Materena hangs the dress back on the rack.
Next shop.
Next dress . . . and Materena is so excited. She can’t believe her luck today! She just loves the red dots on that dress, they really give it an air of gaiety.
Again, Auntie Rita steps in. “Cousin, the fabric . . .” But there’s only so much Rita can say about fabric and she’s running out of ideas. It’s Leilani’s turn now to tell Materena what’s wrong with the dress she’s just taken off the rack.
“I don’t like that dress,” Leilani says.
“What don’t you like?” Materena asks.
“Everything, Mamie,” Leilani says, trying to keep her sweet voice. “The shape, the size, the color.”
“What’s wrong with the color? Yellow is a beautiful color, what’s wrong with yellow?”
“Mamie . . .”
“Oh,” Materena says as she puts the dress back on the rack. “You’re not going to wear brown for the rest of your life!”
Next shop.
Materena doesn’t want to go into the next shop. She doesn’t like the shopkeeper, who always looks at you like you’re going to steal something.
Next shop.
No, clothes in that shop cost the eyes of the head.
Next shop.
No, that shop looks too high-class.
“Come on, let’s go in,” Rita says.
“
Ah non,
cousin,” Materena says. “That shop is for rich people.”
“Well, I’m going to look inside,” Rita announces. “You can wait outside.”
Rita and Leilani walk in while Materena stands outside. Every time Leilani waves her mother to come in, Materena waves her away.
Here’s Leilani taking a lacy black dress off the rack. Facing her mother, she puts the lacy black dress in front of her and shakes her shoulders. Materena widens her eyes, meaning: Stop it, hurry up and put that dress back on the rack before the shopkeeper sees you!
Grinning, Leilani puts the dress back on the rack. Then she takes another one. This time it’s a very long white dress with frills, which again Leilani puts in front of her, but this time she bows before her mother with her eyes closed.
But what’s this? Materena asks herself. It’s to try to get me into that shop? As Leilani puts the frilly dress back on the rack, Materena gets her purse from inside her pandanus bag, opens her purse (still in the pandanus bag) . . . Okay, there’s five thousand-franc bills, one five-hundred-franc bill . . . lots of coins . . . total (approximate) is seven thousand francs.
Here’s Rita at the door with her handbag casually resting over her shoulder. “And so?” she calls out. “You’re coming in or not? You need an invitation?”
Materena looks down at her thongs, cursing herself for not wearing her shoes today. Her feet were hurting so much this morning. Well anyway, her thongs are clean, she scrubbed them last night. We’re going to eat breadfruit today, tomorrow, and the day after, Materena tells herself as she walks into the shop, trying to muster all her dignity.
Ah, at least the music here is soft and relaxing. Here’s Leilani holding a folded blue dress with thin straps, asking her mother if she can try it on.
“Why not?” Materena says, looking at the well-dressed women in the shop from the corner of her eyes. “But let me feel the fabric first.”
Materena discreetly checks out the price tag as she feels the fabric. Oh, what a relief! The price is quite reasonable. There must be something wrong with it.
Materena asks Rita to feel the fabric.
“Top quality,” Rita declares.
All right, then. Leilani hurries into the changing room, followed by her mother. She pulls the curtains closed and begins to undress. After a while Materena pokes her head in.
“Mamie! A bit of privacy here!”
“Oh,” Materena whispers, half-cranky, half-laughing as she pulls the curtains closed. “Who do you think gave birth to you, you silly coconut.”
Half a minute later and Materena is beginning to feel impatient. It doesn’t take a century to slip into a dress, and plus, another girl accompanied by her mother is waiting to get into the dressing room. How come this shop has only one dressing room available? Materena asks herself. But there are some stupid people involved in commerce.
“So?” Materena discreetly calls out from behind the curtains.
“This is the dress I want, Mamie!” Leilani calls back.
“Can I look?”
Materena is just thinking of walking into the dressing room when Leilani pulls the curtains open in one theatrical movement, then rolls her derriere, one hand on her hip, before marching out of the room. You would think she was on the podium for the Miss Tahiti contest. The girl who’d been waiting for the dressing room to be free walks in with her mother following, and Materena calls out to Rita to come and see.
Rita appears in a flash.
Her face lights up, “
Aue!
