18 March, 1999

Fruit Punch

In the light of the morning sun, the streets shimmer slightly, resembling the mythical streets of gold that immigrant families probably dreamt of in the latter half of the last century. My footsteps are smooth, assured as I walk into the light, across the zebra stripes in the tarmac and over to the other side. A hot dog and pretzel stand has taken up residence at the corner of K and 22nd streets and I pause to sift through the ice-covered juice and soda bottles in the styrofoam coolers set out in front of it. I have had too much soda lately, so I swiftly reject the bottles of ginger ale and cola. My hand falls on the neck of a bottle of red fruit punch. Lifting it gingerly, because it is slick with icy water, I fumble in my pocket for a dollar bill and pass it over to the man inside the aluminum walls of the cart. As I walk away, I twist off the cap and tilt my head back letting the cool, sweet liquid slide down my throat, evoking memories of a not-so-distant childhood.

There's just something about the taste of fruit punch and Kool-Aid that makes me think of America. It roots me more firmly into the here and now of this country more than almost anything else, except perhaps peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and refrigerated Chips Ahoy cookies. There are other foods and drinks, like hamburgers, apple pie and Coca-Cola which are traditionally associated with being "American" foods, but when I was growing up in Europe, the cultural invasion of the Old World was already in full swing and things like McDonald's, cola and Rice Krispies were readily available. My mother made American-style apple pie for dessert on a fairly regular basis, and even PBJ migrated across the ocean with us, though it tasted very different there because my mother was buying Planter's peanut butter and local strawberry preserves instead of Skippy or Jif and Smucker's grape jam.

Over the course of the eight years that we lived abroad, we came back to the States on vacation several times, usually to see my grandparents, often to spend a week or so on Nantucket or Cape Cod with friends. My childhood perception of the USA is therefore filled with all sorts of summer-time associations: blisteringly heavy and humid heat, the smell of thunder-storms, ice cream cones, hot cement under bare feet, the sound of the ocean crashing into the rocky beaches of Massachusetts, the smell of sun-warmed salty sand, Fourth of July fireworks, kites flying high in a clear blue sky, stolen cold cookies from the refrigerator, dinners out at a variety of restaurants, red fruit punch served icy cold in transparent blue plastic pitchers with ice cubes still floating in it.

Until we moved to Philadelphia in 1985, my idea of what America was like, was limited to this amalgam of summer imagery and dim memories of the three years lived in New England and New Jersey prior to our departure for France.

It was in suburban Philadelphia that I finally experienced first-hand the full life-cycle of the seasons in the United States. I reconnected with Halloween, learned about President's Day and Memorial Day (which, to this day, I still confuse with Labor Day for some odd reason) and became familiar with the progression of sports from baseball to American football to basketball instead of pretty much year-round football and rugby.

In the lunch-room at school, I found out that there was more to American food than Kool-Aid and cookies and wasn't very impressed. In class I quickly grew bored as we covered over and over again, things that I had learned years before in elementary school or conversely, was stumped by English grammar whose rules about run-on sentences it took me years to master (and obviously, still don't follow religiously) and comprehend.

From my childhood adulation and vague sense of pride about America, I swung to the opposite end of the spectrum. Over the course of a few short months I rapidly became disillusioned with the society and culture that I was exposed to and started shifting into full rejection mode.

This made me very unpopular with my peers who found me to be "weird" and "geeky" and "nerdy".

After a while, I began to believe that I didn't care anymore because I convinced myself that I was so much better than they were. None of them had ever lived anywhere but here and had no concept about what the rest of the world was like. I rejected their fashions, I rejected their taste in music, I refused to read what they read. I doggedly pursued a course of action that isolated me from the common threads that bound them together, setting myself willfully apart, feeding into the natural tendencies of teens to categorize and group according to "coolness factor."

I looked for friends elsewhere and was lucky enough to find one nearby, just up the street from my house. Much later, I would follow her to the public school system and be a much happier, more well-adjusted person as a result.

Many years passed this way, with me, head down in a book, studying a lot, being good, feeling lonely except for my one best friend: Zoë. My concept of what it meant to be American broadened gradually and I became even more of a cultural hybrid than ever, with my European mores blending and merging with the new concepts I learned through reading and school.

When I went back to France first, in 1987, I hadn't changed that much yet and I still felt like I belonged there more than here. The next time I went back, to Belgium, in 1992 as a senior in high school, I had changed a great deal and the cross-over while linguistically simple, was more confusing culturally. On this visit I revisited my childhood more fully, staying with old school friend and then a family from my old neighborhood just a few houses down from where I used to live.

It was after that trip, that it fully crystallized in my mind, that while I had a lot of feelings for Belgium and France, I was no more fully a part of those cultures than I was of America. This shook me badly, leaving me with a sense of having nowhere to belong.

In 1994, I was a junior in college and studied for a year in Switzerland. There are a lot of Americans in Geneva, but the nationality that I was always mistaken for, was Belgian. I still speak like a native, when I go, I do my best to dress like one. the cultural instincts are still there, if more deeply buried.

Yet inside there is still that dichotomy about how to define where I belong.

There are days, living here in the greater Washington area, where the scenery shifts slightly and the architecture is just French enough to make me think that I could be somewhere in Europe. I walk along listening to the birds sing and I can call up the catalogue of sights, smells and sounds that connote "Europe" to me: tight streets, chestnut and Japanese cherry trees in bloom, the small of dog excrement on the pavement, something ineffably light about the air, the distinctive sound of a Renault engine, the pin-pon of police cars and ambulances, old ladies dragging their shopping caddies behind them.

Then I open my eyes and see a large Ford Taurus barreling down at me and remember where I am and the taste of fruit punch lingers in my mouth, calling up all those summery perceptions from years before.