Red Plaid Shirt

by Diane Schoemperlen

  She teaches Grade Ten English at an inner city high school with concrete-block walls and a barbed wire fence around it. Every September she faces a new room full of thirty potential juvenile delinquents and warns them about the dangers of dangling participles, split infinitives, and the unforgivable incorrect usage of those tricky little words which, that, and who. Even while she asks the class to write two pages, double-spaced, one side, on one of the following topics: butterflies, nuclear war, submarines, the etymology of the word word, or “How I Spent My Summer Holidays,” she is wondering why nobody ever falls madly in love with her.

  At the age of thirty-two, she has had a sum total of two boyfriends. Neither of these romances was officially consummated. (When thinking along these lines, Naomi often mixes up the words consummated and conjugated, and then she discovers that they really do amount to essentially the same thing.)

  First there was Hector Addison, who was temporary head of her department for six months in 1983 when the regular head was away on maternity leave. The trouble with Hector, it turned out, was that he was just no fun. What attracted Hector to Naomi in the first place (her free spirit, he said, her liveliness, her sense of humour, her penchant for wild dancing and imported beer) was exactly what he tried to knock out of her in the end. She should not dress so casually, he said. She should not be so friendly. She should not drink, talk, or laugh so much. She should not listen to that rock and roll music anymore because it was puerile and would probably damage her morals, not to mention her eardrums. He was always correcting her grammar, the more so when she said “Youse guys” on purpose just to annoy him. Hector was, Naomi decided, too smart for his own good.

  And so her second boyfriend, two years later, was Billy Lyons, a dump truck driver she met in the laundromat. The trouble with Billy, it turned out, was that he was just not serious enough. And what attracted Billy to Naomi in the first place (her brains, he said, her education, her good job, her informed opinions on everything) was exactly what he tried to knock out of her in the end. She read too much, he said. She didn’t know how to live, really live. She shouldn’t think so much. She should just lighten up. Naomi was always correcting his colourful speech, especially when he said, “Right on, fuckin’ A!” Naomi was, Billy decided, too damn smart for her own damn good.

  Modern men, Naomi decided then and there, were a bunch of malcontents. They wanted too much or too little, or they wanted somebody else altogether. They thought women were like empty rooms, just waiting to be redecorated. The wonderful women they had in their heads had little or nothing to do with the ones they took to their beds. It was hardly her fault that all she wanted, all she really wanted, was to be adored, to be swept away by a man who thought she was perfect. She decided she was tired of being disappointed. She would rather be a cynic. She would rather give up on men than give in. And they would all be sorry in the end.

  Now, every summer, once school is out, Naomi takes herself on an expensive vacation. She goes for a month or six weeks to somewhere warm and exotic, tropical, preferably an island. She has already worked her way through the more popular tourist attractions: Hawaii, Barbados, Majorca, Jamaica, and the Virgin Islands (she’s always had a good sense of humour, even in reference to herself, and is especially fond of irony). She now favours more remote destinations: tiny primitive islands which are difficult to get to, where the natives resemble those bare-breasted women and loin-clothed men frequently featured in National Geographic. These islands are the well-kept secrets of a certain travel agent who specializes in, as he puts it, offbeat vacations for unusual people and vice versa. Naomi likes to think of these islands as uncharted and unnamed, although she knows this is no longer possible in our shrinking world. But still, she finds comfort in putting herself in a place where no one would ever think to look for her, where no one will ever find her.

  2. He

  The man is named Iquito Hermes Honda Plato Mariscal Estigarribia. “Iquito,” he says to everyone, “you can call me Iquito.” But the truth is that he calls himself by different names on different days, depending on the weather, a whim, or a voice in a dream. On the day he met Naomi, he was thinking of himself as “Honda,” but said, automatically, “Iquito, you can call me Iquito.” So she does, and sometimes he doesn’t know who she’s talking about.

