Paradise Park

by Allegra Goodman

  It seemed like Corinne couldn’t help smiling at me, loving Little Women and sitting on the couch in my shorts and my tank top that I was wearing without a bra. Not that I was one of those bra burners at that time, not at all, but I had to wear one to work, and this was my day off. I put Little Women on the stack next to Jane. “When I was little,” I said, “I always wanted to live back then. I wanted to live in the old days.”

  “Well,” Corinne said, “all girls like the old days when they’re little, and then they grow out of it.”

  “Not me,” I said. Because suddenly, the old days seemed like the epitome of shore, and those March girls in Concord, Mass., seemed so cozy sitting at the piano—singing songs and knitting, and putting on plays. And I, on the other hand, was all alone, and I was sailing out that Tuesday. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for myself, going six hundred miles away to the northwest islands, and without women friends or music, when it was so cozy in Corinne’s house with Jane—who was named after The Jane. Austen.

  In two days I was going to be adrift with no home at all. No piano, no sisters, no singing. And the ocean was all shifty and impersonal and so lonely. I blinked back a few tears.

  So then Corinne got alarmed. She said I shouldn’t feel like I had to go to the northwest islands. She could help me get home to my folks in Boston, and if I felt I couldn’t go back there, she’d help me find some job, or some better place, and I could stay with her, and register for classes in the fall. But I said, no, no, I had to go because I’d promised, and she asked me if I felt pressured in any way, and if I felt I was going to be used on this trip, since I was going for no money, and if I was sure it was the best thing to do.

  But I said I couldn’t stay with her there in the house, even though the house was so great and I would miss my guitar so much. Admittedly, it felt good to have someone feeling sorry for me besides myself, but after a while it was like I was getting a crick in my neck from being so droopy and being so mothered, and I pulled myself together and went and put my empty tea mug in the kitchen sink. I didn’t mention it, but I had a feeling Rae wouldn’t be crazy about my staying with them. As for my parents, I really didn’t want to get into them. Mom wasn’t in the best shape. And Dad—this was ironic for an economics professor, but true—he had this serious pathology about money. He tended not to spend any, except on himself, which had made childhood and college and stuff somewhat difficult, and I guess had led to a little bit of stealing from him, and check forging on my part. Not to mention some minor drug dealing in high school and college—purely as a middleman—but which he couldn’t forgive me for, since the one time I got hauled up by the authorities I was a BU student, and it so happened my father was a dean at the time. My defense, which was later published in the BU Bridge, had been that Dad was such a dickhead, he wasn’t even paying my tuition hardly, and I had to live off campus, and even there I didn’t have money for food and rent. All of which was true, yet truth was not what the police and university were after. They were after punishment, like community service, and leaving school. And Dad, of course, had to come out against me hardest of all, given his position and his feelings toward me in general. All this being relatively fresh in my mind, the idea of going back to what Corinne called my folks really dried my eyes. “I should get going,” I said. “I have to pack.”

  “Take this with you.” Corinne gave me this fat little Norton anthology of English literature (volume two) bound in green with INSTRUCTOR’S EDITION NOT FOR SALE stamped on it. I stuffed the book in my bag, and Corinne told me my guitar would be waiting there with her safe till I came back. I left with one longing look at Jane.

  3

  French Frigate Shoals

  IN the clear morning light with not a wisp of cloud I stood on the dock and stared at Gaia, our so-called research vessel from the Hawaiian Oceanographic Institute. She was a thirdhand donated yacht loaded down with equipment, like sounding devices and fathoming weights and cables and specimen tanks and rusty old chains. This is it? I thought. It was just she looked like such a piece of crap. Still, when we lifted anchor and set her loose, I forgot any first impressions I’d had. I forgot everything, even being cozy in the old days, since I was so excited to be starting out and actually sailing. We were on a voyage! We were going to be out on the ocean for six days! All the time we motored out of Honolulu Harbor I was just jumping around on deck and watching the whitecaps and feeling like a crazy sea woman.

