I look around my old mothers house
I notice the dirty laundry
piling up in a corner
I notice the dust
choking the windows shut
I notice the crusty dishes
strewn on the counters and sink
what I don't notice is
how tired she looks
how her back stoops over
bent with pain and hard work
how her legs shuffle
from room to room
searching for the hope
that came and left
how when she notices me staring
she says nothing
but just turns her back
and lets me stew in my own shame
Copyrighted
1st Place Short Story - "The Leaping Place" by Lucy Berrington
The Leaping Place
Day One
They arrived at Polihale in the middle of the afternoon and found a spot away from the main camping area. A clearing among straggly trees, it had an unclaimed picnic table and a ring of stones around scorched earth. Sunlight fell in, splattering over the table, which was scratched and painted with wiggly lines and symbols. There were two ropes slung between trees and a pineapple top wedged onto a branch. A couple of trees were wearing shells and stones and coral wired rustily to branches.
“Tree jewelry,” said Melinda. She fingered her diamond ring. They’d left New York seventeen hours and five time zones ago in hats and sweaters and wool socks, shedding clothing along the way, stuffing it into their hand luggage. Now Melinda, in her pink skirt, knelt to pick an orange flower. She intended to tuck it behind her ear in a gesture to Hawaii, their host state, but it was guarded by thorns.
She retreated to the picnic bench and sucked her finger. Harry sat next to her, took her hand and kissed it. Scarlet-crested cardinals arrived to pick up caterpillars. “Look at our new world,” Melinda murmured, “look how lovely…”
She jerked upright. The birds retreated in a flurry to a nearby tree.
Harry squeezed her hand. “Mel?”
“Nothing, I don't know, just a feeling.”
Something unexpected, warm and benign, but not coming from Harry. A barely perceptible breeze, perhaps, the breath of a spirit. It felt like hope – a manifestation of her future with Harry – swirling around the campsite for a moment then settling around them. They had, after all, come here to take a breather from the relentless roster of wedding plans and families and arrangements, to remember what it was all about: them. This was the time to shed her anxieties; to place her faith in him, and in herself.
She laughed and spread her hands wide on the table top: “Harry, look.” Someone had painted the words LAUGHTER, ART, JUSTICE, COMPASSION and even WORK in red and orange. “These could be our wedding vows right here!”
Harry smiled. But he worried the spot was too big. There was room for someone else to pitch up next to them. The main camping area seemed home to a crowd of – what was the word? itinerants, travelers – inhabiting worn, disorganized campsites. Melinda and Harry unfolded their tarp together and strung it up above the table. They didn’t expect rain; this was more about defining their territory. They hung their crushed clothes and towels on every line to air.
Melinda put on her black bikini. Her laboriously straightened hair was threatening to turn wavy. Harry shed his chinos and patterned shirt, and plucked denim shorts and a T-shirt from the clothesline. He was 34 and five feet eleven, only an inch taller than Melinda, meticulously clean-shaven with dark hair that curled after two or three weeks without a cut.
“Come on then,” he said.
They stepped between the trees and examined the beach through expensive sunglasses. This was the longest beach in Hawaii, hot and raw for several miles, rushed by hard, unswimmable waves. Even in winter the sand was too hot for bare feet. The only shells to complete the Pacific journey arrived tiny and fragmented.
“What a place for our pre-honeymoon!” Melinda swung Harry’s hand. “How much do I love you? Too much to fit on this endless, empty beach.”
“I love you too babe.”
A tiny bead of sweat ran down Melinda’s forehead into what remained of her eyebrow after her pitiless attentions with tweezers. She worked in real estate and said looking good in other people’s habitats was part of her job. For the past six months, though, she’d focused on purchasing their own place, their first home together: doing the dispiriting math, checking the midtown and Village listings several times a day (her own needs now taking priority over her clients’). Oh and creating the wedding list, liaising with her mom and maid of honor about the venue and the other 2,999 details. Harry, an economics professor, was in his own way working towards the same goals, for among the benefits of tenure were marriage, home ownership, professional stature, 401Ks, parenthood. But it was Melinda of course who was organizing the event – exhilarated, obsessive, tearful – and that was why she had suddenly wanted to buy a tent and get away. Their previous vacations together had been to cities (London, Miami). This time they would do something uncharacteristic, a whole other mode of living.
They were at least twenty feet from the surf but were suddenly up to their calves in water, grabbing the camera bag, dripping, chasing flip-flops. The sea was gone again in an instant.
“Never turn your back on the ocean,” said Harry, quoting the guidebook. They retreated to a dune and tangled blue nets and looked towards the Na Pali cliffs at the northern end of the beach. Below, a wrecked car peeled in the sun. The ocean beyond was where they could take the luxury catamaran tour Melinda had proposed, or go rafting, maybe spot whales. On the shimmering sand she could see specks, two people apparently walking this way, their progress a hazy line. She dismissed a fancy that they’d crawled out of the wrecked car. The cliffs were topped by radar, part of the defense system that would warn of another attack on Pearl Harbor.
She said, “This is where the spirits of the dead come before moving on to the next world.”
“Says who?”
“Local tradition. I read it in the guidebook.”
“It is impossible to convey in words the majesty of this beach,” Harry murmured.
Melinda did not know how to respond.
He went on, “There’s something about the contrast, the spiritual presence and the military presence. Two different kinds of power.”
Melinda nodded. She acknowledged Harry’s inner poet, but found it demoralizing, since her own inner presence tended to reveal itself as someone who did the dishes or whatever. But she wasn't going to think like that anymore. She looked for the moving specks, the people, and couldn’t see them.
