“Yeah, there’s, um, I’d say, um, let me count, and let me use my fingers to count. Three, four, okay, there’s about six of us living in this staff house, and the rest live in the other one. We call that one Two- Faced Junior. Mainly the cooks are over in Two-Faced Junior.” He tossed his cigarette on the tile floor and stomped it.
“I think it’s dead,” said Vicki.
“Gotta be sure with all this trash on the floor. Can’t let a single spark go.”
“So, where’s my room?”
“Hark! Your room is down the hall. I’m guessing you’re ready to drop your anchor about now.” Denver slipped on a torn magazine page lying on the floor, but his reflexes were surprisingly agile, and he continued floating onward. She had to bend down to make it through the splintered wooden door, painted the color of an old dock. Inside, the walls were painted the color of a swamp coated with light moss or mold.
“This is your boat slip,” said Denver.
“What are you talking about? This is my room? There’s no furniture!”
She ran over to the one and only tiny round window and glanced out. “Thank God!” she declared. “I’m on the side facing the water and the sunset.”
“The newcomer always starts with just a mattress. The next time someone quits and leaves the island, we hold a sort of auction based on good old seniority. You’ll get to grab one piece of furniture just as soon as someone else leaves the island.”
“Oh. There are no sheets on the mattress.” Vicki pointed to the mattress on the floor, then looked down at her sandals. She could barely see her plum-colored toenail polish hidden under the sand. “And they don’t supply us with towels? I should have asked more questions during the interview.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got an extra sheet and pillowcase you can use. I’ll bring it to ya later. It ain’t any problem at all!” Denver flipped the mattress over to hide yellow-and-brown stains. “You don’t want to sleep on that side. The springs are popping out.”
“Oh, dear Lord.” She knew that if she said such a thing, she owed God the respect of saying a prayer. Oh dear Lord, I should have declined this job. I would be happier had I not taken this opportunity. I want to trust in You. Did You put me here, or did I put me here? That is what I struggle with most. How do I know if You are leading me or if I’m making wrong decisions completely on my own? Well, regardless, I’m begging You for help.
“Please don’t leave me,” she whined.
“I don’t have to leave ya. I can stay a bit longer,” said Denver, plopping himself down on her mattress. “Ya like your room?”
She held her breath a moment because, when she inhaled, her heart ripped. She could only blame herself for not asking more questions when she was interviewed, and for lying to Ruth about the tour she never took.
“Denver, you never showed me the staff house the day I was interviewed.”
“You never asked,” he replied.
“So, do we get to vote people off this island?”
“Hey,” he said. “You don’t have to like me, but ya better like Mr. Two-Face. He knows when someone doesn’t like him.”
“Mr. Two-Face is a bungalow! It’s not a person!”
“I’m warning you. Be nice to him,” he whispered.
“I don’t know what kind of medication you’re taking, but this is an inanimate object that we’re in. I don’t know why we are talking about him, it, whatever, in the first place, as if it was alive.”
“You better say something nice about him, or he might scare ya. You’ve gotta see the good in things, even when it’s hard to see, or your fears will really scare ya.”
“My, isn’t that profound!” she declared.
“Well? Can’t you give a compliment?”
“I like his long legs. I’ve never lived in a house on stilts before. We don’t have stilted homes where I come from. Although a lock on my door would be nice,” she said, examining her exfoliated bedroom door.
“Trust me, now.”
“Trust you? I don’t know you.”
“You’ll be safe. We’re all courteous here. And don’t mind the floors. Without pavement on the island, they can’t stay clean. No one’s to blame for it. Are you the clean type?”
“You could say that.” She wasn’t going to tell him that as a kid she’d dust the head of every doll and vacuum her own carpet once a week. “I’m an extreme neat-freak. In fact, I had this horrible habit for a while.”
“Sure, I understand. Alcohol? Drugs?”
“No, nothing like that!” Dressed in a pastel-colored floral print sundress, she stared around the room as she spoke. “We’re talking about cleaning, aren’t we? I used to spray my light bulbs with Windex until they’d explode. That’s before I learned to turn them off and let them cool before spraying them.”
