“Stillwater? Next month?” The town I’d come to think of as painted scenery in a stage play about my previous life became pungently real. I heard the drone of cicadas and the chk-chk-chk of pumping oil wells. I smelled the sour-sharp mix of damp meal and chlorine that was the hallmark of Crystal Plunge, a public pool situated next to a grain mill. I tasted home-grown tomatoes, still warm from the back of a farm truck, and long-simmered pole beans, and cold watermelon. And tater tots! I was there, cruising Main Street with Cindi, honking T-O-G-TOG, Hi-Tri-Chi.
“How long can we stay?”
My father said we’d have at least ten days in Stillwater. Eager to share the news, I set up the portable typewriter on the dining table and pulled sheets of airmail stationery from a bark-cloth folder. Dear Cindi, I wrote. Guess what!!!!! I’m coming to Stillwater next month! I’m so excited I’m going to have to stop thinking about it! I’ll bust my brain!
I wasn’t sure what excited me more: returning to my old home or sharing with my Stillwater friends all the details of my new life. They’d been getting blow-by-blow accounts in letters, but there was so much more I could tell them in person. And pictures! So many to show them. Oh, my friends were going to love it all.
My jagged excitement over the Penicillin Row move and the Stillwater visit had barely leveled into a gloss of pleasant anticipation when more big news arrived. One Sunday afternoon, just back from a sleepover at Wendy’s, I was packing record albums into moving boxes when my father handed me a sheaf of letters from the now twice-weekly mail delivery. I sat on my bed and shuffled through them, scanning envelope fronts for Cindi’s dependably forward-slanting cursive and Danny’s cramped scrawl. In spite of my dalliances, my correspondence with Danny had remained faithful, and I still looked forward to his letters, especially now that Dick was gone. Cindi, too, was a touchstone. Nothing from either of them—a letdown. Maybe in the next mail call.
There was a letter from my same-age cousin Johnny, along with separate envelopes from my former Girl Scout leader, Mrs. Cooper, and her daughter Beth, to whom I’d written for advice on organizing a scout troop for Samoan girls—a project Sylvia and I had initiated around the same time I started working in Mrs. Ieti’s class. I set all three aside and continued rifling through my mail.
Then, at the bottom of the stack, handwriting that set me bouncing on the bed, a smile pushing at my cheeks. It was the precise printing of Tom, an older boy from New Mexico I’d met a few years earlier when he’d come to Stillwater for a summer science institute at the university. He and some other boys from the program had attended services at our church, and my parents had adopted the whole crew, inviting them over for steak dinners and backyard pool parties. The boys, in turn, made me their sidekick and let me in on their egghead inside jokes and dormitory pranks. I don’t know how it got started, but the other boys called Tom “FR-2,” which sounded like some android acronym, but actually was the prefix for Stillwater telephone numbers in the FRontier exchange (ours was FR-2-2741). With his quirky sense of humor and a grin that, disconcertingly, reminded me of Liberace, “FR-2” seemed as good a fit as “Tom” for the boy who became my parents’ favorite—and mine.
There never was anything overtly romantic between us, but I had a crush, and the letters we exchanged after Tom returned to New Mexico were just enough to keep it simmering as my active romances flared and cooled. This missive was brief but mind-boggling. Tom, now a New Mexico State University student working on a satellite-tracking project, was being sent to American Samoa’s tracking station for a six-month stint. He’d be here at the end of the month.
I popped off the bed, unable to contain the jiggles. Letter in hand, I flitted around the room, then stopped to read the words again. At the end of the month. Perfect. In the prospect of Tom’s arrival, I saw a cure for the romantic doldrums I’d fallen into after Dick’s departure. He might be a little geeky himself, but FR-2 was one palagi boy who surely would not consider me weird.
~ ~ ~
The rattan couch in our new Penicillin Row quarters was exactly like the one in our old apartment. Ditto the armchairs, coffee table, dining table, and dining chairs. But the new home, with its airy living room, lent the tropical furnishings a bit more cachet. Outside, palm trees framed a postcard view of Mt. Rainmaker, topped with a coronet of clouds. My own private mountain. What wisdom would it whisper to me?
