her big black brassiere and big black panties, and rustled up a few bags of Fritos and bottles of Coke for the girls.
Mamie and Claire were virginal odalisques, if such a thing is possible. They, too, moved in a dream of languorous stupefaction. It is to their credit that they never, even later, saw the slightest immorality in the situation. Perhaps they were simply fulfilling their true natures, and the competent, but sterile, years of their parents’ rule had left them porous and expectant for just this sort of innocent sensuality.
The house was a mess. Dishes coated with plum sauce and dried
lau-lau
leaves were on every tabletop, and every chair held empty white cardboard take-out containers and jars of hair cream and saucers overflowing with cigarette butts. Jimmy gained five pounds just from licking the dirty plates. Since they had unconsciously restricted themselves to only a few rooms of the house, it could not be said that they had spent the time in filth. It was untidy, but not sordid.
The night before the Clarkes were to return, they seemed to realize that their idyll had come to an end. They felt no dread at the return of McCully and Mary because they felt no guilt. They did feel, all four of them, a luxurious and intimateregret. Mamie hoped that they would be together like this for the rest of their lives, as soon as the girls could get away from their parents.
Gertrude washed the badly stained sheets until four o’clock in the morning.
It was Cecil and Benjie’s job to collect and burn the trash—the beer cases, boxes of See’s candy, Dairy Queen cups and rib bones of various unidentifiable animals. The enormous bonfire on the beach burned exuberantly through the night.
Mamie and Claire cleaned the kitchen. Every glass, every plate, pot, utensil and cup had been used and left, encrusted and glazed, in the sink and on the counters for the whole, happy ten days.
There were a few things that they had left until it was too late, such as the cigar burn in McCully’s bathrobe, and the empty bottles of California wine that McCully was saving for a special occasion, but there was nothing to be done about it.
They went about their chores happily. Claire said she felt like the elves in
The Shoemaker and the Elves
, and Benjie asked, “What’s an elve?”
While Claire gaily told him the story, Mamie scraped the last of the cold
malasadas
into Jimmy’s greasy, smiling mouth.
THREE
Several weeks after McCully and Mary returned from Honolulu, Mary asked Mamie if she would like to help her in the garden. Mamie was very pleased to be asked and worked quietly at the small chores that Mary gave her—weeding under the milky
plumeria
trees and watering delicately by hand the trembling young
liliko‘i
shoots.
Mary may have suspected by then that Hiroshi had done exactly what Mamie told McCully he did, for how else could his disappearance be explained? Mary was also not so removed from her daughter that she did not know that Mamie was an intelligent and honest child. She had behaved rashly when Hiroshi was dismissed, Mary told herself, and she considered that she may not have been kind to Mamie. That she had profoundly altered Mamie’s view of the world and herself in it did not occur to her. She was less honest and less intelligent than Mamie. She did feel sorry that the whole thing had ever happened. She should have told Mamie.
Mamie watched Mary expertly divide the root stock of a
ti
bush. Mamie admired her mother’s ruthless pruning. Mamiewas always a little afraid that she was hurting a plant, but Mary hacked and snipped with a clear conscience.
“That is why you’re a good gardener,” Mamie said aloud.
“What?” Mary was entangled in a vine.
“You’re not worried about hurting the plants.”
Mary looked at her as if she had lost her senses. “Of course I’m not. What a funny idea.” As if to prove it, she ripped the vine from an old wood fence. Mamie was sure she could hear the tiny
Cassandra Zara, Lucinda Lane