Frangipani (11 page)

Avoid foreigners at all costs. Foreigners always go back to their country and they don’t always ask the woman to follow. If your foreigner by some miracle asks you to follow him back to his country, you better make sure your passport is always valid so that you can come home to your mother’s funeral.

Foreigners eat raw fish with salad dressing.

Stay away from typical Tahitian men. A typical Tahitian man will make you earn your wedding ring. Expect to wait years for a typical Tahitian man to commit. One day he’ll tell you, “
Oui,
I’m ready to marry you.” The next day his song will be different, “
Non,
I can’t marry you yet, maybe next year.”

A typical Tahitian man must have three nocturnal meetings a week, at least, with his mates. They drink, listen to music, smoke, and sometimes they talk. More often, though, they just look into each other’s eyes and laugh. Or they tell jokes.

If you’re depressed, lost, crying, your typical Tahitian man pretends he can’t see your suffering. He walks straight past you as you stand in the room with tears streaming down your face.

A typical Tahitian man holds his baby as if it were a pack of taro. He’s very proud to show off his baby to his mates, he’s grinning as if he’s pushed that baby out into the world. When the baby becomes a child and starts asking questions, your typical Tahitian man says, “You can’t see I’m busy, eh? Go see your mama.”

A typical Tahitian man believes that it is beneath his dignity to show his woman affection. You ask a typical Tahitian man, “Am I beautiful,
chéri
?” he answers, “You’re not ugly.”

Enough about men. Now, to make a fruit tree produce you bash it around with a stick and say, “You’re going to give me a fruit or what? Eh? You ungrateful tree! I water you, I give you fertilizer, and all you give me is a great big zero!”

When somebody gives you something in a bowl, give the bowl back as soon as possible, and give it back with something in it. It doesn’t matter whether or not you ate whatever was in the bowl in the first place. Let’s say it was ripe lemons and let’s say you didn’t get the chance to use these lemons and they rotted on you, well, you still can’t give the bowl back empty. It’s not the relative’s fault you didn’t use her lemons.

Never visit a woman who’s just given birth looking your best.

You can put up a six-foot-high fence around your house if you want to. It’s not against the law to put up a six-foot-high fence. But a six-foot-high fence is like saying to the relatives, “I don’t want anything to do with you lot.” So, next time you’re going to be in the shit up to here, you can cry until midnight for the relatives to come and save you. It’s fair. It’s the Tahitian way. You’re in or you’re out, you can’t just accept what suits you.

Soups are always better the next day. So are stews.

A man with missing teeth means he’s been in a fight. A woman with missing teeth means her man beat her. If a man ever knocks out any of your beautiful teeth I’ll cut his balls.

It’s better to put a bandage over a black eye and have people think you’ve just had an operation on your eye than reveal your black eye and have people believe a man beat you. If a man ever gives you a black eye I’ll cut his balls.

When we die it doesn’t mean that we don’t exist anymore. True, we are buried, we become a skeleton, then we become soil, but all that we have left behind is still there. Whenever people talk about us, well, we come alive again.

When a man gives a woman a ring she must immediately drop the ring on the ground and listen up for a
ting
sound, the sound of gold. No
ting
sound means the ring is
camelotte,
fake, and you’ve been fooled.

A dead man’s last wishes are law and must be followed.

You can ask a quilt maker to put anything you want on your quilt (leaves, birds, fruit, vegetables . . . ) but do not ask her to change how things are in real life. Examples: purple limes, red breadfruit, green frangipani flowers, black tomatoes . . .

Don’t start thinking you know more than I do.

Materena presses the stop button, puts the tape in an envelope, writes Leilani a note, and slips the envelope under Leilani’s bedroom door. Then she checks that the gas is closed, switches the lights off, and goes to bed.

Secrets for the Grave

T
here are secrets which can never be told. They are called secrets for the grave. And there are secrets that can be told one day, it’s just a question of waiting for the right moment. They are called secrets, pure and simple.

With the secrets for the grave, we promise to never reveal them on the head of somebody we love and who is dead, we promise before God, and above all we promise to the person who trusted us with her secret. These kinds of secrets die with us.