Boys are going to fall on their knees for you.”
But Materena is not sharing Rita’s emotion. She had thought the length of the blue dress was just an illusion because the dress was folded. Frowning, Materena asks Leilani, “It’s not a bit too short?”
“
Non,
” Leilani replies, “this is the normal length.”
“Eh, stop . . . I wasn’t born in the last rain . . . Bend over.”
Leilani bends over.
“Eh here,” Materena says, “I saw your underpants.”
Rita, cackling, tells Leilani that she better make sure to always be wearing clean underpantsthen. She winks to Materena and since Materena is not winking back, Rita makes a serious face.
“That dress is just too short,” Materena says. “It’s shorter than all the dresses you have at home.”
“No, it’s not!” Then, pleading with Auntie Rita with her eyes, Leilani asks her what she thinks.
Aue,
poor Auntie Rita, stuck between the tomato and the lettuce again, between the daughter and the mother. Is the dress a bit too short? she asks herself. Well, yes, but when you’ve got nice legs, you might as well show them off. If Rita had nice legs like Leilani’s, she’d be wearing short dresses every day. But here, Rita doesn’t have nice legs. When she sees Cousin Lily parading in her short dresses, making men of all ages trip over, Rita gets so envious. Some days, she feels like shaking Lily a little for her luck with those long brown muscular legs. So, is the dress a bit too short? No, not really, compared to what young girls wear these days.
“Not necessarily,” she says.
“You see?” Leilani says. “This dress is fine . . . Please, Mamie.”
Please, Mamie, Materena thinks. That girl only says please when she needs me to open my purse. She looks at her daughter and that dress—that dress is just too short. What a shame, because the fabric is top quality.
But what is a young clever girl going to get wearing a dress so short?
She’s going to get a lot of attention from boys, boys who’ve only seen her in long dresses with thick straps, pockets, and huge buttons. Materena’s cousin Tapeta never buys her daughter Rose short dresses. She always says, “I’m singing at the airport five mornings a week on top of my job at the hospital for Rose to go to private school to get her papers, and not for boys to give her interested looks.”
Materena feels the same way. “I’ve taken my decision,” she says. “And my decision is that the dress is too short.” She goes on about how a dress like this is only going to cause trouble with boys.
“But I don’t want to cause trouble!” Leilani’s voice is no longer a whisper. “I just want to wear that dress for me!”
“I understand what you’re saying.” Materena turns to Rita and asks, “What do you think?”
And this is Rita’s answer: “Even if your daughter wears a sack of potato, boys are going to look at her because she’s got slim legs.”
This answer comes out of Rita’s mouth in one go. There was no need for five seconds of contemplation. But then again, she’s not the mother of the young girl. She doesn’t have to worry about certain things like Materena has to. And if Materena doesn’t buy that dress, her daughter is going to do her long face.
Aue!
Imagine having the money to buy your daughter a new dress every week. What a nightmare!
“Mamie?” Leilani pleads. “You know me. Do I look at boys?
Non.
Never. I don’t have the faintest interest in boys. I will go to university . . . I will become a professor . . .”
But she will stop at nothing, that one! Materena yells in her head. And she’s going to be a professor now? Last month Leilani said she was going to be a social worker. She keeps changing her mind.
“You’re going to be a professor now?” asks Materena. Leilani nods, her hands clasped in prayer, miming, Please, Mamie.
Eh, eh, Materena remembers back to when she was fifteen years old and the fashion was for shirtdresses with a picture of a fruit on the front. When you scratched the picture of the fruit you could smell its scent. There was a shirtdress with a picture of an apple, a shirtdress with a picture of a pineapple, there were many choices and everybody had a shirtdress like that except for Materena. Then one day, her mother said, “All right, let’s go and get that shirtdress you’ve been talking about nonstop.”
But when Loana saw the shirtdress in the shop, she looked at the price tag and did her horrified eyes. “This dress costs the eyes of the head!” she said. “What am I paying all that money for? The apple or the cheap fabric? You don’t think we should buy ten pounds of apples instead of that apple here? And is this a dress or a shirt for when you sleep? It’s way below the knees.”
“It’s a shirt!” Materena said with all her heart and soul.
Loana shook her head and mumbled, “All that money for you to look like an old woman.”
