by T W Neal
We buy another van, and carpool to Island School with a couple of other North Shore families. I reconnect with my Island School friends from our last stint on Kauai without any trouble, but our house is so isolated that a car is necessary for getting anywhere close to my friends. My buddy, Megan, lives in Anahola, thirty minutes away, as do Kate and Emma, British twins who also attend our funky private school. I can’t find my old friend Tita, and I hear she moved into Kapa`a and is attending the high school there.
With the racial barriers from the past just as impervious as ever, there’s no one to hang out with nearby. Out of boredom and necessity, I get back into surfing and buy my first surfboard at a garage sale. It’s a seven-foot, single-fin, light blue Channin “gun” designed for big surf, but I take it out almost daily in any condition.
With nothing to do but chores at home, I find new motivation to get out in the surf and improve on my own. After school and chores, I ride my bike down the potholed dirt road through the taro fields, the Channin precariously balanced under one arm.
The salty gym of the ocean is the place to take all of my angst out on. I attack the waves with all of my frustration, and they can take it and spank me right back. I’m reminded again that nature is a place that can absorb and transform my frazzled emotions. In my sleek black Speedo tank suit or my new green bikini, on any given day I’m out in the ocean, hooked on the challenge and adrenaline rush of surfing.
Surfing. We joke that it’s the only thing to do on Kauai, but what a thing it is. I start out at the beginner spots, sand bars along Hanalei Bay where I don’t have to be embarrassed by how bad I am at first—but I’ve absorbed a lot from being around surfing all my life, and I’ve already got “wave knowledge” from swimming and bodyboarding and my early start when we lived at the Kauikeolani Estate. I can read the lineup, choose a spot to take off where the wave will peak, and be able to tell when I need to straighten off because it’s going to close out in front of me.
All of this helps me progress rapidly. Within a few months, I’ve graduated to paddling out at my parents’ favorite spot, Hanalei Bay. Sometimes I even surf with Mom and Pop while Bonny babysits the younger girls. The first time I get a tube ride, where the lip of the wave curls over me, I’m filled with an exhilaration that makes me yell in triumph after I kick out the back successfully—and the other surfers grin, hoot, and give me “shaka.” It’s a friendly place that day, even though I’m one of just a couple of women out in the water.
I’m beginning to understand Kauai’s addictive quality, and it has everything to do with the exuberant beauty of the place itself, and its great surf.
Reconnecting with old friends at Island School is great, but the “off the grid” world at home still feels desperately small, a shoe that never stops pinching. When I want to make a phone call, I have to ride my bike up to the pay phone in town—and change is coming to the old Ching Young Store building. It’s being cleaned up and remodeled, and Aunty Clorinda reigns over a new, freestanding post office building a block or so away.
1981 rolls around, and Pop gets into the new sport of windsurfing, teaching me and Bonny to sail first. Like most sports, I pick it up quickly and graduate to shorter boards as they are developed, and work on mastering moves like jibing and waterstarts. We all enjoy this new sport, which feels like the perfect marriage of sailing and surfing.
Pop and I get along better now that I’m surfing and boardsailing—we have an interest to share, and Pop and I always get along best when he’s teaching me something. He opens a new business giving windsurfing lessons while Bonny, Mom, and I do a lot of his caretaker job hours. He gets a business loan and buys rental windsurf equipment, and pretty soon Bonny and I are helping load and unload the student windsurfers at nearby Anini Beach Park, even teaching lessons ourselves when he needs help.
I start dating, mostly other surfers, and I go out with a smart, hardworking kid named Greg. We surf together, and he gives me a driving lesson in his little Honda that ends when I run off the road and almost crash into a fence. We take a hike up to Sleeping Giant, a remote mountain near Kapa`a, and with the heat of our exertions, a glorious view, and a cool breeze drawing us together, we kiss and make out.
It’s pleasant, but I thought it would be more exciting—earth-shattering! Captivating! A sonic boom of physical sensation!
