Be-BEEEE-beep.
Be-b’bee-BEEEEP.
Be-BEEEE-beep.
Honking like flocks of cacophonous birds staking out territories and announcing our status. Pulling into the Sonic for lime Dr. Peppers and tater tots—little bullets of potato, deep-fried to a crisp. Wiping the grease from our lips, checking our reflections in our rearview mirrors as we reapplied our frosted pink lipsticks, and backing out of our parking spaces to drive the circuit again.
Some nights, the Sonic was the only place in the world I wanted to be. But sometimes, sitting in the parking lot, I’d stare past the rows of souped-up ‘57 Chevys and family sedans borrowed for the night, stare into the distance, where Main Street turned into Highway 177, and imagine myself really going somewhere instead of around in circles.
My dreams of escape, in some strange way, were in sync with my father’s island fantasies. But my mother? What were her dreams?
Years before, when she was the shoeless girl playing with kittens on a ramshackle porch that made her family’s farmhouse look like it was missing some teeth, had she stared at the treeless horizon and wondered what lay beyond? Had she spun out intricate webs of dreams that she stuffed back inside when she married and my father’s ambitions took precedence? If she had, she never told me, but hints of the life she’d envisioned for herself sometimes surfaced in her hopes for me, like settlers’ abandoned belongings exposed when the wind sweeps away the prairie dust. Over time, my mother’s agenda fused with my own, blurring the line between expectation and aspiration.
“Do you know what this means?” she’d say when I brought home A’s on my French tests. “You’ve got an ear for language. You can be a translator. Work for the U.N. Travel around the world.” And when the Tri Chis elected me publicity chairman, my mother didn’t see it as an affirmation of my popularity; it was the first step in a career as a journalist and foreign correspondent.
There was also this to factor into any consideration of my mother’s motivations: cancer. Double mastectomy and cobalt treatments two years before; everything apparently fine now, but who knew for how long? Though it didn’t occur to me at the time, relatives’ remarks would later make me wonder if my mother’s illness had precipitated our move to Samoa. Remembering my father’s exasperation at well-meaning friends who urged my mother to try crackpot cures or visit faith healers, I wondered if perhaps we packed up and moved six thousand miles just to escape the meddling. Or, if rather than running away from something, my parents were running toward dreams while they still had time to catch them.
Whatever the reasons, that night at the dinner table when my father broke the news that might have fractured some other family, he got no arguments from his wife and daughter.
It might not always be so. But this night, in apartment I-7, we could all agree on one thing: the fish was delicious. And so was the Cadbury chocolate we had for dessert.
Chapter 4—Fiafia
Fa’atoetoe le muli o le ola.
(Keep the remainder of the basket for others.)
—Samoan proverb
From the balcony outside my bedroom, I scanned the courtyard of our apartment complex. A woman in a housecoat was setting out food for her cats. In front of another building, a little girl with blond curls clambered up a jungle gym.
After spending most of my life in a sprawling split-level on a double lot with mimosa trees and arbor vitae shielding us from neighbors, this new communality—sharing an outdoor space smaller than a basketball court with half a dozen or so other families—was taking some getting used to. At first, I felt exposed and self-conscious every time I went outside, like I’d forgotten to button my blouse. But some aspects of out-in-the-open life were growing on me: I could perch unnoticed on my balcony and watch the goings-on for as long as I wanted, and if anything interesting happened, I could come down from my loft and join in.
Once in a while the other teenagers in the complex—the Baker sisters in the apartment directly across from ours and a burly Texas boy named Barry in the building by the jungle gym—wandered out, looking like they wanted company. As I watched the housecoat lady and the climbing girl, Barry moseyed over to sit atop a picnic table next to the playground equipment. I liked Barry; his drawl reminded me of home, and he was easy to talk to, partly because of his laid-back manner, but also because he was clearly off-limits. He had a girlfriend, Bev, who lived out by the airport in Tafuna, and they were serious with a capital S.
By the time I reached the picnic table, the little girl was there, too, telling Barry a rambling story in a five-year-old’s singsong style.
