HALF WAIKIKI by Jane Eaton Hamilton
“We respectfully call upon Amida Buddha to enter this Dojo as we scatter flowers. We respectfully call upon Shakyamuni Buddha to enter this Dojo as we scatter flowers.” The chant ended and the priest nodded to Tom. “The esteemed husband of the deceased Mrs. Dorothy Kimoto will now speak fond words of memory.”
Tom kept his hand on the back of the folding chair as he stood straightening his new tie. He cleared his throat and haltingly talked about meeting his young wife in 1952 at the home where she served as housekeeper and where his father was the gardener; he spoke about the responsibilities of raising their four children – all of whom lifted their eyes to him now, the oldest boy who lived in the US and who had, as was his duty, paid for his mother’s funeral a month previously; his middle son with his argumentative wife; his gay daughter; his youngest son, 28, who lived at home, contributing nothing. He talked about his wife’s favourite things. Dorothy was the best bowler in her league; look, he said pointing towards the altar, at her trophies. “Seventeen trophy,” he said. He picked up her red bowling ball, his large thumb tight in the hole where her small thumb had easily glided. For a minute the conundrum that had haunted him beset him anew. How could a ball, a round and inert lump of urethane, still be here, whole and fine, while his wife, his animated, complicated, many-limbed, human wife, was ash? After only weeks, Tom found that at moments he had already forgotten Dorothy’s face, the delicate shape of her wrists and hands, the torque of her tendons and the bunch of her tough little muscles as she lifted this ball. He dropped it as if it had scalded him, and regarded his company, their upturned faces, their somber clothing, the rows of borrowed chairs, the ocean of multi-coloured carpeting he had carted home from alleys around East Van and patched together, the bulletin boards replete with newly-plucked photographs of Dorothy and the family. “Walking,” he said. “Continually my wife strode through Sun Run, and finished every time.” He paused, scratched at his head. “Knitting,” he said, but could not think of a thing to say about it. “Animals,” he added, as if Dorothy’s obsession had not been a matter of contention between them and one of continuing consternation for Tom, who hated animals in equal proportion to Dorothy’s love for them, and who had to put up with the urban wildlife Dorothy had always encouraged – birds, skunks, raccoons and even coyotes, one particular coyote who treated their back yard as if it was its lair.
Over the years, Tom had picked up abandoned trash on his garbageman’s route through the city and had used the bits – steel, copper piping, mesh, tangled wire, plastic conduit, scrap wood – to make traps, first mice traps, then rat traps, skunk traps, raccoon traps, and even, this past year, a coyote trap baited with steak. The wily coyote stole the meat but was never caught. “Wife longed to be veterinarian,” he said. “But wife belonged home, so she perambulated dogs for SPCA.” Tom smiled. “My wife animal crazy. Even hang bat house in garage.” He didn’t mention that after he had refused to help her put up her apartment house for bats, she’d nearly fallen off the ladder, or that he’d raked the ridiculous thing down from the eaves and burned it while she silently cried. His eyes were upon enlargements of the two of them, younger, during their happiest, early years, at the Obon Festival, walking hand in hand at the PNE, strolling in Chinatown. Later when the babies came, money was tight, and Dorothy was distracted by the kids. Tom worked as many double shifts as the union could get him to help make ends meet. “Every day for years I go to work so wife can feed animals, go bowling. I’m a generous man. Every day I worked hard, hard. After retire, still work hard to help wife and kids.” Tom swiped a hand across his forehead back along his balding pate. He told everyone that Dorothy had very much admired the Crystal Palace cruise the children had sent them on for their fortieth anniversary. “Waikiki,” he repeated, his hands growing moist and his heart palpating like a young bird’s. He remembered how utterly happy Dorothy had been on her cot on Waikiki beach; how easily she had laughed, how the two of them had felt, momentarily, like young lovers all over again. Dorothy had been his whole life, he said; all his dreams had come true on the day he first laid eyes upon her. It was not intended by God that he die first; he had expected to predecease his wife by 20 or even 30 years; he had been saving his money so that his wife would be supported during this long and arduous stretch. “I save money so much,” said Tom. He felt his eyes dampen; he squinted and set his jaw to force the tears back. “Always I do without, so my wife can have smooth retirement.”
“Mrs. Dorothy Kimoto is becoming a Buddha,” said the priest, interrupting, signaling Tom that it was time to sit down.
But he went on. “My wife was all to me,” he said. “With wife gone, I am shell wash up on Honolulu beach. Can you still hear her voice?” Tom cupped his hand behind his ear. He regarded his family, his youngsters, his siblings, spouses and grandchildren, watching him intently, expectantly, pityingly. Now the tears were spilling over, rolling hotly down his freshly-shaved cheeks. He turned away and shook his head, the vice of his feelings squeezing hard. “No, her voice is gone. How can such be possible? I have listened, but my auditory faculty has heard nothing.”
“Mr. Kimoto?” The priest in his robes touched Tom’s elbow.
