Item: Ignoramus, to her delight and surprise, is asked to the next dance by a basketball jock, also known for his witty remarks in class. Her date provokes discussion among the popular girls, who speculate (within her hearing) about why he had not made his intentions known to them. They nevertheless give their blessing to the match. The spring prom, though, proves to be a cipher on a different Rosetta stone. The big event is coming closer and closer with no invitation. She invites an American “cousin” from her host family who goes to another school, who responds with such apparent discomfort that she thinks he does not really want to attend. She makes a deal with him that he will be off the hook should a date with someone else materialize. In the meantime, a phone call comes from a boy at her own school, a football player. Her conversations with him until then had been total dead ends, and she foresaw notes pleated into fans, this time likely diagrammed with football plays. She guiltily declines. (When, as an adult, she gets to know Big Guy a bit better, she realizes saying no had been a mistake: he turns out to be a funny and friendly person who became an English teacher and wrote science fiction on the side.) As far as her refusal goes, it doesn’t even occur to her that people other than her family would know about the invitation. The next day at school, though—
Popular Girl: I hear that Big Guy is asking you to the prom!
Ignoramus, taken aback: How do you know?
Popular Girl: I told him to ask you. I thought you’d say yes.
Ignoramus: Unfortunately I had to say no. I have actually made other plans.
Popular Girl: Maybe he should ask Curly-haired Cheerleader. Tallest Football Star just broke up with her.
An unanticipated phone call spares Ignoramus and (formerly?) Reluctant Cousin the set-up solution. This time it is Football-Star-She-Really-Likes. She says yes. They have a good time, she thinks, even though she would not allow his hand in her bra. Fatal mistake, apparently. He never calls or talks to her again.
With hindsight and information gained from a Carroll High reunion about twenty years into our life as Americans, I realize that my high school peers had really mostly been good people, as insecure as I was, though they expressed their self-consciousness in a different cultural vocabulary.
It was some comfort that the town’s adults loved me—at least as a speaker. In rural Iowa at the time, exchange students were sought-after speakers. Even formerly non-English-speaking students who cringed at the thought of speaking publicly were obligated to their community sponsor—Rotary International was mine—to give at least one speech during the school year. Unaware of the entertainment value of foreign visitors from students to missionaries, at the time I credited my self-perceived maturity for my appeal, but today I believe that, in addition to the fact that I surprised everyone with my “good” English, the real reason was my exoticism as a white person from Africa—which astonished many people—and the fact that my somewhat formal behavior had originated in a culture that, according to Americans, had been outdated since the start of the twentieth century. Whatever the reason, I was invited to and accepted more speaking engagements than any other AFS student before me and won top honors at the Iowa State Speech Contest.
Like the nineteenth-century female orators who traveled from town hall to town hall to spread word of the women’s rights movement, I had found my voice.
It was a much more socially confident me who returned to Pretoria in July 1967 to resume my bachelor’s degree. Outwardly, I took more care with my hair and was more daring in my dress than before—the minidresses I brought back from the United States, mostly items I had knitted or sewed myself, were shorter than those generally worn by my South African peers. An obvious change had also taken place in my auditory self-presentation: I had acquired an American accent.
In the hostel and on campus, the students in my year now seemed very young. Other than my roommate, I did not make new friends for almost the whole semester. For most of my day, I was among strangers. A week or two after the start of classes, I walked into the physics auditorium, still without a friend to look for. I stood in the aisle, looking for a place to sit when, above the subdued pre-lecture murmur in the hall, a familiar laugh sounded. In the section of seats beside me, I spotted a guy with dark, curly hair whom I remembered from a class the year before. We had never really spoken, though we might have said hello to each other once or twice. One of the few English speakers in our predominantly Afrikaans university, he used to hang out with a small group of other English speakers. Amid the blur of still-unfamiliar faces, he seemed like an old friend. I climbed the aisle steps to one row above where he was sitting, and, brashly squeezing past a number of students, took a seat behind him.
I was pulling books from my bag when my chemistry textbook slid off my lap and dropped to the floor. I stuck my head under the desktop to retrieve it. A pair of sparkling brown eyes met mine. From the way gravity distorted his upside-down face and turned it pink, I gathered that my carefully applied makeup was probably not my most notable facial feature at that moment. I muttered something about narrow desks, apologized for being clumsy, and profusely thanked my somewhat-acquaintance who was now holding on to my book’s other end. He laughed. “Where did you get that American accent?”
Did that mean he remembered me from the year before? Before I could explain my accent, a swell of clapping signaled the arrival of Professor Verleger. We craned out our heads to see him being wheeled in on an office chair by a graduate student, who set the chair into a spin, upon which the professor began dramatically swinging his arms, slowing or speeding up like a ballerina, to illustrate the conservation of angular momentum.
