IN 1967 THE Monkees sold more records than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined, which was about the only thing that kept an American like me from being stoned to death in England.
Call me unpatriotic, but if you’d been trailed home from school every day by a pack of mercenaries in blazers and kilts who, because of some genetic xenophobia, felt the need to verbally disembowel you (Get lost, you bleedin’ Yank! Go back to the colonies! Yeah—fuck off an’ bloody stay there!), you’d have cut up your American passport with pinking shears too.
The annual exploding postcard arrived during the last week of camp, informing me that we were emigrating because of the Lord and Master’s promotion. The house had already been sold, and the dogs and horses given away. The life of the chosen one, Will, remained unaffected, meaning he got to stay in a stateside boarding school and spend his vacations in Burdenland, while my younger brother and I were measured for English school uniforms. Had Edward been older, no doubt my grandparents would have claimed him as their legal property as well. I was temporarily placated by a Vidal Sassoon wedge haircut before we sailed from New York to Southampton aboard the SS France, but I shouldn’t have been; it was hideous.
England did not turn out to be a Yardley Slicker commercial after all. I emerged from the train at Waterloo station expecting to see the youthquake in full action: birds in oversized caps and textured stockings running in and out of red telephone booths; blokes with striped bell-bottoms and Edwardian jackets lounging on Jaguars; and benevolent bobbies everywhere. The magazines I’d consumed on the passage over had alerted me to possible sightings at any given place or time of the Beatles or Herman’s Hermits or, at the very least, Lulu.
In reality, suburban London in the late 1960s was a dreary postwar scenario with rag-and-bone horse-drawn carts, blocks of dismal council flats, and a core population of spinsters and widows all vying for the parish vicar’s favor like they were trapped in a Barbara Pym novel. There was nothing fab about the place at all. The authorities had been forced to come up with commercially crazy places like Carnaby Street just to keep people from eating their young out of depression.
Home sweet home was initially a small leaky house on a street named Strawberry Vale, in a town called Twickenham, in a suburb on the southwest side of London. The narrow garden behind gave on to the Thames River with a slippery cement quay that was perfect for accidental drownings. The interior of the house was furnished like a bordello: the squashy sofas and armchairs were upholstered in molting red velvet; the lamp shades were fringed; and all of the oddly sized mattresses had been stuffed during the Middle Ages with coarse black horsehair. Heating anything—air, water, or food—necessitated shoveling coal into the furnace, a quaint task whose novelty wore off within a day.
We all pined for something—my mother, for Miami and iceberg lettuce and Tab; me, for Cheetos and American bacon. The Antichrist wished that his wife’s children would disappear. Only my little brother had what he wanted: unlimited Matchbox cars and his mother, whom he continued to adore unconditionally.
Despite a yearlong crash course in Virginia, domestication continued to prove difficult for the lady of the house. “Goddamn it!” my mother would erupt with when the fat popped at her from the (non-Teflon) frying pan in the cold gray dawn. Somewhere she had read that English schoolchildren began their English school days with a stomach full of eggs and bangers, those pink phalluslike sausages the Brits love. She really was trying.
“SHIT!” she would expostulate twenty times or so during the drive to school, first down our busy road and then into the traffic flowing into Twickenham, then past the Odeon and onto the congested high street that ran parallel to my school.
“Jesus H. Christ! That goddamned mini almost hit me! Oh God, if only I had a tan I could handle this. Look at me! I’m the color of that shiny gray toilet paper the Limeys use!”
You don’t know the meaning of fear until you’ve driven with a hungover, sunlight-deprived woman who is grappling with a stick shift on the wrong side of the road, and whose head is swiveling every two seconds because she is searching for a shop that just might, by some miracle, sell Shake ’N Bake or QT. In less time than it takes to say “public transportation,” I was commuting to school on my own.
Twickenham County Preparatory School for Girls was another school with a fancy name. However, this one was your basic state-subsidized institution: an assemblage of scarred desks, leaky fountain pens, and chalk dust in an archaic Edwardian setting that was permeated throughout with the odor of boiled cabbage and governed by teachers who enjoyed a good caning the way the landed gentry enjoyed blood sports.
My school uniform was an all-inclusive one: itchy wool underpants, kneesocks, dorky sandals, drip-dry ecru polyester shirt, pleated kilt, V-neck sweater, necktie, crested blazer, wool overcoat, and felt boater. Listed by the outfitters as “Nigger Brown,” everything was the color of cheap chocolate cake.
The academic curriculum for Year One included fourteen subjects and an overview of every competitive game played on British soil since the time of Cromwell. “God Save the Queen” was respectfully sung every morning at chapel. Refusal to participate on the grounds of unconstitutionality was not recognized as exercising one’s inalienable rights. It wasn’t long before I was on speaking terms with the top brass.
“Don’t you guys know about the separation of church and state?”
“The only separation you need to know about, Miss Burden, is your desk from the other students. You will sit in the corner until you are repentant and ready to honor the monarch.”
The headmistress and I often met for these cozy chats in her office.
“And I see, Miss Burden, that once again you have been using ink in your rough book. In our rough books, we use pen-sill and only pen-sill. Furthermore, Master Grimshaw informs me that you recently submitted an assignment—in your neat book—in ballpoint ink! Really! Let me remind you that here, unlike in the colonies, we use prrrroper ink and prrrroper fountain pens, and we practice the discipline for a rrrreason.”
