“Because you were so sore?” Claire asked innocently. Mamie kicked her under the table.
“My dear, it had nothing to do with that. The dirty pigs had upset my mind, eh?”
Mamie, who worried about the seeming inability of men and women to really like each other, felt an unexpected relief that men and women did not, after all, understand each other better. It is the only way the world can work, she thought. If they really knew, really understood, the fear and contempt, all of the women in this restaurant would be obliged to leap to their feet to cut off the penises of their lunch partners with the grape scissors, just as the men would be forgiven for lunging across the tables in a final attempt to settle their fingers tightly around the inflamed throats of the women. I got off easy, Mamie thought. An old, calloused hand in a pair of palaka shorts.
The women were talking about houses. Apollonia had taken a wing in an hôtel particulier in the Marais and she invited them all to come to stay.
“I suffered greatly in the childhood from big houses,” Apollonia said.
“Poor thing,” said Alysse. She gestured to the waiter to pour more champagne.
“I was thinking about this the other day,” Mamie said. “I’ve never believed that suffering makes you a finer person, have you?”
They looked at her. She had abruptly altered the tone of the lunch. She saw that Claire was watching her with an amused, challenging smile.
“This whole notion,” she went on quickly, “that suffering gives strength of character. Isn’t it just the opposite—that strength of character is what enables you to undergo suffering?”
“I know where you’re coming from,” said Claire, just to make Mamie crazy.
“Where am I coming from? Iowa? Switzerland? I wish I knew,” Mamie said, blushing.
“I’ll be in Gstaad in January,” said Apollonia. “You must come to stay with me, eh?”
These people are always inviting you somewhere, Mamie thought.
“Lady Studd is here,” Alysse said in a low voice to Apollonia. “Two tables down. With that Iranian.”
“You mean Persian, no? Nada mais Iranian.”
“Is she the skinny woman in black?” Claire asked. “I’ve been watching her eat. She ate everything on her plate, then everything on his plate, all the bread and butter, then three desserts. She should weigh three hundred pounds.”
“Oh, she’ll be home in an hour vomiting,” Alysse said dismissively. “She taught me how to do it years ago: you drink two glasses of milk or eat some ice cream to coat your stomach—”
“Exactement!” said Apollonia with approval.
“And then you put your fingers down your throat. Of course, it eventually ruins your digestive system and leaves you unable to control some parts of your body. Poor Georgiana. There have been complaints about stains on tapestry chairs.”
Although Mamie was fairly hypnotized by this information, as well as by the matter-of-fact tone of her aunt, and while even Claire was set back a bit, the two older women, pleased with the world, gazed contentedly around the room. They did everything but lick their paws and velvet muzzles. People were finishing lunch and standing to say good-bye, and there were blown kisses and pantomimed promises to telephone and to soon meet. The women held their eyes open very, very wide, which gave them a startled, slightly insane expression, as if they were feigning extreme interest in something that bored them very much, and the men had a benign, sated look, as they took out their cigars for a quiet smoke on the drive back downtown, more than delighted to leave all of the fuss and exaggeration and exclamation to the animated women. The men were there as angels, as theatrical investors; the show that day simply being “lunch.”
Alysse and Apollonia carefully took it all in while they sipped their double espressos. Apollonia reapplied her fuchsia lipstick by looking into a knife blade held horizontally before her beautiful, placid face.
Lady Studd stopped at their table on her way out of the restaurant. She was very thin. “How are you?” she asked Apollonia in the barely disguised, avid tone of someone longing to hear bad news. “I know how you are!” she said gaily to Alysse.
Alysse laughed loudly and asked for the check.
Later, lying on their beds, Mamie forced Claire to admit that, like herself, she had had to use all of her self-control not to stare at the back of Lady Studd’s dress.
“It looked all right to me,” Mamie said, somewhat disappointed.
“You never can tell with black,” said Claire.
SEVEN
Mamie and Claire spent quite a bit of time lying on their beds. Alysse was invited out almost every night and the girls did not expect, or want, a begrudging Lydia to prepare dinner for them. With the last of Mamie’s saved rent money, they bought a cheap cassette player and Mamie carried home food they could eat out of a bag. She also bought long stalks of tuberose to put on the little table between the beds. The room smelled like the tuberose and french fries.
