Red Audrey and the Roping

by Jill Malone

  She grabbed for the shovel again, but I held it over my head.

  “Split the work. Grab another shovel; then we’ll both fill and distribute the wheelbarrows.”

  Finally she relented. We filled all three wheelbarrows and began the treacherous job of guiding them over the rutted, marshy pathways to the kitchen side of the house. By lunchtime, we’d humped twelve loads to the areas Hiromi designated, filled holes in the paths, and spread the rocks as evenly as possible. In the back corner of the lot, the heap of rocks, still tremendous, seemed to scoff at our work ethic. Hiromi returned to her own house for lunch and I stretched against the doorframe of the studio, massaging the tight strain of my hamstrings.

  “It’s kind of you to help her.”

  I turned around so quickly that I jerked off balance and tumbled toward Emily. She stretched her arms out and would have caught me if I hadn’t leaned backwards instead, nearly tumbling again.

  “God, are you OK?” she asked.

  “Mm-hmm. Legs are a bit tight is all.”

  “I’ve made lemonade. Thought I’d come out and lend a hand if you guys could use me.”

  I looked toward the insolent mound and nodded. What the fuck? sang through my head as I tried to think of something to say since evidently we were speaking again.

  “Would you drink some lemonade?”

  I nodded. Emily walked back toward the house to get the pitcher. Cups, I thought suddenly. We’ll need cups.

  “I’ll grab some glasses,” I called after her.

  When I returned with three glasses, she was standing in the yard before the doorway as if barred from entry into the studio. I stepped out and handed her a glass.

  “We could drink it at the table,” I suggested.

  She took the glass, filled it, and switched me for an empty one without moving toward the studio. OK. So we were speaking, but we weren’t going indoors. It was just a matter of figuring out the rules.

  “Have you surfed lately?” she asked.

  “Grey and I caught a couple of nice sets last weekend—wicked crowded, though.”

  Her legs looked pale in her cyan sarong. Piled on top of her head, her hair seemed anxious to pitch toward the thin straps of her bikini top. If I had extended my arm, I could have touched her, but the distance felt insurmountable.

  “I surfed when I visited Charlie in California: lousy waves and cold.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that.”

  Standing in the grass, she kicked her foot absently as though juggling a soccer ball. After gulping the last of my lemonade, I lay on my back and stretched my body on an imaginary rack. Pulsing against my skin, I felt my hamstrings expand in painful millimeters as the slothful vines of the banyan trees loomed overhead.

  “Why did you stay?” she asked.

  I studied her, though her profile, like her tone, confessed nothing.

  “It seemed worse to leave you,” I said finally.

  As soon as the “you” slipped, I wished it back again. It seemed worse to leave. Yes, so much cleaner without the presumptive you. After all these months, I still couldn’t speak to her properly.

  “I’ve debated that as well,” she said softly as if to herself: “Has it been more painful knowing I could cross this garden to you?”

  A strand of hair tumbled down her throat and nestled across her collarbone. Though the sun straddled the sky, our corner of the garden, shaded by the banyans, felt cooler, protected.

  Hiromi returned with her giant peasant hat and extra gloves, tried to protest Emily’s help but quickly quieted when Emily threatened to send Hiromi home and finish the job herself. All afternoon, the three of us cleared weeds, filled ruts, humped pile after pile of red rock around the property as the sun pitched overhead. Emily and I worked in bikini tops, heads bound in bandanas, grateful that the rains had finally relented.

  At six, a delivery of Chinese food came and we scrambled to finish the last load before our food went cold. We ate at one of the little tables on the back balcony. It hurt to lift the fork to my mouth.

  “You’re taking the rest of the week off,” Emily told Hiromi.

  Hiromi said nothing, though I knew she’d be at work the next morning as usual, hours before I awoke. How an old woman could handle this, I couldn’t fathom. My lower back had knotted as tightly as the core of a golf ball.

  Emily passed another beer to each of us and we ate in silence as dusk collapsed into night. Hiromi left, patting Emily and me on the head as she went, disappearing noiselessly into the garden.