Sitting in what I would come to think of as my own, very straight-backed chair, I faced the headmistress and her suspiciously tidy desk. “I don’t see why I can’t use a Bic (wear earrings, sit out cricket, boycott lunch).”
“If you persist in demoralizing this institution with your slovenly ways then we shall have trouble, my girl, that we shall.” She stood up and reached for the Magistrate, a splintery yardstick that had produced more than its share of martyrs.
“George the First should have never allowed tea into the colonies. Hands out, please,” and she drew back for a mighty lash.
They say the English are an accommodating breed; after all, they’ve been invaded and infiltrated for thousands of years, inviting everyone to stay, or at least not asking them to leave. They didn’t seem to feel that way about me, though. Being considered a foreigner had never occurred to me, what with the Mayflower and all that. So what if I spoke differently; on paper, wasn’t it all the same playing field? Explaining this fact, or my documented chromosomal connection to Charles II, had little effect on the enemy, and I found myself routinely pinned against the WC wall with a razor blade by large girls with lavender thighs who didn’t like the way I said “hi.”
Eventually I picked up a few friends, losers who found an American curiously compelling (as in something offensive that you can’t keep away from); wets with names like Roxanna and Felicity. But the friendships came to a grinding halt when they tried linking arms with me and I’d squeal, “Hey! You a lezzie or what?” What is it with English girls always touching one another and falling in love with horses and getting crushes on their female gym teachers?
My mother was quick to point out my unpopularity. “When I was your age I was making out in the cemetery every weekend. What in blazes are you doing home on a Saturday night?”
My mother liked to tell the story of how she and her classmates would down a couple of aspirins with a Coke (back then it still had traces of cocaine in it) and then go neck in the local graveyard. Since I knew my parents were dating in high school, I liked to imagine the two of them, young and in love and making out all over the headstones.
We were sitting at the dining room table. I was doing homework—with fourteen subjects it was pretty much a constant activity—and eating a slab of heavily buttered bread the size of my state-owned chemistry textbook. My mother was cataloging a set of medieval floor tiles she’d recently swiped from the ambulatory of Salisbury Cathedral during a smoke-screen stampede of Taiwanese tourists. Her can of Diet 7UP was close at hand. It wasn’t really Diet 7UP, it was 90 percent Bacardi, but everyone went along with it in the interest of harmony. The only problem was that it was impossible to count the number of drinks she had consumed, so I had to rely on the expression on her face and the tone and delivery of her observations.
I told her I was home because I didn’t have any friends.
“And why don’t you have any friends?”
“Because everyone hates me,” I explained. I burrowed my nose more deeply into the effect of temperature on equilibrium.
“Poppycock,” she said, pulling lustily on her straw, “you just need to put on a skirt. But with black tights—they’re slimming, you know.”
We both glanced down to where I was straddling the chair. My high-waisted corduroy pants were so tight they were practically cutting off my heartbeat. It wasn’t as if I was legally fat, or had ever even been fat. The issue was that I wasn’t thin.
My mother was thin. And beautiful. I would have given my ovaries to look like her. She arranged the brown and yellow tiles into a pattern. “You know,” she said, looking down at her work, “someone remarked the other day that if you painted those lower lashes under your eyes and lost ten or twenty pounds, you’d look just like Twiggy.”
“Hmmm. I’ll bet that someone was you,” I said.
“And so what if it was?” she retorted. This was not a new approach, my mother’s attempt to get me to look like Twiggy—or rather to try to get me to starve myself to look like Twiggy. She regrouped. “I’ll bet you haven’t tried marching yourself right up to people and being friendly. Ask them what they’re up to on weekends. If they know any boys! You’re old enough to be dating regularly.”
“Oh, come on. I’m a twelve-year-old kid in school. I’m getting judged every minute of the day by someone. By my teachers. By other students. By boys I pass in the street. By you and Adolf—”
“Don’t call him Adolf!”
“School’s bad enough. The last thing I need is to be condemned for being a Yank at the movies or a dance or, or playing spin the bottle!” With that, I packed up my neat books and rough books and textbooks and fountain pens and blotting paper and ink bottle and ink eradicator and stormed off to my room. It’s a waste of time trying to have a conversation with anyone in a see-through crochet dress, let alone your own mother.
Anyway, it’s not like I had time for a social calendar. That first year, my weekends were spent hanging around gloomy churches and Celtic burial sites while my mother pursued her fascination with antediluvian British history, and trying to steal it. Like a good American tourist, she had discovered brass rubbing, the art of transferring onto paper the funereal engravings of medieval knights and their kin. Our hallways flapped with their morose, wraithlike effigies, clad as they were in chain-mail hoods and armor and the pointiest metal booties imaginable. I had to brush past their papery guard on my travels to and from the bedroom, bath, or kitchen. I may have been into the dead, but my mother was into the deader.
My childish interests hadn’t been for naught. Tucked away in those Cimmerian churches, burrowed in the vestries and sacrarium, I managed to find something to amuse me: relics. Most churches possessed one—the arm of St. Philip, the eyelid of St. Euphemia, a splinter of the True Cross. This martyred cadaver jerky was cached in everything from jeweled crystal boxes to clumsy wire cages, and you didn’t even have to go to the crypt to see it, which was a travesty in my opinion. Some churches had gift shops where you could buy postcards of their relics, the image rendered deliciously putrid by substandard photography and cheap printing. In an obscure Norman church in Gloucestershire I even found a relic for sale. It was the (purported) big toenail of a local virgin and charlady, Mildred of Chipping Whopping, who had been martyred at the hands of her sexually deviant master.