I sense my capacity for these feelings, but they remain elusive. I want sex to be meaningful: deep, intense, total rapture, and fulfillment. Maybe reading so many romance novels has given me unrealistic expectations, but I’m still not going to settle for anything less than the full experience of falling in love and passion.
Mom drags me to our family doctor in Kilauea for birth control, over my protests. “I’m hardly even dating,” I grumble in embarrassment.
“But you’re going to. And you want to be in control of what happens with your body,” she says.
I have to admit, having several months’ worth of birth control pills does give me peace of mind. I’m grateful to Mom for making me look the issue in the eye. Getting pregnant would be a disaster for my aspirations, and she loves me enough to know this.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Experimentation Allergies
Pop teaching me to windsurf
Age: 16, Hanalei, Kauai, 1982
The first time I ever get drunk is at an adult party at night on a sailboat anchored in Hanalei Bay. There are some young people there, but I’m definitely the youngest. I’m handed shots of tequila, which go straight to my head. Dizzy and giggling, I strip off my clothes with the rest of the partiers, and soon we’re all jumping off the side of the boat, skinny-dipping, shrieking and laughing as rock music echoes across the Bay.
One of the guys dares me to take one of the windsurfers tied up to the boat out for a naked sail, and some part of me can’t help but rise to the challenge—the same part that climbed a forty-foot tree to play on a raft of vines, and will surf and jump off waterfalls when none of the other girls will.
I pull up the sail from the water by the stretchy uphaul. Keeping my balance with difficulty, naked breasts swinging, I reef the boom in, angling downwind. Overhead, a vault of stars is rendered fuzzy by my lack of glasses, and, sliding by under the windsurfer, the water is a glassy black abyss that, when I inevitably fall off, feels cold and filled with unfamiliar monsters.
I end having to paddle the windsurfer back, and am stone cold embarrassingly sober by the time the boat’s lights fall on my nakedness. “Nice form!” comes a drunken holler. I seriously consider sailing away to shore, but the wind’s died. I end up climbing the ladder onto the boat and enduring razzing until I can find a towel.
Out in my screen box bedroom, I write about the experience in my journal. I don’t like the way drinking makes me feel—out of control, silly. I’m four times more likely than other people to become an alcoholic since I’m the offspring of alcoholics, and I worry about that.
The worst episode of this experimentation phase happens at a party when I drink too much and end up in a sleeping bag on the beach, making out with Greg’s older brother home from college, a guy I barely know. Waking up in his arms, both of us crusty with dried salt from night swimming, I have no idea how I got there. I crawl out of the sleeping bag and check my panties, deciding I’m still a virgin because they’re the only thing I have on and look clean.
My best possibility in getting off Kauai lies in going to college, and to do that I need to stay focused. I’m in very real danger of getting accidentally pregnant or derailed from school through some stupid alcohol or pot-related blunder, and I’m meant for bigger things than struggling to make ends meet at some menial job in this beautiful backwater just so I can surf.
An anti-drink and anti-drug decision hardens into resolve.
“That’s it,” I tell my friends after the Sleeping Bag Incident, taking my decision public for accountability purposes. “No more drinking or pot, or I’ll get stuck on this rock.”
My PSAT scores make
the Garden Island paper as they’re in the top ten percent in the nation. My grandparents, allowed back in our lives because of their help with the Island School tuition, encourage my college dreams.
“We’ll take you to look at schools,” they say, which means colleges in California near them. I give lip service to being interested in that—but I’ve got my sights set on faraway new places like Boston and New York. I want to see everything, try everything, and have a much bigger, better normal life: one with a fulfilling, interesting job and fat paychecks.
All we have is a giant column-shifter van for me to learn to drive on. I’m well past sixteen and still don’t have my license, purely due to neither parent wanting to teach me. After much begging and trading work for the lesson, once I have my permit Pop agrees to instruct me. Between clutching, gassing, and braking the huge vehicle, I bump the van into the gravel pile we use for filling the potholed road. On impact, I giggle hysterically—we haven’t even made it out of the parking area.
