“What do you want?” Lee asked me.
He ordered rum and pineapple juice.
I said, “Ever since Silvie died, it’s like I’m wrapped in gauze. I’m numb. I need to come back to my senses.”
“That’s why we’re here.”
Two women came in and sat at the bar. I saw them as the one who lived here and the visiting friend. They were about my age, between 29 and 35, out on a Friday night, dressed down but feminine touches caught your eye. The visiting friend wore a denim jacket, but her white skirt was inviting. The one who lived here, her sparkly red tee shirt was tucked in tight in her jeans and she seemed to know all the men.
One guy yelled over for her and her friend to join him and his friends. She argued a few minutes across the room then joined them. I drank rum with Lee, which was expensive. An older, beautiful woman in a flowered dress came in selling flowers and leis.
“I’d get you one of those if you wanted,” Lee said.
I considered it while one of the drunks waved the flower lady over and bought scented leis for the two women. They pushed their heads through the necklaces, put the flowers to their noses, and smelled. I could smell gardenia from way over here. Could it please me to have one of those leis as much as it pleased those two? They smiled in their gardenia garlands and posed for pictures. The drunk man got up on a chair with the visiting friend’s camera and aimed down at the whole table of men and the two women wearing their leis until the waitress came along and told him to keep his feet on the floor or he’d have to leave.
“Maybe we could go someplace else?” Lee suggested, draping me with gardenia flowers.
The wind blew my flowing pink skirt up as we came down stairs from the second-floor bar and my husband wrapped an arm around me as we stepped outside into heavy rain that was fierce and wet, but warm. He pulled me close and we walked hip against hip past the fishing boats. Guiding me by the waist, Lee steered us under the awning of Maalea general store, to a bench where we sat out of the downpour; for a few minutes quietly we watched the rain fall and keep falling.
I sniffed the lei and said, “I feel like a fool.” Lee watched my shadowy face for clues. “For being here.” I moved closer to him. “No one else seems to worry about how much everything costs.”
“Are we talking about money? Now? Now that we’re here?”
“You’ve always been cavalier about money.”
“Don’t use words like ‘cavalier’ in my presence, please.” Lee said it jokingly, but tightened his lips and tucked his arms between his legs. I began to badger him about our lack of financial security, the F word. We were out on a date, on vacation, in Maui, HERE, fighting about money. I could hear that clinking sound that sailboats make in the wind, and smell jasmine in the air, salt water, and everything else sweet and indefinable. There was the beam of light on the water from the moon, and my husband’s fingers combing my hair. Rain off the edge of the awning, dense, like a waterfall.
Lee said, “We could go back to the room.”
“Not yet.”
His lips sucked rain off my cheeks.
“What do you want?” His fingers twined mine on my leg and squeezed.
“I don’t know why I thought there was anywhere I could go.”
“You can’t run away from yourself,” he sang the line as Bob Marley would have, soulfully, knowingly. My blouse clung to my breasts and Lee’s wet arm beside me, the hair on it, caressed my bare arm. This close wetness, that’s what marriage feels like: clasped fingers, woven threads.
“I want Silvie to be alive,” I said.
“She’s not.”
“I know.”
“We have Dale.”
“And this is a very, very good thing. I love him so much more than I can say.”
We held hands, then stood and started walking slowly on the path along the row of beachfront condos. My earrings twisted and turned against my neck in the wind so I took them off and carried them: seashells, worry stones.
“Remember when we took Silvie to your brother’s wedding in Arizona?” Lee said. I didn’t say anything and he went on, telling that story. “She was brain-dead, dying, but we didn’t know when?” His legs were long, his pace grew quick and long; I kept up, walking beside him, his stride as familiar to me as my own.
“I was pregnant with Dale.”
“We had a whole plan worked out with her doctor. If she looks like she’s dying for real, he told us, just head for home. Don’t say anything to anybody….”