  Then that night we hit rough water, after which I was lying below doubled over. All the others were busy running around on deck, back seat navigating, and shooting the breeze with Gaia’s crew, whose name was Sean, and her ponytailed captain, David Abernathy. Captain Abernathy was paunchy and permanently freckled, and his face was covered with tiny wrinkles, either from laughing a lot over the years or from squinting too long in sun, you couldn’t tell which. He had once been an ocean sciences professor at the university but was one of those profs who never cared for publishing, and therefore flunked a department-wide post-tenure review and ended up becoming emeritus when he was just fifty. Now he piloted Gaia full time, which apparently he’d been born to do. Abernathy was an academic sea dog. All around the Pacific he ran Gaia. He sailed her as a long-distance research taxi, and enjoyed her as if she were his own yacht.

  I was the only seasick person on Gaia. I missed out on the views, and the waves, and the sun, and I missed out on most of the food, since what I did eat I couldn’t keep down. After a while I was lying below, too weak to move, practically, and with my eyes closed wishing I’d never come along, I was so nauseous, and so embarrassed being this way my first time. I’d pawed through my clothes, and got Grandpa’s watch, and I was holding it, clutched in one sweaty hand, while my tongue was heaving up into my mouth. The others came down and glanced at me with either pity or disgust. “You okay, Sharon?” Rich asked, which was one of the most asinine questions I’d ever heard.

  Brian was the one in charge of the whole grant and expedition, and I thought he would be worried, or feel a little bit responsible for me. That was what I had left over from being a registered college student. That was that little feeling of entitlement I clung to. I mean, wouldn’t Brian be in trouble with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, or wherever the hell he got his money, if I ended up dying, and Abernathy had to bury me at sea?

  When Brian came below, I managed to croak to him how I thought I was hallucinating. I was dehydrating. I couldn’t even keep one sip of water down. I’d take a drink, then run up to the deck and puke over the rail.

  He looked me over lying there, and his eyes crinkled up. I wanted to beat him over the head. He was trying not to smile.

  “Well, you’ll get over it,” he said.

  Then along about the third day, late in the afternoon, I got up. I lifted my head and it stayed up. I swallowed, and I didn’t gag. I staggered to the stairs, and hauled myself up onto the deck. The wind hit me, and the dazzling water foaming up; the waves slapping Gaia. There were dolphins playing all around us, and I laughed out loud. I felt like I’d risen from the dead.

  Mostly people treated me like I was some kind of servant, like I’d signed on for cabin boy, since I was an unpaid volunteer with no experience. Rich and Geoffrey had been out before on expeditions, so they laughed at me—although Geoffrey was a little nicer to me than Rich. He was what they called a local guy, meaning born and bred in Honolulu. He was part Hawaiian, part Chinese. He’d just recently fallen in love with an undergrad at UH named Julie Liu, and the farther west we sailed the lonelier and gentler he became. He told me he was going to write her every day—even though there was of course no mail service. As for Brian’s girlfriend, Imo, she just seemed to assume I’d come because Rich and I were sleeping together, even though we’d evolved so far beyond that. Imo was, so to speak, a full-fledged ornithologist—a distinguished visiting lecturer at the university. She was from New Zealand—Imo was her nickname, because her real name was Imogen. She was dark from the s
un, and thin and nervous-looking. Her hair was curly and cropped short and she had dark brown eyes and she was so crisp when she was talking with that colonial-English, New Zealandish accent of hers, that she made you feel limp. Imo really took the expedition part of the trip to heart, like we were going out there onto those shoals and we were going to land on those beaches and risk health and happiness to get those birds observed and counted, or God help us all. She was brilliant and fit, and on top of all that she kept a bound journal with pure white unlined paper where she printed her entries in black India ink, and made these drawings with crosshatchings of everything she saw, like of our boat, and the dolphins, and the flying fish that jumped onto the deck. When I saw her journal, I didn’t even dare to bring my notebook out.

