Mango Rash

by Pokerwinski, Nan Sanders;

  The party hostess was Fatima, who belonged to a group of girls that called themselves The Mo’os (The Geckos)—Samoa’s answer to the Tri Chis. When Val, Tom, and I walked into Fatima’s house on a Fagatogo backstreet, I felt for a moment like I was new to the island again. So few of the old, familiar faces. But then as I scanned the room, I picked out Fibber, Peki, Li’i, Daisy, Eti, Tau, and Poloka, along with a high-spirited mass of Mo’o girls.

  The band was playing—swells of surf music and a roomful of bouncing bodies. Coconut oil hung in the air like olfactory fog. Fatima, a smiling beacon, motioned us in and gave us hugs.

  “I’m so glad you came,” she said. As if anyone ever stayed home from a party. “Barb Harold is coming, too, you know.” She said the name as one word: Barbharold. Everyone said it that way, a syntactical peculiarity that added import.

  “I know.” My voice came out like a squeak. It didn’t matter. Fatima, distracted by the entrance of another guest, was no longer paying attention to me.

  “Oh, look! Here’s Barbharold now!”

  I turned toward the door and searched the crowd for a Toni look-alike. All I saw was a round-faced girl with bobbed hair and a comfortably pillowed shape. I tried to merge the real-life Barbharold into the image I’d been carrying around all these months, but the fit was as if she’d tried to squeeze into my party dress, buttons popping all the way down the front.

  Barb made her way over to where we stood, and after receiving Fatima’s hugs and I’m-so-glad-you-came, introduced herself.

  “I wasn’t sure I’d still know anyone here,” she said. “Things change so fast.”

  “Don’t I know it,” I said, as in my mind a goddess packed up and left, and an ordinary girl—just like me—moved in.

  My father was making scrambled eggs. His articulate fingers, tipped with clean, flat nails, cracked the shells on the edge of a metal mixing bowl—he always used the same one—and slid in yolks and whites with a twisting motion that probably was unnecessary but added flair. He added a splash of cream and shakes of salt and pepper before whisking the eggs to a sunshiny froth. On the stove, bacon grease shimmered and popped in a skillet. My father turned down the heat with one hand and poured the eggs into the pan with the other. Then, wielding a spatula as if he’d studied at Le Cordon Bleu instead of Oklahoma University College of Medicine, he played at the firming edges of the eggs, letting the uncooked liquid run underneath until the whole thing was uniformly done to moist-but-not-runny perfection. I had eaten scrambled eggs all across America and never tasted any like my father’s. Whether it was technique or the specific proportions he used, his always came out with a slight sweetness that counteracted the eggy overtones I objected to in other cooks’ attempts.

  He delivered my eggs alongside toast he’d brushed with melted butter and cut on the diagonal. Jam, as always, was served in a small porcelain dish, not straight from the jar.

  I smiled the kind of smile I used to lavish upon him before we came to Samoa, before we came to odds. Lately, I’d been overlooking my father’s failings and irritating quirks, guarding his feelings with ferocity reignited by Karl’s entry in my autograph book and everything I’d absorbed about aiga loyalty.

  “You never told me about that party at the muu-muu girl’s house.” He sat down at the table to watch me eat. Always an early riser, he’d had his own breakfast hours before and was letting my mother sleep in this Saturday morning.

  “Not muu-muu, Daddy, mo’o. Like gecko.” I fed him tidbits of party gossip, which was easier now that Dick was gone and I didn’t have to watch what I said.

  When we were both satiated, we got up from the table and started clearing away dishes. The phone rang, and my father’s forehead corrugated in concern.

  “Who’d be calling this early on a Saturday morning? I don’t have any patients about to deliver.” The furrows tightened into knife pleats of irritation. “They’ll wake your mother.”

  He strode to the rotary phone and lifted the receiver midway through the second ring. I half-listened as I finished clearing the table and ran water in the sink. Probably a nurse needing guidance.

  “What? Oh, no … Oh, no … I’m so sorry … When? … Where are you now? … We’ll be right there.”

  After the second Oh no, I came out of the kitchen, damp dish towel slung across my shoulder, and saw my father’s face turn the color of dust.

