Mamie watched Mary expertly divide the root stock of a ti bush. Mamie admired her mother’s ruthless pruning. Mamie was always a little afraid that she was hurting a plant, but Mary hacked and snipped with a clear conscience.
“That is why you’re a good gardener,” Mamie said aloud.
“What?” Mary was entangled in a vine.
“You’re not worried about hurting the plants.”
Mary looked at her as if she had lost her senses. “Of course I’m not. What a funny idea.” As if to prove it, she ripped the vine from an old wood fence. Mamie was sure she could hear the tiny suckers on the vine whimpering in pain as they popped off the wood rails.
“I think you’ll like your roommate next year,” Mary said, panting a little with the effort of yanking the stubborn vine from the fence. “She’s from the Big Island. McCully went to school with her uncles.” She passed one end of the vine along to Mamie. “And Lily Shields is there, too, a few years ahead of you. Such a strange girl. I saw her the other day in Lihue dressed all in black and wearing white rice powder all over her face. I’m surprised her father lets her go out looking like a ghost.”
“That’s what she is.”
Mary looked up from her work. “What?”
“She is a ghost.”
“What are you talking about?” Mary was irritated. Mamie should have been more cautious. It was well-known that Mary loathed anything fanciful.
“In the school play,” Mamie said. It was a lie, but she would rather protect her best friend than ever explain The Mothers Club to Mary.
“Her mother was strange, too.”
Mamie turned back to the weeds. There seemed to her to be many things that she could never explain to Mary. She had loved Lily’s mother.
“Did you see Auntie Emma in Honolulu?” she asked to protect Lily and her dead mother.
“Twice. We went to dinner at George Brown’s and she made him play the ukulele and she danced all the old hulas.”
“Father must have been happy.”
“I’m afraid he danced, too.” Mary gave a last, mighty tug on the vine, and she almost fell over backward as it finally gave up and came fast off the fence. The word “too” came out of her like a shout.
“I love when Daddy does the hula.”
Mary roughly coiled the vine in an unruly, leafy circle.
Mamie saw that she had lost her attention. “Can’t you see how terrible that is for the vine?” she asked quietly. “Can’t you hear what is going on around you, what Mr. Griep, my science teacher, calls the ‘music of the spheres’?”
“What, Mamie?”
Of course, the question that Mamie most passionately yearned to ask, and the question that was implicit in all of the others, was, Why do you not love me? But she merely said again, “the music of the spheres, the music of the—”
“There!” Mary said with satisfaction.
She had subdued the heavy vine, like a snake charmer. Heedless of the child who sat motionless in the grass, watching her solemnly, she went off to spray the fruit trees.
Exhausted by the effort of trying to keep her mother’s interest and failing, Mamie walked listlessly back to the house.
McCully was sitting in the library in his leather chair, Benjie Furtado’s leather chair, and he looked up when he heard Mamie on the veranda. He came outside. Mamie could hear Sousa marches on the record player.
They sat down in chairs facing the ocean. Behind them was an old bookcase with glass doors. It was filled with the dark, gleaming koa calabashes given to Mamie’s ancestors by the Kings and Queens of Hawai‘i. Heavy stone poi-pounders sat in rows on the bottom shelf, next to thin sheets of brown-and-white kapa cloth. McCully had been asked several times to donate these artifacts to the Bishop Museum, but he withheld his decision. He liked the idea of giving them to Mamie some day. He always said that she would know what to do with them.
When Mamie was younger, McCully would hold her in his lap in an old koa rocker and she would watch the changeable sea, the birthplace of the moon, as he told her the heroic tales of Kaua‘i, the oldest, most verdant, and most sacred of the islands. He told her the legend of the young woman, Pele, who begged permission of her mother and father to leave home. She took with her an egg in which her sister was hatching. Pele carried the egg carefully under her warm arm until the egg broke open and her sister was freed. Although Pele was blessed with the gift of magic, she did not foresee the sorrow her sister would someday bring her. Pele was too distracted. She was looking for fire, island to island.
