Читать книгу Fingerprints of Previous Owners - Rebecca Entel - Страница 10
ОглавлениеFurnace Island: I sneered every time I walked under the resort sign, tying my apron strings at the last possible second before the managers considered me “at work” on their island: this landscaped bite of our oval that existed one hour ahead of the rest of us so that some tourists wouldn’t have to adjust quite as much to the different time zone. Only advantage was I got off work one hour before Mother expected me: one hour to trek inland. Lionel laughed each time he saw me in the evening: “Out of the furnace, into the—what’s worse than a furnace?” Guessed most folks I knew would think the inland was worse, but no one knew I went up there.
My ID tag said nothing but Maid. But it was also my job to be silent and visible only when the tourists wanted to see me. “At work” meant not just a place or time. A being, a not being.
Mother would scoff: “Life is work, Myrna.” Mother in the yard tending the garden. Mother struggling up from tending the garden. Mother in the kitchen fixing meals with her rewards from the garden. Doing the wash for Miss Patrice in exchange for some credit at the store. Packing up what we didn’t use from the garden and carrying a box on her hip around to Bayard’s house, where he’d trade for meat and milk. Mother drying the sisal rope in the dirt alongside the house. Braiding it once it was dry. Selling lengths of that rope at the Straw Market, to tourists only, since everyone else around here knew the rope wasn’t so strong now that her hands were older. Mother trawling the beach from the sun’s first streak in the sky until her stomach was too empty to keep on, eyes cast down for unbroken shells the tourists might buy. Walking home with her skirt pulled into a bowl full of shells, hands raw. After eating a little, Mother flagging friends’ cars on the road to drop her at a different stretch of beach where another harvest of shells awaited. Mother on her knees washing out shells in a metal tub. D-thonk, d-thonk, d-thonk, d-thonk as they hit the sides. This, for hours, before any shells we’d clean out for dinner. Her knees stiff as bark by nightfall. Mother walking the road, back and forth, back and forth, seeking out the most vibrant buds that would open the next morning. Standing outside the resort’s snack bar area, colorful island weeds clutched in her hands and propped in jars at her feet. A cardboard sign resting against her legs: Tourists: Buy Native Island Wildflowers for 50 cents a bunch. U.S. coins and other OK. Mother at work.
But never setting foot inside the resort to work, I reminded myself—reassured myself—each time I arrived at the gate.
The key where the planes landed was close enough that not only could I hear them landing from the gate, but from the pool deck I could see how they rattled to the ground. The propellers seemingly no bigger than a truck’s steering wheel slowed to show their arms, and then the whining of the engines ebbed to silence. I could even see passengers filing out the hatch, jostled by their own bags. And I would ready myself for another arrival.
“Aye, it’s hot today. Sweating in this thing,” said Christine, who I’d heard complain almost every day of our lives. Almost rolled my eyes at her but remembered that when I came into Miss Patrice’s store for Band-Aids, Christine never asked why I had so many scratches. Though she might have recognized the way the pin-sized bits of skin flipped sideways from my ankles and wrists: the work of the innermost nettles of the island. I always stuck to this side of the group these days anyway, Hebbie sticking to the other side.
For all her complaining, Christine got into her role. Came alive when the boats approached. She let the wind whip her sheet out in front of the rest of us and waved her arms at the tourists. The look on her face: astonished wonderment, grateful welcome. She could flatten parts of her face into a plane both ancient and without its own story: a trick of the nerves I could never master. She’d once told me she liked putting on that sheet to pretend she was somewhere else in history. Jumping from Cruffey Island to make-believe Furnace Island. I hung toward the back near Miss Philene, who hated this as much as I did.
“Your sheet’s got a stain, Myrna.” Miss Philene’s cracked voice was older than she was and stubborn in its boredom. She stood strategically behind me to hide her cigarette from the boat staff. I yanked the tail of my sheet around and saw the stain: a bloom of yellowish brown.
“Blotched paradise, my dear.” She chuckled low, a sound that conjured the knobbiness of her face, the bluishness of her lips. She’d said much worse about stains and smells when it was just us soft-padding down the hallway with two rooms’ worth of used guest sheets bundled in our arms. Her face always pinched as if she could solder her nostrils. We weren’t allowed to push a laundry cart, because it would keep us from ducking into corners when guests appeared in the halls. She always said that walking the halls of this resort, hugging the sheets clean rich folks have made foul in all sorts of ways, didn’t mean that foulness touched her. Dropped them at the laundry, did her other chores, went home, and was still herself. She let me steal a drag of her cigarette as Max—Columbus—went through the labored explanation of Furnace Island.
Lionel had been fired from the resort for asking the Arrival Manager if he could edit the boat script. He’d even printed out pages from the Internet showing that furnaces hadn’t been invented yet in 1492. Surprise, surprise. She’d pulled out rebuttal pages from a photocopy of Columbus’s journal, showing that Max said a lot of what Columbus supposedly actually wrote. When Lionel pointed out first, that the journal was full of nonsense, and second, that none of us was descended from or even remotely looked—in our “sheet-y getups”—like the natives of Columbus’s arrival, she banned him from setting foot in the resort. He went back to working at the landfill, where the pay was less but he worked alone most of the day. Getting company when everyone dumped about once a week, when the resort’s trucks came about three times a day, when folks came to pick up the good stuff those trucks had dumped. Where he got to reclaim all the decent stuff to help keep all of our houses furnished, comfortable—and to keep the landfill manageable, according to the plan his granddad measured it for years ago when he was still working and walking.
