by Jill Malone
When they opened the front door to slip inside, an overwhelming thrum blasted out, suggesting orgies, blood sacrifice, all manner of pagan rituals in the impossibly white room ten feet from the recliner where Audrey had turned, kneeling, to push my legs apart, and drag slowly up my body until her mouth met mine in a kiss of beer and pot and strange desire as if we had new bodies, as if we were new lovers. And I should have lit up like kerosene.
I should have been pleased at the commissioner’s approval, at Audrey’s well-earned excitement, at the tired, lush neighborhood and her skin. But this mad party, this stupid irritating paramedic—the obvious, extreme-chick fanaticism—had already bummed me out, so now the astonishing news of Audrey’s best-intentions project, the commission’s endowment for her innovative class and her clever students, her manifest goodness and merit felt like an accusation. Why hadn’t she told me about the commission or the proposal? Why hadn’t she shared her enthusiasm with me? Was she trying to protect me—with my cheerless, staid teaching job—from her own good fortune? Her hips shifted as she slid her hand under my shirt. My mouth tasted like iron.
“You know, you’re an introduced species,” I told her.
She’d felt me stiffen and her hand stopped against my left breast. Leaning back on her knees now, she regarded me: “So are you, Jane. Your father’s Australian and your mother Chamorran.”
“Yeah, so you can whitewash all of us.”
Her face then …. Her face lost everything beautiful: crumpled before me all at once like the dying. A flare of red shot through the night, over the fence, and I turned from her as a second flare swirled behind the first.
“Fuck, we have to get out of here.”
Hoping to outrun the cops and my temper and her expression, I grabbed her hand and pulled her from the deck, through the pristine lawn, over the fence, into a neighbor’s yard, through a hedgerow, and into the red jeep at the end of the dirt road. She sat in the driver’s seat and stared straight ahead.
“What about Ryan?”
“He drove, remember?”
“They looked like they wanted to be alone anyway.”
For a moment, I didn’t understand her. They, who? The jeep’s engine had just turned over when we saw a third red light flashing from the alleyway behind the house. Audrey maneuvered a U-turn and we darted away, neither of us speaking on the drive home, my mind consumed with her face. When I’d released Audrey’s hand outside the jeep I’d felt hypothermic: a sudden, terrible absence of warmth.
We drove through the pineapple fields for centuries, Radiohead crooning from the stereo in a futuristic swell as the jeep growled down the single-lane road. Had Grey and Jenelle wanted to be alone? I hadn’t noticed, although he had blushed whenever she’d directed a question at him. The sky swathed Audrey’s red jeep, the eerie sheathlike fronds of the pineapple, the dull stretch of road.
Maybe I dreamt then of barreled tsunamis, a rocketing ambulance, the unfathomable mouth of a red-haired girl because suddenly the engine cut and Audrey’s hand on my shoulder roused me. She’d parked on the dirt road behind my studio.
“You coming in?”
She shook her head, “Not tonight.”
“Look, I—”
“You invited me to that party. If you hadn’t wanted me to come, why’d you call and invite me?”
“No, I—”
But there was no explanation for the blood in my mouth, the whitewash accusation, the resentment that had flared and swallowed me whole. Afraid suddenly to see her dress slip from her shoulders, the streetlamp fracture the white of her back into a prism, the angled indigo bones of her shoulder blades, her copper hair, the silver slide of her spine; afraid to tremble against her fingertips, yes, to tremble even after she touched me, even then, I climbed from the jeep and watched her drive away.
“Jane? Jane?”
Dr. Mya kneels beside my wheelchair with her hands at my temple.
“Yes.”
“I was only asking about daydreams. I didn’t mean for you to have one.”
She smiles up at me, obviously relieved my eyes can focus on hers.
“I’m sorry. You just asked me something.”
“I asked you to be more specific: you daydream a life apart from what?”
“This hospital, this accident.”
“You daydream about your life before the accident?”
