To Paradise

One day when I was twenty-four, I was driving back to town. It was late in the evening. By this time, I had stopped going to work entirely, phasing myself out of the life of the office until I simply never returned. No one seemed upset or even surprised by this; it was my money, after all, and it continued to come to me in the form of a paycheck, every two weeks.

I was driving through Kailua, which was at the time a very small town, with none of the stores and restaurants it would have a decade later, when I passed a bus stop. Two times a month, I drove around the entire island, one week going east, the next, west. It was a way to pass the time, and I would sit on the beach near the stone church in Lā‘ie, where my father had once handed out money, and look at the sea. The bus stop was beneath a streetlamp, one of the few on the road, and seated at its bench was a young woman. I was driving slow enough so that I could see she had dark hair pulled back from her face, and wore a printed-orange cotton skirt—in the light, she appeared to be glowing. She sat very straight, her legs together, her hands folded in her lap, her purse strap looped over one wrist.

I don’t know why I didn’t just drive on, but I didn’t. I turned around in the road, which was deserted, and returned to her.

“Hello,” I said, when I was close to her, and she looked back at me.

“Hello,” she said.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I’m waiting for the bus to town,” she said.

“The bus doesn’t run this late,” I said, and for the first time, she looked worried.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I have to get back to the dorm or they’ll lock the doors.”

“I can drop you off,” I offered, and she hesitated, looking up and down the dark, empty road. “You can sit in the back seat,” I added.

At this she nodded, and smiled. “Thank you,” she said, “I’d be very grateful.”

She sat the same way as she had at the bus stop: erect and poised, her eyes straight ahead. I studied her in the rearview mirror. “I’m a student at the university,” she finally said, as if by way of an offering.

“What year are you?” I asked.

“A junior,” she said, “but I’m only here for the year.”

She was on an exchange program, she said; the next year she would return to Minneapolis, and graduate from her college there. Her name was Alice.

I began seeing her. She lived in one of the girls’ dormitories, Frear Hall, and I would wait in the lobby until she came down. Every Wednesday, she took weaving lessons in Kailua with an old Hawaiian lady, for which she always wore a modest, knee-length skirt and her hair pulled back. Otherwise, she wore jeans and let her hair loose. I could tell from its texture and the shape of her nose that she wasn’t entirely haole, but I didn’t understand what she actually was. “I’m Spanish,” she said, but I knew from my time on the mainland that “Spanish” could sometimes mean Mexican, or Puerto Rican, or something else altogether. She talked about her studies, and how she had come here because she wanted to be somewhere warm for once in her life, but had grown to love it, about how she wanted to go back home and become a teacher, and about how she missed her mother (her father was dead) and little brother. She talked about how she wanted a life full of adventure, about how living in Hawai‘i was a little like living abroad, and someday, she would live in China, and India, and, when the war was over, Thailand, too. We talked about what was happening in Vietnam, and about the election, and about music; in each case, she had more to say than I did. Sometimes she asked about my life, but there wasn’t much to tell. And yet she seemed to like me well enough; she was very gentle with me, and when I made mistakes, fumbling for too long with her clothes, she placed my hands on her shoulders and unbuttoned her dress herself.