A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body (17 page)

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.

Every prostitute dressed in fluorescent lingerie and tapping at the window she stood at caused me to clutch my map of Amsterdam like a bible. When I stopped to consult my map and find out how to get out of there, I was relieved to discover that I was in front of some sort of drugstore with a display in the window featuring various crackers and jams. They also had a TV set playing a grainy video of what looked like one my childhood favorites,
Old Yeller.

I didn't remember the shot of Old Yeller running in slow motion through a field of grass, so I put down my map and got caught up in what I thought was a part of the movie I'd forgotten. Or maybe it was a European version of the classic. But when Old Yeller reached a naked lady laying on her back with her legs spread wide open, I screamed.

Overwhelmed, I dismounted my bike at the city park and sat in the grass until I got my heart rate down.

I had pulled my journal out in an attempt at calming myself down, when a man sat down right next to me. I looked around to see if perhaps Vondelpark had been suddenly swarmed with people, leaving the spot next to me as the only place to sit. It wasn't. I was surrounded by nothing but empty, green fields.

The man's breathing sounded disturbed and erratic. Then I saw his shaking hands as he pulled out a porno magazine and showed me one of the pictures.

“Do you like zees?” he asked in a German accent.

I screamed at him. “No, I don't like them!” Maybe if he moved his thumb so I could see what the woman was doing to the other woman I might be interested, but I continued yelling.

“No! I don't like that! This is a park! A peaceful park!” By the time I got to the part about “how dare he disturb my journaling” he was gone, leaving me screaming at no one. Just like the junkies I'd been seeing all day.

Amsterdam had shocked me into a state of nervous grannyhood. Ever since I arrived at Schiphol Airport, I felt like a completely different person. Not the free-spirited, fun young girl living her European dream I'd imagined I'd be, but more of a traumatized shell of person with no sense of self.

After so many years spent longing to experience something foreign and fantasizing that I'd feel more at home once I actually left my home, I had no idea who I was.

I had always fancied myself a progressive, liberal, artsy hippie girl trapped in the conservative Midwest and not easily shocked—in fact, I did the shocking back home. But from the first day I arrived, I felt like a scared, prudish, jumpy, overly polite American girl.

 

 

Hans's idea to help calm my culture shock was to mix me in with his school friends. The old gang consisted of about seven young Dutch men and women who had all lusted after and dated and broken up with each other four or five times since they were in kindergarten together. The leader of the group was Rini, a busty, proud, stoic, blonde bombshell who greeted me at her door with traditional Dutch kisses on the cheeks.

“Wow,” she said. “You have so much makeup on. Are you going to the prom tonight?”

Her old friends applauded her clever cultural reference. I tried to let everyone know that it was just lipstick—I'd only
put on lipstick, I swore—but they only laughed at my panic. “So American!” they all agreed.

But the group was welcoming and polite, speaking English throughout the night so I wouldn't feel excluded. I did feel more like a part of the group, until dinner was over and the subject of America came up.

“I would
not
want to grow old in America,” someone said.

From there it took off.

“Well, I'd rather be old than gay in America,” someone else argued.

“I'd rather be gay than a young black man.”

“I'd rather be a young black man than a young black woman!”

“I'd rather be a young black woman than a young black lesbian woman.”

“I'd rather be a Vietnam vet than a crack baby.”

“I'd rather be a crack baby than a Native American!”

“And I'd rather be a Native American than a homeless gay farmer!” I finally said, adding, “Am I the only one who's waiting for that lid to come off that old cookie tin?”

That got me my first laugh since arriving in Amsterdam, from everybody but Hans. He was looking irritated, which was why I took Rini up on her offer to help with the dishes.

“So what made you fall in love with my Hans?” she asked, as soon as we got to the kitchen.

“He's not yours, he's mine!” I answered, totally kidding.

“You can have him,” she replied, completely seriously.

“Hans is not like the other Dutch men,” she told me. “He's quite different. He's never quite fit in. But overseas he's had much more success. Dutch women want nothing to do with him, but the foreign girls seem to really like him.”

“Yeah, those of us from the desperate troll countries love him,” I almost said. But I decided to take a chance and actually try to talk with her. I needed a girlfriend, and though I might have preferred an uglier, fatter one, this might be my only choice. I launched in:

“You put a guy back among his own people and it's just very different. In Indiana it was like we were living this long romantic scene out of a foreign movie. But since we've been here, things have changed. And you know, back home I really fancied myself this radical, liberal hippie girl. I thought everyone else was so prudish and uptight. And now it's me. And Hans—oh my god!—he fights with everyone here! He gets mad if he thinks people cut in front of him at the grocery store. In Indiana he was too busy laughing at all the different kinds of gum to care. I think we're both freaking out a bit.”

I stopped talking even though I could have gone on and on. It had been so long since I'd actually been able to articulate anything besides, “Brown bread, please. Sliced, please. Thank you, please.”

