The Whiteness of Bones (23 page)

Mamie pulled Whit Crawford’s favorite leather chair, the one from his happy years at Yale, over to the small window of the library and sat in it. It was not easy to get the chair through the books and clothes that had been dropped on to the floor and just left there, but Mamie did not have the heart to begin cleaning the room. She had been looking forward to having a few hours in which she could think about Alder. She had a queasy and tremulous feeling in her stomach. It was not unpleasant and Mamie, of all people, would never complain about a symptom that might be taken as the first sign of lovesickness. She looked over her shoulder at the bed. The silver Deardorf’s hatbox full of her mother’s and Lily Shields’s letters had been opened and the letters and postcards were scattered across the bed. Lily Shields always sent funny cards, nude men diving from the cliffs of Capri, and her cards, spread out on the bed, looked as if they had been arranged there for a photograph. Mamie slipped off her shoes and put her feet up on the windowsill.

She could suddenly smell her body. Gertrude had once told her that if you had sex with the wrong man, you would smell bad. Gertrude even claimed that she could tell how long it had been since her own man had last come by the way she smelled after making love with him. That was her way of knowing if he had been true to her. Mamie smiled. She had not known that she remembered these love-tricks whispered to her so many years before. Her vagina did not smell bad. She had not made love with the wrong man.

Gertrude worked as a cashier in the Big Save in Waimea. Mary found her the job when Gertrude’s pretty brown belly had grown so big that even Mary, who was not particularly
observant of people, had to admit that Gertrude was going to have a baby. Gertrude wanted the baby even though she was not married to Benjie. Mamie and Claire had tried to convince Mary to let her stay, but Mary thought that Gertrude was a very bad example to the girls and the other servants. It had never occurred to her, of course, that Gertrude was the primary influence in the lives of her daughters.

Gertrude had moved to a tiny house near the river and Mamie and Claire stopped at the Big Save almost every day when they were home from school and stood alongside the cash register and talked to Gertrude as she worked, pulling the fish and
taro
and cases of beer along the rubber conveyor belt. Mamie and Claire threw the groceries into brown paper bags while Gertrude gave orders to everyone. “Janine, how much da root beer? Mamie, you look too white, girl. Try check da price root beer, Claire.” Gertrude had three children now and Benjie was one of the most feared police officers in Lihue.

Mamie wondered if Gertrude would teach her own girls the secrets she had passed on to her and Claire. Mamie thought that she might not, that she and Claire might be the last repositories of such significant information as how to prepare a love potion from red sugar cane, and sensible advice like “always leave ’em steef.” Mamie had limited herself to kissing, and any deliberate attempt to leave them stiff so that they would come back to her would have seemed to her, at sixteen, dishonest. Her admirers were to like her for herself. Given what she now knew about Claire, it was clear that Claire had profited early from Gertrude’s sensible counsels. Mamie, when she thought about these things, had been prepared to admit that perhaps Claire, despite Orval Nalag, had got it right and that she had done it all wrong.

She no longer thought that way, however; certainly not after
her night with Alder. She was so agitated, in fact, by her night with Alder that in the short time she sat that morning before the window, she convinced herself that she had been, until twelve hours earlier, a virgin. And, in a way, she had been.

Mamie, perhaps because of the novels she had read, believed that there could be little that was more erotic than longing; to be a young woman at a ball, with the formal restrictions of mothers and dance cards, as well as one’s own glittering inexperience; to be raced across a spinning, warm room to the moon-pull of a Strauss waltz; to fall in love at the ball, perhaps unwisely, had always seemed to Mamie to promise a kind of sexual yearning that modern love could not provide. Given this nineteenth-century ideal, it is not surprising that Mamie should have found Tommy Sheehan from San Diego a little disappointing. Mamie might have lived on for years, an excited Natasha awaiting her first invitation to dance, if Lady Studd had not taken the trouble to explain to Alder Stoddard how she masturbated her dogs.

She did not fully understand it until much later, but she believed that Alder Stoddard, too, knew the possibilities of longing. Because he was a man, he was able to exploit it by the way that he used his body and her body; and because she was a woman, she was able to draw him to her and hold him inside of her. With any luck, and without having to resort to any of Gertrude’s tricks, she could keep him there.

In honor of her good fortune, she put on the waltz in A Flat Major by Chopin, the one written for the Countess Bronitska. It would not have been Gertrude’s way of celebrating, but then Mamie was far from home. It was perhaps a sign of Mamie’s increasing willingness to live in the twentieth century, her own century, that she admitted to herself for the first time, that no one, not even Prince Andrey himself, could
have danced to the Chopin waltzes. They were too fast or too slow; they were meant to be performed in salons. Mamie smiled at herself and changed the record. She did not put on Gabby Pahinui, which was another promising sign. She did put on Billie Holiday, but that was only to be expected.

Claire and Mamie were on the subway. It was a concession Claire had made to Mamie when Mamie said that they did not have the money to take a taxi to Greenwich Village and home again. Claire, who was not working, but who had enrolled in another class, lifesaving, and who was dependent on Mamie, had to agree. They had been invited to dinner by Toni. Or rather, Mamie had been invited and, as an afterthought, Toni had said, “And bring your sister, if you like. The one who goes out.”

“It’s that people look at you,” Claire said on the subway. “That man over there has been staring at us since Fifty-seventh Street. And, what’s worse, it makes me stare at him.”

“Well, in taxis they
talk
to you,” Mamie said in her ear. “The other day a Chinese man turned around and asked me, ‘Good for suck?’ Chinese, can you imagine? So unlike them.”

“Suck?”

“Yes.”

“I think it’s your sweet voice, Mamie.”

“You mean it’s my fault?”

“Not your fault. Just your voice.”

