He’d been making frequent forays to the new craft market—built to attract the swarms of tourists expected when the fancy hotel opened in a few months—as he and my mother attempted to improve our apartment’s ambiance. The resources they had to work with—mats woven from pandanus tree leaves, bark cloth wall hangings, and crude carvings made from some kind of smooth, reddish wood—weren’t quite what they were accustomed to. When they’d remodeled our house in Oklahoma, they’d traipsed around to specialty shops and showrooms, selecting damask, terrazzo, no-wax vinyl flooring, and Formica. No such stuff could be found here. Yet my parents, Dust Bowl and Depression veterans who knew a thing or two about sows’ ears and silk purses, seemed exhilarated by the challenge of tapping their creativity more than their checkbook. Maybe the effort brought back memories of their first years together, when my father was a country schoolteacher. Before he went to med school and more than a decade before my birth, they’d lived in a one-room house in western Oklahoma. Dust as fine as baby powder blew in through a gap under the front door, but they’d prettied up the place as best they could. Even later, when my parents could afford to hire decorators and handymen, they’d spent evenings and weekends stitching draperies, upholstering chairs, and hanging pictures, most of which my father had drawn in pastels or painted with globs of oils. Now they were applying the same energy and imagination to decorating the Utulei apartment.
“What do you think?” My father lifted the brown paper that swaddled the new artifact, as if unveiling a Brancusi.
Until now, his additions to the apartment’s decor had been tasteful in their own Pacific-primitive way—tapa cloth panels decorated with geometric designs, glass fishing floats encased in knotted nets, a miniature outrigger canoe like the paopaos we’d seen Samoans paddling in Pago Bay. But this new treasure, a totem-like tiki with two heads stacked one atop the other, was grotesque. The eyes were round shells of a cloudy green color that made the tiki look like it had glaucoma. Both heads wore grimaces—or were those smiles? Their oversized teeth were bared, but their eyes stared so vacantly it was hard to tell what emotion their faces meant to express.
“I call it ‘Double Ugly,’ “ my father said, stationing the tiki by the front door.
My mother glanced up from the sofa, where she sat flipping through magazines and tearing out the most colorful pages. “Whatever possessed you to bring that thing home, Harold?” Her nose scrunched up like she’d caught a whiff of something vile.
My father patted the tiki’s head. “He’s got a kind of charm. You’ll see, he’ll grow on you. And if we keep him here by the door, he’s bound to scare off anything really evil.”
When Dick came to pick me up for the Goat Island Club dance that night, my parents were making beads. This was another of their decorating projects: a beaded curtain to hang in the pass-through between the kitchen and the narrow entry hall. Instead of buying beads, they were making them the way my mother had fashioned necklaces when she was a girl, cutting magazine pages into little triangles, rolling each scrap around a toothpick, applying glue to keep the bead rolled tight, and slipping the toothpick out to leave a hole through the middle. Night after night, my parents sat in the living room, snipping and rolling and gluing and tossing the beads into a bowl on the coffee table. Most nights I snipped and rolled and glued and tossed right along with them, enjoying the wordless intimacy, but this night I’d been too consumed with primping and pacing.
If I’d had my way I would’ve dashed out the door as soon as Dick arrived, but I knew I had to invite him in to meet my parents—to be scrutinized and sized up, that is. We took the two rattan easy chairs facing the sofa where my parents sat rolling and gluing. I perched on the edge of my seat; my eyes traveled around the room as if they might find conversation starters printed on the walls. Dick smiled over at me and sank back in his chair. Either he didn’t grasp what was at stake here or he’d done this meet-the-parents thing often enough to be unfazed.
“What’s that you’re doing?” Dick craned his head toward the coffee table and squinted at the bowl of multicolored tubes.
“Making beads,” my mother said. She showed him how to make one, but didn’t invite him over to the couch to try it.
“Huh. Neat,” Dick said and changed the subject to California, where he’d lived before coming to Samoa. My mother kept on rolling and gluing, looking up occasionally to nod or ask an innocuous question, but my father laid down his toothpick and triangles, rested his chin on his fist, and fixed his gaze on Dick.