“Yeah, reminds me of rehab. This might take some getting used to. But hey, I better get my bones back to the kitchen. You just make yourself at home here. Oh, been meaning to ask, are you from England or something? What’s that sweet sound to your voice?”
“Oh, it’s probably my Dutch accent. I’m from Holland. Thanks for the ride and showing me around. You’ve been accommodating!”
She inwardly scolded herself for always acting overly courteous to strangers, like a Dutch dancer welcoming tourists to the Tulip Time Festival.
“Whoa! You’ve come a long, long ways,” said Denver. “Welcome to America. I hope Mr. Two-Face shares his wisdom with you.”
“I don’t mean the Holland in Europe. I’m from this country. Holland, Michigan. Have you ever heard of Michigan? It’s a state in this country.”
“I’ll bet my brother was there. I’ve got a brother who has gone every place you could imagine. We don’t have much in common. I don’t like his life, and he disagrees with mine.”
She found herself ignoring the scrawny man standing before her. She could care less about his lifestyle, or his brother’s, and only wanted to think about all that she had left behind. She forced herself to yawn, which always meant stolen incoming oxygen. She opened her suitcases, paused, and decided to leave her clothes where they were. Ruth expected her in the restaurant for training.
Ruth lived on the island, but not in the staff house. Instead, the owners provided her with her own tiny cottage, somewhere on the island off the beaten path. She handled everything from scheduling the wait staff to conducting employee meetings to controlling inventory. Above the Jimmy Buffet music, she matter-of-factly explained everything—from the potato salad or coleslaw choice, to telling customers, “Yes, the shrimp deluxe is served hot and in the shells, so you’ll need to peel them.”
Vicki periodically glanced out at the Gulf of Mexico, topped with bobbing boats, then returned to taking notes with the intensity of a reporter gathering something newsworthy.
“You’re a type-A like I was once. I can see it in you, but hey, you don’t need to write all this down.” Ruth looked her straight in the eyes.
“Shorthand. Learned it in college,” replied Vicki. “So you were a Type-A. And you’re not anymore?”
“Nope. Gave it up. Bad for the heart.”
“Ruth, if you don’t mind my asking, what made you come out to this island? I’m curious.”
“Well, first, tell me why you decided to come here.”
“Money. I needed a job.”
Ruth laughed. “Of course you did, but there are more convenient jobs than this. Let’s dig a bit deeper now. Why are you standing on a remote, primitive mangrove in the middle of nowhere when you could be waiting tables at one of a zillion places back in civilization?”
“I have no idea. I’m surprised by it myself. Maybe because this place is so gorgeous that I couldn’t turn down the offer.” In reality, Ben was the gorgeous object she had trouble turning down, and escaping to an island only made it easier.
“Wrong answer, definitely wrong answer. When is the last time you stopped what you were doing and allowed yourself to truly breathe?”
“I
breathe daily. I just don’t stop what I’m doing to breathe.”
Ruth laughed. “We need to stop and breathe. Sure, it sounds odd because breathing is natural but, really, we need to breathe deeper than we are accustomed to.”
“Who has time to actually stop and breathe, Ruth?”
“No one. We have to make time. Listen, if you’re interested, I practice yoga every night at midnight on the deck of the old houseboat down by the dock—the dock located on the back of the island, the one no one uses. Just follow the trail back there, and you can’t miss it. I invite anyone who feels like joining me. Sometimes it’s just me. Other times I have up to five people showing up.”
“Thanks, but I’m not a yoga person. I think it would completely bore me.”
“Are you a perfectionist as well as a Type-A?”
“Yes, I guess I am.”
“Well, that’s quite arrogant of you to admit.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“First, you are far from perfect and never will be. Second, you are measuring your perfection based on what the world claims to be perfect, and that is a shallow measuring device. Give me an example of your so-called perfectionist efforts.”
“That’s easy. I keep my apartment immaculate, meaning not a single sofa cushion can be out of place, and when it does get messy, I clean it immediately, before relaxing if I’m tired and before eating if I’m hungry.”
