The English American (22 page)

T
HANKS TO THE TRAFFIC
,
it’s ten thirty at night, and the lights are off in the kitchen when I finally arrive at Little Tew. I walk through the dining room, breathing in the smell of my parents’ house, clean, old, as comforting as the sound of the grandfather clock and the wooden cuckoo that will pop its head out in half an hour.

Mum and Dad are in the little sitting room at the back. Dad is asleep in the maroon leather chair that Granny H. had in her house when she was alive. Mum is curled up on the sofa, shoes off. The fire is going strong. Dad must have been chopping wood recently, as the wood basket next to the fireplace is full and several extra logs are neatly piled up next to it.

They’ve obviously fallen asleep in front of the telly. Mum stands as I come in, smoothing her pale blue cashmere sweater. She smiles sleepily at me.

“Hallo, darling,” she says, kissing me on the cheek. She smells of Mum. And ever so faintly of the lavender soap Charlotte gave her last Christmas.

“Hallo, Mum,” I say.

“Hallo, Pip,” Dad says. He looks awfully sleepy, too. Tucking in his shirt, he pats me on the shoulder.

“Good flight?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Good film?”

“I watched several actually.
The Queen
was especially good. Gives you a completely different perspective on the whole Diana thing.”

“Yes,” Mum says.

My new green suitcase from Target is standing at the bottom of the stairs. It’s enormous. I thought it was a good deal, getting that much suitcase for twenty-five dollars.

“Good God,” Dad says, picking up my suitcase, “I thought you were only here for a week!”

“Sorry, Dad. I couldn’t decide what to bring, so I brought everything. I’ll take it up.”

“It’s all right,” he says, unable to keep the irritation out of his voice. “I’ll do it.”

He’s almost sixty. He looks a little older than he did six months ago. The suitcase bumps up behind him, stair by stair.

“Do you want anything to eat?” Mum says.

“It’s all right,” I say. “You must be tired. Why don’t you go upstairs to bed, and I’ll see you in the morning?”

“I think we will, darling. Do you mind?”

“Of course not.”

I do mind. I mind terribly that they would rather go to bed than break their usual bed-by-eleven-o’clock routine and spend a little time with the daughter they haven’t seen in six months. I mind that they accepted my offer to get a taxi from the airport, rather than have them drive all the way to Heathrow at rush hour.

Neville calls it Ping-Pong. His theory is that Mum and Dad want to pick me up at the airport as much as I want to be picked up at the airport. But because we’re always putting the other person first in our family, we try and guess what the other person wants to do. And we never tell anyone what we want to do, in case there’s a clash with what the other person wants to do. For a second Billie’s voice rings in my head.

“Would it be so terrible if you just told them the truth?”

I consider the thought for a second. And then dismiss it. I’ve spent the last six months thinking about Billie and what she thinks about things. I’m only in England for one week.

Mum and Dad are in their immaculately tidy bedroom, which looks out over the South Downs. I can hear them talking quietly as they get into their double bed, which is tiny by American standards.

Mum and Dad change their bedroom wallpaper every five years or so. Right now, the room is light blue. They still have sheets and blankets, rather than duvets. In the middle of the blanket is a safety pin, put there by Dad, to make sure Mum doesn’t take more than her share of the covers. Their clothes are all hanging up, or carefully folded and placed in the correct drawers.

Dad’s shiny cedar dresser is on the right-hand side of the room. On top is a shoe horn, a comb, a wooden clothes brush with dark brown bristles, and green and silver nail clippers.

Mum’s shiny cedar dressing table is on the left-hand side of the room. On top is the same Mason Pearson hairbrush she’s had for thirty years, a bottle of Christian Dior perfume, and a light blue makeup bag, containing powder, pink lipstick, blue eye shadow, and a little blush from Boots, which she only puts on for parties.