“You know last Sunday? We went to this fiafia? It was wa-a-a-a-y out on the other end of the island? And they had so much food! I ate so much I popped my puletasi!”
I shot Barry a look. He laughed at my expression.
“A fiafia is a feast,” he explained. “A big celebration. It means, ‘happy.’ “
“I know that,” I said. “The feast part, at least. I’m supposed to go to one with my parents tomorrow. But what did she pop?”
Barry laughed again, eyes merry behind Clark Kent glasses. “Her puletasi? Oh, that’s the kind of dress Samoan ladies wear. Gigi was wearing one last Sunday, right Gigi?”
The little girl nodded, ringlets bouncing like soft springs around her face.
“Oh,” I said in a voice smaller than Gigi’s. “Thank goodness.”
I’d always prided myself on knowing. Knowing the right answers when the teacher called on me. Knowing how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism and sphygmomanometer. Knowing what people were talking about, even when I wasn’t supposed to. I’d grown up around adults—my only sibling was already a teenager when I was born—and eavesdropping on their conversations, I’d learned to pay attention to context and tone. I’d gotten pretty good at figuring out what was being discussed, even if I didn’t understand all the words. But that was in my old life; here in Samoa, I was as good as clueless. Here, I knew less than a five-year-old. I was desperate to learn.
From the moment we set foot in the mountain village of Aoloau, I knew this fiafia would be unlike any picnic back home. The first tip-off: the men with heavily tattooed thighs flashing beneath their red lavalavas as they sweated over underground ovens. And then those centerpieces. I had to look twice to believe what I was seeing. Banana leaves were spread like a table runner down the middle of long, woven mats laid end to end to form a sort of banquet table flat on the ground, and artfully arranged on the leaves were fruits cut into flower shapes, along with the Samoan equivalent of party favors: glistening slabs of raw pork for guests to take home in palm baskets or offer back to the hosts.
The occasion for this ceremonial feast was the dedication of a new school, and many of the Americans on the island were invited to the day-long event—the new school was, after all, the product of the U.S.-funded improvement program. The villagers were feeding us in return for satisfying their hunger for American know-how and prosperity. My parents and I had driven up from Utulei with Dr. Donaldson that morning—our sixth day on the island—arriving in time to watch the tattooed men tending the umus where whole pigs and leaf-wrapped packets of palusami roasted. When I saw Valerie standing with her family, hand on outthrust hip in a stance that broadcast disaffection, I hopped out of the Jeep and crossed the wide lawn to join her and pick up where our kitchen conversation had left off.
“I hope they get that food done soon—I’m starved,” I said.
“Tough luck.” Valerie shifted her weight and switched hips. “The grown-ups eat first; the kids get anything that’s left over. That’s fa’a Samoa—you know, the Samoan way. We can’t even sit with our parents.”
“Wish I’d known. I would’ve have brought candy bars.”
“Maybe Toni can sneak us something.” Valerie looked past me toward the village green; I followed her gaze and saw a girl about our age approaching.
I hadn’t met Toni yet, but I remembered Valerie mentioning her
when she gave me the run-down on all the other American kids on the island. Toni’s dad was principal of the Aoloau school, and their family lived in the village instead of in government housing at Tafuna or Utulei with most of the other Americans.
Watching Toni, I felt the same tug of awe and envy I’d felt when I found Barb’s graffiti in my bedroom. Her hair—the tawny color of dried pandanus leaves and perfectly straight—hung to the middle of her back, and she had tucked a red hibiscus blossom behind one ear. She wore a puletasi—a hip-length tunic over an ankle-grazing wrap-around skirt—and her smile threw off sparkles. She looked like she smiled a lot, maybe because her overbite made it hard not to, but maybe also because she had a lot to smile about.
Toni, who came from Iowa, seemed completely at ease in her puletasi, in her mountain village where people lived in wide-open houses and cooked in the ground and spoke a language that made no sense to me. At least her family lived in a Western-style house—the kind that had walls and sat high on concrete pillars. Even so, she couldn’t enjoy much privacy, could she?
Does she shower outside like the Samoans do? Do they all watch when she shaves her legs?
