The Whiteness of Bones (30 page)

“You still don’t get it, do you? It’s my choice. Mine. I love him.”

“Oh, fuck!” Mamie yelled. “Fuck that! It’s not that simple. Where did you even learn this shit, anyway? You’re like some moronic hold-out from the seventies. Your choice? Is masochism a choice? Selfishness? Get out! Get out of here!” Mamie stood up. She was shaking.

Claire looked at her calmly.

“Get a grip, Mamie. I’ll pay you back, if that’s what’s bothering you.” She stretched with her arms over her head.

Mamie only knew that it was impossible for her to remain in the same room with Claire, breathing the same mean, metallic air, with Sinatra’s sexuality and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” careening all around her.

Claire watched her defiantly, slouched lazily in her chair.

Mamie left the apartment. Claire lay down to have a little nap.

Mamie went into the Park. The sky was white and heavy and her anger gave her a determined liveliness. A woman with two children coming toward her on the path stepped nervously out of her way. Mamie did not even see them.

Although she had a deep sense of the insult done her, as well as the danger in which Claire stood, she did not think that Claire was stained with vice. It wasn’t about sex. Mamie didn’t mind who made love to Claire, or where, in the ass, in the mouth, but she was frightened by the willful desecration that Claire so boldly revealed. Mamie could not bear that Claire had relinquished herself. She had meant to tell her that.

She sat on the greasy grass. The tentative but hopeful answers she had tried to make for all those years seemed worthless to her, and her secret attempts to make sense of her answers seemed meaningless, and even a little embarrassing.

That she could not protect Claire, that she would not be
allowed to do so by Claire herself, even were she willing to devote her life to it, was a discovery that Mamie would have had to make some day. It came a little sooner than she might have wished. It made her feel foolish. Perhaps Claire will be famous and I’ll be the nun, she thought. It would be better.

She used the pay phone outside the Delacorte Theater to call Toni. A man in a black leather jacket was using one of the other telephones and he turned to face her when he heard her pick up the receiver and he smiled and stared at her, even though he was speaking to someone. She turned away from him.

Toni said, “I’ve been trying to reach you for two weeks.”

“I was in the country,” Mamie said.

“Felix said you walked out on him.”

“No,” Mamie said. She sighed. “Not quite.”

“He said you wanted him to marry you and when he refused, well, as he put it, you left him holding the shit. Actually, he said ‘sheet.’ ”

“I wanted to marry him?” Mamie said loudly. She remembered the man next to her, using the other telephone, and she blushed.

“I know he’s a liar, Mamie,” Toni said calmly.

“I think you tried to tell me. The night Claire and I came to dinner.”

“Did I?”

“Well, I wasn’t difficult. I left, but I wasn’t particularly difficult.”

Toni did not say anything.

“But I’m trying to learn,” Mamie said. “My sister is having a birthday party for me in a bar she’s discovered. Will you come? And Jean?”

“I don’t know,” Toni said. “I’ll let you know.”

“I’ll be twenty-one,” Mamie said.

They said good-bye. The man on the telephone alongside had disappeared. Mamie slowly walked home, without her fury, without her liveliness, under the pale northern sky.

In the days that followed, Claire and Mamie found ways to avoid each other in the small apartment. Claire was going to Atlantic City for two days with Sean and Brooke. Brooke had decided to become a performance artist and she was hoping to do her first concept on the boardwalk in front of the casinos. Wearing a shower cap and a wet suit loaned to her by Claire (Mary had mailed it to her), she would drench herself with water from a large zinc bucket. She said it was symbolic of the artistic drought in the city.

Mamie stopped Claire in the hall as she left to meet Sean and Brooke in the lobby downstairs. They did not come to the apartment when Mamie was there. Mamie held Claire in the open doorway.

“I love you,” she said. “You’re an island girl, remember.”

Claire laughed and patted Mamie gently on the face and said, “You don’t understand. I’m all right. You always exaggerate, Mamie. Such a sensitivo.” She wiggled her way past Mamie and rushed to catch the elevator.

