by Chad Norton
When I was five the hula girl watched me at the piano.
My brothers and I pumped the pedals with our hands since our feet merely dangled from the height of the bench. The holey paper scrolled over the tiny gaps in the metal bar that made the notes ring out and the black and white keys play with invisible fingers. “Maple Leaf Rag” was my grandfather’s favorite but my brothers and I liked “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” better. And the hula girl, well, she seemed to like all the songs we played.
My very first turn on the bench was when I met her. As Chris and Anthony worked below me to crank the music up to tempo, I placed my hands lightly over the keys waiting to pantomime a performance and gawked at the music room’s wonderland of clutter. Crammed in the small space were bookshelves over-stocked with dusty collections from Time-Life on automobiles, airplanes and both World Wars. There were autobiographies of past presidents, coffee table heavyweights called Hollywood’s Golden Years, The Space Race and Colonial America and countless fictional examples of a lifetime of literary pack-ratting. An ornately stitched sombrero hung on one of the pine-paneled walls next to African masks of darker wood and straw and just above a guitar with a massive belly.
Behind me, two fat armchairs faded and flattened from use sat on a golden-fringed Oriental rug near one of the room’s two paned windows and before me towered the immovable upright piano with the picture of the hula girl on top, looking out from behind the glass inside her delicate, bamboo frame.
She gazed down from her perch in the hazy, soft light of a tall floor lamp’s cream-colored shade. And though dusty and sometimes battered trinkets surrounded her – Mexican rattles, a carved boat with a crooked, canvas sail, antique bottles and tarnished frames with stained photos of people only my grandfather could recognize – the hula girl seemed shiny and perfect as if she could be no other way.
She was the most beautiful thing my young eyes had ever seen. And I watched with amazement as she smiled back at me to say that she liked me, too.
I grew taller and older between visits to see my grandfather and the hula girl. During those holidays, family reunions and summer vacations, every change in me saw little change in her. Year after year, she waited for me in the same place above the piano and tirelessly listened to my skillful renditions of “Mack the Knife,” “Basin Street Blues” and “The Girl From Ipanema” before applauding me with silence. Each rendezvous was a predictable extension of the last, an on-going, secret conversation where ghost-tickled ivories and chords from A to G formed the only vocabulary we needed to know. And it wasn’t until July 4th weekend the summer I turned twelve that any of that really changed.
The six-hour drive to my grandfather’s that morning was fueled with donuts and orange juice that sent my mind racing with the weekend’s possibilities: there’d be fishing for my father and Chris, hiking for my mother, swimming for Anthony, fireworks for everyone and the hula girl, I told myself, especially for me. My brothers and I were so excited when we finally arrived that we ran up the steps in our t-shirts and surf shorts and burst through my grandfather’s front door before my father had killed the station wagon’s engine.
Then we stopped cold, knees and elbows locked vertically in a temporary rigor mortis of shock. Things inside the house were different. Nothing old was where it used to be and new items had been added. Furniture had been moved. Pictures had been rearranged and straightened. Dust bunnies had disappeared and the traditionally soupy, particle-filled air appeared clearly breathable. Bright flower arrangements rose from doilies and frilly curtains hung in place of much denser ones that had worked fine for fifty years. The smell of brownies tempted our noses.
We weren’t certain what had happened, but a big clue loomed in front of us.
“Hello boys!” said a tangerine-haired lady with an apron wrapped around her wide waist. “I’m Beatrice, your new grandma. Grandma Beatrice.”
My skinny grandfather popped up from behind his new wife.
“Don’t just stand there catching flies,” he said. “Give your grandmother a hug.”
In a flash we were pressed into the brownie batter-crusted apron by arms the size of tree trunks and I wondered exactly who the woman was suffocating us in greeting. My grandfather had been divorced from my real grandmother, Helen, since before I was born. She had not-so-naturally red hair too and lived down in Florida where visits to her house always included souvenir sunburns and trips to Disney World. We had seen my grandfather with lots of orange and red-haired lady friends, some relationships lasted a year or more, but to find him married to someone we’d never even met took us all by surprise.
When my parents came into the house a moment later and learned the news, my father looked more confused than anyone. He removed his sunglasses, dropped the cooler he was carrying and just stood there, blinking under a single, contorted eyebrow. But my mother was as graceful and unflappable as ever. She stepped forward and rescued us from the grip that had emptied our lungs and congratulated the newlyweds with considerably lighter hugs.
“Well, isn’t this a wonderful surprise,” she sang just before her simple shirt and crisp khakis were momentarily enveloped within the yardage of Grandma Beatrice’s bold, floral jump suit. “I wish we’d known.” My mother turned to my grandfather and widened her eyes. “We could have at least brought you a wedding gift.”
“Nonsense. Your visit is gift enough,” my grandfather sparkled. Then he picked up the cooler my father had dropped, tilted his head and addressed his son.
“Hello Richie.”
My father studied his father’s face as if he were looking at an alien.
“Don’t you have anything to say to the happy couple?” my grandfather asked.
Grandma Beatrice squeezed her husband’s shoulder and smiled and bit her lip at the same time. That was when I spied a familiar white flower poking through stray, color-enhanced strands over one of her ears. The wide, flat petals were stiff and creased, not natural enough to be real, and they captured my father’s attention. He seemed to fixate on them, momentarily hypnotized until a fog cleared from the landscape of his thoughts and he turned to lock eyes with my grandfather.
“So what was it? A shotgun wedding?”
