Skirting the pork, he speared a gray chunk of boiled taro. “I can’t wait to see that at your parents’ next dinner party.”
From behind the buffet came clattering and clapping, the sounds of sticks on hollowed wood and hands on bare chests, beating out cadences that accelerated into frenzied rattling. Dancers emerged and put on a floorshow, performing the slap dance, in which young men rhythmically smacked their open palms and inner arms against their chests and thighs, and the gasp-inducing knife and fire dances.
Then the music turned more melodic, with guitars lacing in and out. Half a dozen women in puletasis emerged, moving in that Locomotion-like step-step-step-HOP dance I’d first seen at the fiafia in Toni’s village. Unsuspecting hotel guests were about to be enlisted to join in a sivasiva free-for-all. I knew this from seeing similar floorshows at the new hotel on Tutuila. Usually I shifted in my seat and tried to make myself invisible when the dancers got to this part of the program. This time I didn’t even wait to be pulled from the crowd, I leapt onto the lawn and fell in step with the sideways, toe-to-toe, heel-to-heel shuffle. I kept dancing as long as the music continued, outlasting several contingents of red-faced tourists and earning smiles from Aggie Grey, who swayed in her own sivasiva style on the sidelines. When I finally stumbled, sweat-soaked, back to my seat, Nana was waiting there, her face creased chin to forehead in benevolence.
“How’d you like to go to a real Samoan dance?” she asked. “I’ve got the rest of the night off, and there’s a big party in my village. I’ll take you there.”
“I’d love that!” I said, not bothering to consult Tom, who’d returned to the buffet for more Samoan pudding. When he’d finished eating and was ready to hit the night spots again, I begged off.
“You guys go ahead, I’m pooped out from all the dancing.” I slumped in my chair and dabbed my forehead, quite convincingly, I thought. “I’ll just hang out here with Nana for a while and call it a night.”
The minute the boys crawled into a taxi and took off for the evening, I found Nana and chirped, “Ready!”
What I remember most about the drive that followed is darkness and disorientation. Once we left Apia, I had no idea where we were or which direction we were headed. Unlike Tutuila, with its solitary, coastal highway, Upolu had back roads—and a serious shortage of streetlights. It was the first time in my life I experienced that I-could-die-out-here-and-nobody-would-know-what-became-of-me feeling, but instead of fidgeting with my ring or picking at my cuticles, I sank into my seat, surrendered to the strangeness, and waited to see where we would end up.
Finally I saw twinkling in the darkness, and as we drew closer, a festive scene that reminded me of the midway at the Payne County Fair. Strings of bare light bulbs stretched from fale to fale, and people of all ages milled around on the malae. The only village dances I’d been to on Tutuila had been school- or church-sponsored affairs for teenagers, but here the whole village had turned out, and once the music started, no one stayed on the sidelines.
I danced as heartily as I had at the hotel, but now, instead of being on display with a bunch of self-conscious palagis, I was part of a laughing, whooping mass of exuberance, our faces aglow from the overhead lights and the conviviality. All around me, people were talking in Samoan, and though my vocabulary was still too limited for me to know what they were saying, the now-familiar sound of those cascades of vowels, mingling with the plinkity-plinkity guitar melodies of the sivasiva, made me forget I was the only palagi in town. This was Samoan village life the way I’d longed to experience it, and in a funny way, being part of it felt like a homecoming. Not returning to a place I’d once lived, but coming to a home I’d been trying to find.
When our legs ached too much to dance any more, Nana took me to her sister’s fale, where we sat cross-legged on pandanus mats and drank tea with sweet biscuits. The two women conversed in Samoan, but Nana interpreted every exchange so as not to exclude me. From time to time, teenage boys strolled by the fale, and flirtatious looks were exchanged, but Nana shooed the boys away with tirades she refused to translate. I didn’t mind. I was content to sip my tea, watch the dancers move from shadow to light, light to shadow, and reflect on this place where adventures came sheathed in safety, and acceptance was as easy as joining in the dance.
Long after midnight, Nana brought me back to Aggie’s and walked me to my room. I started to open the door but stopped and turned to her.
