A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body (19 page)

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 get 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!”

Maybe it's jet lag but I cannot muster any enthusiasm. I just sit at the cash register with a deeply crabby look on my face that doesn't change all day. The only time it even comes close to changing is when a group of ten-year-old kids comes running into the store and all start clapping loudly. At first I think it's a Boy Scout troop putting on a little show for money, but it turns out they're clapping to set off the sound-activated ghosts
hanging all over the store. At the sound of a clap, the ghosts start shaking and making a high pitched “Ooooo” noise. It's not unlike my “huuuu” chant, but without the accompanying golden light it's brutal.

As soon as the ghosts stop, the kids clap again, setting them off. Everyone in the mall knows about these ghosts, and throughout the day, just as it finally gets quiet, someone sticks their head in, claps, and leave me huu-ing in hell.

Besides the ghosts, the relentless use of the word “cute,” and eating muffins the size of Bundt cakes for lunch, the hardest thing about the day is my mother explaining my behavior and appearance to every customer—whether they ask about me or not.

“That's how they dress in Europe, I guess!” she says, repeatedly. Or if I fail to give a customer a receipt: “In Copenhagen you don't give receipts, I guess!”

When I correct her and tell her I live in Amsterdam, she blames that on Europe too. “I guess in Europe it's either Copenhagen or Amsterdam. It can't be both!”

While this makes no sense to me, it seems to make perfect sense to the customers, who all smile and nod in agreement.

 

 

The harsh judging I had been required to do since landing in Indiana was really making it difficult to showcase my new “ability to love” talent. But tonight I am making dinner for my entire family. Tonight is Pannekoeken Night.

Family lore has it that as a teenager I'd made Jello-O that never gelled. Many a bewildered dinner discussion was spent trying to figure out how I managed that. But now I am going to make a feast of savory and sweet Dutch pancakes everyone is going to love. And the great thing about pancakes is that you have to keep making them, thereby avoiding a great deal of the dinner table discussion.

“Lauren, can I get another apple one?” my sister calls sleepily from the table.

“Why yes, you can! Any other orders?” I ask, doing my family pancake-making dance in the kitchen. The
pannekoeken
are coming out perfectly—thin and crepelike. Perfect.

“She can't balance a checkbook or remember her house key to save her life,” my dad chimes in, “but she sure can make some pancakes, can't she!” He polishes off another sausage delight.

This moment is not about pancakes. It is about me giving of myself unto them—doing something that is entirely not about me. And as I watch my family using way too much syrup, I realize I'd been thinking about them every moment of the day in Amsterdam. That with everything I did, I'd imagine them watching me do it. Approving or disapproving (mostly disapproving), but they were with me.

“Mom's choking!” my sister yells, interrupting my reverie.

I run to the table and find that, sure enough, my mom is choking on her apple pancake.

We all freeze and watch her for a moment. But when we finally realize that wishing the moment away isn't working, someone takes action—the person most concerned for my mother: my mother. She reaches her finger into her throat and sends a piece of pancake flying out of her mouth.