Middle Son

by Deborah Iida

Genres: Family Life

Synopsis

When Spencer Fujii's grandparents arrived in Hawaii at the turn of the century, they brought Japanese customs with them. Five decades later, those traditional expectations still shape the lives of the Fujii family. Spencer, the child of first generation Japanese-American (Nisei) sugarcane plantation workers, is the middle son of this exquisite first novel. He is haunted by the sacrifice of Taizo, not only Spencer's big brother but his hero, who kept the tradition all too faithfully. While the Japanese traditions of responsibility, acceptance, and sacrifice form the structural backbone of this remarkable novel, it is the delicate evocation of Spencer's family life, his childhood days with the much-loved Taizo, and the beauty of his final communion with his mother that displays Deborah Iida's enormous talent. "Deborah Iida's fine writing and her wonderful ear opened the window on the world of Japanese Americans in Hawaii, a world that captured this reader."--Abraham Verghese, author of MY OWN COUNTRTY; "A small gem."--Kirkus Reveiws; "Resonant. A tender tale of secrecy and obligation, introducing us to a Hawaii the tourists never see."--Glamour.

Release date: July 1, 2000

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 238

Sample

My mother is dying. We live on different Hawaiian islands, and I fly to hers on the weekends, sometimes with my wife and children but more often alone. My mother and I have begun to talk about the past, now, more than we consider the future. Much of a parent-child relationship lives in the past. On the second day of an infant’s life, the parent reminisces about the first.

As I wait in Maui’s modern, open-air terminal for my baggage to be unloaded, I remember the former terminal and the old banyan tree that shaded it. The tree is gone, now, but I like to imagine that some of its roots still spread beneath the concrete that covered them.

Tourists crowd tightly around the conveyor belt as baggage begins to revolve. I stand back and wait. My suitcase and box pass three times before there is enough space to politely claim them. I get a hold of the suitcase with one hand and a twined box with the other. Of the two, the box is the more important. It holds pistachio nuts from my recent Las Vegas trip, kalua pig and cinnamon bread from Oahu fundraisers, and the pork-filled buns we call manapua that my mother likes. She can no longer swallow all these foods, but, no matter, her face brightens when she sees them.

A chauffeured van takes me and a Midwest couple to a car rental firm. They appear to be about my age, and, as we ride, I notice how differently we are dressed. They wear matching tennis shoes and flower-print clothes. I wear a T-shirt, brown shorts, and rubber slippers. The man offers his hand in greeting. We shake and exchange names.

“Fujii?” he asks, repeating my last name. “Is that Hawaiian?”

“Japanese,” I say. “My grandparents came here from Japan almost hundred years ago.”

His wife studies my sun-darkened skin, medium height, and large eyes. “You don’t look Japanese,” she says.

Her husband nods. “I would have taken you for Hawaiian.”

I shrug, used to the mistake. “It’s the sun,” I tell them. “The sun changed us all.”

We reach the car rental firm and the agent assigns me a white Nissan Sentra, the rental car of this year, the trunk that thieves seek out in a crowded parking lot because they figure it will be filled with camera equipment and traveler’s checks.

Despite this rented car, I feel at home in Maui. The new roads puzzle me, and the airport seems to grow during every absence, but Haleakala and the West Maui Mountains are the same, and as yet no developer owns the ocean. The drive is easy, only minutes through town, and then I am on the road home, the road to Wainoa—the ocean glinting through the palms on my left, the mountains rising peacefully beyond the sugar cane on my right. Within ten minutes I turn onto a quiet dirt road that breaks the rows of sugar. I pass the sugar mill, a few houses, and I’m home.

My mother has anticipated my arrival and waits at her front door. As I climb the front steps, baggage in hand, I nod to her, a greeting that has devolved from the ancient bows of Japan, and she smiles.

“Come inside, Spencer. I been waiting.”

I step out of my rubber slippers—the basic footwear in Hawaii and called thongs and flip-flops elsewhere—and my bare feet cross the threshold to a familiar wooden floor. My lips pass across my mother’s forehead easily, and I set down the suitcase.

“How your trip was?” she asks as she follows me down the long hallway to the kitchen.

“Easy,” I say. “Easy to come Maui.”

“Nice you came.”

“I like to come,” I remind her.

I set the box on top of the wooden kitchen table. My mother gets some scissors and cuts through the twine to see what I have brought her.

She kneels on one of the two wooden benches that run the length of the table and reaches with both hands into the box. “No need bring nothing,” she says as she pulls out a loaf of bread.

