Freckled

by T W Neal

  I shut my mouth and put the burger down, looking around. No one is eating yet.

  Gigi takes her first bite of Veal Piccata, and, still conversing about golf, Pop and Grandpa Jim do the same. Mom’s got that little smile on as she pokes at her Vegetarian Selection, something green with pasta.

  “Use your knife and fork,” Gigi instructs.

  On a burger? I frown. That can’t be right. I stab my burger with my fork and saw at it—too vigorously, knocking my Shirley Temple so that it wobbles.

  “Slow down. Smaller pieces.” Gigi demonstrates how to cut a piece off of my burger and take a bite. “A lady cuts everything with knife and fork.”

  I manage to get through about part of my burger that way, when she lays a cool, soft birdy-hand on my wrist once more. “Only eat half of your food. Maybe three-fourths. Otherwise, you’ll get fat. You’re picking up some weight already.” She pinches my cheek, and it’s true. I’ve noticed my cheeks are fuller.

  I’ve spent so much time being hungry that it’s hard to imagine worrying about being fat, but I guess I need to be concerned about that, too.

  I hear a funny sound from across the table, and it’s my mom, breathing hard through her nose and giving Gigi stink eye, her lips tight. She stands up suddenly. “Come, girls. We’re going to the ladies’ room.”

  Pop and Grandpa Jim hustle to stand up too, and wait for Mom to get out from behind her seat and Bon and me to get up. She takes our hands and we walk rather fast, for ladies, to the restroom.

  Inside the fancy bathroom, Mom squats down and pulls us close, her arms around each of our shoulders. I breathe in her beloved Mom-smell—sandalwood oil and skin. Nothing artificial.

  “Don’t listen to Gigi. Eat all you want; however, you want. Okay?” She strokes our hair and pulls us in against her. The three of us hug for a long moment. I am so happy she’s feeling better.

  Returning to the table, my appetite is gone. It’s too much work to cut my burger, and the stress of Mom against Gigi makes me a little queasy as I pick at my fries. The half-full plate carried away earns me a “good girl” murmur from Gigi, and then I feel disloyal to Mom. I entertain myself for the rest of the meal by chasing the cherry in my Shirley Temple, trying to suck it onto the end of my straw and keep it there without getting in trouble—I’m pretty sure ladies don’t play with their straws that way.

  Later, after bedtime, I’m hungry. I sneak into my parents’ room and tell Mom, who’s lying on her side of the bed reading Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. She tiptoes with me into the big cold kitchen and gets me a lemon yogurt, and one for herself. We perch at the glass dining room table and eat them with Gigi’s silver teaspoons.

  “Ladies might not eat much at dinner, but later they go into the kitchen for snacks,” Mom whispers, and I lean against her warmth. Mom’s back!

  Chapter Thirteen

  Coconut Island

  Me in a tree

  Age: 8, Kaneohe Bay, Oahu, 1973

  We’re in La Jolla nine months altogether before we move back to Hawaii. By then, I don’t want to leave, because all I can think of is how miserable school was in Hanalei. I’m liking school now, despite having to wear shoes. Mom says I don’t have to go to Hanalei School this time; she’s going to homeschool me. I have worries about that, but I don’t say anything.

  Gigi and Grandpa don’t agree with us going back to Kauai, and there are lots of loud arguments and Gigi blinks a lot and hides red eyes. They’ve even bought us a cute little house on a street nearby, to get the family to “settle down.” But Mom and Pop are determined. Kauai matters more to them than anything I’ve seen them care about, except surfing—and Kauai and surfing are tied together.

  I’m especially sad to leave sweet Nanee and my buddy Uncle Steve when we say goodbye, but I’m glad to leave the guest room of a house where I never stopped worrying about messing something up. We all want our own house again, so Pop goes to Kauai ahead of us to find a job and that house.

  Mom, Bonny, and I fly over to Oahu for that month to visit Mom’s dad, marine biologist Grandpa Garth. He has paid for our tickets so that Mom can also bring Judy, Lauren, and Bettina, his daughters from a second marriage, and babysit them while they visit too. They are not allowed to visit him alone, and Mom is there “to make sure they’re safe.”

