I could have built a substantial career on the thousands that were to follow.
When I returned to school after spring break, I decided to reinvent myself. Throughout the fall and winter terms I’d put in my usual time in the principal’s office for misdemeanors ranging from Extremely Poor Attitude to coauthorship of a slam book, which is basically a compendium of the filthiest words in the English language.
Now I resolved to become a good student, starting with my English class. I remember exactly what I was wearing when I finally got an A for something other than an art project. It was free dress day and I was proudly dressed in geometrically patterned go-go boots, beige windowpane tights, a faux leopard hip-hugger miniskirt with a white plastic belt, and a black skinny-knit poor boy sweater.
God,
I was cool.
“My, my,” said the teacher as she handed out graded papers to the class. “Somebody had a wake-up call this vacation. Either that, or some very much needed tutoring.”
I accepted mine from her and checked out the big beautiful A. “I’ve been reading,” I said.
The bell rang and students started leaping out of their chairs. Miss Gleason rapped her desk with a ruler for attention. “Quiet down! Now listen, it will be your own choice for next week’s book report, so I will expect creativity. And remember, comics and record liner notes do
not
count.”
I smiled and patted my book bag. I was halfway through “The Monkey’s Paw.” Future book reports would practically write themselves.
Oi,Yank!
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.