The Whiteness of Bones (28 page)

She did not want to watch him, even though she knew that what he was doing to her and what he was giving her were the very things that she and Lily Shields used to wonder about when they studied their vaginas, each in a separate room.

The sensation that began in her clitoris, of frustration and tension and startling pleasure, spread quickly through her body. She could feel the blood moving through her arteries, away from her strong heart, straight to his mouth. She could feel the electricity gathering slowly in every eager nerve. She could feel the slide of liquid between her buttocks and she did not know if it had come from her or if it was his saliva.

She made herself watch him. He took her hips in his hands, her knees splayed now in slack submission, and he tilted her
hips so that she was more exposed to him and more open. He moved her hips back and forth in the chair.

“Do this,” he said. “Slowly.”

“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered.

“I’ll tell you. I’ll show you.” He moved her with his hands until she caught the motion and began to move herself. She closed her eyes, afraid to let him see her.

“Breathe,” he said. “You aren’t breathing.”

She didn’t answer, pressing herself against him as if she could not draw him deep enough inside of her. She put her hands on his head and held him to her.

Later, when he kissed her on the mouth, she could taste and smell herself on him, and to her surprise and delight, it tasted and smelled like the sea.

Mamie would not swim in the pond with him. It was not the opaque brown water; the ocean at Hanalei, after a storm, was no more limpid. Mamie needed running streams, a tidal change, and, despite the muddy rainwaters of lovely Hanalei Bay, she liked to be able to see the bottom.

“It is very like you,” he said, floating on the pond. He was sorry that she would not come into the water. “The need for clarity. It will cause you to miss some things, Mamie. Such as this swim.”

Mamie did not defend herself. As someone who had seen as a child that the consequences of one’s actions could induce a terror and despair never implicit in the act itself, Mamie did desire clarity. While Alder, too, had the temperament of someone who wants to diminish, as much as is practical, the possibility of surprise, Mamie had gone far beyond that rather fundamental wish. Mamie knew there would be surprises; it was inevitable. What she hoped for, and it is why she sought
clarity, was the relief in knowing that the surprise had not been occasioned by herself. Mamie, who embraced every kind of responsibility, real and contrived, may have been, in truth, avoiding responsibility by taking it on so eagerly, but she would never be accused of neglect or carelessness.

Of course, Alder was right, too. She would miss some things. She would have to fight in herself a certain rigidity and impatience. She would grow tired, sooner than others, from the unflagging concentration needed just to make out the bottom through the muddy water. Her watchfulness would exhaust her.

Ever since her adolescence, when she had so eagerly begun the long lesson of discovering what it was that she was going to be allowed to have, she had, in the trusting, concave way of her sex, accepted everything that she was given. Even the boys she picked were chosen with the idea of wanting to know what she would be allowed. If she was allowed kissing, what else was she allowed? Even if she was given only a little, it was better, at fifteen, than having nothing at all. It would only be when she was older, older even than she was now with Alder, that she would begin to understand that she had only two choices: if she could figure out what it was that she was permitted, she could take the risk and ask for it, or she could find safety and comfort, and even a kind of rigorous, intellectual pleasure, in having nothing at all.

What was so sweetly ironic was that the lack of clarity, so thankfully absent in most things, not only country ponds, was just what drew Mamie on, what lured her forward and kept her interested. The secrets of all things enticed her and ensnared her and saved her.

“Are there water snakes?”

“You sound like Baby.”

“They don’t have snakes in Hawai‘i.”

“So you’ve said.”

“Many times?”

He nodded.

She took off her T-shirt. She took off her jeans. Although it was very hot, her pale body, in her brassiere and underpants, was pricked with goose pimples. She stepped into the pond. Her toes sank slowly into the cloudy layers of silt and came to rest at last on the slippery clay bottom. Alder watched her.

“This is because of Baby and the snake?”

She shook her head. “If Pal Kaleihao ever knew that I was afraid to go into a little mud hole—”

He swam to her, making his way through the clotted weeds. He stood up and took her hand and pulled her back up the muddy bank.

“Mamie, he won’t know. I promise.” He looked at her.

