Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints (18 page)

Luckily, there was an alternative.

The other option was, in its own way, even more exotic than the radical fairy culture. I’m referring to the local gay working-class pubs and clubs.

The indigenous Manchester homosexualists who drank in these dives were so waspishly feminine and catty they made the campus wizards look like Burt Reynolds. It was not their clothing: The working-class blokes were often dressed quite conservatively. It was their speech.

When I first walked into a pub and came upon this phenomenon, I felt like Margaret Mead stumbling upon a cache of albino pygmies.

It took me a moment to figure out what was going on.

As I stood at the bar, all I could hear were the words “Daughter!” and “Mother!” screeched over and over again. This was the sound of exuberant friends and acquaintances greeting each other at the end of the grim workweek. “Mother!” “Daughter!” “Daughter!” “Mother!” The practitioners seemed to derive immense pleasure from this activity. It was as if they were working through some horrible oedipal trauma.

Gradually things became clearer. A social structure emerged.

These flamboyant men were divisible into two distinct groups:
mothers
and
daughters.
A
mother
was an older gay man who had a bit more money and more experience than the typical
daughter.
The
daughters
were the noisy rapscallions who cadged drinks and coquettishly teased the
mothers
about their age and their vanished looks.

I was fascinated and delighted. Having grown up in a house full of misfits and lunatics, I was always happy to stumble upon anything which made me feel less strange. But I needed someone into whose forearm I could dig my fingernails. I needed a witness to this pantomime of perversity.

The next day I wrote a letter to Biddie (one didn’t phone in those days) and insisted that he visit Manchester for the weekend to experience the hilarious world of
mothers
and
daughters
for himself.

Two weeks later I met him at the train station. He looked amazing. With the help of one of his old girlfriends—he had gone through a straight phase, which coincided with an LSD phase—he had cobbled together a new glamrock outfit. This consisted of a high-collared, homemade, sequined Roxy Music jacket, velvet knickers, silver space boots, and a tangerine feather boa. His bright red Bowie hair shook like a nylon feather duster. The high collar of the jacket hid the gentle flow of blood which was coursing down his neck, the result of an aborted attempt to pierce his ear on the train with one of his grandmother’s chandelier earrings. He was wearing false eyelashes and metallic copper eye shadow.

Fearing a less than warm reception from the gangs of Manchester United Football supporters who roamed the station, I immediately dragged Biddie, suitcase in hand, straight to a pub called The Rembrandt. We ensconced ourselves at the bar just in time to watch the cabaret act. Two fire-eating drag queens in cheap beaded tops jumped through a Mylar curtain onto the card-table-size stage.

The performers took turns swigging gasoline from a milk
bottle and singeing their lips and hair. As we marveled at this spectacle, we began to tune in to the adjacent conversations.

All around us men were
mothering
and
daughtering
each other relentlessly.

“ ’Ere, daughter! Buy yer old mother a drink, would ya?”

“Daughter! Where have you beeeeen?”

“Who made yer outfit, daughter? Ya look ’orrible!”

“Oh! Mother! What
have
ya done to yer ’air?”

We began to study the nuances. The appellation
daughter,
from what we could tell, seemed a lot more common than
mother. Daughter
also seemed more palsy-walsy than
mother.
There were, however, exceptions. In addition to indicating friendship,
daughter
could be used as a brutal put-down, i.e., I’m calling you
daughter
even though we are the same age because I’m superior to you. Conversely,
mother
could be hurled at a fellow
daughter
to communicate the idea that, even though we are the same age, I am going to pretend that you are older than I am and that you are less attractive and should therefore buy me a drink. There were a million permutations. It was all about tone and intent.

If you wanted to be exceptionally evil, you could tease a really old homosexual about his age by, preposterously, calling him
daughter,
as in “Having a nice evening are you, daughter? A bit late for you, isn’t it? Mind your step now.” This could also be done in a friendly way to remind an old
mother
of the days when she had once been a young and attractive
daughter.

Biddie and I were in heaven. Here were fellow human beings who were actually more common and bizarre than we could have ever hoped to be. We spent the entire weekend inhaling
the gloriously fetid atmosphere of this tawdry working-class microculture. In no time we were
daughtering
each other with skill and vehemence. Vehemence was important: every “
Daughter!
” had to be hurled as with a slingshot. Every “
Daughter!
” had her very own exclamation mark.

The highlight of the weekend came right before Biddie caught the milk train back to Reading. We stopped into The Rembrandt to catch the Sunday night cabaret.

The featured artiste was an ancient, one-legged cross-dresser, who billed herself simply as
MOTHER. GRANDMOTHER
would probably have been more accurate. Having lost her leg in the Second World War, the ancient
MOTHER
was proud of her prosthetic limb and flaunted its flesh-colored plasticity in a glittery minidress.

MOTHER
’s “act” was even more heart-stopping than her appearance. She stood, arms and leg akimbo, on the little stage, drenched by a moody blue spotlight. Then, without any musical accompaniment, she delivered a deadpan recitation of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” All six stanzas of it. The choice of material prompted several unkind
daughters
to posit the theory that
MOTHER
had actually lost her leg in the Crimean War.

