The Whiteness of Bones

by Susanna Moore

  Claire came into the room with a Mai Tai for Mamie. The drink was decorated with a piece of pineapple and a little paper umbrella.

  “Don’t you think we’re drinking too much?” Mamie asked. She ate the pineapple, holding it over the glass so as not to stain the antique paisleys. It upset her that the old cloth had been cut up to make covers for the bed and the pillows.

  “You know, they actually bill the customers for charm at Hadashi’s. We might want to do it in real life,” Claire said.

  “What exactly do they call ‘charm’?”

  “Not much. I pretend I’m Ed McMahon and announce the songs, you know, ‘Mr. Yamaguchi will honor us with his version of “Feerings.” ’ ”

  “Claire,” Mamie said, laughing, “are you sure this is what Alysse would call a good move?”

  Claire shrugged. “I’ve never been particularly attracted to Japanese men. It isn’t the smallness because look at Toshiro Mifune, your hero. Maybe it’s the hairlessness. I definitely don’t like their legs. Do you think their dicks are bowlegged?”

  “I’m glad you’ve thought this out so clearly,” Mamie said. She lay back on the bolsters and balanced her glass on her breastbone. “At least bring home some sushi.”

  What could be more secret and strange, Mamie thought, than Claire sitting cross-legged at a low table, more and more splashed with shoyu and Johnnie Walker Red, with a group of giggling Japanese businessmen, proudly shouting World War II American slang at her as she tried to pour hot saké from a little jug with her two big, pale hands?

  Claire was not comporting herself in the way a girl of her background was expected to behave. While both of them had realized, almost intuitively and quite early on, that they were not like the other girls that they knew, Claire did not have a clear picture of herself, other than a romantic and indulgent idea that she was a rebel. The car repair class was only a temporary solution for Claire’s unrecognized feelings of helplessness. She was unable to support herself in a way that would give her both dignity and sustenance, but she would be able, at the very least, to clean a carburetor.

  With all of her insolence, Claire was struggling to hold on to her singularity. While Mamie sought comfort in books and island dreams, Claire sought it in sensation: the sensation of rum and talking dirty and petty shoplifting (she stole the eye shadow when she went out to buy a pineapple), and the sensation of physical pleasure. She explained many times to Mamie the importance of a good bathtub as a place to masturbate and she complained for days when she discovered that the Crawfords’ apartment had only a shower.

  “I think you’ll be fine,” Mamie said.

  “I hope so.” Claire sighed. She tilted back her glass to finish her drink and the pineapple fell onto her nose. “Do you remember McCully’s desk?”

  Mamie turned to look at her.

  “Well, I was the one who wrote your name on it. Carved your name on it.” She held the empty glass at her mouth and stared over its rim at Mamie.

  “Why?” Mamie was not shocked.

  “I don’t know. Jealous, maybe. Neither of us had her, but you seemed to have him.”

  Mamie nodded. She turned away from Claire.

  “Are you mad?” asked Claire.

  “Sometimes, especially after he died, I used to wake in the middle of the night, wet with perspiration, thinking that I had really done it myself. I would sneak into the library to study the letters. I regretted so much that he wasn’t alive so I could tell him how sorry I was that I had ruined his lovely desk.”

  “So like you, Mamie.”

  “I guess.”

  They sat there quietly.

  “Do you want another drink?” Claire asked.

  “Sure,” said Mamie.

  TEN

  Mamie, who had never understood the moral view of time, the view whose stern adherents frowned on sleeping too long or too late, slipped into a harmless and easy routine. As she did not have to be at Mr. Felix’s showrooms at set hours, and some days not at all, she was free, for the first time in many months, to do just what she wished with her time. She was not lazy or profligate. She arose each day earlier than Claire, who did not return from Hadashi’s until two o’clock in the morning, and she enjoyed the new rites of her domesticity. As might have been expected, she was a good housekeeper. Claire, who veered wildly from sloth and chaos to compulsive neatness, was happy to fall, once again, under Mamie’s care. Perhaps it is true that Mamie had always been like a mother to Claire. She had protected her and counseled her during the years they were at boarding school, and Claire certainly did take advantage of Mamie in that way that real mothers, wise mothers, come to expect and tolerate in their children. She did have that same subtle sense of due, not without some gratitude, as have those children who are completely confident of their mother’s love. It never occurred to Claire, then or later, that it was an unfair burden on Mamie. The notion that Mamie had for years been taking on more than her share would have surprised Mamie as much as it would have surprised Claire.

  If Claire’s way to keep from spinning hopelessly out of control was to take a class in car maintenance, Mamie’s way of keeping herself steady was her correspondence with her mother. To her own surprise, Mamie had come to look forward to her mother’s letters, not because they provoked and satisfied her homesickness with their details about the breeding ground of Hawaiian monk seals and the new honeycreeper nests, but because she was, however belatedly, beginning to know her mother. In their weekly letters, there was a growing, fragile intimacy, not based on dark female mysteries (that would have been alarming to both of them), but on a simple exchange of prosaic information.

