The Goddesses

by Swan Huntley

  We thought that loosening the leash might have the reverse-psychology effect of making them want to be at home more, so we told them that yes, if their homework was all done, they could skip family dinner and go out with their friends a few nights a week. So far, this plan wasn’t working, and they went out as often as they could get away with it, which was often.

  Chuck was working late regularly now, and he was also spending two nights a week shooting pool with the Tide Poolers. The team was getting more competitive. Marcy had even gotten them some shirts. White on red—same coloring as Costco, since most of the guys on the team worked there. I hadn’t returned Marcy’s calls since the day of the lei-making class, but I had, because I was a nice person, texted her an excuse: I’m SO busy. Hope you’re well.

  It wasn’t that I hated cooking like Ana did, but I resented that it felt forced upon me. I needed a break. Plus the boys didn’t enjoy my new healthy food, so if Chuck wasn’t going to be home, I gave them dinner money and let them go out. This won me tons of Cool Parent points.

  I spent a few evenings alone, enjoying the hum of the crickets and the kissing noise of geckos, and trying not to turn on the TV. It wasn’t that I felt lonely on those nights. No, not at all. It was more that I felt that if everyone else in my family is out, having fun, I should go out and have fun.

  So Ana and I started a new tradition. On Chuck’s busy nights, I would leave dinner money on the counter for the boys and we would meet around five for Evening Activities. That’s what we called them. Sometimes she would take me somewhere new: the saltwater pool at Kona by the Sea, the blowhole at NELHA, the hidden beach past the mangroves at the end of the harbor. Most of the time, we did “Books and Natch,” which meant going to the used bookstore and then to Island Naturals, the Hawaiian Whole Foods equivalent, sort of, but smaller. We’d plate up our dinners at the healthy buffet and eat at the outside tables as the sun set.

  If it was a new moon or a full moon, we would find somewhere to lie down and enjoy that. Either we’d go to one of the beaches or we’d just sprawl out on the still-warm hood of her Jeep, eating Red Vines and talking about how the sky in Hawaii had so many more stars than the sky on the mainland. Ana preferred the full moon—she said it gave her power—and I liked the new moon better. The blankness of those all-dark skies was full of possibility.

  At yoga—and, I hoped, in life—I was becoming much more flexible. I could reach my toes in a forward bend now. I could also do an unassisted jump back, which was just exhilarating.

  The week Patty’s cat Marbles finally lost the battle and died, Ana dedicated the class to him, and Patty cried and used her MARBLES shirt as a tissue. The sight of his whiskery face may have made her cry harder. No one made the joke that Patty had lost her Marbles, even behind her back, because we were good people who did yoga and believed in the strength of kindness and compassion above all things. That was how Ana phrased it, in her soothing yoga teacher voice: “We are yogis. We believe in the strength of kindness and compassion above all things.”

  Sara Beth had officially fallen for this new guy she was dating, and we were all so happy for her, and Kurt was his usual warm and wonderfully shirtless self. I felt a little bad for wishing sometimes that Chuck were more like Kurt—a man with perfect teeth who cared about the state of his aging body. But this, I knew, was completely normal. A person was allowed to have her fantasies as long as she didn’t act on them.

  After class, Ana and I melted our hard-worked bodies into the Jacuzzi and talked and talked. Ana would rest her head on the plastic edge and look up at the pink house and be constantly amazed that Eunice still, somehow, had not posted the ad. “We are outsmarting the universe, Nan,” she said one overcast morning, and blew a kiss into the wind.

  We had our sandwich deed down to a science. Thirty sandwiches was the perfect number. We started getting the ingredients—a two-pack of Love’s bread, a two-pack of Skippy, and a three-pack of Ziplocs—at Costco with my discount. The amount of money was a small price to pay for how great we felt to be the Sandwich Sistahs. People were really counting on us now. We went Monday through Friday at the same time—noon—while blasting what Ana called “our soundtrack,” which was “Lean on Me,” played on repeat. Our targets loved that. “We all need somebody to le-ean on.” Their heads danced instinctively to the catchy rhythm, and the ones who were more awake sang along.

