The Whiteness of Bones (6 page)

Her father’s slowness to understand made it worse for Mamie. She wanted to leap to her feet to shout angrily that it had been blissful while they were away, shouting as if it were his fault that she had been so happy.

McCully shook his head in amazement.

“Gertrude is going to marry him,” she said, wringing her hands.

McCully finally saw how much she suffered. “Well, good,” he said cautiously, trying to understand her distress. He took her hand.

“I couldn’t stand it, Father,” she whispered, “if anything happened to them because of me.”

“Nothing will happen, dear,” he said, stroking her arm.

She let him calm her, and she believed him when he said that he would take care of everything. He made her promise that she would not worry. She saw that he was still mildly troubled by what he could only guess had happened, but she knew that she could trust him.

They walked across the lawn to the beach. He had his arm around her shoulder. It was windy and some Hawaiian children waiting for the boat to Ni‘ihau were throwing sand. They ran away when they saw McCully, as if they were not allowed to play on his beach.

McCully and Mamie walked down to the wooden dock and were back in time for dinner.

Mamie and Claire were both good readers and because their parents were not, their reading went largely unremarked. Very little that was stimulating was offered to them at school, so their eager imaginations depended on the books that Mamie brought home daily from the small public library. Claire was partial to books from the adult section. Mamie told the dubious librarian that Claire’s selections,
Forever Amber
and
Valley of the Dolls
, were for her mother. Mamie was a serious, mature reader, and although she had read most of Dickens and all of Dumas, she had a special fondness for books about desert isles. She read
Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, Lord of the Flies
, and even
Peter Pan
with deep pleasure.

It had something to do with what she later called the “white bone-fantasy.” It was an image of herself washed up on a beach, as smooth and as white as a bone. It was a notion she had first had from Lily Shields’ mother, Anna, who had often taken the girls to distant, isolated beaches—they had to struggle down steep cliffsides, hanging dangerously from the horizontal roots of the
‘alula
—where she would encourage them to remove their bathing suits and pretend they had been shipwrecked. Given Anna Shields’ notorious charm, it is not hard to see that this game would have been very alluring to Mamie. The girls would hunt in the
naupaka
for dried husks and pieces of torn net to use as loincloths and tools.

This fascination with desert isles was perhaps a reaction to the assault Mamie’s body was suddenly undergoing, as black hair began to grow under her arms, and on her rounded pubis, and swellings like little green peas began to ache under her
nipples. This would be the conventional interpretation. Mamie yearned for and sought a kind of purity. In another family and another time, Mamie would have eventually entered the convent, taking the name of one of the more intellectual, masculine saints like Jerome.

It was a matter of temperament. Claire thrived on turmoil and intrigue with a heartless exuberance, but Mamie had begun by innocently trusting outward things to play their part. Lately she had come to realize that there was no promise that things would, or even could, play their part and her body was proving to be the most unreliable thing of all.

Perhaps it was this feeling of tentativeness and isolation that led her one hot afternoon into town and into the dusty photography studio of Mr. Yasunobu Tsugiyama. Mr. Tsugiyama’s modest business was to take photographs of Japanese wedding parties and small family groups, photographs to be ceremoniously sent back to Japan to provincial parents and grandparents. The solemn faces in the portraits could be framed, at the sitters’ choice, in hand tinted pink cherry blossoms or red temple gates. The photographs were used, too, as burial cards. Mamie had looked at them closely whenever she was in the Buddhist cemetery, pasted onto the gravemarkers, and prettily decorated with silk flowers and paper inscriptions when the grave was fresh.

Perhaps that is where she first had the idea of being photographed. Mr. Tsugiyama was certainly very surprised to see the
haole
girl come into his little store that humid day. He did not speak English very well, only a few words, but she spoke to him in English as if he could understand her, and she did not raise her voice or speak very slowly in a way that would have patronized him.

He ushered her through the faded calico curtain with elaborate
politeness and sat her in a wooden folding chair and gave her a pink plastic mirror and comb.

