This Is Paradise (2 page)

We tap the gas pedal, then hit the brakes again. Our cars lurch to a stop. Our heels and briefcases slide across the passenger seat, and one shoe drops to the floor with a hollow thunk. As successful career women we left work feeling
powerful, but the traffic at Kapiʻolani and Kalākaua has ended that. We might be the ones chosen to mold our islands’ future, but we’re stuck like everyone else, our cars moving at the speed of poi.

We stare into the four-story convention center, its glass walls lending the impression of a squared fishbowl. A dental convention is in town, and we watch as a cluster of attendees crowd the escalator. On the ground floor they shake hands and exchange business cards. One of them reaches into his plastic goody-bag to show off a collection of maps, pamphlets, and lastly some travel toothbrushes, which causes riotous laughter among the group. We are not privy to the joke, but our mouths are sticky from nine hours at the office. We could use those toothbrushes right now.

We could also use massages and an end to this traffic. Esther Lu could use a glass of wine, which she would sip on the couch when she finally reaches her condo. Laura Tavares would like two hours of television, preferably the Food Channel. The rest of us want a personal chef. Lacking one, we’ll probably call our parents and see what they’re having for dinner, which we do on more evenings than we’d care to admit. One more benefit of returning home to the islands.

Despite our tendency toward culinary laziness, our exhaustion is not allowed to overtake us this evening. Tonight, we’re celebrating. Laura just submitted her proposal for a LEED-certified resort on Maui, and we hear
her firm will win the bid; Kiana Naone was promoted to Politics Editor at the
Honolulu Advertiser
; and Esther will take the lead on a high-profile murder case that all but promises her making partner in a year. After years of part-time jobs and student loans and late nights with a desk lamp’s yellow light on our books, we’ve made it. Or are making it. Or are close to saying we will make it.

It doesn’t hurt that we’re from here. We are considered by our peers to be local women who’ve done well, left but come back, dedicated their education and mainland skills to putting this island right. We speak at civic club gatherings and native rights events. We are becoming pillars of the island community. We are growing into who we’ve always dreamt of being. But sometimes, late at night and alone beneath the hand-stitched Hawaiian quilts we can finally afford to purchase, we wish we had followed our law and grad school boyfriends to D.C. or Chicago. We could have foregone being pillars. We could have been regular women.

Meeting room doors are flung open and dentists stream from the fishbowl. The day’s activities at the convention center are ended. The dentists cross the Ala Wai Canal, swarm the bridge on Kalākaua Avenue, and the traffic stands completely still as our cars are consumed by a mass of people armed with travel toothbrushes. Some jackass honks his horn like it’s going to move the herd. The dentists all look so similar, with their neatly cut hair, ruler-straight teeth, and habit of striding with purpose, as
if their assistance is urgently needed elsewhere. We can’t help but wonder which of them are single.

In this moment of exit, their spirits high from presentations on the latest anesthetic or whitening solution, the dentists forget where they are. Hawaiʻi has less tropical flavor than they recall from the morning, less exoticism, less beauty. Waikīkī has become like any other city strip. We’d like to tell them that Waikīkī is nothing more than a succession of Hyatts and Courtyard by Marriotts, Cheesecake Factories and Planet Hollywoods, Señor Frogs and dingy Irish pubs with names like Murphy’s and Callahan’s. We’d like to tell them the real Hawaiʻi is elsewhere, hidden in the karaoke bars on King Street and on Waimānalo’s ranch lands, in the view of the Mokes from Pillboxes and along the beach by Dillingham Air Strip, the portion of North Shore where only locals camp. We could tell them, but we say nothing.

Our cars inch forward. We stare out the windows, bored. A woman in a polka-dot bikini and pareo is shopping in one of the ABC convenience stores. Why do women from the Continent think they should shop in their bikinis? She buys two bags of Kona coffee, four boxes of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, a string of cheap Pacific pearls, and a stack of postcards featuring various beaches all bathed in the reddish light of the same sunset. Her brother—same ski-jump nose, same narrowly set eyes—holds up a T-shirt, pointing proudly to the central image: a hula girl wearing a coconut bra, grass skirt, and
lei. The hula girl’s skin is fair, haole skin, and we’re not sure if this makes the image better or worse.

