calm. The father reminded me of Lolo somehow, and I looked down at the wooden mask I was carrying in my hand. It was a gift from the Indonesian copilot, a friend of my mother’s who had led me away as she and Lolo and my new sister, Maya, stood by at the gate. I closed my eyes and pressed the mask to my face. The wood had a nutty, cinnamon smell, and I felt myself drifting back across oceans and over the clouds, into the violet horizon, back to the place where I had once been….
Someone shouted out my name. The mask dropped to my side, and with it my daydream, and I saw my grandparents again standing there, waving almost frantically now. This time I waved back; and then, without thinking, I brought the mask again up to my face, swaying my head in an odd little dance. My grandparents laughed and pointed at me and waved some more until the customs official finally tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I was an American. I nodded and handed him my passport.
“Go ahead,” he said, and told the Chinese family to step to one side.
The sliding doors closed behind me. Toot gathered me into a hug and tossed candy-and-chewing-gum leis around my neck. Gramps threw an arm over my shoulder and said that the mask was a definite improvement. They took me to the new car they had bought, and Gramps showed me how to operate the air-conditioning. We drove along the highway, past fast-food restaurants and economy motels and used-car lots strung with festoons. I told them about the trip and everyone back in Djakarta. Gramps told me what they’d planned for my welcome-back dinner. Toot suggested that I’d need new clothes for school.
Then, suddenly, the conversation stopped. I realized that I was to live with strangers.
The new arrangement hadn’t sounded so bad when my mother first explained it to me. It was time for me to attend an American school, she had said; I’d run through all the lessons of my correspondence course. She said that she and Maya would be joining me in Hawaii very soon—a year, tops—and that she’d try to make it there for Christmas. She reminded me of what a great time I’d had living with Gramps and Toot just the previous summer—the ice cream, the cartoons, the days at the beach. “And you won’t have to wake up at four in the morning,” she said, a point that I found most compelling.
It was only now, as I began to adjust to an indefinite stay and watched my grandparents in the rhythm of their schedules, that I realized how much the two of them had changed. After my mother and I left, they had sold the big, rambling house near the university and now rented a small, two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise on Beretania Street. Gramps had left the furniture business to become a life insurance agent, but as he was unable to convince himself that people needed what he was selling and was sensitive to rejection, the work went badly. Every Sunday night, I would watch him grow more and more irritable as he gathered his briefcase and set up a TV tray in front of his chair, following the lead of every possible distraction, until finally he would chase us out of the living room and try to schedule appointments with prospective clients over the phone. Sometimes I would tiptoe into the kitchen for a soda, and I could hear the desperation creeping out of his voice, the stretch of silence that followed when the people on the other end explained why Thursday wasn’t good and Tuesday not much better, and then Gramps’s heavy sigh after he had hung up the phone, his hands fumbling through the files in his lap like those of a cardplayer who’s deep in the hole.
Eventually, a few people would relent, the pain would pass, and Gramps would wander into my room to tell me stories of his youth or the new joke he had read in Reader’s Digest. If his calls had gone especially well that night, he might discuss with me some scheme he still harbored—the book of poems he had started to write, the sketch that would soon bloom into a painting, the floor plans for his ideal house, complete with push-button conveniences and terraced landscaping. I saw that the plans grew bolder the further they receded from possibility, but in them I recognized some of his old enthusiasm, and I would usually try to think up encouraging questions that might sustain his good mood. Then, somewhere in the middle of his presentation, we would both notice Toot standing in the hall outside my room, her head tilted in accusation.
“What do you want, Madelyn?”
“Are you finished with your calls, dear?”
“Yes, Madelyn. I’m finished with my calls. It’s ten o’clock at night!”
“There’s no need to holler, Stanley. I just wanted to know if I could go into the kitchen.”
“I’m not hollering! Jesus H. Christ, I don’t understand why—” But before he could finish, Toot would have retreated into their bedroom, and Gramps would leave my room with a look of dejection and rage.
Such exchanges became familiar to me, for my grandparents’ arguments followed a well-worn groove, a groove that originated in the rarely mentioned fact that Toot earned more money than Gramps. She had proved to be a trailblazer of sorts, the first woman vice-president of a local bank, and although Gramps liked to say that he always encouraged her in her career, her job had become a source of delicacy and bitterness between them as his commissions paid fewer and fewer of the family’s bills.
Not that Toot had anticipated her success. Without a college education, she had started out as a secretary to help defray the costs of my unexpected birth. But she had a quick mind and sound judgment, and the capacity for sustained work. Slowly she had risen, playing by the rules, until she reached the threshold where competence didn’t suffice. There she would stay for twenty years, with scarcely a vacation, watching as her male counterparts kept moving up the corporate ladder, playing a bit loose with information passed on between the ninth hole and the ride to the clubhouse, becoming wealthy men.
More than once, my mother would tell Toot that the bank shouldn’t get away with such blatant sexism. But Toot would just pooh-pooh my mother’s remarks, saying that everybody could find a reason to complain about something. Toot didn’t complain. Every morning, she woke up at five A.M. and changed from the frowsy muu-muus she wore around the apartment into a tailored suit and high-heeled pumps. Her face powdered, her hips girdled, her thinning hair bolstered, she would board the six-thirty bus to arrive at her downtown office before anyone else. From time to time, she would admit a grudging pride in her work and took pleasure in telling us the inside story behind the local financial news. When I got older, though, she would confide in me that she had never stopped dreaming of a house with a white picket fence, days spent baking or playing bridge or volunteering at the local library. I was surprised by this admission, for she rarely mentioned hopes or regrets. It may or may not have been true that she would have preferred the alternative history she imagined for herself, but I came to understand that her career spanned a time when the work of a wife outside the home was nothing to brag about, for her or for Gramps—that it represented only lost years, broken promises. What Toot believed kept her going were the needs of her grandchildren and the stoicism of her ancestors.
“So long as you kids do well, Bar,” she would say more than once, “that’s all that really matters.”
That’s how my grandparents had come to live. They still prepared sashimi for the now-infrequent guests to their apartment. Gramps still wore Hawaiian shirts to the office, and Toot still insisted on being called Toot. Otherwise, though, the ambitions they had carried with them to Hawaii had slowly drained away, until regularity—of schedules and pastimes and the weather—became their principal consolation. They would occasionally grumble about how the Japanese had taken over the islands, how the Chinese controlled island finance. During the Watergate hearings, my mother would pry out of them that they had voted for Nixon, the law-and-order candidate, in 1968. We didn’t go to the beach or on hikes together anymore; at night, Gramps watched television while Toot sat in her room reading murder mysteries. Their principal excitement now came from new drapes or a stand-alone freezer. It was as if they had bypassed the satisfactions that should come with the middle years, the convergence of maturity with time left, energy with means, a recognition of accomplishment that frees the spirit.
