There was no withdrawing or isolating themselves in misery, no asking why one fale was hit while another was spared. Instead, I witnessed an acceptance that was not resignation or passivity, but a kind of grace. It was something to admire. Later I’d hear this typically Samoan reaction to misfortune described as a manifestation of malosi, a word that means strength, not only of the body, but of the spirit.
Malosi or grace or whatever it was, I wanted to tuck some away for the next time I stumbled and needed shoring up. For the next time misfortune tore through and left a mess in its wake.
As diverting as Samoan Fales rehearsals were, I couldn’t stop thinking about life in the villages—the devastation, yes, but also the cheerful pitching in to make things right again. I felt like I should pitch in, too, yet what could I do? I had no idea how to thatch a roof or repair a tattered pandanus mat.
I did, however, know how to read.
When our principal announced that Fia Iloa elementary school needed teachers’ aides to help with reading classes, I applied and was picked to work with a second-grade teacher, Mrs. Ieti.
Just a short walk from my school’s front steps, Fia Iloa (the name means “I want to know”) was the elementary equivalent of SAP, with a mix of Samoan and palagi students. So I wouldn’t be teaching only Samoan children, and I wouldn’t be working in a village. Still, doing something other than perpetual partying and playacting seemed better than doing nothing.
Two days after I was selected, I was dispatched—with no real preparation—to meet Mrs. Ieti in her classroom. Round-faced and round-bodied, with her hair gathered into a mound atop her head, she seemed even more nervous than I was. She spoke in a murmur and kept her gaze directed downward. School was over for the day, so she gave me a stack of papers to grade. When I whipped through them and handed them back, she finally looked me in the eye and smiled.
“Fa’afetai,” she said. “Thank you.”
The next day, she let me work with the class on reading skills. Unlike Mrs. Ieti, the kids needed no warm-up. They flocked around me, eager for turns to read aloud, and their faces lit up when I smiled and nodded approval. I lit up too, inside, just as I always had when I’d played with my little nephews. My brother’s sons were not much younger than these second graders, and when they were babies and toddlers and I myself was a grade-schooler, they’d been like little brothers to me. Could I really be feeling the same kind of affection for these schoolkids I’d met only minutes before?
As the days went on, one little boy charmed me even more than the rest. Tui had mischief in his eyes and missing teeth in a smile that was almost too big for his face. His reading efforts were valiant, but what he really loved was drawing. Whenever I saw him bent over a new creation, I made a point of complimenting it, just to see that smile.
One day, as I was leaving Mrs. Ieti’s class, Tui ran up and handed me a sheet of rough paper. I turned it over to find a crayon rendering of a fale. I took it home and pinned it up in my room, along with other special souvenirs—a paper lei, postcards from friends, a magazine photo of Sonny and Cher.
I might not be rebuilding villages, but I was building something, and now I had my own Samoan fale to show for it.
Performance night came. The backstage bustle. The squeaks and rustles of the audience shifting in their folding chairs and fanning their programs. Broadway itself could not have felt more thrilling. Dressed in matching pink lavalavas and schoolgirlish white blouses, we chorus girls fussed with one another’s hair and glopped on as much blue shadow and black eyeliner as our eyelids could hold. As we waited in the wings for the show to start, we ran through lyrics and traded lines of dialogue. We had only a few short songs and speaking lines, but after weeks of rehearsals, we’d memorized the whole script and score and felt their cleverness now belonged to us. Most of the songs and skits were innocent jabs at government officials and bureaucratic snafus or witty observations of life, fa’a Samoa. But a few were a touch risqué. Those, of course, were the ones we most delighted in reciting.
Chanting in a sing-song voice, Kathi launched into a talking blues piece: “Tafuna town is just like any other town … “
Suzi joined in: “The mountains are up, and the ocean’s way down … “
Then the rest of us: “The people live at such a pace, I think they’re gonna call it Tafuna Place. Yeah, Tafuna town is just like any other town, and I’m glad to call it home (I love my neighbors). I’m glad to call it home.”
