I wanted to tell her I wasn’t hungry, but she was already unloading the food: bento boxes of rice and mochi fried chicken and nishime, cucumber namasu, and cut muskmelon for dessert—all the things I had once loved to eat. “It’s all for you,” she said, as I began to serve her. “I already ate.”
I ate so fast and so much I gagged, but she never scolded me, and even after I had finished, she was still silent. She had taken off her shoes, which she’d placed neatly by the edge of the mat, and had stretched her legs out before her; I remembered she had always worn her nylons a shade darker than her skin. She was wearing a lime-green skirt printed with white roses, now very faded, that I remembered from my childhood, and as she looked up at the sky through the branches, leaning back her head and then closing her eyes, I wondered if she too—as I was occasionally able to myself, though with far less frequency—was able to appreciate the land’s difficult beauty, the way it seemed to yield to no one. Some yards away from us, the builders had finished their lunch break and were once again pounding and sawing; I had overheard one saying that the land was far too wet for a wooden house, and another disagreeing, saying the problem wasn’t the humidity but the heat. They had had to delay the foundation work, and then re-site it, when it had been discovered that the original location had abutted a swamp, which had been drained and then filled. For a while, we listened to the construction, and I waited to hear what she was going to say.
“When you were almost three, I took you to the mainland to see a specialist,” she began. “Because you didn’t speak. It was clear you weren’t deaf, which was what we first thought. But when your father or I said your name, you turned to us, and when we were outside and you heard a dog bark, you would get excited and smile and clap.
“You liked music as well, and when we played your favorite songs, you would even sometimes—not hum along, quite, but you would make little noises. Still, you wouldn’t speak. Your doctor said we perhaps weren’t speaking enough to you, so we spoke to you constantly. At night, your father would seat you next to him and read the sports section to you. But since I was the one who was with you the most, I talked to you most of all. Ceaselessly, in fact. I took you with me wherever I went. I read books to you, and recipes, and when we were in the car, I’d tell you everything we were passing. ‘See,’ I’d say, ‘there’s the school you’re going to attend someday, when you’re a little older; over there, that’s the house your father and I lived in right after we got married, before we moved to the valley; up that hill is where your father’s high-school friend lives—they have a little boy just your age.’
“Mostly, though, I talked to you about my life. I told you about my father and my siblings, and how, when I was a girl, I wanted to move to Los Angeles and be a dancer, except of course that wasn’t the sort of thing that I would be allowed to do, and anyway, I wasn’t a very good dancer. I even told you about how your father and I had tried so many times to give you a sister, and each time, she slipped away from us, until the doctor told us that you would be our only.
“How much I talked to you! I was lonely in those days; I hadn’t yet joined the Daughters, and most of my friends from school had large families or were busy running their own households, and I was already estranged from my siblings. So I just had you. At times I would lie in bed in the evening and think of all that I’d told you and feel frightened that I had perhaps damaged you by telling you things I shouldn’t tell a child. Once, I became so worried that I even confessed to your father, and he laughed and took me in his arms and said, ‘Don’t be silly, pet’—he called me ‘pet’—‘he doesn’t even understand what you’re saying. Why, you could curse at him all day long and it wouldn’t make a difference!’ I swatted him on the arm and scolded him, but he just laughed again, and he made me feel a little better.
“On the flight to San Francisco, though, I thought again of how much I’d told you, and do you know what I wished? I wished you would never speak at all. I was afraid that if you did, you would tell someone the things I had told you, all of my secrets. ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ I whispered into your ear as you lay asleep on my lap. ‘Don’t ever tell what I told you.’ And then I felt horribly guilty—that I should hope my only child never spoke, that I should be so selfish. What kind of mother was I?
“But at any rate, I didn’t have to worry. Three weeks after we came home—the San Francisco doctor had no greater insight than our own doctor—you began to talk, not just in single words but in whole sentences. I was so relieved: I wept with joy. Your father, who hadn’t been as concerned as I, teased me, but nicely, in that way he had. ‘You see, pet?’ he asked me. ‘I knew he was going to be all right! Just like his old man, didn’t I tell you? Now you’re going to pray for the day he stops talking!’
“That was what everyone told me—that I would someday pray for you to stop talking. But I never had to pray for that, because you were so quiet. And sometimes, as you got older, I wondered: Was I being punished? I had asked you not to say anything, and so you hadn’t. And then you said less and less and less, and now—” She stopped, cleared her throat. “And now we’re here,” she concluded.
We were both quiet for a long time. “For god’s sakes, Wika,” she said, at last. “Say something.”
“There’s nothing to say,” I said.
“This isn’t a life here, you understand,” she said in a rush. “You’re thirty-six; you have an eleven-year-old son. This place—what do you call it? Lipo-wao-nahele? You can’t stay here, Wika. You don’t have any skills, you or your friend. You don’t know how to cook for yourself, or take care of yourself, or, or—anything. You know nothing, Wika. You—”
Once again, she stopped speaking mid-sentence. She shook her head, quickly; she seemed to refocus herself. And then she stacked the now empty containers inside one another and placed them in her bag, and rocked back on the balls of her feet into a standing position. She stepped into her shoes, and picked up her bag.
I looked up at her, and she looked down at me. She would say something terrible, I thought, something so insulting that I would never be able to forgive her, and she might never be able to forgive herself.
But she didn’t. “Why am I worrying,” she said, coolly, as she studied not just my face but the whole of me, my unwashed T-shirt and torn board shorts and the patchy beard that made my cheeks itch. “You won’t be able to survive out here. You’ll be home before I know it.”
And then she turned and walked away from me, and I watched her go. She slid into her car; she put the bag of empty containers onto the seat next to her; she checked her reflection in the rearview mirror, running a hand along the side of her face, as if reminding herself that it was still there. Then she started the engine and drove away.
“Goodbye,” I said to her, as the car disappeared. “Goodbye.” Overhead, the clouds were turning gray—I could hear the foreman urge his crew to hurry, to finish their work before the rain came.