  Dear Mamie,

  It is hard to imagine the New York flower beds mulched with old Christmas trees, as you described them, and with their tinsel sometimes left on. You write that it is pretty. I have never been to New York, as you know, or east of Chicago. Henrietta used to take us to Chicago once a year to go to the dentist and be measured for new shoes. You had to step up onto a special machine that actually x-rayed your feet and the salesman would always say, “I think we have a perfect fit,” although I never understood what he meant, as we weren’t being fitted. Alice always jumped up on the machine the minute she was in the shoe store. You could look down, through a glass, and see the skeletons of your own feet. I was always frightened of it. Do you think it is possible to get cancer of the feet? Do you know? It wouldn’t surprise me, all those bad rays flying into your bare feet. They didn’t know about these things in the Forties.

  You mention that my support for the movement to teach Hawaiian in public schools is the first political act of my life, and perhaps you are right. There is much objection to it, as its critics say the children should learn to speak English (instead of Pidgin) before they learn to speak traditional Hawaiian. You and Claire spoke both forms of English when you were children, switching back and forth constantly, depending on whether you were in the kitchen or at the table. It took me years to even understand Pidgin and I sometimes thought you used it as a kind of secret language around me, but I always admired your skill. I still can’t speak it. A professor at the University, who calls it Hawaiian Creole, says it is best learned in childhood and he even writes that the “sophisticated” grammar of Pidgin was, in fact, created in one generation in the 19th century by the workers’ children! It never seemed sophisticated to me, but I have come to all of this very late.

  Sheridan Shields has disappeared and I hear that Lily and Tosi are on their way home. He has probably just gone on one of his jaunts for more art. I wonder where he finds the room for it. Such an eccentric family. Always telling each other how they feel. I remember Lily as a little girl calling her mother on the telephone to tell her that she loved her.

  I have been given by the University the honor of preserving the ma‘o hau hele, the yellow hibiscus, in the garden here. It is extinct as a wild plant on Kaua‘i and although there are many foreign species and hybrids, there are only a few native species left, eigh
t, I believe. I feel that I will guard it with my life. I have already been out several times this morning just to look at it. It is like having a newborn baby you feel you must check every few minutes, you are so amazed by its very existence, and so fearful that some harm will come to it. Mrs. Kaona came to visit it, too. She says her great-aunt had many yellow hibiscus years ago in Koloa and that the leaves and buds were used to treat constipation and cleanse the blood.

  I don’t know how much cooking you are doing, but I have the recipe for Punahou Caramel Cuts now, so let me know if you want it.

  Love,

  Mother

  Mamie went to Alysse’s apartment to return the two very expensive suitcases Alysse had loaned to Claire to transport what Mamie called Claire’s dowry—little dinner suits with shoulder pads and silk taffeta ball gowns with sleeves like big balloons—clothes that Alysse had bought for Claire. Mamie doubted if the dresses would be thought suitable by the demanding Mrs. Hadashi.

  Mamie had not seen her aunt since the Claire-and-Mamie dinner, although she had written her a note to thank her. She knew, because Claire had told her so several times, that Alysse was not yet over the “humiliation” of her leaving, during the main course, with Alder Stoddard.

  Lydia was very happy to see Mamie and quickly brought her, even though it was eleven o’clock in the morning and she had not been requested to do so, a cold Dos Equis beer, no glass. Alysse frowned when Lydia came rushing in with the beer, her devotion to Mamie clearly not anything Alysse had ever experienced.

  Alysse was having a pedicure. Mamie had noticed before that Alysse held certain persons to be invisible, usually someone from outside who was paid to do something to her, as opposed to Lydia who actually lived with her and was thus in a strong position to carry out small retributive acts, such as not giving her the correct message when the Santo Domingan Ambassador to the Holy See telephoned or not canceling her session with the Scotch Hose at Arden’s when she had a particularly bad cocaine hangover and couldn’t even get out of bed. So Mamie was not surprised when Alysse spoke as if she and her niece were alone in the room.

  “Harry Shannon used to call me from wherever he was, Geneva or Monte Carlo, to tell me he’d be in New York in ten days and ask me not to bathe.”

  Mamie hesitated. “Really?”

  “He liked must. Or is it musk? Limp, I could wrap him around my wrist.”

  “Your filthy wrist,” Mamie said.

  “Ouch!” Alysse angrily pulled her foot away from the expressionless manicurist and examined her toe with exaggerated concern.

  “He’s in a monastery now somewhere in Vermont. He’s reached the second or third level of Weirdness. Alder Stoddard would know.”

  “I haven’t seen Alder Stoddard,” Mamie said calmly.

  “Doesn’t it bother you that you’re wearing dead people’s clothes?” Alysse asked suddenly.

  Mamie looked down at herself. She was wearing a Mexican skirt, brightly embroidered with burros and sombreros, and a white undershirt with the sleeves rolled high on her thin arms, and silk polka-dot flats.

  “Where’s your pack of cigarettes?” Alysse asked, looking at the sleeves of the undershirt.

