by Pamela Moses
I watched as she parted her lips to apply the color, then mustered my courage. “Can you put a little on me?”
Usually she relented, dotting my bottom lip with a pale coat. As I inspected my reflection in the mirror, I wished for another coat of lipstick and plumper lips like hers.
“Ooh, la, la! So grown up,” she would say, laughing over her shoulder as she fastened gold starfish earrings to her ears. “Try not to drive the boys too crazy!”
And I would steal a second glance at the mirror, wondering what it was about my expression or the makeup on my mouth that amused her.
Mother, it seemed, knew many things about men, secrets of how they thought and what they liked. In California, after the divorce, she had dated frequently. One blond man had lasted for two months—Cyrus, who reminded me of a fairer version of the photo of my father, which Mother kept among the many snapshots in her travel album. And in these first weeks on the island, I began to notice, everywhere we went, men asked her name, told her jokes, stroked their fingers along her arms. Sometimes I saw other women staring in our direction, and I would toss my shoulders proudly, smiling at the attention.
• • •
Dinner at the Passionflower began at six, and it was Mother’s job to seat the guests and check their meals, and to make sure the customers at the bar received a steady flow of drinks. For the first two hours or so she floated from table to table beneath the restaurant’s palm frond awning, pausing to chat with the diners at one table before gliding on to the next. So there was little for me to do. Most nights I asked Atneil, the bartender, for a ginger soda with ice. “Thank you so much, Atneil,” I would coo, imitating Mother’s soft voice, forcing myself to draw nearer despite the ragged scar on his neck, which gave me gooseflesh, and offering him my hand as she did now and then. From the cooks in the kitchen, local island women, I ordered curried chicken or lamb stew or fried conch fritters, depending on my mood. If they were not too busy, they let me watch as they cleaned redeye fish or gutted chicken cavities, wiping scales and blood across their apron fronts and singing songs about the island, about whalers out to sea and the heartbreak of poor Josiah Moody, abandoned by his cheating wife. When I joined in singing the parts I’d learned, they chuckled. “Funny child! Don’t you have better things to do than watch a bunch of biddies work!” I shrugged and then shook my head, which only made them chuckle more. “Will you sing the one about the fisherman’s daughter?” I would ask. Usually they gave in, sometimes sharing with me the hunks of papaya or toasted coconut they munched from bowls. Then when they tired of singing, I carried my plate to the bamboo love seat against the wall of the hotel. I took tiny swallows of soda and poked at my conch or chunks of lamb, trying to make my supper last, passing the time until the dinner crowd thinned and I could rejoin Mother.
When the families and couples began to disperse, Mother chose a table at the open end of the floor, closest to the sand, and faced the shore, inhaling the salt of the ocean.
“Surprise me!” she would say, throwing her hands in the air, when one of the kitchen staff asked what she wished to eat. Holding a fresh glass of ginger soda, I would slide into a chair beside her.
“Goodness, Opal, you scared me! I forgot you were still downstairs!” Her loud words confused me because I could not tell if she was annoyed or merely teasing.
“Where did you think I went?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Off with one of the hunky British boys!” She laughed, and I tried to laugh in her same careless manner, not wanting her to think how childishly, impatiently I’d waited for the end of her shift.
Then within a minute or two, it seemed, a man approached, looming over our table. Sometimes he was an acquaintance, a resident of the island who frequented the bar, but more often a stranger, a guest of the hotel or the skipper of a boat in the harbor. He had not yet eaten, he would say. Would my mother mind some company? He swirled a glass of pale brown liquid and handed her the cocktail stuck with slender straws. He was from France, he said, or Italy, New York, California, Brazil. As he sniffed, I could see into the dark nostrils of his carved rock of a nose. And Mother would smile, nodding at the wicker chair across from us, sipping at the straws in her drink. She waited until his dinner arrived before beginning her own. “Sharing a meal with a man is a gesture of intimacy,” I remembered her telling me once, and I’d wondered if she and my father had eaten together in this way; though I knew he’d been a part of her life only briefly, a season of just a few months while she’d lived in Europe.
