The Whiteness of Bones (25 page)

“I think,” he said slowly and carefully, “I think that you can get it back again, the lack of shame. You must try to get it back. It gives men too much power if you don’t.”

“Alysse told Claire that when she belonged to a ‘conscience-raising’ group, as she put it, they would sit in a big circle and show their vaginas all at the same time to overcome their self-loathing.”

He laughed, and she smiled.

She sat on her bed facing him, the pillow held in front of her. “Men suffer the Fall from Grace as well and they aren’t ashamed.”

“No,” he said. “But they’re something else; they’re afraid.”

“My sister is neither ashamed nor afraid. Claire would have refused the fig leaf: ‘No, thank you, I’m perfectly happy this way.’ Claire likes her vagina. She says so all the time.”

She lifted herself to pull down the blanket. He turned out the little lamp in the corner, and the room was filled once more with the cream-colored light reflected from the magnolia in the garden. There was the faint, intermittent sound of car horns and sirens, as if the city were falling away from them. She lifted an edge of the blanket and he slid in beside her, opening her legs, both of them wondering if he could perhaps change her mind, if he could convince her that the world had not won, after all.

“What was her name?”

“Baby.”

“Mrs. Baby Stoddard?”

“I’m afraid so.”

It was their second day in the guest room. From time to time, Alder left for a few minutes and always returned with some little thing: a cassette player and tapes (Roy Orbison,
Il Trovatore
); clean blue-striped shirts for each of them; baked potatoes with sour cream; towels and a toothbrush. Mamie had called to tell Claire that she was with Alder, but there was no answer at the Crawfords’. Sometimes when they slept, Mamie was awakened by the sound of footsteps as the restless man above them paced slowly back and forth.

“Why did you marry her?”

“Her family. They were very charming. You know what South Americans are like. Irresistible.”

“I presume you mean rich South Americans.”

He looked at her. He was stretched out on the chaise in his clean shirt and boxer shorts.

“I hate the sloppiness of it,” she said. “The carelessness. I don’t mean you so much because you would take your child if they’d let you, but look at your mother and look at Alysse, and Brooke and Courtney’s parents. It’s so second-rate. My sister says that I am a snob and I’m contemptuous because I feel I’ve been let down by the world, but she’s wrong. Besides, it’s not that it’s second-rate for me, it’s second-rate for everybody. For your daughter. For Baby even.”

“I’m afraid that Baby is deliriously happy.” He lighted a cigar.

She looked at him, thinking. He shook out the match and looked at the tip of the cigar.

“In boarding school,” he said, putting the match in a drawer next to him, “there was a boy whom all the parents admired.

My father thought he was the most promising new boy since Learned Hand. He was the president of our class. He worked as a Senate page each summer. He even had the
Washington Post
delivered to the dorm. My mother, who was never particularly interested in my school friends, was angry with me for not inviting him home at Thanksgiving. I couldn’t stand him. Then one term, at the urging of his friends, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he fried his pet parakeet on the hot plate in his room.”

“What happened to him?”

“He went to work in the White House for Nixon. And then he did a little time.”

“They almost always get it wrong, don’t they? My mother did. It bothered her when I read too much, so she would send us off to the ranch and one of the cowboys, Daniel Alohikea, taught us a chant that we used to sing when we jumped rope and all the
paniolos
would fall in the dirt laughing. It always seemed a little odd to me. Then in an anthology years later, I read that it was a famous sex chant:
‘He‘e ana, i ka muku la, Ho‘i ana, i ka lala, ‘ea ‘ea.’
 ”

“Perhaps in English, Mamie,” he said, hidden in cigar smoke. “It’s not working.”

“ ‘Surfing to the left, surfing to the right, it was I who rode into that shore. I thought that she was there in my arms. This ends my praise of
Halala
, the bird’s beak.’ ” She blushed. “We’d have been better off with
Hans Brinker
.”

“Not necessarily,” he said.
“Halala?”

She came over to him and sat on the edge of the chaise and he started to unbutton her shirt, the cigar held deep in the fork of his fingers.

“Isn’t it my turn to do something to you?” she asked solemnly.

“Is this feminism or desire?”

“Feminism.”

“All right, then,” he said and crossed his arms above his head and rested them against the faded silk damask.

“May I smoke my cigar?”

“If you can,” she said.

Mamie finally went home because she was worried about Claire. Alder offered to go to the Crawfords’ to leave a note for her. He wanted Mamie to come with him to the farm, but she had been with him in the gray and white room at Mrs. Lee’s for two and a half days and she wanted to be alone, not because she was tired of him, but to have the luxury of thinking about him.

Claire was lying on the sofa when Mamie came home. There was a Mai Tai, with its paper parasol, on the table next to her. A damp washcloth lay across her eyes.

Mamie, who would be away for a week showing the collection with Mr. Felix, was anxious about leaving Claire alone in the apartment. They did not have much money. Mamie was paid three hundred dollars a week by Mr. Felix when she was working, and each sister received two hundred dollars a month from Mary. The Crawfords would be back in two months and Mamie and Claire would have to find someplace to live. There was also the question of the ruined kite, Mamie explained to Claire, and the stained sofa and other broken and
damaged things that would have to be replaced. Claire had shrugged and told her to forget about the kite.

