“Tell Peki I liked his letter very much, and I hope to see him soon,” I told Fibber.
Fibber pushed himself off the rusty fender and started walking in that slow, rolling gait of his, toward the Samoan side of campus.
“Don’t worry, my sister,” he said, looking over his shoulder. “You will.”
My father turned off the paved road, guiding our Pontiac Tempest down a bumpy lane that was hardly more than two ruts plowed through dense forest. At a clearing, he turned off the engine.
“This is the end of the line for this aiga bus,” he said. “We’ll walk the rest of the way.”
Val and I gathered up beach towels; my father popped open the trunk, and he and my mother unloaded tote bags filled with suntan lotion, camera gear, and snacks. Then we all headed down a narrow trail that disappeared into a jungle dark as a backstreet alley: the path to Larsen’s Beach.
On an island where postcard-perfect stretches of sand lay around every bend in the road, it might seem odd that we had to drive ten miles and then hike through thick jungle to sunbathe and frolic in the surf. But most other beaches were right next to villages, and plopping a towel on one of them would be as boorish as invading a neighbor’s backyard pool. What’s more, a woman wearing swimwear in public was a serious breach of Samoan standards of modesty. My friends and I could get by with it when we swam off the docks in Utulei and Fagatogo, where townspeople were accustomed to palagi transgressions, but out in the villages where tradition was taken more seriously, we’d offend entire communities by splashing around in even demure bathing suits. Larsen’s Beach nestled in an isolated cove, so we could swim there without giving offense.
No matter how many times I hiked to the beach, the experience of being so deeply immersed in vegetation always filled me with awe. Even on the brightest day, sunlight barely penetrated the canopy. Looking straight up or to either side of the trail, all I could see were tangles of vines, arching branches, and assorted shapes and sizes of leaves, all the same deep emerald hue. Yet for all the dark and isolation, there was nothing scary about this forest. Its enclosure felt secretive in a cozy way, like the tunnels of blanket-draped chairs my brother used to build for me in our family room. Even the sounds enchanted me: the purr of doves, the string-section chorusing of cicadas, the swish of leaves as we brushed past them.
At the trail’s end, the shushing of waves on shore muffled the jungle’s music, and the ocean’s fishy tang prickled our noses. We stepped out into blinding sunshine and the kind of scene that, before coming to Samoa, I’d seen only in travel magazines: an ash-white beach free of footprints. At both ends of the horseshoe-shaped expanse of sand, steep walls of black lava cloistered the cove. There was no one else in sight.
We spread our towels on the beach. Val and I raced to the water, kicking at the froth of surf and wading in up to our waists. On an earlier trip to the cove, Marnie had taught me how to body surf, aiming just so to slip through spaces in the reef and avoid being shredded on the coral. I showed Val how to do it, and we took turns riding the waves to shore.
“God, I love it here, don’t you, Sis?” I whooped after one swell deposited me on the beach.
“Yeah, Kalamazoo never came close to this.”
“Do you think you could live here forever?”
Val stared past the breakers to where the water turned from turquoise to sapphire and stretched as far as we could see, and beyond. “Nah. There’s too much stuff I’d miss after a while—like French fries and TV shows that aren’t two years old.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.” I wasn’t sure I meant it.
Driving out to the beach that afternoon, we’d passed through half a dozen villages, still alien to me, but increasingly attractive. Church services were in session, and through the open doors of the whitewashed sanctuaries, voices carried all the way to the road. The sound didn’t so much waft as saturate the air. Sung a capella by a full congregation in strong, nasal voices, Samoan hymns sounded more assaultive than sweet to my ear, yet in spite of that, the close harmonies, steady tempos, and strangely wistful melodies entranced me. Each time we passed a church, I imagined myself inside, immersed in music and washed in rainbow sunlight. After church, there’d be a feast with roast pork, palusami, and taro, foods I was starting to crave as much as foot-long chili dogs and tater tots. I still wasn’t sure I could handle the communal lifestyle and lack of privacy that Samoan family life required, or the extreme sharing that the aiga system demanded—it was considered stingy and cruel not to hand over anything a relative asked for—but the food and music might make up for all that.