  “Thanks for dinner,” I said.

  She nodded.

  I finished my beer and wished for another, for some reason to draw out the evening, though it hurt to sit, to move, to breathe. I’d been too tired and hungry to throw on a sweatshirt and shivered now in the dark.

  “Will you help me clear this up?” she asked.

  I grabbed the bottles and boxes, separating for recycling and garbage at the far side of the house. Something might have happened. I’d wished for something to happen all afternoon, working alongside her in the garden, our bodies like pivots among the tendrils of vines and shrubbery stretching always skyward as though they had some memory of heaven.

  With the table cleared, and no sign that she might re-emerge, I returned to the studio. Has it been more painful knowing I could cross this garden to you? I filled the bath with scalding hot water, and knelt against the tub; uncertain whether I had the strength to climb in.

  XXVII.

  Early on the last Saturday morning in September, Therese and I raced mountain bikes on the trails, skirting occasionally along the road and through adjoining fields, until finally we caught a path running parallel to the shoreline. From the sea, a breeze kicked past, but the sky spread before us clear and bright. We rode hard for over an hour, shifting gears and grunting against the slope, nailing roots and rocks while guiding the bikes with the hovering lean of our bodies. Therese led, and whenever I looked up I noted the tense strain of her back muscles as well as the cut of her triceps. She looked good, as hard as the Marin she piloted like a schooner over the trail.

  Although I biked everyday, often riding for hours, I had become accustomed to city streets and quick sprints between passing cars; mountain biking required a different set of muscles. Instead of keeping my head up and watching around me, I had to keep my head down and force my bike over the ruts I would always avoid on the street. By the time we reached the turn-around point, I was aching.

  “Swim?” Therese asked when I caught up to her.

  I nodded, draining my water bottle. We shouldered the bikes and sprinted down to the beach. Tossing our bikes on the sand, we stripped and ran into the water. It was tit-numbing frigid, but I felt my muscles relax after a couple of minutes as my sweat washed away.

  “You were mad up there. How often do you ride?”

  “Nearly every day.”

  “God, I haven’t been on a trail since Ireland.”

  “Just street biking on Oahu?”

  “Yeah. I bike nearly everywhere. Not the same, though, this is killing me.”

  She looked over at me and smiled, pleased to have challenged me so thoroughly. Her hair slicked back from her forehead, her beady eyes flickered at me beneath her sparse strip of eyebrows. Her body quite taut; she didn’t look anything like middle aged.

  “We’ll ride tomorrow too, if you decide not to surf, yeah? I enjoy having the company.”

  “Is it company when I’m so far behind? Tomorrow I’ll ride harder.”

  I climbed out and shook as much of the water off as possible, then soaked my shirt, sponging my body. Shouldering the bikes from the beach up to the trail took a determined sprint, but the ride back to the house was easier for me since I anticipated some of the twists and pits.

  Back at the house, I climbed the stairs to shower, determined to dwell in scalding water for at least twenty minutes, but I’d only just stepped in when Therese knocked once and stuck her head in the room.

  “H
urry up, yeah, and meet me on the back porch.”

  I glanced through my lather and rinse, shivered the wet into my towel, and squirmed into my T-shirt and shorts, before hurrying down the steps. As soon as Therese saw me, she turned and walked toward the barn. She led me through the landscaping tools, buckets, and piles of hose upstairs to the loft. There were three large trunks and several stacks of boxes in the loft, along with an old tandem bicycle and some of the crates of toys I’d long since outgrown.

  “Your mother’s things are in the trunks and a couple of the boxes.”

  “I remember this stuff. I went through some of these before I left for school. I felt really guilty about it.”

  Therese stood at the top of the staircase and watched me move into the memorabilia. I looked up at her when she spoke: “It will be different to look through them now.”

  I nodded, stared at the trunks. Had she had so little? I heard Therese descending the staircase.

