Mango Rash

by Pokerwinski, Nan Sanders;

  “Can I put it on?”

  I hesitated. I could be generous with my friends, but sharing clothes with anyone but my mother was where I usually drew the line. What’s more, Ati’s shape was nothing like mine; she was stocky and looked like she still had a band of baby fat around her middle. I envisioned splitting seams.

  “Well … okay. But be careful. It’s new.”

  “From the fa’afafines?” she asked.

  I nodded and watched her operate the zipper like she was ripping open a Christmas present. She tugged the dress on and, to my astonishment, fit into it and didn’t look half bad. Then, from downstairs came the rat-a-tatting of a stick on wood. One of the kitchen helpers was playing the fish-shaped drum that summoned guests to dinner.

  “I’ve gotta go now,” I told Ati. “Come back after dinner, and we’ll go to the party.”

  Ati sat down on the bed and began folding one of my blouses.

  “I wait for you. I finish packing while you eat.”

  Tempting. The sooner the packing was done, the more time we’d have at the party. Why not? I thanked Ati and told her I wouldn’t be long.

  Dinner was Samoan lobster—more like a giant crayfish than the Maine lobster I’d eaten on a few special occasions, but tasty. When I excused myself before finishing mine, Tom gave me a sideways look.

  “Are you sick or something? You never leave food on your plate. And we haven’t even had dessert—I hear it’s coconut ice cream.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, “but I still have to pack, and I want some time to write in my diary before we leave for the airport.” Amazingly, Tom hadn’t caught onto any of my secret excursions, so I figured I could pull off one more.

  “You and that diary.” Tom waggled his head from side to side. “I don’t know what you could possibly have to write about all the time.”

  I smiled, backed away from the table, dashed upstairs and burst into my room. Most of my clothes were still heaped on the bed. Ati was gone and so was the fa’afafine dress. I yanked out the drawer where I’d left my wallet. Still there—thank God. I snapped open the bill compartment. Empty.

  Dizzy and sweating, I sank onto the bed, stung as much by the shame of my gullibility as by the betrayal. My thoughts scattered and spun; I tried to funnel them into some logical sequence. What to do? What to do? Admitting to Tom that I’d been duped by one of my newfound Samoan friends would give lie to the Rousseauean scene at the waterfall. And what could he do anyway? If we reported the theft to the hotel, police might be called in, and that would surely get back to my parents. There was only one person I could tell about this.

  Nana was mixing a Screwdriver when I slipped into the lounge.

  “I have to talk to you,” I stage-whispered. Then remembering she was working, added, “when you have a minute,” and sat at the bar tapping my thumbnail against my tortoise-shell ring.

  My face must have communicated urgency. Nana delivered the drink and hustled back to the bar, her broad behind laboring to keep up with her shoulders.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I told her about the missing dress and money and the girl I was sure had taken them.

  “Who is this girl?” The folds of concern on Nana’s face sharpened into a fierce expression.

  “She said her name was Ati.”

  Nana made a sound like spitting.

  “Ptuh! Ati! Ati is a bad girl. Very bad girl.” On the bar, a candle flickered in a red glass hurricane lamp; its reflections blazed in Nana’s eyes.

  “You stay here,” she ordered and then disappeared around a corner. A few minutes later she was back with several of the hotel’s waiters and kitchen workers, burly young men whose eyes burned with the same fire as hers.

  We piled into someone’s car—I didn’t notice who’d been left in charge of the bar, and maybe Nana didn’t either—and took off on a wild chase worthy of an action movie. As we careened through Apia’s darkened streets, Nana and the other passengers shouted to the driver in Samoan and pointed in different directions. Every so often the car lurched to a stop in front of a house or a hall where a party was in progress, and the sounds of music and laughter punctured the gravity of our mission. Then Nana, henchmen in tow, marched inside to search for the larcenous Ati as I waited in the car, playing with my ring, slipping it off, putting it back on, taking it off again, until at one stop I dropped it onto the back seat floor.

  I reached down and felt around, but my fingers found nothing but filth and grit.