On the stereo, João Gilberto sang in a voice that personified gentle air and the rhythmic lapping of waves against seawall, and Stan Getz’s saxophone exhaled notes like lovers’ murmurs.
The album belonged to Tom, who sat beside me on the sofa.
“Sounds almost as good as your friend down at the hotel.” Tom’s face folded into the Liberace expression, creasing around his eyes and across the bridge of his nose. “Maybe if we’re lucky he’ll serenade you again today.”
He was talking about Iakopu, a tour operator who sang and played the ukulele for tourists when ships were in port and spent the rest of his days cruising up and down the island’s one road in his Checker limo, offering rides to my girlfriends and me and proposing to take us on picnics. We never accepted, but Iakopu, with perennial cheer that also was somewhat Liberace-like, never gave up.
On Tom’s first day on the island, a few days before we’d moved to Penicillin Row, I’d shown him the sights of Utulei and Fagatogo, rhapsodizing all the way about the noble mountains, the fine men and women, the lively children in Mrs. Ieti’s class. We’d ended up at the hotel snack bar, where Iakopu and his band were entertaining. As soon as Tom and I sat down, Iakopu made a beeline for our table and stood beside it, plinking away, until I acknowledged him. Tom found the serenade and Iakopu’s ardor hilarious and wouldn’t stop teasing me about it. I acted mortified but in truth enjoyed Tom’s joshing, more tickle than taunt.
Teasing, however, was the only sign of affection Tom had displayed, except for a brief, arm-around-the-shoulders hug when we picked him up at the airport—a neutered squeeze, emptier than no touch at all. I’d thought we had something more special than that.
Within days, though, I realized we did have something special—something I needed more than another romance. Here was a boy friend who wasn’t a boyfriend, and what a relief that was. True, I already had a couple of platonic male friends, but neither was a constant presence. My neighbor Barry and I only hung out together when his girlfriend Bev wasn’t around, and lately Bev was nearly always around. Fibber still dropped by sometimes (Peki, apparently weary of my fickleness, rarely came along now), but Fibber had a girlfriend, too, and the heap of family commitments that came with being Samoan. Tom, on the other hand, had no clingy girlfriend, no aiga obligations, nothing to do except scan the skies on nights he was scheduled to work. The rest of the time, he was eager for companionship and open to anything I might suggest—except changing his footwear from leather loafers to something more island-appropriate.
His nose wrinkled as he regarded my flip-flops. João Gilberto was singing “Só Danço Samba” now—all bossa nova beat and slurry Portugese words, burnished with Getz’s sax notes—as we lounged on the sofa. “How can you wear those things?” he said. “Don’t you get blisters between your toes?”
“Not anymore. You get used to them.” I slipped off my rubber thongs and propped a foot on the coffee table, spreading my toes to reveal the toughened space between the first two. “But I guarantee you’re going to get blisters if you keep wearing those loafers in this heat. Plus, they look dorky.”
“Not as dorky as you’re going to look when you get parasites, and your leg swells up to the size of a pontoon.” He hopped off the couch and crossed the room in a Quasimodo gait, dragging one leg like a cumbersome, inert attachment.
I doubled up laughing; my mother stuck her head around the corner from the dining room, where she was pinning pattern tissue to a length of fabric printed to look like tapa cloth. The move to the bayside house, her now daily sunbaths, and possibly our renewed rapport had transforme
d her. No longer complaining of exhaustion, she was a dervish of cheerful industry, stitching curtains and dresses and painting furniture bought second-hand from departing families.
“What are you two up to now, chasing frogs again?” she asked in a voice pitched like a giggle.
“No, ma’am; that’s more of a nocturnal activity,” Tom said, and his use of the word nocturnal and the memory of the night before, when we’d scrambled around the damp front lawn like deranged hounds, trying to round up the scores of toads that emerged every evening, struck me even funnier than his heavy-leg routine. I slid off the couch like soap from a bathtub rim, then pulled myself up and staggered toward Tom, drunk on hilarity.
“C’mon. Let’s go look for Iakopu.”