“I understand your mother runs a boarding house,” he said.
How’d he know that? I didn’t even know it.
“Right. Atauloma—it’s an old girls’ school out on the west end. Mostly Air Force guys stay there now. Great bunch of guys.” Dick put his arms behind his head and stretched out his legs.
I thought my father was heading for common ground, about to mention that he and my mother had run a boarding house when he was in med school, but he stiffened and his eyebrows arched. Was it something Dick said or his cocksure make-yourself-at-homeness? Was it the long hair? The cigarette pack in his pocket?
I made a show of checking my watch but knew without consulting the hour it was time to leave. Snatching my purse from the floor and rising from my chair in a single swoop, I dashed across the room, brusquely kissed my parents, spun around, and headed for the door, bumping the table in my haste and spilling the bowl of beads.
Dick lit a Kent as soon as we were out of sight. The smoke rose in a single stream toward a palm leaf silhouetted against a sky the color of deep water.
“I’ve never dated a girl whose father makes beads.” Even in the semi-darkness I could see his smirk.
Our sneakers crunched in unison on the gravel path. I counted five steps before responding. “He’s not like most fathers, okay? He’s different.”
“I’ll say.”
Another five steps. Crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch. I was weighing words, wanting to defend my father, but then not wanting to, as my affections shifted to the boy beside me. Then wanting to again but not knowing how, never before having felt the need. Back home, no one thought it odd that my father would rather plant tulips than play golf or putter in the garage. He didn’t hunt or fish and couldn’t talk sports, but if anyone thought less of him for it, they kept it to themselves. My mother’s friends always told her how lucky she was to have a husband who liked shopping and decorating as much as she did; my friends admired his paintings and said they wished their dads baked cookies. Even Judy, whose pop was a college football coach nicknamed Moose, seemed to think my father was as charming and talented as I thought he was.
Walking next to Dick as we’d left the apartment, I’d felt that shiver in my midsection again, but now the sensation slid up into my throat and made it tickle and tighten. In the place where the tingle had been, a hollow chill crept in. This was my daddy that Dick was disrespecting, and I was my daddy’s protector. I had to speak up for him—didn’t I?
Dick took my hand. A fresh wave surged through my insides, erasing my angst like warm surf smoothing a beach. I liked the feeling. And I hated myself for liking it.
Even before the music started, everything seemed amplified—the noise, the light, the colors of the girls’ flowered dresses, the smell of the coconut oil Samoan boys used to tame their hair, a scent so assertively unctuous it could be nauseating. On the walk over, I’d imagined we were on our way to a grownup nightclub, a dim, smoky place with multi-colored lights over the bar and candles on the tables—or maybe those little lamps with beaded shades, like in Casablanca. But no. Goat Island Club, an expat hangout on the second floor of a warehouse near the cruise ship dock, was bright as a schoolroom. Empty metal folding chairs stood like wallflowers around the room’s edges. Teenagers—about half of them Americans and half Samoans—gathered in clumps, talking and laughing loudly. Boys elbowed each other and feigned combative stances; girls fussed with each other’s hair and yelled cha
llenges at the boys: “Hey, Gus! You gonna dance with me tonight?” Unlike the barefoot girl I’d seen on the footpath my first day on the island, the Samoan girls in this crowd—with their straight skirts, sandals, beehives, and bobs—seemed more like my friends and me. I could envision doing typical girlfriend things with them.
All the tennis court crowd was there; Toni, too, from the fiafia village. She’d shed her puletasi and fa’a Samoa ways and now, in sleeveless shift and ponytail, looked every bit the all-American high school girl—except for her bare feet. She smiled with a sweetness that seemed sincere yet for some reason annoyed me. As Dick steered me past the group, Marnie and Valerie raised their eyebrows and nodded their “way-to-go” approval. Suzi pretended to be absorbed in conversation with Joyce, but her eyes shifted in our direction as we passed.