In a man’s presence, Mother ate differently from when we were alone. At home, in San Francisco, she had made chicken cutlets or ordered mu shu pork and Chinese noodles from the Shanghai Palace down the street. And at our kitchen counter, we had piled the food onto our plates, scooping forkfuls almost without tasting as Carly Simon played on the stereo. Now she savored every bite, cutting delicately into kingfish or spiced shrimp.
“This is divine,” she would say, arching her neck so that I could see each swallow. And I noticed the man always watched, too.
“Try a bite of mine,” he would offer, and they would both stretch across the table, turning their shoulders from me so that she could reach his fork. Afterward, they might share a dessert—a slice of coconut pie, a bowl of orangey mango sherbet. In slow rhythm, their spoons dipped into the dish, and the man would regale Mother with stories. She would tilt her head to one side and lick at the corners of her mouth. “Do you know how beautiful you are?” the man would tell her, and they would begin to joke about things I struggled to understand.
“You don’t mind if I take your mama out for a sail under the stars?” a Portuguese banker with a mustache that coiled at the ends like periwinkle shells asked me one evening. “I promise to have her back by daylight!” Mother giggled into her glass.
“Oh, I love to sail,” I said, speaking rapidly, as they did, crossing my arms on the table in my most sophisticated manner. But to my dismay, this only made them laugh harder. The man rattled the ice in his drink and gazed at Mother. “That’s not quite what I had in mind.”
“Oh, to be eleven and innocent again.” Mother let out an exaggerated sigh, and she and the man smiled as they tapped their glass rims together, making a dull clink.
I began to pull at a stray thread in the hem of my shorts, sensing that my ignorance was the subject of their toast, hoping the blood I felt rising to my cheeks wasn’t visible in the dimness.
Some nights Mother sent me up the stairs to bed alone, telling me to go to sleep—she would follow soon. But though I listened for her key in the door for what seemed long hours, she rarely returned before I drifted off. And the next morning, when she breezed into my room, smelling faintly of seawater and cologne, I wondered what excitement I had missed.
How enticing this adult world was, full of whispered jokes and mysterious secrets. And often, in my nighttime dreams, I imagined I, too, was a part of it, that I had learned the grown-up ways of speaking and acting that allowed my inclusion.
So I began with the bottled peanuts we kept in our room, experimenting in the mornings before Mother awoke, nibbling with my mouth closed, shutting my eyes dreamily as I chewed. I tried purring softly in enjoyment the way she did. When the local boys with fishing rods slung over their shoulders passed our beach towel, I lay on my side, a hand on my hip, like the ladies on the covers of magazines Mother read, and practiced eating plantain chips in my new alluring fashion.
“Do I look older than eleven?” I asked Mother.
She shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted at me. “Oh, infinitely. Easily twelve or thirteen.” But a flickering in her smile as she turned again to her latest paperback made me determined to try harder.
• • •
On Saturdays, we visited the market in the center of town. For these excursions, Mother laid two or three sundresses on her bed, holding them against her one at a time before choosing. She donned her large-brimmed straw beach hat and round, black sunglasses. Before the mirror,
she arranged the hat at various perches until she found the prettiest angle. Then we strolled along the road by the water, following the path lined with palm trees to avoid the swelter of the midday sun.
“‘Oh, the fisherman’s daughter, she cry, she CRY . . .’” I sang out the words I’d learned from the White Heron’s cooks.
“Is this performance for the benefit of the whole island?” Mother joked when my voice swelled.
At rickety stands under the tree branches, local women sat beading coral bracelets. “Lovely ladies! Something pretty for your wrists? Just five U.S. dollars for such lovely ladies.” I waved as we passed, wishing I had a pair of heeled sandals like Mother’s that clicked on the pavement.
