Bowing like a level-one monk in training, I replied, “Yes, thank you. Oh, thank you.”
“But first you have to come to meet the guru,” Gudula insisted.
Uh-oh—if the guru was a good one, she’ll take one look at me and call “bullshit.” Or try to read my aura but find my colors blocked by clouds of green pot smoke.
Maybe it was more a formality. Like a meet-the-parents thing. Whatever it was, even bathing the guru’s feet in goat’s pee—if it meant getting the apartment, I’d do it.
That evening the girls took me to a large hall full of hundreds of followers (or possibly apartment hunters) where the guru was holding a public meditation. Unless Gudula and Florina were high-ranking followers—which they could be, as they could “cool breeze” like nobody’s business—I doubted I’d have to meet the guru one-on-one.
The bulk of the evening was spent waiting for the guru, a heavyset Indian woman in a canary yellow sari, to make her way from the back of the room to her stack of pillows in the front. Ms. Guru was somewhere between the age of seventy and one hundred and ten. (The golden scarf wrapped around her head kept slipping down into her face—otherwise I could have gotten a better look.) She moved very slowly, grabbing onto the backs of chairs and any available arms as she shuffled. A few times her sari got caught on the chairs behind her, prompting her to give it an aggressive tug and whip around with a glare, “Who the hell is standing on my dress?”
When she stopped at our aisle, Gudula and Florina grabbed my arms and squeezed. I raised my eyebrows with a sort of “Well, look at that!” fake excitement and hoped the guru would suddenly find the energy to point at me and shout, “Get that woman a credit check!” But she passed right by, leaving our entire row buzzing.
“Very powerful eyes!” the crowd oohed. “Very powerful!”
The guru finally reached the stage—a miracle in and of itself. A nervous minion led her to a flapjack stack of brightly colored pillows covered in rose petals and clipped a microphone to her sari.
After she caught her breath, which took a good three minutes, the spiritual lecture began.
“The truth is the truth,” she wheezed. “The TRUTH is the TRUTH. The truth IS the truth. THE truth is THE truth.” Etcetera, etcetera.
When she finished speaking she remained seated on her pillow pile (where she was probably going to stay until her next session the following morning). I turned to the girls.
“It’s so true,” I gushed. “The truth IS the truth. I mean, the TRUTH is the truth.”
The day I signed the lease, Gudula and Florina showed me a bowl of lemons and peppers. They told me to leave the bowl uncovered for four days and five nights. On the fifth day I was to throw the offering into the canal. The lemons and peppers were supposed to suck any bad energy out of the room and throwing them in canal was, Gudula added, just for fun.
As I threw the lemons and peppers into the faces of unsuspecting bikers and tourists, missing the canal entirely, I realized that this apartment was the beginning of my new life—the first step on my spiritual journey.
If I can score an amazing apartment like this at the age of twenty-three, I can’t possibly be the fucked up, irresponsible, mild epileptic with poor judgment that my family has seen all these years.
Tomorrow morning I head home for three weeks. My bags are stuffed with Dutch pancake mix and syrup and a few sausages, plus Drop, the Dutch candy that tastes like dog shit mixed with asphalt—gifts for my American family.
I’d promised my mother I’d help out at Romancing the Seasons for the first week of my stay. She asked and I agreed because I thought it sounded kind of kitschy and crazy.
“I’m going home to work in a mall!” I kept telling all the Dutch people I work with at the hotel.
“Well, tell J. R. Ewing we said, ‘Howdy!’” they would say back.
I’m a beloved sort of mascot for all the hard-working Dutch folks who have spent their whole lives in the service industry. I’m the little round, loud American girl. It’s not uncommon when I’m preparing a tray to bring up to one of the guest rooms for me to find myself surrounded by a few cooks, a dishwasher, and someone from accounting who wandered into the kitchen to steal some food.
“I heard her laughing all the way down the hallway,” one of the gathered will say. “She laughs loud. You laugh loud, you know?” Then they want to know why I do, which I can’t answer, but they laugh at the funny faces I make while I feel attacked and surrounded.