Granted, most of my understanding of Samoan family life had come from Margaret Mead’s nearly forty-year-old book. Still, many customs hadn’t changed much over the decades. In reading the book, I was struck not only by the strangeness of some practices, but also by how similar some aspects of Samoan daily life were to life everywhere, including our household, with everyone reflexively pitching in to tidy up living spaces and help with cooking, gardening, and other chores. Even my family’s weird habit of asking in the most roundabout way for someone to pass the potatoes had a Samoan counterpart, at least in the times Mead documented. A Samoan, she wrote, wouldn’t just show up at a relative’s fale and bluntly ask for something; he’d hang around all day making himself useful while the host tried to guess what he wanted, and only at bedtime finally make his polite request.
“Got any candy bars?” Val asked, clearly not schooled in Samoan protocol. We headed back to our beach towels, and I dug a Carmello bar out of one of the tote bags. We savored it square by square, nipping off bits of milk chocolate and letting the liquid caramel swirl around our tongues before taking another bite. Tongues: what strange things they were when you stopped to think about it—organs of taste and touch, utilitarian yet erogenous.
“So who do you like best: Dick, Danny, or Peki?” Val wore an expression of mild interest, not the suspicious squint from our early conversations about Danny.
I poured a pool of baby oil into my palm and spread it on a cordovan thigh. “Hard to say. Peki’s sweet, but I don’t know … Dick, I’m crazy about of course, but that’s doomed. And Danny—I don’t know if he’ll even be the same person when I see him again. His letters are getting weird.”
“Weird how?”
I wiped my oil-slicked hands on the towel and leaned back on my elbows. “Dark. Moody. Always some drama going on with his dad or sometimes things he won’t even discuss. He just drops these bombshells, like he’s been thrown out of the house or he’s joining the Marines, and then he gets all secretive. Drives me crazy.”
“You sure he’s not making stuff up to get your sympathy?” The squint was back. I countered it with a glare.
“You don’t even know him.”
Damn her. She might be right. How very sister-like of her to zero in on a sore point.
I steered the conversation away from my boyfriends. “So how’re things with Li’i?” Li’i was Val’s new beau, a Samoan high school senior whose fawnish eyes and palm-frond lashes gave him a feminine beauty. Li’i was as shy as Peki, and at social events the two of them were usually side-by-side, creating through synergy the confidence that neither alone possessed. Together they embodied the Samoan proverb, So’o le fau, a literal description of joining two pieces of cord with a knot, interpreted to mean “There’s strength in numbers.”
“Li’i? He’s okay, I guess.” Val broke off another Carmello square. “He doesn’t say much, but he’s a good kisser.”
My parents had wandered away from our sunbathing spot and were picking up seashells, appraising them like estate jewelry before depositing the most perfect ones in the pandanus basket my mother carried on her arm. As always, they seemed two parts of an inseparable whole, moving, stopping, bending, and straightening in unison, but I knew the appearance of consensus could be deceiving. In my last letter to my Stillwater girlfriend Cindi I’d written, “I think my parents like it here pre
tty well, that is, my dad likes it real well and my mother is liking it better.” The adjustment had been harder for her than for my father and me. Cooped up in our tiny apartment with its ambient soundtrack of crowing roosters, barking dogs, and blaring radios from passing cars, she took refuge in bridge games and dinner parties. Lately, even those had become tedious. Still anemic from the cobalt treatments, she tired easily, and she didn’t tolerate the heat well. On shopping days, when she had to make the rounds of the general stores and stand in long lines at the agricultural market, she came home completely wrung out.
Watching my parents together on the beach, I wondered what other sacrifices my mother had made to keep my father happy and whether I could ever be the sort of wife who surrendered her own desires to her mate’s—or to her whole family or village, as Samoan women did.
Hours passed in sun-doped lassitude. From time to time I emerged from torpor enough to lift my head and scan the opening in the trees where the trail broke through from the forest. Finally, late in the afternoon, I saw motion and a striped shirt I recognized.