Tom met the man’s eyes and on his tongue was a fluent litany – let me speak, you barely knew her, leave me alone – but he caught himself. To talk so to their priest! In front of company!
When the one-month ceremony ended, a great sweep of people hugged Tom and shook his hand until his enlarged knuckles throbbed, jabbering at him in an endless stream of both Japanese and English. “Are you all right? You are okay? Doing fine, ne?” they asked, leaning close so their breath covered his face and congealed like thrombi, these things the doctor thought Dorothy had formed in her lungs, when really she had had suffered a cauliflower of infection on her heart valve which had broken off and flowed downstream into her bladder and upstream into her brain.
“Are you getting enough food? I will deliver tray of sushi on Monday,” said his sister, nodding, her features accordioned into deep concern.
His daughter-in-law said, “I’ll bring over miso and motoyaki oysters, Dad. I know you love oysters.” She pushed her hair back from her face. “You loved Mom so much, Dad, my heart is just breaking for you.”
“Also mine is,” said Tom, nodding sorrowfully. “Nobody knows how I feel.”
His brother said, “I hate to think of you alone. Dorothy did everything for you.”
“I did everything for her,” corrected Tom. They had been pearls in the same necklace which had snapped apart, the jewels tumbling and rolling from sight.
“Oh, Daddy,” said his daughter and hugged him.
When everyone was finally gone, Tom blessed the silence. He moved around the kitchen preparing jasmine rice, oranges, gomae, manju and green tea, which with his clumsy fingers he manoeuvered into miniature containers. These he reverently carried to his wife’s altar. Behind him, his youngest son started folding up the borrowed chairs.
“I will do that,” Tom said sharply, turning. And he thought: How can I eat when my wife cannot? For although he kept a plentiful array of fresh food on the altar for her delectation, when he removed it, old and stale, it was always completely untouched.
“Dad, it’s fine,” William said. “Let me help.”
Tom set down his tray and wrenched the chair from his son’s hands. “If you ask me, too much help. All the time, every direction, too much damn family talk talk talk. Go to bed, turn stove off, take heart medicine. All too much. Leave me alone.”
His wife had grown sick. First a little bit sick, a cough, then more sick, then very very sick. He had been a good husband and had worked hard from the time he was thirteen until retirement at 77, twelve years later than Canadian men, but still this had happened to his wife. As she ailed, he began to shop for groceries. Always when he carried them in, his wife grew exasperated. “Why did you buy so much broccoli? Who will cook it? How do you think we can eat six loaves of bread before it goes moldy?” The bread had been on sale, a bargain, Tom thought. He needed Dorothy to compliment his efforts. He needed Dorothy to thank him for pitching in, but she did not. Her illness made her frustrated and grouchy. So Tom told himself. Be patient, he said to himself. One week he bought too much; the next week he bought too little. One week he bought a caseload of lima beans on sale although Dorothy hated lima beans. One week he laundered Dorothy’s colours in with her whites and turned her underwear and bras a dusty blue. One week he poured bleach not just into the toilet but all over the frilly pink carpet beneath.
When company brought dinner, he bragged. “Wife sick, I do everything, everything. Shop. Wash clothes. Iron. Vacuum. All day long, morning till night. Up at four o’clock in the morning to do everything. Work so hard all my life and now wife sick, work harder. So much work, fourteen hours a day. Look after everything.” And his wife would shuffle into the kitchen in her robe and slippers, swatting his arm. “What did you expect? Do you think being a housewife is easy? Did you think all I did all those years was sit on my behind eating bonbons?” Tom looked at her. He’d thought she bowled. He’d thought she walked stray dogs.
“Hey-yup, Tom,” she said one evening pulling aside the living room drapes. “Will you look at this?”
Dorothy’s coyote had three gamboling puppies at her wasting side. Her teats swung low, the nipples grotesquely swollen. She stood looking up at them standing in the window.
Dorothy said, “Isn’t that sweet?”
“Stupid,” said Tom. “I set up trap again. Get babies, anyhow.”
Dorothy caught her breath. “Don’t you even think about it, Tom. You leave her alone. She never hurt you.”
The first time Tom tried his hand at spaghetti, the noodles came out of the pot stuck together, a stiff, thick stick, inedible. His wife made a noise through her teeth, and stood at the stove cooking a second batch even though she said she was too tired to stand.
Eventually Tom began to understand the rudiments of household budgeting, how much food was required for three people, what it should cost and how to search out the bargains and offer coupons to the cashier, how much lettuce would go bad in the refrigerator. He began to successfully boil eggs for Dorothy’s breakfast using an egg timer whose beige grains spilled either too slowly, if he was watching, or too fast, if he turned his back, and to prepare simple sandwiches for her luncheon. More and more as time went on, she rested in bed, the scruffy, patchy hair of her partial alopecia no longer covered by wigs but fuzzing around her head like the fine down of a newborn. At night he took to drawing a bath for her and laying out her blue robe and striped nightie at the end of their bed. He placed her slippers there as well, on the tired linoleum, ready for her tiny feet to slide inside.
