by Jill Malone
“God, I love Maui. I biked up Hana last time I was there and nearly died. It was scorching.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I had a nasty wreck on Hana when I was a kid. My dad took me biking there and I thought I saw this boar tearing around in the underbrush down from the road. I freaked and slammed right into a boulder. My dad, convinced I’d had a seizure, started screaming and shaking me. I thought he’d give me whiplash.”
“Seriously? Were you all right?”
“I had to have stitches,” I showed her the scars; “both elbows and my left knee. There was a lot of blood.”
She fought the urge to laugh at me, her scar crinkling at the corner of her eye as she got her grin under control.
“I’ve stayed in Paris for months at a time, but I couldn’t handle living abroad for years. Have you ever heard of the Casket Girls?”
“Are they a band?” I asked.
“No,” Emily laughed. “They were immigrants to New Orleans from France in the early eighteenth century. 1718, I think. Anyway, each girl brought a coffin with her for a dowry. I have this visual of them standing beside the docked ship with their French fashion and their coffins and welcome to the new world, you know? That must have been surreal.”
“Well, that’s a cheerful little story.”
“I suppose more than anything then you had to be pragmatic.”
Behind Emily, another pair of French doors opened to a small patio with several overstuffed chairs. I wanted suddenly to be outside, to watch the garden, to stare at anything besides the curve of her neck, the drastic cut of her biceps, that patch of freckles on the bridge of her nose.
She looked over her shoulder and back at me.
“Do you want to sit outside? It’s warm in here.”
I don’t remember talking much as morning melded into afternoon; rather I listened to Emily’s stories while the sheath-edged heliconia nodded along with us against the rail of the patio.
“What do you do, for work, I mean? What’s the job you ran off to last night?”
“I own and manage the Blue Spark at Restaurant Row.”
“Is that a restaurant?”
“God, I keep forgetting you’ve been living abroad. No, the Spark is a dance club—an extremely profitable and time consuming dance club, unfortunately.”
“Success isn’t a good thing?”
“Honestly, I wanted to sell it, but my mother insisted we keep the club as long as money kept pouring in. And it has—more, in fact, than before I took over.”
It turned out that Emily’s mother had not been just some obscure jazz club singer (as if the house weren’t indication enough); she was Michiko Nomura, the Japanese piano prodigy who’d immigrated to Hawaii with her parents when she was sixteen and revolutionized the local music scene with her bizarre throaty voice and wild stage antics—She’s insane but in an endearing way. Eventually, Michiko married Texas cattle baron Owen Taylor (father of Emily and her chef brother, Charlie); invested in the nightclub scene at Restaurant Row and made money, barrel upon barrel.
Owen Taylor died of heart failure when Emily was in grade school, although she said he was away from home on business so often that they’d never been close. Emily was two years older than I—she’d turned twenty-nine in January—and had graduated from U.H. with a degree in sociology. (“A necessary degree,” she laughed, “if you’re going to run a bar.”)
“My mother,” Emily said, “speaks English randomly—you know, transforming slang for the effect—Good Jesus, Baby, is one of her favorites, or we’re just talking about wiggle—she has a million of these ridiculous sayings. And they’ve become so much worse as she’s grown older.”
She handed me another beer. It seemed less troublesome to look at Emily when she was talking, her forehead creased whenever she concentrated, or her eyebrows arched in a mock of surprise.
“On my sixteenth birthday, right, I invite my friends over for a slumber party: pizza, movies, boy gossip—the whole bit. So we’re at the table and somehow we end up talking about our fathers. Mine died when I was eight so I was always curious about girls who had dads, I guess. Anyway, halfway through the conversation my mother suddenly exclaims, I wish I had had bondage with my father! in this incredibly loud forlorn voice.”
I felt my face color and Emily started laughing:
“Exactly. I went bright red. I was just looking at her like you’ve got to be kidding. Of course she meant ‘bonding’ with her father. But you know, she was always proclaiming horrible shit like that. Jesus, it was a travesty.”