The new batch of tourists started scrambling off the boat; it was impossible to climb off the thing in an elegant way, but the boat staff was there with smiles and hands, twisting and bending their bodies to ease the transition. They were even stepped on where the sand was gummy with strands of seaweed. Some of the tourists looked weary from travel, but most twinkled at us as if we were magical.
So rare a black American came to the resort that we had to notice her climbing off the boat. She was all sharp angles: octagonal bracelets clattering up her arms, the arrows of her elbows facing us. Biggest purse I’d ever seen: a pastel-pink summer-weight bag stamped with an aqua palm tree and a tick of blue paint on the strap. Sharp corners of a book sticking through the fabric against her hip. She’d surely designated it, among all her other purses, “Vacation, Resort.” But like that book was pulling her down.
Also had to notice her white-as-Max husband waving his phone around, frowning, and the little boy between them. Far as I could tell, everyone—maids and boat staff and tourists—took note. Then a white girl standing near them in her college T-shirt the color of a cherry sucker, taking the little boy’s hand when the woman told her to. Hands free now, the woman shifted her bag to the other shoulder, pressed it close to her hip. (Later I would feel how heavy that book really was, weighed down with time and the smudges of all the other hands that had held it. Weighted with what it was.)
Christine murmuring, speculating: “You think his daughter from a first marriage?”
“Maybe,” Della whispered. “But I don’t think it’s his wife. Maybe she works for them, and they let her bring her kid along.”
“Naw,” Miss Philene tutted. “Seems like wife, way she told that girl to take the boy’s hand.”
Before anyone answered, the little boy was whining for a grape sucker; he started off a chorus of kids, and pennies started slipping from the sweaty pockets of palms all around us. A few of the maids bent to their knees to save the pennies from the sand.
Max was ambling through the crowd, repeating that there would be a reliable Wi-Fi signal once they were inside the confines of the resort. “Not to worry,” he kept saying with a puffed-up chest.
He began barking over the wind again, back on script. “Willing to trade anything, ladies and gentlemen!”
Lionel’s voice came loudly into my head, swishing in the background. Performing the speech he wrote one night when we were having beers on Junkful Beach, posturing above us on a dune while Christine and I laughed and laughed. That speech was just a joke to her, but I kept imagining it over Max’s words:
Willing has nothing to do with it, ladies and gentlemen! Come gaze on these people draped in white because they are darker than the natives who I originally came across in 1492, sent off to the silver mines and otherwise cleared from the island, setting the stage for the other ships that would come later, bringing the ancestors of these people you see before you in uniforms, here to serve because the economy is a rough ocean, my friends. They will smile and greet you. But during your stay they will be a reminder of the sad and punishing history of this island whose beauty you soak in, that you will take with you like the sand that will, I promise you, come back with you no matter how many times you try to shake yourselves free of it!
A giggle rumbled out of my lips, and my cheeks inched up toward my eyes. Max caught my eye and smiled, big and bright, his chest puffing up even more. Like I was finally playing my role with the glee he’d been waiting to see. I had to squint my eyes as his rings caught the sunlight and shot it at me.
Christine and I ducked our heads to remove strands of plastic beads and handed them to the tourists in exchange for pennies. I could see in their eyes: the expectation of gratitude, how the pennies—not worth stooping to the ground for back at their homes—were transformed through some sort of island alchemy. The alchemy of poverty.
And to the Maids’ Brigade, I say: our resort will take anything, yes, and shall make you so eager to please!
Behind the fence we stepped around the crabs that’d been missteered by our brooms. But out of the tourists’ way still. After I dropped my stained sheet off at the laundry, I took my handful of pennies back to the jar in the kitchen. Their clink-clink sounded like a shell cracking under a tire. The Arrival Manager would count to ensure all fifty pennies were returned, then they’d be handed out again on the next boat in expectation of the natives showing up with more trinkets. Which we would, since there was no other work.
The resort’s blog mainly told tourists the day’s meals (always a buffet with everything) and the day’s weather (always warm, sunny) and sometimes where to go (today: the Jamboree). It didn’t tell them what not to look at; “at work,” we had to keep them from seeing.
Island Jamboree for kids of all ages. Featuring our local steel drum band and native women selling native crafts. Hair braiding, too! Special guest appearance by our Captain Columbus. Get a taste of the island without venturing too far from the comfort of your room: the Jamboree will be held at the snack bars that are conveniently located just beyond the resort’s gate. More details will be available on The Beach Blanket Blog.
We had to memorize the description in case any tourists asked about the event ahead of time. Only words I’d be allowed to say to them. Script stuck to my tongue like a piece of a brochure washed up from someone else’s island.
The job of the AYS was to bring water, lemonade, extra-sweet-smelling punch with too much rum—but not just to serve. They soothed with drinks, they directed with conversation, they encouraged the purchase of trinkets. The drinks, the braids, the massages were all free. But the Jamboree was always outside the gate to up the number of snacks purchased from the snack shacks and the number of bikes rented from the Captain-on-Wheels bike shack. (Some of the kids on the island got the old, discarded bikes from the dump at least. Not even old, just replaced.)
