I have often wondered how I would have turned out had I finished my teenagehood down under. I think one can “turn out” up until age eighteen (I secretly hope there’s still a remote chance I will “turn out” okay). Presumably I’d be less neurotic and a better surfer. Of course, Australia wasn’t all good times and Foster’s. What I perceived as the Australian spirit of frankness—the result of a criminal-, shark-, and plague-prone lineage that seemed to say “screw high tea, the jig is up”—extended to more serious topics as well. I remember very well one Girlfriend essay by a young woman who had been attacked on a beach. A bunch of drunken boys had lured her into a jeep and taken her to an abandoned lifeguard tower. The essay was detailed and illustrated with helpful tips for young girls (biting, urinating, wearing jeans) as well as what the girl herself would have done differently (not gotten into the jeep).
But at least it was something different and it felt real. Now what was I supposed to do? My Australian dreams had disappeared into the night like a baby in a dingo’s jaw. I was stuck in White Plains, New York—the bastard child of Westchester County—and I was all the more determined to define myself in some other way. It’s not that I so desperately wanted out of my teenage wasteland. In fact, the big problem was that there was nothing definite to escape. The walls of suburbia are as flexible as the grass blades that blanket it. The side effects of growing up “just outside of [insert major urban center here]” are many but practically intangible. This is logical given the fact that suburbia itself is a side effect and practically intangible. For instance, suburban kids are uniquely mean. They don’t have the dangers of drive-by shootings or shark attacks to put things into perspective. The poor aren’t considered genuinely impoverished and the wealthy aren’t rich rich. Everything is muted. Other side effects include but are not limited to: inadvertent house arrest until the age of eighteen, the mall as ecosphere, jingling car keys as status symbol, an intimate knowledge of golf courses but a lack of global awareness.
I spent a lot of time waiting for things to happen to me, which is more or less as pathetic as it sounds. But not entirely my fault. There was a lot of suburbia in the movies during the ’80s and ’90s and in them teenage actions are always propelled along by some outside force—say, a giant pink dog-faced dragon takes you away on his back or the rich popular girl steals your boyfriend or you get tossed into a white van and kidnapped. Or you get lost in the Australian Outback with a band of unlikely but lively companions, one of whom is a potential love interest. Back in reality, you wait for the bus, you hang out in other people’s basements, and you define “exciting” as chalking your license to get into bars that probably would have let you in anyway. Suburbia is too close to the country to have anything real to do and too close to the city to admit you have nothing real to do. Its purpose is to make it so you can identify with everything. We obviously grew up identifying with nothing.
Then one day you look in the rearview mirror of your existence and realize that you can see clear down the hill-less and curveless and bridgeless road of your life, straight to the maternity ward where you were born. And then you go to college. Where your bland past meekly follows, sluggishly scraping its feet on the floor.
It was in college that I came to understand that being born and raised in suburbia makes it difficult to lay claim to a specific type of childhood. I wasn’t conscious as a small child that one day I would be required to attend parties and go on dates and identify myself as having been from a certain kind of home (rough or privileged), exposed to certain kinds of things (alcoholics or teenage suicide), into certain kinds of music (Nirvana or Nas). I was barely conscious of New Jersey, forget the notion that there were other elementary schools in California and private embassy schools in Bombay. Or, if I thought of them, I thought of them as being in an alternate universe, half frozen in time. I couldn’t imagine what the kids there would be taught, what cartoons they were exposed to—only that everyone in Southern California had a view of the ocean and lockers big enough to stuff a nerd into. In my world the cool kids were rich, poor, smart, black, white. As long as you did drugs and were relatively attractive, you were okay. That was about as complicated as our one rule got, but it was the only one we had so we stuck to it.
