by T W Neal
It’s a pretty good exit line. That’s a tiny comfort, but not nearly enough for having loved someone and offered everything, only to be turned down.
I turn away and break into a jog, headed back to school to phone for a ride. He calls after me, but I speed up, running full tilt down the road. Tears choke me. My first broken heart feels very much like an actual stab wound to the chest.
Chapter Forty
An Enema for the Pain
Age: 17, Hanalei, Kauai, 1982
Everything about home has begun to chafe.
Our morning breakfast, made from boiled chicken feed: “Why pay more for the packaging when it’s all the same ingredients?” says Mom, buying a fifty-pound bag of mixed cracked corn, rolled oats, flax, and barley scratch from the farm supply store.
The Meher Baba quotes taped on the refrigerator:
“Don’t worry, be happy.”
“Mastery in servitude.”
“No amount of prayer or meditation can do what helping others can do.”
Yogananda’s quotes were deeper. Why did we have to change gurus? That happened somewhere along the way, and I was too caught up in my teenage life to pay attention.
The refrigerator itself annoys me. Small and rusty, it’s run by turning on the cacophony of the generator once a day for an hour, the only electricity we have.
The composting toilet outside the kitchen window rankles. It’s functional, but doing my morning poop in public stresses me out. Pop can’t be bothered to build a screen for the composter, nor anything around the “shower,” that hose tied to a tree. Now that I’m a well-rounded seventeen, showering in plain view irks me even more than the stone-cold water. “Why are you so fussy?” Pop says. “Nobody cares.”
“I care,” I say, but that’s never mattered.
Daily rain blows into my little screen room, covering my few possessions in mold. When it really rains, I have plastic blinds I can go outside and roll down, but I have to get soaked doing it. When it really, really rains, which it does often in winter, the roof slant of my tacked-on room is too flat and water backs up and rolls down the inner wall, soaking everything it touches.
The alternative is to go inside the crowded family shack and sleep on the floor of the living room—too claustrophobic even to contemplate.
The endless yard work of Pop’s caretaker job takes the annoyance to a whole new level because I get the tasks that require a strong back. Standing in mud in the pond with a sickle to chop back the thick, choking buffalo grass is one of my chores. Cane spiders, their environment disturbed, run up my body, and I almost hack off a limb more times than I can count trying to get them off me. Shoveling gravel into a wheelbarrow to fill the potholes and puddles in the road to the estate is my chore, along with chopping encroaching hau bush with a machete or chainsaw and digging out the multi-bulbed stumps of banana trees.
I wear my bikini for all these tasks, telling myself I’m getting a tan and getting in shape. Wearing my bathing suit also saves having to wash filthy work clothes at the Laundromat since we don’t have a washer.
No phone. No car. No music. No TV. Nowhere to go, or shop, or hang out with friends. I miss Brian and our secret meetings; I miss our easy friendship just as much. I’m frustrated, isolated, and claustrophobic all the time I’m not in school or out surfing.
Surfing becomes an escape, a way to discharge energy, a place to socialize. I can “talk story” with the other surfers in the parking lot or out in the break. I’m improving, though being a girl counts against me.
There’s no respect from other surfers. If you fail to make a takeoff even once, no one will let you in to the takeoff spot to try again. But I know a lot of people from growing up here, and eventually I find a lineup where I can usually get waves; out at the big Hanalei break, I hang way inside and pick off the smaller waves no one wants.
Taking off, left foot forward because I’m a “goofy foot,” angling down the wave and pumping the board to pick up speed on the liquid, moving surface, drawing up tight to tuck under the lip, making it out the other side—that’s when I stop thinking or feeling anything but totally connected with the energy moving through the water. There’s a shared power in riding waves, just like riding horses—a merging that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
I struggle because of weak arms and not being confident, and I don’t like being one of just a couple of women surfers. I work on strengthening my arms at home by lifting gallon milk jugs filled with water and doing squats and lunges as I go about my yard work.