My job was to clear away and not be seen. I was one of the maids in charge of water bottles. Some others, plates and flatware. Others, trash. The Events Manager thought tables full of near-empty bottles or abandoned plates with sprays of food fork-nudged to their edges or blooms of crumpled napkins catching the wind didn’t say “Jamboree.” Clear it all away and ourselves, too. Keep moving. Event management didn’t want us standing still for more than eight seconds at a time, and two of us couldn’t stand next to each other at all. If any of us stood still for too long—watching for a table that needed us, talking to one another, or just leaning quickly against anything at all—trouble dusted up, like sand you couldn’t get out of your clothes.
Sometimes the sun painted yellow shadows along the sides of the bottles, making it impossible to see the water level. Half full or more: give the guests five minutes to return to it, then assume abandoned. Less: our cue to whisk the bottles away. Then we’d have to approach carefully, when the guests had left their tables or, if they were still sitting, when they were engaged by the AYS. Certain times of day, it was impossible to step close enough to reach without throwing your shadow over the guest tables. Luckily today’s Jamboree was right after lunch, when the sun pounded our shadows straight under us.
The steel drum players were Floridian. Bought their set off some Jamaican street band in Miami. But the tourists leaned in for every timbred bounce of their mallets. The couple from room B1 was smiling and bopping—wouldn’t have guessed from watching them they had so many pill bottles I had to line them up on the floor in order while I wiped their bathroom counter. It wasn’t bad music, but repetitive—and, as far as I could tell, all Trinidadian songs on Floridian-Jamaican drums anyway.
Miss Vernie sat behind the table spread with earrings and necklaces, candleholders and straw bags. The resort didn’t even buy the bags from Miss Minnie, best weaver on the island. Had them shipped in, big flat boxes of them with plastic bubbles tucked in between. The banner above the table: Miss Martha’s Island Crafts. Management had told Miss Vernie to keep weaving and unweaving the same four plumes of straw while the maybe-customers browsed.
(Before they started shipping in crafts, and before Lionel was fired, the Events Manager had asked him to bring stuff from the dump. My brother would help him turn junk into stuff tourists would gladly buy. I remembered sitting in the back of Lionel’s truck while they worked, watching them cobble before bringing stuff around to the Events Manager for approval.
“Not authentic enough,” he might say. Or he might put it right on Miss Martha’s table. Whoever Miss Martha was that time.
Sometimes it was all just scamming: shards of a broken beer bottle called sea glass. But Troy took great care, sometimes, his artist self not letting his hands rush. His specialty was stitching scraps of brown leather from a thrown-away belt to hooks not good enough for fishing. To the tourists: coconut-shell earrings. He’d soak the leather in salt water, then let it dry around an actual shell for the right curve. With each Jamboree, that old belt hanging from his doorknob inched shorter and shorter.
“Does this look like a coconut shell?” he’d ask me. I’d shrug, which he probably took as ambivalence about the pretense. I just didn’t know what coconut shells would look like as jewelry.
But I knew he was an artist, transformation just by turning over in his hands. I was always more interested in how Troy made things, without a tool to his name or an art class his whole life. A brother more distant than the three-plus years that separated us. Led me to try to see into his mind through the steps of his art. Trace back to the thought that propelled his fingers. “Study a work of art to understand the time and place that produced it and the sensibility of its maker.” That’s what the university art history brochure had said, and that’s what I—not a maker myself—had wanted to find out: time, place, sensibility. About Troy, the maker. Before I’d heard back about the application I’d secretly mailed, the major had been shut down. Funds shuttled to the burgeoning Hospitality Studies School. And I went to work instead. With an apron around my waist and the sunset logo stamped on my shoes, like I’d signed up for the hospitality major after all.
When Troy and Hebbie’s brother, Andre, first went to the capital, they’d set up a table outside the dock of the big resorts. Andre was the better salesman. Standing there in his always-intriguing T-shirts that tourists came closer to read; aloof with his headphones in, acting like he didn’t care if he sold a piece or not. Troy not even at the table. Felt sick to my stomach thinking of them tinkering up their own Jamboree. Hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch, giving the nausea more room to bloom.)
Three women who I also recognized from hall B, my cleaning wing, were trying jewelry on their ankles and wrists. Hands raised to the sun, feet looking soft and rested. The black American woman from B3 was clipping a coconut-shell barrette in her son’s curls, the two of them laughing. Not seeing the interested looks shot their way. His head just reaching beneath her squared-out palm tree bag.
Days at the resort now, and we were still talking about that family with the refrain the woman with the white husband. Her mix-up kid staying in the room next door with the white girl in her college T-shirts. Some places in the Caribbean were beyond a mix-up from the mixed-up-ness of history—all the ghosts on every dot of an island in this sea—but some places were color coded clearly. Cruffey certainly was. And Furnace Island—certain.
Hebbie’d been put to braiding. Joke to me, since growing up I was the one always doing her hair. Not wearing her uniform but not her regular clothes either. I didn’t know where they got the getup they’d given her to wear. A dress so long like it was meant for her brother, tall as he was. Her tray of beads rattled with kids and women riffling through for their colors, then sitting and squirming while she worked.
Hebbie’s own hair was braided for her to play the role: shooting stars of pink ducking behind black. Wondered who’d done it for her. Her eyes looked sad without her bangs winging above. Looked just like her brother with that high shiny forehead. She caught my eye like she was going to say something, but I stared down at my black sneakers, like I was investigating the sinking spider sunset stitched into my feet, then walked away before eight seconds added up beneath them.
