Born Under an Assumed Name

by Sara Mansfield Taber

  This was supposed to be my culture, but I didn’t know how to interact. Embassy kids were taught to be diplomatic, to make others feel comfortable by expressing interest in them, so I asked kids about themselves, but kids here didn’t reciprocate. At Sidwell, when I told my classmates that I’d just come from Holland, they said, “Oh, really?” And that was the end of the conversation. Over time, I’d given up. I’d learned that Holland—my past, my self—could be and only was a private place.

  The big hitch was, while most Americans were simply here in America, being, I was stuck comparing. I knew I could be in Japan or Taiwan, and that it would be different. Having lived abroad, I could see America from the outside—therefore, I couldn’t just be American. I couldn’t be in the movie.

  The kids at Sidwell had an unfamiliar ease, an offhand sophistication, a stance that said, “I deserve.” They gave off a flitting scent, like a rare and faraway rose on the breeze. I couldn’t identify it as such—elitism is something you sense beneath your epidermis, like an invisible river of liquid diamonds—but I was face to face with American privilege in concentrated form, the hidden American class system, for the first time in my life. Sidwell, it turned out, was a petri dish for the children of the elite. It was disarming and perplexing because these people appeared unostentatious, in their sloppy clothes and sloppy postures, but actually Sidwell was a castle of the powerful, ambitious, and status-conscious. I’d been around ambassadors, generals, foreign princes, and oil tycoons, but this was different. These were princes and princesses of a new stripe. My mother was confident in her work, my father had an important job, and I was proud of them, but these counted little in this sea of kids whose fathers were inside-the-Beltway TV journalists, lawyers, and politicians. Easier the brute, boasting wealth of Texan oil tycoons than the smooth, subtle exclusions of Washington insiders.

  American wealth is hard to sink your teeth into. It doesn’t look like European privilege. You know when an English person is wealthy—she speaks with a distinctive crispness and wears cashmere and pearls, or when a Chinese person is wealthy—she wears rich navy or dark grey satin and sleek hair up in a bun, but in America it is hard to see. The differences are as infinitesimal and subtle as the hand of a watch—there is just something a little more exquisitely frayed about their jeans, a shift in the voice when they mention their cottage on Nantucket—and I wouldn’t have a clue even that these giveaways existed, much less how to read them, until years later. I didn’t have a clue that America was not the pure meritocracy it claimed to be. In graduate school, in the late 1980s, I would interview female tenured professors at Harvard and be told by each one her feelings of never being quite good enough—not being tall, male, or a Cabot or Lodge. And I couldn’t have said I felt marginal at Sidwell. I just felt lesser, like I didn’t have a right. I was just blundering along in the midst of them, wondering why I was feeling out of place: a bewildered middle-class kid struggling to stay afloat in a sea of privilege.

  It wouldn’t be until twenty years later that I’d discover, at a gathering that included other Sidwell alums, that I hadn’t been the only one. Other students, too—even some in the in-crowd—felt marginal and unintelligent in that subtly competitive world of burnished Washingtonians. And it wouldn’t be until I entered social work school that I’d become acquainted with the concept of relative wealth: the notion that the sense of well-being is comparative. If you belong to social groups made up of people with your own economic status, you have a sense of well-being. If you are surrounded by those who are more wealthy, no matter how well off you might be relative to the whole of society, you feel poor.

  “There are no nice people at Sidwell,” I announced to my father at home.

  “Sure there are,” he said. “There are good people everywhere.” My father believed that people were basically good, that all human beings were the same inside, and, an idealist, he believed class shouldn’t matter. He believed good people looked beyond upbringing and economic status to the person within.

  But he also seemed to know, without my saying anything, what was going on—that while people are all the same inside, they can also be different, at least outside. (As I’d realize much later, he had an even steeper situation at his work: a clique of chummy Yalies to contend with, but he was better able to ignore than I.) He quoted Fitzgerald: “The rich are different,” and he played for me his record of Carl Sandburg’s The People Yes in which the poet quotes Iphicrates, the Athenian general and son of a shoemaker: “My family begins with me. Your family ends with you.”

