~ ~ ~
I was still chewing over Pili’s words the next afternoon when the girl gang assembled at Val’s. We were listening to the Rolling Stones—jangly guitar and prickly lyrics of “Get Off My Cloud”—as Sylvia, comb in hand, attacked Suzi’s hair, undoing her pigtails and teasing with an intensity that bordered on maniacal. Val lounged on her bed; Kathi and Marnie shuffled Val’s record collection, trying to decide what to play next.
“The Byrds?” Marnie held up an album. “The Animals?”
“Birds are animals,” Kathi observed.
I ignored her and changed the subject. “I think Pili and Eric were flirting with me at the movie last night.”
Suzi turned toward me, causing Sylvia to flail her comb at thin air.
“Don’t get your hopes up. And don’t count on any of the other palagi boys rushing in now that Dick’s gone.” Her lips curled derisively, and she turned away to face the mirror again. Sylvia’s comb flitted back like a nesting bird to Suzi’s ratted-out hair.
“Bullshit,” Val said.
Marnie stepped between Suzi and me, a human shield. “Yeah, Suzi, why would you say something like that?”
Suzi turned to me again and lowered her voice. “Well, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I overheard the guys talking about you after Dick left. They said they all thought you were cute and cool when you first got here, but now that they’ve gotten to know you, they think you’re weird.”
“Weird? What do you mean?” Once again my mind rolled the tape of recent months, searching for examples of strangeness on my part. I saw myself acting awkward at times, like Audrey Hepburn in that movie, and having a few embarrassing moments, like the time a note I’d written to Val about Eric fell out of my binder and Eric picked it up and read it. But weird? No. I hadn’t stalked anyone—well, except for Johnnie Ray, with whose fleeting popularity and failure to live up to expectation I now identified. I didn’t dress funny, except for maybe the poufy dress and the open-toed go-go boots I’d found at a discount store in Stillwater and sometimes wore to parties. But everybody said those were cute. The girls, anyway.
“Weird in what way?” I prodded.
Suzi shrugged and turned back to check her hair in the mirror. “I’m just telling you what I heard.”
I wanted to think Suzi’s comment was just another mean-spirited fabrication, but her words burrowed into me like a parasitic worm. With no ready comeback, I was left to consider again the question of where, exactly, my true identity was to be found. Was it in gossip passed along by a so-called friend whose intentions were suspect? Was it in my parents’ image of the ideal daughter, no better a match to reality than my expectation of meeting a movie star in a Fagatogo back alley? Was it in my own mind, stitched together from self-scrutiny, emulation, and wishful thinking? Or was my identity, like Samoa’s, still being forged from fragments of past, scraps of present, and slivers of imagined future?
Chapter 23—Snapshots
E le pu se tino i ‘upu.
(Words do not pierce the body.)
—Samoan proverb meaning “Insults should not be taken too much to heart.”
Wendy studied the menu like a scholar extracting universal truths from an ancient scroll.
“I was thinking hamburger, but—wow, banana split. I haven’t had one of those since I left the States. Yeah, banana split. Or wait, do I want a milkshake? Hmmm. Yeah, yeah, chocolate shake. No, wait—banana split.”
I folded my arms across my chest to keep from drumming my fingers. The view from our table at the hotel snack bar fanned out before us like movie scenery: the pool of faceted aquamarine, the low lava-rock wall edging the poolside deck, and beyond that, breakers and the harbor’s mouth, a welcoming gap between mountains that stair-stepped down to meet the sea. The sight usually made me feel serene, but this afternoon I was keyed up and impatient to get to the matter at hand: my party pictures.
Wendy kept staring at the menu, tilting her head this way and that, squinching her eyes, mumbling to herself.
“Just pick something, okay?’ I said. “It’s only food.”
The waitress, a young Samoan woman with upswept hair and an eye that wandered independently of its partner, strolled over from the bar and stood smiling between us. I ordered a hamburger and a Coke with a side of breadfruit chips, tasteless, tooth-defying disks I pretended to enjoy as much as the unobtainable Frito-Lay products I craved.