My senior year of high school there was a fight in the boys’ locker room and some kid got his ear Van Goghed with a pocketknife. This wasn’t particularly shocking at the time but in college it recycled itself into a story. It’s not like I had been “knifed.” Nor did I know anyone who was a good candidate for a knifing. I hadn’t even been in the appropriate wing of the school to witness it. But I clung to the fact that I could have witnessed it as a way to make me feel as if I came from someplace I could point to, someplace where I could say, “This is where I come from. This is who I am.”
Which brings us back to Belgium. A random country I chose with a little globe-spinning. Sure, birthing my child in Belgium is risky business. Being “the Belgium kid” could very well lead directly to a middle school existence peppered with Division 1 playground pummelings. I am equally aware that the word “Flemish” is hysterical to an eighth grader and that to hail from a country famous for its waffles, chocolate, and fried potato is to pray for a high metabolism. However, as I become less and less Australian with each passing year, I am increasingly willing to take this risk on behalf of my unborn child. Beyond a general case of suburban apathy, if anyone has a right to move her spawn to a major European port city and back, it’s me. After all, I survived “Sloane.”
Yes, my name is my cross and my copilot. “Sloane,” a vowel-heavy name inscrutable to people of all nationalities, became my Sydney in place of an actual Sydney. Like a lunatic in the psych ward with only smocks and slippers for clothes, my name is the one definite thing I own. It is the one thing that stepped up to define me when my kangaroo dreams hopped lamely into oblivion. And, like all things unique, it came at a price:
Number of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off jokes (included here are those specific to the dialogue when Ferris disguises himself as Sloane’s father and picks her up from school): 3,567
Number of Sloane Square and/or Sloane Ranger jokes made by acutely observant British people: 457
Number of times I have been referred to as man: 890
Number of times I have almost been referred to as a man (see: “I thought you’d be a man.”): 123
Number of times I have heard the phrase “I thought of you today” as a direct result of the “Sloan” plaque affixed to automated toilets in public restrooms: 94
Number of times I have heard the words, “Oh, like the cancer hospital”: 851
Number of children determined to turn me into two syllables, by placing an “a” between the “s” and the “l”: All of them
Names I am most commonly called by telemarketers: Simone, Slain, Siobhan, Flo, Stacey, Susan, Slater, Leanne, and Slow (Yes, my parents named me “Slow.” That’s because they hate me and made me sleep in the linen closet subsisting only on bath salts and Scope.)
Number of times I say I’ve never met another female Sloane and people become inexplicably defensive about their worldliness and say, “Well, I’ve met a Sloane.”: 116
Number of times I have received an e-mail with my name spelled incorrectly in response to an e-mail originating from me and therefore making use of the correct spelling of my name and thus have passive-aggressively retaliated by leaving off the last letter of the sender’s name in all future correspondence: 32. “Thanks for getting back to me, Rebecc.”
I have had this conversation with other odd-named people—Xantheses and Joaquins—and there’s something about having an especially different name that makes it difficult to imagine what you’d be like as a Jennifer. It was easier when I was little to dream of being a Jane or a Becky, because the possibilities are endless in general. Around the same time I was pretty geared up to be an astronaut. This was before I realized (a) I have no math skills and (b) I am afraid of heights, helmets, extreme speed, and antig
ravity chambers. All I knew was that the stars were cool and the moon was even cooler, as far as round, glowing things in the sky were concerned. With the cosmos as the limit, who was to say I couldn’t be named Lauren? I even had some guidance, as my mother’s, father’s, and sister’s names all start with D and my mother and sister even have the same initials. Could I have been a Danielle? Maybe. A Daphne? Perhaps. I wouldn’t have objected to being a Daphne.
But now it’s too late. Unlike imagining my alternate past as an Aussie or my unborn child’s future as an Antwerper (Antwerpite? whatever; I’m not Belgian), changing my name is almost impossible to imagine. It’s like imagining myself with a penis. Sure, I’ve seen them used but I’m not quite sure what I would do with one. Stare at it in the mirror as boys always vow to do with breasts if they could become women for a day? Occasionally there will be a character with my name on TV or in the movies. I find this incredibly distracting. I should hope this is not so much the fault of my vanity as it is the fault of my untrained hearing. I assume, when I hear the sound of my name, that it is referring to me. It’s like watching commercials on the Spanish channel and comprehending nothing except the word “Coca-Cola.”