Pop is not amused. “That’s it. I’m not teaching you. This is too stressful.”
“Everything is too stressful for you. I don’t know why you even had kids.”
“I never wanted kids. Your mom wanted you.” I’ve never heard Pop say his truth quite so clearly before. I do know the story—it’s been told often enough. Mom got pregnant with me when they were in college, and their parents made them get married—and from then on Pop was an unwilling sperm donor. Pop yanks the keys out of the ignition and gets out of the van. “You can figure out getting your license yourself, Never Enough Girl.”
Never Enough Girl. The nickname hurts, as if my ambition and dreams are something bad, something shameful. I rest my head on the steering wheel and cry as he slams the door.
I trade babysitting the neighbor’s toddler son for using her phone and getting driving lessons in her stick shift VW Bug. Now I only have to walk down the long-ass muddy road to the house at the end of the taro fields to use the phone extension she puts out for me in her garage. Calls to my friends Megan, Kate, and Emma usually go like this: “Can I spend the night at your house and never come home?”
Twins Kate and Emma are originally from Europe, and have sophisticated style from traveling all over the world with their hippie mom. Kate’s funny and hyper, always full of fun and creative ideas; Emma is more mellow. Pretty much anything goes at their house. I can tell that they’re sometimes as unhappy as I am, and finances aren’t easy.
Megan has it the best of the four of us. Diana, her mom, is a lovely woman who teaches music at our school. Things are clean and fun at her house, and there’s always plenty of food. Some of my happiest times take place lying on her bed with the other girls, listening to music and talking about boys.
Kate dates a local guy, the only one of us to do so. Kimo’s adorable, gentle, and fun with a great sense of humor. He makes me wish I’d had a chance to get to know Hawaiian boys better, but bad memories have put me off. Attending Island School with other haoles, I don’t even see the kids I used to go to school with in Hanalei.
In spite of teasing from my friends, who’ve already cast off their outmoded virginity, I’m waiting to fall in love before having sex. I’m a romantic surfer girl “Anne of Green Gables,” complete with red hair and a reading fetish.
One day, a boy I’ve known since I first went to Island School shows me a scribbled poem on his geometry paper. “I’m making lyrics out of this math poem,” he says. “‘The square root of the hypotenuse’ could be a catchy title. Next stop, top forty!” He laughs.
Math poetry becoming song lyrics? Yes, please. Brian has a keen intelligence, and for years, as I’ve shuttled back and forth between schools, whenever we’re together we compete to get the best scores. Smart guys are sexy.
This particular day, the sun hits his auburn hair and lights a fire in the depths of it. I’ve always admired how Brian could pick up any instrument and play it, but now I notice him physically too. His longish red hair is curlier than my strawberry blonde, but otherwise, down to our eyes, we’re as matched as twin ginger bookends.
A constraint falls over our usual banter. I catch him looking at me when I’m sneaking looks at him, and it feels hot and scary and different from the relationships I’ve had so far. Nothing happens, but I notice every small uniqueness about him: full lips that would be too soft if not opposed by a square jaw. A compact surfer’s body sprinkled with delicious freckles like nutmeg. Dexterous musician’s hands, sensitive and confident.
After play practice one day, the room clears out as he plays an improvised, original song on the school’s old upright. I lie on the stage next to the piano, floating with my eyes closed on the sound as if it were a rich and colorful magic carpet. His music is like my art and writing—something that arises from within, unstoppable and necessary.
The song ends. “Let’s take a walk,” he says.
We leave the building and cross the road to the beach across from school. Brian’s hand feels like the only real thing in the world at that moment; his warm, firm grip is keeping me from flying away like a balloon on the breeze.
This. This is what I’ve been holding out for.
The wind hums in the branches of a beach heliotrope tree we take shelter under. Brian’s wearing board shorts for surfing, his default outfit, and he takes his shirt off with a quick and graceful movement, dropping it to the sand. I love looking at him, and the tiny dimple beside his mouth tells me he knows it.
