Fingerprints of Previous Owners. Rebecca Entel
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.