Wendy stammered, then blurted, “Okay, a banana split. But, um—chocolate? Strawberry? It’s been so long I’ve forgotten—do you specify a flavor, or is it standard?” The waitress looked as perplexed as Wendy, but maybe it was just the eye.
“You’re making this way too complicated.” I sounded snappish and didn’t care. “A banana split is a banana split.”
Wendy reddened and fluttered her hands like she was fanning herself. “Okay, okay. Just plain banana.”
The waitress scribbled on a pad, one eye tracking the movement of her pen while the other roamed skyward; then she ambled back to the bar.
“Finally.” I reached into my purse and pulled out a thick packet of three-by-five color prints. After a two-week wait, my birthday pictures had at last arrived from the processing place in the States where we sent film. Val and I already had looked through them a dozen times, arranging them so the best ones of Dick came last, but Wendy hadn’t seen them yet. I scooted my chair over so I could look on as she paged through the stack. She regarded each one deliberately, giving the photos the same attention she’d lavished on the menu, but without the indecision and dithering.
“See, there’s you.” I pointed to the middle of one print, where Wendy, in a white shift that made her tan look four shades deeper, bent close in conversation with Suzi. “And right there, behind Sylvia, that’s Dick’s arm. You can’t see his head in this one.”
“Hmmm.” Wendy made the neutral expression sound sympathetic. Then, “Oh, look—that’s unfortunate.” She pointed to a circle of perspiration radiating from the armpit of one girl’s pink party dress. “Why would she wear long sleeves? It was stifling that night.”
I hadn’t noticed the stain before, because when I looked at that picture I fixated on myself dancing next to the glistening girl, specifically on the childish puffed sleeves of my dress and the goofy angle of my arms: shoulders drawn back, elbows raised behind me, forearms hanging limp.
“I look like a chicken about to take flight. Tell me I don’t really look like that when I dance.”
“You don’t really look like that when you dance.” Wendy started to move on to the next picture.
“More convincingly, please.”
Wendy laid down the pictures and turned to face me full-on. “Honestly, Nance, I don’t know what you’re worried about. You’re cute and cool. Cute, cool, cute, cool, cute, cool. And maybe just a little weird, but in a good way. Okay?”
I took a moment to assess her response, trying to gauge whether she was offering a legitimate appraisal or just telling me what she thought I wanted to hear. I couldn’t be sure—it was as hard to find the truth in her judgment as in Suzi’s—but begging for more assurance seemed really pathetic so I simply said, “Thank you. Same to you.”
The waitress returned. She set my hamburger, Coke, and breadfruit chips on the table and then, in front of Wendy, plopped a paper plate with a single, unskinned banana.
“What the … no, no, this isn’t right.” Wendy picked up the fruit and waved it at the waitress, whose eyes darted crazily, trying to follow it.
“But you said ‘plain banana,’ “ the young woman protested. “This is plain banana.”
“Banana split, plain banana split. Do you even know what a banana split is?” Wendy’s flush deepened from crimson to maroon.
The waitress lowered both eyes. For once they traveled in concert.
I was surprised at Wendy’s flare-up; she was usually more considerate. I had to believe her indignation had more to do with her own sen
se of disconnection from stateside life than with the server’s blunder. She’d confided to Val and me that she worried she wouldn’t know how to act when she moved back to the States at the end of the school year. She’d been in Samoa nearly two years now. That was a long time to be out of the loop on fads and fashions.
“Give the girl a break,” I said. “Would you know how to make palusami?” I explained to the waitress that what Wendy actually wanted was the entire ice cream concoction. The waitress headed back to the grill to relay the revised order, Wendy calmed down, and we turned our attention back to my pictures.
The next one showed couples slow-dancing in the foreground, and towering behind them, grinning widely and gripping a bass guitar, a massive Samoan guy with a Mohawk haircut. He wore a calf-length black silk kimono, embroidered with an elaborate peacock design, open in front to reveal his bare chest and tight, black swim trunks. His name was Magalo, but everyone called him Bill Bigfoot, and though he looked imposing and had a belligerent streak, he was mostly a lovable goofball. The Mohawk and kimono were just part of his persona and didn’t raise an eyebrow among our crowd.