“The leaping place of spirits, that’s what the name means, Polihale,” she remembered.
They explored parts of the dunes. Just after six there was a sunset over towards Niihau, the private island where tourists couldn’t go. The sky was dramatic, orange and red, jazzed.
Day Two
A dawn raid by the state park authorities reduced the number of tents from eight to four.
“Permit?” Melinda said, still in her dream, to the voice from outside. “Can’t it wait till tomorrow?”
The voice said they needed to see it now. They’d been having problems in the park.
Her pillow was a synthetic bag stuffed with clothes. She foraged inside it for yesterday’s shorts, which seemed dewy, and Harry’s T-shirt, and didn’t have time for underwear.
“Ask him what problems,” said Harry, asleep but curious.
Unzipped, the day seemed pale and distant. Thorns pricked Melinda’s feet. There was post-coital stickiness inside her thighs and she longed fleetingly for her own bathroom. She gave the permit to the large man with the clipboard who was waiting outside their tent.
“What kind of problems?” she asked.
“Derelicts, hippies, you know, hanging around. They’ve been vandalizing, messing up the bathrooms. We’ve had complaints.”
He stared at the permit as if he’d never seen one before, and said she was okay. “Sorry about that early wake-up.”
No chance of going back to sleep. Melinda unpacked the breakfast apparatus and made eggs and bacon, toast with jelly. Prepping for the vacation, Harry had gone to an outdoors supply store and a supermarket, returning triumphantly with useful things. Not just the tent and stove: various lanterns, a solar battery charger and complicated penknife, an ingenious toasting device, a coffee maker and plastic stay-intact egg box, folding spatulas and spoons, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter in a tube. He had never camped before and now thought he had discovered a camping talent. More like a shopping talent, Melinda had thought. They’d spent $1,400 on gear alone, despite her vetoing the Wild Animal Protection Kit and a portable GPS.
After breakfast she sat at the table with her magazine called 101 Things to Do on Kauai, which she’d marked up with asterisks on the plane. “Come to the beach,” Harry said, and she tossed the magazine on the wood pile – it would be kindling tonight.
The sun was glossy and confident again. The breezy heat felt permanent, unfamiliar. This was not the thick, solid heat of New York City in which they had carved out their lives (although the memory of that heat had been distant this frigid December). The warm air here in Hawaii felt unstructured, unexpected, the context for who knew what.
Several camping parties were dismantling their tents and leaving: at least one sizeable contingent had been busted. Harry and Melinda walked towards the picnic pavilions, which were in the dunes with other human artifacts: lavatories, grills, a planted row of palms. There was an unforgiven quality about it all. The trees looked windswept even when the air was still. The concrete picnic tables had been ripped apart and the inside metal spokes were bent and rusted. Pieces of the bathroom roof were missing; a long beam saying WOMEN lay in the undergrowth. Melinda assumed this was the work of the hurricane five years before.
They had planned their first hike in detail. Instead, by undiscussed agreement, they moved around the beach, read books, took photos, returned to the campsite for a lunch of spaghetti with canned clam sauce and salad, then dozed on the sand. Time passed lethargically. The sunset was surprisingly tender, lavender and gray, a gentle sheen.
****
They sat at the picnic table in the dark beneath a thick layer of tarp, beneath a thick layer of stars. Harry had made burgers in English muffins and fruity tea and afterwards Melinda cleared everything away, listening to the swish of the ocean and invisible wilderness movement, rustling nocturnal dramas. The sound of a flute came thin and hopeless from the darkness a hundred yards north.
“The reason it bugs me,” said Harry, in the end, “is that I don’t dare go over and tell them to quit it.” He was writing a postcard to his parents by the vivid light of the propane lantern.
“Yeah,” said Melinda. She could see her face in the bottom of her cup, a green enamel cup that looked the part but got too hot to hold. Her nose shone back at her, circular, her eyes inverted crescents in the distance.
Harry said, “A lot of people would just go over there and say, Hey!’’
“They have a guitar too,” said Melinda. “And probably a ukulele. Maybe drums!”
She reached for Harry’s card and read it. ‘There is an interesting predator-prey relationship between the police and the hippies who flock here in great numbers. As predicted by the Volterra equation there are significant fluctuations in hippy numbers.’ His father was also an economist.
“They’re not hippies,” said Melinda. “Hippies were a different generation.”
“Wannabe hippies, travelers. I wish there were a number we could call, get the party closed down.”
“Come on honey, we’re on vacation.” She laid down the card and reached for his hand. “What, I take you out of the city for a minute and you get crabby?”
“Middle-class people bumming around the world and living off their parents, playing crap music, thirty years too late.” He was pressing his ballpoint into the table, not so much writing as engraving: C R AP M U— “I’m surprised any of them are still here. It can’t be very hippyish to have a permit. They’ll be kicked out of the Hippy Union.”
Malinda smiled. “There’s this powerful weed here apparently.”
“Sure. You should get us some.”
“Years since I smoked any.” We should, she almost added; it might soothe you. She worked on her own postcard to her sister. ‘We are camping on a vast desolate beach where a hen and her five chicks visit us for toast.
“You learn stuff about yourself when you’re camping,” Harry said. “For example, I’m expanding a certain economic theory.” He went to the stove and poured himself another cup of tea. “Meanwhile you have discovered your hair is naturally curly.”
“Oh, thanks a lot.” Melinda threw down her pen.