Surfing puts me back into the “tomboy” role I’ve always had in spite of my body’s betrayal into curviness. After my home chores, I become “one of the guys” and pile into vehicles with boys from school and the neighborhood to go out wherever there are waves.
Evenings in Hanalei are when there’s some of the best surfing, as the wind is often offshore, helping hold the waves’ shape. The sandbar next to the Hanalei river mouth is crowded with parked trucks filled with guys and their families and girlfriends, passing joints and sipping beer, watching the sunset and telling stories of the waves they caught that day. Sometimes I spot Knight with his posse of friends, but we never speak. He’s becoming a model and a surf star, and is too exalted to say hi to me.
The canoe club team comes into the river mouth from their ocean practice, pushing upriver. Their shoulders swing in sync, keeping the beat with, “Hup! Ho!” from the steersman as the beautiful wooden canoe trimmed in yellow slices through the water. Parked on my baby blue Channin, I sit in classic surfer pose on the beach: ass on my board on the sand, arms looped around my knees, one hand clasping a wrist. I’m a part of that scene, and it feels good. I’m a surfer chick; not a beach babe like Bonny, who’s become frighteningly beautiful.
Going anywhere with Bonny has become hard on my ego. “Back off, she’s only thirteen!” I tell my surfer friends, who hardly glance at good ol’ buddy me but are agog at Bonny. She’s grown to five foot ten and strolls down the beach on long tan legs with about an acre of white-blonde hair bouncing in the sun.
I’m mouthier, angrier, and more frustrated than ever. Mom and Pop have no idea how hard it is to be seventeen and living our weird, smothering lifestyle—which is how I’ve begun to see it. One day, in a rare moment alone at the beach with Mom, I tell her how I’m struggling. “I’ll die if I don’t get off this island. I think about killing myself sometimes. I can’t end up trapped here.”
“Always such a drama queen,” Mom says. “Never Enough Girl.”
I walk away so she won’t see the tears spill over, adding to my “drama queen” reputation—and I stop trying to communicate. She’s never understood my drive to excel, my hunger for normalcy, my need for a broader world.
I wake up with a pain in my abdomen one morning, a stabbing sensation that makes me curl around myself in my little foam bed, moaning. I’m hot all over, my mouth is dry, my lips chapped, and skin burning. I try to get up and walk to the house to tell Mom I’m sick, but when I stretch my legs out, the agony in my stomach makes me curl up again.
“Help!” I pound on the wall behind me, a wall that connects with Mom and Pop’s room. “Help!” My voice is raspy and small.
How did I get so sick, so fast?
I have to vomit, suddenly and overwhelmingly, and barely make it to heave up my empty stomach outside the little door of my room.
Bonny comes in answer to my pounding and her eyes widen as she sees me lying on the floor of my room, smells the vomit outside my door.
She fetches Mom. By then I have diarrhea, which doesn’t really work with the composting toilet, and my cries of agony at having to walk and climb the ladder. The owners are gone from the main house, and Mom and Pop half-carry me upstairs to the only real bathroom on the whole property. I’m shaking and burning with fever and weeping from the pain.
Mom consults her home remedies book and decides I have a blocked bowel. “We need to give you an enema.”
I’m too weak and
delirious to protest.
Mom plies me with water, which I throw up, and inserts the enema. She barely gets me onto the toilet in time. When there’s blood in the toilet, and I become incoherent and am still vomiting, my fever around a hundred and four, she and Pop confab and decide I have to go to the hospital.
The hospital.
None of us have gone to the big white square cube of Wilcox Hospital in Lihue since Anita was born. Mom and Pop hate hospitals and Western medicine and we have no health insurance, but they finally load me in the van, leaving Bonny in charge of the younger girls.
I clutch a barf bucket, lying on the bed in the back of the van, flickering in and out of consciousness as we speed down the road. At the hospital, I shriek like a banshee when the doctor palpates my abdomen.
“Appendicitis,” he says. “You got here just in time. We have to operate.”
I’m too far gone to notice much but the colored lights overhead as they wheel me down the hall toward the operating room—but just before they take me in for the surgery, a gunshot victim arrives.
