I could go back, I thought. I could always go back. That probably should have comforted me, but it made me feel worse than before. Just the thought of coming all that way and then giving up! Retracing my steps so defeatedly. Just letting Gary have the whole Western hemisphere—when he didn’t even deserve it. Leaving him to sail the Pacific, when he was the one who dumped on the whole ocean and all the islands in it! Even Hawaii wasn’t good enough for him. Even Oahu wasn’t paradisiacal enough, not to mention me!
I hopped off my bed and ran over to the balcony and I stood out there and saw the crowds of tourists down below, yet that didn’t bother me. There were fast-food joints, yet that could be a good thing, not bad. I’ve never understood this: Just because you are on an odyssey, is there something wrong with once in a while having a hot meal? I looked down from the balcony. I leaned way over the edge—not that I was going to jump or anything, but I leaned. I called out, “Go to hell, Gary. You can take Fiji and shove it!” And I screamed some other things, mostly swear words, I admit, until I was tired, and I felt like an idiot.
Then I went back inside and just sat on the floor for a couple of hours, until I was very very calm. With great deliberation I picked up my plane ticket from the bed. I knew I could do one of two things. I could stay in Hawaii, all bitter and heartbroken, feeling sorry for myself and drifting aimlessly, just wrecking my spiritual compass. Or I could retrace my steps, rethink my actions, fly back to San Francisco, and then make my way back to Boston—trying to learn from my mistakes and grow, reconcile with my dad, return to school, and live my life. So that was easy.
I ran down to the hotel lobby where the desk manager guarded probably the hotel’s only copy of the Honolulu phone book.
I called a ticket broker, and I walked all the way down to his office near Hotel Street, and I sold that guy my ticket home.
Having sold the ticket and decided I was going to hang out in Honolulu and just be an abandoned aimless folk dancer with a broken compass, I felt much better. I went back to the hotel. No one had cleaned up the room. The dirty towel was still lying there, but I took a shower anyway, since who knew when I’d see a shower again. Then I packed up, went downstairs, paid my bill, and checked out. I walked off down the street just like in the song: “Oh, I shall go a-wanderin’, my knapsack on my back….”
All around me the hotels were crowding up to the beach. The whole day was ahead of me. So what should I do? I wandered around for a long while before I came up with something. Laundry.
I found a coin-op Laundromat just off Kuhio Avenue and I put all my clothes and also the hotel towel in the wash. Everything was dirty, even what I was wearing, so I went across the street and bought some breakfast at a noodle shop and used their facilities to change into my bikini, so I could get even the clothes I was wearing into the machine.
I was sitting on a rusty old folding chair with my bare feet up against one of the dryers. I was holding a tall foam cup and eating my first saimin, which was this warm salty soup swarming with noodles, vegetables, and pink-and-white discs I later found out were fish cake, and I was all absorbed in my thoughts and in my saimin, but I guess because of my attire some of the other coin-op clientele might have gotten the wrong idea about me. A couple of guys approached me, and one even asked where I was staying. Of course I didn’t even look at them, since I was off men.
When my load was done, I put on my shorts and T-shirt, all warm and clean, over my bikini, packed up the rest of my clothes, and took the bus to see the only person in Hawaii that I knew, Professor Williamson at the university.
I went straight to the zoology department, and when it turned out Williamson wasn’t in his office I waited out in the lounge, which I realized smelled really peculiar, now that I was spending an hour there. The place smelled nauseating, like cats had got into the green carpet—not that I had anything against cats! Probably the being I was closest to in my whole childhood was my cat, Clarissa, who I raised from when she was just a tiny ball of fluff and who became admittedly so obese, you would have thought she was pregnant if she hadn’t been spayed. Yet she was beautiful that way. She had heft. She had stability! She would sit and sit. What I’m saying is—that comment wasn’t meant as derogatory that the department smelled like cats. Just I was surprised to smell cats in that context!
So while I was waiting, a couple of zoology graduate students, Rich and Geoffrey, wandered in, and we went down to the candy machines in the basement level of the building and the two of them got some snacks—and I almost did, but then I thought, I’d better not. I was afraid to blow any excess money.
I told Geoffrey and Rich how I’d come out west from Boston. And they told me about the smell in the building. It was actually from chickens that were kept upstairs and experimented on, which kind of turned your stomach. Still, I didn’t leave. I kept looking up the stairwell, and finally I saw Williamson sauntering in, dragging his bike after him up the stairs.
“Brian,” I called out.
He looked around, confused.
“It’s me, Sharon.” I ran up the stairs.
“Hi.” He looked nervous to see me, since I guess a few days earlier I’d sounded hysterical and maybe suicidal on the phone when I’d called him looking for Gary. “I still haven’t seen him,” he told me.
“Oh, well, that’s okay,” I said hurriedly. I’d resolved to myself in the reception area never to speak of Gary, so that way I would avoid crying. “I didn’t come about that,” I said. “Actually, is this an okay time to talk? Are you busy?”
“Well, yeah. I am.”
I felt my eyes welling up when he said that, but I held the tears in. “Do you have just one minute?”
