Ngarima says a stupid girl can’t stay in the water all the time like a dog with bugs. You’ll get sick and we’ll be blamed, she says. She asks how I am.
Fine, I say. Just in for a morning dip, I say.
Ngarima has been slapping what I think is rope against a rock. She watches me.
Who’s more interesting than me? Here, when I open my mouth, everyone else shuts theirs. Here, when I say I’m going nuts, nobody says anything until two hours later, when someone asks, Is this where the nuts are?
I am not facing Ngarima. I am answering her with my face to the sea, as if I should not take my eyes off it, as if a boat will pass by if I do. If only I could climb to the top of the tallest coconut and keep watch and stay in the water at the same time. What was screaming this morning? I ask, half submerged.
A pig. Pigs don’t like to die.
I clear my head from the water. Just a pig. Good, I say.
It was the pig you gave your bottle of soy to, that fat one.
That one? Oh, yes, right. I did buy a bottle of soy sauce. I shut my mouth. That pig was happy with that soy sauce. What about its bottle? I arch my neck over the water to see if it’s still afloat. Things do float against the morning brightness — is that a bottle? Or Temu?
I can’t tell.
We are having a celebration, she goes on. For you, she says. And for the other one, Harry. We haven’t had visitors for such a long time that we are making a party to show our respect. But for such a party, we have to wait for the sauce to sour, for one of the pigs to get big.
Ngarima, I say. I am stopped from saying what a fine thing this is to do, but unnecessary, how many pigs do you have? let alone how ungrateful I am to be here where pigs scream first thing in the morning and deformed babies roll out of mats and giant sponges lurk, and what’s wrong with Temu anyway? when I see what’s coiled on her shoulder. Intestines, garden-hose long. They are all clean, I see that, flat and clean, there’s a bottle of Joy in her hand, I see its bubbles not far away, a little extra foam, and a little something brown swirling around me in the water.
So much for the water.
I get out and shake myself dry.
Another pig is dying behind us. Why not a woman? The scream is high-pitched enough, furious and animal enough. A woman in high heels, a hoofed woman. The lagoon goes red, and deep inside it starts glowing, it starts to scream itself.
A boat is coming, isn’t it? I say. In time for leftovers?
Ngarima starts. A boat will come, she says. Yes, she says. Her yes sounds like yes, it is possible a boat will come like the sun will rise, the day end.
Behind us men throw dice against the church wall, the noise of their play followed by soft ha-ha’s that could be laughter or something else I don’t understand. One of them flicks on a cordless razor. It has to be cordless — there are no plugs. Then he brings that buzzing razor over to the dead pig and begins to shave it.
When was the army here last? I ask.
The army doesn’t come here, Ngarima says She is watching the surf the way I do, but the way she watches is better — she can see past it, she can see into it.
But Barclay says it comes. He told me they showed movies.
She squeezes her hose again. Yes, a sort of army still comes. She gives me a look that I equate with their present tense: every word she says revealed to her as she says it.
Over the sound of pig death begin the quick strokes of a drum. They are a heartbeat’s, doubled. Ngarima’s son walks down the beach from where that sound is coming to take the hose from Ngarima.
Go practice the dance, she says to me. Until it’s time.
I look out at the empty ocean. The dancing faces it.
In second grade we had to dance, I say to Ngarima’s son. We put on skirts made of paper cut into wavy lengths that stained, and we had to wriggle. I wriggled hard the way a robot would so no one would laugh. I hated it when they laughed.
Ngarima’s son is already smiling.
I follow him to where four women weave something about birds with their hands over their hips, and their hips say something else in circles, each hip saying it exactly the same way as the next woman’s. Only the size of the hips varies, and as fast as I see this, the size doesn’t matter, one matches the other in what they say with how they move. It’s not that collecting-shells kind of dancing, that bursting forth, but the engine of the island in serious precision. Maybe this is Morris dancing, maybe this is square dancing, but when the men waggle their knees open and shut and dance close and dance closer to the women’s hips, it isn’t folk, I can’t dance it with my parents paying for the outfit.
Ngarima’s son dances, boy enough to make a farce of the dance and its peacock engagement, and the other men are old, the other end of what wags. But they wag, they shimmy and wriggle up to me, scissoring their knees and legs while the drum tats louder and harder and I start to sway.
You have to put your arms up to sway right. The hips need room. But with your arms up, men find places to hold on to, the curve and the bulge where the breasts grow, though they don’t touch me. But then I don’t sway much.
At a nightclub on the island where we shot Paradise, all the tourists were asked to dance. I either kept to the back or else I did it, with my face flushed and watching the back the way a ballerina would, to keep from falling into their precise swaying that pressed toward me again and again without touching. Touching is never the point. Everyone who is not an islander is a Methodist when it comes to this not-touching dance, we have no limbs that correspond to theirs, all we can do is touch and not sway that well.
I try not to breathe, I try not to let any of the island into me. I just dance and forget that I am here by being so here. I say nothing to anyone, even when they shout Vagina Mouth and clap out my path.
I am saying no to their beer that they make out of what? when Harry comes and says, Don’t be stupid. Hearing that so soon a second time makes me think I might be. If a boat comes this time, even they will miss it is what he says when it’s almost dark and doesn’t matter.
I think of my son. This island I’m on is a planet drifting farther and farther away. Not drifting the way planets do on film but screeching along at a pace, that second per second they calculate that wrenches us away from the other stars and wandering planets. My son is standing on a street corner on another faraway planet — just like one of those classroom models — and he’s waiting for the traffic to part so he can run across and somehow join me, but the traffic is part of the orbiting too, it’s the ocean, and the street corner I’m on drifts farther and farther away.
We are all soon slick with scented lagoon water and flower-crowned with stiff white fragrant ginger. We each take a seat in front of half a cold chicken and three pounds of pork and blood pudding and coconut pudding and bananas for garnish on banana leaves and a half coconut shell filled with sauce four weeks soured. Barclay and many others make speeches, long, formulaic speeches that I smile through, smile as if my life depended on it, which perhaps it does, they now being us to me, us with our Vagina Mouth talk, with our sickness and secrets, with all this air I breathe, the food we will eat together — yes, I will, I smell the food, even the dead pig’s dark blood in pudding makes my stomach fierce, I will eat and meet them, stomach to stomach, as if in dance, and when they speak so long and full of flattery, I decide they are going to ask me to do something for them.
~ ~ ~
But they ask nothing. Or nothing I understand.