“Only small,” I say.

“Mrs. Sato going be happy for see pistachio nut,” she says as she mentally divides these favorites among her friends.

“Make sure you tell her I came rich on this trip to Vegas.”

She laughs at me, the chronic Las Vegas loser. At least once a year I board the plane for Las Vegas. I usually get out of the casinos with a few dollars left in my wallet, but who can walk past that last row of slot machines at the airport? On my return flight to Hawaii, I haven’t enough money to rent movie earphones. If the movie tempts me, I read lips.

“Manapua,” my mother says, pulling out the small box and opening it. “I been wanting for eat this.”

“Go on,” I say, “take one. I can put the kalua pig in the freezer for you.”

She sits on the bench and politely bites the large oval bun. “Honolulu get the best manapua,” she declares, pleasing me with her appetite and apparent health.

I stack the plastic containers of kalua pig in the freezer and look away from my mother so that she may eat in peace. The kitchen is comfortably familiar. As a little boy, I sat at the end of the hallway and watched my mother scrub away sticky grains of rice that had fallen to the floor from forks and chopsticks. When her back was to me, I reached out and with my finger drew slippery circles on the wet floor.

The kitchen table, like the family that gathered around it, is the only one this house has ever had. All four table legs sit in little plastic cups which my mother fills with water to keep ants away from her table. During childhood my brother, Taizo, and I stood at opposite ends of the table and rolled marbles down its length. After he died, I rolled the marbles knowing there was no one to catch them at the other end. They fell to the wooden floor and kept rolling.

An electric stove and microwave have replaced the old kerosene stove upon which my mother used to cook food and heat dishwater. The wick coiled round and round on each of four burners. I could see it when I stood on my toes. A turn of the knob raised the wick toward my mother’s lit match.

My mother has finished her manapua and we walk together to the parlor. Not much has changed over the years in this room, either. My mother’s home and her easy contentment comfort me. The old koa sofa and matching chairs have new slipcovers; she must have sewn them. Would my mother have sewn new slipcovers if she believed the doctor’s explanation that her cancer cannot be fought?

I sit in the flower-patterned chair, big tropical flowers of green and brown, and compare it to the modern furniture in my Oahu home. “Chairs never last this long nowadays,” I tell my mother, while patting the wooden arms with my palms. “Every so often we gotta go buy new furniture.”

“Only old, this furniture,” she says as she lowers herself into the far end of the couch, “and the chair get termites so better stop pounding already. Or else,” my mother says and begins to giggle, “the chair going fall apart when you stay on it.”

We have begun to ease into another of our weekends. Two months ago the doctor explained to my mother—a woman from a culture that reveres cleanliness—that her liver is failing to cleanse parts of her body she cannot reach. Yet I am not certain she will die, not certain at all. Today I have seen her laugh and seen her eat.

“The furniture same like me,” my mother says, perhaps sensing my hope. “From outside never look too bad, but inside everything stay falling apart.”

I nod, feeling that I must. She begins each visit the same way, forcing me to confront her illness. She must understand my hope and therefore feel it her motherly duty to ease the hope away. She will not dwell on this once she is certain the hope I have gathered since our last weekend visit has begun to weaken. I am anxious to get past this beginning.

“There,” she says, watching me. “Good for accept truth.”

“No sense only give up.”

She shakes her head. “My parents teach me for accept.”

“Old style, that. Accept this, accept that.”

“Maybe,” she says, caught between the ideas of two generations. But that has always been my mother’s predicament. Her parents spoke Japanese, and her children spoke English. My mother has told me she feels fluent in neither. I understand her confusion. I, too, am a person of two languages: the oral and the written. Pidgin, the language of my childhood, inhabits my voice, and my lifelong love of reading lives in my writing. When I must speak textbook English, my mind visualizes the written words and forwards them to my mouth.

My mother pulls her legs up onto the couch and wraps her arms around her knees. She reminds me of those ladies in old folks homes who hide in corners. Her white hair, once long and black, swinging without effort, now curls only an inch from her scalp. Old age is greedy, unsatisfied, a continual process of taking away, but I wish it could have left my mother’s hair alone. At least her skin, the beautiful brown of the earth, has somehow escaped without much wear. It does not hang as if an appendage but instead stretches taut and is remarkable, actually, considering her seventy years.

