My mom and I stepped up to the post office counter with a package for my grandmother. We had barely landed and recovered from our harrowing trip, but my mom fixated on doing something for her. I knew this was a response to the guilt my grandmother drilled into her before my mom moved 5,000 miles away to Hawaii.

“I don’t need a signature?” she questioned. She differed greatly from my father when it came to social interactions. He was chummy, always asked how the other person was doing, and repeated their name too many times before getting down to business. My mom, on the other hand, quickly launched into the matter without any small talk or much eye contact. I think this stemmed from a lack of exposure more than a disinterest in human interaction.

“It’s just giving you options,” the postal worker replied. He stared straight into her soul with impatient, piercing eyes.

I suddenly felt the all-too-familiar pang of curdling under a man’s sternness. This intensity came naturally for most men, like a second skin, but for women, any tinge of reprimand activated a deep wound, an ancient reminder that speaking up was risky. I wondered about my mother’s relationship with her father. Did he make her feel small? He died before I was born and she didn’t talk about him much. I only knew he sold school textbooks, read voraciously, and wore pajamas most of the time. My gut said he kept to himself, much like my mom.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to read the screen.” I could tell she was buckling. To avoid the postal worker’s unwavering eye contact, she focused on the terminal, her pointer finger flustered as she scrolled through the shipping options.

I became angry—not at her, but at the general need for women to minimize themselves, code switch to soften men. I looked back at the line. Three people waited behind us, spaced too far apart but in even measure. Someone outside approached the door, grabbed the handle, then stopped short upon noticing the long line. I silently chided those waiting for not moving up so the person outside could enter. Maybe I just wanted more people in line to buffer the interaction’s awkwardness. Each word twanged like a ringing echo punctuated by charged silence. They probably didn’t pick up on it, but in my head, this was a performance, a one woman show in a small black box theater, everyone watching a commentary on the ways women are made to feel small just by existing.

I looked down and noticed my mom’s hand tugging at her dress. She had pulled it up on one side, high enough that her fingers could scrunch its lettuced hem. She bought a bunch of these same cheap, cotton dresses before moving to the island. She had previously started wearing dresses to help with her hot flashes, but now she’d be wearing them year-round. She wanted to make sure they were on theme so she opted for ones decorated with hibiscus flowers and full-bodied leaves like monstera. My heart lurched for her when I saw this silent gesture, a sign that she felt defenseless.

“So, what’s the best option?” I chimed in, flashing my teeth and failing to disguise my protectiveness. My mom picked up on it and, being averse to any kind of confrontation, interrupted.

“Just the cheapest option is fine, that should be…” she trailed off before she could finish her own sentence.

********************

Our next stop: the farmer’s market. Despite my exhaustion and jet-lag from twenty hours of travel, the sun revived me. It drove my desire to try as many types of fruit as possible while I helped my mom settle into her new life.

New kinds of food inundated me immediately. One booth sold a starchy, lilac-colored pudding called poi, while another sold crispy slabs of spam served with eggs and rice. I saw a variety of fruit which I’d previously only seen online: breadfruit, lilikoi, rambutan, lychee, starfruit, apple bananas, egg fruit, soursop. It was an astonishing banquet of colors and textures. The deeply pink pigment of the dragon fruit glowed under the tent. It all came from this land, this tiny, lush island. They weren’t labeled with little stickers that revealed far-away origins. They were picked by the same hands that now sliced pieces off for people to try.

SUGARLOAF PINEAPPLE, read one sign. My mom saw it and tapped the back of my hand like someone smacking the butt of a ketchup bottle to get it flowing. As we walked over to the tent, I caught a whiff and my tongue prickled from the memory of pineapples I’d eaten before. First, the sting of sour, then a soft, sweet blanket across the tongue. This variety was different, though. Its less fibrous, white, creamy flesh didn’t get caught between my teeth. The absence of that electric tang struck me upon taking my first bite. It had low acidity and hints of sweet honey laced through it, but after those delicious first few bites, I missed the complexity of regular pineapple.

My mom, however, couldn’t get enough of it, evidenced by the juice dripping down her chin. She caught it in her hand, laughed, and looked around, a gesture of someone whose joy is quickly undercut by concern for others. I took another giant chomp of my own piece, letting it drip down my chin in solidarity, trying to assuage any embarrassment she felt. I thrust my hips back and my head forward so it dripped on the grass instead of on me. I wanted to help her feel safe in being hungry and messy in front of the world.

My mother has always had the most tenacious sweet tooth. When I was younger, she’d wake from a nap, wander into the kitchen, and grab a spoon and a tub of Duncan Hines frosting. I watched her from the living room while doing my homework or discreetly AIMing boys. She’d come over to check on me, eating frosting by the spoonful. We matched perfectly when it came to cupcakes because I preferred the cakey bottom and she preferred the frosted top. She’d wrap her fingers around the bulbous top, twist and pull, clearing it clean off the bottom, then hand me the moist vanilla cake stained with artificial rainbow colors.