My name itself has become a placeholder for the heritage and cultural grounding I never had. It’s a frightening prospect—every single thing I have ever known or ever will know about myself hinges on six letters. Technically, my family is Russian and technically my name means “elephant” in Russian. This is a coincidence, but because I am neither obese nor big eared, I can share this fact with strangers and it comes off as flirty. Who is to say that “elephant” is not a term of endearment in Minsk? The French call their children little cauliflowers and nobody seems to have a problem with that.
The real story is that my mother got the name from a 1950s black-and-white movie called Diamond Rock. Apparently I am not a naturally curious person, as it took me twenty-seven years to make a real effort to get my hands on a copy of it. I was in White Plains for the weekend and came across one of my old issues of Girlfriend with a smiling freckled girl on the cover. Flipping through the magazine set off an especially strong craving for a hit of definition. Australia hadn’t been mentioned in our house for some time and, starting with the magazine, my parents and I got to talking about old times, until we hit Diamond Rock. They assumed I had seen it. In the past I had put too much weight on the big (an entire continent) and the small (my single-syllable name) and perhaps this movie was Goldilocks’s third bear—the “just right” version that could explain everything.
But that’s not exactly what I got when I finally entered the world of Diamond Rock. Upon logging on to Amazon.com, several signs suggested this movie might not, in fact, be the key to my existential plight:
The movie is called Diamond Head, not Diamond Rock. This could very well be my fault. I’m not a very good listener.
It was made in 1963, not the 1950s, and in glorious color.
Even a semiofficial site such as imdb.com spells the character’s name three different ways: Slone, Sloan, Sloane.
Things were not looking well on the self-discovery front but I remained convinced I was on to something. I slid in the DVD and pressed Play. Diamond Head is the ridiculously campy story of senatorial candidate “King” Howland (Charlton Heston), who has made his fortune through his very lucrative pineapple dynasty, and his sister, Sloan Howland (the beautiful blond Yvette Mimieux). Apparently the Howlands are fiftieth-generation Hawaiians despite the fact that they are as white as orchids. Sloan has been attending college on the mainland with her childhood friend and Hawaiian lover, Paul, and they have returned to the Howlands’ private pineapple plantation to propose their plans to procreate. Sloan loves Paul. Although…when the movie opens she’s wearing a glamorous dress in front of a mirror and he puts his arms around her and says, “Never take off this dress.” I’m going to go ahead and spoil it by saying that she does indeed take off the dress. There are, in fact, at least six more costume changes, each one a slap in the face of true love.
The movie is full of Hestonesque bits of eloquence, like, “I love you. Damn it, I do.” And: “I don’t admire your sense but I do admire your guts. Even if I have to string ’em on a barbwire fence someday.” It’s a story of race and class, sex and tiki torches—a Guess Who’s Coming to the Luau. Determined to marry Paul against her brother’s wishes, Sloan says things like, “Someday all blood will be mixed and all races gone.” Which is presented as sweetly enlightened and we are meant to ignore the vague ethnic-cleansing undertones. The gecko in the hut, of course, is that Paul has few good qualities and even fewer lines. He’s presented as an ignorant tradesman whose love for our heroine is purely physical. After successfully completing the “five-year program” at college, he plans on living largely off Sloan’s pineapple inheritance. But hey, whatever makes the racism more palatable. The good news is that Paul gets stabbed at a luau, resolving the whole sticky mess.
I ejected the DVD.