Mamie went to her little room. The room was lighted only by a small bronze desk lamp, and with the hanging tapestries and the paisleys and the steel bed, Mamie, as she lay on the bed, clothed and sleepless, might have been a general waiting in her tent for the battle at dawn, and in a way, she was waiting.

She tried to collect herself. Haunted, she thought. I have been haunted for so long. How strange it was for her to feel the natural lightness of the ghost, to remain suspended
ever so tantalizingly over the lovely earth, and to feel the constant longing to fling herself onto its comforting, maternal surface. But she had reached out for the world’s solace long enough to know that it was not to be had simply for the yearning.

It was the night of Mamie’s birthday. Claire had arranged everything and even managed, despite her tendency to tell, (“Secrets are for telling, that’s why they’re called secrets”), to keep the details of the party from Mamie. Alder would meet them at the nightclub. Toni and Brooke were going to be there, but not Alysse, who had bought a table at a benefit to raise money to restore opera costumes damaged by warehouse rats. Sean was not able to come, as he was in the South, taking a series of nude portraits of Cubans in deportation camps. Claire was relieved that he would not be at the party. He had accused her of purposefully keeping him away from Mamie and perhaps she had kept him away, but it was not for the reason he suspected, that she was ashamed of him, but because Claire did not want Sean to like Mamie better than herself. She was convinced that, given the choice, anyone would always choose Mamie. She could make a list, beginning with McCully.

The party was at the Aloha Kai, a bar on Tenth Avenue at Fifty-third Street. Claire was proud to have found the club and she was very pleased to see her sister’s surprise when Mamie found herself submerged in bright turquoise light, under dusty
fishing nets and giant clam shells—the Aloha Kai’s attempt to reproduce the effect of being underwater. A big balsa-wood Polynesian god, a tiki, stood behind the bar. The waitresses wore sarongs and plastic flowers.

Toni had waited on the street for them. They were late because Claire had forgotten Mamie’s present in the apartment and had insisted on going back for it.

“So this is what Hawai‘i is like,” Toni said to Mamie as Claire chose a table. They sat in front of the raised stage. There was a row of drums on the stage.

Claire ordered Mai Tais for all of them, but Toni stopped the Puerto Rican waitress as she passed behind her and changed her order to a vodka. There was music, the soundtrack of the Elvis Presley movie
Blue Hawaii
. Claire shouted that she had only ordered pupus for them—egg rolls and chicken wings and fried wonton.

Mamie kept looking toward the door to see if Alder had arrived. Claire and Brooke ordered more drinks. There were rubber orchids in the rum drinks and Brooke lined them up in a row on the sticky tabletop. There were fat ceramic tikis on the table for salt and pepper, and dirty cruets of soy sauce.

Toni leaned forward and asked Mamie, “What are you going to do?”

Mamie, who was not sure of her meaning, hesitated.

“Felix asked me to tell you he would be very happy to have you back. He is doing the winter collection.” Toni shrugged and smiled. “So I have told you.”

Mamie shook her head. The loudness of the music forced them to exaggerate their pronunciation and their gestures. Mamie, who was astonished by the Aloha Kai, had worried at first that Toni, with her dirty nails and her fastidiousness, would be bored, but of all the women at the birthday table, she was the most at ease. There were not many customers in
the bar, although it was almost eleven o’clock. Claire promised that it grew very crowded after midnight.

A black man and two white men ambled nonchalantly to the bandstand from different corners of the room. Mamie had noticed the black man sitting at the bar when he had turned on his stool to look at them when they came into the club. One of the white men, a thin man with long arms, said lazily, “Good evening, ladies, how you doin’?” as he moved around their table to step up onto the platform. Even in the white light of the stage, he had the gray skin of a night worker. His face was the color of papier-mâché.

