Paradise Park

by Allegra Goodman

  I got to know some of the guys who took care of the dolphins, and some of the vets who watched over the sick and injured animals that came through—dolphins with big bites taken out of their dorsals, and little orphan seals, and a baby humpback whale, who was resting in a holding tank before getting towed out to sea. And I loved those animals, especially the dolphins—just the way they rolled slightly on one side to look at you, and the way they chirped when you spoke to them, and clucked and laughed. The dolphin guys, Jason and Neil, would let me throw herring to the dolphins sometimes. They’d let me stand on the platform that extended over the dolphins’ tank, and I’d toss out fish, and sometimes beach balls that the dolphins would bat back to me.

  There was one older dolphin named Leilani, one of the stars of the park, who used to get off work the same time I did, meaning she finished her afternoon show when I went off shift at the store. I used to sit down on the platform by her private exercise tank, and tell her all my troubles—for example, how I missed Kekui, and the quiet back on Molokai, and Leilani would really listen. She would glide right up and cock her head and look at me with her wise black eye. I’d ask her questions, like “How do you think I can ever get back to living in a more natural place?” and she’d swim very deliberately around the tank, like she was thinking it over, and then she’d come back to me and roll so she could look at me with her other eye, so penetrating, but yet so sympathetic. I really considered her my mentor, and I told her everything, even things I’d never dream of telling anyone else. She always listened to me. She always had time—and, of course, since she was far more intelligent than any human, she always understood. Actually we had a lot in common, because we were both so isolated. Leilani was an Atlantic dolphin, and she’d been imported five years before for some comparative scientific experiments on echolocation. So she came from back east like me.

  “The thing is,” I told her, late one afternoon, “the happiest I’ve ever been was out where it’s still wild. Where people haven’t spoiled the land yet.”

  Leilani bobbed up in the water and sat back, head and neck out of the water, which was one of her signature tricks. That was when, in the shows, Neil or Jason would toss a lei around her neck.

  “Civilization,” I said, “is such a scam. It’s all about affiliations, and school. And pleasing other people.”

  Leilani bobbed up and down, yes.

  “Living your life for your mother, for Godssakes! You think you know someone,” I said, “and then he goes home, and he’s completely different. It’s almost like the person he was when he was with you didn’t exist at all!”

  She clicked.

  I trailed my hand in the briny water of her tank. “Do you ever wish you were a wild dolphin again?” I asked.

  Then she dove down into the tank and swam around deep. I was crestfallen. How could I have asked such a tactless question? I should have known it would offend her.

  Leilani put up with a lot from me. I used to come read my poetry to her in the tank, and she used to glide up right near me and listen with her invisible ears. And I used to sing her songs I had composed back when I had my guitar. But now I sang a capella. One of my best songs was titled “Hey!”

  HEY!

  I said, hey, did you see the sky today

  Did you see the sun shining down?

  Hey, did you see the sun today,

  Warming everyone?

  Hey, all of you,

  Did you thank the land today

  For supporting us for free?

  Well there’s a lot of giving in the world

  No thanks to you and me.

  I used to ask Leilani what she thought of her keepers, and what she thought of animal rights—whether people leading that movement was actually a contradiction in terms. I told her how I was over Kekui. How could I respect somebody who would just walk away like that? I was going to find someone else. He wasn’t the only one who had other people in his life! I had other people too—I just hadn’t found them yet.

  I even used to tell Leilani about my family. I said, “When I was a kid I was an orphan—I mean, not technically, but to me I was. It was like everybody had left me behind. We started out and we were the most regular, most normal family. Mom used to get up in the morning. Dad drove home every night in his car. I took ballet, for Godssakes. I was in Hansel and Gretel. Then Dad left and got married to Joanne. Then An drew was killed. Then Mom took off. And then there was one—I was the last of the Spiegelmans. What do you think of that?” Leilani was perfectly quiet, listening.

  “I had a plan, though. I was going to take the train to New York and audition for the School of American Ballet and star in the Nutcracker. But nobody let me. I had to move in with my dad and Joanne instead.”

  “Clik!”

  “Yeah, everybody thinks performing is so great. You get out there in front of an audience. They throw you a fish. People don’t even realize how hard you’re working. But I was thirteen. What did I know?”

  “Clik. Clik.”

  “My brother had drums. Andrew got a complete drum set for Christmas when he was ten. He let me play it, too, even though I was only five. He let me do a lot of things. He was really generous for a brother. He was the one who got me into music. He was going to have a band, and when I was older he was going to let me in—or at least help set up and be the stage manager.”

  Leilani looked at me with her beautiful smooth face. I didn’t have to say it, the next thing, which was that Andrew never had a chance to get his band off the ground. She knew. Her mind was tremendous. The way Leilani thought, she was always three steps ahead of you. People from the university were always evaluating her intelligence, yet the essence of it was impossible to pin down in some academic test—because her intellect was all intuitive. I even introduced her to this guy, Wayne, who was a Marine I was dating at that time. She got his number right away. Just tisked at me. “Tk, tk, tk.”

