Mango Rash

by Pokerwinski, Nan Sanders;

The woman raised her eyebrows, turned away, and said something in Samoan to the other woman. I took that as a yes. It was a more accommodating response than we often got when we shopped in Fagatogo’s general stores, where clerks routinely ignored us while waiting on a dozen Samoan customers who came in after we did. I never knew whether to act even nicer to the contemptuous clerks and grudging waitresses or to return their haughtiness with a dose of my own, as Val did. Neither strategy changed the outcome, and with each rebuff I shrank a little more into myself.

  Still, the hamburgers satisfied our need for grease. The donuts—fresh, yeasty, and sprinkled with granulated sugar that crunched between our teeth—provided the perfect counterpoint to the red pop’s fizz. We sat at a table beside an open window, in a mild stupor from the sugar and the fan’s hum, and swigged the last of our pop, licking lingering sugar grains from our fingers as breezes lapped our faces and riffled our hair. We would’ve lingered, too, but the women’s glares discouraged that, so we went looking for other diversions.

  At another dock near the new hotel, where Coast Guard and Navy ships tied up, we found Suzi with her sidekick Kathi—small, spunky, with brown eyes set like polished river stones in a heart-shaped face, and a paint splatter of freckles across her nose. With the two girls was Suzi’s older brother Karl, who had the same sharp features as his sister—a face that looked like it was assembled from spare elbows—and a personality to match. He stood talking to a sailor from a ship that had docked the day before.

  “So, what’s there to do here—besides get drunk at Pago Bar?” the sailor asked. A tuft of sand-colored hair drifted onto his forehead, and he swept it back with fingers held stiff like the tines of a comb.

  “Get drunk at the Kava Cup,” said Karl. His upper lip twisted in a way that reminded me of Suzi’s smirk, but Karl was signaling something other than sarcasm: a kind of knowing, stick-with-me-buddy semaphore.

  Diesel fumes masked the pastel scents that usually surfed in on breezes from the bay, and mechanical clanks and whirrs from the nearby ships drowned out the voices of the singers at the cruise ship dock.

  “What about girls? How do you meet local girls?” the sailor wanted to know. Did he not see the four of us standing there? Or were we not the sort of girls he was interested in meeting?

  “Funny you should ask,” Suzi said. For once her expression resembled a real smile more than a sneer. I knew her well enough by now to doubt its sincerity. “See that girl over there?” She pointed toward a Samoan teenager walking by. A slender girl. A pretty girl. A seaman’s stereotype of Polynesian perfection, right down to the flower behind her ear: a red hibiscus like the ones that rained down on tourists from the cable car. “She saw you in town today and told us she thinks you’re cute.”

  Kathi nodded with exaggerated zeal. “Yeah, she said she’d like to meet you.”

  “Really?” The sailor twisted his head to look at the girl, then turned back to Suzi and Kathi, grinning like the tiki at my apartment’s front door. “What do I have to do?”

  Suzi and Kathi traded sly looks, but the sailor, swiveling to steal another look at the girl, missed them. Val and I looked at each other, too, clueless, but curious what the other girls were up to. This might be good.

  The Samoan girl was close enough now for us to see her look of friendly interest—eyes widened, lips a curvaceous arc. The shipboard clamor had died down, and the singers’ voices reached our ears again. Another load of flowers drifted downward, as if the sky had burst and begun delivering not pallid strangers from an unknown land, but things of beauty straight from heaven.

  “Just call out to her,” Suzi told the sailor. Then turning to Karl, “What’s that girl’s name again?”

  “Mimi,” Karl said. His lips contorted again. “Just yell, ‘Mimi!’ “

  Anthems aside, my Samoan wasn’t very good, and the word wasn’t in my Teach Yourself Samoan book, but I was pretty sure mimi was a Samoan vulgarity related to genitalia.

  Wait!

  I didn’t care if Suzi and the others messed with the sailor, but that girl—

  No! Stop!

  Though I had the urge to yell those words instead of only thinking them, to turn things around and point us all in a different direction, I hesitated. These were my new friends, and I was trying as hard to fit in with the expat kids as to be accepted by the Samoans.

