Terese Svoboda: A Drink Called Paradise

This ocean that won’t talk.

I go to where the men bring their chairs, where I have seen Barclay.

Not many of us sit in the chairs next to the copra shed, midday or not, he says when I ask, Where is everybody? Men leave the island to make money, he says, and the few men there all nod.

It’s the same where I’m from, I say, men leave for the city.

Men die without the island, he says.

It’s a cash economy, I say. Men die on the island too.

I choose to stay here, he says. He makes his job of greeting visitors, of saying yes, sound very good, makes his place here under the palms on a chair sound great. He is pleased.

What’s with the giant sponge? I ask.

Two men stop throwing dice. Giant sponge? Barclay laughs so that others laugh. I have seen those in the movies.

All the men eye me now, my short shorts, my braless sheet-wrapped top.

Which movie? I ask.

She is asking which movie, he says, as if there’s an interpreter, as if I am a voice he has thrown. The army’s movies, he answers. Let me see, once we saw The Fly . Once King Kong .

One man pulls his undershirt aside to bare some chest, to beat it.

Nothing’s giant around here, says Barclay, turning to me. Everything’s small. Small coconuts, small island, small people. Compared to yours.

The army? When was the army here?

Barclay shakes his shoulders as if the question bites at his back. Come here, come here, he says. He tows me over to the flagpole next to the wharf — there’s no flag on top, just a bit of metal on the rope hitting the pole — and his audience follows. Did you read our plaque?

It is fastened to the base, I have to squat. Love makes the world go round , I read out loud. I thought it commemorated a battle or something.

A battle? An actual smile is what happens across Barclay’s face. When we made these houses out of cement, he says, mixing and hauling and spreading, many nights we came to our women exhausted. We did not like that, he says. You see, there’s only one thing that grows big around here.

I’m too physical — I step back.

Don’t worry, he says when his friends stop laughing. Why did you come, anyway, if you didn’t want to be part of our customs? The man who came with you has no problem with our customs. And now it’s the water, it’s what’s in the water. Isn’t what’s in the water why all people want to come to an island?

I leave Barclay and his dice-throwing friends and find the only shop open among the abandoned and half-built ruins that front the wharf. There I buy a bottle of soy sauce, the condiment of choice for taro, from a young girl who has been sleeping across the counter. The soy-sauce bottle is long-necked and corked — just what I need. But I need it empty, and without thinking to save it for Ngarima or even myself, I pour the contents into pig mash that sits souring in a bucket beside the path. I know it’s mash because two pigs fight over it as soon as I leave.

The girl who has sold me the bottle tells me the sauce will fatten the pigs well, so well someone will pay too much for them. Although her hand is very hot when she gives me my change, along with the advice, she smiles all the way across her face.

Children smile with fresh muscles, they don’t know where their smiles stop or start. Even in perfidy, they smile so sweetly. I buy a length of suckers from her belt of them and give them out to her and her friends. Except one of the suckers I crack and then wedge down the bottleneck. Then I find matches in my pocket — the Girl Scout in me yet — and the girl lets me buy her last pen so I can write a note on the inside of the matchbook, the perfect-sized paper and tough weight for such writing. Dear Timmy, I print, I miss you and want to kiss you. Here is where I am.

The map I make shows me in the middle, any tourist’s rendering. I tear off the cardboard and stuff it into the bottle with the sucker. The children puzzle over the waste of the sweet, licking each other clean of every trace of the suckers’ sugar. Except for the smallest, who tucks his little lump-and-stick behind his ear. Then they all talk about what a crook I am to fatten the pig with soy sauce, and I smile wide the way they do.

They follow me to the wharf. I am happy to have them. I want witnesses. After all, if I get a reply I want someone to say I am the one who threw the bottle. But which way to throw it?

I take aim to the west, where the boat disappeared, where continents wait and roads end with cars that sit in driveways with answering machines blinking inside houses. I wind up my pitch to the west with a great series of circles, which sends the kids into screams, then I release the bottle, I throw the bottle as hard as I can into that boatless, spongy lagoon, throw it off the only jetty on the island, off the pile of coral I was dumped onto when I arrived. After I throw that bottle as far as I can, throw it, a real Little Leaguer mother throw, and it lands with a bright single splash in the middle of the lagoon, it bobs around as if it is getting its bearings, and then, several small swells later, it begins its float back to me.

I pack all the shells I can fit into my bag, wrapping them in underwear and shorts and the one long formal dress I was going to wear at some romantic and thus formal moment, wrapping the shells to keep them from breaking but listening to each one before its interment to hear if the beach inside is the same as the beach outside, to hear if I take their ocean with me.

Just their ocean.

I lay money on the counter over the roach drawer, payment for room and board, all the wasted taro, the too-stinky chunks of tinned mackerel I secretly pushed between the floorboards. I leave my paperback for Ngarima’s son, who reads comic books with mold on the pages as bright as the pictures, and maybe Ngarima will like my thongs since she often takes them in the morning before I wake up. I have this wooden fishing spear leaning in a corner, the one Ngarima used to delay me, a seven-foot-long piece of something that surely never grows here and that now no one uses. I’m wondering how to fit it in the airplane that follows the boat: saw it in half?

I do all this at daybreak since I’ve pretty much given up sleeping after that man-who-broke-the-lamp. You know which one . I may be a little too tired from all this not sleeping, but I try not to forget to pack anything, which might happen if the boat loads at dawn as they do in movies to avoid the heat. So I’m in a hurry when I slap my flowered sheet in the air and see bits of my sunburn float off — always the cost of a good tan for me, my souvenir self — and smooth the sheet flat to my rice-bag bed.

I skip breakfast. Seasickness will take care of whatever I manage to get down anyway. I squirrel away a few of those candies I bought from the girl with hot hands for later. How about a note to Harry, wishing him well and thanks for nothing? Instead I write one to Barclay. Your hospitality has been generous. Ba-boom. That’s it. What else? Keep that flagpole humming? I write on the back of one of the other island’s brochures, and then I prop it up a few inches from Barclay’s slack, sleeping mouth.

It’s quiet except for the rooster when I step out. The rooster is personally annoyed that I’m up ahead of him and lets me know it. He actually swoops after me in the fraudulent way that fowls have of flying. Or does he just want to crow at another female? As I hurry up the path to the wharf, I pass a pig eating a broken shoelace. It can’t be spaghetti. One of Harry’s disemboweled shoes? Or is that the end of Harry? The pig grinds down a last delicious morsel.

I smile.

I’m not worried that the wharf is empty, that nobody’s piling coconuts or counting out chits as if the boat were imminent. It’s such a sleepy place. I poke my head into the tin-roofed shack where they keep the copra, but no one’s even asleep inside, and what do I know about how copra’s processed? There are coconuts inside.