of energy and knowledge that she had. They’d hear the clicking of her shoes as she approached the classroom, and she’d enter briskly with that wrinkled and serious brow over her long face, lay the textbook down, and say, “Class, we have much to accomplish today”—and then she’d go at it.
“Did she recommend books for you to read over the summer?” Lydia asked as they approached her classroom.
“Of course,” said Alice. “I read them both twice. I just finished rereading The Grapes of Wrath last week. I read Beloved twice in June.”
Lydia looked puzzled. “That’s strange,” she said. “She had me reading The Federalist Papers and Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia.”
“Maybe she thought we’d talk to each other and trade books.”
“Maybe she sees us differently,” said Lydia.
They walked into the classroom and sat on opposite sides so that they wouldn’t be tempted to whisper if Miss Den Harmsel said something that excited them both.
This was Senior Advanced Placement Literature. All sixteen students were preparing for college, several of them to become teachers. Miss Den Harmsel loved Emily Dickinson and William Shakespeare. She said that those two authors would be the focus of the entire semester.
Alice savored the prospect and had both thick texts lying on her desk, used copies that cost only four dollars each and which, for some reason, the bookstore manager had set aside for her.
Alice put her hand on the Shakespeare text and waited for Miss Den Harmsel as she distributed a printed study guide.
Why would anyone want to waste their time on a basketball court with insulting morons from public schools when you could spend time in the presence of a Miss Den Harmsel! Alice thought. Public schools didn’t have anybody like Miss Den Harmsel. Miss Den Harmsel was a scholar and elevated students with her high expectations. She acted as if knowing the classics was a birthright that no educated Christian should resist. “Get wisdom. Get understanding,” she often said. She was quoting the Bible: Proverbs.
“If you know Dickinson and Shakespeare, you’re ready to understand all literature,” she began. “Irony is at the heart of both comedy and tragedy,” she said. “Shakespeare and Dickinson knew that.”
It was strange that Miss Den Harmsel would appreciate irony but never speak ironically herself. Ironically, she probably knew that.
11
Miss Den Harmsel assigned A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the entire play, for the first week.
“We’re starting out with the light stuff,” she said. “The only tough part will be the Elizabethan English. Read the footnotes, my diligent ones.” She said those words with such respect that even those inclined to be less diligent took note.
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
