Mango Rash

by Pokerwinski, Nan Sanders;

  I swayed in time with the music, self-consciously at first, but then with a growing boldness that set off sensations like those I’d felt while reading Val’s secret book. Suzi and Kathi picked up the beat; one by one, the other girls joined in, and by the time Cher was belting out “Then He Kissed Me,” we were all undulating like crazy in our flowered shifts, copying each other’s moves and experimenting with new ones. Breezes slipped through the living room’s screened walls to stroke our hair and play across our bare arms and legs. Smoke from the boys’ cigarettes blended with the bay’s fishy fragrance and the Evening in Paris cologne we girls had dabbed on our pulse points. I locked eyes with Dick—no more timid glances now. The sensations grew stronger.

  Outside, couples strolled along the sidewalk that ran behind the houses, but inside we were so engaged in dancing and flirting and imagining the night ahead, we weren’t aware of any other activity. When the screen door slammed open, we all started as if shots had been fired. Val’s mother stood in the doorway, her figure filling the frame. She looked around the room, at Dick and the other boys scrambling to stash beer bottles behind sofa pillows, at the girls frozen mid-watusi.

  “Valerie, you’re coming home with me. Now.”

  Her voice was not loud; it didn’t need to be. Her posture and mass carried enough gut-roiling authority. Val turned toward us and rolled her eyes. Her hair, normally a riot of exuberant unruliness, clumped in damp strands around her face. I shot her a tough luck, kid glance and pressed against the wall, impersonating a shadow. Across the room, Dick looked like he was trying not to laugh.

  “You, too, Nancy,” Val’s mother said, menace beneath her controlled calm. “You know very well your parents wouldn’t approve of this monkey business. You can spend the night with Val.”

  Now I was the target of the other girls’ pitying looks and the boys’ snickers. Without making eye contact with each other or anyone else, Val and I slunk out the door and down the sidewalk behind her mother, the two of us filled with shame more burning than we would have felt for any of the forbidden things we’d considered doing that night.

  My parents said nothing about the slumber party when I came home from Val’s the next day. But when Dick called that evening, my father appeared beside the phone the moment I hung up. The lips that angled up at the corners when he told one of his funny stories now leveled into a pair of tight lines. I knew that look. It made my stomach feel like a fist.

  “I don’t want you seeing that boy anymore,” he said.

  “Fine,” I said. “It’s not like we’re really dating.”

  That was technically true. Dick and I kept company at every opportunity, but we usually met up somewhere instead of going there together. Since we didn’t go on actual dates, I reasoned, we weren’t actually dating.

  “I mean I don’t want you even talking to him. That boy’s bad news, and his mother’s a disgrace, living out there with all those men. I won’t have you associating with people like that.”

  My fingernails dug into my palms as I pushed past my father and stumbled toward the door, nearly colliding with the tiki Double Ugly and muttering to myself. Who could live up to his standards?

  Val showed sympathy with nods and murmurs when I burst into her room and spewed out the story.

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “I don’t know—throw myself off a cliff into the sami?” I used the Samoan word for “sea” because it sounded more dramatic.

  “How about we go to the movies instead? They’re showing Zulu at the Rec Hall.” She pulled me up from the bed where I’d flopped and steered me out the door and down the path toward Fagatogo’s business district.

  Clamor and bright light engulfed us when we entered the community center’s makeshift movie theater. But even with the commotion, I couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation with my father.

  Why can’t he just look the other way, like Margaret Mead says?

  Just before the lights dimmed, Dick slid into the empty seat beside me and draped an arm across the top of my shoulders. Without looking at him I blurted, “I have to talk to you.” Then, in a voice stretched thin: “But I don’t really know how to say what I have to tell you.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “I think it is.” My words felt like they were coming from a character in some crappy movie I’d been cast in against my will.

  “Will I think so?” Dick leaned forward, turned toward me, and tried to position his face in front of mine. I kept my eyes fixed on the opening credits.

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” I did know. I just hoped he wouldn’t care enough to be wounded.

  “Well, if it’s something like I can’t see you anymore, then it’s very bad,” Dick tried again to make eye contact.

  I exhaled and turned to face him. “Yeah. That’s what it is.”

