A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body (18 page)

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

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:

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 beautiful 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.

Bowing like a level-one monk in training, I replied, “Yes, thank you. Oh, thank you.”

“But first you have to come to meet the guru,” Gudula insisted.

Uh-oh—if the guru was a good one, she'll take one look at me and call “bullshit.” Or try to read my aura but find my colors blocked by clouds of green pot smoke.

Maybe it was more a formality. Like a meet-the-parents thing. Whatever it was, even bathing the guru's feet in goat's pee—if it meant getting the apartment, I'd do it.

That evening the girls took me to a large hall full of hundreds of followers (or possibly apartment hunters) where the guru was holding a public meditation. Unless Gudula and Florina were high-ranking followers—which they could be, as they could “cool breeze” like nobody's business—I doubted I'd have to meet the guru one-on-one.

The bulk of the evening was spent waiting for the guru, a heavyset Indian woman in a canary yellow sari, to make her way from the back of the room to her stack of pillows in the front. Ms. Guru was somewhere between the age of seventy and one hundred and ten. (The golden scarf wrapped
around her head kept slipping down into her face—otherwise I could have gotten a better look.) She moved very slowly, grabbing onto the backs of chairs and any available arms as she shuffled. A few times her sari got caught on the chairs behind her, prompting her to give it an aggressive tug and whip around with a glare, “Who the hell is standing on my dress?”

When she stopped at our aisle, Gudula and Florina grabbed my arms and squeezed. I raised my eyebrows with a sort of “Well, look at that!” fake excitement and hoped the guru would suddenly find the energy to point at me and shout, “Get that woman a credit check!” But she passed right by, leaving our entire row buzzing.

“Very powerful eyes!” the crowd oohed. “Very powerful!”

The guru finally reached the stage—a miracle in and of itself. A nervous minion led her to a flapjack stack of brightly colored pillows covered in rose petals and clipped a microphone to her sari.

After she caught her breath, which took a good three minutes, the spiritual lecture began.

“The truth is the truth,” she wheezed. “The TRUTH is the TRUTH. The truth IS the truth. THE truth is THE truth.” Etcetera, etcetera.

When she finished speaking she remained seated on her pillow pile (where she was probably going to stay until her next session the following morning). I turned to the girls.

“It's so true,” I gushed. “The truth IS the truth. I mean, the TRUTH is the truth.”

 

 

The day I signed the lease, Gudula and Florina showed me a bowl of lemons and peppers. They told me to leave the bowl uncovered for four days and five nights. On the fifth day I was to throw the offering into the canal. The lemons and peppers were supposed to suck any bad energy out of the room and throwing them in canal was, Gudula added, just for fun.

As I threw the lemons and peppers into the faces of unsuspecting bikers and tourists, missing the canal entirely, I realized that this apartment was the beginning of my new life—the first step on my spiritual journey.

If I can score an amazing apartment like this at the age of twenty-three, I can't possibly be the fucked up, irresponsible, mild epileptic with poor judgment that my family has seen all these years.

 

 

Tomorrow morning I head home for three weeks. My bags are stuffed with Dutch pancake mix and syrup and a few sausages, plus Drop, the Dutch candy that tastes like dog shit mixed with asphalt—gifts for my American family.

I'd promised my mother I'd help out at Romancing the Seasons for the first week of my stay. She asked and I agreed because I thought it sounded kind of kitschy and crazy.

“I'm going home to work in a mall!” I kept telling all the Dutch people I work with at the hotel.

“Well, tell J. R. Ewing we said, ‘Howdy!'” they would say back.

I'm a beloved sort of mascot for all the hard-working Dutch folks who have spent their whole lives in the service industry. I'm the little round, loud American girl. It's not uncommon when I'm preparing a tray to bring up to one of the guest rooms for me to find myself surrounded by a few cooks, a dishwasher, and someone from accounting who wandered into the kitchen to steal some food.

“I heard her laughing all the way down the hallway,” one of the gathered will say. “She laughs loud. You laugh loud, you know?” Then they want to know why I do, which I can't answer, but they laugh at the funny faces I make while I feel attacked and surrounded.

When I once complained to the bartender, Rocco, about this practice of being surrounded and picked on, he looked at me quizzically.

“Everyone loves you!” he said. “They think you are a funny American girl and want to play with you!”

 

 

During this past week, I've been in a self-imposed spiritual boot camp to guarantee that my family will see who I've become, trying to get as much enlightenment in as I can before I get on the plane. I've increased my “surround those who cause you the most pain in a golden light of forgiveness”
visualizations to twice a day, and every morning I've been cramming in three hours of spiritual affirmations:

They're not so much affirmations as discussions.

With my journey home looming in the morning, I use my break at work to hide in the dressing room and do some quick chanting on the ancient word for god (“huu”), which my healer friend, Wendy, had taught me. A transplant from Australia who lives just down the canal, Wendy told me I should chant “huuuu” in a high-pitched “this is a test of the emergency broadcast system” tone twice a day to help me summon my dream master.

I get about three minutes into heavy huu-ing when the dressing room door flies open and Rocco enters. I've had a crush on Rocco's cocky bartender ways for a long time, and I find his blatant desire to have sex with me touching. He'd heard my “huuuu” noise in the hallway and thought there was
some kind of leak in the pipes. I tell him there's no leak and we start making out.

After I pick up my paycheck I catch a glimpse of him cutting up limes behind the bar and almost go over to talk to him but decide I shouldn't. My focus should not be on flirtations and boys, it should remain steadily fixed on my Trip to Bountiful—my journey home.

At 4:00 a.m. my doorbell rings and it's Rocco. “I thought I saw your light on,” he yells into the intercom.

I have a major trip the next day—a spiritual quest of sorts—and my plane leaves at 11:00 a.m., so this is really obnoxious. But flattering too—he knew where I lived, and I'd never shared that with him.

I buzz him in.

After some incredibly mediocre sex we lie on my tiny mattress together. Well, he lies on it. I am half off it, gripping the side with one leg and one arm, the other half of me on my freezing concrete floor.

“You see this?” He points to his chest. “Stab wound,” he says. I pull myself up onto the mattress to give it a little kiss, but then I realize I don't want to kiss a stab wound.

“How did that happen?” I ask. Suddenly the reality that I had a man named Rocco in my bed hits me. “Never mind,” I say.

He gets up and moves to my couch. He lights a cigarette and sits down with his arms stretched out across the back of my couch, using his stab-wounded beer belly as a little shelf
for his ashtray. He looks completely wrong in my light blue room adorned with hanging crystals and paintings of fairies kissing magical flying pigs.