She smoothed down her hair, and ruffled up her eyebrows with saliva the way Gertrude had taught her to do. She was wearing a lei of
pikake
. He moved her head, tilted her chin this way and that, and straightened her collar. She allowed him to pose her as he liked and then she froze obediently, holding the pose, while he studied her. The poses were not very sophisticated—an index finger held to the chin, cocked head resting on a fist—but Mamie did not know any better. She was concerned that his deep frown meant disapproval, but when he finished fussing and backed away from her, smiling, pleased with his work, she saw that it was only concentration that made him look so serious.

He disappeared under his black cloth. He took far more photographs of her than he would customarily have taken of the shy Japanese bride in her heavy wig and wedding kimono who was his usual subject. This odd, solemn child was altogether something out of his experience, and if he spent more time with her than was usual, it was because she interested him.

When they finished, they shook hands and bowed low several times. He watched her with curiosity as she went out into the harsh light. When she reached the corner, she looked back and bowed again.

In the middle of the afternoon, when Gertrude had an hour off, Mamie and Claire often went to Gertrude’s room at the back of the house, next to the garage, to lie on her small bed and entice her into telling them secrets. Whatever they knew of seduction, conception, abortion, betrayal, murder and seemingly,
but not necessarily, less serious things such as how to keep a man or how to pierce ears with an ice cube and a lei needle, they learned in those happy afternoons with Gertrude. Sometimes it rained and the noise of the heavy, plump drops falling on the roof of the greenhouse made Mamie feel reassured and happy. Gertrude’s radio was always on and they listened to Golden Oldies and the surfing report: “Mahalepu has heavy swells, no crests; breaking to the left at three to five feet.” There was the sickening sweet smell of Lilac Vegetol hair cream on Gertrude’s pillow. It gave Mamie a headache. It was a man’s hairdressing, Mamie knew, very greasy and very popular with the straight-haired, black-haired boys from the camp. The camp boys called
“bilat-bilat”
to Mamie when she self-consciously pumped past them on her bike. When she’d asked Gertrude what
bilat-bilat
meant, Gertrude matter-of-factly said “cunt.”

Mary forbade Mamie to shave her legs, even though the dark-haired Mamie was always in shorts or a bathing suit, and embarrassed by the hair on her legs. Gertrude secretly took Mamie aside to show her how to remove the black hair with a sharp stone brought up from the beach. Gertrude had learned the primitive technique from her mother on her home island of Ilocos Norte. The hair removal was painful, the stone acting as a pumice. It removed the skin from Mamie’s legs as well as the hair. Mary had not noticed, even though Mamie’s legs were bright red for several days. Claire, of course, had the nerve to wonder, after the terrible suffering Mamie endured while Gertrude vigorously planed her raw calves, why Mamie did not buy a razor with her allowance.

“This is how her mother taught her,” Mamie said, trying to be patient. “It is authentic, and even romantic. Like being a castaway on a lonely isle.”

“Romantic? Your legs are bleeding, Mamie.”

“You are more modern than I am, Claire. I like to pretend I live in a distant past.”

“You act like you’re someone in a story.” Claire would have soaped and shaved her legs in front of her mother if she’d felt like it. She was not cautious, as was Mamie, but her assumption that she was entitled to have her way did rob her of a certain tenderness.

Gertrude was full of other kinds of lore as well, requiring less physical pain, perhaps, but just as thrilling to Mamie. She told them, for example, that Orval Nalag’s older brother, Clinton, who played first string football at Castle High, had made Ann Portago, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the state senator, pregnant. Or, as Gertrude put it, “knock-up.” Ann Portago had disappeared from the face of the earth two weeks earlier and the girls had been told that she had mononucleosis and had been sent to Santa Barbara, California, so the girls knew that Gertrude was telling the truth.

