Mango Rash

by Pokerwinski, Nan Sanders;

  What’s more, I wasn’t sure the book’s author—one C.C. Marsack, whom I pictured as a pasty, balding English ex-missionary—was such an expert. He admitted in the acknowledgements that his stenographer Taialofa not only transcribed his dictation but “from time to time by a frown of disapproval or a smile of amusement has compelled me to recast some of my Samoan phraseology.” Better to learn the language straight from Taialofa or, failing that, someone else who grew up speaking Samoan.

  Someone like Peki.

  Ah, Peki …

  He giggled and shrugged when I made the suggestion after school a few days later, but that evening he and Fibber showed up at my door.

  “Time for Samoan school,” Peki said. He ducked his head and looked away, embarrassed, before kicking off his flip-flops and coming inside.

  Fibber and Peki were as different as sand and sky. Fibber was a flirt and a smooth talker; Peki was so shy he’d hide behind a porch post until I spied him and urged him out. Fibber wore stateside styles; Peki was all island boy in loose pants and baggy shirts. If he wore anything on his broad feet, it was flip-flops, never pointy boots. Fibber had a comical look about him with his tuft of orange-red hair; Peki was travel-poster handsome: mahogany-skinned with high cheekbones, a slender wedge of nose, and teeth like chips of white shell. He stood nearly six feet tall, and his coconut-oiled black hair—cut close on the sides and left long on top—added another two or three inches to his height.

  Granted, Peki’s looks weren’t the kind that would’ve made me circle the Sonic a second time in Oklahoma. It was the era of the Beach Boys. The guys whose yearbook pictures I fantasized over were all blue-eyed, with long, straight hair worn in an eyebrow-sweeping style like Danny’s. But Peki—dark-eyed, curly-haired Peki—had a charm that transcended haircuts. Maybe it was the way he laughed at everything, sometimes out of nervousness, but usually out of pure, uncomplicated mirth.

  The three of us sat at the dining table where I’d been typing a paper for my English class. I put on my glasses to communicate the seriousness of my intent.

  “OK,” I said. “Let’s start with some easy words.”

  Peki tapped his chest with his index finger. “Tama.”

  “Boy?”

  He nodded. “Good.”

  Then pointing at me, “Teine.”

  “Girl!” I pushed up my glasses and ran two fingers through the ends of my hair to check for upstart waves.

  Another nod.

  My mother had set a plate of packaged cookies on the table when the boys arrived. Peki took one from the plate and bit it in half; crumbs fell from his fingers and littered the floor. Using his wide foot like a whisk broom, he swept the bits under his chair and glanced up to see if I’d noticed. I shook my finger in a mock-scolding gesture.

  He laughed, a sheepish sniff, before swooping down to pick up the crumbs and deposit them on a napkin.

  Across the table, Fibber doodled on a sheet of typing paper. He kept his free arm across the page so I couldn’t see what he was drawing, and when I tried to peek he covered the whole thing with both hands.

  “OK,” I said to Peki. “I’ve got tama and teine, what’s next?”

  He laid his right hand over his heart as if pledging allegiance and clasped his left hand over the right.

  “Alofa.” He dipped his head again and giggles spewed out like silvered bubbles from a surfacing pearl diver.

  “I know that one. Love.”

  “Alofa Nasty?” Fibber said, and both boys cracked up, Fibber laughing his lazy ha-ha-ha and Peki covering his mouth in a vain attempt to suppress his high-pitched titters.

  “What’s the joke?” I had a feeling it was on me.

  Peki stared at the table top and shook his head.

  Fibber laid down his pencil. “We’ve never known any girls named Nancy, and when Peki first heard your name, he thought it was ‘Nasty.’ We’ve been calling you ‘Nasty’ behind your back.”

  “Oh, that’s real nice, guys.” I pretended to sulk, but secretly felt pleased they’d been talking about me, no matter what they called me.

  “Not nice. Nasty,” Peki said and expelled another stream of giggles.

  Fibber pushed his drawing across the table. “Now you can look.”

