Mrs. Becker tried too. She showed Rose a potted orchid and said, "This is a happy little plant."
"Plants don't have brains," Rose said.
"A plant can still be happy."
"You mean healthy."
Instead of intervening I simply listened and awaited Sweetie's approach, her scooping up Rose in the early evening and saying, "Time for your bath, Rosebud," and my stern, literal-minded daughter was transformed into a picture of smiling placidity.
"Say good night, Rosebud."
"Good night."
Mrs. Becker was smiling at the mother and daughter. In a little far-off hotel among palm trees and volcanoes, these visitors liked being reminded of the most humdrum rituals of domesticity, even more than being reminded of the palm trees and volcanoes.
"Time for swimming," Mrs. Becker said.
"Not swimming," Rose said. She glared at Mrs. Becker. "A bath."
Ed Figland, on his way through the lobby with a towel over his arm, heard the exchange and said, "When I was little I used to be afraid that I'd go straight down the drain when my mother pulled the plug at night."
While Mrs. Becker laughed softly and touched Figland's arm in appreciation, as though he had awakened in her a memory of infancy,
Rose said, "No one is little enough to go down the drain."
Upstairs, in the bathtub, she became exasperated again at the mere mention of Figland's name and said she didn't want to see him or talk to him. She did not use the words; she did not need to; but it was clear that she regarded Ed Figland and Mrs. Becker as irrational, shallow, and easily frightened, a skittishness that caused them to be unreliable, provocative, and unfunny.
Rose said, "I don't like them."
After that, these people kept away from Rose. Figland was much happier when his wife showed up and accompanied him. They went everywhere, in matching aloha patterns.
"That's the little girl I was telling you about," he said one day.
Mrs. Figland looked at Rose with disapproval, saying nothing. She had heard the whole story.
"Aren't you glad we never had any children?" she said, and soon after that the Figlands became friendly with Mrs. Becker and Mrs. Najeeby. I often heard their giggling at mealtimes and their shrieks as they splashed in the pool.
9 The Limping Waiters
People thinking it was remarkable whispered that two of our waiters, who were friends, had the same distinctive disability, each a foreshortened leg — Wilnice's left, Fishlow's right. They wobbled and bobbed, bumping shoulders, but it was no coincidence. They had met in a hospital ward where there were many others like them, and been roommates there in the hip unit, and become friends in rehab. Their common disability helped their friendship and formed a crude basis for mutual understanding, like a colorful ethnic trait. But that was not their bond. No one except I knew their bond was much odder, a disability of a profounder kind.
They were "seasonal hires." Our busy months at the hotel, November to March, and the Japanese frenzy of Golden Week, in late April and early May, meant we had to add more wait staff. Each year, from their home in Texas, where the slack season was winter, I hired these two men. They were in their forties, Charlie Wilnice and Ben Fishlow, who arrived as a pair rather than a couple. They came pedaling and pumping at you. They were through with the Waikiki Pearl, our neighbor hotel, and said they would tell me why, providing I never asked for references. I understood this to mean that the explanation itself would define them, as sometimes when someone wishing to express something forceful says, "Let me tell you a story."
Wilnice had been waiting on a young Japanese woman. You noticed their big floppy hats, which, with their skinny stemlike bodies, gave them the aspect of decorative flowers. This one had said, shyly but formally, like a sentence she had practiced, "Please you can deliver this to my room," and handed over a small purse. Wilnice did so after work, and she met him at the door. He was surprised to see her — what was the point of the delivery? — then he knew everything. She was dressed — undressed, rather — wearing a robe, a happi coat, which was undone, loose at the front, unbuttoned. No, the buttons were her nipples; this young woman was naked. "Like one of those pillow pictures," Wilnice said. Certain small, precise erotic Japanese prints, called shunga, depict egg-faced women improbably exposing themselves while observing the conventional horror of body hair, the love of crushed printed fabric and submission, the proper woman made wanton, the rape fantasies of Hokusai subjects incised in woodblocks. This young woman mimicked a courtesan, tempting Wilnice by seeming meek.
"Please you come in." And yet she cowered. Her bad grammar made her seem more innocent and helpless.
Wilnice stepped backward, bobbing on his bad leg, and went away, stride-hop, stride-hop.
Telling Fishlow about it later, seeing his friend smile, Wilnice had no idea that his shock, his puritanical disapproval, had made him remember every detail of the fleeting encounter — the button business, her slightly bowed legs, the pale hollows of her inner thighs, her red thick-soled clogs,
her black-painted nails and black lipstick. And he repeated it, answered questions ("It was a junior suite. . Yes, she was alone"), believing Fishlow was also shocked.
The next day, Fishlow sought out the young woman, went out of his way to serve her. She seemed to notice his leg, the way he walked, how he surged toward her, bumping people as he passed them.
She asked for tea. Fishlow brought it solemnly to her table. She offered him the purse that Wilnice had described and repeated the formula: "Please you can deliver this to my room."
Attempting a bow, Japanese fashion, Fishlow bent himself crookedly, lifting his arms for balance. At four, when he knocked off work, he went up in the service elevator to the woman's room. She answered the door. It was all as Wilnice had described, like a promise kept: the loose happi coat, the nakedness, skin like silk, hairless, smooth, without a mark, pigeon-toed in the red clogs. She invited him inside.
"You sit here?" she said tentatively, patting the sofa next to her.
Fishlow obliged. Without any preliminaries — Wilnice had supplied those — he kissed her. She clung to him, groped him through his clothes, but thoughtfully, as if she were squeezing a fruit, testing it for ripeness.
Her small, almost pressureless chafing gestures roused him.
She suddenly got up, went to the window, and peered through the blinds, turning her back on him. If she heard the drawer open and shut she did not show it.
Holding the Gideons Bible, Fishlow came bobbing and swaying behind her, hiked up her happi coat, moved her feet wider apart, and as she canted forward to receive him, Fishlow chucked the Bible to the floor, placed his foot on it to brace his short leg, and thus braced, he entered, lifting her. Then she reacted, as though lifted onto a peg.
"No! No!" she cried out, which terrified him. He stopped, fearing that her plea might carry even through the closed window. But in a softer voice she implored him to continue. All the while, she remained turned away from him, said nothing more, did not appear to see him balancing on one leg to hoist his pants before pedaling out of the room, stride-hop, stride- hop.
Recklessly, against all hotel rules, he met her again. He could not help himself. It was a feature of their lovemaking that Fishlow never saw her face, that somehow she always contrived to hide it; and they were always upright, so the Gideons Bible was another feature. And "No! No!" And her reaching behind and clawing him like a cat. Like lovers on Sundays who sleepwalk through museums as a break from bed, they went to a movie and once to a sushi bar — perfunctory, almost meaningless, she had practically no English. But her body spoke. Her body said: For the sake of my modesty, I must pretend that it is rape, but don't be fooled — look closely and you will see it is rapture.