“Has he said something to upset you?”
Barbara rolled her eyes, though her mother couldn’t see. “Daddy doesn’t write for a year, and now you ask if I’m upset?”
“Bar, that’s not fair. You know how concerned I’ve been about you. And I would like to know what he said.”
Barbara twisted around and faced her mother square on. “It’s addressed to me.”
“Fine,” said her mother, leaning back so forcefully her chair creaked. “Bar, you look flushed. Are you feeling all right?”
“I’m fine.” Her skin did feel overheated, most likely from the botheration of it all.
“Why don’t you help me with these transcriptions?”
“I don’t want to.” How could her mother ask her to work at such a time? She stood and grabbed her swimsuit off the indoor clothesline. “I’m going for a swim, and then I’m going to the celebration by myself tonight.”
Her mother’s gaze followed her. “I am invited, you know.”
Barbara walked to their screened-off shower. She hated her mother watching her every move. Lately, she’d taken to dressing and undressing behind the screen. “I know, but for once, I’d like to go by myself.”
“For once? You practically do everything by yourself.”
“I just want my own friends. Can’t you understand that?” Barbara slipped into her swimsuit. She’d swim and swim and wash away her father’s words.
“Please don’t be this way,” said her mother.
There was so much Barbara wanted to say: Then find your own friends; then don’t jabber endlessly about work and money; then start all over on your miserable marriage. Instead, she stomped out of the hut and down to the beach.
✭
When the sun’s rays made looming shadows of the island trees, Corie came to fetch them. Dressed in a royal-blue pareu and garland of scarlet hibiscus, she beamed with excitement. “Bon soir, Madame Follett, Barbara.”
Corie had arranged a traditional celebration for her “white islander friends”—as she referred to Barbara and her mother. Barbara wanted nothing more than to lose herself in the pleasures of Polynesia. She’d not record this event for her dishonorable father. Nor would she allow her mother to interfere, which is why she’d promised, if her mother would allow her to go alone, to spend the whole next day helping with the language project. So, her mother held back and told them to have a nice time.
Corie took Barbara’s hand as they strolled along the sandy beach. “Your mother does not wish to come?”
“She has work to do.” Barbara blotted out the thought of her mother and her endless demands. She wanted to live like a native Tahitian, to abandon herself to the islanders’ easy ways.
The celebrants had gathered at an inlet where a meandering river met the ocean. Bowls of colorful foods lined a table, with brown-skinned women and girls fussing over the arrangements and laying out wood-carved serving plates and bowls. Young men, their skin glistening in the sun’s lengthening rays, surrounded an earth oven covered with banana leaves. Some of them bent over and removed the leaves, peeking at a suckling pig beneath them.
Barbara made her way around the spirited group, greeting those she knew, who in turn introduced her to the others. She hadn’t mastered much Tahitian, but when she spoke in French, the islanders responded in kind. It was comforting—being a world away from her troubles, with people who knew nothing of her old life.
When the men finished carving the pig, the party settled in clusters on the ground and feasted on it, along with fish and vegetables soaked in coconut milk, a sweet pudding baked in banana leaves, and juicy papaya slices. Barbara felt a little queer—light-headed and dull of appetite—but she couldn’t resist trying bites of every single offering.
As the darkening sky inked over the sunset, the party milled and rearranged itself. A few men stoked the fire, two others gathered guitars, four took up three-foot-high cylinder drums, and the rest seated themselves in a ring around the fire. The music makers strummed and drummed, and the steady throbbing music drifted over the circle and into the darkness. Five women wandered into the middle of the ring and did an arm-twisting and hip-jerking dance. Some men joined them, high-stepping and keeping their trunks level at the same time—like trotting horses. The fire’s blaze tinted the women’s hair orange and glinted off the men’s bronze bodies.