As if we hadn’t heard the lines a hundred times, we all burst into giggles at the likening of Tafuna to Peyton Place, the fictional setting of a TV series whose characters’ lives overflowed with illicit passion and hypocrisy. Most of us had watched the show in the States, and its parallels to the rumored infidelities and other unseemly behavior among the expats of American Samoa were unmistakable.
The show began, our cue came, we trooped onto stage and took our places on a set designed to look like a tavern, presided over by a salty cocktail waitress named, with a nod to Somerset Maugham, Sadie. We were no longer teenage innocents, and we were not Rockettes. We were B-girls in a sleazy tropical bar.
I’d known this in rehearsals, but it hadn’t really sunk in until, before an audience of island bigwigs, neighbors, teachers, and parents, we danced and kicked our legs high and sang a song with lines about charming men into buying us drinks. Now, in place of the glow that lit up my stateside performances, I felt the burn of embarrassment coloring my cheeks.
This was different from dressing up in fishnets and high heels in ninth grade. Though my Samoan Fales costume was more modest than my talent show get-up, my perspective was more revealing. As a ninth-grader, I hadn’t yet been exposed to the seamy side of grown-up behavior—except in the occasional adult movie I’d slipped past my parents to see. Now that I was actually living among adults who drank too much and had secret affairs, grown-up naughtiness revolted more than titillated me.
I watched the faces of people in the audience turn red, not with shame, but with the exertion of uproarious laughter over references to their own hanky-panky. Certainly there were many upstanding adults—like my parents—in that audience, but viewed through my scandal-tinted lens, I saw only sinners. To my mind, these adults were no more mature than my friends and me—maybe less so, because instead of wanting to grow up, they still wanted to act like us, with our shallow, serial romances, secret drinking, and duplicity.
I smiled at the back row, as I’d been trained to do, but I didn’t laugh anymore. As the lights stung my eyes and melted my makeup, I thought back to scenes in the villages after the hurricane. Samoans had shown us their best face. What kind of face were we showing them? What examples were we setting for the children in Mrs. Ieti’s class and all over the island?
My anthropological observations were confirmed. My models were not to be found in the expat settlements of Tafuna and Utulei and Fagatogo; they were out in the villages where a different kind of adulthood was being played out. The kind where men and women, free-spirited and fun-loving as they were, acted their age and willingly shouldered responsibility. The kind with malosi.
Chapter 21—Uma Lava Pisupo
Aua le tufia le popo pa’ū po.
(Don’t pick up a coconut that falls at night; wait until morning.)
—Samoan proverb meaning “Be wary of disturbing news from an untrustworthy person.”
Life, post-hurricane, was moving toward normal, and then—another upheaval. This one had little impact on the island as a whole, but it rattled my world all to pieces.
I first heard of the impending disaster from Suzi, who acted all concerned with her I-have-really-bad-news opening, as we stood on the path where we’d stopped to talk—she on her way to Marnie’s house, me on my way to Val’s. But then she seemed to take unnecessary pleasure in watching my reaction to the punch line.
“So I guess you’ve heard Dick’s leaving,” she said, “and just when it looked like you two might get back together.
Tough luck, eh?”
I stared at her and replayed her words. Sounds of passing traffic roared and blared in my ears. Had I heard Suzi correctly over the noise? Dick couldn’t be leaving—not now. He’d just broken up with Kathi, and at a party the night before, he’d turned his attention back to me.
Now, less than twenty-four hours after that romantic rekindling, Suzi was telling me—what? I stepped off the path and asked her to repeat what she’d said.
“You heard me: Dick’s leaving. Pretty soon, too.” She sounded bored. “Too bad for you.”
This time, the words buzzed in my ears and drowned out the traffic. I glared at Suzi. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Why would he leave in the middle of his senior year?” I hoped she didn’t notice the quaver in my voice.
