“But all that water!” my mother wailed, her usual restraint breached. “What if it floods the first floor?” I knew she was picturing those streams cascading onto her electric organ, which had just arrived from the States with the rest of our things and now sat directly below the sodden spare room. My smoldering anguish flared at the thought.
Neighbors heard the commotion and came out to watch and to console us. When they asked how the fire started, my parents shook their heads and said they didn’t know. I looked away and said nothing. Along with the fiery closet’s contents, my self-esteem was melting into something unrecognizable. The good student was failing chemistry; the dutiful daughter, lately turned rebellious and heedless, had set the house ablaze; the intrepid adventurer didn’t have the guts to admit responsibility. This kind of thing could get you in a heap of trouble with an aitu, maybe enough to make you sick.
My meditation on that thought was cut short when Pam and Sarah Baker, schoolmates who lived across the courtyard, dashed over in their nightgowns, keyed up from the hubbub and the discombobulation of being roused from their beds. Their mother—plump, hennish—followed in her robe. After the girls asked the obligatory questions and, with obvious excitement, watched the firefighters for a while, Mrs. Baker asked if I’d like to come back to their apartment until the fire was out. Her kindness magnified my shame, but I said okay, that would be nice.
Sitting in the kitchen with the Baker girls, I kept my attention trained on the scene across the courtyard. Pam, the slimmer, prettier sister, with long blond hair that dipped over her forehead, tried to distract me with chatter about school. I answered in monosyllables. Sarah, fleshy like her mother, with brown hair that always looked unwashed, scooped a cat off the floor and held it out to me. I took the animal on my lap and stroked it. Its purr and the feel of fur through fingertips soothed me a little.
Mrs. Baker fussed around the kitchen, checked the refrigerator, opened cupboard doors, and peered inside.
“Would you girls like some cocoa?”
The idea of drinking hot chocolate in the middle of a sultry, tropical night when my home was being reduced to charcoal struck me as ludicrous—and perfect.
I nodded, still mute with self-loathing.
When Mrs. Baker set the steaming mugs on the table I waited until Pam and Sarah drank from theirs. I took a sip and another, guilty at the pleasure of sweet liquid spilling down my throat and settling in my hollow belly. The night’s events looped through my mind: the struggles with homework, the fitful sleep, the fateful decision to leave the blanket on the closet floor, the smoke and blaze. I set my cup down and hung my head.
“It’s my fault.”
The girls and their mother looked at me with identical expressions of bewildered concern: heads tilted, eyebrows knitted, lips pressed together.
“No, no, dear, don’t say that,” Mrs. Baker said, apparently thinking some general sense of self-reproach had compelled me to assume the blame. “How could something like this be your fault? Bad things just happen sometimes; it’s no one’s fault.”
Unsure how much more I wanted to say—could I let it go at that, or did I have to elaborate?—I didn’t respond at first. My mind ran the scenes in reverse: fire … smoke … blanket … homework. From homework, my thoughts wandered to my friend and tutor Abe and how, when I’d get stuck on a chemistry problem, he’d coax the answer out of me: “You know this, Nancy. You know the right answer—it’s in there, just pull it out.”
Not only was Abe the smartest kid in school, he was also the most respected for his levelheadedness and upright character—a good guy who knew right from wrong, and not just on Mr. Hieronymus’s quizzes. More than once I’d sought his advice when some ethical dilemma baffled me as much as the laws of thermochemistry. Now I asked myself what he’d advise in this situation, but all that came to mind was this cryptic counsel: “You know the answer, Nancy—it’s in there.”
I fortified myself with another sip of cocoa and finally spoke.
“No, it really is my fault,” I said. “See, I got up in the middle of the night to get a blanket off the shelf. I think I may have knocked another one down, and maybe it landed on top of the light bulb.” There. I’d come clean, as I knew I should. But even in my confession I couldn’t completely own up to what I’d done. I could see aitu elbowing each other and rolling their eyes.
“Oh dear,” Mrs. Baker said. “Well, I’m sure you didn’t mean to do it.”
