The ten very special women, holding hands, with their packets of tissues by their sides, are now sitting in a circle around the sick tree. Tepua, red-eyed and with swollen eyelids, thanks them all for coming. They all say that it is an honor to be present.
The prayer begins.
The women, eyes fervently closed, sing for the little girl and her tree. Every now and then someone half opens an eyelid to see if something is happening to the tree, something like a miracle. A few times, Materena’s half-opened eye meets Rita’s half-opened eye. Other times, the half-opened eye belongs to Lily, or Mama Teta. But Georgette’s eyes are wide open. Materena thinks Georgette looks strange, staring at the sick tree as if she’s trying to hypnotize it.
The prayer goes on for an hour until Tepua calls for a break and the women go inside the house. It’s a mess, but no one expects Tepua to have the energy to tidy up when her heart is a mess. No one pays attention to all the clothes lying around, the crushed plastic cups, and the dried grains of rice everywhere.
Materena and Rita, with slices of chocolate cake preciously wrapped in a tissue, go and stand in the kitchen by the louvers. As they look out to the tree through the four missing louvers, they eat and sigh and shake their head.
“I’m sure Moea is going to get better from today,” Rita whispers.
“That is our hope, eh?” Materena replies.
Both women are whispering the whisper of respect.
“There’s nothing like women’s power,” continues Rita. “There’s eleven women here today and we’re all giving that tree all the love and the power within us because . . .”
But here is Georgette now, running from her car to the tree with a bucket. Georgette, wearing her usual attire—baggy shorts, tight shirt, and tennis shoes, but this time with not one single piece of jewelry—pours the contents of the bucket on the ground. She’s on her knees now, furiously spreading what looks like dirt around the tree.
Materena and Rita press their faces to the gap between the louvers.
“What is that Georgette doing?” asks Rita.
Georgette jumps to her feet, races back to her car, and comes back without the bucket to stand by the tree. She’s looking down at the tree and scratching herself between the legs.
“But! Georgette is scratching her balls!”
“Shussh, Rita.” Rita is all red in the face from trying to keep the laughter inside. She breathes in and out to calm herself down. But Georgette must have heard Rita’s laughter, for she swings around. She sees Materena and Rita and waves, and then walking her feminine walk, Georgette walks to the house.
Minutes later, the prayers continue in the living room. The women sit on the ground, again in a circle, and again holding one another’s hands, and all eyes are fixed on a newborn’s name bracelet laid out on the cushion in the middle of the circle. The bracelet is closed and you can see how tiny the wrist of a newborn baby is. Smaller than a fifty-franc coin. Tepua explains how this bracelet was Moea’s bracelet, but Moea wore it for only five hours because she left the hospital six hours after her birth with her new parents and without her bracelet.
Tepua wipes her eyes with her tissue and rests her head on her chest.
This bracelet, this tiny bracelet that we all wear after our hospital birth, is making the women cry out in pain, and not one single eye is opened as they fervently pray and beg the Virgin Mary, Understanding Woman, to take away whatever Moea’s sickness is.
For two long hours.
Every now and then Materena stops thinking about her niece to think about her daughter. Following Mama Teta’s advice at the cemetery four days ago, Materena has been giving her daughter space, but first Materena explained the situation, laid all her cards on the table. “Girl,” she said to Leilani, at her desk doing her homework, “you’ve been very mean to me lately, it’s like you hate me, but I’m not going to hate you back because I love you, so I’m just going to give you space, but if you need me, you know where I am.” Leilani nodded a vague nod—yeah, whatever—and Materena left the room crying her eyes out. Since then, mother and daughter have been avoiding each other. Even Pito noticed it. He said, “What is it now?
Aue,
you two are
fiu!
” Well, at least there hasn’t been any shouting in the house.
When the ten women very special to Tepua leave, they are all red-eyed and exhausted. As they walk back to Rita’s car, Rita says to Materena that praying with all your heart and soul is draining.
“When you cry a lot”—Materena sniffs into her tissue—“you get tired too. That saying—crying yourself to sleep—it’s true.”
“I gave all my love to that baby girl.”