  In the center of the full-page cartoon was a pot-bellied figure holding a spear and wearing nothing but a grass skirt, arm bands, and a hoop earring: the stereotypical “native” I’d pictured while listening to my father’s travelogue. Flies swarmed around his oversized head, which was dominated by protruding lips the size of Frisbees. He stood on a curving path that led to a grass shack like the ones Danny and I used to draw. A crooked television antenna poked out of its roof, and a sign over the door read, “Nasty.” The cartoon’s caption: “Welcome to Samoa!”

  It was a flippant sketch, and a skillful one, but it didn’t make me laugh; it made me wonder. Did Fibber see himself that way? Did he think I did?

  INTERLUDE—MEDICAL MARVELS

  Oh, child of the moon

  Keep far away

  Disease and Death

  —Samoan prayer to the deity Aloimasina, offered at the new moon

  Oloā: Sores. Very painful. The Samoans believe that they are caused by the bite of Nifoloa, a cannibal God who dwells at Falelima, Savai’i. Treated with medicine made from leaves of trees. Very common and afflicts young and old.

  Puela: Ague and is usually associated with mumu or elephantiasis. Body is covered with many mats or clothing and hot water applied. Common.

  Toma: Yaws. Very common amongst young children. Treatment is to scrape sores with a shell and cover with medicine made from leaves of trees.

  Mumu: Elephantiasis. Most common in legs, feet, arms, breasts, scrotum. Young and old are afflicted with the disease which sometimes assumes astonishing proportions. Commences as a fever and is ultimately associated with gradual swelling of the part afflicted which swelling remains permanent.

  Treatment is by native medicines and rubbing with occasional puncture by sharp instrument.

  —From “The More Common Diseases from Which the Samoans Suffer” in An Account of Samoan History up to 1918

  Wings beating in a blur, the mosquito hovered over my knee and homed in on a swath of exposed skin. I watched it land and mentally defied it to stab my flesh. It rested on my leg, then took off without even trying to bite.

  No surprise there. Since coming to Samoa, I’d noticed mosquitoes left me alone, especially if I harnessed my powers of concentration to deter them. I was impervious—convinced of it—and that was a good thing. Here in Samoa, mosquitoes weren’t just an annoyance that left you itchy and welt-spotted, they were bearers of disease. Filariasis. I’d never heard of it before coming to the islands, but now I saw evidence of it every day: men and women with legs that looked like they belonged on a brontosaurus—a late-stage manifestation of filariasis known as elephantiasis. So I willed mosquitoes away, and they obeyed.

  My superstitious behavior might have seemed wacky back in Oklahoma, but not here. Every day, my father came home from the hospital with tales of ailing men and women whose symptoms had no medical explanation but who’d taken sick after being cursed by enemies. He marveled at “incurable” diseases that vanished when patients abandoned Western medicine and put their faith in traditional Samoan healers.

  I marveled at this new way of looking at sickness, health, and the span between the two. In the traditional Samoan view, health and well-being depended upon balance among the social, natural, and supernatural aspects of one’s life. Healing involved identifying parts that were out of balance and taking action to restore harmony, such as apologizing to someone you’d offended or appeasing a specific aitu.

  I knew a little about aitu—local legends and lore abounded with tales of these spirits that stuck their noses into all sorts of physical and social phenomena. But I’d never given much thought to how to stay healthy, with or without the help of spooks. That might seem odd, g
iven that I grew up in a household where medicine was a dinner-table topic: my father discussing episiotomies and breech births as casually as he talked about roto-tilling the garden; my older brother, once he got his M.D. degree, debating with our dad the pros and cons of Panalba.

  Oh, there was plenty of talk about medicine in our household, about techniques and challenging cases and finding the right fix for a given ailment. But even when my mother got cancer, family conversations centered more on how her doctors would treat the disease than on what caused it, or how to keep it from happening again, or what parts of my mother—besides her afflicted breasts—might need healing. Now, considering this new concept that staying healthy involved more than taking your vitamins, getting your shots, and following doctors’ orders, I wondered if something was out of balance in my mother’s life and how her equilibrium could be restored.

