by Wendy Burden
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.
The woman who ran the gift shop had my number. “Lovely, innit?” she simpered, hovering beside me as I gazed longingly at the scat-like thing. “I’ll just wrap it up for you then, shall I, luv?”
Now really, what did I want with someone else’s toenail when I still had my own collection from three summers ago? I was hemming and hawing, trying for once to be economical, when I spied out of my little eye my mother preparing to burgle. She had entered the church in her yellow tartan reversible cape (now you see me on the yellow side, now you don’t on the black) and when last seen, like two minutes ago, had still looked like a school bus in a cave full of bats. Now she was a bat. I’d seen her do a double take at the ornamental stonework by the baptismal font. If I was going for the toenail, I’d better hurry.
“I’ll take it!” I called to the shopkeeper, a little urgently. She bustled on over.
“You’ll get plenty of use out of this, you will,” she said. “Why, I’ve a bit of her ear meself, and when me and my Stan have a row I go straight to where I keep it in a tin, and I ask her for help, I does. American, are you?” I swallowed hard as I held out the ten-bob note I’d been planning to spend on a couple of Mars bars and some salt-and-vinegar crisps.
“Ta, ducks.” She handed me my relic in a small brown envelope. “Care for some snaps of her torture chamber to go with it? Only half a crown . . .”
I apprehended my mother just as she was preparing to chisel a pint-sized gargoyle from its perch of several centuries. She hissed at me as I shoved her off her mark, using my little brother, her accomplice, as a sort of bludgeoning tool. I had to repeat this several times until she eventually scuttled out the door
of the church, damning me to hell in front of God’s House. Her unappreciative behavior led me to consider slipping the toenail into her Diet 7UP can. I considered it all the way home, and then, to prove I hadn’t lost my Wednesday touch, I did it.
By the following winter my mother and brother and I had been to just about every stone circle, henge, barrow, ring, and hill-fort, every ruined Norman wall, turret, keep, abbey, and urinal, every Celtic cross, Iron Age fortification, medieval castle, Roman site, Neolithic flint mine, Saxon church, and Gothic cathedral within a ten-hour drive—including the Cheddar and Wookey Hole cave dwellings, Grimes Graves, Long Meg and Her Daughters, Ackling Dyke, Bevis’s Thumb, and the incomparable Pike o’ Stickle (Britain’s biggest source of stone axes and the alleged home of the saintly nipple hair of the Martyr Thomas Plumtree).
My mother’s favorite was Stonehenge, as would be evidenced by our Christmas cards over the next several years.
“Here, kids, back up against that trilithon and let me take the picture. Jesus, Wendy, wipe those crumbs off your face. And don’t you have any lipstick? What are you now, thirteen? Oh, use mine. Now, where is your brother? Edward! What do you mean you don’t like frosted pink? Just use it. EDWARD! Jesus H. Christ, I turn my back for one goddamn minute—”
Edward was at the developmental stage where boys like to urinate on weird things. He was partial to one of the Station Stones outside the circle.
My mother considered Stonehenge to be her personal archeological site. She had a chip off every stone except for three, and she would have gotten those had they not erected a fence to keep enthusiasts like her out. She was also extremely fond of the Uffington White Horse Hill Cut. In the garage there was a gallon bucket filled with chalk that she’d filched over a number of visits to the site. Once, when I’d allowed our new dog to poop in the vicinity of the horse’s head, my mother had become apoplectic. I’d carefully apologized, the way one does to a psychopath, but she’d reiterated that it had been a bratty thing to do and Jesus H. Christ why couldn’t I show some respect for a prehistoric figure dating back to 2000 B.C.? Sparks had flown.
“Oh yeah? Well stealing the chalk the Celts made the thing with, and then carting it home in a Baggie sounds real respectful,” I’d come back with.
Scooping the stuff as fast as she could, my mother had matter-of-factly pointed out that no one loved animals more than her, especially horses. She was right, of course; and when the sexton would lower her into the hallowed Puritan dirt of her former playground, the Milton Cemetery, the only thing my brothers and I would throw on top of her coffin would be a tattered photograph of Puck, her favorite hunter.
Into our second year, and our third rental, I remained pretty much friendless. Among other things, my accent had refused to adapt, unlike that of my little brother, who within minutes of arrival, had taken on the piping tones of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Even my mother had developed an accent, albeit an ultra-embarrassing, inaccurately feigned Oxbridge one. On a good day I could barely pass for Canadian.
For my birthday that year, a sympathetic and well-paid “babysitter” took me to see Hair, the “American tribal love-rock musical,” in which a guy gets drafted and a bunch of hippies on acid screw their brains out while they rant about the Establishment. Then the guy goes to Vietnam and dies. I don’t remember much else—except all the words to all the songs because I bought the LP as we were leaving the theater and I played it from the second I got home until the needle wore straight through to the other side.
People left the theater saying things like, Wow, that really blew my mind, and Yes, peace will guide the planets and love will rule the stars. All I knew was that I had heard more dirty words in an hour and a half than I had in a lifetime, and that fourteen men and women had taken off all their clothes and demanded that I stare at them. Heretofore life had been pretty much about horses, trying to reach the end of puberty, keeping up with modern mortuary science, and steering clear of my mother’s relationship with the Antichrist. Hair was a hormonal wake-up call.