“Honey, I was joking.”
Melinda held her head in her hands. When she had first moved to New York, before Harry was her – what was the phrase? – her primary emotional relationship, she’d been warned how hard it was there to be single. Also how hard to be in a couple. There were just way too many women, the competition glamorous and intense. Her friend Sarita had lived with a post-grad student, nourished him through his PhD – emotionally, sexually, financially – and then the guy had graduated and dumped her. He needed a “more stimulating girl”.
A more stimulating girl. The phrase chilled Melinda. It was an ice sliver moving down her gullet – though just yesterday she’d decided this stuff wouldn't bother her any more. What happened to that?
I should have shrugged it off, she thought; now I’m moody too. She retrieved her pen and completed her postcard. ‘The area is beautiful and sacred, the place where the spirits of the dead lingered before they departed the island. I don’t blame them. I’d want to hang around here too.
She didn’t, though, not right this minute. She stood up and brushed her teeth, spitting onto the sand, washed her face in mineral water and took the flashlight for the tent. The time was 8.50pm.
“You going to bed already?” Harry asked.
“Yeah.”
Day Three
The beach exerted a mesmerizing pull. Polihale was in any case the end of the road and they weren’t up for too much driving. They ate a scanty breakfast and read Joseph Conrad and Flannery O’Connor, the latter on Melinda’s reading list for night school, and sunbathed and talked a little.
They had to pass the remaining travelers every time they went to the bathroom or their car or the faucet. The main camp was based around the broken-up concrete tables near the parking lot. It looked similar to theirs, except three tents instead of one – though a second glance revealed faded flies, a flapping zipper, random items strewn in the sand (a tea kettle, a black rag doll, an acoustic guitar, a man in khaki trunks) and more extensive tree jewelry. Melinda couldn’t imagine this camp contained fire starters – just for example – or I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. There was a thin mixed-race woman who always smiled at them; Melinda smiled back. The woman had a daughter aged about five, elfin with a dark braid. They were part of a group, perhaps seven adults, though hippyish types were by nature uncountable, plus the child and a toddler in a sarong. Melinda caught lines of their conversation, like this, from a white guy with dreadlocks: “So we met up and he was like, fire, and we were air—!” at which the others laughed sympathetically.
Melinda had scooped her crinkly hair into a ponytail and wore a baseball cap. The guy with dreadlocks smiled at her lengthily: no fear of eye contact, which felt unnatural to Melinda after all the time she’d spent on New York’s subway.
The first time she and Harry had seen the travelers’ car it had been blue with white puff clouds painted on it. Then the clouds moved and they realized this was a reflection, the Hawaiian sky resting for a moment on the Hawaiian hippymobile. In fact the car was pink, a rusting Subaru station wagon with a purple pillowy interior and no seatbelts. It was filthy, like every vehicle that arrived here. Polihale was accessible via three miles of red dirt road, except after heavy rain when it was not accessible at all.
Late in the morning Harry announced he’d drive to Weimea, the town, for supplies. “What do we want for dinner?”
Melinda’s interest in camp cooking had waned. “Anything. Gas cylinders and coffee.”
She walked with Harry as far as the parking lot, where the itinerant toddler pranced about. The dark-haired five-year-old, wearing nothing but a floral shirt, was making a pattern of coral pieces in the sand. “Hey, Neema!” someone called to her, and the child jumped up.
“Oh!” Melinda said.
“What is it babe?”
Melinda tuned away from the group, spoke quietly. “The little girl has a penis.”
Harry looked. “Jesus. She does.”
“He, I meant. He has a penis.”
Harry took a moment – a few paces on the trail – to digest this. “What, they’re raising a boy as a girl?” His voice was low, already scornful.
“Hey,” murmured Melinda. She reached for his hand and missed, hopped around retrieving an errant flip-flop then hurried after him. “Maybe she’s both,” she said, reaching their white rental Ford Taurus, also brown with dirt. “You know, an in-betweeny. Bisexual, ambidextrous, whatever it’s called.”
“He. It’s the parents who are in-betweenies, in between passably normal people and fucking idiots. Where are the social services when you need them?” Harry glanced back towards the camp, pulling the car key out of his pocket. “Sick.”
Fantastic, thought Melinda, leaning against the car, now I have to spend the rest of the week still listening to him bitching, like the flute playing wasn’t enough. She watched him fold a map that had been on the driver’s seat, pressing it closed, the intensity of his feeling. His blackish stubble – rare that Harry let it show – seemed to suit his anger. She leaned into the car and kissed him. “You’re overreacting, baby.”
He drove off along the red road. The sky was solid blue, the sugar cane bright green, the cliffs behind them gray. Melinda was surprised to see Harry brake a few hundred yards away below a large acacia tree. He seemed to be talking to someone. She couldn’t tell if it were a man or woman, but whoever it was got into the car. Harry had never picked up a hitchhiker before, as far as Melinda knew. She watched the car disappear around a bend in the road.
****
It was their third evening as campers. Melinda was deciphering two old words scratched into the tabletop, tracing with her fingertip. ANIMA MUNDI, she figured.
“It was a girl,” Harry said, “but like the kid in that regard, I mean I couldn’t tell until I was close up. There she was with no purse or backpack, no bra for that matter. And so offhand, as though she wouldn’t have minded waiting a few more hours under her tree. I nearly left her there.”
The girl had brought camping smells, sweat and cooking and sandalwood, into the car, wore her earrings in rows like shower hooks and disregarded the basics of personal safety. “I asked if she was staying here and she said she got busted the other day with her boyfriend.”
