Sisterchicks in Wooden Shoes! Page 7

  “I’m still amazed at how straight all the rows are.”

  “That’s Dutch precision for you.”

  “This morning I read from the devotional book you left by my bed. The prayer for today had a last line with something about ‘let our ordered lives demonstrate Your beauty and peace.’ I don’t remember the words exactly, but I was thinking of that while looking up and down all these rows. An ordered row or an ordered life really does demonstrate beauty and peace, doesn’t it?”

  “My father-in-law would like what you just said. He has a farm.” Noelle bent down to look closer at a wide-open pink tulip. The flower seemed to snuggle to her touch the way a dog relaxes when scratched behind the ears. “When I first came here, I couldn’t believe how hard my father-in-law worked and how detailed he was about everything he did. He was the king of orderly rows of crops and an orderly routine to his life. He was successful in a very quiet, unnoticed way and well respected for his criticism.”

  “Did you say for his criticism?”

  “Yes. His critical comments were highly valued. Individuals took what he said about them or their work with great appreciation. Sounds odd, doesn’t it? This was one of the most difficult parts of the culture for me to adjust to because I’m so big on praise and affirmation. I’m still not sure I fully understand it.”

  “Are you saying that a critical comment is more highly valued than a compliment?”

  “Something like that. Here, when a person hands out praise and compliments left and right, he is considered a flatterer and insincere. More than that, he is seen as… What’s the term? Simpleminded?”

  “An airhead?”

  “An airhead.” Noelle laughed. “I hadn’t heard that term before. That’s good. That’s what a person who compliments a lot would be considered. On the other hand, a person who offers constructive criticism is considered caring and smart. That individual tells it like it is, which reflects more thought and intelligence.”

  “I would have a hard time adjusting to that way of thinking.”

  “I did at first. Now I have settled into a sort of hybrid of Dutch thought and American ways. I still hand out far too many compliments and praises, according to my husband, although I have had some influence on him. You saw how complimentary he was of you at dinner last night.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m also still too loud and expressive to be mistaken for a true, hundred percent Dutch woman. Jelle says you can take the girl out of the USA, but you can’t take the USA out of the girl.”

  “I don’t see that as a bad thing.”

  “Neither do I.” With a sly grin Noelle added, “This is one of the reasons your visit is so good for me. It gives me a chance to be my good ol’ US of A self around someone who understands.”

  “You can be as US of A around me as you want.” We were heading toward the gift shop, so I added, “If by any chance they carry American flags in the gift shop, I’ll buy one for you.”

  Noelle laughed. “I doubt you’ll find any. But if we find some wooden shoes, I will buy those for you.”

  We entered the gift shop and found wooden shoes, all right. Every size and color. We found key rings with tiny wooden shoes dangling from the end, wooden-shoe planters for flowers, and wooden-shoe Christmas ornaments.

  The swarm of visitors had increased in number and nationality, it seemed, since we first had arrived. The gift shop felt unbearably crowded.

  Noelle selected a big bouquet of mixed colored tulips and was standing in line at the checkout. I opted for buying an ornament for my Christmas tree.

  Noelle insisted on purchasing the ornament along with a second one she had picked out for me. My selection was a hand-painted, cutout ornament of a red tulip. Noelle’s choice for me was a pair of yellow wooden shoes dangling from a long black ribbon.

  “They look like ballet slippers hanging from their satin laces.” I held them up and watched the wooden shoes sway like wind chimes.

  “Well, you saw how the breeze made the tulips dance. You can just consider wooden shoes to be the Dutch dancing shoes, if you want to go sway with the tulips.”

  I loved both of the winsome reminders of our fun day together. More than likely I wouldn’t tuck the ornaments away and wait until Christmas to hang them on the tree. I would find a special place at home, like the swing arm of the lamp behind the couch or the corner of my bathroom mirror. That’s where I would hang the little hand-painted charmers.