The worm of discomfort inched up my spine again, the same one that made me shudder at the sight of all those Samoans crowded into the fale at the airport. The togetherness of village life was unimaginable to me; sharing an apartment courtyard in Utulei was a big enough adjustment. And yet—something about this place, with its clusters of cozy huts, its shrubs flaunting blossoms as big as saucers, its umus huffing out aromas of roasting pork and coconut cream—something about the place took hold of me and generated an inner warmth intense enough to shrivel the worm.
I’d experienced a similar feeling on the drive from Utulei to Aoloau that morning. As we rounded one bend, the sight of the ocean straight ahead dazzled me: the waves broke at an angle, and the sunstruck aqua water glowed like backlit bottle glass. With a froth of whitecaps, that patch of sea reminded me of a marble I’d found when I was a kid, clear turquoise with swirling veins of white. As the memory whirlpooled with my new surroundings, I was buffeted by a sensation I’d known only in the throes of infatuation.
It was the feeling I’d had the night Danny and I first touched. After days—maybe weeks—of exchanging looks and chaste, exploratory notes in algebra class, we’d finally made physical contact at a classmate’s party. We knew next to nothing about each other, but we knew something that made us want to know more. Danny arrived on his Cushman motor scooter, a rattle-trap assemblage of metal that in my mind was as enticingly wicked as any Harley. I remember the darkened den, the Beach Boys on the stereo, and Danny—a skinny kid who’d just moved to town from Cupertino, California—appearing in the doorway and crossing the room to take my hand and move with me in that awkward, swaying hug that passes for dancing when you’re fourteen. His skin smelled of plain soap and gasoline, a combination that excited me more than the scents of citrus, wood, and old leather other boys splashed on themselves from bottles. I wanted to breathe him in with every breath until my last.
But Danny was a boy; boys were supposed to make girls feel that way. Now I was being romanced by—what exactly? I did not know.
The shouts sounded angry and defiant: “Ku-sa-fa! Ku-sa-fa!”
I wheeled around; Valerie didn’t even glance toward the noise.
“Relax. It’s just Rex,” she said. “He does this whenever we go to a fiafia. He thinks he’s a Talking Chief.”
Valerie’s five-year-old brother, bare-chested and wearing a pint-sized lavalava, stood at the head of the table-like mats, in the place where Samoan dignitaries would sit during the feast. He shook his fist and scowled and shouted long strings of words in what sounded like perfect Samoan.
“How’d he learn the language so fast?” I asked. I’d been struggling to memorize vocabulary lists from the Teach Yourself Samoan book I’d picked up at the London Missionary Society bookstore in Fagatogo. I’d learned a little about pronunciation—that that “g” sounded like “ng,” so Pago Pago was PAHNG-oh PAHNG-oh, and Fagatogo was fahng-uh-TOHNG-oh—but not much more. Now another five year old was reminding me how much I didn’t know.
“That’s not Samoan.” Valerie’s folded arms rose and fell with her chest as she heaved a sigh. “He just makes up words that sound like Samoan. Ku-sa-fa is his favorite. In case you hadn’t noticed.”
I looked around to see if anyone else was paying attention to Rex; no one was, and that was good. On the way to Aoloau, Dr. Donaldson had impressed upon us the importance of adhering to Samoan protocol, and I worried that Rex’s antics might offend our hosts. The name fiafia sounds carefree all right, but traditional Samoan feasts—and the kava ceremonies that precede them—are highly structured events with formalities that must be followed to the letter.
Only the ranking village chiefs—the matais—and certain other officials and honored guests are permitted to participate in the kava ceremony, and they follow a complicated series of sacred steps and speak in a language style that no one else understands, Dr. Donaldson had told us. Most of the oration is done by the High Talking Chief, the matai’s designated mouthpiece. It was this respected elder that Rex was impersonating.
As the adults gathered around the mats, Toni ushered us to one side of the clearing and told us we could watch from there; then she went off to help the other village women and girls prepare and serve the feast. I marveled at her ease in playing hostess, at how she understood all the rules and seamlessly shifted from American teenager to village maiden, laughing and joking with the Samoan girls.