Corie, who’d been sitting beside Barbara, rose and entered the circle. Barbara watched her twist and twirl. As the beat picked up, Corie danced faster and faster, her eyes flashing with gleeful abandon, her arms weaving against the screen of surging smoke. When she whooped with joy, her teeth shone brightly in her thrust-up face.
More and more of the group rose and entered the circle of dancers until only Barbara, and a few older women remained. Corie’s brother Tane danced up to her and held out his hands, inviting her to join the celebration. Barbara hesitated. The dancers looked so sure of themselves, so beautiful in their abandon; she felt shy and clumsy in their presence.
Yet as she watched the dancers stomping and weaving, her muscles twitched and ached for release. Tane’s feet bounced with the beat, and he kept his hands out, smiling his invitation. Why not, Barbara thought: Why shouldn’t I be as free as these islanders? She placed her hands in Tane’s. He levered her up and pulled her into the fray.
Barbara blended in with the sweat-burnished dancers, pounding her feet and throwing up her arms, imitating the women’s movements. Their arms and torsos swayed and swung, as fluid and graceful as grass rippling in the wind. But her limbs felt jerky and awkward, even as a quickening force gathered in her and propelled her on. A chant rose in her: Me, child of nature, me, island creature.
Harder and harder, the drummers beat their husky drums. The deep thrums steeped her every cell as if these fleshy forms had joined and their hearts beat together. Her mind swirled with dizzying images—of the horizon twirling around her, of palm branches trembling in the breeze, of stars reeling overhead.
Fire sparks darted from the flames. Against the air’s hot pliant waves, the dancers’ arms shimmied in sinuous shapes. Barbara felt connected to the dancers by an electric-like charge; she gorged on the quiver and tremor of mingling muscles and skin.
Energy surged in her core, pulsing down her torso, into her legs, out her arms. She gave herself over to dance and merged with the bounding bodies, stomping her feet and twisting her hips. Oh, pure abandon. Such sweet freedom. Her shoulders and arms brushed and stroked against the others, imparting and partaking of the coursing ecstasy. She turned delirious, wild, mindless.
The drummers thumped, louder and faster, until they could beat no harder, no faster. They crowned the ceremony with rounds of off-beat thumps and flung their arms skyward. The dancers whooped in response and all dashed for the beach. Tane grabbed Barbara’s hand and pulled her along with the throng. All paused at the water’s edge to toss off clothes and sandals.
Barbara undid her pareu, cast it over the slanting trunk of a coconut tree, and bounded into the shallows. The revelers dove and surfaced, turning a swathe of the sea into an explosion of splashing bodies. Barbara raced to join them, stepping high against the water’s resistance, and plunged in. Her overheated skin sizzled at the coolness. She surfaced with a shriek and plunged again and again, becoming one with the water. She gave herself over to its delicious surges and swirling grasp, treading gently, moaning with delight.
Tane swam up to her and beckoned her shoreward. They swam and splashed, turning corkscrews and playing the waves. They reached shallow water. Tane sat; waves washed over his chest; he floated in, then out. She knelt and tried to steady him against the coursing water. A wave surprised her, flopping her forward. They laughed. Tane braced her. As a retreating wave whooshed her back, he reached out and scooped her into his arms.
He raised a handful of water and spilled it over Barbara’s face, washing back her hair. He kissed her parted lips, and seawater tingled her tongue. She wrapped an arm around his shoulder, smooth and
slippery with water. He stroked her back and molded his chest to hers, turning them into one body floating and shifting with the waves, their lips and arms locked.
Every inch of her skin thrilled with aliveness. She wanted to chase this joy to its pitch, to completely surrender to rapture. She felt Tane harden against her. An insistent throbbing pulsed deep inside her. She reached for him; she wanted to embrace this part of him.
Then she heard the cry: “Barbara, Barbara.”
It was her mother, splashing through the waves toward her, her face gaping with alarm.
Barbara let go of Tane. He stood and dove away from her.
Still, her mother came, hollering at her, wildly swinging her arms.
