My theory was further fortified by the way girls were treated at school. Girls who were cheeky and impulsive, and good at the immediate retort, received multiple rewards. Candy, who tossed her bangs and said “So?” with chilling authority whenever she pleased, was the first girl chosen at dances, always got the lead in the play, and held court on the playground like the queen of the largest ranch in Texas. Even Mr. Potts, the harsh British science teacher, began to twinkle in her presence. “That’s some kid,” adults said, shaking their heads in admiration. If you were outgoing, you held all the promises of America—the apple pie, the pie in the sky—in the palms of your hands.
My father and I had long talks about my shyness. “Be a leader,” he said. “Don’t worry if other people laugh. Speak out.” “Don’t be afraid to be different.” “Be an Eleanor Roosevelt or a Harriet Tubman.” “As [Ralph Waldo] Emerson said, ‘Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.’” Regarding my difficulty with speaking up in class, he gave me pep talks: “You know, Sara, other people like a person who can make a mistake and laugh at herself.”
Tomorrow, I made stern vows to myself after a talk with my father; I will speak up before anyone else when the teacher asks a question. Determined to beat out my shyness, using all my willpower, I would force myself for several weeks to speak up, awkwardly, and with a squeaky voice—going cold like there was alcohol running through me when I did so—but the shakiness was always there.
During these days at The American School of The Hague, it would have been helpful to have had even a little glimmer of the European notion of “character” as something unalterable and inviolate and sacred that is given to each person, or to have someone acknowledge that you live in a different, but still legitimate world and have special qualities to offer, if you’re shy, to balance my treasured American idea that a person could be anything she wanted to be if she put her mind to it—but this knowledge was many years in the distance, and for now I was American, desperately American.
I took the only tack I knew. I made resolutions. “If at first you don’t succeed . . .” In this land of thatched farms and windmills thrumping in the wind, I made vows to be breezy, to say “howdy” like Candy did, to boast about American power. I was sure that if I just tried hard enough I would receive the cornucopia the States had to offer: the chummy girlfriends, the boys in baseball hats, and most of all the do-or-die personality.
In the end, I could launch my campaigns, but my campaigns were those of a squadron set against battalions hidden in a teeming jungle. And my own brain kept calling my bluff. The cowgirl kept slipping out of my lasso. No matter how hard I tried to convince myself that I was one thing, the truth was otherwise.
Nevertheless, there were moments of hope. One winter weekend, a bunch of us fifth and sixth graders were gathered at a skating rink in the suburban outskirts of The Hague. After skating to Beatles music for an hour or more, we stood at the edge of the ice, eating patates frites and sipping Fantas. As we were about to leave, a Dutch boy skated up, executed an expert twirl, and yelled “Amerika” as he sped across the circle of ice. A moment later, another boy appeared and did the same thing. By the time the third arrowed toward us and stopped just short, in a whoosh of ice shavings, all our bodies were pumping with adrenaline. I shrank with fear and wanted to just get away, but the boys with us were riled. To them, it seemed, all the mouthy crassness of our American identities had been summoned. Knowing they couldn’t compete on skating skill, they began yelling back, “Dutchie! Dutchie!” as though it was the worst swear word in the language. The Dutch boys pooled on their side of the rink, laughing and pointing at us, and our boys did the same, on ours. It was as though we Dutch and American kids were giving voice to the welling antagonisms in the air of the world.
As time went on, the girls, too, filled up with a clean, murderous, white fury, and began yelling along with the boys. “Dutchies! Dutchies! Dutchies!” And before I was aware of it, I was yelling, too, and as I did I felt suddenly strong and free. The shy girl in the cage disappeared and a confident, outgoing Sara took over my body. As we American kids yelled, all the differences between us as individuals melted away as we united against a common enemy. We became one pulsating American army.
We finally left, us girls pulling the glowering boys along with us, but not without our hurling back that word—by now imbued with hate—over our shoulders time and again until we stepped out into the cold sunshine.
