BacktoSA Helene hits Hickville!

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Helene hits Hickville!

I arrived in Atlanta after what seemed a never-ending night from Jozi via Dakar to find long queues and immigration officials bent on checking everyone’s credentials all over again.

If I thought my 10-year visa entitled me to a friendly “good day ma’am and welcome to Texas and can we point you to the oil baron lounge” I was mistaken. Instead, two burly guys with suspicious expressions started poring over the computer, asking me questions, taking my fingerprints, made me walk through X-ray machines without my shoes and generally acting like Americans in Iraq.

So when they asked me how I met Melee,

this friend I was visiting in Texas, I made myself comfortable and said, “I saved her from a deranged game ranger in Kruger and it’s a really long story and would you like to hear it?” they gave each other a look, then turned to me and one said, “You can go through, ma’am”. He stamped my passport and I grinned triumphantly. Yee-ha! You don’t mess with South Africans with 10-year visas, dammit, especially not ones who actually CHOOSE to live in Jozi, the most dangerous city on earth.

I then jumped on a tiny plane to Houston, where Mad Melee was waiting, talking non-stop, and immediately started introducing me to all and sundry, including strangers. “This is Helene, my friend from South Africa. She’s a magazine editor for a magazine like Cosmo, except it’s for black women.” “Managing editor,” I’d hiss. “Actually, can you please just not mention it? I’m on holiday. I’m just an ordinary woman on holiday.” To no avail. “Don’t deny what you are,” she’d say loftily. “It’s important to show Americans you’ve achieved something in life, otherwise they don’t listen to you.”

She certainly didn’t listen. While in SA, I asked for a bed and a place I could put my stuff. I got neither. I sleep on a half couch with a foam mattress on top, which sags on the side, and which is propped up by various cushions and boxes. I am covered with an assortment of cloths from all over the world – no actual bedding or duvet as we know it. My stuff is perched on a couch in her bedroom, which she has proceeded to cover with her stuff.

MM, you see, is a collector, and she has enough stuff in her two roomed wooden cottage to fill a mansion. Cloths over cloths on walls and sofas, rugs over rugs, cushions, lamps, furniture, tables, chairs, hats, pictures, masks, books, mermaids by the hundreds (including a baleful one that came off a ship), things that could be lumped under office (3 computers), sewing (3 sewing machines) and cleaning (cloths and wires and vacuum cleaners), and bits and pieces too numerous to mention.

Then there’s the kitchen

There’s no kettle, so I can’t just put the kettle on to make tea. There’s no microwave (the rays will do something unspeakable to her thyroid), so I can’t just warm up water in an appliance I thought nobody could do without. She has a huge antique red gas stove, which requires almost as much effort to get going as my visa application, so I avoid it. (It’s a thing of beauty though, and I keep on expecting it to play music from the ‘50s.)

MM doesn’t cook, so her laidback husband Eddie does it most nights. Last night we had a bun with a sausage on it and a beer. Eddie had a dagga cookie he’d baked himself. Breakfast is something called a biscuit (scone-shaped croissant) with jams. (And I don’t do sugar!) I’ve eaten something green only twice since I got here – broccoli once and a celery stick at a Friday First art evening, when Eddie played the music at an exhibition for local artists. I got so excited about the celery stick (and admittedly, free red wine) that I bought a painting (print, not original) for $90. Times that with R7 to get an idea in Rand. Anyway, yesterday, MM bought a cactus leaf, which Eddie will cook up sometime. I didn’t know you could eat those things.

MM is the most generous person I know, and also the bossiest.

It’s dangerous to say “That’s nice” (something we say because we’re polite) because next thing she wants you to have it. In fact, she insists that you have it. She’s given me piles of shoes, books, magazines, T-shirts, make-up and dresses. (And I don’t do dresses!)

She made me wear a Mexican embroidered dress to bed (she had a reason, and it was just easier not to argue). When we go to stores, she takes me into places I would normally never frequent, places the Rockefeller or Kennedy women might like, with hats still in their boxes and frocks out of A Streetcar Named Desire (before Blanche had to start depending on the kindness of strangers). All silk and satin and brocades and $800 price tags. Then, just to confuse me, she takes me to a church thrift shop, where everything cost a dollar or less. She then buys BACK some of the clothes – her own clothes she took there – because she can’t bear to see them so unwanted. And, of course, she introduces me to everyone in the store, when all I want to do is toddle around quietly, blend into the background and observe Americans.

Her aunt died this week, but that’s another story. Oh all right. Her aunt was a nymphomaniac. I made suitably sympathetic noises, upon which she got furious, telling me her aunt was a mean and vicious old bird who slept with her father and her brother and that nymphomania was a choice not an addiction. Turns out the aunt was a kleptomaniac too, who stole MM’s stuff, which got me thinking that when I go home, I won’t be taking any of Melee’s stuff with me, not even those mad red cowboy boots with the parrots on which I really really like.

When she comes back from her cleaning job,

we may go cycling around the island. That would be nice, but knowing MM, we’ll probably do what she wants to do. But the victory will be mine, because whatever it is, it’ll make a good story.

 

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This page was updated on June 28, 2007