“The world will never reward you enough for your attempted perfection because it will continuously demand more on a daily basis, so you may as well surrender your quest for perfection now, at this age, before you become a slave to pleasing something that will never be pleased. You will burn yourself out, leaving no time for true joy.”
“Ruth?”
“Yes, dear?”
“I simply asked you why you came to the island.”
“Join me for an hour of yoga one of these nights, and I’ll show you. We all have our stories, and we all like sharing them.”
She knew there was only one path on the entire island, and she had already traveled it once with Denver, and again on her way to the restaurant. It would be simple to walk in the dark, she thought, but the others had warned her differently, and now she knew what they meant. The path seemed much longer in the dark. It felt like it took a couple of years to walk from the restaurant to the bonfire site, then another couple of decades to pass the picnic table, and another forty years to reach the lighthouse tower, and then she had to leave the path to venture to the staff house. “It’s a choice,” she mumbled to herself, recalling what Denver had told her. “It’s not a stop on the path. It’s a choice off the beaten path, and it’s a choice I’ve made.”
Her arms, shoulders, back, and legs ached as if she had just run the senior citizen’s four-hundred-meter low hurdles and skidded into the finish line. As she walked up the steps to Old Mr. Two-face, she trembled because, at night, with the black shadows from the moving palms hitting its back and the rippling reflection of the gulf hitting its front side, he looked more like Old Mr. Schizophrenic.
Once inside her room, she shut her door and, for a moment, felt safe, like a bug hiding inside an azalea’s fuchsia petals just before they open. Then she turned the lights on and saw the hideous-colored room, so she turned them off again and lit a candle instead. She walked over to the tiny round window and peeked out at the black water. From the tiny piece of land she stood on, she stared way out into the Gulf of Mexico, which at night looked very dark. She hoped there weren’t any big waves out there, waves big enough to wash over the island and kill Old. Mr. Two-face.
Looking out at the water made her feel so small and out of control that she knew she’d be happier in a room on the other side of the staff house, facing the trees instead.
She couldn’t control her insomnia or her breathing or her ever-so-urgent desire to get down on her hands and knees and scrub the dirty floor of her new room.
She walked into the bathroom in search of a mop or broom that might serve the purpose, but after standing there, staring at nothing but ants in bumper-to-bumper traffic from the floor to the sink, she changed her plans.
She plopped down onto the mattress on the floor and slowly pulled Denver’s torn bed sheet over the yellow-stained mattress. She opened the never-ending letter to her grandmother.
Dear Grandma,
Here I am, my first night on this island called Tarpon Key. I feel lonely, and all I have are my own annoying thoughts to keep me company. Is there no escaping ourselves? With no lock on my door, I also feel threatened and somewhat paranoid, as if I can’t protect that same self that annoys me. I hear a lot of voices down the hall, but I plan to stick to myself out here and just make money. I don’t want, or need, to get close to these people.
I’ll learn their names, and that’s all. I do believe a woman can be an island of her own, and I will prove so this summer.
As for my crazy panic symptoms, I thought that if I kept busy and forgot about my fear of death, they’d go away. Well, life is one big trial and error, so I’m still looking for something that might work.
Now I hear someone playing the guitar. It must be Denver. He works in the kitchen, washing dishes and cleaning. His lyrics are kind of redundant. He’s singing over and over that, “Life is so hard, life is so hard.” I wonder why life is so hard for him? I also wonder if these people ever sleep? I guess I don’t mind if they don’t! Goodness, I should love people who don’t sleep. In my own freaky manner, I’m one of them.
Today, a few of the cooks and Ray the bartender made similar comments to me. One, who has a wild-looking black mustache, said I look so “clean-cut.” Another called me “proper.” I’ve never thought of myself as clean-cut and proper. Then again, I’ve never been around so many men with ponytails and wild mustaches. Well, I’ll just stay in my room with my door shut every night, and they’ll think I’m sleeping.
