The Whiteness of Bones (13 page)

“You must have sneaked out to see Orval that time you said you were going to paddling practice.”

“I never made the crew and Orval was with his grandmother at McBryde Plantation.”

“I thought his grandmother drowned in that accident.”

“No.”

The constant surprise of this freshly created past confirmed Mamie’s suspicion of her own individuality, and the individuality of others. It gave her, too, the beginning of an idea: memory, happily, was not the same thing as truth.

“Well, how did it happen then?”

“What?”

“With Orval. How did you get pregnant? It’s awfully hard to get pregnant these days, isn’t it?”

Mamie’s own sexual life was limited. That is to say, the act of sexual intercourse had so far played only a small part in Mamie’s life, while her sensuality was unexplored and unlimited. The best part, it seemed to her, had been the kissing. The hours and hours, all through the night, that she had spent kissing boys. Kissing in moored boats, kissing between trees in the cool palm grove, in the chapel at school, in Dicky Herbert’s airless tank, on the reef at low tide, while baby-sitting, while making
lei haku
, on horseback, on wet sand that exploded with phosphorescence every time she moved. When she thought back, she could not always remember just
who the boy had been. This was not an injustice to her partner, it was only that the sensation, the passion really, was so strong that the boys seemed to melt into one big, delirious boy who could kiss all night long (Gertrude used to say to her when she scratched on the back door at four in the morning, “You look like you been smash-up, girl”). The expectancy and excitement she had felt before the date, the nervous preparation (toothpaste, mouthwash, Q-Tips, deodorant), the lies to Mary (“Oh, we’re just going to Lily Shields’ to see her father’s slides of Angkor Wat”), the deep, deep comfort and excitement of those kisses. There was even a time in the night when both pairs of lips and two tongues and the area all around the mouths were numb, but even though all sensation, at least in those parts of the body, was lost, the kissing did not stop. Once her boyfriend, Billy Quinn, leaned her against a telephone pole to kiss her, and she was so moved by this kiss that when he finally released her, she keeled over stiffly. Little clouds of red Kaua‘i dust bloomed around her. He thought that he had killed her until he heard her moan in happiness.

Mamie was considered a wild, bad girl by the mothers who themselves opened back doors to dazed, chafed sons. In fact, she was chaste. Her wildness was only the beginning, unconscious struggle for exemption from the passivity expected of her as a girl. It was a proud, impassioned attempt to escape the limitations she was beginning to feel as a woman.

It was the boys of her adolescence who first experienced her imperiousness; her sudden, irrational changes of heart; her instability and contrariness; her high, high sense of separateness. All of these things that passed for wildness in Mamie were only signs of a disorganized resistance to combat the false femininity that the world was forcing upon her.

If the night was about kissing, the day was about daring. The same thunderstruck boys who lay next to her on the cold sand staring up at the drifting stars while they embraced had to endure her untiring energy by day. There was not a challenge she would not accept. She provoked challenge. There was no vine footbridge she would not cross, no matter how dilapidated; no race she would not run; no tree she would not climb.

There were contests of chicken on the Kekaha highway. There was even a mysterious robbery (two jars of pigs’ feet were stolen at the feed store). There were practical jokes (Lily Shields received pigs’ feet for her birthday from a secret admirer). She grew famous for her recklessness, if famous is not too strong a word considering the smallness of her world.

It wasn’t about sex at all. With all of her hair-flinging and teasing and kissing, Mamie was very inexperienced sexually. It was a pose. Mamie had recognized instinctively that she was not going to win (perhaps that is why she refused to go further than kissing), but there was a bravado and an exuberant sweetness about her struggle—it was not that comfortable kissing all night long in the ridged bottom of a boat.

Mamie snapped out of her reckless defiance the moment that she lost her virginity. It was during her sophomore year at college. Overnight, she became well-behaved and acquiescent, no longer demanding more than her share. The mothers who had so disapproved of her in her kissing days would have approved of her then. Stupefied by the years of their own passivity and forgetful of their own meager struggle, they would have gladly welcomed the rehabilitated Mamie into their unhappy midst.