“Daldo Fortunato tells me he’s making you a new surfboard,” McCully said.
“In exchange for taking over his son’s paper route.”
“The one who just joined the marines?”
“He wants to go to Vietnam.”
“Now I remember. He’s the one who was kicked out of Castle High.”
“They’re sending him instead to California and so he tried to resign from the marines, but they said no. You can’t just resign, they said.”
“Why did he want to go to Vietnam?”
“Orval said it’s because of the grass. He has a plan to develop a new kind of marijuana seed.”
McCully looked at her. She was not trying to be funny, although she knew that what she was saying was funny. Besides, she was telling the truth.
“You’ve always talked about the importance of our agricultural economy,” she said, trying not to smile.
“Didn’t anyone else want the paper route?”
She shook her head.
“But it’s worth a surfboard?”
“Daldo makes the best sticks on Kaua‘i.” She pronounced it in Pidgin, “steeks,” and he finally laughed.
They could hear Mitsuya chopping vegetables in the kitchen. The chopping was surprisingly in time with the Sousa march.
“Something quite mysterious has happened,” McCully said. He had temporarily restored her frail sense of well-being, so she was not prepared when he went on to ask, “Were there people here in the house when your mother and I were away?”
“I think so,” she said, very low and still.
“Was there a party or something?”
She was silent.
“Some things are missing, there are burns in my clothes. It doesn’t make sense.” He was not trying to entrap her, but in his guileless way, he was mystified. “I found a pair of woman’s undergarments in the pocket of my bathrobe, and I don’t believe they belong to Mother.”
Mamie felt herself begin to perspire. She looked at him, forcing herself to stare into his sunburned face. She was afraid. She had awakened every morning since Hiroshi disappeared with the anxiety that something just like this would happen. She would lose Gertrude now, and whatever was left of her mother’s affection, and, worse, even McCully would be disgusted by her. She had instinctively come to realize that although she and Claire had been deliriously happy on their honeymoon with Gertrude and Benjie, McCully, and especially Mary, would be shocked by it.
“Someone was here, but it was all right. Not a party.”
“Someone?” He was so intent on the curiousness of it that he still did not notice that she was very upset.
“I cannot tell you,” she finally said.
“You can’t tell me?”
“It was Gertrude and Benjie,” she said, hanging her head.
“Benjie Furtado, the cop?”
Her father’s slowness to understand made it worse for Mamie. She wanted to leap to her feet to shout angrily that it had been blissful while they were away, shouting as if it were his fault that she had been so happy.
McCully shook his head in amazement.
“Gertrude is going to marry him,” she said, wringing her hands.
McCully finally saw how much she suffered. “Well, good,” he said cautiously, trying to understand her distress. He took her hand.
“I couldn’t stand it, Father,” she whispered, “if anything happened to them because of me.”
“Nothing will happen, dear,” he said, stroking her arm.
She let him calm her, and she believed him when he said that he would take care of everything. He made her promise that she would not worry. She saw that he was still mildly troubled by what he could only guess had happened, but she knew that she could trust him.
They walked across the lawn to the beach. He had his arm around her shoulder. It was windy and some Hawaiian children waiting for the boat to Ni‘ihau were throwing sand. They ran away when they saw McCully, as if they were not allowed to play on his beach.
McCully and Mamie walked down to the wooden dock and were back in time for dinner.
Mamie and Claire were both good readers and because their parents were not, their reading went largely unremarked. Very little that was stimulating was offered to them at school, so their eager imaginations depended on the books that Mamie brought home daily from the small public library. Claire was partial to books from the adult section. Mamie told the dubious librarian that Claire’s selections, Forever Amber and Valley of the Dolls, were for her mother. Mamie was a serious, mature reader, and although she had read most of Dickens and all of Dumas, she had a special fondness for books about desert isles. She read Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, Lord of the Flies, and even Peter Pan with deep pleasure.