  No! Not this. Not my ring, too. The thought of losing that and the dress and my money made my insides squish like Samoan pudding. I dropped to the floor and crawled around in the dark, groping and grinding grit into my knees and cursing my carelessness until finally, almost out of reach beneath the front seat, I felt the ring’s smooth contours. Hands shaking, I slipped it back on and left it alone for the rest of the night.

  After half a dozen or so unsuccessful raids, I reminded Nana I had a plane to catch and suggested it might be time to give up. Going home broke and dress-less would be bad, but not as bad as missing the flight and not making it home at all. How would I ever explain that to my parents? Plus, Tom had no idea where I was. He’d be out of his mind if I didn’t show up in time to leave for the airport, and my parents would be furious with him for losing track of me. This was awful and getting worse. And it was all my fault.

  But my pleas to speed up the search or call it off altogether went unheeded. By now, the quest was no longer about me and my concerns; it had taken on a larger significance to everyone else in the car.

  Finally, with maybe twenty minutes to spare before I absolutely had to be back at the hotel, we hit one more hall. When Nana and her posse didn’t emerge after a quick sweep, I knew they’d closed in on their quarry. Now we were getting somewhere. Maybe I’d get my dress and money back, but more important at this point, maybe this ordeal would soon be over.

  Through the open car windows came shouts and the commotion of chairs being pushed aside. Someone opened the hall’s front door to come outside and I caught a glimpse of Nana and the men in a tight circle around a cowed figure. More minutes passed. Then the gang burst through the door, waving the fa’afafine dress like a banner. Later I would wonder what they’d left Ati wearing, but at that moment the thought didn’t cross my mind.

  The money was gone, and that still stung. A fifteen-dollar lesson learned the hard way. But I had my glorious dress, Ati had been brought to justice, I would make it to the airport in time, and with any luck, Tom and my parents would never know about this caper.

  On the flight back to Tutuila, I slumped in my seat and closed my eyes but didn’t sleep. My mind was busy replaying scenes of the past five days—the shopping, the village dance, the waterfall, the flirtations, the betrayal—and processing the conflicting emotions that accompanied them. Painful as it was, I had to admit that no matter how bold, how womanly, I believed myself to be, I still was largely unprepared to function on my own in a world where calamity was the flipside of adventure. What troubled me more than my wobbly self-image, though, was the speck of tarnish corrupting the shining stereotype I’d been constructing over the past ten months. Samoans, I now realized, could be as humanly flawed as their palagi counterparts. For all the Nanas and La’es and Daisys and Etis, there might always be, lurking on a shadowed side street, an Ati with fifteen pilfered dollars in her pocket.

  Ptuh! Ati! Hateful, hateful girl. I despised her for ruining my perfect adventure and hated her even more for spoiling my illusions. I thought of Nana and her gang circled around Ati and hoped they’d scared and shamed her. Maybe even slapped her for good measure. Yeah. That’d serve her right.

  I brooded on bitter thoughts until I’d exhausted my inventory—and myself. Then, lulled by the plane’s drone, I burrowed into my seat and let my mind sail away from Apia and back to Tutuila. A memory floated by, trailing a feeling that drifted down to my heart and ballooned there, filling it up. It was th
e feeling that came over me as I walked around the island the morning after the hurricane, seeing palm trees stripped and splintered and hills denuded. And with that feeling came this thought: If I could love Samoa with its ugliness exposed, surely I could be as generous with its people.

  Chapter 28—Arrivals and Departures

  Aua ne’i galo Afi’a i lona vao.

  (Let not Afi’a be forgotten in his forest.)

  —Samoan proverb interpreted as “Remember those left behind.”

  The scrap of aqua paper, cut into the shape of a soda bottle, looked cheerfully intriguing stuck in the screen door, but when Val pulled it out and read it, she grimaced.

  “Another tofa party.”

  I read over her shoulder to see whose farewell it was this time. The honoree was Kathi and Bev’s brother Chris, the latest in a string of schoolmates going back to the States for college or because their parents’ contracts were up.

  “I’m just glad you’re not leaving,” I told her. “Otherwise it might be just me and Mr. Hieronymus at school this year.”