The light changes. Our cars inch forward again. We return our gaze to the dentists, whose spouses are waiting for them in front of numerous hotel lobbies. The spouses are tired and hungry and pink as boiled shrimp from their day at the beach. The kids—all ages—are bored or playing video games or asking when they can next swim in the hotel pool. We pretend that, if on vacation ourselves, we would act differently—hike Koko Head, attend a bon dance, visit the Palace and learn about the Hawaiian monarchy—but deep down, we know we’d do the same as they: venture no farther than the nearest Starbucks.

In front of Denny’s, one of the kids whines, “I wanted Mickey-ear pancakes,” and the mother says to her husband, “Next year, Florida.” We want to tell the boy we understand: Hawaiʻi lacks a Toon Town and roller coasters. And outside of Waikīkī, the native dress seems suspiciously similar to what’s on sale at Macy’s. Hawaiʻi is no fantasyland.

Men fill the Lava Lounge the way sand fills a tidepool: at the edge of the rock walls and then creeping toward the center. A game is on—at the Lava Lounge, a game is always on—and a spontaneous moan issues from the bar. The men’s faces tilt upward, in the direction of the big-screen
TVs mounted above the top-shelf liquor, and their arms are crossed in such a way that their beer rests in the crooks of their left elbows. They speak to each other out of the corners of their mouths, analyzing plays and players and, maybe once, a woman who crosses their field of vision. They are not immune to us, but they aren’t ready to pursue us yet either. In the meantime, we order dinner and describe the waves we caught this morning.

The women in the bar—the ones other than us local girls—are tourists or college students eager to start the night. They pretend to watch the game, but their Lycra skirts and jean short-shorts give them away. One girl—petite, barely twenty-one, if that—has tucked her sheer tank top into a neon orange skirt. When she bends over, we glimpse the top of a pink thong. She seems to enjoy bending over.

We want to tell her to wait, bide her time. Let the men drink and enjoy their game, and when they’re good and ready, they’ll notice you. But we know she won’t listen to us. She’s in a hurry to pair off, stake a claim, fall ecstatically into someone’s arms or bed. Watching her, we feel we are being flung through time and space, that the rush of air on our faces is the world spinning faster for this girl, for all girls.

Our burgers arrive and we look at each other, surprised. Haven’t we already hurled ourselves past this moment? Hasn’t the fourth quarter ended? Haven’t the men
climbed down from their stools and taken up residence with a table of women? Isn’t the night already careening to its end? A reggae band has assembled its drum set on the low wooden stage. The singer presses his mouth against the microphone: “One-two-three, check. One-two-three, check.”

Our plates are cleared, the girl in the orange skirt rests her fingertips on the muscled arm of an army man, and we complain, as usual, about all these haoles coming on our land, even though we’ve come to Waikīkī. But where else can we go for a strip of bars and clubs? For our friends’ band, and the other young locals we’ll see? Why do we have to share it with all these tourists, military, college kids? We are just getting good and worked up when we spot the polka-dot girl from this morning. She stands at the entrance, hesitating, the spotlights outside illuminating her body, the soft curve of her hips, her small breasts. She’s wearing a maroon dress, nothing flashy, simple in its loose cut, with a hemline that grazes her thighs. She glances furtively around the bar, then makes a beeline for an empty two-top, a high bar table with a pair of backless stools. A boy falls in her wake. Not a boy, exactly. But not a man either. He doesn’t touch her but mirrors her, watches her for clues as to what he should do. Her younger brother or cousin, we decide, as he orders piña coladas for both of them.

She keeps glancing around the bar, sizing up the men and the plastic tiki decorations. The night’s possibilities
widen her eyes. We want to make fun of her, but she possesses a certain girlishness that awakens our forgiveness. It’s not her fault she’s haole.

