After filling their minds with Miss Den Harmsel’s passionate rendering of her favorite passages from the play, Lydia and Alice had lunch together.
The cafeteria was a testimonial to Dutch frugality and efficiency. The space served as chapel in the mornings, as theater and choir room in the afternoons or evenings, and, magically, as cafeteria at noon when tables and serving counters appeared at 11:45 and disappeared at 12:45.
Alice and Lydia stood in the honor student line, picked up their pizza, walked over to the honor student table, sat down, and silently said grace.
Alice wanted to read snippets from A Midsummer Night’s Dream as they ate.
“Yes!” said Lydia. “Let’s read it loud and freak everybody out. What ho!”
Her loud and sassy voice carried over to other tables and made heads turn. If Alice’s height drew others’ attention, Lydia’s voice and dress drew even more attention. She was different in ways that Alice probably would never be. Even her last name, Laats, separated her from most people in the community. Even though Laats was a Dutch name, there was only one “Laats” in the phone book.
At home Alice had followed her father’s interest in the history of the Dutch in America. The way Alice found private reading time in the haymow, her father found it in his basement office. One of his favorite books was a large tattered book that was an early 1900s Atlas of Groningen County. It contained historical texts, maps, family photographs, photographs of early churches and schools—and advertisements: pages and pages of advertisements that probably made publication of this huge book possible. Alice had quietly dipped into the book herself and found pictures of her own ancestors. She had studied the picture of her great-great-grandfather and her grandmother Krayenbraak and pondered the grim austerity of their expressions. Variations of that grim expression characterized most of the portraits. Some of the men hid their grimacing faces behind heavy beards and mustaches, but there was a ferocity in the eyes that was chilling. It was impossible to tell if the fierce expressions were the result of straining to keep their eyes open for the camera or if there was something more foreboding in their lives. The women in their long and dark stylish dresses that they must have put on for the photographer looked even more tormented—and always the high collars tight around their necks. Was that to hide necks that might be considered too erotic? But the mouths—so grim, so sad.
If her mother had been alive back then, she would have looked like one of these grim women. There were no more than three detectable smiles among the hundreds of photographs. Maybe the photographer was ugly, Alice had mused to herself, and they felt disgusted to look at him. More likely these people simply were not happy. They looked like a lesson plan in pessimism. Maybe her father was looking for a way to accept the present by viewing the grim legacy recorded in these photographs. Maybe he was using a kind of logic that said: when you look at how bad things must have been back then, the present looks pretty good.
Now her best friend sitting across from her was someone who was the real thing, the living Dutch at the end of the twentieth century. It was hard to imagine that Lydia’s family had roots that connected to the Dutch Alice found in the Atlas. The Dutch who had come to America in the nineteenth century were evidently a whole different breed from the people like the Laats who had come late in the twentieth century. Theirs was not a name that appeared in the old Atlas.
After Lydia’s family moved from Canada to Dutch Center, her father became a realtor and insurance salesman, and her mother was the town librarian. Alice knew the whole family spoke Dutch fluently, though Lydia rarely used Dutch words, no doubt because she did not want to break her image of a totally Americanized young woman. Still, there was something different about the Laats: her father always wore a suit and tie, and her mother had a wonderful flair about her that had rubbed off on Lydia. The whole Laats family had a confident manner that made them seem almost foreign, which they actually were, but sometimes their confidence came across as naive. They could act like people who couldn’t even imagine that others would be suspicious of them or speak ill of them. Alice envied that confidence in Lydia and hoped that someday she could equal it.
Lydia’s playful wit was also hard to beat. When Alice saw that telltale smirk on Lydia’s face across the table from her, she knew there’d probably be a Nancy Swifty before they looked at Shakespeare. Nancy Swifties were Lydia’s idea and dated back to their sophomore year. She had discovered Tom Swifties (“‘Doctor, are you sure the surgery was a complete success?’ Tom asked halfheartedly”), but she didn’t like the fact that Tom Swifties were always about men.
“What we need are some Nancy Swifties.”
Alice agreed. That’s how it started, and it was Lydia who kept the Nancy Swifty fires burning. She was verging toward a chuckle before she told the one she was storing up. The pizza they were eating was Canadian bacon and pineapple, what kids were calling “sweet swine.”
Lydia delivered a Nancy Swifty: “‘Where’s the pineapple?’ Nancy asked dolefully.”
They leaned toward each other, groaning in unison.
“Not bad,” said Alice. “Not Shakespeare, but not bad. Now how about some Shakespeare?”
Lydia held her pizza in one hand and paged through the play with her other. “Here’s a sweet passage,” she said. “It could be about us.” She read in a voice that sounded very much like Miss Den Harmsel’s: “‘So we grew together, / Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, / But yet an union in partition; / Two lovely berries moulded on one stem; / So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart.’”
“That’s between two women?”
“Indeed ’tis, madam, though I don’t think the whole speech is sweet.”
“Here’s one I like,” said Alice. “‘Lovers and madmen have such seething brains.’”
“Cool. Miss Den Harmsel liked that one too. How about this one? ‘A wise prince seeks a woman tall and fair’?” she said in a Miss Den Harmselian voice.
“Where’s that?”
Lydia had that look on her face, and then she couldn’t hold her laugh. Her cheeks bulged while her shoulders and breasts bounced.
“You made that up, didn’t you! Didn’t you!”
“Nevah nevah. From the pure of soul the pure of tongue.”
“Dos’t thy tongue betray thee, lady?”
“I’d smite it off, I would,” she said.
Alice held up a half slice of pizza and threatened her. Lydia held up a piece of her pizza in the same manner. “Aye, me lady,” she said, “woulds’t thou make of me a pizza face?”
“A face of many colors,” said Alice. Lydia guffawed. Alice guffawed. Now many faces from other tables turned toward them as if surprised to hear something unexpected from the honor students’ table: food fights or any kind of bad behavior.
Lydia did one of her quick mood changes and looked at Alice seriously: “There’s something I’ve got to tell you,” she said. “Better from me than from someone else. Word is out there that you’re not doing any sports this year. The jocks are pissed, so they’re calling you ‘Barbie Doll.’”
They united in a mocking, sneering laugh.
“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” said Alice.
“Better than ‘ass and a beanpole.’”
“Not much,” said Alice.
“Who cares?” said Lydia. “They’re all jerks.”
Alice agreed, but she’d still have to look at them every day. “Barbie? Barbie?”
“Sorry,” said Lydia.
Alice knew it had to be something