1J
That morning I woke to the sound of retching. At first, I thought the noise had followed me out of my sleep. Some shadow of a dream I’d already forgotten, but no. It was there in the room. A violent, choked sputter followed by the slick slop of release.
Through the cracked bathroom door I glimpsed the bare bottoms of Ren’s feet. Ten toes neatly rowed atop the pearly tiles. She’d developed an obvious intolerance to alcohol toward the end of our twenties. A single drink made her empty herself completely the next morning.
This didn’t stop her.
In bed, I rolled toward the open window and listened to the ocean breathing until the toilet flushed and the faucet hissed.
When the mattress gave to her weight I spoke without turning. “Why don’t you puke in your own bathroom?”
“Yours is cleaner.”
Not anymore. Her foot landed cold against my calf. I shifted, close enough to study the freckles cinnamoned across the bridge of her nose. The skin around her eyes was swollen and her breath carried Listerine and the bland antiseptic odor of vodka.
“Hi,” she said. Her smile was apologetic. She was always apologetic when she drank too much. As if apologizing to me and apologizing to herself were the same. I resisted the urge to smooth the dark, ruffled line of her left eyebrow.
“Did you leave your car again?”
She screwed one eye shut in reluctant admission and then, seeing my face, poked me beneath the covers as if reminding me not to judge her and said: “Will you come? Tonight?”
I turned onto my back.
Above me, the cracks in the ceiling were familiar little friends.
“Please.” Her voice went low. I knew if I looked at her, her bottom lip would be stuck out the way it always is when she wants something. “You haven’t been in months.”
Actually, I hadn’t been to Crazy Palms in over a year. I didn’t correct her. Instead I asked if she was teaching later though I knew she was. “Don’t change the subject. Theo’s down to go. I asked.”
When I turned she was facing away from me. Her shoulder flashed bare beneath her camisole. I inched closer. Blew a long draft against her skin. On the inhale, I could smell cocoa butter. Salt, too. Even fresh from a shower, Ren always smelled of salt. The kind that speckled the glass on our windows, the ones that faced the sea.
“Please?” Her voice was already clotting with incoming sleep.
I didn’t answer. Just blew again on her back. Tiny huffy puffs of warm air until her breath went deep and throaty.
6:15 a.m. and Theo was already in the kitchen separating egg whites. Headphones on. Shoulders swaying. He moved like his sister, bones in easy communication, driven by a tempo that was inaudible, unavailable, to me.
He nodded in greeting. There was an interesting zigzag design shaved into the side of his head that hadn’t been there yesterday. As I poured myself coffee the jangle of Sookie’s collar began. I turned just as she charged inside through the open sliders, face one large smear of smile. Her tail helicoptered as I rubbed her back, her solid body wriggling between my legs.
I loved this. Mornings in the kitchen, the room a bright warm bulb in the center of the house. It was the main reason we bought the place. The lanai was mid-rot, the roof on its way out, but the kitchen. A center island stretched its length like a runway. Mango cabinets. The space was crafted. Cultivated. Someone had loved it.
“But we don’t cook,” Ren objected when I first showed it to her.
She was right. Before Theo came, the kitchen was just storage space for cereal boxes. Still. Much of the land along Kalaniana‘ole was flagged for homesteads, so listings without a blood quantum requirement didn’t come up often. I felt guilty for being so excited about this, but comforted myself with thoughts of how at least I was born here, would live in the house, was not some twenty-six-year-old software developer flying in from the continent, buying the place sight unseen with plans for a vacation rental.
We made an offer that afternoon, taking the auntie by surprise.
She’d just meant to hire me.
The night we closed, Ren popped a bottle of mid-range champagne and danced around our living room in an oversized tee and knee socks. We were twenty-five then. Living in a little two-bedroom by the golf course. Our third spot since graduation. Ren was already teaching at the gym twice a week, a cross between dance hall and kickboxing. Kickjam, I’d joked, and it stuck. I was studying for my broker’s license and Theo had still been in LA trying to make it as a DJ. He didn’t like when we brought that up now.
I carried my coffee over to the sliders. Out in the yard, liliko‘i vines choked the chain-link fence with fat purple flowers like something full of poison and in the back corner sat that sad mound of mulch. Six feet high at least. Higher than the fence. Delivered last summer with the idea of building up a garden. Months later it lay quilted with vines and weeds. A lone, pregnant mound of earth. Sookie liked to roost atop it. Queen of the yard. All tongue and teeth.
“Eggs?” Theo’s headphones were down, bass bleeding out around his neck. I shook my head. My window was closing—even in April, the sun would punish by seven.
