As other students came in, they joined groups of two or three others across the room near the series of French doors leading out onto the veranda. “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I’ve Got Love in My Tummy” was put on the record player, the lights were doused, and I watched, across the room, the clutches of two or three girls and two or three boys (none of whom any longer had names) moving in and out and against each other like dolphins gobbling a school of tropical fish in a sea.
A Monkees song was on the record player now, and pairs of girls and boys had broken off from the flirting and jostling and begun to dance together. I stood in the doorway wishing so hard that a boy would ask me to dance that my arms and my legs and my body were like heavy, hooked-together stones hanging inside the cloth of my dress.
No one looked my way. For two hours, I leaned my heavy stones against the wall near the door, propping myself up against its hard strength, as the boys passed by back and forth, back and forth. When, toward the end of the dance, someone put on the single, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” I felt a welling like an ocean pushing up through and about to explode a mountain of rock.
I returned home saturated with disappointment. My new dress, too, was saturated; I never wore it again.
My mother stood beside me, patting me, helpless in the face of my crying. My father called me to him and took me on his lap, my legs—no longer able to fold up to join the rest of me in a lap-fitting bundle—dangling from his knees to the floor. “You’re very pretty, you know,” he said. “But, more important, you’re kind and smart.” This made me cry even harder: Would any girl give up being pretty to be smart? I cried on his shoulder in the big armchair in the living room until the heaving died down and I trudged upstairs.
But nothing could stop me. I was driven, driven by a possibility, a dream of which I couldn’t let go. Driven to cling to the blade of a knife. I had enlisted in boot camp, and was going through the exercise where you crawl on your belly while people shoot over your head. I had to go forward, persist, or die. I sensed there was something I had to conquer, and the stakes were too high to give up. I couldn’t see into the future and considered this my only chance.
At night when I took my bath, I looked down at my body. I was twelve years old and now, when I looked, I was dismayed by what I saw. My body was growing fur, and there were apricots swelling up on my chest. Worst, the sides of my upper thighs had swelled. I hated this. Boys’ jeans didn’t fit right anymore. I felt ugly all the time.
One night after dinner, my father lifted my chin. “Girls are supposed to have hips, you know,” he said. “That’s a part boys like.”
Maria seemed to know best of anyone what a fever I was in. In her thick, chapped washerwoman’s hands, she brought me tiny bunches of tulips—as if to say, “One day a boy will bring you these. And, until then, you are still my Saratje.”
Finally persistence paid off. In March I achieved the unachievable. I was going steady. Rusty, a boy in sixth grade, had given me a pin of a guitar. It wasn’t an ID bracelet, but “what’s the diff,” as Candy would say: I could show it off to the other girls. I had only spoken to Rusty once or twice, but gazed at him a lot. He was tall, with unruly curls, and had a lopsided smile.
The weekend after he asked me to “go” with him, he invited me to a movie downtown. My mother, who said I was really too young to date, and to whom I replied “Oh Mo-om!” suggested that we go to the movie at the embassy. She would drop us off and pick us up.
Choosing a shirt to go with my Wranglers, I was nervous, but I knew I had to go. I was in a fever to get this first date under my belt.
But when we sat down again in the theater, after having stood up among all the little kids to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” like you did at every embassy movie around the world, I suddenly realized going to this movie with this boy was nothing like going to see The Sound of Music with my family.
And when Rusty put his arm around me, I realized I found him repulsive. My stomach twisted. As the movie began, I tried to pretend his arm wasn’t there. I’d thought going steady was something else, something else I had no knowledge of, but definitely not this feeling of being imprisoned by the grinning face of someone I didn’t even know and a heavy arm across my shoulders. I wanted to run out of the theater.
When I got home, my shoulders, which had felt like stiff wings hunched on my back, fluffed back down into their settled position. My father was there, like a promise of something better to come, in his reassuring suit, and his talk of the Peace Conference.
The next day Rusty and I broke up by ignoring each other. Maybe my mother had been right about not being “ready.”