In the tub, she leaned back into his hands and permitted him to wash her hair. “Ah,” she said with a deep moan of pleasure.
The shampoo ran through his fingers like sweet spices while Dorothy surrendered herself.
After discovering Dorothy in 1952 soon after he arrived in Canada, Tom met with his grandmother. His was an arranged marriage with a Canadian-born Japanese girl. He had known Dorothy only three months when they wedded. It was a good marriage that lasted fifty-one years. Though his wife had not kept a respectful tongue-in-cheek, it was nevertheless a good marriage in which he had continually prided himself, a marriage without dissolution.
Dorothy had experienced chest pain three months into her wasting, uncertain, undiagnosed illness and though Tom was right beside her, sleeping, she rose and called the ambulance that would take her to her death without waking him. In the hospital, she seemed to be getting better on warfarin, a poison the doctor explained that in other circumstances was used to bait rat traps, to cause internal hemorrhage (Tom had used it for this purpose himself), and antibiotics, but then, just minutes after the doctors diagnosed her actual illness, bacterial endocarditis, a cardiac infection, a blood vessel oozed its liquid lethal cargo into her brain. The warfarin had caused a massive stroke. It was too late for anything but two days of anxious pacing while Dorothy hovered between life and death. His eldest son flew home from Utah. The family sat in a waiting room lit with unremitting fluorescence while the doctor explained that tests showed no brain stem activity. She patted his arm and said, “You should consider disconnecting life support.”
After Dorothy’s death, Tom refused to leave her side. His family members came to the hospital bed singly and in groups, trying to coax him away with doughnuts and sushi and hot strong thermoses of tea, begging him to take a bite, a sip. “Come home now,” they said. “Daddy, she’s gone. Mom’s gone.” But he would not budge, until finally after four hours his wife’s doctor led him protesting away. “Can’t I take wife home?” he said. “I not leave wife here. Please let her come with me home.”
Tom didn’t recall the ride away from his dead wife’s side, but when son Robert pulled up to their driveway, Tom noticed glittering pinpricks dashing around the yard. The coyote, Dorothy’s coyote, her three energetic pups snarling and leaping towards her mouth, from which dangled, lifeless and dripping blood, the neighbours’ orange cat. The coyote had hardly any hair – it had fallen out in the shape of continents on her sides and back, exposing the long, sunken slats of her ribs. Vancouver coyote dens had been found containing hundreds of cat collars. Tom turned to his son. “Will you tell the Thomlinsons? Tell them it wasn’t me. Tell them I left their cat alone.”
“I’ll take care of it, Dad.”
Still Tom didn’t move. He watched the coyote. “Maybe that bitch dog stole Mom.”
His son looked at him, then regarded the coyotes as they slunk into the shadows. “Mom died,” his son said in a dull, hollow voice. “Come indoors.”
“Maybe she didn’t,” said Tom, still not moving.
“We need sleep,” said Robert.
The coyotes loped down the street.
With his arthritis, Tom had trouble holding brushes, but after his retirement as a garbageman and until his wife got sick, he had been an enthusiastic amateur painter. At first, he’d drawn on scrap bits of cardboard his wife provided – the back of their electric blanket insert, cardboard that came back from the drycleaners – but after a year or so he visited his first art supply store. He took a class. Beginners Painting. He took another class, Beginners Painting. He took a third class, Beginners Painting. In each of them, he learned about proportion and media and colour mixing. He bought his canvasses pre-primed, one or two at a time, not large. He tried his hand at watercolour, oils, pastels, acrylics. He enjoyed the tubes of colour, each marked in a band around its top – Phthalo Green, Permanent Alizarin Crimson, Cerulean Blue Hue – but still a surprise. Very wet, very thick, very saturated. He was intrigued to discover some oil paints never truly dried.
For his 45th wedding anniversary, he had painted Waikiki fifteen feet by 30 feet on the back driveway. He erected a barricade against traffic. While he toiled in the weeks preceding his anniversary, he made his wife keep the blinds closed and use the front door to come and go. He painted Diamond Head, that dark distant brooding rock. Mindful of scale, he carefully sketched in fronds and trunks of palm trees, a lengthy expanse of sand. But try as he might, he ran out of time and was forced to unveil his creation unfinished.
He led his wife out wearing a blindfold, which he removed with flair.
His wife burst into tears.
“Waikiki,” said Tom, confused.
“Is this my present?” She lifted a hand to her mouth.
Tom puffed up.
“Is this my present? Tom, all that time. You’ve been out here every spare minute for months.”
“Happy anniversary, wife,” Tom said.
“It’s sweet of you, I guess, but Tom, all that wasted time,” said Dorothy. She shook her head. “I swear. Forty-five years and I don’t even know who you are.”
“Not like Waikiki?”
“I want to go there again, Tom. I want you to take me, that’s all. How did that turn into this?” She wiped her eyes, indicated his painting.
“Not enough money. Maybe someday. Save for you to live life of luxury later.”