  Val tucked the invitation into the pocket of her shift and opened the door. “You think I’d leave you here to have all the fun? It’s bad enough you went on that little spree in Western Samoa without me.”

  I didn’t want to dwell on that escapade, so I tried distracting Val with a fashion dilemma. “What’ll we wear?” With so many going-away parties lately, we’d already worn all our best outfits. I trailed her into her room and pushed a pillow aside to wallow into my usual spot on the bed.

  Val opened her closet door and stared glazedly inside like a hungry person surveying a barren refrigerator. She shut the door with thudding resignation, then flopped down beside me. We tallied up who was left on the island—we could practically do it on one hand. Us. Marnie. Joyce. Sylvia. Ed. Pili, for now, but he had a scholarship to some college in Missouri and soon would be gone. Daisy and several other Samoan kids were headed for a community college in Colorado. Thank goodness I had another year before I’d face pressure from my parents to return to the States. I hadn’t divulged my desire to stay in Samoa, but they’d picked up the vibes and already were offering to send me back “for a visit, after college.”

  “Maybe we’ll get some new kids that we like.” It felt funny saying that. It hadn’t been even a year since I was the new kid. Now it would be my turn to watch Fibber stroll up to some other, fresh-from-the-States girl at the tennis court, and for me to befriend her as Marnie and Val had befriended me in those first, sweet-strange days on Tutuila.

  From outside came the crescendo and diminuendo of a blaring radio from a passing car. I heard it and wondered why I had. Slivers of music, laughter, and shouting had become such familiar background noise that I barely noticed them anymore. I was habituated to the rhythms and refrains of life in Samoa, yet even when I failed to notice the details, I still savored the overall marvelousness. The steadiness of my summer routine grounded me as well. With Mrs. Ieti’s help, I had lined up jobs tutoring children from her class in reading. Now, purpose, as well as passion, fed my connection to the place.

  “Hey,” Val said, “Mom was talking to Barb Harold’s mom at Kneubuhl’s, and she said Barb’s coming back this week.” She made the comment offhandedly, unaware of the bedroom graffiti and its hold on me.

  A wave of dizziness rippled through my head. Consciously or unconsciously, I’d been remaking myself in Barb’s image—or at least the image I’d concocted from what little I knew of her—for the past ten months. Now I’d find out how I stacked up against her in real life.

  At home that evening, I rooted through fabric I’d gotten for my birthday until I found a Polynesian print in shades of green and brown with touches of metallic gold. Then I pulled out a pattern I’d been saving for my next sewing project. There was a good chance Barb would be at Chris’s party. I wanted to look every bit the Palagi Princess for the meetup.

  I carried everything into the dining room, spread the fabric on the table and laid out pattern pieces. The canvas curtains were open, and music from the floorshow at the hotel around the bend mingled with ocean smells and wafted in as one synesthetic sensory infusion. Just as I started pinning pattern tissue to fabric, the wind picked up and whipped at the curtains. One gust lifted a pattern piece from the table and took it on a fluttery tour of the room. I chased the piece to a corner and brought it back to the table. No sooner had I smoothed it into place than another draft snatched one of its companions and transported it like a magic carpet into the living room. I toted it back, anchored it with a box of straight pins, and pulled the curtains shut. I returned to my pinning, but spastic breezes burst in through gaps in the curtains and ripped at the pattern edges.

  Damn damn goddamn wind. I-hate-you-I-hate-you-I-hate-you!

  My curses had no effect, and I had no more patience. I gathered fabric, patterns, and pins into a giant wad and stalked to my room, my only consolation the wisdom of having claimed a bedroom with solid walls on all four sides.

  My room was arranged like a sitting room, with two daybeds in an L-configuration at one end and a low, wooden table in front of them. My photo album, bound in brown leatherette and thick as a major metropolitan telephone directory, sat on the table.