“All right,” he said.
I followed him into his office and sat down in a rush. “I wanted to come talk to you about the census project and find out if you still have an opening on it, because I’d really like to work on something like this—”
He leaned back in his swivel chair, back, back, till I thought he might fall over, and he put his feet up on the edge of the desk. He wore frayed old leather sandals. “I thought Gary was the one who wanted to study bird populations.”
“No, no,” I said, “Gary was just a bullshit artist. Really. He never cared about birds at all—especially not red-footed boobies. He might have said things to you about how he loved endangered animals and how he wanted to help the native honeycreepers, but it was just like a fad with him—it was just a passing thing.” I choked up a little there, but I was worried any second Williamson was going to say he had stuff to do, so I kept talking, making up whatever I needed as I went along. I said, “The truth is it was my idea to come out to Hawaii, because for years I wanted to come here and I wanted to be a tropical naturalist, but there weren’t any good courses in that at BU, so I came out here wanting to transfer to UH. And when I made that decision Gary got all interested and decided birds were his thing, too, but when we got here and he saw the reality of living in Honolulu, and also when he realized how much work the booby census would take, I think he got just—just—”
“You’re an undergraduate at BU,” Brian said.
“A junior,” I said, which was almost true, because if I’d been back in Boston and in school I would have been a junior.
“Uh-huh,” he said, and he looked at me blankly like he’d almost rather I was some kind of bird, because then he wouldn’t have to be polite and have a conversation with me. He could just count me or something. “Sharon, we won’t even be starting the census until next May. Remember what I told Gary? The observation time is from mid-May until September.”
I was just crushed when he mentioned that. When the birds actually laid their eggs hadn’t occurred to me. I’d just figured I was going to convince this prof to let me on his boat right away and he and I and the rest of the team would be sailing off to the northwest islands far away. But the project wouldn’t even start for almost a year. A lot of the charm of the whole census idea wore off right then.
&
nbsp; Much subdued, I said thank you to Professor Williamson and trudged off to the campus center, which was practically empty. But I got a sandwich and talked to the guy behind the counter about cheap places to stay. I found out about the YWCA on University Avenue, and I went there and checked it out. It was an old beige brick-faced five-story rooming house with a restaurant-cafeteria downstairs called The Breadline. What was neat was, the restaurant had almost all special-needs employees. The downside, I discovered later, was, there was this chili-like gruel, like if Charles Dickens went to Mexico, and it just kept coming back at you every day. The Breadline was the kind of place that had stainless-steel milk machines and a few bugs in the corners, but hey. I gave the superintendent a deposit and I got a room on the third floor with a bed that had sheets and a pilly blanket and a pillow so flat you had to fold it over to rest your head on it. There was a table and chair and a splintery dresser with little mounds of sawdust in the drawers, which later I found out were termite droppings. There was no rug or telephone. There was a pay phone in the restaurant. At the end of the hall there was a bathroom with showers. It was good I’d brought my own towel from the hotel.
WELL, the next few days were bleak, because I didn’t actually know anybody, and here I was across the street from the university, and the summer session was starting, but, of course, I wasn’t registered. And it wasn’t like being unregistered at BU, where I knew people on campus, and could walk around looking disaffected and too cool for everyone else. Here, I’d never been a part of the scene to begin with, so there wasn’t anything to be disaffected from, which, if you think about it, is the whole point of being cool, the whole raison d’être.
However, pretty soon I got out and started hanging at the campus center, and befriended some people—not so much the young undergraduates, all my age and cute and perky—but the older crowd, the graduate students, a lot of whom were from the Mainland like me, and the postdocs, and some of those zoology students I mentioned before. They were a rowdy group with great parties off campus, usually on the North Shore, and a lot of times they’d take me along, being very hospitable. They shared everything they had—food, drink, drugs. I remember a couple of times lying out on the beach in a white and pristine cove—about twenty people, including Brian Williamson and his girlfriend, Imo, and Brian’s colleagues Ron and Christian—all eating chips and smoking dope, just getting a pleasant buzz, just softening your edges a little so your self wasn’t all hard and separate from the rest of the world, but sort of dissolving. It was like becoming all crumbly, and cracking your outer shell—but not in a crazy way, not like turning into some kind of volcano spewing red hots, but rather, feeling your mind and your whole spirit becoming porous inside, like a malted milk ball.
One of the zoology students I hung out with was Rich, the guy I’d met at the department. Rich was short and hairy with bright brown eyes like a squirrel’s and faded T-shirts and cutoff shorts, and a love of birds, seabirds especially, and also a love of oceans. He’d spent his childhood landlocked in Arizona. He was lighthearted and laid back. He could have been a real heartbreaker if he’d put in the time. Truthfully he was just too sweet and lazy.