“Where are all the people? Why aren’t there any tourists in your Waikiki?” She shook her head again, sniffled, and turned to go back into the house.
“I not paint people yet,” he yelled at her back. “Still Beginning Painting!”
For years afterwards his wife complained about Waikiki. “When will you finish that ridiculous painting? I’m embarrassed every time company come over.” Or: “Why do I have a husband who paints my driveway? What did I do to deserve this?” Or she shook an advertisement for Home Depot. “Look here, Tom. Asphalt paint. You can paint grey right over that mess.” Or, “Never mind tourists, Tom; after all this time I’d be happy if you’d just paint a shark.”
“I finish soon,” he always told her, but somehow he never did.
“Take me to the real Waikiki,” his wife said.
“Go out to the driveway,” he always said back. “Why are you never content? Go out to driveway on hot day and you won’t know the difference.”
After the one-month ceremony, tradition decreed that he was free to leave his house, and Tom took up walking. Dorothy no longer had her legs or feet, but he imagined that inside her urn she was itching for exercise. Like that TV girl Jeannie, thought Tom, examining the urn, its raku shine. Dorothy might very well have a whole universe inside hers – all of Vancouver, with a miniature bowling alley, with her SPCA dogs, or even Waikiki.
Now, every morning when Tom went out for his stroll, the first place he had to walk was across the beaches of half Waikiki before scaling the sheer cliffs of Diamond Head. He could almost picture Dorothy striding along beside him, her determined little elbows held high while overhead gulls wheeled and screamed. Half Waikiki was much on Tom’s mind since his wife’s death. He’d fought an overpowering urge to paint over his mural, this loathed anniversary gift, to cover it up, to be rid of it. Dorothy had hated it, so he hated it! It made him feel guilty, as if he had failed as a husband, that he was as stingy as Dorothy had maintained. Why hadn’t he taken his wife back to her beloved Hawaii? He could barely remember now. His pension was taxed back, the economy was bad and his investments drew barely any revenue.
Sadness and remorse caught in his throat, but he forced himself to keep walking. Around the block the first day, scuffing through matted, decomposing leaves. To the store and back the second day, through a thin and slippery icing of snow. All the way to the video store the third day in a deluge of rain. He never imagined his legs would continue to carry him along, because they throbbed like the sleep button on his son’s computer, but he kept determinedly on. He started to believe that maybe it was his wife from inside her urn, helping, perhaps lifting and pushing each of his feet in turn.
Three weeks later, when he was resting in his nightly bath trying to ease the deep muscle pains his walking engendered, he heard his wife.
“Hey-yup,” she said in an annoyed, reedy tone. “Get out of the tub, lazybones, and go fetch the Comet. There’s a ring around this tub the size of Richmond.”
Tom gazed around but could not find her. He wanted to cry – the joy of hearing her familiar voice! He wanted to tell her how much he had missed her, but the words would not leave his mouth. No words would, and though he listened hard, she didn’t say another thing. Tom lay in the water imagining the feel of her wet hair under his hands, the shape of her skull under his fingers as he shampooed her, the peach scent of her shampoo. He lay until the water was stone cold.
Within a week, he both heard and saw Dorothy on a regular basis, her diminutive body wiry as a coiled spring, her hair springing up like screws all over her scalp. She came along on every walk. “Swing your arms,” she lectured. “Don’t walk pigeon-toe. Turn here. Speed up. Stand up straight. Always so greedy with money, look at those disgusting old shoes hanging in bits off your feet. Try to run, old man. Walk backwards, why not give it a shot?”
Gradually, as his muscles toughened, as he grew accustomed to his new, shrill wife, his initial relief at having her back turned to annoyance. She didn’t like the routes he chose, she didn’t like how he kept the house, she didn’t like the food he cooked.
“This is inedible,” she said of his sushi.
“This is hard like leather,” she said of his minute steak.
“A two-year-old could do a better job,” she said derisively as they stepped onto Waikiki. Another morning she said: “Why don’t you just drop all our garbage on Waikiki and spread it around to improve things.”
She had a heart the size of a dog’s testicle.
One day Tom walked so far his thighs and calves ached, his breath clicked inside his lungs. Trout Lake, where he had sometimes picked up his wife and children after a long shift in the garbage truck. These days Trout Lake was an off-leash dog park with a path ringing the murky, lily-strewn water, and Dorothy had often brought her SPCA mutts up here to exercise with the owned dogs. She tried to convince the dogwalkers to adopt. Labradors, Irish setters and bulldogs ran and swam and caught tennis balls or Frisbees, while red-winged blackbirds and swallows sailed the currents above the water. Tom was easily three miles from home.
That night his children arrived and together they cooked a ham, rice, green beans, a salad. Tom watched them work in his wife’s kitchen, opening Dorothy’s cupboards and pulling at Dorothy’s drawers, clattering her pots and pans and cutlery. His busybody children – who said he wanted them here? Tom became inflamed that they could so readily touch his wife’s belongings.
His daughter-in-law Tina said, “Dad, you left the candles burning at the altar again.”
