Mango Rash

by Pokerwinski, Nan Sanders;

  My seventeenth birthday party, an indulgent fête at the new hotel, had already been scheduled before I found out Dick was leaving. Now it turned out his departure date was just a few days after my party night. My party would be his last on the island. But not his farewell, thanks to Marnie.

  “We can’t have your birthday celebration be Dick’s official send-off,” she’d said when I’d told her about the timing. “That just will not do.” In a matter of days, she’d organized a tofa—goodbye—party for Dick at her house the weekend before mine.

  Dick and Eric arrived at Marnie’s after everyone else, having come from another party in a village on the island’s west end. The boys wore leis of red ginger and frangipani, and when I danced with Dick, scents of flower and boy combined into a wrenching aphrodisiac.

  Toward the end of the evening we sat on the front steps of Marnie’s house, looking out at Mt. Rainmaker’s darkened contours. We talked for a long time, saying things we’d said before, but this time with more resignation than tortured yearning.

  I gave Dick the song Val had written for him, but not the square of folded notebook paper I’d had in my pocket that night at the club. In the intervening week, Val and I had made Dick a booklet, with his song typed on onion skin and bound in cardboard from the back of a writing tablet.

  He opened the cover, read the words and laughed at the end of every line. Then he laid the book on the step, and his face puckered.

  “You girls.” There was mild astonishment in his voice. “Nobody’s ever done anything like this for me.”

  Some time that night he said he loved me.

  Loving. And leaving.

  Coke bottles—not Fanta, but genuine Coca-Cola—stood at attention in ice chests, like eager, tuxedoed waiters. Grills sweated in anticipation of frankfurters. The Vampires twanged guitar strings, tapped microphones, and prepared to reverberate eardrums. It was the eve of my seventeenth birthday, and on the hotel’s poolside terrace, my party was about to begin.

  Guests arrived, the boys in high spirits, the girls toting packages wrapped in the same candy-store colors as their party dresses. When I later unwrapped the gifts, I would find myself in possession of an enviable assortment of tortoise shell bracelets, enough lengths of printed fabric to satisfy my sewing needs for at least a year, and about a pint of Evening in Paris cologne, portioned up in one-ounce bottles of cobalt blue glass that delighted me as much as the toilet water’s wood-tinged scent.

  I should’ve been the happiest seventeen-year-old on the island—on the entire planet—and would’ve been if not for the penetrating melancholy and disbelief. Dick’s departure was now just days away. How I could enjoy my birthday under those circumstances was beyond me, but I made up my mind to try.

  The music started, that slide at the beginning of Slaughter on 10th Avenue that sounds like a hawk’s cry terminating in a staccato chord, followed on its heels by jungle drums and a repetitive three-note bass line. And then the melody, wandering unexpectedly into dips and rococo flourishes and turning skippy-hoppy. Even with a sinking heart, how could I not dance to that?

  I looked around for a partner. Carlson-the-governor’s-son appeared as if cued for an entrance.

  “Okay,” I said before he even asked for the dance. We threaded between round, redwood tables and slatted chairs to a spot in front of the band, but before stopping there I made sure my parents had a clear view of us from the corner where they’d settled in to chaperone. My strategy for the evening was to conspicuously engage with as many parentally-sanctioned boys as possible in hopes that occasional disappearances with Dick would go unnoticed.

  Those hoped-for connections were few. In photos from the party, Dick is a peripheral presence, his face at the edge of the frame or barely visible in the crowd. That’s how he seemed to me that night: central in my thoughts but out of reach, nearly vanished.

  Slaughter on 10th Avenue ended with a single, sustained chord. Carlson tried to stay attached to me until the last musical molecule evaporated, but I broke away. The Vampires paused just long enough for swigs of Coke before launching into Walk, Don’t Run, a danceably inviting tune that I chose to sit out.