  The sailor’s lips moved, forming a word. I couldn’t will mine to open. Another moment passed, barely long enough to shoot a helpless glance at Val.

  “MIMI!” the sailor shouted. “Hey! Mimi! Come here!”

  The girl’s face changed. Her mouth twisted, but not in the self-satisfied way that Karl’s and Suzi’s did; her eyes shifted left and right and then fixated on the path as she hurried away.

  I could not presume to know how she felt. Traveling that same path, I’d been yelled at, too, but “sky burster”—though it stung as much as the gravel my flip-flops flung against my calves—was no match for what that girl had just been called.

  I was not the one who’d been disgraced, yet I felt my shame growing like some strangling tropical vine, and I wished I could disappear through a slit in the heavens. Now it was clear to me why the Tropic Isle ladies and their sisters in the shops of Fagatogo weren’t singing any welcome songs to my friends and me.

  We might shed our stateside clothes, we might pick up the language and legends, we might dress in puletasis and tuck blossoms behind our ears. But before we’d ever really belong here, we’d have to learn to harmonize.

  Chapter 9—Taboo

  Taboo—also spelled tabu, Tongan tabu, Maori tapu, the prohibition of an action or the use of an object based on ritualistic distinctions of them either as being sacred and consecrated or as being dangerous, unclean, and accursed … Taboos were most highly developed in the Polynesian societies of the South Pacific, but they have been present in virtually all cultures.

  —Encyclopedia Britannica

  Val had something to show me. She wouldn’t say what it was.

  “You’ll have to come over to my house,” she said on the phone one night, her voice low, conspiratorial, “when Mom’s not home.”

  After school the next day, when our mothers were playing bridge with the other expat women, we headed straight to the Pucketts’ house. Instead of ushering me to her room as usual, Val led me around to the back. Like all the houses on Centipede Row, the Pucketts’ sat on concrete piers so high you could walk in a crouch beneath the structure. Val disappeared between two piers, her bouncing auburn curls like a headful of beckoning fingers.

  “Would you mind telling me what we’re doing down here?” I swatted cobwebs. “It’s creepy.”

  “You’ll see.” Val reached into a space at the top of a post and pulled out a sheaf of onion-skin stationery with typing on each page. She handed me the manuscript. “You gotta read this.”

  I scanned a few pages and saw words I’d never seen in print and a few I’d never even heard. I hoped the dim light would conceal the flush that bled across my cheeks and around the tops of my ears.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  Val smiled. Her eyes slanted wickedly in the semi-darkness. She told me that during a stopover in Hawaii on the way to Samoa, her family had met the family that had just moved out of the house the Pucketts were moving into. Their teenage son had told Val about the hidden book, a typed copy of a paperback another kid had swiped from his parents’ bedroom.

  The pages softened, almost melted, in my damp hands. “You haven’t told anyone else, have you?”

  Val’s look could’ve withered a taro patch.

  “Please. If I tell the other girls, it’ll be all over the island. Mom will find out for sure.”

  That we did not want.

  We both lived in fear of Mrs. Puckett’s wrath. Sweeping imperiously around the island in floor-length muumuus that exaggerated, more than concealed, her broad hips and torpedo breasts, she was one scary woman. It wasn’t
just her size; it was her eyes, a look that made me think she knew things about me that my own mother didn’t know, things I hadn’t even done but might want to do. And her smile. It was the smile of a woman—a woman—who was absolutely sure of herself, afraid of nothing and no one. She should have been an inspiration, but with her bold pulchritude and sheer amplitude, Mrs. Puckett personified everything about womanhood that terrified me.

  We huddled under the house, reading silently, the hush broken only by gasps at vivid passages. What astonished me was not just the language, but also the power of mere words on a page to elicit sensations—surges of warmth, throbs that ached, shivering twinges—in the strangest places.

  Though the book’s content was steamy, the writing was laughably bad, even by our sophomoric standards. We immediately appropriated the silliest lines for our own inside jokes.

  I glanced at my watch. “Won’t your mom be home soon?”

  Val nodded. “Let’s go downtown, if you have any money, that is.”