Harry’s tone seemed determinedly casual, anecdotal. But Melinda thought she could detect the slightest undercurrent of excitement. She imagined him and the hippyish girl in the car together, Harry discreetly conscious of his hitchhiker’s slippery posture, the girl’s brown hands, multiple rings and braided friendship bands.
“Was she pretty?”
Harry finished his tea and got up, tipped the water out of the cooler. “She’d be pretty if she cleaned up.”
“But hardly your type.”
He shrugged. “I’ve decided I’m okay with the hippies. Travelers, transsexuals, whatever they are. That’s my revised policy. Life’s too short.” He threw a package of ham into a trash bag. “Maybe it’s me, maybe I just need to fucking relax.”
Another turnaround. Perhaps the girl was a new prototype of desirable, for Harry, Melinda thought. Perhaps he liked her – liked the fact that she had got into his car. Maybe her trust moved him.
She asked, “So what are they going to do?” Oh, she thought, I bet a solution came to him immediately, himself and this girl and me in our tent.
Harry said, “This is the only place they can stay now because of the shelters.”
“I don’t believe any of them actually left,” said Melinda. “The ones that got busted. They just scattered for a moment like dust, and now they’re settling again.”
“I said to her, well, this is quite a place. This is some place you got here. She said yeah, it’s very special.”
Melinda said, “You can certainly feel the— There is a very strong— ” She wasn’t sure how to express it, the vividness the beach invoked, and the unease.
Harry grilled steak over the campfire while Melinda steamed broccoli and a caterpillar. There was something about those people, the travelers, Melinda thought: popping up, vanishing, enemies of Harry, Harry’s new best friends.
When the flute playing started Harry glanced towards the sound – not once, repeatedly. “It’s actually not bad.”
“Where’s my coffee?” asked Melinda.
“I forgot.”
Little moths fell into the citronella candles, to be preserved there like in paperweights.
Day Four
The fourth day the hen had only three chicks; a minor tragedy by Melinda’s reckoning, though Harry said he’d eat a three-chick sandwich without a qualm. In fact lunch was bananas gone brown in the cooler and multigrain crackers. They wandered along the sand and identified at random the spot where they should sit. Sightseeing helicopters were whirling above the Na Pali coast, just out of reach of the ravines. The ravines were angry and tormented; they hadn’t had a helicopter in ages.
“Harry, what’s the Volterra equation?”
“What?” He was rubbing sun block on her shoulders while she twisted her disastrous hair in a clip.
“You said in your postcard–”
“Yeah, well, think of wolves eating goats. How many wolves could survive if there were no goats?”
“None.”
“Right. Zero and zero. If you have hundreds of wolves and they all eat a goat a day kind of thing, then you’d soon have no goats, or very few; there would always be a few goats who were good at hiding. Then as the wolf numbers went down it would get easier to be a goat again, so the goat numbers would go up. So then it’s easier to be a wolf. So what happens is you get a continual – ”
“Pattern.”
“Even some very simple equations like that, though, generate behavior that’s so complicated it’s called chaotic. What I was humorously suggesting to Dad was here is such a chaotic system in action with the wannabe hippies and the police.”
“If you have no hippies, how many cops do you need to monitor them? None. But you need loads of cops to get no hippies.”
Harry said, “It’s a similar thing. In the first couple of days we observed the transition from a large number of hippies to a small number. Although like you said, they seem to have come back already.”
“Thanks very much professor.”
“I think you’re done.” He snapped the sunscreen shut and wiped his hands on his shorts.
The sea was less enraged today. Several surfers were out and two microscopic boats: but Melinda’s urge for water activities was over, not even recalled. “Oh and Harry,” she asked, “what’s anima mundi?”
“Anima mundi?”
“It’s on our table.” She handed him the sunscreen meaningfully.
“Well, anima, animated.” He rubbed a token amount onto his own arms. “Life force, vitality, something like that. And mundi, world.”
“The life force of the world.”
“Maybe a universal spirit kind of thing.” He stood up. “I’m going to the bathroom.”
She closed her eyes. “Get water, will you.” No answer. She looked up. He was ten yards off, heading towards the parking lot.
*****
Harry didn’t come back. Melinda passed the afternoon reading and dozing, then finally went to look for him. The beach was suggesting it. Harry, Harry, murmured the sea. Melinda did not want to be alone too long. She did not trust this place , though it seemed gentle today, by Polihale’s standards, as if it even wanted to make friends.
She passed the faucet – no sign of Harry – and the parking lot, where a park warden heaved himself into his pick-up. Native Hawaiians were huge, that was the only incongruous thing about this place Melinda could see. Not like those women from the Bounty movie shimmying in grass skirts and leis, eager to give coconuts and themselves to disembarking white men. Maybe this was what happened to a race genetically selected for efficient fat storage, people who could survive thousands of miles across insane sixth-century oceans. Then they settled here, and Europeans come along and turned their papaya islands into the fiftieth state of Burger King and Dunkin’ Donuts.
Look at me, she thought, quite the anthropologist. She kept heading south along the relatively stable ground between the thick sand and the woods, tramping on grasses and creeping plants and dark fragments of last year’s vegetation, then prancing along a bleached tree trunk. The island Niihau slumped offshore, waves pushing against it, shrieking. A half mile up the beach in the late afternoon heat, four middle-aged women were working through a haphazard sequence of poses: Warrior, Downward Dog, Salute to the Sun, Something, ages since Melinda had done yoga.