Some Saturdays we browsed through the boutiques. My favorite was called Lusanne’s by the Sea. It was where my mother had bought her straw hat and two sleeveless blouses with frills adorning the chest. Everything in the shop flashed with bright colors—purple shell pendants that hung in the windows, gauzy skirts printed with birds or giant flowers, beach wraps that stirred on their hangers in the breeze from the open door. One morning the boutique bustled with tourists from a Norwegian cruise ship. Pale women fondled the trinkets and garments. In the doorway leaned three boys who looked close to my age. They were laughing with open mouths, taunting each other, pointing to some of the women and teenage girls in bikinis who sauntered up from the beach. I smiled at the tallest boy and gave a quick flutter of my eyelids. But he didn’t seem to notice, and I suddenly longed to be wearing something other than my baggy shorts and flat shoes. At the back of Lusanne’s was a small selection of sandals, all with cloth straps and thick, angled heels like Mother’s. I slipped my feet into one of the sample pairs and studied my reflection in the full-length dressing mirror, then strode across the room toward the boys, swinging my hips from side to side with each step.
“Sexy girl,” hissed one of the boys in his Nordic accent, bobbing his chin at me. His eyes trailed from my waist to my feet, and I sucked at my cheeks to keep from grinning.
To my delight, Mother agreed to buy me the shoes as well as a checkered halter top with gathered pleats in front, which gave me, for the first time, the illusion of a tiny bust. That evening, I allowed extra time in readying myself for dinner, adjusting my halter top until its folds fell in the most flattering places, winding the straps of my sandals high above my ankles. When Mother disappeared into the bathroom, lathering her legs with scented lotion, I asked if I could try applying her lipstick on my own.
“Ooh, quite the little lady tonight, aren’t we?” she said, but though I waited, she added nothing further, only shook the contents of her lotion bottle.
So I fished through her cosmetic bag until I found the tube, then, with careful strokes, coated my top and bottom lips with a thicker layer than I had worn before.
Downstairs, while Mother attended to the dinner guests, I leaned against one of the wooden pillars dividing the dining area from the bar. A family with two boys my age or slightly older sat at a table to my right. I spun the ice in my ginger soda, checking my halter top now and then to make certain the pleats had not shifted. With each lull in the family’s conversation, I gently kicked one of my sandaled feet into the air, flexing my calf, the bare skin of my neck and shoulders prickling as I imagined their eyes on me. But it was one of the men at the bar who noticed me first, a Carib Indian whom I had seen at the Passionflower once or twice before.
“Enjoying your drink, missy?” He cocked his head to one side, staring, so that I felt he absorbed every bit of me from the silver barrette in my hair to the wedge heels of my new shoes. Like other Carib Indians on the island, he had high cheekbones, dark eyes, and such a smooth, brown complexion that it was impossible to tell his age.
I nodded and sipped from the thin straw in my soda, trying to remember Mother’s dainty way of swallowing.
“What do you have there? A Coca-Cola with rum?” He motioned with two fingers for me to take a step closer.
I smiled as I did so, pleased with his assumption. “No, just a soda,” I said, as though it were simply my choice for this particular evening.
He grinned so that I could see the pink crescents of his gums and lifted his Hairoun beer to his lips. “Do you have a name, miss?”
“Opal,” I told him, lowering my voice to a half-whisper as my mother did when introducing herself to men.
“Ah, a pretty name for a pretty girl.” His mouth glistened wet from his beer. I flushed from the flattery, not knowing what to say.
He told me that his name was Donavan and asked what he could buy me from the bar, pointing to my nearly empty glass.
“Another soda, please,” I said, swinging my leg so that the overhead lantern light caught my sandals.
As he handed me the glass, his fingers grazed mine for an instant, just as I had watched men do who offered drinks to Mother.
That night, under the cool of my sheets, I silently recited Donavan’s compliments. He liked my shirt, he’d said, the way it didn’t quite meet my shorts. He liked the strand of coral beads around my neck, which, he’d declared between swallows of beer, looked very grown-up. For hours I watched the wind twisting my curtains and the honey-yellow moon gleaming through my open shutters, wakeful with eager thoughts.