His daughter Debra said, “You have to be more careful. Are you sleeping?”
His son said, “You’re losing weight. Dad, are you losing weight? How much weight have you lost?”
Tom had strung garlands of sympathy cards around the house, and had wound them in a barber’s spiral around the support beam that he had welded from scavenged metal trash. His children pushed him into a chair, set great mountains of food in front of him. “Stop it, all of you!” yelled Tom. “Mom is alive! Mom is here right now!”
At the altar, candles sputtered as if Dorothy had something to say.
“Mom is certainly not,” said Debra in a tremulous voice.
“What do you know?”
“Dad,” said Tina, “Mom is dead and gone, and the sooner you start accepting it, the better.”
“You don’t know,” said Tom, shaking his head. “I lose my wife.”
A fat tear rolled down his daughter’s cheek. Finally she swallowed and said, “I miss Mom, too. All of us do. You’re not the only person who had a loss here.”
“If you’re not going to eat, Dad, go, go on to bed,” said Tina. “You’re obviously pooped. We’ll manage the dishes.”
Tom stood up hollering. “I wash my own dishes! Mom shows me how to do everything. You don’t know, none of you.” His voice rose. “Losing your mother is nothing! Nothing.”
Tom swallowed three Advil and wore an elastic brace around his mid-section to ward off back pain. He dragged a rusty chaise longue with hanging webbing up from the basement and carried it out to half Waikiki. He rummaged around for a rickety side table and his wife’s sunglasses, along with sunblock of 35 spf, and fixed a glass of lemonade. He cracked a Tom Clancy novel open at page 127 and laid it atop a towel. He congratulated himself for being a good, generous husband, although when Dorothy appeared, she threw up her hands and refused to sit down.
Tom had taken to walking to Superstore and carrying his groceries home in a packsack. His wife had needed him to drive her to the mall, but now Tom could walk under his own steam. He headed there when the weather was foul, strolling the echoing, vaulted aisles with the other old men who needed to get out of the house. Although his wife appeared over his shoulder, nattering and criticizing (“Old man, you don’t take me traveling, too busy working, everything I want – ballet classes for Debra, winter coats for the boys, a new bowling ball – cost too much, but now you have money to burn?”), he purchased things from stores he had never been inside before. What did he want with Roots, where all the clothing had logos? He didn’t approve of wearing advertising, had in fact demanded his wife throw out a L’Oreal ‘Because I’m Worth It’ T-shirt. “What are you worth?” he’d asked her. “Are you worth the neighbours laughing?” She’d just rolled her eyes: “You think the neighbours laugh at me?” None of that stopped him from buying Roots sweatshirts in several colours, and giving them out to his daughter and her girlfriend, to his middle son and that boy’s bossy wife. In a novelty store he bought a 12-inch-tall Talking Sponge Bob Drop Pants for $29.99. It was yellow like cheese. If he squeezed its pump, Sponge Bob dropped his pants. He set it on the dining room table beside a centerpiece he had found in someone’s garbage.
“Take it off!” his wife said, and that was when Tom realized that, although her mouth worked overtime, she could not lift a thing. “Take that piece of crap off my good tablecloth!”
Tom didn’t have to listen.
Late one night Tom woke up to find Dorothy sitting on the edge of the bed wailing. “Be quiet!” he hissed. “Why are you howling? You sound like dog.” A second later he realized the noise wasn’t coming from her at all, and got up to explore. There was frost in the yard, a thin icing on the picnic table and dusting the grass. In the middle of half Waikiki stood the skinny coyote bitch and her litter, their breath shaping thought clouds in the star-freckled night. Tom didn’t understand why they had come and turned to ask Dorothy if she knew, but Dorothy had disappeared.
Cooking Class Number One: Easy Two-Person Meals. (His son was hungry but his wife did not eat much.) All the other students were young men getting divorces or just moving away from their father’s houses; he was the only widower, the only wise man. The teacher stood by Tom’s elbow while his wife stood at his other elbow and helped him learn how to measure dry ingredients, which he discovered were not the same as wet ingredients and in fact needed a different measuring cup.
Tom had trouble fitting his many new chores in. He planted his wife’s marigolds into sterilized soil in tiny pots his argumentative daughter-in-law Tina provided. His hands felt large and clumsy as he pushed the tiny seeds under the dirt. He watered them and stood back waiting for them to grow. A half-hour later, though he was patiently shivering in the cold, nothing had happened. How did his wife do this? He went in to scrub the kitchen floor, but when he checked back again, absolutely nothing.
His son and daughter-in-law came for teriyaki chicken and he led Tina to the porch to show her. She clapped a hand over her mouth, unable to hide her smile.
Tom wanted to slap her. “You make fun me?”
His children had more answers: He should go to bed earlier, wear ear plugs, take sleeping pills, not walk so far, let them help more, hire a cleaner, make Robert buy his own lunch, and do his own laundry.
“Cleaning, gardening, and now cooking,” said Debra. “Are you trying to become Mom?”
