Born Under an Assumed Name

by Sara Mansfield Taber

  “We have the money right here,” Jen said, digging in her shorts pocket.

  The man grimaced through a film of sweat and reluctantly let her go.

  “He thinks he can get me,” Jen said, smirking, as the man went back down the aisle.

  As we proceeded by the cashier with the bundles, Jen slipped a candy bar off a rack and tucked it in her pocket, and then smiled merrily as she paid the older lady cashier for the toilet paper.

  When we got out of the store, Jen fished out the candy bar, and took a defiant chomp. She offered me a bite, saying to Lucy, “You have ta get your own,” but— wishing we were a lot farther from the store—I said, “No, thanks.”

  Next, the girls led me to a house up the street from theirs where, they said, a boy who had just papered their house lived, and started wrapping toilet paper around the tree and lightpost in the front yard. Pretty soon, though, a lady came running out of the house and yelled, “Cut that out, or I’m going to report you, young ladies!”

  There was something too free about this life Jen and Lucy had, and I was glad when my mother picked me up right after we got back for the Oreos and root beer Jen and Lucy promised me as the crowning touch of the day.

  Back at recess, Peggy said, “I love all the historical things here—the castles, the cobbled streets.”

  Tammy said, “I like lots of things in Holland, like the dunes in Scheveningen.”

  When she said the word Scheveningen, my imagination took off. The beach formed in my mind. As the wind beat at us, Gracie and I raced to the water’s edge, jubilant as the cold bit into our bodies and the sea hurled spray into our cheeks and eyes. . . .

  All the Dutch things I liked began to stream past my mind’s eye. The tulip fields in May that looked like blankets of apples, lemons, and oranges tossed over the earth. The tufted dunes in Wassenaar where Andy and I played King of the Mountain. The hyacinth-ringed, thatched farm houses that hunched on the rain-sodden pastures. The fat, fluffy ponies we rode on weekends. The Dutch rubber boots and wooly ribbed scarves we wrapped around us as we set out on wonderful, rainy hikes along canals. Our Dutch housekeeper, Maria, whose hugs felt as warm as those of Martha, the housemaid who looks after Sara in The Secret Garden. My beloved klompen. All the things I loved about Holland suddenly shone brighter than the sun, and flashed and whirled inside me. I tried to switch off the images in my head, but in those persistent mental pictures, the Keds on my feet kept turning into klompen.

  I remembered how Peggy had said, “Holland fits in our pocket.” I liked how that sounded. And that was what I liked about Holland: it was small and had beautiful little gardens and beautiful little houses and big, golden people.

  In the logic of our junior-high brains, the inferiority of all other nationalities was essential, but try as I might, I couldn’t hate the Dutch. Whenever I stepped outside the boundaries of the school gate on Parkstraat, I came face to face with a direct challenge to our American swagger. The Dutch—the provos and the hippies—were holding the court of cool. As my father said, “The Dutch can out-hippy anyone.” The throngs of these tall, sturdy people in their long gowns and seaweed hair stirred me in spite of myself. The snarl-haired Dutch teenagers were more ragged than any Americans I’d seen, and their faces more careworn, in an exquisite, romantic, brooding way. The teenaged boys with filthy mops topping their tall, sturdy frames looked like bedraggled princes out of storybooks. I might swoon if one turned a blue eye on me.

  By myself, up in my bedroom in our drafty row house, I sat and tried to fend off an insistent question: If we are so cool, what about the Dutch?

  My father represented the U.S. government, and was a patriot, yet he too was drawn to the Dutch. Having grown up under Roosevelt, and educated on Norman Thomas, who believed in governments helping people, he was taken by the Dutch’s liberal social policies. “America is a rich country,” he said. “We can afford programs that meet people’s basic needs, like inexpensive or free university education, a secure retirement, free medical care, and unemployment compensation. This is what government is for—to make sure people are secure, and to help them when times are tough like in the Depression.” Even though he knew it bothered me, he said, “The Dutch do this better than we do. We have a lot to learn from them.”

