Raised American, I licked my wound and seized, “Where there’s a will there’s a way.”
A week or so later, Candy was issuing her daily edicts to us girls, standing around her like monkeys waiting for tossed peanuts. She motioned with her shoulder toward Molly, over near the jungle gym. “Can you believe that hideous plaid skirt? And look at her hair. Her bangs are longer on one side than the other! She looks like a Dutchie!”
This was it: my moment.
I had heard from my mother that Molly’s military parents didn’t have much money, so her girls had to wear hand-me-downs from cousins in the States, and her mother cut the girls’ hair. The girls in our clutch were all nodding, laughing, and straightening their miniskirts and plumping up their hair as they peeked over at Molly.
My thoughts had stopped. It was as though the part of me that had the capacity for independent thought and knew the golden rule had left my body and I was now solely want and need, and could only be Candy’s echo.
I choked out, in a voice I didn’t recognize, “Yeah, Molly’s a hick.”
Candy was a saucy gull who had stolen an egg from a sparrow’s nest. She flew off, wheeling in the sky, laughing a raucous gull’s laugh.
At home, when I reported, shakily, to my mother and father about Candy— “She’s so cool, she has the nicest clothes, but she’s also mean”—my mother said, “Just look at Tina Jones.” She was an older embassy girl at school. “Tina doesn’t care what other girls say. Just be confident in yourself.”
My father took me on his lap. He told me, “What the other girls say isn’t the thing to focus on. Look inside yourself for what you like and what you think is right, and then try not to think about what others think and do.” I tried, but it was almost impossible. I had to be Candy’s friend; craving has no shame or cease.
One day in late summer, Lucy and I went to the park together and stood by the huge old oak tree at its center. We took sharp sticks and jabbed and scratched them along our forearms until, finally, we raised tiny drops of blood. Rubbing our drops together, mixing our bloods, we became blood sisters. A few days later, Lucy left for the States on the SS Rotterdam. When skinny, flyaway-haired Lucy of the eager eyes sailed away on the ship, I was left with a hole inside me, into which—for better or worse, for good and for bad—Candy Carlton dropped like a stopper in a drain, or a gumdrop in a mouth.
Now that we knew where my father worked, and were established in school, the customary rhythms of our family life were slowly unpacked from our black and green footlockers. We ate pancakes for breakfast on Saturdays, as we had in Bethesda and Taipei, and on weekends we went for hikes—not on the Appalachian Trail in hiking boots, but beside cow fields in black Dutch rubber boots. Other elements of life were distinctly Dutch and we assimilated them easily into our American-style life. Marketing had a whole new meaning and rhythm: my mother hardly had to set foot into a shop. Every few days, the fish man, the meat man, the green grocer, the milk man, the bread man, and the flower lady magically appeared at our door and made deliveries to the yellow row house: of Menken Melk in wonderful plastic bags like water balloons; of paper wraps bulging with apples and tomatoes; of newspaper-triangles of fish; of bread that was still warm; and of bundles of tulips.
Turned loose in the afternoons, Andy and I mounted our bikes and, under a felted grey sky, we charged off to fish in a canal with strung-up sticks and hunks of old bread; to feed yanked-up clumps of grass to wiggly-lipped ponies; to peer at the pots of red flowers and blue-and-white pitchers set in the large lace-curtained picture windows of the Dutch people’s houses.
Days when we were not in the mood for cycling, Andy and his new neighborhood friend, Jan, dug holes to China in the kerchief-sized back garden, with my brother’s turtle, Egbert, standing by. I zoomed up and down the sidewalk on my roller skates or clumped back and forth on my new Dutch stilts.
No day in our new country was complete without a dash to the neighborhood candy shop. By now we knew the Dutch names for our favorite sweets: Kings peppermints; Mentos, another kind of mint with a hard, white shell; candy necklaces; Rangs, which were like Life Savers; and strong dubbelzout licorice.
It was on one of our visits to the candy shop that I saw the thing that fastened me to Holland forever. If chewing gum symbolized America, what I saw at the shop distilled Holland to me.