The following week, I convinced Mother to buy me a second halter top and a fitted red miniskirt with a calla lily painted on the pocket. And I began while dressing to take scraps of toilet tissue from the bathroom and fold them into two wads. These I arranged under the cotton of my blouse so that two small mounds protruded. I was learning the right clothes to wear, the way to stand with my hip askew and smile in order to draw attention. I was discovering the womanly manner of chattering nonchalantly that invited approving, winking eyes.
No longer did I eat my suppers in solitude on the bamboo love seat in the corner, finding that if I lingered near the bar, pointing my toes, glancing every so often at the crowd, it was only a matter of time before Donavan or one of his friends approached me with a soda and soft phrases that seemed to seep through my skin. “Looking so lovely in your skirt tonight, missy.” “Such a nice smile you have, miss. Sweet like sugar.”
One evening after Mother finished her shift, I announced to her the many attentions I had received that night, tossing my wrists as I spoke as though these were things to which I had grown quite accustomed.
“Oh, Opal,” she said, sweeping her fingers through her hair so that it fanned behind her neck. And she shook her head, her lips curling as though I had made some silly mistake. “Lord knows how many drinks those men have had!”
No! No! She didn’t understand how their eyes had glittered as they talked to me, how their voices had crooned with meaning. But before I could tell her, Mother was joined by some visitor from a neighboring table. Within minutes they were deep in conversation, their shoulders brushing, no longer aware of my presence.
Midway through the summer, a group of twelve Americans arrived at the White Heron. They would stay for five weeks, we learned, in the guest bungalows at the far end of the courtyard. Among the twelve were two middle-aged couples, a family with three small children—white as the guinea fowl in Ezra Dupree’s coop, two young women who wore matching hair scarves, and a graying, olive-skinned man who reminded me of Cary Grant, the old movie actor. Raymond Mordue, we soon discovered, was his name.
“He’s handsome, isn’t he,” Mother said, spotting him across the restaurant patio as we descended for dinner.
“Oh, yes,” I agreed, repeating her enthusiastic tone. “Very handsome.”
She shook her head with amusement as if she hadn’t really expected me to respond. “A little old for you, my pet, don’t you think?” she laughed.
I smiled as broadly as I could in case she should suspect the lump tightening in my throat. Then I watched as she glided off to seat the first table of guests, the diaphanous rose of her skirt fluttering behind.
Late into the third evening of his stay, after dining with his frie
nds, Raymond Mordue meandered toward the dimly lit table where I had joined Mother, and asked if he might pull up a chair. He wore a thick cologne that tickled my nostrils, like the scented incense coils that burned in some of the local shops. He had just returned from traveling through all of Asia and much of Africa, he said, having recently retired from his job in advertising. He traced his tanned fingers over the tabletop as he spoke, outlining a map of his route. In the autumn, he would be joining a friend’s wine import business, but a few decadent weeks in the Caribbean seemed a perfect conclusion to his time off. Unlike the other men whose company Mother had accepted, Raymond addressed his every word to both of us. As he told of safaris in Kenya, mountain hikes through Tibet, he gazed into my eyes as well as Mother’s, was pleased, I thought, with my interest as much as hers. I nodded as he talked and propped my hands on the table edge, displaying the iridescent pink with which I’d polished my nails earlier in the day. Every few moments I peered at Mother, wondering if she recognized the way I was being included.
Soon Raymond began to join us not only for drinks but for meals. In the afternoons, too, he would find us on the beach and, removing his terrycloth shirt, stretch in his swim trunks alongside our towels. Always he arrived bearing some special food that he had purchased from one of the vendors in town—papaya juice, lime-colored breadfruits, guava jam, pumpkin bread.
“One should always experience new tastes, don’t you think?” he said in his smooth voice that seemed to match the hush of the waves.
“I couldn’t agree more.” Mother smiled, then bit into soursop ice cream or a custard apple, allowing shining rivulets of juice to trickle down her chin, giggling and licking her lips as Raymond dotted below her mouth with the corner of his shirt.