After another ten minutes she started to – not flake exactly, but think about flaking. She hadn’t thought to move into the scrubby trees but suddenly there was a trail, faint but compelling, and she followed it. There was shadowy sunlight and the flutters and occasional chirps of birds. The trail headed out the other side of the shrubs towards sand dunes and wound left, inclining through beach grass. A bunny leapt away.
Melinda came to the crest and saw beyond it a whole range of dunes. Late afternoon was the best time of day for dunes, the light gentle and flattering, like the landscape. Melinda continued, her feet sinking with each step.
Against the distant swish of waves she heard a voice. Nothing distinct, just a cry blowing in from somewhere, and she glanced around, still walking. The trail split rather than confront a steep uphill slope, and she headed down the side of a dune, slithering across an undulating dip, and then clambered straight up a peak. This wasn’t a trail any more. She glanced back across the dip and now had a view of the other side of the dune she’d come around.
I should probably leave now, Melinda realized, in some distant part of herself. Yet she always felt compelled to get to the ending of a story, even when she sensed it couldn’t possibly uplift.
She crouched. Another shred of a voice. Peering through beach grass, she saw someone a way off to her left, maybe twelve yards. Two people – of course – two people – not that she had much of a view. All she could see of them was a shape in a gap between smaller dunes, and slight intense movement.
Melinda felt an unnatural cold metastasizing at record speed, spreading from her core through her bones and muscles to her skin – as though whatever power cord had connected her to the heat of the day had been yanked from its source.
There were figures pressed together, part of an arm, a thigh. She had a glimpse of mousy hair and something red on the sand behind. There were muffled words, a physical disentangling. One of them sat up, kneeling, and stretched his arms above his head.
Harry.
The cold inside her was being ousted by a fierce adrenalin heat. It started in her head and seeped down through every limb, every internal space.
Harry’s back was towards her, his sunglasses pushed onto his head. His navy trunks exposed a section of ass. The girl was still largely out of sight, hidden by the dunes and now Harry. His hand reached out as if stroking her belly.
Melinda kept watching, lying down now, gripping the grass, full of hot anxiety. This was a new perspective for Melinda, like the time she snuck into Harry’s department and saw him lecturing: a Harry she didn’t know. Her thoughts were rushed and jumbled, barely there, displaced. Harry had made love to her with the same pressure and urgency as with this girl – but also in other ways, with mutual distraction and fatigue.
Something intruded on the periphery of Melinda’s vision. A white and brown – uh – hen. Here is a hen, Melinda thought. It must be lost, en route back into the woods. It passed close to Harry and the girl. So already they were part of the scenery, the wildlife comfortable with their coupling. Melinda felt intruder’s guilt, confusion. For a moment she didn’t know if this were her business, if Harry’s situation had anything to do with her. And then a prickle of defensiveness: “I just happened to… It wasn’t me who…”.
Harry was lying down again; his arm came up. He was probably running his fingers through his hair. He always did that after sex. Now the gesture suggested he was grooming himself for the next seduction.
As reason returned to Melinda it seemed imperative that Harry didn’t know she’d seen. That gave her more options, the advantage (advantage?). She could pretend she didn’t know – although that wasn’t necessarily the option she would choose, of course. She had some self-respect (she did?). She laid her head down in the sand. Would she and Harry ever discuss this? What would happen? What did this do to weddings? Maybe Harry was following the protocol, cramming in another woman just in time; wasn’t that what stag nights were about, time-honored practice?
Or not. Maybe all her work was for nothing. She wriggled backwards down the slope, to where she could stand up unseen – although the act of standing was disorienting, her mind and body out of sync. The hot and cold were coming together now, chasing and pummeling each other. She could not have said which one she felt. She made her way onto the trail, through the shrubs and trees, back to the beach, light-headed. The ocean sounded noisier than before although it looked just the same. She could wade in, obliterate the knowledge. People drowned here all the time apparently. Harry would think she’d died broken hearted; he’d suffer a lifetime of conceited guilt.
Just as likely she’d have killed herself because she couldn’t stand the thought of being single again in New York City. She hoped her friend Sarita would explain that to him.
The women were still out on the beach doing yoga. Melinda walked for a while then lay down. She felt naïve and mistaken. The beach had taken her to Harry: she would examine the motives of the beach on some future date. In her first moments of viewing Harry with the hippy girl the sight had seemed simultaneously implausible and inevitable.
Nothing like this had ever happened to them in New York. The rules were different here, thrown up on the sand by the ocean, broken and misplaced, rearranged in ancient or accidental combinations.
Day Five
“I’m done with this,” said Melinda, the next morning. They sat at the table, she at JUSTICE, Harry at COMPASSION. “We just sit around all day. I want to see some of this island.”
Harry had put on water for tea. He went to the dishwasher – a bucket – and scrubbed an enamel dish left over from last night, scowling, the suds cold against his skin. Melinda noticed his left-handedness; she remembered witnessing it on their first date. Still, it seemed odd, almost coincidental, that he was left-handed here as well.
He said, “We came here to relax. Rushing everywhere— ”
“Did I say everywhere?”
“It’s raining in the north. The woman in the store said so. That hippy girl in my car said so.”
“Oh, the hippy girl.” Melinda ripped a piece of bread, screwed it into a ball and ate it.
Harry said, “We came here for the sun.”
“The north is the most beautiful part of the island.”
“Nowhere is more beautiful than this.”
“We don’t have to stay here, we don’t have to share it with this bunch of—” People without real lives, she thought. “This is their place, not ours.”
