The Whiteness of Bones (20 page)

“Where’s your pack of cigarettes?” Alysse asked, looking at the sleeves of the undershirt.

Mamie did not understand that had she told Alysse the truth
(Alysse, you just don’t get it), Alysse might have admired her. She might even have left her alone. Mamie believed that it would have been rude, and even dangerous, to speak the truth, but instead of protecting Alysse from her own ignorance as she believed she was doing, she was instead justifying Alysse’s secret belief in Mamie’s hopelessness. The irony is that it is Alysse who would have said that Mamie didn’t get it and would never get it.

If Mamie had been very candid with herself, she would have had to admit that there was another reason, too, that she did not shout out the truth to Alysse. It was the worry that once started, she would be unable to stop.

“He’s had lots of girls,” Alysse said carelessly.

“Has he?” Mamie said over her shoulder. She knew that her aunt was talking about Alder Stoddard.

“Scads.” Alysse held her feet splayed stiffly before her. Pastel cotton balls separated each plump toe.

“I’m happy for him,” Mamie said. “And the horse.”

“What horse?” Alysse did not like that Mamie might know something that she did not know.

“Lydia’s friend’s horse in Guatemala. Hasn’t she told you?”

“What
are
you talking about?”

Her pedicure was almost finished. The manicurist dried each pink nail with a gold Japanese fan. Mamie finished her beer, holding the bottle by the neck, and asked the woman which way she was going, they could walk together. Startled to be acknowledged, the manicurist admitted cautiously that she was headed downtown. She quickly packed her things.

Mamie burped contentedly, politely covering her mouth with her hand. She hoped that Alysse would not offer to walk with them, to take the air, as she put it. Mamie had walked with Alysse on Madison Avenue, Alysse’s favorite street, and
she had been exhausted by the effort within six short blocks. Alysse was thorough. She did Madison Avenue as if she were doing the Nile.

“Give ‘Feel’ my love,” Alysse said as she hobbled into the bedroom. “Tell him I’m coming in for a preview and I want a discount.” Alysse was late for a luncheon meeting to plan the Library’s new fund-raising theme, “Befriend a Book.”

Mamie didn’t answer and Ruda, the manicurist, was not certain whether Mamie licked her lips or stuck out her tongue.

They walked together as far as Ruda’s next appointment, a lady from Colombia who had taken the twentieth floor of a hotel on Fifth Avenue. Ruda was booked to do sixteen hands, presumably belonging to Senora Campos’s many sisters and cousins.

Ruda thought Mamie a little odd at first, maybe even eccentric, but by the time they reached the hotel, she had offered to do Mamie’s plain hands for half-price whenever Mamie wanted a good manicure. Mamie looked at her short nails and wondered aloud at how it might be just another thing to worry about. Ruda went through the revolving door into the hotel and Mamie went serenely on her way, the roar of the city all around her.

Mamie had found once or twice before that just when she was beginning to lose hope, something unexpected and fortuitous appeared before her to fortify her and give her the interest to begin all over again. She thought this about Alder Stoddard and she thought this about two dead chickens she came across on a big rock in the Park. Their skinny legs were bound with white rags. There was no blood and the animals did not look as if their throats had been ceremoniously slashed to propitiate
the
loa
. They did not frighten Mamie at all. She was used to seeing chickens in far worse degrees of butchery after the cockfights in the workers’ camp.

The chickens reminded her of the homemade wire coops, full of small animals and poinsettias, in the little back yards of Waimea. Over the years, Mamie had come to be taken for granted in the houses of the servants and field workers and they did not bother to conceal from her their rites and passions. For quite a while, when she was young, she had believed that people who were white did not have sexual intercourse, or at least did not have it like Mr. and Mrs. Buddy Mendoza, who were always fighting violently and then making love so hastily and exuberantly that they did not bother to close their front door. She knew, too, that the workers’ lives were secret because they were able to magically transform themselves into timid laborers and laundresses whenever her mother was around. The moment that Mary was gone, they again became noisy, funny men and women, full of opinion.

While the local people were superstitious, and saw nature as an animated force that could be rewarding or vindictive at will, Mamie knew that her mother did not pray to her plants, or use them in healing or in sacrifice. There was for Mary no animistic, spiritual connection to the plants and hills and trees, and certainly no chant or legend passed down through generations of Clarkes. The Mitsudas, however, tied pieces of inscribed paper and trinkets to the pine tree in front of the Hongwanji temple and the Kaonas refused to pick litchi at the abandoned Gay estate because the old house, built on Hawaiian burial ground, was full of malevolent
mana
.

Mamie learned many things in the camp. She liked having her fortune told with bones and she heeded the warning of Mrs. Kaona, who scolded her for disturbing the tree of the
pueo
, the owl totem of the Kaona family. These superstitions
and taboos were good for Mamie because they implied order and reason, cause and effect, and this made her feel less isolated and less helpless.

So when she saw the voodoo chickens laid on the rock in Central Park, she was reassured. It meant that someone, somewhere in the exhausting city, still believed in the Spirits.

Mamie walked to Mr. Felix’s salon. It was the last week of fittings before Felix took the collection and two models to the big department stores in Chicago and Dallas and Los Angeles. It was how he best sold his clothes, making a personal appearance tour, standing on the floor with his models, flattering the customers. The women who came to see the collection preened and fluttered and spent a great deal of money when he made one of his trim bows and kissed their hand. Mamie and another model, a blonde, were going with him.

The dresses, although they were more formal and more mature than Mamie’s own clothes, looked very well on her. She was sometimes surprised to catch sight of herself in the mirror wearing Mr. Felix’s clothes. She did not like them. Mr. Felix was equally surprised at the way Mamie looked when he happened to catch her coming or going, in her old khakis and gold flats. Once or twice, he stopped her and made her spin around for him as he watched her with squinting eyes, and she noticed the appearance of a few new details in the collection, like appliquéd skirts and more fully cut trousers.

