way grounded,” she reminded him.
“They can’t keep us apart,” he said. Then he took on his goalie look, like he was about to meet the opposing team.
“Let me see what I can do,” she said—to calm him down because she knew he might do something crazy, the way he’s crazy on the soccer field. Like he doesn’t care what happens to himself.
“You can come to Ebeye?” He sounded surprised.
“I can come,” she promised.
And here she is.
She’s not big-headed or anything but sometimes, really, she thinks she’s super blessed. It’s not like she’s especially good or holy or anything like that. But sometimes the greatest things happen to her. Like right now: she’s standing here, pretending to eat this Marshallese paste with her Diversity Delegates and Mister Norman is luging on one of his bobsled rants about nuclear fallout, how America tested H-bombs in the Marshalls forever—sixty seven bombings in all—and the fallout was horrible and the Marshallese got all fucked up and deformed and the money the Americans gave hardly covered the cost of relocating people to different islands and nobody but nobody can clean up the places that were bombed, it’s gonna take, like, a million years. . . . So Mister Norman is going on the way he does—a “Norman invasion”—and then, out of nowhere, Jeton walks up to her and says, “Hi, lijera.”
Nora nearly fucking faints!
It’s a Hollywood moment that the senior class is going talk about for weeks!
Nora takes Jeton in her arms and plants a big one on his gorgeous lips. And now Jeton looks like he’s about to faint because, as Mister Norman will tell you, the Marshallese don’t do PDAs! No, never!
Then, as if announcing she’s going down the hall for a drink of water, Nora says she and Jeton are going to take a little walk.
“That’s fine,” Mister Norman says. “We’ll be right behind you.”
Nora and Jeton walk on the oceanside, the best place Jeton can think to take her because everywhere else is too crowded. He once told her that Ebeye is the most wonderful place on earth. He described the sweet scent of fried onions, the smoky aroma of grilled chicken, the muddy alleys, the crowds of giddy children, the bright blues, reds, yellows, and greens of painted plywood, the laundry flagging on lines behind every home, the sputter and stink of motorbikes, the chaos of radio music, the yelping of dogs. . . . But now, with her at last on his island, he is sure that she cannot appreciate these things.
There is too much garbage, he realizes—plastic Coke bottles and bright white chunks of Styrofoam from broken beer coolers and disposable diapers washed up like dead fish. This is why Americans think the Marshallese are dirty. Just beyond the garbage-strewn sand, four small children are afloat in a doorless refrigerator. Flagging their arms, they shout in triumph as shallow waves push their boat to the shore a few feet, then suck it out a few feet, back and forth. The tide is coming in, the reef exposed in high places, sun glinting from trapped water.
Carefully, Jeton says, “The best islands are to the east in the Ralik chain. Everybody says so.”
“Really?” Nora says, though he can tell she is only being polite.
“There is one called Wotje. The Japanese brought dirt from Japan to make a grand garden there.”
“You mean during World War II?”
“Yes, long ago.” Gingerly he toes aside a disposable diaper. “It is very beautiful.”
“Are you going to move there?” she asks.
“With you,” he says, wanting this to sound like a promise or a proposal. But it sounds so much like a question he secretly berates himself: bôkâro!
“I told you I have to go to college, Jeton.”
“Nobody is making you go, Nora.”
“I want to!”
When he doesn’t answer, she adds: “You could go too.”
“I am no good in school.”
“You could start with junior college—on Majuro.”
It tires him to hear her talk like this, pretending that he is school-smart. “Why do you say these things you know are not possible?”
“Because I believe in you!” she says. “Because anything’s possible, isn’t it?”
“Anything?” He wants to laugh bitterly. Is it possible to make Nora stay?
He promises himself that he will not be a baby—eokkwikwi—who cries for her attention or a baka fool who believes she will do whatever he wants just because he says she should. He understands for the first time what she has meant by the expression “get real.” Money is real to Nora. Plans are real to Nora. The future is real to Nora. So he will give her all of that by letting her believe that he agrees with everything she says. It is the curse of the ri-aje to be so giving, so polite.
Seven degrees north of the Equator, every day is summer. That’s the problem, Alison decides. Who can concentrate? Her students do little more than tolerate their time in her class. If they ever look at her with wonder when she wields a brush like a conductor’s baton or tangos across the front of the room in her enthusiasm, it is only to say that she is other, as strange as the giant squids that reportedly dwell in deep waters just north of Kwajalein.
Slouched in their plastic bucket-seated school desks, they seem all but naked, bare legs crossed, flip-flops dangling from their delicate toes, everyone in shorts and halters or tight-fitting tees, the fair ones bronzed from sunning, hair highlighted, skin gleaming with perfumed lotions. They can barely keep their hands away from each other, barely disguise their mutually-consuming appetites, barely suppress their smirks as they consider all that they’re into and all that their parents don’t know about them.
Cosseted, cajoled, and comforted by their parents at every turn, it would never occur to these children that they’d be lucky to achieve the same level of mediocrity enjoyed by the grownups they find so pitiable.
“It’s not your job to beat them down,” Erik used to tell her. “They need all the encouragement they can get.”
Don’t we all? she thinks now.
Erik meant that life would beat the kids down soon enough.
When the lunch bell sounds, they stream around her, a whitewater rush of laughter, squeals, insults, and jests. Leaning into the second-floor railing to keep herself clear, Alison hears a few check themselves when they see her standing there: Ms. Spence, the Art Teach. Then they spill by, a torrent of great hope and mild anxiety, leaving behind the confused scent of sugary perfume, citrus cologne, body odor, bubble gum and herbal shampoo.
Their patronizing, dismissive glances make her wince. And angry. Here’s the searing irony of her life among school children: they pity her not because she lost her husband in a scuba diving accident fifteen months ago but because, at 34, she is old already. In their world view, there’s nothing left for her but to raise her two boys, then get out of the way.
Now, alone on the annex balcony, Alison peers to the lagoon’s sun-hammered surface and regards the noon ferry returning from Ebeye. She and Erik came to Kwajalein to get away from it all. Unloading their house and car payments saved them from certain ruin. They were deep into the suburban dream—double mortgaged and maxed on credit cards—and couldn’t understand where they had gone wrong. Housing is free on Kwajalein and grocery prices, like everything else, is subsidized because Kwajalein is an American military base sans the military. With the exception of a few officers and intelligence types, everybody here is civilian—mostly