Mango Rash

by Pokerwinski, Nan Sanders;

  “Cool pin,” I said. “You were in an art club?”

  Valerie fingered the pin and smirked. “Yeah, last year. But down here, I’ve been telling people I got it from my boyfriend in the States, Arthur Club.” She exhaled a barely audible chuckle.

  “You have not! Has anyone fallen for it?”

  “Couple people. Can you believe that?”

  I laughed out loud, cheered by a thread of connection. Leaning across the placemat, I asked, “So do you really have a boyfriend back home?”

  “Nah. You?”

  “Yeah. Well, sorta. There’s this guy, Danny. We’ve been going together for a while. Actually, he moved to Alabama before I moved down here, but we write to each other all the time, and he says he’ll wait for me.” I smiled at the thought of Danny’s picture on my dresser.

  “Wait for what?” Valerie, fiddling with the spoon again, shot me her slant-eyed look.

  “Till we can be together again. I mean, we might date other people for now, but when I’m back in the States, we’ll get together and get married someday.” Arms crossed, I leaned back in my chair as my mind filled with images of candlelight satin, alençon lace, and peau de soie slippers—specifics I’d absorbed from reading wedding write-ups in the Stillwater News Press.

  The whap of Valerie’s spoon slamming against the table jolted me out of my reverie, but her next words jarred me more.

  “That’s bullshit.”

  Good God, is everyone from Michigan as blunt as this girl? That’s where the Pucketts were from: Kalamazoo. Where we came from, people were not so direct, especially not in our family. Even at the dinner table, we weren’t supposed to ask straight out to have something passed. The proper etiquette, according to my father, was to ask the person seated nearest the dish you wanted if they would like some of whatever was in it: “Would you care for potatoes, Mrs. Wilks?” And if Mrs. Wilks didn’t catch on and simply said, “No, thank you,” instead of the correct response: “No, but may I pass you some?” you were out of luck.

  “Want a Fanta?” Valerie asked. I looked around to see if there was something I was supposed to pass.

  “A what?”

  “Fanta. We don’t get Coke or Pepsi down here. Just Fanta. The orange isn’t too bad. If you like fluorescent beverages.” Valerie’s lips eased into a half smile, but her eyes were still like slits in a mask.

  “Okay, one fluorescent Fanta, please.” I mirrored her expression, allowing the corners of my mouth to rise only so far. “You wouldn’t happen to have any Day-Glo Cheetos to go with that, would you?”

  Valerie’s half smile broadened into a bona fide grin, evidence that the test was over and I’d made the grade. My smile expanded, too, not in a copycat way, but reflecting real pleasure. I was still making up my mind whether I liked this girl, but I liked that she now seemed to like me.

  Valerie pushed out of her chair, went to the refrigerator, took out a bottle of orange soda and set it on the table with two glasses, making no attempt to hide the warty finger.

  “There you go. Would you like a napkin?”

  So she does have manners. I reached for the bottle and poured us each a glass. “No, but thanks for asking.”

  “Just trying to be the perfect hostess, you know.” With a theatrical flounce, Valerie flipped her head away, then looked back over one shoulder and showed a cheesy smile. “Mother says I have a flair for entertaining.” She burst out laughing, buckling at the waist and gripping the refrigerator door handle as if too weak to support herself.

  I was laughing, too. “Oh, you have, you have. A real flair.”

  I was still smiling and thinking about Valerie as Dr. Donaldson drove us back to apartment I-7. Just before our turnoff, another girl caught my attention. A Samoan girl about my age, the first I’d seen up close, ambled along the path that ran beside the road. She walked like those people at the airport, like she was going somewhere but didn’t care when she got there. Her broad feet were bare, yet she didn’t flinch as coral gravel crunched beneath them. She wore a red-and-white lavalava tucked around her hips and a white blouse buttoned all the way up to its Peter Pan collar. Her hair—black, thick, wavy, and coarse as sisal—was plaited into a single braid that hung to her waist. It looked like a cable that could hold up a bridge. Her features, too, were indelicate: wide, flat nose; full lips; narrow eyes under heavy, black eyebrows. Nothing like the pretty Polynesian girls I’d seen in cruise ship ads or the smiling hula girls in Honolulu.

