Should I smile? Try to make eye contact? Say hello? Does anyone even understand English? All I heard was babble that didn’t sound like words to me—strings of vowels punctuated with hiccups. Even the voices sounded foreign: loud, nasal, and abrupt.
At the far end of the baggage claim, a slight, ruddy-faced man in a flowered Hawaiian shirt stood out in the crowd of sturdy, bronze Samoans. When he spotted us and hurried over, I wanted to throw my arms around him—and believe me, I was not one to dole out hugs to strangers.
My father looked relieved, too. The sharp-edged expression he’d worn since we’d stepped off the plane softened into the Good-to-see-you face he wore in public back home, where he knew everyone, and everyone knew him. Big ol’ smile filling the space between chin and ears, eyes tipped up at the corners like he was already thinking of a joke to share. He could relax a little now because the man headed toward us was a peer—not just another small, light-skinned person like us, but another doctor like my dad.
“Dr. Donaldson?” my father said.
Please, I prayed, don’t let him say, “I presume.”
Dr. Donaldson shook my father’s hand and made a little bow toward my mother and me. “Welcome to Samoa,” he said. He pronounced it SAH-mow-uh, as we’d been told the Samoans did. “Let’s see if we can find your luggage. We’ll drop it off at your apartment and then I’ll take you on a tour of the island.” His words were friendly, but there was something distant, wistful, about his delivery. As he spoke, his eyes scanned the sky above our heads as if he were watching for flocks of birds and preparing to fly away with them. His ethereality made his first name—Manley—seem like a lifelong joke at his expense. But never mind that, or his peculiarities. We’d arrived, we had a ride to town, and soon we’d see our new home.
By the time we collected our bags and loaded them into the blue government-issue Jeep, the sun had risen, but gray veils like vaporous cobwebs still hung over trees and gathered in low places, and a campfire-ish pungency scented the air. Smoke from underground ovens, Dr. Donaldson explained. In the villages, Samoan men and women were preparing the Sunday meal of roast pork and palusami—coconut cream baked in taro leaves. My stomach mumbled a reminder that I hadn’t eaten on the overnight flight from Honolulu. I had a distinct craving for fried chicken and mashed potatoes, our usual Sunday fare.
Dr. Donaldson pointed out some of the sights as he drove us along the fifty-five-square-mile island’s one main road: here a coconut plantation, there the island’s tallest mountain, a two-thousand-foot peak with jagged contours padded in dense vegetation. On either side of the sunlit road, the forest deepened and darkened with an intensity that gave me the willies. On family vacations I’d ridden in spooked silence through densely wooded Appalachian hillsides and stood, Lilliputian, in California’s sequoia groves, but I’d experienced nothing as darkly alluring as this jungle and its impenetrable blackness. With the growing realization that I was half a world away from anything familiar, I slid closer to my mother in the Jeep’s back seat.
We passed through a village where half a dozen fales sat in a semi-circle around a common green, and I picked up a scent that reminded me of flowers I’d seen everywhere in Honolulu. They looked like little stars carved from wax—five creamy petals with a smear of butter yellow in the center—and their fragrance melted in the air like the scent of gardenia or jasmine. What did my dad call them? Frangopango? Frangipani? That was it, frangipani; the entire village smelled of frangipani. My breathing slowed, and I dissolved into my seat.
My mother tapped my arm and tilted her head toward the village. “Nancy, look!”
I turned to see a small boy in what I would learn was a lavalava, chasing a scrawny dog, then stopping just short of the road to wave and smile as we passed. Finally, a friendly gesture. I grinned and waggled my hand like a doofus.
In the next village, the houses were all square, with sturdy walls and tin roofs, and some sat atop concrete pillars that hoisted them a full story off the ground. Better in hurricanes, Dr. Donaldson told us.
“Oh?” The lines between my mother’s eyebrows deepened, and her voice came out like a sliver, barely piercing the thick air. Hurricanes.
Behind one house, a man bathed at an outdoor faucet. He held his lavalava around his body like a shower curtain, deftly maneuvering it from back to front and side to side with one hand as he washed himself with the other. Across the road from the village, boardwalks led from a narrow strip of sand into the ocean, and at the end of each pier-like walkway sat a privy. I tried to remember if indoor plumbing had been mentioned in the description of our quarters in Utulei.
