The Crisis of Identity

The Broken Plate, Ball State University, Spring 2021.

I want to tell you about the time in my life when I was a teenager, when we lived in Stuttgart, Germany, from 1968 to 1971. My father, an Army physician, had been assigned to the 5th Army Hospital in Bad Cannstatt as the commanding officer.

I was fourteen and we had already moved seven times: from Ankara, Turkey to Alexandria, Virginia; Ft. Devens, Boston; West Point, New York; San Antonio, Texas; Vicenza, Italy; and Monterey, California. That’s three transatlantic crossings, eight houses, five schools, and we hadn’t stopped yet. Being a teen was bad enough; being an Army brat at the same time was a voiceless existence. Trying to speak up and say no, I don’t want to move again; no, I don’t want to say good-bye to all my friends; no, I hate starting a new school again was like shouting above the sound of crashing waves. Army brats are picked up and put down from one military post to the next. There is no choice. Period.

Being an Army brat means a crisis of identity. Each time someone asked me who I was or where I was from, I could not answer. How to explain easily, without seeing faces contorted by confusion, that you have no place to call home? How to answer, in a few words or less, where you are from, like I’m from Kansas or New York, instead of something that sounds like a world map? I take a deep breath and tell them the truth: I’m an Army brat, I’m not from anywhere. They will either look at me strangely, wondering what that means, or look at me with almost pity because they know what it means: I am not, nor ever will be, anything like them; i.e., a normal person.

Before we moved to Stuttgart, we were stationed at Fort Ord in Monterey, California, for one year. I was in the seventh grade. Thanks to having read Dante’s Divine Comedy in the sixth grade, in Italian no less, I recognized my surroundings right away. We were in hell. In my interpretation of Dante’s epic poem about Purgatory and its nine rings, Fort Ord was a tenth ring he somehow forgot. In the Ring of Fort Ord, also known as Being Thirteen in California in 1967, you are forced to wear multicolored “tent” dresses (designed for Twiggy, not someone with a pudgy figure like mine), little flat Capezios, and white fishnet stockings that leave tortuous diamond patterns in your legs. The only sound you hear is the Monkees playing at full blast. And every meal fed to you is a Swanson TV dinner, not cooked all the way through, with still-frozen pieces of corn and lima beans because your mother, who is a fantastic cook, hated California too and refused to go into the kitchen. Oh, and you also don’t have any friends or anyone to talk to who shares the misery of riding your bike to school on a sand path full of gooey ice plant when you had, just four years before, been living in Vicenza, Italy, walking down Corso Palladio in a very nice dress and wearing very nice Italian shoes, on your way to a trattoria to eat tagliatelle and braciola di vitello alla griglia. There had been tears of sorrow when we left Italy, but when the time came to leave Fort Ord and move to Germany, I shed tears of joy. It was a brief happiness.

In Stuttgart we lived in a bland apartment building in Robinson Barracks, one of the many Army posts. Our apartment was on the second floor. The living room windows faced a deep, sloping hill known as the Valley, later the site of many parties. Mercifully I had my own bedroom, and the windows, on the other side of the building, faced a complex of buildings that included the movie theater, the Post Exchange (familiarly known as the PX), and the bowling alley where GIs and military dependents could enjoy the comforts of being stateside and pretend they weren’t living in a foreign country, but the GIs, like us teenagers, knew better.

In eighth grade I considered myself marginally attractive. I had long hair, past my shoulders, which was the look then in the late 1960s. At school the dress was skirts, sweaters, and blouses; we were allowed to wear pants on Fridays. I did cool stuff like played my guitar, took riding lessons, and joined the ski club, but I was not as cool as the kids from Patch Barracks (one of five surrounding bases), whose fathers were high-ranking officers and generals working in NATO headquarters. Most of the Patch kids had recently come from the States so had newer, more updated clothes. They also knew a thing or two about lots of things, like alcohol, cigarettes, dope, and sex. I, on the other hand, having spent nearly all of my growing-up years overseas, was mostly clueless about these things. I was in great awe and wanted to be just like them.

As an Army brat, making and having friends means survival, the only thing that keeps you grounded, and I was undaunted in my effort to be popular. I ran for class president and won with a speech that opened with “My Soul Brothers and Soul Sisters,” a nod of respect to my many Black classmates. They were much more attuned to the unrest and social changes going on than white students. I remember how proud, strong, and brave the Black kids were, in dress and behavior, so true to themselves. While the white athlete guys in their letter jackets swaggered down the halls, Black students swaggered with a purpose: they knew who they were without any apologies or any rancor either. In the military dependent schools, your father’s rank decided which clique you belonged to, not so much the color of your skin, but we were all friends. Not close, maybe, but not divided or antagonistic either. The diverse comradery was enriching and rewarding; we bonded together in the unique experience of growing up in a foreign land, far away from the place many called home.

Between eighth and ninth grade, there was a dramatic shift. Somehow, overnight, we all turned into quasi-adults: drinking lots of beer in gasthauses and at Oktoberfests (sixteen was the legal drinking age and no one cared anyway), smoking cigarettes and dope. Hash was more readily available than grass, so that is what we smoked. A friend who was a senior showed me how to crumble up the hard, brown ball into bits and roll them into a cigarette. I tried it, got stoned, and wandered around the Valley with a very heavy head and blurred vision. My feet felt like lead. I decided hash was not for me, let alone the risk that came with it of getting caught.

