Hotel Honolulu

15 Madam Ma

Ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma, the Chinese stammeringly say, and if the pitch and tone of each ma are right, the meaning of the apparent repetition is, "Does Mother scold the horses, or will the horses scold Mother?"

This sentence often murmured through my mind when I saw Madam Ma, who scolded the horses and everyone else. She objected to Rose's being around, and so I was more familiar with Madam Ma than I wanted to be. The woman was a resident of the hotel, and the residents were mostly pests, like members of an unhappy household, contributing nothing but conflict, always claiming privileges, and forever blaming the family.

I did not need this woman to tell me my daughter was a monkey. I loved Rose for her antics. I knew she was a monkey in the way she hooked her fingers on a chair and swung herself into the seat, where she knelt instead of sat. Reaching for a candle, she would snatch the flame with a fat-fingered monkey pinch. But she was not only a monkey. Once she said, "Why does the fire of a candle always go up and never down?" and she waited for the answer.

"Don't play with that!" Madam Ma said on the day of the candle question, and the old woman startled Rose with her wicked white mask and twisted scolding lips. Her face was like a formal portrait of Edith Sitwell, but when I mentioned this my staff just stared at me. Rose stumbled and fell to the floor, the result of being scared by Madam Ma, who said, "Serves you right," in a harsh gloating voice as my little daughter sobbed.

Madam Ma was the worst of Rose's critics, and the slightest sound from the child had the older woman going expressively silent and rigid. Finding the child with her disapproving face, her eyes like dark bulbs, Madam Ma gave a theatrical, haughty snort. She was a haole; she had been married to a Chinese man named Ma; she had a column in the Honolulu Advertiser.

"She pupule, but she a guest," Sweetie said. Never mind that the guest was crazy, my wife knew the protocol: Madam Ma had been a resident of room 504 for a number of years, from long before my time. The Chinese man Ma had long since left her. She had a hapa son, Chip, whom she adored and mentioned often in her three-dot column, which was full of plugs and boasts and practical advice and mentions of restaurant openings and celebrity sightings. She wrote endlessly of food but could not cook.

She went to every party, she knew everyone's name, she was a repository of postwar island history, and the history was mainly scandalous.

Madam Ma's photograph at the top of her column depicted an attractive, even glamorous woman in her forties, though she was really in her sixties. In the column itself she was a woman whose feet were firmly planted on the ground, guided by the folk wisdom of her Irish grandmother, a kama'aina, who was a font of old-country good sense. Chip could always be counted on for a smart remark. He was a lovable kid, eternally fifteen years old in the column, but I knew for a fact that he was forty-one and lazy, and pretty sad from drinking, and that his lover was Amo Ferretti, an older man who made a living as a florist. Ferretti was Portuguese and had a wife and children in Kailua. Often Madam Ma had her son and his lover over to the hotel for Sunday brunch. It was at one of these brunches that she snorted with pleasure at seeing Rose topple over.

"I would never have a daughter," she said to Chip. "How could I do that to you, my darling."

She was one of those people who, instead of turning away, take a visceral delight in preoccupying themselves with something troublesome, for the joy of creating greater fuss and adding to the confusion with a louder complaint. Her intention was a wicked wish to prove how much happier and more orderly her own life was. At the Hotel Honolulu I noticed how odd people sought out even odder people as companions, to show by contrast how normal they were.

I wanted to say to Madam Ma: Never mind! Leave her alone!

"Look at her," Madam Ma said. "Isn't she awful?"

Why did she care? She was being queenly, with Chip on her right and Amo Ferretti on her left, both men strenuously flirting with her while she pretended not to notice. Trey, meanwhile, ran back and forth with a chilled bottle of chardonnay, refilling her glass.

Rose had not stopped screaming from her fall. Sweetie picked her up and comforted her. A little while later, Rose was sitting a few tables away, eating with her fingers and, having locked her toes around the chair legs, tipping her chair backward.

Madam Ma gave Rose an ugly superior smile and said, "Her hands are forever dirty. Feet too. She never wears shoes."

Rose pinched her sooty fingertips and parroted my explanation. "Because the rising air makes the flame rise by feeding it oxygen. Oxygen is a gas."

"Look, she's bleeding," Madam Ma said.

Rose laughed. "Taco Bell hot sauce!"

"She's combatative and mischeevious," Madam Ma said, unmindful of her malapropisms. "She's rotten spoiled. Just looking for attention. And look at her horrid little pet."

Rose clutched her grandmother's cat and pouted.

