Finally, to my relief and dread, the first day of school arrived. My mother gave us hugs at the door. Then she kissed my father and said, “Have a good day at the State Department, Honey.” Her eyes twinkled with meaning as she said it, and her mouth smiled at him in a lopsided way.
As we drove the Fiat up to the school on busy Wisconsin Avenue, girls in white blouses and maroon tunics—with maroon bloomers that showed when their skirts flicked up as they dashed back and forth—were hitting balls with sticks on the front playing field. To me they looked like students of a British boarding school. A little shiver of interest ran through me. My father gave my shoulder a squeeze and said, “Just be yourself and they’ll love you, Girl-child. This is a new, grand adventure. Just wait and see.”
While I fumbled at my locker in the long building, the kids rushing past me in an endless river, I picked up snatches of conversation. A couple of boys wearing ties and jackets with hair flowing over their collars were whispering about “grass,” and I heard a kid in pants that dragged on the floor exclaim to another, “that motherfucker,” a nasty-sounding expression I’d never heard before. When the teachers—in beards or sacklike dresses—walked into the classroom, they stood at the front and opened the class with a moment of silence. The kids called some of the teachers by their first names, and the teachers put their feet up on their desks.
I blurred through my first two classes. As I stepped out into the hall after the second one, my English class, the river of kids eddied around a whirlpool of girls, one of whom had been in class with me. The girls’ hair reached down to their derrieres, as Gabrielle would have said, and they were a-shimmer with fluorescent colors in their minidresses. The girl from class moved over slightly to make room so I could edge into the circle. The girls were all talking about a program I had never heard of. Their sentences bumped up against and overlapped each other so fast that I could never have gotten a word in even if I had had something to say. One said, “Yeah, and remember when the fuzz cornered that dude . . . ,” and another said, “Man, what a cool cat,” and someone else said, “Yeah, and then the pig opened the door and that chick got arrested.” I stood and nodded and laughed when the others did, but I was in the dark. I might just as well have been standing in a group of Russians or Egyptians, for all I could understand or contribute.
Late morning, I followed the crowd to Meeting for Worship, the Quaker religious service. My father told me I’d have “silent meeting,” a time for reflection, once a week, and that it would be interesting. We all sat outside on the lawn behind Zartman House, the admissions building, and everyone was silent, except for two teachers who stood up toward the middle of the hour. One, a man, looked sad: “Like all of you, I am very preoccupied by what is happening in Southeast Asia. Today I am hoping for a lull in the fighting.” A lady teacher said, “I’m deeply concerned about what our country has become. I hope we can work together this year to bring about change.”
The kids shuffled around when the teachers spoke and then everyone looked down again and picked at the grass. I felt the hard, grassy earth under my legs and listened to what the teachers said, but I was too nervous among all these jazzy, hippie-ish kids to feel contemplative, and I didn’t even know how to think about the war in Vietnam or about an America that needed to change.
At a free period, I stepped into the Common Room, the space in the center of the building. I’d gathered it was the place people went between classes and where the students convened for assemblies or to make decisions about “the school community.” I stepped through the doorway into a furniture-less, wall-to-wall expanse of carpet with pillows thrown around against which kids were sprawling every which way. Girls with hair like Rapunzel’s were lounging against shaggy boys. Trios of handsome, lanky boys were caucusing on their bellies, their legs like the spokes of bicycles; a couple of boys were flopped out, asleep; pairs of girls were huddled together in deep, intimate whispering. At this sight of people engaged in intent conversation, a lightning jag of fear zigzagged through me. I edged backward out of the room. Safely in the hall, my heart slowed in my chest. I’d avoid setting foot in the Common Room for months, even when I didn’t have class; the place was so pungent with intimidating cool.