Sookie whined as I moved for my sneakers. She had many virtues. Patience was never one of them. “Hair’s new,” I said to Theo as I laced up.
“You like?”
“Sure...”
He held a jar of mayonnaise and an uneasy smile. “What?”
“Nothing, just...” I shrugged. “Forty is coming no matter what.”
“Yeah, hey, don’t forget to run into traffic.”
I laughed, popped out the door and then swung my head back in. “You mind driving separate? I have a doctor’s appointment.”
Theo nodded, licking mayo off a butter knife.
Out on Kalaniana‘ole, we ran right. Past the beach parks and run-down motels, their roofs blanketed with rust, all of it outdated. Like they got left behind somehow.
Our feet pounded a familiar heartbeat along the worn pavement. To our left, the ocean frothed. Tourists would clog the road come noon, smelling of reef-safe sunscreen and looking both ways before they jaywalked.
We ran to where the road skidded out, then took the slim dirt path to the Queen’s Bath. The too-blue lagoon always looked a bit fake. Like a movie set. One and a half miles there. One hundred squats under the old manele tree as Sookie snacked on dirt or dog shit or the occasional coconut. One and a half miles back.
I focused on my breathing. Smooth and controlled.
I’d be home by seven thirty. The early hour hid me from harsh sun, which would feel good on my bare skin but would burn badly if I didn’t protect myself. This had always seemed cruel.
How something that felt so lovely could do so much damage if I let it.
That day I had a nine o’clock appointment with a moon-faced couple on the freshman side of their twenties. They fidgeted across the desk as I ran through it all, slowing on the bit about a house they could grow in and smiling with practiced warmth. I told them not to decide now. To go home and think about it.
I watched their eyes meet.
It was always easier with a couple. They thought they had a language of their own. The darting gaze. The lift of an eyebrow. Like teenagers in the back of a car. But the way they communicated was easy, and I was fluent.
They were not going home to think about it.
She nodded, just a minor dip of the chin. He reached for the pen.
After they left I took a lap around the office, found Ku‘ulei by Lisa’s desk laughing at something on her computer screen. “Kayson got into my lipstick,” Lisa said when she saw me, moving aside to offer up her screen. I leaned in enough to be polite.
The child looked directly into the camera. His chin was smeared in waxy clownish red and his nose appeared to be full of snot. “Cute,” I said, and Lisa laughed.
She was always doing that. The laugh thing. I couldn’t tell if it was off-putting or endearing to clients. Ku‘ulei checked her phone.
I imagined their relief as I turned to leave.
Kim’s desk sat sentry to the double doors that swung out into the parking lot. She’d been my very first hire. I could never bring myself to call her from my office though she called my office from her desk all the time. She minimized something on her desktop when she saw me coming and I pretended not to notice. Made small talk about the rain before asking about my messages. Reminded her to schedule a call with the guy who ran our WordPress site and another with Lorna, who kept our books.
I made sure to smile before I moved away.
At exactly ten o’clock I dialed the house and imagined the phone ringing on the wall of the kitchen. Once. Twice. Three times. Then I hung up.
Theo walked by my office door, Lava Java cup in hand. Late technically, but it didn’t matter. His numbers ran double what the others managed. I knew he’d kill if he could commit. That’d been the risk with him but by the time I took it, it was as much for Theo as it was for Ren. When I’d first shown her our house, I’d tried to imagine how I’d show it to a client. A young couple maybe. The house was perfect for a young couple. And the third bedroom could be an office... I’d trail off then. A dramatic pause—or a nursery. Time to smile. Feign casual. You never know.
But that afternoon, standing with Ren in our future kitchen, tile floors glossy as the white of an eyeball, I hesitated. And the third bedroom could be a room to stretch in. Or space for an older brother in the midst of a nervous breakdown. You never know.
I didn’t have a script for us. I’d never needed one.
We met our freshman year through a dorm assignment. One hundred and ninety feet of twinned space. Two school-issued desks. Blue nylon mattresses.
The halves remained identical for fifteen minutes until Ren showed up and exploded color. Bright scarves over the mirror. Windowsill dotted with competition trophies. Books she’d never read lined up spine-out along the floor.
Ren found it radical I’d never left the state. “But you’ve been on a plane, right?” Once, two hours earlier, from Honolulu to Hilo. Her mouth popped open then shut itself.
She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.
It took us two weeks to understand the room assignment was likely based on some sort of familial algorithm. Or rather, a lack thereof.
Ren was six when her parents’ car flipped over a meridian on their way home from a conference in DC. Theo was ten. They’d been asleep at their grandmother’s in Fairfax. They never went home again.