  My mother loved all this about the Dutch too. She liked Dutch people’s openness about naked bodies. She loved that Dutch doctors made house calls. She thought the Dutch had an excellent health care system. She admired the fact that the Dutch had motorized wheelchairs unlike anything in America, which let disabled people move around. She also liked it that the people in Holland selected their retirement homes—there was a lovely one down the block, an old, grand Victorian house with white-haired people drinking coffee from white cups and playing cards in the window—when they were young, and looked forward to entering it early with their friends. She thought Holland was a better place to grow old than America. She liked that the Dutch had apprenticeships for young people to learn trades. She liked that they learned many languages, which was good for children. She liked that they had hard schools. She liked that they ate meat slices for breakfast because it was good to have protein to start the day. The Dutch were practical, industrious people, like my mother.

  I absorbed, like sponge cake, my parents’ views on the Dutch. One day, in a graduate social work class on social policy in Seattle, I’d find myself delivering a fervent speech—with absolute conviction—about the importance of national health insurance. That a rich country such as ours should assure its citizens their basic needs would always be met, no matter what befell them, seemed obvious to me: I learned this while young, growing up in Holland.

  I was drawn to the Dutch, not only because they were cool and humane but also—I couldn’t admit this to myself—because they offered me a salve for my failures on the American front. Dutch people often said to me, “You seem more Dutch than most Americans.” I knew this meant they thought I was quieter, humbler, and more polite than some of my countrymen, and for a brief moment or two when they said these things, I felt my chest inflate with a thing like pride. With Americans I always felt too shy. It would take many years, and living in Japan as a teenager and in Spain as an adult, to discover that there were many people and cultures that viewed quiet, reflective people through another lens.

  The Dutch dangled the exhilarating possibility that a person could be messy and earthy and not a sassy cowgirl, and still fine. The Dutch—I could tell—felt most themselves in the outdoors the way I did. In their rubber boots and big, baggy sweaters, with both their legs and their cheeks bare, flaming, and chapped all winter long, they seemed solid and basic, like primary colors.

  Every week I experienced the alternation, the flip-flop. I went from my weekends of bike rides, feeding horses in the slop and rain, and mingling with the Dutch, to my little American weekdays of trying to be pretty, outgoing, and the same as everyone else. I didn’t know enough about Dutch culture to know its inherent complexities and inner conflicts, but to be Dutch, I thought sometimes, tucked secret and safe in my room, would be easier.

  Without my awareness and through a stealthy, clandestine process, I had become part-Netherlander. There is some sort of essence of a culture—despite all the range and variety in its individuals—that is in the water, in the air—and you soak it up, through your six senses, when you live somewhere. Perhaps it is easy to caricature or idealize if you look at a culture from the outside, but an outsider also sees things those within the culture don’t see—and if you live somewhere long enough, the habits and vistas of a culture seep into your muscles and blood. I didn’t know many Dutch people save for the few at school—I mainly observed them from outside—but jostling them on the street, handing them coins in shops, bumping woolen shoulders with them in steamy koffiehuises, and tromping through their soggy paddocks, I had taken in something strong and real, though it had no name. It was similar to the way, within a decade, the whole world would, via television, have absorbed some
tincture of Americanness. Something about the Dutch—their dike-consciousness, their practical way of stamping straight into the salty mud and mush of the world and shoveling it into farm fields—had become a kind of loam in my body.

  Now dyed into my fibers, along with a longing for America, was a lust for the Netherlands, and, more broadly, for the worn stone of Europe. As the poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote, “Europe herself gathered me in her warm embrace, and her stones, chiseled by the hands of past generations, the swarm of her faces emerging from carved wood, from paintings, from the gilt of embroidered fabrics, soothed me. . . . Europe, after all, was home to me.”

  This was another one of those little packages—or Pandora’s boxes—that life was tossing me, and would dare me, one day, to open.

