The Goddesses

by Swan Huntley

  “Thank you,” I said, raising my shoulders and shrinking into myself. We were saying thank you too many times. “Well,” I went on, taking a step toward the car. But right as I was about to leave I thought, Wait. Here’s a person you find interesting, Nancy, and you need friends, and you should obviously ask her if she wants to get together outside of class. The thought made me skittish. I hadn’t asked a new friend on a friend date since—forever. My friends in San Diego naturally became friends because our children were friends. But this was a new chapter now. I felt like I was back in high school when I said, “I’d love to get together sometime outside of class.”

  “Yes,” Ana said. “Why don’t you stop by sometime? I live right over there.” She pointed down Ali’i. “Number 75-6016. We can sit in my Jacuzzi.”

  “That would be lovely,” I said, memorizing the number.

  “How about Friday. Anytime after two?”

  “Perfect.”

  I walked toward the car with a bounce in my step, feeling like I could take over the world. I was all stretched and open and ready for the day. New people, new chapters. Because Nancy, you have a friend date. And your marital problems are fixable. And your body doesn’t feel like a log. Let’s go home and throw away that secret stash of Hostess CupCakes because you don’t need those anymore. And Hostess CupCakes are disgusting, by the way!

  •

  I went straight to Target and bought a swimsuit. I safely chose black because it was slimming, and I got out of my comfort zone a little with the deep V neckline. I was trying it on in the bathroom when Chuck got home from work.

  “Nancy?” he said from the other side of the door. “Can I use the bathroom or do you want me to use the other one?”

  “You—” I was about to tell him to use the other one, but then I thought I might want his opinion. I put my hand on the doorknob.

  “Hello?” he said again.

  And then I thought, Screw it, and opened the door.

  “Wow.” He looked me up and down twice, and I realized this was what I’d really wanted: for Chuck to think I was sexy again.

  “You like it?” I asked, wanting more.

  “I love it,” he said. I could tell he wanted to touch me.

  “Okay.” I might have giggled. “Thanks for your feedback, Chuck.” I put my hand on his chest and gently pushed until he’d backed away from the door.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said, right before I closed it.

  In the mirror I looked elated. And relieved. Because exchanging swimsuits isn’t easy, I thought. And because yes, I did look good. Not perfect, of course, but different somehow, and that was even better.

  My face was flushed and glowing.

  Imagine the energy below every living thing like a light, she had said.

  And imagine us, me and her, going over more facts about energy in her Jacuzzi. Imagine us complimenting each other’s swimsuit purchases. Imagine us sinking into warm water. Imagine us enticed. Imagine us open. Imagine us unarmed.

  7

  Ana lived in a pink house by the sea. A pink the color of Pepto-Bismol, with white trim. Vines grew fiercely up the walls and over some of the windows. I thought it was charming.

  Right as I was about to knock, she opened the door. She was wearing a gecko-green top and red linen pants with wide parachute legs. She looked very relaxed, like maybe she’d just woken up. In a gravelly voice, she said, “I heard your car.”

  “Wow, you have good hearing!” I exclaimed. You’re nervous, Nancy. Calm down, Nancy. It’s only a friend date, Nancy.

  “I was just doing a little meditation.” She motioned to the yellow yoga mat on the floor behind her. On it was a blue satin pillow, and at the edge a stack of books with a gold Buddha figurine on top.

  “Oh, is this a bad time? I can come back if you want,” I said too fast.

  We both knew I didn’t mean it.

  “This is a perfect time,” Ana said. “Please, come in.” She smiled her flawless smile. In the shadows of the house her face looked more angular. Her cheekbones were enviably pronounced. I slid off my shoes and added them to her bamboo shoe rack by the door and wondered if my cheekbones looked more pronounced in this light, too.

  Her house smelled like a blend of incense and orange spray. It was very tidy and bursting with color. Tibetan prayer flags on the wall and orange curtains lining the sliding glass doors and vibrant afghans in perfect taquito rolls near the couch. Her furniture was minimal and low to the ground. It gave the illusion of spaciousness, even though the house itself was pretty small. On the coffee table was another Buddha figurine. And another in the corner. And on the bookshelf. And in the soil of a leafy plant. There were Buddhas everywhere.