After devouring three pieces of toast and marmalade and drinking a glass of milk, which, after months of Skinny Cow 2 percent, tastes rich, creamy, and delicious, I go upstairs to my bedroom.

Mum and Dad have put new curtains up since I left. They’re green, and they have ruffles and a peach lining. Mary Wesley, Anne Tyler, John Fowles, and Jane Austen are among the paperbacks on the chest of drawers. The books are neatly stacked, in order of height, between two metal bookends. Dad has put my suitcase on the wooden suitcase stand by the bed.

I hear Mum’s feet padding gently along the corridor, past the enlarged photograph Dad took of Charlotte and me skiing ten years ago, in the Pyrenees. And a more recent one of Mum sitting on a cairn, with Boris, somewhere in Scotland. She looks quintessentially, gloriously, utterly English in her green anorak, brown corduroy trousers, and walking boots, with her dog by her side.

Popping her head around the door of my room, Mum hands me a hot water bottle in the panda bear cover I gave her last Christmas. She’s wearing her Marks and Spencer nightie—the light blue one with the white ruffle round the collar—and a comfy pair of light green slippers.

“It’s lovely to see you darling,” she says, blowing me a kiss. “Sleep tight,” she says.

“Sleep tight, Mum.” I listen to Mum pad back along the corridor to her room.

I am much more tired than I realized. Perhaps because this is the first time I’ve felt truly relaxed since I went to America. Except for that one time at Jack’s. Actually, those two times at Jack’s. Before I can work out how many times I’ve been to Jack’s, I am asleep.

Thanks to jet lag, I’m awake at four o’clock in the morning, so I go downstairs to make myself some more toast and a cup of tea. Boris is lying in his dog basket under the kitchen table, but gets up, tail beating against the kitchen floor as I feed him some of my toast and Dad’s homemade marmalade.

The pink and yellow pottery mugs from Greece are still hanging from the hooks under the kitchen cabinet next to the window. The tartan drying-up cloth is still folded over the rail by the sink. The white electric kettle is still in the same place, next to the tin of Earl Grey tea. The yellow ceramic pot with sugar written on it is still next to the slightly larger pot with flour written on it in the same lettering.

Mum’s new Too Hot to Handel oven gloves are hanging where her blue and white checked ones used to hang, on the hook next to the oven. The plastic rotary in the cupboard is still home to the salt and pepper holders, the Ryvita, the marmalade, the honey, and probably the same jar of Marmite I ate from before I went to America. Yes. Everything is still here. Reassured, I kiss Boris good night and head back upstairs to my room.

Five hours later I can hear Mum and Dad’s voices coming up from the porch. I used to come home from university and sleep for days. Dad’s always complained about it.

“She’s still asleep.” Dad sounds put out.

“Sssh, darling. She’s exhausted. She’s lost so much weight. She’s tiny and terribly pale. Can’t you tell how tired she is?”

“Yes, but she’s only here for a week. And she’s come to see us, not to sleep!”

I walk into the large, drafty bathroom at the end of the corridor, with its claw-footed white iron bath and hundred-year-old copper taps. In a reluctant concession to modern life, Mum and Dad installed one of those plastic showers the English are so fond of, that eventually dribble lukewarm water over you after you’ve let it run for at least five minutes. I choose, instead, to have a bath.

Drying myself with Mum’s soft cream towel, I turn on the electric heater above the mirror and, feeling cozy and warm, look out over the Sussex countryside, soothed by the quiet.

When I come downstairs, Dad announces he’s going on a sponsored bike ride to raise money for the Sussex Historic Churches Trust. “Why don’t you come with me, Pip?” he asks.

I really just want to spend the day at home. In fact, I’d rather do just about anything than spend a day biking around the English countryside in the rain. But Dad looks so hopeful, and I haven’t seen him in months.

“I’d love to,” I say.