My lower lip twitched. Mrs. Baker patted my shoulder.
“You just sit right here and drink your cocoa and don’t worry about anything. I’ll go see how things are coming along across the way.”
She crossed the courtyard and approached the silhouettes of my parents. She took my mother aside and spoke to her, their heads bent close. Now and then Mrs. Baker gestured toward the apartment where Pam, Sarah, and I sat—silent now—with our cups of chocolate. I strained to pick up words through the screened walls, but all I could hear was the rise and fall of the women’s voices. After a few minutes, my mother turned to my father and spoke to him. He looked toward the Bakers’; then together they walked toward the apartment.
Head, heart, and every pulse point in my body thudded. I took another sip of cocoa but couldn’t swallow. My mouth was a flannel-lined pocket with an emery board for a tongue. I thought of bolting for the back door, but my parents were inside the apartment before I could move. I couldn’t look at their faces; I trained my eyes on the floor and watched their feet, scuffling on the pandanus as they moved toward my chair.
Not even bothering to concoct a defense, I braced for a tirade. Whatever they were about to dish out, I deserved. Recalling every bitter exchange I’d ever had with my parents, which admittedly had been few up to this point, I envisioned their usual displays of anger--my father’s reddening face and caustic criticism, my mother’s rigid silence—and felt chastised without their having spoken a word.
Then my mother touched my shoulders, and my father cleared his throat.
“Honey?” His sympathetic doctor voice. “It was an accident. It could’ve happened to any of us.”
I looked up. No trace of anger or even disappointment showed in my parents’ faces.
“It’s all right,” my mother said. She stroked my hair as if I were a pet. “We all got out safely, the fire is out. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Cool rivulets streamed through me, but traveling with them, a load of confusion. Only days before, my father had practically disowned me over pronunciation. Now I’d nearly burned down the house, and not even a scolding? It made no sense at first, but then it did, sort of. Some things could be replaced; some were too precious to lose.
There was this, too, behind my parents’ reaction: compassion. Somehow, they could forgive my failings. Could I? Tonight, my self-esteem had come close to being incinerated, but if I’d learned anything about heat in chemistry class, it was that it didn’t always cause destruction. Sometimes it acted as a catalyst, imparting energy to chemical reactions and prompting transformations that wouldn’t otherwise occur. In the heat of this night, all elements of my character had come forth, both ignoble and noble. I wanted to believe they could combine into something new and better, something worthy of whatever adventures this paradise had in store for me.
Chapter 13—Kinship
Ia ifo le fuiniu i le lapalapa.
(May the cluster of nuts bow to the midrib of the leaf.)
—Samoan proverb interpreted as “The individual is responsible to the family.”
If one word can sum up a culture, that word, for Samoan society, would be aiga. Peki hadn’t covered it in our lessons, but already I’d begun to understand its meaning, or at least the literal translation and the contexts in which the word was used. A fuller comprehension would come later.
The definition of aiga (pronounced ay-EENG-uh) in my Teach Yourself Samoan book was simply “family,” yet Samoans used the word to describe things I never would’ve associat
ed with the mother-father-sister-brother unit that meant family to me. There were aiga buses—open-air jitneys painted gaudy colors—and aiga baskets, woven from palm fronds and used to carry leftovers home from feasts or funerals. The common connection was the extended family—parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and others related by blood, marriage, or adoption—and the sense of shared responsibility, whether operating a family bus service or divvying up pork and palusami.
The spirit of sharing, the habit of pitching in, the sense of sacred obligation that is not a burden but a duty rooted in respect and devotion, all of that is infused into the meaning of aiga as perfume is into a petal. And because aiga in its broadest sense is such a central concept in their society, Samoans seem not to care where the edges of their families overlap with others; they spread their generosity clan to clan, village to village.
