Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints (5 page)

Betty pointed out a red-faced man in Tyrolean hat. We all perked up a bit. Then we saw that he was sitting next to a homeless senior citizen who was cooling her gums with an ice lolly shaped like a rocket.

England, merry England.

The bus stopped every now and then. On one occasion, a bunch of unruly kids piled on. I recognized them from the orphanage. They stood on the seats with their muddy feet and screamed at each other.

“Why can’t we do that?” I asked sincerely.

“Because we are different,” replied Betty with queenly emphasis.

The bus continued its journey through Kafka country. The view was dominated by factories, smokestacks, and municipal buildings. There were no rosy-cheeked milkmaids or herds of brown cows with silky lashes.

The soot-blackened industrial sprawl was depressing enough, but worse still were the residential areas where the citizens of England lived out their short, untwinkly lives.

The streets were so small that, even from the vantage point of our bus, we could see comfortably into the living rooms and bedrooms of the passing houses. I observed a worn-out, prematurely aged mother scrubbing the steps of her tension-racked row house. Inside a man was swatting large flies on his window with a rolled-up newspaper. Upstairs
a demure lady wearing a twinset and pearls clutched a letter which obviously contained bad news.

Next door a lonely secretary was eating beans on toast at six o’clock, illuminated by the cold, gray flickering light of her telly. She will finish her food by 6:20
P.M
., and then what? How about an evening stroll down by the gasworks?

The 1950s were grim. Nobody is to blame. That’s just the way it was.

In this rushing panorama of English life, recreational activities appeared to be extremely limited: taking a constitutional next to a polluted canal; dozing in a bus shelter; briskly walking to the local butcher shop. Housewives emerged from these establishments clutching bloody packages containing lamb chops or miscellaneous offal. They looked vaguely disgusted, as if they had been sold rotten meat. If anyone in England ever celebrated Teddy’s birthday, we certainly never witnessed it.

The bus stopped again. A very tall, severe woman with a crew cut climbed aboard. She was wearing a shirt and tie, a tailored army greatcoat, and flat men’s wingtip shoes. We recognized her. She was the receptionist at the local doctor’s office. Her name was Fern, and she sometimes wore a monocle.

Betty smiled.

Fern acknowledged Betty, saluting in a military fashion.

It was Rhett Butler doffing his chapeau to Scarlett O’Hara.

Fern’s air of masculine chivalry immediately restored order to the bus. The orphanage kids stopped spitting and wiping their phlegm on one another. Everybody onboard made slight postural adjustments. Fern had that effect on people.

Fern took her seat across the aisle. Betty and Fern caught each other’s eyes again and quickly looked away.

They had something in common.

They were two self-invented people wordlessly acknowledging one another.

On the next hill, the engine stalled. The bus stopped. The bus went quiet. We hoped it would not roll back down the hill and into the canal. Fern projected an aura of reassuring competence. We waited anxiously for the deafening engine to start again.

My sister broke the silence.

“Why is that lady dressed like a man?” she shrieked at the top of her lungs. Everyone turned around to look at Fern. Fern stared straight ahead. Betty lit a cigarette.

Betty glared at Shelagh, but Shelagh did not see. She was too busy staring at the fabulously androgynous Fern. Was she seeing the glimmering signposts to her own lesbian future?

“Well? Why
is
she dress—”

RRRooarrh!

The bus lurched forward. Betty exhaled a sigh of relief and nicotine and smoke.

Much to Betty’s relief, we were soon back at the bus station.

It was getting late. Terry would be leaving for work soon. If we hurried, we could all celebrate Teddy’s birthday together.

“M
y mother is called Betty, but her real name is Martha. She bleaches her hair and she drinks gin.”

I wrote this miniprofile when I was nine years old. It was part of a school essay. Our assignment was to describe each member of our family.

I do not recall how I described the rest of my nearest and dearest. I remember Betty’s blurb because, for years to come, she would hold up the incident as an example of my compulsion
to focus on the tawdry and unwholesome, to the exclusion of anything more cheery or heartwarming.

“Oh, great! I can hardly wait till parents’ night,” said Betty as she pored over the essay, having just poured herself a sizable gin and tonic.

“What about my weekly pottery class? You could have mentioned the silver cup I won for flower arranging.”

I did not really understand her point. It was not as if I had made the whole thing up. We all knew she bleached her hair. And damn good it looked too! Martha Elizabeth Doonan was, hands down, the most charismatic, glamorous mum in the neighborhood. She wore white pencil skirts, seamed stockings, maquillage, and figure-accentuating, long-line girdles. Next to Betty, the other kids’ tea-total mothers, in their sensible flats and sweater sets, looked like a bunch of middle-aged men dressed up as Queen Elizabeth on one of her off-duty corgi days.

And, yes, she drank gin. Uncle Peter, a family friend, worked for an illustrious London gin company. A bachelor and a bon viveur, he was no stranger to what he called the “sample room.” As a result, our sideboard was invariably groaning with stolen gin of various genres and vintages. On Friday nights he would ride over to our house on his motor scooter with a bottle of gin strapped insouciantly to the passenger seat.

Gin and bleach aside, it was a shock to me that Betty could not quite grasp the overwhelmingly complimentary thrust of my essay.