  On the cusp of summer, a rare, blazing morning, my parents drove us to the beach in Wassenaar. Coming over the shoulder of the dune I looked down on a colony of Dutch mothers, children, and old people in various stages of undress. Mothers with smooth, athletic-looking legs stood, bare breasts hanging down like pendulums, wiggling into their bikinis. Their children had thrown off their clothes and were pouring sand over each other’s heads. Babies sat, bare-bottomed, in the sand. Old men sat beside them, in white underwear, their splay-legged posture identical to that of the babies. The fathers stood, penises to the sea and bottoms toward me, as they donned their skin-tight bathing briefs. Unlike on Rehoboth Beach in Delaware where we once went from Bethesda, bare bodies were sprawled out everywhere on the beach, with not a whit of shame or modesty to diminish the caress of the salt breeze.

  Everywhere, every which way, bare-bottomed tiny children and older children in just their white underpants were dashing. In the sea itself heads bobbed and bodies splashed and flashed merrily as sea lions. The summer beach in Wassenaar was a metamorphosis. With the reappearance of the sun, the Holland of wet navy wool had vanished. In its place was a land of toasted sand and calming sun sprinkled with tow-head children, royal blue and hot orange swim clothes, and curves of golden skin.

  I hurtled myself down the dune, set down my knapsack with my Seventeen and my Droste bar, and staked out our encampment as the rest of my family approached. Once we were assembled, we got ready to swim. Andy only had to take off his T-shirt. He wore his knee-length army shorts every day, for both land and sea, so he had nothing to change, and my mother already had on her boxer-legged swimsuit from Montgomery Ward. My father matter-of-factly changed out of his khaki pants and into his swim trunks out in the open. He was calm, like a man after a war, when there was nothing to fear or lose. I mimicked the Dutch uninhibited-ness my parents said was healthy, not bothering to cover myself with the towel as I put on my turquoise Dutch bikini, and as I did so, a little thrill of carefree Dutch-ness rippled through me.

  At this juncture in my life, when I was so ardently patriotic, I was both as vehemently American as I’d ever be, and—though I didn’t know it—at the end of any chaste Americanness.

  Back at school, I still orbited Candy, but I’d begun hanging around a bit more with Gabrielle. She was the girl in my class who had a Belgian mother and American father, and was a little out of style, from the point of view of the rest of us full-blood Americans. Her knee-high black boots weren’t quite high enough, and her corduroy skirts revealed too much of her thighs.

  Gabrielle lived in a dark row house in an area of town my family seldom saw— on the outskirts of The Hague near where the old, three-story row houses dribbled into big, modern apartment buildings with a lot of vacant, not-yet-planted, rubbled space between them. The curtains were drawn in Gabrielle’s house, making dark, shadowy shapes around the overstuffed furniture and obscuring the corners of the rooms. Her small, thin mother spoke in Belgian-accented English and Gabrielle spoke back in breezy, dismissive French. I imagined her mother to be horrified at having a daughter with such hearty American looks.

  One Friday afternoon, Gabrielle had me over. She was excited to have me, and told me three times at school about the special dinner her mother would be cooking specially for us.

  Gabrielle happily showed me around the house, to her strange dark room with—as I re-imagine it—a red curtain draped on the wall with art postcards on it. She was already an adolescent—she had older brothers to mimic—while I was just beginning to feel the first bubbles of that potent brew. With Gabrielle, I felt in the presence of an odd maturity. She viewed me as her peer, but I knew, via an inner tingling, that she was way ahead of me on the road: older boys and even men found reasons to tease her, though she seemed to pay them no heed. Maybe, it occurs to me now, she was simply European in her intimate femininity, but Gabrielle’s dou-bleness—the simultaneous presence of both her adult and her child selves—made me shift a little on my feet, as if I were in the presence of a power greater than myself. There was an innocent lustiness about her. She was a person whom you sensed would take large portions in life.

  When her mother set out dinner on the thick, dark-textured tablecloth, it was a large platter of pizza. “This is my favorite,” Gabrielle said, dishing me up a large slice. And she kissed her mother on the cheek, a style of affection it never occurred to me to offer to my mother. “Merci, Maman!“ she said. And her mother said, “C’est bon, Cherie?“ Gabrielle gobbled down the pizza, drinking huge gulps of Fanta along her way, while I mincingly took bites of the strange dish. The pizza was topped with tuna fish—an experience too far out of my standard American repertoire of burgers and fries to tempt me, but, out of politeness, gagging a little, I got a piece down. (And later, after I left Holland, I would have given a lot for a slice of that pizza.)