This particular day, we had to wait to request our sweets until a magical farmer, who smelled of horses and cows, bought a box of cookies and a package of cigarettes. What was magical about this burly man was not his rich smell or his purchases, but his footwear. The farmer was standing in a mucky pair of wooden shoes, plastered with mud and straw—as were the two small, blond thatch-haired children in hand-knit, striped sweaters he had in tow. The moment I saw those shoes—then and there—I fell in love.
Clomp-plunk: that is the sound of Dutch wooden shoes. Klompen. I noticed them everywhere hereafter: on the feet of farmers, country children tromping in paddocks, and even some old fishermen walking around in the centrum.
We stopped one day in a village for pea soup. As we wandered down a lane, we came to an old wooden barn where a man was at work among blocks of wood. We watched as out of a block of blond-white wood set on a pedestal the man chiseled, with smooth, deft twists of his large hands, a shoe exactly like something out of a fairy tale—a smooth wooden slipper that fit my foot like a sock, with an upturned elfin toe.
When we got home, I put on my fairy-tale shoes and from then on, I wore them whenever I could. The Dutch shoe fit my parents and brother as well. My mother and father had by now taken to biking in the rain, their wheels splattering their coat tails as they pedaled. And they took great glee in reading the latest naughty Dutch novels. And as for Andy: rain just added to the richness of his dirt-digging. He was meant for a mud wallow.
By the end of the summer, six months after our arrival in The Hague, I could walk on stilts in my klompen, but even at this my patriotism held strong. Even a lot of Dutch kids, I reckoned, could hardly walk in their klompen this well.
One night, on my way home from buying eggs for my mother at the candy shop, some neighborhood boys yelled, “Amerika! Amerika!” as I passed by, and tossed clumps of soil at me. While running away, I jolted the eggs.
Once I got home, with a basketful of broken eggs, I sobbed to my mother about the mean boys. “They’re nothing but a bunch of dumb Dutchies,” I said, mimicking the kids at school.
My mother patted me, in sympathy, and then she said, “But don’t ever call Dutch people ‘Dutchies’ again. It’s not respectful to our hosts.” She then loped off herself, to buy another dozen eggs.
I sat stiffly on the couch during the time my mother was gone. While trying to focus on my book, I tasted, for the first time, the red-hot shame—the mixture of anger and chagrin—that would become one side of the split response I had to Holland for as long as we lived here. On the one hand, my chest burst with fierce pride in being an American—the unadulterated pride that only a grade school child can have—and, in my arrogance, I wanted to sic some big American boys on my tormenters to show them whose country was the stronger. On the other hand, a wonder had poised itself in my mind. What could the Dutch boys not like about America? This question was to be the porridge I ate each day for breakfast throughout my four and a half years in The Hague.
Back in America, other kinds of eggs were being thrown. Cross-cultural conflict with another country was heating up.
One early August night, when we were sitting at dinner, my father said, “Something important has happened. Congress just signed the Tonkin Bay Resolution.”
When we’d arrived at The Hague, just six months before, in March, the civil rights march on Washington had occurred, and America was full of people jumping up and down for joy on television. This summer, the American Ranger 7 space probe had sent back photographs of the moon, and Carnaby Street in London had become the coolest place on earth. I’d spent hours staring at magazine photos of English model
s in Mary Quant miniskirts. Now, over a dinner of mashed potatoes and wurst, my father said, “With the Tonkin Bay Resolution, President Johnson has been given a blank check for bombing North Vietnam, the Communist part of Vietnam.”
My father pointed to Vietnam on the globe. He said more and more Americans were being sent there every month, to fight the Communists. It was a very difficult war, but it was important to stop the Communists in Vietnam, because our government thought if we didn’t, the Communist Chinese might take over Vietnam—and then, like dominoes, one after another country would fall.
When I left Bethesda, I had left behind the possibility of being a pure and simple American girl. Now, just six months later, though I was unaware of it, my country, too, had lost its innocence and purity.
After this, more and more frequently, I heard my father talk about Saigon. “Bill said things in Saigon are hot . . . ,” or “I heard from Tom yesterday. He said Saigon station is a messy place. . . .” I knew, deep in my bones, however, regardless of anything that went on in the world, that America was still the heroic country that won World War II, the most powerful country in the world—and I knew we could do no wrong.