I put my packed lunch in the dark brown wicker basket attached to the handlebars of Mum’s light blue Raleigh bicycle and follow my Scottish father on his black Raleigh bicycle past hedges and tractors and trees, along the narrow country road, and down the hill into Peaseminster. He’s wearing waterproof trousers, a blue windbreaker, and the baseball cap I brought him from New York. I’m dressed in Mum’s blue windbreaker, which has a hood.

As we come into town, Dad shouts, “Coming through!” to anyone within five feet of him.

I follow him through Peaseminster’s tiny cobbled streets, past the little shops with Wall’s ice cream signs outside. We bike past Muriel’s Cream Teas, Pickwick’s Bookshop, Mary’s Coffee Shop, and in and out of alleyways, through the ancient streets, from church to church. The town is one of England’s oldest and has no less than twenty churches. The average congregation numbers about twelve, which is quite large for the Church of England.

Old women with blue hair sell cups of tea and orange squash for fifty pence each every fifth church or so. They sit behind little tables, under umbrellas, counting change and trying to keep the plastic cover that’s supposed to keep the rain off the tea from blowing away in the wind.

“You remember my daughter, Pippa,” Dad says to the old women whenever we pass by one of the sodden tables. His face is wet and red and his eyes are alight, alive from all the exercise. He’s smiling. Charming them all. “She’s here for a week,” he says, biking past. “From America!”

“Must be lovely to have her home!” they call after us.

“Yes, it is,” he says. “It is.”

Dad doesn’t stop for a rest, and I dare not ask for one. Somehow I manage to keep up with him as he bikes up hills, through woods, past streams and the duck pond, where small boys in green Wellington boots are feeding yesterday’s toast to the ducks. Dad only stops when he sees an ill-placed Coke or beer can. Then he sighs loudly and gets off his bike. Then he puts the offending article in the plastic bag, which hangs from the handlebar of his bike specifically for that purpose and takes it to the nearest bin.

We’ve been biking for six hours when we reach the chapel at Gately Castle. It was built in the twelfth century. The dark gray gravestones are covered with moss and weeds. And everything—the grass, the air, the inside of the church, which was built out of damp, old stone—smells of England.

Dad knows exactly when each church was built and who built it.

“The only good thing about religion,” he says, “is the architecture.”

At last we reach our final destination, Peaseminster Cathedral, with its great arches, domes, and the crypt in which the first earl of Peaseminster is buried.

I was confirmed in this cathedral. All the confirmation candidates, as we were called, were driven by our parents and godparents into Peaseminster from St. Margaret’s in our white confirmation robes. After the service, a huge tea was laid on for all the parents back at the school, complete with sticky currant buns, chocolate cake, and help-yourself Ty-phoo tea, which we poured into thick-rimmed white ceramic teacups from enormous silver urns.

Today a boy’s choir is rehearsing Mozart’s “Ave Verum” in the loft above us. I’d like to go up and see them, but a light-blue velvet rope at the bottom of the stone spiral staircase stops me.

“I’ve stopped going to church,” Dad says, as we’re on the final stretch, headed home. “I’ve decided it’s all a load of rubbish.”

“But you’ve been church warden at St. Luke’s for years!”

“That’s only because they needed a good accountant. They’ve got an American vicar now. One of those bouncy evangelicals. He’s got everyone playing guitars and throwing their arms up in the air left, right, and center. I can’t stand the music.”

On our way home, Dad and I sing all our favorite songs, from “What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor” to “Loch Lomond.” Dad’s rich baritone voice blends with mine, loud and clear against the traffic:

At supper, Dad and I devour several helpings of Mum’s steak and kidney pie, then polish it off with a bowl of treacle pudding and custard.

“You can always count on a twenty-mile bike ride to help you get over jet lag,” Dad says, patting me on the head. “That was fun, Pip. I’m off to bed.”

M
UM AND
I were wondering how you were doing for money,” Dad says the next morning. I’ve slept through the night until ten o’clock and feel rested for the first time in months.

“Fine,” I say.