  “I brought you some jam,” I said, and handed her the jar. I’d bought it in town from a woman named Sylvia who was obsessed with whales. She told me she’d moved to Hawaii just to be near them, and then she went on and on about their blowholes and their migration patterns and this one mother and baby she was tracking, and I stopped listening after a while because it was just too much information.

  “Thank you,” Ana said. She looked at the label. “Oh, Sylvia’s jam.” She cocked her head. “Did she tell you about her whales?”

  “Yes!”

  “Of course she did,” she said, and I was glad I’d bought Sylvia’s jam and not another jam so we could bond over knowing her.

  Ana seemed to be pondering my face, which made me nervous. She was so present, much more present than I was, and obviously very intuitive, and what was she thinking? My swimsuit had shifted into a bad position under my clothes. I tried to ignore it.

  “I’m just going to put my stuff away, and then let’s have some tea.”

  “Sure, no rush,” I said, trying to relax. Adding new people to your life is always a challenge, I reminded myself. The getting-to-know-you part is the worst, and after that it gets better.

  While Ana rolled up her yoga mat and put the blue pillow on the shelf, I put my hand on my waist and did my best to act natural.

  “I like your Buddhas,” I said.

  “The Chinese ones are my favorite. They’re so fat and happy. Look at him.” She pointed to the one on the coffee table. “He’s laughing his ass off.”

  I picked it up so that my hands had something to do. The Buddha was heavy, cackling, and wearing a necklace.

  Ana bent to pick a speck of something off the floor. Then she fluffed a pillow on her couch.

  “You’re very neat,” I told her.

  “Did you expect me to be messy?”

  “No,” I said. “No!” Although maybe I had expected her to be messy, or at least a little messier than this.

  “You know what they say about neat people.” Ana took the Buddha from me and set it down and swiveled it back and forth until she’d found the right angle. This was when I realized that all the Buddhas were facing the same way: out the window. “Neat people fear death more than messy people. It’s about control.”

  “Right,” I said. And I really meant that. It did seem right. It seemed like kind of a revelation, actually.

  I followed her to the kitchen, which was right there, and looked out her sliding glass doors and said, “Your view!” She was literally right on the ocean. Which I’d known, obviously, but seeing it from here—it was stunning. And so close. After the doors was a cement deck with a small Jacuzzi perched on the edge, and right after that all you could see was the light blue ocean and the lighter blue sky.

  “Sometimes it reminds me of heaven,” she said, like heaven was a place she had been to.

  I sat myself on a bar stool and watched her add water to the kettle, which was scratched and dented but very clean. On the counter was a basket filled with miniature soaps.

  “Oh, that’s for you,” Ana said. “It’s a welcome basket. Welcome to Hawaii. Alo-ha!”

  “What?” I picked up a soap and smelled it. Lime. They were all different flavors. “This is so nice of you. Thank you.”

  I said �
��thank you” at least four more times, and then I said yes to green tea. Ana took out two packets and set them inside two small mugs that were chipped and baby blue, and then she stood there, looking sort of at me and sort of at the view, and then she traced her eyebrows with her fingers. She seemed to be making sure they were still there. “If you’re wondering why my eyebrows are basically nonexistent,” she said, “it’s because I had breast cancer.”

  “Oh,” I said. Her eyebrows looked completely normal to me. Losing them must have given her a complex. I put the soap in my hand back in the basket. I didn’t look at her breasts. I now understood why they were so perky. Implants. And her hair—of course. Of course it was a wig. How had I thought it was real? “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “But you’re okay now?”

  “I hope so.” She chuckled. “I’m in remission. It’s funny though, I always had a feeling I would get cancer.” She set her elbows on the counter and clasped her fingers together. “I’m kind of surprised it took so long, really. Karma is a strange creature. A mysterious bitch. That’s what my friend calls it. Funny, right?”

  “Right.” I looked at the floor to find my thoughts. Cheap linoleum but sparkling clean. “But wait. Do you think karma had something to do with your cancer?” I asked slowly.