  I waited for Dick to say something, do something—smash his fist into the back of the chair in front of him, swear, stand up and walk out. But he just slouched in his seat, arms crossed, head down, silent. Finally he reached for my hand. “Let’s go.”

  He led me to the shadowy end of the building and leaned against the wall, a freshly lit cigarette glowing between his fingers. I stood close to him and replayed in my mind other shadowed scenes: that first night at the tennis court, the stroll down Centipede Row’s palm-lined sidewalk after the dance at Goat Island Club. The atmosphere of this night was the same, but the feeling was stripped of sweetness.

  I told him my parents had heard rumors about him, that my mother’s bridge club friends had warned her he was “a troublemaker,” and that she’d “better watch him.” I had no idea what offenses Dick supposedly had committed; my parents refused to discuss the details, and I didn’t know if that was because Dick’s misdeeds were so heinous or because the rumors were so vague.

  “I know about the rumors,” Dick said, “but I haven’t done anything bad here.”

  Before I thought to ask if that meant he’d done something bad elsewhere, he continued in a voice that had lost its swagger and sounded more like a whimper.

  “I wanted you to go steady with me. I was going to ask you to take this.” He took off his ring and held it out to me. It shone dully in the faint light.

  Through the theater wall came the muted, pulsating rhythm of Zulus beating their spears against their shields, a sound that approximated the feeling in my chest. I shook my head.

  “Go ahead, take it. You don’t have to wear it. Just take it.” His face looked even more compressed than usual.

  “I can’t.” I felt bad saying it. Bad, as in one emotion like a blistering red coal and another like a burr. Hot, hot anger at my father for forcing me into this role; prickling guilt for not hurting as much as Dick had to be hurting. No one was rejecting me, no one was questioning my worth.

  My eyes darted back and forth between Dick’s crumpled face and the road, where I half expected to see my father appear at any minute, cruising by to check up on me. I chafed at his intrusions, longed to experience a world without restrictions, where I could be the bold adventurer of my childhood fantasies. But when it came right down to it, I wasn’t brave enough to take a single defiant step, even if my cowardice meant crushing the feelings of someone I cared about.

  “I’ve gotta get back inside,” I said. “You should leave now.”

  Dick reached for my hand. I backed away. “I mean it. Go.”

  For the next week, Dick followed me around between classes and after school, begging me in that pitiful voice to take the ring, asking what he could do to make my parents like him.

  “What if I cut my hair?” he’d ask. “What if I quit smoking?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Changing his hairstyle and habits wouldn’t sway my parents; it would only make him less himself. Whenever I thought of Dick now, I pictured him behind a sign like the one that stood at the entry to the Governor’s driveway. UA SA, it read: FORBIDDEN. There was no questioning its authority,
no asking for explanations. My parents’ edict, in my mind, was just as inflexible. But like an off-limits sign that tempts trespassers, my parents’ prohibition made the forbidden more desirable, and the drama heightened my emotions. If I was infatuated before, I was love-crazed now. I wrote tormented entries in my diary and mooned over the picture hidden between its pages: a photo booth shot of Dick and a friend mugging with cigarettes dangling from their lips.

  At the end of that week, Sylvia threw a party at her house on a hillside overlooking the village of Pava’ia’i, fifteen miles from my parents’ eyes and Mrs. Puckett’s meddling. Sylvia’s parents treated their daughter and her friends far more leniently than Val’s and mine did—her dad openly shared his beer with the guys, and her mom didn’t rat us out to the other moms—so the atmosphere was relaxed and drenched in the smell of the chicken mole and homemade tortillas Mrs. Vallez was whipping up for us.

  The other girls and I clustered around the stereo, ears close to speakers, and played one track of one album over and over. It wasn’t Sonny and Cher this time, and the beat and lyrics weren’t the source of our fascination. I’d discovered a place on the Beach Boys Today! album where one of the Beach Boys spoke a few words in a voice that sounded exactly like Dick’s: high pitched, but with enough sandy grit to abrade any hint of femininity. My friends, bless them, indulged me as I wallowed in longing for the banned boy.

