Fingerprints of Previous Owners. Rebecca Entel
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