Rini turned off the water and let out a little laugh. “Wow, you talk
very
fast,” she said, and walked out of the kitchen.

 

 

A month later Hans asked Rini to have sex with him after a night of beers and meatballs at their old hangout, The Mole Hole. She called me the next day and turned him in.

“I told him no,” she said, and hung up.

I was supposed to return to America in two weeks, which was two weeks too long to spend in the company of a wannabe cheater.

I announced to Hans that I was breaking up with him and going to live with a friend that Rini had kindly set me up with—an art student who was willing to trade rent for my posing naked holding a giant metal pole in my hands for three hours a day.

Hans went into a rage and tried to tear his turtleneck off. As he pulled at it, the stitching gave way at the neck and left him on the floor with only the cloth around his neck. He looked like a crazed priest.

As I was on the steps of the houseboat with my bags packed, screaming and crying for him to let me go, I realized I finally had the emotional references I needed a year ago to play what had then seemed like a foreign role—the “crumpled paper.” The irony was that since we were breaking up, he'd never cast me in that role again.

As I rode away on my bike, Hans screamed after me that he loved me. When I didn't respond, he screamed that he hated me. It was all very Bergmanesque.

 

 

On the day I was to return home I sat in a cafe and stared at my return ticket.

Though I'd been there three months, Amsterdam still seemed completely foreign and intense, which made me want to get out. Take a break. Be able to buy a stamp without having to prepare days ahead of time and recover for hours afterward.

But if I went home now, I'd be returning as the exact same person I was when I first arrived (except I'd learned how to flush the toilets and hop off my bike while it was still moving without toppling into a pile of rottweiler shit). I'd also be going home single, and I knew the foreign boy dating pool was much larger in Holland than in Indiana.

If I didn't start packing within the hour I wouldn't make the plane. And if I didn't make the plane I didn't know what would happen. I had no idea where I'd live, what I'd do for money, or how I'd ever manage to get back home. But it seemed sad to abandon the adrenaline rush of navigating each day from scratch in exchange for the calm of the known.

I decided to stay—it was too life-threatening not to. Plus, trying to figure out how to tell the clerk at the train station I needed a “one-way ticket to the airport” would take
me at least an hour. And I'd just ordered myself a cheese sandwich and didn't want to feel rushed. It just wouldn't be very Dutch.

S
itting on the piece of rectangle foam covered in a black sheet that serves as my couch (the nicest piece of furniture in my Amsterdam apartment), I open a letter from my mother written on smoke-damaged kitten-with-a-ball-of-yarn stationery that she saved from our house fire ten years prior. The envelope is sealed with a large Christmas sticker. It is late September.

It seems much has happened in Indiana since she last wrote.

In the bad news department, there was a shooting at the Earring Tree Kiosk in the Indianapolis Mall, which affected sales at Romancing the Seasons, my mother's year-round Christmas store, unfortunately situated on the same end of the mall where, as my mother puts it, “gang people buy their earrings.”

In the good news department, the mystery of my always-napping sister was solved—she has been diagnosed with Epstein-Barr virus. For years she'd been napping the day away, with only a few sad attempts to wake herself to watch the news and scoop the kitty litter. Since her diagnosis, she can nap in front of the TV all day, guilt-free. She also has taught her cat to pee in the toilet.

And in news I can't decide is bad or good, only one of the five obituaries my mom enclosed with the letter is someone I actually know.

The letter ends with what is, I think, an invitation to come home for a visit: “Don't forget to take a break from what I'm sure feels like a ‘fairy tale' and come back to reality for a while. We'd love to see you!”

As far as I can tell, the only fairy tale aspect of Amsterdam (besides the canal houses, the little lit-up bridges, and the talking cows) is the little troll junkie who hangs out near my apartment and who is often so full of magic he passes out with a needle dangling out of his arm.

This same morning, the troll junkie tries to scare me from crossing his bridge by standing in the middle of the bike path,
screaming and pulling out his eyebrows. But since I am en route to the New Age bookstore, where I make weekly visits, I know whatever trauma I endure will soon be remedied.

I need to write back to Mom and tell her that I am already planning a trip home from Disney-dam, but that can wait. I write my three double-sided
The Artist's Way
“morning pages” in an effort to tap into my subconscious mind—where my true self lies—and I come up with some pretty astute insights.

But I still have important work to do. I need to spend the next forty-five minutes composing what I know is a very important letter to a very important person in my life. And her name is “me.”

Part of
The Artist's Way
guide for my life's journey, the letter is my spiritual task of the day. I am to ask myself for forgiveness for all that remains unforgiven from my past. This is my third time attempting the letter, and this time I really need to get all the unforgivens out—from dating the creepy twenty-two-year-old stand-up comedian when I was sixteen to buying all my bikes since I've lived in Holland from junkies. (As soon as they steal one, I go buy it back—a practice the Dutch have scolded me for so often I have to lie and claim the junkies are just friends that I lend my bike to once in a while.)