  “You’re as smart and kind and pretty as anyone there,” he asserted, squeezing me tight. “The equal of anyone.” I felt a little lighter, but I was still a lone leaf drifting in the fall air.

  I was walking down Maple Avenue by my new house. High, glorious trees were tipped with red, yellow, and orange, but each tree merely set the world afire with a Dutch memory. The huge oaks were golden like the Dutch sky just after a storm and the sun was blended with cloud, the maple leaves were the color of the wax on aged Gouda cheese. The leaves that were still green took me to the greenness of spring in the park up Duinweg where I took Gracie every afternoon. My whole body longed to be back in The Hague with a slanting rain coming down, hearing the snap of my boots on the cobbles.

  If I closed my eyes I could be there. Shutting my eyes on the bed of my pink, closed bedroom, I was transported to my spacious Dutch room, sitting on my high bedstead, with the pineapple finials standing up, perky, like guards. The door of my wardrobe with the long mirror was a little bit open, displaying my history: the tiered skirt in the Indian wigwam print that I wore nearly everyday when I was ten, the candy-striped, empire-waist dress I wore to parties when I was eleven, the chartreuse miniskirt I bought in a boutique downtown when I was twelve, and the dress made of light blue eyelet that my mother had tailored for my eighth grade graduation. To my left, through the door into the bathroom, I could see the rounded edge and one of the rusted ball-and-claw feet of the tub where I soaked each night in a veil of steam. To the right were the French doors, looking out into the rainy grey. I saw a zigzag of lightning in the sky. In a few minutes, a slit in the grey sky widened and down poured a lighthouse beam of yellowy-blue. In this beam, I lay like a lounging lioness. I will just stay here, I drowsed. I will pretend Washington is not here, and will stay in Holland all day long.

  I was in a strange sea, holding on for dear life to something I loved so much that my fingers could not let it go. I was clinging to the wooden bowsprit of a bucking ship that was trying to shake me into the frigid waters. I had to hold on or everything that I had loved, everything that ever felt comfortable, that ever felt like home, would be gone.

  All day long so many things made me want to cry: a lousy American pastry, a brick wall. Every time a European or Dutch place or person was mentioned—Van Gogh, Carnaby Street, Gouda cheese. I ached for black afternoons.

  16

  words

  Things were tense at school, and in the country. Just before the election, my father showed me the headline: President Johnson had announced a halt to all bombing of North Vietnam. The Republican presidential nominee, Richard Nixon, claimed that he had a plan to “end the war and win the peace” in Vietnam. My father said he doubted the validity of the claim since Nixon wouldn’t divulge any of its particulars. “He’s a dangerous man—another virulent anti-Communist. His plan probably consists of threatening the Communists with more aggression.” My father’s lips were tight. For a moment, this made me halt in my self-centered tracks.

  Exclusion is a bruising you learn from. Like a good soldier, my job was to swallow reality and forge ahead. After Sadie Hawkins, I gave up for the time being. A tent becomes a dead flag if it has only one peg, so I struck my old shelter and fashioned a little hermit’s hut of sticks and mud.

  My father tried to tempt me out of my dejection with thoughts about the world while I dumped my bottled-up frustration on my mother’s head.

  I’d just se
ttled in to read my biology homework. My mother called up the stairs, “Sara, come set the table.”

  I was annoyed at being interrupted so I dawdled, knowing I was making my mother mad. The truth was, this gave me a cheap little shot of pleasure. I wanted her to feel angry. I couldn’t stand any piece of her now that we were in America because she was glad we were here. Even though she made me tuna sandwiches with just the right amount of mayonnaise, like I liked them, and folded them lovingly in wax paper, she seemed to embody all that I hated in the world.

  She came charging up the stairs. “Sara, when I say I need you, it means I need you right this minute.”

  “I’m busy. Why do I have to?”

  “Because I told you to,” she said, her eyes flaring.

  Now suddenly at home I was arguing all the time. At dinner I tried out the new ideas that were swirling around me at school and in the American ether—Sidwell was seeping into me in spite of myself—ideas I knew my mother would object to. Arguing with her made me feel alive and powerful, instead of like an ant skittering at the feet of the important.

