Chapter 30—My Samoan Chief
No matter how small and steep this little rock in the Pacific might prove, I was prepared to stick by it for life.
—Fay G. Calkins, My Samoan Chief
For the next week, I tried to put the sore spot out of my mind—except at mealtimes, when its presence was painfully obvious. I lived on scrambled eggs and boiled taro and otherwise carried on as usual. My test results would be coming soon from a medical lab in Hawaii; no point in worrying in the meantime, right?
Okay, I did worry. What if it was syphilis? How could I ever convince my parents there was no way I’d caught it by the usual route? But then, what if it wasn’t syphilis? What the hell was it—some strange new form of mango rash? I kept thinking about ma’i Samoa, and the more I thought, the more the idea of being stricken with some exotic tropical disease, scary as that was, took on a tragically romantic appeal. I could see myself languishing in a tent of mosquito netting, chestnut hair attractively splayed on my pillow. Friends filling my room with frangipani and spikes of red ginger, me afloat in viscous fragrance as my parents spoon-fed me coconut ice cream. (No, chocolate—gallons of it.) And then, a miraculous cure, perhaps from some fofō in the shadowed depths of jungle. I’d be restored to perfect health and made an honorary taupou, worthy of fine-mat robe and fancy headdress.
When I wasn’t indulging in suffering-heroine fantasies or helping out at home, I occupied myself with sivasiva dancing lessons, tutoring sessions, long walks, and writing in my journal—not just brief, factual entries in my Every Day Diary, but longer, more reflective passages in a kraft-covered notebook imprinted on the front with three palm trees and the words American Samoa Exercise Book in midnight blue. With Val gone, I’d become my own confidant. In myself, I found a friend who had infinite patience with my foibles, took my side on every issue, and applauded my wisdom and wit.
One topic I explored in depth with myself was exactly how to extend my stay in Samoa beyond the thirteen months remaining in my father’s contract. Without a college degree I couldn’t get a teaching job, but I believed I could support myself by adding a few more kids to my tutoring roster.
But where would I live? Only U.S. employees could stay in government quarters, so I’d have to rent a room or insinuate myself into a village. Or join the Peace Corps—I’d read that the agency was establishing a program in Western Samoa. I wrote for information and even showed it to my parents, who weren’t opposed to the idea—after college. My dad, after all, had answered a call to help out in Samoa. How could he deny me the opportunity?
There was another option: I could marry into an aiga and have an instant home and family. I even had a likely candidate in Peki, who visited regularly now, perhaps because he knew I needed cheering up after Val’s departure, but also because our new home on the bay was tailor-made for a timid visitor. Instead of knocking on the front door and standing anxious and exposed on the front stoop, he could slip up to my open bedroom window and tap the screen or make little snuffling animal noises until I noticed his presence.
One morning, as I sat on the bed writing in my journal, I heard music and recognized the signature slides and vibratos of the Vampires. It was too early in the day for a dance at the Turtle, and the sound didn’t advance and recede like spillover from a passing car; it seemed to be right outside my window. I pulled the curtain open. Nothing there. I craned for a better view. Peki and Poloka were crouched beneath the sill, a portable tape player between them.
“We thought you’d like a wake-up concert.” Peki stood up, and the scent of his coconut-oiled hair drifted into my room with his nervous giggle.
Poloka smoothed his madras shirt and poked the machine’s off button. “We’re going downtown. Want to come?”
I’d run out of thoughts to obsessively examine in my notebook, so I told the boys I’d be right out. By the time I got outside, Poloka was astride his motorbike, headed in a different direction, tape machine hazardously clenched under one arm.
“I just remembered I have to go slice bread at the store,” he said, nodding in the direction of his family’s bakery. The lopsided curl of his lip was a tip-off to the boys’ ploy. “You two go ahead,” he called over his shoulder as he rode away. “Have fun.”
Peki and I waved to Poloka and set off along the path to Fagatogo, Peki’s broad feet leaving Sasquatch prints beside my size five-and-a-half narrows. I no longer felt self-conscious walking around the island, but with Peki beside me I felt even more like a local and less like an uninvited guest.
“I’ve been sad since Val left, Peki.”
He nodded, sympathy visible in the crimp between his eyebrows. “Maybe it’s time for Mike to come back.”
Months before, I’d given Peki the gray kitten when it was clear he was more attached to Mike than I was. Until Mike got too big, Peki had carried him around on the motorbike, zipped inside his jacket with just a furry head poking out at chest level. The bike’s whizzing and whirring didn’t unnerve the animal at all, which I took as further evidence that Peki was the better cat parent.
“No,” I told him. “Mike belongs with you, at home—wherever that is.”
Peki’s frown lines deepened, and he waved an arm in a sweeping arc. “I told you. On the mountain.” All these months I’d known him, and this was as much as I’d ever gotten out of him about where he lived. His home life and family were as unknown to me as the far side of the island, undeveloped and accessible only by mountain footpaths.
At the end of Centipede Row, we passed the warehouse where Peki worked after school. I’d seen him leaning, arms crossed, against the frame of the open door at break time, but I had no idea what went on inside. Whenever I asked him what he did there, the answer was the same: “Work.” This time, I didn’t bother asking.