  When he hung up, he pressed his hand to his forehead as if he’d been hit with a crushing headache. “Dr. Puckett,” he said. “Died in his sleep. Go wake your mother and get dressed.”

  I took a step toward the bedrooms, but the air jelled around me, and my mind congealed. Val’s father is dead. That one thought stuck in my consciousness and swelled like a sore, forcing out all others. When I tried to consider what it meant and what might happen next, I couldn’t move beyond the singular fact. Val’s father. Dead.

  ~ ~ ~

  Val sat at the kitchen table where we’d talked, prickly with newness, my first day on the island. Now, her eyes haloed red and desolate, her face streaked, she was unrecognizable as the ballsy girl I’d met that afternoon. I smoothed a wayward curl off her forehead. It sprang back at me. I put both arms around her.

  “Oh, Val.” I had no idea what else to say. My parents, more practiced in comforting the grieving, talked in low tones to Mrs. Puckett in the living room. I strained to overhear, but picked up only a word now and then: ambulance … heart failure … funeral.

  In disconnected phrases, Val filled in the details. Her mother had awakened her early that morning, just in time for Val to see the ambulance pull away. Not long after, Mrs. Puckett was on the phone, checking on departing flights.

  “She wants to get us all out of here as soon as possible, back to Kalamazoo, where things will be more normal.”

  What would normal be like without a father? I didn’t ask.

  Val fiddled with a spoon that lay on the placemat before her. I noticed the wart on her finger, the one she now made no attempt to hide. I went to the refrigerator and slid out two bottles of orange Fanta. In so many ways, the moment was identical to so many others over the past eleven months. In so many ways, it was nothing like any moment we’d ever lived before.

  With all the departures of friends and the knowledge that our time on the island was limited, we’d thought we had a handle on impermanence. But whenever the ground had shifted before, we’d always had our parents—and each other—to anchor us. Now it was clear that even anchors sometimes slipped their moorings.

  Chapter 29—Samoan Sickness

  Mo’omo’o, Mo’omo’o ‘oe

  Tu mai ā tu mai ‘oe

  Oso i le fi, oso i le vao māoa

  Oleā ou velosia ‘oe

  Mo’omo’o, Mo’omo’o

  Show yourself, show yourself

  Flee to the cordyline tree, flee to the deep forest

  Before you are impaled on my spear

  —Samoan healing incantation

  Val and I sat at a table by the hotel pool, same as always. Only not. The topic of discussion: not parties, but pathologies.

  “What is sprue, anyway?”

  Val had just told me that was the disease that precipitated her father’s death. Sprue—something vaguely botanical about the term, something nineteenth-century sounding, too softly benign to be fatal, unlike the clinically consonanted tuberculosis or cancer.

  Val picked at a breadfruit chip as if it were a fleck of lint instead of something edible. “I can’t tell you the medical details—Mom could—it’s some kind of wasting disease. You eat, but your body can’t take in what it needs. At least that’s how it was explained to me.” She told me her father had contracted an intestinal infection on a visit to Korea—for a World Health Organization conference, ironically enough—and afterward developed sprue.

  “I did notice he was getting thinner,” I said. My parents had commented on it, speculating that hospital politics and clashing cultures w
ere taking a toll on Dr. Puckett’s health. Worried the same might happen to my father, I’d become as alert to his physical state as I was to his emotions, sensitive to pallors now, as well as psychic pain. I fretted about my mother’s health, too. Though the move to Penicillin Row had invigorated her, she still had days when her energy flagged, and she couldn’t put on weight no matter how much she ate.

  “Down to a hundred pounds by the time he diagnosed himself,” Val said. “Mom wanted him to go back to the States, but he thought he could treat it.”

  A hundred pounds. That was what my mother weighed. The thought of my own father withering down to my mother’s size was heartsickening. My nose tingled and felt cotton-stuffed—a sensation that usually preceded tears. I glanced at Val. Her eyes were dry, but there was a tremor in the hand that toyed with her food.

  “Can we not talk about this anymore?” Val pushed her plate away as if it were attached to the subject matter.