  I didn’t realize at first that we’d arrived at French Frigate Shoals. I couldn’t make out anything because the islands lay so low in the water. But the winds were behind us, and when we swung in closer, French Frigate Shoals came clear. The islands were tiny—so much smaller than I had expected. Just clumps of rock and sand atop a coral reef, and with a little scrub brush in places. No trees.

  David Abernathy and Brian and Rich got out the charts and started amending them in pencil, because in French Frigate Shoals, what with the shifting tides and currents and sand deposits on the reef, you never know how many islands there will be. In the time since Brian had last visited, two of the islands, Whale and Skate, were now joined by a sandy isthmus. And Big Gin had shrunk, so that Little Gin now dwarfed it. Several islands had disappeared and had to be crossed off the maps, and on the charts in the column for elevation above sea level, Abernathy had to write next to those islands, “Awash.” But there were also new islands that had risen up, and while at last count there had been nine islands in French Frigate Shoals, now there were eleven. The largest of the new islands we called Tonic, since we figured there were already two Gins. Tonic was full of sticks and debris and, it looked like, nesting birds.

  LET me tell you about red-footed boobies. They are white with long pointy bills and pouchy necks like pelicans’. Their feet are bright scarlet red, and they lay one egg, and they hold that egg with their two scarlet feet, and I learned right away that if you come in close to take a look at them, those birds rise up flapping and open up their beaks and scream at you, and sometimes barf squid vomit on your head. They are not small birds, and they are not tame, and you have to creep up slowly and tiptoe around them. Once you approach them with the proper attitude of respect, however, the birds stopped screaming and just glare.

  The work was hypnotic. We mammals all went into a trance there on those islands, while from sunrise to sundown we tracked and watched and stalked those nesting birds. And I know it sounds strange, but the birds became almost like people to us. Although they were only two feet high, they did not seem short. We were crawling around at their eye level, and so, to us, the birds had almost human stature. We thought of the boobies that way—just as if they were these white sharp-eyed aristocrats who happened to have red feet. It was as if we’d arrived on these islands inhabited by bird people. And there we were trying to interpret all their screams. What were they telling each other? What were they trying to say to us? We were like bird disciples, we were straining so hard to understand.

  That was a magic time among those disappearing islands. I knew it even then, down on my knees among the bird people, the boobies. Their black eyes absorbed me, and their small heads, just the way the boobies held themselves against the wind, and took turns on their nests in twenty-four-hour shifts, mates flying in with wet feathers and food nipped from the sea. Their calls to one another, as much as the waves, filled my ears. That was a place of great teaching; that was really an open university. The lectures were all from the birds, the research was all done on foot, and the learning wasn’t done in words, but all by hand.

  I remember one day I was working with Brian observing on a rock ledge. The sun was beating down. There wasn’t anything to break the wind or absorb heat there on those barren rocks. Brian and I crouched down, and there was a booby, and we were close, but quiet, and I saw something stir, and the mother bird was moving and shifting, and she opened up her wings a little like she was flapping a white parasol, and then Brian touched my arm, but I already saw that Mom’s chick was hatching, and I saw that in the hot sun she was shading the chick with her body and her wings. She was her baby’s own awning. “Like a beach umbrella,” I whispered. But Brian put his fingers to my lips, and then we watched together and we didn’t say a word.

  We almost forgot ourselves in deference to the birds. It stopped mattering who was a professor, and who a student, and who might have been the girlfriend of a student. There was this mystical silence that grew up among us, because we were all listening and looking so hard at nests. And that was my first glimpse of the world, I mean, the creation: the heavens and the earth, and the birds in between. In the mornings we all sat up and saw the sun rise, all of us, the humans unzipping tents, and sitting up in sleeping bags, the birds, alert in their nests, built up just off the ground from bracken. In the morning light the ocean spread out around us and you felt how the land was just a speck out there in the water, the ocean tides sucking, sucking the teeny shore just like the island was sucking candy. You felt out there under that blue sky and in that sea you might actually be resting in the palm of God.

