Leilani’s story is about a ten-year-old girl who loses a thong while sitting on a pontoon. The girl is admiring the sunset when one of her thongs slips away from her foot and gently lands on the water. The girl can’t swim, so there’s nothing she can do to save her beloved thong, she just has to watch as the thong drifts toward the horizon. She’s very sad because her best friend bought her those red thongs.
That night, the girl dreams the thong came back with the current, but the next morning, when she hurries down to check the shore, there’s no thong there. Just an old woman gutting fish.
“Why are you crying?” the old woman asks. The girl reveals the reason for her sadness.
“Aue… ,” the old woman sighs. “It’s not the first time the sea has taken a thong, but don’t cry, girl, the sea will bring your thong back one day.” The old woman says she knows of a young girl who also lost her thong in the sea and found it twelve years later, buried under branches at Papara Beach.
Materena likes the story. She understands.
There are books everywhere in Materena’s boss’s house. The first thing Materena does each morning is go around the house picking up books and putting them back in one of the bookshelves—wherever there’s a space available. Every now and then, Materena flicks through the pages and reads a few lines, but the words are too complicated. There’s a paragraph she read once, it was all about the sky, how the clouds were like cotton balls and everything.
Leilani’s story is simple, and half-true and half-invention. Leilani lost thongs last year, but she wasn’t sitting on a pontoon, she was sitting in the truck. She just got off the truck without her thongs—brand-new thongs too. And Materena got real cranky at Leilani.
Materena feels bad now about how she overreacted that day. Perhaps she’d been in a bad mood already and Leilani losing her brand-new thongs made her bad mood worse.
Materena puts Leilani’s story and merit award in her never-to-throw-away box of things. Leilani is going to want to read her story to her kids and display her framed merit award in her house for everyone to see and comment about.
It is clear to Materena that her daughter is destined to become a writer.
Materena goes and says this to Pito, who’s practicing on his ukulele outside.
“Be careful about saying things like that,” says Pito. “Just think about your cousin James.” He doesn’t even stop practicing on his ukulele.
“What about my cousin James?” Materena asks.
“Where’s his canoes, eh?” Pito says. “They only exist in James’s dreams. Now James is angry because he’s not building canoes and his mother is angry because he doesn’t have a job.”
One day, James helped his uncle Hotu build a canoe, and the uncle said, “James, it’s a good canoe you’ve built.” And James told his mama about what his uncle had said. And his mama decided that James was going to build canoes. She couldn’t stop raving about how, her son, he was going to build canoes, and not just any kind of canoes, but the best in the world! “You’re going to build canoes,” she kept on saying to her son. “My son is going to build canoes,” she kept on saying to the whole neighborhood.
“Don’t compare my cousin James to Leilani.”
Materena is not happy with the comparison. The way she sees it, dreams don’t come to you—you have to make them happen. That James, he thinks his canoes are going to fall out of the sky, and he’s dreaming about his canoes, but all the while he’s drinking by the side of the road and counting cars. Dreaming dreams isn’t going to turn dreams into reality.
Leilani can become a writer. There’s no stopping her.
“What if Leilani says she wants to be a pilot, are you going to tell her it’s possible?” asks Pito.
“Oui.”
“The president of Tahiti?”
“Oui.”
“The president of France?”
“Ah oui! Of course!” This statement comes from the bottom of Materena’s heart.
Pito shakes his head. Materena goes back inside the house to get Leilani’s story. She wants Pito to read it.
“Later,” he says.
Right this moment, he’s too busy fooling around with his ukulele.
That night, Pito reads Leilani’s story in bed. Materena expects him to say, “Eh, this story is good,” because the story is good. Pito frowns as he’s reading the story. Then he grimaces, and when he finishes he goes on about how the story doesn’t make sense to him. What’s all this fuss over a thong? You cry when a person dies, you don’t cry because you lost a thong. And why didn’t that silly girl jump into the sea to get her thong back instead of just watching it slowly drifting toward the horizon, like a martyr?