  I tried not to notice as boys began arriving, but wavelets of anticipation swelled and flattened every time the door opened and someone other than Dick entered. Just as we were loading our plates with chicken, beans, and tortillas, a motorcycle hummed up the driveway. The engine clicked off. Dick walked in, blond hair bouncing in time with his step. He grabbed a fork from the table and playfully tried to snitch a bite of refried beans from my plate.

  “Can I have some?” he asked in the Beach Boys voice. “Oh, that’s right, you can’t talk to me. Val, ask Nancy if I can have some of her beans.” He was his irreverent self again, teasing and scoffing at adult censure. I couldn’t help smiling, buoyed by his defiance and a similar attitude ballooning in me.

  After dinner, there was dancing, drinking, smoking, kissing, and cuddling in dim corners—a scene that played out much as I’d imagined the night at Suzi’s would. A Beach Boys album played on the stereo, but instead of straining to hear a snippet that sounded like the boy I’d fallen for, I slow danced with the boy himself as five other Californians harmonized:

  Now here we are together,

  This would have been worth waiting forever.

  I always knew it’d feel this way.

  Toward midnight, Dick and I slipped out to sit on the darkened hillside below the house. We kissed. We kissed some more. The kisses tasted of beer and cigarettes and inflamed youth, all now familiar to my tongue. The night air streamed around us like a blood-warm ocean; we floated in its currents. Kisses grew longer. Hands ignored posted warnings and rushed headlong into restricted areas.

  In the midst of all that nicotine-tinged kissing and clutching, an uninvited image flashed into my mind: my father’s disapproving face, hard-edged and contracted. A stab of guilt followed. Then a fleeting thought: Is this really wrong, or just forbidden?

  Another face appeared and blotted out my father’s scowl. It was the face of a woman, now sixty-something, I’d seen on television a year or so before. It was that feisty, freethinking anthropologist, Makelita. And she was smiling.

  Chapter 10—Anthropology

  Said Tagaloa, “To each of you from above I now impart a will. Your faces they must shine, I so ordain. That they may Tagaloa entertain.”

  —From Amerika Samoa: An Anthropological Photo Essay, by Frederic Koehler Sutter

  Makelita’s face and the mountaintop make-out session were fresh in my memory the next afternoon when I curled up on my bed to record the previous evening’s events in my ivory-and-gold leatherette Every Day Diary. With emerald green ink loaded into my cartridge pen, I meticulously printed the date in the designated space. Then, pen poised on page, I hesitated. I wanted to preserve every ardent moment for all time, but I sensed my parents, always on alert, might be tempted to peek at my private thoughts.

  My parents. Their rules and expectations—borne of Baptist Bible study and middle class propriety—were maddeningly confining to a girl all set to experience the world. I wanted to shake loose of their code of conduct, yet what would I substitute in its place? I knew of no guidebook telling a girl like me how to grow into the kind of woman I hoped to become. Fearless like Val’s mom, but with a touch of my mother’s restraint. Decent. Dignified. But alive and free.

  I stared at my hands and twisted my Tri Chi ring, talisman and emblem of the girl I’d been before I came to Samoa. Back in Oklahoma, my moral compass received weekly adjustments at Baptist Training Union meetings, which I willingly attended, being more inclined toward righteousness at the time. Training Union was like Sunday school, except that instead of learning Bible stories and verses, we discussed moral and ethical dilemmas—in the form of hypothetical scenarios—with our leader Evelyn, a college girl who was close to our ages and so much cooler than our parents. Though I’m sure the lessons were structured to lead us to Baptist-approved conclusions, the discussions at least made us think we were thinking for ourselves.

  Those meetings with Evelyn gave me a sense of right and wrong that stuck with me, but with no Baptist church in Samoa, my principles no longer got weekly tune-ups. Lacking handbook or regular tutelage, I turned to my anthropologist idol, Margaret Mead. Not her book—it was forty years old and mostly about a culture to which I didn’t belong—but her example. In the spirit of Makelita, I resolved to become a student of human behavior, specifically adult behavior, in hopes of finding some worth emulating.

  I didn’t have to wait long to begin my field work: my parents and I were invited to dinner at another doctor’s home on Penicillin Row that evening.

  “I’m sure Edith will be in fine form tonight,” my father said as we walked from our apartment complex to the row of houses across the road.

  My mother grimaced. “I just hope she doesn’t corner me. You’ll rescue me, won’t you?”

