A Drink Called Paradise by Terese Svoboda Page B

asked to dance. I either kept to the back or else I did it, with my face flushed and watching the back the way a ballerina would, to keep from falling into their precise swaying that pressed toward me again and again without touching. Touching is never the point. Everyone who is not an islander is a Methodist when it comes to this not-touching dance, we have no limbs that correspond to theirs, all we can do is touch and not sway that well.
    I try not to breathe, I try not to let any of the island into me. I just dance and forget that I am here by being so here. I say nothing to anyone, even when they shout Vagina Mouth and clap out my path.
    I am saying no to their beer that they make out of what? when Harry comes and says, Don’t be stupid. Hearing that so soon a second time makes me think I might be. If a boat comes this time, even they will miss it is what he says when it’s almost dark and doesn’t matter.
    I think of my son. This island I’m on is a planet drifting farther and farther away. Not drifting the way planets do on film but screeching along at a pace, that second per second they calculate that wrenches us away from the other stars and wandering planets. My son is standing on a street corner on another faraway planet—just like one of those classroom models—and he’s waiting for the traffic to part so he can run across and somehow join me, but the traffic is part of the orbiting too, it’s the ocean, and the street corner I’m on drifts farther and farther away.
    We are all soon slick with scented lagoon water and flower-crowned with stiff white fragrant ginger. We each take a seat in front of half a cold chicken and three pounds of pork and blood pudding and coconut pudding and bananas for garnish on banana leaves and a half coconut shell filled with sauce four weeks soured. Barclay and many others make speeches, long, formulaic speeches that I smile through, smile as if my life depended on it, which perhaps it does, they now being us to me, us with our Vagina Mouth talk, with our sickness and secrets, with all this air I breathe, the food we will eat together—yes, I will, I smell the food, even the dead pig’s dark blood in pudding makes my stomach fierce, I will eat and meet them, stomach to stomach, as if in dance, and when they speak so long and full of flattery, I decide they are going to ask me to do something for them.

But they ask nothing. Or nothing I understand.
    I dance and dance, and even Harry dances with me once. He is as stiff as wood, despite all the beer they ladle out for him with their oil cans. But I am Vagina Mouth, who cares what I do? They shout when I swivel, they roar when I bump him with my hip. Harry doesn’t care, Harry drinks enough beer to dance his stiffness wild with all the island women, from crone to toddler. The men egg him on, they shove their fists into the air when the drumming gets going, they thrust themselves forward at the torso, they yell in their language, Get it on, the way men’s language does.
    If I should not eat the food or drink the water, the beer must be worse—that is what beer is for. I get loaded, I wander away into the dark. The path I take turns past where coffee tins are planted with whatever’s growing right beside them, and beer bottles surround a chair in the center of that tin garden, so many beer bottles they could be a collection, or an offering. Behind this leans a house with a defeated roof, and the house is dark and doorless, and what wafts out in the heavy, humid darkness is the smell of suppuration, of scabs picked and reopened, and what sound accompanies it is as constant as a series of waves. It’s not the weepy, wet sound I hear from Temu that carries over the water and makes Ngarima rise but guttural and fresh like a hose tightening around someone, some peculiar sound that realizes itself, like constant pain, in the present.
    I am not curious. I don’t want to see who or