With the secrets pure and simple, we don’t promise anybody to never tell. We just wait for the right time to spill the bucket. Sometimes, though, it happens that secrets come out into the open at the wrong time. This happened to Materena when her mother told her the truth about her dog. Materena’s dog was named Prince and Materena loved him so much. But one sunny morning he ran away. For years Materena was so confused. She kept thinking, What did I do to Prince for him to go and abandon me like that?

One day she asked her mother that question and Loana said, “Eh, what? Who are you talking about?”

Materena said, “My dog. Prince?”

Loana just shrugged and said, “Eh, who knows what goes on inside a dog’s head.” It was years later that her mother told her the truth. It just slipped out of her mouth. Materena had been going on about Prince and all that, how she couldn’t believe he had abandoned her, and Loana said, “
Aue!
Prince didn’t abandon you . . . stop going on about Prince . . . Richard Lexter sold it to some Chinese people, they wanted to eat your dog.”

When secrets come out at the wrong time people can be hurt. That’s why Materena is going to reveal a few secrets to her daughter today, because today is the right time.

Leilani is drinking her chicken soup with ginger that Materena has made just for her. And plus, nobody else is home. Today is a good day to say a few more things to the new woman.

“Girl?” Materena begins as she sits at the kitchen table facing Leilani. “I have a few things to tell you.”

“A few things?” asks Leilani. “Like what?”

“Like secrets.”

“Secrets about who?”

“About you.” Then Materena hurries to add, “But these are not secrets for the grave.”

“Oh, a secret is a secret,” says Leilani, shrugging.

“
Non,
Leilani.” Materena proceeds to explain the two types of secret to her daughter: the secrets we take to our grave, and the secrets we can tell.

Leilani attentively listens, then puts her spoon down, and arching one of her eyebrows, she looks into her mother’s eyes and says, “Go on, then, spill the bucket.”

Materena takes a deep breath and begins.

Her first secret is about how she lied that her French father had died in the Second World War defending his country. Materena explains to Leilani that she was just too young that day she asked about her French grandfather to know the truth. That he’d left after military service in Tahiti. That Materena had never met him. Materena expects Leilani to get a bit cranky, but Leilani cackles. “Oh, Mamie, I’ve known the truth for years.” Leilani explains to her mother that it was impossible for her grandfather to have died in the Second World War. She’d done some calculations and concluded that Tom was about eleven years old (the same age as Materena’s mother) when the Second World War broke out.

And now Materena is really embarrassed. “Ah,” she says. “Ah . . . I didn’t think you were going to do some calculations.”

“Mamie”—Leilani laughs, enjoying herself—“have you forgotten that I have a scientific mind? People with scientific minds always question things. They never assume.”

“Ah,” Materena says again.

“What’s your next secret?” Leilani asks cheekily.

But first Materena would like her daughter to promise that she won’t get cranky, because it’s quite a big secret. Leilani puts a hand up and promises that she won’t get cranky. So Materena tells her daughter about that pink bicycle Mama Roti had given her for her seventh birthday. But first, let’s have a bit of recapitulation.

That day Mama Roti couldn’t stop raving how the pink bicycle had cost her the eyes of her head. Mama Roti was so happy her granddaughter loved the bicycle more than she loved the quilt her other grandmother had made working day and night for a whole week. But Materena was not happy at all about that bicycle. In her opinion, you just don’t give vehicles to other people’s children. Materena really believes you should see the parents and ask them if it’s okay with them for you to give their child a vehicle. But even back then Mama Roti never asked Materena what she thought about her ideas. Here she was, clapping her hands at Leilani riding that bicycle, and every time she fell, she yelled, “Watch out for your brand-new bicycle!”

The second Leilani fell and split her chin open, Materena understood God was giving her a sign, and so she decided to make that bicycle disappear. Later on that night Materena wrapped the bicycle in a bedsheet and hid it on top of a wardrobe in her bedroom at her mother’s house. Her mother said, “My eyes didn’t see what you’ve just put on top of the wardrobe.”

There, here’s the story about Leilani’s pink bicycle, and Materena waits for a reaction, hoping Leilani won’t get too cranky. She cried for days when Materena told her somebody had stolen her bicycle.

Right now Leilani is laughing. “Mamie,” she says, “I’ve known the truth for years!” Leilani explains to her mother that the day she saw that big thing wrapped in a bedsheet on top of the wardrobe she knew straightaway it was her bicycle. She could see the shape of the handlebars.