  “I think I have a few pennies in my purse,” I said, borrowing a line from the book and setting her up to deliver the punch line.

  Val leaned close and, in her best imitation of lechery, breathed, “Sweetheart, you’ve got a goldmine in your pants.”

  At home in Utulei, I had my own clandestine reading material. It wasn’t lewd like Val’s, and my parents probably wouldn’t have grounded me if they’d found it. Still, I felt the need to keep it under wraps.

  I’d developed a ritual for reading my special book. First, I changed into my lavalava, a midnight blue sarong with a border of white philodendron leaves and hibiscus blossoms. Next, I selected a record, slipped it from its jacket, and centered it on my stereo’s turntable. My mood music wasn’t the Beach Boys or any of the other albums I’d brought with me from Oklahoma. It was a compilation of Samoan songs I’d bought at South Pacific Traders.

  From my stereo speakers, Samoan quartets and choruses sang about flowers and doves and chanted staccato incantations to summon sharks from the depths, all accompanied by guitar strums, ukulele riffs, hand claps, whoops, and clattering sticks on hollowed-out logs. Sometimes I skipped over boisterous tracks to play songs that made me feel pleasantly heavy-hearted, with lyrics about searching for love, finding love, and losing it, only to search again. In some songs the object of desire was an elusive lover; others were songs of farewell written to Samoa itself, testaments to the islands’ haunting sweetness and the anguish of leaving the homeland behind to travel overseas.

  Once the atmosphere was right, I turned the music low, dug through my underwear drawer, and extracted my book: Coming of Age in Samoa, anthropologist Margaret Mead’s classic study of “primitive” youth, based on her field work in the islands during the 1920s. I pored over its pages, absorbing as much as I could about the mores of Samoan society. Most fascinating were Mead’s discussions of taboos: practices that were forbidden, not because they were indecent or immoral, but because they were too sacred for ordinary people to engage in, or in some cases simply because of practical considerations. Taboos weren’t all about sex, as I’d always thought. Mead wrote about “taboo fish” that had to be relinquished to the village chief and a host of pregnancy taboos that forbade expectant mothers from sitting, dancing, gathering food, or eating alone.

  She also wrote a lot about sex. About adolescents slipping away for clandestine, “under the palm trees” encounters, about stealthy elopements and formal courtships, and about moetotolo—sleep crawling—in which boys spurned by day crept into girls’ fales at night to commit rape. Mead concluded that Americans might be better off adopting certain Samoan habits and attitudes—not the sexual assaults, but the practice of looking the other way when consenting young couples stole off to the coconut grove.

  Referring to American adolescents, she wrote: “The present problem of the sex experimentation of young people would be greatly simplified if it were conceived of as experimentation instead of rebellion, if no Puritan self-accusations vexed their consciences.”

  When I read those words, listening to songs about love and longing, with frangipani-charged breezes stirring teenage desires, I had to agree. This anthropologist the Samoans called Makelita already had my respect for venturing off to the South Seas when she was only twenty three; now I idolized her even more for championing sexual freedom and chastising overly protective parents.

  Sexual freedom and overprotective parents were still on my mind a few days later, when I noticed the woman sitting alone in a dingy café. The shape of her face, framed by hair that streamed and glowed like hot lava, reminded me of someone else. But who?

  I’d seen the woman when I first entered the café with the gang of girls I’d come to think of as my tribe—a shifting pack that always included some combination of my schoolmates Val-the-cynic, Wendy-the-wit, snide Suzi, perky Kathi, not-a-mean-bone Marnie, and hair-obsessed Sylvia. It was Friday of the second week of classes, and already we’d established an after-school routine: wandering Fagatogo’s cluster of shops, trying on cheap, plastic jewelry, browsing through the latest shipment of record albums from the States, and stopping for Fantas at a local eatery.

  This afternoon, we’d just appropriated a table when Marnie nudged me and nodded toward the woman. “That’s Dick’s mother.”

  Of course. That same, flattened face my father had compared to the hideous tiki’s head. I tried not to stare, but stole glances when the woman looked away. She wore bright colors that clashed with her hair, and she smoked a cigarette—not in the slow, stylish way my mother sometimes smoked after dinner, but sucking the smoke in and puffing it out the side of her mouth.