“It’s not all a test.” He handed her her clothes.

“It isn’t?”

“I don’t think so. I can’t be certain, but I don’t think so.”

“I know that I seem to refer everything back to my childhood, but may I tell you one more story? Then I won’t ever say the words ‘palm tree’ again. I
know
it’s tedious. Even Claire is bored and she had the same childhood. Perhaps that’s why. I promise.”

“Tell me, Mamie.” He was laughing at her.

“There was a girl named Gwenda Tanaka at the local school. She was Japanese and she was particularly responsible and tidy and organized, the way Japanese girls are, and we elected her class treasurer. It was her job to collect the class dues, little sweaty piles of quarters and nickels, which were set aside for the dreaded Seventh Grade Picnic. Well, she lost the money one day, perhaps someone stole it, but it disappeared forever, and she never came back to school. They moved to another
island.” Mamie looked at him. “Everyone in Waimea thought it was very honorable.”

Alder was amused, as much with Mamie’s odd little story, as by her choosing to tell it. “Why have you told me this?”

“It can’t have been that much money. Eight dollars maybe.”

“Mamie, is this all about the pond?”

“I do think, in the end, that it’s often a test.” She laughed at herself. “They all thought Gwenda Tanaka did the right thing. But I never thought so. That’s all.” She smiled up at him. He was standing over her, holding on to the low bough of a flowering pear tree. The white petals, like torn tissue paper, dropped onto his wet head and bare feet.

“Are there snakes in the pond?” she asked, pulling on her jeans.

“Yes.”

She put on her T-shirt.

“Did I pass?” he asked, watching her.

“That wasn’t a test,” she said in surprise. “I was afraid and I hate being afraid. Gwenda was afraid, not honorable. It is what I dread most.”

He took her hand and they walked home through the fox’s meadow.

It had been some time since Mamie had what she called in childhood “the white-bone fantasy.” Perhaps it was that, her body having completed its metamorphosis, she no longer felt the disgust and fear she had suffered at twelve when startling patches of new leaves and bark began to appear on her body. That transformation, and the discovery of shame that had so interested her and Lily Shields that they held meetings just to discuss it, lost some of its immediacy the moment both girls
discovered that boys rather liked the seedlings and nests on the girls’ bodies, and while they had not turned these strange physical manifestations to account, the way Gertrude or Alysse might have done, they tried, at least, not to despise themselves. Their girl friends, too, had the same wild grasses growing under their arms and between their legs.

It was not until Mr. Felix ejaculated on her stomach that Mamie had cause to remember the old longing, that old seeking for purification. In her fairness, she admitted that Felix had not asked for that much. If her part had been to discover how much the world would allow her, Mr. Felix’s part had been to see how much he could take. In his own way, he, too, had been passive.

Mamie was tired.

To be a castaway, sheared and stripped of the world; to teach, through the long, silent days, cats how to dance as the abandoned sailor, Mr. Selkirk, had done, was a way of starting fresh. She would be cleansed of the semen running down her hips, and cleansed of the city.

Her sister had exhausted her, too. Claire’s determination to be gratified; her assumption that the world was lucky to be just like her (“Everyone I know is masochistic”); and her contempt for the ineffectual, the damaged, the frail had left Mamie encrusted in chalky secretions of plankton and calcified shell. Mamie did not know how to scrape herself clean except by casting herself away. Like Aphrodite in Cythera, another island girl, she would rise from the foam and start anew, as smooth and as white as a bone.

She was not so sure, however, just what she would do once she had stepped ashore. She knew that she would not work for Mr. Felix. The Crawfords would be returning soon from Florence. Claire did not have a job, and even had she seen the need for one, her idea of employment was to take the test for
the Fire Department. Mamie did not want to live in other people’s rooms, worried all the time that she had forgotten to rinse out the sink. She didn’t know what she was going to do.

Mamie walked with Alder to the walled orchard. He was trying to grow miniature peaches against the warm, mossy bricks of the old walls. It was very like him to be growing a few dozen small, perfect fruits at great expense and care. He planned to eat the peaches himself.