  “I believe in premarital sex,” I announced one day as we ate soy sauce chicken, even though I was light years from even touching a Sidwell boy.

  My mother took the bait. “Oh you do, do you?”

  “If two people love each other, why shouldn’t they get to know each other in every way to make sure they’re right for each other before they commit for life? Look at all the divorces that result from the wrong people marrying each other,” I said, as if I were a sociologist.

  My mother was hot in the face. “Young girls should save themselves for marriage,” she said. “Making love is sacred. And boys don’t like used goods. . . . You watch out, Young Lady. Girls who sleep with their boyfriends live to regret it.”

  “I won’t believe it even if you prove it,” I said. This was my new favorite line.

  My father laughed. “That’s silly, Sara. But she might have a point, Lois. Look at the divorce rate.”

  This made my mother even madder. “She needs to treat me with respect.”

  Andy slipped out of his seat and went off to read his new American history book by the fireplace.

  “It’s okay for her to question,” my father said. “She’s fourteen,” but his voice was almost inaudible. And my mother said, “Watch your mouth, Young Lady.”

  After the fight, when my mother was on the phone, my father came up to my room where I was furiously clutching my Delft wooden shoe, breathing hard, trying to find a ration of patience. He sat on the bed beside me. He said, “You need to be polite to Mom, but you keep on thinking for yourself. It’s okay to explore ideas.” But we knew he couldn’t let on in front of my mother. It was almost like my connection to my father was secret, and he had to choose to defend either me or my mother.

  Another night, I tried out another idea.

  “Marijuana should be legalized,” I said, righteous as a right-wing hawk. “It’s stupid to waste prison space on people who’ve just smoked a little pot.” I acted like I knew all about drugs.

  My mother left the table.

  My father said, “You might like to think that through a little more.”

  One evening, following a talk on American poverty at school, I fixed on my father. I knew he could withstand any amount of defiance I might summon. “Why is America like this? Why can’t America be like Holland—doing things that are good simply because they are the right thing to do? Why can’t we make our country the model of good things: the best schools, the best health care, the most leisure, the best research, the most kindness? . . . Or why can’t we be like Sweden?” He had often told me about Dag Hammarskjöld and Gunnar Myrdal, and how in Sweden there were few differences between rich and poor.

  “How can America be this way—spending all its money on defense when it makes no sense?” I said.

  I lay flat on my bed, thinking nonstop. Why do I have to be here? Why do I have to go wherever the government wants Pop to go?

  The next night, as my mother was putting meatloaf on the table, I made my announcement. The moment she sat down, I blurted, “I hate America. I am going back to Holland. I am going to babysit to earn enough money, and then next summer I am going back.” My voice was assertive and strong the way it never was at school. And my sentence sitting there in the air gave me hope, made me feel like I could accomplish anything in the world. My parents looked at each other, and my mother said, “All right. If you earn the money, you can go.”

  Immediately I started babysitting. My announcement gave me a heady surge of power, but the babysitting was hard work.

  On November 5, Richard Nixon was elected president. The next day at school, everyone was stomping around saying this was bad news for America. “He only won by one percent of the vote! The war is going downhill, and Nixon is going to make it worse.” And their fathers should have known; many of them were Capitol Hill politicians and newsmen.

  A night after the election, my parents’ friends, the Grays, came over to drink beer and eat Chinese hot pot. As they fished bits of beef, mushrooms, and Chinese cabbage out of the simmering broth, and dipped their loaded chopsticks in the sauces they’d mixed of mustard, soy sauce, peanut butter, and sesame oil, they talked first about the election, and then, as always, the conversation shifted to Vietnam. Everyone was concerned Nixon would bomb North Vietnam to smithereens.

  Mr. Gray said, “The people at State are taking the position that there’s a good chance of defeating Ho. Our guys on the ground think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell. . . .”

  I didn’t think anything of these words about “State” and “our guys,” but I noticed Andy was listening carefully while reading his book on Vietnam over in his chair by the fireplace. The secret swirled like the mushrooms in the broth.

