All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [30]
When the applause for the floor show stops, everyone in the audience gets up to dance. The girls pull me, and I can’t help but follow them onstage, doing whatever approximation of Samoan dancing I can muster, something like flamenco on acid at a Grateful Dead show. Everyone laughs—with me, at me, it doesn’t matter. They all dance, dazed by the drumming, exhilarated. Each of my body parts seems to be responding to a different rhythm. I’ve left my mind, my story, my culture, everything but my body back at the table with my beer, and I dance and dance.
It’s delirious—to be included as an outsider, to have stumbled into such a colorful group of revelers. All that dancing feels like shedding a skin. By the time I return to my hotel, I’m exhausted with exhilaration. I jump into the pool, float, and stare at the unfamiliar stars, content. If I had a husband and children, I wouldn’t be out dancing with Samoan drag queens and floating in tropical pools.
THE LAST EVENING in Apia, I meet Sonia in the bar. She’s wearing a leopard-printed mini with a stretch lace black top and is accompanied by Tini, a burly fa’afafine with a flower tucked behind one ear and gopher-size biceps. The waiter flirts outrageously with them, giving Sonia a squeeze around the waist.
“Do the men still see fa’afafine after they’re married?” I ask, when the waiter leaves.
“It’s still cheating, but it’s more cheating to be with another woman,” says Sonia. “That’s when the wives really get ferocious.”
“Being with a fa’afafine is like a joke to the wife,” says Tini, shrugging her giant shoulders.
It’s not much of a joke, really: knowing you are a woman but that men won’t take you seriously. Wanting to have a husband and children and not being able to manage it. I’m beginning to identify too closely with these fa’afafine, I think, and I have another drink. The fan twirls on the ceiling, and I realize we’ve all become quiet. “But did you ever fall in love?” I ask.
Sonia sighs. “We have women’s feelings, so of course we fall in love.” She waves this thought away and begins ticking off several long-term boyfriends she’s had.
“But the men always eventually leave,” says Tini, shaking her head. “They go with women who will give them children.”
“Do you have children?” Sonia asks, ignoring Tini’s last remark, and I shake my head no.
“Why not?” asks Tini. “Children are beautiful.”
“Never met the right father, I guess.” I twirl the parasol in my drink.
“But you’re not so old, you’re still attractive,” says Tini. “Why don’t you have a husband?”
“I don’t know.” They look at me expectantly. “I had a husband, but we split up, and since then … I guess I’ve been busy working.”
Sonia puts her hand on her hip and shifts her legs in her miniskirt. “You have a job like a man, traveling by yourself,” she scolds me. “Maybe a man wants someone who is more like a woman.”
It’s making me uneasy, having a fake woman tell me I’m not acting enough like a real one.
Later, in my room—after more drinking with the fa’afafine and dancing with tattooed Samoan men—I am too rattled to sleep, though it’s the middle of the night. I flip on the TV and see that the Brazilians have just won the World Cup. I know that on the other side of the world, Gustavo is going crazy, and I want to talk to him, hear his voice, feel his presence, congratulate him. I dial all the international codes, and when I get his answering machine, I hang up.
THE NEXT DAY, I leave Upolu for Savai’i, a more traditional Samoan island, to see how village fa’afafine are different from the big-city girls. From the plane, a little puddle jumper, velvety green islands rise out of the turquoise sea. Savai’i’s outermost piece of land, a panhandle called the Falealupo Peninsula, floats near the international date line, edging toward yesterday. The lush peninsula is considered