“We’ve got company,” I whispered to Val.
Peki and Li’i sauntered toward the beach as if they’d just happened upon our little party. In truth, Val had told Li’i about the planned excursion and figured the boys would find a way to join us.
“Well, look who’s here,” my mother said. “How do you suppose they knew where to find us?”
“Word travels fast on this little island, Mother,” I said. “Everyone knows everyone else’s business. Surely you and Mrs. Puckett know that.” Her blink of hurt made me regret the remark. In the wake of the fire, I’d been trying to be more respectful of my parents, but I couldn’t always rein in my sarcasm.
The boys sat on our beach towels, and Val and I tried to tease them the way we did at the tennis court. But even banded together, Peki and Li’i were struck dumb by their shyness. Before long my father announced that we’d better be getting back to town. He said the boys could ride with us.
We hiked back to the car. Peki and Li’i crowded into the back seat with Val and me; we wriggled onto their laps. The boys dropped their heads and shifted in their seats, but their lips curled into the slightest smiles and held those expressions through the long, silent drive back to Utulei.
After school the next day, Fibber handed me another letter on the same ruled paper.
Dear Nancy-Moreen, Peki had written, misspelling my middle name in a way that seemed sprightlier than the turgid Maurine. Next time we go for a swim, don’t let your parents go.
Aiga apparently had its limits.
Chapter 14—Hard Rain
It was not like the soft English rain that drops gently on the earth; it was unmerciful and somehow terrible; you felt in it the malignancy of the primitive powers of nature. It did not pour, it flowed. It was like a deluge from heaven, and it rattled on the roof of corrugated iron with a steady persistence that was maddening. It seemed to have a fury of its own.
—W. Somerset Maugham, “Rain”
Peki ran the roller through the pan of cream-colored paint, careful to load just the right amount onto the nappy surface. With long sweeps, he applied latex to the cinder block wall, his arms easily reaching from floor to ceiling. I followed behind with a paintbrush and touched up spots he missed. As he worked, tiny spatters spun off the roller and left pale flecks on his brown cheeks, like reverse freckles.
“It’s really nice of you to do this.” I bent down to dip my brush into the pan. “My parents usually take care of this kind of stuff themselves, or else hire a painter. I don’t think we’ve ever had friends come over to help around the house—until we moved here, I mean.”
Peki frowned. “No?”
“Things are a lot different here, Peki,” I said. “Fa’a Samoa isn’t fa’a everywhere else.”
He drew the back of his hand across his face, wiping off sweat and smearing the paint flecks into a shower of shooting stars across his cheeks.
“Better here,” he said.
“Much.”
In the days following the fire, Peki, Fibber, and Li’i had spent more and more time at the apartment, helping out or just hanging out. Peki was still teaching me Samoan, and in return I typed his school reports, correcting his English in the process. Many nights, Fibber sat at the table sketching, but not just idle doodles; his drawings now had purpose. I was running for vice president of SAP’s student council, and he was designing campaign badges and posters with my caricature—turned-up nose, turned-under hair, and all. I loved the drawings but had to edit his captions; “Vote for Nasty” didn’t send the right message. Li’i usually sat quietly doing homework until he worked up enough nerve to quiz me about the depth of Val’s devotion. The easy camaraderie among the four of us was something I’d rarely experienced with boys back home and hardly ever felt with the palagi boys on the island. Though I still frequented the tennis court and get-togethers at the Jorgensens’, evenings at home with the three boys were a welcome counterpoint.
These guys are so much fun, I wrote to Cindi in a letter that carried the heading: Live, from Pago Pago, Samoa!
They’re really sociable, too—they don’t go off by themselves like some boys. They’re so considerate and polite and friendly—they always talk to us and treat us real nice. Like today I was walking along and Peki and Fibber both offered me rides on their Hondas. Think anyone would ever offer me a ride in the States?! And they act so concerned! They say, “Can I take you anywhere?” “I don’t want you to have to walk by yourself.” “Are you sure it’s not too far?” And they’re really sincere. I just love the guys here!