  I’D met Wayne at the concession stand where he was with some buddies and buying batteries for his camera, and we’d got to talking. He was a tall, blond, slightly sunburned, chivalrous guy. Incredibly strong, and thick necked. He had blue eyes, stunningly clear and bright. His nose bridge had a bump in it, because when he was growing up in this ranch place in Colorado, he’d got into a fight one day with some other kids. Wayne came home with his nose broken, and his dad, who was naturally much bigger and stronger and tougher than Wayne, was really proud of him, and he never let Wayne go to the doctor and get it set right. Wayne’s dad said there wasn’t anything wrong with a broken nose that wouldn’t heal naturally.

  Wayne would bring you chocolates, and he would bring you flowers—real florist flowers—even if he couldn’t afford it. Really, he would do anything for you—the downside being, if you talked back or provoked him or made him jealous, he’d just as soon slam you against a wall. The first time he ever took me out he brought me a dozen long-stemmed coral-pink roses. I had to borrow a vase from my neighbor. And he took me out to dinner—not for drinks, or to a club, but for dinner at Horatio’s in Ward Warehouse, with candles on the table, and a basket of fresh rolls, and medium-rare steaks and crème brûlée for dessert. On the way home I stepped off the curb before the light changed and a car shot out at me. Wayne pulled me back. He said, “Sharon, don’t go off endangering yourself, now!”

  I leaned in against him. He put his big strong arm around me. Even the way he did that—he didn’t drape his arm over your shoulders like Gary used to, or just give you a quick hug like Kekui—he held you close, and you felt like you were the most treasured, most delicate thing in the world.

  The first time he kissed me was when he walked me home that night. His lips just brushed my cheek and my ear. It was almost a shy kiss, as if he were afraid to presume.

  The second time he kissed me was in Waikiki on one of those warm crowded Saturday nights when people were streaming out of the movie theaters and every store window was lit up to sell. Wayne had wanted to buy me something—a necklace made ou
t of coral beads, or a little glass figurine of a bird, or a batik dress, or at least a stuffed animal—and I wouldn’t let him, because all this idea of buying stuff for me made me nervous. Like he was determined to turn me into his princess. And I stopped right on the sidewalk, and I said, “Wayne, stop it. I don’t want anything, and I’m not going to want anything. Presents just aren’t my thing. They aren’t.”

  And then he put his arms around me and kissed me right on the sidewalk with the people streaming and eddying around us, and he said, “I’m sorry.” He tried too hard, which scared me sometimes, and embarrassed me, but was also charming in a way. He was clumsy, and shy, falling over himself trying to be some kind of gentleman. He was trying to be as good on the inside as he was on the outside, and sometimes he succeeded.

  THANKS to the military Wayne and I had an actual courtship, like from my parents’ era—when there were such things as parietals, and people went on dates. We couldn’t live together, and a lot of times we couldn’t even see each other, because Wayne was stuck out at KMCAS, which was Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station. He was living in the barracks with the guys and doing that enlisted-man thing. No women after hours and all that. Those rules were harder on Wayne than they were on me. He was dead serious about us right away.

  “Sharon,” Wayne said to me at The Chowder House, “someday we’ll get a bunch of land, and we’ll build our own house….”

  And I’d be thinking, Oh God, can’t we just enjoy our meal here? The current meal—the lobster in front of us, as opposed to the banquets we would eat on our great big farm in Colorado with the kids sitting around the table and our horses running around outside.

  “I like pipe dreams,” he admitted to me.

  “Well, I don’t,” I said.

  “What do you like?”

  “Just being here now,” I said.

  He took my hand. “Why can’t we think about the future?”

  “’Cause I’m not sure about the future,” I said.

  He said to me, “Sharon, you’ve never been with any guys who treated you right. You don’t even know. But you’re my lady….”

  I choked on my drink. I was laughing so much; I couldn’t help it. “Did you just say ’you’re my lady’?”

  So he got furious and stormed out and left me there at the table, and he didn’t call me for days. I guess we broke up for a while. And then he called me up again and we went out camping on the beach and we were back together again. We went out to dinner, and we went for drinks, and we even went to Paradise Park, which was a whole bird zoo with walk-in aviaries and daily parrot shows. You drove up to this jungly place in the back of Manoa and you paid your money and got stamped on the back of your hand, and then you could wander through the great aviaries where parrots swooped and called, and if you were unlucky pooped on you as you strolled along. You could see the brilliant flashes of macaw wings, scarlet, and blue, and golden yellow. The birds were all flying up into the rain forest canopy that soared upward, until they hit the high wire-mesh roof.

  “You think they’re happy?” I asked Wayne.

  “Sure,” he said.

  I looked around; I craned my neck as we stood there on the walkway. I was trying to catch sight of those birds’ faces.

  “They’ve got the good life,” Wayne said.

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah; they’ve got no predators whatsoever. They’ve got all the food they’d ever want to eat. Plenty of room to fly around.”

  Tourists with cameras were thronging the walkways. The birds were shrieking louder and louder.

