Free The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup by Susan Orlean Page B

grown up in a small town in Hawaii, surfing all day and night, spending half your time on sand, thinking in terms of point breaks and barrels and roundhouse cutbacks. Or maybe they don’t think about it at all. Maybe these girls are still young enough and in love enough with their lives that they have no special foreboding about their futures, no uneasy presentiment that the kind of life they are leading now might eventually have to end.
    MATT KINOSHITA LIVES in a fresh, sunny ranch at the top of a hill in Haiku. The house has a big living room with a fold-out couch and plenty of floor space. Often, one or two or ten surfer girls camp in his living room because they are in a competition that starts at seven the next morning, or because they are practicing intensively and it is too far to go back and forth from Hana, or because they want to plow through Matt’s stacks of surfing magazines and Matt’s library of surfing videos and Matt’s piles of water sports clothing catalogs. Many of the surfer girls I met didn’t live with their fathers, or in some cases didn’t even have relationships with their fathers, so sometimes, maybe, they stayed at Matt’s just because they were in the mood to be around a concerned older male. Matt was in his late twenties. As a surfer he was talented enough to compete on the world tour but had decided to skip it in favor of an actual life with his wife, Annie, and their baby son, Chaz. Now he was one of the best surfboard shapers on Maui, a coach, and head of a construction company with his dad. He sponsored a few grown-up surfers and still competed himself, but his preoccupation was with kids.
Surfing
magazine once asked him what he liked most about being a surfboard shaper, and he answered, “Always being around stoked groms!” He coached a stoked-grom boys’ team as well as a stoked-grom girls’ team. The girls’ team was an innovation. There had been no girls’ surfing team on Maui before Matt established his three years ago. There was no money in it for him—it actually cost him many thousands of dollars each year—but he loved to do it. He thought the girls were the greatest. The girls thought he was the greatest, too. In build, Matt looked a lot like the men in those old Hawaiian surfing prints—small, chesty, gravity-bound. He had perfect features and hair as shiny as an otter’s. When he listened to the girls he kept his head tilted, eyebrows slightly raised, jaw set in a grin. Not like a brother, exactly—more like the cutest, nicest teacher at school, who could say stern, urgent things without their stinging. When I pulled into the driveway with the girls, Matt was in the yard loading surfboards into a pickup. “Hey, dudes,” he called to Lilia and Theresa. “Where are your boards?”
    “Someone’s going to bring them tonight from Hana,” Theresa said. She jiggled her foot. “Matt, come on, let’s go surfing already.”
    “Hey, Lilia,” Matt said. He squeezed her shoulders. “How’re you doing, champ? Is your dad going to surf in the contest this weekend?”
    Lilia shrugged and looked up at him solemnly. “Come on, Matt,” she said. “Let’s go surfing already.”
    They went down to surf at Ho’okipa, to a section that is called Pavilles because it is across from the concrete picnic pavilions on the beach. Ho’okipa is not a lot like Hana. People with drinking problems like to hang out in the pavilions. Windsurfers abound. Cars park up to the edge of the sand. The landing pattern for the Kahului Airport is immediately overhead. The next break over, the beach is prettier; the water there is called Girlie Bowls, because the waves get cut down by the reef and are more manageable, presumably, for girlies. A few years ago, some of the Hana surfer girls met their idol Lisa Andersen when she was on Maui. She was very shy and hardly said a word to them, they told me, except to suggest they go surf Girlie Bowls. I thought it sounded mildly insulting, but they