Then, at the edge of the courtyard, my father appeared, walking slowly toward the apartment. His shoulders were square as shirt box corners and he held his head erect, but his face sagged around his mouth. The boys and I surrounded him before he reached the porch. He looked around the circle, meeting each pair of expectant eyes with a grave expression. The doctor’s bad-news face.
“I’m afraid it’s not good,” he said. “The boys were all out on their boards, and the waves overpowered them. The one boy, Tau, he’s all right; he made it back to shore, but he lost sight of the other two.” He took in a breath and exhaled a heavier one. “The Coast Guard has a rescue team out there looking for them now, but they’re not hopeful. I’m sorry.”
One by one, Pili and the other boys drifted silently away, bits of flotsam on an ocean of incomprehension. I sat on the porch and tried to reconcile what had happened with what little I knew of loss. Both my grandfathers had died years before, and an uncle I rarely saw had succumbed to a heart attack out in Oregon. But they were old by my childish standards, and though their deaths were unexpected and sad, it was common knowledge that older relatives, eventually passed away. But schoolmates, friends—no. They didn’t disappear, didn’t … die. I had trouble even thinking the word.
Sure, accidents happened: Betty McCollum fell from the second story of a construction site where we weren’t supposed play; Sue Ann Tolleson ran her forearm through a plate glass window; Danny broke his arm learning how to pole vault. But those mishaps resulted in stitches or plaster casts that friends could autograph. Everything got fixed. Put back together, good as new. Nobody died. Nobody’s soul went flying heavenward, defying anyone to catch it and stuff it back inside the body of one too young to be taken.
With the enormity of absorbing the loss came a creeping guilt. It wasn’t just Marnie’s flippant dismissal that echoed in my mind, but also things I’d said and done to Wayne. Lately, we’d flirted a little when I wasn’t preoccupied with Dick, Danny, Peki, or someone else, but whenever Wayne got too serious, or just plain got on my nerves, I pushed him away. On New Year’s Eve, he’d walked most of the ten miles from Fagatogo to the party in Tafuna, expecting to connect with me. But when he got there, I was all wrapped up with Dick and barely acknowledged him. Just days before the hurricane, he’d run into Val and me at Tropic Isle and told us he was organizing a get-together at his house. “If it all works out, I’ll come down and get you girls,” he’d said. I’d fired back: “What makes you think we’ll want to come with you?” I was teasing, but he was wounded, and I never said I was sorry.
My mother came out onto the porch, sat down beside me and took my hand. I waited for her to say something soothing, the way she always did when she knew I was sad or hurt. For the longest time she said nothing. Then, gently: “We’re going to the hotel for dinner. Come along.”
I crawled into the Tempest’s back seat and stared out the window as my father drove us to the hotel. As we passed Penicillin Row, I caught glimpses of dark ocean through the gaps between houses and wondered if the Coast Guard was still searching, and if in their search they’d encountered any displaced souls waiting to be returned to their rightful owners. Then I pictured Wayne and David, weak but still clinging to their surfboards, bobbing out there in the blackness. As we turned into the hotel driveway I noticed one first-floor room where the curtains were open and the lights blazed. Just then someone walked in front of the window—someone with a lanky frame and an energetic stride that looked so much like Wayne’s I did a double-take and allowed myself, for a moment, to believe he was alive and safe.
But no, he couldn’t be. We would’ve heard.
The hotel dining room’s curved wall of windows overlooked the bay. We took a table by a window, and though it was too dark to see anything but squiggles of moonlight on the water, I stared out through the glass for the whole meal and ate only a bite or two of my hamburger.
When we returned to the apartment after dinner, I sat in the darkened living room and tried to make sense of everything that had happened over the past four days. Why had the hurricane hit our island and bypassed others? Why had the tidal wave changed course? Why had Lee and Tau been spared, but Wayne and David lost? Were these random, disconnected happenings, or was God weaving the dark and bright strands into some magnificent fine mat that only He could envision? And if He was, could we petition Him to tweak the design into something more to our liking?
