by Paul Theroux
“I’ll be your board carrier,” Sharkey said.
“Every day?” she said, jeering at him.
He faced her solemnly. “Whenever you want. You ask and I’m there. Okay, sister?”
“Braddah,” she said, smiling, and dropped to the sand beside him, breathing hard.
Brother, sister—she was the family he desired and needed. He did not want a follower, a pet, a student, someone who was not an equal. He did not need power over her, he wanted a friend, someone like her. How was it possible to be a mediocre surfer and be so confident?
“I’m tired,” she said.
“Let’s get a burger.”
“Gotta go back home,” she said.
“All the way to town.”
“To my ohana,” she said. “They expecting me. You keep this board, yah?”
Then she turned and at her car took out a gallon jug of water and emptied it over herself to wash the salt from her body, wrapped herself in a towel, and drove away without a backward glance, without another word.
And that night at home Sharkey summoned her pretty face and brown shoulders and sunburned lips and replayed her words, the pidgin in her speech, I stay town and my ohana and no make ass and come more big. And he tried to elaborate, listing in his mind what he knew about her—her waitressing at Sunset Grille, her commuting from town and her family to the North Shore, to work, to surf; her refusal to drink or smoke, her dislike of being touched, the fond mention of her father. And the ultimate puzzle, that she seemed to have no other friends. But she had a family, in that nest that he imagined—that refuge, that consolation. When he had first seen her, alone on the wave, he had been surprised that there was no one on the beach to cheer her—no surf buddies, no one watching except him. But she had an ohana waiting in town. He imagined her entering her house, the ohana greeting her. She didn’t need friends.
She was still like a stranger—he hardly knew her. But that was a goad. He wanted urgently to see her again.
* * *
After that, they met whenever she was free to surf and the surf was up. He did not want to see her at the restaurant where she worked, nor want her to wait on him. Some nights he lingered in the parking lot, and when she finished work he said, “Tomorrow?” and named a break, and usually she said, “Cool,” and got into her car and headed to town, while he stood, smiling, her taillights vanishing in the night. Such a long drive for her to see them made her family seem so powerful, so whole, enclosing her as he drove back to his house. And his house, once such a consolation as a refuge from his mother, seemed empty now, cavernous and shadowy.
He suggested adjustments to May’s technique, which she listened to, always frowning, as though evaluating them. She was a strong swimmer for her size. But though she might eventually learn to surf a big wave, she’d always have trouble paddling into it.
He did not tell her that. Yet she knew. When he said, “You remind me of myself,” she replied, “I stay small. I never catch big waves.”
“Do you want to?”
“I just want to surf, anything I can. Get more better. That’s for why I come here and don’t surf town.”
“A wise man once said, ‘The best surfer is the one having the most fun.’”
“Ass right.”
“You live near Waikiki?”
“Kapahulu side.”
“Tell me about your family.”
She made one of her feline faces, drawing back, then smiled and shrugged, looking baffled and finally amused, as though at a private joke, too complicated to share.
“Chinese kine,” she said. “My family everything to me. And they geeve”—she hesitated—“they geeve me everything.”
The statement left Sharkey wordless and envious, needing her more than ever, feeling something like love for her—desire, anyway, a wish to have her by his side. In that way he saw her family arrayed with him, as in the Hawaiian way he became part of the ohana. In a wrinkle of anxiety in his mind he suspected what she would say next.
“What about your ohana?” she said.
“I don’t have one,” Sharkey said. “My father died when I was a kid. My mother’s busy.”
“Cousins?”
“No one,” Sharkey said. “Just you.”
He began to reach, to take her hand, to hug her, to reassure himself and her. But in a reflex of hesitation he fought the throb of urgency, suspecting that she would draw back, stiffen a little, and be spooked.