  “Oh, gawwwwd, yes, darling!” My father’s voice rose a decibel, and his words came out slurred. I whipped around to see what was wrong; then he grinned and I realized he was impersonating the party hostess.

  “I’m serious, Harold,” my mother hissed. Then turning to me, “If Mrs. Finley gets me in a corner, and I give you a sign like this”—she tapped her cheekbone with her index finger—”come and tell me you’re sick and need to go home.”

  So, deception is acceptable under certain circumstances. I made a mental note.

  Before my father could knock on the front door, Dr. Finley, flushed and amiable, greeted us and escorted us into the living room. With canvas curtains pulled back to let breezes through the screens, the spacious room looked and felt like the living rooms in Suzi’s and Val’s houses, but the view, across the mouth of the bay to Mt. Rainmaker’s flocked-velvet slopes, was more Bali Ha’i-ish. Dr. Finley offered my parents a drink; they asked for old fashioneds (they were that kind of Baptists, and they danced and played cards, too), and our host headed for a small table that held a bacchanalian still life of liquor bottles, ice bucket, and tumblers.

  Mrs. Finley, an angular woman whose exaggerated facial features looked like caricatures of themselves, lifted her glass, her reddened lips curving up at the corners like a panting dog’s.

  “Oh, A-r-r-r-r-r-r-nold!” Her husband’s name came out like a whine. “Get me one, too, while you’re up.”

  Dr. Finley took the glass, refilled it, and handed it back, all without looking at his wife. Then, serving my parents their cocktails, he put on the cordial face again, but his smile involved only his mouth; his eyes expressed something else—a flicker of apology? A plea for sympathy?

  Subject appears conflicted, I noted. Resentment is evident, but not outwardly displayed. />
  Dr. Finley took a seat on the rattan couch—identical to ours—and made small talk about progress on the new hotel down the road.

  “Oh gawwwd, A-r-r-r-r-r-r-nold,” Mrs. Finley wailed. “I’m sick to death of hearing about that damn hotel. Who the hell’s going to come to this godforsaken heap of lava for a hawl-i-daaay?” She laughed, a long bray, and—clunk—set her glass on the coffee table. Liquid sloshed over the rim and left a puddle that she made no attempt to wipe up. “I mean, am I right, or am I r-i-i-i-ght?”

  I watched my parents, prepared to record their reactions. My mother, eyes lowered, swirled a swizzle stick around her drink. My father smiled with closed lips. “I guess time will tell, won’t it, Edith?”

  Committed as I was to my anthropological project, the conversation made me squirmy, and I wasn’t the only one. The Finleys’ daughter Paula, a year ahead of me in school, stood and reached for my hand. “Come on, I’ll show you my room. We can listen to records.” Her eyes had the same look as her father’s.

  Over the next few days I expanded my observations to Samoans I encountered on the footpath, in the schoolyard, on the open-air buses that ran from one end of the island to the other, and in the villages through which we passed. The men and women I met on the path carried woven palm baskets of bananas and breadfruit from the market in town and were friendlier than the shopkeepers and waitresses. They’d raise and lower their eyebrows in the classic Samoan eyebrow flash, an expression of acknowledgement, and sometimes hail me with “Malō!”—hello. I didn’t know these people, knew nothing of their home lives, but in their broad-footed gaits and the regularity of their daily routines, I found a reassuring steadiness.

  On Sunday drives, I saw women, generous in girth and gracious in bearing, ambling down the road in their white puletasis, matching parasols held decorously over their heads, on their way to the whitewashed churches that anchored every village. In town on weekdays, I watched bare-chested men in flowered lavalavas husking coconuts at the dock and briefcase-toting men in dark lavalavas, suit coats, and closed-toe, leather sandals coming and going from the Fono, the territorial legislature. In the schoolyard, pairs of Samoan girls my age, pigtailed and dressed in full-skirted cotton frocks, strolled hand-in-hand in an unselfconscious show of friendship. Just below the surface of all this everyday activity wriggled a playfulness that erupted with the slightest nudge into uninhibited laughter. On the bus, in the villages, outside the shops of Fagatogo, everywhere I went, I saw people of all ages teasing and swatting each other, shrieking and doubling over with hilarity.