In the years following high school, I wander, trying to find out where I belong, and end up in very different circumstances from life in Pacific Palisades. I wander to Athens, Greece, sleeping in subways and on rooftops, earning seven dollars a day from an abusive hotel owner who locks me out if I don’t recruit enough guests and holds my passport hostage in a safe. Later, I join a circus as an usher and live on the road in trailers with bunk beds stacked three high next to addicts and racist, violent roustabouts, and when I see how the rest of the world lives, I learn, maybe through some self-exile of my own, that my family was never poor, and that lack is just a learned mentality that would exist in my family no matter what our circumstances might be. Tilting at windmills like Don Quixote, always fighting an imagined devastation about to happen. Even now, we are perpetually waiting for the knock, the bomb, the rejection.
15
THINGS
Pacific Palisades, California, 1981
My father tumbles in from the cold, his hair blown every which way. He is carrying a fractured lamp. “Look at this! This is a perfectly good lamp someone’s just throwing away,” he states incredulously, ignoring my mother’s objections as he begins to apply silver duct tape over the fissures in the lamp’s bright orange base. “I don’t want that broken lamp in here,” my mother complains, and we all watch the word land like a flaming paper bag on my father’s doorstep.
Broken.
Of course he steps on it. The word is too loaded for him to accept. “It’s not broken.” He spits the word at her. “It has a small crack. It’s not broken. This lamp still works. You guys think everything is broken if it has a little crack.” Admitting that something is broken is an indefensible resignation, to his mind. Indeed, there isn’t much that cannot be repaired with duct tape, in my father’s estimation, and he routinely rescues the most tattered items from curbsides all over town to render them whole again. He is egalitarian and unbiased in his approach. When the leg breaks off the eighteenth-century carved wedding chest, it too is wrapped back into place with duct tape. Our garage is packed floor to ceiling with things. Things like boxes he hasn’t looked at for decades. Things like a massive, inoperable, rusted iron drill press from the 1940s. Things like cracked lawn chairs and carpet remnants from other people’s houses and gray institutional metal desks missing drawers and nonfunctioning coffeemakers.
“Look at that. You see? Perfectly good,” my father says, regarding his duct-tape resurrection of the lamp. Perfectly good is one of my father’s most used phrases. The lamp goes on his nightstand, right beside another duct-taped lamp. It stays there for the next twenty years and is never turned on.
It’s just one example of how my siblings and I learn in myriad unspoken ways growing up that we are perpetually balanced on the precipice of loss, and to hold on white-knuckled to every object that crosses our paths. We learn to transfer our fears onto the things we can see and hold, because there is so much we have no control over losing.
Despite my best efforts, despite growing up surrounded by wealth, the anxiety creeps into my own behavior. I don’t seem to be able to discern what’s normal or neurotic as I age. I see more and more schisms erupting each day. With irritation and surprise, I recognize my father in me when I start to recycle my dental floss, rinsing it and setting it next to my toothbrush for a second use. But I also cannot stop doing it. Without being aware of it, I seem to have appropriated the “poverty mentality” my sister, a psychologist, describes us as having. At Christmas in our family, we all unwrap our gifts carefully so that we don’t rip the paper, and we fold it up to use again, winding the ribbons around saved paper towel rolls. Sometimes there is another person’s name crossed out on the packages we open, the paper passed down from a prior year. I never questioned this practice until later in life; I thought it was what everybody did. It is so ingrained in me that it is still always a slight shock to watch somebody open a gift I’ve given them by tearing into it and throwing the paper aside or stuffing it into a garbage bag. When I buy a jar of expensive face cream on sale, I always start to use smaller and smaller dabs as it begins to dwindle. Unable to let it go, I save the last little bit at the bottom of the jar in my medicine cabinet for a “special occasion” that never comes, until it dries out and becomes unusable. When I move out of my apartment, I reluctantly discard a whole graveyard of cream jars and shampoo bottles under my sink, each with a centimeter of product left in the bottom. My sense of loss is significant.
My whole life, my mother has had an almost fetishistic interest in small, insignificant gifts, trinkets and baubles. Better still are found items—stones, feathers, pennies, an earring. Large gifts don’t have the same effect on her. A new car, a fancy dress, or a new piece of furniture won’t hold her interest for long. But a chipped egg cup or a tarnished teaspoon will have her cooing. I grow up learning this feeling, though I can’t quite put a name to it. It’s almost as though the tinier the item, the more honored I can feel that it has been bestowed on me. I learn that there is a romance in reenacting lack.
As adults, my siblings and I each receive four pieces of fine silverware from a set that has been divvied up. I ask my mother what we should do with silverware that cannot be used formally for more than one person, why she chose to do this. “It’s pretty,” she says, as though she can’t imagine why we would think it strange that she would break up a set and render it useless as a table setting. “I just like to take the spoons out and look at them.” For a few years, my mother created miniatures for a boutique as a side business, and some of her creations ended up in museums. I don’t believe that this job making miniatures is just coincidental. Being small and taking up little space is her specialty. In a curio cabinet at my parents’ house, she has a collection of tiny stuffed teddy bears, some as small as a thimble. The root of that particular teddy bear interest, however, lies in a more obvious place, on that street in Apeldoorn during the liberation.