My mother tells me she named me after the character because she was fond of the name and Yvette Mimieux was “such a good, pretty little actress.” I wanted specifics. I wanted that isolated bit of dialogue that made her think, “This is the name I’m going to stick my kid with for the duration of her natural life and beyond! Here is the philosophy I want her to fall back on in times of trouble. What would Sloan Howland do?” If I wasn’t going to be named after a dead grandmother or a natural wonder or have my citizenship changed, I felt that she owed me this much.
“I liked the name, but I’m not sure it has anything to do with who you are.”
“This is my point.”
“You’re acting like you were adopted and now you’re searching for your adoptive parents.”
“I guess I am, in a way.”
“I don’t know how to respond to that.”
“Mother, I love you. Damn it, I do.”
I have now had numerous viewings of Diamond Head, largely by myself but occasionally with friends whom I have subjected to the shamelessly self-indulgent Paul-is-dead exercise. The disc menu pops up on the TV and I casually mention this is the movie I was named after, hoping that they will see what I don’t. That they will come up with a good adjective for Sloan—“passionate,” “intelligent,” “steely.” Anything besides just “blond.” You would think I was watching the Zapruder film. The problem is, I can’t be sure what I’m looking for. I’m not quite crazy enough to crumble into a spiral of nothingness if I find no meaning in a Charlton Heston movie. Is Yvette Mimieux me? Am I her? Are we both Sloan? Mother, is that you? Who knows. What would Sloan Howland do? She’d toss her hair and make a pineapple upside-down cake, that’s what.
Turning to Mimieux herself looks like a fruitless tree as well. Not having the decency to be legitimately French (she was born in Los Angeles), Mimieux’s star more or less faded after the 1960s. However, she got lucky on the cultural identification front: she was most certainly a movie star so we know she’s got more going for her than an unusual name. And ten bucks says she’s been to Sydney for a movie premiere. Alas, in the grand tradition of my hazy upbringing, I was not looking for anything particular from Diamond Head, but this is what I found:
Things about the Character of Sloan I Aspire To
She’s a spiffy dancer.
She has an affinity for wide-brim hats and admirably lays off the pastels considering she was raised in a tourist destination.
She owns several ponies of the nonplastic variety.
One online review notes that Diamond Head is “not for people who do not like drama and certainly not for racist separatists.” I like to think my life is like that.
Things I Do Not Aspire To
She has a moody side she refers to as “the spitting witch.”
She eats pigs on spits.
She drives barefoot and runs in the sand (both terrible for the arches).
She makes several references to Paul making her “burn,” almost like she’s conjugating verbs. I burn for him
. He burns for me. We burn for each other. One cannot help but suspect VD as a factor in their engagement. This comes up again when King defines a “hapahali” as “two people jumping around in the same skin.” An image which, like the burning, is disgusting.
Neither Here nor There
After Paul’s murder she goes to a bar in Maui and gets drunk on martinis and licks the spillover from the base before passing out on the floor.
This didn’t leave me with much. Sometimes we don’t know what we want until we don’t get it. It’s like meeting someone for the first time after hearing their voice on the phone—before you met them you’d have said you had no particular image of them; afterward, you inevitably say you imagined them looking different.
When my father came back from Sydney, it took me a few months to fully realize our family was never going to take the Qantas leap. I lost one of the opal earrings a few years later and a few years after that I broke the pen (the opera house only stays in one place now, which could actually mean I fixed the pen). I have decided to take my mother’s advice and stop watching the same movie over and over. The funny thing is, I get the impression that neither she nor my father actually liked Diamond Head very much. It’s hard to imagine that anyone outside of the pineapple industry does. But maybe they knew. They knew that we were a middle-class, semidysfunctional, felony-free, religiously inept clan, and they thought this name was something interesting they could give me. They randomly picked it, just the way I had done with the cold countries of the European Union. They wanted me to have something I could point to and say: This is where I’m from. This is who I am. Because a Sloane, by any other name, is actually an Yvette. With an e, of course.
I Was Told There'd Be Cake Page 7