The woman who ran the gift shop had my number. “Lovely, innit?” she simpered, hovering beside me as I gazed longingly at the scat-like thing. “I’ll just wrap it up for you then, shall I, luv?”
Now really, what did I want with someone else’s toenail when I still had my own collection from three summers ago? I was hemming and hawing, trying for once to be economical, when I spied out of my little eye my mother preparing to burgle. She had entered the church in her yellow tartan reversible cape (now you see me on the yellow side, now you don’t on the black) and when last seen, like two minutes ago, had still looked like a school bus in a cave full of bats. Now she was a bat. I’d seen her do a double take at the ornamental stonework by the baptismal font. If I was going for the toenail, I’d better hurry.
“I’ll take it!” I called to the shopkeeper, a little urgently. She bustled on over.
“You’ll get plenty of use out of this, you will,” she said. “Why, I’ve a bit of her ear meself, and when me and my Stan have a row I go straight to where I keep it in a tin, and I ask her for help, I does. American, are you?” I swallowed hard as I held out the ten-bob note I’d been planning to spend on a couple of Mars bars and some salt-and-vinegar crisps.
“Ta, ducks.” She handed me my relic in a small brown envelope. “Care for some snaps of her torture chamber to go with it? Only half a crown . . .”
I apprehended my mother just as she was preparing to chisel a pint-sized gargoyle from its perch of several centuries. She hissed at me as I shoved her off her mark, using my little brother, her accomplice, as a sort of bludgeoning tool. I had to repeat this several times until she eventually scuttled out the door of the church, damning me to hell in front of God’s House. Her unappreciative behavior led me to consider slipping the toenail into her Diet 7UP can. I considered it all the way home, and then, to prove I hadn’t lost my Wednesday touch, I did it.
By the following winter my mother and brother and I had been to just about every stone circle, henge, barrow, ring, and hill-fort, every ruined Norman wall, turret, keep, abbey, and urinal, every Celtic cross, Iron Age fortification, medieval castle, Roman site, Neolithic flint mine, Saxon church, and Gothic cathedral within a ten-hour drive—including the Cheddar and Wookey Hole cave dwellings, Grimes Graves, Long Meg and Her Daughters, Ackling Dyke, Bevis’s Thumb, and the incomparable Pike o’ Stickle (Britain’s biggest source of stone axes and the alleged home of the saintly nipple hair of the Martyr Thomas Plumtree).
My mother’s favorite was Stonehenge, as would be evidenced by our Christmas cards over the next several years.
“Here, kids, back up against that trilithon and let me take the picture. Jesus, Wendy, wipe those crumbs off your face. And don’t you have any lipstick? What are you now, thirteen? Oh, use mine. Now, where is your brother? Edward! What do you mean you don’t like frosted pink? Just use it. EDWARD! Jesus H. Christ, I turn my back for one goddamn minute—”
Edward was at the developmental stage where boys like to urinate on weird things. He was partial to one of the Station Stones outside the circle.
My mother considered Stonehenge to be her personal archeological site. She had a chip off every stone except for three, and she would have gotten those had they not erected a fence to keep enthusiasts like her out. She was also extremely fond of the Uffington White Horse Hill Cut. In the garage there was a gallon bucket filled with chalk that she’d filched over a number of visits to the site. Once, when I’d allowed our new dog to poop in the vicinity of the horse’s head, my mother had become apoplectic. I’d carefully apologized, the way one does to a psychopath, but she’d reiterated that it had been a bratty thing to do and Jesus H. Christ why couldn’t I show some respect for a prehistoric figure dating back to 2000 B.C.? Sparks had flown.
“Oh yeah? Well stealing the chalk the Celts made the thing with, and then carting it home in a Baggie sounds real respectful,” I’d come back with.
Scooping the stuff as fast as she could, my mother had matter-of-factly pointed out that no one loved animals more than her, especially horses. She was right, of course; and when the sexton would lower her into the hallowed Puritan dirt of her former playground, the Milton Cemetery, the only thing my brothers and I would throw on top of her coffin would be a tattered photograph of Puck, her favorite hunter.
Into our second year, and our third rental, I remained pretty much friendless. Among other things, my accent had refused to adapt, unlike that of my little brother, who within minutes of arrival, had taken on the piping tones of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Even my mother had developed an accent, albeit an ultra-embarrassing, inaccurately feigned Oxbridge one. On a good day I could barely pass for Canadian.
For my birthday that year, a sympathetic and well-paid “babysitter” took me to see Hair, the “American tribal love-rock musical,” in which a guy gets drafted and a bunch of hippies on acid screw their brains out while they rant about the Establishment. Then the guy goes to Vietnam and dies. I don’t remember much else—except all the words to all the songs because I bought the LP as we were leaving the theater and I played it from the second I got home until the needle wore straight through to the other side.