Her old feelings did not disappear, of course, just because
she finally allowed a nice, funny boy from San Diego to force his way inside of her the night after the Rose Bowl. Like all good resistance fighters, she simply went underground. She stopped kissing all night long. She waited for something to happen. She did not know it, but she missed the feel of dry
plumeria
leaves slowly crushed to powder on the ground beneath her, and a big-shouldered, sweet-smelling, sweet-smiling island boy lying over her, kissing her.

“It wasn’t that hard,” Claire said. “I’d been fucking him since I was thirteen.”

Mamie slowly rewrapped her cheeseburger and neatly repacked it in the bag. She rolled up the bag and set it down on the needlepoint rug between the beds. She was shocked.

“Why did you never tell me? I wanted to know.”

“Oh, Mamie.” Claire laughed. “How could you have wanted to know if you didn’t know?”

“I mean I would have helped you.”

“Helped me?”

“I would have been your friend and you could have told me things.”

“I tried to tell you once. Remember the time I had to go to the clinic because I said that I already had a Tampax in and I put in a second one? And when the nurse was cleaning up the room, she said, ‘Next time you have sex, girly, be sure to take it out.’ I told you what she said, as a way of telling you, and you said, ‘Oh, what a mean person.’

“I believed you.”

“Mamie, you believe everybody.”

“I don’t really. But I believed you.”

Claire could no longer pretend that Mamie was not upset.
She sighed loudly and moved over to Mamie’s bed. They sat side by side.

“You didn’t miss much,” Claire said gently. “I used to sneak out to meet him during the summer. We did it the first time in the banyan tree.”

“The banyan?”

“It was pretty uncomfortable.”

“You used to say that Orval liked
me
.”

“I think he did. But then he gave up.”

“I do feel that I missed something. It might have been good for me if I had known.”

“You were always off fording a fucking river. Or reading.”

“You are this wonderful mutant, Claire,” said Mamie quietly. “You have just what you need. You’re not stupid and humorless like Aunt Alice and you’re not dumb and serious like me. You’re some genetic She-of-the-Future. You’ll be all right. You’ll be perfect.”

“And you won’t be?”

“Oh. Me. I don’t know about me. I wish I could be like you.”

“I always wanted to be like you. And care passionately about things. But I don’t. I don’t know why, but I don’t. You’ve always had these strong feelings about things. I could feel strongly about your cheeseburger, however.”

Mamie eased herself back on to her pillow, leaving her legs hanging awkwardly over the side. She moved in the careful way of someone who has been slightly injured; someone who does not yet know the extent of the damage, but is moving cautiously nonetheless.

“No, I don’t want it,” she said.

Claire turned over the Coleman Hawkins tape and moved back to her own bed. She ate the rest of Mamie’s cold cheeseburger,
using her flat stomach as a table. She kept time to “You’re Blasé” with her pretty foot.

Everything that Mamie knew, she knew from books and her own watchfulness, but it seemed to her that other people, like Claire and Alysse, were more fully informed than she was about the world and how things worked. Where had they received their information? And how? Mamie was bewildered. Her mother used to say to her, “You are your own worst enemy,” an observation Mamie thought neither original nor true. She had always thought it was just the opposite.

She was inhibited by her extreme notion of responsibility. It was not an exaggerated sense of omnipotence, but an expectation that the consequences of her actions would be unbearable. She had taken responsibility for Hiroshi, for McCully, for the banyan tree, for the vines ripped by Mary from the fence, for Gertrude and Sherry Alden, but she could not act on her own behalf.