When my father finally returned of a late, dark afternoon, it was as though an extra lamp had been suddenly lit in the house. At the kitchen table, he listened to me tell him about my day, and then he said, like he was suddenly waking up, “Oh boy, I’d better take my shower.” He and my mother were going out to an important event at a Dutch minister’s mansion. They went out for cocktails or dinner parties, or hosted them at our house, three, four, or five nights a week. “Official functions” were a big part of their job.
Later, when my father entered the kitchen where Andy and I were sitting at the long, rectangular, wooden farm table, eating the yummy Swanson’s fried chicken and Salisbury steak TV dinners that my mother had bought at the commissary, he was dazzling. Instead of his ordinary dark suit, he had on a tuxedo with a beautiful crimson-and-gold cummerbund. He looked as dashing as Prince Bernhard, Queen Juliana’s husband. My mother wore a floor-length, turquoise silk dress and her pearls. I loved these romantic clothes. Looking at my parents made me shiver.
When my parents had a dinner party at our house, we had to put on nice clothes and descend the staircase during the cocktail hour to pass the crackers and cheese and peanuts and greet the guests. As I passed the peanuts, my father’s eyes smiled at me, and he secretly patted my hand as I offered him the basket of nuts.
Fathers and daughters: an unmatched category of love. Of course, you, the daughter, want to marry your father when you’re five, and you’ll measure all boys— and then, men—against him. When childhood is as it should be, your relationship with your father is the foundation of exuberance and lust, but it’s also something else: an experience of unfettered adoration, a sense of being loved without reserve, of having someone wild about you—a fundamental joy designed for every girl, every child.
It was elevenish on a Saturday morning as I watched my father walk down the street toward the sea. He was off to get the Handelsblad and de Volkskrant, the Dutch newspapers, and grab a bite of herring. I imagined what would happen. My father would sit on a bench in the wind on the promenade in Scheveningen, look out to sea, slurp his fish, and read his Dutch newspapers—and he would be perfectly happy.
When I was little, back in Taiwan, and in Japan, my father had gone away on weekends with his friends to climb mountains. He’d climbed all the biggest mountains on Formosa, and when I was a baby he’d climbed Fujiyama. He had special hiking boots and a cloth army rucksack in which he took his “provisions”—and when he returned his face was lit up. When I was five I thought of my father as “a man who climbs mountains.” Here in Holland, and whenever we visited other places—farm villages or modern Dutch towns—my father took walks in the early morning. His walks were on flat land now, but the set of his eyes, the spring in the middle of his stride, as he moved toward the distance, were the same.
Most of the time when he wasn’t at the embassy, my father was reading to me or Andy, racing through the paper, studying Dutch, or talking to my mother— doing things that helped others—but walking was the singular thing he did for himself alone. Sometimes he had an excuse—like today a need to buy a Dutch paper in Scheveningen, or the Herald or Le Monde at the newsstand downtown, or to check on something at the office—but mostly it was “I’m going to just go have a look around . . .” (Later I would learn that, on some of his walks, he had actually been working: doing things like
checking out the territory; leaving a note written in invisible ink, under a stone in a forgotten churchyard; tucking a roll of money into a cone of frites or some other unlikely place; taking part in a clandestine meeting in the dunes.)
But mostly my father walked to walk. When I watched his body move down our brick street, or looked down at him from a high hotel window, he walked briskly, rain or shine, at his favorite pace. I could tell, from my perches at windows, that his walks were not only an exploration but a gathering. Pulling on his raincoat and setting out into rain, my father shrugged off his secrets and donned his truest self.
Like his secrets, he kept his dreams in hidden harbors—and on his walks, he went to visit them.
As a young adult, I would soon discover how like my father I was. A devoted walker, I would love the anonymity of a big city: getting up in the cool damp of early morning as the concierges were sweeping the stoops and the garbage collectors and dogs were doing their rounds, faint whiffs of garbage and fresh bread in the cool air.