Tom’s newest purchase arrived, a green vinyl blow-up chair. He had the idea that he and his wife could sit in it together while they watched TV. He called over the neighbours’ son and together they pushed the old chesterfield out into the back yard and blew up the new chair. When it was finished, he sent the boy away with a loonie for his trouble.
Dorothy was angry. She refused to sit. “So now you get rid of old garbage can couch? How many years did I beg you to let me get a new one?”
“It’s not your business,” said Tom. “You dead. You not my boss. Children not my boss. Bossy, but not my bosses.”
“You’re always criticizing the children. I see some things never change.”
“Why not criticize them? Good for nothing.”
“They’re wonderful people, professionals.”
“Useless to me. One live in America. One grows lettuce. This is so good? One is social worker. Why I pay for singing lessons so she become gay social worker? Why I pay for acting class for son who is executive?”
“You have to start treating the children better. All my life I told you that.”
“They not deserve better,” said Tom. Above him, sympathy cards danced like festive lanterns.
Tom discovered the priest at his door.
“Come in,” said Tom, and bowed. He was proud to have the visit, since the priest only sought out men of stature in their community. “Please permit me to serve you some tea.”
“I came to see how you’re getting along.” The priest carried a prayer book covered by a purple ribbon, along with tea biscuits in a tin from his wife. “Your daughter came to see me. She’s worried about you.”
“I am fine, thank you,” said Tom. “I am exceedingly well.”
The priest passed the green blow-up chair without mention before genuflecting at the altar. They spoke of the priest’s wife, and about Tom’s sister who had sprained her ankle. Tom bustled to the kitchen and carried in a pot of jasmine tea.
“You are getting along, then?”
“Oh, supremely,” said Tom. He noticed Sponge Bob in the middle of the table and wished there was some way to take it away without drawing attention. If the minister asked, Tom would say it belonged to a grandson. “I walk every day just like my wife. I am learning to cook. Cook real good lasagna, teacher says best in class.”
“And are your children helping out?”
“My oldest son is very important man. Boss of seventy people in Utah, United States. My other sons very busy. Older son is important vice principal teacher in elementary school. Youngest son drives all the way to Abbotsford to be environmental scientist, experiment with lettuce. Daughter very smart. Social worker getting Ph.D.”
Dorothy appeared in the chair opposite them like a light turning on.
“They care about your well-being,” said the priest. He patted his prayer book. “You must be generous to them if they are clumsy in helping.”
“I am happy,” said Tom, pouring out tea with a trembling hand. Always these days he had a small tremor his daughter insisted was caused by starvation. He had lost 26 pounds in all; he now weighed just over 110.
The priest lifted his palm, a question.
Tom was itching to pick up Squeeze Bob’s bulb. Instead, he set biscuits on a plate with jam and butter. “Eat, please.”
The priest nibbled. “Tell me how things are going.”
“I see my deceased wife, Mrs. Thomas Kimoto,” he started. Tom looked at Dorothy in frustration, wanting her to confirm this. “She is here with me. Look at her across the table, sir. Say hello to the priest, wife. Now would be perfect time.”
“Tom,” said the priest, stirring sugar into his teacup, “surely you understand your wife is a Buddha.”
“Not Buddha!” Tom said forcefully. “Fleshy, bossy woman. Canadian woman, modern, want to be veterinarian. Still prefer to divorce me.”
The priest ran a hand across his head. “Tom, were you in an unhappy marriage?”
Tom stood on half Waikiki with cherry blossoms silting down as pink spring snow onto the beach, into the water, onto his wife’s lawn chair. Early spring already, March. Covering up the fronds of a palm tree was a pile of turds, which he bent over, finding tiny bones and prodding it apart with the toe of his shoe until a skull tumbled free, a rat’s skull, hair and flesh yet clinging to the bone.
Behind him, Tom heard Dorothy cackle. “Half Waikiki looks much better now,” she said, slapping her knee, bending double with laughter, “covered by coyote poop!”
“Not funny, wife.”
“Oh, yes, it is, Tom. That coyote is one smart dog.”
“Stop your talk,” said Tom, hurt.
“That’s one good joke,” said Dorothy, hooting.
“I tell you cease laugh. Why you leave and then come back as person who just gets mad? Mad at me, make fun of me, criticize me. You’re no use to me, just cruel. You can’t even cook. Can’t touch you.” Tom balled his hands into fists. “I so good to you, try so hard, and you not grateful.” Tom stormed indoors, down into the basement, where he hauled up house and art paints. He found brushes, levered the lids off, plunged in a brush.
“Hoo! Hoo! What do you think you’re doing?” Dorothy pranced from foot to foot trying to stay out of his way.
Tom sank onto stiff, cracking knees. He daubed his brush in white. He drew a miniature version of the chaise. He painted a stranger right onto the sand, a woman, hair black, bathing suit pink, skin brown. He roughed in three, then six, then nine, then dots for hundreds of other tourists. He still did not know how to paint faces, so he gave them all turned-away heads. He gave them boogie boards and masks and flippers. He dotted umbrellas up and down the beach. He outlined the shape of hotels. He added boats, and striped purple fish visible under the water. He looked up at Dorothy.