  I’ve never spent any time with Grandpa Garth that I can remember—whatever happened between Mom’s parents happened before I was born, and she’s not close to him.

  Mom’s nervous and snappy as she herds all five of us girls onto the plane from California to Oahu. “He’s the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. from Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla,” Mom tells us as we get settled in our seats. “Your grandpa got his doctorate the year you were born, Toby. He’s the world expert on sardines. Their population is dwindling, and he’s been influencing fishing policy by using data to show that overfishing is leading to the problem.”

  I have five aunts total from both my Grandma Stella and Grandpa Garth’s second marriages, but this is the first time I get to meet and spend any time with Judy, Lauren, and Bettina. Judy’s a year older than me, with brown eyes and long brown hair, serious and quiet. Lauren, the middle daughter, is a year younger than me, has Grandpa Garth’s dark eyes and black hair. Bettina is almost three and has lighter hair.

  It’s so weird to have aunts that are young enough that they seem like cousins or something.

  Grandpa greets us at the Honolulu airport with a rented passenger van. A black-browed, handsome man with hair turning silver at the sides of his head, he has a booming voice that makes the younger girls jump. “The gang’s all here! What a family—my granddaughters and daughters are the same age!”

  “Except for me,” Mom says acidly, settling herself beside him in the front passenger seat as we arrange ourselves on bench seats in rows in the back.

  “Except for Sue, of course,” he says, equally acid.

  Grandpa Garth’s science career is why Mom grew up in Hawaii, moved to La Jolla, and traveled so much in Europe when she was young. Their family knew all sorts of famous and interesting people because of his work. Maga and Grandpa Garth divorced when Mom was seventeen because of his drinking and hitting, and because Maga had met Egidio, a handsome policeman in Rome, while there for one of Grandpa’s fish conferences.

  Mom is the oldest of four kids, and it was a bit scandalous at the time when her parents divorced and then both of them remarried. Mom had to leave college to come back home and take care of her brothers, Garth and Eric, and her little sister, Jan. She did that until she was nineteen and Grandpa got remarried to Judy, Lauren, and Bettina’s mom—but their marriage eventually ended too.

  Grandpa’s over hearty when we arrive at his house, a big two-story on pier posts with a yard that ends at the huge expanse of calm Kaneohe Bay. “You’ve got the run of this whole place. Just don’t get in my way!” His laugh sounds like distant thunder.

  Grandpa Garth works for the University of Hawaii as a professor during the day, and it’s apparently a stressful job because he closes himself away in his study drinking in the evenings, even on the first night we arrive. Mom tells us all to be quiet and leave him alone, and we don’t need to be told twice.

  The brackish ocean’s right there, lapping at the edge of the yard of Grandpa’s house, and a long pier in front points toward a tiny atoll across a deep blue channel. I’m thrilled to throw off my mainland clothes and shoes and run down to the edge of the water with a big red scoop net I find under the house. Unlike Kauai and Rocky Point where we lived before, Kaneohe Bay is shallow, wide, and very calm, with a silty-mud bottom—ideal for fishing and catching stuff.

  Judy and I become friends the first day as I show her how to catch opae with the net, and thread them, still flipping their tails, onto a hook on a couple of spare bamboo poles. We jig for papio off of the pier. I get the feeling Judy’s not used to this kind of thing, but she doesn’t complain, which I like. Lauren and Bettina stay in with Bonny
and Mom, baking and playing in the house.

  Grandpa Garth notices us fishing and comes down in khaki cargo shorts and a faded green University of Hawaii Rainbows tee. He puts on a faded canvas fishing hat that looks like it’s been around the world, and his deep brown eyes sparkle with intelligence from beneath the brim. “Want to put out some crab traps?”

  “Sure!” I’m super excited and grab Judy’s hand, giving her a tug toward the flat-bottomed skiff with a little trolling motor tied to the pier. Grandpa Garth piles wire cages into it as we sit together on a bench in front. Each trap has a scrap iron weight at the bottom, and a bleach bottle tied to it so it can be found again.