“It’s a three hour drive to the north.” Harry poured the tea, filling the green enamel cups. He did things more carefully when he was irritated. “I knew you didn’t like this site. I can’t believe it.”
“I do like it! That’s so unfair.”
She wrote a postcard to Sarita. ‘Having a fantastic time in Hawaii. The best campsite ever (like she’d been to others). It is impossible to convey in words the majesty of this beach.
Melinda went onto the sand, Harry following at a distance. A naked man was meditating a hundred yards away. Melinda moved to a patch of shade by a dune, and sat in her one-piece. Then she took off her baseball cap, smoothed her salty hair as best she could. A hundred yards away Harry rested on a tree trunk.
Melinda thought he was looking at her, though it was hard to tell. And they sat like that nearly an hour, looking towards each other, or past.
****
“Okay,” said Harry, suddenly behind her. “We’ll go somewhere, a day trip, wherever you want.”
She didn’t really want: too late to say so. They tried for an outing to Weimea Canyon; ‘The Grand Canyon of the Pacific,’ as Mark Twain had famously described it, though – as the guidebooks admitted in their footnotes – it actually wasn’t Mark Twain because he’d never been to Kauai. There would be red earth, layered lava rock, waterfalls, tiny cacti and twisty trees stripped by the hurricane.
Melinda got their stuff ready. She felt abandoned and distracted, resisting the urge to lie back on the sand anticipating her own demise. Instead she laid out their belongings, which seemed over-the-top, the paraphernalia of a former, uptight life.
Clothes for walking, sensible shoes, insect repellant, bee sting kit, beach things in case of sudden beaches, sun screen, Nikon, film, valuables, flip-flops, water, Trail Mix. She ran her gaze along the table. The equipment of her relationship with Harry. How foolish should she feel? She loaded their backpacks.
The boy-girl Neema beamed at Melinda and Harry as they walked to their car. I can’t believe we haven’t ventured off the beach before, Melinda thought, we’ve been here five days: but at the same time she was surprised they were going somewhere now. It was a feat of self-discipline, or desperation. A couple was kneeling on the ground together, the guy who liked her and a woman who seemed older.
Melinda got into the driver’s seat. She saw the hippy couple in her wing mirror; leaning into each other, their eyes closed and foreheads touching, a box of granola beside them. She pulled out sharply and the car slid a little.
“Look,” said Harry. “I’m really sorry if this is about the coffee.”
“I’ll get my own fucking coffee,” she said, and they were both startled.
Day Six
Harry was pulling on a T-shirt, getting ready for Weimea. He planned to cook something special at last; this would be their final camp dinner. Melinda was sitting cross-legged on the ground in her red bikini, snapping a stick into pieces. She felt something land in her hair, a caterpillar probably, and jumped up, shaking her head. The pieces of stick scattered.
“Why do you always go to Weimea? Why not me? I think I’ll go today.”
“It’s what I do.” He smiled at her. “I drag the bison to the cave, my gift to you.”
“We came here to camp, right? Why do you keep running back to town? Who’s in Weimea, Harry?”
Harry stared. He dragged his hands over his face – his beginnings of a beard, incongruous and solemn – and rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay. You go if you want.”
He looked about to peel off his T-shirt. Melinda turned her back on him, unzipped the tent and crawled inside. She sat in the reddish interior among the disorder of sleeping bags and clothes, deodorants and flashlights. There was Harry’s paperback, The Secret Agent, open and face down. She picked it up and saw Harry was at the same page he’d been on two days ago, which was odd, since he’d appeared to read it since. His book was just a front for… for pretending to read. She held it upside down by its two covers, half expecting small illicit papers to fall out, tickets, receipts. Nothing.
His voice from outside: “Are you going to the store?”
“No.” Melinda felt muddled and depressed. “I’ve got that reading for my class.”
The tent flap was pulled aside; Harry’s face appeared. “You know something? The evenings you spend in classes learning to be fascinating are evenings we can’t spend together.” He let the flap drop.
Melinda peered out to see Harry pat his shorts pocket for his car keys and his wallet, striding off along the path. She grabbed her baseball cap and trailed him, pausing at the bends, watching from behind bushes. She wanted to observe Harry’s existence without her, but regretted it. His casualness and his attractiveness, his unawareness of her, his departure: little shocks. He unlocked the car, got in, reversed, drove off. She felt sorrow trickling into her and wished she had gone with him. No one was waiting for him under the acacia tree.
A voice said, “Hey.”
She swiveled. It was the traveler guy, the dreadlocked smiler. He was walking towards her off the beach wearing only cotton drawstring shorts, rolling a reefer. Maybe he had seen her creeping after Harry like a lunatic. This guy was thin, not muscular. As he reached her she noticed a long scar down his chest and concave abdomen, almost neon against his tan, and an incomprehensible tattoo on one bicep.
She said, “You spooked me,” and tightened her stomach.
He smiled. “You want a smoke?”
“Sure.”
They sat on a couple of rocks at the edge of the beach, where a plant spread in tight curls across the sand. Melinda took the joint and inhaled cautiously at first, then, closing her eyes, deeply. She almost forgot to give it back. The traveler’s name was Luke. She observed herself in a series of idle confidences.
“We’re getting married soon, but I don’t know if he wants me anymore, I don’t know if he thinks I’m...” An unexpected tear slid out of one eye.
Luke sat with his elbow on one knee, holding the roll-up between thumb and finger.