  After sandwiches, if we were up for it, we picked up a few hitchhikers and took them to their destinations, or closer to their destinations if their destinations were very far. Our hitchhikers were mostly young nomadic guys. Some of them—the cleaner ones—reminded me of the boys. One—Teddy, who worked in construction—had the same striking dish-detergent-blue eyes the boys had inherited from Chuck. When he got out of the car at Matsuyama’s, Ana said, “He was a stud. I should have slept with him. That would be a good deed, right?” I was appalled. “No,” I said, and she slapped my knee and said, “Nan! I’m kidding!”

  One day Ana went into Longs to get us Vitamin Waters and came out with those and something else she had tucked under her shirt. “Nan,” she said, hovering her hand over the mysterious package pressed between her tank top and her stomach, “I have found an object.” She took off her buggy sunglasses and then she took off my boxier sunglasses with one cool sweep of her hand. “This object officially binds us forever,” she said, removing the package slowly from under her shirt. Then she stopped. “Wait.” She pressed Play. The familiar beat of “Lean on Me.” And then she whipped out the package—said “ooh” because maybe it had scratched her stomach on the way—and held it up for me to see. “Yin and yang friendship necklaces.” Yes, that’s what they were. One black, one white, their apostrophe shapes dangling from thin silver chains. “Now for the important part.” She opened the package and held the necklaces, one in each hand. “Who do you want to be?” she asked. “The black one or the white one?”

  White was the obvious choice. I was the pure housewife. Ana was the rebel.

  “Black,” I said.

  “A surprise,” Ana said, tilting her face to the sun. “I love surprises.”

  She put the black one around my neck. “Connected.” She clasped it.

  Without words, I followed her in this little ceremony. “Connected,” I said, clasping the white one around all her orange hair.

  •

  Chuck and I met at the green picnic table for date night. When I pulled up in Sharkie, I saw that he had covered our N + C engraving with a patterned plastic tablecloth And, as I walked toward the table—where was Chuck?—I saw he’d set a bouquet of peach-colored roses between our Costco meals. Oh, Chuck. He’d chosen a chicken bake for himself (of course) and a Caesar salad for me (of course), and he’d neatly arranged the plastic cutlery on napkins I recognized as being the ones from the dispensers in the Costco food court. The tablecloth was patterned in schools of orange fish swimming in a navy blue sea, and Chuck had smartly added beach rocks to the corners so it wouldn’t blow away. Its hanging edges made crumpling sounds in the breeze.

  “Nance!” Chuck called, emerging from the bathroom. He did a funny little twirl, which at first I thought was part of a grand hello until I saw his elbow jerk and realized that no, he had turned away from me to zip his fly.

  We sat the same way we had sat last time, with Chuck facing the mountain and me facing the sea. I had trouble prying the plastic casing off my salad.

  “Here,” Chuck said, “let me get that for you,” and yanked it apart.

  I speared my romaine leaves. The salad was good, same as it always was. I wondered how many Costco Caesar salads I had eaten in my life.

  “How many chicken bakes do you think you’ve eaten in your life?” I asked Chuck.

  “In total?” He wiped his mouth. “Well, I usually have one a week. We’ll say two, though, because in the beginning, I had three or four a week. So two times a week for fifteen years. Fifty-two weeks in a year times two is one-oh-four times fifteen is about fifteen hundred.”
A look of disbelief. “Wow.”

  “Wow.” I changed the subject. “How was pool? You played late last night.”

  “I’m getting better.” He raised his eyebrows. “A lot better.”

  “Well”—I speared—“you should invite me to one of your games so I can see you play.”

  After a moment of hesitation, and a quick glance at the nearest palm tree, Chuck cautiously said, “Yeah.”

  “You don’t sound very excited about me coming, hon.”

  “No, I’m sorry, I just didn’t think you’d want to come. But you should come, you should come.” He took a sharp inhale, as if resetting himself. “So,” he said, “what did you do today?”