I pondered these mysteries until my head ached and my thoughts blurred. When I finally stumbled to bed, I fell into fitful sleep, filled with dreams of sinking through green liquid that stung my eyes and burned my lungs. Then, near dawn, came a different dream, one that seemed more real and replayed the previous evening in vivid detail. In the dream, I drove to the hotel with my parents, saw the figure in the window, returned to the apartment, and sat alone in the living room. But this time, the phone rang. Just as I picked up the receiver, I woke from the dream. I lay in bed, in that dusky state between sleep and wakefulness, trying to re-enter the dream and find out who was calling. In a sort of phantasm, I saw Wayne in the hotel window, holding a telephone receiver to his ear and waiting for me to answer.
But then, as desperately as I tried to hold onto my half-sleep fog, it dissipated and left me in the glare of full consciousness, where the reality of Wayne’s disappearance and death was undeniable. I forced myself out of bed and downstairs to join my parents, who were making breakfast.
“Good morning!”
The cheeriness in my father’s voice made me blink as if I’d walked into a too-bright room. My mother beamed, too.
“They found Wayne,” she said. “Alive.”
“He’s fine,” my father added. “The Coast Guard heard him whistling out there in the water and followed the sound.”
I sat down at the table, feeling as if my parents had flung open the window slats to reveal a scene unscathed by the hurricane: mountains reupholstered in greenery, palm trees erect and leafy. I wavered between relief and disbelief.
The day before, I’d struggled to comprehend how, in less time than it takes a wave to break on the shore, an entire life—the sum of first steps, first grade, first kiss, boyhood dreams, teenage desires—could vanish like that singular palm on my favorite ridge above Utulei. Now, it was almost as hard to accept that someone who was supposed to be dead was alive after all.
Wayne had been taken away, but miraculously snatched back, body and soul intact, leaving me with remnants of grief and guilt I didn’t know how to unload, but also a shred of reinvigorated faith. I thought about that moment when, passing the hotel window, I’d allowed myself to believe that Wayne was safe. Had my belief, transient as it was, improved the odds of his rescue? Had my prayers been picked up on some divine telecommunications line?
“What about David? Is he okay, too?”
My mother’s smile flatlined. She pressed her lips together and shook her head. “They haven’t found him. The Coast Guard has called off the search.”
“But maybe he’s still alive. Like Wayne. Maybe they just haven’t heard him whistle.” I searched my parents’ faces for the brightness I’d seen moments before.
My mother laid a hand on my shoulder. “Maybe, honey. We can hope. But I’m afraid it’s not likely.”
I thought again about my wishes and prayers. In my guilt over hurting Wayne’s feelings, had I prayed harder for his rescue than for David’s? Did I value David’s life less because I’d met him just days before? A new burden bore down on my psyche, and I found myself hoping that if there was such a thing as divine intervention, it didn’t involve me in any way. As much as I wanted to believe we all can summon the power to turn tides, to wrestle souls back into place and send death out to sea, I wasn’t sure I could handle the responsibility.
Chapter 20—Samoan Follies
Pago is … cloudy weather and
Pago is … rain
Pago is … very windy
A big hurricane
<
br /> Pago is a barren island where
Trees are blown away
Drier every day
No breadfruit or taro (pause)
We’ll cook the wheelbarrow
—Larry Broquet, “Pago Is!”, Samoan Fales, 1966
After the hurricane, David’s drowning, and Wayne’s near-death, I would’ve given anything to plunge right back into the social swirl, to wash away the fear, the grief, the guilt, to go on with life as usual. But Samoa was different now. Life was not as usual.
The whole island is practically gone, I wrote to Cindi, dispensing with my usual obsessive recounting of romantic woes. In places where the jungle was so thick you couldn’t see two feet in front of you, now you can see for two miles … It makes me so sick to see how the island was ruined in just one night.
That one night—and its awful aftermath—had changed my friends and me, too. Though we’d all endured our own, separate hurricane ordeals, we’d lived through something momentous together. We now were connected in a way we’d never been with our stateside cohorts. We were wiser, too, in ways we’d rather not be. Already all too aware our days on the island were numbered, we now also realized our youth offered no protection against time running out altogether. David had died. So could we.
