—Samoan proverb
The boyfriend thing was getting sticky. Peki not only made himself at home in our living room, he also stationed himself by my side at every party, like a Fita Fita guard standing duty. One night, emboldened by beer, he’d whispered “Alofa Nancy,” and not as part of a language lesson.
Did I reply “Alofa Peki”? I’m not sure. His company and devotion were rock beneath my fidgety feet, but sometimes I felt like that rock was fastened to a chain around my neck. That was the thing about attachment: it grounded you, but it weighed you down. Narrowed your options. Obliterated your identity if you weren’t careful. Right now, even in my conciliatory mood, I was detaching from my parents, trying to become my own person. Why tether myself to someone else?
Especially now, when my options were so uncommonly kaleidoscopic. For the first time in my life, I had not just a boyfriend, but boys, boys, boys, boys lining up to dance with me, walk me home, date me, kiss me. So what if my desirability had more to do with being one of a handful of palagi girls on the island than with my shiny hair or kissing skills? I was loving the attention, the fizzy thrill of never knowing who I’d end up with at a party.
In my diary, in tiny backhand script, I detailed encounters with the many young men I believed to be infatuated with me: student council president Eric (of the long limbs and skewed smile), Vampires bass player Poloka (of the Dylan-esque hair and scowl), drummer Pili (Beatle-ish swoop of bangs), governor’s son Carlson (limo and freezer full of hamburger patties), new kid Wayne (half-Hawaiian, hyperkinetic, marginally annoying), two-years-younger Lane (twerpy, too, but with redeeming Burt Reynolds looks), plus the ever-present Peki, and Dick, always Dick.
As for my own affections, they shifted from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. “Stringing along” was not a term I liked to apply to my current state, but for now, neither was “attached.”
Not to boys, at least. My island, my mountains, those were another matter. Those were attachments I didn’t mind, attachments that demanded nothing of me. But the more attuned I became to my island home, the more I noticed its growing attachments: to American dollars, goods and habits. Those connections did come with strings, strings that were hard to see at first, like a spider web you don’t notice until you walk right into it and feel the cling of its strands.
They’d grown slowly during much of American Samoa’s sixty-five years as a U.S. territory. For most of that time, the territory was left to its fa’a Samoa ways, except during World War II, when the place swarmed with sailors and Marines and serenity was shattered with guns firing practice rounds and even one shelling from a Japanese sub. After the war, decades passed and not much happened until the early 1960s, when, embarrassed by a Reader’s Digest article titled “Samoa: America’s Shame in the South Seas,” the U.S. government coughed up some cash and appointed a new governor.
Enter H. Rex Lee, Carlson’s dad and former deputy commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. When Governor Lee took charge of the territory he described on first encounter as “a melancholy vista if ever I saw one,” he shook loose more funds from Congress, recruited help from the Navy, got island chiefs onboard with his vision—new schools, educational TV, roads, tourism—and transformed Tutuila so completely that when the Reader’s Digest reporter came back to see the results, he wrote a glowing sequel to his first story, titled “Samoa: America’s Showplace of the South Seas.”
That second article had just come out, around the same time the new luxury hotel opened with a grand celebration, and now the whole island was basking in the blinding sunshine of acclaim and expectation.
But sunshine makes for shadows, and the modernization campaign had a darker side. With all the public works projects underway, jobs were plentiful and traditional ways of making a living—fishing and farming—weren’t so attractive. More and more, Samoans now relied on paychecks instead of age-old skills, and because most of those paychecks came from government projects, Samoan society depended more and more on its U.S. connection. Who could foresee the day when funds would dry up, roads and buildings would corrode and crumble in the salt air, and there’d be no resources to maintain everything that had been created and dedicated with great fanfare during the current building boom?
Governor Lee always insisted that “All we do is aimed at keeping Samoa Samoan.” But really, how could American Samoa hold onto its identity with all its new entanglements?
Like I said, attachment can get sticky. Sometimes, though, you can’t resist. Case in point: New Year’s Eve.