“We were wondering,” Dad continues without pause, “because, according to your June credit card statement, which we opened by mistake before forwarding it to you, you owe MasterCard three thousand pounds.”

My first thought is to be thankful that he didn’t open May’s by mistake. It was five thousand last month. I borrowed money from my Visa credit card to pay it off.

“You know what the credit card people want you to think, don’t you? They want you to think it’s free money. Well, it’s not free money!”

“Yes, Dad, I do know that,” I say, feeling about twelve years old again.

“They’re charging you hundreds of pounds in interest!”

“Yes, Dad, I know.”

“So why don’t you pay it off?”

Dad looks utterly bewildered.

I’m cornered. There is no way out here. “Because I can’t. Okay, Dad? I can’t.”

“Just put twenty percent of every paycheck aside…”

“Dad, I don’t have a paycheck.”

“What do you mean you don’t have a paycheck?”

“Dad, Billie doesn’t have enough money to pay me. So I’m working in lieu of rent.”

“She’s making you work for rent?”

“Well, yes. All American kids pay their parents rent.”

As soon as it’s out of my mouth, I wince. Luckily, Dad doesn’t seem to notice what I just said.

“I’d have thought after everything…well, she might bloody well spring for that!”

Dad gets up, storms into his study, and comes out with a check-book—one of the new ones from the NatWest Bank, with furry little beavers on it. He hands me a check for three thousand pounds. “Here you are, Pip,” he says.

“Dad, I can’t take this!”

“Take it,” Dad says.

I’m mortified. Ashamed. Embarrassed. Relieved.

Charlotte and Rupert throw me a Friends of Pip party on my last night at Rupert’s flat in Kensington Gardens. It’s filled with familiar faces from the world I knew before I found Billie. Charlotte’s hair has grown longer now, but is still cut in a trendy bob, shorter at the back.

Charlotte expresses her excitement at seeing me by cooking huge amounts of food. Only Charlotte could keep a cream silk dress clean while making forty-four profiteroles, by hand, without an apron.

“Who’d have thought it, Pip?” she says, spooning the gooey mixture into tidy little eatables. “You, a singer and performer. In a club in New York City, no less! You must meet so many interesting people.”

Because Charlotte and Rupert seem to find it so exotic, I tell them all about The Gold Room, and the open mike competition I’ve entered.

And, for that evening, even though everything has happened, it also feels as if nothing has happened. I am standing in an overcrowded London kitchen, drinking warm Budweiser with drunk English people I went to university with. Everyone’s as pleased to see me as I am to see them.

“Life is dull as ditchwater without you around, Pip,” Neville says. “I haven’t been on an all-day pub crawl to ease the heartache of whichever poor sod made the mistake of falling in love with you in yonks. London has become unutterably boring.”

And Miles is there, standing next to a bowl of Twiglets and a sensible-looking woman, who Neville tells me is a physiotherapist from Gloucestershire. I’m surprised to note that the man who once could have destroyed me by so much as looking at another woman could be holding on to one in front of me a year later and I’d be more interested in the Twiglets. She looks nice. She’s probably domesticated, too.

I have nothing left but a feeling of mild affection for Miles. I’ve often thought that the moment you realize you’ve fallen out of love is far more exhilarating than falling in it, and I think it again now.

“Hallo, Miles.”

“Pippa.” We kiss twice on each cheek. “This is Clare.”

“I’ve heard so much about you,” Clare says. “You sound so
interesting.
”

There was a time when I would have cringed at this. There was a time when I wished, more than anything, that I could be less
interesting
and just blend in. Not anymore.

Clare’s utterly sweet. She’ll be perfect for Miles. And then we’re interrupted by Jan—and Fiona and Fiona and Fiona.

“Pippa!” Fiona says. “Pippa!!!!! Pippaaa!!!” Her long white arms curl around my neck. “How’s America?”

“Oh, full of Americans,” I say, “but apart from that it’s fine.”