Eventually her mother bought a flat in Paris and moved there permanently after she’d married her third husband. (“The second guy was in fashion,” Emily said. “It got really ugly before it ended.”)
“So I maintain the house and investments here, and manage the Spark. I can stay because she left.”
I thought of my father in the orchards, walking the rutted paths carefully as if he did not have each step memorized. How his women had chosen for themselves. How he had not been a factor.
I didn’t know if my father waited for me to come back from Ireland and live on the orchard, or if he had no expectations at all. We had never discussed what would happen. We had never discussed anything beyond the orchard. Our whole lives were there in the trees and the beams of the house. In the fence line and the rutted paths, the pitched bark of the high-strung shepherd, Toby. There was no family outside that orchard, and I could leave because he stayed.
“The investments pay for the house here and my mother’s life in France, and my job at the Spark pays for the documentaries.”
“Documentaries?”
“I’m a partner in a production company, Tantalus Films. We try to grab promising directors from festivals. That’s my partner’s job; he’s the scout. I’m the money. It’s been really exciting. We’re in our fourth production right now and they seem to run more smoothly each time, which is promising.”
“What kind of documentaries?”
“This current one is about this kid who’s a mathematical prodigy in Oregon. They’re, you know, watching him interact with people and problems and documenting the results. So far we haven’t shot anything locally but that’s my goal. I’d love to see a documentary on the Pali Lookout, or some aspect of the North Shore … the collapse of the sugar cane fields, that would be really interesting, yeah?”
Her eyebrows arched as she looked at me, smiling self-consciously as if embarrassed by her own ardor. I grinned.
“Yeah, I’d pay to see it, especially about the Pali. It freaked me out when my dad took me up there when I was a kid: the thought of all those soldiers pushed over the cliff, and the freaky pork story, too. I mean have you ever heard of another horror story that involved pork?”
We were drinking Cape Cods now and I held the vodka in my mouth a moment for the burn. Emily had this endearing habit of grabbing my thigh whenever she wanted to emphasize her point. It was like being branded, the sudden pressure of her fingers on my skin.
II.
In April 1985, my mother drove her vintage orange Camaro seventeen miles from our house and slammed into a cement retaining wall. The impact didn’t kill her, not immediately. When a local boy biking home from school found her that afternoon, her body was still warm.
Being fifteen, I’d slept late that morning, woken to the smell of gingersnap cookies in the kitchen, and assumed—as had Therese, our young Filipino housekeeper—that my mother had left for her habitual stroll through the orchard.
In his report, the medical examiner noted that my mother bled to death over a period of not less than two, nor more than four hours while I sat on the kitchen floor with gingersnap cookies, Sex Wax, and my surfboard. Therese said later that I never cried for my mother that day. She said I was a brave girl. I thought it strange to call such coldness brave.
My mother never wore shoes and never laughed. I don’t know how she’d found the keys to the Camaro; my father had hidden them, and forbidden her to drive years e
arlier. She had taught school on Guam, and later, after she married my father, on Maui, until she’d collapsed, suffered a spell, had an episode … and was relegated to the orchards with me, the summer I was five.
In the morning, after the men left for the orchards, my mother walked slowly around the house, staring out each of the windows. A tall, tense coffee-colored woman, with long, frizzy hair that roped down the length of her back, high-strung as a cat, incapable of coming to rest, she paced the house, manically bare-footed, her toenails chipped and grouted with mud, the soles of her feet thick and calloused. She told stories among the mango trees whenever I followed her to the orchard. While conjuring characters and plots, she’d swing her feet slowly like heavy pendulums from her perch atop the thickest branch of her favorite mango tree. On my back, in the tamped down section of the rutted path, I listened with my eyes closed to lore and myth spooled into gleaming threads she wove over both of us like a net. I was her disciple then, that sweet summer of my mother’s decline.
