GOLDSEA | ASIAN BOOKVIEW | FICTION

Makai
by Kathleen Tyau
Farrar Strauss Giroux, New York, 1999, 289 pp, $24
The story of two Chinese-Hawaiian women who are friends for life.
EXCERPT

nnabel Lee is coming, and I'm not going to be cheap. I'll buy a new dress and we'll go out dancing. Annabel Lee and me, Alice Lum, still best friends after all these years, not just old married ladies. It's been seven years since the war ended, and I miss the music, miss the dancing. The men holding me, spinning me around, my high heels clicking to the beat.
     But instead of music, I hear my husband Sammy, snoring. He whistles through his nose, like a teakettle coming to a boil again and again.
     Wake up, Sammy Woo. The rain has stopped. Annabel Lee is coming tomorrow. You promised to take me shopping in town. A real town, with more than one store. Not like this place where I am stuck. Hana, Maui. Out in the sticks, where the road stops, where you can't get the ocean out of your head.
     Look at him smile. He must be dreaming something good. How can he sleep with all his snoring? He gets made if I wake him up. When I ask what he's been dreaming, he says, I forget.
     How can he forget? Me, I remember everything. Sometimes I wake him in the middle of the night and tell him what I'm dreaming, so he can help me remember in the morning. But when I go back to sleep, my dream is gone. Maybe that's why he's smiling. He is dreaming my dream.
     The sun is bright, screaming through the windows.
Makai


     All that rain, for so many months and days. This is my home. Underwater. It rains in my sleep, in my worst nightmares. My nightgown, the sheets, my husband Sammy, my daughters Beatrice and Lurline -- everything, everybody I touch feels damp. My whole life turning into mildew.
     But this morning, sun on my face, on my arms. Tears from the sky no longer falling. My bare feet creaking across the kitchen to the back door. My face pressing against the wet screen. Dew evaporating off the grass and the ti leaves. The clothes steaming on the line. And, rising over the ohia and the guava and the banana trees, a giant rainbow. The biggest rainbow I have ever seen, landing right on top of my papaya tree. And now look. Count them. Three new papayas. Three of them, yellow and green...