by Wendy Burden
Worst of all, she then had to tell me afterward how pleasantly surprised she was by the size of his penis.
Like a lizard dropping its tail to avoid capture, I stopped speaking. I walked the three miles to school rather than have to communicate with the bus conductor. Outside of the house, I transmitted through the written word, telepathy, or kinesics, which meant I did a lot of wild shrugging and facial gesticulation. When displeased, I pretended to vomit; when happy—well, I never was. My teachers were hardly sympathetic, and it wasn’t long before my hands looked like I’d been knitting with barbed wire.
At home I practiced in front of the bathroom mirror:Privacy—pri(not prie)-va-see
Schedule—shed-dule
Sexual—sex-yoo-all
Vitamin—vit(not vite)-a-min
Zebra—zeb-rah
I made a decision to radically alter my wardrobe and began to clothe myself in what I imagined to be the expression of a sexual free spirit with countercultural values. I wore lace-up Greco-Roman sandals, fruit-colored snakeskin waistcoats, long hippie skirts I sewed myself, and Spanish shawls with trailing fringe. I frizzed my hair out and carried hobo handbags that also trailed fringe. I went fringe crazy: I had fringed jackets and fringed Indian boots and fringed leather skirts and wristbands with clacking, beaded fringe. You could hear me before you saw me.
In order to be an insouciant free spirit, I knew I’d have to understand the vocabulary of one. Unfortunately sodomy was not in the school dictionary. Fortunately, my mother supplied me with the definition one evening without my even having to ask.
“D’you know what shodomy is?” she said, plonking herself down across from me at the kitchen table where I was doing my geometry homework. The thunk of her soda can echoed in the hard-edged room. We had just moved (for the fifth time) into a house that appeared to be for keeps. It was a small, newly constructed, two-storied brick box attached to a very large six-car garage. My mother had outfitted the rooms with cheap Danish furniture. She’d hung her beloved knights up on the walls, but even they looked uncomfortable. Reimagining herself as the kooky artist, she’d painted the kitchen a migraine orange, and furnished it with a picnic table varnished to a blinding gloss.
“I shaid, do you know what shodomy is!” she repeated, after a deep suck on the can.
“As a matter of fact—”
“I’ll tell you what it is. Is fucking illegal, thas what it is.”
“Shodomy is illegal? But—”
“Not SHODomy, shodomy!”
“Right. Shodomy. S-H-O-D-O-M-Y.”
She flapped her hand and leaned over to snatch my fountain pen. She wrote out s-o-d-o-m-y on the cover of my rough book—the precious, state-provided, teacher-monitored notebook that only pen-sill was permitted in.
“There.” She sat back and took another hit. “Shodomy ish fucking in the ASH.” She pounded with the soda can for emphasis. Great. Now there were rum stains to enhance the inked profanity.
“Well,” I replied, affecting nonchalance, “isn’t that what poofters do?”
She drew her head in like a tortoise.
“Poof-ter! Poof-ter? What kine of a word ish that? Shodomy ish what your shtepfather doesh to ME.” She sat there, fiddling with her straw. I sat there, twirling my compass. I was not entirely sure what I was supposed to do with this information.
“An I don’t like it,” she added, after a long pause during which I considered my options. If nothing else, it was one word down in the song (plus the title) from Hair, with only thirteen more to go.
“An I’m wan a divorsh,” she said, tossing the straw over her shoulder and tilting her head back to gulp her drink. Gone was the red face of stoicism; she was teary. I elected to act indifferent. I just wanted to get back to trying to figure out the Pythagorean theorem
I don’t want to know this, I thought.
“It hurts,” she whimpered, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her robe.
She brought this on herself. My father’s passport picture flickered in my head. (Oddly, it was the only picture I had of him.)
I stood up and went around the table to fetch her a paper towel. I waited while she blew her nose on it, and then I threw it in the garbage. I massaged her rigid shoulders until she stopped crying. I took a sponge from the sink and cleaned the table where some of the rum had spilled, though I knew I didn’t have to. My mother would be wiping the kitchen down late into the night, drinking and wiping, forestalling bedtime with the mechanical and comforting motions of housekeeping.