Materena reminds Pito that the girl can’t swim.
“Ah oui,” Pito says. Still, the story doesn’t make sense to him. It’s not like you can’t get a replacement thong at the Chinese store.
Materena is getting more annoyed by the second. That Pito, she thinks. He understands nothing when it’s not about his Akim comics.
She puts the story back in the never-to-throw-away box and turns the light off. She gets into the bed, making sure to stay on the far side because she’s cranky at Pito.
“Materena,” Pito says a while later.
“What?” she replies.
“Leilani—did she tell you she wants to write books?”
Materena’s answer is almost a murmur. “Non.”
But Materena knows the kids don’t always tell her everything. They’ve got secrets.
So next payday, Materena buys Leilani a diary, a leatherbound diary with a key. “Here,” she says, casually giving Leilani the leatherbound diary.
And before Leilani has a chance to comment, Materena adds, “It was on special at Hachette Pacific and I thought it might be of use to you. If not, well, just give it to one of your friends.”
Whatever You Want to Be Is Fine with Me
Materena knows that nobody else should read a diary except the person who writes in the diary. But she’s only going to read the first line, the first two lines, the first three lines, no more. Materena just wants to check how many pages Leilani has used in the diary she gave her. She might need a new one. Materena might also check if Leilani has ever written about her hardworking and loving mother.
And if the diary is locked, then Materena won’t insist.
So Materena goes into Leilani’s bedroom and closes the door. She looks under the pillow, the mattress, in the desk drawers. The diary is hidden underneath the Bible that Loana gave Leilani for her Communion.
Materena looks at the door with anxiety. But Leilani is out with Loana, sweeping the church. Every sixth Saturday it is Loana’s turn to sweep the church, and usually Materena goes and helps her mother, but this morning Leilani offered to go in Materena’s place.
Leilani’s diary is not locked. So Materena opens it and reads the first two lines.
I know Mamie would like me to be a writer because I got a Merit Certificate for Colorful Imagination, but, God, what I really want to do is to serve you. Deep in my heart, I feel a strong desire to be a nun . . .
Materena snaps the diary closed. Because the writing is about God, she feels it is a sin to read Leilani’s diary.
Materena, a bit shocked, sits on Leilani’s bed and thinks about her cousin Heipua.
When Heipua announced at twenty-one that she wanted to be a nun, nobody was surprised.
That Cousin Heipua, she liked to be in the church.
She went to two Sunday Masses, the morning and the night Mass. She also went to the daily Masses at six o’clock in the morning, with all the old people.
And in her bedroom, Heipua had many statues of the Virgin Mary, Understanding Woman, even glow-in-the-dark statues and a statue with a beating red heart that plugged into the power socket. When she was a little girl, Heipua once said that the Virgin Mary, Understanding Woman, smiled at her. Nobody thought it was a child’s imagination.
At sixteen, Heipua had pinned pos
ters of Jesus Christ to the wall. Her other sisters’ posters were all of actors and singers. One of the sisters said, “Eh, you don’t think Jesus Christ looks a bit like an actor, with his long hair?”
Heipua got cranky.
Heipua never paid attention to boys, unlike her sisters, who would jump over the fence in the middle of the night to go and meet boys. Heipua, she just stayed home and watched the TV or prayed. She was a very serious type.
And she had special powers.
She visited the old and the sick at the hospital, and she only had to hold their hands for them to feel better. Sometimes she sneaked into the maternity ward to look at the newborns.
She had to sneak because the woman in charge of visits to the hospital didn’t like Heipua to look at the newborns. The woman preferred Heipua to look at the dying people.
Heipua wore long dresses to the ankles, and her hair was always braided in two heavy plaits. She had glasses for the sight too, her eyes were a bit damaged from reading the Bible all night long.
One night, just after she turned twenty-one, Heipua said, “God spoke to me.”
Her mother hurried to pass the news on to the coconut radio. Nobody said, “What is this fairy story?”
