Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

“What if he kills me?” she wondered aimlessly, and reached up onto the cliff ledge and took down the rubber cervix-covering item and put it in.

“Never say how long you were anywhere. It breaks the spell, the way an alteration of memory can redeem everything,” Tanya said, and Jim smiled. She took off her sandals she’d wet getting out of the pool. They were leather huaraches; she put them by the fire to dry. She had nothing on. She dried her hair; which was long and thin and brown, with the blue towel and then sat down at the fire and took over cleaning the seeds out of the dope, some kind of Maui Wowie given to her by one of her young Hawai’ian buddies. She had impressed Jim with this, that she knew how to score local dope from locals, although he’d pulled off the same trick, meeting Michael within days of his arrival from Midway. He’d explained he’d once lived on Moloka’i; most of his friends there had been Hawai’ian.

They made love and lay in the sun and baked and swam in the pools beneath waterfalls and occasionally Tanya wondered, when, as it must, it would end, and vaguely, whether he would kill her, although he had never given any indication. Perhaps she’d just seen too many horror movies as a child, horror movies on television and the other kind, the kind she hid in the laundry room to escape from. Now, here, it was only at this moment that they passed through her skin, her outer membrane, that they made her truly fearful. The terror she’d had to suppress at the time.

What if he kills me?

Yet even still she missed her father a little.

Jim gave her enough pleasure to match the pain, an equal and opposite force, until she was filled. Then the pleasure ousted the pain. You have to be filled with something. It’s one or the other. Nature abhors a vacuum.

They collected avocados on a rainy day. Jim climbing high up into the tree and shaking the limbs, and Tanya standing underneath to catch them so that they fell, one after another, plump and somehow obscene, green and huge, fleshy and woman-shaped, into her hands.

The sky came down and settled on her shoulders and she cried. They went back through the forest to their camp.

Jim asked what was wrong. “Hey babe, you haven’t missed your period, have you?”

She almost punched him. Anyway, it wasn’t logical. They’d just met. And she never hid her birth control from him. She didn’t point any of this out.

She looked at Jim’s hands, so much larger than her own, large and strong and hairy and yet oddly gentle and she thought, they are like my father’s hands.

She didn’t tell him. It seemed like a terrible thing to tell him as if it was some awful secret, and he would be mortally offended, and he rolled another joint and then she couldn’t talk anymore even though it sat in her throat like a fat white dove struggling to break free: your hands are like my father’s.

And they were. She’d always dated young men before, barely out of high school. Jim was in his late twenties and had sailed from Tahiti with his friends, who, he always assured her, they would go meet soon. He had a sailor’s hands, rough and knotted as, well, knotted ropes.

She cried. It was obvious to think of the waterfalls, pooling in pools and then hurrying in streams to rattle down cliffs and eventually empty into the sea but she thought of it anyway.

“After we’ve finished patching the boat we have to go,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“B.C. The Queen Charlottes maybe. You’ll love it. You’ll learn how to sail well enough to crew anywhere.” Maybe there didn’t have to be an ending. But she liked the way he left it open-ended, too. After you spend this time with me, you’ll be able to go anywhere, for free.

“Your friends won’t like me,” she said, knowing perfectly well what she meant was: I won’t like your friends.

At last her father’s voice when it came was an exception, rarely interjecting. It was a place he couldn’t easily come, a place she was inviolate. For she’d always belonged to him; he was always in her head, telling her she just that. That was Jim’s gift to her: to almost silence her father’s voice so that she felt for the first time in her life free of him, and could be herself instead. Whatever herself was. A friend of Mouse.

Jim poked the fire with a stick. He took her face in his hands and kissed her, apologizing for his lack of tact, her tears that had prompted him to ask the one question his own fear had demanded of him. He read his book, Mark Twain or Tom Robbins or someone; he rolled another joint, he tried to make love to her. Finally he went for a walk up the valley by himself to get oranges, Valencias, he said, that legend had it some Mexican paniolo had planted at the turn of the century. Or was it Spanish? She loved those stories everyone was always telling in Hawai’i, about history, even if only half of them were true.

She realized her father was always there with them, just as the Mouse was. And what her father said was this: he isn’t good enough for you. And, astonishingly, this was just what her father had told her, when, in spite of everything, she’d begun dating, the year before both she and her mother had left, setting off in opposite directions. Two years ago precisely. Her mother was living in the Peg.

Tanya herself had drifted around Canada and then come here. Someone had told her the living was easy, but more importantly, it was geographically as far a distance from her father as it was possible to get. She kept hearing him say it, over and over and over again, a hoarse yet insistent whisper, so that finally she got up and followed Jim up the pig trail to the orange tree. At last she motioned him down and climbed the tree herself, thinking this effort would silence her father’s voice; and, throwing oranges like little suns down into Jim’s waiting hands, big as baseball gloves, she wondered, what can my father possibly mean, what can be better than this? And then she wondered again whether Jim might kill her. They were camped in such a remote spot no one would ever know. Perhaps that was what her father meant. Over roast breadfruit she forgot her irrational fear. Mouse helped feed the fire, and she lay on her back, staring at the stars peeping out between the gaps in the canopy. Nothing of this would be possible without Mouse along. Mouse washed the dishes, he sewed, repaired her jeans she tore tree climbing. The next morning after her swim, she sat at the edge of the stream, watching her reflection in the clear water, her image streaming away, carried by the currents and eddies like the many tiny yellow leaves. She sat with no clothes on, just the piece of blue cloth wrapped around her hips, while her shirt she tore climbing a food tree was being mended. While she was being mended.

“My mother wants me to go Winnipeg and live with her, you know. Finish high school and so on.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“Do you want to?” Jim asked.

“Want what?”

“To live with your mom.”

“No. But I feel sorry for her all the same.”

Jim didn’t pry, said only, “Don’t let your compassion get in the way of your wisdom.”

She looked down at her body. It was very brown, graceful, very young. She looked at it in a kind of fascination, as though she couldn’t believe something so beautiful could be hers. She wore their only towel, the blue one, as a sarong. She remembered how she found it in the bushes at Seven Pools, gave it to Lulu to take back to the laundromat in Pa’ia when they got back. She and Jim made love on it that night they met, spreading it on the ground over the prickly layer of ironwood needles, soft as a bed, everything fine except for the palmetto bugs, huge tropical cockroaches scurrying over and sometimes into her sleeping bags; hence the big towel only. She hated the cockroaches, although in the forest they seemed almost benign, living in a relationship less parasitical to humans; no longer an indicator of their own failures: to be clean, to keep their lives in order, to hope for the future. In Hawai’i they were just beetles.