Peter’s sketch of Professor Verleger while attending a physics class, 1968
Nobody was more surprised than I when, after class, my under-the-desktop friend followed me out and introduced himself as Peter Saunders. That day we walked just a short distance across campus together, but a day or two later he met up with me again and, finding that we lived in the same direction, we walked together all the way to my hostel. The apartment block where he lived with his parents, he explained, was just around the corner and across the railway line. Soon enough we found ourselves almost always walking home together. Not that serendipity didn’t have a role in this astounding development; we were both enrolled for a BSc degree, and our classes, as well as our three-hour lab sessions on weekday afternoons and math tutorials, followed the exact same schedule. Like most BScs, we had Friday afternoons off so that we could study for the three-hour tests held every Saturday morning. Alone with my books in my room—my alluring roommate had multiple suitors and was frequently out on dates—I worked as hard as I could to avoid thoughts of what Peter might be doing on his weekend. On weekdays, by contrast, I knew exactly where he was: he was with me.
Over the span of weeks, I learned about Peter’s family and childhood, and he about mine. He had gone to Boys High, the Pretoria English high school that was socially paired with the English girls high school. His mom was Afrikaans and his father English. Dudley Saunders had worked all his life as a carpenter for the South African Railways, building wooden coaches of the kind that would later supply stunning backdrops for films such as Murder on the Orient Express. Raaitjie Saunders, who had always been a housewife, had, from the time Peter started at university, worked as an office administrator at the government lab that, among other things, tested the alcohol content of suspected drunk drivers. Peter’s older brother, Cliff, a radio reporter (who would a few years later become a household name in South Africa), was married and his wife, Ria, had just had a baby.
I also learned about a goal on which Peter was very much focused at the time: buying his own car. He already had quite a bit of money squirreled away from his earnings as a magician at children’s birthday parties over many years. He had learned to drive long before the legal age of eighteen, using the spacious grounds of the South African presidential estate as his own speedway—for that is where his family had lived until they moved into their flat a
year or two earlier. Previously they had shared the house of the groundskeeper during the presidency of Blackie Swart, South Africa’s first president after it left the British Commonwealth. The groundskeeper’s wife had been his mother’s second cousin, and Raaitjie had promised the young woman on her deathbed that she would help raise her two little girls.
Peter and I even knew the names of each other’s childhood pets. His constituted a menagerie that included several dogs—one of which he had taught tricks—and also, from the avian class, a crow that pecked his ear in the mornings to wake him up, a house-dwelling chicken or two, a gander that attacked visitors, and a baby ostrich.
At the end of the academic year, Peter and I said goodbye without making any plans to see each other until the next school year. After a short while with my family, I returned to Pretoria to work at the Atomic Energy Board, a condition of my full scholarship. My vacation accommodation was a mattress on the floor in the flat of a friend of a friend. The flat was near a bus stop where I waited every morning before work, a forty-minute drive away. It was also near the university hostels, which meant that it was close to Peter’s place. Though I knew he would be in Cape Town, my heart beat faster whenever I spotted a dark, curly head bobbing some distance away on the sidewalk, only to sink into disappointment when the face never was his.
Near the end of the holiday season, though, one of the bobbing heads looked more and more like Peter the closer it came, until it appeared that I was on the mark. He was delighted to see me—the feeling was mutual—and had me point out my flat and give him the number. The next evening he came to visit. We were alone. Before I knew what had happened, we were in the middle of a passionate kiss. When we said goodbye, we knew we would not see each other until the start of school, which was a week or so away, because I was about to go home to the farm for a few more days. There was no discussion about our future relationship.
Though not in quite the way I had imagined, our relationship did take a new turn once school started. One day, with what seemed like studied nonchalance, Peter invited me to his home for tea with his parents. I immediately loved them. They were welcoming, full of fun, curious about everything to do with our university life, and wonderful talkers, particularly Raaitjie. They spoke about what was going on around them in the world rather than offering news-related opinions or abstract philosophies. Most astonishingly, they were physically demonstrative, frequently touching each other lightly or exchanging looks of pleasure or amusement. In the kitchen, while we were clearing tea things away, Dudley lightly kissed Raaitjie on the top of her head with an affectionate murmur. They had been married for thirty-some years.
Our meeting over tea soon led to an invitation back to dinner. On that occasion, I was, in manner of speaking, initiated into the family when his father played a prank on me. Without me looking, Dudley had substituted two raw eggs for look-alike canned peach halves coated in heavy syrup in my dessert bowl. When I stuck my spoon into my first “peach,” yellow swirls of yolk bled into the “syrup.” From the way everyone hooted at once, I knew that the whole family must have been in on the joke. The implication that they must have discussed it and decided I would be game gave me so much joy that I laughed the loudest of all.
The happy togetherness Peter and his family bestowed on me drew further into the spotlight the baffling question of why, then, he never asked me on a proper date. Not for the first time, my roommate and I dissected this fraught situation. Did he have a secret romance with a girl that his parents either did not know about or disapproved of? Had he been pledged at birth to the daughter of a war buddy who had saved his father’s life? Was he gay?