”… because then there’d be medical heroics, futile interventions, all the wrong questions.” I felt the fist in my lungs, right back there again, in the heat of that terrible trip.
“We did all that when she was born. We tried to save her. We loved her so much.” Lee comforted me like always, his strong arm around me, holding my shoulders upright as we walked.
“There was no way to bring her to life, everyone knew it. But we all tried, day after day, for weeks, months.”
“Dr. Whitelaw told us, ‘Go to your brother’s wedding. If Silvie dies on the road, protect her body in a cooler with ice if the desert gets too hot.’ Insane advice, right?”
“At the California border agriculture check, we’d say, ‘No fruit, Sir, just our dead baby.’”
“I remember that trip.”
“I kept complaining that it didn’t seem like much of a vacation.”
“Yeah?”
“You said, ‘Don’t expect so much. We’re just here to look at things in a different light.’”
We walked through the warm Hawaiian storm while our tears flowed side by side then dried in the rain, and we arrived at our door. We stood on cement and looked at each other in the dark. We could hear the wild surf pounding the beach, wind rattling palms, and our beating hearts. Lee kissed me, wet, hard, rapturously, and our slippery flesh pressed close in passion.
“Are you sorry we’re here?” I asked.
“No, Babe, I’m glad we’re here.”
Ambition
Every morning, a lone man cleaned the pool. Lee watched him through the window early, as the sun was coming up. The man was handsome, well built, in his forties maybe, barefoot with shorts, tee shirt, hat, and sunglasses that reflected whatever he faced. Systematic, slow, he appeared thoughtful, contented, as he worked, at the same hour every morning. First he hosed flower petals from the cement, then watered the lawn and landscaped bushes and plants, then turned to the chairs. He re-arranged them the same way each morning: two lounge chairs poolside, four chairs around the glass table, two chairs and a low table facing the beach, two chaise longues in the center of the little lawn. As the day’s sunlight moved toward noon, everything would get moved around by sunbathers, to accommodate their shifting needs as they turned to face the sun at this or that point in the day. Or moved out of the sun to sit side by side in the shade of the palm. Lee watched out the window as the man did his job, before anyone else was up in the morning, alone, quietly, consistently. Did the man lack ambition? Or, was it possible, he had what he wanted? Stability. Peace. No expectations. No grief.
The Rest of Our Lives
Dale was obsessively drawn to hats, and wherever he turned, it seemed, someone was wearing one. “Hat, hat,” he would say, his first word.
There was a big, fat lady on the big beach wearing a white visor. Her legs were huge and dimpled, breasts mountainous; folds of herself wrapped around her as she rested on a striped beach towel in the palm-tree shade.
Dale ran up to her, said, “hat, hat,” and she sat up and smiled at him.
“Cute,” she said. “How old?”
“Two,” I said, and Dale toddled off down the sand, with Lee following close beside him.
“Your first?” the big lady asked.
I gulped.
“No.”
She looked around for the other.
We were on a magnificent beach, Makena; most people called it Big Beach. The sand was white and soft and stretched far away along the edge of th
e island where long waves of turquoise water lapped it.
“Our first baby died,” I told her.
The woman was probably in her fifties. Now she sat up fully and tilted her eyes up from under the visor to see me better.
“I lost one, too,” she said and patted the space beside her for me to sit with her.
Lee had wandered off toward the water with Dale. I could see them walking in that slow way you walk with toddlers, stopping and going, standing still for a second to study tiny bits of nature buried in the sand, then running to save him from danger as waves crashed toward him, over and over.
“My fifth out of seven,” the woman said. “The rest of them are here with me, matter of fact. They’re around somewhere, there.” She waved to an approaching trio of grown sons. “What happened to yours?” she asked.
“Brain damage.”
“My sixth has Down syndrome. The most beautiful child I have. She’s rare; you should see her: skinny, blonde. Gorgeous, until she opens her mouth.”
She considered her daughter’s beauty, pictured it, cherished it then asked me. “Your baby full term?”
