Born Under an Assumed Name

by Sara Mansfield Taber

  “And what about Cassius Clay? He’s the strongest man in the world and he’s American,” Billy said.

  “And we have the most beautiful actresses. Katharine Hepburn is American, and so is Natalie Wood,” Candy said.

  President Kennedy was the best president, and we have Martin Luther King Jr. They are some of the greatest men in history. And we have the Peace Corps, they help people all over the earth. My parents often talked about these things at dinner, and this was what I would have said if I didn’t get a pit in my stomach whenever I thought of talking in class, or of saying something that might be different from what others would say.

  I’d felt different from the day I looked up into the pine fronds over my cradle back in Japan—and afterward, in Taipei and in Bethesda, too. I didn’t like knowing something no one else knew—for instance, knowing about water buffaloes and sad Chinese eyes. I didn’t know about gloating. I hated it when other people lorded it over me that they knew something I didn’t know, and to think of knowing something all by myself made me feel alone. I hadn’t yet got it that there wasn’t going to be anyone just like me, ever—that we were all distinct stars in a galaxy.

  “We’re also about the biggest country in the world—except for Russia and China. And we’re 225 times bigger than Holland. Holland fits in our pocket, that’s what my dad says,” Peggy was saying. She was another embassy kid.

  We were building up our sacred argument, brick by brick.

  “The White House is tons bigger than the president’s house here.”

  “They don’t have a president. They have a prime minister. But what about the queen’s palace? That’s big.”

  “Aw, that’s just a palace. And the queen’s just a figurehead anyway.”

  Margrite, who was half-Dutch, with taunting, sparking blue eyes and a beautiful, aquiline nose, tossed her straight-as-straw bangs out of her left eye. The traitor in our midst, she said, “The Netherlands was one of the most important naval powers in the world, way before America even had cities. Even now, we’re way ahead in shipping. Rotterdam is about the biggest port in the world.” None of us had known that.

  “And,” she continued, “in America, you don’t have any barges. Our barges transport goods all over Europe.”

  “So? We have billions of super-fast trucks.”

  “Trucks are nothing to barges,” she said. “Our friend has one and I’ve ridden on it.” Having delivered these penetrating blows, she moved on without missing a beat. “We also have engineers that are better than any in the world. Our engineers can make land out of the sea!” she said, knowing she’d trumped just about anything.

  The room was quiet for a minute and then Johnny said, “Anyone can build a dike.”

  “We also have some of the world’s most famous artists,” she went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “Rembrandt, Van Dyke, Van Gogh.” She said Van Gogh the proper Dutch way, with the gluck sounds both at the beginning and end of “gogh.” “You don’t have artists that famous.”

  “Yeah, well did you hear what the Dutchies did yesterday?” Billy said, upping the ante. “They burned the American flag!”

  “That’s against the law!” Tommy said, his face growing red.

  “Ja, well those protests are about the atom bomb. My mum told me about them,” she said, revealing her ignorance by saying mom the British way. “My mum said America thinks it’s great because it has the atom bomb. Well, the opposite is true. Who would want to come from a country that builds the most destructive thing in the world?” She paused a minute to let her point sink in.

  “Just cuz Holland isn’t smart enough to build one!”

  “Life isn’t about bigger and bigger weapons,” she said, as though she was the pope, or God himself. “And what about what America is doing in Vietnam? Life is about being kind and letting other people rule themselves. That’s what real democracy is.”

  We didn’t know that at this juncture President Johnson was contemplating ways to intensify the war in Vietnam, or that the American public and Congress were paying little attention to the situation. It wouldn’t have made a difference anyway—our country had been insulted.

  “Yes, well, class,” Mrs. Van Gelderen quickly dumped a bucket of water onto the flames that had erupted all around the little room, “Margrite has pointed us in an interesting direction. Let’s talk about what democracy is. . . .”

  We all fumed in silence as she droned on about Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence.

  How American you were was constantly being tested at school. I sensed I still had to prove myself worthy of the title.