  Oh God, wouldn’t you know she smokes like a chimney—and has long hair. Red, too, probably dyed. I could imagine my father’s reaction to this dame, who not only kept a boarding house full of single men, but also violated his standards of appearance and behavior acceptable for a lady. Never mind that Dick also had a father with a respectable Public Works Department job. In my father’s eyes, I might as well be dating the son of Sadie Thompson.

  I desperately hoped my parents hadn’t yet encountered Dick’s mother. Even if not, I had a feeling the omniscient Mrs. Puckett had given them a full rundown. I suspected that was how they knew I’d been sneaking rides on the back of Dick’s motorcycle, a Honda like the one Elvis (another bad influence) rode in Roustabout.

  No doubt Mrs. Puckett had reported on Dick’s profanity, too. It wasn’t that he used an impressive range of swear words. He just found a way to integrate a particularly earthy few into nearly every sentence. He carried this off with an attitude that projected not so much defiance as entitlement, as if impropriety were such an integral a part of his being, speaking any other way would be false. As if to underscore his identification with the obscene, he insisted on being called not “Richard,” not “Rick,” but “Dick.” Marnie and I tried calling him “Richie” for several days, around the same time we talked him into letting us comb his hair into an eyebrow-grazing, Beach Boys style. At first he went along with both makeover attempts—loving the attention, no doubt—but before long he’d reverted to his swept-back hairstyle and to being, incontrovertibly, a Dick.

  Evening came, and with it another routine: a stop at the tennis court to see who was out and about, then on to Suzi’s house, which served the same social function as the tennis court but in a less public setting. The Jorgensen kids—Suzi, Karl, and their younger brother Nat—had connections to everyone in our school, thanks to the age range they spanned, and every demographic was represented at these nightly gatherings at “Jorg’s pad.” The older boys showed up on pretense of visiting Karl, knowing all the girls would be there with Suzi, while Nat gave the preteen crowd an excuse for hanging around us teenagers, alternately spying and trying to fit in.

  Whether or not Mr. and Mrs. Jorgensen were home, they seemed not to care what went on in the house, so beer, cigarettes, and loud music were the adjuncts to all sorts of fooling around. We girls s
tyled each other’s hair, spun records, and danced. The boys—Karl, Dick, a charmingly gangly boy named Eric, the Vampires’ Beatle-haired drummer Pili, slow-mo Fibber, and several other Samoans and palagis from the tennis court crowd—smoked, swigged their beers, and teased us. Once in a while an amorous couple would sneak away to a screened-in sleeping porch off the living room. Before long the rest of us would hear shrieks and the clatter of feet and know that Nat had slipped in unnoticed and dumped cold water on the lovers.

  These evenings followed a pattern, in that the same cast of characters showed up every night and engaged in predictable behaviors. But the nights also carried the overarching sense that unexpected things could happen. We were, after all, a bunch of adolescent males and females with all the attendant impulsivity, fickleness, and colossally poor judgment.

  If even ordinary nights had an open-ended, expectant air, this night held still greater promise. Suzi had invited the girls for a sleepover, sure to devolve into an all-night party with boys, beer, and exploits we’d whisper and giggle about later. Parental restraints would be breached. Rules would be violated. Webs of secrets—and alibis to conceal them—would be woven.

  It wasn’t my first experience with boys at a girls’ slumber party. There’d been times in Stillwater when guys showed up after midnight, knocking on windows for brief rendezvous with girls who seemed unfazed at being caught in their baby-doll PJs and sponge-rollered hair. This night would be different. Boys, my new boyfriend included, could conceivably stay the whole night. They could sleep with us, and even if it was only literal sleeping, we’d be crossing a line I’d never crossed. A line I was certain my parents did not want me to cross.

  Suzi slid a record onto the turntable and set the needle on the first track.

  They say we’re young, and we don’t know, won’t find out until we grow, Sonny Bono intoned. I glanced at Dick sprawled on the sofa, jeans stretched across narrow hips. He was already looking my way.