When we landed in L.A. and made our way through the terminal to catch our connection, I scanned the throngs of fellow travelers, looking for brown skin, broad noses, and colorful clothing. I saw one or two possible Polynesians but failed to make eye contact, and instead of eyebrow flashes and friendly Malōs, my Samoan dress elicited only curious stares.
I’m back in the States now—I’m excited, right? I tried to remember what I’d missed while I was away, the things I’d dreamed of doing and seeing and hearing and tasting when I returned. Department stores. Bobbie Brooks outfits. Yardley Slicker lip gloss. Radio stations that played teenage music all day. Sonic tater tots. Driving. The Tri Chis. Danny. But each trickle of anticipation was swamped by a wave of strangeness—a sense of being out of place in an environment that once had felt familiar.
But this is L.A., after all. Oklahoma will feel different. I’ll be home.
I consoled myself with that thought on the LAX-to-OKC flight, and by the time we touched down, a seed of expectancy swelled into excitement. The wait for other passengers to open overhead bins, gather belongings, and move down the aisle and through the jetway seemed longer than the six-thousand-mile journey, but finally we emerged into the terminal, and I caught sight of my cousins Mary, Martha, and Debbie, waiting with Aunt Wanda and Uncle Bruce.
We four girls had been stair-step playmates in childhood: Mary was three years older than Martha, who was two years older than me; I was two years older than Debbie. That, and the unusual nature of our relatedness, had made us especially close. We were first cousins and second cousins, due to the small-town circumstance of my father’s sister Wanda marrying my mother’s cousin Bruce. It was all perfectly legal—not one of those hillbilly cousin-to-cousin deals—but eyebrows always arched when we tried to explain the connection to friends, so we’d learned to keep our double kinship to ourselves.
It was close to 10 p.m. when we arrived, but Wanda and my cousins were dressed, made up, and coiffed as if it were noon and they were on their way to lunch at Val Gene’s Cafeteria in Penn Square—all in coordinated slacks and tops, with hair teased, smoothed, and sprayed into immobile bubbles. How enviable their perfection. And for me, how unattainable. No matter how hard I tried to copy their hairstyles and fashions, I always felt rumpled and just short of the mark.
Martha hugged me, then stepped back and eyed me up and down.
“You look so pretty,” she said. “Is that some kind of Samoan costume?”
“It’s a Samoan dress,” I told her. “It’s called a puletasi.”
“Pool-a-what-ee?” Martha waited for me to repeat the word, but I was distracted. Her word—costume—had spiraled me back in time to another night with these same cousins.
It was Saturday of Halloween weekend, and while Mary, Martha, and I were almost too old to trick-or-treat, for Debbie’s sake we dressed up to make the rounds. Technically, we were a day early—Halloween fell on Sunday that year, but because Monday was a school day we were convinced Saturday was the proper night to go begging for candy. We spent most of the afternoon and early evening preparing outfits and applying makeup. Martha went as the Queen of Hearts, wearing poster-sized playing cards like a sandwich board, along with a sparkly crown and circles of rouge on her cheeks. Debbie wore a black satin cat costume and drawn-on whiskers. Mary dressed as a flapper, and I was a gypsy in a purple taffeta skirt and peasant blouse, heavy make-up, and strands of beads and gold coins. For once, I felt every bit as glamorous as my cousins. As we set off around the block I took the lead.
“Let’s go to Mrs. Lane’s house first—she always makes caramel apples and popcorn balls.” We rang the doorbell at the brown-shingled bungalow, and after a minute the porch light flicked on and the door opened, a crack at first and then wide to reveal a sixtyish woman with a pinched expression.
“Trick or treat!” we chimed, as if the neighbor lady only needed reminding of the purpose of our mission to produce some spectacular goodie.
“Halloween’s tomorrow, girls,” she said, not very charitably. “I’ve got nothing to give you but an old onion. You want that?”
We shook our heads and retreated. Still believing we were in the right, we hit the next house. No one came to the door. On around the block we went, picking up an occasional handout, but more frequently, reproofs.