And he smiled at his restraint, because he’d always been so reckless. Perhaps May was the proof that he could be chivalrous and unselfish; that he would know her better by respecting her, that winning her trust was everything. He admired her for being self-possessed, with a spirit that made her resolute. She was not a great surfer, she might never be, but she had mastered the mental challenge of surfing. She had the strength of mind to ride a wave, which was the ability to stay clear-sighted and in control. She would always be a happy surfer.
She had mastered herself, through willpower, fending off men. And when she told him how they’d pawed her and pinched her, Sharkey recognized his old obnoxious presumption with women. It was the support of May’s family that had given her confidence, the big Chinese ohana in town, which was more like a nation than a family. Thinking of them, he often had a glimpse of his house in Manoa, his coming home after school. His widowed mother smoking a cigarette, her drink on a side table, waiting for a man to take her to dinner. “I won’t be late,” she’d always say, and she was always late.
“They worry about me,” May said. “But I know they proud for me too, because I don’t ask them for anything. Only for aloha.”
Sharkey did not say what was he was thinking: I have no family, and even when I did have the Colonel and my mother, I did not have that kind of love. The power of this family behind May was something he had never known, and drew him to her, and it made her marvelous. After a few weeks of surfing with her and carrying her board and watching her drive away, she was still resolute, self-possessed, wholly herself—a rarity in his experience. Always eager to see her, bewitched by her body and her beautiful face and her resourcefulness on her board, he wondered if he was falling in love.
He’d always thought how women assessed him, and other men, with the woman’s question “Is he the one meant for me?” Because he’d always felt, even in the recklessness of the North Shore, that the women wanted more, wanted a partner, or a baby—for them the sex was the beginning of everything. For Sharkey, for most men he knew, it was something accomplished, a done deed, of always going home alone, sex as something final, a kind of cure.
But he began to think, Maybe she’s the one meant for me—his future—and he loved her for resisting him. Her resistance was like an element in their courtship.
Still, they surfed, he sometimes met her at work, and he saw her off as she headed back to town many evenings. In his mind, she was driving into the unknown, and so one day at the beginning of February he asked again about her family.
“Maybe you get a chance to see them,” she said as she poured a gallon jug of fresh water over her head and let it splash over her body as she shook herself and tossed her hair.
“I’d love to.”
“Maybe New Year’s.”
“It’s over,” he said. “That was a month ago.”
“Chinese New Year,” she said, blinking water out of her eyes. “The Year of the Rat. I’m taking the week off from work. Staying in town—no surfing.”
“Party time?”
“Family time,” she said, and the suggestion of intimacy gave him a pang. “Family dinner. Wong ohana.”
“I envy you.”
She stood straight, hands on hips, still dripping. Her eyes were on him, but she was not looking at him; the eyes were unfocused, gleaming with the fluidity of intense thought—a calculating gaze that was like blindness, droplets from the water jug glinting on her long lashes.
“I never invite anyone before,” she said, and licked some drops from her
lips, and shrugged. “Okay.”
Sharkey was grateful and relieved and expectant. In all that time, the month or more of giving May his full attention, of avoiding his old girlfriends and his surfer buddies, he had dropped out of his circle of friends—had chosen to surf with May at breaks where he was sure he would not see them. But he was happy in his concentration. It was how he imagined an old-fashioned love affair, his spending time with her, carrying her board, wooing her in his way. And this adjustment, resisting himself, he was impressed by her example—the way she had fended off all other men. It had strengthened him but also isolated him, in the way love does, by his need for her, that nothing else mattered and no one would understand. It was a rare thing for him—he could not remember a time when he’d felt so insecure. And that other fact, that keeping her distance as she became more important to him, the knowledge that he had no one else.
He saw that what he was living through was nothing that he’d known before, not his picking a woman, singling her out, and snatching her—the woman flirting or waiting to be chosen. This was a dance, during which he and the woman circled each other, whispering, interacting, assessing, not touching but existing in a vague companionship and surfing together, the basis of a future. May did not flirt, she did not confide, and so she had power.
That May had a whole family magnified her, made her seem decent and protected, a world away from the North Shore anarchy of Sharkey’s recent years.