  Every time I looked at them I would remember this morning—the morning Noelle and I went bobbing on a lake of dancing tulips. If I ever doubted that any of this spectacular day really happened, I would have hundreds of pictures as evidence, red-hot mamas and all.

  Leisurely taking the road back to Noelle’s, we stopped for lunch at a restaurant that Noelle said was known for its omelets. We chose a table outside under a wide, orange-striped umbrella. I settled in and noted that overhead the unhurried clouds floated like enormous, abstract sheep grazing in a field of faded blue, freshly mown “grass.”

  Noelle and I talked about a thousand small nothings. Both of us commented on how fun it was to talk about everyday girlfriend topics such as which vitamin supplements we were taking, why we found it hard to stay motivated to exercise, and what sort of dental floss worked best—waxed or unwaxed. From there we easily slipped into bemoaning the advance of our underarm wobbles.

  We were having fun just talking and not having to run a spell check on words like cellulite or elliptical trainer before sending off our comments. Here, the sentences were simply going across the table, not across the e-mail expanse.

  We ordered dessert, of course. Then we laughed. We had just spent a solid forty minutes decrying the injustice of sagging bodies and agreeing that the only recourse was to try harder and stick with whatever weight-loss or health-improvement methods had worked for us in the past. Then we ordered some sort of creamy pudding that came with whipped cream on top. But we ordered only one and split it. That had to count for something in terms of our efforts to stay in shape, right?

  I wasn’t bothered that we talked so much about health-related topics. The conversation fell more along the lines of beautification than life-altering health issues such as I might soon be facing. For now, at the outdoor café under the orange-striped umbrella with the fluffy lamb-clouds frolicking overhead, I felt healthy, alive, and interested in picking up a few tips on combating under-eye puffiness.

  Noelle leaned back in the middle of a statement she was making about the virtues of cotton undergarments compared to nylon or silk and said, “I just heard myself. Are we talking about underwear?”

  I laughed. “Yes. Are you embarrassed all of a sudden?”

  “No, I’m used to having these sorts of conversations with my two daughters, but I think I got carried away having you to talk to. We should be talking about something else.”

  “What else should we talk about? Politics? No thank you. Our children? That’s all we talked about at dinner last night. The way I see it, we have a lot of years to catch up on all these girlfriend topics. We’ve spent years preparing short summaries of our lives and giving reports to each other in our letters. If we want to talk about things like Botox, then why shouldn’t we?”

  “Botox?” She leaned forward and examined the corners of my eyes. “Summer, have you had Botox treatments?”

  “No!” I laughed. “I did buy a good eye cream last year that I’ve been using. Does that count? Although I bought it at the grocery store, so I’m not sure that puts me in a league with those who really attempt to fight the forces of gravity.”

  “I don’t even use an eye cream, and I should. I know I don’t pamper myself enough. It’s not part of my thinking. Time to make a change, though, don’t you think?”

  I nodded and dipped my spoon into the rich pudding. Before I had swallowed the decadently delicious dessert, I grinned.

  “What is it? What are you thinking?”

  The pudding slid down my throat in the most soot
hing sort of way. “I was thinking of a joke I heard about a woman who is eating her way through a box of chocolates. She says, ‘I don’t dare try to lose weight at my age. Can you imagine how many wrinkles I’d suddenly have if all my cellulite went away? Besides, bonbons are better than Botox. They fill in the wrinkles and taste good too.

  “Clever! And don’t forget that bonbons don’t require a needle for application.”

  I laughed, and we continued to enjoy our dessert with no regrets.

  “You know,” Noelle said, “since we’re on the topic of self-improvement, I was reading an article a few weeks ago that made it sound as if every third woman in America was having some sort of cosmetic work done to her face or body.”

  “That might be. I don’t know. I’m not the one in three.”

  “The article also said that one in four women have breast cancer. Can you believe that? One in four. I had no idea the numbers were that high. What do you think the reason is? Did you do a lot of research on it when your mom was going through all that?”