Getting shot on Kauai is a front-page news event—it never happens. I lie on my gurney, writhing in agony, puking up the fluids they’re pumping into me via IV, as they rush the bloody gunshot guy past me into the hospital’s one operating room. The doctor, already prepped in a blue gown and gloves to do my surgery, does him first.
They can’t medicate me because they’re going to put me under, so it’s another two hours before I’m finally wheeled in after they finish with the gunshot guy.
“Frontier medical conditions,” the surgeon, on rotation from Oahu, grouses as he changes into clean scrubs with a nurse’s help. “I can’t believe this place. It’s like the fucking outback.”
I’m wheeled into the operating room and the man looks down at me, examining the smooth, flat, caramel-colored expanse of my belly, sliding his gloved fingertips across it like it’s a fresh canvas and he, the painter. He looks up at me and his brown eyes, all I can see above the paper mask, are kind. “So pretty. I don’t want to mess you up with a big ugly scar. Nurse, shave her so I can do a bikini line incision.”
“Right away.”
This means more delay, and I’m pretty sure I’m dying. “I don’t care,” I croak. “Just do it. Just get this over with, please.”
He shakes his head. “You’ll thank me later.”
The nurse shaves my pubic area and tapes everything off, and finally the anesthesiologist puts a mask over my face and ends my suffering.
The surgeon gets my appendix out just before it ruptures. I recover rapidly from the first operation any Wilson has ever had at Wilcox Hospital, and do indeed write a card to thank the doctor for taking the time to cut me just above my pubic bone, leaving a seam of scar that can be hidden under my bathing suit.
That summer, Island School decides to close their high school program and only operate a middle school. This decision is terrible for me personally as an eleventh grader. Now my choice for senior year is Kapa`a High School, with every post-traumatic terror that invokes, or homeschooling myself.
I’m determined to make my high school record as good as it can be for college. Homeschooling, in addition to being too isolating, won’t help my grade point average.
The news about Island School throws me so far into desperation that I get an idea: I could go back to Santa Barbara by myself. Perhaps I could live with Maga and finish high school at Santa Barbara High. I bet I could even make my patchy high school resume look good with extracurricular activities, maybe Student Government or a sports team. I could go to a prom and have a real high school experience my senior year!
I trek down to the neighbor’s house and tell her I have to make a long-distance call. I give her five dollars of babysitting money and, standing in the dirt-floored garage with the phone pinched through the door that leads into her kitchen, I make my call.
“Toby?” Maga’s deep, intimidating voice summons up a memory-picture of her bold blue eyes, the tall long-legged frame Mom and Bonny have, and the long ripple of strawberry-blonde hair I inherited. “What are you calling for?”
We’ve had a good relationship since the days of crashing at her house, but I’ve never called her by myself before. I’ve never had the sense that she thinks of me as a granddaughter—more like a niece or a cousin to Nancy and Patricia, her daughters so close to my age.
“I’m calling to ask a big favor.” I take a deep breath, hold it. Squeeze my eyes shut. “Can I come live with you for my senior year of high school? I promise I’ll help out. Do yard work. Clean your house.”
“Sure. Of course.” Maga hardly takes a moment to think about it, something I love about her. “Nancy’s gone at college and you can have her room. Patricia’s still in the house, going to City College. And you know that I work, so there won’t be any handholding.” She’s brisk, no-nonsense, with all the nurturing of a platypus. I’ve often thought my mom had it hard as her oldest, but as a grandma she’s great.
“Of course, Maga, I don’t expect that.” I’m hopping with excitement, raising little puffs of dirt on the floor of the neighbor’s primitive garage. “I’ll do anything you want.”
“Put your mom on,” she says. “I want to talk this over.”
“I have to go home and get her.” I bite the side of my finger. Mom and Pop might decide to be difficult about this. I can’t get my hopes up.
Surprisingly, they’re thrilled. “This is a great solution,” Mom says. “I was so worried about what to do.”
I didn’t know they felt that way. The broadcasting of my misery wasn’t totally missed after all. I thought they’d be happy to get their mouthy firstborn with all of her complaining off their hands, but even Pop seems downcast as I start packing.