“Don’t you dare paint me,” she warned. “You’re not good enough.”
“Of course I paint you,” he said. “What else I paint? Everything else gone. I paint you with pink bathing suit.”
“Don’t you even think about it,” she repeated.
“Why? Why I not paint you? You dead, you can’t stop me.” He drew the fin of a shark cutting through the water, then quickly sketched in Dorothy, a tiny woman about to be consumed by the great white. “There!” he shouted, getting to his feet. “Done! Finished! Happy anniversary! Now you can stop henpeck me! Be good wife!”
“I can’t be a good wife to you, Tom. Nobody could be a good wife to you. You are impossible.”
“Oh, you think? Impossible to be good husband with bad wife!” cried Tom. “You like animals more than me!”
“All I wanted was to go back to Hawaii. Was that so much to ask?”
“Not all. Ask for food on table, new purse, new shoes, electricity, water. Ask everything. Never stop asking.”
“You were not a good husband,” she said. “I loved you, you stupid man, and you never even noticed.”
“I not want you around anymore! Go, go. You a bitch, just like dog!” Tom said. He painted the shark’s mouth opening around his wife’s midsection.
“Tom,” she said. “I’m already gone, you ignorant, foolish, self-absorbed man.”
He thought it was just arguing, but she was really gone. Tom, the first day alone, was glad. He did the breakfast dishes without Dorothy nattering an endless stream of complaints into his ear about the water not being hot enough or that he was using too much dish soap. He went for his walk whistling at the top of his lungs and a spring in his step. But by dinnertime he missed her. “Hah!” he said. “Disagreeable old woman, you’ll be back. I will run your bath.” He poured the water the exact way Dorothy liked it, plenty of hot, plenty of bubbles, and he thought of her pliable neck loose in his hands.
He spent an hour sitting on the toilet seat waiting for her.
“Okay,” he said finally, “you win. Okay, okay. I wasn’t so superb a husband, ne? Okay, so I say it. I sorry. There. You hear that, Mom? I am sorry. I am sorry I was just a garbageman. I am sorry I criticize children. I am sorry I fill up basement and garage and yard with junk. I am sorry I paint damn half Waikiki on driveway. I’m sorry I not have time for you, don’t take you to Hawaii one last time. So sorry, sorry, sorry.” He listened, but there was no response. “There. Now you happy, Dorothy?”
“Dad,” Robert said a few nights later when Tom was again drawing his wife’s bath. “Stop. All that water just goes to waste.”
“You be quiet. Not your business.” How was his wife’s bath his son’s affair?
“Stop it,” his son said. “I mean it, Dad. This isn’t good. Mom is dead. She’s dead. D-e-a-d.”
Tom looked at his son – well-fed, the owner of a fancy computer, the driver of a Lexus. Dorothy and Tom had gone without to look after the boy, to give him everything he had. Why, if they hadn’t had to support their children, they could have traveled regularly to Waikiki. “You shut up! You were an accident! We not plan you! We not even want you!” Tom left the tub water brimming and slammed into his bedroom feeling tears start up. He remembered the day his wife had announced her accidental pregnancy with Robert fourteen years following the birth of their daughter, when they had long believed childbirth was out of the question. She said she felt like a schoolgirl. They fell on the bed together and wrestled like teenagers, Tom laying an ear on her naked belly to listen for the astonishing, impossible baby. Now Tom lay on his back like his wife in her casket, hands crossed atop his heaving chest, waiting for his arrhythmic heart to pump calmly. He thought about his children. His children were disappointments.
He was an old man, and his sons were supposed to be useful, his daughter a loving obedient lotus-flower daughter, as his wife had been his loving obedient lotus-flower wife. (Not that obedient dead, actually. Not even so obedient in life.)
He walked four, five, six hours a day, searching for Dorothy. He sat in the bowling alley while league women bowled, but she never appeared. He walked around and around Trout Lake, picking his way through dog excrement, but there was no sign of her. He walked the route of the upcoming Sun Run, but she was not on it. He apologized to her endlessly. He apologized as he brushed his teeth, as he combed his hair, as he used the toilet, as he consumed toast. He was a worthless, useless husband. He had not deserved her. He still did not deserve such a paragon of virtue as the woman who had been his wife.
When a week later Dorothy had still not returned, the motion detector light above the driveway flicked on. When Tom peered out a crack in the drapes, he saw the mother coyote and her pups – older now, half-grown – curled up on and around Dorothy’s chaise longue. He ran outside screaming, broom in his hands; for a long second, the coyotes didn’t move, just stared straight at him with their cold, uncurious yellow eyes. But as Tom raged nearer, the mother slipped from the cot and the babies ran yelping from Waikiki. That coyote, Tom thought as he stood there shaking, the coyote had Dorothy. He hated the coyote. Maybe the coyote bitch had Dorothy in its den, captive. He would show that damn coyote. He searched high and low through his basement, pulling jars of screws and electrical switches and gasket seals off the shelves. The label when he found what he was looking for confirmed that the box contained warfarin, the same compound administered by misdiagnosis to his wife in the hospital. He poured it out into his new chrome measuring cup for dry ingredients, one full cup. He took a mixing bowl and added the poison into the pound of hamburger meat he’d just picked up at Superstore.