I had also walked out feeling tight with Uncle Sam again. This was Hair—the American tribal love-rock musical. Not the British one. And the Brits were spending pounds to see it. I was so proud, I let my accent rain down on everyone in section CC, and then out onto the streets of the West End and into a steamy little café we stopped in to warm ourselves before heading home on the tube. That was a mistake, because the frazzled tea lady behind the counter had not had the pleasure of seeing the show.
People were pressing in on one another, yelling for service and trying to stay clear of the harried waitresses. When my babysitter at last got the ear of the tea lady, she had to shout out our request over the din of crockery and laughter and short-order jabberwocky.
“Whot? You want two cups of tea and a whot?” the tea lady yelled back at us as she simultaneously ladled soup into a take-away container and rang up a bill for a pedophile who kept elbowing me in my future bosom.
“Yes, please,” my babysitter screamed back politely, “that’s two cups of tea and some buttered toast, please.”
“Some whot?”
“Er, toast, if you please. Any sort will do. And some butter on it would be lovely, thank you ever so much.”
“Oats?” she shouted back, her hand to her flabby ear. Good God, the English. This was no time for gentility; I was starving. Emboldened by my patriotic musical experience, I put my face into the tea lady’s bestial one and hollered, “Tea and hot buttered toast, please!”
Maybe I only imagined that the room went morgue-quiet, and that everyone heard the tea lady repeat what I said with the most torturous mimicry imaginable. In my head the ruddy English faces moved in with the menace of a lynch mob. The tea lady stuck her dishpan hands on her walrus hips and, wagging her head with each nasal syllable, said, “Sam hat badderrrrd towwwst? Is that what you bleedin’ want, now is it? HAT BAD-DERRRRRRRRD TOWWWSSST?”
I shrank away from the counter in the most intense self-loathing and mortification of my short, miserable life.
On the tube ride home I came to the conclusion that the only way out of this misery was to change my nationality. And what better way to begin than by desecrating my passport, thereby getting rid of the evidence. Following this liberating act of treason, I felt better—until I got in serious trouble, not only with my mother (Jesus H. Christ, Birdbrain! You think that’s going to solve your problems? Contact lenses and mascara are what you need!) but more enduringly with my grandfather.
En route to Paris, my grandparents had stopped in London for a night. Edward had ratted on me during a lull in the feeding of the sea lions at the London Zoo, where my grandmother had insisted we go following lunch at the Connaught. My grandfather was speechless with rage; so speechless that I thought I’d escaped relatively unscathed—until the quiet dark of the Nocturnal Mammal House unlocked his tongue. We were standing in front of the slow loris exhibit when he let me have it. “That’s an act as blasphemous as burning the flag!” my grandfather thundered. The lorises watched, unperturbed, and continued to munch (very slowly) on grasshoppers behind the glass.
In a swell of bravery I lashed back. “I don’t see what’s so great about being American!”
“I suppose you prefer the dismal mediocrity of socialism to democracy?”
I had no idea what he was talking about, and I said so.
“You truly are the most ignorant girl—have you not heard of freedom? Or private enterprise? I’ll tell you what’s so great about your country—”
“Bill!” my grandmother interjected, laying her gloved hand on his rigid arm. “Please. The animals are feeding. Can’t we chat about this over tea and scones back at the hotel?”
“You have no idea what it’s like to be an American here. Everybody hates me. The kids in my school, the greengrocer, the bus conductors, they all hate Americans. HATE them. The only time anyone’s been nice to me at school was when we watched the landing on the moon, and that only lasted until they turned off the TV in
the auditorium. When I won the academic prize at the year-end awards, they practically stoned me. You want me to be patriotic and die?”
“Of course not, dearie, we just don’t want you to forget who you are,” said my grandmother.
“Are you kidding? I won’t survive another week here if I don’t.”
“What utter rot!” blustered my grandfather.
In the near total darkness, his was a disembodied voice, with correspondingly little effect on me. Burdenland might have been in a different galaxy for all it mattered. I had more in common with the dentally challenged, loudly dressed, and hushed-with-wonder family next to us than with my own blood, my grandfather in his pinstripes and homburg, my grandmother in a Givenchy dress patterned with exploding roosters, clutching her poodle-portaled pocketbook. A Bentley waited by the zoo entrance to whisk us all back to the world’s most expensive hotel.
“Bloody hell!” piped Edward, nose to the glass. “The little bugger’s eatin’ ’is mate!”
“That’s it,” said my grandfather, pounding the floor with his tightly rolled umbrella. “It’s boarding school for both of you!”
The populist family shot us a collective look of horror and scooted over to the ring-tailed lemurs.
“Oh yeah?” I hissed at him. “Well you’ll have to drag me there!” I turned back to the lorises, who appeared to be watching our domestic exchange with deep interest.
“’Allo, cuntface!” Edward chirped to the small creature staring back at him.
It probably should have bothered me that my older brother and I were like strangers now, but it didn’t. Will remained my grandparents’ favorite, and I wanted nothing to do with him. Our relationship had quickly unraveled after his departure for boarding school, and now there wasn’t even the common ground of Burdenland. For the first three years we were in England, I didn’t go back to the States, and Will had come to visit just once. The only thing I can recall of that awkward Christmas break was that my brother capsized his kayak into the winter-cold Thames, and my mother “had to” dive in to “save” him. Like he hadn’t spent about ten summers learning to swim at camp. She fake-rescued him while he was hanging on to the overturned kayak maybe two feet away from the quay at the bottom of our garden. Then she hustled him inside and got him undressed and into a hot bath like he was a baby instead of a fifteen-year-old. I was beside myself with jealousy.