  Once loaded, he poles us across the still, shallow water of the inner bay with its gray bottom and long, squishy sea cucumbers. Mom and the other girls wave to us from the shore. Mom has a little worried frown on her forehead, but Grandpa’s in a good mood, and I can tell it’s going to be fine.

  He maneuvers the boat into deeper water and shows us how to set the crab traps, baited with pieces of bacon he brought down from the house. We drop them around the Bay in a pattern, marked by the floating bleach bottles, to check on the next day.

  “Now that you know how, you can take over baiting and bringing in the traps,” he tells us. I’m thrilled about this and can’t wait to see what we catch the next day. “Samoan crabs, mostly,” he says, when I ask him what to expect. “Slipper lobsters, sometimes.”

  My mouth waters. Samoan crabs, with their pointy-edged shells and blue-lined claws, can grow to be huge. They like mud and mangroves, which Kaneohe has in plenty. The slippers, horseshoe-shaped brown lobsters with beady black eyes, are bottom dwellers that dig into silt or sand.

  “I’ll show you my lab,” Grandpa says, once the traps are set. His lab is why he’s living in this house right across the channel from the University of Hawaii’s facility on Coconut Island, he tells us, and points to the atoll I noticed on the first day. Coconut Island is a hockey puck peppered with palms only a few hundred more yards out to sea, across a deep turquoise channel.

  “The island is a natural atoll with its own very healthy barrier reef.” Grandpa’s deep voice booms from his barrel chest, and I can easily see him teaching college—he has a voice you want to listen to, and a face that’s hard to look away from. “In the thirties, the heir to the Fleischmann yeast fortune bought it, made artificial ponds and other changes to it, and built his house there. The University of Hawaii owns half of it now, and the wealthy Pauley family owns the other half. Coconut Island’s an ideal location for research because it’s right in the middle of reef habitat and near open water too, so we can study marine animals in varied natural environments. We have a lot of studies going and also teach students out there.”

  I am so excited to go to Coconut Island to see his lab that I bounce on the seat where the life preservers are. He doesn’t make us wear the jackets, which means he knows we can swim and handle ourselves. Well, I can, at least. Judy looks back at the shore, her eyes squinty and her face pale, but doesn’t say anything.

  Grandpa Garth pulls on the rope attached to the small outboard and fires it up. The skiff moves along well, sliding across the deep-water channel on the other side of the mud flats and all the way to the atoll.

  We tie the boat at the dock on Coconut Island. I’m almost hopping with excitement but restraining myself from talking too much as Grandpa takes us into the marine biology building. The steady heartbeat of bubblers fills a dim and fishy-smelling barnlike place, where rows and rows and rows of glass tanks crusted with the drying salt of splashed ocean water line walls and aisles of shelving. No kids ever get to come here, I can tell. I’m lucky to see this.

  Grandpa tells us all sorts of things about the tanks’ contents, but I only really notice the huge cylinder tank in the center of the room, filled with sardines circling and circling in a shape like a tornado. They’re individually small, but make a shape like one big thing, silver and fluid as mercury. They remind me of a beehive—busy, organized, and not interested in us at all. I press my face against the curved Plexiglas. I could watch them all day.

  “These are my babies.” Grandpa Garth sets a big square hand on the tank, gazing into the whirl of sardines. The reflection of their passing lights his face, and I can feel how much he loves those fish—maybe more than the people in his life, which makes perfect sense to me as I take in their beauty.

  We continue on past offices and classrooms, then walk out of the building to look at ponds and docks around the island’s edge as he tells us about the invasion of mangroves into Kaneohe Bay. He picks up a green, pointed mangrove seed floating beside the dock. About the size and shape of a pen, the seed’s slightly rounder on one end. He shakes the water off it and gets our attention with his intense dark eyes, holding it up by the bulb.

  “These mangrove pods floated to Hawaii, and they’re taking over the ancient fish ponds and choking out the native Hawaiian birds’ habitat. If you see any of these seeds, pick them up and throw them away, but not anywhere that they can grow—all the way into the trash. Pull up any baby trees you find when you’re playing around in the mud.”

  We promise to fight the Mangrove Invasion every day.

