At a vegetable stall in the market, a woman my age was gazing at a pile of white asparagus. She was a rather bony blonde with beautiful but tired green eyes and a wrinkled upper lip, the badge of smokers and sunbathers. Plastic surgeons irreverently call such a thing ‘a pleated skirt’.
She was holding a toddler girl’s hand, apparently a granddaughter: also blond with green eyes, but without wrinkles. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” the market vendor asked rhetorically. That was about the asparagus. “Wonderful,” the woman replied. ‘I come across as special, don’t I. Of course we live in Nieuw-Vennep.’
There was slight regret in that last sentence. What was wrong with Nieuw-Vennep? Could you really not buy asparagus there? That seemed strong to me. The woman rubbed two together, making a soft squeak. Yes, they were fresh. “Just put in 4 pounds,” she said. And she repeated again, a bit wryly: ‘Yes, we live in Nieuw-Vennep…’
“Grandma?” the child asked. ‘What is a Nieuw-Vennep?’ She pronounced it like ant fake† The merchant laughed. “Would you like a banana, mop?” he said. The child nodded, but insisted, “Grandma, what’s an ant fake?”
“Not ‘an ant fake’,” said the grandmother. ‘Just, Nieuw-Vennep. That’s where we live.’ The child stared ahead and thought visibly. The merchant loaded the asparagus into a plastic bag with due tenderness. The grandmother peeled the banana. “Why?” continued the child. Yes, she was the age for that.
I waited anxiously for the answer. ‘Because in Nieuw-Vennep the houses are not so insanely expensive’, perhaps. Or ‘because it’s clean and quiet there’, or ‘because you can still order a cappuccino in Nieuw-Vennep without the waiter (a 19-year-old ‘urban nomad’ from San Francisco with a teapot tattoo on his neck, thread spool, pincers or other apparently everyday but undoubtedly meaningful object for him) asks you: oat milk or cow’s milk?†
“Grandma, why do we live in an ant fake?” the girl insisted. The grandmother handed her the half-peeled banana. ‘Yes, why, why…’, she said grimly. The merchant laughed and posted the infamous clincher: ‘Why are the bananas bent? If they are straight, they will fall over!’
The girl looked bewildered at her banana. It wasn’t exactly crooked. He was actually surprisingly straight, for a banana.
“Eat up,” said the grandmother. ‘We still have to go to the cheesemonger. And then we go back. To Nieuw-Vennep.’