After the picture of Bill Bigfoot came a shot of the hotel’s poolside bar, overhung with dozens of glass fishing floats, each in its own form-fitting net of knotted, white cord. Down at the end of the bar sat sailor Lee with his Coke and his perpetual expression of friendly superiority. I wondered what he’d been thinking as he took in the revelry. It occurred to me that although my partying friends and I weren’t engaged in any death-defying conquest, this time in our lives might end up being just as memorable for us as for the boy adventurer. For the moment, I was content to be right where I was, moored to a single, safe island, with no desire to venture out into an uncertain ocean. I sympathized with Wendy’s anxiety over leaving Samoa. All of us palagi kids had similar worries and sought reassurance from anyone who’d already returned to the States.
As we continued looking through my pictures, I thought about a letter that was published in our school newspaper, the Samoana Shark, a few days before. It was written by Barb of graffiti fame, from Des Moines, where she now lived. The letter, which went on for nearly two mimeographed, legal-sized pages, described her reunion with four Samoan friends who were attending a community college in Muscatine, Iowa. It should’ve given me hope that leaving Samoa might not mean losing touch with everything fa’a Samoa, but instead it evoked quite a different response. The letter read:
REUNION IN DES MOINES, IOWA
Yesterday, Saturday, February 12, 1966, was Foreign Student Day. It was indescribably wonderful. I was down at the Veterans Auditorium at 8:30 a.m. and worked to set up the Samoa booth. Malae and Ne’e arrived first. We jabbered on and on till we were worn out. The whole auditorium was crammed with people from everywhere in the whole world. Everyone I talked to had a different accent, different color of skin, and different way of smiling. It was almost too much for the emotional capacity of any human heart. Next came Moega and Marie. Everyone was embracing, jumping, on and on, slapping each other on the backs, crying, and just plain bursting … They rattled on in Samoan for hours, and all welcomed and greeted me with unexplainable warmth and happiness, like I was one of them … We got a record player and had Samoan music going the whole day. We ran around the auditorium all day laughing constantly, joking, reminiscing, and just being glad to see each other. I, in no way, felt out of place, American or like a visitor. Everywhere they were asked to go, they took me too, by the hand. They wouldn’t allow anyone to take their picture without me in the middle, their arms around me. Several people stopped to ask me, “you must be part American!”
We ate at the Auditorium at 6:30 p.m. and never stopped talking long enough to really eat … I got a few funny looks, being the only odd one among a crowd of foreigners! The boys were in their brightly flowered shirts, while everyone else was in suits. I felt like a queen. Of course, when the band started, they couldn’t sit still, so we all flew out to the dance floor. It was the first time I had felt free and glorious enough to dance since I left the land of love. At the end of the night, I was red from exhaustion and wet from head to toe, like the many nights in Samoa after a Goat Island teenage party! We all left the dance, arm in arm, singing “Amerika Samoa.”
At first Barb’s letter had triggered the same envy that had gnawed at me since I’d found her graffiti in my bedroom that first day on the island. There Barb was, all the way back in Des Moines, still Palagi Princess of Samoa, and here I was—yes, it dawned on me now as I leafed through my photos, here I was living the covetable life Barb had left behind, a life she now could only reprise for one sweet-sad day and night.
All at once I saw myself through a different filter. Even in my poufy party dress, elbows akimbo, I was the smiling girl surrounded by big-hearted Samoan friends and loyal palagi pals. I hadn’t seen it before, but here was irrefutable evidence, captured in Kodachrome, that true friends embrace you in spite of your eccentricities—whether Mohawk and kimono, or general weirdness—and that I could claim plenty such friends. If I went back to my apartment and inscribed on that piece of plywood my own social circle, it might rival even Barb’s.