It’s a cheap shot, but guaranteed to make everybody laugh. When they do, I feel like a traitor.

“I’ve no idea how you can even think of living in that country,” someone says, burping. “Everything’s so excessive. The Americans always have to have the biggest car, or the hottest weather, or the biggest trade deficit.”

“And they can’t talk properly, either!” someone else chimes in. “They can’t even ask for a glass of water! Last time I went to New York somebody actually said, ‘Do you want to hydrate yourself?’”

Everyone guffaws. I’d forgotten how snobbish the British are about Americans. The put-down is delivered with an air of absolute superiority, which is ironic considering the fact that so many of their paychecks come from American companies.

Now one of Rupert’s cricketing buddies is talking about an encounter he had the week before with that eternal target of British mirth, a lost American tourist.

“I wanted to say, ‘Noooo. We don’t pronounce the “ham” in Buckingham Palace!’”

“Why didn’t you?” I say.

He burps. “Why didn’t I what?”

“Why didn’t you say, ‘We don’t pronounce the “ham” in Buckingham Palace’?”

“Pippa!”

“I’ll tell you why,” I say. “Because what you British call politeness is really a kind of cowardice.”

“
You
British?” Fiona says, laughing, “Oh come
on,
Pip. Next you’ll be telling me you love everything about America, including its appallingly imperialistic foreign policies.” She’s a little woozy, and I love her, but she looks so smug about it, and I just can’t stand it.

“As opposed to what? Nonimperialistic British foreign policy? Wasn’t it
we
British who marched into India and Africa and said, ‘Now listen here, you little brown buggers, we’re white, and you’re not, therefore we’re going to take over your country’? At least George Bush can be excused for being too stupid to understand the consequences of what he was doing when he went into Iraq. Tony Blair’s smart as a whip.”

“Blair’s an idiot!”

To most of the Americans I know, Blair looks like a genius next to George Bush.

“At least we march against the war in this country, Pip, even if the bloody government doesn’t take any bloody notice,” Fiona says.

She’s right to point this out. Nobody marches in America much. We send e-mails. It satisfies the impulse to protest without requiring any actual effort.

I wonder, not for the first time, what happened to the children of the Americans who took to the streets in protest against the war in Vietnam.

“Bloody Blair,” Fiona says. She can’t stand him. No one can stand him. But she is distracted from her tirade by Neville, who kisses her neck and pulls her off into the sitting room.

Later, when pressed, surrounded by four Fionas, one Neville, one Rupert, and a Max, I say, “There are lots of good things about America.”

“Like what?”

Like the fact that I can do what I’m doing, performing in nightclubs, without anyone questioning me in any way. I’d never have been allowed to set foot on a comedy or cabaret stage in London. My accent’s too posh. No one would have let me get past the “fuck off back to your Cordon Bleu cookery” attitude, despite the fact that I really can’t cook.

I’ve spent the last few months feeling homesick for England, but by the end of the evening, I feel homesick for the United States. Where I can be completely myself because no one has any preconceived ideas about me at all. Where the school I went to is irrelevant. Where no one cares who I vote for. Where enthusiasm is considered a good thing. Where everyone’s far too wrapped up in their own lives to care whether or not I have any fashion sense.

But the people standing in this London kitchen have made up their minds about America, and they’re not going to change them. And so, to keep the peace, because it’s easier, when they ask again, “What’s good about America?” I take the easy way out and say, “George Clooney and…well, George Clooney.”

The next morning, I call Mum and Dad from London as I’m leaving for the airport and tell them I’ll be back soon. Dad picks up the extension.

“It was lovely to see you, darling,” they say.

“It was lovely to see you, too.”

That’s not true either. It wasn’t lovely at all. It was far too short a visit, and with so much left unsaid, painful, difficult, and complicated. But it’s what we say to one another, because we’re English.

Charlotte and Rupert drive me to Heathrow, and I get on a plane and go back to America.