The black man played the marimba. The thin man was on the congas. The last musician, an older, effeminate man with a hairpiece, was the vocalist. While their repertoire could not be called Hawaiian, even if Mamie’s strict standards were relaxed, they did limit their selections to songs about islands. They played “Yellow Bird” and “Jamaica Farewell” and “Little Brown Gal.” Claire wanted Mamie to dance the hula to “Little Brown Gal,” but Mamie refused. She was still looking over her shoulder every few minutes, hoping that Alder would be there every time she turned to look for him in the darkness. It was not like him to be late.

The man playing the congas seemed to have taken an interest in their table. Claire smiled up at him. Brooke yelled out a request, “Light My Fire,” and the man nodded and held up his fist in a power salute. Toni sat quietly, sipping her vodka. When the band listlessly finished the short set, the black man hopped stiffly from the platform and went back to the bar at the front, and the drummer brushed past the table and said, “Can I buy you ladies a drink?”

Mamie shook her head and Claire smiled and said, “I’m afraid this is girls’ night. It’s my sister’s birthday.” She shrugged apologetically.

“Well, many happys,” he said slowly. Although he spoke with a lazy deliberateness, his eyes were tense and unsteady. He looked down at Toni, who smiled up at him, a little cynically, but not rudely; just enough to let him know that while it was nothing personal, it was just not working on her. He shrewdly let his gaze jump over to Brooke, who handed him one of the orchids. She was already a little drunk. Mamie thought for a minute, when he turned aside, that he was going to pick up an empty chair and sit down, but he was only looking for someone in the watery blue light. He took the orchid and walked into the darkness outside the glare of the spotlights.

Toni said goodnight. She gave Mamie a little box wrapped in tissue paper. Mamie stood up and they kissed on the cheek. “Happy Birthday,” she said. She shook hands with Brooke and Claire. Mamie watched her make her way calmly past the men now standing at the bar, and the women sitting cross-legged on the high bar stools, blue cigarette smoke hanging over them. Claire was right, the bar did become crowded.

“We’ll be right back,” Claire said to Mamie. “I wonder what happened to Alder?”

As she stood up, Brooke knocked over the card listing the special drinks and cover charge. Claire and Brooke went toward the back of the club, where a black corridor led to the toilets.

Mamie opened the present from Toni, holding it under the table. Don Ho was singing “I Will Return.” His voice, slurred with false sexuality, reminded Mamie of stewardesses and the smell of Coppertone.

Toni had given her one of her ivory bracelets. Mamie had seen her wearing it. It was the color of wood, stained with betel oil by the African woman who had once worn it. The inside of the bracelet was almost black with the old color of the oil. Mamie pushed it on, over her knuckles, and held out
her arm to look at it. It will be my good-luck amulet, she thought.

She waited for Claire and Brooke. She finished her drink. It was not as good as the Mai Tais that Claire made, but then Claire used fresh fruit and sugar syrup that she boiled down herself.

The band did not return to play, although Mamie saw the marimba player sitting at the end of the bar. He was laughing with a man in a nylon windbreaker who looked like an undercover policeman. The black man seemed to know everyone at the bar.

Mamie went to the bathroom. Claire and Brooke were not there. She walked down the corridor to a little office. A man in a baseball cap sitting behind a cheap wooden desk looked up quickly when she appeared in the open doorway. He slowly opened the top drawer of the desk so that it pressed into his big stomach. He laid his hands, fingers outspread, on top of the receipts he had been checking.

Mamie walked back to the front. She stopped one of the waitresses to ask her if she had seen the two girls, and the woman shrugged and pointed overhead. “I seen two go up with Vinnie,” she said without interest.

“Vinnie?”

“Yeah, he’s got a room upstairs.” She pointed to a back staircase. “But they all use it, those guys.”

Mamie went up the dirty stairway. There was a strong smell of marijuana. At the top of the stairs was a landing and three doors. One of the doors was open to a messy storeroom with cartons of canned maraschino cherries and toilet paper stacked against the walls and blacked-out windows. Behind the next door, Mamie heard music and a girl’s laughter.