  Awed by the staggering difficulty of keeping one’s social, natural, and supernatural aspects properly aligned, and surrounded by potential perils, I took comfort in knowing at least I was invincible.

  Chapter 12—Heat

  E manatua pule, ‘ae le manatua fa’alaeo.

  (Compassion is remembered, destruction forgotten.)

  —Samoan proverb

  Sitting cross-legged on my bed, I peeled a sheet of notebook paper from my sweaty leg as if picking at a sunburn. It was the beginning of Samoan summer—a season that stretched from October to May—and temperatures were edging upward from balmy to broiling. Trying to do homework in that kind of heat was maddening; if my papers weren’t sticking to me, they were fluttering off the bed like startled pigeons whenever the electric fan turned its head their way.

  As I struggled to solve chemistry problems, my very brain seemed a bubbling flask poised to explode with the slightest nudge. It wasn’t just the heat and flapping papers that had me feeling off kilter; it was the fuzzy way my mind had been working lately.

  Schoolwork never had been hard before; I’d always been able pick up what I needed to know by paying attention in class and drilling with flashcards when memorization was required. But now I was foundering in chemistry and calculus, staring blankly when Mr. Hieronymus droned on about Avogadro’s number or when Mr. Oster scrawled derivatives on the blackboard. I tried taking notes, but found myself preoccupied with my teachers’ peculiarities: the way Mr. Hieronymus’s nose narrowed and flattened at the very tip into something resembling a pencil eraser and the similarity of Mr. Oster’s bulging eyes to ping pong balls. When I wasn’t mentally caricaturing my teachers’ features, I was daydreaming. About Danny and Dick and now Peki, and weekend parties where the Vampires played their libidinous music and the air smelled of ginger blossoms and coconut oil and the ocean’s brackish bouquet.

  At test time, I stared at equations that might as well have been written in hieroglyphics. My cheeks reddened. My mouth went gluey. My thoughts darted around like a madwoman racing from room to room, searching for a misplaced item that never was there in the first place. I guessed at answers or left blanks and prayed for better grades than I deserved or ultimately received.

  Already I could imagine my parents’ reactions when report cards came out. No melodramatic scene, just the conspicuous absence of the usual praise and pride. My mother would frown, but a frown of concern, not disapproval. My father would say grades aren’t everything and try to cheer me up with a joke. Later I’d hear voices through their bedroom door, too faint for me to make out anything but my name.

  Academics weren’t pushed in our household; brainpower was simply a family trait that my parents—and I—assumed I’d inherited. My mother and her sister had always excelled, so much that their parents sent the girls to the big high school ten miles away from their rural hometown while their brothers—no mental lightweights—stayed home to work on the farm. My father started college at sixteen; my brother was a Rhodes Scholar candidate. In a galaxy so bright, how could I not shine?

  But now my star was burning out before its time. As I stared at pages in my textbook, chemistry formulas wavered and shimmered, mirages on the blistering asphalt of my brain. The noise coming through the screens didn’t help my concentration. Our apartment was the end unit; behind it was the Hospital of American Samoa, where my father worked, and the wing that housed the men’s ward was so close I could peek through its screened walls from our bathroom window. Every night I heard whatever TV show the men were watching: reruns of Gunsmoke, Adventures in Paradise, Hawaiian Eye, and Bonanza on the single channel that carried evening programs.

  I heard the closing theme to Adventures in Paradise—strings and a swaying rhythm that suggested trade winds and swelling emotions, a song the Vampires played so often at Goat Island Club dances it seemed like the soundtrack to my own dramas—and I waited for the American Samoan anthem to close the evening’s programming. Once again, my chemistry problems remained unsolved. Maybe I’d feel smarter in study hall the next day, I told myself, knowing I most certainly wouldn’t. I’d have to get help from Abe, a brainy Samoan kid who tutored me on balancing equations and drawing electron dot diagrams. I turned off the light, pulled the sheet over myself and, after tossing for what felt like half the night but was probably only minutes, fell asleep.