The heavy makeup on Madam Ma's face gave her the cracked and broken mask of a decaying empress. Perhaps fascinated by the woman's leer, Rose said, "What are people made of?"

"How should I know?" Madam Ma said, making her voice screech, and she winked at Chip to show that she thought the question absurd. "But little girls are made of rats and snails and puppy dogs' tails."

"That's little boys," Rose said.

"She's right," Chip said.

"Stop playing along with her. You're doing just what she wants you to do," Madam Ma said to Chip, and to Amo, who shrugged, she said, "He's flirting!"

"Why do you have hairs sticking out of your nose?" Rose said to

Amo.

After the meal, Madam Ma made a point of showily detouring around Rose, who was playing on the floor. Chip smiled in what seemed like sympathy. Amo had not let go of Madam Ma's arm; his was crooked in hers, like a formal couple in a procession.

"We are mostly water, with some carbon and specific minerals," Rose said, scrupulously quoting me.

The old woman screeched again, but Rose continued talking.

"Hyenas eat the whole animal they kill, and that's why when they poo the bones it looks calcified."

"What does?"

"The scat, which is the poo," Rose said. "You didn't finish your ice cream."

"That is none of your business," Madam Ma said, and hooked Chip onto her free arm.

"And he's your horrid little pet."

I was watching all this from the maitre d's lectern, so attentive to the absurdity that I wanted it to play itself out to the last exchange. Rose made for the left-behind ice cream melting in the bowl.

On other occasions, Madam Ma seemed to seek Rose out, looking for trouble, as though to provoke the child and challenge her. If Rose was playing at the far end of the lanai, that was where Madam Ma sat, to go on glowering. Rose had lunch after she got home from nursery school, always at one; Madam Ma never failed to eat at the same time, sitting nearby. Once Madam Ma's newspaper column was finished, she was free the rest of the day. So she sat sipping a drink, usually with Chip, often with Amo, who did the flowers in our lobby in return for bar credit — a Buddy Hamstra arrangement, like Madam Ma's room.

"My mother used to say, 'I don't care what you do in life — just be fabulous,'" Madam Ma said.

"And every year you get better," Amo said.

"But every year seems shorter," Rose said. She had been listening. "Why does this year seem shorter than last year?"

"It's that horrible little child calling attention to herself again," Madam Ma said.

"Give her a break," Chip said.

"You always stick up for her. You need to process that."

Flexing her monkey fingers, Rose said in a lisping way, "Because as you get older, each year is a smaller proportion of your life. How old are you?"

"Forty-seven," Amo said.

"Why encourage her?" Madam Ma said.

"Next year will be one forty-eighth of your total age, and the year after that will be one forty-ninth." Rose pursed her lips at Madam Ma, who, to show her indifference, had picked up Puamana's cat. "Each year is even less for her."

"This cat's paws are wet."

"Because there's a puddle where I did shee-shee on the floor," Rose

said.

"Rat shit!" the old woman said.

"You said a bad word," Rose said. "But there's a rat in my room."

"Not true," I said, and gathered Rose into my arms, holding her like an infant, a heavy infant. I carried her away as she protested. I began to understand that in the way Madam Ma sought her out, Rose did not object, and even seemed to enjoy doing battle with the woman: two coquettes vying for attention, with Rose usually having the last word.

She would ambush Madam Ma only when either Chip or Amo was around, sensing perhaps that she was protected by their more benign presence. One day in the lobby, seeing the three of them walking abreast,

Rose tagged along behind, and as they entered Paradise Lost, Rose said, "Why is the past so sad?"

"There is something seriously wrong with your daughter," Madam Ma said as I blocked Rose from entering the bar. "Probably a chemical imbalance."

"Because it is only when we look back that we see how weak we were," Rose said. "The sun is actually a star. And Moby-Dick is a white whale. And rat shee-shee can make you sick. There's a rat in my room."

All this in her parroty singsong as Madam Ma sighed. "There she goes again. God, she's never at the beach."

"UV rays are bad for you. They cause melanoma on your skin," Rose

said.

One night Rose crept downstairs to where Madam Ma sat with Amo and Chip, silently drinking, each man holding one of her hands.

"What thing succeeds?" Rose said.

"I pity the man who marries her," said Madam Ma.

"The thing that makes us less lonely."

When Sweetie coaxed Rose away and apologized, saying, "She's afraid of the dark," Rose squawked and said, "No! It's the rat in my room!"

Rose loved ice cream and fruit smoothies and flavored shave ice, and though Housekeeping swore there were no rats, we put a sticky trap in

Rose's room to humor her. The next morning she found a brown rat struggling in it.