  Iquito has lived on this small island for his entire life, fishing mostly, and sleeping in the sun. He is, in English years, almost seventeen, but the island calculations for such quantitative definitions are complicated, akin to figuring a dog’s real age by multiplying its people-years times seven or to converting Celsius to Fahrenheit by doubling and adding thirty-two. Chronological age, to the islanders, is either an approximation or a popular misconception.

  Iquito works as a courier, delivering the island mail which arrives by boat every other Monday. His brown feet are muscular and sinewy from all the running around he must do. As part of his training for the courier job, Iquito has been to the missionary school to learn how to read, write, and speak English. When he delivers a letter, he reads it aloud to the recipient, who then dictates the response, which Iquito skillfully translates and transcribes and then carries back to the boat. Like most colonials, Iquito speaks English with a stilted precision, better than Naomi speaks it herself, so that he sounds thoughtful and genteel at all times, even when he is telling jokes or talking dirty. Iquito knows everything about everyone on the island and they all depend on him, with collective good faith and great respect. The grateful islanders reward him regularly with food, liquor, sex, and more secrets. On this island anyway, no one would dream of shooting the messenger.

  The day he met Naomi, Iquito had just returned from a run to the eastern side of the island. He was feeling loose-limbed and nimble after all that exercise, and he was pumped up with pride, having just delivered and deciphered a complex letter from a lawyer on the mainland to a woman who was about to inherit a small fortune from a distant uncle she’d never heard of. The letter was dense with words and phrases like forthwith, hereto, whereof, and the party of the first part. The woman was so pleased with the good news (once Iquito had figured out that it was indeed good news) that she rewarded him with a bottle of homemade wine and a blow job.

  Naomi, who had arrived on the island just three days before, was lying on the beach, her bare stomach flat on the hot white sand, her bathing suit top unhooked so she wouldn’t end up with tan-lines across her back. She was half asleep, listening to the water lapping at the sand like a tongue. Iquito squatted down beside her and kissed the small of her back, where the sweat was gathering in a salty pool. Startled, she rolled over quickly and her bathing suit top fell right off so that she lay there bare-breasted and blinking her little white eyes at him. “Iquito,” he said, “you can call me Iquito.”

  In the language of love, as Naomi had learned it from her high school students, Iquito was “hot stuff.” Much to her own surprise, she realized that she wanted nothing more or less than to lie him down and fuck his brains out for a whole week straight.

  3. They

  Naomi and Iquito have now known each other for three weeks and five days. They have been married for six and a half hours. For their honeymoon, they have travelled on horseback to the northern end of the island where there is a luxury hotel with one hundred air-conditioned rooms, two heated swimming pools in the shape of kidneys, and a restaurant specializing in French cuisine. It rises out of the humid green jungle like an oasis or a mirage, its copper-coated windows reflecting circling seagulls and clouds banked up in thunderheads to the west. Iquito and Naomi are the only visible guests. A uniformed valet leads the thirsty horse away and ties him up out back.

  Iquito takes the unlikely presence of such a structure in such a place totally for granted. He cannot tell Naomi when it was built or why or by whom. He lives in a world of such perpetual wonderment that nothing surprises him. He never has got a grip on words like incredible, incongruous, or imagine.

  4.I

  “I can hear w
hat you’re saying,” Naomi says, “but I don’t know what you mean.” She is not exactly complaining.

  5.You

  “You must listen,” Iquito says in his elegant English, “to the water instead of the words.”

  Naomi still doesn’t know exactly what he means, but she’s willing to give it a try. She figures it should be simple enough, something like listening to the ocean inside a seashell. She has to admit she’s been getting a little fed up with words lately anyway, having spent her whole life (or so it seems in retrospect) surrounded by them, struggling with them, up to her ears in syllables and syntax. (Iquito, she has observed, has unusual ears, which remind her of gills. Maybe he is from the lost continent of Atlantis, washed up here by accident, waiting.)