Biddie and I were transfixed by this Dada performance. The recitation was made all the more surreal by the fact that the
mothers
and
daughters
present ignored the entire thing. They caroused and screeched and smoked all the way through it, barely acknowledging
MOTHER
as she rode “into the valley of Death.”

At the end of this weekend, we were both tired and happy
and completely and utterly in the thrall of the
mothers
and
daughters
of the greater Manchester area. We had found a place where all the marginalized freaks of the world were welcome. Even us. We embraced our
daughterdom
with manic enthusiasm.

“Bon voyage, daughter!” I yelled as Biddie boarded the train home on Sunday night.

We were henceforth incapable of holding a conversation without
daughtering
each other to death. In no time we had lost our grip on parody and become bona fide
daughters.

*  *  *

Fast-forward thirty years.

I’m living on another continent in another century.

My husband, Jonathan, has a solemn look on his face. He has something important to tell me. I am concerned. We are, as far as I am aware, very much in love and almost obscenely compatible. Here in New York, where griping about one’s significant other is a daily pastime, our happy union is something of an anomaly. Is our relationship about to disintegrate? Am I about to enact one of those horrible scenes when a cataclysmic announcement is made and everything goes from blissful to nasty? Is he dumping me for somebody younger? Has he made arrangements to drop me off at a retirement home on our upcoming trip to Florida? My fiftieth birthday has just passed. Should I, like so many of my contemporaries, have zipped off to Brazil to avail myself of a cut-price liposuction–cosmetic surgery Xmas combo package? Has Jonathan become a Kabbalah devotee?

In measured tones, Jonathan lays out a new and revolutionary scenario for our lives. He tells me that he has decided
to add to our ménage. Nothing kinky. Quite wholesome, in fact. He wants to hire someone who can cook our food and make our beds and fold his Lacoste shirts and arrange them by color so they look like the ones in the store. He wants us to hire a live-in housekeeper!

“A housekeeper!” I shriek, clutching the area where pearls would be if I wore them. “That’s so insanely bourgeois! I have my image to think of. . . . ”

“You’re middle-aged and you wear Gucci silk pocket squares,” says Jonathan in a kind and caring tone. “No offense, but you have about as much street cred as Rip Taylor.”

Fast-forward one hour.

Jonathan is out for the evening. I sally forth to rent something radical from the video store which will bolster my dwindling sense of street cred. This looks perfect:
Murder at the Gallop,
starring Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple.

I order my take-out food and pop in the VHS tape.

Bicycling furiously, cape flying, Miss Marple returns home to her tiny thatched cottage after a hard day of sleuthing. She dismounts. With the air of a woman who would love nothing more than to take off her hot tweed outer garment, roll down her knee-highs, and make herself a fortifying cup of tea, she waddles toward her rustic, knotty front door.

Magically, the door opens. A uniformed housekeeper greets her, curtsies ever so slightly, and wooshes that cape from her shoulders. Miss Marple flops into a squishy old chair and, with forefinger and thumb, begins to rub her jowls in a meditative fashion, pondering her latest investigative conundrum. Within seconds the housekeeper returns, carrying a
magnificent tea tray groaning with cucumber sandwiches and fresh-baked scones.

Street cred, schmeet cred! I’m sold.

*  *  *

Fast-forward one week.

Marita is from the Philippines. She is skinny and petite. She has the shoulder-length, pin-straight hair for which every woman in New York City would kill. The agency has sent only one applicant: Marita. We like her hair and her cheeky personality and hire her on the spot.

She moves into our spare room.

Upon learning of Marita, none of my friends and colleagues seem remotely concerned about my loss of street cred. They are infinitely more focused on our collective loss of privacy. When confronted with their horrified reaction, Jonny and I realize that we are both antiprivacy. We like togetherness. Privacy is a greatly overrated condition. If people have privacy, they start to do unsavory things like surfing ghastly sites on the Internet, wearing preposterous undergarments, and berating one another in an uninhibited fashion. We have no doubt that Marita will have a moderating influence on our behavior and our language, which can, without scrutiny, become appallingly obscene and provocatively un-P.C. within a matter of minutes.

*  *  *

Marita’s first day. She has a question. She is unsure how to address us. Should she call us “Mr. Simon”? “Mister Adler”?

I try to remember how Miss Marple’s trusty aid addressed her.
Ma’am
is a tad frumpy. We decide to sleep on it.

Fast-forward twenty-four hours.

The smell of fresh-baked scones is wafting through the kitchen.

“I decide what I call you!” says Marita with a sparkle in her lovely black-currant eyes. “You are like my mother, so I call you Mother. It’s okay?”

“I don’t see why not,” I reply, trying not to betray the fact that I am quite taken aback. Marita, as far as I know, has never even heard of Manchester.

“Yes, you may call me Mother if that is what you would like.”

“What about me?” says Jonny, sounding quite left out.

“You are like my daughter. So I call you Daughter!”

Mother and Daughter!

“And what about you? What shall we call you?” I ask, with the growing sense that this could be getting a little creepy.

“Mother, Daughter, you call me Nanny, because I am your nanny.”

Nanny, Mother, and Daughter!

We seal the deal with a group hug.

The best thing about having Nanny in our home is not the cooking or the cleaning. The best thing is watching people’s concerned expressions when, at social gatherings and family functions, our nanny uninhibitedly calls out, “Mother! Daughter! You want me to serve food now?”