Defeated and chagrined, we finally slunk home. I felt so foolish in my gypsy garb and makeup I vowed never again to venture out of the house in fancy dress.
Now, standing beside my cousins in my puletasi in Will Rogers International Airport, I felt every bit as ridiculous, all dressed up in a costume when it wasn’t even Halloween.
“You don’t sound like you.”
That was the first thing Cindi said when I called her from Aunt Opal’s house in Stillwater the next afternoon.
“You talk so fast. And you’ve got some kind of accent.”
“No, you have.” After nine months away, Cindi’s drawl sounded as alien to me as my Californian-Samoan-pidgin patois must have sounded to her, but within a few minutes we were speaking the same language: boys, clothes, pop music, school.
“Why are we talking on the phone?” I finally said. “I have to see you!” I borrowed the red Mustang convertible my father had rented for our stay and drove across town to Cindi’s house, past the high school, Griff’s Burger Bar, and the Sonic; past the Leachman Theatre, with its Art Deco murals, marble floors, and plush seats; down a leafy side street that took me by the junior high, where Danny and I once exchanged love notes in a classroom that smelled of disinfectant and oiled wood. Memories came at me like fat grasshoppers thwacking against the windshield, each one transporting me completely to its own place and time, supplying all the associated sounds, smells, and sensations before being bumped by another recollection. Once, this was my world—my whole world. Now, sweet as it was to recall, it all seemed so … small. So far removed from what I’d come to think of as my life.
Cindi was waiting outside when I pulled into her driveway, her frosted blond hair parted in the middle and hanging straight, a gilt frame for her dark eyes and prominent cheekbones. She slid into the bucket seat as if our separation had been minutes, not months.
“First order of business: tater tots.” I turned the car around and headed back across town. The day was typical of Oklahoma in mid-summer: a sky the color of infinity, with clouds that started out like dandelion fluff and gathered into pillowy heaps. The sign on the bank read 86°—about the same as it would have been in Samoa—but the feel of the heat was altogether different, a blazing, baking warmth that penetrated down to the level of atomic structure. Not an unpleasant feeling; in fact I preferred it to air conditioning’s artificial chill, and as we drove along with the top down and the sun frying our bare arms, with the radio dialed to 1520 KOMA-AM (KO-ma in Okla-HO-ma) and the Beatles singing Paperback Writer, my estrangement began to soften like overheated asphalt.
The Sonic drive-in had two wings of parking spaces that stretched out on either side of a boxy hut where carhops picked up orders of burgers, footlong Coneys, Frito-chili pies, cherry limeades, and those delectable little nuggets of potatoey crunch. Everyone—at least everyone who mattered—knew the protocol for selecting a parking spot. The north wing of slots was the “cool side,” with the two spaces at the very end understood to be the coolest. That wing was where you parked when you wanted to see and be seen, and you knew you were cool enough for everyone else to want to see you. The south wing was for losers and kids who suffered the humiliation of coming to the Sonic with their parents.
Even those who had legitimate claim to the cool side had conventions to follow: while it was fine for girls—in carloads or in pairs—to park there during the day and on weeknights, doing that on Friday or Saturday night was an advertisement of one’s datelessness. And except for the most popular senior guys, no one ever, I mean ever, parked at the Sonic alone.
It was just after noon on a Friday when Cindi and I reached the drive-in,
so parking and ordering was admissible. As usual, I ordered a lime Dr. Pepper to complement my tater tots—as perfect a pairing as Merlot and filet mignon. Cindi opted for Frito-chili pie and a chocolate Coke. We sipped and smacked for a few minutes, then Cindi asked how it felt to be back.
“Good, kind of. I mean it’s great seeing you, and I can’t wait to see everyone else, and I love all the stores and the radio stations and being able to drive again. But I sort of feel—” I let the sentence trail off and was grateful the radio filled the silence. How to explain that here in my old home town, where foods and faces were familiar, where I knew the language and the rules, I felt more like an outsider than I had at that first fiafia in Aoloau?
“Probably just a little culture shock.” Cindi jabbed a plastic fork into her chili pie. “You just got back, after all. Before you know it, it’ll be like you never left.”