When Peki and I finished painting the wall, we cleaned the pan, brush, and roller in the utility sink just outside the back door. Along with the washer and dryer, the extra sink sat in a small, roofless enclosure where our house girl Malo—a woman about my mother’s age—hung shrub-sized bunches of green bananas that she lopped off a few at a time and boiled for her lunch, leaving us the perfectly-ripened rejects. At first it had seemed ludicrous hiring a housekeeper when we lived in such small and easy-to-clean quarters. But Mrs. Puckett, for whom Malo also worked, told my mother that all the palagi families employed house girls, and it was expected that we would, too. With my mother’s constant fatigue, a little extra help around the house couldn’t hurt.
Malo was no taller than my five-foot-two-and-a-half, but like most Samoan women she was round as a breadfruit, thanks to Polynesian genes and a steady diet of boiled bananas, taro, and canned corned beef—the fatty staple Samoans call pisupo. (As the story goes, the first canned food brought to Samoa was pea soup, but islanders assumed the name applied to any food in tins. When corned beef displaced pea soup in the Samoan diet, the name pisupo stuck.)
Malo dressed in puletasis and wore her hair in a squat bun that added to the impression that she was wider than she was tall. When she ran out of household chores, she made flower arrangements, attaching hibiscus blossoms to the ends of slender reeds that bobbled in the breeze, or she carved whole pineapples into spirals almost too artful to eat. She spoke little English and communicated with my parents and me mainly through eyebrow flashes and gap-toothed smiles, though we suspected she understood more of our conversation than she let on. One sentiment she conveyed quite clearly without words was her disapproval of my closeness to the trio of Samoan boys. When Peki, Fibber, and Li’i were around, Malo scowled and banged pots and pans. The boys just laughed, but once or twice I overheard them having terse exchanges in Samoan with her in the courtyard.
I paid no attention to Malo’s insolence. It was my home, and my Samoan friends were welcome there.
~ ~ ~
That afternoon, after Peki left, I sat at the table and opened an issue of Newsweek that was several weeks old, yet still the latest we’d received in our weekly mail. As usual, I flipped through the magazine’s front section, skipping most of the stories on world affairs, stopping only when a grisly photo from the war in
Vietnam caught my eye. I seldom read the articles about the war, couldn’t make sense of them, couldn’t keep straight all the names of places—Da Nang, Chu Lai, Bien Hoa—couldn’t understand what the fighting was about. Still, when I came to the national news, I lingered over stories about antiwar rallies, especially when they happened in California, the epicenter of all that was cool and cutting edge. When I read about peace marches in Berkeley, where the poet Allen Ginsberg talked about “flower power,” I yearned to be one of those long-haired, blossom-adorned girls who smiled with slightly unfocused eyes from the accompanying photographs, taking a stand, urging the world toward a gentler way of settling differences.
For similar reasons, I pored over stories about the civil rights movement. Earlier that year, Martin Luther King and some 2,600 supporters had been arrested in Alabama, Malcolm X had been shot to death in Harlem, and Negroes—who now preferred to be called Blacks—had rioted in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Unlike the war, the issues behind civil rights protests made sense to me. What I didn’t understand was the hostility.
I’d experienced it first hand in Oklahoma. There’d been no race riots or even demonstrations in my hometown, but in high school I’d noticed an undercurrent of tension among my black classmates, most of whom I’d known since junior high. Up through grade six, they’d gone to their own school, Washington Elementary, in the part of Stillwater white people called “Colored Town” when they were being polite (“N----- Town” when they weren’t). At the beginning of seventh grade, I’d made a point of being friendly to the black kids, just as I would with anyone new, saying hi in the hallways even if I didn’t know their names, and joking with the girls in my gym class. They were friendly in return, with a few exceptions, most notably Connie, a muscular girl with wild, comb-defying hair and an unrelentingly fierce countenance. But Connie’s belligerence crossed all boundaries of color, gender, and age. She was mean as a snake to everyone.
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