HE HAD TO have it, he said. If he didn’t get it, there was no telling what might happen. ‘I’m on edge, babe,’ Ned had said. ‘I need a win bad.’
That was my mistake. Empathy. My heart’s too open. You get hurt when your heart’s too open. Like, I see people waiting to merge until the last possible moment on the freeway, and think, How would you feel if someone did that to you, huh? I think, Their hearts are closed; they’ve got no room for others. But still, there’s got to be a line—some point where you think of yourself. Where you see yourself repeatedly getting taken advantage of and say, ‘Wait a minute, I’m a person too. Doesn’t what I think matter? What about Edna? What about me?’
In that way, I know I’m to blame too. It isn’t all Ned. There was a moment near the beginning when he’d asked me, ‘Is it too much? What do you think? Now, don’t sugar coat it, babe. I can take it’—and I didn’t speak my mind. I didn’t do it because my heart’s too open, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Then later it felt, considering how happy he was—like he’d never had a thing he really identified with before but now did—that putting my foot down then might seem overly cruel. But even if it appeared that way, I should have, because it was turning into more than a hobby. His identity started getting wrapped up in it, where it was tough to tell where Ned ended and it began.
My out, I realise now, the one that risked him the least embarrassment and pain, was in the beginning. I had my shot but didn’t take it; didn’t even draw. Or maybe a month or two in, that could have maybe been okay too. I probably still could have put my foot down then and told him, ‘Ned, honey, it’s too much.’
Now it feels like if he were to ask me again if it’s too much, if I were to be completely honest, I’d have to say, ‘Honey, any more and we won’t be here. Any more and too much will be all there is, and it’ll feel like before was some past life and we’ve since reincarnated, only to find ourselves right back in the same too-much cycle.’
Maybe a few months in, that was my last best opportunity to cause him the least amount of pain, and I blew it because of my too-open heart.
It all began, Ned’s fascination with the kitsch of kitsch that is Tiki, in the fallout after the Nerds for Less disaster. It turned out that people, Vergil (the owner) had said, didn’t want to pay less for nerds. Bargain-bin nerds, according to potential customers—who Vergil had not bothered to consult before committing to the name, business cards, and office space—were not the nerds for them.
You don’t skimp on a nerd when you’re in the throes of a computer crisis. That was the lesson Vergil told Ned he’d learned the hard way. And even though Nerds for Less’s prices were essentially the same as everybody else’s who offered computer support to non-nerds, the damage had been done through poor branding. They’d shutter, come back as Nerds for More, but when they reopened they would do so Ned-less, as in, there’s the door, nerd, and don’t let it hit your pocket protector on the way out.
‘Less in this case,’ Vergil had told Ned, ‘is kind of more. No pun intended.’
That’s the way it goes sometimes. You get laid off, and it had happened before. Ned had had other technical support jobs that had ended for one reason or another, but he’d always gotten off the mat. This time was different, though. Something broke this time. But letting it take you down the dark path of Tiki? Well, I didn’t know it was a dark path in the beginning. I thought it was just a bit of escapism, something to occupy his time while he rebounded, like model trains. I learned, though. Came to discover it had levels. But every time I think I see a hint of China below, I learn it’s just a mirage. That there are still depths to plummet.
Which is why I’m at this garage sale evaluating vintage Chinese lanterns. I know what Ned’ll say already. He’ll say, ‘China’s not Tiki, babe.’ But anything can be modified, right? You can tweak a thing and make it something else. This is something that can be done. And doing so will not involve paying Polynesian Eddie an outrageous sum for something ‘authentically’ Tiki.
I can’t stand Polynesian Eddie, who’s not even Polynesian. He’s as white as the rest of these Tiki people, who, if they’ve even heard of cultural appropriation, would only smile and laugh, saying, ‘Oh, lighten up. We’re just having fun.’
I buy the dusty set of nine not because we need more stuff but because I feel bad after our last face-to-face. The tired-looking woman standing on her lawn (when she’s not sitting in the caramel-coloured Easy-Boy she’s also trying to unload) tells me there used to be a tenth, but someone stole it earlier in the day. She apologises for having watched me like I have sticky fingers, and I tell her I’m sorry too, that she had to go through that.
