I thought back to that first fiafia in Aoloau, when I’d envied Toni for knowing the dance. Now I knew the steps, too.
We danced until the music ended and the dancers and tourists drifted away. Then we sat on a lava wall with a view of the harbor’s mouth and picked up the thread of the previous afternoon’s conversation. Sal told me he planned to stay in Samoa as long as he possibly could. I told him I did too and confided my own schemes: Peace Corps, tutoring, marriage to Peki.
“I really think I’d die if I had to leave,” I declared.
Sal nodded—a single, slow nod—and pulled from his shirt pocket several folded sheets of onion skin paper.
“I wrote this on the plane coming down here.” His slender fingers peeled the paper open. “I wouldn’t let most people read it, but I have a feeling you’ll understand.”
I took the paper from him and read the three-page poem he’d printed in blue ballpoint. It was bad, sappy verse, but I didn’t know it at the time, and it wouldn’t have mattered if I had. Its lines about “greenness on blueness sea, white and whiteness sand,” and “never ending passion and fondness” for the people and the paradise where his soul washed to shore expressed all my own overwrought emotions.
I told him it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever read and asked if he’d make a copy for me. He said he’d do it that night and give it to me when we met up again the next day.
I could have sivasivaed all the way home, buoyed by my new friendship with someone who saw Samoa the way I did and who didn’t think it was crazy to want to spend a lifetime—or at least a few more years—here.
Still smiling as I opened the front door, I stifled my joy and made what I thought was an appropriately sober face when I saw my parents’ troubled expressions.
“What’s wrong?” I hoped another doctor hadn’t died. I looked past my parents and searched the living room for Tom, hoping he’d waggle his eyebrows to telegraph what was going on or reassure me with the Liberace crinkle. He was nowhere to be seen.
My mother put an arm around me but turned her face away. My father took both my hands in his. “We got your test results.”
My mind shifted into high gear, racing through scenarios as I tried to read the medical report from my parents’ faces.
It can’t be syphilis—they wouldn’t be acting this nice if it was. So that’s good, right? But why do they look so upset?
“The pathologist in Hawaii called me long distance to make sure I hadn’t mislabeled the sample,” my father continued. “He said, ‘This is not something we see in a seventeen-year-old girl.’ I told him I was sorry to say that I was sure it was the right sample; I took it myself from my own daughter.” At that, my father teared up, but the only emotion I felt was impatience. This was no time for one of his anecdotal lead-ins.
“So what is it?”
Pulling himself together into the composed physician, my father delivered the diagnosis: “Carcinoma,” he said. “Cancer.”
I should have been knocked senseless, but my first reaction was relief that instead of a shameful social disease I had something dramatic that would elicit sympathy and leniency from my parents. A brain tumor would’ve been better—more suffering heroine potential. Tongue cancer didn’t sound nearly as impressive and, in fact, was downright gross. Still, I’d work with it. I didn’t know enough about cancer to realize the odds weren’t in my favor. I only knew that my mother had had it and was still alive, so I imagined I’d have some sort of treatment, be tired for awhile and then get back to life as usual.
I couldn’t figure out what to say, so I said nothing as I continued to study my parents’ faces. Once again, I was causing them pain—not through anything intentional, but perhaps through some thoughtless act or oversight that triggered a ma’i Samoa that turned into cancer. I was supposed to protect my parents from disappointment, sadness, and stress. How could I do that now?
“Don’t worry, honey.” My mother stroked my hair the way she had the night of the fire. “We’ll get you the best care we can find, no matter where we have to go.”
That was when it sank in that our lives were going to change considerably more than I’d thought. And then came the news that crushed me more than any diagnosis could have.
“We’ve already made arrangements,” my father said, thinking he was reassuring me. “Tom’s gone to the airport to pick up our tickets. We’re leaving for Oklahoma Sunday night; you’ll be back home soon.”
It was already Thursday. Another year on the island wouldn’t have been enough, but now I had just three more days. My recurring dream was reality: my time in Samoa was too quickly slipping away.
“But we’ll come back here as soon as I’m better, right?”
