by Wendy Burden
When I came back down ten minutes later, my mother had not disappeared, but was sitting in Mr. Doran’s armchair with a glass of water and a napkin folded on her naked knee. Everyone was sitting up straight, minding their Ps and Qs and trying not to stare. My mother was chattering away about her upcoming trip to the Canary Islands, and how these fabulous new bikinis were designed to let sun in so that you could get an allover tan without being nude, and how she had just been accepted to Christ College at Oxford University. With her phony accent, she sounded like Churchill doing a drag act.
“Oxford. How luffly,” said Mrs. Doran with a tremendous tick of her nose and upper lip.
“Yeah. But if you don’t mind me askin’, what on earth for?” said Mr. Doran. He wore a bemused expression, like someone half-tolerating the parlor tricks of a pomeranian.
“Hell no, I don’t mind! I’m getting my doctorate in numismatics,” my mother explained with a toss of her hair. Her roots were showing and I couldn’t wait to tell her.
“What the fuck is that?” asked Chris politely. His pinky crooked out daintily from a coffee mug that depicted Sneezy and Bashful in an act of homosexual congress.
“It’s the study of coins. In my case, ancient Greek coins. I’ll be doing my dissertation on a particular hoard from the island of Aegina. It’s absolutely fascinating because some of the coins have tortoises with three marks on their backs and some of them have four, though they are of the same denomination, which has led experts to conjecture—”
“Time to go,” I yipped, snatching up my things and heading for the door.
“I thought you were going to stay for supper,” Josephine said. “We can give you a lift home, can’t we, Dad?”
“Well, I am a bit hungry,” my mother began. I pushed her rudely out the door and down the uneven sidewalk and wrestled the driver’s side door of the Ferrari open with so much force it nearly came off its shiny little Italian hinges. I practically threw her in. A small crowd had grouped themselves around the car, but they took off when they saw the lightning bolts shooting out of my eyes.
After a couple of failed attempts, my mother got the engine going and we moved off.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” I said. “Those are MY friends and you are NOT welcome there.”
“Oh, poppycock,” my mother retorted, missing the gate on the gearbox for third and grinding the lever back into first. The engine nearly leapt out of its compartment in anguish.
“I’m serious,” I said. “You leave them alone. If you don’t, I’ll dump out every bottle of Bacardi I find from now until I leave home for college.”
We had stopped at a zebra crossing to let a group of ladies in blue raincoats and orthopedic sandals cross. My mother had her hands on the steering wheel in a death grip. In a quiet voice she said, “But I’m lonely too.”
Poof! I made the sudden (unwelcome) sensation of compassion disappear. “Get your own friends,” I said coldly, and turned my face to the window to hide my shame. The car bucked into first and stalled, and we sat there.
Christ. I finally get a life, and I can’t shake her. “I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t really, but honestly, it didn’t cost me much.
“Yeah, well I’m sorry too.” After that, neither of us said anything, we just stared at the black leather dash and the swoop of sparkly platinum metal beyond it, until finally she restarted the engine and turned the car around, bumping up over the center island and scraping the low front of the undercarriage with a sickeningly expensive sound, and drove me back to the house on Stanley Road. I told her I’d be home by ten and climbed out.
The Dorans were having a meal my mother would have appreciated, if not partaken of: fried eggs, fried streaky bacon, fried sausages, fried bread, fried tomatoes, deep-fried chips, and tinned beans. We ate on our laps in the living room with the telly on and the wireless squawking in the kitchen. Mr. Doran and Chris and his friends chain-smoked while they ate. Jane had a crying fit because she felt ignored. She would remedy that situation in the not so distant future by giving birth to her first child at fifteen.
Mr. Doran ran me home in his battered Rover. He dropped me at the end of my street as I requested, too embarrassed for him to see the house I lived in. It was modest by American standards, but a mansion compared to the street of dismal houses and tiny littered yards where I’d just been.
“Night, then, Yank,” he called from the rolled down window. His long gray face, his eyes narrowed from the smoke of a No. 6 permanently hooked in his mouth, would become unimaginably dear to me. But I had only an incandescent inkling of that as I hurried down the dark street to my mother’s house.