As we walked down the street, I felt like I was going to explode with happiness. For this half-hour flash in the stretch of time, I was all-American. I was exuberant and outgoing, and absolutely certain about the truth of the world.
My life at The American School of The Hague was life in an Escher print. A trick picture, endlessly confusing, with seemingly contradictory truths flipping in and out of focus. I could be shy or I could be American. I could love America or I could love Holland. I could see the American point of view, or I could see the world’s. I could never bring the black birds and the white birds into focus at once. I was not yet old enough to know that there could be two simultaneous truths about the world.
11
my father’s bath
Ever since I was small, my mother had talked about fevers—tubercular fevers that killed children, fevers that felled whole villages in Taiwan and China. On a record of Rudyard Kipling stories that we had listened to time and again, I had heard about “the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees. . . .” Fevers were lush, black-green places, swamps of limbo and fear. Places of danger that sucked your spirit, where you dwelt—slopping through clutching weeds and swirling heat—until you finally stepped out onto new, clean, firm ground.
My father and I would each develop fevers in the next eighteen months—I would contract meningitis, my father another strain of illness, each serious and each an omen of more dire fevers to come.
In the Duinweg front hall with its dark burgundy-black-and-brown two-story paintings looming overhead, my father put on his raincoat and tweed cap. His glove opened the front door. His head and then his desert boot disappeared. The door clicked closed. I hurried to the front of the house, to my window post. I put my face up close to the glass and watched my father stride past the front hedge, and on down the sidewalk. The rain descended in sheets, but his head held high did not bow even a quarter of a degree. His eyes stayed fixed somewhere way off—to a place out in the North Sea—and his swift pace held. I watched him walk over the brow
of the little hill.
My father disappeared each day to the burnished, half-hidden world of the embassy. He vanished into his important, secret realm, but all day long, while I was at school, and after, while I was stenciling Bunsen burners into my lab report or reading the pages of my French text in the dimming light, a part of me was a girl at the window, waiting to be with my father again, for being with my father steadied and cooled me. He taught me about boys and men. More, he was my Santa Maria, my passage to other, grander worlds.
At school I lived in a constricted, air-tight bell jar. Now in seventh grade I was not only obsessed with being plucky, all-American Candy, but with something else.
It had started back in the fourth grade, with my first boy-girl party. At that point, all the rules of the game had changed; the colors of my universe had flushed from those bright Crayola colors of kindergarten to the mauves and saffrons of nervous, mixed feelings. As of that moment of playing spin the bottle, I understood that all that really mattered, for a girl, was how pretty and saucy she was. That year I had cut all the “Boys” off the covers of my brother’s Boys’ Life magazines, and taped them, to his dismay, on my walls. The tenacious notion, that a boyfriend was the key to a girl’s success, wouldn’t be contradicted until I was exposed to feminism in college, and introduced to the startling notion that girls should not be rivals for men, but supportive sisters.
During the fifth and sixth grades, the project had continued, and now, in seventh, boys were
like a wildfire raging through my body.
While Madame Evans was pointing out places on a map, we girls were passing notes and keeping an eye on the boys. The boys, on the other hand, were all legs and arms and gawky bodies. In constant motion, they were hunching around at their desks, draping their arms down over the backs of their chairs, kicking their legs out into and down the aisle. Suave Jeff was leaning way back in his chair, and so was skinny Mike, who did everything Jeff did. (He was to Jeff as I was to Candy.) Roger was making a paper airplane out of a page of old math homework. Sandy-haired Billy, who most of the girls agreed was “Sooooo cute!” was tossing a ball back and forth between his hands. He was interested only in balls, so we gazed at him in vain. Too-handsome Richard, whose mother looked like a movie star in her mink coat, was trying to listen to the teacher, but Kit was tempting him by pointing at pictures in the Mad magazine open in his lap.
