Hawai'i One Summer Read online

  Joseph’s method of moving in is to decide that his bedroom will be the one in the attic, next to the writer’s garret, and he spreads everything he owns over its strangeness.

  As at every place we have ever moved to, we throw mattresses on the living room floor and sleep there for several nights—to establish ourselves in the middle of the house, to weight it down. The night comes black into the uncurtained windows.

  I attack the house from my Headquarters, and again appreciate being married to a person whose sense of geometry is not much different from mine. How do people stay together whose eyes can’t agree on how much space there should be between pictures?

  The final thing that makes it possible to live in the house is our promise to each other that if we cannot bear the weight of ownership, we can always sell, though we know from fifteen years of marriage that this is like saying, “Well, if this marriage doesn’t work out, we can always get a divorce.” You don’t know how you change in the interim.

  My High School Reunion

  I just opened an envelope in the mail and found a mimeographed sheet smelling like a school test and announcing the twentieth year reunion of my high school class. No Host Cocktail Party. Buffet Dinner. Family Picnic. Dancing. In August. Class of ’58. Edison High. Stockton. My stomach is lurching. My dignity feels wobbly. I don’t want to go if I’m going to be one of those without the strength to stay grown up and transcendent.

  I hadn’t gone to the tenth year reunion. The friends I really wanted to see, I was seeing, right? But I’ve been having dreams about the people in high school, and wake up with an urge to talk to them, find out how they turned out. “Did you grow up? I grew up.” There are parts of myself that those people have in their keeping—they’re holding things for me—different from what my new friends hold.

  “When I think of you, I remember the hateful look you gave me on the day we signed yearbooks. That face has popped into my mind a few times a year for twenty years. Why did you look at me that way?” I’d like to be able to say that at the No Host Cocktail Party. And to someone else: “I remember you winking at me across the physics lab.”

  I dreamed that the girl who never talked in all the years of school spoke to me: “Your house has moles living in it.” Then my cat said, “I am a cat and not a car. Quit driving me around.” Are there truths to be found?

  Another reason I hadn’t gone to my tenth was an item in the registration form: “List your publications.” Who’s on the reunion committee anyway? Somebody must have grown up to become a personnel officer at a university. To make a list, it takes more than an article and one poem. Cutthroat competitors. With no snooty questions asked, maybe the classmates with interesting jail records would show up. We are not the class to be jailed for political activities or white collar crimes but for burglary, armed robbery, and crimes of passion. “Reunions are planned by the people who were popular. They want the chance to put us down again,” says a friend (Punahou Academy ’68), preparing for her tenth.

  But surely, I am not going to show up this year just because I now have a “list.” And there is more to the questionnaire: “What’s the greatest happiness you’ve had in the last twenty years? What do you regret the most?” I should write across the paper, “These questions are too hard. Can I come anyway?” No, you can’t answer, “None of your business.” It is their business; these are the people who formed your growing up.

  I have a friend (Roosevelt High ’62) who refused to go to his tenth because he had to check “married,” “separated,” “divorced,” or “single.” He could not bear to mark “divorced.” Family Picnic.

  But another divorced friend’s reunion (Roosevelt ’57) turned out to be so much fun that the class decided to meet again the very next weekend—without the spouses, a come-without-the-spouse party. And when my brother (Edison ’60) and sister-in-law (Edison ’62) went to her reunion, there was an Old Flames Dance; you asked a Secret Love to dance. Working out the regrets, people went home with other people’s spouses. Fifteen divorces and remarriages by summer’s end.

  At my husband Earll’s (Bishop O’Dowd ’56) reunion, there was an uncomfortableness as to whether to call the married priests Father or Mister or what.

  What if you can’t explain yourself over the loud music? Twenty years of transcendence blown away at the No Host Cocktail. Cocktails—another skill I haven’t learned, like the dude in the old cowboy movies who ordered milk or lemonade or sarsaparilla. They’ll have disco dancing. Never been to a disco either. Not cool after all these years.