  She has suspected all along that there is a trick to words that she hasn’t figured out yet: if you can just find the right ones and then string them together in the right order, it will all make sense. But there are so many of them, arbitrary and constantly shifting like sand beneath her feet. Sometimes she is overwhelmed by the sheer number of words in the world, by the sheer number of people flinging them around so freely, so certain that their words can mean something, do something, change something: so that silence is no longer significant or socially acceptable.

  6.It

  It is a question of mind over matter.

  B. NOUNS

  1. Water

  After a pretentious but delicious supper in the French restaurant, Naomi and Iquito take a stroll along the shoreline. They drag their bare feet through the wet sand and let the warm water wash them clean again. Naomi has never learned how to swim because she is afraid of the water. For somebody who spends so much time on islands, she realizes this is slightly ridiculous but she can’t help herself. Mostly she is afraid to get her face wet. She is afraid of the way when you open your eyes underwater, everything around you is colourless, including the other swimmers, who look then like corpses, their stringy hair like seaweed, their arms and legs like driftwood. When they open their mouths, they look like bloated fish and only bubbles come out.

  Iquito, who cannot imagine a world without water all around it, wades out deeper and deeper, until he is swimming parallel to Naomi who is still walking in the sand. She thinks of the time when she was twelve and her best friend, Lucy, nearly drowned. Lucy couldn’t swim either, Lucy couldn’t even float, and when she tried it, she sank silently out of sight into the water so deep it looked black. Naomi, who was perched on a rock on the shore, could do nothing but watch as the other girls, screaming and crying, dragged Lucy out by her hair and then pounded on her until the water and the mucus streamed like fish guts out of her mouth and her nose. Afterwards, they went back to the cottage where their unsuspecting parents were and they sat outside in the lawn chairs eating a whole watermelon, smearing the juice and the seeds all over each other, laughing hysterically, and flirting outrageously with Lucy’s older brother and his friends, until finally somebody’s mother turned the hose on them to calm them down and clean them off.

  If Iquito drowns now, Naomi thinks, she will be a widow in her widow’s weeds. She is not exactly sure what this phrase is supposed to mean but she imagines herself on this beach with green-black strings of seaweed draped over her face and bare shoulders like a veil, while the water-logged body of her new husband is plucked by the fishermen out of the sea.

  If she was going to get wet at all, she would rather be in one of the kidney-shaped pools back at the hotel, where there is a lifeguard and blue water wings. But swimming in a heated pool while in sight of the actual ocean strikes even her as an absurd thing to do, so she doesn’t suggest it. She lets Iquito coax her out to him bit by bit until suddenly she is in past her waist. She is proud of herself for not panicking. Iquito swims slowly away just beneath the surface. When Naomi isn’t looking, he circles back and grabs her from behind. He holds her head under the water with both hands.

  She has always been afraid that once her head was under, the water would rush in through her ears and her nostrils, filling up her whole head, which would then either burst or stay like that, leaving her with water on the brain like her cousin who was born that way.

  She remains absolutely still and nothing happens. Iquito lets go and she stays under for a few more seconds of her own free will. Her lungs are beginning to ache as she opens her eyes and there to the left is a car, a white car with the trunk, the hood, and all the windows open. A golden fish with large blue fins swims through it, undulating and unconcerned. Its gills seem to throb and its iridescent scales flicker through the milky sea like laughter or tiny hands in motion.

  If the Eskimos have twenty different words for snow (and everybody says they do, although nobody seems to know what they are), the islanders have at least that many for water. So that a glass of water, a body of water, and water under the bridge have virtually nothing to do with each other. There is even a different word for water when you are in it as opposed to water when you are only looking at it, thinking about it, or wishing for it. Naomi is coming to understand that this dislocation makes more sense than a lot of other things. Iquito has never had any reason to think otherwise.

  2. Angel

  Back on the beach, Naomi lies down to dry off in the sinking sunlight. Her white cotton shirt and shorts stick to her skin like warm plastic. Iquito squats by her head and braids her long blonde hair which is stringy and gritty with sand.