Instead of Iakopu, we found Daisy and Eti at the hotel. Daisy Jessop, older sister to Vampires’ bass player Poloka, was slim and stylish—more Rio than Pago. Whenever I heard Astrud Gilberto’s rendition of The Girl from Ipanema, it was Daisy I pictured strolling the beach, tall and tan and young and lovely, oblivious to admirers’ smiles. Eti, plumper, with hips perfectly proportioned for the Tahitian dancing she performed more fervently and skillfully than any other dancer on the island, was Fibber’s most-of-the-time girlfriend.
The two girls were best friends, in addition to being related in some ambiguous way (Daisy called Eti her “auntie” but the actual relationship was more complicated). Lately they’d been treating me like a kid sister, which bewildered as much as thrilled me. Daisy and Eti were the most beautiful, sophisticated girls on the island; I was a toad on the lawn compared to them. But I made them laugh, and they appreciated my fascination with Samoan ways of life, so they included me in after-school gossip sessions at Daisy’s quarters over the family store and Eti’s house just up the alley from South Pacific Traders.
The two older girls gave me the lowdown on all the Samoan boys—which ones were “tauf” (Samoan-speak for “tuff,” meaning cool or sharp) and which were “no-good-for-you-Nancy” and informed me about the intricacies of fa’a Samoa and the aiga system, which seemed mainly to involve a lot of complicated swapping of fine mats and pisupo. On several occasions they tried to coax my lank palagi hair into a beehive like theirs, but eventually they gave up and diplomatically insisted I looked cuter in a ponytail.
As Tom and I approached the umbrella-shaded table where the girls sat that day, Daisy waved and called out, “Hey, who’s your new friend?”
Tom went red but aimed the Liberace beam straight toward her.
“Daisy, Eti, meet FR-2.” I expected them to ask about the nickname, but apparently FR-2 was no stranger than “Top of the News,” and neither girl raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow.
“Hey, FR-2—” Eti paused to swipe frosted pink lipstick across generous lips. “Want to come to a party tonight?” She pressed her lips together and opened them with a sound like a popping champagne cork. “You, too, Nancy. It’s at Chris Grey’s, down in Pago—you know, you’ve been there with us.”
I said I’d have to ask my parents. Chris, an afakasi ground stewardess for Polynesian Airlines, wasn’t part of the usual crowd, and her house was a little out of the way.
Tom, his bashfulness melting like coconut oil on sun-warm skin, winked at Daisy and Eti—or maybe he just smiled so intensely that one eye was forced shut.
“We’ll be there,” he said.
And so began an arrangement that suited both Tom and me and bound us together in a kind of surrogate-sibling symbiosis. Through me, Tom gained entrée to girls he was too shy to approach on his own. In return, he talked my parents into letting us go places they’d never have allowed me to go alone or with my other friends.
It was almost like having my real brother around again, the brother who—though already a teenager when I was born—was the hub of my small world when I was young. For the first seven years of my life, it was as if I had three parents: two of the conventional sort and an extra one whose sole purpose was amusing me and convincing the other two to go easy and let me have my way. It was my brother Ron who bought me my first Schwinn and taught me to pedal without training wheels, running alongside to steady me when I wobbled. It was Ron who took me sledding and fixed my cocoa when we came home pink-cheeked and chilled, who built me rocket ships from old packing boxes and drew me treasure maps showing where to find coins he’d secretly buried in the back yard.
His wedding day, when I was seven, was the day I first felt the cold and queasy desolation of abandonment—the rolling heaviness inside like being filled with bird shot, the grasping for something solid as the earth fell away. At the reception I sat alone on a sofa so deep my feet dangled from its edge, sat there in my floor-length, aqua organza flower-girl dress, sipping punch and eyeing my brother and his new wife as if they were petty thieves and I a wary cop.
Just before they left on their honeymoon, my brother and sister-in-law came to tell me goodbye. Ron knelt beside me.
“I’m not deserting you, Nan—you know that, don’t you?”
I stared at the toes of my dyed-to-match slippers, not yet knowing love and loss would be an undercurrent in my life, only knowing this goodbye felt really, really bad.
“Nothing’s going to change. You’ll always be my sister. We’ll still have fun—you’ll see.”
I know he believed it, and as I wrapped my pipe-cleaner arms around his neck in a near stranglehold, I tried to believe it, too. But my brother was making a promise that would prove impossible to keep. Sure, there would be frequent visits in the early years and charming, handwritten letters illustrated with stick figures. But before long, other children—his own—would vie for whatever attention he could spare, and by the time I was sixteen and he was thirty, we no longer would know how to talk to each other.
