Sleeping Beauties (23 page)

“My boy is handsome,” Packard said with a smile. “No
huhu
, Henry,” he called to him: Don’t be angry, Henry.

“I was wondering how the break is at Long Beach.” He turned away from the door. He was restless. “We’re going now, Pop. You need anything?”

Packard slid his dimpled hands behind the loose bib of his denim overalls, as if he’d been caught misbehaving. He looked like a big brown baby and it was hard for Clio to imagine him on the back of a horse, one of the last
paniolos
.
He did not have the lined, calloused skin of a man who had spent his life in the sun and wind, and Clio wondered if it were because he had grown stout since the days he had won his trophies.

He walked them to the door, moving with the deliberation of someone who has lived around big animals. “You say ‘How’s it’ to your ma,” he said, confused about her relation to Emma. He put his hand on her shoulder.

“I will,” she said.

“Was your auntie one of those Clarke girls?”

“Yes,” Clio said, pleased.

“Do you take after her?” he asked. For an instant, Clio could see recognition in his eyes. He was trying to remember Emma, out of nostalgia as well as a wish to please, but he could not do it.

“I don’t think I do,” Clio said. “I wish I did.”

He laughed. “For what?”

“She was lovely.”

He slapped his thigh and Clio expected to see dust rise in the air around him. “Isn’t that something!” he said to Henry.

“Goodbye, Pop.”

“Adios,” said Packard. He took Clio’s empty soda can from her hand. They went onto the porch. He gave them some bananas that were leaning against the wooden porch rail. The dog stood close to him, pressed against his legs, whimpering happily as he pulled her ears.

As there was no telephone in the cottage, Clio called Emma to give her the number at the pay phone in Obayashi’s store. “Don’t just call in an emergency,” Clio had said. “We can talk about anything. Even genealogies.”

Emma called once, a week after Clio left Honolulu, to
tell Clio that everyone was looking for her. “You’d think you’d robbed a bank,” Emma said. “What did you do?”

“I don’t know,” Clio said, bewildered. “I just left. Perhaps that’s it.”

“Yes,” Emma said. “They worry if you leave. They have all the defensiveness of the provincial. They
are
provincial. They wonder if you might know something they don’t know. That frightens them. There’s a package here for you, too. From a Ms. Mimi Sands. Shall I open it?”

“What about Claire? She left, too, but no one holds it against her.”

“But she’s come back as a duchess and someone who’s lived in Europe. They like that. You know how some people are prurient about sex, or money? I’ve often thought that island people are prurient about the outside world.”

“So all I have to do is come back a duchess? That sounds easy enough to do.”

“But you’d have to be Claire.”

“Oh,” Clio said.

“Your father called.”

“My father?”

“And Dix came by with a bag of lichees and a good book on Hawaiian furniture. All twenty pieces of it. He stayed only a few minutes. He was so restless he kept hitting his head on the branches of the
hau
tree. I thought he wanted money, which I’d have found for him, but he wanted to know where you were, too.”

“I should leave more often.”

“My mother thinks that you’re here, of course. That’s one advantage. She thinks you’re here at Hale Moku repairing the outboard so that you can take her by sea to Rosemount Plantation. She asked me this morning when you’d have the boat ready. Do you ever think how beautiful the women must have been? Those lovely
hapa-haole
girls
with their thick black hair and green eyes in the Worth ball gowns they ordered from Paris. Going to dance at Rosemount in white satin gowns. They wore white to show off their brown shoulders. The only trouble was those slippers. The ones you liked to dance in when you were a child. They had trouble dancing in shoes.”

“How did you know I used to dance in the slippers? You never told me how you knew. I thought Lester had told you.”

Emma laughed. “I myself have seen it.”

“You watched me?”

“I saw you once, by accident. The door was open. That is my memory. Or perhaps I dreamed it. It’s all a dream, Clio.”

“Yes, it is all a dream. I’d be happy to take Grandmother to Rosemount Plantation, even if it’s overgrown and deserted. Like Sleeping Beauty’s castle. We’re used to that.”

“Perhaps you
could
take her,” Emma said. “Perhaps she’s right and we are the mad ones. It all exists in the imagination, anyway. Memory and expectation. Reality is the least important aspect.”

“I worry about that,” Clio said. “The unimportance of it.”

