A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body

by Lauren Weedman

  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, w
hat 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.

  THE HOMECOMING FLOAT

  Sitting 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.

  Well, good morning! Here I am, doing the best I know how to do. Am I crazy or are rice cakes with cottage cheese and hot sauce on them the perfect snack?

  Man, I’m scared to die. And in the dream there was this little baby that I was in charge of—I think it was a baby—it felt like a baby—and I left it in a shopping cart. No, when I left it in the shopping cart it was just a sweatshirt. Anyway.

  Why do I keep telling everyone that I don’t eat breakfast? I do eat it, I always have. Why am I ashamed?

  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.)

  I dive into the Letter to Self one more time. I can never get past the first line.

  Dear Lauren,

  I’d like to say I’ve known you all your life but in reality, I feel I just met you last week at the New Age book store.

  Dear Lauren,

  Remember when you were so fat that kids would “moo” at you in the hallways at school? Well, I do.

  Dear Lauren,

  I hope you can read this since your handwriting is so shitty.

  Exhausted from my morning pages and my Letter to Self, and knowing I should save some energy for my morning meditation, a quick postcard will have to suffice for Mom. My search for a working pen is interrupted by a loud voice.

  “Do you see those hooks on the top of the houses?” On the street below my window, the tour guide’s amplified question breaks the morning silence. “Well, when the Dutch move in or out of their homes, they use a method they’ve been using for centuries ...”

  The boats run all day long, right in front of my building, offering tourists a taste of historic Amsterdam. I pull my curtains back, open the windows, and plant myself in a pose that I hope looks like a Dutch girl sitting at her breakfast table, writing in her journal. I don’t yet have anything to write, but the boat is right in front of my window, tourist cameras poised to snap what they believe is an intimate portrait of Dutch life. For their benefit, I fake-write a few lines with my pen just hovering above the postcard. When I hear a few excited American accents say, “Look up there!” I start fake-writing like I am Amadeus—clutching at my bangs and composing furiously.

  Once the boat passes I write:

  Dear Mom,

  I have a paid three-week vacation (I never got that back in “reality”) and will be coming home. It starts in October. Can’t wait! Love you all very much, exactly as you are.

  —Lauren

  It’s time for me to go home and show my family how much living in Amsterdam has changed me. I am so different than the girl they had last seen, it’s as if I’ve been away at rehab for two years, only with a lot of smoking and drinking. Reverse rehab.

  I wish they would all come visit and see my new life in action. But they made it clear that their last big trip, a cruise to Alaska, had in their opinion been a complete bust. “I’ve seen more wildlife in our backyard,” they like to say. They are done with traveling for a while.

  Mostly I want them to see the amazing eighteenth-century canal house where I have an apartment—an apartment that is a direct reflection of how far I have progressed on my spiritual path.

  It is the inkling that I would have never found my lovely home if I hadn’t been a four-hundred-pound Moroccan man in a past life who died choking on his own spit that led me to my favorite spot in town—the New Age bookstore (or as I like to call it, the I’ll Never Have Another Unhappy Day Again store). Whenever I cross the threshold, hear the whales singing, and smell the myrrh burning, I know I am on the brink of discovering answers, answers, answers.

  It was the past life section where I met two light and airy German girls who lived half the week at an ashram following an Indian guru with “powerful eyes,” and the other half in the apartment that is now mine.

  The German sari sisters had just received the news that the guru had a dream, and in that dream the two girls moved to Dallas to marry men that lived at her Texas ashram.

  “Is Texas wonderful?” Gudula asked, with wide loving eyes.

  I got so caught up in the way they both seemed to be bubbling with this “isn’t life wondrous?!?” energy that I started talking back to them in a sort of hybrid Indian/German ashram speak.

  “Oh, yes! For you shall see! Wondrous is it, this land of Texas!”

  They invited me over for lavender tea and “meat that is good for your blood.”

  The moment I walked into the apartment I got heart palpitations. It was gorgeous. Three tall windows lined one whole wall of the main room and opened out onto a be
autiful canal. So much light has never before filled an apartment more beautifully. I was ready to push them down the steps and take over the lease.

  An hour later I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, wrapped in spiritual clothes, as Gudula stood behind me and pushed on the top of my head with her palm. Apparently this was a major component in the cool breeze meditation practiced at the ashram, but I had my eyes on the prize.

  “Have you guys found someone to take this place when—”

  “Shhhh,” Florina interrupted. “Get ready!”

  Gudula removed her hand and plopped herself down right in front of me. Florina plopped down next to her. Both of them had huge smiles on their faces and were so close to me I could smell their good-for-the-blood meat breath.

  “Is someone from the ashram going to take it?” I asked, undaunted.

  “Do you feel it?” Florina asked.

  The only thing I had felt was her taking her hand off of my head. And the intense hope of moving in. Right when I was about to ask about what the total move-in cost would be they grabbed each other’s little hands and intensified their anticipation. I wasn’t going to get a key without celebrating my new cool breeze.

  “Oh my god! That’s amazing!” I yelled.

  The girls started clapping and I joined in.

  “Yes, the cool breeze out the top of your head! You felt it!” Gudula and Florina gave each other a hug.

  I wanted to ask them if the cool breeze might have just been from the blood rushing back to where they were pressing so hard, but didn’t want to put a damper on things.

  It wasn’t until we were all singing made-up songs to the sunset that they asked me if I would like to take the apartment when they left for the wonders of Texas.