  The swimming pool, with its underwater lights, seemed filled with liquid radium that cast eerie, dappled reflections onto the faces of the boys who dove and splashed in it. (The girls, with hairdos to protect, kept their distance from anything damp or chlorinated.) Wayne was right in the midst of the aquatic exuberance, doing cannonballs off deck chairs and exploding out of the water like a missile shot from a submarine. After that terrifying night in the ocean, I’d have thought he’d have hung up his swim trunks for good, but either he’d put the experience behind him or he was facing fear head on. Either way, I gave the guy a lot of credit, but I’d also come to realize that even though Wayne had nearly drowned, his juvenile antics really got on my nerves.

  Watching Wayne, though, a thought popped into my head. If the powers that control such things could reverse his death, then turning Dick’s departure around should be a snap. That thing I’d said about divine intervention? I took it back on the spot and began praying: Don’t let him go, don’t let him go, don’t let him go. Don’t let my party be the end.

  Maybe for once, I could be responsible for something good happening.

  The rest of that night is a fuzzy memory that sharpens momentarily when I look at photos that show me whispering to Val, dancing with coconut-oiled Samoan boys, and standing with arms crossed behind my back and head tilted in an earnest display of interest as my favorite Vampire Pili demonstrates a guitar riff.

  I have no photos of the last dance, but my memory needs no prompting to recreate that scene. Dick had put in his bid hours before, and at 10:45, when the drumbeat call and agonized guitar response of Blue Star’s opening strains signaled the party was drawing to a close, he made his way to my table, held out his hand, and led me onto the floor. It was the sort of moment that Blue Star was composed to orchestrate, with all the essential elements: love-struck teenagers, ramped-up hormones, a painful parting. It would’ve been clichéd if it hadn’t been my own damn life.

  “I wish it didn’t have to end this way.” Dick’s face was so close I couldn’t bring it into focus, but I could read his voice: resolute, not doleful as before.

  He said it. He said “end.” That’s when I knew it really was.

  The Samoan word for “over” is uma, but when something is so absolutely finished there’s no hope of reprieve, Samoans say it’s uma lava pisupo—”no more corned beef.”

  As Blue Star trailed off with those last, plinking notes, Dick and I were most definitely uma lava pisupo.

  Chapter 22—Mistaken Identities

  Ua o le malu i Falevai.

  (It is the protection of Falevai.)

  —Samoan saying applied to disappointment at unfulfilled hopes

  Val and I scuffed along the path to Fagatogo’s shopping district. We had no specific destination or purpose; going downtown after school was just what we did. Once we got there we’d find something to make the trip worthwhile: Fantas to be drunk, hamburgers and donuts to be eaten, and, on good days, a new shipment of record albums to be pawed through at South Pacific Traders.

  “I wonder where you’ll see Dick today.” Val asked the question as matter-of-factly as she might inquire where I wanted to shop.

  Almost a week had passed since Dick’s departure, but I kept catching glimpses of him around the island. Not that I actually saw blond, motorcycle-riding look-alikes, but my heartsick imagination converted anyone with the slightest resemblance into the boy I wished I could see. A blur of mannish shape on a passing motorbike, a flash of white jersey—that was all I needed to conjure him.

  “Who knows?” I said. “He’s everywhere—and nowhere.” I dragged my feet, taking self-pitying pleasure in the scratch of flip-flops on crushed coral. A queue of basket-bearing Samoan men and women passed by, each one smiling, flashing eyebrows, and calling out the gre
eting, “Malō!” Each malō renewed my admiration for their malosi, even if I myself could manage only an arc of a smile and an eyebrow flash.

  We reached the edge of the malae, an oval-shaped expanse of grass about the size of a football field. At the far end, bunched at the base of a mountain, sat the shops of Fagatogo, a collection of white frame, two-story structures with peaked-hat roofs, mixed in with larger government buildings. They all looked comfortable there, like they belonged, but they hadn’t always. Some buildings dated back to the turn of the century, when the United States and Germany divvied up control of the Samoan islands, and the U.S. Navy moved in. Others were more recent, but all departed squarely from Tagaloa’s sacred, rounded fale design.

