“What’s up?” The interest in my voice was slack as the strands that framed my face.
She quit the fingernail tap dance and gave me an earnest look, sixteen years of maternal concern engraved around her eyes. “Christmas. Just wondering what you’d like for Christmas—a new dress, something for your room? There’s not much to choose from here, we have to make do, but—”
“Peace on Earth,” I said, erasing the last trace of inflection from my voice. “That’s all I want for Christmas.” Or at least peace in this family.
I tugged the comb through my hair and pulled at the ends, trying to straighten the waves. Val had been right, Dippity Do was not to be found on the island. I’d had to resort to stretching my hair taut and Scotch-taping it under my chin until it dried or setting it with beer, which worked pretty well except on rainy days (almost every day now that rainy season was underway), when the dampness made my head smell like Pago Bar.
My mother picked up another comb and fussed with my hair, restoring the waves I’d just smoothed. I swatted her hand away. She gave me the forbearing-mother-of-a-trying-teenager look and changed tack. “We were thinking about a cable car ride the day after Christmas. Daddy has the day off. Maybe Peki would like to come along.”
Peki? I shot a look at the geckos to see if the suggestion surprised them as much as it did me. They blinked, impassive little blinks I couldn’t read. My eyes traveled to my mother’s reflection. Her expression was just as inscrutable.
“Haven’t you heard?” I said. “There’s a Samoan boy ban in effect. Along with the previously-imposed palagi boy ban.” I opened a drawer and flung my comb into it, just to hear the clatter.
“Oh, honey. You know Daddy gets worked up sometimes and says things he doesn’t mean. We just worry about you girls. Val’s parents do, too. It seems like we’re the only parents on the island who do. But Peki’s a good boy. He doesn’t have to stay away.”
I looked again at the geckos. I could swear one of them shrugged. Everybody said teenagers were hard to understand, with our up and down moods, but parents were just as screwy, acting one way one day, changing direction the next. I still wondered what was going on in my father’s head—and heart. Had he blurted something uncharacteristic in the fury of a protective parental conniption, or were there parts of him I hadn’t seen—hadn’t wanted to see—before? I wanted to stay angry at him until I was sure he deserved mercy, and to be pissy with my blameless mother for good measure.
Anger heated me up and gave me a righteous glow, but its sour taste curdled in my stomach. As much as I wanted to rage against my parents, I had to admit they were the same parents who tolerated my flaws and still loved me, even when I set the house on fire. Besides, it was the holidays. Yes, but …
Conflicting emotions whipsawed in my mind. Fury. Forgiveness. Indignation. Indulgence. Resentment. Reconciliation. Outrage. Outreach. If only I could separate my belligerent and benevolent sides like the Samoan twin goddesses Taema and Tila-faiga. Born conjoined, the sisters split apart when a scrap of wood shot between them as they swam in turbulent waters. After traveling together and slaughtering warriors on Tutuila and Savai’i, they agreed to separate for good, with Tila-faiga remaining warlike on their home island of Ta’ū and Taema pursuing a more peaceful path, forever protecting the island of Tutuila from strife.
But I was no goddess, and I couldn’t split in two. I was one very mortal girl, indivisible, with loving and hateful impulses wrestling inside me. Only I could decide which would prevail.
I unclenched and let my mind fill with soft-focus pictures: childhood Christmases with heaps of presents and a feeling like candy dancing in my veins; magazine photos of my mellow, flower-child idols flashing two-fingered peace signs. My hostility shut down for the holidays.
“So.” I turned to my mother, and my voice brightened like a lit-up Christmas tree. “Tell me about the party.”
Back in good graces, Peki seemed more a part of our aiga than ever and now visited several nights a week without Fibber or Li’i for support. Some evenings, he’d hang around even after I’d gone to bed, sitting in the living room with my parents, not saying a word, just reading magazines until my mother suggested it was time to go home.