People left the theater saying things like, Wow, that really blew my mind, and Yes, peace will guide the planets and love will rule the stars. All I knew was that I had heard more dirty words in an hour and a half than I had in a lifetime, and that fourteen men and women had taken off all their clothes and demanded that I stare at them. Heretofore life had been pretty much about horses, trying to reach the end of puberty, keeping up with modern mortuary science, and steering clear of my mother’s relationship with the Antichrist. Hair was a hormonal wake-up call.
I had also walked out feeling tight with Uncle Sam again. This was Hair—the American tribal love-rock musical. Not the British one. And the Brits were spending pounds to see it. I was so proud, I let my accent rain down on everyone in section CC, and then out onto the streets of the West End and into a steamy little café we stopped in to warm ourselves before heading home on the tube. That was a mistake, because the frazzled tea lady behind the counter had not had the pleasure of seeing the show.
People were pressing in on one another, yelling for service and trying to stay clear of the harried waitresses. When my babysitter at last got the ear of the tea lady, she had to shout out our request over the din of crockery and laughter and short-order jabberwocky.
“Whot? You want two cups of tea and a whot?” the tea lady yelled back at us as she simultaneously ladled soup into a take-away container and rang up a bill for a pedophile who kept elbowing me in my future bosom.
“Yes, please,” my babysitter screamed back politely, “that’s two cups of tea and some buttered toast, please.”
“Some whot?”
“Er, toast, if you please. Any sort will do. And some butter on it would be lovely, thank you ever so much.”
“Oats?” she shouted back, her hand to her flabby ear. Good God, the English. This was no time for gentility; I was starving. Emboldened by my patriotic musical experience, I put my face into the tea lady’s bestial one and hollered, “Tea and hot buttered toast, please!”
Maybe I only imagined that the room went morgue-quiet, and that everyone heard the tea lady repeat what I said with the most torturous mimicry imaginable. In my head the ruddy English faces moved in with the menace of a lynch mob. The tea lady stuck her dishpan hands on her walrus hips and, wagging her head with each nasal syllable, said, “Sam hat badderrrrd towwwst? Is that what you bleedin’ want, now is it? HAT BAD-DERRRRRRRRD TOWWWSSST?”
I shrank away from the counter in the most intense self-loathing and mortification of my short, miserable life.
On the tube ride home I came to the conclusion that the only way out of this misery was to change my nationality. And what better way to begin than by desecrating my passport, thereby getting rid of the evidence. Following this liberating act of treason, I felt better—until I got in serious trouble, not only with my mother (Jesus H. Christ, Birdbrain! You think that’s going to solve your problems? Contact lenses and mascara are what you need!) but more enduringly with my grandfather.
En route to Paris, my grandparents had stopped in London for a night. Edward had ratted on me during a lull in the feeding of the sea lions at the London Zoo, where my grandmother had insisted we go following lunch at the Connaught. My grandfather was speechless with rage; so speechless that I thought I’d escaped relatively unscathed—until the quiet dark of the Nocturnal Mammal House unlocked his tongue. We were standing in front of the slow loris exhibit when he let me have it. “That’s an act as blasphemous as burning the flag!” my grandfather thundered. The lorises watched, unperturbed, and continued to munch (very slowly) on grasshoppers behind the glass.
In a swell of bravery I lashed back. “I don’t see what’s so great about being American!”
“I suppose you prefer the dismal mediocrity of socialism to democracy?”
I had no idea what he was talking about, and I said so.
“You truly are the most ignorant girl—have you not heard of freedom? Or private enterprise? I’ll tell you what’s so great about your country—”
“Bill!” my grandmother interjected, laying her gloved hand on his rigid arm. “Please. The animals are feeding. Can’t we chat about this over tea and scones back at the hotel?”
“You have no idea what it’s like to be an American here. Everybody hates me. The kids in my school, the greengrocer, the bus conductors, they all hate Americans. HATE them. The only time anyone’s been nice to me at school was when we watched the landing on the moon, and that only lasted until they turned off the TV in the auditorium. When I won the academic prize at the year-end awards, they practically stoned me. You want me to be patriotic and die?”
“Of course not, dearie, we just don’t want you to forget who you are,” said my grandmother.
“Are you kidding? I won’t survive another week here if I don’t.”
“What utter rot!” blustered my grandfather.
In the near total darkness, his was a disembodied voice, with correspondingly little effect on me. Burdenland might have been in a different galaxy for all it mattered. I had more in common with the dentally challenged, loudly dressed, and hushed-with-wonder family next to us than with my own blood, my grandfather in his pinstripes and homburg, my grandmother in a Givenchy dress patterned with exploding roosters, clutching her poodle-portaled pocketbook. A Bentley waited by the zoo entrance to whisk us all back to the world’s most expensive hotel.
“Bloody hell!” piped Edward, nose to the glass. “The little bugger’s eatin’ ’is mate!”
“That’s it,” said my grandfather, pounding the floor with his tightly rolled umbrella. “It’s boarding school for both of you!”
The populist family shot us a collective look of horror and scooted over to the ring-tailed lemurs.
“Oh yeah?” I hissed at him. “Well you’ll have to drag me there!” I turned back to the lorises, who appeared to be watching our domestic exchange with deep interest.
“’Allo, cuntface!” Edward chirped to the small creature staring back at him.