“Yes.”
“Yes. My boy was eight pounds, eight ounces, just fine. You’d never know anything was wrong. Two days after he was born he turned blue. Five days and he was dead. You know what it was? He had no chambers of the heart. Nowadays, God, they can even give you a new one. But then….” She went back over it in her mind and I could see the emotions heave in her chest, twenty years since she lost him.
She looked at me, “You know what I think happened?”
“What?”
“You know how the heart is formed sometime there in the early months?”
“Yes.”
“I was given a shot and it went against nature. Do you know what happened to yours?”
“Not really. Loss of oxygen, maybe.”
“During labor?”
“We think so.”
“Live long?”
“Seven and a half months.”
“How bad?”
“As bad as you can be and still be alive.” Big Mama waited for me and I told her, “Silvie couldn’t eat, cry, or grow.”
“Couldn’t grow? Imagine that.”
Blue Hawaiian waves lapped sand over there, and the mama shifted back, following the shadow of the tree in the sand, closer to me, farther from the water as the tide rose and shadows shifted. Her big sons arrived and hunted through the cooler for beer then plopped down in the sandy boundary of territory the family had staked out.
“It’s best she died, if it was that bad.” Big Mama told me, without hesitation, certain it was true.
I could see Dale on the sunny beach, running to his father, who lifted him high in the air. My baby boy squealed with joy.
“There’s reasons,” Mama stated, as if to conclude and clarify everything. She gathered her huge body together, leaned on a knee and a three-footed cane, shifted her weight onto the sturdy cooler, sat, and placed her legs apart, assuming a solid stance. Her two daughters and three sons sprawled in the sand around her feet could have been an audience before the Sphinx, their mother one of Picasso’s sculpted women, enigmatic like that, statuesque.
“There are reasons,” she repeated, and I waited. “We just don’t know what they are.”
Mothers serve divine purposes. Just as some children are born to live on long after you and I are gone, those babies were meant to come and go before us, like waves, like drops of water into waves, passing through on the way to some place as far and unknown as the one from which, with such hard labor and innocent expectation, they emerged. We are merely vehicles, witnesses to predestined lives.
I stayed behind on the sand when Big Mama stood to go. She smiled and tilted her visor higher, leaning on faith, a cane, and her own two legs. She left the beach with the rest of her children, moving on to their next destinations: Waikiki, Las Vegas, then Florida, home.
Waianapanapa
Lee and I marveled every day at our son, amazed, he came from nothing, a dot, a mysterious binding product of ourselves, which grew. His complexity was perfect, he contained everything he needed to become himself and move on.
We hiked with Dale in Lee’s backpack-for-babies on one side of the state park, following signs to the burial site of an old king. The trail ran along the rough jagged cliffs of northeast Maui, and became more rocky as we went, waves breaking close, hard, and high.
The destination turned out to be a pile of rocks cemented together, with the king’s long Hawaiian name handwritten in concrete, a monument to his life. What number of men had it taken to bury him here? How had they carried him? Like Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, I pictured, on a pallet resting on the shoulders of his followers, men sweating in tropical sunshine as they struggled with the weight and walked the difficult path in search of sacred ground.
This king, so long dead, exuded nothing human; unlike a new death, in whose presence breathing life could still be felt, the king’s body had already, centuries ago, been assimilated in the land. The world prevailed: vast sea crashing on black sand and sharp rocks, the dominion of God ceaselessly re-creating it. That old king had merged long ago with the earth where we stood; no longer separate from nature like we were, balanced precariously on the edge of an island. Midday. Sun high in the sky. Air warm on our shoulders, pulse in our throats, hearts pumping. Alive in earthly paradise.
Lee moved away, physical body, driven by breath and fluids, muscles rubbing on bones. He reached to hold my hand, sweaty as he carried our boy on his back, returning carefully along the trail, thirsty and hot. When Dale fell asleep he looked heavier, his head resting against the back of his father’s neck, forcing Lee to hunch his own head forward.