“Me too.” Materena is aching all over. “I gave her all my love.”
“And I gave her all the power within me.” Rita gets into her car.
There’s a bit of a traffic jam in Tepua’s garden. Lily, who is riding her Vespa, has no trouble getting out. The same goes for the women who came barefoot. But no one waiting in their car is tutting the horn.
“Cousin, I’ll walk,” says Materena.
“
Non,
I’ll drive you . . . I don’t want you passing out on the highway.”
The cousins remain silent except for frequent sighings of sadness, and they both jump with surprise when the back door opens and in sneaks Georgette.
“I have a confession to make.”
“Ah,
oui alors,
” says Rita. “What were you doing with that bucket?”
Georgette confesses that all she did was put a bit of fertilizer around the tree. Materena and Rita, stunned, say in unison, “Fertilizer?”
Georgette hurries to explain that it’s not that she doesn’t believe in prayers, but she thought it could just be that the tree needed a bit of fertilizer. She’s been thinking about this since yesterday.
“Jeez, Georgette,” Rita says, “I hope you know about fertilizers! Too much fertilizer can be fatal!
Ah hia hia,
Georgette! What got into your head? I thought it was just dirt you put around the tree! Georgette, you stupid man!”
Materena tenderly reaches out for Georgette’s hand. It must hurt Georgette when people refer to her as a man when she is, in her head, in her heart, in the way she dresses, a woman. A woman who is always so willing to help out because she was born with a big, giving heart. Georgette often says her penis has got nothing to do with her identity. She often adds, “I’m a woman through and through, even when I’m naked.”
But Georgette shouldn’t have tampered with Tepua’s daughter’s tree. All women have got to know their limit.
“Cousin,” Materena says, worried, “do you know a bit about fertilizers?”
Georgette swears that she followed the instructions on the fertilizer packet religiously.
On the coconut-radio news three days later, it is confirmed that Tepua’s sixth child, Moea, has been cured from her illness. Her tree is beautiful and healthy again. Some say this is the result of the fervent prayers to the Virgin Mary, Understanding Woman, at Tepua’s house. Others say Madame Pietre took her adopted daughter to the doctor, because that is what mothers do. They worry and they expect.
M
aterena fell in love with Pito a long time ago, but she still remembers those distant days when her mind would be all over the place.
She once forgot about a chicken cooking in the oven, despite her mother reminding her about it before leaving for a family meeting.
Loana came home to a burned chicken and a smoky kitchen. She yelled her head off, “Materena! Are you trying to burn the house down? I told you to take the chicken out of the oven at eleven o’clock! Do you think money grows on trees? Who’s going to buy me another chicken, you? Do you think a chicken is cheap?”
Materena was in the clouds, she was in love with her secret boyfriend, Pito.
Now, almost twenty years later, she’s in bed and Pito is snoring next to her.
Materena puts her head under her pillow, but she can still hear Pito’s annoying snore.
“Pito!” Materena rolls him to his side, but Pito fights, he wants to stay on his back.
“Pito! I can’t sleep!”
Growling, Pito rolls onto his side.
Materena closes her eyes, enjoying the silence. Then her mind starts ticking away about this and that: tomorrow night’s dinner, Moana, who’s just turned fifteen and who left school two months ago for an apprenticeship at the five-star international Beachcomber Hotel’s restaurant as a chef, Tamatoa, enlisting for military service in France, how she needs to buy new thongs.
Suddenly a thought pops into her head. Is there a boy on her daughter’s horizon? Lately Leilani has been so nice. (But
so
nice! Which makes a welcome change, Materena has to admit. Plus we’ve got singing love songs in the shower too!) And she’s got that look, that special look girls get when there’s a boy on the horizon.
Aue,
girl, eh, Materena thinks, don’t pay attention to boys, work hard at school, you’re almost there. Get your degree and then you can look around as much as you like. Pick the best one of the lot.
The following morning, Saturday, Materena is on a mission.
“Girl?”
“
Oui,
Mamie?” Leilani is combing her hair in front of the mirror.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“
Non!
” Leilani laughs that little laugh that says yes.