I think I know what it is that underlies the desire to re-create the feeling of receiving a small token for which one feels a disproportionate gratitude. It is a deep feeling of shame, a feeling of unworthiness. In the Netherlands, the families of NSB members are still called fout to this day. People say, “Your family was fout during the war.” It’s a laden word that plagues the children of NSBers throughout their lives. Fout. Documentaries and books have been written about this label in the Netherlands. I believe this word has seeped into my mother’s soul, into her very identity, and then, in some ways, into mine. Fawning over tiny things—trinkets and pebbles, in our case—feels familiar and right. It feels like the appropriate manner in which to express our gratitude for being worthy.
Certainly many other people who survived the Depression and World War II have these tendencies, regardless of what side they are on. But the specific way it is exhibited in my mother and her older siblings indicates a deeper reflection of personal identity. Before she died, my mother’s sister, Hannie, came the closest to actually articulating the mentality to me. I remember a particular day when we were in a thrift store and my aunt was looking at a coffeepot.
“What a rip-off,” I said, checking the price. “You can buy this same coffeepot brand-new for only a few euros more. Why would you get a used one of inferior quality for basically the same price? That seems foolish.”
She shook her head, became irritated with me. “Maybe we aren’t always supposed to have things of superior quality in life, even if we can get them,” she said. “We aren’t just automatically entitled to nice things.”
While I questioned her choice to accept inferior things for herself, it is difficult to think of an instance in which I have ever paid full price without looking for a cheaper alternative. It was drilled into my head to search for bargains. When all the children were wearing Dolphin shorts as a child, I was wearing “Doves.” When all the other kids were turning up the collars on their Izod and Polo shirts, I was wearing a “Fox” shirt. When Guess jeans came into fashion, I became obsessed along with
the rest of my classmates. But my mother refused to pay for expensive jeans for a growing twelve-year-old. While shopping with my mother at a discount overstock clothing store in downtown Los Angeles, I came across a purple acid-washed jean vest. It was absolutely god-awful. But it was Guess, and that red triangle logo is all I saw. I begged my mother for it, and because the price was so low, she bought it for me. In a place like Pacific Palisades, my bargain clothing provoked a great deal of teasing that I might not have experienced in another community. Of course it is shallow and snobby, and now I also see the gift in it; these experiences gave me an understanding of privilege that many of my peers never got. I’m grateful that I had a different perspective than they did. But I am slightly concerned about my extreme internal dogma to buy only what is on sale or inexpensive, the chipped and defective, the fixer-upper, the leftovers from last season, rather than the quality things I really want. Or rather, I am concerned about the emotional source of it. I want to break these patterns. I had a conversation with my mother about this once, when I noted that she had purchased a cheap cheese slicer that wouldn’t slice cheese. She then purchased another cheap cheese slicer that also would not slice cheese. “This makes no sense, Mom. If we bought better things,” I said, “maybe we’d spend less money than we do having to replace things when they fall apart.”
At home when I was growing up, our kitchen drawers were filled with hundreds of rubber bands from the daily newspaper, stacks of rinsed plastic yogurt containers, wads of plastic bags. Today, my drawers are filled with rubber bands, plastic yogurt containers, and plastic bags. I don’t know how that happened. I recall visiting my father when he relocated to Missouri for a brief period, before my mother could join him. I opened the cupboards and they were filled with stacks of plastic and Styrofoam containers he had saved from take-out meals, straws, and flimsy pie tins. At the time, I chastised him and could not understand his compulsion to keep everything. Now, after mining his war experiences, I know that this is a testament to an unrelenting drive to triumph over the unpredictable circumstances in life. It’s spectacular, his will to survive, even when the rest of us don’t see any perceived danger. It’s in his bones to prepare for what he can.
When I encounter his hoarding tendencies now, accompanied by his insistence that everything could be useful “someday,” my exasperation is tempered by a realization that this is precisely what got him through a war that killed his friends. With thousands of miles between us, and the liberty of reflection gained by being removed from the day-to-day frustrations of living with the mess, I have gratitude for that quality. Now I think that the “camp syndrome” doesn’t need to be an apology or an excuse for his behavior. Maybe it doesn’t need to be a detriment at all. Maybe when the deluge comes, my father will fashion an ark out of lawn chairs, rubber bands, and duct tape, and he will show the rest of us how to float.