But now, in Tom, I was finding what I’d lost when my brother went away: a champion of my causes, an unfettered playmate, a confidant, a co-conspirator. This young man from the Land of Enchantment would not fill the shallow gully of my romantic longings; instead he would, for a time, close a chasm that ran to my depths.
Chapter 25—Home
Ia manuia le Malaga.
(Blessings on your journey.)
—Samoan adage
The gauzy curtains on my bedroom windows, sea-green in daylight, were drained of color when I awoke sometime after midnight. Outside, a street light cast a bright circle on the lava-rock wall, the gravel path, and the edge of the roadway. Beyond the circle: the dark stillness of tropical nighttime. Silent except for the ocean’s pulse, steady as a peaceful sleeper’s. Pacific.
In the next room, my parents stirred. Time to get ready for the middle-of-the-night drive to the airport to catch our flight back to the States, by way of Hawaii. Soon I’d be back in Oklahoma, reconnecting with Cindi, the Tri Chis—and Danny, who’d promised to drive up from Alabama. My excitement was a hot wire running head to toe, sending currents to my skin, all prickly and alive.
I slipped into the bathroom before my parents, washed up, swiped on eyeliner, and ran a brush through my hair, which I’d shampooed and set on big rollers the night before. Not bad. Then back to my room to don the travel outfit I’d pressed and carefully hung in the center of my closet. Not the pinstriped dress and pumps in which I’d traveled to Samoa—I’d forsaken that get-up the moment I peeled it off that first day. For this momentous journey, I’d made a very different wardrobe choice. Though I rarely wore one on the island, I’d decided the perfect travel garb was a puletasi.
I slid the ankle-length lavalava from its hanger and wrapped it around my waist. Next came the fitted, short-sleeved tunic in the same green-and-gold floral print that bordered the leaf-green skirt. A pair of white sandals, a white cardigan for chilly airliner cabins, my tortoise shell ring, and Island Girl was ready to take flight.
Almost. The finishing touch: masses of shell ulas—long necklaces typically bestowed on travelers. Mrs. Ieti’s class had given them to me when they’d learned I was going away, along with a han
dmade booklet of their drawings, inscribed with carefully printed notes: Dear Nancy Sanders, I just want to thank you for all the things … Dear Nancy, It’s very good to have a teacher like you … Dear Nancy Sanders, I do not want you to leave. I will miss you very much … I love you very much … Come back in Samoa. I must have had at least ten pounds of shells around my neck, but there was no way I was going anywhere without the children’s gifts.
The layover in Hawaii was brief, but walking through the terminal I felt welcome—and not because some enterprising photographer’s ti-leaf-clad assistant threw a lei around my neck. This time things were different. On our previous visit, en route to Samoa, I’d assumed all the brown-skinned people I saw were Hawaiian, but now I could pick Samoans out of the crowd—more by gestalt than definable differences—and because of the way I was dressed, the Samoans recognized me as a compatriot, albeit one forced to travel with some strange palagi couple. In every corridor, I was met with eyebrow flashes and friendly greetings of “Malō!” By the time our L.A. flight was announced, I was radiating island energy like a tin roof.
Some of that glow may have been a residual buzz. Marnie, Eric, and another schoolmate, Brad, had also been on the flight from Samoa to Honolulu, and once the other passengers settled in to sleep, we four flocked to an empty row near the back of the plane, where we spent the rest of the night drinking ginger ale mixed with scotch from little bottles that Brad swiped from the galley when the stewardess wasn’t looking.
On the Honolulu-to-L.A. flight, though, my friends were no longer with me, and as the buzz and the warmth of companionship wore off, the jet engines’ drone became a fitting accompaniment to the dullness that overtook me. Each passing minute corresponded to miles of distance, and as the minutes added up, I felt ever more disconnected from my island world, with its consonance of crowing roosters, biscuit-tin drums, rippling laughter, and raucous shouts, and the pervasive scent of those little white flowers: frangipani. My mother tried to cheer me up with stacks of magazines in plastic binders. I laid them on my lap, stared out at the clouds, and wept through the whole flight.
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