Chapter 14

WILHELMINA

Teuila lets her hand drop to the floor, following the waves of her hair which pool at the foot of her bed. Here next to the ashtray is her phone. While she retrieves it, the screen briefly reflects her unmade face, colourless like something glimpsed under water, before she manages to punch out the number with her thumb. In a whisper she says: ‘Wilhelmina, I think I’m drowning.’ As if grief is a body of water.

By the time she comes to, Wilhelmina’s taxi has driven a good way up the front lawn, its headlights casting the darkened room in a strange pinky glow. The wind has died down and the temperature still has a midday intensity to it. Teuila’s forehead bursts with pinpricks of heat and then she is suddenly shuddering with cold.

At least the weight has lifted from her chest, and Teuila manages to prop herself up with a pillow for the arrival of her guest. At the doorway, Wilhelmina’s silhouette hovers like a balloon about to be released into the sky.

She fumbles for the switch. Then the single globe overhead floods Teuila’s room with light. It’s as if all the wigs, baubles and gowns that drape the dressmaker’s mannequin are being woken from their hibernation. Pinned above the door is Teuila’s Miss Tutti Frutti sash.

Behind Wilhelmina looms another figure, anxious to get in. Tall with her towel-turbaned head, she appears imperious and, like Wilhelmina, virtually expressionless as they enter Teuila’s room.

The visitors absorb the room’s visual clues: the crystal ashtray overflowing with half-smoked Consulates, the large bottle of Sprite standing barely touched. But it is the absence of music and Teuila’s puffed and unseeing eyes that give her away. Her skin is the colour of ash.

Dropping their bundle of stage costumes and cosmetic bags on the floor, the pair huddle at Teuila’s bedside just in time to hear her say in a voice punctuated by a low stringy cough, ‘I thought I was gone.’

There comes the dry rustle of palm fronds outside and soon the curtain levitates in a warm stream of air. With her visitors to perform to, Teuila feels her spirits lifting too. Her cough splinters into a laugh, her fingers thrumming her throat, and next she is reaching for her cigarettes.

‘Can you believe Shema was wearing a white beach dress that was on sale at Chan Mow & Co last week? That girl has no shame!’

Teuila’s audience wait a moment before smiling, at which point they realise that she is saved.

Wilhelmina presses play, and Whitney Houston’s ‘Greatest Love of All’ vibrates through the speakers of the ghetto blaster. It is as if they have been waiting for this signal. Tara shakes her hair free of the towel and slides across the vinyl floor to take her place, knees up, under the window louvres. For a moment the curtain strays across her face, and Teuila can’t help herself.

‘Tara, it’s your veil.’

Wilhelmina steals a quick glance at Tara before nudging a cosmetic bag into the centre of the room with her toe. Here she settles cross-legged on the floor just as the ballad builds to its finale.

Despite Whitney’s best efforts, the song is anticlimactic. The visitors want to ask Teuila about the wedding, but they also know they must wait until later, much later – by the bar at Tropicana, or in the back of the minibus coming home, or (more likely) back here in Teuila’s magic room. But not now. Spread out on her bed and blowing smoke rings at the ceiling, Teuila won’t be talking.

Just as Whitney’s voice pauses for breath, the curtain retreats through the louvres; Tara’s face is revealed under the light bulb’s glare.

‘Look at her freckles,’ says Teuila, laughing through the cigarette smoke. ‘Tae lago.’ Fly shit.

Tara’s pencilled eyebrows flick up, and her crescendo of American-tinged cursing drowns out Whitney mid-chorus. Then, with the utmost delicacy, she begins to scrape her ankle with a Lady Remington.

Taking a slow swig of Sprite, Teuila watches these dress-up rituals from her bed. The sugar acts like a drug, intensifying the shifting registers in her room. As she bobs up from the floor, Wilhelmina casts a monster beehive shadow across the walls behind her. Frosted fingernails flutter over bronzedusted eyelids. ‘Almost there.’ Dab, dab, dab and soon her eyelashes are done – ‘Superglue for super lashes!’