My mother’s hand gestures toward her left and guides my eyes to the altar directly across the room from me. “The altar going be yours,” she tells me. “Pretty soon the altar going be yours.”

This Buddhist altar is her dearest possession, her tribute to life and death. The altar doors are opened as wide as a reverend’s arms and within them rests a picture of my father. In this picture he is a man of middle age, my age, and I wonder why my mother has chosen this picture to display. Does she look back on her married life and remember a time of greatest love? Or does she want to look at her young husband instead of the white-haired man who died on their double bed?

A little gold cup holds a miniature scoop of cooked rice and sits next to my father’s picture. The cup is brass, I know that now, but as a boy it was gold to me. My mother offers rice at this altar before serving herself. Even my demanding father allowed her to make an offering of fresh rice to the altar before hurrying back to serve him the second scoop from the rice pot.

On the rare childhood occasion when we hosted overnight guests, my mother prepared their futon bedding in this room, the parlor, the room of the altar. No higher honor could be offered in our simple home.

A picture of my brother, Taizo, also sits on this altar. Over the years I have learned to sense the boundaries of his picture, managing to look on all sides of the frame without seeing Taizo. Some eyes, I have learned, are not for looking into.

“Teresa and Amber stay fine?” my mother says, referring to my daughters.

I turn from the altar. “Fine. They wanted to come.”

“Why you never let them?” she asks.

“Cannot come every time,” I say. “Too hard to talk when they come.”

“Not that hard,” my mother says. “Maybe you only want for get away from your own kids.”

“Why not?” I respond. “Nothing wrong with that.”

“No, nothing wrong with that,” my mother agrees. “Before days I no can get away. I wrap the crib sheet around my back and you stay inside. If never did that, I no can get my work done.”

“Now we call the babysitter.”

“Good for you,” my mother says. “I think nowadays more better.”

Our conversations these days alternate moods from sentence to sentence. I do not have to think carefully about each word I speak. We both recognize the limits of my mother’s life, and I am free, now, to ask a lifetime of unasked questions. As a child I was quieted, scolded for my curiosity, but now my mother will patiently listen. Our family codes are breaking down.

“You mind if we talk about Taizo?” I say.

“Can.”

“Long time we never talk about him. I think about him, though, watching how Teresa and Amber play together. When they fight, the memories come even more fast. Was good to have an older brother, even if I never look good beside him.”

“I never compare.”

“Hard to follow a brother like that. Almost perfect, him.”

“I never think he stay perfect.”

“Maybe,” I say, unconvinced.

“He never did give me trouble,” she says, remembering. I can see she daydreams, and I wonder which day she has chosen to recall.

“Taizo was hard to understand,” I tell my mother. “I still keep trying to figure him out.”

“No sense,” she says. “Only come sick if think about past.”

“But if can figure him out, the whole past going to fall into place.”

“Cannot change the past,” my mother says because she knows that is exactly what I would like to do.

“How long I miss him,” I say. “Who could know I would miss him this long?”

“Even me. Not going forget my oldest boy. Having you helped, but. Plenty joy you give me.”

“And much sorrow,” I tentatively say, watching for her reaction.

My mother’s head nods slowly. “Maybe,” she says and pulls her knees more tightly to her body. “Maybe get sorrow.”

Though I have led my mother to these words, I am unprepared for their pain. The child knows the truth, has always known the truth, but no matter how old, he would still rather not hear it.

Our eyes pass child to mother, mother to child. “I never held it against you,” she says. “I never did.”

And this, of course, I also know. I feel as if I have begun to reclaim all that I was, the parts of my childhood so thoughtlessly discarded over the years. I want to go on, to fall into the past. But my mother, who has always known me well, stands and walks from the room. “Can talk later,” she says from the hallway. “Now I like for go cook.”

“No need cook for me,” I tell her, starting to sit up. “Can pick something up.”

She does not respond and continues toward the kitchen. I sit back down. The chair feels comfortable, and I settle deeply into the cushion. If I were still a boy, I’d search for marbles in this chair. My brother would help me lift the cushion.

I want to look at Taizo’s picture. We haven’t much time together before our childhood home will be gone; these old plantation houses are razed after their occupants die. Many years have passed since I have dared to look at my brother, and I miss the long, definitive lines of his face. I know I need only to look across the room toward the altar and he will be there, dependable Taizo, always where he is expected to be, the little boy who never became a man. I think I can look, that I am ready for any confrontation, but I am a cowardly man and fear my brother’s anger. We have a peace to settle, m. . .