She used to play piano in the abandoned house by the southeastern bay while I talked a streak about everything I could think of. When she was studying in the capital I used to go over to her mother’s house for her scheduled calls home. Inseparable as our brothers. Until we got the news about Troy, and Mother stopped speaking, and I couldn’t bear to be going around with Hebbie knowing her brother was going around without mine. Knowing her brother knew things about how it all happened. Hebbie was my sister-friend, more than Christine or some of the others my own age, but hearing any of it, even filtered through her voice, would make it all meaner than it already was.
Christine was walking toward me like she had something to say. I turned half sideways and drifted along behind where the braiding was happening, where my eyes wouldn’t meet Hebbie’s again. The taught white scalps looked so raw they made me cringe. I wanted to muss that hair back over all those riverbeds of skin. Flaming pink burn would spill around each braid soon enough.
Maneuvering around without touching anyone or stopping anywhere felt somewhat like trying to go inland without a machete, dodging haulback nettles and keeping on and on to avoid the insects gnashing on you. Less visible snags here—but nowhere to get to either. Kept walking by the other maids, hearing just snippets of what they wanted to tell me.
Miss Philene, tray primly under her arm like her at-church purse: “Arrival Manager’s office. Right after this.” Her back to me before I could ask a thing.
Christine right there again: “Trouble brewing.” Ripple of her fingers for emphasis. Max walked by in his Columbus hat, reached out and tickled his fingers against Christine’s. She half laughed, but I shrugged my free hand into my pocket.
Miss Philene again, trading places with Christine in a figure eight: “Boil and bubble.”
One of the AYS stepped in between us. I lofted my tray of near-empty bottles onto my shoulder and kept circulating.
One of the backup Columbuses, also in costume, rode circles on a kid-sized bike, legs sticking out like rifles, throwing his hands up in the air, too, while the kids cheered. Wind almost took his hat into my face before he snatched it back.
The pocking of the steel drums turned into pounding. Not like the rustle chorus of insects inland in the evening, the cicadas crushing the air, like an engine moving me on and on.
I headed back around the brush, circled behind the cluster of padded chairs where Max was now standing next to the AYS who usually did the massages. In one chair was B3’s husband, telling the woman next to him about that morning’s gecko on his bedpost. (Complaining about my cleaning or just storytelling about exotic wildlife? Hard to tell with his voice that refused to spike with interest.) Max kept pushing up his bulky costume sleeves as he squeezed another man’s shoulders.
The man scowled each time the sleeves slid back against his neck. Said to his wife and to whoever could hear: “On our cruise last year we loved the massages from the Jamaicans.”
His wife nodded vigorously as an iguana. “Yes, yes, the best hands are the Jamaicans’.” More nodding. The chain attached to her sunglasses clinked against her earrings. “Shouldn’t you have a local do this sort of thing?” she asked.
Hurried off to the kitchen before I could be recruited. Last time a guest requested a local woman give her a massage, Miss Philene was yanked over. Afterward management had examined her hands for an hour, debating whether it was more or less authentic for the maids’ fingernails to be painted when the guests wanted us to touch them. My own nails were ragged and encrusted with the dirt of the inland. Fingertips gouged by the stones. I again stuck my free hand in the emptiness of my pocket. Had a flash of when Mother used to clip my and Troy’s nails out on the doorstep, when we were small enough sitting still was an even bigger chore than now.
I placed each empty bottle gently into the recycling barrel that was almost as big as the door. According to management, bottles were placed carefully to avoid clatter; according to Lionel, to avoid the denting that revealed recycled bottles to be not new. There was no recycling facility on the island. But the tourists liked to see the green bins with their happily spinning arrows.
Sometimes Lionel gave kids spare American coins that turned up in the trash for washing the bottles, and we’d sneak them back in. The trick was not to sneak bottles in our bags, betrayed at the gate by the crinkling sound, but to load a pallet of them into Lem’s truck when he delivered to the dump. So they came back in via the truck entrance and could be shelved with the new pallets. Lionel our island recycling facility after all.
The trick was to do it only once before the resort’s logo on the bottle started to rub off, gave us away with disappearing letters or an asymmetrical sun. If we didn’t risk it, though, the piles of plastic at the dump clacked in the wind, rolled against one another as if huddling from the gusts. Could hear them all the way at Garrett and Della’s house. Pile of empties so high it could distort the view. Even at the top of the landfill, there was a view.
My next load, one completely empty bottle got picked up by the wind. The plastic crinkled against the gravel as the wind blew it away from me. I stooped, reached out, only to have the wind swoosh the other way. Finally grabbed the bottle by its cap as it tried to sneak around the bend where the resort’s landscaping gave way to the bursts of brush we were used to. That grew the way it just grew. I noticed a few other empties rolled up under the brush, and I pulled my apron up and out into a bowl for them.
Looked up to see Lionel’s truck parked just out of view of the Jamboree. Lionel himself, dressed like a tourist: bright T-shirt, baggy shorts with pockets bigger than his knees, rubber sandals like spiderwebs. Probably wearing dumped tourists’ clothes.
He was talking to B3, the woman with the white husband and the palm tree bag. Showing him something that she’d bought from “Miss Martha.” Maybe beer-bottle sea glass, maybe a string of wrinkly tumor-shaped beads called sea pearls. Something shiny and split to pieces.