  My spirit quieted itself and drew inward. “No, not a lot.”

  Noelle must have sensed my immediate climate change. She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “I’m sorry. That was insensitive of me to toss out the comment about your mom. I didn’t mean to bring you down.”

  “You didn’t. It’s just that…” I stopped myself before confiding to her any details of the pending biopsy. I was determined to stay in denial.

  Just then her cell phone rang. Noelle took the call with a quick apology, stepping away from the table. Not that it would have mattered since she was speaking in Dutch. The break in our conversation couldn’t have come at a better time.

  Would I have enjoyed the extraordinary field of tulips as much as I had that morning if thoughts of my health had been at the forefront of my mind?

  No.

  Pressing health issues would still be pressing health issues one week from now when I returned home. For now, all I wanted was to live in the moment. I wanted to soak up the beauty of this place and the new experiences and just be happy.

  The waiter brought the check to the table, and I pulled out my credit card before Noelle returned. I hoped it worked the same way as at home. Noelle had been paying for everything so far; I wanted to pitch in.

  She returned to the table as I was signing the credit card receipt.

  “What do you think you’re doing, young lady?”

  “Trying to figure out where to write in the tip. And don’t you dare try to stop me.”

  “Oenie.”

  “Oenie moonie looney tooney,” I retorted.

  She laughed. “I only make up new words. You make up entire rhymes. Impressive!” Noelle reached into her purse and pulled out a few coins. “I’ll let you pay this time but only because you’re being such a poet about it. I’ll cover the tip. We’re not big tippers here.”

  A half grin pulled up the side of my mouth. “If you’re paying some and I’m paying some, does that make our lunch a Dutch treat?”

  For a moment Noelle appeared as if she didn’t understand my little joke. “You can stop trying to find all the possible connections to things Dutch, if you want. I think we might have exhausted enough stereotypes for one day.”

  “Got it.”

  On the way home we stopped at a grocery store that seemed similar to any grocery store at home except this one was smaller, and of course all the prices were in euros and the labels in Dutch. Noelle selected a variety of fresh vegetables and the usual basics, such as eggs, bread, and milk. She added some interesting bottles to the cart, explaining that it was drinkable yogurt.

  “This is what Jelle usually has for breakfast. It’s okay, but I would rather eat yogurt with a spoon or, better yet, frozen. Do you want to try one?”

  I selected chocolate and said I would give it a whirl at breakfast the next morning.

  “Actually, we’re not going to have breakfast at home tomorrow.”

  “Is that your surprise for me?”

  “It’s part of the surprise. We’re going to start early in the morning. Very early.”

  “How early?”

  Noelle squinted her eyes. “Four o’clock.”

  I couldn’t imagine what sort of surprise required rising at four a.m. “Do we have to drive far?”

  “Not too far. I think you’ll like it. I hope you’ll like it. It’s a very special place, and that’s all I’m going to say. You’re not going to get any more clues from me.” She pantomimed zipping her lips shut.

  “How about if I take the bottle of yogurt with me just in case I’m not crazy about the surprise? Then at least I can have something else to look forward to.”

  Noelle shook her head at my comment but didn’t respond. She led the way to the checkout, where she chatted with the young woman at the register. It amazed me to watch her converse fluently in Dutch. Her expressions and inflections were the same as when she spoke in English, but she used a bunch of words that seemed to start in a different place in her throat. Certain back-of-the-throat sounds and tongue-flicking-off-the-roof-of-the-mouth sounds weren’t used with English words. Her ease as a bilingual person baffled me. I had taken three years of German in high school, but if my life depended on it, I bet I could come up with only five or six words now.

  Watching Noelle, I was sure there had to be something to the necessity of using a second language regularly or the words would just slip out of your memory. At least that was the case for me.

  Once we were back at Noelle’s, she and I worked together in her kitchen, washing vegetables and cutting them up for steaming later. She put some rice in an electric rice cooker and let it do its thing for the next hour.