They stretched out on top of the covers and ate their greasy, delicious dinners and listened to the tapes Claire had brought from home—Coleman Hawkins, Mamie’s Brazilian sambas, James Brown, and the Hawaiian slack-key guitarist, Gabby Pahinui. Mamie worried only briefly about their nutrition. They were careful to throw out the grease-stained bags and paper wrappings when they were finished so as not to offend Alysse, and they sometimes had to light scented candles when the smell of the food (pepperoni pizza, sauerkraut) overcame the smell of the tuberose. Claire, who was looking for employment, read the want ads aloud while Mamie took off her shoes and stockings and washed her hands.
There were letters from Mary, separate letters, for Mamie and Claire. Claire started to read her letter, but did not make it through to the end. Mamie read her letter dutifully.
Dear Mamie,
I certainly think it is nice that Claire is visiting you during her school break. She deserves a vacation. She was studying so hard. Every time I would telephone, her roommate said she was in the library. How nice that it is open all night.
Boar hunters sighted in Na Pali a nest of the rare Laysan albatross. They are sending a team from the museum to try to track them and some of the old people here think it’s a bad idea. No bracelets on holy birds, Mrs. Kaona told me.
The ‘akala raspberry is coming into fruit at Koke‘e and even though I love its early bitter taste, it is a dangerous, invasive plant. After the tidal wave, I used to prize the specimens labeled “invasive” in my horticulture books—they would do the work for me and overnight. I don’t think you will remember how bare the garden was, on the Kekaha side. Beautiful in its way, but not as beautiful as now with the bamboo that never stops moving and whispering.
I am going to Wainiha, to the cottage where old Malia Kaanehe spent her girlhood summers. She says it is so changed now, but, of course, I don’t see it, and I’m rather glad I don’t. I do think lovely Hanalei must have been the Garden of Eden.
Love,
Mother
Mamie asked Claire if she could read her letter, dropped to the floor, but it was already lost in the daily scree of crumpled wrappers, tear-out magazine subscription cards, underwear and Dos Equis beer bottles.
The letters made Mamie depressed because they reminded her of all the things she was trying so hard to keep tamped deep in her memory. Mamie remembered that Mrs. Kaona had named her after the albatross, Ka‘upu, the bird that observes the ocean, because Mamie was so watchful. She remembered that ‘akala was prescribed by the herbalists to obtain forgiveness.
While Claire ate Cheez Doodles and watched “Three’s Company” on the little television in the armoire, Mamie tried to understand just what it was in her mother’s letters that filled her with such grief. The very words “Wainiha” and “girlhood summers” were enough to fill her eyes with tears. I must be homesick, she thought. It is only that, nothing more. She had already noticed that a recording of Louis Armstrong singing “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” caused her heart to feel as if it
were being crushed between her ribs. Even though it is the kind of sentimentality I most dislike, it is only homesickness, she said to herself. I will get over it.
Mamie had all the courage of her naïveté. It was lucky that she did, for it was neither homesickness nor sentiment that were slowly breaking her heart. It was something that had begun, years earlier, under the gummy, dusty boughs of a banyan tree.
Mamie had so far managed to learn little from Claire of the extraordinary circumstances that had brought her sister so happily and unexpectedly to Sixty-fifth Street and Park Avenue. Claire was not very forthcoming. It was more a matter of temperament than a need to conceal or a desire for privacy. She tended not to reconsider. She did not sift through the past for clues. Mamie had learned long ago that Claire saw things in a way altogether different from her own view, so Mamie was always very interested to hear Claire’s version of things. She questioned Claire ceaselessly about the past, not because she required pure information, nor to reinforce her own cool, fastidious memory, but because the variations in the story thrilled her.
“You must have sneaked out to see Orval that time you said you were going to paddling practice.”
“I never made the crew and Orval was with his grandmother at McBryde Plantation.”
“I thought his grandmother drowned in that accident.”
“No.”
The constant surprise of this freshly created past confirmed Mamie’s suspicion of her own individuality, and the individuality of others. It gave her, too, the beginning of an idea: memory, happily, was not the same thing as truth.
“Well, how did it happen then?”
“What?”
“With Orval. How did you get pregnant? It’s awfully hard to get pregnant these days, isn’t it?”