Speakers from the Jamboree blotted out whatever he was asking her. When they quieted down again, I could hear her describing to Lionel what sounded like his landfill but she called her consignment shop. Explaining how the topography of the shop shifted slowly but remained fully populated: novelty lamps swarming her cash register, a baby buggy filled with lizard skulls, midcentury TVs that were their own furniture, vintage cameras like miniature luggage stacked in a skyline by the window. The objects bearing some marks of their owners. How she liked sorting and recontextualizing the donations into anonymous objects that could belong to someone new, to anyone. People bought this stuff from her, she said. Arranged their purchases on shiny mantels and texted her proud photos.
“We turned a particleboard bookcase on its side,” she was saying to him. “Like a holding place for some stacks of smaller items but also a balance beam to travel toward the front of the store. That’s how full to the gills the store is sometimes! With a clothesline to hold on to.” She mimed it for Lionel: feet shuffling sideways, hands overhead.
Reminded me of the corridors Lionel’s father had created along the far wall of the landfill when it was first built, wide enough for one. Few times I was up there with him, each of us tracing a different level, facing each other only every fourth sentence or so. Thinking about Lionel taking an American tourist up there to show her the similarities in their jobs: made me ready to laugh. Once in a while he did get up to forty dollars taking them on what he called the “real island tour.” But getting paid by an American tourist to take her to the dump? That’d be the same day the resort made me captain.
When I heard Lionel actually offering to show her how he handled the sorting and the navigating at the landfill, I turned my head away to hide my smile, a little bit of a laugh seeping out onto my face.
That’s when I saw Mother, facing the road. In the afternoon light her grayish hair shimmered platinum. Lost count of how many times Miss Minnie had asked various managers at the resort not to schedule the Jamboree on Straw Market Day, especially when a new boat of tourists had just come in. She and Mother must’ve agreed to split up this time. New strategy for selling.
Mother’s sign for selling flowers was facing the road. I saw only its blank, dusty back through her ankles. And her own dusty back. Just a slice of face in my view. Resort would let non-employees sell so close to the gate only if they faced out, pretending to sell to their own. Not take a single coin away from the Jamboree vendors if management could help it.
I rebalanced my tray with the partly full bottles and gathered together the empty ones in my apron pouch. Tried to keep them wrapped from the wind so no one would hear me standing there, catch me watching.
Then I heard the word plantation, American accent. Stopped dead still. Must’ve heard wrong, I thought. Plan, nation, plant, situation, damnation. Something else said. But still I stood, a stone myself.
Corner of my eye saw B3 clutching to her a book the size and shape of the records Miss Wayida Callaghan could be heard blasting out the open windows of her church no one would set foot in. An old book, corners soft. She turned back to Lionel, lowering the book to show him the cover, and his face folded in. Not his usual eye-and-mouth puppetry, especially when trying to sell a tour. Not his usual shag of braids jumping around with his head. His eyes shifted toward Mother. Hand gently nudging the book back up against B3’s torso.
Force between Lionel’s eyes, Mother’s hunched body, book whose title I couldn’t read. Mother shifted her position so I couldn’t see her face at all. Shoulder blades a fortress. Her back a curling wave about to sink back under where it came from. Eight seconds, then I had to move my feet so management wouldn’t move theirs toward me.
Lionel might have said something, but I could no longer hear their conversation as a bunch of older tourist kids who’d rented bikes zoomed around me, hooting, almost knocking my tray out of my hands.
Before I could round back, an AYS appeared. Skin alive with anger or too much sun. At me standing still? At Lionel being here? At B3 talking to a local? At the possibility she could buy a flower from Mother or something, anything, from somebody else?
Once I got to the kitchen door with my new load, I upturned any bottles that weren’t empty. Watched the wet darkness burn off the ground almost instantly.
When I came back, B3 had rejoined her husband. He tapped his hand on his knee to the beat of the music, and the two of them passed a cup of rum punch back and forth. Their kid was sitting in the lap of that white girl while she got her hair braided. Hebbie’s hands rushed. She had to join us for the maids’ call-up, whatever it was about.
From across a table, Miss Philene’s lips reminded me: Office.
“What now?” I whispered. Circled a table, counting seconds. Came back around so she could answer me.
“Don’t know, dear,” she said. “But keep your hands in your pockets, I’d say.”
I slid my tray on top of hers by the bar station, and we followed the others out of the sun, waiting for our sweat-soaked uniforms to get soggy and cold in the air-conditioning.
They took us in one at a time. According to the four who’d already gone in, they were each first addressed as “Christine.” Christine found this funny, but I saw under the older women’s eyes a subtle strain. We stood quietly, each fidgeting with the rim of a pocket or something deep inside.
Only one talking like a rainstorm was the actual Christine. Talking about how antsy she got standing still like we were. How she needed to go out and see things, talk to people.
“No worry,” Miss Philene said. “Plenty to see and new people to talk to when they march us back out for the next boat.” She rolled her eyes.
“And that’s fine,” Christine answered, ignoring the shushing of everyone who was sick of her talking. “May sound silly, but I like standing on the sand.”
“Standing on sand?” Della snickered. “What are you, taking a break out there?”
Christine shrugged. “Can pretend and be myself at different times of day,” she said. She stepped out of line and pointed to each of us in turn. “Other girls having so much trouble here? They need to learn how to do that, I think.”
“We’re all in trouble, that’s what we’re doing in this line. Over pennies, not pretending.” Miss Philene moved to the back of the line. She’d rather wait all day than stand next to Christine.
Christine kept talking by the mile as always, this time about the new tourists and what she’d learned about them at the Jamboree.