When my father told us about the blank check, though, his eyes were very serious. I didn’t realize it, but another war was gathering force, a war that would shape my life.
10
dutchies
One raw afternoon, my father took us to an exhibit of M. C. Escher’s prints. The exhibit was housed in a vast, modern building stretching across a garden in a part of The Hague I had never seen before. Inside the immense rooms with large windows, I walked from print to print, captured by the artist’s work. Each woodcut was a puzzle. One moment, all I saw inside the frame was black flocks of birds. The next, the picture held flows of white fish. One piece, titled Day and Night, showed a patchwork landscape of geometric shapes that gradually rose and changed into birds. Above the fields, white birds flew toward a black medieval town with church and windmill, and in the opposite direction, black birds winged toward a mirror image of the town, this time in white. It was impossible to hold both the black birds and the white birds, both night and day, in my eyes at once. One part of the picture rose up and trapped me every time.
Up until this point in my life, age ten, I had always had a clear picture in my mind of a world of white American knights in a castle on a hill fighting foreign enemy black knights from a castle below. But now, planted in a fresh and interesting country, I could no longer bring reliably into focus one clear, steady, white picture of America and the world.
My life became a nervous affair: of black and white doubles that flicked in and out of focus, white-then-black, black-then-white, as my ardent patriotism hit up against Dutch opinions about American foreign policy; as my efforts to act the confident, jocular American clashed with and faded into my private shyness; and as the tiny world of my American school was trespassed upon by, and warped into, the great world beyond. My life became a constant struggle to restore the white knights to their rightful place in the white castle on the hill.
It was October now—my first Dutch autumn—and tinges of oranges and apples mixed with the green wetness of the trees and the damp red brick of the row houses. We had moved to an old, rambling brick row house on Duinweg, Dune Way, in the heart of the city near the sea.
Our new rented house with its seven bedrooms, five fireplaces, and four bathrooms; its old, heavy furniture; its dark, Dutch paintings; and its farm-style kitchen with a big rectangular wooden table in the middle, was dark and gloomy and the happiest house I’d lived in yet. Our housekeeper was usually in the kitchen with my mother, wiping the counters when we got home. Maria, who was stout and had ruddy cheeks that felt like sandpaper, gave me an enveloping hug against her broad bosom and said, “Dag Lievert! ” Then she tickled Andy, who proceeded to flop on the floor. “Andytje! ” Maria lovingly scolded, pulling him up with her gentle, chapped paw.
Maria was the reincarnation of Mary, our Taiwanese amah—but this amah was hazel-eyed, large, and sturdy. Maria was humus, an earthy woman putting forth delicate blooms. I’ve never seen a more beautiful face: radiant eyes shining from thick, wind-rouged cheeks—colors of red delicious apples and whipped cream.
One of the boons of living abroad is the way class differences dissolve. When you’re in a foreign country, perhaps because you are so undeniably different and this cannot be changed and must be surmounted, love vaults the brick walls. I’d experience this years later, in my twenties on a job in Patagonia, where I was able to have friends as various as a member of one of the richest families in the land, a bush pilot, and a woman who lived from the proceeds of her tiny hotel in a two-bit whale-watching village. This forging of friendships across the frontiers of class is one of life’s great pleasures—and now, here in The Hague, I adored a Dutch washerwoman.
My mother loved her too. Maria bustled around her, giving her pillowy hugs like she gave me, dispensing love like it was as cheap as Dutch tulips.
I stepped out of the cozy warmth of the Duinweg house into the drizzle, my grey U.S. army surplus munitions bag slung over my left shoulder. I had swapped the Dutch leather satchel my mother loved for this bag, which was like that of every other child in my class at The American School of The Hague. I loved this bag. It was American. On its sturdy grey canvas I had inked slogans: “I Love Paul” (of the Beatles) and “Love Potion Number Nine.” We lived only one long block from the school.