  The other fifth-grade girls and I were sprawled in the assembly room, making posters for a bake sale, eating our lunches, and gabbing. Our Keds were flung around the floor. Some of us had on the school sweatshirt. We’d campaigned mightily for this sweatshirt. At first the school had issued a Dutch-style velour pullover with a school patch. We all viewed it with disdain, thinking of our stateside cousins’ big, baggy cotton shirts with their fathers’ university seals on them, but we wore the sweater with the insignia anyway. When the school finally came up with a Golden mustard yellow sweatshirt with a huge crest of stars and stork blazing its front, we’d felt we could finally stand up for our school properly, the American way. Now, when we walked down the street, jacketless in our glaring, sun-glow shirts, no one could mistake us for Dutchies.

  We saw Margrite out on the front lawn, yanking at Richard’s jacket, flirting as usual. “She’s probably never even lived in the States,” Candy said. “Back in the States, we are so much cooler. Everyone imitates us. Look at all the Dutchies in blue jeans. Those are our jeans. They want to be like us, even if they say they don’t.” We were all swept up in the intoxicating thrill of jingoism.

  “Yeah, we’re the leaders of fashion, back in the States,” Lizzy said.

  “Back in the States”: it was like those four words gave authority to any sentence that contained them. Though few of us had spent more than a couple of years on the American continent, when we referred to our native country, we all said it this way. Not “America”—that was too Dutch, and not “the United States”—that was too long, but “the States.” We uttered our country’s name with bravado—like little boys brandishing swords—as though we knew all about it, and privately owned it. And we would have defended this abstraction to the death.

  “Back in the States, everything is better,” Teri said. “I saw skirted bikinis when I was on home leave. They won’t come out here for five years. My mom said they haven’t even come out yet in London.”

  We lost momentum for a moment, as Carnaby Street and Kings Road spun into our minds, and then Kathy took up the banner again.

  “I saw the cutest pants suit in the Montgomery Ward catalog. They don’t have anything like it here.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “and the poor boy T-shirts in the Sears catalog are so cute.” My family had only just begun getting mail-order catalogs, at my insistence. My mother would never have bothered. She thought it was silly to buy clothes from the States when the Dutch had such nice things. But I talked like this with the girls and it was as though I was in a gentle sea, just swaying with the water currents. The girl who loved her housekeeper, Van Gogh, and thatched houses vanished, and I was blissfully a part of girl marine life. It never occurred to me that I might choose not to be in this particular school, or that I might follow my own nose through the ocean, or that I might even lead the school of fish. Only later would I think, I shouldn’t have said that, or I don’t really think that way. Then I would feel guilty and pricked by fear at my duplicity.

  “And Dutchies don’t even have sliced cheese,” Kathy was saying. We were back to food, the refrain of our song.

  I happily joined in, listing things Holland lacked: bologna, Fritos, good ice cream, chocolate chips, Oreos. . . . “And they don’t even have Hershey’s! All they have is dumb old Droste.” I ignored the fact that I loved Droste chocolate coins.

  �
��Yeah, well, you’re lucky, Sara, you can get Hershey’s at the PX.”

  “Yeah, but my mom won’t buy me hardly any. . . .”

  Scattered around the floor with our shoes were our lunch sacks. These held white-bread sandwiches, potato chips, and cookies—lunches as close to regulation Wonder Bread and bologna, Fritos, and Hershey’s bars as our mothers could get on the Dutch market. In the daily lunch competition, the child who brought a fluffernutter to school (by definition a child whose mother had been smart enough to bring some peanut butter and marshmallow Fluff back from home leave, since they weren’t available in Holland, or an even luckier embassy or military child whose mother could buy them any time at the PX at the American army base near Schiphol Airport) was immediately conferred five minutes of high status. Chocolate-chip cookies, Snickers bars, and Hostess Twinkies were also solidarity foods. I was dying for all these wonders. My mother could easily have gotten them, but instead she sent me to school with whole-wheat Dutch bread sandwiches, carrot sticks, and raisins.

  This was what drove me crazy about my mother. She didn’t realize that if she’d just buy all our food at the PX, I’d have kids admiring me all day long every day, but my mother had told me to lay low about our PX privileges. Almost every day there were debates on the playground over whether embassy and military kids had any more right than business kids to PX privileges. “We’re as American as you are,” the business kids said. “Well, your fathers make more money so you can afford to buy on the Dutch market,” we embassy and Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) kids retorted, mimicking our mothers’ words. Then they said, as if we owed it to them, “Well, next time you go to the PX, bring me five Tootsie Rolls.”