My father’s eyes told me he wasn’t going to make promises he couldn’t keep.
“Someday we’ll send you back to visit,” he said. “But no, we won’t be coming back to live.”
Chapter 32—Tofa
Ua fa’ala’au tu i vanu
(Like a tree standing near a precipice)
—Samoan proverb interpreted as “The future is unknown.”
I’ve heard people say that when something disastrous happens, life changes in the blink of an eye. It’s true, fate is redirected in a matter of milliseconds. But the sinking in, the conscious course correction—that’s a more gradual, layered process.
The next three mornings I awoke as always, with sunlight filtering through my curtains and slowly returning color to my bedspread and wall hangings. Minutes passed before I remembered my diagnosis and looming departure. When reality eventually broke through, I tried to push it away and burrow back into my den of ignorance, but truth, insistent as the sun, forced me into full awareness.
When it did, I jumped out of bed, only because if I lay there any longer I’d think too much about how far away Val was and how much I needed her zaniness to distract me.
Other friends tried, but how could they know what to say to a girl with cancer? They faltered and fumbled and hung their heads and made me feel as bad for them as for myself. Even Peki made himself scarce, as if afraid he’d catch my ma’i palagi. If my sweet, accepting Samoa friends were this uneasy with my illness, how would it play in Stillwater, where I already felt like a misfit?
It was worse when someone tried too hard to lighten the mood, like when Marnie blithely remarked, “I guess we should call you Cancy now, huh?” I laughed it off instead of burying my head in a sofa pillow like I wanted to. I’d been struggling for the past eleven months to define myself; was a disease now going to hijack my identity? Not if I could help it. I’d stood up to my parents, to Suzi, and to anyone else who tried to tell me who or what I was. I’d be damned if I’d let cancer pigeonhole me.
Especially not tongue cancer. A disease no one but raspy old men got. There was absolutely no glamour to be eked out of that—not the disease, and certainly not the afflicted body part. A breast was sexy, a brain was essential, but a tongue—really kind of disgusting when you looked at it closely, which I’d been forced to do lately. Yuck.
In a way, it was good we were leaving so soon. With my days now a schizoid scramble of life-as-usual and frantic, last-chance bustle, I had little time to dwell on distress or anything else. I showed up for my tutoring jobs, got a haircut, guzzled milkshakes with Tom at the hotel, declined another picnic invitation from Iakopu, and raced around the island handing out invitations to my thrown-together tofa party and snapping pictures of everything I hadn’t yet documented.
With my Kodak Instamatic, I shot landmarks like Fatu and Futi, the “flower pots” that jutted out of the ocean just offshore. Tall as two- and three-story buildings, the massive black lava outcrops topped with vegetation looked like oversized planters spilling with greenery. For centuries, those mute sentinels had watched islanders and temporary inhabitants come and go. Had they taken note of me?
Farther down the coast, I tried to capture the backlit glow of that particular patch of
ocean that dazzled me so on the drive to Aoloau for our first fiafia. How little I’d known then! How much I knew now—not just about customs and dance steps, but about resilience and survival. As I clicked away at a sunset over an expanse of ocean, I thought about Wayne staying afloat, whistling in the waves. When I photographed fales in the picture-book village of Pava’ia’i, I remembered Samoans rebuilding and rebounding after the hurricane. Even my shots of our old apartment building, the airport, and the palm-lined sidewalk behind Centipede Row dredged up memories of strength and grace in the face of adversity: friends helping out after the fire, Val and her mother pulling themselves together and taking care of business after Dr. Puckett died.
The survival lessons of the past year were everywhere, and as I made my rounds, everything seemed amplified: the shouts and snatches of music louder, the shades of sky and sea deeper, the fragrance of frangipani headier, as if every sound, color, and scent were striving to imprint itself on my consciousness.
I communed with my mountain muses, viewed through a scrim of tears. Malosi had taught me not to ask why me, why now, but still I raged and mourned. Cancer was tearing me away from these mountains, from children’s hugs and crayoned sketches, from palm trees, bay breezes, swooning guitars, and swaying rhythms. From all I had loved and all I had imagined. Cancer was stealing my dream.