The asphalt parking lot at Nia Marie’s general store was sticky and the air filled with tarry fumes. Young men in lavalavas lounged against parked cars, old women sat cross-legged beneath the broad tin roof that shaded the building’s side entrance, and shoppers streamed in and out of the open doorway. We smuck-smuck-smucked our way across the lot, through the door and into the cool and dim interior.
Peki spoke to the clerk in Samoan, pointing at a box on a shelf behind the counter. She retrieved it and set it in front of him.
Amazing how easy it was to be waited on when you weren’t palagi.
Peki paid, and as we walked back outside, he opened the box, extracted a fistful of gingersnaps, and held them out to me. I took one and bit down, then winced and put my hand to my mouth.
“Ow!”
Peki looked at the cookies and then at me, his eyebrows in a twist that mixed alarm and perplexity so comically I burst out laughing and almost spit half-chewed cookie at him.
“It’s nothing!” I assured him. “I forgot about my sore tongue. Probably burned it on boiled taro. Should’ve let it cool longer.”
“Don’t be in such a hurry.” Peki shook a scolding finger but smiled, all at once more handsome than he’d looked in recent memory.
In my bedroom that night, I took out the brown notebook and my fountain pen, along with Skrip ink cartridges I’d bought at a stationery store in Stillwater and carefully rationed. Jet Black, Blue Black, Green, and Peacock Blue. Before beginning to write, I re-read a long entry I’d written on graduation day, when I’d volunteered to usher with several friends from the Samoan section of Samoana High, kids I’d met through National Honor Society.
June 18, 1966
I was over at the auditorium by 8:00 wearing my usher’s uniform and ribbon, and the bow Palesitina had given me. I was so glad to see that Misiuaita, Fasega and Jack were working there. I stood at the door, across from Misi, handing out programs. All that time we were joking and teasing each other and everyone else. After a very long time the seniors started to march in. The first one I knew was Peki. He smiled at me and squeezed my hand. Each one that I knew took my hand as he passed and I stood there smiling and lov
ing them all.
When they all took their seats I went and sat on the table in back with Jeannette, Clement, Mike, Helen, Misi, Fasega and Jack. We all kept playing and laughing. Whenever something was said in Samoan, whether by the speaker on stage or just in conversation, Jack would say, “Do you understand?” If I didn’t, which was almost always the case, he would translate it all for me.
Then the program started and the seniors chanted the Lord’s Prayer. I had never heard it that way before, and it was beautiful. After many speeches and music, it was time for the presentation of diplomas. As I watched Peki, Eric, Gus, Li’i, Pili and Fibber walking across the stage I cried. Then the seniors sang that beautiful Samoan hymn once more, and when they had finished the seniors marched out. The parents all started pushing to get out and present their children with ulas. Fasega pushed me right into the crowd and there I was, being shoved against walls and laughing at Fasega, who couldn’t get out himself. I squeezed back to the table to pick up a program to keep always.
I went outside and stood at the door for a few minutes, looking at all the happy people. Then I walked out in the rain to look for Peki and the others. First I found Li’i. We shook hands and kissed each other on the cheek. I went on, shaking hands and giving congratulations. Finally I went back inside and saw Peki standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by his family and friends. He was the one I wanted to see.
It was true. Even when keeping his distance, Peki always had his eye on me, and even when chasing after other boys, I still felt real affection for him. He was one constant in the ever-shifting tableaux of my life. Shelter from the rain. Breathing space in the surging crowd. Good feelings, all right, but did they amount to love?
I turned to a blank page in the journal, loaded a Blue Black cartridge into my pen and began exploring my thoughts.
I realize that emotion has a lot to do with love, but more than emotion must be involved. For two people to really be in love, they must know each other so well that one knows what the other will say or will think before it happens. This must all come automatically—without either really realizing that it happens. The two must always be best friends with each other; sharing everything until it really seems like they were always together.
I laid down the pen and thought about all the boys I had loved or thought I had. Danny and I had once had that kind of connection. With Dick it was hard to say. Every time we started getting close, some drama erupted, and whatever bridges we’d begun to build were buried in the ash and lava of crisis. With Peki there were no upheavals; his devotion was unwavering, and though I’d never felt wildly in love with him, he’d always been my friend and sometimes more. But what did we really share? Laughs. Kisses. Cookies.
I went to my dresser and pulled out a paperback I’d stashed under clothes, along with Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. I’d bought the book at a Fagatogo bookstore and pored over it as much as Mead’s opus. The cover illustration showed a bare-chested Samoan man against a stylized background suggestive of a pandanus mat. The man’s raven hair was swept back from his forehead into crests and troughs like ocean swells in moonlight. Black eyes, bright as burning candlenuts, peered out beneath caterpillar eyebrows, and his nose, a broad triangle, was centered above perfectly-shaped lips. The book’s title, My Samoan Chief, was printed in red above the man’s left ear, and the author’s name, Fay G. Calkins, floated alongside his left shoulder.