Betty Doonan examined her reflection in her compact mirror. She was checking on the status of the complex, much-admired
hairdo into which she funneled so much creativity. With a sigh of resignation, she took the bottle of peroxide out from under the sink.

“I can’t imagine what Mrs. McCann must think of me,” she said as she began to touch up her roots.

*  *  *

Mrs. McCann was not really concerned with the likes of Betty Doonan. Nor were any of our teachers. More’s the pity. They could have learned a thing or two from Betty Doonan. Betty was fun. Betty looked great. Betty smelled great. Betty made the world a more glamorous and amusing place. Betty was life-enhancing, and Betty judged everything and everybody on the basis of whether or not they too were life-enhancing.

Our teachers would never have qualified. They were not life-enhancing. They were life-corroding and life-disemboweling. While my home life was all gin and bleach and fun, school was the exact opposite.

To describe our teachers as “dour” would be inaccurate. They were completely and utterly Stalinist. Every school day was more of a gulag fest than the last.

There was nothing pedestrian about the way these gals enhanced our lives. They were extremely creative. Whether tying us to chairs with our own skipping ropes or subduing us with terrifying gusts of flatulence and halitosis, our tormentors were full of surprises. And, lucky me, I arrived just as an entire generation of these angry women were ambling into the menopause.

Our day started with morning assembly, which was staged and choreographed with totalitarian flair. Punctually and
wordlessly, we filed into the gymnasium in our green and gray uniforms accompanied by Miss Stoddard on the piano.

What cheery, uplifting selections did she favor to start the day? “All Things Bright and Beautiful”? “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of My Garden”? Much too prissy. With amazing libidinal passion and skill, Miss Stoddard pounded her way through “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Edvard Grieg’s ominous, throbbing anthem conjured the hellish kingdom of the Norwegian trolls and their dark and horrible leader, the Mountain King. With her relentless pounding, Miss Stoddard gave our morning gatherings a distinct feeling of impending folkloric genocide. She had brought us together only to eradicate us. We would never have thought of staging any kind of uprising. We were just a bunch of worthless little trolls, and we knew it.

Once assembled, we scabby-kneed trolls were called upon to sing gruesome, unlife-enhancing Anglican hymns about choosing “the steep and rugged pathway” and not wanting to linger “by still waters.” There was no mention of gin or bleach. The message was simple: the more grim life is, the more character-building will be its effect, especially upon wretched little trolls.

After a couple more hymns, we would repair to our various classrooms. These were designated as either A or B. It was a simple enough system: at the beginning of each year, the smart trolls were sent to A classes and stupid trolls went to B classes. Smart trolls were being groomed to attend the local grammar school, the gateway to a life of middle-class contentment. B troll boys like me were headed for the secondary
modern school and thence to a grim, fiery apprenticeship in sheet-metal welding, which was very troll-like, if you think about it.

Girl trolls fared better. They could look forward to, among other options, a hairdressing apprenticeship. This had a certain appeal to me. I had frequently assisted Betty in the application of her bleaching unguents.

It was around this time, not uncoincidentally, that I started to consider the possibility of gender reassignment.

One night when Betty was tucking me in, I impulsively told her that I had decided to become a girl.

“My name will be Clare,” I said, assuming a wistful demeanor, “and I will have very, very long blond hair.”

Betty smiled enigmatically and stared at the space on the pillow around my head where one day soon that long blond hair would lie in all its flaxen glory. Turning out the light with a jangle of her heavy bracelet, she advised me not to share my secret with anyone in my little B class or with that nasty Mrs. McCann. She might not understand.

Betty was right.

Mrs. McCann would never have understood. Mrs. McCann had never thought about the possibility of gender reassignment. Mrs. McCann did not think about anything much, except Canada.

Mrs. McCann had recently returned from Canuck country. She had traversed that continent on the Canadian Pacific Railway. The double-decker observation car had afforded Mrs. McCann a spectacular view of the endless wheat fields. For some reason she found this very life-enhancing. In fact, she returned
from this trip having fallen hopelessly and madly in love with wheat.

She elected to share her new passion with us, over and over again. In lesson after lesson, Mrs. McCann dragged us from one side of Canada to the other, while encouraging us to marvel at the immense, golden nothingness of it all.

Once she got warmed up, Mrs. McCann would stride about in front of the blackboard, twitching her dirndl skirt and tossing her dry, crinkly torrent of split ends, which coincidentally, had the consistency of wheat.

No detail of her sojourn was too small for our consideration. After the wheat fields, she introduced us trolls to the concept of grain silos and then more grain silos and still more. Time and time again her chalk would break as she passionately scrawled endless statistics on the board relating to the vastness of the Canadian prairie, number and size of silos, and the inconceivably massive amounts of grain which poured forth from “The World’s Breadbasket.”

Her travelogues were supported with brochures and personal snaps: Mrs. McCann boarding a train, Mrs. McCann staring into the middle distance on an observation platform, a grain silo, a wheat field, another silo. To this day, I cannot look at a loaf of bread without thinking of Mrs. McCann and the vacation of a lifetime which she shared with us over and over again, ad nauseam, ad delirium.

Her thinking was no doubt as follows: “Since these trolls and trollettes will never ascend to the level of society which permits transcontinental Canadian vacations, let them vicariously enjoy mine.”