The Whiteness of Bones (5 page)

Soon Benjie was watching “Gilligan’s Island” with them. He sat in McCully’s leather chair and drank San Miguel beer
from the brown bottle. Then Gertrude began to want to sit in the chair with him. This was impossible, so they moved to the big
hikie‘e
. They necked while Mamie and Claire sat in front of them on the floor, painting their short nails, eating sweet and sour preserved apricots with just the tips of their fingers, so as not to smear the polish. Despite the occasional moan or burp from the lovers, the girls were very content. They were not in the least disturbed by the voluptuary sweetness that slowly overtook the house. Jimmy was slightly frenzied, perhaps because of the erotic, sweaty scent that padded the air around Gertrude and Benjie whenever they stirred. They did not stir much. From the
hikie‘e
in the library to the refrigerator to, eventually, the big bed in McCully and Mary’s cool bedroom. Gertrude very kindly gave a grumbling Mitsuya the week off.

Benjie’s cousin, Cecil, began to drop by after work. He had been in Vietnam and, according to Gertrude, he had come back a “hang-loose keed.” Mamie asked him about the war while they played slap dominoes and he said, “The big things in my life, good things and bad things, happened there. What I dream about is the smell. There was a smell there. I smelled it as soon as I got off the plane. It was like what the food smells like in the back of a Chink restaurant after it’s been there a week.”

He came back the next evening for a rematch and before Mamie could even say hello or double-or-nothing, he said angrily, “Don’t ask me no more about Nam. You started me thinking about it,” and she said, “Sure, Cecil,” and calmly set up the tiles.

Four days after Mr. and Mrs. Clarke boarded the plane for Honolulu, the girls stopped going to school. Mamie no longer read. Benjie and Gertrude spent most of the day in McCully
and Mary’s bed. At two in the morning, a tousled, sated Benjie, clearly nude under McCully’s roomy bathrobe, barbecued
char siu
pork for them and fried bananas, and Gertrude taught the girls how to crack gum. Gertrude could crack gum louder and faster than anyone in Waimea. This was a feat proved at the last Captain Cook Festival when she’d won first prize in a gum-cracking contest. The local newspaper begged her to reveal her special formula, two Juicyfruits? One Hubba Bubba? But she refused to tell. Gertrude no longer bothered to dress when she staggered out of the bedroom every evening. She waddled happily to the kitchen in her big black brassiere and big black panties, and rustled up a few bags of Fritos and bottles of Coke for the girls.

Mamie and Claire were virginal odalisques, if such a thing is possible. They, too, moved in a dream of languorous stupefaction. It is to their credit that they never, even later, saw the slightest immorality in the situation. Perhaps they were simply fulfilling their true natures, and the competent, but sterile, years of their parents’ rule had left them porous and expectant for just this sort of innocent sensuality.

The house was a mess. Dishes coated with plum sauce and dried
lau-lau
leaves were on every tabletop, and every chair held empty white cardboard take-out containers and jars of hair cream and saucers overflowing with cigarette butts. Jimmy gained five pounds just from licking the dirty plates. Since they had unconsciously restricted themselves to only a few rooms of the house, it could not be said that they had spent the time in filth. It was untidy, but not sordid.

The night before the Clarkes were to return, they seemed to realize that their idyll had come to an end. They felt no dread at the return of McCully and Mary because they felt no guilt. They did feel, all four of them, a luxurious and intimate
regret. Mamie hoped that they would be together like this for the rest of their lives, as soon as the girls could get away from their parents.

Gertrude washed the badly stained sheets until four o’clock in the morning.

It was Cecil and Benjie’s job to collect and burn the trash—the beer cases, boxes of See’s candy, Dairy Queen cups and rib bones of various unidentifiable animals. The enormous bonfire on the beach burned exuberantly through the night.

Mamie and Claire cleaned the kitchen. Every glass, every plate, pot, utensil and cup had been used and left, encrusted and glazed, in the sink and on the counters for the whole, happy ten days.

There were a few things that they had left until it was too late, such as the cigar burn in McCully’s bathrobe, and the empty bottles of California wine that McCully was saving for a special occasion, but there was nothing to be done about it.

They went about their chores happily. Claire said she felt like the elves in
The Shoemaker and the Elves
, and Benjie asked, “What’s an elve?”

While Claire gaily told him the story, Mamie scraped the last of the cold
malasadas
into Jimmy’s greasy, smiling mouth.

Several weeks after McCully and Mary returned from Honolulu, Mary asked Mamie if she would like to help her in the garden. Mamie was very pleased to be asked and worked quietly at the small chores that Mary gave her—weeding under the milky
plumeria
trees and watering delicately by hand the trembling young
liliko‘i
shoots.

Mary may have suspected by then that Hiroshi had done exactly what Mamie told McCully he did, for how else could his disappearance be explained? Mary was also not so removed from her daughter that she did not know that Mamie was an intelligent and honest child. She had behaved rashly when Hiroshi was dismissed, Mary told herself, and she considered that she may not have been kind to Mamie. That she had profoundly altered Mamie’s view of the world and herself in it did not occur to her. She was less honest and less intelligent than Mamie. She did feel sorry that the whole thing had ever happened. She should have told Mamie.

Mamie watched Mary expertly divide the root stock of a
ti
bush. Mamie admired her mother’s ruthless pruning. Mamie
was always a little afraid that she was hurting a plant, but Mary hacked and snipped with a clear conscience.

“That is why you’re a good gardener,” Mamie said aloud.

“What?” Mary was entangled in a vine.

“You’re not worried about hurting the plants.”

Mary looked at her as if she had lost her senses. “Of course I’m not. What a funny idea.” As if to prove it, she ripped the vine from an old wood fence. Mamie was sure she could hear the tiny suckers on the vine whimpering in pain as they popped off the wood rails.