“What a life,” a stranger said, on the path. She nodded toward our sleeping prince. “Beautiful, too bad they have to grow up.”
I knew what she meant: This too shall pass; this beauty will pass.
But to change was nature. We wanted him to grow.
Only spirit is lasting: the soul that precedes birth, sustains life, and transcends physical death. We can feel whole again aware of that presence, not empty, reverent, knowing life once born is everlasting; the proof was here, wild and intangible, everywhere around us.
We moved past the stranger, following signs to a former temple of worship on the other side of Waianapanapa, and arrived at another pile of rocks. We sat awhile on the ground against it. The view was grand. Then we turned around and hiked our way back to where we started.
Emporio Rulli
First time I noticed Harry was because he had a copy of The Rebel balanced on the ledge next to his table at the café. It was the same paperback version with big orange letters that I had read in college. We all read Camus in college but I’d never seen a middle-aged man with a copy. Turned out we were Rulli regulars. I generally sat with a different crowd, though there were overlapping, smiling acquaintances with shared aptitude for the lifestyle. We came for the caffeine but mostly to participate in ongoing conversations that had no goal.
One morning I was up and out early and Harry was there at the café alone, dividing his attention between Cliff Notes (!) for Steppenwolf (Hermann Hesse), a cappuccino, a notepad where he made notes, and roving judgmental blue eyes all over each person who came through the door.
I was compelled to comment: “Cliff Notes?”
“Short and sweet,” he tossed me the yellow and black striped pamphlet.
It landed in my creamy pastry.
He gestured that I should eat the cream.
I scooped a mouthful off the book then licked my fingers.
We smiled.
According to Cliff Notes, Steppenwolf disdained all evidence of human hunger and violence, hated beastliness, and especially abhored its presence in himself. He preferred to see himself as refined, like the denizens of Emporio Rulli. We knew better than to bring unseemly problems here, into space reserved for esoteric discourse. There was to be no talk that requ
ired taking sides or resolution. Gripes between used-to-be friends, over business, money, car deals, divorces, etcetera, were left outside. Though on any given day our reliable ease could be jarred (shockingly) by the appearance in our midst of a beast. The gracious upbeat intellectuals would quiet down for long staring moments as we reckoned with its uninvited presence: a crying baby, who doesn’t understand the etiquette for making gross needs known. Or toddlers, who won’t sit still, and like to climb walls. Teenagers dressed too sloppy (the guys) or too skimpy (the girls). Someone curses, too loud, another spills coffee all over someone’s pressed beige suit.
One afternoon Steppenwolf came in wearing a blonde wig under a Giants baseball hat. (I recognized him: I was reading the novel.) The beast was in a good mood, snapping his fingers, whistling. He wanted another glass of red wine, more, wine for everyone here. He moved to kiss a woman who didn’t want to be kissed, dropped a glass and broke it, picked up a shard and made a gash across his wrist. Then he was bleeding in front of us and said something about heartache, bellyache, boredom, futility, fear, what else (fill in the blank…).
Harry noted, “Jewel, look up from your book, this is a true moment.”
I looked around.
“You like spilled guts in public?”
Harry swept his arm around the room, gesturing at the bleeding man amidst the marble, mural, mirrors, coffee, cakes, and conversations, saying, “We love our pleasantries…. But we’re also self-loathing saps and cruel brutes who commit atrocities.”
Harry and I chatted at the cafe for months and never discussed our work, marital status, children, or where we came from; only our deepest literary tastes and thoughts on philosophy, art, music, sports, beauty, politics, and other trivial matters. Acquaintances, we only knew the stories we told in public and what we could guess because we read the same books. We weren’t lovers. We were not even friends. But when I ran into Harry at Emporio Rulli we talked. One day I suddenly felt like telling him my cliché and we had this dialog about Lee.
Love Is Blind in One Eye Page 2
