Chokotoff leaned forward to search for food from this dandy new stranger—and stepped down so quickly that he crushed Anais’s middle finger.
The finger turned black in under a minute. Takeshi dropped his immaculate helmet to the ground and picked up Anais, the dust and mud from her overalls smearing his beautiful jacket. She protested in her own broken mix of English, French, and frustrated Flemish—It is just a finger! I can walk! Why are you kidnapping me?—until she saw the look on his face.
It was the most gallant expression she’d ever seen anyone make. She stopped struggling. She let him carry her out to the parking lot. He set her carefully in his little rented Fiat and with her pointing aid drove her to the town doctor. Dr. Thys drained the swollen finger, pulled out some bone shards, and set the remainder with a tongue-depressor splint. Takeshi watched him like a hawk the entire time.
A stupid mistake for anyone to make, it was especially humiliating for Anais: she’d been riding at these stables her whole life. She insisted on proving herself to Takeshi, teaching him to ride, jump, and control the horse with some basic dressage in twelve weeks.
They were married by the end of the year.
Takeshi then perfected not just riding, but skiing, baccarat, cycling, and skeet shooting—the collegial activities of the wealthy businessmen who moved in and out of the circles of power in Brussels, Antwerp, and Luxembourg—along with Flemish and Dutch, Luxembourgish and German, and French and English, enabling him to move up the ranks at Mikimoto with speed as they grew their business with the Antwerp-based jewelry industry.
Now, after only three weeks of retirement spent pacing around the barn, trying to boss Anais and the horses around until she forced him back to the house with the business end of a pitchfork, he had taken a job in the Brussels office of an NGO to coordinate EU aid into developing economies at a fraction of his previous salary. Taki said it was service to the continent that had taken him in.
Cat was pretty sure he just didn’t know how to be a person if he wasn’t working.
Anais had continued painting and riding, and she took care of Cat, too, until they sent her off to Miss Sawyer’s in the ninth grade. Cat’s prior education at the European girls’ school had given her flawless English, French, formal Dutch, German, and Italian on top of her native Flemish, but despite the rigor of her education, the Onos had been concerned that staying in Europe would turn her into what her mother called ijdele prinseske.
Transliterated it was “idle little princess”: many of the wealthy euro-brats she’d grown up with were already asserting their entitlement over the world. Their casual utterances—formed in the bedrock-deep continental racism that Anais had never questioned until it was aimed at people she loved—were painting her daughter with a constant wash of inferiority. As she entered puberty, Cat started to look at herself with an eye so critical Anais feared she’d never recover.
Anais and Taki could see the consequences of their choices happening to their little Katteke, and they didn’t like it. They had wanted Catherine—whom they’d given a Catholic first name to help her fit in anywhere—to be like them but better; to be practical and dedicated and earnest and then happy. That was the formula. There would be no happiness in chasing the same ambitions of the upper-crust Europeans whom Taki mimicked but was, at his heart, decidedly not. “Never let the mask become the face,” he would say, adapting Orwell for his own purposes.
Taki was always on time, always at her baseball games and swim meets, always a proud and loving father, but he had a million rules. No television. No store-bought toys. Homework before riding or archery or baseball or swimming. By the time Cat was in seventh grade her peers were getting cars and drivers, heading to Paris or London for shopping weekends with their mothers and nighttime trips to bars with flashy young men. Cat’s own mother, usually covered in a mixture of horse shit and oil paint, preferred Danskos and denim; she did not understand Cat’s concern for clothes, for handbags, for objects and things. She worried that Cat, unable to realize that people who love themselves will fit in anywhere, was trying to change herself to fit in.
So Taki and Anais had searched for a practical solution to help Cat find her confidence. A friend of a friend described Sawyer’s as “a challenging school for hearty girls from nice families.” Intrigued, they sent away for the admissions materials, knowing it might be too late for that fall but pleading with the school’s office to send them anyway.
Anais had squealed with delight over their glossy catalog. The rainbow-nation photos of other multiethnic Sawyer girls—a rowing crew, and girls with dirt on their faces tilling fields for the school’s then-unusual organic farm—could have been staged from her dreams. Taki studied the academics and Ivy League acceptance rates and was pleased at their high numbers. Cat liked that it was in America, in Connecticut, the home of Yale University and a Barbara Stanwyck movie she had on VHS.
She had to write an essay about why she wanted to go but couldn’t think of anything good to say. Because…my parents think I know too many silly girls, and…I think they are right? Because America is exciting? Because I want to be an American girl with her own convertible, at a football game, like Nancy Drew? Because I want to see New York City? The day after the catalog arrived she had sat at the kitchen table until dark, her mechanical pencil poised to write a brilliant first draft. But nothing came out. Six languages and she had no words. Taki looked at her blank cahier page and shook his head.
“You’ll try again tomorrow,” he said in English. “You must sleep on it.”
She’d run up to her room, thrown herself on the bed, and sobbed loudly. She didn’t fit in here, but she couldn’t even articulate why she deserved to fit in somewhere else.
Her mother snuck in and stroked her head, something Cat had stopped letting her do a year earlier. She patted and finger-combed and braided Cat’s big hanks of black hair until her red-faced daughter finally stopped wailing and looked up.
“The Onos are adventurers,” Anais leaned down and whispered to Cat in Flemish. “It’s in your blood. You must cross an ocean to discover your soul.”
In the morning Cat rose with the dawn to watch her mother traipse out to the barn, then put on her school uniform and sat down at the kitchen table. She drafted her essay with a furious purpose. By the time her father appeared to make the coffee it was almost done.
“May I read it, little Katteke?”
She handed it to him proudly. He read it out loud, a barely suppressed grin on his face.