On the night of the fire, my little nub of a family felt the expansive embrace of aiga even before we’d finished assessing the damage. Fibber scrambled down from his mountain shack and roused his cousin Gus; together they mustered more boys, some related to them, some not, and as soon as the fire was out and it was safe to go back in the apartment, they were all in our living room, along with most of our palagi neighbors, moving furniture, rolling up soggy pandanus mats, mopping floors, and wiping down smoke-streaked walls with the efficiency of a professional clean-up crew.
Barry, the amiable Texan who lived in the next building, came to help, too. “Kinda going to extremes to get out of your chem quiz, aren’t you?” His eyes glinted through the lenses of his glasses. “Couldn’t you just fake being sick like a normal person?”
“My dad’s a doctor, remember? I have to get creative.” I laughed and was surprised to hear myself laughing, even if it was more from relief than amusement.
Standing there joking with Barry, I realized I was in my housecoat, my hair tangled like beached seaweed, in a room full of teenage boys. Oddly, I wasn’t as self-conscious as I usually felt fully dressed, coifed, and made-up for a party. The atmosphere in the room felt so relaxed, so familial, like Christmas mornings when my brother still lived at home, all of us in pajamas with sleep-puffed faces and bed-rumpled hair, my father aiming the movie camera’s blinding light bar at each of us, me prancing from coffee table to Christmas tree, my brother ducking behind his hand like a criminal leaving a courthouse, my mother sipping coffee from a Currier & Ives-printed cup. Even though this morning we were cleaning up a real mess, not cast-off ribbons and wrapping paper, and the wood-smoke smell was not from a blazing hearth but from a house fire, I couldn’t shake that incongruously homey, holiday feeling. And then it hit me: Fibber and his gang weren’t just boys from the tennis court and dance hall anymore; by crawling out of bed to come to our aid in the middle of the night, they’d become like kin.
Barry felt like family, too, though not everyone understood that. Girls at school had been asking his girlfriend Bev how she felt about him spending so much time with me—we walked to school together most mornings and often, after Bev had gone home to Tafuna, spent idle afternoons and evenings hanging out in the apartment courtyard. Barry assured me Bev wasn’t jealous, and for the sake of our friendship I hoped he was right. I didn’t tell him that I was the envious one, watching the two of them at parties where they danced only with each other, Barry wrapping his ursine hulk around Bev’s small frame, her stubby, blond pigtails jutting out like clumps of dry grass as she rested her head against his chest. Stable, devoted, and apparently basking in parental approval, they seemed a different species from the rest of us, with our embattled, on-again, off-again romances. Val and I nicknamed them Mom and Dad. We called each other Sis.
Our real parents had found kinship on the island, too. My mother and Mrs. Puckett, as different in style and substance as two women could be, bonded over bridge games and the challenges of raising teenage daughters in a land where life sometimes seemed a little too free and easy. When the two of them weren’t commiserating, my mother headed off to beaches or hilltops with Phyllis Hieronymus, my chemistry teacher’s wife, to collect seashells or wood roses, flower-shaped seed pods that formed on climbing vines. Phyllis was at least a decade younger than my mother, and her tell-it-like-it-is attitude contrasted with my mother’s finesse, but they shared Midwestern sensibilities. Other days, my mother crossed the courtyard to visit Char, a young mother whose toddlers became surrogate grandchildren.
Not all of my mother’s new friends were palagis who hailed from the heartland, though. Tiva, who managed the airport restaurant, and Mere, a school principal, were island born and bred—and as gracious and genteel as any of my mother’s country club friends back home.
As for my father—who’d once confided that his only real friend in Stillwater was the rough-edged but sympathetically attentive owner of the Conoco station where we had our cars serviced—he’d already found comrades in two co-workers. “Doctor Paul” Godinet was a warm, cultured Samoan with wavy, gray hair who’d received medical training in Fiji—not enough for an M.D. degree, but enough to impress my father with his knowledge of both Western and traditional Samoan medicine. In the hospital hierarchy, he was a medical practitioner, lower in rank than a physician, but in my father’s eyes he was every bit an equal.