“Steamy called, too. I gave him the number at Obayashi’s. He’s thinking of going to Waimea with Claire and he wanted to know what you thought. ‘Clio will kill me,’ is what he said, to be exact.” She paused. “They all want something from you, Clio.”

“Except Henry. Henry is the only one who doesn’t want something.”

“I think that’s how it works, Clio. People wanting things, I mean. They’re supposed to want something. It’s not unreasonable to want something.”

“But I don’t want anything from them.”

“That’s not true. You do ask for something.”

“I do?”

“You ask to be left alone.”

“That shouldn’t be too hard. For others, I mean.”

“And what about me?”

“You?”

“Do I ask for something?”

“Oh, you are the worst of all.”

“Well, there’s the irony then. That you think I’m the worst of all.” There was regret in Emma’s voice.

“You all give me too much power,” Clio said. “Me, of all people. Grandmother even thinks I can summon back the dances at Rosemount Plantation.”

“Well, you can.”

“By taking her there?”

“By letting her believe that it exists.”

“I do. I do let her believe it. And still it’s not enough.
That
is irony.”

“Perhaps I’m wrong then. Perhaps she shouldn’t be encouraged.”

Clio laughed. “I’m going fishing tomorrow with Henry. He is a fisherman.”

“Well, I’ve opened your package while we talked and Ms. Mimi Sands has sent you what looks like a child’s uniform. I can’t quite make it out. Could it be a girl’s scouting uniform?”

“Yes, it could.”

“Shall I mail it to you? Is it something that you need?”

“No. Not yet.”

“I’ll speak to you soon, then.”

“Emma?”

“Yes, child?”

“I didn’t mean to offend you. About the past and what
you have hoped to do. When I said that you wanted more than anyone.”

“No, Clio, never. You have never offended me.”

A few hours later, Obayashi’s granddaughter came from the store to say that there was another call for Clio.

Mr. Obayashi looked up irritably when Clio came up the wooden stairs of the store. There was a smell of tobacco smoke from the pipes of the men sitting in the yard, and the acrid fumes of mosquito punk, and the peppery aroma of fried chicken cooking in the back of the store. Clio decided to buy some of the chicken to take home for supper.

“Stay plenty time,” Obayashi said, shaking his head as if it were Clio’s fault that the caller had been kept waiting so long. It had taken ten minutes for Clio and Obayashi’s granddaughter to run back to the store.

Clio reached for the phone, out of breath. Obayashi’s fingers had grown rigid around the receiver and he could not let go of it. Perhaps that is why he is angry with me, she thought. His hand is paralyzed with age and disease and he is embarrassed that I see it. As she helped him to unwind his fingers, she wondered who would be calling at seven in the evening on a windy day on Moloka‘i, wondered who had been willing to wait nearly twenty minutes to speak to her. She hoped that nothing had happened to her grandmother, or to Emma. Mr. Obayashi’s short-legged
poi
dog watched intently as Clio prized the phone from Mr. Obayashi’s grip. The dog’s long pointed ears twitched with interest. Except for Packard’s dog, all of the dogs on Moloka‘i looked alike. They, too, were related. She yanked the phone away from Mr. Obayashi.

“Hello?”

“This really is not a good idea, babe. Not a good idea at all.”

“What isn’t?”

“I just want you to know that I don’t approve of what you’re doing. This is not the way to do it. All wrong, babe. I waited that night at the Outrigger ’til nine o’clock. I thought something had happened to you. Lucky for you, your brother was there and we had dinner with Claire. He has a movie he wants me to do.”

Clio could suddenly see the force of all things efficacious that would be brought to bear on her.

“His script’s not bad,” Tommy said, momentarily distracted by the thought of his career. “I’m thinking of doing it.”

She was so angry at them, her husband and her brother, so furious, that she began to tremble. “What does this have to do with me? Why are you calling me?”

The old woman cooking
makizushi
on a hot plate had stopped to listen. Mr. Obayashi turned his back to Clio and noisily rearranged a blue glass pyramid of Vicks VapoRub jars. Flies lighted on a long rectangle of pineapple upside-down cake on a piece of waxed paper, but Mr. Obayashi was too upset to notice them. Perhaps he was thinking of the caller’s telephone bill. Clio wondered if she could reach far enough with her hand to chase away the flies.