She gave me that look, like a cat gives you when it’s been purring on your lap and abruptly decides to swipe its claws across your forearm. “After you left last night, he told Karl his family is moving to Manu’a. He doesn’t want to go with them, so he’s moving back to California to live with relatives and graduate from his old high school. He had a girlfriend back there, you know.”
I forced every muscle in my face to remain neutral. “So? I had a boyfriend back in the States, too. Big deal.”
Suzi arched her eyebrows and shrugged. My stomach seized up.
Get a grip, I told myself. Think this thing through like a chemistry problem or a math quiz. Start with the knowns.
Okay. I knew this: Marnie had told me that before I came to the island, Dick was always saying he wanted to move back to California, but once he met me he stopped talking like that—except when one of those shadowy rumors about him circulated among the palagi parents. Now the rumors had died down, and my parents were letting him come to our apartment as long as other kids were there. And he was talking about leaving? I wasn’t buying it.
“It’s just talk,” I told Suzi. “He’s said things like that before, and he’s never left.”
“He’s serious this time. Ask him yourself at the movie tonight,” she said over her shoulder, continuing on her way as casually as if we’d been discussing what to wear to the next party.
I fumed and rationalized all the way to Val’s house, kicking chunks of crushed coral from the path. This was classic Suzi. She couldn’t stand to see things working out for someone else, so she had to make up lies to tarnish every lustrous moment.
Val was sitting at her desk typing on onion skin paper when I walked in.
“You won’t believe what Suzi just told me—this has gotta to be her biggest whopper yet.” Already the fib seemed so preposterous I was able to laugh as I related the conversation to Val. But then a shard of doubt pricked my certainty.
“You don’t think it could be true, do you?”
“Are you kidding?” Val’s expression blended empathy with impatience. “There’s no way Dick’s leaving this island until you do.” She pulled the sheet of paper from the typewriter, added it to a pile on her desk and handed the stack to me.
“Here. I just finished typing up what we wrote last time.”
The manuscript in my hand was our latest project, our own musical fantasy about life in Samoa. Once again proving her best-friend-worthiness, Val had agreed to make my romantic tribulations the focus, as she did with most of the cartoons and stories we co-authored.
“Oh, and I came up with another song last night. I wasn’t going to show it to you yet, but it seems apropos.” She rifled through notebooks piled on her desk, pulled out a page and laid it atop the sheaf in my hands.
I read the title: That Whitaker Boy (sung by ladies’ bridge group). “Oh, this is going to be good.”
I read on:
Of all the teenagers here—
And we have a lot.
The sly! The fat! The dumb! The queer!
The sexed! The had—the got!
We ladies of the bridge club
Have a child we hold most dear
We admit—for him, we’d try
If our bods weren’t all so shot!
“Wow, Val, this is better than Samoan Fales! This is great—or should I say, ‘marvelous’?”
“Keep reading. It gets better.”
The next lines detailed Dick’s cigarettes called Kent and Honda with fender bent … his bouncy, sexy walk, his incoherent Air Force talk, his unindustrious habits in school, and his tendency to disobey rules.
“Can I show it to him at the movie tonight? He’ll crack up.” I already had the paper folded and stuck halfway into my shorts pocket when Val nodded, smiling with the satisfaction of a heralded author at a standing-room-only book signing and the warmth of a loyal pal who’d just made her best friend happy.
Dick was waiting just inside Goat Island Club’s back door when Val and I arrived that night. He reached for my hand and led me to a row of empty seats. The movie, Island of the Blue Dolphins, had sounded good from the review in the Samoa Times, and I expected its story line about an orphaned girl living in the wild on an isolated island to resonate with my own going-Samoan fantasies. But the plot was too simplistic and the dialogue too contrived to hold my skittery attention.
Dick seemed restless, too. When he suggested leaving, I shot from my seat like a breaching porpoise. As we walked behind the warehouses, toward Centipede Row, I debated whether to show him the song first or mention Suzi’s remark. I hoped both would amuse him, so I decided to start with Suzi and save the song for the finale.
