Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-one
“I’m going to ask you a very serious question,” my sister says, and I sit up a little straighter, preparing for an interrogation. “Is he hot, or is he just tall?”
“Both. And that is part of the problem.”
We’re at a café in De Pijp, not too far from my first apartment—which, I saw when I pointed it out to her, had been completely boarded up.
It’s so indescribably wonderful to see her that I can’t stop touching her, as though needing to make sure she’s real. I rested my head on her shoulder when I rode the train back with her and Maya from the airport, linked my arm with hers as we walked the streets, and even now, I have a hand on her elbow. Today she’s in her indestructible patchwork cardigan, her dark hair in its usual messy bun, and she even managed to unearth that bracelet I made her years ago during my short-lived jewelry phase, with its blocky wooden beads. I could cry over how familiar these details are, this relief that she hasn’t dramatically changed since I’ve been gone. There’s an element of the surreal to it, my sister with Amsterdam’s canal houses in the background. This merging of my two separate lives.
Maya returns to our table with a tray of pastries. I’m still getting used to the sight of her this pregnant, an empire-waist dress emphasizing her six-month bump, auburn curls hanging down her back. It’s a staggering visual reminder of all I’ve missed since I moved here.
I couldn’t help everything from spilling out as soon as they settled in a bit, at a hotel a couple blocks from the Prinsengracht, after they’d met Wouter and George and confirmed that my current living situation is far from dungeon-esque.
When Phoebe saw Wouter again, she dropped her purse, mouth falling open before she enveloped him in a fierce hug. Then, once she picked up her bag, she gave him a gentle thwack with it.
“I had to,” she said with a shrug. “For the breakup. Sister loyalties.”
He gave her a solemn nod. “I understand. Completely deserved.”
Then he had a hundred questions about her bookstore, and she had a hundred more about his life here in Amsterdam. The kind of thirteen-year catch-up I’ve grown familiar with.
Maya takes a bite of a koffiebroodje, a swirl of sweet bread dotted with raisins, and her eyes fall shut for a moment. “Are all the pastries here this good? Because I think a few more would cure my jet lag.”
“Unfortunately, yes,” I say as I reach for a pain au chocolat.
Phoebe rests her hand on the back of Maya’s chair as she downs her second espresso of the day. “If everything is finally out in the open between you two, the sex is fantastic, and you like spending time together…then what’s holding you back?” She screws up her nose in confusion. “Sorry, am I missing something?”
My face heats with the memory of him hoisting me onto the kitchen counter a few days ago before dropping to his knees. Dragging me onto the balcony and asking how quiet I could be.
“I didn’t come here just so a man could save me.” Another few bites of pastry. “Not to mention, his family won’t ever want to see me again once they find out the truth.”
The statement is bitter on my tongue. I’ve never quite thought about it that way, but it’s the truth, isn’t it? As soon as we divorce, Roos and his mother and grandmother won’t just be out of my life—they might even see me as a villain.
“I guess that does make it a bit more awkward than your typical forbidden teenage romance turned green-card marriage,” Phoebe relents, and I’m grateful for it, because as much as I’ve craved her advice at times, right now all I want is to make it to the other side of this wedding with as little anxiety as possible.
“How’s the baby’s room coming along?” I ask.
“We’re not quite done yet.” As an interior designer, Maya’s going all out, using as many thrifted materials as possible. “It’s a bookish theme, and we have this friend working on an amazing mural combining some of the children’s classics— Goodnight Moon , Corduroy , The Very Hungry Caterpillar …”
“Baby Architectural Digest or bust,” Phoebe says.
“I can’t wait to see it,” I say, realizing with a lump in my throat that the first time I do, it may be with two phone screens in between.
—
King’s Day is a late-April holiday celebrating the king’s birthday—but really, it’s more of a countrywide excuse to party.
Just about everyone has the day off work, all the shops are closed, and the drinking starts early and goes late. Over the past couple days, the city’s been setting up extra public urinals in preparation, and you can definitely smell it.