The best part about the ninth grade was my boyfriend, PM. He was tall, blonde, a great kisser, and a sweet, gentle guy (now a successful artist). We had a wonderful romance with flowers, poetry, and lots of cuddling on the bus on ski trips. It was the first time I was “felt up.”

Being felt up was not considered sex at that time; sex was going all the way. I was terrified of going all the way. A few girls in my class had suddenly disappeared from school for weeks and “gone to London,” which I learned from my father was code for getting an abortion. As the head of OB/GYN, he had treated them and told me if I ever got pregnant, he would kick me out of the house and disown me. So much for a warm heart-to-heart with your father. He was, as I already knew from previous experience, much better with a stick.

My boyfriend in tenth grade was a senior, tall, very good-looking, with his own car. His parents were older so he had more freedom than most other kids. He lived in the apartment building next to ours, which is how I got to know him. After school, both of his parents at work, we’d hang out in his room. He’d make himself a scotch and soda, put the Beatles on the record player, and we’d lie on his bed, making out for hours. I loved the feeling of his hands on my breasts, his warm touch on my skin. I was so naïve then, but he never took advantage of me, and by that I mean at no time were any of his body parts exposed other than his scotch-soaked tongue. He even took me to the senior prom, which I thought was pretty cool. Then he left to go back to the U.S., like everyone else eventually had to do.

With so much practice, saying good-bye to our friends and boyfriends became a skill. We learned to shut the door and not look back because it hurt too much. We learned how to make friends quickly and deeply because one minute you are here and the next you are gone. But like many of our pains and fears, dealing with loss was not talked about. We zipped our lips and pretended each day was as good as the next or the last. It was our secret code, a way of coping with the anguish of the inevitable departures when your father said it was time to go, whether you wanted to or not.  

But my doctor father wasn’t the only one giving orders or making decisions. My mother said she knew what was best for me because I was a teenager and what did I know. What she meant was I didn’t have a choice. She wanted me to have plastic surgery.

When I was twelve she didn’t like my body (I was pudgy) and made me wear “slimmer” dresses, jumper-like shifts she sewed to give me the appearance of being slim. Now, at fifteen, she did not like my nose. I had been put down so many times already that getting plastic surgery felt like the next logical step in a process that would transform me into who they wanted me to be, not the person I was—singer/songwriter, artist, philosopher, hopeless romantic; desperate to be loved. Sadly, I was too afraid to object.

The day of the surgery came, and off we went, bags packed, to the hospital in Frankfurt. When we got there, however, we were informed the surgeon had had a sudden emergency and could not operate. I guess my mother took this as a sign because the subject never came up again. Her next big decision was to send me to boarding school in Switzerland, a very famous one (we’re talking royal families), where they sent my sister a few years later. I refused to go. In my mind my mother just wanted to get rid of me. Screw that, I’m staying put, I told myself. In retrospect I should have gone. I would have been happier than being at home. My life was beginning to feel like one big run-on sentence of catastrophe.

I was saved, my junior year, by my two best friends, C and M, and my first true love, NK. He was not like the other kids in school. A Southerner by birth, he was very polite and mannerly and loved all the same things I did: looking at stars at night, having picnics in the woods with champagne (he had great taste), driving around the countryside in his cute VW bug, and eating dinner at local stubes—German taverns—where we’d be the only Americans. He touched my body but he also touched my soul. I know this sounds corny but it is true. I felt the comfort of his hands but also the reassurance of his honesty. Here was someone who cared and loved me for who I was, nose, body, and mind. NK held me close, urging me not to let my parents get to me, to be my own person. We went to Paris together on a school trip. How savvy teachers were back then, turning a blind eye. The French doors in our bedroom in our hotel room faced the Moulin Rouge. I will never forget the red neon lights, the brightness of the night, the sounds of the crowds, and being held in loving arms and loving back. My choice, my decision to be there. For a few blissful moments, I knew who I was, comfortable in my own skin, both feet on the ground. Until the ground opened up, tectonic plates shifted. It was time to go.

Coming back to the U.S., I entered a Pennsylvania high school as a senior. The school had three thousand students, one thousand in the senior class alone, while my class in Stuttgart had not been more than one hundred. I was overwhelmed, lost, and afraid, untethered, like a balloon floating away. It wasn’t just the mass of students, an overwhelming wave, but also the culture change. A spotlight, the one I imagined, shined on me the first day of school, illuminating my differences and foreignness. All around me girls wore long, flowered skirts, lace tops, with beads around their necks and scarves around their heads and sandals on their feet, like gypsies. There were some more conservatively dressed kids, but my outfit, a dark-brown corduroy skirt, brown blouse, black patent flats, which would have been perfect in Stuttgart, here made me look ridiculous. Here’s another literary reference for you: Frankenstein. I had been one thing before, but the thing I had become, through new, observing eyes, was a freak. My disfigurement was displacement. I was more of an outsider in my own country than a foreigner in Germany, less at home than I had been anywhere else in the world. My parents were the clueless ones now. They had no idea what they had done. Stuck in their own little world, they had ripped me away from mine—my boyfriend, friends, and place of safety. I was thrown into a cold and strange land with no recognizable landmarks, nothing to hold on to. Then came the inevitable.

Where are you from, someone wanted to know.  

I searched for what to say, grasping the thinnest of threads, not to let the fabric of my being be torn to shreds. I was totally alone, my support system and friends oceans away. Popularity, fitting in, didn’t seem to matter so much anymore, just survival.

I jabbed a finger at my chest.

I am from Me, I said. I got the same confused stare, the cough of politeness, the turn of the head to avoid me, but this time I didn’t mind.

THE END