So she got a chair, climbed on top of it, grabbed her bicycle, and started to ride it in her grandmother’s garden. Loana was weeding that day. When she saw Leilani riding her bicycle she said, “It’s best you don’t tell your mother about that bike.”

“I rode my bicycle in Mamie Loana’s garden for years,” says Leilani, clearly enjoying watching her mother’s eyes pop out of her head. “You’re not the only person with secrets, you know.” Leilani cackles.

“What other secrets have you got for me?” Materena asks, shaking her head with disbelief.

Leilani puts her spoon down and starts to think. “Okay, do you remember how I used to go to school with four slices of banana cake to eat at recreation?”

Materena nods.
Oui,
she remembers the two years Leilani went to school with four slices of banana cake to eat at recreation, before lunch at the school canteen. Materena was always making banana cakes. She couldn’t keep up with Leilani’s growing appetite. Then one day Leilani said, “I don’t need four slices of cake anymore. One is enough. I think I’ve stopped growing.”

“What about those slices of banana cake?” Materena asks. “Don’t you dare tell me you were chucking them in the trash!” Materena is already getting cranky.

“Me, chuck food in the trash?” Leilani exclaims, also cranky. “Do you know to whom you’re speaking? I would never, ever chuck food in the trash! I gave those slices of cake to a girl who had nothing to eat.”

“Oh,
chérie.
” Materena smiles. “Oh . . . that was so nice of you to do that . . .” But what happened to that girl, Materena wonders. How come she stopped eating Materena’s banana cake?

Materena asks her daughter this.

“She backstabbed me,” Leilani says. “She told everyone in our classroom I was a show-off, that I wanted to be the teacher’s pet.” Leilani continues about how she confronted that girl and told her, “You stupid idiot. Don’t you know never to bite the hand that feeds you?” From that day on, Leilani stopped feeding that girl.

“Just like that?” Materena asks. “No second chance?”

“You know me, Mamie. People are nice to me and I’m nice back. People are mean to me and I’m mean back . . . This soup is delicious! I’m going to have some more.”

Materena watches her daughter help herself to some more soup and cackles at Leilani’s declaration that she’s feeling so much better now after that delicious soup. The period pain has definitely eased up.

As soon as Leilani is at the table, she asks her mother if she could ask her a question. “It’s a bit private, though,” she adds.

“Well, ask your question and I’ll tell you if I can answer it or not.”

“I’m just curious . . . I don’t want you to think I’m being disrespectful.”

What is her question? Materena asks herself. She is now very curious. “Come on, scientific mind.” Materena smiles. “I’m waiting for your interrogation.”

“Okay.” Leilani puts the spoon down. “How was I conceived?” There. Leilani has asked her question and she can now continue to drink her soup, her eyes on her plate.

Materena can’t believe Leilani’s question. She’s never asked her mother how she was conceived. Everybody knows that stories of conception belong to the mother and the mother only. The conception of a baby is a very private affair. Well, you have the right to know if you were conceived in a bed, on a rock, on the kitchen table, in the bathroom. But how? None of your business!

“Leilani, it’s not the mouth that goes to the spoon,” Materena says. “It’s the spoon that goes to the mouth . . . and no slurping noise, please.”

“I knew you’d be cranky.”

“I’m not cranky! I’m just reminding you of the proper way to drink soups.”

“It’s fine if you don’t feel comfortable telling me about my conception,” Leilani says, making sure the spoon goes to the mouth and not the other way around. “I don’t mind. Maybe it’s too wild to be told.” She chuckles.

“Leilani, the hormones have already started kicking, or what?”

“Oh, Mamie! You’re the one always talking about the hormones!”

Materena shakes her head and laughs.

“Mamie, was I an accident?”

Materena stops laughing.

Was Leilani an accident? Well, most babies are accidents, aren’t they? Materena asks herself. The only person Materena knows who fell pregnant because she decided to was Madame Colette. Twice Madame Colette said to her husband, “Jules, I’m ovulating, I’ll see you in bed.” But all the other women Materena knows (cousins, aunties, and herself) fell pregnant because they didn’t think. Materena’s three children were accidents. The first accident took place under a tree, the second in bed, and the third on the kitchen table. But the moment Materena discovered her children’s existence, she welcomed them into her womb and into her life as if she had planned them.