The kids at Sidwell, with their Indian headbands, their moppy hair, and their high-lifted, laughing faces, seemed both the height of chic and remote as Indian braves—and worldly wise. When later in the month our biology teacher Mr. Pond demonstrated in the air, with a packet marked Trojan, how to open and put a condom on a penis, everyone acted nonchalant, like they already knew all about it.
Here, in this fancy school, everyone seemed self-contained and removed and, most of all, confident. Years later, I’d read Chilean poet Marjorie Agosín’s comment on the people she met when she took up a professorship at Wellesley College. “Calm and indifference seemed the hallmarks of proper behavior in New England.” At my new Quaker school, likewise, a cool, detached self-assurance seemed the required mien.
I traveled home on the city bus feeling small and drab in a world of the flashy and cool. I felt worn out, chastened by my American school.
At seven o’clock, when my father came home in his work-rumpled khaki suit, he gave me a long hug that let me know he knew how hard it was to be new.
“It’s not a good adventure,” I said.
“It just takes time,” he said. “Come tell me about it while I change my shirt.”
When I explained how hard it was to talk to people, my father said, “Just be true to yourself. Be the good person you are. It will all work out.”
At dinner, my father listened to my description of Meeting for Worship— “Really weird,” Andy’s report on school—“I hate having to keep my shirt tucked in,” and my mother’s day with her patients—“Mrs. Goldstein was cranky but I badgered her into taking three steps without her cane and she was proud of herself.”
When my mother asked my father about the office, he said, “I like the contact with the Chinese, but it’s life at Headquarters—you know what it’s like.” This meant the office was full of bureaucracy, territoriality, scheming, politics, cleaving to the current ideology, and watching your rear. My mother understood this, but I didn’t have a clue.
Now my father said, skipping forward to the national political situation, “Things are really hot in Saigon. No one seems to have the answer. In The Hague I couldn’t see how bad it was. I’ve never seen the place so divided between Hawks and Doves, and Ho seems to hold all the cards. Jackson, of course, is stomping around the office railing about Communists. All this, on top of the election . . .”
“And what do you think about it all, Charles?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
Afterward, my father settled into the green wing chair and, as usual, read the paper. He sighed as he rattled the pages, and ran his hand through his bristly hair. I did my math homework and was too much a tight-rolled ball of yarn to wonder what he’d meant at dinner, and what it was he was reading that troubled him so.
I cried all night—for Lizzy, Mike, and Mr. Leonard.
I was right to miss my past self and to be filled with loneliness and dread, for in the next few months, my new American school yanked out of the ground all the pegs to which I’d staked my little Army Surplus pup tent of confidence. In short order, Sidwell upheaved the store of surety I’d built up in my ability to express myself through art, my ability to forge friendships with girls, and my attractiveness to boys—and my sense of belonging in my country.
I eventually found my footing—all transitions are toppling—but this, in my own country, was the most challenging of my childhood.
In art class, on the second day of school, the teacher, a lady the shape of a short, stout vase, with snowy hair, flat bulbous shoes, and a commanding, pert look, looked at my drawing of a tree and announced, “You’ve never had any art training, have you?” I wouldn’t take art again in high school until the last term of my senior year, when I was far away across the Pacif
ic Ocean.
That was the first peg of my little pup tent expeditiously knocked out of the ground.
The next peg: friendships with girls.
Over and over again through the coming weeks, as I walked down the long hallways, I passed closed circles: circles of maidens with long gold and brown tresses who shone with the buttery glow of belonging. Girls with a golden shine around them like around Jesus and Mary in a medieval painting. I dubbed them “The India Girls” because of their gorgeous dresses from South Asia.
One day I was standing at the rim of the golden circle of the India Girls. Hedley, the queen of chic poverty, was gesturing expansively with her long, skinny arms. Her bangles tinkled with her enthusiasm. She was facing Alex, Francie, and Vita.
“My parents are out of town,” she said, an excited hush in her voice. “James, Jonathan, Flynn, and Brian are coming. So it’ll be four cats and four chicks. I’ve got the dope in my closet. It’ll be a rush,” she said.
