Before my father’s funeral, in my parents’ bedroom on the beach, I ask my mother about that old mannequin, Uncle Nuke. I am blow-drying a pair of blue suede shoes to help the leather stretch, to fit my feet into them, when I ask her how she ever got rid of him. Where. She can’t remember, not now.
I wish I could talk to him again, I tell my mother. We pull our funeral dresses over our heads—white and silk. She places a purple lei of orchids over my shoulders, kisses me on each cheek, and I do the same for her. I think we look too young for this.
Should we order some pizza for after the service? she asks. How many people are staying over?
Did you take him to a dump? I want to know.
Are your brothers staying over?
I wish I could know what Uncle Nuke remembers.
Why? she says. Is today really the day for this?
If I were giving the eulogy, I would say, “My family began with a mannequin.”
You should speak today, she says, nodding. That mannequin was the beginning.
He wasn’t supposed to die.
He wasn’t supposed to die in a hospital, she says. That’s true.
You shouldn’t have thrown him away.
That’s a different story.
Maybe the unfinished story is the story.
We hold the funeral at the Sands Club, in the town of Lawrence, Long Island, where my father had his senior prom. Just last month, he told me about this place, the music—Be my little baby—the arm wrestling and bottle fights in the parking lot. I’ll know it when I’m going to die.
I’m buzzed on the cinnamon whiskey my brothers and I shared behind the stage curtain. My thumbnail is pressing moons into my lei orchids as people speak. I take inventory of who shows up—my father’s doormen and chauffeurs, ex-business partners, Clarissa—as I hear Gambling Man / Mad Man / Father / always the Jokes / Even Money from the microphone. I sit on my hands. I chew on my hair. Dad, you would have liked this crowd. Everyone’s dressed sharp for you. I count chandeliers. I think about sea monkeys and those mannequin legs in the corner of our first apartment and Dai Vernon shuffling cards, the weather. Cheated on a math test / his First Wife / because that’s how it Was in the Army / Ha Ha Ha Ha! / How he did it / Bet on Life / thought Invincible. I think about the carpet of this place and my shoes are too fucking tight and that little red wagon I had as a kid, how he’d helped me paint it blue and we glued it all over with cotton balls until it was a Time Machine, and lobsters, the way he used to bring them home on Sundays, that was before I really knew my dad, when he was just a man who carried thrashing paper bags on his shoulders, when he was just a man who said, I caught us some lobsters, and I smashed them and I ate them.
Photographs are projected to the song “Free Bird.” A tissue box is passed down our row. I don’t know when the slideshow started, but it’s ending. Dad, you loved this part of the song. You pumped the gas and brake pedals of your convertible in time with this guitar solo until my seatbelt locked and dug into my shoulder and the whole thing made me sick. The sun is in your eyes. There we are.
We release my father’s ashes the next day.
WINTER, 1972
KAILUA, OAHU, HAWAI‘I
See the encyclopedia over my grandfather’s knee, in the study of their house, his finger finding the golden notch of the letter F. My mother, Tao, and the boys sitting in a semicircle at my grandfather’s feet. Florida, he says. He stretches the syllables as if it’s a healing word. Florida—it’s on the Mainland. It looks like a sock, or a gun maybe. He points to the state on a map. In Florida, people plug straws right into oranges, and everyone has blonde hair, and alligators sunbathe, and kids wear shoes to school.
Shoes to school? My mother cannot believe this. She will remember it as long as she lives: shoes to school. What would it be like on the Mainland, away from Tūtū, away from Paulele Street, Hanauma Bay, the sweet thick pull of haupia between her teeth? Yes, she has always been curious about life somewhere else, but what gods or friends would she have in this Florida?
Why are we leaving? Tao wants to know, but there is no answer.
Yeah, why? asks my mother. She has a better chance.
We leave next week, says my grandfather, so you’ll need to pack your things and start cleaning.
My Grandma Mei Mei stands in the corner of the room. She considers this conversation, this rush. Her husband—her first love, ulua—who had picked her up from the soda stand at the beach. She worked there, watched old mokes move chess pieces in the trade winds. One day, Al showed up. A Native Hawaiian man, through and through; he was gentle, akamai, older, a talker. Always in a sailor’s cap, he was worldly, and so she said yes, and so she agreed, and so she married him three days after her sixteenth birthday. They exchanged vows at the Mormon Church where they would soon work—he, as a priest, and she, a Sunday school teacher. Yes, she loved this man. In this part of the story, she still does.
But here’s the first moment Mei Mei questions her husband: His body leaning forward in the living room chair—this encyclopedia, open on his lap—Florida.
The diamond ring. She knows.
Al sold jewels to Hawaiian retailers out of the trunk of his Lincoln. Pink coral carefully arranged in velvet boxes—so expensive kine—all of it shipped from the Mainland. He had mentioned the ring when it went missing from his collection last month, an emphasis on his words: Missing. The diamond ring has gone Missing. She had noticed other leftover stock that came home with him lately—worthless, not for sale—out of their cases. But the diamond ring, she’d remembered that most. The value of it; he was too careful with the words. His wife had to know the exact time and day it happened, his pockets and drawers flipped, emptied—the diamond ring has gone missing, he’d repeated.
That red boat appeared two days later.
Yes, she knows why it’s time to go.
Al and Mei Mei, 1960
WINTER, 2015
VOORHEESVILLE, NEW YORK
Here’s what happens after death: Every object changes shape. All the little objects of hope, innocuous, gentle things: the bottles of Diet Coke saved for when he would get better, the stacks of New York Posts, the wedges of pineapple, the warmer socks, the protein powders, the Chinese herbs, the electro-acupuncture pens, the pictures—all the pictures, removed and naked of their frames, brighter in the corners, the pictures, gum-tacked to the hospital bed for when he would remember, he would, he would—these objects, every last one of them, become the most unbearable of all, the most acutely garish, the splintered underside of the table on which you have tried to smoothly splay out the map of your new life without this person, whom you just so happen to love most.
I am spending the holidays with Hannah and her family before I leave for New Hampshire. Someone else’s family, I repeat, because your father is dead. This year, there will be no Hanukkah candles, no botched Hebrew prayers, no wads of cash, no marathon of Michael Corleone. Dead.
Hannah is gentle with me, and sometimes I wish she were not so gentle. That’s the way other people have been treating me, the way they look at me as they quietly stir their coffee spoons, the way they creep around the facts. Hannah changes my clothes when I’ve been crying too hard to keep my balance. She pins my arms down when I have night terrors of tubes and machines, reminds me of where I am. When we have sex, I ask her to choke me. I want to hurt. I want flashes behind my eyes. We go on like this for weeks.
On Christmas Eve day, Hannah tacks up the mares in her yard and wraps my calves with horse polos. She weaves her hands together for my knee, lifting me into the saddle.
Up, up. Let’s move, she says.
Hannah, who brought me back to horses. Hannah, who kissed me for an hour straight the first time it happened—in a dark bar full of drag queens and popcorn, her palms cradling my face—the way she called me Thunder Snow.