The years at boarding school had been full of gaiety. Perhaps I was very busy, she thought. I was very busy and I didn’t realize just how stricken I was. It was not until her last year at college that it seemed to catch up with her. When it did, she was unable to move. I am in a period of recovery, she had said to calm herself. It is grief, she had thought. This was the period when she broke up with her boyfriend, Tom Sheehan from San Diego, whom she had continued to sleep with, after losing her virginity to him, in order to justify his victory. It was not that she disliked him or had minded the relinquishing of her maidenhood. It was the disappointment of it, the commonplace loss, that had surprised and confused her. By giving Tommy Sheehan significance in her life, she gave significance to the act. She had wondered if other girls felt the same way. She had not asked them. She wrote to Lily Shields, who left
the Big House for good when she was seventeen, and spent her small trust fund moving from country to country, and Lily wrote back that just as young men were sent to brothels to be introduced to the mysteries of sex, so young women should be taken in hand by practiced, older men who knew what they were about. She herself had been lucky to find such a man in Asolo, even though in her case it was a little late, as she was already the mother of a young child. She was no help to Mamie. She is in a state of amiable depression, Mamie had thought, and knows nothing. Following her advice, I should have slept with the loathsome Mr. Kipper. Mr. Kipper was a Yugoslav professor who waylaid Mamie one night as she walked back to her dorm and asked if she would show him her breasts. What is the
matter
with them? she had wondered. Do women lurk about waiting to ask men to show them their balls? Their cocks?

She stopped seeing Tom Sheehan when he asked her if she would play the part of a maid at a fraternity party. She would have to wear a very short black satin maid’s costume, and high heels and fishnet stockings and a coquettish white lace cap. His request had not seemed unreasonable to Tommy and his fraternity brothers, and he was astonished when she told him that she didn’t want to see him again.

When she thought back over her time with Tommy, she thought about the night she lost her virginity. What had held the most importance for her, the most humiliation, was when, the first time he put his two fingers inside of her, he did so through a hole in her cotton panties. He had been unaware of the hole, she knew, but it had mortified her, and distracted her from the astonishing rush of pleasure she had felt, the heating up of her body as he roughly pushed his fingers inside of her.

She had met Mr. Kipper once again, in the library, and he
had whispered to her in his bad accent, “In Burma, there are four things never to be trusted: rulers, thieves, the boughs of trees, and women.” She had wanted to smash him over the head with the book she was reading, Volume III of
The Golden Bough
, but she’d held herself to saying wearily, “I know. I know you all hate us, but what do you want me to do?” She should have hit him with the book, rather than ask such a heartfelt question, because Mr. Kipper had grinned and answered, “Just love me a leetle.” She had packed up her papers and notebooks and left the library.

It was not long after this that she stopped going to classes.

She stayed in her room for weeks, eating Butterscotch Krimpets and reading all of the Balzac she could find, listening over and over to the Bach Suites for Cello until her roommate, a nice girl from Beverly Hills, threw the cassettes out of the third-floor window. Mamie rushed out of the dormitory in her old
muumuu
to search for the tapes in the bushes. It was the first time she had been out of the dorm in a month. It was while she was on her hands and knees pawing through the pachysandra that some boys coming back from track practice stopped in curiosity to watch her and she realized that she would not be graduating that year from the University of California. She never found the tapes. She had gained fourteen pounds from the Krimpets. She figured about three books a pound. She was gone in a few days, using the plane ticket Aunt Alice had sent her as a graduation present, leaving the
muumuu
and the paperbacks under her bed.

As the weather at last turned fair and warm, Mamie began to understand more fully certain things she had once read
—Ethan Frome
, for example, and the Dylan Thomas poem
“The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.” As someone whose previous experience of cold was limited to one very rainy February in 1973 when the temperature at the Lihue airport plummeted to seventy-one degrees, and whose idea of spring was defined by early English poetry, Mamie was stirred and elated to discover that although the weather did not change very much every day, as it did on islands where there were rainstorms and drought all in one afternoon, the weather changed in an invisible, slower and larger way. There was winter. And then there was lovely spring. Mamie even went back to reading Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Frost. She fought the impulse, some particularly lovely evenings when she walked home from Deardorf’s, to speak to every person she saw on the street for she had been told many times by Alysse that the first rule of the street was “no eye contact, darling.” Mamie was someone who, by her very nature, sought eye contact, so it was difficult for her to practice this life-saving discipline.