“I think you’ll like your roommate next year,” Mary said, panting a little with the effort of yanking the stubborn vine from the fence. “She’s from the Big Island. McCully went to school with her uncles.” She passed one end of the vine along to Mamie. “And Lily Shields is there, too, a few years ahead of you. Such a strange girl. I saw her the other day in Lihue dressed all in black and wearing white rice powder all over her face. I’m surprised her father lets her go out looking like a ghost.”

“That’s what she is.”

Mary looked up from her work. “What?”

“She is a ghost.”

“What
are
you talking about?” Mary was irritated. Mamie should have been more cautious. It was well-known that Mary loathed anything fanciful.

“In the school play,” Mamie said. It was a lie, but she would rather protect her best friend than ever explain The Mothers Club to Mary.

“Her mother was strange, too.”

Mamie turned back to the weeds. There seemed to her to be many things that she could never explain to Mary. She had loved Lily’s mother.

“Did you see Auntie Emma in Honolulu?” she asked to protect Lily and her dead mother.

“Twice. We went to dinner at George Brown’s and she made him play the ukulele and she danced all the old hulas.”

“Father must have been happy.”

“I’m afraid he danced, too.” Mary gave a last, mighty tug on the vine, and she almost fell over backward as it finally gave up and came fast off the fence. The word “too” came out of her like a shout.

“I love when Daddy does the hula.”

Mary roughly coiled the vine in an unruly, leafy circle.

Mamie saw that she had lost her attention. “Can’t you see how terrible that is for the vine?” she asked quietly. “Can’t you hear what is going on around you, what Mr. Griep, my science teacher, calls the ‘music of the spheres’?”

“What, Mamie?”

Of course, the question that Mamie most passionately yearned to ask, and the question that was implicit in all of the others, was, Why do you not love me? But she merely said again, “the music of the spheres, the music of the—”

“There!” Mary said with satisfaction.

She had subdued the heavy vine, like a snake charmer. Heedless of the child who sat motionless in the grass, watching her solemnly, she went off to spray the fruit trees.

Exhausted by the effort of trying to keep her mother’s interest and failing, Mamie walked listlessly back to the house.

McCully was sitting in the library in his leather chair, Benjie Furtado’s leather chair, and he looked up when he heard Mamie on the veranda. He came outside. Mamie could hear Sousa marches on the record player.

They sat down in chairs facing the ocean. Behind them was an old bookcase with glass doors. It was filled with the dark,
gleaming
koa
calabashes given to Mamie’s ancestors by the Kings and Queens of Hawai‘i. Heavy stone poi-pounders sat in rows on the bottom shelf, next to thin sheets of brown-and-white
kapa
cloth. McCully had been asked several times to donate these artifacts to the Bishop Museum, but he withheld his decision. He liked the idea of giving them to Mamie some day. He always said that she would know what to do with them.

When Mamie was younger, McCully would hold her in his lap in an old
koa
rocker and she would watch the changeable sea, the birthplace of the moon, as he told her the heroic tales of Kaua‘i, the oldest, most verdant, and most sacred of the islands. He told her the legend of the young woman, Pele, who begged permission of her mother and father to leave home. She took with her an egg in which her sister was hatching. Pele carried the egg carefully under her warm arm until the egg broke open and her sister was freed. Although Pele was blessed with the gift of magic, she did not foresee the sorrow her sister would someday bring her. Pele was too distracted. She was looking for fire, island to island.

“Daldo Fortunato tells me he’s making you a new surfboard,” McCully said.

“In exchange for taking over his son’s paper route.”

“The one who just joined the marines?”

“He wants to go to Vietnam.”

“Now I remember. He’s the one who was kicked out of Castle High.”

“They’re sending him instead to California and so he tried to resign from the marines, but they said no. You can’t just resign, they said.”

“Why did he want to go to Vietnam?”

“Orval said it’s because of the grass. He has a plan to develop a new kind of marijuana seed.”

McCully looked at her. She was not trying to be funny, although she knew that what she was saying was funny. Besides, she was telling the truth.

“You’ve always talked about the importance of our agricultural economy,” she said, trying not to smile.

“Didn’t anyone else want the paper route?”

She shook her head.

“But it’s worth a surfboard?”

“Daldo makes the best sticks on Kaua‘i.” She pronounced it in Pidgin, “steeks,” and he finally laughed.

They could hear Mitsuya chopping vegetables in the kitchen. The chopping was surprisingly in time with the Sousa march.

“Something quite mysterious has happened,” McCully said. He had temporarily restored her frail sense of well-being, so she was not prepared when he went on to ask, “Were there people here in the house when your mother and I were away?”

“I think so,” she said, very low and still.

“Was there a party or something?”

She was silent.

“Some things are missing, there are burns in my clothes. It doesn’t make sense.” He was not trying to entrap her, but in his guileless way, he was mystified. “I found a pair of woman’s undergarments in the pocket of my bathrobe, and I don’t believe they belong to Mother.”

Mamie felt herself begin to perspire. She looked at him, forcing herself to stare into his sunburned face. She was afraid. She had awakened every morning since Hiroshi disappeared with the anxiety that something just like this would happen. She would lose Gertrude now, and whatever was left of her mother’s affection, and, worse, even McCully would be disgusted by her. She had instinctively come to realize that although she and Claire had been deliriously happy on their
honeymoon with Gertrude and Benjie, McCully, and especially Mary, would be shocked by it.

“Someone was here, but it was all right. Not a party.”

“Someone?” He was so intent on the curiousness of it that he still did not notice that she was very upset.

“I cannot tell you,” she finally said.

“You can’t tell me?”

“It was Gertrude and Benjie,” she said, hanging her head.

“Benjie Furtado, the cop?”