  In the first trunk were her clothes. They smelled and felt coarse to my fingers. Some of the shirts seemed familiar, but none of the pants. Had I seen her wear any of these clothes? Several flair-rimmed hats sat atop the clothes, and I remembered the orange straw hat as her favorite. She’d worn it often in the orchard if we walked in the afternoon. Nothing smelled like her, though; the clothes, old and musty, belonged to an ancient tribe.

  The second trunk held trinkets: porcelain cats, two strands of pearls, an assortment of handheld fans, a tea set with elaborate black Kanji symbols, several Japanese lanterns, yellow and red silk robes, cloisonné pieces, and miniature landscapes with one white crane, one traditional dwelling, and one tree encased behind glass. A number of bowls—sea colors of greens and blues—held small change from each foreign city she’d visited throughout her life. She’d had a story for every coin; there were dozens at rest in the bowls—their faces and symbols worn now, their sheen dulled.

  I remembered each of these pieces and fingered them gently, as if I’d been left alone in a museum. When had Father put her things away? I’d felt her physical absence so keenly that I couldn’t distinguish any sensation of loss beyond her. That seemed right to me, though, and I was relieved that I associated the pieces with nothing so much as her.

  In the final trunk, I found the mother I knew from the stories she’d told me. On Guam, she’d headed the Language Program at the high school on Andersen Air Force Base, and had found the most effective way to teach students to speak foreign languages was for the students to write stories. If they had to think about using the language to convey original ideas, they were more motivated and invested in the outcome.

  For variation, they wrote and acted plays and also delivered spontaneous news broadcasts of real and imagined current events. When she married my father, she brought with her to Hawaii an old chest full of plays, posters, and kooky stories scrawled in the lopsided, ambitious handwriting of ninth graders. I was now scouring that very chest.

  Packed away with her students’ work, were two journals my mother had used to draft teaching plans and sketch ideas for her classes. Her footnote on the first page read: “Language at basic level always symbol: the stroke of letter, the picture of word, the line of sentence. This stands for me: this ‘I’; kono watashi. And god is half altar, half say.”

  In the loft, I sat staring at her handwriting, the delicate curl of her g, the tight round of her a; each stroke ornate and purposeful. I read through what I could decipher of her journal—she had a habit of lapsing into Japanese when she wrote hurriedly—laughing at the bizarre pictures she’d doodled in the margins, until my father climbed the staircase to let me know supper was ready. When he found me on the floor with piles of my mother’s papers and trinkets scattered around the floor like a paper tsunami, he stood for a moment and smiled.

  “Therese said she’d left you up here hours ago.”

  “Her journals.”

  “Will they be useful to you?”

  I nodded, one journal balanced as carefully in my hand as a glass of wine. Without really considering, I had expected my search to irritate him; somehow I’d felt he might disapprove of what I myself regarded as an intrusion into my mother’s belongings. But he didn’t mind; in fact, he seemed pleased that I’d found anything of interest. Was I such a stranger to my father?

  “Take anything you choose.”

  He walked across the loft and knelt near me, his brown arm stretched to ruffle my hair. His favorite gesture, this quick mussing of my hair—all of his tenderness made evident in a single reach of his golden-haired arm. When had he grown so old?

  “How do you find Therese?”

  “She kicked my ass on the trail today.”

  “Strong that one, she’ll live a thousand years and still not have a wrinkle.”

  His grooved brown face broke suddenly into his crooked grin. I followed him from the ruins.

  XXVIII.

  The trade winds vanished and the last, unseasonably arid days of October festered in the withered grass, scalding pavement, the blinding climb of buildings, landscape parched with want of rain. Back just two months from the outdoor cafés of Venice, and the mythical contentment I associated with that crumbling city goaded me. Bubbies Ice Cream Parlor at University and King, a weekly stop on my bike ride home from class, had become a daily respite from the brutal, unholy weather.