  I passed out sandwiches to people on the street and brought three hitchhikers to their destinations and Ana gave me this necklace you haven’t noticed.

  I still planned to tell Chuck all of this later, but for now I was enjoying my secret life, and I thought I deserved it, too. Especially since he was being so weird about me coming to his pool games.

  “Not much,” I said. “I took it easy.”

  “A relaxing day,” he said. “I like your necklace, is it new?”

  And then I was annoyed he had noticed. What was wrong with me? “It is,” I said. “Ana gave it to me. It’s a friendship necklace.” I held out the black apostrophe. “She has the other half.”

  He squinted at it. “So Ana was part of your relaxing day?”

  “On-a.”

  “You two are spending a lot of time together. She must be a great person.” Chuck peeled more tinfoil off his chicken bake. “I’d love to meet her sometime.”

  I glanced at the palm tree. “Yeah,” I said. And then, noticing the hesitation in my voice, I really committed to the next part. “I would love for you to meet her, Chuck.”

  17

  But Chuck did not invite me to watch him play pool, and I did not invite him to meet Ana. It rained for a week straight. Ana canceled class. Our targets were nowhere to be found because they’d gone inside to find shelter. Ana said, “It’s time to switch it up anyway. That’s probably why it’s raining. Celia is telling us it’s time to switch it up. So tell me what you think of this plan, Nan. Ha. I just rhymed. Okay, on Sunday, we’ll set up a stand at the farmers’ market. Free tarot! You can be my first client.”

  “What if it’s still raining?”

  Ana shrugged. “I’ll bring a tarp.”

  On Sunday it was still raining, but less. I told Chuck I was going to the farmers’ market with Ana and that I might be a while. I left the house before the boys woke up. Their game was canceled because of the rain, and we had no family plans today. The last thing I said to Chuck on my way out was “This can be father-son bonding time.” “Mmm-hmm,” he had said, his mouth full of Rice Krispies.

  I walked up and down the aisles of the farmers’ market looking for her. “Green bean lady!” my familiar vendor exclaimed. “Hello!” I waved. I realized then that I didn’t know her name either. Where was Ana? I decided to call her, and that’s when I realized I’d left my phone at home. “Damn,” I said, searching my purse again anyway, my open umbrella awkwardly propped on top of my head.

  And then I heard her voice. “Nan!” It took a second “Nan!” for me to register that she was the blond woman I’d walked by several times. She was under the massage tent spreading one of her afghans over a foldable table, and she was wearing a short red dress with large billowing sleeves.

  “You like it? This is my Marilyn.” She broke out into Marilyn’s signature wind-blowing-up-the-dress pose and puckered her lips. I saw that she’d adhered some little jewels to her face. Silver studs above her eyebrows, echoing their arches, and a larger red jewel in the center, right above her nose. She was stunning.

  “Ana!” I shook out my umbrella and joined her under the tent. “You need to tell me when you change characters.”

  “No way, the surprise is the fun part,” she said, and puckered again, looking down at her lips. “Man, I need to get my lips done again. They need to be refilled. So. Badly.”

  Ana’s lips didn’t look “done” to me. “Refilled with what?”

  “Restylane.” She winked. “It’s the best, but I can’t afford it right now.” She straightened out the afghan, her billowing sleeves trailing her movements. Just behind the table were three massage chairs, all still empty because the market hadn’t officially opened yet. One masseur stood among them. He was Japanese, maybe, and rubbing oil into his hands.

  “The massage people are letting us squat. Great, right? Because I brought a tarp but nothing to hang it on.”

  “That’s good luck,” I said, and smiled at the masseur, who didn’t notice. He was using the oil to coif his short hair now and yawning at the rain.

  “Good luck?” Ana scoffed. “Try good karma, Nan.” She unfolded the chairs she had brought. One for the client, one for her, and one for me, which she put in the corner and adjusted so it was facing the massage chairs. “This way you can pretend like you’re not listening, but you will be.”

