In the lunchroom I would try to position myself with my best side—the side of my hair where the perm actually “took”—facing the lonely foreign boys, in order to capture their hearts with my loud laugh and hearty appetite. I interspersed my outbursts with moments of total silence during which I’d grow pensive and stare at the ketchup bottle. Then I’d grab my notebook and start sketching, hoping that this would inspire a foreign friend to grab his sketchbook and sketch me.
“Your beauty is very, how do you say, uhhh, misunderstood?” he would say. “In my country, blue eye shadow worn all the way into the eyebrows is the luxury of movie stars and prostitutes.”
The problem with my fantasy was that the host family members guarded the foreign exchange students as if they were brand-new Game Boys.
The one time I tried to get to know the Swedish exchange student, his new American sister told me to not to come any closer because of my perfume. She explained that in his village, perfume was used to kill the rodents and scare away evil spirits and my smell was upsetting him.
By the end of my senior year the closest I’d come to contact with a real, live foreigner was David Bowie’s Let’s Dance album, which I held in my arms like a teddy bear when I slept.
Two years later, I found myself in the European hotbed of the Midwest—the Ellis Island of the Kentuckiana border—Bloomington, Indiana, where I was taking classes at Indiana University.
My friend Emily called to ask if she could give my number to a guy in her directing class who was looking for actresses for his final directing project—an experimental theater scene where I’d be playing the role of a piece of crumpled paper.
Emily and I had both been in community theater productions during high school, and she knew that I’d stepped away from the theater to get a degree in feminist filmmaking while cocktail waitressing at a local sports bar famous for its Thursday night “Best Butt and Legs” contests. The bar was known for hiring only babes, which I found completely offensive until they offered me a job.
“I don’t know his last name,” Emily said. “Everyone just calls him ‘Hans, the guy from Holland.’”
Hans from Holland sounded like exactly whom I’d come to college to meet, meaning someone completely opposite from the guys I’d met in the sports bar, who would ask me things like, “Why does only one of your nipples get hard? Is it inverted?” And the natural follow-up question, “Could you put an M&M in there and then pop it out so my buddy can try to catch it in his mouth?”
When Hans called me, he had a very different question.
“What is your greatest fear?” he asked. “I want you to think about that before our first rehearsal.”
Not only did he ask me the best question ever, he asked it with a Dutch accent, which I’d never heard before. It was so unlike how I’d imagined. The predominant influence on his English was the Queen, so he spoke with a very un-American, proper accent, with hints of what I guessed were Dutch influences. T’s and th’s were pronounced like d’s. A Dutch accent sounded like Jeremy Irons with a speech impediment.
Just to ensure he wouldn’t fall too in love with me right away, I said the dumbest thing I could have said before we hung up.
“Hey, I just wanted to tell you that I love Van Gogh.”
He was patient and instead of telling me he loved Abe Lincoln, he simply corrected my pronunciation. I had no idea that hocking a loogie could ever sound sexy, but when he pronounced “Van Gogh” in its full Dutch glory I fell a little bit in love.
The next day I fell the rest of the way.
From the first moment I saw Hans I felt like I was watching a Bergman film. He was extremely tall (perhaps a medical giant), pale, and thin with wire rim glasses and crooked bottom teeth. He always wore a suit jacket, slacks, and shiny black shoes with a little heel. He had some sort of bronchial trouble and coughed into a handkerchief throughout rehearsals, just like Cathy in Wuthering Heights. Dying from TB was just another sexy foreign guy affectation, like wearing an ascot.
During the first attempt to explore my crumpled paper character (which I was told represented a worn-out woman), Hans instructed one of the male actors to stand across the room and tear up a piece of paper. I was to imagine myself as this paper. By the end of the exercise I was in a heap on the floor sobbing. Hans was impressed. He gave me a little nod and then told me to “dry up.”
Now I felt like I was not only watching a Bergman movie, I was in one.
At the end of the first rehearsal someone asked Hans if he could leave a message about rehearsal on his answering machine. Hans flipped out.
“I don’t have an answering machine, man!” he said in a sarcastic American accent. “I’m not an American, man! Okay? We’re number one! Go team! Man!” Then he stormed away, his jacket flapping behind him. I applauded until he whipped around and told me to stop. So I applauded on the inside.
On our first date, Hans took me to his “favorite bakery” for doughnuts. He told me it was a little-known gem that he had discovered on one of his many long bike rides around campus. It was called “7-Eleven.”
Not having the heart to tell him the truth, I marveled at the selection.
Hans was a wonderful combination of posh European sensibilities and manners, mixed with a pure goober’s delight in American kitsch culture. On campus he had a reputation as “the Nazi director,” which offended him to no end, not only because he was insistently “not a German” but also because his parents were of the occupation generation, making Nazi references less jokey, crazy fun for him.
On the other hand, Hans turned many aspects of America that I found offensive into exciting safari adventures. He punctuated every trip to the mall, the grocery store, and the DMV by taking photos and stopping at the customer service desk to find out if there was any point of interest we should be sure not to miss. (This was usually followed by my taking a picture of Hans with whomever was manning the desk.)