Dick bought me an orange Fanta, and we leaned against a wall watching as the band—a Samoan group called The Vampires—set up electric guitars, a drum set, microphones, and amps and began their sound check. Electric guitars! Here on this dinky island in the middle of the ocean. This place has more promise than I thought. The drummer’s straight, black hair swooped Beatles-style over his brow; the bass guitar player wore a scowl and a towering frizz that made him look like a Samoan Bob Dylan. All the others sported hairstyles that were nothing like boys at home wore: cut close on the sides and long on top, combed back from their foreheads and slicked with oil that accentuated the waves. Their faces were handsome, but I couldn’t get over the hairdos. I was glad for the beach-boy blond at my side.
The music surprised me as much as the club’s mood. I knew most of the songs—Wooly Bully, House of the Rising Sun, Mustang Sally—but I’d never heard them played the way the Vampires played them, with notes held long and embellished with vibrato and wah-wah flourishes. The sound reminded me of Hawaiian music, but the beats and melodies were pure rock ‘n’ roll. In between the songs I knew, the Vampires played other tunes I’d never heard, slow instrumentals like yearning rendered as music. Had my ears ever been touched by anything more sublime?
From the very first note, the dance floor blurred with couples in motion—no timid wall-hugging like at dances in Stillwater, no pairs of girls twisting together out of desperation. Everyone danced, not just swaying, but gliding, dipping, moving their hips. Among the first to hit the dance floor, Toni pranced out with one of the well-oiled, wavy-haired boys, whose eyes, brown and gooey as bonbons, never wandered from her.
Dick guided me onto the floor and began to move with the same rhythmic fluidity as the other dancers. I swayed noncommittally in place for a few bars; then, involuntarily, my body mirrored Dick’s, gliding and dipping when he glided and dipped, my hips moving in sync with his. As the evening passed, lights dimmed, and the crowd mellowed. With my eyes closed and my head against Dick’s shoulder, Goat Island Club began to feel more like the place I’d pictured.
Then the dance ended, the lights came back on, and we hurried outside as if romance were a delicate artifact we had to protect from the glare. We stepped out into liquid air that carried the fragrance of unseen flowers; I started walking toward the road.
“No, this way.” Dick pulled me toward the docks. I wasn’t sure I should follow, but I did. We walked along a row of corrugated metal warehouses set back from the bay on an expanse of asphalt, then down a few steps to a walkway overhung with palm trees. It was the sidewalk that ran behind Centipede Row, the line of houses on our right, Pago Bay on our left. The bay was maybe a half-mile wide at this point, and we could see the lights of villages and Japanese fishing boats on the other side. Behind them, mountains rose like the sloping shoulders of proud, old men.
Until that moment, the most romantic place I’d been alone with a boy was Couch Park, a corridor of green that ran along Stillwater Creek, out by the county fairground. The water in the creek was brick red and opaque, but tall trees and a swinging bridge lent an air of enchantment on summer evenings. Now, in a tropical setting that required no imagination to feel dreamy, I strolled under palm trees in moonlight, hand in hand with a boy who until days ago had seemed half-fantasy.
“Let’s sit here for a while.” Dick pulled me toward a park bench that faced the bay. I peeked at my wristwatch, knowing my father would be checking his. Then I sat down beside Dick.
When he kissed me, I tasted cigarettes, a taste I’d thought I hated, but didn’t any longer. Didn’t hate at all.
I knew better than to ask, but I blurted out the question first thing the next morning: “What do you think of Dick?”
My father was making coffee. My mother, setting out cups, said nothing, as if lining up their bottoms with the saucers’ indentations required her full attention. I, too, avoided eye contact.
“Dick?” my father said. “Oh, you mean Double Ugly?”
I shot him a look that shattered my pretense of nonchalance.
“That’s what he looks like, you know,” my father continued. “One of those tiki heads, with his slicked-back hair and pug nose.”
It was only too true. Writing to my girlfriend Cindi a few days earlier, I’d described Dick as “all the Beach Boys put together, only better,” but the fact was, he wasn’t that good looking. His nose looked like it was permanently pressed against an invisible pane of glass, and his eyes, though blue, were small. Still. I liked him. We’d had fun the night before, we’d started something that felt good, and I wanted to keep feeling good, even if my father tried to spoil it. He always came up with some bogus criticism to diminish boys he didn’t want me to date: “That boy’s a compulsive liar,” or “He’ll never amount to anything.”