She was gone for almost a week. He suffered this absence and discovered the helplessness of a lover, in thrall to a Chinese fox-witch. And then she called.
* * *
“Meet us at the restaurant,” she’d said. “It’s more better we don’t show up together. My father so strict. He trusts me, but he don’t trust anyone else.”
So Sharkey drove to town, murmuring so shtrick, forty miles in his peeling VW bug, to the restaurant she’d named, Hee Hing’s on Kapahulu. Self-conscious about the condition of his car—the dents, the rusty roof rack, his sponsors’ bumper stickers—he parked a little distance down the street under a kukui nut tree. He walked to the restaurant on the hot cement sidewalk, the sun bearing down on him and slowing him as he squinted in the glare, hating the side streets of bungalows and small shops, the whole neighborhood paved over.
Going into Honolulu meant a change of climate, of landscape, from the North Shore shacks to the suburban streets and high-rises, the crush of people and cars. It was hotter here, leeward, under the mountains, without a breeze, a different place, and reminded him of his school days, hurrying down the back streets of Makiki in the afternoon sun to the safety of Magic Island to surf.
The dining room of Hee Hing’s was visible in the big rectangle of window under its red sign, on the second floor of a newish square-jawed building, a staircase at the side. Sharkey climbed two flights and went through the foyer where people were waiting for tables.
“Wong party,” he said when a spiky-haired Chinese man in a red shirt stepped forward to block him.
“Got plenny Wong. Which Wong?”
“No idea, man.”
The man impatiently waved him into the loud room, where thirty or more large round tables were ringed with diners and piled high with platters of food. Sharkey stepped into a density of heat and noise, the clatter of plates, the screech of talk, and, added to the din, three television sets set on high shelves against the walls. Simultaneous snow scenes were being televised—a brilliant whiteness of steep slopes, skiers carving their way downhill, speeding through sunshine, throwing up snow as they turned. But the sound was inaudible in the racket of the restaurant.
Making his way through the tables, among the odor of frying fat and soy sauce and scorched meat, Sharkey began to perspire in the stifling room, his shirt sticking to his body. All the tables were occupied, and he smiled to see that all the diners were Chinese, reaching with chopsticks at the platters and chewing and yelling. He looked for another haole and saw an old mustached man at a corner table, who signaled to him with a shaka, as though to a friend.
Searching the room, he saw May at a far table, gesturing—she had obviously seen him first. He hardly recognized her in her dress, ankle-length and silken and crimson. As at her job at Sunset Grille, she was more alluring, sexier, in this dress than in her skimpy bikini. Her hair was combed and styled, molded to her head like a black cap, a creamy plumeria blossom fixed at her ear. She waved him near, but when Sharkey got to the table she avoided touching him and stepped toward an old man and hugged him.
“Dad, this is my friend Joe I was telling you about.”
The old man was about to put something into his mouth. He glanced upward and winced a little at Sharkey, then nodded, peeled the thing he held in his hand, and nibbled at it. It was a severed chicken foot. He went on nibbling as May stepped away from him and pulled out a chair for Sharkey.
“Chicken feet—cool,” Sharkey said.
“Phoenix claw,” a fattish young man said in a scolding tone, his head tilted, his mouth twisted, gnawing one of his own. He was pale and jowly, with a clammy face, in a flower-patterned shirt.
“My brother Winston,” May said, but the man looked away and kept eating. “And this is my mother.”
The older woman said something, but Sharkey could not hear it over the racket. She fluttered the fingers of one hand, and with one finger of her other hand was encircling a bowl of poi, gathering a purplish clot of goo on her finger. She poked it into her mouth and wiped it on her tongue.
“Dis so ono!” she shrieked—he heard that—and dipped her finger into the bowl again.
As he sat and scanned the table, he saw two other women, one in a hairnet and green scrubs, the other in a stained sweatshirt, with wild hair. They were dabbing at the platters with chopsticks as Sharkey said, “Aloha.”