  Kneubuhl’s was the largest, most modern store—almost like a supermarket, with shopping carts and self-serve refrigerated cases for meat and milk, along with the requisite shelves of canned goods, bolts of fabric, and housewares. But South Pacific Traders was the place I liked to shop. The small store sat behind the row of businesses that faced the malae, and to reach it you had to travel down a narrow alley where scrawny dogs whimpered for handouts and children from nearby fales scampered and yelled “Palagi!” A turn down an even narrower alley and a climb up a flight of stairs took you to the second-floor shop. Though it was probably only half a block from the malae, venturing back to South Pacific felt like wandering through a Moroccan bazaar.

  As we cut across the malae, headed for the shops, I caught sight of a figure in the distance—a youthful frame and a head of blond hair. My mind playing tricks again, no doubt. But as we drew closer, the hallucination didn’t disappear or meld into something more explicable. About that time, I noticed a flock of official-looking men and women—an entourage—surrounding the blond guy, and my brain made another flying leap.

  “Omigod, Val! It’s Steve McQueen!” Ever since I’d seen the macho movie star jump that barbed wire fence on a motorcycle in The Great Escape, he’d seemed the very archetype of male sex appeal. Now, here he was on my little island.

  Val squinted. “I don’t think so.”

  I picked up my pace, stumbling in my flip-flops. “Well, it’s gotta be somebody famous—look at all the people around him. And look at the hair. Who else has hair like that? I’m telling you, it’s Steve McQueen.”

  I kicked off my flip-flops, scooped them up from the ground, and took off running barefoot toward the business district, the shoes flapping against each other like muted castanets. In the back of my mind, I remembered my father’s stern warnings that going shoeless in Samoa was inviting parasites, but damn, that was Steve McQueen over there.

  Val, trotting beside me, pointed. “They’re walking away. No, wait, they’re going down the alley.”

  We gained on the group. My calves ached. I hadn’t run this much since I’d gone out for track in sixth grade. My armpits and the backs of my knees dampened, and I could feel my bangs, so sleek when I’d left home, forming ropy clumps. Weaving around startled-looking Samoan women in puletasis, we raced up the alley just in time to see the golden-haired man and his group ascending South Pacific’s staircase. I stopped so abruptly Val crashed into my back.

  “Sorry,” I said, slipping my feet—undoubtedly parasite-infested by now—back into my rubber thongs. “Now here’s what we do: we walk in nonchalantly and pretend to look at records. Then he says hi, and we say hi, and we strike up a conversation. See, that way we don’t seem too fawning.”

  Val gave me the dubious slit-eyes. “What if he doesn’t say ‘hi’?”

  I was already halfway up the stairs, pulling at my bangs in a vain effort at straightening and fluffing. “Just follow me and do what I do.”

  At the top of the stairs I paused, took a deep breath, and pushed open the door, prepared as any sweat-soaked seventeen-year-old could be to meet a movie idol. The shop was small—just a couple of rooms about the size of a living room and bedroom, with shelves and glass cases around the perimeter and tables of merchandise in the middle. The record bins were near the door, and because that’s where the famous man and his contingent were gathered, we found ourselves in their midst as soon as we stepped inside.

  Only then did I get a good look. If this was Steve McQueen, then the three years since The Great Escape had not been kind. The fair hair that lured me across the malae was actually a peroxided shade of yellow, more brass than gold. The overtanned face was all puff and pudge, nothing like McQueen’s rugged movie-poster image.

  As I stared at the man, trying to reconcile expectation and reality, one of the shopkeepers, a plump Samoan woman with a dramatic air, fluttered over.

  “Girls! Do you know who that is?” Her stage whisper struck me as ridiculous; the putative star was standing right behind us. “That’s Johnnie Ray!” She made a sweeping gesture that took in both the disappointing celebrity and a display of record albums on the table beside him. The name and the album cover photos triggered dim memories of a cornball entertainer who sang in a way that made it seem like he was crying.