  The experience at the table with the pizza widened my eyes. Suddenly, for the first time, I could take in this girl before me. Somehow, at age thirteen, Gabrielle had accepted her foreignness and her odd American-Belgian ways, felt comfortable with her mother’s strangeness, even if the rest of us did not—and wholeheartedly loved her own self and her own life. It was a lesson that would recur repeatedly during my life—these confident children with a foreign parent who had a strange taste, like a strain of soy sauce in the Jell-O.

  At school, too, Gabrielle held her own, a goat happy among sheep. She could joke around with us, and yet she seemed happy to be alone too—doing twirls on the bars, not minding that she was showing the dark tops of her pantyhose. Funny and affectionate, she had nicknames for the people she liked. She called me “Tubby Tuber.” She yelled across the side yard, “Hey Tubes, come climb on the ropes with me.” And Gabrielle was, in equal measure, confident and jocular with the boys, over whom she towered by at least four inches. She had a loud, unselfconscious laugh, and would as readily kick a boy with a long leg as send him a love note. What was new and amazing to me, captured inside my bars of shyness, was the realization that Gabrielle, someone so odd as to eat tuna fish pizza, could be different and survive—and be happy.

  Back in seventh grade, during the first week of school, our French and homeroom teacher, Madame Evans, a tiny, delicate Belgian woman with commanding grace, had assigned us all French names. Almost everyone’s name was turned French easily—with a shift in accent or by adding an “e”—but even though Sara was a name in France, Madame Evans said, “Sara, I think your French name should be Nicole.”

  Things people from other countries say sometimes stun you like car lights hitting you, a rabbit, on the road. In rebaptizing me Nicole, a romantic, sophisticated name as opposed to my, to me, old-fashioned one, it was as if Madame Evans had seen something about me that I didn’t see. By renaming me, it was as if she were holding out to me another way to be: Some other cast of femininity—something feathery, rich-hued, and confident. Something different from American-issue. Ever since then, and continuing now in eighth grade, this other femininity had fluttered around me as a possibility. Had I the courage to take it into my hand?

  One day my mother and I went to visit Madame Evans—Mr. Evans worked with my father—at her tidy brick row house. In her richly appointed antiques-and oriental
rug-filled living room, Madame Evans asked me, in French, how my studies were going. She was kind, but expected clear, honest answers—not just polite, cheery ones. This made me feel simultaneously challenged and comfortable. Madame Evans’s eyes scrunched just a tiny bit and twinkled softly as she listened—she was so pretty, with her soft fluff of ginger hair, in her angora sweater.

  There was something about Madame Evans, and Vrouw Wandersee, and my mother’s other European lady friends, that shot like an arrow into my bull’s-eye. European ladies spoke the truth and knew things in a deep, eyes-wide-open way. Even their posture was different from that of my mother, Mrs. Grant, and Lizzy’s American mother in her Peter Pan collar and A-line skirt. Vrouw Wandersee was frank, almost strict—there was no evading in the blunt Dutch book of life, and Madame Evans seemed like she knew something about girls, and about boys—something having to do with delicate finger touches, up-tilted chins, and daring-eyed smiles—that was different from what American mothers knew. Madame Evans showed me a different kind of lady a girl could grow into, as she offered me a different kind of girl.

  My angle on boys was being shaken up too. American boys were sturdy Chevys and Fords. Boys from other countries, alternatively, were Peugeots and DAFS—different and interesting to daydream about and watch. French boys, for instance.

  When Mrs. Evans first introduced me, at her home, to her son, Pascal, who was a grade ahead of me at the French School, he said, “So you’re one of the girls from the American School.” His eye had a twinkle, and his tone was a mix of mockery and teasing. I felt my cheeks grow hot with embarrassment. This made him beam and nod his head knowingly, which made one part of me want to flirt and slap him, and the other want to escape as fast as I could.

  Pascal was taller than his mother, and while he uttered this troublesome sentence, his arm was around her tiny waist. No American boy I knew would kiss his mother, much less stand with his arm around her while flirting with a girl. And Pascal’s whole manner was completely different as he assessed me, a girl.