It had something to do with what she later called the “white bone-fantasy.” It was an image of herself washed up on a beach, as smooth and as white as a bone. It was a notion she had first had from Lily Shields’ mother, Anna, who had often taken the girls to distant, isolated beaches—they had to struggle down steep cliffsides, hanging dangerously from the horizontal roots of the ‘alula—where she would encourage them to remove their bathing suits and pretend they had been shipwrecked. Given Anna Shields’ notorious charm, it is not hard to see that this game would have been very alluring to Mamie. The girls would hunt in the naupaka for dried husks and pieces of torn net to use as loincloths and tools.
This fascination with desert isles was perhaps a reaction to the assault Mamie’s body was suddenly undergoing, as black hair began to grow under her arms, and on her rounded pubis, and swellings like little green peas began to ache under her nipples. This would be the conventional interpretation. Mamie yearned for and sought a kind of purity. In another family and another time, Mamie would have eventually entered the convent, taking the name of one of the more intellectual, masculine saints like Jerome.
It was a matter of temperament. Claire thrived on turmoil and intrigue with a heartless exuberance, but Mamie had begun by innocently trusting outward things to play their part. Lately she had come to realize that there was no promise that things would, or even could, play their part and her body was proving to be the most unreliable thing of all.
Perhaps it was this feeling of tentativeness and isolation that led her one hot afternoon into town and into the dusty photography studio of Mr. Yasunobu Tsugiyama. Mr. Tsugiyama’s modest business was to take photographs of Japanese wedding parties and small family groups, photographs to be ceremoniously sent back to Japan to provincial parents and grandparents. The solemn faces in the portraits could be framed, at the sitters’ choice, in hand tinted pink cherry blossoms or red temple gates. The photographs were used, too, as burial cards. Mamie had looked at them closely whenever she was in the Buddhist cemetery, pasted onto the gravemarkers, and prettily decorated with silk flowers and paper inscriptions when the grave was fresh.
Perhaps that is where she first had the idea of being photographed. Mr. Tsugiyama was certainly very surprised to see the haole girl come into his little store that humid day. He did not speak English very well, only a few words, but she spoke to him in English as if he could understand her, and she did not raise her voice or speak very slowly in a way that would have patronized him.
He ushered her through the faded calico curtain with elaborate politeness and sat her in a wooden folding chair and gave her a pink plastic mirror and comb.
She smoothed down her hair, and ruffled up her eyebrows with saliva the way Gertrude had taught her to do. She was wearing a lei of pikake. He moved her head, tilted her chin this way and that, and straightened her collar. She allowed him to pose her as he liked and then she froze obediently, holding the pose, while he studied her. The poses were not very sophisticated—an index finger held to the chin, cocked head resting on a fist—but Mamie did not know any better. She was concerned that his deep frown meant disapproval, but when he finished fussing and backed away from her, smiling, pleased with his work, she saw that it was only concentration that made him look so serious.
He disappeared under his black cloth. He took far more photographs of her than he would customarily have taken of the shy Japanese bride in her heavy wig and wedding kimono who was his usual subject. This odd, solemn child was altogether something out of his experience, and if he spent more time with her than was usual, it was because she interested him.
When they finished, they shook hands and bowed low several times. He watched her with curiosity as she went out into the harsh light. When she reached the corner, she looked back and bowed again.
In the middle of the afternoon, when Gertrude had an hour off, Mamie and Claire often went to Gertrude’s room at the back of the house, next to the garage, to lie on her small bed and entice her into telling them secrets. Whatever they knew of seduction, conception, abortion, betrayal, murder and seemingly, but not necessarily, less serious things such as how to keep a man or how to pierce ears with an ice cube and a lei needle, they learned in those happy afternoons with Gertrude. Sometimes it rained and the noise of the heavy, plump drops falling on the roof of the greenhouse made Mamie feel reassured and happy. Gertrude’s radio was always on and they listened to Golden Oldies and the surfing report: “Mahalepu has heavy swells, no crests; breaking to the left at three to five feet.” There was the sickening sweet smell of Lilac Vegetol hair cream on Gertrude’s pillow. It gave Mamie a headache. It was a man’s hairdressing, Mamie knew, very greasy and very popular with the straight-haired, black-haired boys from the camp. The camp boys called “bilat-bilat” to Mamie when she self-consciously pumped past them on her bike. When she’d asked Gertrude what bilat-bilat meant, Gertrude matter-of-factly said “cunt.”