George
THIRTEEN WAS HUGE for me. I finally got to see a grown man naked, and I fell in love—although not with the same person. The naked man was my stepfather, and seeing his fruit bowl only increased my aversion to him.
It was late at night and I’d been up reading Forever Amber. Ravenous from all that wanton behavior, I decided to make some toast and slather it with butter, Restoration London style. My room was adjacent to the kitchen, which was extremely convenient for nocturnal refreshment, and at night the kitchen became an integral part of my bedroom suite. So you can imagine my irritation when I opened up the door to see my stepfather bare-assed in front of the refrigerator.
I had to stuff my hand in my mouth to keep from screaming. Apart from my two brothers, the David was the only male anatomy I was familiar with, and his was the aesthetic penis of high art—a tidy marble package crowned with a pyramid of tastefully coiled tendrils. On backlit view in front of the Tupperware and cottage cheese and orange juice was a limp sea cucumber, one of those nasty, squirting, shell-less things that untalented fisher-persons like myself are forever pulling out of the ocean in a clump of dark, stringy kelp. No wonder my mother hit the Bacardi.
My stepfather was busy chugging a bottle of milk so I knew he hadn’t seen me, even though his wandering left eye seemed to stare out from beneath the Adolfian thatch of hair. I watched until he drank to the end of the bottle. He replaced the foil top, leaving an inch of spittle-laced backwash for someone’s cereal in the morning (my brother’s, because I wouldn’t tell him), farted robustly, and exited the kitchen. I closed my bedroom door on feathered hinges, leapt into bed, and yanked the covers up over my head. My appetite had vanished, probably for life.
One week, sixteen hours, and twenty minutes after my conception of idealized manhood was shattered (teenaged diaries are all about detail), I sat at the kitchen table slogging through a government-issued copy of The Merchant of Venice—in German, which made it even more gripping, if possible. My mother leaned against the sink in the late afternoon sunlight, reverentially bathing a head of jet-lagged iceberg lettuce like it was the Christ child. Her recent discovery of the Food Halls at Harrods—and, consequently, other long lost friends from departed shores: Tab, Rice- A-Roni, Chef Boyardee, Chun King, and Carnation Instant Breakfast—had so appeased her, she’d cut back on her dosage of Miltown by 200mgs.
A mound of raw chopped beef lay on a piece of butcher paper beside the sink. From time to time my mother would pinch off some of the meat and dunk it into what looked like floor sweepings.
“How the bejesus have I survived for two years without Lip-ton onion soup mix? And dreamy iceberg,” she said, smiling beatifically down at the puny lettuce on the drain board. Slicing a minuscule wedge, she spooned some gelatinous dressing over it and, shuddering with pleasure, took a bite. I flinched from habit as her teeth rang annoyingly on the tines of the fork.
My mother always changed for dinner before her husband came home from work. Tonight she was wearing one of their all-time favorites, the crocheted brown micromini dress. As usual, she skipped the underwear. The dress must have been made with the largest hook on the market, because there were more spaces than yarn, and my mother’s nipples poked through them like pencil erasers.
On cue, the rumble of a 3.0-liter V-12 engine could be heard turning onto our street. I
t revved to a wail as it streaked past the four Victorian row houses before our hideous detached modern brick. The Ferrari 250 GT spun through the gate and squealed to a halt in front of the only noncommercial six-car garage within forty miles. Out sprang Herr Peter Beer, as immaculately groomed as when he had left the house ten hours earlier. His gray flannels were still sharply creased, his shirt tautly tucked in, his custom John Lobb side-buckled shoes as glossy as when they’d come out of the box, and the black Hermès briefcase he gripped had barely sustained a scratch in ten years of service. The Ferrari gleamed as well, but he had me to thank for that: punishment in our house was dispensed in the form of a tin of simonize wax and an afternoon of flunky labor.