Melinda looked out to sea. You couldn’t see the turquoise of the water from a low vantage point, which was the only drawback with the beach, that and the likelihood of drowning if you dipped a toe in. Right now the ocean was colorless. Cliffs reared up to the north, scrunched volcanic grays.
She said, “And then yesterday I saw him with – one of your friends.”
This was the hottest day so far. Melinda wondered if she had enough sunscreen on. Harry never wore much sunscreen. It was insulting, really. Did he imagine she had nothing better to do with her life than nurse him through skin cancer?
“The hip– the girl, whatever her name is,” she said. “He met her the day before, he gave her a ride to town.”
“Juliana.” He passed the reefer back to her.
“Oh, Juliana.” She took a drag quickly.
“But it wasn’t Juliana he was making out with, that was Freddie.”
“Freddie?’ Melinda inhaled wrong and had a fit of coughing. “Oh, how cute, Freddie. I thought for a moment, sounded like a guy.”
“Freddie is a guy.”
Melinda stared at him. She glanced around, took another (careful) hit, then handed the joint over. “That is ridiculous.”
“Why?”
“Because Harry isn’t gay.” She rearranged her legs on the rock.
Luke smoked and didn’t comment.
She said after a minute, “I love Harry, Luke, I’m engaged to be married to Harry.” She flexed her finger, considered her ring. She was Harry’s spokesperson. “He’s never been remotely homosexual, I would know.”
“You know anything about teen boys?”
“That's different, they outgrow it. Anyway, he didn’t even do that. Harry and I talk about everything. It’s true! And don't even think of suggesting he’s marrying me to cover up that he’s gay. This is 2004, we live in downtown Manhattan. It’s better to be gay.”
She tucked some strands of hair into her baseball cap. Again, Luke did not respond. Finally, she said, “What, you saw them together or something, Harry and Freddie?”
“Getting water.”
“Well I saw them actually doing it in the dunes, and I can tell you it was Juliana.”
“Juliana’s in town with her boyfriend.”
Melinda’s anger was gone now. She felt unhinged, on the verge of tears. Juliana, where are you when we need you? Visions of Harry making out with a man: no, no, no, no, no.
Why not exactly?
They were New Yorkers, which was all about living outside the box – although now she thought about it their city lives looked nothing if not box-shaped. Anyway, they were here, unboxed in Polihale, consorting with these gender-challenged wannabe hippies. What if Harry in confusion had mistaken this feminine Freddie for a girl, at least initially, until it was too late to care, did that still make him gay?
“I can't believe it,” she said. “I have to marry someone and he’s cheated on me and I don’t even know if he...”
“Have to marry?”
Melinda frowned. “You wouldn’t understand, you don’t have things like marriage. Social structures.” She reached for the joint. “I suppose you think it’s just a piece of paper. Like a camping permit.”
Luke stretched, his back arching, his scar getting longer. “You want to swim?”
“It's so complicated,” said Melinda. “It's just so much more complex…” She closed her eyes briefly. “Than organizing the buffet.”
Luke asked, “When’s your birthday?"
“July 30.”
“You’re not typical.”
“I’m very typical. It’s this place, all of you, who aren’t.”
“You’re not a typical Leo.” Luke stood and put out his hand.
Melinda looked at him doubtfully. “You’re not a typical guy. How do I even know you are a guy?”
He took his shorts off. Naked, he looked male, even by the bewildering local standards. Harry would freak if he came back right now (she should be so lucky). Melinda took Luke’s hand and they walked towards the surf. Her vision was bleary. She wiped her eyes, nearly poking them with the lit end of the reefer, then Luke took the last drag and threw it away. They went right into the water. She wanted Luke to have an erection in her honor but of course she couldn’t see now, he was up to his chest, though the water was brutal, which meant he didn’t. She jiggled about in the shallows, clutching herself – her female self in her bikini – and shivering, realizing this was her first time in the ocean the whole vacation. Luke was leaning back in the water, half-floating, watching her.
He called, “I went to New York once, for a day. I couldn’t stand it.”
“You couldn’t?”
New York City usually inspired envy and respect for her. The concept of someone not wanting to live there was a new one to Melinda. Billions of people didn’t, of course, but she had assumed this was because there was no room for them.
It’s just out of the question, she thought, Harry with another man. There was a name for that lifestyle, the down low, and it was highly dangerous, they got HIV and gave it to their wives. Had Harry even looked at any man in an incriminating way? She would have noticed. Would she have recognized it? Harry on the down low! What a riot. Their marriage would resolve this. Not that there was anything to resolve. An infidelity, a fling, well that was something to resolve, but how resolvable it seemed after the down low.
The surf tugged at her ankles. The waves were splashing her face and she was crying.
*****
She and Luke came out of the sea and walked to the open showers. Then because he was naked, she got naked too, peeling off her bikini and dropping it on the sand next to her baseball cap. It seemed appropriate and polite. This wasn’t something she had ever thought she’d do; she was operating at the furthest edges of her personality. It was easy. Cold water crashed over them, and the happy lunchtime sun. Of course, in new friendships you discovered previously unsuspected regions, unmapped areas of yourself. She recalled a similar process happening with Harry two years before, the dancing for example. Had Harry looked at other women? That Starbucks barista. Normal.
She and Luke swayed under the shower streams and looked each other over, squinting slightly from necessity. There was a glare to everything, as if the world were not quite formed. Vague shrieks and voices came from the direction of the travelers’ camp, almost drummed out by the water on the square of concrete under them.