It was a drizzly weekend. All of Holland was a green, soggy, foggy bog, but my father had decided to take us to a war museum he had heard about in a little village. Weekends, even if it was raining so hard it was like a machine gunner attacking our roof, his eyes always glinted miniature lighthouse beams as he thought about all the historical sites we could visit. It was as though he saw Europe as a sweet shop in which every little town offered a new kind of candy to sample. We were long past the early euphoria Foreign Service families usually experienced when they arrived in a new post— it had never gone away for my father in Holland.
After an hour or so, we reached the museum in a village with a main street of thatched, hunched-down farmhouses. The dingy cases of the exhibit were filled with helmets and guns. Andy and my father talked and pointed beside the displays, and my father struck up a conversation, in Dutch, with the curator. He was an old man, and while he talked to my father about World War II, he had to wipe his moist eyes like a lot of Dutch people did when they mentioned the war. After a while, I was bored with looking at bullets and maps. I felt like putting a piece of tape over Andy’s mouth, so he would stop asking questions about the grenades and bunkers, so we could get out of the museum. Even when my father and Andy let us leave, we had to stay longer so that Andy could climb on the old cannons. Sitting on a cannon in the scruffy museum yard, his smile was so happy, I wanted to spit.
Soon after we visited the museum, we were wandering through a flea market in the village, and my father called to Andy. “Look at this!” he said. “An English helmet!” After that he and Andy started collecting helmets. Before long, they had several of the Allies’ helmets: the English, the American, the Dutch, and also those of the Axis: the Italian and the German. One of them had a bullet hole through it, which Andy proudly showed his friends.
Another day, my father stopped the car by a mossy fence on an obscure lane in the countryside. He led us through a small graveyard full of mossy stones. The graveyard was quiet and still, and somehow different than those beside old Dutch churches. “This is a Jewish graveyard,” my father said, a hush in his voice.
In Amsterdam, we visited Anne Frank’s house. From the outside, it was just an ordinary Dutch house: narrow, brick, four stories high, on an ordinary street divided by a soupy green canal. The inside, though, was full of secrets. Walking around the tiny, grey-walled attic rooms hidden behind the bookcase—Anne’s postcards were still on the wall—I could imagine being Anne, dreaming and thinking over her diary up near the sky, but the thought of the Nazis breaking through the wall and into the rooms was lightning mixed with frigid wind streaking through my insides.
Another day, we stopped along a country road and walked over a hump of land toward the purple-grey, foam-crashing sea. The wind was slamming in so hard from the ocean that I could barely stand. At a loose barbed-wire fence, my father, who was in the lead, put up his hand. “We aren’t allowed any farther,” he said. “From here to the sea,” he said, “the coast is full of mines from the war.” Just seeing the innocent-looking dune, tufted with coarse blond grass, sent another streak of cold lightning through me. I imagined taking one tiny misplaced step into the fenced area and my body being blown to smithereens. Maybe this was why my father’s work was so important—to protect us all from being blown to smithereens.
When my father did these things—took us to war cemeteries and houses with hidden rooms—it was as though the air parted around him and a quietness took over his body, a quietness that radiated out and infected me too. My father had told us many times that he had been eager to serve in World War II, but it had turned out that he was a little too young. He was on a troop ship headed for Yokohama when the war ended. As he looked out over the Dutch landscape or tenderly handled Dutch and English helmets in a flea market, it was as if he was looking for the war he missed.
It was funny. By now, my father had taught us so much about the war, and taken us so many places, it felt almost like I’d been alive in World War II. Because of my father and his fascinations, my love of men would always be bound up with war, horizons, and mined ground—and with men’s potential for bravery and sacrifice— as if I were a child of the last World War.
I found it tiresome, though, when my father hauled us all to Normandy to look over the cliffs at the sea from which the American soldiers, on D-Day, charged to free Europe of the Nazis, and made us walk around huge graveyards of white stones commemorating dead soldiers from many different countries. Only later, in my forties, when I revisited Omaha Beach, with its open, exposed sands and cliffs that had to be surmounted to reach and liberate the farmlands of France, did I understand. America—Americans—achieved a truly astonishing, brave, and noble triumph back then in 1944, a triumph we’ve striven to match ever since.