‘You open your home to strangers,’ I say, ‘and somebody takes advantage.’
‘Tell me about it,’ the woman says, shaking her head as she wraps the Chinese lanterns in brown paper.
I try to prepare myself for what I’ll find when I get home. I didn’t really want to visit my mother, not when Ned was acting strangely, kind of manically, but what other choice did I have? When you have a hip replaced, you’re practically a baby. You need someone there to help, and some things you need help with you’d prefer strangers didn’t do.
I checked in with Ned each night while I was in Tucson, asking him how he was getting by, gently probing to see if he’d bought anything since our last conversation before I left, where I asked him to consider the mortgage, and that meant maybe holding off on buying anymore Tiki, just for a little while. He’d cried when I told him that, ‘cause sort of test-running putting my foot down then was too late in the game. It reminded me of how he’d fallen apart after Nerds for Less. These days he’s either up-up-up, or down-down-down.
I’ve tried broaching the idea of seeing the doctor, him getting a checkup, talking to someone. That being up-up-up one minute and crying the next might not be, you know, exactly normal. But when he’s up-up-up, he thinks he’s got the world on a string, and when he’s down-down-down he’s so sensitive you could knock him over with a feather. But while I did my daughterly duty in Tucson, the phone calls with Ned were normal. He said he was beginning to understand how I felt about Tiki, and I cautiously thought, Maybe he’s coming out of it. Who the hell knows how the brain works? Sometimes you go through a phase and then it ends. Because on the phone in Tucson, separated by about a thousand miles, he sounded like the Ned I’d fallen in love with and not like the hepped-up-on-stimulants Ned or the down-in-the-dumps Ned that I’d come to expect.
Yeah, maybe he’s turning a corner. It could be he’ll see these Chinese lanterns and say, ‘You know what, babe, thanks but no thanks. We’ve got enough.’ Then again, he might see them not as a gesture that says, I’m doing something nice for you. Maybe he’ll see them as mocking him after I asked him to hold off on buying more Tiki stuff. ‘Oh,’ he might say, ‘I see how it is. I can’t, but you can. Got it.’
When I park in the driveway, everything looks in order. There’s still the wooden sign, which I didn’t exactly expect him to take down. There’s nothing wrong with a little dose of whimsy, after all. He’d gotten a wood burner engraver thingy months back and burned The Island on a fancy piece of wood and bolted it to the backyard fence’s gate.
I go inside the house but leave the lanterns in the car, which I’ll probably end up tossing, just taking in my suitcase and purse.
Stepping into the living room, I hear the familiar sounds of exotic music wafting through, Martin Denny and his ensemble, who occasionally intersperse their soft jazz with animal noises, as if they’ve stopped to give a concert mid-safari. Seeing it all—all the stuff, the bamboo pieces, the intricate mugs on the shelves, the shelves themselves which were mounted solely to display said mugs, the ‘theming,’ as Ned and Polynesian Eddie call it—I can only see dollar signs attached to obscene figures that require a degree in mathematics to calculate.
It’s worse than I thought. He hasn’t done anything new to the living room since I left, except for placing the leopard-skin rug by the fireplace that had previously been in the attic (and will be returning there soon). But seeing it all after a two-week hiatus knocks the wind out of me. I get dizzy. I have to sit down. Focus on my breathing, because for a moment there my lungs give up the ghost. When I feel my pulse, my heart is racing like I’m running for my life. Like that stupid leopard knows I plan to exile it back to the attic and is rushing to eat me before I can.
Yes, there are levels. I think I’m on one only to find I’m really on another. But it’s never a higher, lighter level. I never say, ‘Oh, it’s not as bad as I thought.’ No, it’s always worse, like a man getting kneed in the testicles and thinking, At least that’s as bad as it gets, only to find some other guy running up on him to knee him in the nuts with a gymnastic double-knee attack. Yes, always deeper. Basements with trap doors that lead to dungeons, but I’m not shackled to a wall so I just keep tumbling through trap doors to deeper and deeper sub-dungeons. Ned hasn’t done anything new, but what’s been done is staggering—and a fire hazard. Two weeks apart has given me perspective. It’s time to drop the hammer. A temporary embargo on stuff was a cute vanilla phase one, but now it’s time for a crazy Ben and Jerry’s flavour phase two.