  As I watched her on the footpath, I tried to imagine us being friends, cozying up in my room, listening to Beatles records, leafing through teen magazines, and whispering about our boyfriends. But the picture wouldn’t come into focus. Whatever American-style modernization was going on in Samoa, it didn’t seem to have affected this girl. For all I knew, she had no idea who the Beatles were; I doubted she’d ever had a boyfriend, and she clearly wasn’t keeping up on the latest styles. I was also fairly certain she would not find humor in the garish hues of soft drinks and snack foods.

  I tried, but I couldn’t see myself making friends with a Samoan girl, not this one or any other. That girl from Kalamazoo, though, maybe.

  Chapter 3—Sadie Thompson and Orange Samoa

  When he came on deck the next morning they were close to land. He looked at it with greedy eyes. There was a thin strip of silver beach rising quickly to hills covered to the top with luxuriant vegetation. The coconut trees, thick and green, came nearly to the water’s edge, and among them you saw the grass houses of the Samoans …

  —W. Somerset Maugham, “Rain”

  Happy talk, keep talkin’ happy talk,

  Talk about things you’d like to do.

  You got to have a dream,

  If you don’t have a dream,

  How you gonna have a dream come true?

  -- Happy Talk, “South Pacific,” Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein

  Whizzing coconut milk and chunks of coconut meat in a blender, my father improvised a sauce for the fish he was about to bake. Beside him in the narrow galley, my mother sliced papayas and wedges of lime to squeeze over the fruit, her knife rapping in counterpoint to the blender’s steady whir. In this domestic task, as in everything else, my parents worked as a unit, moving around each other in a pas de deux as graceful as the steps they’d perfected in their ballroom dancing class.

  Our first few days on the island, we’d been invited out for meals, joining fellow expats for lunch in the Rainmaker Hotel’s bayside restaurant and dining at other doctors’ homes (where my mother, who’d left the fine china in Oklahoma, was chagrined to discover the other wives had brought theirs along). Now we were settling into a routine of shopping and cooking for ourselves.

  “I went to BP’s today—” my father announced over the kitchen racket. The way his voice rose at the end of the sentence, I could tell there was more to come, and knowing how long he could ramble, I sat down at the table.

  “—and that’s why we’re having fish instead of beans.” He switched off the blender and lifted its lid.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, knowing he was pausing for my question. I always took the bait, always listened to his stories, always laughed when he got to the punch line. I was the unofficial guardian of my father’s feelings, a role I’d assumed more by instinct than by choice. My whole life I had sensed vulnerability beneath his mirth, a sinkhole in his psyche. Listening and laughing were the ways I tried to buffer him from disappointment and sadness. Years later I’d wonder why I, more than my mother, felt so compelled to validate and protect the man at the center of both our lives, but at sixteen I acted automatically on the impulse without examining it.

  When he didn’t respond, I prodded: “BP’s—that’s the place with the good candy, right?” I hoped he’d remembered to buy me a Caramello bar.

  “That’s the one.”

  There were no real supermarkets on the island, so we shopped at the open-air market and made the rounds of
the various general stores in search of whatever we needed. It didn’t take long to learn which stores to hit for certain items: Jessop’s had its own bakery with a machine that sliced bread just right for sandwiches; Kneubuhl’s carried New Zealand beef and real milk that came frozen and had to be thawed but still tasted better than powdered; Haleck’s stocked an assortment of canned goods, along with bolts of bright fabric on shelves behind the cash register; BP’s offered Cadbury chocolate. Though Samoan merchants tried to accommodate the tastes of the growing number of Americans, some of our favorite foods had been hard to track down.

  “I really wanted to cook up a pot of pinto beans—a taste of home, you know?” my father said.

  I sure did. Soupy brown beans with cornbread baked crispy in a bacon-greased skillet were staples on our table back in Stillwater. The mere mention of the dish evoked the meaty, pleasingly dirty flavor of the beans.

  “And?” I urged him on.