He wanted to learn how to drive while he was in America, so I took him out on the backcountry roads of Bloomington. (I taught him how to drive and he taught me how to stop shaving, both of which could have gotten us killed in the state of Indiana.) He’d go twenty miles per hour and scream “whee!” as if he was on a carnival ride.
The first time we consummated our love, Hans used the excuse of “naming all my body parts in Dutch” to dislodge a pubic hair caught in the back of his throat. At least that’s what it sounded like he was doing.
He pointed to my eye and made the hocking-a-loogie noise (aka spoke Dutch), then kissed it. It was both nerve-wracking and sexy.
When he excused himself to use the restroom I jumped up to check my back in the mirror to make sure he wouldn’t be translating “back acne” upon his return.
The skin on my back seemed clear, so I took a running dive into bed. But in midair I noticed there was something in his bed. I tried to switch directions mid-leap to avoid landing on whatever it was, but it was too late. I fell directly onto the bloodstain that covered the sheets.
I begged god to let there be a horse’s head at the foot of the bed—anything but the horror of what I knew had happened. I’d gotten my period in his bed—on his childhood sheets, no less. It looked like the little sailboats had weathered a terrible storm.
I’d been getting my period for seven years at that point, yet every single time it took me by surprise. (“Oh my god! I’ve been shot! No, never mind—I just got my period. Go about your business.”)
I ran to the window and checked to see if it opened, planning to jump out and run home and call him when I got there to break up. But it didn’t open, and we were on the seventh floor.
I ripped the sheets off the bed and started shoving them underneath it. But there were books under the bed taking up valuable soiled-sheet room. I tried cramming the sheets in my purse, but they wouldn’t fit there either.
When Hans returned I was forcing the sheets into his desk drawer.
“What are you doing?” he asked. He immediately grabbed
at his sheets, which started a tug of war until I lost my grip, weakened by blood loss and shame.
“What is this?” he asked, noticing the blood. He looked down at his bare stomach, as if checking to see if it was coming from him.
Maybe there was some program like witness protection where girls who have done this are given money to move to new towns and get plastic surgery and new identities.
“Hans, I’m so sorry,” I said. “It’s me.”
When it dawned on him what had happened, Hans unfurled the sheets and held them out in front of him.
“Look at that!” he exclaimed. “Look!”
I was looking. Was he trying to shame me? What was he going to do next—wipe my nose in it?
But he was smiling. And then he was laughing—big, open-mouthed, booming laughter.
“Yeah, man!” he said. “I love it!” He started hugging the sheets.
“Oh, don’t do that, Hans,” I said.
“I’ve been with a real woman and I’ve got the evidence right here!” he continued. “All right! I can’t wait to do laundry tomorrow!”
He couldn’t wait to show the other boys in his dorm. At one point he was so excited that I worried he was going to get out his camera.
The last time I’d heard a man even acknowledge the fact that women have periods was when one of the cooks at the sports bar told me that he didn’t trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn’t die.
I loved Hans and all of his people. I loved how you couldn’t gross out the Dutch. Except by mistaking them for Germans.
Since things were going so well, we planned a summer trip to Amsterdam to meet his parents. In preparation, Hans started teaching me a few simple Dutch sentences. He began with the essentials that every traveler abroad should learn, like, “Your son has a very large penis.” To avoid any awkward silences when I met his mother.
Upon arrival in Hans’s hometown, I was greeted like the Allied troops. His entire family—mother, father, sister, brother, and grandpa—all clumped together in front of their modest village home waving little American flags and singing the theme song from The Mickey Mouse Club.
His mother took the lead vocal part as the other members of the family backed her by mumbling the basic tune, but without using any actual English words.
“Who the leader in the club she is you and me!” his mother sang, as I stood five feet in front of them clutching Hans’s arm.
When it got to the point where his mother was simply chanting “Mickey! Mickey! Mickey!” over and over again, I realized that nobody—not even I—knew exactly how the song ended. It just petered out as Hans’s younger brother (who looked like an angry Muppet version of Hans) tried to spell the letters “M-i-c-k-e-y” and couldn’t. He took this failure very hard. He stomped his foot on the ground after getting stuck on the letter “e” and then shoved his hands in his pockets and glared at me for causing all this pain.
Hans’s mom saved the moment by jumping forward, yanking Hans from me, and giving her son—whom she’d not seen in seven months—and then me Dutch kisses.
“Hello, Lauren!” she said. “We love you!”
Everybody laughed.
‘Thank you!” I yelled. “I love your son! He’s so tall!” I mimed “so tall” by acting as if a giant was coming toward me and was going to step on me. I even gave a little scream: “Ahh! Don’t step on me!”
The flags stopped waving.
“You are adopted?” Hans’s mother asked.
Hans said something to her in Dutch, which made his Muppet brother even madder, and they started hocking and barking at one another.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m adopted. It’s no big deal. Everybody stay calm,” I said.
I found out later that Hans’s family had decided the reason that I’d so easily left my family and come to Europe for the summer was because I was adopted and didn’t have a real family.
While the rest of the family babbled away to Hans, his brother glared at me. When I tried to tell him I was struck by how different everything looked—how much greener the grass was, how much cleaner the streets were—he cut me off.