“Do they still use those?” My mother nodded toward the outhouses.
“Afraid so.” Dr. Donaldson turned his head toward my mother but gazed beyond her shoulder. “We’re trying to phase them out and introduce flush toilets, but … “
He shrugged.
“Fa’a Samoa.”
Fa’a Samoa: The Samoan way.
Stretches of deep forest alternated with bright villages and views of the Pacific. Placid at the horizon, the ocean turned energetic near the shore, flexing and relaxing, glinting and glowing like a muscular showoff. Each time we passed from sun to shade, I shivered, though the air remained balmy. I twiddled the silver ring I wore, stroking its smooth sides, twisting it around my finger and pressing its angular designs into my skin to make x-shaped impressions, soothing myself with the familiar feel of the metal.
At last, the Jeep rounded the final bend. “Here we are,” Dr. Donaldson said. “The Utulei apartments. You’re in I-7.”
Ahead was a cluster of new-looking, two-story buildings with corrugated metal roofs and cinder block walls at each end. Each unit had a wide front porch overhung by a second-story balcony, and the buildings all faced a central courtyard, where a few American-looking families sat talking and laughing at picnic tables. Now this was starting to look civilized.
“Very nice,” my father said, but his eyes darted across the road, where a row of squat, white houses faced a bay, offering views of green peaks on the other side. Penicillin Row—the houses usually offered to doctors. No vacancies there right now, but we were on a waiting list.
As we neared our apartment building, I noticed that the walls running between the cinder block ends weren’t walls at all, but panels of screening.
Oh great, a see-through house. Isn’t that the dream of every self-conscious sixteen-year-old? We might as well be living in a thatched hut.
Once inside, I saw that the screens were outfitted with wooden louvers that could be closed for privacy. A smile—albeit a tiny one—took hold of my lips, and I looked around to see what else our new home had to offer. The floors were covered wall-to-wall with woven mats that smelled like dried grass and scritched beneath our dress-up shoes. Very South Pacific-y. That should make my dad happy—my dad, the romantic whose Rodgers and Hammerstein-fueled fantasies had landed us here.
A galley kitchen separated the living room and dining room, which were furnished with rattan tables, chairs, and a sofa. I had nothing against rattan, but with the cinder block-and-jalousie walls, the overall effect was a bit like a cheap Florida motel—the kind we’d been forced to stay in while vacationing, on days when we’d spent too much time beachcombing and waited too long to start looking for the night’s lodging. Not exactly the airy beach house I’d imagined. Then again, better than a fale stuffed with four-hundred-pound Samoans.
Dr. Donaldson said he’d give us some time to “get situated.” He’d return in an hour or so to pick us up for the island tour. “I’m sure you’ll want to freshen up”—he smiled vaguely as his eyes drifted across our dress-up clothes and fixated on a point on the wall just beyond where we stood—”and change.”
I took a few more minutes to investigate the first floor, then dragged my suitcase up the staircase, past the—yes, thank you—bathroom, to have a look at the three bedrooms. I claimed the middle one, a narrow, nondescript box with
tan vinyl floor tile, a plain dresser against one wall, and a twin bed against the opposite wall. Heaving my suitcase onto the bare mattress, I pictured my bedroom back in Stillwater: the wide bed with its Martha Washington woven spread, the coffee-colored wall-to-wall carpeting, the double doors that opened into an adjacent room my parents had converted to a sitting room for me after my older brother moved out and married. In that private suite, I entertained friends and, when alone, engaged in secret rites of diary-keeping and tracking on graph paper the ups and downs of my attitudes toward various interests, romantic and diversionary.
My new room in Utulei was maybe a quarter the size of the space I had at home and more suited to a novitiate than to a girl whose idea of deprivation was giving up her Princess phone. The room’s one redeeming feature was a door that led onto the balcony, from which—by squeezing myself into one corner and craning my neck—I could glimpse the bay and inhale its bouquet: essence of ocean creature steeped with seaweed in a salty broth, a scent that gave me a vacation-y feeling.