I had heard that Hedley had a big house in the woods near Rock Creek Park, where kids went to play the guitar, smoke hash, and make love. In Holland we got together and ate popcorn.
After Hedley waved her arm like a golden wing that swept the three other girls within its protection, and said, “Let’s split,” the four girls disappeared down the hall, heads together, hair swinging like charms on the golden bracelet that was them. I could hear Hedley’s laugh, trickling like a brook.
It was like I was born, back there at the beginning, at the foot of the Great Buddha of Kamakura, and dunked into a bath of envy for American kids who automatically belonged.
When I heard months later, via gossip, that Hedley was seeing a psychiatrist, I was filled with disdain. It seemed like a self-indulgence or an affectation of the wealthy. I didn’t realize she could be suffering. I believed her devil-may-care air. And I certainly couldn’t imagine that I would, myself, be seeing a psychiatrist within a couple of years.
It was a mercy that Hedley hadn’t invited me to her party as I’d have been swimming in water way over my head. At this point in my life, I’d have been far more comfortable in a party of foreign adult diplomats than in a room of my American peers, sprawling on couches, talking smooth, and sucking joints. But left here standing in the hall, watching the quartet flounce away, I wanted to hide in a dirt hole. What I’d suspected was true: I would never figure out how to make friends in America.
Two pegs yanked, my canvas started to luff.
In the kitchen where we were doing the dishes, I heaved all my despair onto my mother: my frustration at being alone, at wanting to fit in and not fitting in, at girls who didn’t acknowledge my presence.
“Don’t worry, Sweetie,” she said while I scraped the plates furiously into the sink where the disposal could roar them down. “The friends will come. . . . You can do anything for a year.”
“Don’t say that all the time! No, they won’t. Not at this place!” and “No, I can’t!” I hurled back.
I turned to my father, who was drying the frying pan.
“I hate it here,” I said.
“Oh Girl, come here,” he said, putting down the skillet to put his arms around me. “It’ll get better. Give it time.”
“I wish I were a different person,” I said. “I wish my name was Sam.”
The next evening, when he came in the door after work, he yelled out, “Hey Sam, where are you?” and I couldn’t suppress the momentary delight. My father was the one star that was always visible in the sky.
One more devastation to go.
While in Holland boys had taken an interest in me—and an afternoon with a Dutch boy on skates had spurted a charge of glory and hope through my body—in America it was as if boys had receded. In the face of Sidwell boys, seemingly so cool and indifferent, my dreams of romance had to go underground, all those exuberant “BOYS” signs I taped to the solid walls of my Dutch bedroom now attached to clouds.
But an event at school stirred my stifled yearning. It was time for the Sadie Hawkins Dance, and the India Girls were all aquiver. By the week of the dance, the popular boys were all doled out, except for one who had (how had that happened?) fallen through the cracks. Channing was one of the alpha boys, one of the kings. He was tall, he had shiny Beatle hair, and he strutted with the supreme confidence of the offspring of the wealthy. He had been at the school since birth. He was a portrait of cool—way too Washington-insider for the likes of me, a Foreign Service kid. But somehow—the Fates are playful—one of the India Girls decided that I should ask Channing to the dance, and the others chimed in.
This thoughtfulness on the part of one of the India girls, as it turned out, had inadvertent, unfortunate consequences.
Somehow—this was all a cloud—every part of me hesitant, but all my self-preservation instincts having flown in the whirl of the India Girls’ certainty, I found the courage to ask Channing to the dance and somehow—Was he repelled? Was he being polite?—he said yes. Then came the agony of sitting on the wall in front of the school, eating the McDonald’s burgers, and my tortured efforts at conversation. “What did you think of Beowulf?“ There were about forty-five minutes when I felt naked and gagged, and also like I’d shown up in a tight, conservative suit at a hippie picnic—and then, when the dance was about to start, Channing vanished.