At the end of a few parties we stayed after, camping in this old army tent, and fooling around in the dark, and I have to say he felt good after Gary’s melancholy, and his sad little smiles and pretentious hair, and that abstracted look he had—like he was thinking of higher things than you. Rich was always right there with you. With Rich it was never what would happen next, and where would we go, and if he would be happy when we got there, it was just him and me drawn up to him when the ocean was calm. Just us swimming together in shallow water and lying down on towels warm from soaking up the sun. And not all that ego, not to mention all that undressing and sheets and beds like there used to be in Allston, and being careful not to brush the silver radiator, all clanging hot as a teakettle, but instead, being naked to begin with and already wet inside and out. It was just for fun, nothing serious. Apart from a few weekends Rich and I had pretty much a platonic relationship.
The money thing was a problem, but I did manage to earn some cash as an emergency substitute secretary around campus for departments and programs that were in the middle of fiscal belt tightening, scandals, sanctions, firings, and other crises. I used to come and fill in when needed—always purely as a temp worker, officially a “casual hire,” since, of course, it was a state university, and only state employees could be real permanent secretaries—which meant wearing dresses to work and having candy dishes on your desk and photos under the glass of your desk top. I just came as is and did filing and phone answering and hunt and pecked a few letters, as the case may be. My favorite gig was the Women’s Studies Program, which had digs in the back of Crawford Hall, so you actually had to climb up and down a rickety metal fire escape to get to and from the parking lot. It was just a few lady profs and a department library with metal shelves and floor cushions, and a desk for a receptionist, which was a lot of times just me at the black rotary dial phone. We used to cool the place with World War II—era oscillating fans with putty-colored rubber blades, and I loved it there because, as I said, it was just femmes, and very egalitarian. We were all like sisters. There was a southern lesbian English prof named Corinne who would give me poetry books to read, and there was a psychologist, Margo, who used to tip me off about jobs at the medical school where you could get cash for sleeping in a lab or being a patient for students to learn on—not getting operated on or anything like that, but just undergoing physical exams. Women’s Studies was my home away from home. There was a poster on the wall above my desk, a black-and-white picture of Golda Meir with a caption that read “But Can She Type?” That was very empowering to me when I worked there, because I’d never learned.
RICH and the zoology guys, even Brian, liked me a lot, and when May rolled around they mentioned that if I still wanted, I could go out and lend a hand on the booby census. I could go with them to French Frigate Shoals—as a volunteer. They didn’t have funding for me, but I could come along with Brian and Imo, and Rich and that other graduate student named Geoffrey, who was a weight lifter but also a very religious person who had dedicated his whole life to Jesus Christ, so to him, studying boobies was for the glory of God.
It was such a great group of people, I said I’d go. I wouldn’t earn anything on the trip, but I’d get room and board, so to speak. Free beer and good dope, I figured—judging from the department parties—moonlit swims, and my name on an article, not to mention just being on some island where hardly anyone had ever been before.
The downside was leaving my guitar. Everyone said that where we were going, my guitar would be toast. So I wiped it clean and put it in its case and took it over to Corinne, the English prof from Women’s Studies who lived in a gorgeous old moldy house in Manoa with saggy wood floors and lots of pictures on the walls, botanical engravings warped in their frames, and faded frayed books and furniture covered with white hair from Corinne’s cat, Jane.
“Oh! I miss my old cat,” I said as soon as I saw Jane lying on the couch. I put my guitar down by the door and I went and sat on the couch and stroked Jane and, God, my fingers had almost forgotten how good it was to be stroking a cat, just knuckling that wiry body under that soft soft fur. Oh, wow, I missed my cat so much, my cat Clarissa. She died when I was seven and no one let me have another one. This cat Jane was all white, except she had a black nose, just the tip, like she’d dipped it. She was so sweet and she felt so good, so knobby.
“Let me get you some tea.” Corinne went to the kitchen and put on the kettle. She was a very literary southern gentlewoman, and she had short silver-gray hair and willowy arms, and gray eyes and this melodious voice. I’m sure back in Nashville once upon a time Corinne had been one of those girls in white silk and organdy in cotillion balls. She, of all the people I’d ever met, I could imagine wearing white kid gloves with buttons at the wrist. We had raspberry tea and English tea biscuits that came out of a tin, an
d I told Corinne about the expedition. All the time I knew her, I loved to confide in Corinne. She was what I would describe as a wisewoman. Full of reason, and gentleness, and self-respect. She always gave me good advice, except I never followed it, which proved to be a little bit of a strain on our relationship. That and Corinne’s girlfriend, Rae, who was fierce and short and spiky, with a buzz cut and heavy black eyebrows that she would knit when I was around.
Anyway, Corinne was a scholar of American women’s literature, and she showed me her own original Alcott books that she’d kept from when she was a little girl and taken with her after she broke up with her original husband. She had Eight Cousins, and Rose in Bloom, and An Old-Fashioned Girl, and everything. “Oh, I love that book,” I said, when I saw Little Women.
It seemed like Corinne couldn’t help smiling at me, loving Little Women and sitting on the couch in my shorts and my tank top that I was wearing without a bra. Not that I was one of those bra burners at that time, not at all, but I had to wear one to work, and this was my day off. I put Little Women on the stack next to Jane. “When I was little,” I said, “I always wanted to live back then. I wanted to live in the old days.”