So gracious were my parents, Peki decided he wanted to buy them a special Christmas gift. Carried away with the peacemaking spirit, I suggested going in together on a basket or carving from the tourist fale in Fagatogo, never considering that giving a gift as a couple—to my parents, no less—might imply a degree of attachment I didn’t intend.
I should’ve known better. As much as Peki seemed like part of the family, he didn’t want to be my brother; he wanted to be my boyfriend. I knew it and didn’t know what to do about it. I liked him well enough—what was there not to like about such a sweet, unobtrusive boy?—but he wasn’t the boyfriend I wanted, if I wanted a boyfriend at all. Dick still was, and even though he’d become resigned to our enforced separation and now treated me more like a kid sister than girlfriend material, I knew he still wanted me on the back of his Honda.
Christmas morning, my parents exclaimed over the handmade gifts I gave them—a housecoat for my mother and an empty brandy bottle for my father, decoupaged with a mosaic of colorful magazine-page triangles like the ones we’d used to make the beaded curtain. But they gushed over the gift from Peki and me. We’d splurged on a fifteen-dollar, tabletop replica of a fale, with shells and woven pandanus around the base, crushed coral on the floor, wooden posts, and a carved roof that looked like real thatch. I couldn’t wait to tell Peki, who was home celebrating with his family, how much my parents loved the gift.
But first, I had my own gifts to open. From Oklahoma friends, nail polish in pop-art colors, a selection of frosted lipsticks packaged like watercolors in a paint box, and a record album; from cousins, perfume and nylons; from each of my grandmothers, a five-dollar bill; and from my parents, two dresses, three pairs of flip-flops, a dust ruffle for my bed and—the best—a tortoise shell bracelet with S-A-M-O-A spelled out in inlaid metal. The bracelet matched the ring I now wore on the middle finger of my right hand: a tortoise-shell band with an inlaid circle of iridescent shell that changed color when I turned my hand this way and that, and my initial, “N,” embedded just above the pearly circle. Samoan girls wore rings like this. At first I’d tried wearing it alongside my silver Tri Chi ring, but the two rings rubbed and clacked against each other and didn’t look right together. Without ceremony, I’d taken off the Tri Chi ring and stashed it in a box in my dresser. Now the island-girl ring was my talisman and worry stone.
Rubbing its polished surface, I took my time before reaching for one last package. Wrapped in green and red with my name printed in ballpoint pen on the paper, the gift was from Peki, and as much as I’d shaken and prodded it, I had no clue what was inside. I always hoped for boys to give me jewelry at Christmas—heart-shaped rhinestone pendants or engraved bracelets—but this box was too big for a trinket. It could’ve held a blouse, but whatever was inside was too heavy and rattle-y to be clothing. I imagined some delightful assortment of crafts from the tourist fale—shell necklaces, seed-pod garlands, a shark’s tooth pendant, a miniature kava bowl—a uniquely Samoan selection chosen just for me.
I laid the box on my lap and peeled off the paper, slowly, as if undressing the present. Peki’s was the only gift I’d gotten from a boy this Christmas; I needed to savor every step. I lifted the lid, just enough to peek inside; then all the way. I commanded my fingers to remain calm, but they raced ahead, impelled by a momentum all their own, scrambling through layers of tissue paper to reveal—what?? No shells, no seeds, no kava bowl. Inside the box, under the tissue, lay a vanity set, a fancied-up plastic comb, brush, and mirror, the kind girls gave each other at pre-teen birthday parties. I picked up the brush and ran it through my hair. The handle didn’t fit my hand. The bristles scratched my scalp. I laid it down, picked up the mirror and caught a glimpse of a face devoid of delight.
> Peki didn’t know what I wanted. How could he know? He was a Samoan boy guessing at what would please a palagi girl, unaware that authentic Samoan creations were finer treasures than American junk. But Peki’s gift was my only gift from a boy this Christmas. I would try my best to love it.