  She nodded as if to say: that’s a great question. “Well, I guess I mean that in a way, I feel I deserved cancer. I know—it sounds so self-flagellating. But deeply, that’s how I feel. I…let’s just say I haven’t always been an outstanding citizen. When I was younger…well…” She sighed. Then she tucked her short black hair with the neon pink shock behind her ear, and I wondered what it was like to wear a wig all the time. “The point is that moving forward, I’m going to be as good as I can be. For the rest of my life. Because karma works both ways. You do bad, you get bad. You do good, you get good. I mean, right? It’s pretty simple. It’s almost like a little game.”

  We were quiet for a few moments while Ana poured the steaming water into our mugs from a high angle like a bartender, and then it dawned on me that maybe in her mysterious younger years she’d actually been a bartender. The idea of a checkered past made her more intriguing than she already was, and so unlike the water polo moms in San Diego, whose entire past, present, and future existed safely within the same four freeway exits.

  “Because the worst thing would be if the cancer came back,” she went on. “Death, obviously, is the worst thing. And I’m not ready to die yet. So,” she shrugged, “I’m working the universe.”

  I’d never heard anyone talk about karma in this way. Which—of course I hadn’t. I didn’t know anyone who talked about karma at all. But I thought it made sense. I mean, in theory.

  “So I’ve been thinking about how to be more compassionate,” she said. “Which is something we should all do anyway, but I’m trying to step it up. I want to do good in bigger ways. I’m not sure exactly how yet, but I have some ideas.” She rubbed her hands together, and I was even more intrigued.

  “So far, I’ve been doing small things, like opening the door for people and smiling at people, which is just common courtesy. It’s not groundbreaking. I was probably doing a lot of that stuff before.” She looked at the welcome basket. “But like this, for example,” she said. “Would I have given you this soap before? I don’t know. Maybe. But honestly, maybe not.” She laughed a deeper laugh than her usual chuckle. “I’m covering all my bases.”

  “Thank you again,” I said, absentmindedly tugging my tea bag.

  “No,” she said, “thank you. You might be saving me from death right now.”

  •

  After tea, Ana showed me her bedroom. Clean and colorful with her bed low to the ground like everything else. A tattered hardcover book on the floor because she had no nightstand. On the windowsill were three baby succulents. “And that’s my snake.” She pointed to the terrarium I hadn’t seen behind me. “If anyone asks, she’s a lizard. Snakes aren’t allowed in Hawaii.” The snake was black and white and moving. “Portico gets excited when I come in here, don’t you, Portico?” she cooed.

  “Portico?”

  “It’s not a symbolic name,” she said. “It’s just a good word. I like the way it rolls off my tongue.”

  “Por-ti-co,” I said phonetically.

  “Exactly.” She put her hands on her hips and looked at the tank. “I’ve thought about turning her in,” she said, “since I’m being good now. But I’m not sure my god cares about the snake law.”

  I nodded in a way that said: Okay, uh-huh, tell me more.

  And she did.

  She told me that she didn’t mean God like crucifix-goatee-capital-G God. But that she believed in a greater something, you know? Something beyond herself. She said, “And if you didn’t make the sun rise this morning, Nancy, then you believe in something greater than yourself, too.”

  Ana’s lowercased god was nature, really. She saw her in the clouds, and yes of course it was a her, and she’d even given her a little nickname, which was Celia. Because Celia sounded like “ceiling,” and the ultimate ceiling—“obvious!”—was the sky.

  When she asked me if I believed in anything, I said I didn’t know. “You can borrow Celia until you figure it out, if you want,” she said. She told me she used to not know either, but cancer had changed that. She saw her life clearly now. Of course I was glad I hadn’t gotten cancer, but I envied her clarity.

  When Ana looked out the window, I watched her, wondering what it was that she saw so clearly. It turned out to be simple. “The Jacuzzi is calling us,” she said. “I’ll change and meet you out there.”

  •

  The plastic Jacuzzi was set right on the ocean. It was like heaven. All that horizon, and the waves crashing against the rock wall, spraying me a little, just enough. I was happy she’d left me to undress alone. I lowered myself in, let my body melt into the heat. I looked at the palm trees moving in the wind and I thought: This. This is it. This is what living is like.