“Sometimes. I mean sometimes I actually dream things that happened, and other times I dream things I don’t remember.”
“For example?”
“I have these vivid memories of walking through the streets of the U.H. District in the middle of the night.” In Dr. Mya’s office I can smell the slick of the rain on the pavement and the stir-fried fish from someone’s flat; trees taking shape like old men; the world bled of any color beyond black and the cast of streetlamps. “I have these distinct, sentient visuals, but I don’t know if they happened. I can’t remember if I really experienced them.”
“Confusion like this is normal, Jane. You’ve had a very serious head injury. What else do you remember?”
“A girl’s face in the sunlight watching the windsurfers at Kailua; this mad chick dancing on stage at Anna Banana’s; my greenhouse classroom—I have millions of image fragments swirling in my head.”
She adjusts her spectacles and fiddles with her pen before asking: “Do you enjoy teaching?”
“Yes. More than I imagined possible.”
“But you’d had trouble at the school, hadn’t you?”
“It’s U.H.; everyone’s had trouble.”
“You mean the strike?”
“Beyond that. Universities are terribly political in a grade school way—there’s a lot of passive-aggressive, bureaucratic bullshit that inhibits a teacher’s ability to challenge and a student’s ability to become enlightened.”
Over her head, the sun glares brilliantly against the windows of the opposing buildings. This office is becoming less comfortable by the moment. The anger of my recovery, of waking to find myself an invalid, is as random, as consuming, and ultimately as bewildering as my anger at Audrey that night in Haleiwa. My throat and head have begun to ache.
“Do you feel that you challenged your students?”
“Not as often as I meant to. I took teaching very seriously.”
“On a typical day teaching, give me some highlights.”
I tell her that I often arrived before noon, in time to catch my office mate, Samara Delvo. Occasionally Delvo would stay while I wolfed my lunch and we’d argue about linguistics, the thwarted philosophy of higher education, whatever.
“Delvo’s a beefy woman with a tenacious, stubborn mind. I’d eat, look over my lesson plan, meet with students by appointment or drop-in, then teach all afternoon. I’d leave around six and bike home.”
“What were your students like?”
“Bright. They were really bright and studious.”
“And you felt challenged by the work?”
“Challenged? No. I expected to be teaching graduate-level courses after my first year. Instead I taught second-year Latin term after term.”
“Why the discrepancy?”
“Lack of money is the official version.”
“What did you enjoy most about teaching?”
“Recitation—that chorus of voices running declensions. It was like the sound of God.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Of course not.”
She looks at me a long moment before adding a note to her journal. I imagine her penmanship to be old-world and remarkable, the way grandmothers scribe. The light in the room pierces whatever I look at, spotting and blurring objects.
“You applied for the teaching position by phone from Ireland, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“That’s quite a transition.”
“It was time.”
“You weren’t happy in Ireland?”
“Who can say?”
“You can. Your own happiness
is subjective, isn’t it?”
“Often. Often I felt happy.”
“So you left because teaching at U.H. was a better opportunity for you?”
“Better, different … I wanted to come home.”
“You grew up on Oahu?”
“I wanted to come home to Hawaii.”
“You were more forthcoming during our first meeting.”
“The morphine probably helped.”
She looks at her pen, then back at me. Do they make cinnamon incense, or cinnamon perfume? What am I talking about? Hadn’t they stopped giving me morphine several days ago? No, they’d lowered the dose. Too low. I’d said the dose was too low.
“What happened in Ireland?” she asks.
“The inevitable divorce.”
“Your marriage ended?”
“Figuratively.”
“So the relationship ended.”
“Yes, all of them.”
Dr. Mya stares at me. What does she see? Injuries? Does she see beyond the casts and IV to the scars on my back? Would my mother have liked her? Would my mother have liked any of them?
“How many sexual relationships have you had as an adult?”
“I have no idea.”
“Think about the question.”
I shake my head, not sure how to start the calculation.
