Frankie Healey
Gene Pool
Last summer, a doctor told me that I had big feet. I’d asked him to have a look at the calloused efforts of my wearing in a pair of sandals and he diagnosed me with big foot syndrome. So, I left carrying a printed prescription for a special foot cream and the weight of a new problem. I scrunched my toes up all the way home in an attempt to shrink them.
*
My mother used to love picking me up from swimming lessons. This was in the time where she liked to show off my sister and I like handmade accessories.
‘Oh, you think they’re cute? Well thanks, I made them myself.’
She seemed proud, but I was really only a good swimmer because I was bigger than the other girls. At that age it had nothing to do with talent. It was more about the buoyancy of your puppy fat and how wide you could spread your toes. Only a few of us big girls actually grew to have swimmers’ bodies – most remained big, and others developed eating disorders. Some of us now only have the feet to remember it by.
*
Dad worked 70-hour weeks when Mum went back to study. He told me recently that he would chew two Panadol with every meal in order to get through the winter. I got sick a lot too, flus that left me sucking on canned pears while my fever ate away at that baby fat that had won me backstroke races during summer. One earache was so hot and throbbing that my mum had to take me with her to a tutorial. Her sports nutrition degree was full of young people with taut calf muscles and energetic eyes. I developed a crush on a young man called Matt and a hatred for the adult-size skeleton in the corner of the class. At nine years old, it didn’t seem like I had much room to grow into it. My mum would often say, ‘We Māori girls, we’re just big-boned.’ I didn’t know which one of us she was coddling.
*
It was clear that my mother always wanted me to know about being Māori. I was the white kid in kapa haka. The blonde girl on the marae. I learnt to braid harakeke before I could plait my hair and my poi would often accompany me to afterschool playdates. Buckled into the backseat of a Range Rover I’d proudly demonstrate the way the soft plastic smacked against my forearm. When we arrived at their hilltop homes overlooking the water, I would spend the afternoon practicing my mihi. I’m Māori, I’d say. You’re Māori, they’d question. Yes. I’m from the Ngāpuhi iwi and my great-great-grandfather was a chief. This wasn’t the mihi they taught us in school – the one they wanted us to recite but didn’t care if we understood. This was the one that I’d tell middle-aged white women while they prepared sticks of carrot and celery in their glowing kitchens. The one I’d use to defend my pounamu to kids in the playground.
*
What is it like to exist in more than one place but not belong to any? My mum would claim to know. The girls at her school in Paihia used to call her honky, pushing their noses up and squealing like pigs when she walked past. The true white girls stuck their noses up too. I imagine a childlike version of her dark hair, muddy green eyes and olive skin. Sitting on the edge of the school pool, drawing circles in the chlorinated blue with her toes. Those big bones of hers invisible beneath her milky thighs. Yearning to be seen. Maybe that’s why I never knew her to like being in the water. She told me that there was a time that no one could get her out of the swimming pool, before my nana told her that they let sharks in when it closed. But I’m convinced it was the swimsuit she was more afraid of.
*
My cousin Madison was born three months after me. When we were young this closeness in age became a catalyst for friendship . Our steely blue eyes and the fact that we both played netball were our only other common ground. For a few years my grandparents lived across the road from the courts where our games were held, so we would often have sleepovers there the night before. Our nana has four sons – two of whom are our dads – so we were the girls she had been holding her breath for. My nana is well-meaning and warm, but sometimes it was obvious that she’d never raised a daughter. Like when she encouraged me to try on my cousin’s netball skirt, my prepubescent hips proving too gargantuan for the small wrap of fabric. I think I spent my entire time on the court that morning trying to suck in my stomach. And for a while after that I hated Madison. Like I did that stupid skeleton.
*
Memories are preserved in the air of that place. Whāngarei, the gateway to the Far North. A place my mother had taken my sister and I once as little girls. She told us that it was so she could show us off to her aunties, a group of women who were wider than they were tall. I’d broken my arm falling off the monkey bars at school not long before, so every day I was given my antibiotics with two chocolate fingers and a glass of coke. Chocolate-covered things were always a treat on Dad’s side, where I knew all five of my cousins. On my mum’s side there was an abundance. My favourite was my cousin Ruby, who had hair to suit her name. We spent every night together after our extended family cook-ups, sprawling through the yard with the rest of the kids in a game of spotlight. Ruby, my sister and I were always the first ones to be found.
*
It was a summer defined by firsts. My first boyfriend, my first smoke of green and the first time I was ever called skinny. A friend told me, with the sickly-sweet confidence of a Rekorderlig cider, that she felt I’d lost weight. She was right. I finally fit the curves that had started blooming years ago, and all my fat had been fed to my starving hormones. But I’d been distracted. My mind was stuck on a loop of you-can’t-fit-Madison’s-skirt. The accusation that I was thin left me scrutinising myself in the mirror like a palaeontologist in search of my big bones. I wanted to ask my mum where they had gone, but that was also the summer that she left. Fleeing over the hills to reinvent herself by the coast.
*
Global connectivity really complicates estrangement. I have a monthly routine now where I stalk her socials, typing her name into the search bar of each platform and watching the pixels on the screen morph into photos of her. Words that she’s shared. Snaps of her art. Those watercolour paintings where strokes of candyfloss and bubblegum frame moko kauae-wearing women. An aesthetic of confusion. Sometimes I wonder if my sister and I made that confusion worse. Like little golden-haired reminders of her active participation in colonialization. How can you be Māori with kids like that?
Nowadays her Instagram bio reads: Ngāpuhi princess.
*
A coffee to catch up on three years. I felt self-conscious of my $200 jeans and the ease with which I had ordered a latte over ice. She sat across from me with her mocha. Stirring the dark chocolate santé bar into the foam and letting it come apart in swirls that left the milk muddy. I had so much I wanted to tell her. Like about how Dad had started calling kūmara a sweet potato or that when the doctor said I had big feet I thought of her. Or that when Ihumātao happened it left the blood of my woke-ass white friends boiling. But mine simply tugged on my veins and cried like a child to go home. I had so much I wanted to tell her.
It was drizzling when we parted ways outside. Her goodbye came in the form of a giant grin. I could have sworn that in that moment, the air smelled like chlorine.
Frankie Healey currently lives on Aotea/Great Barrier Island and is completing her Master of Creative Writing, specialising in creative non-fiction. When she’s not working on her thesis, or on creative ad copy for her job in social media, she’s stoked to be able to explore the delicious whenua she’s lucky to call home.