I did not need to get off the floor in front of the speakers to know what was happening behind the door. Hiram, bug-eyed and sweating, would be backing away after having performed his obligatory knocking. Sanford would be waving the timid manager down the hallway while fretting with his hair and expression, concerned with looking supportive yet boyishly handsome.
I didn’t rush to open the door upon hearing his voice, and I knew Sanford’s mask must have slipped. “Beccah!” he roared, pounding the door. “It’s me.”
I turned the knob of the volume down. “Who?” I said, then twisted the knob back toward high.
Sanford stopped pounding for a moment, then yelled out his name as if it were a question.
About to take pity on him and open the door, I heard my mother call me, weaving my name into her chants, her prayers for justice.
Beccah-chan, lead the parade of the dead. Lead the Ch‘ulssang with the rope of your light. Clear the air with the ringing of your bell, bathe us with your song. When I can no longer perform the chesa for the spirits, we will look to you to feed us. I have tried to release you, but in the end I cannot do it and tie you to me, so that we will carry each other always. Your blood in mine.
I remembered watching my mother lay out the offerings for the dead before she would feed me, remembered her dancing over me with strips of cloth torn from the sheets of my bed. And while I had felt invisible, unimportant, while my mother consorted with her spirits, I now understood that she knew I watched her. That in her way, she had always carried me with her.
Feeling my mother’s arms around my waist, I walked to the door. “I’m speaking to my mother,” I told Sanford through the cracks.
“Your mother is dead,” Sanford said, speaking to me as I had spoken to my mother, as if she were unstable. Dangerous.
I looked at Sanford, made small through the tunnel of the peephole. When I was in high school, the art teacher taught us to look through a square made by our fingers, in order to focus on what we wanted to paint. I often looked at my mother through the finger frame, trying to put her in perspective. I liked the way my fingers captured her, making her manageable. Squinting my eye through my lens, I could make her any size I wanted. I could make her shrink, smaller and smaller, until she disappeared with a blink.
I looked at Sanford as I had looked at my mother, fitting him in the space between my fingers, and slowly, slowly, with infinite gentleness, brought my fingers together until he shrank smaller than the lines in a standard obituary, smaller than newsprint.
“I have to leave you, Sanford,” I called out, while he slammed his weight against the door. I watched him rub his shoulder, then dropped my hand and closed my eyes. With my mother’s voice filling the apartment, her words swirling around my shoulders, I thought how easy—in a pinch, with a blink—it was to make someone disappear. “Goodbye,” I told him. “My mother is calling me.”
18
Reno and I fought over my mother’s body.
“What’s this? And this? And this?” I pointed into the rented casket, at the black eyeliner circling my mother’s eyes, the blush slashing across her cheeks toward her temples, the bright-orange lipstick, the feathered headpiece perched on her piled hairdo.
“What?” Auntie Reno placed her hands on her hips. “Whatchu trying for say?”
I glared at her pursed lips, done up in the identical shade of tangerine as my mother‘s, and snorted.
“Whass your problem? If you no like Koral Kiss, then I change em; I know not everybody can wear em like me.”
“Yeah, Reno. It’s the lipstick. And the purple eye shadow—looks like somebody beat her to death. And the clothes and the hootchy-kootchy feather thing—straight from the strip show in Vegas or what?” I leaned over the coffin. “This isn’t my mother,” I told her. “This is you. Just like it’s always been you.”
Reno slammed her hands down on the edge of the casket so hard the feathers on my mother’s headpiece quivered. “Goffunnit, girlie. You wait. You da one leave dis in my hands. You da one say, ‘Auntie Reno, I no can dress my maddah. Auntie Reno, I no can fix her face. I no can touch one dead body. I no can even write one suckin’ obituary.’”
She marched around my mother, toward my side of the coffin. “So what den? If her own daughtah not goin’ take care her, den who? Me. Auntie Reno. Thass who. And dis dah tanks I get.”
Instead of backing up when she stomped toward me in her tottering heels, I stepped forward. “Oh, Auntie, thank you thank you thank you,” I sneered. “Always, all my life, I’ve been thanking you. And for what?”
“What!” Auntie Reno screeched, bringing the mortician running into the room. “For what—for what?”
The mortician smoothed the front of his coat and cleared his throat, oiling his voice. “Ladies, may I assist you in some way?”
Reno turned toward him, bringing her hand to her forehead. She wobbled, the bulk of her body threatening to drop onto the young man. “I sorry, sir,” she breathed. “For one moment, I was overcome wit grief.”
The mortician touched her on the shoulder, a practiced move: sympathetic yet unintrusive. “I understand. This is a difficult time for the ones left behind.” He glanced at my mother. “She was a beautiful woman,” he said, then, looking back at Auntie Reno, added, “Your sister?”
I snorted, and Reno fluttered her eyes. “Jus’ like. I dah one help her when she first move to Hawaii. I dah one gamble on her, give her her first job.” She raised her voice and, turning her face from the mortician to give me stink-eye, said, “I dah one manage her business, take care her daughtah when she was, ah, feeling indispose.”
I forced a laugh. “Thank God for Auntie Reno,” I crooned into Reno’s scowl. “What would we have ever done without her?”
“You bettah believe it, sistah,” Reno spat.
The mortician lifted his hand in my direction, placing it tentatively between Reno and me. “Uh, you must be Ms. Bradley, daughter of the deceased.”
I ignored him. “Oh, I believe it, Reno. And what would you have done without my mother? Without all the money she made for you? How could you have made all those gambling trips? How could you have sent all your own kids to Punahou—at least until they got kicked out?”
Reno slapped the mortician’s arm down and narrowed her eyes. “What exactly you tryin’ for say?”
The man inched toward the door. “Eh, Frank! Frank,” he called toward the front room.
I glared at him. “Do you mind? We’re trying to have a private conversation. »
Reno pushed at my shoulder. “Eh, no take it out on him, he’s jus’ doing his job.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Unlike some people, leaving dah dirty work for others.”
The mortician backed against the door. “Frank, I said, try come,” he shouted, his job English fraying under stress. “Please! Dis only my first week, and look, get one 911 in here!”
Reno bustled over to the man. “Hush you, boy,” she clucked, patting his hands. “No worry ‘bout us. We jus’ havin’ one difference of opinion.” She smiled. “You was saying?”
The man rubbed his hands across the thighs of his pants. “No, really,” he said, pasting a smile across his face. “I nevah said—I wasn’t saying anything. In fact, uh, if you’d please excuse me, ladies, I, uh, should check on the arrangements for the next group.”