“I wanted to ask you, was it my imagination or did Brooke really train her pubic hair to grow in the shape of a heart?” Mamie looked around to make sure that no one was listening to them. “You know, like topiary.”

“She had it waxed for Valentine’s Day and everyone liked it so much, she kept it that way. Isn’t it cool?”

“This was the girl who wouldn’t go down a flume.”

“She’ll go down just about anything now.”

They sat quietly for a few stops. Mamie liked the graffiti in the subway cars and she stared at it while she thought about Brooke and Courtney.

“I thought you were with the Butcher of Santo Cristo last night,” Mamie said as she suddenly remembered that Claire was supposed to have been at their aunt’s for dinner.

“Brooke telephoned just as I was getting ready to leave. Gosh, Alysse was really, really mad this morning. At the last minute, she had to put Mrs. Crooker next to General Barrios instead of me and Mrs. Crooker told the general that she admired his country’s handicrafts. She was just trying to make dinner conversation, poor thing, but he thought she was making fun of him since there aren’t any hand-embroidered tablecloths left after fourteen years of civil war.”

“He’s very sensitive. I suppose dictators are.”

“He told Mrs. Crooker that as far as he was concerned she could suck out his asshole. In perfect English. Alysse said I ruined the party and hung up.”

“I had no idea you figured so prominently in her social plans.”

“Not any more,” said Claire. “Look, that guy over there, the Italian guy, he wants you, Mamie.”

“Me?”

“You think he has permanently chapped lips? Or maybe it’s just a nervous habit. He’s trying to tell you something.”

Mamie turned sideways in her narrow seat so that she could not see the man lifting his eyebrows in invitation and sensuously flicking his big tongue at her. His tongue was green.

“Poor man just ate a whole box of Tic Tacs,” Mamie said.

“He reminds me of Orval.”

“Maybe it’s you he wants.” Mamie sat awkwardly in her seat, her knees sticking out into the aisle.

“I think he’s coming over,” Claire said, starting to laugh and now she, too, looked away.

Mamie giggled, unable to help herself, furious at Claire for encouraging the stranger.

They were both very relieved when the car stopped and he swung out the open doors like a trapeze artist. Mamie looked up. He gave her a big wink and she couldn’t help but smile back at him.

Toni lived in an old clapboard row house off a gloomy brick courtyard overgrown with dusty ivy and ailanthus trees. The little courtyard was entered through a small wrought-iron gate and the low shuttered houses that enclosed the courtyard were painted red with white doors and window boxes.

Toni opened the little crooked door and Mamie had to shout to introduce Claire over the loud barking of dogs. Schnauzers leaped and nipped around them. The ground floor of the house was a dog-grooming salon. Toni took them upstairs, carrying Pépé in her arms.

There was a woman in the tiny kitchen taking a meat loaf out of the oven with a big fireproof mitt that looked like a lobster. Toni introduced her. It was difficult for them to shake hands because of the mitt. The kitchen smelled of parsley and garlic.

Her name was Jean. She had a small, pale face, made smaller
by the huge amount of thick black hair that seemed to stand straight out from her head. She had a space between her front teeth.

Toni handed them each a glass of red wine and they sat down to eat at a table in the front room.

Toni, who was not given to random conversation, spoke very little, although she was an attentive hostess and jumped up to open a bottle of wine when she saw Claire looking for wine on the table.

Jean spoke one soft command to the hysterical terriers and they lined up, as if in a drill, and sat down, and quietly stayed that way for the rest of the evening. It was Jean who had the dog-grooming business. She washed and trimmed dogs and sometimes, when it was requested, painted their nails. Mamie noticed ribbons and cups from dog shows on a shelf of the bookcase.

Claire ate voraciously. “Did you go to the Puerto Rican Day parade?” she asked.

Jean and Toni admitted that they had missed it.

“There were thousands of people on Fifth Avenue, with lawn chairs and Eskimo coolers and little cooking stoves. It was if they had just moved in, with all of their relatives and all of their belongings. There were even a few people with beds. That’s what New York is like in the summer. Businessmen; and then hundreds of thousands of nice brown people. Where are all those big white women in Ferragamo Shoes and all those blond children with book bags?”

Toni laughed and lit a cigarette. She had not eaten very much.

“When do you go to Chicago?” she asked Mamie.

“Two weeks from Wednesday.”

“Felix may surprise you,” Toni said. She squinted to keep the smoke from her eyes and waved the smoke away with her
hand so that it would not disturb Claire, who was having more mashed potatoes. Jean rose to clear the table and Toni stood up to help her. Mamie noticed that they were very solicitous of each other. It had never occurred to her that Toni was homosexual, but now that she understood, it did not shock her.

“He’s had great success with women,” Jean said.

Mamie did not feel the sexual attraction of Felix, but she had seen enough at the salon to know that the women like Alysse who came to buy their clothes wholesale, and many of the girls who worked for Felix, were very, very fond of him. They trusted him. Unlike other men, he paid attention to the things that interested them. It was his business, after all. When a woman asked Felix if he liked her shoes or her breast implants, he told her the truth. In Felix, a woman had someone who would make love to her and then spend hours discussing the kind of neckline that best suited her. It was no wonder that he was a success.

“I don’t like him,” Jean said. She brought a lemon meringue pie to the table.

Toni laughed. “Jean hates his clothes. She says that like all bad designers, it’s about the sleeves. Too much shoulder.”

Mamie watched Jean cut the pie. She had not thought about Felix’s sleeves, but she could see that Jean was right.

Claire said, “Our stepcousin—is she our stepcousin, Mamie?—told me that she broke up with her last boyfriend because he complained that she ruined his Hermès ties when she tied him up.” She held out her hand to pass the dessert plates.

Mamie held her breath. She hoped that the lemon meringue pie would stop Claire.