  On the way back, I catch a nice, hand-sized papio with my bamboo pole from the skiff, and when we check the traps, I pull out a Samoan crab caught without a fuss or getting pinched. At the house, Grandpa tells Mom, “This girl is a natural!”

  I get to cook my fish by myself at the stove. I feel really good that Grandpa noticed how good I am at fishing, and I can tell Mom likes that too.

  Mom’s trying really hard to be nice to Grandpa and my aunts and keep everything fun and interesting for all of us girls. She makes meals for everyone and cleans the house. I’m still a little worried about her, but she seems pretty much back to how she was before the crazy started.

  During the day, Judy and I roam the bay in the skiff, setting the crab traps and pulling in buckets of Samoan crab and slipper lobster, which we eat nightly. The younger girls play at home in the yard and under the house.

  Mom gets the idea to surprise Grandpa by having us make a “natural history museum” on the shady side of the house next to the hedge. This project is something all of us girls can do, so each day we scavenge for interesting things. We add treasures daily: a sun-bleached cat’s skull, eggshells and bird nests, road-flattened toads, lobster molts, coral and shells. Judy and I look the names of things up in Latin, and write them in our best handwriting on little paper tabs. We plan to impress Grandpa Garth with a grand tour when we have it finished.

  A few days after we start the museum, Grandpa tells us we’re having a barbecue down by the dock. “Caught something big,” he says, his eyes glittering. “Come see.” The gaggle of us follows him down the slanting lawn to the barbecue area near the dock.

  A dead five-foot gray reef shark lies on the grass, its glassy, opaline eye staring up at us. Dark patches on its rough skin make it look like pictures I’ve seen of salmon exhausted from spawning.

  “Shark steaks!” Grandpa says in his over hearty voice. “Something new for you girls, I’m sure.” He brandishes a huge buck knife, and squats beside the carcass. “Judy and Toby, hold the fins and tail so I can gut it.”

  I hold the dorsal fin reluctantly, breathing through my mouth because it stinks in a dark and funky way, worse than most fish I’ve gutted. Judy’s face is white, and her lips are folded together, but she holds the tail by her thumb and forefinger, because I know she’s even more terrified of her dad than holding the shark.

  Grandpa Garth stabs the knife, grunting with the effort of getting through the tough skin, into the poophole of the shark. Muscles bulging, he saws and strains as he slits it. Guts bulge out, springing free as if pressurized, and a wave of rotting meat smell rises. Judy lets go of the tail and runs for the house, her sisters in her wake. Bonny comes and holds the tail in Judy’s place.

  “You two girls aren’t afraid of a little blood, right?”
Grandpa pulls the ropes and bags of guts out. The smell is nauseating, a solid thing I have to find a way to breathe through. Bonny squinches her face, but we both hang onto the shark’s wriggling carcass to steady it.

  I’ve gutted enough fish with my dad, even game fish like aku and papio, to know that this shark wasn’t well. “Grandpa, it doesn’t smell right,” I say. “Do you think it might have been sick? Should we eat it?”

  My grandfather glares at me, hands covered with blood, neck red with anger, giant knife in hand. “I’m a marine ichthyologist. Do you think I’d feed my family bad fish?”

  We eat the barbecued shark steaks because he says we have to. Mom protests, but he won’t let her fix anything else. The slabs of shark are greasy and rancid, and reek of the rot that was in the fish’s gut. Bonny and I both eat what’s put in front of us and get to have ice cream after. The other girls cry and don’t finish theirs, but get the ice cream too, in the end.

  We all feel the lash of Grandpa Garth’s disappointment.

  He must have been right that the fish was okay because we don’t get sick. But after that, we stop making the natural history museum.

  Another evening, near the end of our stay, Mom slices carrots for dinner, and gives some to the five of us to snack on. We’re hungry and ready for dinner, but Lauren complains that Mom hasn’t peeled the carrots.

  “I never peel the carrots. All the nutritional value’s in the carrot skin.” She’s said this before. In fact, I don’t remember ever eating a peeled carrot.

  Lauren fusses that she doesn’t like them that way; that’s not how they have them at home. Mom ignores her, continuing with her meal prep. Lauren disappears and returns a few minutes later, towing Grandpa Garth out of his den.