  Shirt soaked with sweat, Nick pressed the glass of his root-beer float against his face and leaned his elbows on his thighs. Though the air conditioner hummed above us, our clothes clung like wallpaper. Decorated with bizarre black and white photos and Bubbies-through-the-ages T-shirts, the narrow parlor seemed desperately out of time as though a leggy roller skater with fake eyelashes might drift by at any moment with an order of fries for a greaser by the jukebox. In fact, the parlor had a jukebox, and Cracker’s Low bellowed out, a denial of every time-warp sensation.

  “So, what’s up?” Nick asked, wresting his bangs back from his forehead in an aimless gesture—they toppled instantly and covered his eyes. He’d been eating more of my mint ice cream than I had, and now he spooned some into my mouth as if I were a toddler.

  7:00 p.m. on a Monday evening, three young men sat on the stools at the counter up front, flirting with the ice-cream chick. All four of them spurt-laughing in an effort to drown the sad finality of a spoon clinking against the bottom of an ice-cream bowl. Nick had come straight from work to meet me; I’d been practicing my speech for two days, and couldn’t remember a word now.

  “I’ve decided to keep the studio and continue living there.”

  He straightened, set his glass on the table.

  “Really?”

  “I don’t like the idea of giving up my place.”

  “I thought you were worried about the money.”

  “I am worried about the money, but I’ve got this gig at UPS—”

  He groaned. Grey had finagled me a job on his ramp crew, unloading packages from the belly of a 747 into dozens of white containers the size of walk-in closets, which we then wheeled around the tarmac on Toyota tugs and dropped at various sort zones in the Hub from 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m., Tuesday through Saturday. Three weeks of work and I’d already browned darker, bruised deeper, and put on five pounds despite rampant heckling from the crew about my twiggy girl arms. For Nick, the idea of a chick with a Ph.D. in Classics crouched inside the cold slick belly of an airplane, heaving boxes onto metal rollers was beyond absurd—to him, it was prodigal.

  “It’s a job, Nick.”

  “A job that’s beneath you.”

  “I’m keeping the studio.”

  He looked at his glass a moment, then smiled at me. Obviously he’d recalculated his strategy.

  “Why not take the winter off, concentrate on your classes, conserve your resources?”

  “I don’t mind the work.”

  This was true. It felt like a gift, to dress in my secondhand combat boots, surf shorts and tank top, to drive a Toyota tug with a three-cart load of thousands of packages a
round the hectic tarmac to jeers from a crew both riotous and crude. My yellow leather gloves lent the work a rodeo flavor—and always at the end of the morning a tangible sense of accomplishment.

  “It’s ridiculous to waste your money on rent when I have plenty of room at my place. What will you do when the teachers strike? How are you going to afford the studio then?”

  “I’d face the same dilemma at your place.”

  “But you’d have savings to rely on because you won’t need money at my place.”

  “Jesus, Nick, I don’t want to be the chick that latches on to the money guy and stops working, stops paying to support herself. It’s important for me to have my own place. I don’t want to worry about disturbing you when I can’t sleep or when I have to be up at 5:00 a.m. Don’t you like the idea of choosing to sleep together rather than assuming we will night after night in some dismal pattern?”

  “Some dismal pattern? What are we really talking about?”

  I wanted to tell him that something had happened. My insomnia was worse; emptiness sprawled inside me like an oil spill; our sex never sated me anymore.

  “We’re talking about my staying in the studio because it’s necessary.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  I followed him outside into the oppressive glare, the noise of traffic and pedestrians no longer muted by the air conditioner, or the jukebox. A patch of sweat spread down the middle of his green oxford shirt like an inlet. He paused beside my bike, leaned close to me; his hand stretched out to touch my belly, and left a wet mark.

  “Let me come to the studio with you tonight.”

  I nodded. I felt us ending there on the sidewalk as a shockingly white girl buzzed past on a pink moped.

  This miserable October, even the banyans could not keep the studio cool. I’d cast all the windows open, left the lights off, the ceiling fans churning so that the main room felt almost bearable, the wooden floorboards cool beneath our bare feet. He’d never been in the room before, not in all the months we’d dated. I’d kept this much for myself.