It probably should have bothered me that my older brother and I were like strangers now, but it didn’t. Will remained my grandparents’ favorite, and I wanted nothing to do with him. Our relationship had quickly unraveled after his departure for boarding school, and now there wasn’t even the common ground of Burdenland. For the first three years we were in England, I didn’t go back to the States, and Will had come to visit just once. The only thing I can recall of that awkward Christmas break was that my brother capsized his kayak into the winter-cold Thames, and my mother “had to” dive in to “save” him. Like he hadn’t spent about ten summers learning to swim at camp. She fake-rescued him while he was hanging on to the overturned kayak maybe two feet away from the quay at the bottom of our garden. Then she hustled him inside and got him undressed and into a hot bath like he was a baby instead of a fifteen-year-old. I was beside myself with jealousy.
Worst of all, she then had to tell me afterward how pleasantly surprised she was by the size of his penis.
Like a lizard dropping its tail to avoid capture, I stopped speaking. I walked the three miles to school rather than have to communicate with the bus conductor. Outside of the house, I transmitted through the written word, telepathy, or kinesics, which meant I did a lot of wild shrugging and facial gesticulation. When displeased, I pretended to vomit; when happy—well, I never was. My teachers were hardly sympathetic, and it wasn’t long before my hands looked like I’d been knitting with barbed wire.
At home I practiced in front of the bathroom mirror:
Privacy—pri(not prie)-va-see
Schedule—shed-dule
Sexual—sex-yoo-all
Vitamin—vit(not vite)-a-min
Zebra—zeb-rah
I made a decision to radically alter my wardrobe and began to clothe myself in what I imagined to be the expression of a sexual free spirit with countercultural values. I wore lace-up Greco-Roman sandals, fruit-colored snakeskin waistcoats, long hippie skirts I sewed myself, and Spanish shawls with trailing fringe. I frizzed my hair out and carried hobo handbags that also trailed fringe. I went fringe crazy: I had fringed jackets and fringed Indian boots and fringed leather skirts and wristbands with clacking, beaded fringe. You could hear me before you saw me.
In order to be an insouciant free spirit, I knew I’d have to understand the vocabulary of one. Unfortunately sodomy was not in the school dictionary. Fortunately, my mother supplied me with the definition one evening without my even having to ask.
“D’you know what shodomy is?” she said, plonking herself down across from me at the kitchen table where I was doing my geometry homework. The thunk of her soda can echoed in the hard-edged room. We had just moved (for the fifth time) into a house that appeared to be for keeps. It was a small, newly constructed, two-storied brick box attached to a very large six-car garage. My mother had outfitted the rooms with cheap Danish furniture. She’d hung her beloved knights up on the walls, but even they looked uncomfortable. Reimagining herself as the kooky artist, she’d painted the kitchen a migraine orange, and furnished it with a picnic table varnished to a blinding gloss.
“I shaid, do you know what shodomy is!” she repeated, after a deep suck on the can.
“As a matter of fact—”
“I’ll tell you what it is. Is fucking illegal, thas what it is.”
“Shodomy is illegal? But—”
“Not SHODomy, shodomy!”
“Right. Shodomy. S-H-O-D-O-M-Y.”
She flapped her hand and leaned over to snatch my fountain pen. She wrote out s-o-d-o-m-y on the cover of my rough book—the precious, state-provided, teacher-monitored notebook that only pen-sill was permitted in.
“There.” She sat back and took another hit. “Shodomy ish fucking in the ASH.” She pounded with the soda can for emphasis. Great. Now there were rum stains to enhance the inked profanity.
“Well,” I replied, affecting nonchalance, “isn’t that what poofters do?”
She drew her head in like a tortoise.
“Poof-ter! Poof-ter? What kine of a word ish that? Shodomy ish what your shtepfather doesh to ME.” She sat there, fiddling with her straw. I sat there, twirling my compass. I was not entirely sure what I was supposed to do with this information.
“An I don’t like it,” she added, after a long pause during which I considered my options. If nothing else, it was one word down in the song (plus the title) from Hair, with only thirteen more to go.
“An I’m wan a divorsh,” she said, tossing the straw over her shoulder and tilting her head back to gulp her drink. Gone was the red face of stoicism; she was teary. I elected to act indifferent. I just wanted to get back to trying to figure out the Pythagorean theorem
I don’t want to know this, I thought.
“It hurts,” she whimpered, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her robe.
She brought this on herself. My father’s passport picture flickered in my head. (Oddly, it was the only picture I had of him.)
I stood up and went around the table to fetch her a paper towel. I waited while she blew her nose on it, and then I threw it in the garbage. I massaged her rigid shoulders until she stopped crying. I took a sponge from the sink and cleaned the table where some of the rum had spilled, though I knew I didn’t have to. My mother would be wiping the kitchen down late into the night, drinking and wiping, forestalling bedtime with the mechanical and comforting motions of housekeeping.
As I was about to retreat to my bedroom, I had a thought.
“You wouldn’t happen to know what pederasty means, would you?”
The key to becoming part of a coed peer group is a willingness to exchange saliva. Once I understood this, my social education began to progress in a relatively normal way—if you can call dating a guy with a harelip normal. Melvin Moss was the richest boy I knew. Which wasn’t saying much, given where I went to school and the select coterie I hung with. Rich, in my new life, did not mean four houses and a staff of twenty. Rich meant your family owned two cars. It was almost as if Burdenland and the immoderation of my grandparents’ life had never been a part of mine.
