Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

I’d tried, of course, thinking, “This is just like high school…” and ordered tea and enormous almond cookies like everybody else, and maybe, I think now, I was more successful than I thought, coming at the difficult problem of being human. In that room, before I left, I reached across the table and took the hand of the dark-haired girl you’d slept with even though we were ostensibly together, and smiled.

I’m grateful; you were witness to the brittleness of my youth. How vulnerable I was, wearing my solitude and harmed quality on my sleeve in place of a heart. That you got to see that side of me I will never be able to forgive you. It is better to have the distance, to write to you. It is so easy to idolize the past, but perhaps all I say here is true.

I’m on holiday with our old friend Lulu, on my first island, Kaua’i, and not Maui, where you and I spent time together. Still, just being in Hawai’i reminds me of you so much I feel compelled to write. Hawai’i has changed, much of its wildness paved over by indistinguishable malls and hotels, even on the outer islands. The old Japanese men no longer sit in the beach parks, playing hanafuda. I wonder where they are now? Remember we sat with them once and asked them to teach us how to play? We got the basics that afternoon, under the tattered palms, sitting at the name-and-fire scored picnic table. But the nuances were endless. They finally got rid of us by threatening to play the next game for money, and we ran off, needing what few bills we had for takeout tempura and Kirin beer.

I unfold the page, look at your drawing I’ve kept all these years. The mouse is still so lifelike, but it doesn’t move. I’ll keep it forever. I’m already forgetting what you look like, except that your forehead was broad and tanned and high, and your big knotted hands much gentler than my father’s.

Before she left for her solitary hike through the Alaka’i swamp, Lulu looked at me. “Did you call?”

I shook my head. “I have to write, try and sort it out one more time.”

“Don’t write too long,” Lulu said. “You know what the verdict was, not so bad.”

“That doesn’t mean he was innocent; his lawyer might’ve just been good.”

“Tomorrow is his release date. If you don’t call today he might be gone. There’s no harm in it. If he’s not what you thought, you can change your mind.”

I do not know how to tell this story. Hence I will try writing it as if it were a story, in third person, with made-up names. For write it I must. If I don’t, I won’t be able to decide.

His brown eyes met hers across the yard, across the fairy tale crowd at the free temple dinner. She had gone inside to help in the kitchen, but just as she looked towards the door she saw him coming out. He was deeply tanned and wore a white cotton shirt, loose and unironed. She noticed him immediately. They passed each other, but he only glanced at her. In the temple kitchen she arranged fruit on platters: lemons, apples, papaya, mango, pomelo, liliko’i. Apple bananas, each banana the size of a thumb so that a bunch of bananas, a hand as they are called here, really does look like a hand, being almost exactly the same size. Guavas. Small as tennis balls, they fit in your hand, brown on the outside, green and slushy on the inside. Strawberry guavas that are smaller, perhaps the size of huge farm grown strawberries, scarlet and smooth-skinned. She took the platters out and set them on the table and looked for him but he was gone.

After the dishes were done she caught her ride back to Baldwin Park, where, as most nights, there was a fire and drumming as Scorpio appeared in the sky. She watched the fire and then him, standing directly across the flames, noticed how his forehead was so smooth and large and his hands were large too, but very gentle as he took an offered drum.

He came to her campsite that night, a secret campsite Lulu knew, under ironwood trees a quarter mile from the park.

“Hello,” she said.

“Are you awake?”

“Yes.”

She turned on her flashlight. He had come through the woods without one. She was glad. She didn’t want anyone knowing where she was camped.

He showed her a drawing he had made, of a mouse.

“How did you know I was here?”

“I just sort of knew.”

His mouse was very mousy. It had soft brown hair and jumped off the page and under the covers with them. They made love right away, in silent relief. Afterwards they went to the Chinese restaurant to eat, walking across the cane fields to get to town, because it was shorter than taking the road. She didn’t even wonder how Mei’s restaurant, which was usually in Lahaina, was now in Pa’ia. Or perhaps they’d walked the dirt tracks through moonlit cane fields for hours, and it only felt like minutes. Maybe it was because the mouse came too. The mouse was a very good supper companion, making them like each other and feel good without saying very many words. They ate in the shadow of the mountain.

Hitchhiking up the mountain the next day, they walked between rides, along an unpaved road, a gravel track really, covered in yellow crescent shaped leaves; neither of them knew what the tree was called. She walked beside Jim. She didn’t know him very well although they were new lovers; the leaves were like the fingernail clippings of a family of giants. She wanted to say something important to Jim, something that would make him remember her. She hadn’t eaten any mushrooms herself. It began to rain. They were hungry and, passing through a village, went into a café to eat. The proprietor scowled at Jim, more than at her, but served them coffee and fried egg sandwiches nonetheless.

She’d feel this peculiar chagrin in restaurants with Jim. It was the only time they were ever in public together. The Chinese one in either Lahaina or Pa’ia was the exception. Was he barefoot? Did he smell? She didn’t much care, but it was tiresome and she didn’t understand it. In Mei’s restaurant, the mouse had tea with them; in other restaurants it stayed in his pocket. It’s always a tea party when you have a mouse along, even if you’re not wearing your mad hat. Jim talked about nothing and she talked about nothing, both careful to obscure their pasts, to cloud their trail. But that wasn’t it; it was as if they really didn’t have pasts. On Maui, she often found herself telling people she was from Kaua’i, and realizing, in a shocked kind of way that it was true. She’d been on Kaua’i for eight months and then met Lulu; they’d come here together. She’d been in Hawai’i almost a year altogether. When you’re so young that’s a long time, and each experience in that year so vivid her father paled behind it, grew ghostlike. But not entirely.

She realized, years later with Lulu in Koke’e that she’d loved Jim, even though she hadn’t known it at the time. She’d liked him a lot, the sex had been great, and she’d felt like they’d known each other, which almost never happened to Tanya. Somehow, though, she hadn’t put this together as love.

“Every time I bend over I have this major realization,” she said, pulling her head back out of the waterfall. On a stone lay their toothbrushes, the expensive health food store shampoo. Her one luxury.

“Like what?” Jim had made a camp fire and she was drying her hair after swimming. They were going to eat breadfruit and coconut, both of which Tanya had found. Tanya could tell by looking at a coconut what stage it was inside, milky or hard, or the puddingy in-between stage called spoon meat that some people loved.

They’d done their hike through Haleakala, and now, on the way back out, they’d left the trail and were camping on parkland, or maybe it was private land. They didn’t know; it was such a vast tract that nobody could possibly find them. Waterfall after waterfall came splashing down the mountain like a stairway from heaven; mist and rainbows crowning the treetops of the rainforest like damp halos. They had been there for three days; the crater hike itself had been another three.