Mamie’s own sexual life was limited. That is to say, the act of sexual intercourse had so far played only a small part in Mamie’s life, while her sensuality was unexplored and unlimited. The best part, it seemed to her, had been the kissing. The hours and hours, all through the night, that she had spent kissing boys. Kissing in moored boats, kissing between trees in the cool palm grove, in the chapel at school, in Dicky Herbert’s airless tank, on the reef at low tide, while baby-sitting, while making lei haku, on horseback, on wet sand that exploded with phosphorescence every time she moved. When she thought back, she could not always remember just who the boy had been. This was not an injustice to her partner, it was only that the sensation, the passion really, was so strong that the boys seemed to melt into one big, delirious boy who could kiss all night long (Gertrude used to say to her when she scratched on the back door at four in the morning, “You look like you been smash-up, girl”). The expectancy and excitement she had felt before the date, the nervous preparation (toothpaste, mouthwash, Q-Tips, deodorant), the lies to Mary (“Oh, we’re just going to Lily Shields’ to see her father’s slides of Angkor Wat”), the deep, deep comfort and excitement of those kisses. There was even a time in the night when both pairs of lips and two tongues and the area all around the mouths were numb, but even though all sensation, at least in those parts of the body, was lost, the kissing did not stop. Once her boyfriend, Billy Quinn, leaned her against a telephone pole to kiss her, and she was so moved by this kiss that when he finally released her, she keeled over stiffly. Little clouds of red Kaua‘i dust bloomed around her. He thought that he had killed her until he heard her moan in happiness.
Mamie was considered a wild, bad girl by the mothers who themselves opened back doors to dazed, chafed sons. In fact, she was chaste. Her wildness was only the beginning, unconscious struggle for exemption from the passivity expected of her as a girl. It was a proud, impassioned attempt to escape the limitations she was beginning to feel as a woman.
It was the boys of her adolescence who first experienced her imperiousness; her sudden, irrational changes of heart; her instability and contrariness; her high, high sense of separateness. All of these things that passed for wildness in Mamie were only signs of a disorganized resistance to combat the false femininity that the world was forcing upon her.
If the night was about kissing, the day was about daring. The same thunderstruck boys who lay next to her on the cold sand staring up at the drifting stars while they embraced had to endure her untiring energy by day. There was not a challenge she would not accept. She provoked challenge. There was no vine footbridge she would not cross, no matter how dilapidated; no race she would not run; no tree she would not climb.
There were contests of chicken on the Kekaha highway. There was even a mysterious robbery (two jars of pigs’ feet were stolen at the feed store). There were practical jokes (Lily Shields received pigs’ feet for her birthday from a secret admirer). She grew famous for her recklessness, if famous is not too strong a word considering the smallness of her world.
It wasn’t about sex at all. With all of her hair-flinging and teasing and kissing, Mamie was very inexperienced sexually. It was a pose. Mamie had recognized instinctively that she was not going to win (perhaps that is why she refused to go further than kissing), but there was a bravado and an exuberant sweetness about her struggle—it was not that comfortable kissing all night long in the ridged bottom of a boat.
Mamie snapped out of her reckless defiance the moment that she lost her virginity. It was during her sophomore year at college. Overnight, she became well-behaved and acquiescent, no longer demanding more than her share. The mothers who had so disapproved of her in her kissing days would have approved of her then. Stupefied by the years of their own passivity and forgetful of their own meager struggle, they would have gladly welcomed the rehabilitated Mamie into their unhappy midst.
Her old feelings did not disappear, of course, just because she finally allowed a nice, funny boy from San Diego to force his way inside of her the night after the Rose Bowl. Like all good resistance fighters, she simply went underground. She stopped kissing all night long. She waited for something to happen. She did not know it, but she missed the feel of dry plumeria leaves slowly crushed to powder on the ground beneath her, and a big-shouldered, sweet-smelling, sweet-smiling island boy lying over her, kissing her.
“It wasn’t that hard,” Claire said. “I’d been fucking him since I was thirteen.”
Mamie slowly rewrapped her cheeseburger and neatly repacked it in the bag. She rolled up the bag and set it down on the needlepoint rug between the beds. She was shocked.
“Why did you never tell me? I wanted to know.”