  “I looked all around the store and didn’t find any, so I went up and asked the Samoan lady behind the counter, ‘Do you have any beans?’ And she said, ‘Beeeeens? We have beeeeens. What kind of beeeeens you want?’ “

  He paused to pour the coconut sauce over a slab of fresh wahoo, a local, tuna-like fish. My father’s hands, accustomed to sewing up lacerations and palpating for lumps, were just as adept at kitchen chores. He picked up a spatula and smoothed the sauce across the flesh, covering every bare spot as if frosting a cake.

  “‘Pinto beans,’ I told her, and she said, ‘Pinto beeeeens? I don’t know what you mean pinto beeeeens. We have clothes beeeeens and straight beeeeens. No pinto beeeeens.’ “

  I laughed. Not a fake laugh to make my father feel good, but one that burbled up on its own when I got the joke: In spoken Samoan—or English spoken with a Samoan accent—“b” and “p” are virtually interchangeable.

  My father continued: “I said, ‘No, beans, beans,’ but there was no way I could make her understand that I wanted beans, not peeeens. So I asked for wahoo.” He opened the oven door and slid the pan of frosted fish onto the rack.

  I laughed again. “Oh, well, Daddy. Fish is fine.”

  “Yes, but I really wanted beans.”

  He made a clownish, frowny face that I knew was only mock sadness. Conditioned as I was to respond to any hint of dismay, I cracked, “Clothes beeeeens or straight beeeeens?”

  My father rolled his eyes. He smiled, and the pebble of anxiety that was rattling around my ribcage disintegrated. Whenever he launched into one of his tales about some everyday frustration—whether related with humor or sputtered out in anger—I worried he’d get so riled up and red-faced in the telling, he’d pop an artery and fall over dead. In these anecdotes, he was always engaged in a reasonable quest—back in Oklahoma it was usually something like correcting an error on his Sears bill or changing a procedure at his medical office—but he invariably met resistance from some stubborn or thick-headed functionary. One day it was a store clerk, the next day his office nurse, a strong-willed woman named Beulah who ignored his complaints and kept showing up for work when he fired her, which he did at least once a year.

  Why, with his low threshold for frustration, had he brought us to a place where simply buying a bag of beans could be a trial?

  He’d never really explained his attraction for Samoa. There were vague, dreamy references to Somerset Maugham and Rodgers and Hammerstein, so I supposed his South Pacific fantasies has been brewing for some time, fed by Hollywood movies and books read years before. One of the characters in Maugham’s short story, “Rain,” was a physician on his way to spend a year on a nearby island when he and his shipmates became stranded in Pago Pago. Maybe Maugham’s Dr. McPhail was my father’s inspiration. But the doctor in the story befriended the prostitute Sadie Thompson, something I couldn’t picture my father doing. I’d heard him make derogatory remarks about women who wore tight dresses and grew their hair long. “Sexpots!” he’d say, hissing the word so it sounded more distasteful than provocative. Shopping at Haleck’s general store—the current incarnation of the old boarding house where “Rain” was set—was probably as close as my father ever would come to reliving the adventures of the fictitious physician. So what had possessed him, at fifty-two—a man with a thriving medical practice, every material comfort he’d ever hoped for, and two young grandsons he and my mother adored—to decide to set off for Samoa?

  All I knew was that one night at dinner, he’d nonchalantly made the announcement.

  “I saw an ad in the back of a medical journal,” he said.

  “Um-hm.” Expecting one of his rambling anecdotes, I barely looked up from my mashed potatoes.

  “They were looking for doctors to work in American Samoa. You know, down in the South Pacific? The government’s got a big modernization campaign underway down there. They’re hiring American teachers, doctors, you name it.”

  “Hmmm.” I fed him the prompt I knew he expected, but I was more engrossed in chasing a pea around my plate than in following his narrative.

  “I was just curious, so I wrote to find out more. That was, oh, about a month ago, and I’d forgotten about it until I got a letter back yesterday.” The pitch of his voice crept upward, the way it did as he neared a punch line.

  “The letter said I was hired, and could I be there by September?”