I dipped my last tater tot in ketchup but bit off only half. “Yeah,” I said, “I guess.”
Back at my aunt’s house, a note sat atop my suitcase: Danny called. Will pick you up at 7. With the prospect of seeing him again, my uneasiness at being home, yet not at home, dissolved.
Dinner almost made me forget all about taro and breadfruit. Aunt Opal had cooked up a feast of fried steak with country gravy, mashed potatoes, okra dredged in cornmeal and fried popcorn-crisp, sliced tomatoes, and pole beans simmered with bacon, all served with tall tumblers of iced tea. For dessert, peach cobbler. I hated to pass that up, but it was getting late and I wanted to look my best for my date with Danny. Opal said she’d save me a piece and make sure there was some ice cream left, too.
I hurried upstairs and changed into the stretch denim shorts and red-and-white striped top I’d worn the last time Danny and I were together. That was a year before, when he’d come up from Alabama to spend a month in Stillwater, leaving a couple of weeks before my family took off for Samoa. That month had been the kind of summer dream I’d read about in teen-girl magazines: a suntanned swirl of dances, drive-in movies, and kissing, lots of kissing. Now Danny was back in town, and I was ready to relive the rapture.
The doorbell rang. I bolted, but Aunt Opal beat me to it. By the time I got to the door, Danny was already in the foyer, and Opal was offering him iced tea. He politely declined, and my aunt ducked back into the family room, leaving us alone and first-date awkward.
Then Danny smiled, and that inanimate, disembodied face from the frame on my dresser lived and breathed again. I catalogued his features. Eyes, a color not quite blue but not gray—like the sky on a day that can’t make up its mind. A nose that sloped out and then hooked under at the last minute, perfectly shaped for tracing with a fingertip. A smile that occupied half his face and listed to the left when tentative or twisted with sarcasm. Sun-streaked hair that grazed his right eyebrow and ventured over the tops of his ears.
Feature by feature, this was the same Danny I’d bid goodbye a year earlier. And yet, not. Before, we’d been the same diminutive size, a pair of pixies and almost as innocent. Now he was taller, more handsome than cute, with a serious tinge to his barely familiar voice. A boy emerging into manhood. A man impatient with a boy’s preoccupations. The Danny-not-Danny differences threw me off. I had changed, of course, I knew that. Why had I not expected he would, too?
After the requisite small talk with my parents, we drove off in Danny’s car, a Panama Beige VW Beetle with black racing stripes that ran from front bumper, across hood, top, and back, to rear. I’d been with him when he applied the stretchy, vinyl tape, lining up the stripes laser-straight and pressing out the bubbles. The Beetle had transported us to all the scenes of the past summer’s pleasures—to Crystal Plunge for Teen Night dances, to the swinging bridge at Couch Park for hand-in-hand strolls, to a dead-end country road where we’d found privacy to talk and test the limits of our nascent libidos.
That’s where we ended up this night. Danny’s hands had grown surer in our year apart, his lips more assertive, and I responded with fervor fueled by the tang of memory and the titillation of the unfamiliar.
The next night found us there again, after a day spent entirely in each other’s company. Danny was leaving the following morning, due back in Montgomery at his summer job, and as he switched off the engine, satisfying physical urges seemed less pressing than saying everything we still needed to say before parting again.
For probably the hundredth time that weekend, we professed our love. Then Danny said, “You’re still gonna wait for me, aren’t you?”
I ran my hand over the ID bracelet I’d given him two Christmases ago, fingering the links like rosary beads.
“I want to.”
“Well then, do.” His voice cracked, and I felt a swell of affection for the boy he’d been and hadn’t quite left behind. “Just tell me you’ll still be my girl when you come back next year.”
I touched the tip of his nose, took my hand away and laid it in my lap.
“See, that’s the thing. I’m starting to think I don’t want to come back when my parents do. I think I want to stay in Samoa. To live in Samoa.”