Freckled, smart-alecky Roger was now softening wads of paper in his mouth and shooting them, whenever Madame Evans wasn’t looking, at Jeff through a straw. With an expert, gentle puff, his spitballs hit their mark: Jeff’s ear, his neck, his cheek. Jeff was raising his fist at Roger behind his chair. Link, who was cool and tall as a man, and wore mod, double-breasted pinstriped suits to school, was egging Roger on. Now Roger held a banana just below his desktop. He made sure Jeff was looking, and then squeezed so hard the banana pulp shot, whole, up out of the skin. Jeff was so choked by the laughs spazzing up from his belly, he had to put his head on his desk.
Meanwhile, dark-haired Kit had tossed his Mad on the floor and was whittling at the edge of his desk with a forbidden pen knife. Kit was like the handsome, dark-haired Artful Dodger in Oliver. You could smell the cigarettes and the motorcycle, imagine the shoplifting, feel the sharp-filed edge of the knife he was walking on.
To us girls, boys were like promises. Because they had loose, straight legs and a jet-fired energy we couldn’t match, and sped like a pack of cheetahs over the soccer field, they fed our imaginations. One day, we dreamed, one of them would emerge from out of the fray, and become ours. Kit with his gleaming-coal, straight flop of hair, Billy with his nonchalance, quiet Mike with his shy smile; who would it be, with his protective or possessive arm over our shoulders, in a few years, or just a month from now?
I assumed that all boys were like my father. When I finally had one, he would be quiet and dignified, and when he spoke, worth listening to. I would sit at his feet, and his sun would warm me as I absorbed his wisdom.
Later, in adulthood, I thought, How strong the drive toward love is in a child. It’s an unstoppable force. There are the hormones, but there is also the raw sincerity of it.
My friend Lizzy, who was one grade behind me, was my main source of advice on how to be with boys. She was the kind of friend you could slop around with and not worry about how your hair looked—a true friend.
Lizzy had sleek chestnut hair clipped in a blunt cut just below her chin, like Twiggy’s, and big, wide, caramel eyes. She was very skinny (with weak ankles ending in thin, flat feet—her only endearing flaw) and very pretty: put together like the girl in an ankle-length coat and hair ribbon I’d seen one time going into the Ritz Hotel in Paris.
I knew, without knowing, that Lizzy was classy. She had a natural elegance, entirely different from Candy’s cute, all-American, TV good looks. I didn’t have a clue about this now, but Candy and Lizzy’s differing styles of prettiness were the difference between New England and Texas. (Not for many years would it dawn on me that another thing that distinguished Lizzy was the natural confidence endowed by patrician wealth.) Lizzy told me her mother had been ABJ, which meant “Anyone But Johnson,” in the last presidential election. Her family was pro-Goldwater. My father said Goldwater was a narrow-minded man. We were pro-Johnson, but Pop agreed that Lizzy was nice.
The best thing about Lizzy was that she was goofy. When she saw me at school, she said, “Hi, Gorgeous,” and I said back, “Hi, Elegant,” and then we hustled over to join the clutch of other girls, gossiping and nudging each other with our pointy elbows.
To be in Lizzy’s female-dominated home was to touch something as smooth as a silk slip, something feminine and fine. We were sitting together on her sixteen-year-old sister’s bed. Lizzy was reporting to me all of Becca’s secrets for attracting boys and I was listening eagerly.
“The only swear word she would ever use is ‘Damn,’” Lizzy said. “It’s the only one that is still okay for a lady.”
I tried it out. “Oh, damn,” I said. “Like that?”
“Not, ‘Oh, damn,’ just ‘Damn.’”
“And never say ‘woman,’” Lizzy instructed. “That’s coarse. Always say ‘lady,’ and sit with your legs like this,” she said, holding her knees together and her feet— clad in flats—flat on the floor. Her sister had learned this at a Miss Somebody’s Dancing School back in the States.