The last pictures in my Samoa album are from the night of my farewell. There’s me, pre-party, in the same lavalava I wore by the waterfall at Papase’ea Sliding Rock, wearing a wistful expression as I stand beside the Vampires’ drum set in my living room. And later that evening, me in the fa’afafine dress, framed by brown faces; me in the kitchen with my parents, whose smiles look forced; me dancing with Bill Bigfoot (in crewcut and muscle shirt, not Mohawk and kimono), who kept telling me, “Sure gonna miss you, little girl.” There’s Marnie laughing with a boy she thought she loved; there’s Fibber with his arm flung around his cousin Gus’s shoulder, and Maika and Bill Bigfoot making strong-man muscles. There’s a close-up of Sal in a turquoise aloha shirt, his features washed out from the flash. There’s Pili and Poloka clowning around on a break between sets. The Mo’o girls teasing a pack of boys. Eti beaming, but looking half-complete without her sidekick Daisy. Peki, dear Peki, huddled with a bunch of other boys on the daybed in the corner.
Thirty-one photographs, not so very different from the other party pictures in my album. Not so very different from the snapshots of any palagi girl whose stay on the island was brief.
There was nothing much to see through the double-paned window. Runway lights and a glimmer from the terminal. Mountains and sea lost to night’s negritude. Everything receding, growing smaller.
The lightlessness reminded me of the night I rode with Nana to her village, over highways whose mileposts and landmarks were invisible to me. This night, on a jet bound for Honolulu, I was again unsure of what lay ahead, yet inexplicably free of fear.
Settling into my seat, I reflected on all that had transpired since this palagi girl burst from the sky and landed on the island that now was disappearing from view. In the span of eleven months, I had witnessed the perfect beauty of a frangipani blossom and found beauty in imperfection. I had observed human beings—palagi and Samoan—at their finest and most flawed. I had sought transformation, expecting to find it in grand experiences, and found it instead in small moments: sitting by a waterfall, dancing in a village, sharing love and laughter and friendship. I had yearned for a challenge that would redefine me, and imagined setting off with a rucksack filled with topo maps and hardtack, or sailing away with a change of clothes, a bilge pump and emergency flares. Instead, I was bound for a very different kind of challenge, equipped with memories and a spirit imbued with malosi.
EPILOGUE
Malosi served me well: I survived. Not just the five years my prognosis predicted, but long enough to look back and reflect fifty years later. In the years between, I’ve navigated the alien world of illness and its aftermath, faced down surgeries and scars, learned the language of recurrence and metastasis, suffered losses, pondered impermanence, and tried to do it all with as much grace as I could muster.
Those first months back in Oklahoma were a jumble of ups and downs. Still jet-lagged from traveling six thousand miles, I was hustled off to an Oklahoma City hospital for more tests and biopsies—all negative. My doctors wore puzzled looks and talked about a possible mistake in the earlier results from Honolulu. My hopes rose. If I wasn’t sick after all, we could still turn around and get back to Samoa for my senior year.
Further tests turned up spots that were cancer. No return ticket to Samoa for me.
There was alarming—and mercifully brief—talk of surgery to remove my jawbone and half my tongue. When I refused to consider any such thing, my parents backed me up and found specialists in Colorado who would see me for monthly check-ups and take a wait-and-watch approach, allowing me to start school in Stillwater. I packed away my puletasi, cruised the Sonic with Tri Chi friends, and broke the habit of reaching for girlfriends’ hands when walking together. From every outward appearance, I’d made a smooth transition back into stateside life.
My diary entries told a different story: “I hate it here,” I wrote night after night. “I want to go home to Samoa.” After I’d cried myself to sleep, that recurring dream—the one of being back in Samoa, but not for long—still haunted me.
In time, my mood and health stabilized. My mother’s health, however, deteriorated. Two years after our return, her cancer slipped back and stealthily spread. By the time her back pain led to its discovery, the disease was too advanced to be deterred. Under my father’s care, she held on for more than a year, exhibiting her own brand of malosi. When she died, shortly after my twenty-first birthday, I wondered if I would ever again find anyone or anything to hold onto.
