“Is this what you were looking for?” she asked, as if she thought it might be right.
“Actually, no,” he said. “This isn’t at all what I was looking for. Does anyone know how to do their job here?” he said. “Seriously. You don’t. I asked for fresh carrots.”
“Sir, I’ve asked the kitchen to do the carr—”
“No. No. You obviously haven’t asked. This is the same shit you brought me last time.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, a tremor in her voice. “I’ll take it back.”
“I think that would be a good idea,” he said. “You should think about why you’re here and whether you are actually doing your job. Because so far what you’re doing is crap. Everything you’ve done is crap. You just bring this shit again and again. I would like shaved carrots and lemon in a bowl.” He made a gesture to show the size of the bowl.
“Yes, I understand, but—”
“All I’m asking for is the simplest thing. Do you have carrots.”
“Yes, but—”
“Do you have a lemon.”
“Yes.” She stood very still.
“Do you have a grater back there in the kitchen.” He leaned his chair back and looked toward the kitchen opening across the carpeted floor.
“Yes.”
“Okay. I’d like you to tell them to take three carrots and grate them like this,” he motioned pressing a carrot down a metal grater. The ends of his words were sharp as whips. “And then bring it out with a lemon.”
“The kitchen grates the carrots in advance.” She was crying but trying not to show it. “I’ll ask them what they can do.” She started to walk away. He moved in slow motion, looking down at the disappointment on his plate as if he’d suffered a tragedy.
“You know what,” he called out to her across the carpet. “Don’t bother about the carrots. Can I see the menu again?”
She brought it and waited near him.
“I’ll just have this.” He pointed to a pan-seared fish. “Except I’d like it to be steamed, not fried. I don’t want any butter or any cream. I don’t want anything with it. Just the plain fish.”
She wrote it down. She didn’t say anything. This fish would not please him, either, without the ingredients that gave it taste. I knew this. He liked butter, he just didn’t like the idea of it. He should have ordered what Mona had. This resort kitchen would not get it right when he invented the dishes and had so many rules.
The rest of us had almost finished when she returned with his fish: white on a white plate with a cloudy drip of cooking water leaking from the side. This time the manager came out and stood beside her, a squat man with a mustache.
With the edge of one tine of his fork, my father pulled up a piece of white flesh the size of a matchstick and put it into his mouth. He winced.
“It’s not any good, but thanks anyway.” He dropped the fork. He looked wounded.
“We’re sorry it’s not what you wanted, Steve,” the manager said. “What can we do so you’ll be happy with your dinner?”
“Nothing. You can’t do anything. Too bad your dinners are so bad,” He leaned the chair back, smiling the tight smile. “But, you know, the rest of this place is great. So I guess that’s just the way it is.”
“We’ll do everything we can so this doesn’t happen again,” the manager said.
As we walked back from dinner, the geckos chirped, their bodies twirling around the poles of the low lights beside the white sand paths. Laurene wore a white dress that glowed in the near-dark. Walking along the paths, I felt we were all inside the movie Citizen Kane. My father had come over a few afternoons when I was younger and whispered, “Rosebud” to me, like a growl, before we went to see the movie at the newly reopened Stanford Theatre. I hadn’t thought much of the story, but the sets, the palm fronds and long shadows, the glowing white clothing, the torches, reminded me of this place, so that I felt swept up in a fantastical world.
The next day we discovered that a friend of my father’s, Larry Ellison, was at the resort too. He wore a straw hat. After lunch I sat with Larry and my dad at a table on the lava rocks that jutted out near the ocean. Larry said he’d been reading about how evolution didn’t happen in gradual stages but bounded and stuttered—that, if you looked at the fossil record, there wasn’t a linear progression. It was impossible for animals to have adapted at the rate they did through gradual random mutation.
They made business jokes I didn’t understand. Larry had a low voice but he laughed high and fast as if he’d sucked on a balloon, as if the man who spoke was a different man from the one who laughed. He’d arrived with one woman who flew home on a United flight that day. Another woman was flying in to visit him tomorrow, he said. The second woman also wore high heels, and was unaware of the first.
My father grabbed me and squeezed. His affection surprised me, seemed complete, and then vanished, and then reappeared, like the two different landscapes on the island.
“What do you think, hon,” I overheard my father say to Laurene the next day. “If you gave a kid a trip to this resort in Hawaii every year or sent them to college, which one would be better?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “This place is pretty great.”
“I think it might be best to just bring them here every year. That might be better than college, if you weigh the two.”
Were they joking? He didn’t mind being strange compared with other parents. At restaurants, he blew his nose right into cloth napkins. I should have asked about college before coming on this trip; I hadn’t considered the possibility that in agreeing to one, I might be forfeiting the other. I am a girl who goes on vacations, I’d thought, and I am a girl who will go to college. It was an entitled way of thinking, I knew, and I liked thinking it. Both. Now, so many virgin piña coladas in, the trip was spent. How much did it cost to come here? It must have been less than college. I didn’t know. I regretted everything about it. The smells and the trees and the birds made me sick.
“Yes, I think that would be worth it,” Laurene said, “in the balance.” She said it in her joke voice. Maybe she thought he would never do it, not really. How ridiculous, I wanted her to say.
“What did you tell your teachers?” my mother asked when I called her on the white resort phone, one of two phones stationed in a room near the reception office.
“I told them I was going on a college trip,” I said. “If I’d told them the truth, they wouldn’t have let me go.”
“I’ll tell them,” she said. I hadn’t imagined there was a way out of it, other than continuing to lie. I’d been staying inside, to avoid tanning.
I gave her the names of my teachers, the classrooms, and the following morning she went to the school and spoke to them, telling them I could not find a way out of it and had lied because I was ashamed. When I returned to school, I got a few quizzical looks from teachers, and Ms. Lawrence teased me, but soon the matter was forgotten.
On one of our last nights in Hawaii, I stood on the place where the lava overhung the ocean, near the restaurant. Below me I watched a series of tiny waves lapping, illuminated by a dim lamp attached to the bottom of the overhang. The warm wind swirled, and I saw a fish lit up and swimming out toward darker water, a bright star hanging far above it. In that moment I saw—sensed, really—a cord strung between the fish and the star, connecting them. It was silvery and strong, like a rope, distinct, obvious, as if it were really there.