Outside it’s a riot of orange, the Netherlands’ national color. Maya decided to take it easy, so Wouter and I meet Roos and Phoebe along the Prinsengracht, where Roos gives my sister a hug and drapes orange feathered boas around our necks to match the cheap orange sunglasses Wouter and I already picked up from HEMA earlier this week. We press our way through the thick crowd, Phoebe’s jaw dropping every time we turn the corner. The streets are covered with blankets of knickknacks—vrijmarkten, free markets—because this is the one day a year yard sales are legal. There’s a guy leading a group in the Macarena. A woman with cords wrapped around herself holding a sign that says MOBILE PHONE CHARGER . Every so often, there’s a street too packed with people for us to freely pass through, so we have no choice but to dance along to whatever electronic track is blasting through someone’s open window.
Phoebe grabs my arms and throws her head back as the horde sways with us. “This is ridiculous ,” she shouts. “I love it!”
When we pass more than a few people with their hair dyed orange, I reach up and ruffle Wouter’s hair. “Where’s your national pride?”
“I’m not sure my hair would survive the chemicals,” he says with a laugh. His hand finds the small of my back, guiding me through the crush of orange shirts and face paint.
“We can stay married however long you need to,” he said yesterday after a breathless morning in bed—all because I’d watched the way his forearms flexed while he was brewing tea and couldn’t resist. Evidently, the process of making tea is foreplay to me now. “What’s happening here…doesn’t have to change anything.”
There was some relief to that, of course. A year was the timeline we laid out at the beginning, but now that two months have passed since we signed those papers and he has ownership of his place, a year suddenly doesn’t seem very long at all.
When we get to Dam Fine’s dock, it seems everyone had the same idea; the canals are packed with boats, their passengers singing in Dutch and in English, orange confetti in the air. Even though the alcohol is flowing freely, there’s an undeniable wholesomeness, too. An infectious energy.
“So it’s always on the king’s birthday, April twenty-seventh,” I say once we take off. Iulia’s at the front of the boat in her captain’s hat, Wouter next to me, and my sister on the other side, along with Sanne, Bilal, and a couple of Roos’s friends. “But…it’s not always a king, is it?”
Sanne shakes her head, some orange hair glitter scattering on the deck of the boat. “It used to be Queen’s Day. Queen Beatrix, she was the queen before Willem-Alexander—she kept it on thirtieth April because that was her mother’s birthday. She was born at the end of January, which would have been a miserable Queen’s Day.” Then she breaks off, laughing. “The year it switched over to King’s Day, a bunch of tourists came here to party on the thirtieth even though it was now the twenty-seventh.”
“It was pretty hilarious, actually,” Bilal says. “They completely missed it.” He offers around a box of tompouce, a traditional Dutch sweet with—of course—orange frosting for King’s Day. It’s small and rectangular, two layers of puff pastry with cream in the middle.
“Super lekker,” I say when I bite into it, accompanying it with the gesture I learned in Dutch class: a hand to the side of my face, waved back and forth.
“The lekker hand wave!” Roos exclaims, so enthusiastically that she nearly whacks her orange sunglasses into the canal. “I’m so proud.” She cozies up with Iulia at the front of the boat, taking selfies, stealing her captain’s hat.
Phoebe’s gaze drifts from the chaos in the canals back to Wouter and me. “God, this is all so fucking weird. Amsterdam, the two of you…everything.”
I nudge her. “That’s what I’ve been saying for the past few months.”
Wouter’s arm comes around my stomach, pulling me onto his lap. “Weird at first, maybe,” he says. “But now…it’s really incredible having her here.”
I thread my fingers with his as he leans his chin on my shoulder, and while this kind of gesture might typically kick my heart into panic mode, today it only sparks a warmth in my chest. We don’t need to put on this kind of performance—not in front of my sister, not when everyone else on the boat is in their own worlds—but something about the way he holds me feels different now.
Real .
Almost terrifyingly so, and yet I’m not pushing him away.
“I feel like I’m getting a very specific picture of Amsterdam,” Phoebe says to the group. “Dani keeps saying it’s not like this all the time, but…”
“Maybe not quite this orange.” I sit back, tipping my head toward the sun starting to peek through the clouds. “This place is unreal, though. I can’t believe it’s legal to just…live here.”
“Yeah, we’re absolute shit at keeping it a secret,” Bilal says.
Wouter’s thumb skims up my elbow. “They really just let anyone in here,” he says, a hint of amusement in his voice that makes me squeeze his hand.
“Next year we should go to one of the music festivals,” Sanne says. “There’s a huge techno one that happens in Oost.”