  In the barren world of my school, in spite of Mom’s advice to do just this, I kept busy and focused on my studies. I was getting all As and would probably be on the Dean’s List. Grades weren’t a full meal, but at least they were some peanuts and crackers. And I turned to the printed word: books are hearty soup. Loneliness has its compensations.

  “She, suddenly pitiful, broke off a twig with three or four wan flowers and held them against her face. . . .”

  My English teacher, Mr. Oates, was reading from D. H. Lawrence’s short story, “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” The protagonist of the story, Elizabeth Bates, was a desperate woman, straitjacketed in a coal-mining town with a drunken husband. The woman’s only wisp of hope, at least as I interpreted the story, existed in the petals of the coal dust-blackened pink chrysanthemums she grew in her yard.

  Mr. Oates had a gap between his front teeth, tousled sandy hair, and a flare for mod ties. He had a charmer’s smile. Here, today in the classroom, Mr. Oates was at his passionate best, bringing to life in the classroom a lonely woman with a garden of struggling flowers.

  With D. H. Lawrence’s aid, Mr. Oates—one of those fine American teachers who fired young minds, who could point to a line in a story and paint a life—was teaching me far more than either he or I knew: that gingery, bitter scents, soft-flopping lobes, bright pinks or reds or whites—that literature and the application of the senses—could be a hedge. A protective wand of color and scent to wave at your own black moods. A hex to hold up later against a father’s disillusionment, a father’s future watery-wavering-slipping-away sadness.

  My father brought home to me one evening a book on Mahatma Gandhi. “Have a look at this,” he said. “I think you’ll like it.” These late fall days he was encouraging me to look outward beyond the doors of the school into the sky, across the continent, across the seas toward Asia and the largesse of the world.

  I took the fat volume upstairs, lay down on my bed, and as I read Gandhi’s biography, it was as though a fresh wind was blowing into me. His creed of self-discipline, modesty, and humility suited a girl who was already on meager rations.

  Gandhi’s creed provided a counterpoint to the gluttonous Ameri
ca of overseas adventures and melded perfectly with the Quaker principles of nonviolence and simplicity that I was absorbing at school. I listened carefully now during Meeting for Worship. I liked the four “testimonies” of the Friends that the teachers referred to, listed in the pamphlet they handed out at school:

  Equality: Friends believe all people are equal, and “there is that of God in everyone.”

  Integrity: Friends believe people should live their beliefs and strive to speak their truth at all times.

  Peace: Friends are committed to nonviolent means of resolving conflict, and oppose war.

  Simplicity: Friends are committed to “living simply so others may simply live.”

  In Sidwell’s hallways, Herman Hesse’s books were passed from student to student like forbidden bibles. Up on my pink bed, I opened the black cover of Siddhar-tha and I stepped back through a carved door to Asia. Reading about a country of gaunt people, stone gods, and prayer wheels, something was restored to me. Suddenly my veins were brimming with the elixir of the Orient. Dusty but familiar images reared up and flamed: gold-laced brocades, crenulated fans, dung, bamboo pipes, red lanterns . . .

  Siddhartha led me to Buddhist and Hindu texts. In these books I discovered words that seemed both to be rooted in the earth and to sail on magic carpets. It was astonishing how a short word, in an instant, could change the color of the world. Maya was one of these. It referred to the transitory world of appearances—to the ephemerality of outer skins. This seemed an answer to the posturing I saw around me in America: so much of America seemed bluster and show. Another earth-shaking idea was the Buddhist notion that everything on this earth was transitory, in a constant state of flux. This was a concept cobbled for the Foreign Service child.

  Seizing these words as holy writ—they complemented the current fashion for the “natural”—I cleaved to the idea of being real, of shunning veneers. I disdained makeup; I used only natural Herbal Essence shampoo. Increasingly I turned my mind toward worthier subjects: religion, philosophy, pacifism, war. My ideal now was to be a disciple to an Indian sage. More and more, Asia seemed the ultimate continent. I dreamed of going to India, of studying yoga, of joining an ashram. India was utopia. I lusted for it. I could feel Asia dancing in my blood.