  I put my bag and umbrella by my chair. Ana put her deck of cards on the table. “Look.” She held a few up. “They have my face on them.”

  Yes, there was Ana’s face in an antique-looking oval, wearing the penetrating expression of a fortune-teller from an infomercial. Portico was coiled between the fingers of one hand, which she held up close to her neck, and her hair was long and dark, same as mine.

  “Is this your real hair?”

  “Yes.” She frowned. Then quickly, as if she had no choice, Ana’s hand went to her stomach. “No.” Her hand clutched. Her face tightened in pain.

  “Are you okay?” I said, tightening my face, too.

  She closed her eyes, inhaled and exhaled deeply three full times, and then the pain seemed to subside and she said, “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.” She pressed the big red jewel into her forehead.

  We made a sign on a piece of cardboard because that was all we could find. FREE TAROT! We couldn’t write more because the piece of cardboard was small. “It looks like one of our target’s signs,” I said.

  “It does look shitty,” she said, “but we’re not charging so what do they expect?”

  “Good point.”

  “Okay, Nan, you’re my first client. Come come.”

  “Great, let me just take off my”—and right as I said jacket, a young girl with braces took a seat across from Ana. She bounced in the chair and set her twiggy elbows on the table.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “I am so excited. Are you going to tarot me?”

  Ana was professional. She chose the client over me. “Yes, yes I am,” she said, in a deeper and more prophetic-sounding version of her yoga teacher voice.

  The girl couldn’t seem to stop bouncing. And she couldn’t seem to stop rubbing her face or checking her leopard print phone while Ana shuffled the cards. I was surprised when, between her bouncing and rubbing and checking, the girl noticed me staring at her and said, “Hi.”

  I promptly returned my gaze to the massage chairs. One person was getting a massage now—a large man. All I could see was the back of his Dallas Cowboys shirt. The maybe Japanese masseur kneaded his shoulders, swaying with his eyes closed like he was playing a piano.

  “What’s your name?” Ana asked the girl.

  Breathlessly she said, “Mandy.”

  “Mandy,” Ana repeated ceremoniously, as though blessing the name. “Here’s how this works. You’re going to ask a question, and then you will choose three cards. So,” Ana shuffled the deck, “what is it you would like to know?”

  Mandy bit her nail. She looked suspiciously left and right and then behind her. She scooted her chair closer to the table—so close that it pressed into her ribs—and whispered, “Are Trevor and I going to get back together?”

  “Are Trevor and Mandy going to get back together?” Ana asked softly, sensing Mandy’s need for privacy around this issue. After a healthy
pause, she said, “Pick your three cards and lay them facedown on the table.”

  I pretended to look out at the drizzle while Mandy, who had become completely still, discerningly chose her cards. “They have your picture on them,” Mandy said seriously, as though this were an important piece of evidence she had collected.

  “They do,” Ana confirmed, her voice maintaining its new baritone. She flipped the cards over.

  “What do they mean?” Mandy was bouncing again. She tried to scoot closer, which was futile and probably bruising her ribs.

  “This is your past, this is your present, and this is your future,” Ana said, tapping each card.

  Mandy’s nail returned to her mouth.

  “Your past is the ten of swords reversed. Did your relationship with Trevor end suddenly?”

  Mandy rolled her eyes. “So suddenly,” she said. “It was seriously so sudden.”

  “This card also suggests it was recent. Was it recent?”

  “Twenty-two days ago,” Mandy said. And then more casually, “Like three weeks.”

  “Your present card is the six of cups, which suggests you might still be thinking about Trevor, possibly a lot. A lot of your attention is focused on Trevor right now, and you are feeling lonely.”

  “So lonely.” Mandy scrunched her face. “I feel like a hermit crab.”

  “And your future,” Ana went on. “Ah, the emperor. This is good. This means you will overcome your feeling of loneliness. The past card mirrors the time frame of the future card, so if you broke up twenty-two days ago, you can expect to feel less lonely in about twenty-two days.”