma penciled her absent eyebrows onto her prominent forehead in an arched line only when she felt like it. She rarely left the house without a bright red lipstick and a light mist of hair spray on her curled salt-and-pepper bangs. She smelled of baby powder, which gave her dark brown skin an ashy appearance under her collection of patterned silk shirts.