  She stretches out her arms and legs, moves them slowly back and forth, making an angel in the fine white sand. Iquito finds this hilarious and lies down beside her and makes one too. She tells him how the children in her country do this in the winter in the snow, how she used to do it too, in her red snowsuit with the bunny ears, flat on her back in the front yard at five o’clock on a January Saturday afternoon when it was already dark and the houses of her friends up and down the street were already receding into the night which was pressing down on her face like a pillow. She tells him how the tricky part is getting up again and jumping out of your angel without messing it up or leaving a trail of footprints which will give you away.

  Iquito does it again and again all around her, until he can do it perfectly and there are sandy angels everywhere. He heard about angels at missionary school, but he thought they had to be ethereal, airborne, and self-righteous. They were also chubby, and probably irritating, hanging around, as they did, at all the wrong times. He decided then and there that angels weren’t for him. But he likes these ones better.

  He has also heard about snow but has never been able to get it clear in his mind. He would like more information.

  “What does it taste like?” he asks Naomi.

  “Water,” she says, which is not quite true.

  “What does it smell like?” he asks.

  “Nothing,” she says, which is not true either. Snow smells like snow. There is no way around it.

  They jump out of their angels and walk slowly on.

  Iquito is no angel. He is an innocent, Naomi thinks, a reckless and remorseless innocent, who has no sense of sin and so no sense of the guilt which animates the remains of the real world.

  3. Monkey

  As they walk beneath the smooth-faced cliffs, they meet a man with a monkey named Atimbo. The man is also named Atimbo. Both the man and the monkey are wizened, with leathery brown skin and no eyelashes.

  “What a nice monkey,” Naomi says politely.

  “She is not just any monkey,” the old man informs them proudly. “She is a talking monkey.”

  Iquito is very rude to the monkey, turns his face away and will not look the animal in the eye. The monkey snorts and spits at him. Iquito spits back at her. The old man doesn’t seem to mind. “Say hello to the nice white lady,” he tells the monkey, who makes a series of quick graceful motions with her black fingers, as if she were a magician about to pull a dove out of a handkerchief. She is talking with her hands. The old man rewards her with a kiss on the lips and a chocolate.

  Iquito says to Naomi,
“You’re not white, you’re pink.”

  The monkey squats square in front of him and makes the signs again, with a slight variation this time, poking herself in the chest with her right index finger. “I am nice white lady,” the old man translates, laughing. “She is one funny monkey,” he says.

  “You’re not white, you’re brown,” Iquito says scornfully.

  “So are you,” the monkey signs back.

  Iquito stomps away. (Stomping away in bare feet, Naomi notes, is much less effective than stomping away in stiletto high heels or hiking boots.)

  Iquito hates monkeys. He is convinced that they are really just funny-looking people who are only pretending they can’t talk. He says they are evil incarnate. He swears by the story that his older sister, Komatsu, was kidnapped by a big black monkey who had stalked her for weeks and then this monkey forced her to live with him in a banana tree and bear his little black monkey babies. He swears by the story that, when these monkey babies grew up, they formed a gang and killed his sister and then they ate her all up.

  Naomi thinks this sounds like a story straight out of the weekly tabloids back home: WOMAN GIVES BIRTH TO MONKEYS or MONKEYS EAT THE HANDS THAT FEED THEM. But she manages to be serious and reassuring for Iquito’s sake. She tells him that in her country all the monkeys live in zoos or circuses, where they are kept on leashes, dressed in little red jackets and hats, forced to dance while an organ-grinder plays music for the audience which then drops pennies into the monkey’s little silver cup. “Good idea,” Iquito grumbles.

  Naomi doesn’t tell him that when all her friends were wanting ponies, she was longing for a cute little monkey of her very own. She would dress it up in doll clothes, she thought, with pink ruffles and a bonnet, and she would push it around town in a baby carriage. She would even teach it to talk, with its mouth, not its hands, and they would be best friends forever. But her parents wouldn’t go for it and they got her a goldfish instead.