I swallowed words soaked in anger. Instead of saying, “Why are you worried about me now, Mother?” or, “Where were you when I needed you?” I said, “This is the nineties, Mom.” And: “Women need men like fish need bicycles.”
My mother straightened, then arched her back, exposing her throat to the sun. I watched her hands come to the small of her back, kneading black dirt into a faded flower print. Her head dropped forward. “Fish?” she said, scowling. “You’re talking crazy. Women need men for children. God listens to men, Beccah. It was your father, praying for forgiveness, wishing for a miracle, who finally pressured God into giving you to us. And when at last you came, your father fell to his knees, held your red body above his head, and thanked his Father in Heaven.”
I pictured my father as an aging Charlton Heston in the role of Abraham, holding a black-haired Asian-eyed Isaac above the altar in heavenly sacrifice to a God who looked like my mother.
I laughed. Thinking of how I grew up—in a household of spirits, not one of them my father or the Christian God—I thought my mother was joking.
“What’s so funny?” My mother reached into her bag of cuttings and flung a handful of nut grass, mud still clinging in clumps amidst the intricate tangle of roots, at me.
“Nothing,” I said, brushing flecks of dirt off my shirt as I swallowed my laughter. “I just don’t think I’ll ever have children. I don’t want the responsibility of having someone need me that much.”
My mother dropped her weeds and turned to face me. “What? Don’t you know that babies are the only way you know you’re alive?” She gripped my hand, pressing dirt and flesh into my palm. I could see fine red welts from the wedelia across the back of her hand. “Beccah, how will you know how much I love you if you don’t have your own children?”
When my mother moved us from The Shacks to Manoa, I changed school districts, leaving Ala Wai for Robert Louis Stevenson Intermediate. I was not upset about this but instead thought of it as a rebirth. I fantasized that by moving out of the orbit of Toots Tutivena and her Entourage, I would no longer be persecuted. In a way, I was right; I was now ignored. I drifted from class to class, sitting in the back row so quiet and hunched into myself that even the teachers forgot I was there. At Stevenson and then at Franklin D. Roosevelt High, except for the other misfits—the unpaired girls with concave breasts or thick granny glasses or hair that frizzed like the Bride of Frankenstein‘s—I was invisible. Safe.
At times we, the Unacceptables, would gather at the bottom of the library steps as if by accident, as if pulled by an innate instinct for self-preservation to see if we still existed. And there, perched on the lowest step, partially sheltered by the splotchy shade of a plume ria tree, we would practice at adolescence, filling our mouths with the names of boys we loved.
“Isn’t Shaun Cassidy fantabulous?” one of the girls said. It was probably Cordelia, whom I remember as a giant of a girl with large red knuckles, who could never grasp the “in” lingo. After our high school’s ten-year reunion, which neither Cordelia nor I attended, I heard a rumor that she worked as a scriptwriter for the children’s show Barney.
“Totally cool,” the rest of us agreed, pretending that we did not consider Cordelia—or ourselves—geeky.
“He’s the utmost,” Edith sighed. “Let’s add your names together to see if they match.” Edith, who was—at least in the uninspiring academic atmosphere of Stevenson Intermediate and Roosevelt High—considered a math genius, devised a system to establish the compatibility of prospective couples. Based on some numerical values assigned to consonants—vowels were worth zero—Edith would add and divide and multiply our names with those of the boys we loved, crossing out letters and mumbling to herself. The rest of us never quite understood the whys and hows of Edith’s matchmaking rules but were content to wait until she produced the answer, because—no matter which name we gave her—it’d always come out right. An invariable perfect match.
If Edith was not at the stairs when we wanted to confirm that the boy we loved was our truest match, despite his not knowing of our existence, we would cast our fortunes with cards, the king of hearts representing the boy we loved. And we would read the sides of our fists to see how many children we would bear. My fist dimpled five times or zero times, depending on whether the reader was generous in defining the bumps. I chose to see five, one bump for each of the children who I knew would look like their father, the one I always named as the king of hearts, the only one I matched my name with: Maximilian Lee.
All through junior high and the first two years of high school, I watched him. Through eight semesters of advanced English classes, I watched the way he slumped in the chair nearest the door, as if to make an escape at the earliest possible moment. I watched how the shag of his black hair, the part that wasn’t shaved to his skull, fell into his face like a dog’s tail, wagging as he tapped a staccato beat on the desktop with the long, lean drumsticks of his fingers. While the teachers cast frowns at him during their lectures on Milton and Chaucer, Max played his music—ratatatat rataiatat—and smiled. When he smiled I would watch the three moles that framed his mouth dance around his lips, a connect-the-dots invitation.
Sometimes he would even close his eyes as if he were sleeping, and the teacher, if she was new, would finally slam the chalk down and yell, “Maybe Mr. Maximilian Lee can tell us about palindromes,” or whatever topic she had chosen. And without opening his eyes, he would say something like: “Palindromes are like, you know, when you’re in the tube, yeah? And you’re jammin’ down to the left, and whoom! it shuts down on you. So you maneuver to the right, yeah, but whoom! that shuts down too. Both sides are comin’ in on you, like you’re the candy twisted inside those cellophane wrappers—you know the kind I mean, yeah? Those butterscotch or peppermint-stripe ones. And it’s totally cool being wrapped in the tube like that, even though you know you’re gonna eat it, backward or forward. Like, that’s my metaphor for palindrome, man: you’re gonna wind up in the same place, eating sand, no matter which way you read that wave.”
Max knew poetry.
And I knew Max.
I knew that he saw music on the inside of his eyelids and that he carried a notepad in his plaid flannel shirts so that, when he opened his eyes, he could capture the lyrics and notes with his black-ink Pentel fine writer pen. I knew that the music he wrote for his band, the Too Toned, all sounded like variations of “Stairway to Heaven.” I knew his class schedule, and knew which water fountain to hang out at when his PE class let out. I knew that he brought sprout and eggplant sandwiches from home for lunch, then bought manapua and Fat Boy ice cream sandwiches from the lunch wagon. I knew he called his Ford Mustang “The Frog,” not because of its color—which was a dull gray—but because of the way it hopped, its timing off. And I knew when he started watching me back.
It was toward the end of our sophomore year, when the Am Lit teacher’s wife filed for divorce. Rumor had it that Van Dyke—whom his students called Van Dick because his zipper often slipped to half-mast—molested his daughter. From the time we heard that his wife had left him, taking the kids to the Mainland, until the end of the year, Van Dyke told us to write poetry in the “Man vs.” series. On the board each week, Van Dyke scribbled either “Man vs. Man,” “Man vs. God,” “Man vs. Machine,” “Man vs. Himself,” or “Man vs. Nature,” and underneath: “Write about it.” Our final assignment—in the “Man vs. Man” category—was to create a tribute to fathers. The poems would be shared in class and the best selected for the special Father’s Day issue of the school newspaper, printed just before summer vacation. I think Van Dyke planned to send a copy to his own children.