I began unpacking the few clothes I’d brought to wear until the rest of our belongings arrived by ship in a month or two. I tucked white cotton underwear, denim shorts, and my aqua-and-lime striped two-piece swimsuit into dresser drawers and hung print dresses and blouses in the closet.
As I lined up my sneakers and sandals, I noticed a light bulb in a wire cage about eight inches above the closet floor. We’d been warned against bringing leather shoes; they’d mildew in the humidity. But just in case we were foolish enough to ignore the advice—which we were—the constantly burning light bulbs in our closets were supposed to help keep our shoes dry. The wire cage was there to prevent anything from resting against the hot bulb and catching fire.
We’d gotten other warnings as well, like about the geckos—tiny lizards with translucent skin and suction-cup toes. They weren’t dangerous, but they were everywhere.
“They’ll even get on your toothbrush, so check before you put it in your mouth,” Dr. Donaldson had cautioned. I’d already encountered one when I’d taken a tumbler from the kitchen cabinet and—just as I was about to fill it with water—noticed a cricket-sized gecko attached to the inside wall of the glass, staring at me with its head cocked like a curious puppy. I set the glass back on the shelf. I could do without a drink.
Even grosser were the ants—black specks like marching coffee grounds that were attracted to body secretions and, we’d been told, would chew holes in your underwear if you left it lying around overnight.
As I puttered around the bedroom, I left the shutters open, hoping that immersing myself in the sounds and smells of my new environment would make this strange place seem more like the Shangri-La I’d imagined. I’d signed on for palm trees and surf, not moldy shoes, creepy lizards, and panty-eating ants.
But hey, I was in Samoa. I’d come here of my own accord—no whining or pouting when my father came up with the crazy notion of uprooting us and moving us from Middle America to the middle of the South Pacific. After all, being a teenager in Stillwater, Okla-boring-homa hadn’t been all that hot; this had to be better, fungus, fauna, and all.
Still, I wished I’d packed a few knick-knacks that would make the room feel like the haven I needed it to be. Then I remembered the one thing I had brought that would connect me with the life I’d left behind. Swaddled in tissue paper and stashed in a pocket inside my suitcase was a small, brass picture frame decorated with flower-like clusters of imitation pearls. I unwrapped it and gazed at the black-and-white photograph behind the glass.
Danny. My romantic fixation for the past twenty months and twenty-four days. Was it really possible I wouldn’t see him for two years? Two years times three-hundred-sixty-five days. Seven-hundred-and-thirty days. That was longer than we’d known each other. That was forever. Picture-Danny beamed back at me like he didn’t know the meaning of the word.
I set the framed photo on the dresser and sank onto the bed. Six thousand miles hadn’t seemed so terribly far when, sitting on my bed in Stillwater, I’d considered the journey ahead. Fifty round-trips between Stillwater and Oklahoma City. Two Florida vacations. But now I understood that miles were not the only measure of distance. I was very, very far from home.
Overcome by heat and overwhelmed by surroundings, I closed the shutters, the slats clacking like some primitive musical instrument.
The clothes are coming off. I unbutton my jacket, tug my dress over my head, kick off my pumps, and peel my sticky pantyhose down like I’m skinning overripe fruit. Standing in my underwear, I feel the moisture in the air merge with the sweat on my skin. I could use a shower, I’m thinking, and as that thought enters my mind, I remember the man bathing in the open with only a lavalava between my eyes and his nakedness. Could I ever do that? I don’t mean just the skillful whipping around of the sarong, but the comfort with lathering up al fresco. Could I do that? And could I drift off to sleep on the crushed coral floor of a fale, shoulder to shoulder with my kin, and rise to breakfast on boiled taro? And after sleeping and rising and breakfasting and bathing day after day in a village where my every move is exposed, who would I be? Would I be the same girl who’d left Danny and Stillwater behind, or would I be changed in some essential way?