Eh well, times sure have changed.
“All right, then,” Materena sighs, smiling to her daughter. “Hurry up, go and put your dress on the counter before I change my mind.”
T
here’s a
boum,
a party, this Saturday three houses away from where Leilani’s best friend, Vahine, lives. Vahine has been invited and so has Leilani, and of course Leilani is expecting her mother to say, “Yes, of course you can go to the
boum.
”
Leilani has it all planned, so she tells her mother, who is hanging clothes. She’ll be wearing her new blue dress (it has already made one of the nuns so cranky she sent Leilani home to get changed). She’ll be picked up at around six thirty by Vahine’s mother, she and Vahine will be picked up at around eleven o’clock from the
boum,
she’ll sleep at Vahine’s house, and then she will be dropped home on Sunday before nine o’clock, for Mass.
Materena, pegging a shirt, cackles. “For Mass? Why? Are you going to Mass this Sunday?”
Leilani has stopped going to Mass for months.
“Maybe,” Leilani whispers sweetly. “So? Can I go to the
boum?
I’m nearly sixteen years old.”
“Leilani, your birthday is in nine months.”
“
Oui,
I know, but I’m already sixteen years old in the head.” Leilani goes on about how she’s very mature for her age. She understands many things about life because she’s part of such an extended family. Most of her friends at school wouldn’t know what it means to share their last eggs.
“Ah.” Materena chuckles. “Now I understand why you’re so mature.”
“Mamie . . . you’re so
rigolote.
” Chuckling too, Leilani helps her mother peg a sock. “You know what I mean.”
Well, that is the last piece of clothing to hang. Materena picks the clothes basket up and, walking toward the house, she says, “Girl, you’ve got plenty of time to go to
boums
when you’re older.”
“Mamie!” Leilani follows her mother, stomping her foot along the way. “You were young once, you used to go to
boums.
”
Materena informs her daughter that actually she didn’t go to
boums
at Leilani’s age. She went to baptisms, weddings, and funerals.
“Oh . . .” Leilani searches for the right word to say. “Oh . . .”
Leilani, elbows on the kitchen table, is openly admiring her mother sewing buttons on Tamatoa’s shirt.
“Tamatoa always loses his buttons, doesn’t he?” says Leilani.
Materena lifts her eyes and says nothing.
“You’re such a good sewer.” Leilani is still on her mission to persuade her mother to let her go to the
boum
this Saturday. She moans that she’s so hopeless with sewing, she’s not patient enough, she’s not the kind to pay attention to the little details, whereas her mother is so talented with sewing—with everything she does, actually.
“
Merci, chérie,
” says Materena, smiling. She doesn’t mind the compliment, even if there’s an agenda behind it. However, Materena feels it’s important to remind Leilani that she’s offered to teach her to sew on several occasions.
“Oh.” Leilani waves a hand. “Sewing is not really important for our new generation because we care about other things.”
“What, for example?” Materena asks, very interested in what Leilani will say.
“Well . . .” Leilani looks into her mother’s eyes. “The death penalty. The starving children in Africa. The laws. Empowering women. The alarming birthrate in Tahiti and in the world. Our generation has so many issues to worry about, Mamie. We need to loosen up, otherwise we’d go mad.”
“Ah, I see.” Materena nods knowingly. “And are you saying that the women of the old generation had nothing to worry about?”
“Of course I’m not!” Leilani exclaims, on the defensive. She explains that the women of Materena’s generation paved the way for the women of her new generation. They said no to arranged marriages. They said no to work without pay. They said less sewing, please.
Materena bursts out laughing. And that is when Leilani attacks her mother with her request about the
boum.
Materena stops laughing. “Girl . . . sometimes children have to accept their mother’s decision.” Then, smiling, Materena adds that she has her reasons for not letting Leilani go to the
boum.
“What are they?”
Materena stops smiling and puts her sewing on the table. “Do I need to draw you a picture?” she asks.
“But what are your reasons?” Leilani insists.
Materena shakes her head with disbelief. She can’t understand Leilani’s generation. Her generation wouldn’t dare ask their mother to justify her decision. What mamas said was the law, the final word. Well anyway, this is the new generation, and so Materena explains the situation, which has everything to do with danger.