ghost story, part one (which is mostly exposition)

I’ve written before about how, when I was a junior in high school, I spent a semester in France with my folks and a good friend who was my age, and how she and I tore around the countryside with another American girl, Jenn, defacing the property of rock stars and the like.

If any story could sound more absurd than one involving three American teenagers, in rural France, year 1993, festooning Mick Jagger’s hedge with toilet paper, it would have to involve the supernatural. Even better: the supernatural, amoral Dutch people, and weiner dogs.

As absurd as it will no doubt sound, the following did really happen to me, as best I can remember. I will tell it in two installments, so as to avoid creating a post too long to read in one sitting. It was disturbing, and continues, at times, to disturb me, though not quite so much as the cheese booger does.

Back to rural France, 1993: Jenn’s family lived in a seven-hundred-year-old house. Once the parsonage of the village church, it had since become the property of a grossly wealthy Dutch couple, from whom Jenn’s parents rented the property. This couple—let’s call them Anders and Natalia—were amiable, as landlords go. Anders, a veterinarian, had married Natalia, a retired manager of exclusive hotels, in middle age, and they lived the kind of international, jet-setting lifestyle that I had previously only encountered in novels.

God knows where all their money came from. Natalia’s job may have brought in some hefty cash, but Anders surely couldn’t have made that much as a vet. There were whispers of Anders running afoul of the Russian mafia, which suggested extraneous business dealings. How a Dutch veterinarian comes to run afoul of the Russian mafia is a matter at which the likes of me can only speculate. The only thing I could really glean from the gossip was that Anders was probably not squeaky cleanest of individuals. Had I been a bit worldlier at the time, I probably could have surmised that just from the make of his car.

Anyway: the point is, they were rich—richer than almost anyone I’d ever met in my life. They went to haute couture fashion shows. They were both plain, but dressed so upscale that no one noticed. Natalia wore a fur coat and dyed black bob and carried two tiny, foul-tempered weiner dogs, Fifi and Zero (no pseudonyms there) with her everywhere, even into restaurants and posh boutiques. (The little dog thing sounds eccentric, but it’s not uncommon amongst a certain class of older European women, from what I’ve observed. Money buys you the right to make lesser beings clean up your dog’s shit, even if your dog uses Givenchy as a litter box. The world is not just.)

They lived in Holland, but when they were in France, it was expected that Jenn’s parents would accommodate them, should they choose to pop in. So the families had a relationship, albeit one with a severe power imbalance. Still, there was enough trust there that when Jenn, my friend (I’ll call her B) and I asked permission to go on a short trip to Amsterdam by ourselves, our parents agreed that we could, so long as we stayed with Anders and Natalia, who lived in small town near the city.

And yet, despite the fact that we were sixteen and heading for Amsterdam, which was, well, Amsterdam, my parents seemed more concerned about the influence of this homely, middle-aged couple than about any of the evils of the Sodom and Gomorrah variety. To their infinite credit, they knew better than to forbid the trip out of over-protectiveness, but they gave us a few warnings, the essence of which were, Trust your instincts. Don’t be too enamored of these people. I failed to see any problem with the arrangement, and accused my parents of prejudice against the rich.

But now I understand where they were coming from. To Anders and Natalia, Midwestern American girls like B and me were charming novelty items. They couldn’t get over us: We didn’t wear makeup? We went to Amsterdam in jeans and hiking boots? We were Christians? B was particularly exotic, as she actually defended her religion and refused to drink wine. “You girls are so natural, “ said Anders with relish, as we all sat around the dinner table in their plush dining room.

Our folks were right not to worry about us in Amsterdam. We took the train into the city from Anders and Natalia’s small town, and spent the day looking at Van Goghs and Rembrandts. Anders and Natalia would of course have adored it if we had staggered off the train in the evening stoned out of our brains; they would have poured us a cognac and celebrated our corruption. Denied that pleasure, they settled for amusement at our innocence. “You went to museums! How refreshing!”

Anders was more disposed to let us remain odd American curios and merely wonder at our strangeness, but Natalia seemed irked by our apparent purity. After our lackluster performance in Amsterdam, she called several of her twenty-something friends and arranged for us to go out to a club. How a Chanel-suited hatchet like Natalia came to befriend this posse of young punks, I did not know—it was one of the mysteries of wealth. Though I drank nothing, I recall little of the club experience, except for the strobe lights, my profound self-consciousness, and a friendly young man with long black hair and a tusk hanging from his ear.

I had been hoping that staying with people like Anders and Natalia would automatically bolster my sophistication, transforming me effortlessly from a stringy-haired high school junior from Kansas into the sort of person who could read French Vogue on the TGV without looking as though she was doing so on purpose. In the interest of this, I would tell Anders and Natalia that my religion was nothing serious, that I was probably going to come back to a French conservatory for college, and that I loved Belgian endive. Unfortunately, none of this felt as effortless as I wanted it to. Especially the Belgian endive, which turned my face inside out.

I was the only one of us three with this particular problem, this wannabe-Euro problem. Jenn, having lived in France for most of her teenaged years, was an authentic expatriate, comfortably bilingual, bicultural, and seemingly free of troublesome national identity issues. B was simply too wholesome to be taken in by glamour; at the end of the day, she answered to Jesus. Though they differed substantially in background and beliefs, they had one extraordinary thing in common; at age sixteen, each of them had a pretty good idea of who she was. I, on the other hand, was still trying on costumes, and would rather no one watched while I was changing. Like Madonna, I had to pretend that whatever I was at the moment, I had been all along.

In spite of that, though, the three of us got on magnificently, our bonds solidified mainly through our shared interest in anything medieval, magical and/or spooky. The paperback that got the most circulation between the three of us was Celtic Magic. In our natural habitat, the wooded, terraced backyard of Jenn’s seven-hundred-year-old house, we threw carnivals for the village children, dressing like witches and fortune-tellers. The beauty of my relationship to Jenn and B was how easily my identity worries dropped away around them, how easy it was to just exist together in the same loopy headspace that we had all occupied when we were hyper-imaginative children. (There were no boys around, either. That helped.)

Our trio was based on an idea of fun that was unintelligible to someone like Natalia, and so it wasn’t surprising that after a few days in her world, we were sick of her. By our last night in Holland, we were fairly itching to bust out, so we went on a walk. We figured we’d head for the river, which cut through the small town and was a workable distance from the house.

We kept up the pretense of gratitude, of course. At Natalia’s suggestion, we brought Fifi and Zero with us. They were the two most useless dogs in Europe, but we didn’t anticipate needing any protection from attackers.

By the time we reached the river, the sun had set. The sky was purple.

And then things started to get weird.


(To be continued, sometime next week.)