“My sisters,” May said, and tapped the arm of the woman in scrubs. “Winnie, say hello.”
“I’m on call,” the woman said, tugging at her green shirt.
“I’m Wallis,” the wild-haired woman said. “Did Wendy tell you I’m the lolo sister?”
Leaning closer so that he could be heard, Sharkey said, “Wendy?”
“That’s me,” May said. “I got sick of the rhyming names—Winston Wong, Wendy Wong—so I decided to call myself May.”
“It means beautiful in Chinese,” Wallis said, and ran her fingers through her hair. “My problem is I got no kala. No money. My life kapakahi. Wendy beautiful, Wendy got plenny money, Wendy got haole boyfriend.”
“Joe’s not my boyfriend. He’s my surf instructor. And I got money because I got a job, Wally.”
“I want to go to the Olympics,” Wallis said, looking up at the TV set. “See some real snow.”
And Sharkey realized that it was the Olympics being televised, the skiers still speeding down the snowy slopes. As he watched, one of the skiers fell and skidded and spun into a net fence.
“He done a huli!” Wallis said.
May was still introducing Sharkey to the others at the table: a solemn Chinese man—“My brother-in-law, Kenton, Winnie’s husband”—and four small children—“Nieces and nephews”—whose names were lost in the noise.
One of the small girls was kneeling on a chair with a boy standing next to her, both of them giggling and taking turns as they jammed handfuls of rice into a drinking glass half filled with water, while another boy lay on the floor kicking the legs of Sharkey’s chair.
“Winston was Chinese Man of the Year,” May said, “at the Tien Tao Ming Society.” And Winston heard—he nodded—but went on tonging food with his chopsticks. “Like she says, Winnie’s a nurse, but she’s super-important at Queen’s. If someone is, like, having a spasm, they’ll call her. See that little box? It’s her beeper. She’ll get beeped and she’ll have to go.”
“Pager,” Winnie said, patting it.
“These children,” Sharkey said, his chair jogged with the boy’s kicks.
“Two are Winston’s, the other two Winnie’s,” May s
aid. “This is Galen,” of the boy thrashing on the floor among scraps of food.
Seeing the boy on the floor, the old woman said, “Oh, da cute!”
“You try the pig?” Wallis said to Sharkey, tapping her chopsticks on the platter of dark shredded kalua pig. “They imu it round the back. Hee Hing famous for it.”
Before Sharkey could respond, Winston said to his mother, “I told that fricken haole guy he never join the hui. Hell with him. He never bring no omiyage for present.”
“Because of that wahine,” the old woman said. “She big trouble.”
“Plus plenny niele,” Winston said. “Never keep her nose out of other people business. She part Hawaiian, and the other part maybe Portugee.”
“I came back from the war,” May’s father said, still nibbling a chicken foot reflectively, and gesturing with it as he spoke. “I thought maybe I join the Elks Club. But my pakay friends say, ‘Don’t do it, Wallace.’ I say”—he chewed and swallowed and now had the whole table’s attention—“I say, ‘I give it a try.’ But was no good. The Elks then was too much haole and some Portugees. Exclusive kine.”
May said, “But they never let any wahine join up.”
“No wahine in the Tien Tao Ming,” Winston said. “That’s why it same like a secret society.”
“What’s the Tien Tao Ming?” Sharkey asked, intending to be polite.
But when Winston did not reply, May said, “Like a club. Chinese kine.”
“You got one job, mister?” May’s mother asked.
“Joe’s a surfer,” May said.
“That one job?” The old woman smiled at the thought.
Sharkey’s shoulders moved with the kicks against his chair. He said, “I got some sponsors, a few endorsements. I’m competing on the tour.”
“Where you go?” Wallis asked, and she too was moving, beating her feet on the floor, her knees jogging up and down.
“Wherever there are waves,” Sharkey said, and realized that May had slipped to the other side of the table, where she sat between her father and Winston.