“Oh, Mamie.” Claire laughed. “How could you have wanted to know if you didn’t know?”
“I mean I would have helped you.”
“Helped me?”
“I would have been your friend and you could have told me things.”
“I tried to tell you once. Remember the time I had to go to the clinic because I said that I already had a Tampax in and I put in a second one? And when the nurse was cleaning up the room, she said, ‘Next time you have sex, girly, be sure to take it out.’ I told you what she said, as a way of telling you, and you said, ‘Oh, what a mean person.’
“I believed you.”
“Mamie, you believe everybody.”
“I don’t really. But I believed you.”
Claire could no longer pretend that Mamie was not upset. She sighed loudly and moved over to Mamie’s bed. They sat side by side.
“You didn’t miss much,” Claire said gently. “I used to sneak out to meet him during the summer. We did it the first time in the banyan tree.”
“The banyan?”
“It was pretty uncomfortable.”
“You used to say that Orval liked me.”
“I think he did. But then he gave up.”
“I do feel that I missed something. It might have been good for me if I had known.”
“You were always off fording a fucking river. Or reading.”
“You are this wonderful mutant, Claire,” said Mamie quietly. “You have just what you need. You’re not stupid and humorless like Aunt Ali
ce and you’re not dumb and serious like me. You’re some genetic She-of-the-Future. You’ll be all right. You’ll be perfect.”
“And you won’t be?”
“Oh. Me. I don’t know about me. I wish I could be like you.”
“I always wanted to be like you. And care passionately about things. But I don’t. I don’t know why, but I don’t. You’ve always had these strong feelings about things. I could feel strongly about your cheeseburger, however.”
Mamie eased herself back on to her pillow, leaving her legs hanging awkwardly over the side. She moved in the careful way of someone who has been slightly injured; someone who does not yet know the extent of the damage, but is moving cautiously nonetheless.
“No, I don’t want it,” she said.
Claire turned over the Coleman Hawkins tape and moved back to her own bed. She ate the rest of Mamie’s cold cheeseburger, using her flat stomach as a table. She kept time to “You’re Blasé” with her pretty foot.
Everything that Mamie knew, she knew from books and her own watchfulness, but it seemed to her that other people, like Claire and Alysse, were more fully informed than she was about the world and how things worked. Where had they received their information? And how? Mamie was bewildered. Her mother used to say to her, “You are your own worst enemy,” an observation Mamie thought neither original nor true. She had always thought it was just the opposite.
She was inhibited by her extreme notion of responsibility. It was not an exaggerated sense of omnipotence, but an expectation that the consequences of her actions would be unbearable. She had taken responsibility for Hiroshi, for McCully, for the banyan tree, for the vines ripped by Mary from the fence, for Gertrude and Sherry Alden, but she could not act on her own behalf.
The years at boarding school had been full of gaiety. Perhaps I was very busy, she thought. I was very busy and I didn’t realize just how stricken I was. It was not until her last year at college that it seemed to catch up with her. When it did, she was unable to move. I am in a period of recovery, she had said to calm herself. It is grief, she had thought. This was the period when she broke up with her boyfriend, Tom Sheehan from San Diego, whom she had continued to sleep with, after losing her virginity to him, in order to justify his victory. It was not that she disliked him or had minded the relinquishing of her maidenhood. It was the disappointment of it, the commonplace loss, that had surprised and confused her. By giving Tommy Sheehan significance in her life, she gave significance to the act. She had wondered if other girls felt the same way. She had not asked them. She wrote to Lily Shields, who left the Big House for good when she was seventeen, and spent her small trust fund moving from country to country, and Lily wrote back that just as young men were sent to brothels to be introduced to the mysteries of sex, so young women should be taken in hand by practiced, older men who knew what they were about. She herself had been lucky to find such a man in Asolo, even though in her case it was a little late, as she was already the mother of a young child. She was no help to Mamie. She is in a state of amiable depression, Mamie had thought, and knows nothing. Following her advice, I should have slept with the loathsome Mr. Kipper. Mr. Kipper was a Yugoslav professor who waylaid Mamie one night as she walked back to her dorm and asked if she would show him her breasts. What is the matter with them? she had wondered. Do women lurk about waiting to ask men to show them their balls? Their cocks?
The Whiteness of Bones Page 9