As I watched her eat the pineapple, the mother who couriered pieces of her trauma into our relationship fell away and she became a child, not yet burdened by the world, immersed in life’s simplest pleasures. I loved the way she perked up when she ate anything sweet. It was a visceral moment, a noticeable jolt, the way her eyebrows shot up and her eyes brightened. I wondered if this sugar infatuation started after she quit alcohol, when she needed to fill the void with another rush.

She never told me herself that she was an alcoholic before I was born. I heard it from my aunt who drunkenly revealed it at a family holiday party. Later, my Dad confirmed it.

“When did she stop?” I asked him.

“The day she learned she was pregnant with you,” he replied. “Never drank since.”

Any time I start to doubt my mother’s love, I remember how much she loved me before she even knew me, and how that love pried her away from a force that keeps so many people in an endless, toxic loop. We never broached the subject. I was delicate about it, never drank around her, and fantasized that I would have the courage to bring it up one day. I waited for her to give me an opening because I didn’t want to reveal that my aunt exposed her secret, but the longer I waited, the harder it got to bring that question to the surface and admit I’d known all these years.

She left out a lot about her life before me. I only caught traces of it from my aunts when they poked fun at her, alluding to how different she was back then. They mentioned acid trips, Grateful Dead concerts, and protests. I cataloged these retellings in my mind like ephemera and puzzled together my own mental scrapbook.

One thing that hadn’t changed was her steadfast activism. She toned it down these days, but it occasionally revealed itself in bite-sized pieces. As we walked back to the car after leaving the farmer’s market, she leaned in and whispered, “Do you know about the history of pineapple here?”

She often talked in hushed tones when in public, afraid someone might overhear. You’d think her always gossiping, but she did it with benign things too. I remember once driving by a house and gawking at its beauty from the passenger seat before my mom shushed me. I snapped back that they couldn’t hear me, but I knew this reaction stemmed from her childhood, from so many years hiding as a way to protect herself. Like many, she grew up around beliefs that were never hers to begin with.

“No, what is it?” I asked, eager to crack open the passion fruit in my hand.

“They were total monsters,” she started. “That Dole guy came over and made a fortune stealing land from the native people. You hear all the time that pineapple is a sign of hospitality, but what they don’t tell you is that he staged a coup and overthrew Queen Liliuokalani.”

She stumbled a bit on Liliuokalani. After getting the job, she immediately began researching the islands, hoping knowledge would blunt her whiteness. She knew full well she was a foreigner, a haole, but she wanted to atone for this by paying homage to their history.

********************

Our Airbnb sat situated in a complex of single-floor apartments, some sharing walls, but all circled around a small courtyard. It felt strangely quiet for being fully occupied. I assumed most people went out exploring during the day, given the lonely Jeep in the parking lot with its top down and sides smeared with dried mud.

Haggard and hungry stray cats littered the property. One chauffeured me to her litter of kittens, shaded from the sun under one of the apartment’s front steps. When we arrived, the mother looked at me pitifully, and I felt a throb of guilt for not having anything to offer them. I walked through the parking lot—more of a lawn than a lot—to an abandoned gazebo with a community grill and disheveled pool chair. I gazed out at the towering mountains in the distance, the new contours of land my mom would follow on her commute to school each day. I studied them closely, creating a mental imprint so that when I missed her, I could imagine her driving alongside them at sunrise, on her way to school, taking in the lushly-layered green that covered just about every inch of the island.

Once I got too hot, I moseyed back towards our place, past the cowering cats and sun-dappled noni trees. My mom’s bedroom was between mine and the kitchen, so I had to sneak by her to get to my afternoon snack. I stepped into her room, thankful the floors were tile and not old, creaky wood, then crossed the space on the balls of my feet, like a barefoot ballerina, reveling in the cool tile against my skin. Luckily, the fan whirring next to my mom’s face drowned out any noise I made. She also wore earplugs, the neon orange foam sprouting from her ears like gumballs. Her arms flopped messily overhead and her legs coiled in the starchy sheets, which were ruined from too many washes and overheated dry cycles.

I paused at her bedside. She slept worry-free—untroubled by debt; undisturbed by grief from years of not seeing her estranged daughter, my sister; and unmoved by the world’s constant stimulation which generally kept her highly sensitive nervous system on edge. Her body heaved, her belly and ribs expanding in unison. Her breathing seemed labored, but not in the sense that she couldn’t get enough air in. Instead, it felt like the first time that day that she could get enough in, and her body savored the feeling. I tip-toed into the kitchen, wrapped my hand firmly around the fridge handle, and pushed down before pulling out to help dull the unsticking sound. I set aside a few slices of sugarloaf pineapple for her, knowing she’d wake up in a daze, drunk from sleep and wanting something sweet to shake it off.