“I’ve quit the new lifesaving class,” Claire said. “I wasn’t learning anything.” She held the washcloth to her head with her hand. “It was
very
upsetting.”

Mamie sat on the arm of the sofa. She rubbed Claire’s bare toes.

“It was taught by this really cute policeman, you know, with a moustache and muscles, and he kept calling me up to be the volunteer. He made slings for both of my arms, and a stretcher out of two poles and a blanket, emergency equipment we usually have with us, and I had a broken neck and two sprained ankles. Of course, he was touching me all the time, flipping me over and wrapping me in gauze. Everyone else in the class was seventy years old. The final insult came during the resuscitation demonstration when he pretended to pull me from a lake.” She lifted the washcloth from her eyes and looked at Mamie. “Saved by a thousand French kisses.”

Mamie laughed. She massaged Claire’s feet, and then her calves. She noticed a dark bruise and welts on Claire’s legs. “Did he do this?”

Claire sat up and threw the wet cloth onto the table. She looked down at her legs.

“No,” she said with a tired sigh. “That was Sean. You should see my ass.” She began to unbutton her jeans.

Mamie jumped up. “Don’t! Don’t, Claire. I don’t want to see it.”

Claire shrugged, a little disappointed. “If I don’t mind, why should you mind?”

Mamie hesitated. She was confused as to why she should mind, especially since Claire had spent years trying to convert her to the belief that, as Claire put it, “if it doesn’t hurt anyone, it’s okay.”

“I’m not sure that it doesn’t harm you,” Mamie said. “You say that you don’t mind, and I even believe you don’t mind, but I’m not sure that it doesn’t cause you harm anyway.” She slid into a leather chair. “We’ve had this conversation many times.”

Claire nodded and lay back on the sofa.

“Where were you?” Mamie asked.

“With Sean and Brooke. I went to the Frick with Brooke yesterday and it was incredibly interesting. She believes she’s had earlier lives, she’s reincarnated, you know, so she kept recognizing paintings that once belonged to her. Do you know that Ingres painting of the countess in the blue silk dress?”

Mamie nodded.

“That was hers.”

Mamie smiled.

“No, really.” Claire finished her Mai Tai and played with the tiny parasol, opening and closing it on its little stick. “I think I might try to get into that writing class, you know, the one where you have to fuck the teacher. Only I’m hoping Edwin will get me in without that. Courtney says she’ll introduce me to him and—”

“What does he do to you?” Mamie asked quietly. The very thought of what Sean might do to Claire made her sad.

Claire looked at her. “Belts and things. He takes—”

“Don’t tell me! I’m sorry,” Mamie said quickly, interrupting her. “I love you.”

Claire smiled. “There’s mail for you.
And
I didn’t open it. Aren’t you proud? Alysse has a new boyfriend. Well,
she
calls him a beau. A German art dealer who wears green crocodile shoes. He buys all the paintings for the Bressen-Bach collection. And all the girls, I’d imagine.”

Despite the pain behind her eyes, Claire carefully made her way to the record player to put on Billie Holiday. She sang
along with Billie, and Mamie noticed, as she had before, that Claire always gave the words of the song the same pronunciation as the singer: “Our few-cha togetha …”

There was a letter from Vivi Crawford asking that Mamie not allow anyone to touch the piano. It had belonged to her father and Oscar Hammerstein had once played the score from
South Pacific
on it. Mamie looked at the piano. It had a cigarette burn on it. Brooke had left a lighted joint the size of a hot dog on top of it.

There was also a letter from her mother.

The letter surprised Mamie and made her happy. She had tears in her eyes. She put the letter back in its envelope. “Tell me one thing, Claire, and I won’t bother you anymore.”

Claire moaned.

“Do you think of it at all?” Mamie asked.

Claire studied her sister for a moment to see whether or not she could answer truthfully. Neither of them thought it necessary to clarify just what it was that “it” represented, that impersonal pronoun that could only mean the island, and home.

“I’m not like you, if that’s what you want to know. I don’t walk around in some flora-and-fauna hallucination with tears in my eyes.”

Mamie looked down at the envelope in her hand.

“I do have a few, very specific things I
sometimes
think about,” Claire said quickly. She paused. “Not too often, though.
Sometimes
.”

“Like what?”

“Well, the taste of a Duane’s Ono-Burger. Or the time we were caught on the Hanakapiai cliff trail during that storm and it took us four hours to crawl a half-mile in the mud on our hands and knees.”

“I don’t remember that,” Mamie said, frowning.

“Mamie!”

“Just teasing. Just teasing.” Her voice was full of melancholy, and even sorrow, not for the constant island in her heart, but for her sister. It had nothing to do with islands. Claire, who was in the kitchen making two new drinks, did not see the regret in Mamie’s face, nor hear it in her voice, and even if she had, it would not have made any difference.