“This has been the best day of my life, Nana,” I told her. “I mean my whole life.” Then I gave her the hug she’d earned the night before.
Moments before Tom took the picture of me standing beside the waterfall in my lavalava, we’d been watching caramel-skinned boys ski barefoot down the cataract’s face. They started from a height as tall as the rooftop of a two-story house and slid, standing straight up, down the nearly vertical drop into a rocky pool. One by one, they slid and splashed and clambered back up the cliff to do it again, giggling and yelling “Chahoo!”—that odd whoop I’d heard other islanders make, a cross between a cowboy’s holler and a sneeze.
As I watched the boys, Tom was watching me. “You seem so at ease,” he said. “Like you belong here.”
Tom didn’t seem at ease, didn’t look like he belonged in this scene that Gauguin could have painted. He was still dressed like a college boy in khakis and those ridiculous leather loafers. It had been his idea to come to Papase’ea Sliding Rock the morning after my visit to Nana’s village, but as we hiked down the forest trail from the road, sweat collected in the furrows of his forehead, and he complained that his feet hurt. After taking a few shots with the fancy camera he’d lugged from the car, he’d said he wanted to go back to town for a nap.
“I want to stay here,” I said. “Not here, by this waterfall, but here in Samoa.” I pronounced it SAH-moa, the way the Samoans did.
“For how long?”
I sat down on a lava rock the size of an ottoman and ran my fingers over its spongy surface. “I don’t know. Forever?”
Another round of whoops and splashes came from the waterfall. I turned toward the sounds and smiled, thoughts of the Stillwater trip, college plans, and marriage to Danny far from my mind. Thoughts of villages, laughing children, sivasiva dances, and umu-baked palusami so much more vivid and appealing.
“That look on your face right now,” Tom said, “that look you get when you’re in a place like this, around these people—it’s so rare.” He bent over, slipped a heel out of his loafer, and rubbed a blister. Then straightening, he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
“I could see you living here,” he said. “I really could. Not me. Not a lot of people, but you, yes.”
Chapter 27—Like a Woman
Talanoa atu, ‘ae le talanoa manu.
(The bonitos swim about thoughtlessly, but the seagulls are on the alert.)
—Samoan proverb meaning “Woe to the incautious.”
I waited all the next morning for Tom’s naptime to roll around. When post-lunch torpor finally took him down, I wandered into the hotel gift shop to visit La’e, a young woman who worked there and had promised to take me shopping. With her beehive hairdo, big-sister chumminess, and urbanity, La’e reminded me of Daisy and Eti. I felt right at home under her wing. As she finished waiting on customers, I poked around the shop, admiring carved tikis and bowls, shell necklaces, and leis made from sheer, loopy ribbons of some woody fiber. Like everything in the shop, the leis were infused with a camphory smell that reminded me of the drugstore where my grandmother had worked. But without the pipe tobacco notes, the scent was much more agreeable. I had to have one of those leis; Wendy and Kathi had come back from their Apia trip wearing them, and I’d coveted them ever since. I bought two.
La’e left a coworker in charge, and we walked along Beach Road toward the business district. The scene shimmered: the aqua harbor; the sky a shade paler, with a fluff of clouds at the horizon like pompons stitched to the hem of a skirt; the whitew
ashed buildings clustered along the shoreline. At intervals, the outstretched canopies of flame trees interrupted the expansive vista and offered momentary shade.
“First we’ll go to some shops, then I’ll take you to see the fa’afafines,” La’e said.
I tried to mirror her cosmopolitan air. “Oh, I’ve seen fa’afafines,” I informed her. “There’s one in my school, and Apia is crawling with them.”
Fa’afafine means “like a woman,” and that was an apt description of my schoolmate Vena, with his plucked eyebrows, shaved legs, and formfitting lavalavas. Apt, but not disparaging: in Samoa, there was no shame in being a girly guy. Daisy and Eti had told me that in the old days, families with a surplus of sons and not enough daughters to keep up with the women’s work would pick out a boy to be raised as a girl. Nowadays, though, fa’afafines were more likely to be truly transgender. The ones I’d seen around American Samoa displayed only subtle signs of femininity like Vena, but here in Apia, fa’afafines looked like drag queens in their miniskirts, stiletto heels, blue eye shadow, and peroxided bouffants.