“Relationship seems out of context.”
“Why?”
“Sometimes sex isn’t that complicated.”
“Do you believe that statement?”
“I want to believe it. Let’s say it’s the hypothesis I’ve tried to prove.”
“Have you found proof?”
“Not definitive proof. No.”
“How many sexual partners have you had?”
“Around forty, probably.”
“Would you say that your sexual relationships have been complicated?”
“Yes, but not always for me.”
She nods. How have we digressed to this? Does anyone have uncomplicated sexual relationships? Is she trying to confuse me? Who wears powder-blue power suits anyway? She seems very suburban housewife suddenly in this cinnamon-infused pen—very Girl Scout leader—as she sits, ankles crossed, making notes in her immaculate hand.
“Are you currently in a relationship?”
“I don’t remember.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“I’m tired.”
The room swims around us and her voice struggles toward me through the water. I can see the disturbance. Then the room isn’t flooded, but hollow and girded like a mineshaft. From across these landscapes, I hear her and the panic vanishes.
“What’s the last relationship you remember?”
“The surfboard heir.”
X.
Emily and I sat on the shaded hill overlooking Kailua beach, eating shave ice with azuki beans and a scoop of ice cream, watching the windsurfers. I’d tried windsurfing once in junior high. Cursed with featherweight arms, I found the whole experience severe water torture—a casual drowning—completely removed from the elegant skirt of the five sailors skimming across the water this afternoon.
We’d spent the morning playing beach volleyball with a group of Marines who kept reciting Beastie Boys’ lyrics with a Pentacostal fervor that evoked the disturbing image of SS Troopers as they nailed the ball in short unfocused strokes. They took turns flirting with us: fingering Emily’s bellyring, running down any ball I set, supplying iced beer between games. Emily indulged them with more kindness than she usually showed the casual groper: military guys were a staple of the Spark; sailors descended on the place twice a month, cash-fisted, sporting drinks for any local girl who gave them a glance if they couldn’t keep time with the polished legs of the owner/manager. Besides, we had to humor them; the net was theirs.
Most Sundays, we drove the lonely sprawl of the Likelike Highway to the unlikely haven of the windward side: water rippled by the constant breeze, palm trees stooped and overburdened; Kailua beach was fairly shallow, often windy, and sometimes reeked of sewage, but the silence of the beach—away from North Shore crowds and Waikiki tourist droves—went far to recommend it. It might have been a beach on a different island, more like Maui than Oahu, cottages tucked into narrow neighborhoods, mango trees behind ramshackle wooden fences, sand on the streets.
Two dogs ran loose along the shoreline below us, charging the water to retrieve the tennis ball their owner tossed into the waves. We wore sweatshirts over our bikini tops, and I was wishing I’d brought socks. Emily kept resting her head against my shoulder. Her skin smelled of calendula.
“I saw a shark once while I was surfing,” I told her.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, I’d skipped school and been out all morning, catching one sweet swell after another. I was paddling out when I saw it: this dark silhouette in the crest of the wave breaking maybe five meters beyond me. This sleek, shimmering shape skimming through the water and I just freaked. I flipped my board and paddled madly for the shore. The next hour I spent running up and down the beach looking for it, but it had vanished.”
“Jesus. That’s crazy. Were there any attacks that year?”
“No, lucky for me. Since I’d cut school, I couldn’t report that I’d seen a fucking tiger shark at the beach. Imagine the guilt if someone had been attacked out there.”
“Are you going home for Christmas break?” Emily asked.
I’d been back in Hawaii since May and had yet to visit my father and Therese. Somehow the summer had gotten away from me, and I couldn’t decide if I should make the trip for Thanksgiving or Christmas. A hop to Maui wouldn’t take an hour and was fairly inexpensive, so time and money weren’t the obstacles. I didn’t want to think about the obstacles.
“I don’t know. I’m still kicking it around. You going to Paris?”