Now Lizzy was telling me about Becca’s boyfriend. He was tall, handsome, and had a motorcycle. “Becca only rides side-saddle,” she explained. “It’s the elegant way. That way she can show off her legs and let her scarf flow out behind her.”
Lizzy’s two older sisters were attending Pembroke, the sister school to Brown University. “We’ll all go there,” she explained. I’d never heard of the school, but I could tell by the tone of Lizzy’s voice that this was something to be impressed by, even though I was not even sure Lizzy knew what it meant. “Mother’s a little afraid Becca won’t get in if she doesn’t start doing better in math. That’s why she and Dick spend their afternoons curled up in the family room—doing Becca’s math. Mother only lets them go out after Becca’s homework is done.”
In bed at night, I imagined being Becca: I was beautiful and sleek, with my waist-length hair hanging down like a walnut river. I sat gracefully, knees together, on the back of the motorcycle, remaining a lady even on a greasy machine. I imagined my hair flowing out in the air as I was sped off behind a tall, dark, and handsome boy who also possessed perfect chivalrous manners. As Becca, I was in possession of perfect knowledge. I knew the perfect thing to wear, had the perfect words for every social encounter, knew instinctively the perfect way to behave— the tiniest bit alluring but with perfect grace and loveliness. I almost swooned at the thought of being that perfect. Having all the mothers praise.
We girls had strict rules for how to attract boys. Lizzy and I rehearsed them, primping against the toilet stalls, spinning around the maypole, and slouching around in our nightgowns on each other’s beds. The rules were like commandments. If you didn’t follow them you would be a slut, or even worse, boyfriendless.
Never be smarter than a boy.
When you’re with a boy, never talk more than he does.
Your job, when you’re with a boy, is to make him feel not only smarter than
you, but stronger and better. Always build a boy up. It’s okay to break a plan with a girlfriend if you are asked for a date. Boys
come first.
If you really love him, don’t even tell your best friend about him. It’s better to be elegant and hard to get than cute and loose. You know which one he’ll marry.
Be very attentive and then play hard to get; be charming and pretend you don’t care.
Don’t let a boy know you like him or he won’t like you. Take an interest in the boy’s interests. Read up on football, if that is his passion.
Don’t ever win if you’re playing a game with a boy.
Never telephone a boy. It’s too aggressive and boys hate aggressive girls. Let the
boy be in control. Never kiss on the first date. Never let him feel you up; never let a boy use you.
And never, ever go all the way. That’s being a slut and he’s sure to drop you.
The most important question of all is: Does he respect you?
Lizzy and I, and the other girls, couldn’t wait to do all these things. If only the boys would hurry up and get a little older. If they would just take their eyes off the ball, even for a minut
e, they might have seen that we were waiting for them, primped and armed with all of our rapt attention and our ardent hearts, ready to try out our new powers.
The problem was, there were some flaws in the commandments about how girls should be with boys.
Mid-year, I won the recess ping-pong tournament for two days in a row, triumphing over one of the cool boys. I loved ping-pong, and I felt the wind of glory whipping inside me when I won, but when I went home each day, I felt engulfed by remorse. I should have let him win, I thought.
Another day I got a better grade on my science notebook than Richard, who everyone considered the smartest person at school. I told myself afterward that I should never do that again. It’s not that I’m smarter, I reassured myself. It’s just that I work hard.
Over and over, I came head to head with the same dilemma: how to be smart, how to be good at something, and still be liked by boys.
The first dance of seventh grade, I stood near the door of the assembly room— the parlor of the Victorian home that our school used to be. The ceilings and walls were draped with crepe streamers and decorated with American flags. The lights were still on, the seventh and eighth graders just starting to assemble. I wore the new pink empire-waist dress my mother and I had selected. I had washed and set my hair, covered my pimples with Clearasil, and powdered my shiny clean nose (my mother would later refer to this period as my “gooky” stage), and I was brimming with a yearning so liquid-big it was about to burst the old plaster walls of the room and spurt into the yard.
Born Under an Assumed Name Page 17