“Girl,” Materena says very seriously, “you can tell me if you have a boyfriend. I’m not going to get cranky, because it’s normal.”
“There’s no boyfriend.”
Okay then, since Leilani refuses to share the news, Materena is going to have to turn into a spy. The last time Materena peeped in her daughter’s diary four years ago, she read that Leilani wanted to be a nun. But let’s see now, eh? The hormones have arrived!
Here is that diary on the desk, wide open, that’s a good sign. It must mean Leilani doesn’t mind people reading it.
Materena, hands on her broom, ready to start brooming in case Leilani appears out of nowhere, begins to read.
“Eh?” she says out loud. “What’s this? This is not writing!” There’s a rectangle followed by a sun, another rectangle, a flower, a circle, a star, a square, and an exclamation mark. An exclamation mark means excitement, surprise, something you can’t believe is true, thinks Materena,
non?
Another way for a mother to find out secrets about her children is to listen to them talk to their friends. The trick is to listen while looking like you’re not listening.
Materena, washing basket on her hip, strolls to the clothesline. Leilani and Vahine are lying on sarongs on the grass, but she doesn’t say a word. She’s so focused on her job. She puts the basket on the ground and, focusing, hangs the bedsheet first to hide behind it, all the while pretending she’s looking for pegs.
“Girlfriend, you’re sure we’re not going to die with your invention?”
“
Non,
girlfriend, it’s great for sweating.”
What’s going on? Materena asks herself. She peeps from behind the bedsheet. Leilani and Vahine are wrapping plastic sheets around their waists.
Aue!
What is this? If Materena understands the situation correctly, the plastic sheets, combined with the heat of the sun, are supposed to make the girls melt. But what is there to melt? They’re so skinny as they are.
Materena goes back to her job and waits for the girls to start talking about things.
“Mamie!” Leilani calls out sweetly. “Are you going to be long?”
Materena calls back that she’s going to be as long as she has to because clothes should always be hung properly and not in a hurry.
“That’s what Maman’s personal assistant says too!” Vahine calls out.
Materena continues to explain the situation about hanging clothes. When you hang clothes properly, you don’t need to iron them for too long, but when you don’t hang clothes properly, you need to iron them for a while because the clothes are creased and . . .
After some time, the girls start talking, talking loud and clear, like they want the whole population to hear their conversation. They’re talking in a foreign language that is definitely not English. Even if Materena doesn’t understand that language apart from a few words of greeting, she can pick it up easily. When you have years of experience hearing the American tourists talk out loud in the middle of a street, in the middle of the market, in the truck, their language becomes familiar to your ears.
The language Leilani and Vahine are talking in sounds more like a made-up secret-code language. Every single word ends with
o
. And they’re laughing their head off, those two silly girls.
Materena knows very well the girls are talking in a secret-code language because she’s at the clothesline and they’re automatically suspecting her to be listening—as if she’s got nothing else better to do in her life. Materena hurries up with her job, shoving T-shirts and shorts onto the line. The secret-code language is getting on her system.
Every now and then she hears Vahine languidly pronounce the name of Materena’s eldest son, Tamatoa. Vahine is in love with Tamatoa and the less he’s interested in her, the more she wants him. It’s complicated.
Well anyway, there are no more clothes to hang. Materena marches back to the house, past the girls still going on in their
charabia
language.
“Eh,” she says, “I’m not a spy, you know, and keep your laughter down, Moana is asleep. Some people work at night.”
Later on Pito heads out of the house with his ukulele and his beer for a bit of practice under the sun, but at the sight of his daughter and her friend wrapped in plastic sheets, he quickly retreats back inside the house.
The girls are still outside hours later and Materena is getting worried. Sun goes to the head. Sweating too much is not good for the health.
“Eh, girls!” she calls out from the shutter. “You don’t think you’re brown enough? You don’t think you’ve sweated enough?”
“We’re nearly finished,” the girls call back.
“You want something to eat?”
“Not now!”
“Something to drink?”
“Not now!”
All right, then, since nobody is hungry or thirsty, Materena gets the ironing board and the iron out to iron Moana’s uniform. But first it’s time to wake him up. It’s twelve thirty.