  In high school, we did not choose our friends. I sort of ended up with certain people, and then wondered why we went together. If she’s the pretty one, then I must be the homely one. (When I asked my sister [Edison ’59] about my “image,” she said, “Well, when I think of the way you look in the halls, I picture you with your slip hanging.” Not well-groomed.) We were incomplete, and made complementary friendships, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Or more like the Cisco Kid and Pancho. Friendships among equals is a possibility I have found as an adult.

  No, my motive for going would not be because of my “list.” I was writing in high school. Writing did not protect me then, and it won’t protect me now. I came from a school—no, it’s not the school—it’s the times; we are of a time when people don’t read.

  There’s a race thing too. Suddenly the colored girls would walk up, and my colored girlfriend would talk and move differently. Well, they’re athletes, I thought; they go to the same parties. Some years, the only place I ever considered sitting for lunch was the Chinese table. There were more of us than places at that table. Hurry and get to the cafeteria early, or go late when somebody may have finished and left a seat. Or skip lunch. We will eat with whom at the Buffet Dinner?

  Earll says that he may have to work in August, and not be able to escort me. Alone at the Dance. Again.

  One day, in high school, I was walking home with a popular girl. (It was poor to be seen walking to or from school by oneself.) And another popular girl, who had her own car, asked my friend to ride with her. “No, thanks,” said my friend. “We’ll walk.” And the girl with the car stamped her foot, and said, “Come here! We ride home with one another.” Meaning the members of their gang, I guess. The popular-girl gang. “I remember you shouting her away from me,” I could say at the reunion, not, I swear, to accuse so much as to get the facts straight. Nobody had come right out and said that there were very exclusive groups of friends. They were not called “groups” or “crowds” or “gangs” or “cliques” or anything. (“Clicks,” the kids today say.) “Were you in a group? Which one was I in?”

  My son, who is a freshman (Roosevelt, Class of ’81), says he can’t make friends outside of his group. “My old friends feel left out, and then they ice me out.”

  What a test of character the reunion will be. I’m not worried about looks. My woman friends and I are sure that we look physically better at thirty-eight than at eighteen. By going to the reunion, I’ll be able to update the looks of those people who are always eighteen in my dreams.

  John Gregory Dunne (Portsmouth Priory ’50) said to his wife, Joan Didion (McClatchy High ’52), “It is your obligation as an American writer to go to your high school reunion.” And she went. She said she dreamed about the people for a long time afterward.

  I have improved: I don’t wear slips anymore. I got tired of hanging around homely people. It would be nice to go to a reunion where we look at one another and know without explanations how much we improved in twenty years of life. And know that we had something to do with one another’s outcomes, companions in time for a while, lucky to meet again. I wouldn’t miss such a get-together for anything.

  War

  Trying to define exactly how Hawai‘i is different from California, I keep coming up with the weather, though during certain seasons the weather isn’t all that different. In 1967, Earll and I, with our son, left Berkeley in despair over the war. Our friends, retreating from the
barricades, too, were starting communes in the northern California woods. They planned to live—to build and to plant, to marry and to have babies—as if the United States were out of Vietnam.

  “Look,” Lew Welch was saying, “if nobody tried to live this way, all the work of the world would be in vain.” He also wrote about Chicago: “I’m just going to walk away from it. Maybe / A small part of it will die if I’m not around / feeding it anymore.” That was what we felt about America.

  We did not look for new jobs in Hawai‘i. It was the duty of the pacifist in a war economy not to work. When you used plastic wrap or made a phone call or drank grape juice or washed your clothes or drove a car, you ran the assembly lines that delivered bombs to Vietnam.

  Gary Snyder said that at the docks the forklifts make holes in sacks, and you can pick up fifteen or twenty-five pounds of rice for free once a week. We discovered that a human being could live out of the dumpsters behind the supermarkets. Blocks of cheese had only a little extra mold on them. Tear off the outer leaves, and the lettuce and cabbage heads were perfectly fresh. It wasn’t until about three years ago that the supermarkets started locking their garbage bins at night.