Carlson had the limo and Tuke’s services for the entire day and night and recruited a gang of us to party with him. After swimming at Larsen’s Beach and stopping for ice cream and Cokes at the Governor’s house, we piled back into the car and headed for a party in Tafuna, where Peki, Dick, and others waited.
The mood at the party was flirty and convivial, everyone exchanging New Years’ kisses like dime-store hearts on Valentine’s Day. After giving and receiving a few, I turned to Peki, who stood in his usual spot beside me.
“You’d better get busy. A lot of girls are waiting for your kisses.” I gestured toward the floor where Marnie, Suzi, Kathi, and a few others sat in a circle, smiling in his direction.
Peki looked at his feet, spilling over the sides of his flip-flops. “No. I’ll only kiss you,” he said.
“Have it your way.” I flounced to a sofa in the next room, where Val sat with Dick.
“Peki’s missing out on all the fun,” I told Val. “Go give him a kiss.” She went off to find him, leaving me alone with Dick.
“Silly boy. Peki says he won’t kiss anyone but me.” I meant to sound playful but realized too late it came off conceited. Dick looked away, then back at me with eyes like small oceans.
“If everything had gone the way I wanted it, I’d be the one saying that.”
His words whirled in the pit of my stomach and set off vibrations as stirring as the Vampires’ music. I gave him a long, appraising look. He hadn’t gotten any better looking. No matter; some deeper appeal kept drawing me back. Was it just the drama of forbidden romance? The self-centered pleasure of knowing he was tormented with unfulfilled desire for me? Or was it something about him—his outrageousness, his motorcycle-fueled sex appeal, his refusal to shape himself into anyone else’s notion of what he ought to be? It was all those things and the way they were mashed up together. And it was also the simplest thing: when he wasn’t spewing profanity or pissing off grown-ups, Dick was a genuinely nice boy who cared about me and treated me with respect.
Also a helluva good kisser.
“Say it anyway.” I pulled him off the sofa and into a corner.
We kissed, and I vowed I’d make it work with Dick this time, parents be damned, Peki be damned, detachment be damned. I didn’t tell him about my intentions; I didn’t see the need. We were attached.
Chapter 17—Wind
Ua liua le vai o Sinafatunua.
(Sinafatunua’s river has turned around.)
—Samoan proverb used when someone loses an advantage and another acquires it.
The waters where my friends and I took our after-school swims were growing warmer by the day. The breeze, just a sighing presence until now, was becoming as assertive as the Oklahoma winds I despised. Of all the weather extremes I’d endured in my home state—summer days in the hundreds, January ice storms, tornado-spawning thunderstorms—the relentless wind always caused me the most distress. No, distress is not a strong enough word. The wind drove me stark raving mad. In winter it whipped at my ears and poked its witchy, frigid fingers through my warmest parka; in spring, its pollen-laden gusts sent me into sneezing frenzies; in summer it kicked up dust swirls that scoured my face and left my hair gritty. I reacted as if every draft were a deliberate attack on my sanity. I slammed doors and screamed into gales. The gales howled louder and drowned out my cries.
Now, Tutuila’s wind infuriated me just as much, launching me into tira
des when it snatched schoolwork from my fingers and scattered my papers down the street. I hated how it twisted things around, wrested control from my hands, tore apart what had seemed orderly and secure.
The windy days made everyone else edgy, too, especially Dick, whose eruptions boiled out of proportion to the minor frustrations that triggered them. His anger never was directed at me, but I took responsibility for quelling his inner furies. I had cleaved myself to him; I was his mainstay, his tie-down in the tempest.
He should have been in better humor, given recent developments. Though I still hadn’t mentioned my resolution to devote myself to him, I’d been sending unmistakable signals: winks, smiles, appreciative laughter, fingertips on his forearm. And as of New Year’s Day—an auspicious beginning if ever there was one—my parents had even eased up on him.
That evening a bunch of us, including Dick, had gone to a party at a Samoan kid’s house in Pago Pago. The band that was supposed to play had gone fishing instead, so the party was called off. Still in a social mood, we all traipsed over to my house to play records. I raced inside ahead of everyone else to ask if it was okay for Dick to come in. My mother gave me a quizzical look and said, “Well, of course,” as if I’d asked permission to mop the floor. My father offered no resistance, either. I hustled Dick inside before they could change their minds.
