The Goddesses by Swan Huntley

Author:Swan Huntley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-07-25T04:00:00+00:00

21

I woke up in a perfect nest of white sheets. Rays of yellow sun spilled through Ana’s window. The smell of the ocean came before the sound. The waves were big today. They crashed and crashed against the rock wall, crashing sometimes with a slap, and they were so close that it could have been frightening, but it wasn’t. The waves would not rise over the wall. The birds would never stop singing. The peace in this nest of sheets was real. We were safe and we were calm.

•

We ate mangoes for breakfast and got in the car. The sun, the sky, the ocean. Snow-capped Mauna Kea and tourists spelling out their names with white coral in the lava. I looked for our MURPHY, but it was gone. Our letters had been taken by new families to make new letters. The wind was loud and rushing. We sipped our Vitamin Waters and didn’t listen to music.

Gregory lived in Hawi. Yes, he was the guy Ana had lived with for two years. The two longest years of her life, she said, and they’d even adopted a Siamese fighting fish together and named it Paco. “Because he said if we were going to adopt a real kid, we should prepare with a pet.”

“You wanted children?” I asked. “I didn’t know that.”

And she said, “Oh yeah, of course I did,” as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Like all men, Gregory was great until he wasn’t. He owned an Italian restaurant, which was fun in the beginning—free wine, really good pesto—but then he started to work more, and more and more and more and then he was at this restaurant twenty hours a day. He was neurotic and very type A, which was what had attracted Ana to him at first—she thought he had his shit together. So she assumed he was at the restaurant obsessing over details, like the size of the ramekins and the little tear in one of the chair cushions and the salmon—should it come out with two almond slivers or three almond slivers? Those were the types of things that Gregory cared about. Their home together was spotless. Anyway, fast-forward, it turned out his real obsession was with the anorexic chef. Whom he impregnated. And during the breakup, when Ana had called the chef anorexic, Gregory had called Ana “fatty.”

“If yoga hadn’t reformed me,” she said, “I would have chopped his balls off right there.”

Ana was wearing the black wig with the pink streak that framed her face. “This is my least conspicuous one,” she’d said when she put it on that morning, “even though it’s still pretty conspicuous.”

I felt bad for thinking I preferred her in a wig. Seeing her bald was uncomfortable. It made her look so weak.

I checked my phone again. The night before, I’d called Chuck to let him know I wasn’t coming home. He hadn’t responded. This was unlike him. It meant things were bad in a new way now, worse than they’d been before.

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