It was lucky I still didn’t have much of a social life. Given my propensity for screwing up, waxing my stepfather’s sports cars took up a fair amount of my time. There were six of them: a Porsche, three Ferraris, a Mercedes-Benz Gullwing, and its 300 SL roadster counterpart. Each perfectly maintained specimen was painted with about a million coats of silver lacquer that my stepfather insisted be buffed, burnished, stroked, and rubbed in a particularly exhaustive (and punitive) fashion.
My mother waved to her husband out the kitchen window, then returned to the stove to dump a cylinder of frozen orange juice over the pale carcass of a duck. She shoved the pan into the oven, licked her hair into place, and took a suck from her 7UP can that could have drained a wading pool.
“To—ré—a—dor, en gar—dé! To—ré—a—dor!” the Antichrist belted as he fussed about the Ferrari, flicking the road dust off with a feather duster, unrolling the fabric car cover, and enfolding his baby in it for the evening. He fancied himself a misunderstood tenor and sang opera far more than was necessary. He sang it all with theatrical gusto, in the seven languages he was fluent in.
The garage door ground shut. Smooth leather heels sounded on the front path. And then, “WAA HOO!” hailed the Tenor. The front door sprang open with a rush of 4711 cologne.
“HOO WAA!” returned my mother, whipping off her apron.
“Where are you, little one?”
“Coming, my Lord and Master!”
That was always my cue to exit stage right so I wouldn’t have to watch him suck out her tonsils and make bread out of her butt.
Beneath the stairs in the core of our house was a triad of tiny gun rooms. These were referred to as the outer, the middle, and the (high-caliber) inner sanctums. Within were samples of what was represented in the tens of thousands at my stepfather’s arms factory: Soviet AK-47s and Dragunovs, Israeli submachine Uzis, German Walther PPK pistols, Belgian Brownings, Italian Berettas, French Chatelleraults, Chinese and Dutch hand grenades, American M-79 grenade launchers; you get the picture.
My stepfather was all for sharing his enthusiasm for the weapons industry.
“Look at this beauty,” he said one evening after dinner, placing a rifle in my seven-year-old brother’s lap. Edward sat on the floor, still in his gray flannel uniform shorts, his shirt untucked and spotted with spaghetti sauce, his tie askew. He’d been playing with his Matchbox cars and was justifiably uneasy at having been singled out for enlightenment. My mother glanced over from where she was slunk in a black butterfly chair (in a leather mini and fishnets) working on her thesis. She was in her second year of graduate school at Oxford.
“Some jokers think this is an AK-47,” said my stepfather. “Ha! It is not!”
Edward stared dolefully at the weapon. Inspired, the Lord and Master leapt up and exited the living room to return a moment later with another hulking assault rifle.
“This is an AK-47.” He leveled the gun and peered with his non-roving eye down the sight at Inky, our recently acquired pound dog, who exhibited her hallmark stupidity by yawning back at him.
Taking up the original rifle from my brother, he stroked it lovingly from its slotted forearm to its cutout skeleton stock. “And this,” he crooned, “this is an SVD: a Snayperskaya Vintovka Dragunova—the first rifle specifically designed for sniping!”
“Blimey,” said Edward, dutifully, and looked toward his mother. But she had given up trying to shield him from these stepfather-stepson moments. Her hands tightened on her notebook, but she said nothing.
“That old Dragunov, now he knew how to design a rifle! The magazine alone took eleven months and twenty-three days to design!” My stepfather said this in an awestruck, Russian-accented whisper, as if he could hardly fathom such a feat of creation.
“They may look the same, but the likeness is strictly cosmetic.” He was trying to transfer some of his zeal to this pathetic child. “The critical difference is the gas system. The Dragunov has a short-stroke gas piston, do you understand?” Edward’s lip trembled and a tear rolled down his cheek. He knew he was failing in the role of stepson, but he was powerless to act any differently. Like all of us, he was terrified of the man.
“Ach!” said the Lord and Master, sitting back on his heels in disgust. “Leslie, your son is a coward.”
“Waaahhh!” cried Edward.
My mother remained in her chair, conjugating Greek verbs, and sucking hard on her 7UP can. She’d make up for Edward later, in bed.
Puberty had not been going too well for me.
