We Had It So Good (12 page)

“Aren't your clients, or whatever you call them, just spoilt children crying to their mummies when they're sad? If you ask me they lack backbone.”

She was finding it more difficult than she had anticipated to build a list, and still more therapists were being trained, coming up behind her. That bloody English stiff upper lip, the stoicism, the determination to break down in secret. This, in the end was what decided her: to, as Stephen put it, “just go take a look!”

But Californians seem at ease, so shallow and content, she cannot guess what traumas they might conceal behind their lightly smiling faces.

They drive down along the coast road, south to Los Angeles. The scenery is spectacular and everything is incredibly
clean
. Andrea does not know what to make of the absence of dirt and disorder. “You could eat your dinner off the floor,” she says, as they go into a convenience store.

Stephen turned and looked at her. “Why the hell would anyone want to do that?”

“It's just an expression.”

“Well don't use it, okay? Not in America.”

The coast is incredibly beautiful, she's dazzled by the ocean light, the change in climate and vegetation, the absence of afternoon fogs, the sun as if it were always noon, the high spot in the sky. Now she feels alive. She channels the great physical freedom of America and understands, for the first time, how claustrophobic her husband must feel in little England, with its narrow city streets not made for
cars to pass each other. She covers one of his hands on the steering wheel and squeezes it.
It's going to be okay,
they both think, because frankly, how can it not be?

They spend the night in a campsite and the children paddle in a fast-running river, their parents' arms protectively around them. At night they light a fire and fall asleep in their sleeping bags under the stars. In the showers the next morning Andrea sees reflected in the mirror standing behind her two extremely fresh-faced women of no age she can determine, because none of the markers is present, dressed in shapeless linen trousers with shaggy colorless hair examining her critically as she applies her lipstick and mascara. She feels she has broken a cardinal rule of camping, that she is an artificial creature who has sullied nature's purity. In America she feels she wears too much makeup, even though she doesn't think she wears much at all, but her clothes are all wrong. They are, she has heard a waitress at a truck stop say,
fancy
. But she'll learn, she supposes. It's not as if normally Stephen could ever be dragged under canvas for the pleasure of it and if she has to dress down, in jeans and the plaid shirts everyone seems to be wearing, she'll do it.

Then they reach Los Angeles. A gigantic neon clown stands on the street advertising a liquor store. “Home!” cries her husband. “I
loved
that clown when I was a kid and we couldn't go in there because my folks never bought any liquor.”

Now they are in the city the skies suddenly turn alien, wide and flat blue, and nothing ascends up into them. Stephen's neighborhood is a
low
place, with houses that look to Andrea to be impossibly generous and expansive, lounging on their lots with yards and wraparound porches and swing sets and screens to keep out insects. She can't believe that these are lower-middle-class homes, built for people who work with their hands.

And the roads are ruled ribbons, going on and on. All intersections take place at sharp angles. No one is on the street, everyone is driving, or hurriedly getting out of a car onto the baking
asphalt of a parking lot and purposefully moving indoors. The appearance of all this, to Andrea, is something brand new, but its novelty is entirely kitsch, like the neon clown. L.A. seems to her to be relentlessly, aggressively banal. “Where are the shops?” she asks. “In the mall,” says Stephen.

Her instant anxious impression is that L.A. is far too vapid to require psychotherapists. What traumas lie beneath? Everyone is happy. Everyone is smiling, urging her to have a nice day, the first time she has heard this expression. It was a void statement. How could a supermarket checkout girl know what lay in store for you? Maybe you'd just had a cancer diagnosis, or lost all your money, or were on your way to a funeral. Yet the desire for others to be happy was slotted into a brief commercial transaction. Was unhappiness a rebellion against that great wall of social bliss?

The old neighborhood, the street where his high school still stands, and the memories of it almost entirely forgotten during his years in Europe—everything looks unfamiliar to Stephen, as if he had suddenly shot like a rocket through outer space to a parallel planet in which he sees the mirror image of what he has known, back to front. The modest homes and apartment buildings look as strange as if he were observing it all through the distorted vision of an acid trip.