As I was about to retreat to my bedroom, I had a thought.
“You wouldn’t happen to know what pederasty means, would you?”
The key to becoming part of a coed peer group is a willingness to exchange saliva. Once I understood this, my social education began to progress in a relatively normal way—if you can call dating a guy with a harelip normal. Melvin Moss was the richest boy I knew. Which wasn’t saying much, given where I went to school and the select coterie I hung with. Rich, in my new life, did not mean four houses and a staff of twenty. Rich meant your family owned two cars. It was almost as if Burdenland and the immoderation of my grandparents’ life had never been a part of mine.
Melvin was not exactly a hot ticket. You could tell that he was the kind of guy who would eventually require an instructional flowchart to participate in real foreplay, but for my needs he was fine. All I required was a snogging partner in order to gain access to weekend parties. I’m not sure Melvin knew I was American; it’s not like I ever said anything more to him than “No—the bra stays on.” Melvin, who pronounced his own name Mayo-vin Mosh, had been patched up at some point, as evidenced by a seam on his upper lip where the hair of his “mustache” parted. Still, speech did not exactly flow out of him. So what; he wore skintight, long sleeved T-shirts and cool bell-bottoms, and he had a snaky little body like Mick Jagger’s. More importantly, his parents had a color TV.
Everything was going according to plan until I tried to give Melvin a hickey. We were at his house one Sunday afternoon in the humid company of four other writhing couples, in the den with the curtains drawn. Cream’s Disraeli Gears was on the turntable, and the parents were at the pub. I had no idea how to give a hickey, or a love bite, as the Brits call them, but that didn’t stop me from trying. Trouble often evolves from confusing semantics, as illustrated by Melvin’s reaction when I bit him. I really was being penetratingly sexy, so I was baffled when he leapt up and shrieked, “Hit! Wash-oo oo at or!” The party came to a grinding halt as everyone popped up his or her head. With both hands clamped to his neck, Melvin sprinted for the bathroom and slammed the door. What a baby. There was hardly any blood.
I picked up my fringed shoulder bag with all the colonial dignity I could muster, and left the house via the back door. Tidying myself as best I could in the garden, I considered my options. The Thames lay in front of me, and I thought about jumping in and floating downstream to my house, because that would have been the easiest way of getting home without having to talk to someone. Judging from the progress of a drifting branch, however, I’d be able to vote before I pulled up to my own backyard. I started walking to the nearest bus stop.
I was waiting for the number thirty-three when a beat-up red Austin pulled alongside the curb. I recognized the dark-haired girl in the passenger seat as Josephine Doran, a typically aloof classmate in my form at school. (So she had been half of the pretzel in the armchair.) The driver, clearly her brother, leaned across and said, “Oi, Yank—want a lift then, do you?” Three gangly boys shoved over for me in the backseat, and I burned out my quadriceps trying to put as little of my weight on them as possible.
“You all right back there?” the driver called above the volume of the tape deck. He introduced himself as Chris. “Crikey, Melvin didn’t half look bloody daft for carrying on like that!” He laughed a smoker’s hack, and I blushed as unbecomingly as a mandrill.
“Don’t be silly,” said Josephine, thinking my lack of reply came from a
puritanical sense of outrage. “Melvin’s so sexually frustrated he often needs a proper set-down to keep him in his place. I shouldn’t worry if I were you.” She flipped her long, curly hair over her shoulder and turned around to read my reaction. She resembled her brother in that both had pasty, troubled skin, small dark eyes, and mouths that were wide and thin-lipped. Her upper teeth had curious tiny ridges along the edges. Josephine was the better looking of the two, simply by nature of her sex and her palpable self-confidence.
The boy named Nigel, upon whose boney thighs I was pretending to lie like a feather, began to mimic Melvin’s snuffled inflection. Soon they all were punching one another in the arms and calling one another fuckin’ git and cuntface, which is a charming colloquialism English lads like to address one another with.
Chris shouted above the fray, “Where d’you live, then?”
I mumbled my address in as Canadian a tone as I could muster. Nigel repeated it in a yee-haw twang.