Chapter 24—Family Matters
Quiet nights of quiet stars, quiet chords from my guitar floating on the silence that surrounds us
Quiet thoughts and quiet dreams, quiet walks by quiet streams
And the window looking on the mountains and the sea, how lovely
—Antonio Carlos Jobim, Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars
My father had good news. I knew it as soon as he came through the door, moving with dance-like steps, the whole lower half of his face upturned. With the hospital right next door, he always came home for lunch and spent the hour entertaining my mother and me with tales of interesting medical cases and jokes he’d heard from the other doctors. Lately, he’d been amusing us with reports on the current trend among Samoan mothers: naming their newborns after favorite television programs and characters. It was funny—and a little disturbing—to think that a child my father had delivered might go through life as Mickey Mouse Atuatasi or Bonanza Noma’aea. My favorite name, for a baby born at exactly 6 p.m., was Top of the News.
But this day, my father had no funny names or stories to relate, he had an announcement.
“Ladies,” he said before taking even one bite of his wahoo sandwich, “prepare yourselves to live in luxury. Well, relative luxury.”
My mother, whose threshold of tolerance for my father’s drawn-out anecdotes was several notches below mine, brightened. “We’re finally moving to Penicillin Row?”
“That’s right.” The corners of my father’s mouth stretched practically to his temples. “Van Kolken’s contract is up. He’s leaving at the end of the month. We’re next in line for the house.”
My mother smiled the way I loved to see her smile. Giddy. Girlish. The way she smiled when she found a perfect seashell, when the surf caught her unaware and bathed her feet in brine, when she played “In My Merry Oldsmobile”—complete with honking-horn sound effects—on the electric organ. At those times, her doctor’s-wife reserve dissolved, her fatigue lifted, and she was the farm child again, displaying the sort of joy that picnics and sunsets had more power to elicit than all the diamonds my father could heap upon her.
“Oh, I can just see myself sunbathing in the back yard, watching the ocean liners steam past,” she said. “I’m going to go right out and get myself a chaise longue—I wonder if they have those at Kneubuhl’s.”
My immediate thoughts were more practical.
“Can I have the front bedroom?” I knew from visiting other doctors’ children that the sole street-side bedroom in every Penicillin Row home was the prize, big and breezy, with actual walls and double-hung windows instead of screens and louvers like my apartment bedroom. The only other options in the new quarters were a stuffy inside room and a sleeping porch that offered no privacy.
“Fine with me,” my father said. My mother, st
ill dopily smiling, gave a vague nod.
The move was set for the first weekend in June, a couple of weeks before school let out for summer. I imagined the three months of leisure ahead: lolling in my new room with girlfriends, throwing parties in the spacious, screened living room (though the perpetual party life had lost some luster since the hurricane), and maybe even lying in the sun with my mother in the back yard, like we used to do in Oklahoma.
We’d done so many things together in Oklahoma. No matter how close I’d felt to my friends, my mother had always been my first choice for after-school company. Though older than my friends’ mothers by at least a decade, she seemed more fun and energetic than her younger counterparts. She and I batted tennis balls on the driveway, tooled around town in the Tempest with the top down, shared dressing rooms at Bonnie’s—a women’s wear shop on Main Street—and swapped outfits like sisters. We laughed to the point of pants-wetting over jokes that no one else found funny, and her questions about school life and boyfriends felt more intimate than intrusive. I didn’t tell her everything—she was still my mother—but I didn’t tell my girlfriends everything, either.
That all changed in Samoa. Was it the place? Her dispirited moods? My passage into full-blown adolescence? Whatever the reason, spending time with my mother became far less appealing than hanging out with new friends who appreciated my sarcasm and didn’t constantly compare me to my pre-Samoa self. Now, it pained me to reflect on how I’d abandoned her at such a lonely, vulnerable time. Maybe, starting fresh in our new home on Penicillin Row, I could make it up to her.
Floating in our separate thought-streams, my mother and I nibbled at our sandwiches and chewed absently, but my father, who still hadn’t taken a bite, had more news.
“I just got the okay to go to a medical meeting in Chicago next month. We can all fly back to Oklahoma, and the two of you can stay in Stillwater while I go to the meeting.”
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