Hey, I really am on a remote tropical island!
P.S. Will you be my guardian angel? I understand man is above angels in the heavenly hierarchy and God employs the angels, but will you ask God for a favor? Ask him if you can be my angel for a while. Thanks, Gram.
Vicki closed the letter then and, as if preparing for an exam, she reread all the watering notes she had taken from Ruth before memorizing the dinner menu, which featured fresh broiled fish and shrimp steamed in beer, and entrees ranging from sixteen to twenty dollars. There was no printed menu. Instead, the wait staff recited it by memory to the guests. She practiced out loud several times, unsure how to pronounce halibut, and started to walk down the hall to knock on someone’s door for help, but then she turned around. She didn’t want to be with anyone right now, so she settled on her own pronunciation.
She tried to fall asleep but knew she wouldn’t, so with a few minutes left before midnight, she grabbed a flashlight and ran out Mr. Front Door. She picked up the trail like one might the subway. She got off at the very next stop, the old dock at the back end of the island, a stop that Denver claimed to be yet another major step on the journey.
Even in the dark of night, with nothing but a flashlight and help from the moon, the dock looked weak and frail, something only a ghost could safely stand on.
“Hi, Ruth. I’m accepting your invitation,” she said as she carefully stepped onto the dock. There were boards missing here and there, and it stood a couple of inches above the black, murky water.
“Well, that was sooner than I expected. Here, I’ll give you a hand,” said Ruth.
“This is the boat you practice yoga on? Will it actually hold two people?”
It looked like a piece of cardboard floating in the water. Ruth stood confidently on it, belonging there the way a fish belongs in an aquarium.
“It’s old, wobbly, and hopefully safe. It will challenge your balance,” said Ruth as she held her hand out to Vicki. “The story goes that this boat belonged to John Bark and his wife when they first arrived on the island. Apparently, they slept on it while building th
eir home. I’m sure it looked like a houseboat back then. The house part of it has since been removed, and no one wants to get rid of the rest. It’s a part of the island, and a great spot for yoga.”
Ruth grabbed a mat and unrolled it a few feet away. “On nights like tonight, we have the full moon to light our way. Sometimes, when it’s cloudy, I’ll practice yoga out here with nothing but a few candles lit,” she said. “Now let’s get started.”
Ruth stretched her arms like the branches of a tree swaying in a gentle breeze, leaning to the left to listen to a secret, then leaning to the right to share that secret, not saying a thing, just making a whispery sound in her throat. Vicki imitated the movements to the best of her ability, self-conscious that there were no mirrors to look into for reassurance.
“Do what feels best for you. Use me as a guide, but don’t try to do exactly as I am doing,” said Ruth. “I don’t use mirrors when I practice yoga because I like to focus on how I feel, not look.”
As she stretched her arms slowly over her head, Vicki’s mind rushed from thoughts of her dirty room to items she needed to buy back on the mainland to the greasy hamburger she had eaten for dinner. She promised she would bleach the floor tomorrow night, buy potpourri on her days off and skip the key lime pie tomorrow night.
“Hold this pose, and close your eyes, Vicki, and bring your awareness inward, thinking about who you are, who you want to be, not what the world wants of you. There is much wasted energy in our minds. Our thoughts can become out of control at times. Yoga helps you quiet your mind from this over-flooding of chitter-chatter. This will, in turn, relax your body.”
Vicki noticed an unstoppable conveyor belt of thoughts moving quickly through her mind. She tried stopping the conveyor belt and the thoughts, but it must have been running on Duracell batteries that wouldn’t die. Her twenties were full of pressures to discover who she was in life, what she would do professionally, how she was going to survive financially, how she would stay fit physically, and who she would end up with romantically. She saw her past decisions making their way like cereal boxes down the conveyor belt, and she noticed herself yanking many of them off before they reached the cashier. There were so many brands to choose from that it made her shopping an overwhelming experience. She looked forward to her thirties because, by then, she would hopefully have a few favorite cereals and the decisions would be over. She’d have her career, her income, her workout regime, and her husband.
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