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house, I was so tired. I had to sleep in the truck on the way home.”
    “You didn’t help me,” Materena hurries to add. She just doesn’t want the encyclopedia woman to start thinking things. “When you told me you wanted to be a cleaner, I had to show you how hard cleaning is.” Materena explains to the Frenchwoman that it is definitely not her plan for her daughter to become a cleaner. In fact, she’s always pushed her daughter to see beyond cleaning and to get a job that has nothing to do with a broom and a scrubbing brush.
    “You are a clever woman,” the encyclopedia woman says. “May I show you the encyclopedia?”
    “Sure. What’s your name, by the way, girl?”
    “Chantal.”
    “Ah, what a beautiful name you have, Chantal. Okay then, Chantal, you and Leilani make yourself comfortable at the table, I’m going to make us a lemonade.”
    “And what is your name, madame?” Chantal asks with a genuine smile.
    “Materena.”
    “You have a beautiful name too, and,” turning to Leilani, Chantal adds, “your name is lovely as well.”
    Leilani informs the visitor that she was called after a Hawaiian ancestor, but not Leilani Lexter, whose husband (Tinirau Mahi) soon regretted having married her because she liked partying too much. “I was called after Leilani Bodie,” Leilani says. “She was very serious. She was a medicine woman.”
    “Oh . . . well, you might become a medicine woman too,” says Chantal.
    “I don’t think so. I don’t like sick people.”
    “We never know!” Chantal exclaims as she sits at the kitchen table.
    “May I ask you a few questions?” Materena, cutting the lemons for the lemonade, hears Leilani ask. Chantal invites Leilani to ask her as many questions as she wants. She’s in no hurry at all. Materena cackles. Chantal, you have no idea what you’ve just gotten yourself into.
    “Why doesn’t it snow in Tahiti?” Chantal repeats Leilani’s question. “That is a very intelligent question, and the answer is that Tahiti is too close to the equator.” She asks for some papers and a pen, which Leilani hurries to get, and next minute, Leilani is getting a free geography lesson.
    Now Leilani would like to know, What is the medical term for the neck?
    Easy, the Frenchwoman quickly draws a human body, and next minute, Leilani is getting a free biology lesson.
    And who started the French Revolution?
    Easy . . .
    And do fish sleep?
    Of course—Chantal smiles—but because fish don’t have eyelids they can’t close their eyes. But fish do sleep.
    On and on and on Chantal shares her knowledge with a delighted Leilani, the knowledge she insists she got after years of reading encyclopedias and other books of interest.
    The main salt in the sea is the same as the salt people put on their food. Its chemical name is sodium chloride.
    Plants make much of their food from water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight. This process, called photosynthesis, produces oxygen.
    When we’re sick our body temperature goes up above normal, which is 98.6 degrees. This rise in temperature is called a fever and is triggered by the germs that cause the illness. They release chemicals that act on the part of the brain whose job it is to control temperature. This in turn produces other chemicals that make us feel cold.
    The human body has more than six hundred muscles, which together make up more than 40 percent of the body’s weight.
    Sixty percent of the body consists of water.
    Hiccups are caused when our diaphragm (the wall of muscle between the abdomen and the chest) goes into spasm.
    Fingernails grow four times as fast as toenails.
    By the time Materena is signing her name at the bottom of the form binding her to thirty-six repayments for the encyclopedias, Chantal looks very drained.
    She earned her commission, that’s for sure.

Bedsheets, Onions, Coconut Milk, and Women
    M aterena’s deal with the children is: Read the encyclopedias and you won’t have to lift a finger around the house. But