  At least the weather in Hawai‘i was good for sleeping outdoors if necessary. So it really did come down to the weather. I remembered Defoe writing in A Journal of the Plague Year that during the plague, moods were greatly affected by the weather. Also, we had our passports ready, and if the United States committed one more unbearable atrocity, we would already be halfway to Japan.

  We discovered that O‘ahu is a rim that we could drive in less than a day. Shoes, clothes, tables, chairs washed up on the shores. We found a ninety-dollar-a-month apartment above a grocery store on the rim. We cadged a bunk bed from an abandoned house, a broken park bench for a sofa, fruit and nuts but not pineapples because of the fifty-dollar fine. If only the war would end before our life savings did, we would be all right. The greenery was so lush that we did not notice for a long time that the people were poor, that we were living in a slum by the sea.

  We had not, of course, escaped from the war, but had put ourselves in the very midst of it, as close as you could get and remain in the United States.

  We should have thought of it—hardware and soldiers were sent to Hawai‘i, which funneled everything to Vietnam. Tanks and jeeps in convoys maneuvered around the rim. Khaki soldiers drove khaki vehicles, camouflage that did not match the bright foliage. Like conquered natives standing on the roadside, we were surprised when soldiers gave us the peace sign. (In Berkeley, we hardly saw any soldiers.) We heard the target practice—with missiles—in the mountains, where we hiked, and looked at the jagged red dirt like wounds in the earth’s green skin.

  At the airport, near the luggage carts, we saw coffins draped with flags. One marine per stack stood guard through the night. The coffins disappeared by day. We went to Tripler to visit a soldier we knew hurt in a motorcycle accident. He was in Neurosurgical Post Op, a ward full of young men who had been wounded in the brain. Quadriplegics. A totally paralyzed man lay on his stomach, his face toward the floor, not reading.

  Soldiers came to Hawai‘i for R & R. At the beach, many swimmers had various unlikely parts of their bodies bandaged. I saw three soldiers, one crippled and two bandaged, jumping in the waves with their clothes on, splashing one another, cavorting. Glad to be alive, I thought, glad to be out of Vietnam alive.

  Many of the soldiers had not been wounded in Vietnam but in auto accidents here, bike accidents, swimming and surfing accidents; also they shot one another. Once out of Vietnam, they got careless, sucked through the Blowhole, drowned in the lagoons, swept away in undertows, killed the first day or week out of Vietnam. Beaten up by locals. “Swim out there,” the girls said, practicing their siren ways, pointing into the Witch’s Brew, the Potato Patch, the Toilet.

  Paul Goodman was spending one of the last years of his life teaching in Hawai‘i. Earll asked him if he were giving up working for peace. The protest was so feeble here. “No,” he said, “people on all levels of power are accessible in such a small place.” He wrote poems about Hawai‘i: “… here I will never be able to make love / the people are not plain. I would be happier / trying to make out with the porpoises / if only I could swim better than I do.” The newspapers cartooned him as an East Coast haole presuming to criticize paradise.

  There was nothing to do but continue the protest, help the AWOL soldiers and sailors when they took sanctuary at the Church of the Crossroads and formed the Servicemen’s Union. During this time, it seemed that there were more nights than days; the light came from candles and hibachis and bonfires in the Japanesy courtyard of the church. The soldiers, mere kids, illiterate boys from the poorer states, did not agree that the war was wrong; some went AWOL because they didn’t like their officers, or the food was bad, or they wanted a vacation, or they were just fooling around. The peace movement was using them no less than the government was.

  In the sanctuary, the peace people drilled the AWOLs in history while from outside came the voice of the Army chaplain on a bullhorn, asking them to give themselves up. Winning hearts and minds. We tried to make conversation. “What do you like to do?” I asked a short boy, who looked both stunted and hurtable in his new PX aloha shirt and the haircut that exposed his neck and ears. “I build model cars,” he said. “I built five hundred of them, and I lined ’em up and shot ’em and set ’em on fire.” “Why did you do that?” “It felt good—like when I was a door gunner on the chopper in Nam. Thousands of bullets streaming out of my gun.” Silence. Don’t tell me about the gooks you shot, I thought. Don’t tell me about the hootches you torched.