Gertrude had been born a twin. The other baby, a girl, had died at birth. Gertrude’s mother came every year from the Philippines to visit her, bringing a suitcase full of the same hand-embroidered placemats as presents. Gertrude’s mother took on new importance to them when Gertrude nonchalantly said that when her mother had felt the birth contractions begin, she had ignored their warning, as she was having her nails done at the time (What color? Claire asked) and they were not yet dry. That was Gertrude’s mother’s explanation for the death of Gertrude’s own other self and Gertrude accepted it with a passive and uncritical literalness. That this explanation of the unnecessary death made sense to Gertrude, that it had a kind of sympathetic logic, that it was, most importantly, without blame or sorrowing guilt, was an amazement to Mamie. Gertrude knew that grief and bereavement took up an unreasonable amount of invisible energy. Both sisters admired her deeply—Claire,
because she recognized another realist (wet nails are, in the end, as good an explanation as any for blind tragedy) and Mamie because she recognized her opposite, her happy opposite.

Mamie was trying not to let the smell of the hair cream make her sick as she watched Claire sing along with James Brown, “(Get Up, I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine.” Claire used Jimmy as a microphone, switching his tail back and forth with her free hand as if it were a microphone cord. She made Mamie laugh. Gertrude passed her Vicks nose inhaler to Mamie for a good, head-clearing pull on it.

Gertrude said that Sharlagne had told her that morning that Dicky Herbert, whose father had bought him a surplus army tank, had taken a pipe of hashish and two green bananas and a girl from the Koloa Camp named Imelda, in honor of the wife of the Philippine president, into the tank and driven to the waterfall at the end of Knudsen Gap, destroying the Knudsens’ famous plantation of rare croton bushes.

“He refuse to let da girl, Imelda, out da tank,” she said, her eyes wide.

There was a quiet knock on Gertrude’s door. All three of them jumped. Claire put Jimmy on her shoulder. The door opened and McCully stuck his head into the room.

“May I see you a minute, Mamie?” he asked. He did not come into the room, having a democratic idea that it was Gertrude’s room, even if it were his house.

Mamie followed him through the house to the little room he used as an estate office. Rain had brought hundreds of small toads onto the lawn. Mamie was always interested in this phenomenon because she could not imagine where the toads kept themselves when it was dry. She watched the toads assembling in the rain. It had something to do with insects, she
knew. When the rain stopped, the toads would disappear as if summoned away by a sorcerer.

McCully did not speak and because Mamie was diverted by the toads on the grass, she did not at first notice his silence or the stiff way that he stood behind his desk.

It was a
koa
wood desk made for McCully the year he had given a workshop to the high school. He had wanted those boys who did not do well in the academic classes, and this would have included most of them, to have the pleasure, tactile as well as emotional, that came from making something good with their hands, something that was not a furrow for sugar cane or a ditch for irrigation. The cabinetmakers he found to teach the boys were local Japanese artisans whose beautiful work, in a more sophisticated and acquisitive market, would have been sold in galleries rather than roadside garages. The boys must have recognized what it was that McCully had done, for by the end of that first year, they had made the desk for him.

If it is possible, the desk grew more beautiful in those years it spent in McCully’s room. Perhaps it was the damp salt air, that air that turned new bicycles to rust two days after Christmas, that breathed mercifully on the lovely desk. It had grown more beautiful each year.

The boys who had made it were grown men now and one of the carpenters who had taught them, Mr. Yomashiro, was an old, old man, and because no one ever left the town, McCully would have seen these men all the time in the fields or in the town. None of them had become craftsmen or artists, and they were not unhappy doing the work their fathers had done before them, planting furrows and digging ditches.

McCully bent down, out of sight on the other side of the desk. “Did you do this?” Mamie heard him say.

She walked around the desk. He was squatting before a drawer, rubbing his fingers against the wood, not looking at her. She did not understand. She bent down next to him. He turned to look at her, close to him, as he reluctantly pulled his fingers away from the wood. There, in deep, precise letters were the words
MARY WILDING CLARKE
. It was her name.

Someone had gouged the letters with a strong knife or a chisel. It would have taken time to do it so clearly and deeply. There would have been shavings and sawdust and the sound of the tool scraping and digging. There would have been sufficient time to reconsider; to stop and run away after the first
M
. All of this became more and more clear to Mamie, as it had become clear to McCully.