Toni did not speak again to Mamie after telling her not to shave her arms, but Mamie continued to watch her and to admire her. She was very surprised when she arrived one afternoon and settled with her book on her usual spot on the floor to be told that Toni wanted to see her.

Toni was in her office. None of the models had ever been
inside the office and there were rumors that Toni actually lived there. They said she hadn’t left the building for the last twelve years and that Pépé, who came and went on the elevator by himself, brought her what she needed from the outside.

She was sitting at a long table. She was eating raw vegetables and
sashimi
, and Pépé, seated across from her, was doing the same. She gestured with her napkin to Mamie to sit down. She did not suggest that Mamie share her lunch, nor did she stop eating. Her hands, as always, looked dirty and ragged.

“You seem like a sensible girl,” she said. “You
seem
like.”

Mamie had been hoping, especially since meeting Alder Stoddard, that she did not seem sensible. She did not say anything. She moved a swatch of pink crepe de chine and sat down in one of the lemon wood Biedermeier chairs. Everything in the room was the same amber color.

“At least you read books,” Toni said. She held a piece of fish in the air with her yellowed ivory chopsticks.

“Yes,” Mamie said. “Maybe too much.”

Toni opened her eyes wide and looked at her.

“I am sometimes confused and I can’t remember what came from which book. It all becomes lost in one endless book.”

“Are you really from an island?”

Mamie smiled at the question.

“You never can tell with Felix. He gets carried away. He used to introduce me as his little ‘princess’ and the twats believed him.”

Mamie looked at her and wondered if Toni, too, was one of those floating ghost-women without grandparents, or a piece of land, somewhere, to which she felt she belonged.

As if she could read her mind, Toni said, “I was born in Bakersfield. I’ve sometimes wondered if that’s why I like the color of dust-in-the-sun so much. Felix went to the Shah’s Birthday in Teheran, along with Dr. Peele, the plastic surgeon.

Felix did the clothes and Peele did the faces. Felix brought back an album of photographs given to him by the Empress and it all looked like Bakersfield. Such a disappointment, and yet …”

Toni took a bottle of Evian from a drawer and poured herself a glass of water and one for Pépé.

For someone whose hands look so dirty, she is a very clean eater, thought Mamie. She liked that Toni was not very polite. There was no condescension. Mamie realized that if she wanted a glass of water, she was expected to ask for it.

“Do you go out?” Toni asked abruptly.

“Out?”

Toni nodded.

“I don’t know very many people here. My younger sister is here now and that changes things. She goes out.”

Toni laughed.

Mamie wanted to look at Toni’s room, but she did not want Toni to see her looking at it. There was a paneled, gold leaf Japanese screen. There was a copper vase, of the Arts and Crafts Movement, full of brown fritillaries.

“There is a temporary air about you,” Toni said. She touched the end of her napkin to the water and cleaned her mouth very carefully, then wiped Pépé’s mouth.

“Temporary?”

There was a knock at the door and Felix pushed it open a tiny bit and sidled inside. He looked slyly from Toni to Mamie and back again. “I am disturbing you?”

“Hardly,” Toni said calmly.

“I need Mamie for the finale.”

He held out his hand to Mamie, as though he were going to lead her in a quadrille.

Mamie stood up and Pépé, noticing her for the first time, growled.

Toni laughed at him. “You’re just like Felix,” she said to the dog.

In the corridor, as Felix walked with Mamie to the dressing room, he said to her carelessly, “Be careful,
niña
, or you will have both of us madly in love with you.”

Mamie frowned. She did not understand him. He smoothed the wrinkles on her forehead with his long fingers.

“Madly,” he said again, drawing his hand away reluctantly.

She backed away from him. He took her hand and patted it. “So sweet. So
mignon
.”

“Like a filet?” He made her uncomfortable. She was not sure of the meaning of his words, in English or in French.

“My dear. So funny you are!”

With the help of three dressers, she put on a silk brocade wedding gown. It was trimmed at the hem and bodice and cuffs with bands of white mink. She wore a headpiece of fur and tulle, and white brocade Russian boots. When she stepped awkwardly onto the rehearsal runway, Felix applauded daintily and the seamstresses and other models began to clap, too.

Mamie was embarrassed. She could see Toni standing at the far end of the room, nonchalantly leaning against the wall. As Mamie came slowly down the runway, Toni smiled and bent down to lift up old Pépé so that he, too, could see the beautiful bride. Mamie, who had flushed bright pink when Felix began to applaud, felt foolish until she saw Toni smiling up at her. If Toni approved of her, then Mamie knew that she would be all right, even with the mink toque wavering precariously on her head, and the twelve-foot train, mink roses on tulle, dragging heavily behind her.

Claire spent only four weeks at Hadashi’s before she told Mrs. Hadashi that she would not be coming back the next evening. Claire was a popular hostess and Mrs. Hadashi reluctantly offered her more money. It wasn’t the money, Claire explained, or the customers who regularly fell into her lap toward the end of the evening, or even the young banker from Osaka who vomited a giant clam on the marabou pom-poms of her new black satin mules.

She did not even mind accompanying the men to the dressing room where the presumably heterosexual customers dressed up in traditional bridal kimonos or nurses’ uniforms. Claire particularly enjoyed squeezing the businessmen into the Playboy Bunny costumes that Mrs. Hadashi provided for them. The pin-on bunny tails were old, soiled powder puffs. Claire was helpful in the dressing room (it was sometimes difficult to conceal the dark hair on their chins), and Mrs. Hadashi had complimented her on her facility with pancake makeup by pressing five crumpled dollar bills into Claire’s hand one night when Claire was leaving.