We turn our attention to the men. The local boys have finally arrived, and they look our way. “You like cruise wit’ us?” they ask, and we answer, “What? You tink we come hea fo’ talk story wit’ you?” They laugh at that. They like our hard to get, and they respond, visiting us in small posses of three or four, clustering around our table. We know they’re wondering who they’ll pair up with, and that that’s what we’re deciding, too. Which one of these bruddas, or none at all?

The youngest of the three Aiu boys asks Lani Pogan to dance, and the two of them weave among the tables until they are directly in front of the band. He hangs his head and bounces slightly, feeling the beat, and Lani, in her white dress, winks at the singer. She’s the worst flirt of us all, and the most hot-tempered, but that’s what we like about her. The eldest Aiu asks Mel Chun to come outside for a smoke, and Mel grabs a pack lying on the table. Even though she grew up in San Francisco, the “healthiest city in the world,” she claims, she smokes when she goes out. She goes out a lot, she says, subsisting on Heineken and hamburger patties to make up for a childhood of healthy living. Despite her habits, Mel’s body is a ball of hard muscle. After four years of competitive outrigger paddling, she’s been accepted by us, become one of us locals.

Another round of li hing mui margaritas and the rest of
us join Lani on the dance floor. Our little tourist is bouncing on her stool, her ponytail swinging to the beat of the music, while her brother approaches the bar to order more drinks. Ricky, the bar manager, lowers the house lights and turns on a pair of blue strobes that pulsate in time to the drumbeat. Cora Jones raises her hand parallel with her eyes and wiggles her fingers at Ricky. She calls this her come-and-get-it wave, but we think it makes her eye look like squid tentacles are growing from it. Lani nudges us and laughs. Cora’s magic works, though: a minute later Ricky is lining up shot glasses on our table. “And one fo’ you, sista,” he says to our tourist, plopping a shot glass in front of her.

She takes it in a single gulp and smiles at us. “Thanks for sharing,” she says brightly. “I’m Susan.” A couple of us nod and smile back, but Lani ignores Susan completely. “Cora neva get one fo’ her,” she says.

Ah, none of us paid, but. On da house
, we reply.

Lani doesn’t care. “She not one of us, her,” she says loud enough for Susan to hear.

We’re studying Susan, wondering how she’ll respond. If she accepts she’s an outsider, then perhaps we could hānai her, bring her into the fold for the night. But if she doesn’t understand, then she’s just another haole. She doesn’t talk back to Lani, which wins her some points, but a few minutes later we overhear her whispering to her brother: “Everyone talks about aloha here, but it’s like
Hawaiians are all pissed off. They live in paradise. What is there to be mad about?”

We look at each other, and we feel the heat rising in our faces. Our families are barely affording a life here, the land is being eaten away by developers, the old sugar companies still control water rights. Not only does paradise no longer belong to us, but we have to watch foreigners destroy it. We have plenty aloha for someone who appreciates. We have none for a girl like this. Lani stands like she’s about to give a lecture or pop Susan one in the face—which for Lani might be the same thing—but we make her sit down.
Not wort’ da trouble
, we say, and for once Lani lets it go.

On the dance floor, Mel has abandoned the elder Aiu and is looking tight with a new guy. We watch them, wondering who he is. He’s not a local boy—his skin is too fair, his hair too short—but he doesn’t seem straight haole either. He has a solid tan, and he navigates the bar like he’s cruised here before. He touches Mel gently on the shoulder, as if to draw her close to him, or just to feel her skin, and us girls raise an eyebrow. We don’t like how close he’s getting to her before we know who he is.

His hair is shaved close to the scalp, and he dances with the stiffness of a military man. Cora guesses Navy. Lani says Air Force. We watch him raise his arms as if to rest a lei upon Mel’s shoulders, and she looks up at him, smiling. He clasps his hands at the back of her neck and bends his
knees slightly to look her full in the face. Mel swirls her hips against his, and when a blue strobe illuminates them, we see, on the underside of his right wrist, a tattoo of a mask with tears.