An Elder Sister’s Story Song

for Kim

I. Genesis

Before you were born, I watched the round globe of our mother’s belly swell into a world. My fingers had traced nine years of shadows into the space in my bosom you were meant to fill out. Then, they traced pink lines raised in relief on our mother’s gut. I started then, feeding you soft words, because the ones I heard most often were sharp. I wanted you to feel safe. You kicked so hard when I spoke that sometimes our mother gasped at the spasm in her womb. My hands were happy then, feeling your feet dance beneath her skin.

            I knew you would need strong legs.

II. Pink

How many times before you were grown did you hear the word pussy spit from the mouth of a uniformed man as a slur? By the time I was nine, I’d heard it uttered as an invective so often, I hated the color pink, because I thought it was the color of weakness. The brother between us was often dressed in blue. No one called him weak. Then I saw the military hospital in Hawai’i where you were born and I never saw a shade of pink as weak again.

            It was painted like a grand vulva.

III. Marine Corps Insignia

We lived a childhood ruled by an emblem. Ours is an earth, pierced by a fouled anchor. It is held aloft by a spread eagle whose talons grip the North Pole. She is flying the Western Hemisphere home to her nest. What is the tale of that emblem? How far have we traveled since you were born? Where are we flying, Sister? Is it to a nest we can call home? Or will we be devoured by her hatchlings when we arrive? We have only her banner to clue us to her intent. It reads Semper Fidelis.

            Sometimes, I find myself asking, is it the eagle who is meant to be faithful to us? Or we to the eagle? I struggle with this, because I am not sure who the infidel is in this equation, and freedom requires at least one willing to break the bond.

            I only know the claws of a raptor dig deep and are fierce to escape.

IV. Manakuke

In 1883, the sugar plantations in Hawai’i were so overrun by rats that the Asian mongoose was introduced to the islands in hopes they’d gorge on the rodents.  There were two problems with this equation:

            1. Mongooses prefer to eat birds or reptiles to rats. There are no snakes in   Hawai’i for the mongooses to devour, and nowadays, fewer birds.

            2. Mongooses are diurnal and rats do most of their scurrying in the dark, when the mongooses sleep, bellies full of birds.

In the language of the land where you were born, a language you’ve never spoken, the word for mongoose is manakuke.  I saw them sometimes in the rainforests, running on strong, short legs, blurry in my peripheral vision.

We called you mongoose.

V. Thyroid

The fifth chakra is located where the thyroid spreads its wings in our throats. It’s shaped like a butterfly whose abdomen butts up against the larynx. In the East, some believe that secrets can kill a thyroid. It is the seat of truthful expression.

            In my twenties, when my thyroid stopped working, I had an ultrasound. The technician couldn’t find it at first. When it finally showed up on the monitor, she said my thyroid had shriveled to the size of a pea.

            Maybe it’s gone into chrysalis stage, having gorged itself on my silence.

VI. Bumblebees

Your hair grew in long, wild, and red. I tried to twist it into tight coils, plait it into braids, wrap it in ribbons—there are so many ways to tie hair tight against one’s head. Yours only wanted to fly loose in the wind, become a prism, and shatter into sunlight. You were never happy indoors.

            The bumblebees plagued you, snarled themselves up in your hair. I’d chase them away, so you wouldn’t be pricked by the barbs beneath their fuzzy pants. Sometimes, I’d get stung when I disentangled them.

I never wanted you to hurt that way, to feel venom pulse under your skin. I couldn’t keep them from stinging you every time.

            We’ve both felt the sharp sac of regrets.

VII. A Fairy Tale

I used to tell you stories to lull you into sleep. Do you remember?

Here is one: Once, there was a golden-haired girl who prayed for a sister. When she was finally born, the golden-haired girl fell in love with her sister’s copper hair. She spent hours staring at her reflection in the ruddy locks. One day, the reflection in the copper hair turned green.

            What did that golden-haired girl see? Was it envy, or verdigris?

VIII. Third Rail

Once, when you were still small, we were out walking, and you had to pee. We weren’t anywhere near a toilet, so I took you into the bushes where you’d have some privacy. When you pulled your pants down, I saw a rust-colored stain in your underwear, and I felt a train rush through my throat. I swallowed hard, past all the warning bells that signal an impending collision. In that moment, I could have just pulled up your skivvies and taken your hand, pretended I saw nothing. Instead, I asked, “Has someone been touching you?”

            You said no.

Here is what you didn’t know that day: I wished you’d said yes. You were easy to protect. Any secret you had didn’t bear the weight of a freight train at capacity.

            If anyone harmed you the way I’d been hurt, I would have thrown the derail switch.