And then, two days after God spoke to Heipua, she announced her desire to be a nun. Her mother hurried to pass the good news on to the coconut radio, and again nobody said, “What is this fairy story?”
Heipua’s mother was honored one of her daughters was going to be a nun. She said to her other children, “You—you’re just going to be good-for-nothings.”
Heipua spent a week with the nuns at the mission. She returned home more certain than ever that her destiny was to serve God. She said, “The nuns are normal women except that their man is God, and their children are the whole population.”
She wanted to join the mission there and then, but the nun in charge of the mission advised Heipua to seriously think about her vocation for the following two months. “Once you’re a nun,” she said, “you’re a nun forever.”
So Heipua did her serious thinking at the church. She went to the early Mass, and instead of going home after the Mass, she stayed at the church until late afternoon—to pray.
One afternoon, a young man of about Heipua’s age began to pray at the church too. They didn’t speak to each other. He came back to the church the following day and the next. They said hello to each other.
The young man was praying to be a priest.
Well, within two weeks, they were kissing and caressing.
Heipua didn’t change her appearance (she was still wearing her long dresses and her glasses for the sight, and her hair was still braided in two heavy plaits), so nobody suspected that anything more than praying was happening in the church.
Aue, those two resisted the temptation, but when there’s physical attraction, it can be difficult not to surrender. And the inevitable happened. After the kisses and the caresses came the fornication. It was the first time for him too.
And Heipua got pregnant.
Aue, the shame and the embarrassment for her mother. She wanted to move to another town, another island, another country, even. She knew well that people were talking behind her back, mocking her, joking about how maybe her daughter’s pregnancy was an immaculate conception.
Yes, it was a shock, Heipua’s pregnancy.
Heipua’s mother threw her out of the house.
And Heipua went to the young man’s house with her bags and her statues.
When his mother opened the door, Cousin Heipua explained the situation. The shocked mother said, “What? What is this story? My son is going to be a priest!”
Then she called out to her son, and he immediately responded to her calling. She said, “This girl tells me that she’s pregnant from you. Is this true?”
And he said, “I never saw her before, Mamie.”
The mother slammed the door on Cousin Heipua.
Heipua, she walked around the streets not knowing what to do next. Night began to fall and she sat on a rock and waited for the day to come. And when the day came, she caught the truck to Papeete.
Two months later, a relative saw her at a bar in Papeete. She was drinking with a sailor, drinking and laughing and acting (so the relative repeated on the coconut radio, we don’t know what the relative herself was doing at the bar) like a prostitute.
Heipua should have been way into her pregnancy, but there was no belly to show for it. Something must have happened to the baby, but nobody knew what, exactly.
Her mother spat, “Ah, she’ll end up in a hole.” Because, according to her, when you do wrong by God, you get punished.
But only last month Heipua’s mother received a letter, a letter from France. Heipua sent her the letter. In the letter, Heipua wrote that she was now living in France and that she was a nun. Her name was now Sister Louise.
There was a photograph of Heipua dressed in the nun uniform, her hands in prayer, standing next to a tree.
But nobody knows if the photograph tells the real story. Nobody knows if Heipua rented the uniform at one of those stores where you can borrow any kind of uniform you want, but they all want to believe that Heipua is Sister Louise and that she’s very happy.
And, as for the young man, there hasn’t been a Polynesian priest for the last fifteen years. It would have made the front page of the newspaper.
Perhaps what Heipua did to that young man pleased him so much he decided to abandon his idea of being a priest. Or perhaps he’s a priest in another country.
This is the nun story of Heipua, and now Materena is thinking about her own nun story.
When she was about eleven, she told her mother that she wanted to be a nun.
“What!” Loana said. “Did God speak to you?”
Materena admitted that God hadn’t spoken to her.
Loana then asked Materena how come she wanted to be a nun, and Materena said, “I don’t know. But when I see a nun, I say to myself that I would like to be a nun.”