  I loved the PX—even if my mother groaned every time we talked her into going, which ended up being only about once a month. For me, to drive past the sentry at the guard post was to enter the one true church. There, inside the high walls of the base, were American soldiers with heart-stirring little American insignia on their clothes. I could find Wrangler jeans in the rumpled piles on the shelves of the shop. And on late Saturday afternoons, while my mother was shopping for Sara Lee cheesecake, frozen banana cream pie, and hot dogs, I could go to the little newsstand-cigarette kiosk just outside the commissary, buy something from the Juicy Fruit and M & M shelf, and nestle down with an Archie and Veronica comic. The Stars & Stripes and magazines like Life and Newsweek, with their headlines shouting out “Johnson Sends $400 Million to Saigon” and “Fifty American Advisors Killed in Last Four Years,” were a subliminal, natural American-style backdrop. For fifteen minutes, I could slouch around with three pieces of Juicy Fruit in my mouth and flip the pages of the funnies. And for those delicious, transcendent moments, I could feel, deep down to my toes, what it was to be American.

  Back on the playground the debate never ceased.

  “America’s got the coolest stuff,” said Katie, a kid who’d come at the beginning of the year. “Back in the States, there are troll dolls everywhere. I have one with purple, and one with pink hair. . . . It’ll take about ten years for those to get to Holland.” I didn’t mention that troll dolls were Danish or that I’d just seen troll dolls with hair in ten different colors, and in every size up to the size of baby dolls, in the centrum.

  “I love Dutch fishnet stockings,” Gabrielle said, taking us back to clothes. Half-Belgian, she was the rare child among us who didn’t care what other people thought. “They’re wearing them all over Paris, and Paris is the center of fashion,” Gabrielle said. “Maman said she’ll get me some next spring, on my twelfth birthday. I’m so excited.”

  This threw us all for a loop.

  But Candy was quick on her feet. “They’ll fall apart in a month,” she said with absolute authority. “My mom said Dutch stuff always disintegrates in the dryer. I’d never buy Dutch stockings in a million years.”

  “I wouldn’t either,” I said. These words just popped out of my mouth.

  “And what about Dutch underwear,” Teri said. “Can you believe they make a lot of it out of wool? It itches more than poison ivy. And even if it’s not wool, it scratches. Dutch underpants come up to my arm pits, and they’re so thick they show under everything, and the elastic stretches out in five minutes.”

  I squirmed quietly in my Dutch underwear, which came up higher than the American kind, but only to the waist. The American days-of-the-week undies I loved were getting holes in them, so my mother had bought me some Dutch pairs downtown just before school started. I hadn’t given them a second thought until this minute.

  “My mom orders all my underwear from Penneys,” Teri finished. I took this in like an urgent cable from Washington.

  “And what about Dutch toilet paper,” Candy said, uttering the ultimate put-down in The Hague’s expatriate American world. “It’ll scrape off your rear!” Everyone laughed. I stayed quiet, remembering my mother’s words about American ladies who complained about things like toilet paper. “Those ladies who moan about Kleenex and toilet paper are whiners. They should take a look at what the Dutch do offer—the churches, the pottery, the flowers, the traditions of helping other people.”

  Suddenly a disastrous thing occurred: a question popped out of my mouth. It was like an ugly duckling part of me—the undercover Dutch sympathizer—erupted out of the pond of white ducks where I had been quietly floating with the other white ducks, and soared into the air, betraying me. “What about paprika chips and patates?” I said. The second I uttered this, I knew I’d made a potentially fatal mistake and could feel my face beginning to burn.

  Luckily, Candy was merciful; she corrected me relatively gently. “Yeah, they’re okay, but American barbeque potato chips are even better, and McDonald’s french fries are ten times better than patates, and we don’t serve them with mayonnaise. That’s just plain retarded.”