Her mother—who only ever held her back, who’d driven her father away. The father she must now live without the rest of her life.
Her mother held her captive, smothered her with her demands.
She felt naked and helpless. A sickening sludge of emotions washed over her—mortification, rage, despair. The blood drained from her arms and legs.
This is my life now, she thought. This and nothing more. I can’t go on like this.
She turned away from her mother, plunged into the open sea, and swam for the dark depths of the ocean.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
HELEN
Tahiti, March 1929
Helen jerked awake and looked around the hut. She’d fallen asleep on the bed. Barbara wasn’t back. She ran to the window. A cryptic moon and sweep of stars marked the midnight sky. Where could Barbara be? Might she do something foolish—like sail off on that proa? Had her father said something to distress her?
She couldn’t help herself. She needed to know what was in that letter. She lit a candle and searched through Barbara’s things—her cloth sack, her stack of papers, her books. And there it was, tucked in her dictionary, a birthday card, and a letter.
February 2, 1929
Dear Barbara,
I’ve finally got up the gumption to write to you. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of the necessity of this letter. Or of how difficult it would be to compose it. There were many times I wished to take up pen and simply write to you of the moon’s blue shadows on forest snow or the glassy icicles dripping from the house eaves. But your mother claims that “empty” words will be of no use to you and that I must give you some real sense of where things stand with our family.
Your mother tells me my absence deeply saddens you, and I hope you know I, too, have lamented all these months apart. The thing that has kept me from writing is the fear of hurting you even more and forcing you into the fray of conflict between your mother and me. But I see it can’t be helped, for you are in the fray, simply by membership in our forlorn family, and so I imagine I can’t make it much worse than it already is.
You deserve nothing less than the truth from me. I’ve always thought there should be complete honesty between us, even when you were a youngster just divining the meanings of words. From early on, I regarded you as your own person, and I won’t retreat from that now, especially now that you’re fifteen and no longer a child.
The situation between your mother and me is, simply put, irreparable. I cannot fathom a return to the marriage that was, for many years, a shriveled-up approximation of what marriage can and ought to be. You can’t know this. And I take it as a tribute to the devotion your mother and I showed you that, even at the time, you didn’t know it. The truth is I only stayed in the marriage out of misguided chivalry. And out of love for you and Sabra. You two became the greatest joys of my life. But, I’m sorry to say, that wasn’t enough to sustain me through the abiding nightmare the marriage became. A man needs a woman who regards him with a modicum of respect and approbation. And I didn’t have that for more years than I’d like to admit. But I’ve found it now, and it’s so precious that I refuse to turn away from it.
I will insist on divorce from your mother. There’s no other choice for me. Your mother will see the sense of it soon enough, for she cannot inhabit this ridiculous self-imposed purgatory indefinitely. Let me assure you that I’ll do my best to provide for you, her, and Sabra. And I do wish for you to be a part of my life, though that depends on whether your mother will allow you to visit me in my present circumstances.
I’ve left New York for less expensive housing in Maine. But I’m happy with the support of a woman who loves me completely for who I am: luckless; sharp-elbowed and freighted with worries. I’m doing that which I’ve craved deeply—I’m writing a novel. I foresee a part for you in it, and I hope you’ll read it someday and be proud of your father.
When I came across this picture of us all pink with excitement to hike up Little Haystack, where we marveled at frost feathers and snow glistening on distant peaks, I recalled the joy we shared on that hike. I can only hope that you, too, cherish this and all our other adventures.
Love always,
Daddy
My God, this was how he “reassured” her—reminding her of their joy-filled times and telling her he’s abandoning the family? Barbara must be reeling.
She rushed out into the night, to the beach, toward the place the feast was taking place. Her feet slipped and slid in the fine dry sand. She groped her way through the darkness, guided on one side by the lapping ocean and the other by the wind rustling the palms, seeking the moistened strip where her feet might gain purchase. Then, a quarter-mile ahead, she spotted the fluttering embers of a bonfire.