The evening felt surreal: Dick in my house, drinking the Fanta my mother offered, shooting me a grin as he picked out a Beach Boys album, settling into the rattan easy chair as if he’d always been welcome to stretch out there. My secret plan was off to a promising start. Yet by the time school resumed after the holidays, Dick was a vortex of agitation.
In typing class one afternoon, he swore under his breath from the desk behind mine as his fingers stumbled during a timed test. At the desk beside his, the class star—a pixie-faced Samoan girl named Ramona—fluttered her tiny hands across the keyboard, logging eighty-plus perfectly-typed words per minute. The faster Ramona typed, the more flustered Dick became, and the louder and more frequent his expletives. The Royal typewriters on our desks were manual models as big as window air-conditioners, with keys that balked unless struck with tendon-snapping force. I hammered at my keyboard with as much pressure as my piano-conditioned fingers could muster, adding to the classroom clatter I hoped would mask Dick’s outbursts.
Blasts of wind swept through the screened windows, rattling the papers in our copy stands and blowing my hair into my face as our teacher, Mrs. Counihan, patrolled the aisles, announcing minute by minute how much time was left until the kitchen timer on her desk rang like a fire alarm. With her spool-like, silver curls and her Naturalizer shoes, Mrs. Counihan looked like she should be crocheting afghans, but she ruled the classroom with the steeliness of a schoolmarm who’d been putting up with adolescent exuberance far too long. Mrs. Counihan tolerated no fooling around, no impudent attitudes, no distractions from the QWERTY keyboard and the interminable transcription of disembodied paragraphs. And because Dick personified distraction, impudence, and fooling around, Mrs. Counihan detested him. Her disapproval meant nothing to Dick and wouldn’t have mattered to me if Mrs. Counihan hadn’t belonged to my mother’s bridge club. I knew she reported Dick’s offenses with the exactitude of a probation officer, and now that my parents were at least tolerating him, I didn’t want to lose ground.
The timer sounded—a drawn-out jangle that ended in a shudder. All around the room, fingers stopped mid-stroke, except at the desk behind me, where I heard tap-SHIT!-taptap-SONOFABITCH!-taptaptap.
Mrs. Counihan’s glare was a gun precisely pointed at Dick’s head.
“Richard!”
I flinched at the sternness of her voice, but it had no effect on Dick. Another gust invaded the classroom and sent papers flying in all directions. My sympathies were blowing every which way, too. Sure, Dick was frustrated—I got that—but why couldn’t he just act right, at least in front of grown-ups, instead of giving them more reasons to distrust and despise him? Was that really so hard? What was I signing on for in pledging myself to this boy? I gave him a harsh look.
“Richard Whitaker, you will stop typing when the timer sounds, or you will receive an automatic F.” Mrs. Counihan bounded down the aisle and ripped the paper from Dick’s typewriter, spinning the platen so hard it kept whizzing after she walked away. She tore the typing test in half, wadded the two pieces into a ball and strode toward the trash can at the front of the room.
There was silence for a moment, then scraping as Dick pushed his chair back from his desk, followed by rustling around the room as we all swiveled in our seats to see what would happen next.
Dick stood, lifted the typewriter off the desk with both hands, and with a huff, heaved it onto the floor. The crash reverberated like a felled tree, and right behind it came Dick’s grand finale.
“I hate Jesus Christ!” he roared like a furious beast. Rage reddened his face. My face burned, too. He hated Jesus? I loved Jesus. Everyone loved Jesus. Did he really hate Jesus, or was that just the most outrageous thing he could come up with?
Dick turned and ran from the room, his sneakers yelping on the wooden floor. I listened as his footsteps reported his path—through the hallway, down the stairs, out of the building.
Then there was no sound at all but the slapping of screens against the window frames.