I anguished, too, for my father. Knowing how he’d suffered through my mother’s illness and death, I worried he’d be destroyed if I took sick again.
Years passed: long stretches of perfect health punctuated by recurrences, surgeries, and more aggressive treatments. Cancer, it seemed, would always be part of my life. Lucky for me, so would Samoa. The dream, yes, and the memories and the lessons learned, but also the friendships.
Close as my mates and I felt during that extraordinary year, we never expected any forever from our friendships. Yet the bonds forged in that islet of time have lasted longer than parts of our lives that seemed so much more durable back then. When I page through my old photo album, I see faces of friends with whom I’m still in touch: Val, Wendy, Barry and Bev (married to each other now), and others. Over the years we’ve shared connection and dispensed comfort through crises more excruciating than we were capable of imagining in youth.
Other faces are ghosts. Marnie, Daisy, Suzi, Toni, and so many more left us too soon. And yet they are friendly ghosts whose pictures remind me that it’s worth forming attachments, even if pieces of you crumble away each time one breaks.
I lost track of some friends. Lee sailed away, but I learned about the rest of his voyage and his life after that adventure from two books he wrote: Dove and Home Is the Sailor. Other friends I reconnected with when, finally, I returned to Samoa twenty years after my hasty departure. That trip is a story for another time. Suffice to say that thanks to a helpful Samoan postmaster (who remembered my family and also happened to be Pili’s aunt) and the hospitality of Pili, Abe, and others, I enjoyed a homecoming sweeter than any in my dreams. Nearly forty years old at the time, I tracked down Fibber at his job in Tafuna and instantly felt the kinship we’d shared in our teens when he lived on the hillside behind my apartment. He told me Peki was married and living in California, news that made me glad for Peki, but wistful about the likelihood of ever seeing him again.
One evening I accompanied Pili to a club where his band (no longer the Vampires, but a new band with the same island sway) was playing. During a break, he introduced me to a young man whose name I recognized. The s
trapping fellow who shook my hand was little Tui, all grown up. I told him I still had the fale he’d drawn for me twenty years before. His grin, just as before, lit me up inside.
My return to Samoa drained the bitter from my bittersweet memories and reminded me that as much as we think we have a grasp on one place at any given point in time, things shift, and we can’t hold on. Yet if we allow ourselves to experience it fully, love it as much as we’re capable of loving, mourn its loss as deeply as we’re capable of mourning, we’ll carry its essence with us and be sustained in other times of change and loss.
We all inhabit islands of impermanence, all try to find our ways in this strange territory of life as human beings. Sometimes we howl into the wind; sometimes we cower from the storm’s fury; sometimes we pursue false idols; sometimes, in our carelessness, we set things ablaze. But when we listen to the music around us and summon our strength, we can all find the rhythm and dance.
We can all find our fa’a Samoa.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Ua le sula fala o ‘Ie’ie.
(‘Ie’ie’s mats were not acknowledged.)
-- Samoan expression of joy for such abundance that one hasn’t enough strength to adequately express thanks
An enormous fa’afetai tele lava to everyone who helped me turn a mishmash of memories into this book.
Lynn Price, I want to shower you with hibiscus blossoms from the cable car high above Pago Bay. Some wondrous alignment of stars brought us together at the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association conference to give Mango Rash the perfect home at Behler Publications.Your enthusiasm for this book has meant the world.
Sister Scribes Cristina Trapani Scott, Cyan James, Cathy Stocker, Laura Bailey, and Elizabeth Solsberg were the midwives who so skillfully assisted with the birth of the manuscript and nurtured it as it grew. Brilliant suggestions, support, and occasional baked goods from members of the Artworks Second Monday Writers Group and the Fremont Area District Library Writers Group were much appreciated as well. Special thanks to Artworks writers Susan Stec, Thea Heying, Christopher Rizzo, Chris Wyman, Magen Gombosh, Millie Gillies, Sally Kane, and the late Mikki Garrels.
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