  What else was there to talk about? Conversation about the future seemed pointless; she was leaving the next day. We’d promised to write and make every effort to get together back in the States, but by now we both knew how hard it was for intimacy to survive separation, how easy for substitutes to take center stage.

  We sat and stared into the distance until a vivid blur appeared in my peripheral vision. I turned to see Iakopu, the tenacious tour operator, in a blue-and-white flowered shirt and a red-and-yellow lavalava, standing between our chairs, ukulele clasped behind his back in a respectful parade rest position. Somber-faced, he bowed in Val’s direction.

  “My condolences.”

  Val forced a smile. “Thank you, Iakopu. That’s very kind of you.”

  Touched by his tender gesture, I smiled, too.

  Iakopu’s eyebrows shot upward, almost merging with his hairline. “Maybe you girls would like to go on a picnic?”

  Val shook her head, “Not today, Iakopu.” After he’d walked away, she began to laugh. Val’s laugh was one of her contradictions. From a girl so bold, you’d expect uninhibited howls, but her laughter was muted, almost pantomime. First her face would crinkle into an expression like the “comedy” half of those comedy/tragedy masks—eyes slitted, forehead wrinkled, lips exaggeratedly upturned. Then she’d duck her head and press one palm against her chest, sinking through the shoulders, as if bowed by the hilarity. Finally, she’d begin to shake, and only then would the softest chuckling escape her lips.

  “Gee, Val,” I teased. “Maybe you should’ve gone with him just this once. Now you’ll have to spend the rest of your life wondering what you missed.”

  Val laughed harder. She shook and shut her eyes and threw back her head and laughed more audibly than I could remember her laughing before, and every so often, sighed and started over again, with the kind of laughter that escapes the grasp of whatever prompted it, rising and floating and pulling out like magicians’ scarves every emotion that’s been compressed inside. She laughed and laughed and laughed so hard that by the end her eyes brimmed over. Those tears, I didn’t try to wipe away.

  Samoans recognize two kinds of health problems: ma’i palagi (white people’s sicknesses—brought to Samoa by outsiders and best treated with Western medicine) and ma’i Samoa (Samoan sicknesses—physical and psychological disorders indigenous to the islands and best treated by traditional Samoan healers known as fofō). Among the ma’i Samoa are ailments stemming from the pain and stress of separation or rifts in relationships. After Val left, with a tearful airport scene to top all previous tofas, I knew firsthand how losing a friend could cause real suffering. My malaise was as wearying as any flu, and if I’d known where to find a fofō, I’d have shown up at her fale o’o asking for herbs or incantations. Instead, I practiced the only healing art I knew: applying pen to paper.

  My letters to Val, each written over the course of several days, ran on for twenty pages or more and were illustrated with Ug cartoons, never as funny or cleverly drawn as hers, but the best I could do in my sick-hearted state.

  A week after she left, my father, passing through the hallway on his way to the kitchen, caught me staring, tongue extended, into the bathroom mirror.

  “That’s not another monkey you’re making faces at, you know,” he teased. He’d been extra jokey since Val left, trying to prod me out of my funk.

  “Vewy funny.” I talked with my tongue out so I could point to the shiny, pinkish spot on its right side. “Wook.”

  My father took my head in his hands and tilted it this way and that until the light was right. “What’d you do—bite it?”

  “I think I burned it on boiled taro, but that was a week ago. It still stings when I get toothpaste on it.” With tongue retracted, my articulation improved, but I still lisped.

  My father swung open the medicine chest door, reached behind the deodorant and took out a small, brown bottle. “Put some of this merthiolate on it, but try not to swallow any. If it doesn’t get better in a couple of days, we’ll take another look.”

  I unscrewed the cap, pulled out the glass rod attached to it, and dabbed the glowing orange liquid onto the side of my tongue. The burn and metallic taste assured me it would do the trick.

  In the kitchen, my mother was making sandwiches on Jessop’s bread. I told her not to make me one, and I opened a cupboard and slid cans around, searching for soup.

  “But I thought you loved wahoo.” The look on her face, halfway between befuddled and wounded, was the one she got whenever my tastes inexplicably shifted and I rejected something she was sure I’d enjoy.

