To Paradise

“From Matthew’s brother,” she’d say—she was proud of him, too, and pride made her even more generous. “Have a big slice, Wika. Have more.”

I didn’t understand why I wanted to see her so badly. But one Friday afternoon, I told Matthew and Jane I had to stay late to help paint sets for the annual school play, and then I cycled over. Forsythia (much later, I would wonder who had chosen this name, as it wasn’t a plant that grew in Hawai‘i, and no one knew what it was) was at the end of a row of small, mostly Japanese-owned stores of the sort that surrounded the Bishops’ house, and though its stucco exterior had been painted a bright yellow, it was designed to resemble a Japanese teahouse, with a peaked roof and small windows cut high into the walls. In the rear of the building, though, near one of the corners, there was a long, skinny window, and it was to here that I quietly wheeled my bike.

I sat down to wait. The kitchen entrance was a few feet away, but there was a dumpster, and I hid behind that. A Hawaiian music group performed here on Fridays and the weekends, playing all the big-band standards, music my father had liked to listen to—“Nani Waimea,” “Moonlight in Hawai‘i,” “Ē Lili‘u ē”—and it was after the fourth song that I heard the guitarist announce, “And now, gentlemen—and some ladies, yeah?—please join me in welcoming the lovely Miss Victoria Nāmāhānaikaleleokalani Bishop!”

The crowd cheered, and I looked through the window to see Mrs. Bishop, in a close-fitting yellow holokū printed with white hibiscus, a lei of orange puakenikeni around her head, her hair coiled into a bun, her lips scarlet, ascend to the small stage. She waved to the audience, which was clapping, and I watched as she danced to “My Yellow Ginger Lei” and “Pālolo.” She was a beautiful dancer, and although I didn’t speak more than a few words of Hawaiian, I understood the lyrics from watching her movements.

It occurred to me as I watched her, her face lit with happiness, that, although I had always liked her, part of me had wanted to see her degraded in some way. “Dancing,” in my classmates’ voices, had sounded so sordid, something a desperate woman would have to do, and something in me had craved witnessing it. Watching her now, queenly and elegant, was both a relief and, as much as I hated to admit it, a disappointment—I realized that I resented her son after all, that I wanted him to have something to be ashamed of, and that I had wanted that something to be his mother, who had always been kind to me, kind in a way her son could never be. She was not dancing because she had been forced to out of circumstance—she was dancing because she loved to dance, and although she dipped her head graciously at the crowd’s applause, it was also clear that her joy was separate from their approval.

I left before her set was over. But in bed that night, I lay awake thinking of the night I had departed the Bishops’ house for the first time and had turned back to see them in the kitchen together, laughing and talking in the house’s warm yellow light. Now I revised that memory: They had put a record on the player, and Mrs. Bishop, still in her Mizumoto’s uniform, was dancing, and Edward was strumming his ukulele, playing along. Outside, in the tiny yard, were crowded all of Edward’s and my classmates, and all of the patrons from Forsythia as well, all of us watching and clapping, though mother and son never turned to acknowledge us—to them, there was only each other, and it was as if we didn’t exist.