I glanced at the room’s one regular window—a vertical pane that ran alongside one of the screened panels—and wondered if anyone in the apartments across the courtyard could see into my room. Before I could give that possibility much thought, something else caught my eye. Nailed across the bottom of the window was a square of painted plywood with something scratched into its surface. I moved closer. The scratch marks were names, like you’d carve on a park bench or the top of an old school desk when no one was looking: PETA, MAIKA, TIVA, BELINDA + MEIF, BARB + ISIDORE.
I knew who had carved those names, brazenly defacing my room. It was Barb, the American girl whose family had lived in apartment I-7 before us. All I knew about her was her name and that she had recently graduated from Samoana High School and returned to the States to live with a friend while her parents continued working in Samoa. Still, staring at the graffiti she left behind, I pictured her whole life. I saw her dressed in colorful island prints, smiling, surrounded by the friends whose names circled hers on the plywood square. I imagined her dancing with brown-eyed Isidore, laden with flower leis and shell jewelry from her island beau. And then, flushed from the dance, laughing as he popped a piece of mango into her open mouth.
I saw it all, and I envied what I saw. Somehow, in this alien world, Barb had found her fa’a Samoa. Maybe, just maybe, so would I.
The garments of my former life, so tight and stifling, are heaped upon the floor. I kick them aside on my way to the closet and survey the selection hanging there. My hand reaches for a splashy, red-and-orange print, then hesitates and settles on a simple, flowered shift in muted shades of blue and green. I slip into the dress and slide my feet into sandals.
I’m an island girl now, I tell myself. As if transformation were as easy as changing my clothes.
Chapter 2—Island Girls
Sa matou tu’u la’au mai nei.
(On our journey we have enjoyed much hospitality.)
—Samoan proverb
The girl sitting across the table from me tipped her head and narrowed her eyes. “So, what do you think of Samoa?”
My parents and I had spent the afternoon touring the island with Dr. Donaldson, driving through countless villages of fales and tin-roofed shacks, taking in palm trees and lava-rimmed ocean vistas, along with occasional incongruities like the boxy building that housed a new TV station. This last stop, at the home of another American doctor’s family on Centipede Row—a cluster of Navy-era quarters with an impressive view of the harbor—was supposed to make us feel welcome. So far, it hadn’t.
For one thing, the pressure was on for us to make a good impression. The family we were visiting was that of my father’s new boss, Dr. Puckett, medical director of the Hospital of American Samoa, wher
e my dad was to practice obstetrics and gynecology for the next two years. And Valerie, the girl opposite me at the kitchen table, wasn’t exactly putting me at ease. The oldest of the Pucketts’ four children, she was younger than me by a couple of years, but the way she interrogated me right off the bat made me feel like a schoolchild searching for the right answer to please an exacting teacher. Older, worldlier girls had made me feel that way, but never someone younger. There was nothing tentative or deferential in Valerie’s voice or manner, and because I was always tentative and deferential in such situations, her self-assurance rattled me.
“What do I think of Samoa? Oh, it’s beautiful. And I—”
“Did you drive in the States?”
“Sure. I got my license last February, when I turned sixteen, and—”
“Well, you can’t drive here. You have to be eighteen.”
She fiddled with a spoon that lay on a placemat woven from pandanus leaves. I noticed a wart on her right index finger. She saw me looking at it and slid her hands into her lap. I kept my hands concealed, too, so she wouldn’t see me twirling my ring.
“How do you get your hair straight like that?” Valerie asked.
I tried to answer economically, doubting she’d let me finish a sentence without interrupting again. “Orange juice cans. The big ones. Roll my hair on them. And I use this gel stuff, Dippity Do.”
“Hm.” She said it in a way that sounded more like an indictment than an expression of interest. “Good luck finding your Dippity Do down here.” She raised her left hand—the wartless one—and twisted a strand of hair around one finger. Her hair had the color and sheen of polished cherry wood, but it lacked direction, pouffing out in some places and lying flat in others. Just above one eyebrow it curled upward, like a misplaced false eyelash.
Groping for conversation starters, I pointed to the lapel pin she wore on the collar of her sleeveless blouse. It was shaped like an artist’s palette, with dabs of paint enameled around its edge and the words “Art Club” emblazoned across its center.
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