All of that was just a smokescreen. The real problem was never truthfulness or ambition—or motorcycles or cigarettes or a mother who kept a boarding house full of flyboys. The problem was, boys like Dick wore their sexuality a little too close to the surface, and there was no way my father was going to let me rub up against the ugliness of that.
As if he—or the tiki guarding our door—could stop me.
Chapter 7—Shifting Sands
Se’i fono le pa’a ma ona vae.
(Let the crab take counsel with its legs.)
—Samoan proverb interpreted as “Consider the implications before you act.”
The five girls clustered in my living room formed a mixed bouquet of complexions, from Suzi’s sunbaked pink to Sylvia’s mocha brown. But it was other characteristics—hairstyle, mannerisms, wit, and likeability—on which I rated them as I surveyed the room, imagining the five as contestants in a pageant for which the grand prize was—ta da!—my friendship. It was a prize I wasn’t sure any of them actually coveted, but friendship—and lunch—were all I had to offer.
My mother had said I could bring someone home for lunch on this first day of classes at Samoana High. I think she meant Valerie. But when the noon bell rang and I rushed out into the hall to look for Val, I found her talking to the other four girls: Suzi, Sylvia, Clydeth, and Wendy. There was no way I could invite only Val and not the others—my Oklahoma manners wouldn’t allow any such thing—so I asked them all to come along.
If my mother was perturbed when half a dozen schoolgirls trooped into her tiny kitchen, her Oklahoma manners wouldn’t allow her to show it. She just smiled, opened an extra can of wahoo, and set out the whole loaf of bread she’d bought at Jessop’s bakery that morning. We all made sandwiches and took them into the living room, leaving—to my mother’s silent consternation, I’m sure—six separate trails of breadcrumbs on the pandanus matting.
As we ate, I mentally compared the girls to my best friends back home. I’d known most of my Stillwater cronies since grade school, and even the ones I hadn’t known as long weren’t from far away; they’d just gone to different elementary schools across town. Not only had we grown up together, we fully expected to go all the way through college together, right there in Stillwater, at the state university, whose Williamsburgish buildings our parents had been pointing out since we were toddlers. Her
e in Samoa, my classmates—mostly displaced Americans like me—hailed from different cities and states, with no common geography, no shared experiences or reference points, and no expectation that our lives ever would intersect again.
Lost in my thoughts and mental assessments, absently fingering my silver ring—that sterling symbol of Tri Chi sisterhood—I wasn’t really following the conversation, but I tuned in when everyone laughed at Val’s description of Mr. Siefried, a stork of a man who taught social studies. Whenever Val said something especially witty, Suzi repeated it, as if to claim some of the cleverness as her own, and each time Suzi parroted her, Val and I exchanged expressions of incredulity, arching our eyebrows and bugging out our eyes. With each such incident, Val moved up and Suzi moved down a notch or two on the likeability scale.
Sitting between Suzi and Val on the sofa, Sylvia interjected non-sequiturs, unaware she was getting off track.
“You should rat your hair,” she commented in the middle of Val’s side-splitting account of how Mr. Oster, the math teacher, had whacked a ruler on the desk of some Samoan boy who’d nodded off in class. Dark-eyed Sylvia, whose faint accent hinted at her Mexican heritage, was the same age as Val and Suzi, but acted younger. She wore an outfit she’d made: sleeveless shell and straight skirt, both baby-girl pink, with her hair teased into a bouffant style that dipped over one eye. Sewing and doing hair—her own or that of anyone else who’d let her—were Sylvia’s favorite pastimes, and she talked of little else. I gave her points for appearance and industry, but had no choice but to mark her down in the repartee category.
Clydeth, a diminutive Filipina with arms as slender and golden as bamboo shoots, perched on an ottoman with her ankles crossed, smiling but not saying much. On her, I reserved judgment, pending further observation.
Sunk into one of the rattan easy chairs in the corner, Wendy—a Californian whose father was principal of our section of the school—bantered with Val, tossing out quips, laughing at Val’s retorts, and blurting confidences.
Mango Rash Page 6