She told me about it that first October. Just before midnight. Each of us hemmed into our skinny beds. I said nothing. Just let her go on. Then, with a rustle of sheets, she appeared next to me looking long and dark in the yellow-green haze from the sodium streetlights. Instinctively I scooted toward the wall so she could climb in. It was the first time I could remember sharing a bed with another person. I lay awake with her breath on the back of my neck and felt safe.
That Thanksgiving I flew to Virginia and stayed in a cavernous blue bedroom in her grandmother’s house. I’d been shocked to walk through the front door and realize the whole place smelled of her. Or, that she smelled of it.
I sat on a wooden stool in the kitchen and watched her grandmother make shrimp callaloo and tea from dried hibiscus, her hands two lively birds at the ends of her wrists.
I was unprepared for the fall weather, which Ren found ridiculous. Virginia was mild, she’d said. We spent most of that week huddled on the couch watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and eating Ritz crackers. I’d never had a Ritz cracker before. Ren found this ridiculous, too.
By the new year, if one of us arrived somewhere without the other, friends and classmates would ask why. As if the presence of only one of us created a hole in the shape of the other. This became a running joke whenever we left the room alone.
Where’s Jess? she would ask, tying a shoe.
Where’s Ren? I would echo.
She was the first person I spoke to in the morning and the last person I spoke to at night. She felt like a gift for which I had no one to thank.
R
You can tell a lot about someone by the front of their refrigerator, and ours went like this: a photo of me and Jess in cap and gown on graduation day, smiling under a banyan tree, me looking into the camera, Jess looking at me. One of Sookie as a pup, her head too big for her body, her legs all gangly, and then a third, Jess and me on our lanai the day we closed, arms around each other, a play on the cheesy homeowner shot that ended up looking natural, the irony lost somewhere. There was the promotional magnet with Jess’s face on it and, pinned beneath, the more mundane: our grocery list written on Paradise Property stationery—eggs, dog food, salad dressing, coffee. I picked up a pen and added “OJ,” with a little heart for effect.
That spring, the surface of my life had grown a scuzzy film of predictability, like water left to stagnate, each day like the day before it, and some translation of the one that would follow, calculable as the telemarketing robot that called the house three mornings a week, always at ten on the dot, always from a private number, three rings and then silence. While it was jarring to routinely have my sanctuary of sleep cleaved by the shriek of the phone, I could hardly hate the spambot, which usually saved me from oversleeping. Even so, it never failed to kick the morning off with a hostile headache. Or maybe that was the vodka.
Back in my own room, I yanked a hoodie and mismatched socks from a rumpled mound on the floor, found my phone on the nightstand with three percent battery and no alarm set. I held my fingers to the bridge of my nose to relieve the mounting pressure in my skull, then sniffed around for something passable to wear, grateful Jess wasn’t there to witness, although she mostly kept out of my room. Theo, too. They couldn’t even stand in the doorway without straightening something. I unearthed a stiff pair of jeans and tossed them onto the bed for my shift later, already tired from the thought of it. I used to find Crazy Palms exciting—the tips obviously, and the crowd—but at some point, the place started feeling like a time loop, some vortex I’d stumbled into at twenty-two and was still stuck in more than a decade later, serving the same faces the same overpriced drinks like a boozy Bill Murray in that movie about Groundhog Day. Each time I walked through the door I felt a familiar weight drop onto my shoulders and it took at least one vodka Coke to lift it. Sometimes two. I could blame it on the cheesy decor or the sunburned tourists or the terrible Marley covers but in reality it was this: there’s nothing more cliché than a middle-aged bartender.
It irritated Jess when I talked about this.
“There’s nothing wrong with bartending,” she’d say, always with some thread of disdain that negated the very statement she’d just made, “and you’re not middle-aged.” It was true, we weren’t quite, but there were changes happening while I slept, a slack to my face that hadn’t been there a year or two earlier, the skin below my eyebrows drifting towards my lids. “Stop that,” Jess would say when she caught me pulling at my hairline.
Back when she still drank, she’d bring in clients and I’d feed them liliko‘i margaritas rimmed with caviar-colored li hing and never let them pay for anything. She came in so much that ChaCha thought we were a couple. We got that a lot after college, although never during. If we looked anything alike, I’m sure we’d have gotten sisters, as if there was nothing in between.
My problem was not necessarily that I wanted to do something different. The problem was that I had come to feel as if I were waiting for something, but I could never quite figure out what.
Studio C at Ralphie’s had low ceilings and a long wall of mirrors that Odessa labored over twice a week with Windex, and as I looked into them I focused on pulling energy from the women behind me, a slippery concept that only worked if I didn’t think too hard about it. The more energy I called in from the bodies around me, the more I had to push out, front back, left right, hips swinging, that zing that kept us all present, daily drudgery forgotten, eyes bright, smiles genuine.