The day after Christmas, my parents, Peki, and I drove up Solo Hill to the cable car station, excited to embark upon the most stunning, palpitating ride in the South Pacific—maybe in the whole world. The tram that swayed above cruise ships and showered blossoms on tourists was the same one that ferried passengers from the Solo Hill terminal, across Pago Pago Harbor, to the top of Mt. Alava, some sixteen hundred feet above the bay. The yellow car hung from a single cable that stretched six thousand feet from terminal to terminal, making the cableway the longest single-span aerial tramway in the world at the time.
Stepping into the elevator-sized car took some nerve, but once we were on our swinging, soaring way, I put my faith in the cable and the operators, men who took pride in their positions. Like many Samoans in this time of transition, they appreciated the government jobs that allowed them to leave the taro fields and rise above.
As we crossed the bay, I pressed against the car’s side wall, my face as close to the window as I could get it without smooshing it against the glass. From this angle, my parents, Peki, and the other passengers disappeared; tram and girl merged, and I sailed solo across the harbor. The water below, sparkle-flecked at the surface, deeply, greenly shadowed beneath, reminded me of the eyeshadow my mother wore to parties. I was swamped with love—for mother and sea and everything in sight.
At the far edge of the bay, the tram climbed straight up the mountainside, and the view through the front windows got me thinking about perspectives. From afar, I’d seen the mountains as uniformly green cushions, but up close, the variety of textures, shades, shapes, and heights of greenery blanketing the hillside looked more like the creation of a delirious florist, everything thrown together in a mix that somehow came out just right. The view out the back was just as mind-bending. All the large-as-my-life settings of my daily routines—our apartment building, the high school, the Turtle, the tennis court, Centipede Row, the shops of Fagatogo—had shrunk to rice-grain size; cars were moving specks, people too tiny to see, too tiny to distinguish Samoan from palagi. A smooth pulse of harmony coursed through my heart. I hoped the whole island felt it.
No longer flying solo, I now was aware of Peki and my parents with me in the car. Were they viewing the island the way I was? I couldn’t find words to articulate the question.
“Wow,” was all I said. “Wowwwwwwwww.”
My parents and Peki smiled, at me, at one another. Maybe they did see what I saw.
We reached the top, exited the tram, and followed a paved walkway through a park-like setting of natural and landscaped vegetation, toward an outlook pavilion shaped like a fale. Everything was clean and new and bright. Two television transmitting towers reached skyward, steely arms in a Hallelujah gesture. I felt like throwing my arms toward the heavens, too. Glory, glory, glory all around.
“Can you believe this place?” I said to Peki. “That we live here?” He gave me a crazy-palagi-girl look and shook his head, but he smiled. Did he know how lucky he was to grow up here? To be able to stay as long as he wanted? Sure, Samoa was changing, but it still was a wondrous place to be.
I leaned over the guard rail and took in the vista, a landscape dominated by volcanic peaks heaved from the ocean a million and a half years before and now necklaced with buildings, some left over from Navy occupation in the first half of the twentieth century, others from the latest influx of Americanism. An island ordained by the goddesses as a haven. From this vantage point, the mountains where Taema and Tila-faiga left their footprints appeared as drowsy giants, unconcerned with all the activity and commerce at their bases. But I knew better. Those mountains watched what went on. They breathed and moaned and sang in concert with the lives beneath them. They listened. Once I’d understood this, I’d made them my friends, more trusted than even the geckos. Now, every day on my walks to school, to Val’s house, to Fagatogo, I confided in those mountains, asking them questions I couldn’t ask anyone else and quieting my mind to hear their answers.
The railing was painted the color of over-ripe papaya, the color of heat. I leaned harder against it and transmitted a message to the mountains: I’m in love with this place! Is this where I belong?
I looked down on trees where flying foxes roosted. Wild ginger spiked the air. Peki, eager to explore the rest of the mountaintop, tugged at my hand.
“Go on,” I said. “I’ll catch up with you.” He shuffled off to the outlook, where my father snapped pictures. I waited and listened, waited and listened, but the mountains were mute. My question was one they’d been asked before, but one they couldn’t presume to answer.
On the way back to the cable car, my father shot more pictures, individual close-ups of me, my mother, and Peki against a scrim of distant sea blending into sky.