After a round of deep breaths to calm myself, which makes me soften my initial idea to burn the house down and collect the insurance money, I formulate a plan. If Ned doesn’t buy anything more, anything new, if he says we’re good with our Tiki collection as is, as it stands today, then he can keep fifty percent. And if he throws a tantrum like a toddler, I’ll tell him fifty percent is still more than enough to make our house feel like we’re living in Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room. Thank God we don’t have children. We’d have no way of sending them to college. All they could hope for when we die is Tiki. I’m ready now, I tell myself, to proceed to phase two. My heart’s not so open, but that’s okay. It can open later. A heart can always open later.
I hear voices from the backyard, rising just over the exotica. I don’t want to dress Ned down in front of others. I don’t want to dress him down at all. Just get him back to baseline, get my husband back, the man I married who liked watching a good ballgame, playing the occasional game of tennis, fishing. That’s what I’ll suggest. Why not get back to watching a game after work with a cold one? Why not try that for a while instead of immediately popping on a Hawaiian shirt after work and spending hours customising the backyard Tiki bar, tweaking the lighting, always darker, while drinking some expensive rum cocktail with crazy ingredients like Falernum? That’s what I’ll do, but I’ll wait till we’re alone.
The patio door is open, so I walk out, and it’s like one of those scenes from a movie where you hear a record make some squeaky sound as it suddenly stops and everybody freezes, staring at the person who’s just arrived. I smile, but feel my cheeks and lips twitching. Everybody’s staring like I’m not the homeowner but some vagrant who happened to wander in. I try to keep it together, noticing the usual suspects.
There’s Maddie, wearing leis around her neck over her obligatory Hawaiian shirt—all these Tiki people wear them like it’s dress code. Then there’s Derrick and Stacy, the couple with the YouTube channel where they visit people’s home Tiki bars. Will, who carves Tiki heads out of tree stumps and sells them, Ned, looking hangdog behind the bar, a blue-coloured cocktail in front of him with a pink umbrella, mint, and a wedge of grapefruit. And the big kahuna himself, Polynesian Eddie, with his slicked-back fifties greaser haircut and Don the Beachcomber tattoo on his forearm, the ringleader of the Woodland, California, Tiki scene. Except for Ned, they’re all seated in wood-carved chairs that Will made with Tiki heads on them, gathered around the lit firepit, with two chairs vacant.
‘Hi, Edna!’ Polynesian Eddie says, waving his big friendly hand broadly in the air. The others seated echo in unison: ‘Hi, Edna!’
‘Hello,’ I say with a nod and proceed to the bar, ducking under the uneven bamboo, palm fronds, and fake vines that hang down from the gazebo’s lattice roof for ‘ambiance.’ Ned looks at me with a warm smile.
‘Welcome home,’ he says, then extends his neck over the bar counter to kiss me.
‘Hi, Ned,’ I reply, and quietly ask, ‘You having a little party?’ I try to say it nicely, but my heart’s not open enough for nice. Just then, I sounded like a teacher asking for a kid’s homework—one who never has their homework but I ironically ask in front of the whole class to make the kid feel small. I didn’t mean to. Maybe I did.
‘Oh,’ Ned says, blushing, bringing a palm up to the back of his neck and rubbing it reflexively, avoiding eye contact. ‘Uh, it’s just, you know, a—’
Someone clears their throat, and Ned turns and nods, his face sombre. My eyes follow. The group around the bonfire are turned my direction, then they all look away and stare at the fire except for Polynesian Eddie. He meets my gaze and grins like a used car salesman, but I don’t need a car and wouldn’t buy one from that slimy phony if I did.
‘Edna,’ he says, ‘Why don’t you take a seat?’
‘I’ll pass,’ I say, and turn back to Ned.
Ned gives me a pleading look and whispers, ‘Please, babe. Please.’