  With a comfortable stretch of time available to us before Jelle returned home for dinner, Noelle pulled out the shortbread cookie tin where she had stored my letters for several decades. We made a pot of tea and sat on the living room couch, reading all the letters together.

  “Look at this one with the sad face,” Noelle said. “This was your dentist-day letter.”

  “Let me see.” I looked at the unfolded piece of stationery with the printed pony in the corner. I remembered that stationery. My grandmother had given it to me in seventh grade. At the top I had entitled the letter “Dentist Day.”

  “I’ll read it to you.” Noelle put on a pair of reading glasses and began, “Dear Pen Pal.” Looking at me over the rim of the glasses, she said, “That’s me.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, playing along with the dramatization and sipping my mint tea.

  “This may be the last letter you ever receive from me. That is, the last letter you receive from the me who has crooked teeth. My father took me to the dentist after school today, and I might be getting braces. Yes, braces! My life is about to end!”

  “Did I really write that?”

  Noelle held up the evidence and pointed to the margin. “Yes, you did. And see the frowny face you drew? So cute.”

  I groaned. “And to think that I accused our three girls of being drama queens! Now I know where they got it. Please don’t ever show that to my girls. They would never let me live it down.”

  “Wait,” Noelle said playfully. “There’s more.”

  “I’m sure there is.”

  Noelle focused back on the letter. “I can already guess that he is going to call me ‘Brace Face’ or ‘Metal Mouth.’ He called Missy Heinrich ‘Tin Grin when she got her braces. You do know who I’m talking about, don’t you? Tommy Driscoll.”

  “Oh, Tommy.” I swooned. “I forgot all about Tommy Driscoll. Now he owns a Toyota dealership in Akron. At least that’s what I heard. I haven’t seen him since our ten-year high school reunion. Oh boy, did I ever have a crush on Tommy. A big crush. But he never noticed me. Not even when I got my braces. I only hoped he would call me one of those names. At least he called Missy names. He just ignored me.”

  “I always wanted braces,” Noelle said. “I thought they looked cool. I remember taking a pa
per clip once and bending it to fit around my front teeth so it would look as if I had braces. I wore it to the grocery store with my mom and kept my lips closed the whole time so she wouldn’t see it. There was only one problem.”

  “What?”

  “The sharp end of the paper clip jammed into my gums, and as soon as I tasted the blood, I wanted to spit it out. So I did, right there on the floor in the frozen-food aisle. My mother was livid. She made me go report to the grocery clerk that I had made a mess. They sent a guy over with a bucket of water and a mop. Complete overkill for a little puddle of spit. ‘Cleanup on aisle four’ and all that.”

  I gave her a sympathetic look.

  “Would you like more tea? I’m going to make some more. This has gone cold. I probably should have made coffee. That would have been more typical, but tea sounded good.”

  She was in the kitchen, filling the electric kettle with more water, so I turned my attention back to the Dentist Day letter and read the rest of what I had written to her.

  “This is the cutest part,” I called into the kitchen.

  “Is there another little drawing?”

  “No. What’s cute is the way I signed it. I wrote, ‘Your friend until the end of time or until I die of braces-humiliation.’ Of course I spelled ‘humiliation wrong. Then I wrote my whole name, as if you might possibly mix me up with some other girl named Summer who was writing pen pal letters to you.”

  “We both did that for a long time, didn’t we? We signed our whole names.” Noelle returned with fresh tea bags on a small serving plate.

  “Oh, look at this one.” I pulled from the tin a letter written on lined notebook paper with a hand-drawn picture of a Christmas tree in the corner and a string of snowflakes trailing down the side margins. “I don’t remember this one.”

  “Read it,” Noelle said.

  I skimmed through the particulars of the letter I had written over Christmas vacation during my freshman year in high school: a visit from my grandparents from Minnesota, a sled run the neighborhood boys built, and how my little brother had his tonsils out and begged me to play Monopoly with him once he was feeling better.