  An hour or so later, I awoke, tangled in my sweat-soaked sheet and chilled by the fan. I thought about turning it off but knew the heat would be more intolerable than the chill. I could get up and retrieve a blanket from the spare bedroom. No, that would require more effort than I was willing to expend. I lay awake and watched the clock’s hands make their rounds as I remained stubbornly immobile. When I couldn’t stand the discomfort any longer, I threw off the sheet and clomped into the next room. I didn’t bother turning on the overhead light; the constantly-burning, wire-caged bulb at the bottom of the closet—the one that kept things from mildewing—shone bright enough for me to see what I was doing. I yanked a thin coverlet from the top shelf. Another came with it and fell into a heap on the closet floor. I briefly considered picking it up, refolding it and putting it back on the shelf, but I was in no mood for chores.

  Inches from my face, Mr. Hieronymus’s nose metamorphosed. From pencil eraser, it transformed into Silly Putty, pinky-brown and elastic, creeping amoeba-like across his cheek and sliding toward his mouth, which opened and formed words: Nancy … wake … up.

  “Nancy! Wake up!” My chemistry teacher’s voice became my father’s, taut with alarm. His hand gripped my shoulder, and he rolled and shook me as if I were an obstacle he was trying to dislodge. I turned away and covered my head with the sheet.

  “Get up! Hurry!” He was shouting now. “Fire!”

  I rolled over to see my mother pulling on a housecoat as she rushed into the hallway. I jumped up, grabbed mine, and followed my parents down the hall, the three of us holding hands, a chain of trained animals in nightclothes. We passed the spare bedroom on the way to the stairs, and I saw flames. Every molecule of air seemed displaced by radiant orange liquid that moved as if alive, advancing and retreating, sending tentative arms upward, grabbing hold with fluttering fingers, and spreading higher. Heat blasted toward us in waves: an incandescent ocean at high tide. The smell reminded me of winter afternoons in Oklahoma, when all the chimneys in the neighborhood spewed smoky plumes. But this was no cozy blaze behind a fireplace screen; our house was burning.

  For a moment the spectacle mesmerized me. Then scenes from every safety film I’d seen in grade school flashed through my mind: families crawling through smoke-choked hallways, whole buildings flaring up like campfires and collapsing into heaps of charred timber. Pulsating terror overtook me. We could die in here!

  With the fear came this horrid realization: The fire was my fault. That blanket I’d been too lazy to pick up, I remembered seeing it land on the wire cage around the burning light bulb in the bottom of the closet. I’d thought the cage would keep the blanket from catching fire. Wasn’t that why it was there? Now the bedroom was a bonfire and the whole apartment complex was in
peril, all because of my carelessness. As we clambered down the stairs, the bite of remorse gave my fear an acrid taste.

  The fire truck arrived, and the scene that unfolded might have made me laugh if I’d been watching it in a movie. Instead, each mishap and ensuing delay made my skull tighten and my stomach twist. First, the firefighters started the pump. The hose lay flaccid in their hands, no water shooting out. It wasn’t connected to the hydrant. The firemen connected the hose. It was too short to reach the fire. The bedroom windows glowed orange and hot as we stood helpless, and the firemen frowned and shouted to one another in brisk Samoan. Finally, someone thought to connect the hose to a closer hydrant at the hospital. The hose reached, windows were smashed and the firefighting began. Thank goodness there was water to be pumped. Until the week before, we’d been on water rationing, and the water supply had been turned off all night, every night.

  We watched from the courtyard as streams of that precious water tamed the flames. Smoke clouds, dark and foreboding as tornadoes, billowed from a shattered window, and the grassy odor of wet pandanus mats overlaid the smell of burning wood. My fault. My fault. My fault.

  “Looks like it didn’t spread beyond the spare room,” my father said, his voice still pinched. “There was nothing in that closet but extra bedding and toiletries, right?”

  Nothing but extra bedding and toiletries. I knew my parents had spent months assembling all those things to ship from the States with our clothing and household goods. We could find replacements on the island, but at twice the cost.