When I once complained to the bartender, Rocco, about this practice of being surrounded and picked on, he looked at me quizzically.
“Everyone loves you!” he said. “They think you are a funny American girl and want to play with you!”
During this past week, I’ve been in a self-imposed spiritual boot camp to guarantee that my family will see who I’ve become, trying to get as much enlightenment in as I can before I get on the plane. I’ve increased my “surround those who cause you the most pain in a golden light of forgiveness” visualizations to twice a day, and every morning I’ve been cramming in three hours of spiritual affirmations:“You are a beautiful person ...” NO! I shouldn’t say, “you,” I should say “I.” “I am a beautiful being ...” A being? What am I, an alien? “I am a beautiful person ...” That kind of sounds like I’m beautiful on the inside, but on the outside? Fucking forget about it. It’s like something you’d say to someone who you found really unattractive: “No, but you’re a beautiful person.”
They’re not so much affirmations as discussions.
With my journey home looming in the morning, I use my break at work to hide in the dressing room and do some quick chanting on the ancient word for god (“huu”), which my healer friend, Wendy, had taught me. A transplant from Australia who lives just down the canal, Wendy told me I should chant “huuuu” in a high-pitched “this is a test of the emergency broadcast system” tone twice a day to help me summon my dream master.
I get about three minutes into heavy huu-ing when the dressing room door flies open and Rocco enters. I’ve had a crush on Rocco’s cocky bartender ways for a long time, and I find his blatant desire to have sex with me touching. He’d heard my “huuuu” noise in the hallway and thought there was some kind of leak in the pipes. I tell him there’s no leak and we start making out.
After I pick up my paycheck I catch a glimpse of him cutting up limes behind the bar and almost go over to talk to him but decide I shouldn’t. My focus should not be on flirtations and boys, it should remain steadily fixed on my Trip to Bountiful—my journey home.
At 4:00 a.m. my doorbell rings and it’s Rocco. “I thought I saw your light on,” he yells into the intercom.
I have a major trip the next day—a spiritual quest of sorts—and my plane leaves at 11:00 a.m., so this is really obnoxious. But flattering too—he knew where I lived, and I’d never shared that with him.
I buzz him in.
After some incredibly mediocre sex we lie on my tiny mattress together. Well, he lies on it. I am half off it, gripping the side with one leg and one arm, the other half of me on my freezing concrete floor.
“You see this?” He points to his chest. “Stab wound,” he says. I pull myself up onto the mattress to give it a little kiss, but then I realize I don’t want to kiss a stab wound.
“How did that happen?” I ask. Suddenly the reality that I had a man named Rocco in my bed hits me. “Never mind,” I say.
He gets up and moves to my couch. He lights a cigarette and sits down with his arms stretched out across the back of my couch, using his stab-wounded beer belly as a little shelf for his ashtray. He looks completely wrong in my light blue room adorned with hanging crystals and paintings of fairies kissing magical flying pigs.
He offers to buy me a new television and pay my rent. But then he cries out, “Oh, man!” and puts his head in his hands. “How I do this to Magda?” He starts crying. Magda, it turns out, is his long-term partner—not technically a wife but pretty much.
; The stab wound just keeps making more and more sense.
“And you know I like you, but you’re not for me,” he continues. “You’re not my type, you know?” He takes a drag off his cigarette.
“Shhhh, I know. I know ...” I tell him.
And then he quickly dries up, gets his clothes on, and asks if he paid my rent could he come crash here the nights he was too drunk to ride his bike home, since I live so close to the hotel.
It’s 5:00 a.m. and I have to be at the airport in four hours.
After Rocco’s departure I’m not feeling well at all. In an attempt at soothing background music I play my creative visualization tape, but I can’t focus on it. Why did I do this? Rocco is disgusting. I’m disgusting. My mom will never find out that I did this. But maybe she’ll be able to tell. She’s creepy-good at knowing everything that’s going on with me. Why did I do this—throw myself off right before my trip?