The palm tree is gone. It got some kind of disease, he finds out later, and was chopped down. Its gaping absence in the front yard is an insult to him.

And through the front door are his parents. To his own surprise he bursts into tears at the sight of them, unable to tell and certainly not caring whether these are tears of joy or tears of sorrow at what the passage of time has done to them. But the tears erupt, all the same. He hadn't understood how much he had missed them, or the extent to which he had taken for granted their undying, uncritical love.

His father is considerably smaller than he recollects, and not a
lot left of his once black hair. His mother looks unbalanced in the chest area, because (and no one in the family had told him this, on the principle that there was no point in worrying him, unless the worst should happen, which thank God it didn't) she had breast cancer three years ago and has had a mastectomy. Her own hair has changed color altogether. From the jet black roll that she pinned back from her forehead, revealing her brown, kind eyes and her plump melting chin, she is now honey blond with what she calls platinum highlights.

“Mom,” Stephen cries, shocked, bewildered, uncomprehending. “Your
hair
!”

“I know, Stevie, I know. But it went gray and it's too expensive to keep coloring the roots. What do you think? Does it suit me? What do you say?”

It doesn't suit her at all, but he runs into her arms, into her navy blue crepe dress she bought last week at JCPenney for his homecoming, and once he has pressed himself against her, he understands that there has been a mutilation.

“My bosom,” she says. “It's not all there anymore. Don't worry, I'm okay now.”

“Oh, Mom,” says Stephen, and bursts into tears again, full of shame and disgust with himself for having been so far away when all these calamities were overwhelming her, oblivious, receiving the placid letters from home and reading them too quickly, taking for granted their misspelled contents and clichéd sentiments about how much they missed him, and the little news of life in the neighborhood, high school friends he had almost forgotten who had done well in their professions, had babies, bought a house. She had said nothing. He squeezed the breath out of her and smelt her gardenia perfume.

“So this is Andrea,” says his father. “And look, here are our beautiful grandchildren.”

Andrea had no idea his parents would be so
foreign
. His dad
is a little old gnomelike Jew with a guttural accent, nothing at all like the rather cold, stern Jews at the Tavistock Clinic who listened to Schoenberg in their offices and read Thomas Mann in the original language. Si Newman has the fleshy nose and large drooping eyes she has seen only in photographs of Polish men queuing up to be taken to an extermination camp. The Jewy face. And his mother, Ximena, is a garish dyed blonde with far too much frosted pink lipstick and too many gold necklaces. The two people standing there are cartoons of what she thinks of as normal human beings.

The kids won't let go of Andrea. Marianne is holding on tightly to her hand while she stares down her new grandfather and Max has his arms round her leg. Any minute he's going to wet himself. He has always been shy about asking for the toilet, and there will be a pool of urine on the carpet.

The sight of these parents takes her back to her father in his brief heyday, standing at the bar of the hotel in his claret-colored cravat and cavalry twill trousers. She can hear in her head her father say of a Jewish couple from Leeds who arrived at the hotel in a Humber Hawk, the wife with a mink stole and a pearl necklace with a diamond clasp, the fat son in shorts and a bow tie carrying not one but two hula hoops in different colors, and spinning a yoyo: “It's always the wrong people who have all the money.”

But Si Newman, who has never come across snobbery, whose only understanding of anti-Semitism is blond Polish boys with sticks torn from growing trees chasing you down the street, is out to woo his daughter-in-law. His son has come home with a wife, and a man must have a wife to
be
a man. It is the natural condition. Wives are kept sweet with gifts and promises and sometimes lies. This is the wisdom he has received from his coworkers at the fur storage warehouse, and the ones who raise their hands to hit a woman are trash. The simple, obvious differences between the sexes must be preserved and honored. Your son brings home a girl, and because
you have had no say in whether he should marry this girl, the deed already being done, she is to be treated as family, a condition which everyone, including Stephen, understands to be a lifelong prison from which there is no escape or parole.