I watched my mother, in her striped pink shirtwaist, lower herself to the ground as gracefully as if she dined this way every day. She crossed her legs in front of her—sitting any other way at a fiafia would insult the hosts—and tucked her skirt over her knees. She, too, seemed guided by some instinct that I lacked.
Baffled by customs I didn’t understand, hungry for delicacies I was forbidden to taste, I took my rightful place on the sidelines.
There was music—strums and plinkity-plinks of guitars and ukuleles and rat-a-tatting on something like a biscuit tin—and a dozen or so variously-aged women in matching puletasis came bounding out in a single-file line, moving in arm-pumping, step-step-step-HOPs that looked a lot like the Locomotion. Then the rhythm changed, the music softened, and the women began doing a sideways, toe-to-toe; heel-to-heel shuffle: the Samoan sivasiva. There in their midst, executing the steps like a born islander, was Toni.
Of course. She knows the dance, too.
After the music and dancing, a group of Samoan men wearing lavalavas and solemn faces made their way to a small fale near the feast area and sat in a semi-circle. All were shirtless, and some had ceremonial fly whisks, which looked like horsetails attached to wooden handles, draped over their shoulders. When the men were seated, a young woman appeared from the crowd wearing an outfit that made me gape. Instead of a puletasi, she wore a finely-woven pandanus mat wrapped around her body. It looked softer and more pliable than the typical floor mats, but she still looked like she was rolled up in a rug. On her head was a mop of bleached, human hair from which sprouted half a dozen or so slender, red sticks, each about two feet long and decorated with tufts of white feathers and round mirrors as big as the one in my Cover Girl compact. With the wild mane and the sticks standing straight up like antennae, she resembled some phantasmagorical creature, equal parts lion, insect, and space alien.
“That’s the taupou,” Valerie informed me. “Village virgin. She’s the only one allowed to make kava for the ceremony. It’s some kind of purity thing.”
I wondered how the villagers knew she was a virgin. I didn’t even know for sure about my best friends back home. They all said they were, but that’s what they would say. The subject hadn’t come up with Valerie yet, but I was pretty sure she was—she was only fourteen, after all. Toni, too, most likely. She didn’t strike me as the type to do anything bad. What about Barb, the girl I knew only
from her bedroom graffiti but pictured as Toni’s double, perennially cheerful and poised, throwing parties in apartment I-7 that the other kids raved about for months? Had she “gotten in trouble” with her Samoan boyfriend? Was that the real reason she’d gone back to the States? I hadn’t gone far enough with Danny to get into that kind of mess, but I wondered if our probing and stroking were enough to disqualify a taupou.
The taupou took her place in the fale, in front of the semi-circle of men. Before her was a shallow, six-legged wooden bowl, big as a birdbath. After a couple of speeches that might as well have been in Rex’s made-up language, the taupou washed her hands and sat with her spine straight as the posts that supported the fale’s roof. She rested the palms of her hands on the bowl’s rim and appeared to wait for a signal.
When the High Talking Chief gave the go-ahead, a choreographed ritual began. Using a wad of something that looked like a dish scrubber (shredded coconut fiber, I later learned), the taupou swished ground kava root around in the water-filled bowl, then held the dripping mass up high for all the chiefs to see. She wrung the liquid into the bowl, wiped the rim and, staring straight ahead, flung the fibrous sponge over her shoulder to an assistant kneeling behind her. The assistant caught it, swung it left and right, and handed it over the taupou’s right shoulder into her waiting hand. Even under the scrutiny of the village elders and esteemed guests, the taupou never fumbled. She knew her stuff. The talking chief might be fluent in a secret language, but in this ceremony, the taupou held the vital knowledge.
The taupou and her helper repeated the sequence three times before getting a signal from another assistant that the kava was ready. Then the ceremony dragged as one assistant, following chanted instructions from another, distributed kava to the chiefs and high-ranking guests. He dipped the cup into the kava bowl and served the highest chief, holding the vessel in both hands and raising it to forehead level before handing it over. Then he backed away from the chief, refilled the same cup and served the next chief.
Mango Rash Page 4
