The Appetites of Girls by Pamela Moses

Author:Pamela Moses [Moses, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

BUILDING RESISTANCE

(Opal’s Story)

• Junior Fall •

Mother’s patience for the occasional reports I gave of my suitemates’ lives was limited. Ruth’s pregnancy, Setsu’s relationship that left no time for her music—these were simply part of the unpredictabilities of life, she said. Anyway, why was I fretting over someone else’s journey? What I needed was to find my own. “Routine is death, Opal,” Mother pronounced loudly into the receiver. She had a philosophy that the moment one’s life began to follow any sort of pattern, it was time to make a fresh start. “Always over the next horizon are a thousand new experiences.” It was for this reason that after three years in the Caribbean, we had moved to Sanibel Island, Florida, where Mother had painted pottery and small watercolors, selling them to several of the local shops. And the reason we had spent a year in Puerto Rico, another two in the blistering heat of Acapulco, and then, three months before my junior year of high school, returned to California. This time we had settled on the southern coast, an hour south of Los Angeles. Crossing the border to reenter the U.S., I had asked about our old neighborhood in San Francisco. But Mother only laughed. “Haven’t we used up our adventures in that city? Won’t it be more exciting to try someplace new?”

Wherever we went, Mother found boyfriends. In Florida, of course, there had been P.T., the sporting goods salesman who took us deep-sea fishing on his motorboat. In Mexico, a series of men she’d met in the nightclubs where she went dancing—the handsomest one had given her welts on her arms and black-and-blue marks on her legs, which she’d masked with the same creamy foundation she applied to her face. Not long after I returned to Brown for my second year, Mother had sent a letter: in California, she had found someone new—Antonio, a travel agent. “We fight like cats and dogs. But he’s gorgeous and the most exciting man I’ve ever known.”

Despite what she referred to as their fiery relationship, Mother had agreed to go into business with Antonio. Together they had opened their own restaurant on the cliffs overlooking the water. They called it Paradise Jungle. The menus, the chairs, the bar stools were covered in animal prints. Thick vines wrapped the railings of the outdoor terrace. The restaurant served every exotic dish Mother and Antonio could think of: venison, buffalo, sea turtle, shark. “World food,” Antonio called it, the selections changing daily depending on what was available. And soon local papers and magazines began to hail Paradise Jungle as the newest hot spot.

Since I would be living at home during summer break, Mother expected me to work nights at the restaurant waiting tables. “I don’t think I’m up for the hustle and bustle of a restaurant. Maybe I’ll just volunteer at the women’s shelter like I did last summer,” I told Mother my first night in the new apartment she and Antonio now rented together.

But Mother would not hear it.

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