Once there was a young man whose sister disappeared. Every day he walked to the river to weep and pray. One morning, as the light slanted through the birch trees, the river took the shape of a woman, her hair flowed over trembling shoulders, her face blurred and shimmering. The water god’s body shuddered like the surface of the current.
“Why do you wake me with your wailing?” she asked, her voice draping over him like a dream. “I have slept a thousand years and would sleep a thousand more.”
The young man prostrated himself before the river god: “Oh, but I beg you, most kind guardian of the river, to tell me what has become of my sister. She has vanished in the night and I am sick with loss.”
The river god groaned and felt the squander of being awakened.
“Your sister has left this place with her lover. She is happy. Grieve no more; she desires not your mourning.”
The young man looked at the river god, but did not believe. A clever plan appeared to him.
“If she has run with her lover, I will leave you in peace. Mighty god of the river, would you but grant me a vision of my sister to sate my grief?”
She cast herself high into the air, spreading her foam edges the width of the banks: “You would ask a vision, then an embrace. You would ask an embrace, then a visitation. You would ask a visitation, then an arrest. Schemer, how your sister will mourn you!”
Extending her fluid arm toward him, she pitched forward: a dizzying torrent of rage and froth like a wolf pack devoured him. In a moment the water receded from the banks, revealing a bowed orange flower just at the water’s edge. The river god smiled and sank beneath the surface. Water lapped at the bank like tongues.
Beware what you mourn.
My mother asked me if I thought myself the child who escapes or the child who flowers. I had no heart to tell her I am the river.
III.
It was a Crayola box kind of evening: the whiskey blitzed our skulls like a locomotive and some guitar-driven post-punk caterwaul hummed around us as if despair spilled from the walls. I thought we’d be drowned: this room full of beautiful people with their stylish comments on celebrity, fashion, and travel all banded together to discuss the most essential and lasting elements of pop culture.
I was hungry for Ireland then, for the wind-burned desolation of an island with winter and European notions to influence its development. After wandering the Seussian rooms with my green beer bottle in search of some rational discourse, I finally settled on the patio at the back of Emily’s house, overlooking the banyan trees. The night was close and warm. Behind me in the house, I heard laughter and the rumbled bass mechanisms as if through the filter of a telephone. Outside in the dark were frogs.
My head was swirling so I sat down on the back steps to steady myself. Outside the cottage—my studio—the garden lamp was on, casting an eerie glow over the plumeria. I didn’t notice him until he spoke:
“Don’t you like parties?”
He was grinning, white Cheshire teeth, a perfectly applied tan, large brown eyes beneath a fro of brown curls like some Hippie Gap Model. I grinned back.
“Too much bass guitar and whiskey.”
He nodded and sat down on the step below mine.
“You’re the Latin teacher.”
I examined him more closely: he wore Levis with a button-down shirt, slippers, and a Shark watch. Surfer boy.
“Not yet, I start fall term.”
“I took Latin from Dr. Adams at U.H. my junior year. She’s really hot for an older chick—imagine Barbara Stanwyck running declensions. I had this recurring dream about poking her in the language library.”
“That’s a lovely visual. I hope I can keep it out of my head when I meet her.”
“You’re too cute to teach Latin. No seriously, a Latin teacher should be like a nun, you know, grave and otherworldly—aside from Dr. Adams, I mean. You laugh, but I’m serious. Now my wife would be an excellent Latin teacher. She’s exactly like a nun.”
I kept laughing, but not quite as effortlessly.
“How long have you been married?”
“Decades and decades. Don’t ever get married. You aren’t married are you?”
“No.”
“No. You’re too cute to be married. I’m too cute to be married. It’s all become terribly confused.”
He kept smiling as if he were talking in a perfectly normal way giving a strange girl professional and marital advice while calling his wife a nun. I spray-painted WIFE across my mind to keep everything else out of my head.