“It has a lot to do with you, but that’s not why I’ve been holding for forty fucking minutes. Not to have a story conference, I can tell you. Not to discuss plots. Not this plot. This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done. By far. No contest. I’m obsessed with this, and I don’t like it. I’m coming to get you. Tomorrow. Claire says there’s a plane every few hours.”

Clio looked around the store. Mr. Obayashi’s granddaughter
sat on top of the white ice-cream freezer, banging her thin legs against the side. Clio thought it must be cold, sitting there. The girl stared at her and ate blue shave-ice from a paper cone. Blue was vanilla. Clio wanted one. The color of the syrup had never corresponded to the color of the fruit, or even to the taste of the fruit. Pineapple was pink, guava was green.

“Why,” she asked, “would you want someone who doesn’t want you?”

“You want to know? I make allowances, that’s why. I’m adjustable. I like having you around. I can deal with your bad behavior. It’s worth it to me. I believe in this family. Even if you don’t. We know how you feel about families, for Christ’s sake.”

“That’s just
my
family,” she said in exasperation, “not all families.” She realized that he had drawn her into a conversation. “Listen, Tommy, I’m going to say goodbye now. Don’t call me again. I’m going home now and eat fried chicken. Then I’m going to find a lawyer.”

“What do you want?” he shouted. “You want to live in Beverly Hills? Okay! You want to drive the Bentley? Okay! You want to work? Fine. You want to have a kid? Maybe.”

“I’m hanging up now.” There was the sudden loud sound of rain on the tin roof. It reminded her of the sound of rain at Nu‘uanu.

Gently, sneakily, with both hands, she placed the heavy receiver back into its cradle. She could hear Tommy shouting her name as she hooked the receiver in place. Mr. Obayashi frowned as she severed the magical connection across the rough channel to Honolulu.

She worried that the phone would suddenly ring again, disturbing the dusty stillness of Obayashi’s store before she could get to the road. She knew that Mr. Obayashi would be shocked if she refused to take the call. The girl was
gone from her seat on the freezer. Clio forgot about the chicken and the other small things she’d meant to buy,
kiawe
honey and a spool of thread. She left without thanking Obayashi and his wife, and set out for home like a thief.

Through the sound of the rain and the tumble of rising stream water at the side of the road she heard the sharp ring of the telephone. She wondered if it would soon be too dark to pick the Surinam cherries she’d noticed on the way, if the rain had already torn the pleated red berries from their stems. She began to run.

The rain fell on her head and shoulders and splashed up the back of her calves, cooling her. Just offshore, along the narrow shoals, the last streams of light clung like spirits hesitant to abandon the land. She could see the lights of west Maui shining across the channel. The trees were dark in the rain, the bark stained black, the leaves heavy in the last light. She watched the rain move through the fields, the grass bowing beneath it. The stones by the side of the road soaked up the light, and the darkness was cool upon her face.

She had read that morning that many new species of insects and reptiles, even fish and birds, were discovered each year, and she wanted to tell Emma. Emma kept a catalogue of the species that had disappeared from the Hawaiian Islands. In the last ten years, thirteen species of Hawaiian plants had become extinct, more than in any other place on earth. The
‘ahinahina
, the silversword; and the lovely spiderflower; and two species of
Phyllostegia
, both named after the amateur botanists in Emma’s family who had discovered them. Emma herself had a fern named in her honor. Clio and Emma found it one morning at Kawaikoi Stream in Koke‘e and they carried it back down the mountain as if they’d been bearing an idol. And of course, Clio thought, we were.

She could see Ginger’s bus in the field. A light bulb attached to a twisted piece of metal hanger was swinging wildly in the wind, like a fish caught on a line. The bus looked like a ship outrunning a storm.

A dog barked, sticking its head through a shattered window of the bus. A boy ran to her across the field. It was Ginger’s grandson, Earl. He stopped abruptly, almost on top of her, his face close to hers, and jerked her hand roughly. Clio could see Ginger standing in the door of the bus with a broomstick. She gestured with the broom, as if to shoo Clio away. Earl’s palm was hot and dirty. Clio wondered if he’d been holding candy, or pennies. He was eating a strip of
pipi kaula
, beef jerky, and it smelled rancid.