The winds and warm waters were signs that hurricane season was upon us. More senseless fury waiting to be unleashed with the slightest provocation. With the changing weather, some savvy islanders stocked up on food and kerosene for lanterns and lashed coconut fronds to their fales, but my girlfriends fortified themselves in a different way, with a sudden new interest—in a sailboat, of all things. In the months I’d lived on the island, we girls had loitered at the tennis court, hung around the cruise ship dock, and explored every shop in town, but never had anyone suggested visiting the marina that lay beyond Fagatogo, near the village of Pago Pago at the harbor’s apex. Now every after-school shopping trip required a detour past the small-boat basin, where a twenty-four--foot sloop had been anchored for several days.
The draw was not really the boat, but its sixteen-year-old skipper. Robin Lee Graham, a California kid with pluck and unbelievably trusting parents, had set off from San Pedro the previous July, intending to sail around the world. Now it was January, and after encountering a mast-buckling gale fifteen miles from Tutuila, he was sitting out hurricane season in Samoa.
I’d read about his voyage before we left Oklahoma—how he’d ventured out on Dove with only two kittens and a guitar for company and $75, some secondhand clothes, and a bunch of ballpoint pens for currency—and I’d wished I could meet such a daring boy. Here was a kid who was doing in real life the kind of stuff I’d playacted in my childhood backyard dramas. And here was a boy who, unlike Dick, channeled his thirst for excitement and independence into real accomplishment, not pointless defiance. Now chance had deposited us both on the same piece of rock in the Pacific.
“Has anyone seen him yet?” I asked as our troop made another pass by the marina.
Suzi and Kathi exchanged smug looks.
“Seen him?” Suzi’s smile was feline. “We’ve been on his boat. Karl went down to meet him as soon as he heard he was in port. So Lee—that’s what he likes to be called—invited Karl aboard for a beer last night, and Karl said we could come along.”
It was bad enough that Suzi had something to gloat about, but Kathi, too? She’d been getting under my skin since I’d noticed Dick paying attention to her shortly after the typewriter incident, though I found her harder to dislike than Suzi. That was just the problem: nothing about Kathi was unappealing; everything was—I hated to use the word—adorable, with those shining eyes and that pinch of freckles strewn across her nose. There was something in the slouch of her stance and the shadows around her eyes that made her seem vulnerable and a tad insecure, but instead of acting tongue-tied and awkward around boys as I often did, she sparkled.
I first observed her in action one afternoon when one of the older Samoan boys took a bunch of us for a ride in the back of his pickup to the east end of the island. As I hunkered down in the truck bed and watched the rolling backdrop of white sand beaches and picturesque villages, Kathi stood pressed against the cab, face to the breeze, laughing as her hair streamed like wisps of smoke in a wind tunnel. At one point she turned toward the rest of us and began singing: I want to go back to my little grass shack in Kealakekua, Hawaaa—iiiii. She knew all the words, even the tongue-twisting Hawaiian lines, and when she ended with … where the humuhumunukunukuapua’a goes swimming by, I secretly hoped the truck would hit a pothole and she’d go flying out and land head first in the sami to sleep forever with the humuhumunukunukuapua’a. Instead, she launched into another song, the spirited Samoan tune Minoi, Minoi (Wiggle, Wiggle), swiveling her hips as she sang. I tried to join in, but I knew only a couple of lines, couldn’t carry a tune, and had no hips worth wiggling, so I went back to staring at the scenery.
So now, this little Gidget, this kitten-girl, had Dick under her spell and a head start on Lee, the boat boy. I told myself that a young man who was out on his own in the world, who had to contend with sharks and squalls, wouldn’t be beguiled for long by a fourteen-year-old’s patter, however charming it might be. And neither would Dick, right?
Val and I spent the next afternoon exploring the Australis, the biggest ocean liner Samoa had ever seen. The thousand-passenger ship was so enormous we kept getting lost in its labyrinth of passageways, becoming so disoriented we forgot to speak to each other in pseudo-Samoan. When we emerged late in the day, Kathi and Suzi were waiting at the end of the gangplank.
“Guess what!” Kathi’s face was luminous. “Lee’s having a little party on his boat tonight. We’re all invited.”
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