  Ana appeared in a red suit, the same red as my nails. “How is it?” she asked.

  “Divine.”

  “Good word,” she said, enthusiastic, and it pleased me to know that I had pleased her.

  She sat on the edge and put her feet in. She tipped her head back and let out a long guttural sigh and kept going until there was no more air left in her lungs. Looking up at the sky, she said, “When I’m feeling in the zone, Celia isn’t just a metaphor for clouds. She’s literally in the clouds.”

  I thought of the boys when they were younger, finding trains and horses in the clouds. They seemed to find whatever thing they were obsessed with at the moment.

  “See that one?” Ana pointed. “It looks like a plus sign. It means I’m doing a good job at being good now.” She smiled, blinked her eyes slowly. Her head was lazily slung to one side.

  After a short silence, I told Ana that this was a beautiful spot. And that her house was so charming. She looked longingly at the house and said, “I wish it were mine.” It turned out she was taking care of it for her friend Eunice, who lived at a nursing home now. Ana was a “permanent house sitter, basically,” and this was perfect, except for the fact that Eunice was now thinking of selling, which would mess everything up.

  When she was done talking, Ana looked at my face and then at my shoulders, and then she rolled her shoulders back, broadening her chest. I didn’t look at her breasts. “How are you feeling right now, Nancy?”

  “Great,” I said. Because that’s how it went, didn’t it? Question: How are you feeling? Answer: Great. But something about being with Ana made this pleasantry seem wrong.

  Slowly, she stood. “Will you do something for me?”

  I said, “Sure”—of course I did—and then Ana told me to get ready because this was an odd request. “Just lie down however you’re comfortable on the ground.”

  I looked at the ground, which didn’t look comfortable at all. “That is an odd request,” I said, laughing to make light of it.

  I fe
lt self-conscious getting out of the Jacuzzi. I thought my breasts were going to pop out of my suit. I also thought I might faint. I pulled the deep V up again and collapsed a little too quickly onto the ground. My eyelids were sweating, and Ana was standing over me now, studying my body. What was she looking for? Was I doing it right? Water dripped from her suit. She tapped her lips with her pointer finger.

  “See how close your arms are to your body, and how your legs are pressed together so tightly?”

  I raised my chin to look at my body. Good, I looked thin from this angle.

  “Just the way you’ve organized yourself says so much. Your tightness, how compact you’ve made yourself, how little room you’re taking up in the world. Really, how little room you might be settling for. I hope that doesn’t offend you. All I’m saying is that it seems like you might be feeling tense.”

  I moved my arms farther away from me.

  “Do you feel tense?”

  I hoisted myself to a sitting position. “I…” I started, and then I followed her back into the Jacuzzi and waited until we were both sitting again to answer. The funny thing was that I changed my answer on the way. I was going to say, “No, not really,” but what I ended up saying once I sat back down on the ledge and caught my breath was “I have to tell you, I am tense.”

  The way Ana looked at me told me she understood. “What are you tense about?” she asked. Her voice was frank and kind of toneless and not judgmental at all.

  “I don’t know.” I forced a smile. “Life?” I didn’t like how sad I sounded.

  “Why did you move here, Nancy? I haven’t asked you that yet.”

  I looked at the expanse of ocean. There were so many possible answers to give her. I thought of San Diego, of the water polo moms, of what I had told them. “It’s a great opportunity for Chuck,” I had said, smiling like a machine. That’s how we smiled at each other: like machines. Maybe we smiled at everyone like that. We were so fake, so cloaked in bullshit, so hidden from one another. We wore visors to hide our worry lines. We made bake sale cookies to support the team and binged on them in the shadows of our cars. I thought of how we would never think to sit in a Jacuzzi like this. Of how our version of a fun afternoon was water aerobics at the Y followed by lunch at the Cheesecake Factory while we complained about our husbands, but only fake complaints that would make each other laugh because no one trusted anyone, not really. I never told any of them about Chuck’s affair, not even Sheila, whose husband had cheated on her, too.