I hollered instruction at the faces behind me. I’d never needed a microphone. The women shadowed me in unison, shoulders rolling, hair flying brown, black, gray, gold. Front and center, Barb became a tornado of trembling flesh and black Lycra, three times a week for the last thirteen years, seventy-eight now, and proud. I smiled and she smiled back and as we got low, I thought: if you haven’t seen a grandma go all dance hall, you haven’t seen shit.
After class I followed Mei out so Ryan would see me busy with someone else, walking half a step behind her, nodding along as she talked about her mother, she calls and leaves a voice mail and then texts to tell me she’s left a voice mail, all while she knows I’m on the way home, will literally see her in forty-five seconds, not really listening, just feeling Ryan’s eyes on me and the predictable zipper of electricity that opened along the front of my body. It was a game I played, one I only won if I refused to notice him, though of course in reality I noticed him all the time. It wasn’t his fault, this weird attraction repulsion thing. Whenever we did speak, he was inhumanly nice, never any leer behind the eyes, a true smile, and real questions about how I was doing, and that jawline—oh god that jawline. We matched on an app once and I was so mortified I deleted my account.
Off-screen, he stood statuesque behind the juice bar three days a week looking so good it made me uncomfortable. He was a parody of himself, that was part of the problem, the overgrown white boy gym rat surfer, living for a decent set of waves, the random string of day jobs, the refusal to acknowledge the passing of time. The island was perfect for that. Not that I could talk, which of course was also part of the problem. Mei was still speaking about her mother. It’s like every time I open my Instagram she’s sent me forty baby animal videos, and I try to encourage her to—As we moved past Ryan’s counter, I touched Mei’s elbow to remind him we were close, that I was well-liked, tipping my head back to laugh over nothing, his torso in my periphery, all shoulders and chest above a fat stack of carrots. My laughter echoed against the gym’s tin walls and Mei laughed back, and I felt a dizzying rush then, knowing he could see me so happy and in charge.
The locker room smelled of bleach and coconut body wash. I had nothing in there, only went in because Mei had, what bothers me most is it’s like, in thirty years I’ll basically be her, but I ducked into a stall anyway for tampons, single serve, housed in their own individual cardboard apartments. I shoved a fistful into my duffel and didn’t feel bad about it. I paid for my own health insurance, and besides, Jess and I both used them. We’d been on the same cycle since I got off the pill and she never asked where I got them, which of course meant she knew. On the back of the toilet sat a wrapped roll of toilet paper and I grabbed that as well.
Ryan was gone by the time I was back on the floor, and I felt that familiar, psychotic double edge of disappointment and relief. Near the exit I paused to peer into the glass fishbowl of a room where keiki played with sticky blocks, Moana playing on loop while their moms firmed and toned, a UH student in the corner scrolling her phone, glancing up every now and then to make sure no one was choking. Ralphie once caught a woman dropping her three-year-old and leaving for work, cashing in on childcare for the low cost of $19.99 a month. He only realized when the woman had car trouble and failed to come back before close, the college girls gone home, just Ralphie and the little one waiting in the empty gym with Odessa and the cleaning crew. He revoked the woman’s membership and I’d felt bad when I heard about it. She probably bought her own health insurance, too.
Through the glass, I watched a baby in a bubblegum-colored onesie crawl across the floor at gastropod speed, pudgy fingers working the soft foam tiles, diaper suspiciously soggy, and felt the urge to enter the room and pick the child up, to press it to my body. Just the idea sent a surge through my body, something like a hunger pain. I could not pinpoint it, a time, an exact moment, when my body awoke from a sort of maternal hibernation and said: now.
“Maybe we should adopt,” I’d said to Jess last spring. She’d been reading in bed and tipped her magazine down on her lap. “What else am I doing?”
I rolled my eyes then, belittling myself before she had a chance to. I didn’t know how to communicate what I really meant, which seemed to be: I want to surrender myself to the care and development of something helpless, something that needs me. I want a reason to hold myself to higher functioning. Jess had stared at me for a moment as if to make sure I was joking before returning to her article on rapid ‘ōhi‘a death, or Hawai‘i’s alarming dependence on imported food, or whatever depressing exposé she’d invested herself in to “relax.”
Inside the keiki corner, two moms queued at the sign-in station, infants dripping from their hips. Both the women seemed younger than me, and I wished I didn’t notice. I tried looking down at my feet, imagining them as a collection of bones and ligaments, something that could exist on any mammal, but it didn’t help the way it normally did.
My bag was stuffed with stolen tampons.
It was not what I thought thirty-six would look like.
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