“Don’t mind him,” Chris said, “he’s fuckin’ mental. Broom Water Road—that’s not far from our house, innit?” I nodded. I had no idea.
The car swerved as Chris extricated a pack of squashed cigarettes from the rear pocket of his Levi’s. These were passed around to salutes—Fuck! Gauloise! and Bloody brilliant!—and lit from a plug in the scratched metal dash. The car rapidly filled with acrid French smoke. Josephine cranked down her window with a look of sovereign disgust and said, “You can leave me off at home first, please, or I shall asphyxiate.” Unlike Chris, who employed more glottal stops than someone actually missing a glottis, Josephine spoke a beautifully precise Oxford English.
“I need the fuckin’ loo,” called out Nigel, to the relief of the others who were desperately holding in an afternoon’s worth of lager. We stopped shortly thereafter at the Dorans’ narrow row house on the Stanley Road.
I waited self-consciously on the upstairs landing as, one after another, the lads emptied their bladders. My foot was finally on the threshold, so to speak, when a humpbacked old woman came out of nowhere and nipped in front of me, slamming the door in my face. I waited, legs crossed, my teeth sunk into my lower lip. I leaned my forehead against the paper-thin wall and held my hand against the swelling tide below. I pressed my ear to the door and heard only the sound of pages being turned.
Just as I reached the point of no return, Mrs. Doran came up the staircase. She was a comfortably untidy, German-born woman with a far more questionable take on the King’s English than mine, particularly as it was punctuated every other second or so by a considerable facial twitch. To me, that spelled kindred spirit.
“Would it be okay if I used a different bathroom?” I stammered sotto voce.
“A different bawsroom? Sorry, love (twitch, twitch), we’ve only the one. Takin’ her time, is she?” She banged on the door. “Here, Granny! Put that bloody book down and get a move on—there’s a queue.” To me she added, “The silly cow gets stuck in the middle of a Louis L’Amour and you can’t get her out till she’s finished.”
From the living room downstairs Mr. Doran called out, “Tell the Yank if she wants another bog she can use the garden. We won’t look.”
The furious unrolling of toilet paper could now be heard from within. This was followed by a series of grumblings and grunts and sighs, and the elastic snappings of supportive garments. Suddenly, Granny burst out with the energy of a water buffalo, leaving the flimsy door banging in her wake, and a brown-colored odor suspended like woodsmoke. I slipped in and locked the door.
Plastered to the bottom of the bowl was a chocolate swirl of dung. With averted eyes, I carefully lined the seat with toilet paper and sat down. The residual warmth from Granny’s old arse radiated disturbingly into mine, but the release of Niagara was so blissful, I got over it. With curiosity, I looked about the bathroom that serviced an entire family of six. A sarcophagean tub took up most of the space. The paraphernalia of personal hygiene was everywhere: loofahs, acne medicine, Tampax, shampoo bottles, toothbrushes, aspirin, tweezers, eyelash curlers, bottles of nail varnish, shaving cream, eye cream, and thirteen different cakes of soap. Drying panty hose and bras hung from towel racks, and hooks, and the window knobs.
If the room hadn’t been so smelly, thanks to Granny’s mighty turd, it would have been downright cozy. It was warm, and, like a good English bathroom, it had thick wall-to-wall carpeting. Waist-high stacks of paperback books encircled the toilet and lined the walls. With the exception of a pile of mysteries, they were all American westerns. I selected the well-thumbed More Brains Than Bullets and began reading.
A thump on the door brought me up sharply.
“Oi! Yank! D’you fall in, then?” called Chris. I hurriedly wiped up and dashed out. He grinned at me but then reeled back dramatically and clutched his nose.
“It wasn’t me!” I squeaked.
“Right,” he laughed, and continued to hold his nose as he entered.
I wilted down the stairs. As I entered the living room, Mrs. Doran pressed a large mug of milky coffee into my hands. I looked at it with trepidation, not knowing then that it would be the first of ten thousand four hundred and fifty something cups of instant Nescafé that I would consume under that roof. I was offered a cigarette, which I declined, and then a seat, and then a biscuit. For a good hour I sat on a sprung couch amid a pile of old papers and Radio Times magazines and quietly took the place in. The boys from the back of the car had invited themselves for supper and were now going judgmentally through a shelf of LPs under the windows. The working-class, beer-bellied man of the house sat next to the television, smoking and flipping through the evening papers, his eyes up and down on everybody in the room, doling acerbic one-liners out sparingly and to great effect. A dog that looked like a stegosaurus lay with its armored head on the master’s feet.