I can’t sleep and start to have a muscle spasm in my stomach.
This hasn’t happened to me since I was in high school and was diagnosed as a “spastic diaphragm brought on by a mild petite mal seizure.” It feels like I’m having the wind knocked out of me over and over again—I can’t catch my breath. I’d told Wendy about these episodes and she’d said to call her the next time one happened and she’d get rid of it.
In the past I hadn’t wanted other people around when I’m rolling around on the floor screaming in pain, trying to rip my clothes off. I considered it quality “me time.” But now I have to get on a plane in three hours. I call Wendy and beg her to come quick.
The first thing she does is lay her hands on me, close her eyes, and let out a giant belch.
“That’s you,” she says. “That’s your bad energy I’m releasing.” Then she burps again. “Wow. You have a lot of bad energy.”
A minute later she lets out a giant fart. “That’s you too.”
All of the burping and farting and blaming her burrito dinner on me makes me more tense, so I ask her to leave.
Before she goes she tells me that she’d seen a vision as she’d worked on me.
“Did it have something to do with acid reflux?” I ask.
“No. It’s about communication. These seizures happen because you are not speaking your truth. You are not saying what you want to say.” Then she has a little hiccup burp. “That one wasn’t you—that was me.”
Her departure brings on a wave of relaxation. Just in time to grab my luggage and head for the train station.
As I’m dragging my bags to the station the magic junkie troll from under the bridge rides by and tries to sell me my bike for twenty guilders. I don’t have time to buy it back. I scream “Fuck you! That’s my bike!” in English, then in Dutch, and make a note to learn how to say it in German. He screams the Dutch word for “bitch” back at me. My spiritual journey has begun.
“You’d better not dress like that when you fly anymore,” my father says as we walk to baggage claim. “Makes you look like you’re running drugs. I’m surprised you got through customs as fast as you did. I would have thought you were trouble, dressed all in black like that.”
By the time he’s sharing his secret technique of tying a bright pink ribbon on his luggage so he doesn’t lose it (saying if I didn’t do it next time, I’d be sorry) I am sucking back the golden light that I’d attempted to surround my family in, farting it out, and blaming them.
“Slow down, please. I’m not used to riding in cars and I feel sick!” I yell to my parents from the back seat. “Everybody rides their fiets in Amsterdam—I’m not used to cars.” I stick my head in between the front seats. “That’s so weird. Did you hear that? I said a Dutch word mixed in with English—wow, I didn’t expect for that to start happening!”
Neither of them even tilts their head in my direction to feign listening. The only thing my mom says is, “Fix your seatbelt, Sid, it’s all twisted up.”
Four hours later we pull into our driveway and I am still trying to impress them.
“I go to the library and check out children’s books in Dutch—that’s how I really started learning the language. And I make these Dutch pancakes—they are so good. They’re very hard to make and I do it really well—I’ll make you guys some while I’m here. If you have the right pan—it takes a very special pan ...”
I finally have the chance to show off my Dutch when my sisters and my parents start asking me how to say certain words in Dutch. But they keep picking words that are exactly the same in Dutch as in English.
“How do you say ‘wind’?”
“Wind.”
“How about ‘water’?”
“Water.”
My father gets bored and announces, “Well, I’m going to bed. Hey, I just spoke Dutch!”
The next morning I tell myself that once Mom and I are working in her store together she’ll tell me how struck she is by the change in me. She always waits until we’re alone to tell me what’s wrong and right about me.
As soon as I come downstairs, ready to Romance the Seasons, Mom sends me back up to comb my hair.
When I tell her I did comb it she says that she has a hard time believing it’s my desired hairstyle and I should go give it one more shot.
I stomp up the stairs, like I’ve been doing since I was nine years old, intent on styling my hair like Dorothy Hamill’s. It’s the only hairstyle my mother has ever really loved on me.