Melvin was not exactly a hot ticket. You could tell that he was the kind of guy who would eventually require an instructional flowchart to participate in real foreplay, but for my needs he was fine. All I required was a snogging partner in order to gain access to weekend parties. I’m not sure Melvin knew I was American; it’s not like I ever said anything more to him than “No—the bra stays on.” Melvin, who pronounced his own name Mayo-vin Mosh, had been patched up at some point, as evidenced by a seam on his upper lip where the hair of his “mustache” parted. Still, speech did not exactly flow out of him. So what; he wore skintight, long sleeved T-shirts and cool bell-bottoms, and he had a snaky little body like Mick Jagger’s. More importantly, his parents had a color TV.
Everything was going according to plan until I tried to give Melvin a hickey. We were at his house one Sunday afternoon in the humid company of four other writhing couples, in the den with the curtains drawn. Cream’s Disraeli Gears was on the turntable, and the parents were at the pub. I had no idea how to give a hickey, or a love bite, as the Brits call them, but that didn’t stop me from trying. Trouble often evolves from confusing semantics, as illustrated by Melvin’s reaction when I bit him. I really was being penetratingly sexy, so I was baffled when he leapt up and shrieked, “Hit! Wash-oo oo at or!” The party came to a grinding halt as everyone popped up his or her head. With both hands clamped to his neck, Melvin sprinted for the bathroom and slammed the door. What a baby. There was hardly any blood.
I picked up my fringed shoulder bag with all the colonial dignity I could muster, and left the house via the back door. Tidying myself as best I could in the garden, I considered my options. The Thames lay in front of me, and I thought about jumping in and floating downstream to my house, because that would have been the easiest way of getting home without having to talk to someone. Judging from the progress of a drifting branch, however, I’d be able to vote before I pulled up to my own backyard. I started walking to the nearest bus stop.
I was waiting for the number thirty-three when a beat-up red Austin pulled alongside the curb. I recognized the dark-haired girl in the passenger seat as Josephine Doran, a typically aloof classmate in my form at school. (So she had been half of the pretzel in the armchair.) The driver, clearly her brother, leaned across and said, “Oi, Yank—want a lift then, do you?” Three gangly boys shoved over for me in the backseat, and I burned out my quadriceps trying to put as little of my weight on them as possible.
“You all right back there?” the driver called above the volume of the tape deck. He introduced himself as Chris. “Crikey, Melvin didn’t half look bloody daft for carrying on like that!” He laughed a smoker’s hack, and I blushed as unbecomingly as a mandrill.
“Don’t be silly,” said Josephine, thinking my lack of reply came from a puritanical sense of outrage. “Melvin’s so sexually frustrated he often needs a proper set-down to keep him in his place. I shouldn’t worry if I were you.” She flipped her long, curly hair over her shoulder and turned around to read my reaction. She resembled her brother in that both had pasty, troubled skin, small dark eyes, and mouths that were wide and thin-lipped. Her upper teeth had curious tiny ridges along the edges. Josephine was the better looking of the two, simply by nature of her sex and her palpable self-confidence.
The boy named Nigel, upon whose boney thighs I was pretending to lie like a feather, began to mimic Melvin’s snuffled inflection. Soon they all were punching one another in the arms and calling one another fuckin’ git and cuntface, which is a charming colloquialism English lads like to address one another with.
Chris shouted above the fray, “Where d’you live, then?”
I mumbled my address in as Canadian a tone as I could muster. Nigel repeated it in a yee-haw twang.
“Don’t mind him,” Chris said, “he’s fuckin’ mental. Broom Water Road—that’s not far from our house, innit?” I nodded. I had no idea.
The car swerved as Chris extricated a pack of squashed cigarettes from the rear pocket of his Levi’s. These were passed around to salutes—Fuck! Gauloise! and Bloody brilliant!—and lit from a plug in the scratched metal dash. The car rapidly filled with acrid French smoke. Josephine cranked down her window with a look of sovereign disgust and said, “You can leave me off at home first, please, or I shall asphyxiate.” Unlike Chris, who employed more glottal stops than someone actually missing a glottis, Josephine spoke a beautifully precise Oxford English.
“I need the fuckin’ loo,” called out Nigel, to the relief of the others who were desperately holding in an afternoon’s worth of lager. We stopped shortly thereafter at the Dorans’ narrow row house on the Stanley Road.
I waited self-consciously on the upstairs landing as, one after another, the lads emptied their bladders. My foot was finally on the threshold, so to speak, when a humpbacked old woman came out of nowhere and nipped in front of me, slamming the door in my face. I waited, legs crossed, my teeth sunk into my lower lip. I leaned my forehead against the paper-thin wall and held my hand against the swelling tide below. I pressed my ear to the door and heard only the sound of pages being turned.
Just as I reached the point of no return, Mrs. Doran came up the staircase. She was a comfortably untidy, German-born woman with a far more questionable take on the King’s English than mine, particularly as it was punctuated every other second or so by a considerable facial twitch. To me, that spelled kindred spirit.
“Would it be okay if I used a different bathroom?” I stammered sotto voce.
“A different bawsroom? Sorry, love (twitch, twitch), we’ve only the one. Takin’ her time, is she?” She banged on the door. “Here, Granny! Put that bloody book down and get a move on—there’s a queue.” To me she added, “The silly cow gets stuck in the middle of a Louis L’Amour and you can’t get her out till she’s finished.”