Looking up, Wilhelmina’s eyes are aflutter. ‘Even without you the show must go on,’ she says, towering in her high heels over Teuila’s bed. ‘That much we learnt from you. Even with one table in the house the show must go on.’

Teuila’s kimono has loosened. The contours of her chest fall away into ridges of plump muscle and dark shadow. Taking a deep breath she says, ‘I never played to one table.’ Her eyes squint suspiciously through the cigarette smoke.

Everyone in the room knows a storm is on its way, and each does her best to deflect attention away from it.

Tara’s lips are now painted a glossy red, and a white silk magnolia emerges from behind her left ear. She pouts for her audience of two. ‘Do I look like Billie Holiday?’

Glancing at her compact mirror, Wilhelmina replies with her own small assertion of self. ‘I’m finding that Retin-A is actually changing the shape of my face.’

Her face appears huge and alien, like a flying saucer, in the tiny mirror.

‘It’s very powerful,’ she continues. ‘We all have different techniques to fight the ageing process.’

‘Just as none of us do blow jobs the same way,’ says Tara.

‘That’s why you’re called the Rubbish Bin,’ comes Wilhelmina’s quick reply. ‘You end up with everyone’s leftovers.’

Tara brings a bottle of Vailima to her lips. The beer slowly rises up the bottle’s neck so the others can sense its sweet salty taste. She pauses before putting the bottle down. ‘Teuila, did you ever do shows with extra money for sex?’

‘Never,’ Teuila says with a firmness that seems to draw the curtains once more into the room. ‘That’s dirty money.’

‘I would do an old man for five hundred tala,’ continues Tara. ‘For a thousand I’d carry his crutches up the stairs.’

‘That’s why we say American Samoans are nothing but trash,’ Wilhelmina declares. ‘And all you’re good for is working the taxi phones – and giving lip.’

Wilhelmina’s chiffon gown, champagne-coloured, grazes the floor. Everything about her is bronzed and dusted.

Teuila’s eyes rest for a moment on this vision hovering by her bed. It’s like looking in the mirror and seeing a younger version of herself, something shinier reflected back – not unlike the diamanté necklace Wilhelmina is holding out to be fastened at her neck. Teuila also senses a quiet hunger, something that can’t be easily sated. It scares her just a little.

‘You should enter Miss Tutti Frutti next year,’ Teuila says, her fingers finding their sense memory as she takes Wilhelmina’s necklace. She motions with her chin towards the satin sash and begins a monologue they have all heard before, on many late nights and early mornings in Teuila’s room. They know the story’s precise rhythm – verse, chorus, verse, chorus – but somehow with each telling something new is gained – just like with a Whitney song.

‘I remember the night I was crowned, a queue ran all the way down the street from the old Chinese theatre. There wasn’t a spare seat in the house. And of all the contestants I was the only one …’ She pauses. ‘Well, all the others had nice figures and I said to myself, “Win or lose, I have to get the talent category.” My song was “Diamonds Are Forever”, and Shirley Bassey was my look. We share the same skin colour, you see. Her voice and style are unique. She sings ninetynine per cent of songs in a different way. And she can’t wear the same dress twice. She’s a dame.’

‘Were you nervous?’ Wilhelmina asks. All eyes in the room are fastened on the sash.

‘I’d prepared for the competition thinking it was just another show night for me.’ Teuila pauses, smiling at the memory. ‘No, there were no nerves. It was like I was running up-down, up-down. I thought to myself, What else do I need? I’ve already got my crown – my crown of self-respect.’

Tara begins to sniff, bringing the back of her hand across her nose.

‘I was thankful for the crown – of course I was – but that’s not the whole of it. Because here –’ She looks at Tara with an accusatory twist. ‘It might be different in Pago Pago, but here it’s family first. Your family comes first.’

The necklace with its tiny gold clasp hangs expectantly at Wilhelmina’s throat. The young protégé swallows, her neck muscles tensing slightly, before yielding to the reassuring softness of Teulia’s hands – despite their largeness, the deployment of hooks, zips and buttons is her particular specialty.

And no sooner is Teuila humming in her smoky contralto ‘Diamonds are Forever’ than Wilhelmina and Tara are sent, glittering, out into the night.