La’e laughed, a musical ripple. “Of course you’ve seen fa’afafines. Who hasn’t? What I mean is, I’ll take you to see the fa’afafine dressmakers, and we’ll have them make you a holomuu.”
“But I’m leaving tomorrow night. Won’t I need to be here for fittings?” I thought back to tedious sessions in my mother’s sewing nook, standing like a statue as she tucked and pinned; flinching when a straight pin grazed a sensitive spot. My mother was a whiz of a seamstress, but even she needed days to turn out a creation that fit just right.
“They’ll have it done by the end of the day. You can wear it to Hula Town tonight, and the boys will be lining up to dance with you.” La’e poked a playful elbow into my ribs. I giggled and poked her back.
After we’d hit all the shops on Apia’s main drag and bought each other gifts—an azure scarf for me, a tortoise shell bangle for her—La’e led me down a dusty side street, and the sharp colors of Beach Road drained away. We came to a long, pavilion-like building with screening above wooden half-walls that needed painting. Inside, sewing machines hummed like swarms of industrious insects. A fa’afafine with a towering coiffure wolf-whistled through the screen. I stared at the ground and pretended not to hear, but La’e released another trickle of laughter and shouted back, “Lookin’ good today, honey.”
We climbed a couple of steps and entered through the open door. La’e spoke to the fa’afafine in Samoan, and the two of them steered me to a wide table where bolts of flowered fabric were stacked like logs on a woodpile.
“Take your pick, sweetie,” the fa’afafine directed. “Personally, I’d go with orange.”
I fingered the cotton fabric. It was silkier than the stiff yard goods I’d bought in Fagatogo’s shops.
“This one has a beautiful drape.” The fa’afafine ran a tapered finger along a bolt of orange-and-white floral print—giant, stylized flowers splashed across a tangerine field—and I noticed that his (or her) fingernails were longer and better cared for than mine. I trailed my hand behind the fa’afafine’s; the fabric flowed like cool liquid beneath my fingers, and I imagined how it would feel encircling my shoulders, sheathing my hips, grazing my thighs. Other colors caught my eye—turquoise, coral, parrot green—but the orange-and-white pulled me back.
“Okay, that’s the one,” I said. “Now what—do I pick out a pattern?” That was the usual order of events when my mother and I shopped at Frye’s fabric store in Stillwater.
“Pattern?” The fa’afafine took a step back and clutched her hands over her chest. “Pattern? No, no, dear! We’ll just measure you up and you can be on your way.” She grabbed a tape measure and looped it around my chest, then slid it down to my waist and hips, calling out the measurements to another fa’afafine, who scribbled them on a notepad.
“That’s it, dear,” she said. “Five pounds cash please. We’ll deliver the dress to your hotel before dinner.”
I counted out five, one-pound notes. Was I making a mistake? The thought flicked across my mind, and I held back for a beat before handing over the money. But no, I assured myself, La’e wouldn’t let me get swindled. Would she?
We passed the rest of the afternoon like longtime girlfriends. La’e took me to a cousin’s house on the outskirts of Apia, a palagi-style ranch with jalousie windows and family portraits hung curiously close to the ceiling. Over lukewarm lemonade, we swapped confidences about boyfriends. All the while, I kept thinking about that cash I’d left with the fa’afafines, hoping I wouldn’t come home empty handed and have to explain to my parents where the money had gone.
When I returned to the hotel after five, I shot straight to the front desk. Before I could ask, the clerk handed me a parcel wrapped in brown paper. I squeezed it to my chest and hurried up to my room, trying to temper my excitement with the very real prospect that the dress wouldn’t fit and I’d feel like a fool for wasting my money.
Slipping out of my shift, I pulled the holomuu over my head and zipped up the side. The fit was beyond belief. The bell-shaped sleeves hung perfectly from my shoulders; the bodice accentuated my waist and even made me look like I had boobs; the skirt skimmed my hips before flaring out and spilling down to the floor. Nothing my mother made me had ever fit like this. This was a woman’s dress.