Mary forbade Mamie to shave her legs, even though the dark-haired Mamie was always in shorts or a bathing suit, and embarrassed by the hair on her legs. Gertrude secretly took Mamie aside to show her how to remove the black hair with a sharp stone brought up from the beach. Gertrude had learned the primitive technique from her mother on her home island of Ilocos Norte. The hair removal was painful, the stone acting as a pumice. It removed the skin from Mamie’s legs as well as the hair. Mary had not noticed, even though Mamie’s legs were bright red for several days. Claire, of course, had the nerve to wonder, after the terrible suffering Mamie endured while Gertrude vigorously planed her raw calves, why Mamie did not buy a razor with her allowance.
“This is how her mother taught her,” Mamie said, trying to be patient. “It is authentic, and even romantic. Like being a castaway on a lonely isle.”
“Romantic? Your legs are bleeding, Mamie.”
“You are more modern than I am, Claire. I like to pretend I live in a distant past.”
“You act like you’re someone in a story.” Claire would have soaped and shaved her legs in front of her mother if she’d felt like it. She was not cautious, as was Mamie, but her assumption that she was entitled to have her way did rob her of a certain tenderness.
Gertrude was full of other kinds of lore as well, requiring less physical pain, perhaps, but just as thrilling to Mamie. She told them, for example, that Orval Nalag’s older brother, Clinton, who played first string football at Castle High, had made Ann Portago, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the state senator, pregnant. Or, as Gertrude put it, “knock-up.” Ann Portago had disappeared from the face of the earth two weeks earlier and the girls had been told that she had mononucleosis and had been sent to Santa Barbara, Calif
ornia, so the girls knew that Gertrude was telling the truth.
Gertrude had been born a twin. The other baby, a girl, had died at birth. Gertrude’s mother came every year from the Philippines to visit her, bringing a suitcase full of the same hand-embroidered placemats as presents. Gertrude’s mother took on new importance to them when Gertrude nonchalantly said that when her mother had felt the birth contractions begin, she had ignored their warning, as she was having her nails done at the time (What color? Claire asked) and they were not yet dry. That was Gertrude’s mother’s explanation for the death of Gertrude’s own other self and Gertrude accepted it with a passive and uncritical literalness. That this explanation of the unnecessary death made sense to Gertrude, that it had a kind of sympathetic logic, that it was, most importantly, without blame or sorrowing guilt, was an amazement to Mamie. Gertrude knew that grief and bereavement took up an unreasonable amount of invisible energy. Both sisters admired her deeply—Claire, because she recognized another realist (wet nails are, in the end, as good an explanation as any for blind tragedy) and Mamie because she recognized her opposite, her happy opposite.
Mamie was trying not to let the smell of the hair cream make her sick as she watched Claire sing along with James Brown, “(Get Up, I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine.” Claire used Jimmy as a microphone, switching his tail back and forth with her free hand as if it were a microphone cord. She made Mamie laugh. Gertrude passed her Vicks nose inhaler to Mamie for a good, head-clearing pull on it.
Gertrude said that Sharlagne had told her that morning that Dicky Herbert, whose father had bought him a surplus army tank, had taken a pipe of hashish and two green bananas and a girl from the Koloa Camp named Imelda, in honor of the wife of the Philippine president, into the tank and driven to the waterfall at the end of Knudsen Gap, destroying the Knudsens’ famous plantation of rare croton bushes.
The Whiteness of Bones Page 4