The woman is a dictator! She never admits to any personal weakness, ever. In almost all of our conflicts over the years she’s used the “I didn’t hit you, you ran into my fist” defense. And whenever I’ve pointed that out, she throws her head back and gives an evil cackle.
Just as I’m about to call on my higher self to guide me, I hear my mother yelling up the stairs.
“And no black. Springs shouldn’t wear black. Check your palette!”
The palette she’s referring to is this color analysis that she paid to have all her daughters undergo when I was in eighth grade. My best color was an institutional green. (I look amazing against the walls of hospitals and jails.) The only color clothing I brought with me is black.
Finally my mother resigns herself to the fact that this must be how they dress in Europe. But she can’t help noting, “Which is sad because it washes you out.”
The first thing I lay eyes on in her store is a life-size porcelain statue of a golden retriever with a big floppy sun hat and a basket of flowers in his mouth. You couldn’t really put a price on a unique item like this, but if you had to, apparently that price would be four hundred dollars.
“Okay, that scares me,” I say, pointing to the shiny Aryan nation puppy.
“Thank you!” my mom says in the brightest voice she can muster. She pats the golden dog on its head and tells it, “Don’t worry, I love you.”
Any item in the store that makes no sense to me and is completely overpriced (meaning, the entire inventory) is, according to my mother, “One of my most popular items.”
“If you see the kids with the puffy coats come in the store, let me know because there’s really no reason they should come in here,” she advises. She fusses with the cobbler’s house in Christmas Village, moving it closer to Scrooge’s house.
There’s no reason for anyone to come in the store, as far as I’m concerned.
“Nothing in your store does anything,” I say. I realize by the manner in which my mother ignores what I say, that I’m pushing it.
She goes in the back and re-emerges with her hands full of teddy bears wearing little homemade outfits.
“Lauren, you are the most negative of my three daughters, and you always have been.” She says this very matter-of-factly and then sets the teddy bears down in their little individual rocking chairs. “And you seem worse. What’s happened to you?”
As soon as she’s disappeared into the back, I pick up the bear wearing a little American flag sweater and punch him in his face.
She calls out from the back, “I saw that!” and I ge
t a chill.
The first customer of the day enters the store wearing a sweatshirt featuring a big hippo dressed like a ballerina. Under the picture it says, “Read a book.” The connection is lost on me but at this point everything is.
“Hi. I’m looking for a hippo-shaped Christmas ornament that says ‘Baby’s Second Christmas’ on it.” She states her request with such seriousness that it sounds like it’s some sort of medical emergency.
But I can’t answer her because my neck muscles have gone slack and my head has tumbled forward.
Luckily, my mom yells out a cheery, fake-sounding but not actually fake “Hello! Can I help you?!?” She escorts the lady to the hippo collectable section and comes back to me, still slumped over the cash register.
“CUTE!” The hippo woman screeches from across the store.
“Oh, what do you see?” my mom asks, in exactly the same way she asks the cats when they’re looking out the window.
The hippo woman holds up a ceramic mouse lying on its back on a piece of cheese. His extended belly is covered in cheese crumbs and his wide-open mouth is drooling cheese.
For the next several minutes, they just scream back and forth at each other across the store.
“Cute!”
“Cute!”
“CUTE!”
“CUTE!”
“CUTE! CUTE!!!!!!!”
Finally Mom runs over to cup the little mouse figure in her hands, beaming like a proud parent.
“You know what he’s called?” Mom asks. “He’s called ‘too pooped to party!’ Now, how much does he cost?”
I’m standing right next to the price-list book but she doesn’t even bother asking me, knowing how useless I’ll be. She goes right to the source and asks the mouse. “How much are you?” Checking his tag she discovers he’s sixty dollars. I suspect she’s shocked she’d priced him so cheaply.
I pick up the cheese knife next to the cash register and try to slash my throat. But because the knife handle features a little mouse on top of a piece of cheese, the only reaction I get is, “CUTE!”
A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body Page 14