Gradually, a potential explanation, if not an excuse, for Peter’s tight-lipped avoidance of dating came to light, though it didn’t come from him. Early on he had told me that he was passionate about ballroom dancing, that he participated in competitions, and that it took a lot of time. Now I got word from friends that he had been seen more than once at university dances with the same woman, who had long blonde hair and was an excellent dancer. But if I had spies out, so did he. He teasingly told me one Monday morning that one of his friends had seen me at a dance with another man the Friday before. I cringed. If I had been seen out with a tall, handsome partner who doted on me, I might not have minded. However, I was actually on an awful blind date with a guy who had worn yesterday’s shirt and couldn’t dance to save his pocket protector. While Peter’s enquiry about my social life presented an opening for me to ask about his dance partner, I didn’t take it. Neither did he volunteer any information. The next day, as usual, we took another long, delicious walk together after class.
Michael Gazzaniga points out that when we do not have enough cues to explain a situation, we very seldom say, “I don’t know what is going on.” Instead, “the human tendency to find order in chaos” causes our brains to fill in conspicuous gaps or loose ends so that “everything [fits] into a story and [is] put into a context.” Gazzaniga calls the brain process that tends to confabulate rather than accept discrepancies the interpreter. It is located in the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere, in contrast, is utterly truthful. It “always choose[s] the option that has occurred the most frequently in the past.” It insists on including information that doesn’t make sense.
Gazzaniga has been studying the separate functions of the left and right brains for over half a century. His research subjects are people who had undergone surgery to sever the corpus callosum, “the superhighway of neurons connecting the halves of the brain,” to obtain relief from epilepsy. After surgery, their left and right hemispheres are unable to communicate with each other. Accordingly, Gazzaniga designed tests to determine the function of each half in the composition of a narrative. In one test, he erected a barrier between the patient’s eyes and placed separate objects or pictures in each visual field, thereby delivering simultaneous images to the left and right hemispheres. Gazzaniga explains that “[e]ach hemisphere was shown four small pictures, one of which related to a larger picture also presented to that hemisphere.” The large picture shown to the left hemisphere portrayed a snowstorm, the right-hemisphere picture a bird claw.
The patient had to choose the most appropriate small picture… [T]he right hemisphere—that is, the left hand—correctly picked the shovel for the snowstorm; the right hand, controlled by the left hemisphere, correctly picked the chicken to go with the bird’s foot. Then we asked the patient why [his] left hand—or right hemisphere—was pointing to the shovel. [Since language production occurs in the left hemisphere, the answer originated on that side.] But because [the left hemisphere] could not know why the right hemisphere was doing what it was doing, it made up a story about what it could see—namely, the chicken. It said the right hemisphere chose the shovel to clean out a chicken shed.
In his book Who’s in Charge?, Gazzaniga relates this research to the interpreter function: “the left hemisphere did not say ‘I don’t know,’ which truly was the right answer… It confabulated, taking cues from what it knew and putting them together in an answer that makes sense.”
Reflection on Dementia Notebook entry of 10-28-2011
You are downstairs getting dressed. On the bed you lay out a sartorial assemblage: turquoise-tinted black jeans, black shoes, your turquoise and black zebra-striped T-shirt, the turquoise earrings your neighbor Ann had given you when you lived on Supernal Way. But first, underwear. When you turn back from the closet, you wonder what earrings will work with the outfit. From your jewelry drawer you select the silver-and-black earrings. When you put them with the outfit, you notice that you had already selected another pair. Oh, well. But look how nicely your unwitting second choice evokes the zebra stripes of the T-shirt. There was a reason your brain did not stick with your first pick: your memory was triggered by the T-shirt’s pattern because it had over the years stored such interesting stuff about zebras in its archives. Equus quagga quagga. A zebra species of which only the front half was camouflaged. In the albumen print of a
lone mare that lived in Amsterdam’s Artis Magistra zoo during the 1880s, the subject’s posture of defeat resembles that of a specimen of Equus asinus that is known even to preschoolers, Eeyore, when he tries to think where he might have left his tail. The mare’s stare is as spaced out as Sancho Panza’s no-name donkey known only by an attribute, rucio, or dappled, a mental link whose farmyard connotations predisposes my mind’s eye to envisage a silver-gray beast of burden patterned with golden circles of light, as if the clock struck once upon a midnight while she was dreaming under a moonlit tree. The hind part of the mare bears reddish brown and white bands like those that might be achieved by the geometric play of light and shadow through the bars of a prison.
Okay, another try, this time sans emotive constructions. Fact is that the coats of Equus quagga quagga; the modern zebra, Equus quagga; and the donkey, Equus asinus, all derive from the monkey business of that god who throws dice about whom Einstein wanted to know nothing, though Darwin secretly loved him: through a play of genetic replication over the millennia, the markings that used to camouflage the hind parts of the Urmother of all three species were retained by the zebra, half erased in the quagga, and completely erased in the donkey. In 1883, when it behooved the gambling god to recall the Amsterdam mare to Holy Headquarters, he performed an even more encompassing erasure: the mare had been the last of her breed, the only remaining representative of the subspecies on Earth. Since at the time the term quagga applied to any zebra found in southern Africa, however, no one noticed until the next century.
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