Next year. If anything could prick my King’s Day bubble, despite my apathy for techno music, it’s that.
Next year: when Wouter and I are divorced. When I’m no longer friends with any of these people.
“Does it ever get old?” I ask Iulia, eager for a distraction. “Being out on the water every day?”
“Honestly? No.” She tips her bottle of beer toward me. “I’m sure most jobs start to feel boring after a while, but not this. Even if some of the facts I recite sound a little repetitive after a while, there are always new people, new questions, new ways to make it feel fresh. It’s impossible to be bored when all of this is your office.”
At golden hour, the light bends through windows and shimmers across the water, giving this weird and wonderful city an ethereal glow.
Days like this, I am certain this is the loveliest place on earth. There is something dramatically different about life not just on this side of the world but in this specific city, something that goes beyond the metric system and the public transportation and the weather. Despite how foreign all this might have seemed a few months ago, I finally feel like I belong .
Maybe this is what Iulia meant about expats staying here forever.
There’s a sense of freedom out on the water that I’m not sure I’ve ever felt on land, but surely this isn’t the something great I’ve been chasing. Unless “something great” seemed so radically unachievable that I set myself on the path of mediocrity early on, and now I’m too far down it to deviate.
I try to see beyond this marriage, once I’ve landed a solid job and proven to everyone back home that I can not only succeed here but thrive.
And I can’t help wondering why the only person I’ve never tried to prove anything to is myself.
—
My next job interview is a couple days later, and given the dwindling balance in my bank account, I couldn’t turn it down. I steer Little Devil through narrow alleys until I can no longer avoid the busier streets and realize waiting for a crowd of tourists to disperse isn’t as terrifying as I thought it might be. Especially when I’m ringing my bell.
When I lock my bike in front of the building, I have to fight the phantom urge to click my keys the way I’d lock a car.
The interview isn’t with a startup but a big-name company I didn’t know had an office here. This would be the same thing I did in LA, just for a competitor and on another continent. There should be some comfort in that, shouldn’t there? If the lobby is a little soulless, that’s just because everyone’s already tucked away in their offices.
Keep an open mind , I tell myself as I smooth my slacks. You are not special just because you don’t love the idea of working in an office.
“Danika, hi,” says the interviewer when he meets me at reception, an American named Todd. “We’re so happy to have you here. Come in, come in.”
Over the next half hour, during which the phrase core principles is uttered no fewer than three times, I rattle off cardboard responses about my leadership skills and greatest strengths.
“One of the major selling points for people is that we serve lunch here every day.” Todd seems stoked about this. “Plenty of gluten-free and vegetarian options. We definitely want to make this a fun, cool place to be!”
“Wonderful. I love lunch,” I say, and although this isn’t remotely funny, he laughs.
I even get a chance to experience it after the interview, and Todd’s right: it’s a solid lunch.
But it’s not enough. It doesn’t fill the existential emptiness, doesn’t soothe the part of me aching to be out in the sunshine.
I’ve assumed my specific college degree qualifies me for this one specific thing, but even Wouter knew when he remet me: this isn’t my passion. Halfway across the world, I’m still trying to force it.
I don’t have to tie myself to those long-ago expectations imprinted on me before I had the words to fight back. Maybe during all those years as a serial hobbyist, I was looking for something I was good at when I could have picked something that made me happy .
Somehow that was never a priority, and now I can’t understand why.
“You know what, I’m so sorry,” I tell Todd as he’s escorting me out of the building. “I’m so grateful for your time, but I don’t know if this is the right fit for me.”
He gapes at me. “Not sure I’ve had this happen before, but okay. I’m glad you figured that out sooner rather than later.”
“Hope I didn’t waste too much of your time. Thanks for the opportunity.”
A crisp handshake. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
I’m already unbuttoning my suffocating blazer as I head out to Little Devil. Then I hit the pedals faster than I ever have before, electric-charged with a false sense of urgency, because what if that job doesn’t exist anymore and they found someone else, when the truth is—I might want it more than I’ve wanted anything in a while.
“Hi,” I say, breathless, bursting into the office of Dam Fine Boat Tours.
Iulia is at a long desk with a couple coworkers, all of them whirling to face me. “Dani, hi,” she says. “What’s up?”
I hold a hand to my chest as I try to catch my breath. “Are you still hiring?”