Free The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup by Susan Orlean Page A

Like Theresa, she was home-schooled, so she could surf all the time. So far Lilia was sponsored by a surf shop and by Matt Kinoshita’s Kazuma Surfboards. She has a twin brother who was also a crafty surfer, but a year ago the two of them came upon their grandfather after he suffered a fatal tractor accident, and the boy hadn’t competed since. Their family owned a large and prosperous organic fruit farm in Hana. I once asked Lilia if it was fun to live on a farm. “No,” she said abruptly. “Too much fruit.”
    We took a back road from Hana to Haiku, as if the main road wasn’t bad enough. The road edged around the back of the volcano, through sere yellow hills. The girls talked about surfing and about one surfer girl’s mom, whom they described as a full bitch, and a surfer’s dad, who according to Theresa “was a freak and a half because he took too much acid and he tweaked.” I wondered if they had any other hobbies besides surfing. Lilia said she used to study hula.
    “Is it fun?”
    “Not if you have a witch for a teacher, like I did,” she said. “Just
screaming
and
yelling
at us all the time. I’ll never do hula again. Surfing’s cooler, anyway.”
    “You’re the man, Lilia,” Theresa said tartly. “Hey, how close are we to Grandma’s Coffee Shop? I’m starving.” Surfers are always starving. They had eaten breakfast before they surfed; it was now only an hour or two later, and they were hungry again. They favor breakfast cereal, teriyaki chicken, French fries, rice, ice cream, candy, and a Hawaiian specialty called Spam Masubi, which is a rice ball topped with a hunk of Spam and seaweed. If they suffered from the typical teenage girl obsession with their weight, they didn’t talk about it and they didn’t act like it. They were so active that whatever they ate probably melted away.
    “We love staying at Matt’s,” Lilia said, “because he always takes us to Taco Bell.” We came around the side of a long hill and stopped at Grandma’s. Lilia ordered a garden burger and Theresa had an “I’m Hungry” sandwich with turkey, ham, and avocado. It was 10:30 A.M. As she was eating, Lilia said, “You know, the Olympics are going to have surfing, either in the year 2000 or 2004, for sure.”
    “I’m so on that, dude,” Theresa said. “If I can do well in the nationals this year, then . . .” She swallowed the last of her sandwich. She told me that eventually she wanted to become an ambulance driver, and I could picture her doing it, riding on dry land the same waves of adrenaline that she rides now. I spent a lot of time trying to picture where these girls might be in ten years. Hardly any are likely to make it as pro surfers—even though women have made a place for themselves in pro surfing, the number who really make it is still small, and even though the Hana girls rule Maui surfing, the island’s soft-shell waves and easygoing competitions have produced very few world-class surfers in recent years. It doesn’t seem to matter to them. At various cultural moments, surfing has appeared as the embodiment of everything cool and wild and free; this is one of those moments. To be a girl surfer is even cooler, wilder, and more modern than being a guy surfer: Surfing has always been such a male sport that for a man to do it doesn’t defy any perceived ideas; to be a girl surfer is to be all that surfing represents,
plus
the extra charge of being a girl in a tough guy’s domain. To be a surfer girl in a cool place like Hawaii is perhaps the apogee of all that is cool and wild and modern and sexy and defiant. The Hana girls, therefore, exist at that highest point—the point where being brave, tan, capable, and independent, and having a real reason to wear all those surf-inspired clothes that other girls wear for fashion, is what matters completely. It is, though, just a moment. It must be hard to imagine an ordinary future and something other than a lunar calendar to consider if you’ve