Where was his wife? He looked under the bed, in the closet, in the kitchen, in the marigold seedlings now four inches tall, in the living room, by her sewing machine, in her bowling bag down the holes of her bowling ball, but he couldn’t find her. He looked in her urn, though the inside of it was as dark and mysterious as a trash compactor. He stood outside in the wind and rain and combed through the dark garden poking his stick into shrubs. He looked into his mural in case she had somehow blended into whole Waikiki, in case the real Dorothy was trapped inside the shark’s jaw. It was windy; the bottoms of his pajamas whipped his ankles. He scrubbed the mural out with unimpeded globs of black paint.
Tom turned the hamburger meat into a Superstore bag, grabbed Sponge Bob and his wife’s urn. He didn’t know his destination, but his legs were strong and the night was clear, and he was on the lookout for the coyote and her nearly-grown pups, those grey babies still, despite their size, trying to suckle. He shivered in the cold. There was that thing wrong with that damn coyote, which was a clue, mange that had made her hair come out in patches like his wife’s had. The coyote would be hungry, like Tom was hungry. People had their garbage out ready for pickup. As he walked by, Tom’s practiced eye slid across a baby crib, a mattress, a cracked porcelain sink. His neighbours’ yards were crystalline, dew-dusted, the trees and bushes whipping the air. Where had the damned coyote gotten to? Like Dorothy, nowhere around when he needed it. Tom trudged along against the wind clutching the urn and Sponge Bob to his chest. A hole started up in the sole of his left slipper.
Tom picked his way onto the path at the ravine. There were coyote dens here; he had read about them. He had no notion where they would be, specifically, whether coyotes had burrows or nests, whether they dug holes or used decaying tree trunks, whether they would be located at the farthest depths of the ravine or closest to the top and food. The ravine was dark, deep, vicious with knives of wind. He was freezing. Tree limbs lunged at him. His foot slid out from under him and he stumbled, losing a slipper. He stood heaving breath, getting his bearings. Above him, the wind shrieked. He could see little – brush, trees in a radius maybe four feet around. His teeth chattered, his heart bounced. Where was the coyote bitch? Tom looked up to a speckling of stars, the Little Dipper. There was a deep, expectant thrum. Every few seconds on the wind he smelled the sharp, cidery smell of pine needles, the tang of fresh earth, his own sour body. He inched forward. He called his wife’s name, his voice thin. He stubbed his bare toe and had to hop, cursing, on one foot. Tears salted his eyes. He stumbled forward slapping branches away and didn’t stop until he came to the ravine’s core, the stream that tumbled over itself in ghostly foam. He dropped heavily to a rock, set Dorothy’s urn and Sponge Bob down. What time was it? One in the morning, two. His pajama bottoms were ripped wide on the right leg, cuts and scratches beginning to sting. He transferred his colder foot into his remaining slipper. Where was the coyote? Had he left candles burning at his wife’s altar? There did not appear to be any coyotes here at all. It was feeding time, maybe; maybe they were roaming the city like specters picking off rodents, house cats, and men’s dead wives. Tom uncapped the urn, upended it, shook it, watched as ash caught in the wind. He picked through the small heap of bone chips without knowing what he was looking for. He would have to bait the coyote and her babies; they would come to the hamburger. Tom dipped his fingers in the Superstore bag, rustling the plastic, and dumped out the meat on Dorothy’s ashes, shaping a small circle of meat the size of a spitball, which he rolled away as if bowling. He made more. He sat back to wait, dropping Sponge Bob’s pants again and again. Tom drifted off, dreamed of Dorothy in her black housekeeper’s uniform years earlier, wiping her hands on its ruffled skirt, laughing back over her shoulder at Tom. Tom knew if they had to do it all over again, she wouldn’t marry him. Tom picked up a sharp chip of bone, held it up to the sky to gauge its size and thickness. He wondered what part of Dorothy it had been – her elbow, her knee, a fragment of her chin, the carapace around her womb. He had not thought, as a young man, that she would give him a second glance, but she had, and when his grandmother approved it, she had married him. She’d lain underneath his body dozens and hundreds and thousands of nights; had borne his four children; had loved him somewhat. She had wanted a different life, one he had kept her from. He had driven her away, surely. He was just so cold and hungry. The coyote was nowhere in sight. How could it hurt if he ate a little – just a little – one or two mouthfuls, of the bad dog’s dinner?
Jane Eaton Hamilton is the author of six books, most recently a collection of short stories, Hunger, short-listed for the 2003 Ferro-Grumley Award. Her stories have been selected for the Journey Prize anthologies and Best Canadian Short Stories, and cited in the Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize anthology. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.