“Why did Baby go away?” she asked, pinching a dried leaf from one of the delicate, espaliered branches. The trees reminded Mamie of the eighteenth-century prints that Lily’s father brought from Japan. He had given her a print of a gray monkey in a cherry tree for her thirteenth birthday. The peaches were not yet ripe on their tiny stems.

“A friend of mine sent her some letters.”

Mamie looked at him.

“A girl I was seeing sent her letters I had written to her.” He spoke deliberately so as not to seem evasive.

“Alysse said Baby didn’t mind about the girls.”

“She didn’t mind. She grew up with two of her father’s natural children. I think that she was lonely. She comes from a big, chaotic family. Everything is a crisis—a death, a lost bracelet, a missing section of the newspaper—it’s all the same. She thought I was interesting because I didn’t mind when the maid forgot to warm the maple syrup.”

Mamie smiled. She watched him bind a pale, wavering shoot to a trellis. She looked at his hands and the clean black dirt beneath his nails and the slender turn of his bare wrists.

“I once saw her father stuff an overcooked pork roast down the front of the cook’s apron. No one, including the cook, seemed to think he behaved unreasonably. Later, when she was pissed off and bored, she used to tell me what her brother
would have done had, oh, the doorman forgotten to put
his
tennis rackets in the station wagon.”

“What would her brother have done?”

“Killed the doorman, I’m afraid.”

She helped him pull the fragile weeds from the curly white alyssum.

“What is so hypnotizing about love,” he said suddenly, absentmindedly putting the weeds in his pocket, “is that you are given a reflection of yourself in the eyes of the beloved. You love the self that is imagined by the other, and you are encouraged to do so. It’s as if you are given another chance, to become your best self, your loved self. It’s like a mirror.”

“Baby was your mirror?” She was hurt by his explanation of the irresistible narcissism of love, as if she were forever excluded from his experience by having met him too late. She was jealous.

“Baby? I don’t think so.”

She patted the black earth around the roots of a climbing purple clematis. The flowers with their spiked yellow centers were like the
liliko‘i
on the grove veranda at Waimea. There was the steady praise of bees, flattering the peaches, teasing the clematis. Mamie watched the bees, soothed and warmed by their sunny hum.

She wondered about him. In his solitude, he was not unlike her mother. Although it was not difficult for her to imagine him when he was younger and more in the world, it was difficult to think of him now, on the farm, with his trout fry and tiny fruit, in his still green woods. He lived like an old man. Mamie could see why Baby had fled back to the conviviality of Palm Beach.

To apologize for Baby, as well as for herself, she said, “You didn’t stand beneath the swaying cane, humming sambas. It
was the saddest thing, the longing to be gone and the grief at leaving behind something so loved.”

“No,” he said. “I never have. I am just beginning to feel, after all this time, that this is where I live—not where I belong necessarily, but where I live. That’s probably why I’ve never changed the house. I hate that fucking furniture from the sixties, don’t you? Why don’t we get rid of it? We can go back and throw it all out. The Indian bedspreads. And the stained glass.”

Mamie laughed. He was excited.

“I thought we should be putting up jam or something. As Lily Shields would say, ‘Too, too Rousseau.’ ”

“Perhaps we should go away,” he said. He had already forgotten about the Indian bedspreads. He went to turn on the water.

Mamie went back to the hot, fretting city with a hamper of lilacs, eight jars of Mrs. Bellows’s apple butter, and Alder. She hadn’t expected him to return with her. The country, too, was frayed with humidity, but there was relief to be had there in the brown pond, or stretched out on old Mrs. Lee’s double wedding ring quilt with a fan and a block of ice in the open window.

To Mamie’s surprise, the apartment was very clean. Too clean, really, and there was a strong odor of Pine Sol. Claire was not there. The sitting room was just the way the unsuspecting Crawfords had left it, except for the burned rug and the broken kite and the sofa, which looked as if someone had been murdered on it. And, of course, the handcuffs that Alder idly picked up from the top of the piano.

“These yours, baby?” He was trying to figure out how to unlock them.

Mamie was in the kitchen.