Luke took two steps towards Melinda. He laid his hands on her shoulders and lowered his head against hers. A helicopter moved above the sea towards the cliffs, its rotors a low, mesmeric beat. Melinda bent her neck and he kissed her there. He was conscientious in his kisses, one side of her neck then the other. His right hand slid over her shoulder and round to her breast.
Melinda moved her hands up his back. She could see some tiny figures on the beach, way off. There was no doubting his erection now. Her pubic hair was pressed against his thighs. In the corner of her view a fleecy cloud moved across blue sky; she felt she was seeing it happen long ago, an ancient vision and scent of the sea. She was suddenly weak in her legs, almost trembling, overpowered by her affection for this man. The moment had sincerity, a contract to love each other for five minutes – somewhat more realistic than a contract to love someone forever. It was joyful, this collision of extremes. The blasting heat, the numbing water, the delicate human touch, the public daytimeness of the location, the private nighttimeness of their behavior. She traced her fingertips behind Luke’s ear and he closed his eyes and smiled (that used to be an erogenous zone in Harry, too).
In the end she took Luke’s arms and pressed them back to his sides, and kissed him once on his lips. They turned off the showers. Melinda realized she didn’t have a towel, but that seemed, at this point, academic. They stepped onto the sand and waited to be dry. The fresh air on her skin, especially the parts that never got fresh air, was arousing. Reluctantly she untangled her wet bikini, rinsed off the sand under the shower, and put it on.
*****
On the beach with the camera bag Melinda was waiting to have another try photographing the sunset. This time of the evening Kauai was its least colorful and most chic. Whites, grays, neutrals, sand; a look created by an interior design consultant and a dimmer switch.
She glanced again at Luke, lying next to her. His dreadlocks splayed out on the sand. His chest had scattered blond hairs like the remnants of a harvested crop. Melinda wondered why they hadn’t gone off towards the scrub and palm trees and found somewhere to have sex. It wasn’t that she wished they had. She didn’t know what she wished. The most compelling sexual image of the week was not of her and Luke. It was of Harry and the girl in the sand dunes – not that Melinda had got much of a look, but she felt surprised and almost awkward, now, to find she’d mentally reconstructed the whole scene. A glowing beach shot, the contours of the dunes echoing the girl’s body. She was taken aback to feel the eroticism of the scene within herself.
She would think about herself and Harry having sex. But instead, she remembered how it was at the beginning, the second beginning, when they were moving out of Casual into Steady. He had been up for it in theory. Sure baby, I love you too. And yet ever so slightly resistant. That girl who did something scientific at the fisheries. Jaime. (Fisheries!) Melinda thought she herself had played the situation skillfully: a year or two of dating in New York was the equivalent of a Masters in psychology. After he’d said he wouldn’t see Jaime she had watched for signs and there had been none. Really. None. So that was that and she was his fiancée.
She picked up her camera half-heartedly, pointed it up the beach and saw a dark speck moving some way off. Adjust the focus: it was a person walking, Harry. The bearded, unfamiliar, unfaithful version of Harry. She saw him veer towards the trees, maybe aiming back towards their tent along the narrow trail overhung by low, hostile branches. Perhaps he’d go back to the camp and cook something celebratory. Behind him the band of sky just above the horizon shone a brightish yellow, the last true color of the day. This was how the dead left Polihale, moving away into the sunset. But Harry was coming towards her now, steering back along the beach. The sun’s late rays reflected off the saturated part of the sand, washed seconds ago by a wave.
Well, let him come. She was sleepy after her splash in the ocean; she wasn’t going to resist. Let him come and meet Luke, have suspicions.
She looked along the beach in the other direction and saw people stooping to pick something up. They called and Luke opened his eyes. It was the post-hippy woman and the child, boy or girl. Melinda waved and so did they.
“Who are they?” she asked Luke.
“Clare. And that’s her kid Anima.”
“Oh, Anima. The life force of the universe.” Quite a burden on a child.
Melinda looked in the other direction. Harry wasn’t in sight now. She leant back, propped on her elbows. They had done things together, Melinda and Harry. Scuba qualifications, the swing dancing in Harlem, obscure movies, upstate weekends; establishing their life force, their shared, coupled soul. Surely that investment had some long-term, binding purpose. She felt her eyes washed under a wave and she stared hard at the sky to dry them out. Polihale was no place to ask for sympathy. This place would rather murder her than sympathize.
The sun had fallen smoothly behind Niihau. She laid her head down and thought about the new apartment she would find, post-Harry, whenever post-Harry might be. There was no rush. They’d get married. What a relief to sit at her desk next week, decide about the flowers, book the transport to the reception. Melinda the bride would be delighted and hopeful, not relating to this Melinda on the beach. And the marriage would be much like any other. There would be a child or two, and many times she and Harry would believe their vows, enjoy each other.
After the marriage, when it was all over, she wouldn’t mind a studio in a pre-war with ornate cornices and antique mail chutes; other people’s love notes tumbling from one story to the next. She’d live somewhere the colors of the beach, without much stuff. Oh, except that the children would fill the place with clutter. Crayons, sippy cups, thermometers, Barbies, bright rubber boots. When they went to their dad she’d sit in silence at the kitchen table for a half hour holding a glass of wine.
Soon she was in darkness. A chill slid over her, wiping her legs like lotion. She would not sleep despite the sand under her body, its undulations and the swishing of the waves. The sky was unfamiliar, as if the stars she knew from home had slipped below the equator and landed in a muddle. They were everywhere, but awkward, and everything so prickly and so vivid. She searched in vain for Leo, her constellation.