Andy, however, had the World War II bug in spades.
“Uuuuur!” “Eeeee!” “Kerblam!!!” “Shewwwwww-BAM.” These were the sounds that burst from Andy’s room, every weekday afternoon and all weekend long, as he exploded imaginary, plastic, or lead tanks and planes and aircraft carriers. Sometimes Andy played with Lincoln Logs or LEGOS, but mostly he reconstructed World War II battles. His room was often completely impenetrable, covered with hundreds of small plastic army men set in position. At night he had to carefully remove the battalion set on his blanket and put it, piece by piece, on top of his chest of drawers. The battles raged for days, until one army took the right hill or village and the enemy surrendered.
Most things Andy did had to do with war. He did cannonballs whenever we went swimming in a pool. He wore swords and a wooden gun he’d made in Dutch carpentry class. He worshiped catapults. He had a dream of possessing one and shooting stones, like the medieval knights did, at everything he saw.
When he wasn’t waging war, my brother read. He read Moby Dick when he was only eight, but mostly he read history books. He read and read and read, lying on his bed among the soldiers. Sometimes he read the encyclopedia. “I think I’ll read B tonight,” he’d announce as he headed up to bed.
Andy was dirty and funny (he told jokes about poop, toots, and elephants) and never brushed his teeth. Sometimes I liked him, and I laughed when he told silly jokes, but mostly he was dumb and boring. All he thought about was history and war. Sometimes I checked to see if he would do something useful like get me something I needed. “Andy,” I’d say, pleading sugar-sweetly, “will you go get me a drink of water?” and, often, to my surprise and affording me a jolt of unexpected power, he did, like a puppy. If my mother caught me doing this bossy big sister stuff she said, “Sa-ra!” and I did feel a little guilty when my little brother brought me a cup with a guileless look on his face.
World War II was America’s great war. Now, unbeknown to me, my country was waging a new one. The U.S. Army now, in 1966 and 1967, was carrying out daily raids against the North Vietnamese, President Johnson was sending troops to Southeast Asia by the ten-thousand-fold, and all U.S. dependents, including some of my parents’ friends,
had been evacuated from the country.
My father and I were walking along the strand in Scheveningen, on the North Sea. The sky was the color of pewter, the temperature was hovering around freezing, but the sea was calm. The grey-purple water was pulsing onto the wet slope of sand beside us. My father was keeping up his usual brisk pace and I was happy hurrying along to keep up. I had my father to myself so I took advantage of it.
“What do you think about God, Pop?”
He paused a moment, looked out at the sea, and breathed deeply, like the air was a supreme pleasure. Then he turned to me. “I believe that God is in all of us.” I knew from his stories about his boyhood that he was raised Baptist, but as an adult he had become a Unitarian. “You’ll have to decide what God is for you, but I believe human beings have all the qualities of God. I think human beings are basically good, rather than sinful as some others think, and we are capable of solving our own problems through thinking.
“I am a humanist, an idea that first took root in Holland. That means I don’t think we need to rely on some greater being in the sky, outside of ourselves, to look after us or make us be good. If human beings just study hard enough and consult their hearts, and devote themselves to it, they can solve even the most terrible quagmires.
“I believe every human being should keep his own counsel,” my father went on. “Every man is his own best advisor as he knows himself best. A man’s own conscience is his best guide.” I knew my father got these ideas from people he’d studied, like Immanuel Kant, Emerson, and Thomas Jefferson. As he said these things, I felt fortified, full of iron will—and certain that the world would one day be peaceful.
The first day of summer vacation after seventh grade, my father told me, “You’re smart and you need to stretch your brain. . . . I have only two requirements for you this summer,” and he handed me Jane Eyre and Silas Marner. These two serious-looking British-published Penguin volumes, with fine print, were completely different from my steady diet of penny romance books. I read them on the beach on our family vacation at Lago Maggiore—and they showed me a depth of feeling, a wielding of language, that, like a moist leaven deposited deep, would rise up like yeasty dough in me later. But for now I was still more interested in how I looked in my new pink bikini than in reading good literature.
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