I’m even more taken aback by outpourings of grief from my sisters as I give away my mildewy possessions and pack my few clothes. Bonny sits on my bed, helping me sort my jewelry, her eyes the blue-and-yellow they go when she’s upset.
“You’ll write me?” Bon’s hair is cut like Farrah Fawcett. She looks like her too, her tall body decoratively draped over the beat-up sleeping bag in my tiny room. We’ve been the two passengers in a lifeboat through all of our family storms. I still can’t quite believe I’m climbing out and swimming for the horizon without her. I wish I could take her with me, but Mom and Pop would never go for that—she’s in line to pick up my chore load.
“Of course I’ll write. Maybe even send you a care package full of Kraft Mac’ & Cheese.” I get a smile out of her as we remember our binges on Maga’s badforyou food.
Anita sits on a scrap of rug in the corner of the tiny space, watching. She’s been crying on and off all day, tears seeping out of her big green eyes. I feel the sickest about leaving when I see her precious face. This morning I took her for a walk alone, up the long dirt road to the gardens behind the church, and French-braided her hair in a crown around her head, studded with plumerias, to say goodbye. I have a pure, unalloyed affection for her—probably because of all the babysitting I did when Mom and Pop were too deep in their drinking and using to take care of her like they have Wendy.
Outside, Wendy is having one of her tantrums. The most emotive of us besides me, she’s loudly objecting to my departure as Mom tries to explain.
“NO!” She shrieks. “No, no, no!” Her wails make my tummy tighten up. They always have.
“I better go help Mom with Wendy. Bon, why don’t you put my jewelry in a Ziploc bag?” I say. “I’ll just keep the real gold stuff. You guys can share the silver and whatever else.” I don’t want anything to weigh me down. Giving them my stuff makes me feel a tiny bit better.
Outside my room, Wendy is howling into Mom’s blue denim work muumuu. Mom looks pinched and sad, and she pats Wendy’s back helplessly.
“Let me take her for a walk.” I say. “We’ll go feed the swans.” Wendy loves feeding the swans.
I take her chubby, sticky hand and we walk across the lawn to the pond. I glance down
at her wispy head. She’s only wearing a diaper and a pair of tiny red plastic rain boots, and she slowly hiccups into silence. My heart squeezes me breathless.
I can’t believe I’m leaving my family.
But I have to.
I’m fighting for my life. If I stay, I have to go to Kapa`a High and face the bullies I’ve been hiding from since fifth grade. For all my bravado, it’s too scary. I’d rather strike out on my own to the mainland.
The swans, necks regally bent into arches, white feathers gleaming against the green glass of the pond, swim eerily toward us without raising a ripple on the water.
Wendy knows where the food is stored in a big Rubbermaid container. She pops the top and leans over, reaching in with the scooper. I follow her as she toddles back to the edge, sprinkling the feed into a trough above the water.
Immediately, the water erupts with tilapia, an introduced fish of the cichlid variety, whose population has exploded in the contained setting of the pond with access to the swans’ food. I grab a nearby scoop net and scoop ten or twelve big flapping ones out and toss them on the bank in the grass. We don’t eat them because they taste bad. Instead, we put them around the papaya and banana trees as fertilizer.
Wendy squats to watch the swans, her hands tucked between her tummy and thighs. The swans reach in among the boil of fish to eat, dabbling their black beaks and lifting their long snowy throats so the food can go down. I sit beside Wendy and put an arm over her. I can’t imagine my life without my sisters in it, but I’m going to have to. “I love you.”
Wendy throws her arms around me in the tightest hug, burrowing into my side.
Mom and Pop take me, alone, for a goodbye beach picnic at the End of the Road, Ke`e Beach, site of so many sunsets when we lived at the Forest House and a thousand family outings since. It’s bittersweet to eat my favorite treats like Brie and French bread and have my parents’ full attention on my last night with them. Pop takes pictures of Mom and me: walking along the sand looking for puka shells, clowning together in front of the camera.