“Nah. I went last year. I thought about visiting Charlie, but he’s working Christmas and Christmas Eve—which is utterly lame—so I guess I’ll just hang here.”
I looked her over. She’d finished her shave ice and crumpled the paper cone in her hands, rolling it between her palms like Play-doh. I’d never considered inviting Emily to spend Christmas in Maui—I wasn’t even certain what such an invitation between us would mean. But, as we watched the dogs hurl themselves into the surf after their ball, there was no question that she wanted me to ask her.
I had never told Emily about my mother’s car wreck. Shouldn’t it have been easier to confide in a girl who knew what it was like to lose a parent when you were still a child? She was so nonchalant about her father’s death; no, not nonchalant, but resigned, accepting. I raged against my mother still and the feral core of me fought to hold those things I could remember, to safeguard them in the same silence my father practiced.
One of the dogs, a black lab, swam way out to catch a ball the owner had over-thrown. She pawed the water smoothly, riding over each crest, swimming at a diagonal. My favorite stories of my mother’s were dog stories. The protagonist was always the same character, Misha, the Great Pyrenees, who had been a powerful, benevolent king until a treacherous sorcerer transformed him into a dog.
Misha was very lonely as a dog and decided to create a companion. He journeyed for several months to the clay pools and, once there, began to roll the clay into shapes—a circle for the head, long cylinders for the legs, a round-edged rectangle for the torso—until he had created the form of a woman. Every day, he lay on the clay form of the woman, allowing his shaggy body to warm the clay until one morning he was roused from sleep by the sound of a heartbeat deep in the clay chest.
For six more months he lay on the body, as vital organs took shape inside her, the clay lightening into dermis around a core of bones; delicate features formed in the malleable circle as strands of hair began to bloom and creep along the curve of her head like vines. At last, one morning, Misha felt the body stir beneath him and stood quickly as her eyes opened for the first time. She drew her hand over her face,
to shield out the sun, and rolled onto her side. When he saw that she shivered, Misha lay beside her until she clutched the fur of his coat tightly against her, straining for warmth. He could hear murmurs; she was singing.
Every day she grew stronger, the skin more defined around her body, the hair longer and more buoyant. Her body was a lighter brown now, both her hair and eyes were brown as well, and she moved slowly as though her body retained the texture of clay. Misha slept beside her each night as a companion, as a guardian; he was content for the first time since the sorcerer had placed the curse upon him.
But the sorcerer was never content. He had often watched Misha, and reveled in the old king’s suffering. Whenever possible, the sorcerer would spark a wind storm or a deluge, anything to remind Misha that he was a defenseless dog without subjects or throne. For months, the sorcerer had monitored the clay woman’s birth closely, awaiting his opportunity to torment the old king. One night, after shrouding his arrival in thunder, the sorcerer cast a sleeping spell on Misha, and then kidnapped the woman.
Misha awoke many days later and panicked when he found himself alone. The air thick with her scent, Misha ran to the clay pools and up the cliffs and along the pathways through the forest, searching for her. Though he came upon many bones, he found that none belonged to her, and to avoid the confusion of coming upon the same bones over and over, he buried the bones deep in the earth and continued to hunt for his companion. He hunts for her still.
“Where’d you go?”
I felt Emily’s hand on my leg and looked over at her. I wasn’t crying. The wind had blown sand in my eyes.
“It’s getting cold. Let’s get out of here.”
She watched me a second, then we both hurried to the car.
On the drive back to town, I watched her shift gears—her fingers long as spider’s legs, thin and practiced in the cupped stroke that propelled her along a swell. Emily reminded me of an anime character: her large brown eyes evoking concern and defiance simultaneously. Somehow, her lean jaguar body managed the contradictory postures of tense stillness so that she never seemed to be at rest.
Emily and I didn’t have a comfortable friendship. None of the easiness Grey and I shared existed with Emily. Instead, there was a palpable friction—sexual and tense—a flint between us always, ready to spark.