Far more than our personal sense of safety had been shattered. We had only to take an aiga bus ride around the island to witness the fragility of our surroundings. Debris and fallen trees littered clearings, rocks were strewn across roads, fales lay tattered. The hurricane’s winds, which reached 120 miles per hour before breaking the gadget at Tafuna that measured their speed, had also flattened breadfruit, banana, coconut, and mango trees and ripped up taro fields, wiping out the mainstays of the local diet. Shipments of government surplus food—mostly butter and cheese—helped a little, though islanders weren’t accustomed to that kind of fare. The butter was fine for making banana bread from all the rotting fruit scattered on the ground, but processed cheese? My Samoan friends and their families had no idea what to do with the stuff.
Their hardship only compounded my guilt. Food shortages were a concern for my family, too, but for now we had meat in the freezer and canned goods in the pantry. If things got too bad, we could fly back to the States. For most of our Samoan neighbors, leaving wasn’t an option.
We could handle only so much despair. For relief, my friends and I threw ourselves into an upcoming musical revue—The Samoan Fales, a spoof of island life written and produced by some of the palagi adults. (The name played on the similar pronunciations of fale, the Samoan word for house, and the English word folly.) When posters went up around town announcing auditions at the Turtle, I marked my calendar and recruited friends to try out for the chorus line.
Val, Suzi, Kathi, and I showed up early and sat cross-legged on the cobblestone sidewalk, waiting for Wendy, Marnie, my neighbor Pam, and Toni, the palagi girl from the fiafia village.
“Do you think we’ll all get in the show, or will they only take the ones with boobs?” Suzi asked. It was so like her to already be cooking up an excuse for possible rejection. The comment did make me wonder, though, if my modest bra size might be a liability. I was glad I’d worn a loose t-shirt that made a mystery of my actual dimensions.
It hadn’t occurred to me until then that I might not qualify, but once Suzi raised the possibility, I sized up the competition. Like me, Pam and Toni had taken dance classes in the States, and they both got bonus points for their long blond hair. Wendy, Val, and Marnie lacked dance training but trumped the rest of us in the boob department. Suzi was no threat in any way, but Kathi was—well, Kathi was Kathi—and now, incidentally, wearing Dick’s ring.
The other girls arrived, looking cuter than I recalled any of them ever looking before, and we entered the auditorium as a singular tangle of tanned legs and pastel cottons. A portly man named Mr. Wiley bustled about, handing mimeographed sheets to the other hopefuls, who sat in folding chairs or on the edge of the stage, dangling their legs like poolside sunbathers.
“Wonderful, wonderful, what a marvelous turnout,” Mr. Wiley exclaimed.
My companions and I, hands on out-thrust hips, exchanged puh-leeze looks, with eyes rolled toward the ceiling and lips expelling little huffs of disdain.
“Is he for real?” Val said it louder than she should’ve.
Ignoring the remark, Mr. Wiley beamed like a cartoon sun, “OK, people, let’s get started.” He bounced to the piano bench and sat down with unexpected delicacy.
“I’ll play you some tunes from the show, just to get you in the mood.” His fingers raced like scrambling geckos over the keys, and he rocked from one butt cheek to the other in time with the music. After a buh-dump-buh-dump-bump-bump intro that sounded straight out of vaudeville, he began to sing:
Pago is … lots of coconuts
Pago is … beer
Pago is … roasted taro and
Pago is … here
Pago is the open market where nothing much is free
Buy it C.O.D.
Look at the bill, and you will be ill, oh!
Pago is … flower ulas and
Pago is … dogs
Pago is … crazy buses and
Pago is … frogs (hogs!)
Those guitars are always strummin’ and
Big mosquitoes always hummin’
You can get to town by thumbin’ ‘cause
PAGO … IS!
The song went on with verses about cups of kava and Mt. Alava, Hawaiian Eye and Bonanza, the hurricane, and water shortages. The guy was over the top for sure, but I had to admit the song was clever. Mr. Wiley played and sang a few more songs; then came time for chorus girl auditions.