Is this what it’s come to? My husband snapping to attention for some charlatan Polynesian and his Tiki troop? I want to take some of Ned’s ice that he picked up from a gas station and rub it in his face. Burst some capillaries, get him to cry. Get him to snap out of it so I can have my husband back and banish this snivelling little thing before me to the attic with the leopard-skin rug. But I remember my mother, how she also looked helpless out in Tucson, as I helped her around the house, helped her change her clothes and go to the bathroom. Although it would feel cathartic to slap him and say, Snap out of it, I just can’t. Instead, I press my lips together tight, shut my eyes—because I can do it just as long as I don’t have to see his face—and nod.
I sit down with my cocktail that’s served in a hippopotamus-shaped Tiki mug, which Polynesian Eddie insisted Ned make me and which took fifteen excruciating minutes just to garnish.
Everyone turns to Polynesian Eddie like their next breath might rely on his continued goodwill toward them, and so I do too. He begins: ‘Edna, you know we love you, right? Don’t we all love Edna?’
‘We love you, Edna,’ the group says as one, including Ned.
‘Okay,’ I say, and take a sip from the drink because it’s there and I’m uncomfortable. It’s good, but not fifteen minutes good. I want these people out of my house. Out of my life. If Eddie starts in with a round of Kumbaya, My Lord, or some version that substitutes in a fake Tiki god, I’m going to remove the skewer from the pineapple in my drink and stab him with it.
‘This is a safe space, Edna,’ Eddie continues. ‘Tiki is family.’
‘Family,’ the others say.
‘Sound like Manson,’ I mutter under my breath, but the close proximity allows the others to hear, setting off a chain reaction of thrashing and writhing in their Tiki chairs. There are clenched hands, frantic face rubbing, animal distress noises, the loss of flip-flops from feet.
Eddie raises his palms to his chest and holds them there horizontally, takes in a deep breath, then slowly exhales as he lowers his hands. The others follow suit, calming themselves, sighing collectively, as I watch, gritting my teeth.
‘You see?’ Ned says, jumpily getting to his feet, pointing a shaking finger at me. ‘This is what I have to deal with, you guys.’
‘Ned!’ I say, scolding, but he turns from me to Polynesian Eddie, who moves his palm in a calming manner, and Ned sits back down.
‘Now, there is no judgement here,’ Eddie says, looking at the others, then at me. ‘Why don’t you tell us how you feel, Edna, hmm?’
Well, I down that stupid Tiki drink in one go and set it down beside my chair. ‘You want to know what I think?’ I ask. ‘What I really think?’
Ned looks shaken to the core, but Polynesian Eddie is all smiles as he nods.
‘All right, fine,’ I say. ‘I think you’re all taking advantage of my husband.’
Gasps. Hand-wringing. Teeth gnashing. Followed by Polynesian Eddie’s calming hand gesture.
‘You’ve all taken him and me to the cleaners. Eddie with—’
‘Polynesian Eddie,’ the others, save Eddie, correct.
‘—with the vintage Tiki this and that and the commission fees. Derrick and Stacy filming our house for their YouTube channel and not sharing any of the money, if there is any.’
‘I don’t feel that way!’ Ned says. ‘We’re getting great exposure.’
Eddie’s big calming hands again.
‘Maddie, who sells Ned her special Tiki Hawaiian shirts. Will, dumping everything he carves on Ned for a pretty penny. You just see dollar signs when you look at my husband, don’t you? Who do you take us for, huh? Why don’t you pick on somebody else for a change and leave us alone?’
Everyone is silent. The others avoid the fire in my eyes for the one in the firepit. Finally, Eddie says, ‘Perhaps it’s time.’
‘You think she’s ready?’ Maddie asks.
‘Were any of us truly ready?’ Eddie says, and Maddie looks like, if she had a whip, she’d flog herself with it.
‘Ready for what?’ I say. With this crew, I don’t know what to expect, just that there’s probably dollar signs attached. And what was in that drink? I make to stand, stretch my legs a little, get the blood flowing, but I get all wobbly and sit again. I feel like I’m on a boat and the water is choppy.