Loana advised Materena not to put this revelation on the coconut radio, and to wait a few more years before seriously thinking about becoming a nun.
“You might change your mind,” Loana said, “when the hormones start kicking in.”
And, sure enough, when Materena turned fifteen the hormones started to kick in, and she no longer thought about being a nun every time she saw one.
But could it be that Leilani… ?
Materena has always hoped that her daughter would become a writer, since she is so good at writing stories, but above all Materena’s main concern is for Leilani to be happy. To have a nice husband who loves her very much, a husband who says nice things to her. Well, he doesn’t have to be a husband, as long as he’s a good person and he makes Leilani happy. But if Leilani wants to be a nun . . .
Materena doesn’t mind it one bit. There are many happy nuns.
And now Materena and Leilani are alone in the bathroom. Leilani is brushing her teeth and Materena is pretending to look for something in the cupboard under the sink.
“Ah, Leilani, my girl,” Materena says. “Have you thought about what you’d like to do when you grow up?”
But before Leilani has a chance to answer, Materena, her head still in the cupboard under the sink, adds, “It’s just that I heard on the radio that it’s good for the parents to know what their children want to do. Because maybe the parents can help.”
Materena stands up and mother and daughter look at each other in the mirror.
“So? Any idea?” Materena is asking lightly so that Leilani won’t think that this is an interrogation.
“I’m not quite sure, Mamie.” Leilani still has toothpaste in her mouth.
“Okay then,” says Materena. Then, in a very serious tone, “But always remember that whatever you want to be is fine with me.”
Leilani nods and smiles.
Squashed Banana
It’s been a while since Materena took the kids to visit their grandmother Ma
ma Roti. She was so busy with the wedding and everything—and what a waste of time that was! Anyway, today seemed like a good day to visit. Materena didn’t particularly want to, but it’s one of those things. It’s for the children.
Right now Mama Roti is resting on the peue mat outside, complaining about her back to Materena. And all the while Materena is thinking about her escape. Materena has been at Mama Roti’s house for fifteen minutes and she wants to go home, but Mama Roti has so much complaining to do. She needs ears.
“Aue, my back, eh. I’m not as young as I used to be. My back is going, everything is going, aue… Eh, one of you kids! Bring Mama Roti a piece of bread and a banana.” She hurries to add, “A ripe banana, not a green banana!”
Less than a minute later, Moana brings his grandmother a piece of bread.
“And where’s the banana for Mama Roti?” Mama Roti asks.
The banana for Mama Roti is in the bread.
Mama Roti looks inside the bread and rolls her eyes. “Eh, I asked for a squashed banana inside my piece of bread?”
Moana looks at his feet and shakes his head.
“What did I ask for?”
“A piece of bread and a banana?”
“You coconut head, va.” Mama Roti impatiently waves Moana away. Then she throws the piece of bread with the squashed banana to the chickens and the dog. Materena gives Moana a little caress, and to Mama Roti she gives a cold, angry look. But Mama Roti’s head is already turned the other way.
Materena is cranky. She gets up. She’s going home.
“You’re leaving already, girl?” Mama Roti asks.
“I just remembered I’ve got a chicken in the oven.”
“Ah, okay, girl.”
Materena kisses Mama Roti very lightly (usually there’s a hug). She calls out to Tamatoa and Leilani that it is time to go home, and they come rushing, glad to go home. Tamatoa and Leilani don’t really like to be at Mama Roti’s house. There are too many things they’re not allowed to do.
They’re not allowed to be in the house when Mama Roti is not in the house, because she thinks they’re going to break something behind her back. Also, Mama Roti prefers the kids to play outside because, in her opinion, kids shouldn’t be in the house when the sun is shining. She never used to let her kids hang around inside the house when the sun was shining, which is probably why Pito can spend a whole day on the sofa now when the sun is shining. And the kids are not allowed to run around in the garden, because Mama Roti thinks they’re going to stomp on her plants. They’re not allowed to play with the ball, because the ball is bound to break Mama Roti’s louvers.
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