“That white college girl is the family’s nanny!” Her hands starbursts. It sorta was a revelation, with how interested folks had been.
“Now I’ve seen everything,” Miss Vernie said.
I wondered how Christine learned this, since I’d been cleaning their rooms and didn’t know. Talking to them directly? Couldn’t be. One time last season when management heard from the AYS that some of the maids had talked all night with tourists who’d been at Thiflae Bar, they’d started asking the guests questions to see if they knew by name who cleaned their rooms or cleared their tables after meals. Even heard they used a poster with all of our pictures, like a mug shot collage, and just asked the guests all sweetly who’d been taking care of them. Nelson’d been fired when three tourists matched his name to his picture. Miss Philene said there was a hidden-away room somewhere with that poster in it, among other things.
Waiting outside management’s office like we were was pretty much a lineup anyway, mug shots or not.
I wanted to hear some more about the family, but Christine was going on and on about her own boy being about the same age as their little boy. Miss Philene, still planted at the back, called out to the whole line, “Let’s talk about the weather.” She was likely to change the subject when it was sons, sons, and more sons. Of her three kids, only one and two—both daughters—still left in the world.
Even I laughed at her idea. So few weather variations around here, not much to say.
“Too bad hurricane season passed us by,” Miss Philene grumbled. “Resort’s not going to blow away while we’re standing here.”
I let out a snort.
We marked time by the worst storms, named them, talked about house repairs by how many storms they’d withstood. Last year was the Big Blowout, when the resort had no electricity for a week and a half, though the structures came through all right on the eastern side of the island. When folks referred to That Storm, everyone knew which one they meant and which roofs had been made useless by the worst winds anyone could remember. The winds had blown the ocean so far inland, salted up the wells for weeks. Even if you hadn’t been born yet, you knew That Storm. We all knew the story of Miss Patrice, pregnant with the youngest of her five kids, and her husband off in the capital. When the roof started blowing off the house, she didn’t know whether she was crying or just wet from the rain coming in. A tree crashed into the door, and they had to climb out the window—all four kids and Miss Patrice with her swollen belly. All of them crawled to her brother’s house, blinded by wind.
Other thing we all knew was that hurricanes didn’t used to slam that part of the island where Miss Patrice’s house had always been. But that was before the resort had bought up more land along the western shore and cleared it of trees. You had to go back a long time to have seen hardwood all over this island. Most of it had been gone since the early nineteenth century, cut down and shipped off for money by Cruffey, who planted his feet here and claimed to own those trees. And claimed to own the men and women who cut the trees down and loaded them up for shipment. Later a lot of folks built houses on that one slice of the island, where trees pointed toward the storms blowing in. Tall trees with roots that stayed firm in the soil. Used to be those trees soaked up some of a storm, withstood the rage. But the resort came in like a storm of its own and stripped the rest of the hardwood, like leaving a door open to those houses.
Worst part was—and we all knew this story, too—Miss Patrice’s late husband had all kinds of engineering know-how. Gave the resort all the right advice about where to clear or not, what to build or not, and was plain ignored. We’d all heard her description of him standing on the beach with all the executives sweating in their suits, their faces red as thiflae in the noon sun, explaining how the small cabin suites they wanted to put in the cleared-out slice couldn’t match Mother Nature on that part of shore. Heard Miss Patrice’s description of him standing on that same beach when the trees had been chopped and stacked like carrot sticks, watching them loading up with his hands fisted against his hips, fingertips white.
The office door opened, and we all stood more still and quiet than we had been. Hebbie came out with the manager behind her. I avoided her eyes as she walked away. I was next.
“Christine?” the Arrival Manager said to me. We called her this—Arrival Manager—behind her back, because from the first she insisted on being called Claudia. Not Ms. Ricken or Miss Ricken or Mrs. Ricken, not Manager Ricken or even Manager Claudia. Not Madame Claudia, as many of the tourists called her. Claudia.
“Myrna,” I said, following her in.
Embarrassed shuffling of papers. “Muuurna...” Stretching out my name while she looked for my last name on her stack of files. Mother used to laugh when she heard Americans say my name. She said they missed the way your lip had to jut out into a tiny half-smile when you said Meer or Mere; as she called it, “the island y.” “The island y,” Troy had said, laughing, “is really a sarcastic sneer.”
Claudia said my last name with the same drawn-out uhhh sound and with a question mark on the end of it: “Burre?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Claudia.”
“Yes. Claudia.”
“You were on the beach last Thursday? For the whole arrival demonstration?”
She knew I was. I had to be at every arrival, according to my contract. And I turned in my time card with all the information from the week: when I was cleaning the rooms, when I was on the beach for the arrivals, when I was assisting with laundry. “Yes, Claudia.”
“How many pennies did you receive?”
“That one day?” Sometimes we had more than one arrival per day this time of year.
“The afternoon boat arrival on Thursday. The jar was missing six pennies when the boat staff prepared for Friday’s arrival.”
“I return the ones that are given to me by the tourists. I don’t count them.”
“Guests.”
“Guests. I don’t hand the pennies out.”
“You don’t hand them—what do you mean?”
She knew what I meant. There were no interviews like this with the boat staff members, who collected the money from the jar and handed them out on the boat. (Or with the guests, who could keep the pennies or throw them in the water for good luck; I was pretty sure I’d seen some thrown.) Waiting outside this beige door was a line of women only like me, “natives,” in our maid uniforms.