  “I do. It’s just this canker sore—or blister or whatever it is—on my tongue. It hurts to eat anything crisp like that crust.”

  “Sore tongue, huh?” My mother lost the pained look and turned playful. “Been telling fibs?”

  Pretending to be absorbed in searching through canned goods, I didn’t answer.

  My mother moved closer, near enough for me to catch the honeysuckle scent of her White Shoulders cologne. “I had a dream about you last night.”

  Uh-oh. Her so-called dreams were always cause for alarm. They usually involved me committing some transgression—one that, uncannily, I actually had recently committed behind my parents’ backs. Whether my mother was psychic or just wise to my ways and using made-up dreams to confront me without actual confrontation, the effect was the same: it rattled me all to hell.

  “I dreamed you came home from that party the other night on the back of Peki’s motorbike instead of with Tom, like you were supposed to.”

  I burrowed deeper into the pantry. “Huh.” In fact, I had been spending time with Peki lately and had accepted a few furtive rides on the bike (and kisses at the end of those rides). But how could my mother know that? Tom wouldn’t rat on me, and with Mrs. Puckett gone, the parental intelligence network was seriously compromised. I almost believed my mother really did have telepathic visions. Living in Samoa made it easy to accept such an explanation, with all those legends about aitu—busybody spirits that inserted themselves into people’s lives. Maybe one of them had taken over for Mrs. Puckett.

  “Weird dream, Mother,” I said. I could avoid confrontation, too.

  ~ ~ ~

  I found myself thinking a lot about aitu and other Samoan beliefs over the next few days, as the canker sore continued to bedevil me. Was I somehow responsible for its lingering? I remembered what my father had told me about the Samoan view of health: that it depended on balance among the social, natural, and supernatural aspects of your life. If you were sick, you needed to identify what was out of balance and take action—appeasing a specific aitu or apologizing to someone you’d offended—to restore harmony.

  I had no idea how to identify, much less assuage, an aitu, but I did believe an apology was in order. I took out my airmail stationery and in contrite, blue-black longhand, composed a letter to Aggie Grey, the Apia innkeeper. I started by expressing my appreciation for her hospitality during my recent stay and complimenting her hot
el’s cuisine and service. Then I told her how much I regretted my poor judgment and apologized for involving Nana and the other hotel staffers in the Ati mess. I addressed and sealed the envelope, walked it to the post office in Fagatogo, and prayed that Mrs. Grey never would respond. I hadn’t told my parents about the dress debacle—or most of my other Apia adventures—and so far my mother hadn’t intuited anything about them. The last thing I wanted was to have to explain a letter from Aggie accepting my apologies.

  The letter healed my troubled soul, but it did nothing for my tongue. That evening I asked my father to take another look. This time there were no jokes about monkeys in the mirror.

  “I don’t like the looks of this,” he said. “You’d better come to the clinic tomorrow.”

  The prospect didn’t faze me. With a live-in doctor, I was used to finger-sticks, swabs, and X-rays for complaints that always ended up being something minor. A sprained elbow instead of a broken arm; a persistent cough that wasn’t pneumonia after all.

  “What do you think it could be?” I asked, more out of curiosity than concern.

  The soft lines in my father’s face stiffened into a look that made my gut contort. “Well … the only thing I know of that looks like this is syphilis.”

  Syphilis. I was too stunned, and too uncertain of the means of transmission, to protest, so I just stood there twisting my ring around my sweaty finger and saying nothing, which turned my father’s face sterner.

  “Be ready when I leave for work tomorrow. We’ll run some tests first thing in the morning.”

  In my room that night, I tried to remember what little I knew about venereal diseases and how you could catch them. Toilet seats, no. Kissing? I didn’t think so. It had to be through sex, and that let me out. If not exactly untouched, I was still as virginal as when I’d arrived on the island. But what if this strange affliction wasn’t VD? What if it was some ma’i Samoa that I’d caught from kissing Peki? Or from angering an aitu who didn’t like palagi girls messing around with Samoan boys? Or simply from causing conflict in my family? Could my father’s tests reveal that kind of sickness?