  What broke the spell was, we all got mites. Tiny red mites lived on the birds, and those mites started hatching in our hair. Then everyone forgot about the birds and the work and the ocean and we cursed and jumped and screamed and were just about ready to murder each other, until Brian rationed out the expedition’s official mite-killing shampoo. We washed our hair with the primitive shower we’d rigged up. Just a plastic bag we filled with salt water. You held it up above your head and squirted the water down at you, which left your hair sticky—but since we’d brought all our drinking water with us, we couldn’t exactly afford to waste it on our hair.

  Unfortunately for me, what the bugs really went for was my long straight hair. Everyone else had short hair on that trip, which now I could understand, because even after I shampooed, I had mites’ eggs all up and down my scalp, and bugs nesting in my roots. That shiny smooth slippery hair that used to sweep around when I was dancing was crawling with mites. Everyone else was rid of them, but I couldn’t wash or comb or pick all those bugs out. Rich took his sleeping bag out of our two-man tent and moved in with Geoffrey, because, obviously, he didn’t want to get reinfested. That’s when Imo said to me, all crisp, “You’ve got to cut it off.”

  “My hair?”

  “Of course, your hair,” Imo said. “What else do you think I’m talking about?”

  But this just goes to show my vanity or foolhardiness or something like that. I waited a whole day after Imo spoke to me before I could face cutting off my hair. I waited and waited, hour after hour, even though I felt like I had a Medusa head and all the tresses of my hair were writhing snakes. I kept limping around while Imo rolled her eyes, and Geoffrey had a horrified but fascinated look in his, like he didn’t want to stare but he couldn’t help it. Like in his mind he was already composing a description for his next letter to Julie. Rich wouldn’t go near me or any of my stuff. Still it took me a whole day to go to Brian and ask for the scissors from the first aid kit.

  I don’t know what it was—the way I asked for it—or the fact that he didn’t want me using the good scissors. Brian had been working on his notes, squatting down with his clipboard, but when I spoke to him, he jumped to his feet, as if to say, I’ve had it! He got the big old shears he used for cutting rope, and he gathered all my hair in one hand and he cut that whole thick pile in one stroke. He kept cutting bunches and fistfuls as short as he could, until I had nothing more than tufts and stubble on my head and a whole pile of hair on the ground, more hair than you would have imagined, like the kind of mess you make when you’re husking corn.

  “Hey, Sharon,” Rich called out. “Look, you’ve c
ontributed new nesting material.” And he pointed to my hair scattered around on the ground. Now the island was littered with scrub and sand and broken eggshell, bird feathers and bird poop, and long strands of my own hair. “I’m gonna have to write you up,” he told me.

  “Fuck you,” I said. I was not very philosophical at that time of my life.

  That night I got into my tent all alone and I lay down and zipped myself inside. I felt like such a worm. You’re such an imposter, I thought. You don’t even know how to deal with mites. Then I thought, We’re all imposters. No wonder the birds look at us like that. The boobies’ faces were like kings on coins—so noble, but also so disgruntled. Who do you think you are? they asked us. How dare you? I lay awake in my sleeping bag, all alone, and all around me in the dark I could feel the birds staring with unforgiving beady eyes.

  I was so blue. I was claustrophobic with loneliness. My tent was suffocating me. I unzipped myself. I burst out and gulped the air. I struggled out of my sleeping bag, and took some steps. I felt the sand under my toes and I knew the other tents were all around me, but I couldn’t see them. I couldn’t see anything on the island. I looked up and the dark was huge. The sky was so deep and the island such a slip of a thing. The stars showered down; they spackled the whole universe down to the ground, like roman candles flickering to earth. The sight of those stars froze me in my tracks. I watched and watched. Finally, I got so cold I had to turn back. But then I saw a tiny red star near the ground. I came closer to the red speck and I could smell it now—the ember of a pipe.

  “Sh!”

  It was Brian sitting there smoking.

  A wave of relief swept over me. I crouched down next to him. He was warm. He had a jacket.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” he said.