Saying those words felt like gulping air after flailing underwater. In a rush of run-on sentences, I confided to Danny how out of place I’d felt since coming back to the States, how much more at home I’d come to feel in Samoa. I rambled on about aiga and fa’a Samoa and houses with no walls. I told him about Fibber and Peki, Daisy and Eti, Tui and his second-grade schoolmates, the plucky scouts Sylvia and I led on hikes over the mountains—all the characters who populated my new world. I complained about conflicts with my parents, and about palagis who didn’t understand the superiority of the Samoan people and their ways. With each confession my emotion escalated until I was teary and blubbering.
“It’s the island we always dreamed about, Danny, only it’s way, way better because it’s real.” The vehemence in my voice startled even me.
I pulled away and searched Danny’s face for the familiar smile of acknowledgement and acceptance. The left corner of his mouth twitched.
I waited for him to say something. He reached into the glove box, took out a cigarette, lit it, and sat there smoking (a new habit) and staring through the windshield at the rutted, moonlit road, overhung with pecan trees. I stared at him and wished I had something to do with my hands, besides twist them on my lap.
“What are you thinking?” I asked when I couldn’t stand another silent second. My fingers played at the cut-off sleeve of his sweatshirt. I wanted to touch his face again, to extract an answer with a kiss, but I knew how hollow I’d feel if that didn’t soften his stoniness.
With cigarette half-smoked, he turned to me, eyes more slate than sky.
“What am I thinking?” He started the Beetle’s engine, let out the clutch and took off down the road, raising his voice to be heard over the motor’s thrash and rattle. “I’m thinking you’ve lost your mind.”
After Danny left, I started thinking he might be right. Something was wrong with me. I wasn’t the girl who’d left Stillwater nine months before, and maybe the stranger I’d become was just plain strange. Was good old, normal Nancy still in there somewhere? Could I change back into her, at least for this visit?
Over the next week, I tried, I really did, to imitate my old self as I immersed myself in Stillwater social life. There were shopping trips, sunbaths and sleepovers with girlfriend after girlfriend, miniature golf games with cousins, and Teen Night at Crystal Plunge, where I danced every dance with a string of heart-throb boys. I drove through the university campus and tried to revive my enthusiasm for college classes and sorority rush—interests that seemed faraway and foreign to me now. I went to a Tri Chi meeting and rode around with Cindi afterward, honking and waving and cutting up.
My diary recorded the remoteness I really felt: I don’t want to live in the States again ever! Ugh … I’m so homesick … Samoa is the only place for me.
I thought I’d feel better when I spent the night with one girl who’d been
a friend since first grade and always made me laugh. After she filled me in on her crushes, I pulled out the pack of pictures I’d been daydreaming over every night of the trip. I showed her snapshots of house parties and afternoons at the beach, scenes of mountains and lava shores, post-hurricane shots of barren hillsides and broken palm trees, and my prizes: a group shot of Mrs. Ieti’s class and a close-up of Tui, grinning gap-toothed. After a dozen or so pictures, she grew bored.
“The kids are cute,” she said, “but I don’t know what you see in those Samoan guys. They look like a bunch of greasers. And everything looks so primitive.”
No fun, I wrote in my diary the next day. I cried almost the whole night.
At the Moonlight Drive-In Theatre another night, I ran into a frequent Sonic-cruising companion. I was so excited to see her I grabbed her hands as I’d learned to do when talking to Samoan girls. She squeezed back, but when I kept holding on she gave me a strange look.
“Um … you can let go now. Any time. Lezzie.” Her laughter had edges like broken glass.
I let go and tried to explain about the hand-in-hand strolls I often took with Daisy or Eti, meeting other pairs of girls who were similarly intertwined.
She took a step back. “Yeah,” she said, “well, that kind of thing won’t fly in Stillwater, sweetie. Sorry.” Later I saw her huddled with a group of girls who kept glancing over their shoulders at me. Just can’t connect, I wrote before bed. I feel like I’m going to crack up. Before moving to Samoa, I’d worried that I’d feel isolated there, but here I was in my own hometown, feeling more cut off on this vast continent than I ever had on the tiny island of Tutuila.
Mango Rash Page 24