  I wondered where the shopkeeper had found the albums; to my knowledge Johnnie Ray hadn’t released a record since the 1950s. I’d never felt one way or the other about the singer, but all at once I despised him, not for his maudlin performing style or his Hollywood has-been looks, but for failing to be the star I thought I was stalking—someone he was not and never had claimed to be.

  With no flesh-and-blood movie star to follow around the island, we settled back into admiring the ones we watched on screen Wednesday and Sunday nights at Goat Island Club. There was boyish Doug McClure in Shenandoah, deeply cool Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, suave Cary Grant in Charade, and the real Steve McQueen in Love with the Proper Stranger. When we weren’t daydreaming about kissing those handsome men, we fantasized about being the leading ladies they actually kissed: Natalie Wood, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn.

  It was a toss-up which actress I most wanted to resemble, but I thought I had the best chance of approximating Audrey Hepburn, even if oversized eyes and heavy eyebrows were the only features we had in common. At the movies one Sunday night, I studied her expressions and gestures, aiming to incorporate them into my own repertoire: the closed-lip smile, the coquettish head dip, the wide-eyed look of innocent astonishment. The character Miss Hepburn played in this film was ditzy and a bit awkward, but the actress was so lovely to look at, her clumsiness seemed all the more charming. I wondered if I was cute enough to be adorable, even when acting like a dipshit.

  At intermission, the lights came on, and I stretched both arms upward, leading with the wrists and flicking my hands upward at the last moment, as I’d seen Miss Hepburn do. Someone tapped my shoulder, and I turned, chin lowered, eyes wide, to see Pili and Eric in the row behind me. Pili was every girl’s dreamboat and no one’s property. His features blended all the best traits of his palagi father and Samoan mother: almond eyes, the smoothest ecru skin, and straight, black hair with a kick of a wave in the swag over his eyebrows. But his looks were only half the package. Pili was also nice to girls, unfailingly, impartially so. He’d mastered certain social skills—the direct gaze, the thoughtful nod, the habit of frequently repeating your name when he addressed you—that made you feel you had his full attention. Yet, though he acted genuinely interested in all of us, he showed no enduring romantic interest in any of us, a situation we all, at every opportunity, tried to rectify.

  Eric, a palagi whose father was my English teacher, was equally engaging and unattainable. Though not as good looking as Pili—his facial features and long, bony limbs were so irregular Val and I called him Crooked Man—he, too, was dependably amiable yet romantically aloof. We palagi girls all vied for his attention, as we did for Pili’s, but he preferred Samoan teines.

  So when Pili (or Eric—I wasn’t sure who’d tapped me) made even this slight overture, it activated my eternal faith in the unlikely. This time it surely meant something.

  As I turned to face the boys, Pili was smiling—whitel
y, evenly—and the highlights in his hair gleamed like starshine on the darkened bay.

  “You know, Nancy … “ (his usual, intimate opening) “Eric and I were sitting here watching Audrey Hepburn up there, and we came to the conclusion that she reminds us of you.”

  I dipped my head even lower and raised the corners of my mouth in a crescent-moon smile, trying to convey mild pleasure instead of revealing the hammering thrill I actually felt. Then parting my lips just enough to speak: “Really?”

  “Oh, sure.” Pili nodded vigorously, and Eric’s head bobbled as if the two friends were wired into each other’s circuitry. “I mean, not in looks, but the way she acts. That’s so like you, Nancy.”

  If Suzi or Karl had made the comment, I would’ve known it was deliberately mean, but coming from Pili I had to assume it was an honest observation. I was no more Audrey Hepburn than Johnnie Ray was Steve McQueen, and pretending otherwise was as futile as chasing a falling star.

  But who was I? Replaying scenes from the past five months, I saw myself as a range of characters with conflicting traits. A girl who carelessly started a fire—yet admitted her guilt … who criticized her father—yet defended him against criticism … who trembled through a hurricane—yet survived! Bold, cowardly, loyal, fickle, kind, spiteful, principled, deceitful, purely palagi, increasingly fa’a Samoa, I didn’t know what to make of myself. I’d soon be even more confused when Suzi, in typical fashion, added another adjective to the mix.