“What does your wife do?”
“She’s an attorney—well, she was an attorney. Now she works for Senator Yoshi as one of his deputies. Politically she’s absolutely rabid.”
“Do you always discuss your wife at parties?”
“Oh, god no. You’re just really lucky. Whiskey?”
He handed me a bottle of Jameson and grinned in a goofy, harmless way. His shoulders were surprisingly wide, and I tried to visualize him running declensions, marrying a lawyer, fucking Barbara Stanwyck. I took a swig of Jameson straight from the bottle and gave up trying to sort the deck. Wasn’t I cloistered as well?
“So you’ve been riding my proto boards?” he asked.
Proto boards? My mind tried to sort out the diction as well as the context of the question.
“You’re Ryan Grey,” I said at last with something akin to reverence.
He blushed. I had pictured him as some has-been in his forties who still talked with a California lilt. Hippie Gap Models are not hardcore surfers; they’re too busy eating egg whites with yogurt or throwing tantrums to do anything as potentially scarring as surf.
“You’re fucking Ryan Grey. Man, your Mako Surf Company boards are unreal—I’ve ridden the Kali and the Ika—keep in mind I haven’t surfed in nine years—and these boards just glide, man. They’re so smooth and natural. Emily just smokes on them. I’m still awkward out there but these boards are a great disguise.”
The blush spread to his ears and down his neck; I imagined it crawling across his chest like a rash.
“I don’t—you know I don’t actually make the boards. I just test protos same as Emily. My dad is the board maker. He named a line after me in a Christopher Robin gesture because I was born on his fiftieth birthday and he thought that was a fantasy trip. So you’re into longboards, yeah? The Kali is my favorite ride.”
“Yeah, it’s a beautiful board. We’ve surfed nearly every day since I moved in.”
“Emily’s been telling me to use you in the ad campaign. She said you look like an Island girl and talk like some mutant international model so you’ll appeal to all markets.”
“Why don’t you use her?”
“Emily? We did. When we were in high school both of us worked the campaign. It was completely absurd; the two of us posing on the beach with the boards and riding these sad little waves so the photographer could get clear shots without being in the water past his waist. We bailed on the whole thing and have dr
afted friends ever since.”
Sure, an ad campaign. I’d always wanted to be in an ad campaign, maybe wearing my hair up in a pink bow with one of those pudgy bathing suits from the fifties with the flared skirt attached. I could dance hula while surfing two-foot waves. We’d been exchanging the bottle of Jameson like war buddies, throating the smooth shots in elegant hits; the din of the party throbbed in the rooms behind us like primitive memory. It was extremely likely that I would be sick.
“Why haven’t you been surfing with us?” I asked him.
“Shit, I’ve been in California the last two weeks. But I’m psyched to go out with you two. We have to go super early, though, by 4:00 a.m., so I can get back for work.”
“What are you, a milkman?”
He giggled. Truly, like a little girl.
“Yeah, I’m your milkman, baby, call me and I’ll come on by. No, I’m a ramp manager at UPS: I start work at 6:00 a.m.”
“Ramp manager?”
“I know, it sounds like skateboarding, but it’s a legitimate job: we unload the plane and transport all the packages to the sorting center.”
“6:00 a.m. must be hard on your social life.”
“Not me, never. I’m with a nun, man. Surfing is practically my entire social life … and the odd house party of course.”
The arms of the banyan tree groped toward me through the dark. I had Van Halen rattling around my head, and this sweet goofy boy next to me like a relic from the sixties. This was pure grief. This was suffering. I wanted to dance up and down the steps like a character in a musical. I wanted that insulated life where boys like this weren’t married and I had never crashed into a dentist determined to love me. I wanted to kiss him and I did, falling against his mouth as my last comrade in this mad garden.
“Hello kids, keeping warm?”
I looked up and caught the glare of a halo of light around the face of a tall girl standing over us.