16
FOOD
On my father’s birthday, my mother always makes fried bananas. I love them too: the sticky caramelized edges, the sweet warm center. My father makes ketimun snacks—crackers with peanut butter, cucumber slices, and spicy sambal. We eat kroepoek, the crunchy prawn crackers we kids love. We eat satay with peanut-coconut sauce and nasi and bami goreng, rice and noodles. As a child, I don’t know that these things aren’t Dutch, and that I am getting Indonesian culture mixed in with my already muddled identity growing up in the United States with Dutch parents. Some days we eat pannekoeken, thick Dutch crepes rolled up with bacon and Gouda cheese or stroop, a thick, dark sugarcane syrup. My mother is an expert pannekoeken chef. She fries them in butter until they are perfectly browned and bubbled on one side, then flips them over to brown the other side before sliding them out of the pan onto the stack that she keeps warm under a tea towel. For me, pannekoeken are the ultimate comfort food, greasy and crisp at the edges, breathing the familiar breath of Holland into my face. Food is part of my cultural identity and inheritance. The power of food in my life is learned, as much as my tortured interaction with it is learned. More than perhaps anything else, the influence of my parents’ war trauma on my family’s behavior around food seems clear. In the camps and during the Hunger Winter, food was a constant focus and source of anxiety for both my parents. War robbed them of this most basic necessity for life at one time; now food would become imbued with all sorts of power in our home.
My relationship with food is and has always been fraught. This is predictable, I think, given both my gender and the cards my family was dealt. With the exception of my brother, I think every member of my family has a dysfunctional relationship with food. As a three-year-old, my little sister goes into a full-scale meltdown when any food on the table is nearly finished. “Niet opmaken!” she yells in her tiny voice, panicking whenever someone reaches for a half-empty jar of jam or the last piece of bread. “Don’t finish it!” If the food item is indeed finished, she dissolves into an inconsolable, sobbing mess. It’s amazing to me now how early we learn nonverbal cues, absorb invisible anxieties, inherit the traumas of our parents, even when none of us realize that it is happening. How does a three-year-old learn such extreme anxiety over the prospect of running out of food in a house where there are two refrigerators stuffed full of it, one in the kitchen and one in the garage? Perhaps it’s from seeing the urgency with which those refrigerators are stuffed. When I am seven, I tell my mother that I love ketchup, and she tells me about the time she got a little tube of mayonnaise all for herself, and how she loved to go into a corner and squeeze a small dollop onto her finger, rationing the mayonnaise out over weeks. She buys me a bottle of ketchup for my birthday and I do the same as my mother, sitting in a corner of the kitchen with a tiny egg cup filled with ketchup, feeling special and bonded with her. As when she remembers the soft-boiled egg she ate on weekends away from the orphanage, or when she emphasizes how special getting real butter is, she fetishizes the lack of food. “The best treat in the world is getting the leftover rice after dinner and putting butter and brown sugar on it,” she says. “We never had dessert in my family, and butter was so rare. I loved that so much.” Later, when I am eight years old, she tapes a diet to my bedroom wall because I have grown a bit chubby. “If you get hungry, drink a glass of water,” she says. We aren’t allowed any fancy snacks. For years, I fantasize about getting a fruit roll-up or a cookie in my lunch like my friends, but I get only half a sandwich and a piece of fruit.
My father always wolfs down his food at the table, then hiccups for several minutes. I imagine this is the way he learned to eat in the camp—the kind of eating that starved animals do. After dinner, he puts the leftovers into Tupperware, and I see him scoop hasty spoonfuls of macaroni or mashed potatoes into his mouth when he thinks we aren’t looking, hunched over the counter protectively. I know this stance, because I’ve learned it too. Eating like we’re shoplifting. When food has spoiled, my mother has to flush it down the toilet to stop my father from pulling it back out of the garbage to inspect it. His standards are significantly lower than ours. I watch him cutting blue fuzz off of crusty bits of cheese that he fishes out of the garbage while chastising us. “You guys are so wasteful. If you cut this little bit of mold off, it’s totally edible. Look at this. This is still perfectly good!” Perfectly good. He eats the hard pieces of post-surgery cheese just to show us how perfectly good it is, even though he just ate a meal and doesn’t particularly like the cheese. This is how I learned to live with food, day in and day out.
* * *
Pacific Palisades, California, 1983
We have rabbits growing up in Pacific Palisades. First we have two rabbits. Then my little sister lets them out of their cages at the same time, and soon we have eight rabbits, then twelve. We can’t give the rabbits away fast enough. My sister likes to watch the male rabbit run around the yard after the females, and she keeps opening our painted “Bunny Hilton” hutch before my mother can stop her. So we have a lot of rabbits. At some point, my mother discovers that the supermarket in the center of ou
r small community throws away boxes full of produce every day. So after doing our grocery shopping inside the store, she starts pulling our green Volvo station wagon around the back to their giant Dumpsters. I always slump down low, beneath the window, when she walks brazenly up the ramp to grab crates of wilted lettuce or carrots off the top of the Dumpster, certain one of my school friends will pass by in their movie-star parents’ Mercedes-Benz and spot us, and that will be the end of my social life. But it gets more embarrassing than that. One day, my mother spots a box of canned peaches in the Dumpster. The labels are torn, but the cans are intact, so she takes those home too. Then a box of twelve ketchup bottles with only one broken bottle makes its way home with us. And that’s how it becomes routine for my mom to climb into the Dumpsters behind the grocery store in one of the most upper-crust neighborhoods in America to root around for several minutes while I hide, knowing it is futile to try to be inconspicuous in our very distinctive mint-green car.
All Ships Follow Me Page 23