“Now you and Peki together,” he said.
Interesting. In our three months on the island I couldn’t recall him taking a single shot of me with anyone else, except my mother. Certainly not with a boy. Was this just another slide for his travelogue—caption: Nancy with native boy? Or did it signal some new level of acceptance?
I stood beside Peki, a modest gap between us. Was this where I belonged? Another question the mountains couldn’t answer.
INTERLUDE—EPHEMERA
That dream again. The one I’ve been having since—when, exactly? Pinpointing when it began is like extracting a raindrop from a river: its haunting impressions meld with images from my waking life.
I’m walking on the gravel path toward Fagatogo, upstream against the current of hearty men and women with flashing eyebrows and baskets of bananas. My gaze meets theirs but then is drawn to the distant mountains. I mentally trace the contours of their slopes, as if running my fingers over a lover’s sinews and soft spots.
I’m home.
But no. Only visiting, and not for long. The moment I feel embraced by familiar sights, the instant I take a breath of frangipani-charged air and sense my heartbeat synchronizing with the pace of island life, I’m aware of an opposing impulse demanding that I hurry, hurry, reminding me my time is running out. And though I’m still here on the island, I yearn for it.
Was it the recurring dream or the reality of this impermanent island life that changed the way I experienced my days? Time had always seemed limitless—it does when you’re young—with days that sometimes felt unbearably long and a future that stretched over the horizon like that highway I used to stare at from the Sonic parking lot. But in Samoa, my perception of time shifted, as if I were at the opposite end of life, aware of time’s all-too-rapid passage and my utter powerlessness against its progress.
The reminders were hard to ignore. In nearly every conversation, someone mentioned a kid whose time on the island had expired before mine began.
“Oh, that’s right, you never knew Reggie—he left before you came. Man, what a blast we used to have with him.” Or, “You never met Barb, did you? We all hated to see her go.”
The comments were vague enough to leave me wondering exactly what I’d missed, but so tantalizing I was sure I’d missed something by arriving precisely when I did. And with that realization came an awareness, like the shadow of a predatory bird, of how ephemeral the Samoa experience was for my friends and me.
In Oklahoma, my friendships were so constant I never considered they might not last a lifetime. Here, transience was a way of life. Except for the Samoans among us, we were all short-timers whose parents’ two-year contracts dictated our tenures. I knew my friends’ projected departure dates as well as I knew their birthdays, and all the while we were growing closer, we were doing the mental math and detaching by degrees, preparing for the inevitable separation.
Ephemerality wasn’t lost on my Samoan friends, e
ven those who expected to spend their lives on Tutuila. In fact, they reveled in an annual celebration—as eagerly anticipated as Thanksgiving—that owes its existence to a fleeting phenomenon. Every October or November (the exact timing depends on lunar cycles and other factors), sea worms known as palolo unhitch the back ends of their bodies like freight trains uncoupling cars. The long, segmented sections, which look like twirling spaghetti and contain the worms’ reproductive equipment, rise to the surface en masse, where they dissolve, releasing eggs and sperm. Unless, that is, they’re scooped up first by hungry Samoans who consider the aquatic vermicelli their ambrosia.
I’d witnessed the annual spectacle, seen the reefs twinkling with the lanterns of Samoans netting palolo, heard my Samoan friends rave about fried palolo on toast. Never tried it myself, figuring something so rare, so relished by the islanders, shouldn’t be wasted on someone who might not appreciate its salty tartness and scratchy texture. Or maybe I just didn’t want to get attached to one more thing I’d never taste again.
Though I never tried palolo, I regarded my whole life now as a delicacy to be scooped up and devoured, throwing myself into beach parties and dances, exclaiming over parades and fireworks, following romantic leads, exchanging intimacies with girlfriends, geckos, and mountains, taking in as much Samoa as I could. Gobbling it all down before it was gone.
Chapter 16—Attached
Ua numi le fau.
(It’s more complicated than it looks.)
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