Trying to absorb the dialogue gave me vertigo.
“. . . If Manchester don’ bloody win next week . . .”
“Shut up, you lot! I can’t hear the bleedin’ news!”
“. . . And the stupid git carried on about the Magna Carter until break . . .”
“Is everyone rich in America, then?”
“Bloody hell . . . Granny’s back up in the loo again . . .”
“Ma, Jo stole my nail varnish. Ma . . .”
“. . . Oh, don’t get your bloody knickers in a twist, Jane . . .”
“D’you know the Monkees, then?”
“. . . and that fuckin’ Wilson, you wait till the next election . . .”
“Does everyone talk like you in America, then?”
“Oh, leave the girl alone! It’s not your fault you speak funny, is it, ducks?”
“No, it is NOT my turn to do the washing up, cuntface.”
“Dad, Granny’s screamin’ bloody murder . . .”
“But why can’t I leave school at fifteen? It’s no bloody use to me . . .”
“. . . with his willie stuck in the effing milk bottle . . .”
“No, YOU deal with her—she’s not my bloody mum—”
“. . . he got it at the beach fight in Brighton over the weekend . . .”
This is bloody brilliant, I said to myself, trying on Josephine’s favorite expression. If I’d wanted to remain silent, it would have been a snap; you had to fight to get a word in edgeways with this lot. But unaccustomed levels of caffeine opened the linguistic floodgates, and I began to rattle on about the number of radio stations on US airwaves, and frozen food aisles in supermarkets the size of rugby fields, and the proliferation of McDonald’s and Hot Shoppes and Burger Kings and Roy Rogers and Howard Johnsons and White Castles and Kentucky Fried Chickens, and how many Ferraris my dreadful stepfather had and how it did less than nothing to make him appealing.
“We’ll take you in as a lodger in exchange for one of those cars then, right?” joked Mr. Doran carelessly. I prayed he didn’t catch the sudden welling of my eyes. If only. I was happy for the first time in eons, happy and stupidly full of hope. And then I remembered that I
had my own puny family and they had no idea where I was.
“I think I better use a phone,” I said to Mrs. Doran. She told me theirs (their single theirs) was in the kitchen. I thought about how my grandparents had his ’n’ her four-line telephones on each side of their beds, and next to the toilets in their bathrooms, and how there were two on either side of the sofas in each of the living rooms of their four houses. I thought about how many bathrooms there were in each of those houses, and felt ashamed. In the New York apartment alone there were fourteen.
The phone was answered on the first ring: “Beer here.”
“Oh—uh, hi,” I said. “I’m, um, just calling to let you, um, know that I’m okay and, um, I’ll be home soon, after I have supper which, um, the Dorans have, um, in-invited me to, um, stay for.”
There was a silence, and then my stepfather responded, “Do you have any idea how many ums you have just said?”
I was pretty well used to this, he having been married to my mother for four years now, so I told him I had no idea, and that I would be taking the bus home.
“No,” he said, with the kind of heaviness the air has when thunderheads are getting ready to crash about. “One of us will collect you.”
I gave him the Dorans’ address, hung up, and began to fret over which was going to be more embarrassing—being picked up by Hitler, or by Barbarella.
The latter, as it turned out.
Josephine and I were taking a magazine sex quiz when the doorbell rang. Jane, the youngest, scrambled to pull open the front door. There stood ma mee, resplendent in a white leather miniskirt and matching vest, and thigh-high wet-look vinyl boots that revealed a good four inches of her bare orange thigh. A silver Dino Ferrari was inefficiently parked with one wheel on the curb behind her. Jane gaped. Everyone in the living room rushed to see the apparition, and I felt my lunch percolate near the region of my colon. Lowering her oversized sunglasses, my mother said, “May I come in?” That was my cue to stream up the stairs to the fortunately empty bathroom.