  I loved so many things about Holland, but when I was at school, I seldom thought of them, much less uttered any of them out loud. The minute I stepped within the gates of my school, I dunked the intriguingly different House of Orange in which I lived in order to pledge myself American. Whenever my America boasting got too far off track, though, Holland reliably reared its head like a whale from the sea, and challenged my position, in a loud, Dutch, guttural hrummph.

  Along with my picture of the world, I, too, altered when I passed through the school gates. The girl who walked on stilts in her wooden shoes slipped away. Only the little ambassador, and most of all Sara-the-pleaser, remained. The American School of The Hague was, to me, a complete and buttoned world, a demanding, all-absorbing place that required the ultimate sacrifice.

  In one way, it was easy for me to meet all the basic qualifications of a real American. I could eat my brown sugar Pop Tarts from the PX, and wear my Wrangler jeans. I could put on my Keds, and carry my U.S. Army ammo bag swinging over my shoulder. And I could sneer at Dutchies and say “back in the States,” as if it were home, and feel like I was the real McCoy. But there was something fishy in the hamburger.

  Mrs. Van Gelderen tossed out a question: “Who is the U.S. secretary of defense?” I heard McNamara’s name every night at the dinner table as my parents discussed the situation in Saigon, and I knew, like I knew that I had two big toes, that he was the secretary of defense. Nevertheless, in the fraction of a second after the question was shot into the air like a bullet, my mind fabricated doubt. “Oh no, maybe the secretary of defense has just changed, and that’s why she’s asking.” Then, “It couldn’t just be McNamara, could it?” To be wrong was too embarrassing to contemplate, and anyway, if I did answer, even if I answered right, everyone would look at me. My belly fluttered with anxiety. I squeezed my mind tight, and sent telepathic messages to Mrs. Van Gelderen, sinking down on my chair, looking hard at the paper on my desk, to prevent her from calling on me.

  Another day, Tommy Williams, a boy whose floppy blond hair and shirts with epaulettes I secretly daydreamed about, told me that I was a good soccer player. After he said it, my heart bea
t like the wings of an injured bird I’d seen flopping in the street. I was struck dumb. There was not one word in my head, much less a quick-fire, American-style, flirtatious retort. I went to the upper soccer field, where no one was, and hid around the corner until I could walk and breathe again, and I didn’t look at Tommy the rest of the day.

  Like a fly in the ointment of my life, a shy girl kept displacing the sassy girl who ate peanut butter sandwiches and munched on Pop Tarts. I knew I was American. I possessed that most American of all things, an American diplomatic passport. But I had figured out something else, something that made my hold on the world waver: to be a real American, you had to be outgoing. Being a true-blue American meant being able to be light-hearted and josh around—and never, ever, to be tender. The Americans I’d seen on television and in movies—beyond those I noticed at school—all seemed to burst with confidence. To be a real American you had to be like Candy; you had to have that breezy, cowgirl air.

  Could I be both all-American and the kind of person who shrinks in a crowd? This question haunted me. Being shy and being American seemed like two animals that couldn’t marry. My equation of American and extroverted was a young person’s overgeneralization, but it was perhaps an accurate perception of America’s role in the world, and of America in the media. I had a Hollywood image of America, just like people all over the world did.

  I couldn’t see that the father I worshiped was shy, and I couldn’t remember (and had I ever noticed?) that there were shy girls at Radnor, and there were even other shy American girls here. I didn’t know that there were legions of quiet, successful American writers, doctors, and lawyers. I was incapable of picking out individuals from the loud, hearty, cheering crowd of American kids. Trapped in the big screen picture of American children joshing around, I pushed away the picture of the shy girl, but she kept popping back up in a corner of the screen.

  It was Mr. Benton, the principal of the school, as much as anyone, who, unwittingly, had led me to this all-important conclusion. He was the quintessential American principal: stocky, with a blond crew cut, and blue-eyed. He wore Oxford cloth shirts and loafers. Hearty and funny, he was master of the quick comeback. He told us, at the opening assembly on the blacktop, that although “principal” could be spelled with an “le” he preferred the “pal” spelling, because that was the way he wanted us to think of him. Mr. Benton was our own private myth walking around. He was the way a person should be: all-American. I adored him. We all did.