IX. Yours is the the Woodcutter’s Tale

You came to me once, in tears, over a framed photograph in your dining room. In that image, you are four years old, laughing, sun in your hair, and Dad is holding you in his arms. You’d been in Maine, on a camping trip. I stayed home that summer. When you returned, you had magic falling out of your mouth about the woodchuck who’d left you quarters on a fallen log every morning, and a moose with antlers as big as the sky. Later, you figured out it was Dad leaving the money, but back then, the wilderness still smelled like a walk to Grandmother’s house, sugar cookies cooling on the windowsill.

            “I can’t look at that picture,” you told me, “not when I think about what he did to you. Why you and not me?”

            This is a point of divergence in our narratives. Your father and mine were two different men who resided in the same skin. Your father told you the Woodcutter’s Tale, one of a cleared, wide path. From mine, I inherited the Story of Talons and Sharply Hooked Beaks, one of deep brambles thick with thorns.

            When we buried Dad, we began to grieve both men.

            One man, whose glance spun the world on its axis.

            The other? No gravedigger could have dug that hole deep enough.

X. The Tale of the Geisha

Dad brought us gifts when he returned from training missions in Okinawa, usually porcelain-faced geishas dressed in silk kimonos. They came in glass displays, or stayed wrapped in plastic so we couldn’t touch them with our mudpie fingers.  Once, he brought me a jewelry box. It had been broken before it ever left Japan. It still played “Sukiyaki” when I lifted the lid, but inside the box, there was a garden scene under glass, and in the garden, a rickshaw with wheels that turned, and in the rickshaw, a geisha, this one with a split-peach bun holding a parasol with a snapped handle. For years, the closest I could come to touching her was to press my fingers against the glass and wait.

            When I had grown, I unscrewed the glass from the box. I touched the geisha for the first time when I lifted her from the garden, and I set her free.

            Then, I took a hammer to the box, smashed it to pieces.

XI. The Legend of Pele and Hi’iaka i ka Poli o Pele (The Cloud Bearer Cradled in the Bosom of Pele): 

This is the story of two sisters, like us, who have different stories to dance. The elder sister, Pele, the goddess of fire, had quite a temper. She’s known both as “She-who-shapes-the land” and as “She-who-devours-the-earth.” That’s the thing about anger. It’s an enigma comprised of equal parts Revelation and Genesis.

            When Pele fled her father’s home, she took her youngest sister, Hi’iaka, whom she loved more than any other child. Hi’iaka was just an egg when they left Kahiki. Pele kept her cradled in the warm fold of her armpit during their long journey to the bellybutton of the world. Once they reached Hawai’i, Pele incubated her sister with story songs inside a deep crater she danced into the earth, and Hi’iaka grew so strong on those hulas that she kicked her way out of the shell that encased her.

            Once hatched from her egg, Hi’iaka favored forests to volcanoes, and the cool mists of waterfalls to the heat of molten lava.  Pele contained all her fire to be beside her sister as she grew, so that Hi’iaka would be protected from the mo’o, the shapeshifting dragons who hide in the water. 

            There came a time when Hi’iaka could dance her own hulas, and slay her own lizards, and she left Pele. Free to dance her own story, Pele reduced the grove to cinders with her song, and boiled the streams with her rage until the riverbeds ran with fire. It was then that Hi’iaka learned to bear the storm clouds that rose from the latent heat of her sister’s wrath, and to set the seeds to flower when the rains fell on a fresh, fertile landscape.

            I’m telling you this because I’ve carried you in my bosom as long as my lungs have taken in air. It is time. The drums are calling me to my hula.

            This is a fire I will not contain any longer. 

XII. E Pluribus Unum

A month before you were born, my fourth-grade class danced at our Lei Day celebration. The school was draped in a rainbow of island flowers.  The teacher said our hula was a story we’d sing with our bodies. By the age of nine, my body felt it would burst from the pressure of containing its song.

            We spent weeks bent over brown paper sacks, pounding them against rocks to make them into softened barkcloth for our skirts. Even boys wore skirts for the hula, and none of us complained about our costumes, not even the crowns of golden tissue paper flowers on our heads. The teacher told us that everyone is beautiful when we dance our story songs. Each gesture of the dance made me into more than I thought I could become. My hands became wind in coconut palms, the rising sun poking its fingers across a horizon of ocean. My hips became great waves, crashing against the welcoming shores of a new land.

            My throat is a fountainhead, ripe with fire and magma. My body is a universe, centered on one pair of very strong legs. I’ve never forgotten how to hula.

            I will dance my story song until I am ash.

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