From the living room downstairs Mr. Doran called out, “Tell the Yank if she wants another bog she can use the garden. We won’t look.”
The furious unrolling of toilet paper could now be heard from within. This was followed by a series of grumblings and grunts and sighs, and the elastic snappings of supportive garments. Suddenly, Granny burst out with the energy of a water buffalo, leaving the flimsy door banging in her wake, and a brown-colored odor suspended like woodsmoke. I slipped in and locked the door.
Plastered to the bottom of the bowl was a chocolate swirl of dung. With averted eyes, I carefully lined the seat with toilet paper and sat down. The residual warmth from Granny’s old arse radiated disturbingly into mine, but the release of Niagara was so blissful, I got over it. With curiosity, I looked about the bathroom that serviced an entire family of six. A sarcophagean tub took up most of the space. The paraphernalia of personal hygiene was everywhere: loofahs, acne medicine, Tampax, shampoo bottles, toothbrushes, aspirin, tweezers, eyelash curlers, bottles of nail varnish, shaving cream, eye cream, and thirteen different cakes of soap. Drying panty hose and bras hung from towel racks, and hooks, and the window knobs.
If the room hadn’t been so smelly, thanks to Granny’s mighty turd, it would have been downright cozy. It was warm, and, like a good English bathroom, it had thick wall-to-wall carpeting. Waist-high stacks of paperback books encircled the toilet and lined the walls. With the exception of a pile of mysteries, they were all American westerns. I selected the well-thumbed More Brains Than Bullets and began reading.
A thump on the door brought me up sharply.
“Oi! Yank! D’you fall in, then?” called Chris. I hurriedly wiped up and dashed out. He grinned at me but then reeled back dramatically and clutched his nose.
“It wasn’t me!” I squeaked.
“Right,” he laughed, and continued to hold his nose as he entered.
I wilted down the stairs. As I entered the living room, Mrs. Doran pressed a large mug of milky coffee into my hands. I looked at it with trepidation, not knowing then that it would be the first of ten thousand four hundred and fifty something cups of instant Nescafé that I would consume under that roof. I was offered a cigarette, which I declined, and then a seat, and then a biscuit. For a good hour I sat on a sprung couch amid a pile of old papers and Radio Times magazines and quietly took the place in. The boys from the back of the car had invited themselves for supper and were now going judgmentally through a shelf of LPs under the windows. The working-class, beer-bellied man of the house sat next to the television, smoking and flipping through the evening papers, his eyes up and down on everybody in the room, doling acerbic one-liners out sparingly and to great effect. A dog that looked like a stegosaurus lay with its armored head on the master’s feet.
Trying to absorb the dialogue gave me vertigo.
“. . . If Manchester don’ bloody win next week . . .”
“Shut up, you lot! I can’t hear the bleedin’ news!”
“. . . And the stupid git carried on about the Magna Carter until break . . .”
“Is everyone rich in America, then?”
“Bloody hell . . . Granny’s back up in the loo again . . .”
“Ma, Jo stole my nail varnish. Ma . . .”
“. . . Oh, don’t get your bloody knickers in a twist, Jane . . .”
“D’you know the Monkees, then?”
“. . . and that fuckin’ Wilson, you wait till the next election . . .”
“Does everyone talk like you in America, then?”
“Oh, leave the girl alone! It’s not your fault you speak funny, is it, ducks?”
“No, it is NOT my turn to do the washing up, cuntface.”
“Dad, Granny’s screamin’ bloody murder . . .”
“But why can’t I leave school at fifteen? It’s no bloody use to me . . .”
“. . . with his willie stuck in the effing milk bottle . . .”
“No, YOU deal with her—she’s not my bloody mum—”
“. . . he got it at the beach fight in Brighton over the weekend . . .”
This is bloody brilliant, I said to myself, trying on Josephine’s favorite expression. If I’d wanted to remain silent, it would have been a snap; you had to fight to get a word in edgeways with this lot. But unaccustomed levels of caffeine opened the linguistic floodgates, and I began to rattle on about the number of radio stations on US airwaves, and frozen food aisles in supermarkets the size of rugby fields, and the proliferation of McDonald’s and Hot Shoppes and Burger Kings and Roy Rogers and Howard Johnsons and White Castles and Kentucky Fried Chickens, and how many Ferraris my dreadful stepfather had and how it did less than nothing to make him appealing.
“We’ll take you in as a lodger in exchange for one of those cars then, right?” joked Mr. Doran carelessly. I prayed he didn’t catch the sudden welling of my eyes. If only. I was happy for the first time in eons, happy and stupidly full of hope. And then I remembered that I had my own puny family and they had no idea where I was.
“I think I better use a phone,” I said to Mrs. Doran. She told me theirs (their single theirs) was in the kitchen. I thought about how my grandparents had his ’n’ her four-line telephones on each side of their beds, and next to the toilets in their bathrooms, and how there were two on either side of the sofas in each of the living rooms of their four houses. I thought about how many bathrooms there were in each of those houses, and felt ashamed. In the New York apartment alone there were fourteen.
The phone was answered on the first ring: “Beer here.”