  “What’s wrong?” Wayne said.

  “Nothing,” I told him. Then I said, “It’s not the good life. It’s parrot prison, that’s what it is.”

  “What do you mean, prison?”

  “I mean, these birds were born to fly, not to be photographed! If you’ve got a pair of wings you’re supposed to shoot for the stars! Not bump up against cyclone fencing every day of the week.”

  “Sharon,” said Wayne, “I guarantee you these macaws don’t know the difference.”

  “By now they’re probably brainwashed,” I said. “They probably are happy. They don’t even know how to live free anymore. Put them back in a real rain forest and they’d be looking for the chopped fruit station. They’d be trying to find the mixed nuts.”

  All during the open-air bird show I was stewing about trading in your freedom for happiness. We were sitting on riser seats and the park bird-wrangler was talking about his bird performers, putting those captive spirits through their paces. The African gray parrot was bobbing his head up and down three times when his human asked him what was two plus one, and a cockatiel was pedaling a tiny unicycle across a teensy tightrope, and I was thinking, maybe the birds didn’t even know how to want to fly away anymore. Maybe they didn’t even care about seeking for themselves. Yet they seemed cheerful, and so attached to their humans. They seemed so tame, by which I mean, eager to please. Maybe they did enjoy their role as educators, maybe that was fun for them, reaching out to the community. There they lived in their giant aviaries in total harmony—since all their basic needs were taken care of. But if the structure is imposed from the outside, how can a place be a true utopia? A real paradise, that would have to come from inside the birds themselves; that would come from their own hearts. A real paradise, that would mean undergoing a paradigm shift in your very soul. And how can you even begin to have a breakthrough when your forest canopy is all you have, and you can never rise above it, due to the roof of your glorified cage?

  I guess the whole place brought home to me how I’d lived in paradise myself (on Molokai), and how little it seemed like I’d got out of it. I’d been good at dropping out, no question. But when it came to tuning in, just what frequency had I been on? As a lotus-eater I was a natural, but as a learner? As a flyer? I looked down at my lap. Look at yourself, I thought. I looked at my shorts. Just look at yourself! Can you honestly say you are the seabird you always thought you were? Or are you actually just a parakeet? Do you travel on the wings of gulls? Or do you chirp?

  Everyone was clapping hard for the African gray’s rendition of “Yellow Bird,” but I walked out.

  Wayne was annoyed as hell. He took offense a lot, because to him it always seemed like I was either making fun of him or acting like I was deeper than he was. But he kept pursuing me anyway. This went on at least a year, because I was his lady and his princess in his mind, and because he imagined that I loved him—and sometimes I did. It was complicated. It was like we were playing from different rule books, and mine was, to be honest, more about lust, and his was also about lust, but more about romance.

  Wayne was always protective of me, although my old friends called it jealousy. He always walked with his arm around my shoulders or my waist. My long hair floating over the two of us. And people like Corinne and Rae, and Rich, and Geoffrey, would look at me and Wayne and then later they would say, “Doesn’t that guy ever let you go?” or “Does he ever let you out of his sight?” I took offense when people commented like that—as if it bothered them that someone cared that much for me.

  Then there was Brian. I’d brought Wayne to a party in honor of Geoffrey and Julie’s engagement. It was a beach party at Rich’s place out on the North Shore—a great big all-day bash like the old days, except there was no booze or dope, in honor of Geoffrey and Julie’s Christian morals. Wayne and I didn’t even come for most of it. We arrived at the end when there were just crumbs of chips left in the bags, and empty soda cans; and the towels and tatami mats spread out on the sand were hot from baking all day in the sun. So we rolled up in Wayne’s rusted-out station wagon and we walked over to the remains of the feast, where Brian and Imo were sitting. Imo was wearing small, dark sunglasses.

  “Hey, Brian!” I said. I bumped into him every once in a while at these kinds of celebrations, and I was by this time truly happy to see him, having forgiven him for leaving me off his precious research paper. Academic credit wasn’t exa
ctly important to me anymore. “You’ve met Wayne, right?”

  “No, actually, not,” Brian said, and he scrambled up and shook Wayne’s hand. “Howzit,” Brian said, politely. Wayne was a head taller than he was.

  Wayne and I sat down on the sand, and I told Wayne, “These guys were the ones who took me out to French Frigate Shoals.”

  “Man, someday I’d love to go out there,” Wayne said.

  “Well, you know, you can’t just go …” I said. “You have to be doing research. They’re restricted islands—just for birds.”

  “I love birds,” Wayne said. “I used to go bird watching all the time when I was a kid.”

  I shook my head at him. He sounded so ignorant in front of Brian and Imo. What was he going to tell them next—how much he loved to go to Paradise Park?

  “What’s up with you guys?” I asked Brian.

  “Well, we got married,” Brian said.

  “No kidding!” If I’d been drinking something I would have choked on my drink. “So now you’re living in the same place all year long?” For the last couple of years they’d had one of those academic commuter relationships. Imo had a position in Auckland, so she had to go down under like Persephone every year for their winter semester, which was our spring.