“Hey,” I said, laughing in an attempt at lightness that came off sounding nervous, “I ran into Suzi today, and she told me—get this—she told me that you told Karl you’re leaving in a few weeks. Is she pathetic or what?”
Dick looked away. I followed his gaze to the fishing boats on the other side of the bay, lit up like carnival rides.
“Shit!” he said.
“That’s what I thought.” The words rushed out faster than I meant them to. “I told her she was full of shit, that there was no way you were leaving now. I mean, really, where does she come up with these things?”
Dick turned back to face me. “I wanted to tell you myself.” His face had that crumpled look, like the night we’d talked in the shadows outside the Rec Hall. “Yeah, it looks like I’ll be leaving in a few weeks. Unless something drastic happens.”
“Drastic like what?” Leaving was the most drastic thing I could think of. What could top that? I looked back at the lights across the bay, twinkly a moment before but now hazy blurs.
“Nothing. Never mind. It’s pointless to even think about.” Dick stopped at the bench behind the Jorgensens’ house. We kissed, but instead of warm waves, I felt sinking stones in the bleakness beneath my ribs. Loving and leaving. Loving and leaving. It happened with Danny; it was happening with Dick. Wasn’t there ever any loving and staying? Any holding on? Wasn’t anything forever?
The mountains, shaded silhouettes across the bay, seemed more remote than usual as I begged them for answers. They’d weathered all sorts of upheavals, witnessed centuries of comings and goings, but they still stood strong. Or did their bedrock hearts crumble a little with each loss?
“I swear, if your parents would let me go out with you, I’d stay here as long as I could,” Dick said. “But I don’t see that happening.”
“Maybe things are different now.” I gripped his hand as if holding tight enough would tether him to the island, to me. “Maybe they’ll—”
Dick stubbed out his cigarette on the back of the concrete bench. “You know they won’t.” I felt his hand on the back of my head, his fingers purposefully feathering strands of hair as if assessing their value. What would they have to be worth for him to stay?
“Don’t leave.” I said it without pleading, as though simply pointing out an option he’d overlooked. When he shook his head, my tone turned plaintive. “Not now. Don’t leave.”
“It’s not that I want to leave you. You know that, right?” He twisted the ring o
n his right ring finger—the ring he’d just reclaimed from Kathi. “Look, I offered this to you before, and I said you could have it any time you wanted. Will you take it now?”
All the times I’d played this scene in my mind, it never had played out like this.
Wordlessly, I took the ring and slipped it into my pocket. Beside it, folded in a tight square, its words concealed by layers atop layers, Dick’s song remained unsung.
For the next two weeks, every fantasy I’d ever had about Dick came true—except the one where my parents realized how badly they’d misjudged him, and he canceled his plane reservation. We were a couple again, together every single day, like when we first met, before my parents butted in. Except for the hovering sense that time was running out and separation inevitable, life felt glorious, marvelous, spectacular, every one of Mr. Wiley’s superlatives.
We exchanged pictures and wrote long, distressed messages on their backs. The only photo he could find to give me was a black-and-white snapshot of him at Tafuna beach popping a wheelie on his Honda. The whole image was a mere two-by-three-inch rectangle, and Dick and bike, midway between foreground and mountains, were the size of my thumbnail. But even in that minute likeness, the hunch of shoulders over handlebars and the wave of blond hair were so typically Dick they made me ache.
I told him to write small on the back, and his careful printing was almost microscopic:
I hope you can beleave [sic] me that I don’t want to leave this place now because if things were O.K. with your father I’d stay here with you just as long as I could.
All my love, Dick.
Unlike when Danny and I parted, Dick and I made no mention of getting back together in the vague, eternally unclouded someday. Our one shot was now, and our now was about to be over. Except that maybe it wasn’t. Every few days, he’d waver and say maybe he’d stay after all. Move in with one of the other boys until at least the end of the school year. I’d hold my breath, careful not to jinx his change of heart. But then the next day, no, he was definitely leaving, and there was nothing I could do about it.
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