I stared at the cover for a long time before thumbing through the book, the story of an American woman who met and married a Samoan in the States and came to live with him in the islands. The jacket copy made reference to the “totally new and charming, if at times frustrating and confusing” way of life Fay Calkins encountered in Samoa. I could relate to that, but it was the book’s cover, not its words, that held my attention.
The man in the picture was handsome in a classic Polynesian way, but I found myself wondering what made Fay willing to follow him to his jungle village and whether she found happiness there. My connection to Samoa—and to my own Samoan suitor—was deepening by the day. But while I could easily see myself staying longer than the two-year stint my father had signed up for, could I imagine myself doing it as a wife, boiling taro and birthing babies in some palm-thatched hut or tin-roofed shack?
I set the book aside, picked up my pen, laid it down, thought some more, picked it up again and wrote in deliberate, backhand script:
Language barrier would prevent me from ever knowing a Samoan well enough to know all of his mind. Because of the difference in our backgrounds I could never feel that he had always been a part of my life.
The argument was persuasive, though even as I wrote it I wondered who I was trying to persuade. Was I expressing what I really felt, or making excuses for holding back from the unfamiliar? After all, if I stayed here for good, I’d learn the language and ways, just as Peki would pick up mine. Yet no matter how much I talked it over with myself, the answers seemed as out of reach as details about Peki’s personal life.
It was all so uncertain. The only thing I knew for sure: one way or another, I was staying in Samoa.
Chapter 31—Last Dance
O le latalata a alafau.
(Although the eye is close by the cheek, it cannot see the cheek.)
—Samoan proverb meaning a person may be close to a thing he strives for and yet not reach it.
A flurry of red blossoms drifted down from the cable car overhead. One fell at my feet; I picked it up and stuck it behind my ear.
“What do you think?” I asked Marnie. “Does it make me look more Samoan?”
Preoccupied with smoothing the waves in her bangs, she gave me a sideways why-are-you-asking-me-this look. Then to humor me, she shrugged and said, “I guess.”
The Mariposa was in port again, and we’d come to the dock to tour the ship. Almost a week had passed since the tests on my tongue, and I needed distractions to keep me from wondering when the results would come back from Hawaii. But while Marnie was good company, she didn’t know how to improvise hilarity the way Val did. No playing pranks on tourists while posing as Samoans today (and really, that was okay; it wouldn’t have been the same). Besides, I’d adopted a kinder attitude toward visitors lately, offering to show them around when they looked lost and, when they asked, sharing tidbits about life in Samoa. Reaching out to strangers made me feel like an ambassador for my island home, more like a true member of the community than I’d ever felt pretending to be Samoan.
I pulled the flower from behind my ear and looked around for some other way to amuse myself. At end of the dock, I spotted a young palagi man I’d never seen before, turning in slow circles and craning to gawk at mountains, cable car, and flower shower, as a punch-drunk grin stretched across his face.
I jerked a thumb toward him. “Who’s that guy?”
Marnie wasted no time sliding into official greeter mode. “I don’t know—let’s find out!”
We scurried over and introduced ourselves to the young man, who looked to be in his early twenties. He told us he was Sal, from Elmont, New York, traveling alone, not on some sweeping tour of the South Pacific, but interested only in spending time in Samoa.
I was flabbergasted. No one in the States seemed to know—or care—about the island territory, and he’d made a special trip here? I looked him up and down, taking in his flowered shirt, khaki pants, and flip-flops, then leaned closer to study his face like a rare specimen.
“How’d you even know about this place?”
Sal told us he’d seen a troupe of Samoan dancers performing in the Polynesia Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair the previous summer and was so entranced with the performance he’d returned to see the show again—and again, and again—and eventually made friends with the dancers.
“I’ve been saving up ever since to come here and visit them.” Sunlight struck his face in a way that made him look like he had light bulbs behind his cheeks. Or maybe the shine really was coming fro
m inside. I’d never met anyone so instantly enthralled with Samoa. I had to get to know this guy.
After Marnie wandered off to shop in Fagatogo, Sal and I spent most of the afternoon sitting on a palm-shaded bench behind the Jorgensens’ old house on Centipede Row—both of us admiring the plush mountains, the hunter green water, and the swaying, flower-spraying cable car—and talking with a passion that seemed ours alone about the place, the people, and our heartfelt connections to it all. When I had to leave for my dance lesson, we agreed to meet the next afternoon at the hotel, where the World’s Fair troupe would be performing.
The next afternoon Sal was waiting in the snack bar as the dance troupe’s musicians milled around, preparing to perform. A crowd of tourists had gathered, but we managed to find a table near the front. Like Sal, I’d seen the troupe’s routine plenty of times—they often performed at the hotel—but each time, the clatter of drums, the swish of grass skirts, and the flash of knives and fire batons brought my own internal rhythms and refrains more in tune with the island’s.
At the program’s end, the musicians eased into a gentle sivasiva, and dancers pulled guests onto the floor. Sal and I exchanged split-second glances before springing from our seats and gliding across the pavement in the alternately knock-kneed, bow-legged shuffle of the dance. Sal was surprisingly good, and when, still moving in pace with the beat, I lowered myself toward the ground, he mimicked the move without tottering.
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