‘What’d you give me, Ned?’ I say.
‘Just a Painkiller,’ Ned says. ‘Well, a Painkiller with a special ingredient.’
‘I feel like my soul’s leaving my body,’ I say in slow motion. ‘Am I looking down from above?’ I am. I’m floating up above. ‘I look pretty tiny from up here.’
‘That was quick,’ Derrick says.
The others move their heads as I do a little shimmy, a little soft-shoe up overhead. I’m feeling pretty good all of a sudden, I got to admit. These people, these Tiki people, aren’t so bad up here. Up here they look kind of like ants. Me too. We look like ants and that fire looks like an ant hill where something went wrong, hence the fire. But we don’t look too upset about our home being on fire. We look like we’re taking it pretty well.
‘Go toward the jungle,’ one of the ants says.
Jungle? I suppose there is some jungle over there, through that open door that’s floating up here in the sky as I do my thing. If there was a dance contest up here, I’d win that thing, no doubt about it. I keep doing my thing through the door and into the jungle and don’t even mind the heat and humidity because I see monkeys and a waterfall and start thinking about Jurassic Park because there’s a big dinosaur that’s got horns and stuff, lumbering around down below.
THIS WAY.
Yowzers! I stop doing my thing because whoever said that made me ram into a tree after he said it like I was hit by a hurricane. It didn’t hurt, but it—oh, I see it now. It’s one of them Tiki things.
I TIKI GOD.
‘Not big on articles,’ I say. ‘That tracks. You up for a dance-off?’
OPEN HEART. OPEN HEART TO TIKI.
‘I’m not much of a kitschy kind of gal,’ I say, recovering from the hurricane, floating higher, up above the canopy, up to where the big Tiki is. It’s a big head—broad nose with a bone sticking through it. Looks kind of fake, to be honest. Like some Hollywood creation of a fake island god’s head that might get an art director cancelled.
NO FAKE, the big Tiki says, and I have to admit—when it says it right in front of me, it looks real enough.
‘No fooling,’ I say, still in a dancey sort of way, like who knows where the evening will take me, feeling mellow and loose. ‘You like floating up here?’
WHY HEART CLOSED TO TIKI?
‘Costs a lot of money,’ I say. ‘You got money? Where would you keep it if you had it? You just a head, or what?’
MONEY NECESSARY. I OPEN HEART.
The Tiki god starts vibrating, getting all blurry, then settles as it shoots friggin’ rainbow laser beams out of its big eyes—its head’s about the size of a two-storey building—and it’s like I’m not there anymore. I see me, though, sitting a mile below in a chair by Ned, me up here covered in rainbow, and me entering the big Tiki’s mouth.
When I wake up on the couch, I have one mother of a headache. I rub my head, groan, and look for Ned. I must have really overdone it. Ned comes in with a glass of water and hands it to me.
‘How you feeling?’ he says.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘I’ve been better.’
‘I’ve got a surprise,’ Ned says, his eyes and smile growing.
That really picks me up. I feel good about this surprise, whatever it is. Just as long as it’s Tiki. If it’s Tiki, and I mean authentic Tiki, not this knockoff stuff, then I feel like I could just about burst.
‘Is it... Tiki?’ I ask, praying he won’t let me down.
Ned, suddenly teary-eyed, holds up a finger to tell me to hold on a sec and rushes out of the living room. I sit up and wait like a little girl on Christmas morning—which is to say, not well. I start itching and scratching. I need something. What do I—I need some Tiki!
When Ned comes back, wheeling a big dusty crate in on a hand truck, I jump and clap and hop and ask him what it is.
‘Why won’t you tell me?’ I say. ‘Why leave me in agony like this?’
Thankfully, he puts me out of my misery after he gets to work with the crowbar, prying the box open. Inside, it’s like birthday and Christmas and any other time I’ve received a gift in my life all rolled into one—except better. My very own giant carved Tiki figure. Definitely authentic. Definitely vintage.
I’m glad the others are here. Polynesian Eddie, Derrick, all of them. Tiki is family, after all. One big happy family.
My heart is open and full.