  “What will you do next if the war doesn’t end?” I asked. I did not want to keep feeding and visiting these people forever. “I don’t know.” Long silence. “You could go to Sweden.” “Sure. That’s in Canada, right? I’ll help your son build model airplanes if he likes.” He was comfortable playing cars with a five-year-old. He did not read the directions and glued the more intricate parts wrong. Not having the sense to stay hidden, he got into two auto accidents; we had to go to the rescue at two and three in the morning. Finally he and another boy turned themselves in at Schofield. They asked Earll to drive them. They swallowed the rest of their acid. Before they surrendered to the M.P. at the gate, they said, “Tell them you captured us. You get fifty dollars apiece reward.”

  The war is more or less over, but we have remained here. The military paraphernalia also remains; even our dovish members of Congress have defended Hawai‘i against military cuts. But after ten years in these islands, I see through camouflages and find the winding trails inland, away from the rim. Reading Goodman’s Hawai‘i poems now, I hardly understand why he wanted plain loves; the world calmer, I like complexities. That his sadness seems inappropriate shows the possibility of a happier place, Hawai‘i a vacation spot. I want to stay for a while to vacation.

  Dishwashing

  Dishwashing is not interesting, either to do or to think about. Thinking has dignified other mundane things, though. At least it will postpone the dishwashing, which stupefies. After eating, I look at the dishes in the sink and on the counters, the cat’s dirty bowl and saucer underfoot, swipe at the dabs and smears recognizable from several meals ago, pick up a cup from among the many on chairs and beside beds, and think about suicide. Also about what to write in the suicide note.

  The note is an act of kindness. The criminals who most upset us are the ones who refuse to give satisfying motives. “I don’t want to wash the dishes one more time.” A plain note, no hidden meanings.

  I run water into the frying pan—its black underside just clears the faucet because of the pile-up—but the scrubber and the sponges are hidden somewhere in the bottom of the sink. Thwarted at the start. The frying pan fills; the pile shifts; greasy water splashes on me and spills. I turn off the water and get out of the kitchen. Let the pan soak itself clean. No way to wash the pot and the blender underneath it nor the dishes u
nder that, the crystal wine glasses at the bottom. The dishpan and the drain are buried, too, so I can’t let the cold, dirty water out. When the mood to do so overcomes me, I’ll take these dishes out and start all over.

  Once in a while, early in the morning, my powers at their strongest, I can enjoy washing dishes. First, reorganize the pile, then fill the dishpan again with clean water. I like water running on my wrists and the way bubbles separate from the suds and float about for quite awhile. I am the one who touches each thing, each utensil and each plate and bowl; I wipe every surface. I like putting the like items together back on the shelves. Until the next time somebody eats, I open the drawers and cupboards every few minutes to look at the neatness I’ve wrought.

  Unfortunately, such well-being comes so rarely, and the mornings are so short, they ought not be wasted on dishes. Better to do dishes in the afternoon, “the devil’s time,” Tennessee Williams calls it, or in the evening immediately before dinner. The same solution for bedmaking—that is, right before going to bed. I try to limit the number of items I wash to only those needed for dinner, but since I can’t find them without doing those on top, the obstructing ones get washed too. I trudge. I drudge.

  The one person I know who is a worse dishwasher than I am pushes the dishes from the previous meal to the middle of the table to make places for clean saucers, no plates left.

  Another person pulls a dish out of the sink and uses it as is.

  When my father was a young man, working in a laundry on Mott Street in New York, he and his partners raced at meals. Last one to finish eating washed the dishes. They ate fast.

  Technology is not the answer. I have had electric dishwashers, and they make little difference. The electric dishwasher does not clear the table, collect the cups from upstairs and downstairs, scrape, wipe the counters and the top of the stove. One’s life has to be in an orderly phase to load and arrange the dishes inside the dishwasher. Once they’re gathered in one spot like that, the momentum to do the rest of the task is fired up.