Claudia closed her files, sighed loudly, and clasped her hands on top of the stack. She kept tucking a straw-colored strand of hair behind her ear, and it kept making its way forward again. Her hair and her skin and the beige shell she was wearing all blended together, her pale blue eyes popping out at me; the contrast was similar, it struck me, as the water to the sand just outside her office. I looked for tides in her eyes. They were ringed by pink. The wide center part in her hair looked like a dried-up riverbed. She looked tired. With the guests she always brightened up, even her faded grayish hair sparkling blonder from the reflection off the pool water.
Her desk faced away from the window, leaving me the ocean view. I knew the setup wasn’t for me; this other side of the desk beautified for upper management or guests or both? Through the window, I could see most of the pool deck, the loungers all faced toward the pool. All turned away from the ocean view, which always surprised me, the way the brochures sold our blue seas. From where I sat, I could see the pool and the ocean in sequence, like two versions of one thing: the heated, simulated version and the rough, cold version that was too vast to see all at once.
There was barely movement out there. Just acres of white skin, strung up in spandex, in various stages of sunburn and repose. Except for the one woman from B3. That woman with her sharp bracelets and elbows seemed softer somehow, reclining in her bathing suit, her thighs the shape of upside-down lungs. Pastel bag slumped under her chair. Her husband was on his side, seemingly fast asleep. Even from this distance the back of his neck looked like rare steak. I didn’t see the little boy or the girl who apparently was his nanny.
Through Claudia’s closed window I could just faintly hear the tinny music still bobbing along. The only movement was a woman snorkeling in the pool, taking in the mural of a coral reef painted on the bottom. The resort used to offer boats to take tourists out to the reefs, but almost none of them wanted to dip into that cold water, real thing or not.
The snorkeler walked slowly out of the shallow end and onto cement in all her gear: steel-colored hair wrapped around her ears and mask, each flipper dropping a short wall of water off its side. She was waving her hand around the same way she had yesterday, when she’d scraped it open on the bottom of the pool and emerged announcing to everyone and no one: “It is so real down there! I reached out to touch it!” She sent the AYS in a tizzy to find a bandage. I’d had a Band-Aid tucked into my apron for that night, but I knew I’d be caught out if a manager saw me touching a guest.
But here I was anyway.
“Have a seat,” Claudia said wearily, her eyes softening and meeting mine. She fixed me with the I-get-it-because-I’m-reallyyour-friend look management pulled out of their pockets.
“Look. The international office makes me investigate if we are missing more than ten percent of any supply. Any supply. Five? Fine. I would look the other way. There have been many times—many times—that we were down one, two, three, four, five pennies, and we made do without reporting a thing. I don’t want to go through this any more than you do.”
I could tell from the slump of her shoulders that she thought she meant what she was saying. Caught up against her will by the powers that be—and by whoever it was who started this whole thing by stealing or misplacing six pennies.
You could have put six pennies in the jar instead of reporting it, I thought. You could have assumed the pennies were dropped in the sand and either told the main office that or gotten down on all fours and searched all day for them. You could have told the main office to get the sticks out of their asses. You could have stolen the pennies. But we both know you didn’t, because we both know that if someone really stole six pennies, that person really needed them.
One of the AYS came in the office without knocking and didn’t even give me a glance. Started fighting with a filing cabinet, and Claudia handed him a tiny key over her shoulder. He unlocked the drawer and took out what looked like a brick of blank name tags. Handed her back the key, left without a word and with the door partly opened. I could feel the ears from the women still lined up in the hallway lean closer to the crack in the door.
I said: “I carefully hold in my palm each penny that is handed to me. I put it safely in my pocket with my hand while I make the walk from the boat arrival location to the counter in the kitchen where the jar is placed. I cup my palm just so as I put the pennies back in the jar so that none can fall onto the floor. I give my bag to the guards every night when I leave so they can search it for anything they think I have stolen, and they hand it back and send me on my way.” I almost laughed at the thought of a guard finding a penny at the bottom of one of our bags and assuming it was trespassing there. Spare change wasn’t typical on this island.
Claudia shuffled through her files, the desperate fidgeting of her fingers trying to get to the bottom of all of this and set things right. As though she wanted to dismiss me to go back to my work if I could just prove, beyond every shadow of a shadow of a doubt, that there was no possibility I took those coins. If one of us maids could just get her off the hook with the international office.
From where I sat I could see only the black cardboard backs of her picture frames held in place by tiny metal arrows. The faces—of husband, kids, maybe aging parents with crow’s-feet smiles—only looked at her. Waiting for her, reminding her to resolve this nuisance and get home to her real life.
She had, after all, dragged the whole family down here for this job. To this dusty place where they didn’t have the things they had at home and where they had a hell of a time getting used to the way our people lived. If it weren’t for the pool they got to use all the time, and the financial opportunity in this international company that she was scrounging her way through with her tough, clean fingernails, that family would not even be putting up with all of this. I had heard it all, when the staff or their families came into Thiflae Bar. Had one or two too many, told us all how it was, this hard thing of keeping the place going, being here, whole family’s life on pause, so a resort could be pushed along. My nose wrinkled itself, as if the sour breath of the night’s last beer were in the room with us, right here with Claudia and me and her desk piled high with problems.
She stood up from behind her desk, secured the door, and I found myself taking the seat she’d offered several minutes before. She stood above me, walking from one side of my chair to the other. Through the window I could see the sun starting to bleed out into the sky, its reflection muddling the resort’s famed turquoise water with a metallic pinkish edge. Out of place, the moon floated beyond like a memory of a cotton ball.