“Hans is my brother!” he shouted, as if we were in the middle of a fight. Then he walked away and joined the rest of his family, who were waiting to see what Hans had brought him from Indiana.
This was about the point when I started shaking. The sound of the entire family barking away in Dutch, interspersing my name in an unpleasant tone, was making me anxious.
I went to the bathroom to collect myself, but I couldn’t figure out how to flush the toilet. There was no water in the bowl—it was just an empty toilet, which meant using it was like going to the bathroom on a plate. Finally I used handfuls of water from the little sink by the toilet to rinse away my business.
When I emerged, Hans’s family was setting the table for dinner. Here was my chance to experience exotic food in a foreign land. Bring on the rabbit-bladder soup and brown crackers! I was eager to try whatever “we use every part of the animal” old-country recipe they threw at me. I just hoped to god that I didn’t eat too much or too little.
But when Grandpa started yelling and pointing at my bread, I knew that I’d done one or the other.
I balanced my slice of white bread with peanut butter in one hand as a fight like I’d never witnessed broke out at the dining room table. There was throwing of silverware. Shouting and pounding on the table. At one point Hans’s mother stood up and started opening and banging shut all the cabinets in the kitchen. And every other word seemed to be “Lauren.”
“Bark-bark-LAUREN! Bark-hocker-bark-AMERICANHOCKER-LAUREN-BARK-BARK!”
I kept trying to grab Hans’s sleeve to ask him what was going on, but he was completely engrossed in the fight. Ever since we’d landed he’d seemed like a different, more agitated person. When I finally excused myself from the table so I could go cry in the bathroom, he noticed how upset I was and filled me in on what the hubbub was about.
“My father thinks you use too much peanut butter on your bread,” he said, pointing to my very modest spreading of peanut butter. In Indiana, this would’ve been considered nothing. It was the peanut butter smearing of an anorexic.
“Ja!” Hans’s father said. “Too much.” He picked up the jar to show how light and empty it now felt.
As the family watched in silence, I scraped all of the peanut butter off my bread and wiped it back into the jar. Once my bread was bare the family settled down and enjoyed the rest of their meal.
At the end of my first day in Europe, Hans tucked me into a little bed next to his in the attic. He announced that we wouldn’t be staying long at his parents’ house because his brother didn’t like me and had told Hans to get rid of me.
We ended up finding not just a place of our own for the summer but a houseboat—an adorable little floating one-room apartment that was a twenty-minute bike ride from the center of Amsterdam.
Whenever I was asked by his Dutch friends, who spoke very clear English, “What is your name?” I’d just stare at Hans, waiting for him to answer this complicated question on my behalf. Hans needed some time when I wasn’t clinging to his leg in complete terror of saying the wrong thing, taking the wrong turn, or using too much peanut butter.
So one day he decided to leave me all alone on the houseboat for a few hours while he went to meet some old school friends at a cafe.
As he rode away on his bike, I sat by the window preparing to stay there all day waiting for him to get home. Moments later, two white swans swam right up to the window and looked in at me. Assuming they’d escaped from the zoo, I jumped up and ran outside to tell someone to call the authorities and let them know we’d found them.
The swans were the most exotic animals I’d ever seen. I looked around to see if there was an elephant and a flamingo heading my way too—perhaps a circus truck had crashed on the road or there was a fire at the zoo. Who knows, but something incredible was happening.
An old Dutch guy w
as washing his boat and for the first time since I’d arrived, I lost my shyness and called to him.
“Look! Look!” I shouted, pointing at the swans.
He smiled and nodded his head, assuming I was mentally handicapped. He pointed to the clouds and tried to get me excited about them too.
I couldn’t wait to tell Hans what I’d seen. But when he finally got home, he patted my head, gave me a cookie, and told me that swans were as common as pigeons but a lot meaner, so stay away from them.
The next day I announced I was going to go into Amsterdam by myself, for the first time. To prove to Hans that I was still the brave, independent girl he’d fallen in love with.
The route was fairly simple—just go over the bridge, ride along the park, and follow the street where the trams ran to the city center.
As I rode by the park trying to look casual and Dutch, a man with his pants down around his ankles jumped out of the bushes and started masturbating in my direction. He was yelling something in Dutch that I assumed was, “I kill you, I kill you!” (Pause to adjust grip.) “I kill you!”
I started peddling wildly and was about to yell for someone to call the police when I noticed a group of Dutch mothers pushing their strollers nearby. The man was still masturbating and yelling in full view of the mothers, but either what he was saying was hilarious or he was a beloved park fixture (Old Crazy Wacking Peter!), because the group of young women just looked at each other and laughed.
When I neared the city center I was hoping to find the famous flower market. I thought I could offset being masturbated at with a nice bouquet of tulips. Instead I ended up in the wacking capital of Europe, the red light district.
Back in Indiana, Hans and I had both joked about the red light district, and I’d told him how I couldn’t wait to finally experience a culture that was not so puritanical—one that loved and fostered its prostitutes. Now that I found myself in the middle of it, I turned into a Baptist housewife.
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