After school one day my mother had marched me into the underwear department of the local Marks & Spencer.
“Listen,” I’d hissed to her as, one after another, she snapped through the racks of gargantuan brassieres, “I don’t even want a bra! Everyone at school will laugh at me—even more than they do already.”
“Oh, poppycock.” She had signaled to the saleslady, a steel-haired matron with a proud, two-acre chest, as I slumped in my mortification.
“I can’t believe you don’t carry a 32AA.” I clutched the glass counter at my mother’s pronunciation of “can’t” as cawn’t. Her fake accent was a constant source of public humiliation.
“I am most dreadfully sorry, madam,” the woman clipped back, her metal spectacles disdainfully down her nose, her hands in prayer over her balcon.
“Just what do you expect girls this age to do?”
“Why, we expect them to grow, madam. I shouldn’t worry, time will take care of her.” She turned with dismissal to the next customer, a spotty girl with double Ds who stood arm in arm with her quadruple-E mum.
My suddenly American mother had grabbed the saleslady’s pink arm. “Well we don’t have time. My daughter needs some boobs now.” With her free hand she continued to rifle through the bras. “Just find me four of the smallest goddamn bras you’ve got, already.”
In the end, her Yankee ingenuity overpowered my modesty. In front of The Avengers that evening, my mother stitched me a set of breasts. She cut the padded cup of a generic brassiere along the seam, brought the bottom half up over the top, and sewed it back into place.
“The sooner we get you into one of these, the better,” my mother had said through the pins in her mouth.
The result was a spongy but credible B-cup bustline.
I wore my new chest out shopping the following weekend, and imagined the admiration of every boy along the high street. I came home and actually hugged my mother. This was a mistake—it convinced her she was making headway.
On the morning of my fourteenth birthday, while I was inhaling a celebratory stack of toast drenched in butter, my mother presented me with a small, carefully wrapped present. Wiping my hands on my school uniform, I took it from her.
She beamed. “Go on, open it up.”
I did, and sat frowning at a round plastic container. “What is it?”
“It’s the Pill, nitwit. Do you love it?”
“The Pill? I don’t need birth control.”
“Bullshit,” she laughed, unwrapping the cellophane from her own breakfast, a caramel-flavored Ayds candy, and popping it in her mouth. “Maybe you don’t now, but you will soon. Trust me.”
“Did you send Will a six-pack of rubbers when he turned fourteen?”
“Are you kidding? He’s just lik
e his father. He’s so sexless he wouldn’t know what to do with ’em.”
I stashed the thing in my bathroom with all the unopened boxes of Tampax she continued to buy me every month.
Within hours of becoming friends with Josephine Doran, I had adopted her family. All that was lacking was the paperwork. In their compassion, the Dorans allowed me to live at their house pretty much full-time without actually residing there, which greatly improved my view of humanity. It amused me no end to think of my grandparents coming to visit me there, my grandfather having to use the Doran household bathroom, or my grandmother being offered Nescafé in the mug with the fornicating dwarves as she perched on the edge of the sprung mohair sofa in a pink shantung Mainbocher with Dino the stegosaurus salivating freely against her side.
Despite her imperfect features and pockmarked skin, Josephine was pure jailbait. There was something minxish about the way she hiked her pleated brown kilt high up on her thighs and slunk her kneesocks down around her ankles before trotting past boys, men, and grandfathers even.
In her wake I began to make progress. After I left the house on school mornings, I would emulate the master by stuffing my brown felt boater in my book bag and rolling my kilt up at the waist so that the hem barely reached the bottom of my regulation brown wool knickers. We timed it so that Josephine and I caught the same bus to school. I’d get on five stops earlier and wait for her in the front seat at the top of the double-decker bus. When we reached our stop near school, we’d flounce down the twisty stairs and hop off in front of the butcher shop. With our noses in the air, we’d traipse past the lab-coated apprentices as they staggered from truck to shop under enormous, stiff carcasses. Swiveling around to gawk, they’d bang into one another like stooges, tripping over the sides of beef and mutton hind ends. It was a revelation that all I had to do for attention was wear falsies and show my underpants.