I looked both ways, crossed the street, turned left, and then set off down Park-straat. The sidewalk was narrow and uneven with broken slabs. I had to watch for dog doo as I proceeded. Dutch people were dog-crazy and there was dog plop everywhere.
The cobbled street, a district of small institutions, was narrow, lined on both sides by villas and small mansions fronted by wrought-iron fences. There were a few spindly trees, and large, overarching willows. The rain misted down, making my face itch. Inside my wool jacket, I sweated. I loved my school, so I hastened along.
I hurried past the French and then the English school, bustling past the bar-retted and tailored French girls and then the chap-cheeked, bob-haired English girls in their uniforms, headed for my own species. Dutch children passed me with leather satchels in their hands on their way to somewhere also called “school,” but with the “ch” pronounced in that globby Dutch way. I knew all Dutch children learned four languages at once—Dutch, English, German, and French. Besides languages, the Dutch were also good at sports. At my school, we hated them for that.
My heart racing like my piano metronome on its fastest setting, I passed three or four more villas and then came at last to my school—the school where I, deli-ciously, at last belonged.
I looked through the iron rungs along the street edge of the side playground: younger children were climbing on the jungle gym and jumping up to grasp the ropes of the maypole. Mr. Thomas, the dreamy British art teacher on playground patrol, was strolling with his head held loftily toward the sky. John and Jeff were hurling a ball across the blacktop as usual. They were wearing jeans, black loafers, and white socks. Both boys had slicked-back hair with little cowlick peaks in front, like Ricky Nelson’s. A little nearer, over to the side, Candy and Lizzy were whispering together, sitting cozy as birds in a nest, on the brick wall. Both girls had brown loafers on their feet, the kind I coveted. Candy’s hair was teased like Audrey Hepburn’s so it poofed up on top and around her face in a perfect bubble, and flipped up on the ends.
As I stood at the fence I breathed in a rush of happiness. This was my school, and this was the way a school and children should look. These were Americans. It was a grand feeling. My father had his American world at the embassy and I had mine.
I turned in the gate and walked over toward Candy and Lizzy. Fighting an inner tug of shyness that was always with me like a pair of dog tags, I soldiered on, hurrying to join my kind.
I’d become accustomed by now to the oddball collection of teachers that matched the motley crew o
f kids. Miss O’Malley, the Irish P.E. teacher who coached us in soccer and Irish dancing, was engaged to a Dutch hockey star. Mr. Leonard, the bearded eighth-grade teacher, was a San Francisco bohemian married to a Surinamese woman with creamy caramel skin and gorgeous eyes that glowed like lighted coals. Miss Bates was a glamorous, outspoken Native American lady who wore zebra-print tent dresses from Vogue. Mr. Thomas, the sixth-grade teacher as well as the art teacher for the whole school, was a tall, gaunt man who painted strange pictures of fruits with globby oil paint. The science teacher was another Brit, Wing Commander Potts, of the RAF. He taught us how to distinguish the elements, and to name all the parts of a Spitfire.
I was now in the hard work phase of establishing myself in the school that I’d attended for four months in the spring. The confusion alternating with euphoria of the first weeks had now been replaced by the hard reality of the struggle to find my place in the hierarchy. The kids at school had a pecking order, just like the chimp troop in the book about Jane Goodall my mother had read to us.
My fifth-grade classroom, on the second floor of the Victorian manse, had French doors with a view out over the front lawn. Our desks, though, faced the wall toward the interior. Mrs. Van Gelderen was an American married to a Dutchman. Her main passion was riding; she sometimes wore jodhpurs to class. She started the day with a question, “So, class, I want to know what you think: What is America’s role in the world?”
Billy said, “That’s easy. We’re the most powerful country on earth. We won World War II. Holland and all the European countries put together couldn’t win without us. We kicked out Hitler.”
“We also have the best researchers in the world,” Tom said. “Our scientists took those pictures of the moon—those sure weren’t Dutch scientists.” A knowing snicker trickled around the room like a whisper in a game of telephone.
“And we’re the best inventors. We invented rockets and hovercrafts and probably amphibious cars, and the atom bomb. . . ,” Jimmy said, making up his facts.
Born Under an Assumed Name Page 15