Her photograph from the time in the squat, just down from Oxford, in the rabbit jacket by the cold light of the north-facing window, had reminded him of an old star from the early silent era, before women shingled their hair. The women had such innocence, their faces not obviously painted, apart from the lines of kohl drawn round their eyes. Of course, she is a few years older now, and a mother, and she has a self-assurance which he has seen before, in the assistants who came to pick up the stars' coats. This, he thinks, is a
capable
girl. It's a shame about her crooked teeth.

“You liked the coney jacket?” he says. “You still have it?”

“Of course I have it.”

“Well, I got you something to go with it.” And he hands her a gift-wrapped box. Inside the box, beneath its decorative wrappings, is another box.

“You bought me a box,” she says. She understands that this feeble joke is merely the self-defense of someone who has no defenses, apart from her husband, who has gone into the bedroom with his mother.

“This is what's known as a hat box. You never seen one?”

“I've never
had
one.”

Long ago her mother had had hat boxes. The hats had vanished and been replaced by an assortment of lipsticks and old letters, and their preserved ration books from the war.

Inside this box is a mink hat.

“Is that a kitty cat?” asks Marianne, who is just coming out of her drugged stupor.

Si places the hat on Andrea's head and adjusts the angle, lightly touching her hair.

“Jesus,” says Stephen, returning from the bedroom, his arm
around his mother's waist and his face still damp with tears. “What the hell's that?”

“A mink hat.”

“Wow.”

“It will keep her warm in the winter in London,” says his father. “The fogs are very cold, I guess.”

“Well, that's my big surprise,” says Stephen, “because we're moving back here, to America.” He feels exultant as he says the words, and his mother raises her hands as if offering a prayer to the god she has neglected, but who all the same has rewarded her.

What happened next taxes Andrea to the limit of her understanding of her new life: they move out into the garden, which Stephen and his parents called the yard, for a barbecue, a meal she has never heard of. You can have a picnic in the garden, sandwiches, cold roast chicken legs, cake, but to go outside to cook is just outlandish.

Si Newman has laid coals and placed giant steaks on a metal grill, haunches of animals marbled with white fat, and at the last minute throws on hot dogs for the kids. There is potato salad, green salad, corn on the cob in its green husk, also grilled on the fire, and potato wedges. Andrea has no idea how you might approach eating a corncob, which resists being cut into slices with her knife and fork. She watches as her husband picks the thing up in two hands and drives his white even American teeth into the kernels, mowing them down, butter dripping onto his chin, and tossing the empty cob over his shoulder.

She looks up, the sky is blue, not a cloud to be seen. The abundance of food amazes her. There is
so much
of it. The steaks drip off the grill, there isn't enough room for them, and Stephen grabs the fork from his father and moves them about the coals, a cigarette between his lips, his face fiery from the heat, sweating, happy, having kicked off his shoes, and turning before her eyes into
one of her own children while she remains seated on a lawn chair, experimenting with the taste of Thousand Island dressing. No, there is no salad cream, a condiment no one in America has heard of. They offer her mayo from a Hellmann's jar. She loves it. Can't stand the yellow mustard in a squeeze bottle.

Dessert is emerald green jelly (“Jell-O,” Stephen corrects her. “You might as well learn the right words for things”) in which marshmallows are embedded. The kids are in seventh heaven. Her own mother used to make a jelly dessert and empty in a tin of fruit cocktail, little cubes of fruit with the cherry the prized delicacy, but marshmallows are so exotic that she has never been able to work out exactly what you are supposed to do with them.

The children love the meal, Stephen adores the meal. Home is where the stomach lies, she thinks. She will not be getting him to eat brown rice again, or lentils or nutritious soups made of cheap ingredients.

This is how we're going to live from now on, she thinks. Out-of-doors. She thinks maybe she can plan a garden, but none of the evergreen bushes on the grass is recognizable to her. Since she has been in America she has seen no roses.