“Oh—uh, hi,” I said. “I’m, um, just calling to let you, um, know that I’m okay and, um, I’ll be home soon, after I have supper which, um, the Dorans have, um, in-invited me to, um, stay for.”
There was a silence, and then my stepfather responded, “Do you have any idea how many ums you have just said?”
I was pretty well used to this, he having been married to my mother for four years now, so I told him I had no idea, and that I would be taking the bus home.
“No,” he said, with the kind of heaviness the air has when thunderheads are getting ready to crash about. “One of us will collect you.”
I gave him the Dorans’ address, hung up, and began to fret over which was going to be more embarrassing—being picked up by Hitler, or by Barbarella.
The latter, as it turned out.
Josephine and I were taking a magazine sex quiz when the doorbell rang. Jane, the youngest, scrambled to pull open the front door. There stood ma me
e, resplendent in a white leather miniskirt and matching vest, and thigh-high wet-look vinyl boots that revealed a good four inches of her bare orange thigh. A silver Dino Ferrari was inefficiently parked with one wheel on the curb behind her. Jane gaped. Everyone in the living room rushed to see the apparition, and I felt my lunch percolate near the region of my colon. Lowering her oversized sunglasses, my mother said, “May I come in?” That was my cue to stream up the stairs to the fortunately empty bathroom.
When I came back down ten minutes later, my mother had not disappeared, but was sitting in Mr. Doran’s armchair with a glass of water and a napkin folded on her naked knee. Everyone was sitting up straight, minding their Ps and Qs and trying not to stare. My mother was chattering away about her upcoming trip to the Canary Islands, and how these fabulous new bikinis were designed to let sun in so that you could get an allover tan without being nude, and how she had just been accepted to Christ College at Oxford University. With her phony accent, she sounded like Churchill doing a drag act.
“Oxford. How luffly,” said Mrs. Doran with a tremendous tick of her nose and upper lip.
“Yeah. But if you don’t mind me askin’, what on earth for?” said Mr. Doran. He wore a bemused expression, like someone half-tolerating the parlor tricks of a pomeranian.
“Hell no, I don’t mind! I’m getting my doctorate in numismatics,” my mother explained with a toss of her hair. Her roots were showing and I couldn’t wait to tell her.
“What the fuck is that?” asked Chris politely. His pinky crooked out daintily from a coffee mug that depicted Sneezy and Bashful in an act of homosexual congress.
“It’s the study of coins. In my case, ancient Greek coins. I’ll be doing my dissertation on a particular hoard from the island of Aegina. It’s absolutely fascinating because some of the coins have tortoises with three marks on their backs and some of them have four, though they are of the same denomination, which has led experts to conjecture—”
“Time to go,” I yipped, snatching up my things and heading for the door.
“I thought you were going to stay for supper,” Josephine said. “We can give you a lift home, can’t we, Dad?”
“Well, I am a bit hungry,” my mother began. I pushed her rudely out the door and down the uneven sidewalk and wrestled the driver’s side door of the Ferrari open with so much force it nearly came off its shiny little Italian hinges. I practically threw her in. A small crowd had grouped themselves around the car, but they took off when they saw the lightning bolts shooting out of my eyes.
After a couple of failed attempts, my mother got the engine going and we moved off.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” I said. “Those are MY friends and you are NOT welcome there.”
“Oh, poppycock,” my mother retorted, missing the gate on the gearbox for third and grinding the lever back into first. The engine nearly leapt out of its compartment in anguish.
“I’m serious,” I said. “You leave them alone. If you don’t, I’ll dump out every bottle of Bacardi I find from now until I leave home for college.”
We had stopped at a zebra crossing to let a group of ladies in blue raincoats and orthopedic sandals cross. My mother had her hands on the steering wheel in a death grip. In a quiet voice she said, “But I’m lonely too.”
Poof! I made the sudden (unwelcome) sensation of compassion disappear. “Get your own friends,” I said coldly, and turned my face to the window to hide my shame. The car bucked into first and stalled, and we sat there.
Christ. I finally get a life, and I can’t shake her. “I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t really, but honestly, it didn’t cost me much.
“Yeah, well I’m sorry too.” After that, neither of us said anything, we just stared at the black leather dash and the swoop of sparkly platinum metal beyond it, until finally she restarted the engine and turned the car around, bumping up over the center island and scraping the low front of the undercarriage with a sickeningly expensive sound, and drove me back to the house on Stanley Road. I told her I’d be home by ten and climbed out.
The Dorans were having a meal my mother would have appreciated, if not partaken of: fried eggs, fried streaky bacon, fried sausages, fried bread, fried tomatoes, deep-fried chips, and tinned beans. We ate on our laps in the living room with the telly on and the wireless squawking in the kitchen. Mr. Doran and Chris and his friends chain-smoked while they ate. Jane had a crying fit because she felt ignored. She would remedy that situation in the not so distant future by giving birth to her first child at fifteen.
Mr. Doran ran me home in his battered Rover. He dropped me at the end of my street as I requested, too embarrassed for him to see the house I lived in. It was modest by American standards, but a mansion compared to the street of dismal houses and tiny littered yards where I’d just been.
“Night, then, Yank,” he called from the rolled down window. His long gray face, his eyes narrowed from the smoke of a No. 6 permanently hooked in his mouth, would become unimaginably dear to me. But I had only an incandescent inkling of that as I hurried down the dark street to my mother’s house.