The Whiteness of Bones by Susanna Moore

it.”
    “You’re in New York now,” she said. “Not some hokey little farm town.”
    Mamie was not happy at work. She was not unhappy, either. She recognized that it was something she must do in order toearn money, so that she could take care of herself. She received a small allowance of two hundred dollars a month from her mother and she knew that she could not stay at Alysse’s too much longer, but she was worried when she read the advertisements for rental apartments in the newspaper. She did not know how she would make her way.
    Although her mother had never written much to Mamie when she was away at boarding school and college, she now began to write to her every week.
    Dear Mamie,
    I was naturally quite surprised by your decision to settle in New York City. You probably don’t remember but when you were a child, you said that you were going to be famous and Claire said she was going to be a nun. We never knew where she got that, although McCully said it was probably Gertrude, because she was so religious.
    I was in Koke‘e yesterday, cleaning out the wild hydrangea, and I was tempted by the possibility of finding some
maile
on the path near the Wiliwili Camp, so I lay down my tools and let myself be drawn deeper into the canyon. There was a faint humming sound, like a swarm of mosquitoes, but I could not see them. I spotted, at a height, a tendril of
maile
, and I pressed against the
lehua
to which it had attached itself, and I saw that the trunk was covered with hundreds of
kahuli
, those little red-striped shells which attach themselves to trees and begin to sing, scritch, scritch. It was the humming sound I had heard. I forgot all about the
maile
in my pleasure of listening.
    Charlie King died yesterday and I must drive to Ha‘ena Wednesday when they scatter his ashes on the reef. I never know quite what to wear for those occasions, asyou do get wet in the canoe. A raincoat would look disrespectful, I think.
    I have had an offer from a Japanese hotel company to buy some of the beachfront here to build a hotel. They would have to dredge the beach, but we would retain a beach right-of-way. They wanted to build a swimming park where the palm grove stands, with water slides and lagoons. The minute I heard that, I said no. I don’t think he meant to tell me. He was Japan Japanese.
    Give my aloha to Alice.
    Love,
    Mother
    Mamie was reminded again of her mother’s curious literalness—settling in New York City, Gertrude religious. It made her smile.
    Alysse wondered indignantly how her sister could have turned down the Japanese offer to buy the palm grove.
    “How she can live on that lonely island, I’ll never know. Their idea of a good time is weird Mexican-sounding music and dinner at five o’clock. I remember going down the road with your parents to someone’s house for dinner and they actually served coffee with the main course, the only course, as it turned out. Can you imagine? Always a bad sign, coffee with pork chops. Besides,” she went on, “you’d be rich.”
    “Rich?”
    “Loaded.”
    Mamie did not mind the idea of being loaded, as Alysse put it, but like Mary, she did not like the thought of Chiefess Deborah’s grove being bulldozed for a swimming park. She wrote back to her mother that she thought she had made the right decision in declining to sell the land.
    She wondered where it was that Alysse had been so disturbinglyserved coffee with pork chops, but she didn’t think she should ask. She refrained from asking Alysse many things and let her talk on in her irresponsible, absolutely certain way. It was not that Mamie accepted everything that she heard (she was still amazed at the inaccuracy of the belief that childbirth left your vagina a vast marshland), but she kept quiet and listened. Part of it was what she considered the polite behavior of someone who was a guest, but part of it was also an astonished interest in her aunt. Although Mamie did not yet understand that Alysse’s