Claudia’s hand was on the pocket of my uniform. I kept looking at the window. She ran her thumb over the knots of my resewn catches that spread like a rash down the front and sides of the skirt and apron. I felt her fingers skimming, connecting the dots that Mother had so carefully stitched for me. Mother stitching without ever questioning what it was that clawed at me, gnawed at the fabric that turned me, each day, into Maid. I sat still as one of the stones, speaking as little as they did.
“Hmm.” Her voice was calmer, surer. Her fidgeting had receded to allow the tide of power back into her voice and movements. “You put the coins in these pockets?” Her thumbnail scratched at some hooks of thread that hadn’t been pulled back through all the way. Hadn’t been reinforced.
“Yes.”
I could hear the music outside break off abruptly for the announcement that the dining room was open for dinner. The speaker’s vowels were flat, the words spreading out like water. That’s when I spotted the nanny and the little boy, coming back up from the shore. Sandy feet and ankles. The only two who hadn’t stayed up on the pool deck. From where they were standing, I knew she could see the break in the fence, where the dumpsters and trucks were, and I wondered if she noticed the division between the workers back there—no maids, since we were all in here, but the other workers, like Lem, in jumpsuits—and the AYS on the deck in their crisp white shorts and pastel shirts. Not just clothing different colors either. As they approached that nanny’s boss, the little boy’s mother, I saw the woman dig through her bag as if she’d misplaced something and then stand up and walk toward the doors to the lobby. (Was it that book that’d drawn Lionel’s eyes toward Mother, made him nudge the cover away from her?) Some of the AYS who circled endlessly between the bar and the pool deck fetching cocktails turned and watched her go through one of the doors.
Claudia’s breath was close to my ear. My eyes left the window.
“And it’s not possible,” she began, “that with all these tears all over this uniform—all over it—that some coins could have slipped through?”
I felt her fingers on all the nubs of thread and fabric, scars of all the trips I’d made inland and back out. The claws of the haulback trying to keep me out, then trying to keep me in.
“Catches in the material like this,” Claudia murmured. “Looks like...” Her eyes met mine, one eyebrow in a knowing arc. Some of the resort people around here, a few of them, knew the land. The plants. I felt goose pimples rise up all over my arms.
She stepped away from me, and I looked back up at her. Behind her on the bulletin board were the season’s disciplinary write-ups, with a thumbtack staked through the stack. Lateness. Stealing (suspected). Stealing (confirmed). Guest Complaints/Service Negligence. Uniform Divergence. Trespassing.
If she wrote me up for negligence (dropping the pennies) or divergence (tearing my uniform), I’d be better off than for trespassing, for which I’d have to meet with the security team and would almost certainly be fired anyway. And either way, fired or kept on, would be watched. An invisible but thick wall between me and the inland. If I forced her to keep going down the line of women, one of them would have to be written up for suspected stealing, since Claudia wouldn’t know how else to resolve this. And whoever it was would never be able to work at the resort again or at any of the resorts in the capital. Why we all lined up so nice and polite even when management got our names—or anything else—wrong. A list, a database, whatever it was that had its way of knowing spread across the ocean. Bad words swam fast.
As they had with Miss Patrice’s husband. The resort didn’t like that he’d kept talking to people about the whole mess with the trees and the cabins and the storms. Especially when there was no need to be put in harm’s way, when he knew better and had said so. Probably couldn’t help himself, all that mix of sad and mad and crumpled men got. They also didn’t like that he’d kept insisting to be paid the consulting fees they’d promised, even if they’d ignored his advice. He had to go back to the capital for work, but that didn’t last long. He kept talking about what happened, and the resort badmouthed him in a way that, after a while, he couldn’t even get work on the capital. All the hotels that used to hire him for projects stopped. Some wouldn’t even see him when he came to ask for work, even people he’d worked with for years as their go-to man. And then That Storm came and tore his own roof off with his family inside.
Thought of myself wandering the capital alone, no work to be had, while Mother rotted alone in our house. If we even still had a house.
“Well, Murna? Possible?”
I reached into my bag and spidered my hand for change. One dime. I put it on her desk. She shook her head slowly, still standing above me.
“The missing coins are already reported. I can’t replace them.” Her fingers went back into my lap, pointing to each spike. I didn’t squirm; I would not squirm. “Well? Is it possible?”
“Are you asking me if it is possible a uniform divergence could have caused the pennies to be accidentally lost?”
“Yes.”
Above my shoulder, Claudia’s blazer was drooping, too big. Like a kid playing at teacher. She looked tired, her cheeks creased like bundles of straw. I went through all the options again and again in my mind. She needed to settle this money thing before she could go home or else she’d spend the night on the phone with management, accused of not doing her job, of letting us natives take the dust from her pockets, as my dad used to say. If not me, she’d convince Miss Philene or Christine or Miss Vernie or someone else. Well, probably couldn’t convince Christine. But Miss Philene was now last in line, no one else to move on to after her. I tried to picture who else was waiting in line before I came in. Ticked off all the names of who would go home employed, not written up, with their water for the week. Claudia waited until I had conjured the others who were waiting. Aprons pristine compared with mine.
“Aye,” I said.
The rest of the line in the hall dispersed when they saw the yellow paper in my hand. Two weeks of overtime garbage duty without pay.
