by Pete Jordan
##
One woman I found myself trailing was dolled up in a tight, sleeveless gown and stilettos, looking as if she were heading to a ball. Even more enchanting than her outfit was the rattletrap bike she was riding. Its front wheel weaved somewhat, but the back wheel was out of control. It wobbled so severely, each revolution looked as if it could be its last before falling off completely. Watching the tail end of her bicycle sway from side to side made me loopy. Finally, when I could stand it no more, I veered off and commenced trailing a guy who was rolling a cigarette as he pedaled. Though I was now spared the nausea, I was left wondering if the partygoer ever reached her festive destination before her bike collapsed.
A couple of blocks later, after my latest guide had finished rolling his cigarette and begun smoking it, I caught a glimpse of a woman biking through an intersection. At first I thought I’d noticed something unusual about her, something peculiar about her midsection. Then I quickly dismissed the notion. Impossible. Still, I wasn’t sure.So I raced through the intersection, labored to catch up with her, then tucked in right behind her bike. From this vantage point, though, I still couldn’t confirm what I thought I’d seen. So I pedaled yet harder and pulled alongside her.
Then I looked over.
Sheesh! I thought.
Either she was cycling to the beach with a beach ball crammed under her shirt—or she was pregnant. I dismissed the former as implausible. But the latter? Inconceivable.
So I looked over again. Now it was undeniable; that was no ball. Of all the methods for transporting kids on bikes in Amsterdam that I’d seen so far, this woman was employing the most basic one: in her belly!
I continued staring at her ready-to-burst abdomen, wondering if she was leading me to the maternity ward. When the expectant mother caught me gawking, she shot me a look that seemed to say, What, you’ve never seen a pregnant woman on a bike before?
In reply, my expression hopefully conveyed, No! I never have!
Mother and fetus then accelerated, leaving me flabbergasted in their wake.
I’d already suspected that this place was magical. What little I knew about Dutch culture (toleration of soft drugs usage, acceptance of gay marriage, etc.) warmed my lefty heart. But there was something about the sight of an extremely pregnant woman casually cycling along that really made me swoon. In America, I’d witnessed motorists verbally attack cyclists who had the temerity to ride with child passengers, calling them bad parents for endangering their children. And maybe those motorists had a point. In fact, I couldn’t imagine allowing a child to roam the streets of an American city by bike the way I did as a kid in the 1970s. But here, children were everywhere on bikes—alone or with their parents. That conveyed to me a lot about this city. And that this society provided streets safe enough to cycle without helmets made a big impression. Yet, the icing on the cake was a people who provided an environment secure enough for a pregnant woman to cycle. It seemed to me the pinnacle of a humane culture.
Before my introductory Amsterdam bike ride ended that day, I saw a second and then a third cycling preggers.
##
I’d come to Amsterdam knowing almost nothing about Amsterdam’s—or Holland’s—history or culture or society. If I’d been asked to point to Holland on a map of Europe, my finger probably would’ve landed somewhere on Scandinavia. What I knew about the country could have fit inside a thimble. Dutch masters? Weren’t those cigars or cigarettes or something? I couldn’t have named a single Dutch person—not a politician nor a monarch. Not a sports figure or a musician. Not even a painter. No, not Van Gogh or Rembrandt. Anne Frank? I was vaguely familiar with her tragic story of hiding from the Nazis and her subsequent death, but if someone had told me she’d hidden in Brussels or Copenhagen, I’d have nodded in agreement, oblivious to the truth.
I’d just spent the previous decade absorbed with exploring America and gave scant thought to what lay beyond its borders. About Holland, mostly, I’d just heard that the Dutch loved bikes. So, as an older, returning college student, I’d come to Amsterdam to study Dutch urban planning for five months at the University of Amsterdam. That first night, I settled into the studio apartment the university provided me.
On my second morning in Europe, I began my intensive, month-long, five-morning-a-week Dutch class. Whenever not in class, I explored the city by bike, day and night. On my third afternoon in Amsterdam, I sat in the sun on a bench in Vondelpark, the city’s central park.
Though I was a newlywed, I was falling for a new sweetheart. I was fully enraptured with Amsterdam, but even more powerful was the thought of sharing Amsterdam with Amy Joy. I sat and fantasized about riding while holding AJ held my wrist or forearm (the way I’d seen cycling lovers do in Amsterdam) or about riding with her on the back of Brownie (another standard among the local lovers). More thrilling was picturing her riding these streets with a big, round belly. Yet, most exciting of all, was imagining Amy Joy cycling with our own future little tyke as a passenger.
As the endless line of cyclists streamed by, I sat on the bench and hand-wrote a letter to Amy Joy. I described my new perspective: how terribly stressed I now realized I’d been while cycling all those years in America compared to how incredibly relaxed I had become in Amsterdam. I described to her how comfortable Amsterdam felt and the utter “coziness” of my new surroundings. The letter ended: “It’s so absolutely amazing to ride a bike here. Maybe we should just live in Amsterdam forever. What do you think?”
This proposition was little more than wishful thinking, not unlike a kid at Disneyland asking her parents if she could stay and live in Sleeping Beauty’s castle. But to Amy Joy, the thought of being at home in Amsterdam was already real. Her response to my letter was so enthusiastic that it couldn’t wait for Air Mail. Just hours after receiving and reading my proposal, Amy Joy—the girl from Mississippi who’d never before set foot in Europe, much less Amsterdam—replied by email: “Living there forever sounds wonderful! I’ve already started telling my friends, ‘Good bye, I’m moving to Amsterdam….’”
Copyright
In the City of Bikes excerpt copyright © 2012 by Pete Jordan, published by HarperCollins Publishers.
Dishwasher copyright © 2007 by Pete Jordan. All rights reserved.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
First Harper Perennial edition published 2007.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
EPub Edition October 2009 ISBN: 9780061743344
Copyright
DISHWASHER. Copyright © 2007 by Pete Jordan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition April 2007 ISBN 9780061743344
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http:
//www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollins.com