She heard voices as she approached and saw swimmers splashing close to shore. She stepped purposely, straining to hear voices, hoping to pick out Barbara’s.
On the beach ahead, she spied a coconut tree, slanting toward the sea, with clothes strewn over its trunk. Then she saw it among the scattered garments: Barbara’s pareu. Turning to the ocean, she scanned the swimmers. There was Barbara, her hair bobbing in the waves. In a man’s embrace.
Kicking off her sandals, she splashed through the water. She closed the distance to thirty feet and called, “Barbara, Barbara.”
Barbara and the young man, who’d been sitting in the water, jerked around and stood. She saw now—the man’s engorgement—and cried out, “Barbara, you mustn’t. Come with me.”
Barbara stood facing her, naked and unmoving, her rounded hips and budding breasts exposed. My God, she thought, she’s turning into a woman. Helen looked at the man. It was Tane. She waved him away and yelled, “Mais non, Tain. Non.”
Tane backed away and dove off.
She rushed toward Barbara, but before she could reach her, Barbara turned and swam away, her powerful arms clipping through the water.
My God, she’s swimming away from the shore. “Stop, Barbara.”
Barbara only kept stroking, the backs of her arms methodically rising and dipping.
She started swimming toward Barbara. No, it was useless. She’d never catch her.
She turned back toward the other swimmers and yelled, “Aidez moi.”
She swam close enough in to touch the ocean floor and high-stepped through the waves. Corie came running to her. Tane and others circled her.
“Regardez,” she said, pointing toward Barbara. “She’ll drown herself. Elle va se noyer.”
“Le proa,” Corie said, turning to Tane and the others. “Prenez le proa.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
BARBARA AT FIFTEEN
South Pacific Islands, March-May 1929
She lay abed, by turns throwing off and grasping for her covers. Thoughts as filmy as fog flitted through her mind: my life is ruined; I’ll never write again; if only I could vanish. Time drifted and twisted, sometimes in tedious ticks and other times in sweeping swaths. She thrashed and slept, dozed and moaned, occasionally aware of her mother leaning over her, propping her up and spooning water or broth into her mouth.
Fevered days passed, hardly unnoticed, into desolate nights. She only wanted to escape this weakness of her body. Sweating discomfort and body-shaking chills racked her. Like water sloshing
through a sieve, her mind passed between wakefulness and oblivion. She didn’t care if she lived or died.
Her mother’s words floated by like shifting winds: “I love you, my dear girl . . . I promise there is brightness ahead . . . Please don’t give up . . . You’ll be happy again; I know you will.”
Then one morning, she woke for the first time in what seemed like weeks, shaky but clear-headed. Her mother sat beside her, rousing her with soft pleas. “Barbara, your fever has broken . . . wake up.”
She blinked her eyes open.
Her mother stroked her forehead. “I was so afraid I’d lose you.”
Barbara brought her eyes into focus. She felt limp and spent, her stomach hollowed out, her memory hazy.
She ate some mashed banana and drank a cup of weak tea, and then collapsed into a deep sleep.
The next day, her mother told her now that she was out of danger and could travel again, that they must journey on. She’d pack their things; they’d go to Tonga. “There’s an American student there who needs help with his thesis. We have to go where I can find work.”
They secured passage on an inter-island steamer. Their first evening at sea, while Barbara lay in bed, her mother seated herself at the foot of Barbara’s narrow bed. “It’s time for us to talk, Bar. About what happened.”
Barbara had never felt so weak and dispirited, not even that time she had whooping cough. Baby Sabra had just joined the family then, and, despite how sick she felt, she knew she was safe and loved. Now she felt as if her life hung from the slender thread of her mother’s care, and she detested her dependence on her. But she had neither the will nor energy to resist. She raised her face to her mother.
“You mustn’t idealize your father anymore.”
The Point of Vanishing Page 11