He takes off my glasses. I take off his. We set them on his shirt near our feet. His eyes, level with mine, are a fascinating umber flecked with mossy green, rust, and gold. I see my outline reflected in their shiny surface. My eyes look like his, so I know what he’s seeing, too. Our similarity feels amazing, like finding a missing part of myself I never knew was gone.
His skin, buttermilk with cinnamon sprinkled on it, covers a lean muscled body. I touch him tentatively, drawing a hand down his arm, over his shoulder. Each touch trails fire through my fingertips and raises chicken skin on him, making his stomach clench. His nipples, the size and color of pennies, tighten into currants. He strokes me in similar fashion, then slides his hands up my arms to cup my face, drawing me closer.
We’re just inches apart, hazel eyes gazing into hazel eyes, and we slowly lean in for the kiss we can’t wait for any longer. I step into a red room of sensation, a spell cast from just the connection of our mouths. The waves crash on the beach behind us, the ever-present wind shushes through the branches of the tree, and our arms circle around each other in a perfect fit that makes each of us sigh with recognition and relief—“Oh, it’s you.”
Over the next weeks, we sneak to the beach often to meet under the heliotrope tree and kiss until our lips are raw and our bodies quiver.
I don’t even tell my close friends about our relationship. It’s a small school, and neither of us feels ready for the usual teasing, as if in telling others we’ll dilute what we have—at least, that’s the way I feel about it. And as our relationship intensifies, I want him to be my first.
I tell Brian so, one afternoon under our favorite tree. “I’m a virgin. I’ve been waiting to be in love.” I can’t get enough of looking at his firm, lush mouth, tracing it with my fingers, kissing and tasting it. His is a beauty that’s crept up on me, a subtle delight I almost missed. “I have champagne. And a tent.”
I’ve broken into my stash and started the birth control pills. I want to be with him in every way I can, and it’s keeping me up nights. He doesn’t say he loves me too—but that’s okay. What he doesn’t say is in his eyes, hands, and kisses.
We tell our parents we’re spending the night at our friends’ houses. We’re going to hike the Na Pali Coast and set up the tent and . . . do it. My imagination boggles at that point, educated as I am by Barbara Cartland and Joan Collins. I can’t wait to be transported into the bliss of sensual oneness.
I get into Brian’s car on Friday afternoon for Mission Deflowering. My backpack bulges with a bot
tle of champagne, bedding, and tent. I’ve even swiped a rubber from one of my sexually prepared friend’s wallets, just in case Brian doesn’t have one.
We pull away from the school and take a left, headed for the North Shore. Brian’s clenching and unclenching his hands on the steering wheel. “I have to tell you something.”
He stares straight ahead. I see an unfamiliar muscle in the square line of his jaw.
“What?” I restrain myself from my old habit of bouncing on the seat with excitement.
“I know what this means to you. And I need to tell you that . . . I don’t feel the same.”
I turn fully toward him. “What?”
“You said you wanted to be in love, you know, for this. And I’m sorry, but I just don’t feel the same. I don’t want to take advantage of you. So . . . I don’t think we should go through with it.” He still won’t look at me.
Somehow, we’re still driving, moving through space. I’m pinned through the heart like a butterfly to a corkboard, breathless and dizzy with pain. All I can think of is getting away. “Stop the car.”
“We should talk about this. I do care about you.” Brian begins to pull over, but it isn’t fast enough for me. I open the door. The asphalt and red Kauai dirt speeds by. “Wait!” He sounds panicked.
He gets the car mostly stopped and I jump out, stumbling and almost falling. I reach back and grab the pack filled with supplies for our special night.
My eyes feel as hot as the volcano goddess Pele’s intense fire. I incinerate him with my gaze as pain turns to rage. “You’re gonna be sorry.” Anger is armor. “I’m the best you’ll never have.” I slam the door.