  Settling onto one bed, I picked up the album, opened the cover and smoothed the Mylar overlay on the first page, where a five-by-seven color print showed me standing on a balcony in Waikiki, wearing that silly striped-and-dotted travel dress and a frangipani lei. Other pages, filled with photos I’d shot with my Kodak Instamatic or had printed from my father’s slides, showcased views of Centipede Row and Pago Harbor from the cable car and scores of scenes from dances, beach parties, and ordinary afternoon walks, all populated with people who had defined my island experience as much as frangipani and Fanta but now were gone: Dick, Wendy, Wayne, Suzi, Karl, Eric, Carlson, Kathi, Barry and Bev, the Baker girls. It was the reverse of those poltergeist pictures where someone takes a photo of an empty room and sees a ghost when the film is developed. These ghosts had been there in the flesh when I took the pictures, but now had disappeared from all the settings where the photos were shot.

  Page by page, my melancholy deepened until I came to a snapshot that changed my mood as abruptly as that infuriating wind. Taken at a lively party, it was a close-up shot of Suzi and a Samoan friend Maika, with Suzi’s brother Karl inserting his head between theirs to crash the picture. Just seeing the angle of his jawline and the impertinence of his expression made my face burn.

  It wasn’t only his face that provoked me. Just before school had let out for summer, at the very party where I’d taken that picture, Karl had developed an unexpected and intense interest in me. For the next ten days he’d kept up the pursuit, paying me visits at all times of day and night. I was flattered and, frankly, floored. Though even more caustic than his sister Suzi, Karl wasn’t bad looking, and he was one of the brainiest among us, headed for Harvard the following fall. If this genius was interested enough in me to spend hours at my house—not just making out when my parents were asleep, but talking about smart stuff—I must have something going for me.

  Then one afternoon, with no preface to soften the blow, he casually informed me that he’d “made a mistake” in getting involved with me.

  “I don’t really like you,” he said with no expression. Then turning a fire hose on the bridge he’d just set ablaze, he added a postscript: “But I might get lonely sometimes, so if I do, will you still be around?”

  The steadiness of my voice surprised me as much as the words I heard myself speak: “You know what, Karl? I don’t like you either. I’m not sure I ever have.” I wasn’t retaliating, I was being truthful. He offered no smart-alecky retort, just a dispassionate “Okay” before he walked away.

  I felt victorious about my assertive comeback until the last day of school, when I passed around my autograph book. That night, sitting on my bed, I leafed through page after pastel page of reminiscences, gibes about
chemistry homework, and exhortations to keep in touch, until I ended up at a butter-yellow page with writing on the diagonal and Karl’s signature in the bottom right corner.

  My feleni, it began. “My friend.” I didn’t think I cared what he’d written, but apparently I did. The salutation triggered a flutter.

  Next time I have a beer I’ll make a toast to you and your beautiful eyes. Was he being sincere or ironic? It was impossible to intuit his tone, so I read on.

  I’ll remember you for a long time (but eventually I’ll forget you), and, oops, I almost forgot, I’ll remember your sweet, effeminate father, too.

  When I reached the end of that sentence, my face fluoresced, and my head pulsed. I forced myself to read the page again, quietly closed the cover, carried the book to the dresser, and buried it beneath my underwear.

  I knew as well as anyone that my father’s penchant for domestic arts was unconventional, but to think that exhibiting his true nature would open him up to ridicule made me feel ripped and gaping myself. It was then I decided once and for all I had no use for the Karls of this world, whose coolness disguises a cruel core.

  Thinking back to that day as I sat in the same spot on my bed looking at Karl’s picture, it struck me that living in a place where the cast of characters rotated in and out with tidal regularity was not entirely a bad thing.

  ~ ~ ~

  I hadn’t resurrected the sewing project by party time, so I wore a dress I’d brought from the States and kept in reserve for pull-out-all-the-stops occasions: a sleeveless, hot pink, A-line mini with buttons down the front and orange ruffles running from scoop neck to hemline on either side of the buttons. I wondered how the dress would compare to Barb’s ensemble. It was hard to envision how she’d look, since I hadn’t met her or seen a photograph, but I’d always pictured her as long-haired and persistently smiley like Toni, the girl from the fiafia village. Perky in her puletasis. Shapely in her holomuus. Fetching in her floral shifts.