A Blind Eye

By

Nicki Chen

A rainy day, though the blank-faced sky pretended innocence, shining in the puddles and on the rain-slicked pavement. Behind her Toyota’s fogged-up windows, Natalie leaned across the steering wheel like a student driver and looked straight ahead, feigning invisibility. Without turning her head, she saw a group of ni-Vanuatu women carrying big multi-colored umbrellas—red, blue, yellow, and green in wedges like giant pinwheels. The women stopped in front of le Privee Disco and waited to cross, each one holding her skirt tight around her knees with one hand as though she were about to ford a stream.

Almost every day Natalie made this seven-minute drive into town—for shopping or to rent a video or pay a bill. On school days she dropped Mariko off and picked her up. But on a Saturday afternoon like this she had no legitimate reason for going to town. On Saturdays in Vila everything closed at noon and didn’t open again until Monday morning. The only exceptions were the little Chinese general stores and the Chinese-owned supermarket, Au Bon Marche. As soon as she passed Au Bon Marche it would be hard to explain what she was doing.

After seven months in Port Vila, Natalie might have been able to say she was enjoying the experience of living abroad—might have, that is, if it hadn’t been for the way her husband had changed. She wasn’t sure when it started or what the cause was. The first couple of months were a blur—the strangeness of life on a little South Pacific island, the hassle of getting set up in a new house and enrolling Mariko in a new school. If Yoshio’s attitude toward her had started changing immediately, she hadn’t noticed. The first incident she remembered was the night of the dinner theater performance at Ma Barker’s.

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