a slow but steady transformation, from boring, uncommitted brown to lighter and lighter hues, until she gave in, said to Fernando, “I might as well admit life is more fun as a blonde. Let’s do the whole head.” It wasn’t true that life was more fun as a blonde, but she was tired of fighting it, of facing daily the unfairness of her hair transmogrifying into old age long before Harry’s. She rubber-bands the honeyed chunks, brushes her teeth, then pulls on her bathing suit. She lifts her cap and goggles from their hook in her closet and shuts the door.
IN THE MAIN COURTYARD, the pool is a sapphire under the sun, shooting liquid rainbows into the house at oblique angles. How she adores submergence. She is a healer of human cracks and fissures, her days spent dealing with her patients’ struggles and agonies, the emotional and psychic often embodied in the physical. She uncovers all the states and syndromes that can spark and catch fire from infancy on, searing a being, those flames rarely sputtering out on their own. She works hard quenching the symptoms, providing parents with answers, and the toddlers, children, and teenagers with techniques to manage their frightening infernos, helping them douse the alarming heat and gain interior strength against what is burning them up. Resolutions if the sufferer and loved ones are lucky, cures if kind spirits are shining down, so that as they grow and mature their lives will be happier, sweeter, so that they will be saved from total annihilation. She gives them all of her time, but this hour belongs only to her, swimming with an uncluttered mind, feeling the expectant delight of having everyone together, remembering that however involved she will become with Noelani, she belongs by blood and love to others, and those others, by blood and love, belong to her.
How fortunate she and Harry have been that they and their children have never been afflicted with any kind of serious illness, not physical, emotional, or mental, everyone on their right paths. Closely knit all these years, enjoying being together, genuinely liking one another. Of course, there are the occasional, normal tensions and skirmishes among her children, and sometimes she wishes they didn’t force her to read their faces, would simply admit to what’s bothering them, but eventually, always, the issue is revealed, and she guides and advises them so judiciously they frequently think they have arrived at the solution on their own.
Head underwater, she holds her breath, then pushes off, stroking strongly to the other side of the long pool. One, two, three … fourteen long and solid strokes to reach the wall today before reversing course.
Half of fourteen is seven, and she’s thinking of Noelani McCadden’s toothpick legs racing her away from home, or toward something. In her session notebook, she had written: Does the actual mileage hold an unconscious significance for Noelani? Jeanine McCadden was adamant that her daughter runs exactly seven miles each morning, no more, no less, as if the girl were fitted with an internal mileage counter. Before her first meeting with Noelani, Roma had researched the number and discovered that in numerology, seven represents the seeker, the thinker, the searcher of Truth who knows nothing is exactly as it seems and is always trying to understand the reality hidden behind the illusions. Roma had realized that definition described herself as well, born on the seventh day of June. And in astrology, seven meant—
No, she is not going to break her promise, no pondering about Noelani, about any of her patients, while swimming.
She will think about … She will think about … Okay, yes, what sort of sea creature would she be? Not a shark, not a whale. Not a seal. What’s the difference between porpoises and dolphins?
Then a mental bolt to that weekend when Phoebe brought home the prophet. She heard moans coming from Phoebe’s bedroom, and had breached her daughter’s trust, carefully turning the knob, peeking through the crack, almost hoping to find Phoebe tangled naked in bed with that long-haired young philosopher whose pacific calm was threatening upheaval in Phoebe’s life, but that’s not what had been happening in there. Elijah had been at her daughter’s feet, washing them. Between his knees, filled with water and suds, was the irreplaceable silver bowl passed down to Roma from Baba Tatiana.
Roma, she says sternly, silently, no more, just swim.
ON CAMILLE TABOR’S THIRTEENTH birthday, when her breasts were just budding, her mother gave her a book written by a woman who had journeyed to the South Pacific to discover whether adolescence was a universally traumatic and stressful time, or whether the adolescent experience depended on one’s cultural upbringing. Camille, a voracious reader, especially liked stories set in faraway places featuring the kinds of people never seen in Palm Springs.
After she unwrapped the present, her mother said, “A little explanation. The book is a vivid account of Samoan adolescent life and was incredibly popular, although eventually Margaret Mead and her research methods came under harsh attack. She was smack in the middle of a scholarly-scientific wrangling that began in the mid-1920s and has yet to be conclusively determined, the nature-versus-nurture debate. To what extent are human personality and behavior the products of biological factors, like the genetics you’ve inherited from Daddy and his ancestors and from me and mine, or are products of cultural factors, like where you live, how you’re being raised, the school you attend, the music you listen to, the television shows you watch, the friends you have. You are now a teenager and it’s important you learn to distinguish between the two so you can make thoughtful decisions from your head, rather than automatic ones, perhaps from your heart, whose underpinnings are harder to understand.”
Her mother was a prominent child psychologist and often said to her children, “You can do anything you want if you have thought it through and are capable of articulating your reasoning. In other words, so long as you can show your work.”
What Camille had already determined was that she wanted a life that was anything but quotidian, ordinary, middling, mediocre, words she knew and never wanted used to describe the life she would have, the person she would become. At home, she wasn’t at all surrounded by the quotidian, but the fear was so deep, she was sure she’d been born with it. Who she would actually be and what she would actually do was all hazy in her head, until she devoured Coming of Age in Samoa by the redoubtable Margaret Mead.
She read that birthday book many times, but it was the first reading that set her on her path, when Camille knew she would become a social anthropologist, studying exotic tribes in exotic places, researching their rules of behavior, their interpersonal relations, their views on kinship and marriage, their motivations and ambitions, their language, customs, forms of currency, music, stories, and material creations, their taboos, ethos, moral codes, the nature of their self-governance, their notions and beliefs about the communal world in which they existed, the gods they prayed to, the visions that manifested in their dreams.
By the time she delivered her valedictory speech to her graduating class at Palm Springs High, she had stormed through all the ethnographies, memoirs, autobiographies, collected correspondence, and biographies by and about every female social anthropologist she could find. They became Camille’s personal heroines.
She entered the University of Washington, thrilled to be facing a lengthy and arduous education. She thought fortitude should be required to become an expert in the rarest field, so temporally and spatially expansive it touched on everything in the world.
At nineteen, light-years ahead of her fellow collegians who hadn’t any idea what interested them, she knew she intended to spend her life in unruly, woolly places beyond the pale, engaged in on-the-ground research, discovering, analyzing, reflecting, and publishing her own important ethnographies, adding to the understanding of humanity.
She was a natural, cruising through the intro and second-level anthropology courses, through biology, statistics, research methods, data analysis, and chose Polynesian as her first foreign language, because of Margaret Mead.