He grinned as he said it but I didn’t think that my father was joking. And as we all stood there waiting for someone to say something further, my eyes wandered over the home I used to know by heart for signs of the familiar.
The rugs were the same, although more colorful from cleaning, and the cobwebs that normally rounded out the corners of the ceiling had been removed, opening up the square footage. Walls had been painted or scrubbed, floors had been swept and waxed, windows had been Windexed. But there was something else, something so obvious I didn’t see it until it came into focus on vacant tables, uncrowded walls and far-too-spacious countertops that peeked through the kitchen doorway – and it made me feel empty inside.
All of the knick-knacks, the salvaged, magical bric-a-brac that served no real purpose and held no real value except within my grandfather’s sepia-toned memories and the imaginative minds of his grandchildren, had vanished.
My stomach pushed its way into my throat and forced my heartbeat into my ears.
“The hula girl!” I announced it to myself and everyone else as I broke into a run and sped down the hall toward the music room.
The first things I noticed were the armchairs by the window. Where they had once sagged comfortably in the midday sun, they now puffed proudly with firm stuffing, vibrant new upholstery and matching covers over their namesake extremities. The pine walls glistened with fresh oil where the African masks and sombrero no longer hung and I hoped the pregnant guitar was being strummed wherever it had gone. The bookshelves held most of the novels and collections I remembered, but in a sanitized, rank and file fashion that would have impressed a 5-star general. And a hesitant turn of my head revealed the renovations that had taken place behind me. A halogen floor lamp had replaced the comforting glow of its predecessor with a chilly glare, the white light bounced off the sheen of the room’s revitalized, knotty paneling and ricocheted from the hard, polished surface that encased the inanimate keyboard.
There was only one place left to look.
The beating in my ears shifted to a rabbity overdrive as I crossed my fingers and toes, proffered last-ditch deals with God and forced my eyes to the top of the piano.
The rattles, the sailboat, the bottles and the photos had disappeared, tossed into some box, bag or trashcan and forwarded to a destination that couldn’t possibly compare to the glory days of their previous residence with its eclectic assortment of roommates. Each one of them would surely miss the hula girl – but I wouldn’t have to. For there she stood, fantastically alone, exalted in halogen light that had finally found its purpose. She dazzled. She soothed. She seemed to twist and twirl. And as I fingered my peach fuzz whiskers and daydreamed her perfect performance, I realized that she was thrilling me in ways she never had before.
The delicately drawn red hair that tumbled past her shoulders thrilled me. The lure of her parted red lips thrilled me. The powdery glow of her skin, the soft hourglass of her torso and the masterful brushstrokes that tapered her arms and legs to fingers and toes where painted nails marked the end of the line, all thrilled me. She wore a single, white hibiscus over one ear and a lei of the fat, tropical flowers draped her otherwise naked chest. Her blue eyes seduced though her body was frozen in mid-dance. One arm swirled upward behind her head and the other floated on air before her. The pale, wheat-colored grass of her skirt fell away from her hips in flowing strips that parted high over her thighs in a suggestively illustrated breeze.
“Some things you can never let go. No matter how hard you try.”
The voice came from my grandfather who leaned against the open doorframe at the entrance to the room. His sly lips were stretched taut into a one-dimpled grin as he uncrossed his folded arms, righted himself and walked over to stand beside me. With his hand on my shoulder, we stared into the bamboo frame together.
March is just one month of twelve
Spring’s chilly and breezy start
But goose bumps have no business here
This hula girl will warm your heart
He recited the verse that shared space with the hula girl. The words were titled “MARCH” by the bolder letters printed above them and thirty-one days were counted off in curvy numbers within a rounded, yellow calendar below. The artist had printed his name with fine script in the lower left-hand corner. The “V” of Varga had a flourish to it and the simple, circled “Esq.” traced the image’s roots back to Esquire magazine.
“She’s been with me since 1945. Since the war.”
“Oh.” I shifted weight to my other sneakered-foot. “That’s a long time.”
“That it is,” my grandfather agreed.
Neither one of us said anything else for a minute or two as we looked up at the hula girl and imagined her bursting free from her two-dimensional surroundings to dance for us in our heads. Then my grandfather lifted her off the piano and lowered the frame in front of us. He used a finger to play with her untamed cascade of red hair before moving on to caress her cheek.
“She’s pretty special, isn’t she?” he said.
“Mm-hmm.” My mouth was dry as I followed his finger down the length of her long, exposed leg.
“A man could spend his whole life searching for a girl like this... his whole life.” My grandfather half-chuckled to himself after he said it and then sighed with most of a smile as he placed the hula girl in my hands.
“Well, they don’t make ‘em like her,” he said. “I can tell you that.”
I put my finger on the hula girl’s leg where my grandfather had had his and slowly worked my way up to the flowers that bloomed across her chest.
“Just remember, she’s not real.” He scrunched his fingers in my hair and held the top of my head. “Alright?”
“Alright,” I promised, sincere but not convinced.
My grandfather paused in the doorway as he headed out of the room and spoke to me without turning around.
“You know, Michael, I met your Grandma Beatrice in Hawaii. Years ago.”
I glanced up from where my finger petted the thin glass that separated me from the hula girl’s grass skirt.
“Yeah?” I said.
The sounds of warped vowels and consonants came to us in waves from another part of the house. An odd, lilting laugh separated itself from the broken words and danced on the tide of echoes.
“Yeah,” my grandfather said. “You should have seen her.”