  My fork was halfway to my mouth. I laid it back on the plate, potatoes, peas and all, and turned to look at my mother. Was she hearing this for the first time, too? Her expression offered no clues. She just raised her eyebrows, as if my father had said, “Let’s drive to Dallas for the weekend,” instead of “Let’s completely uproot ourselves and go off to a place we know next to nothing about, out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Samoa?” I said. “September?” That was only a few months away. School would be starting then—my junior year. I was just getting my bearings in high school, stumbling down the hallway of adolescence, jostled by new sensations, emotions, physical changes, and now I was supposed to start all over in a new place? And not just a new place but an island a kajllion miles from anything remotely resembling civilization? I started to protest, but stopped short before any words came out. He did say Samoa, didn’t he? This can’t be happening.

  It was uncanny. My father couldn’t have known—almost no one knew—but I’d been having my own South Pacific fantasies. And they were set, of all places, in Samoa. The whole thing had started the previous summer, when Danny and I were daydreaming about our futures together. We’d been dating for most of the year, I was wearing his simulated garnet ring on a snaky chain around my neck, and we were talking about getting married someday. But he was Catholic, and I was Baptist, and we were already getting grief from his priest and my pastor about being together.

  “We’ll just have to run away to an island somewhere,” Danny said one afternoon as we sat on the family room sofa flipping through magazines.

  “Okay. Where?”

  He turned a couple of pages and started to laugh.

  “What?”

  He pointed to an ad on the magazine page. A dark-skinned woman with long, black hair held a can of fruit juice. “Orange Samoa,” the label read.

  “How about Samoa?”

  “Samoa it is.” I curled my fingers around his, still resting on the magazine ad.

  For the rest of that summer, Samoa was our secret obsession. We doodled drawings of grass shacks on scraps of paper, and I pasted them in my scrapbook, alongside the Orange Samoa ad. I ordered a tiny silver palm tree from a catalog and hung it from my charm bracelet between the flattened, Lord’s Prayer-inscribed penny and the St. Christopher medal Danny had given me.

  But before we had a chance to run off to the South Seas, Danny moved to Alabama. His father had been transferred, and one August morning his whole family—mother, father, and all five kids—squeezed into their Ford Fairlane and drove away as I watched from the front yard, tearful and tortured with the anguish of first authen
tic heartbreak. I kept the ring, and Danny and I tried to keep up the fantasy in letters we wrote to each other on narrow-ruled notebook paper nearly every day.

  By the following spring, though, when my father broke the news about moving to Samoa, my tropical daydreams were drifting in other directions, like the Kon Tiki blown off course en route to Puka Puka. A ticket to Samoa—or anywhere beyond the Oklahoma state line—had come to symbolize passage to a life that surely was more stimulating than the one I was living. High school was less than I’d hoped for. Not awful. Just not what American Bandstand, Seventeen magazine, and Annette Funicello had led me to expect. I had friends, I got invited to parties, I belonged to Tri Chi, a social club for girls my age, but the best that Stillwater, Oklahoma had to offer seemed not quite good enough—like settling for Tangee lipstick when you really wanted Revlon.

  Tri Chi was fun enough, and there was something to be said for being part of a clique. In winter we wore identical Tri Chi sweatshirts; in summer, oversized Tri Chi t-shirts that doubled as sleepwear. We exchanged Tri Chi charms for our Tri Chi bracelets and hung Tri Chi pendants from silver neck chains. I even had a silver ring custom made with a trio of Xs—three Greek letter Chi’s—carved into its surface, and I wore it day and night. Oh yeah, we Tri Chis were branded with belonging twenty-four/seven. But outside of weekly meetings and occasional rummage sales, we had no discernible purpose. Our principal activity was piling into our cars and driving up and down a one-mile stretch of Main Street, bracketed by the Sonic drive-in on the south and Griff’s Burger Bar on the north, while honking our horns at each other and at girls from the rival club, the TOGs.

  Be-BEEEE-beep. Hi TRI Chi!

  Be-b’bee-BEEEEP. T-O-G TOG!

  All night long, up and down, up and down.