We all popped out of our seats and moved en masse onto the stage, joined by several other palagi and Samoan girls from our school. Mr. Wiley directed us to line up according to height. Then: “Who knows how to do can-can kicks?”
My hand shot up. I’d been in a chorus line in a ninth-grade talent show and still had a photo the school photographer had taken of me backstage in leotard, fishnet stockings, high heels, and excessive eyeliner, looking like an underage hooker, but rather enjoying playing the part.
“Fantastic!” Mr. Wiley’s face glistened and his bald head reflected light like Pago Bay at sunset. “Please demonstrate for the other girls, Miss—”
“Sanders,” I said, stepping forward and thrusting out what chest I had, wondering if the oversized t-shirt had been the right choice. “Nancy.”
“All right, Miss Sanders, here we go!” Mr. Wiley launched into a lively rendition of the familiar can-can tune, and I began hopping on one leg and kicking the other so high I feared it might rip right out of its socket. Midway into my third kick, I had another memory from that ninth-grade stage show. On performance night, we’d come to the part of the dance where we executed our highest kicks while the chorus line traced out a circle like the second hand of a clock. I remembered how the klieg lights had made me feel: warm, but not overheated, radiating an incandescence of my own into the audience, which in the glare I saw not as schoolmates and parents but as rapt admirers and talent scouts. In that glorious moment, I imagined myself on a Broadway stage.
The line swept around in the circle pattern we’d practiced for weeks, but the music seemed faster than in rehearsal, and the soles of my high heels so much slicker than the ballet shoes I’d worn during practice sessions. There, on the end of the chorus line, I felt like I was in a game of crack-the-whip. I clutched the shoulder of the girl beside me, but in one sickening split-second she slipped away, my feet slid out from under me, and I landed on my ass, legs sticking straight out like a plastic doll’s. Even dazzled by stage lights and dazed by the impact, I could see the whole football team in the second row, nudging each other, pointing and laughing. I was back on my feet in an instant, but my dignity was as dusty and bruised as my backside, and my dreams of onstage fame significantly dimmer.
With that memory play
ing, rewinding, and replaying in my mind, I no longer enjoyed my current moment in the spotlight; I only wanted Mr. Wiley to stop pounding on that damn piano before I humiliated myself again. Finally, he lifted his hands from the keys and raised one in a gesture like a policeman halting traffic.
“Splendid!”
How many more superlatives would we have to endure before the night was over? I started keeping a mental list.
“Now girls, let’s see you all do that. Starting on your right … “ The can-can music rolled from Mr. Wiley’s fingers, and fourteen pairs of legs hop-kicked like crazy, hopelessly out of sync and all at different heights. We resembled a chorus line less than a centipede with a neurological defect, but Mr. Wiley seemed delighted with our performance. He sprang from the piano bench, bounded to the back of the room, and conferred in low tones with two other men who’d been watching the auditions.
On stage, we fidgeted, gnawed at cuticles, and exchanged sideways glances.
After a few minutes, Mr. Wiley returned.
“Ladies—” His forehead creased into ripples. “We’ve arrived at a decision.”
I glanced at Val. Arms crossed, she gave me a who-gives-a-shit look.
“Congratulations, you are all Samoan Fales chorus girls. We’ll post rehearsal schedules in a few days.”
“Marvelous!” Val said, again a little too loudly. “Stupendous! Phenomenal! Fabulous!”
I hissed at her, “Stop it!” and nudged her toward the door, burying my head in the crook of my arm to stifle my laughter.
“Oh, sorry,” she said when were nearly out the door. “But really, isn’t this all just too terrific?”
Out in the villages, in the real Samoan fales, life was far from terrific—or marvelous or any of the effusive descriptives in Mr. Wiley’s vocabulary.
Samoa had been knocked on its ass.
And yet, riding through the wreckage with my parents, I’d heard shouts and laughter again as villagers got back on their feet, dignity unbruised, and picked up the rhythm of their lives. Women and children cleaned up rubble, and clans came together to lift whole thatched roofs back onto fales, all with good humor.
Mango Rash Page 19