  Mamie did not understand that had she told Alysse the truth (Alysse, you just don’t get it), Alysse might have admired her. She might even have left her alone. Mamie believed that it would have been rude, and even dangerous, to speak the truth, but instead of protecting Alysse from her own ignorance as she believed she was doing, she was instead justifying Alysse’s secret belief in Mamie’s hopelessness. The irony is that it is Alysse who would have said that Mamie didn’t get it and would never get it.

  If Mamie had been very candid with herself, she would have had to admit that there was another reason, too, that she did not shout out the truth to Alysse. It was the worry that once started, she would be unable to stop.

  “He’s had lots of girls,” Alysse said carelessly.

  “Has he?” Mamie said over her shoulder. She knew that her aunt was talking about Alder Stoddard.

  “Scads.” Alysse held her feet splayed stiffly before her. Pastel cotton balls separated each plump toe.

  “I’m happy for him,” Mamie said. “And the horse.”

  “What horse?” Alysse did not like that Mamie might know something that she did not know.

  “Lydia’s friend’s horse in Guatemala. Hasn’t she told you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Her pedicure was almost finished. The manicurist dried each pink nail with a gold Japanese fan. Mamie finished her beer, holding the bottle by the neck, and asked the woman which way she was going, they could walk together. Startled to be acknowledged, the manicurist admitted cautiously that she was headed downtown. She quickly packed her things.

  Mamie burped contentedly, politely covering her mouth with her hand. She hoped that Alysse would not offer to walk with them, to take the air, as she put it. Mamie had walked with Alysse on Madison Avenue, Alysse’s favorite street, and she had been exhausted by the effort within six short blocks. Alysse was thorough. She did Madison Avenue as if she were doing the Nile.

  “Give ‘Feel’ my love,” Alysse said as she hobbled into the bedroom. “Tell him I’m coming in for a preview and I want a discount.” Alysse was late for a luncheon meeting to plan the Library’s new fund-raising theme, “Befriend a Book.”

  Mamie didn’t answer and Ruda, the manicurist, was not certain whether Mamie licked her lips or stuck out her tongue.

  They walked together as far as Ruda’s next appointment, a lady from Colombia who had taken the twentieth floor of a hotel on Fifth Avenue. Ruda was booked to do sixteen hands, presumably belonging to Senora Campos’s many sisters and cousins.

  Ruda thought Mamie a little odd at first, maybe even eccentric, but by the time they reached the hotel, she had offered to do Mamie’s plain hands for half-price whenever Mamie wanted a good manicure. Mamie looked at her short nails and wondered aloud at how it might be just another thing to worry about. Ruda went through the revolving door into the hotel and Mamie went serenely on her way, the roar of the city all around her.

  Mamie had found once or twice before that just when she was beginning to lose hope, something unexpected and fortuitous appeared before her to fortify her and give her the interest to begin all over again. She thought this about Alder Stoddard and she thought this about two dead chickens she came across on a big rock in the Park. Their skinny legs were bound with white rags. There was no blood and the animals did not look as if their throats had been ceremoniously slashed to propitiate the loa. They did not frighten Mamie at all. She was used to seeing chickens in far worse degrees of butchery after the cockfights in the workers’ camp.

  The chickens reminded her of the homemade wire coops, full of small animals and poinsettias, in the little back yards of Waimea. Over the years, Mamie had come to be taken for granted in the houses of the servants and field workers and they did not bother to conceal from her their rites and passions. For quite a while, when she was young, she had believed that people who were white did not have sexual intercourse, or at least did not have it like Mr. and Mrs. Buddy Mendoza, who were always fighting violently and then making love so hastily and exuberantly that they did not bother to close their front door. She knew, too, that the workers’ lives were secret because they were able to magically transform themselves into timid laborers and laundresses whenever her mother was around. The moment that Mary was gone, they again became noisy, funny men and women, full of opinion.

  While the local people were superstitious, and saw nature as an animated force that could be rewarding or vindictive at will, Mamie knew that her mother did not pray to her plants, or use them in healing or in sacrifice. There was for Mary no animistic, spiritual connection to the plants and hills and trees, and certainly no chant or legend passed down through generations of Clarkes. The Mitsudas, however, tied pieces of inscribed paper and trinkets to the pine tree in front of the Hongwanji temple and the
Kaonas refused to pick litchi at the abandoned Gay estate because the old house, built on Hawaiian burial ground, was full of malevolent mana.

  Mamie learned many things in the camp. She liked having her fortune told with bones and she heeded the warning of Mrs. Kaona, who scolded her for disturbing the tree of the pueo, the owl totem of the Kaona family. These superstitions and taboos were good for Mamie because they implied order and reason, cause and effect, and this made her feel less isolated and less helpless.

  So when she saw the voodoo chickens laid on the rock in Central Park, she was reassured. It meant that someone, somewhere in the exhausting city, still believed in the Spirits.

  Mamie walked to Mr. Felix’s salon. It was the last week of fittings before Felix took the collection and two models to the big department stores in Chicago and Dallas and Los Angeles. It was how he best sold his clothes, making a personal appearance tour, standing on the floor with his models, flattering the customers. The women who came to see the collection preened and fluttered and spent a great deal of money when he made one of his trim bows and kissed their hand. Mamie and another model, a blonde, were going with him.