Dad’s other crony was Manley Donaldson, that peculiar little man who’d chauffeured us around the island when we first arrived. Together, the two of them jounced over rutted roads to visit clinics in outlying villages, passing the time with talk of art and music, my father’s orchid collection and Manley’s travels in Algeria and other exotic places. It was the first time I remembered my father having a true peer—another man with whom he could be completely himself, neither of them making any pretense of being manly in the narrow sense in which the rest of the world defined the word.
It would be weeks before our relatives back home got word of the fire, even longer before their genuine, if helpless, expressions of concern made their way back to us. But here on this island, where a month or so before no one even knew our names, we had all the family we needed.
Peki was conspicuously absent from the clean-up crew on the night of the fire. I supposed it was because he lived too far away for Fibber to recruit him, though exactly where he and his family lived was a mystery. Whenever I asked, he made a vague gesture and said, “On the mountain.”
Had Peki even heard about the fire? It was hard to imagine he hadn’t; The Samoa Times carried both Samoan and English versions of the story:
Fire at Doctors Apartment
The loud siren that awakened town residents Tuesday midnight was a response to a fire call from Utulei. The fire was mostly smoke, but according to reports, it destroyed valuable personal belongings of Dr. and Mrs. Sanders, occupants of the Apartment I-7 where the fire was.
Reports say that something inflammable must have touched a very hot light bulb. There were no injuries.
I was grateful the article didn’t go into detail about exactly how that “something inflammable” happened to come to rest against the very hot light bulb, but word got around anyway, even up on Peki’s mountain. This I learned from a note Fibber delivered during lunch period a few days after the fire. (Apparently, aiga duties included acting as your bashful cousin’s emissary.)
He was waiting for me outside the Standard Academic Program building, leaning against the schoolyard’s inexplicable centerpiece: the rusted hulk of a once-blue Chevy sedan that commanded the space the way statues of school mascots do on other campuses.
“Hey, Nasty! Hey, little sister.” Fibber waved the folded piece of paper as if enticing a child with candy. “Peki told me to give you this.” He handed me the note, written in blue ballpoint pen on lined paper from a school tablet, then stood by, picking bits of rusted metal from the car’s scabbing surface as I opened and read the letter.
Dear Nancy,
I’m not dropping any more food on your floor, and you be careful not to set your house on fire again.
There is something that I want to ask you about. I wonder if you can have me for your friend, in all cases, as long as you want. To me, you are the only nice little babe for me.
Well, I guess that’s enough talking. Anyway I have a poem here ready for you to make yourself happy.
What matter if
The world turns sour
Thorns are a part
Of the sweetest flower.
When the wind blows high
The storms breaks through,
Lucky I am
In having you.
I hope you will like my letter.
—PT
I refolded the note and stuck it in my notebook. “Did Peki write this?”
“The letter? Sure, who else?” Fibber flicked a piece of corroded metal from his fingers like a cigarette butt.
“No, the poem.”
“Poem?” Fibber shrugged and raised his eyebrows.
“Come on, brother, I know you read the note.” I swatted him with my notebook. The letter fell at his feet. He snatched it from the ground and read aloud, his voice syrupy: “Thorns are a part of the sweetest flower. That’s you, Nasty girl—a thorny flower!” Strangling with laughter, he handed the note back to me. “Peki didn’t write that poem. We had to learn it in school.”
I didn’t care. In my mind, any boy who sent romantic words to a girl had the soul of a poet. Danny was always giving me verses he said he’d composed, though most were about hot rods and drag racing (cribbed from a car magazine, I suspected). He did give me one poem I was sure he’d composed for me, ending with “Please for me keep the light alive, and always remember ‘75,” a reference to the year we planned to marry. I kept that one in my scrapbook with our sketches of palm trees and grass shacks.
Yeah, I was a sucker for romantic types. And even if Peki’s poem was something he’d memorized in school, the thought of him sitting in his mountainside fale—or shack or whatever he lived in—scratching out words by the light of a single, bare bulb or kerosene lantern made me feel cherished in a way that both thrilled and unsettled me.
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