Terese Svoboda: A Drink Called Paradise

I take a few steps down the path toward the shop where I bought the soy sauce. It’s closed. Then I turn around and put down my bag and walk to the end of the wharf, where I stand and stare. Even with sunlight streaming out over the lagoon in white-hot sheets, even with my hand held over my brow in strict pirate fashion, I can see nothing, no boat past the reef.

I take a seat.

I dangle my legs over the water. I take off my shoes and let my toes slide in. I take out my hat because sun like this will cook me. It’s not as if I can’t learn. I apply lotion.

Island time, I sigh.

People do come later, a man with a rake, children I don’t know who beg for more of my candy — word gets out — a bevy of nameless women who giggle away at something. I ask them all if I’m in the right place and all of them nod, they yes me.

I walk back to Barclay’s at midday to ask once again if he’s heard anything about the boat. As usual, he’s not home. Men are not “owned,” says Ngarima. I don’t know where he goes, she says. She has Temu in a hammerlock and is spooning something green into him that sprays the walls when he sees me.

It’s my problem, the boat.

Exiting, I take back my thongs. I’m still angry at Ngarima for how she saw the man in my room as what I had come for, what I needed, what everyone wants. Not that that wasn’t what I wanted. But there is swimming and the peace of nowhere and the trinkets of somewhere. Why exactly did she delay me the first time?

I flip-flop all the way around the island, just a quick tour in case a lighter has landed in some unlikely spot I don’t know about. No one else is out. The sun is hot: I could be either the mad dog or the Englishman.

I return to the wharf and take up my vigil. I suck candies all afternoon. I give out a few to the children as if the children are a magic that can move events along if they’re happy. I don’t swim to pass the time. That giant sponge is part of me now, my foot cannot forget the way its swell met me, its size a shiver to be shaken off and pressed out. I am not as haunted by Temu, I’m almost used to his bean head just out of the water. But I’m leaving and taking my pity with me.

Come home, says Ngarima, extending her hand. The sunset’s beginning behind her, a deep yellow and red, her hand’s color.

We call you Vagina Mouth, says the first woman. For those small bites of taro you take. And my name is Spreader. She is Breasts for Three, she is Clam Hold, and Ngarima we call Mouse Touch. You can’t guess why.

We are tapping holes into tiny shells. It takes concentration. I have none. I am taking in air like a son of a gun, the names shock me so. More shocking is that they don’t laugh. These are their “real” names.

Vagina Mouth! I can’t smile now, I can’t do anything with my mouth.

I laugh.

The ladies laugh too, finally, but not at my name — at how all my shells fall to the floor when I laugh. We have spent the morning bent over wet rocks, picking these tiny shells off their undersides, and now I have to pick them all off the floor. I wish the little shells would walk away into the cracks the way they do on the rocks so I won’t have to, so my bad back won’t be part of their talk.

But I like their talk. When laughing women on the way to the beach woke me, I followed them. Ngarima said not to, that in the Bible women together are only trouble. But that’s what I need, trouble. You can’t live on a missed boat or a book or Barclay’s bum radio. You can’t stay up all night, watching the door in the rain, or even sit on the wharf day after day as I have done for another week. Besides, Ngarima is full of the Bible since the missionary’s visit, or maybe she was full of it before, but I thought that was how they talked here.

Vagina Mouth.

Dresses sewn to the neck the way missionaries like them dry on rocks now bare of all the tiny shells. The women work wrapped in their flowered sheets. For the first time I see the tops of breasts and arms of the island women, pale, thick-muscled protrusions — and the necklaces.

Not the necklaces of shell, which they are putting over their heads as quickly as they are strung, but the necklaces that these necklaces hide, a stitching of scar where the shells lie, a scar so neatly stitched around each woman’s neck that I wonder if they’re born with it. But surely they die without it, whatever’s been taken out having grown huge with the dull sex of multiplication. I have never seen someone with that kind of scar, those operated-on necks. I ask one about the stitching with my eyes and touch my own neck, but the woman won’t say, she is singing, they are now all singing and dancing.

The tin roof of the shed rumbles with their singing. I think they pick the shed because it makes singing sound louder. I can’t get the words, they sing so many parts it could be a hymn — but it’s definitely sexy. The women undulate in their seats, they jump up and hula with each other, hip to hip, hip to crotch. Their flowered cloths threaten to fly open with the swaying, their wild undulations. How many are old? Not one. How many ugly? None.

It beats being depressed or boat-nuts. Why have I stuck with Ngarima for so long? Fear of the natives? Of knowing their names? As soon as I know their names, I know too much, I’m accepting the fact of my becoming a castaway.

Now I really know too much, I know their nicknames.

They are poking holes in the shells again, stringing and poking and murmuring the tails of song back and forth, as if they are still singing, as if they never stopped talking. I don’t, in my life of phone chat and cocktail talk, often experience women as a whole, as beings together. Now my hands move as slowly as the women’s, my hands are not fidgety, trying to leave the island on their own. I make each tap on a shell deliberate, not done to be done. Not even sitting on the porch with Ngarima is being together like this, not even opening her tins of fish, peeling her taro, lighting her stove for food. Barclay must make the difference, the deference to his authority. Instead of asking about the necklaces, I ask, Why doesn’t Ngarima come with you?

The ladies smile, the ladies ply their nylon line through the shells. Ngarima, says Breasts for Three, you are not the one for her. The others say I should come to their houses, they will feed me, they will show me.

And besides, says Spreader, her son isn’t with the others.

The ladies cluck.

You mean the one with the small head? I ask.

They laugh at me, they toss up their hands as if he hardly counts. It’s the other. He won’t seduce the girls, says Breasts for Three. All the other boys go off with girls except for him. Except for that other boy and one more, says another. Some other boys who don’t like girls.

One fewer hiding for me in the night, I decide. Does he like boys? I ask.

I have crossed a line. They gasp their shock, but I see some hide smiles, so I know that their shock is for me, not for them. He is not that, they say, straight-faced. Oh, no. He doesn’t sleep with the girls because he is working.

I have to laugh. I don’t want to because it’s not right to laugh at what others believe, but I do. A twelve-year-old boy scorned because he’s working instead of putting in time with the girls? I have to laugh, and they laugh too, but it’s not the same laugh, it’s an uneasy, pro forma, what-will-she-do-next? laugh.

The laugh is interrupted by a cry.

The cry comes closer, and the women quiet, they stop their laughing and their plying of line. They look at each other.

It’s just a baby, I say.

A young girl, the one men paint when they paint islands, wanders in with the crying bundle. She sits on the ground beside us, she tries to quiet it. Her breasts, hard against a band of flowered cloth, are two dark stains of seeped milk, dark as her eyes that say tired and faraway together when she lifts them once, trying to loosen that band, trying to get the women to help her loosen it and quiet the baby.