Like a naìf, I looked for him around the school for ten minutes and then, in the cream-walled hall outside my English class, a kind boy, Colin, told me, his eyes sorry, “Channing went home.”
My tent flapping loose, anchored now to a single peg, I stumbled to the school telephone and my parents picked me up in the Fiat. I didn’t tell them what happened, but I cried, heaving, on my father’s lap, until I was limp-dry and could fall asleep.
Exquisite shame. At school, I felt like that kid in the Chinese crowd again. Circled, plucked clean, mocked.
Cringe, slink, crawl. Humiliation is a burning inside, and then a squishiness. A frantic need to hide, a desperate need to disappear through a crack into a new world. Where was the quicksand—or the Foreign Service—when you needed it?
After the smarting shame subsided, a thudding heaviness took up residence in my body. Often now, through my days at school, there was a sensation of cloudiness in my eyes. I could only look into the far distance, toward the sky. Or I could look down at my own hands. I couldn’t and didn’t want to see the middle distance where the people were. I could only be alone—inside this body, this autistic cage of myself. The outer world seemed too dangerous, too close, too judgmental.
And all day I felt so tired, so very tired. My limbs seemed weighted differently—like my bones were made of stone, my muscles gone lax. And it was as though there were cold pebbles rolling around in the cold, sour emptiness of my belly.
After an evening cry, cleaned out, sniffling the last of the tears, I spent hours looking at photos of Holland, caressing my gone-away life, the life where I was liked, where I was alive.
Depression had set up base camp in my body. It was a potent liqueur in my brain. All the dislocations and stretches of feeling marginal had been a slow drip that now, with these latest yanked moorings, became a steady flow. The losses had risen and finally filled the glass. I was receiving my first sip of concentrated melancholia, the nectar of tristesse. It had a lemon-sour taste, not entirely unpleasant.
With time I curled into it and depression became a sort of fascination, a romance, my partner in a dance. Any speck of sorrow became grist for my mill. I craved sad stories like chocolate-chip cookies. I read Death Be Not Proud and A Separate Peace, archetypal tales of teenage loss. Sad tales were my rice, my comfort food.
But out of darkness comes brightness. In a strange way, my new sadness opened up doors to the girls at school. It was fashionable to be depressed, to brood. The India Girls wailed on each other’s shoulders, “I’m so depressed!” and now I could join in.
Evenings, at home, my father tried to distract me. One night he handed me the Washington Post. “Just have a look a
t the front page,” he said. I looked at a photo of sweat-faced young men in camouflage wading through a jungle stream with rifles cradled in their arms. I thought of some of the upperclassmen at school who were all whipped up, carrying around a Life magazine article that showed the photographs of 250 American soldiers killed in a week. They put up posters with slogans on them like “Make Love, Not War” or “Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No.” They handed out flyers about conscientious objection, draft resistance, and Quaker conferences on peace.
I showed my father the picture of GIs. “What do you think about Vietnam,
Pop?”
My father shook his head and said something that seemed off-topic. “I’m not sure we’re spending our money the right way. With our resources and talents we could be an unstoppable force for good in the world. We could feed everyone on the planet, or end poverty if we put our minds to it.”
My brooding self vanished; for an instant I was engaged. “Why doesn’t America do that?”
“Our government has other priorities right now,” he said. “But don’t you worry. It’ll be all right.” But he didn’t say it with conviction, and I was still confused.
’There’s somethin’ happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. There’s a man with a gun over there. Tellin’ me I got to beware. . . .”
It was strange. America was both too familiar and not familiar enough. Being here was like being with a cousin who shared some of your genes but from whom you had lived so far away that you didn’t really know her at all. Though I looked American, I was not; I was a sort of clandestine foreigner. It was like the Canadians said, “You think we’re just like you, but we don’t feel like you.”
Born Under an Assumed Name Page 25