When I met Tom and Jay for dinner in the hotel’s dining room, their eyes widened.
“My gosh,” Tom said, “I’ve never seen you look so … va-va-voom-ish. I’d better bring my boxing gloves to Hula Town tonight. I’ll have to fight off the other guys to get a dance with you.”
Sure enough, young men queued up to ask for dances that evening. It was Friday night, and true to the barmaid’s word, Hula Town came alive with the squeals of electric guitars and the thrum of wriggling bodies and romantic promise. During a break in the music, I sank into a chair beside Tom and took mental snapshots of the scene: the colored lanterns like holiday festoons, the bustle and blur around the tiki bar, the throngs of handsome boys.
Wendy and Kathi had nothing on this worldly woman.
On our last day in Apia, I had a few loose ends to tie up. First, I asked Tom to take a picture of me with Aggie Grey. The hotel proprietress and I had scarcely exchanged two words, but I wanted to create the illusion, for my parents’ benefit, that I’d been under her watchful eye throughout the hotel stay.
Aggie graciously consented when Tom made the request. He posed us—Aggie in her puletasi, me in my flowered shift—across the street from the hotel, beside a flame tree, with Apia harbor in the background. In the snapshot, we’re both smiling but our posture is a tip-off to our actual level of intimacy: we’re at least a foot apart, and Aggie’s arms are clasped behind her back, while mine dangle, impassive, at my sides. My parents probably didn’t think the poses unusual when I later showed them the picture. I’m sure they had similar ones of my grandmother Nellie and me.
After the photo session, I headed downtown to pick up a few more souvenirs I’d been eyeing. Then one last stop for something else that had caught my eye. When I’d gone out exploring that first day, I’d passed a tennis court where a stunning Samoan boy in tennis whites was practicing. We’d exchanged glances—well, he glanced, I shamelessly ogled—but then I’d hurried on, embarrassed. I knew he probably wouldn’t be there again, but what was the harm in checking?
When I got within a block of the tennis court, I saw a white blur and instantly knew it was the same boy. I picked up my pace, the flapping soles of my flip-flops impatient on the pavement. I found a spot under a tree across the street from the court where I could watch without being too conspicuous and, after sitting there a few minutes, had the bristling sense that I wasn’t alone. I turned to look over my shoulder. A Samoan girl about my age stood behind me. She wore a short shift like mine, and her hair was bobbed, not braided or piled into a bun the way most Samoan girls wore theirs. She wasn’t pretty, but her face had a scampish appeal.
Something inside my ribcage fluttered like riffled paper. “You know him?”
The girl sat down beside me, closer than I expected. “His name is Randall. He’s my cousin.” She yelled across the street, “Eh! Randall!” and the boy turned and raised his racquet. Then to me again: “You and me, we go for a walk. You meet him when we get back.”
As we walked together back toward the heart of town, the girl, who told me her name was Ati, wanted to know all about me—what I was doing in Apia, where I was staying and for how long. I answered her questions and tried to ask her about herself, but she always steered the subject back to me, the way my mother had told me good conversationalists did.
When we returned from our walk, the tennis court was empty. Ati saw my face fall and threw an arm around my shoulder.
“No matter. I take you to party tonight. Randall will be there.”
I told Ati I needed to get back to the hotel to pack for my late-night flight to Tutuila. She offered to help, and on the walk to Aggie’s nattered on about the party and all the good-looking boys who would be there. By the time we reached the hotel she was getting on my nerves, and I really wanted some solitude. Then I thought about the night in Nana’s village and the conversation with Tom at the waterfall. If I was serious about staying in Samoa and living among the Samoans, I’d have to adjust to their ways, intrusive as they sometimes seemed.
Up in my room, Ati nosed around, picking up and examining every item on the dresser as I opened my suitcase and started packing dresses and separates. When I came to the fa’afafine dress, Ati lost interest in my accessories and rushed across the room to run her fingers over the smooth cotton.
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