Gladys Reunited

by Sandi Toksvig

  ‘Don’t do that!’ she said, clearly annoyed with me. ‘I wanted to look for myself.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know’ And I didn’t. I thought she would be just like me, pleased to be in it at all. It was the sort of mistake that I was to make with Rita all my life. Rita and I get along but sometimes it is despite ourselves.

  Much of it has been my fault In 1975, when [had been living in England for three years, Rita came over to visit. For my first two years at boarding school I had seen my parents only during the long holidays when there had been time to fly back home to New York. It had taken me almost exactly six weeks of silent isolation by my dorm at school to develop the most perfect of English accents. I had survived in an alien place by fitting in, by becoming the most appalling chameleon. I had unexpectedly turned into a model student. Well, there was nothing else to occupy the hours of tedium. The common room had an old record player with three singles, no radio and a TV which we watched for half an hour on Thursdays and an hour and a half on Saturdays. The TV was colour but it had been retuned to black and white after an appearance by Gary Glitter on Top of the Pops had been deemed too exciting for us girls. The rest of the week I worked hard, tied my tie with great care and wore the Englishness of it all with a necessary enthusiasm.

  By the third year my parents had abandoned America and had moved back to Europe. There was no longer any need for me to live at school but I think they had got used to my being there so I stayed. I didn’t want to but I stayed. Then Rita came over to Britain for a holiday. My mother picked her up from the airport and brought her to school. We hugged when she arrived and then I whispered, ‘What are you wearing?’

  Rita looked down at her plain black trousers. ‘Pants, why?’

  ‘You can’t wear trousers at the school.’

  ‘I’m not at the school,’ she said reasonably.

  I was appalled. She did not fit in. I did not fit with her. Everything I had built up could be destroyed. I had, in a remarkably short time, turned into a prig. A prig with received pronunciation. She and I went off to Paris. She wanted American food and I wanted her to hold her knife and fork properly. I behaved badly. I thought she was ill-mannered and gauche.

  ‘She is, I’m afraid, an American’ echoed in my head. It was I who had lost my manners and certainly any ability to just relax, live and let live.

  Four years later it was my turn to visit America. The Gladys Society had been formed through a mutual love of theatre but of us all Rita was the one who seemed to hunger for theatrical success. The only daughter of doting Catholic Italian-Americans, she had had a suburban upbringing as far from the bright lights as it was possible to get. Her parents, Rosemary and Angelo, were practical, good people. I don’t know what her father did but I am pretty sure her mother was one of the first to teach computer skills. They were kind sorts but not live-wires. These were not people who listened to show tunes and had an opinion on the impact of Bob Fosse on Broadway. They liked to keep the yard nice and make decent cabbage and beans. Rita, however, was determined to follow a more glittering path.

  The last time I stayed with her was in 1979, when she was living in a tiny apartment in the shadow of the 59th Street Bridge in New York City. That year, Rita had graduated in journalism from a university in Binghamton, New York, a place upstate that I had never heard of before and couldn’t think of any reason to visit. Now she had a Jewish boyfriend called Ron and was busy trying to break into show business. Rita had decided to become a stand-up comic. I was twenty and had just completed my first year at Cambridge. I wasn’t really sure what a ‘stand-up’ was. Britain always lagged some way behind the States in terms of development and the great ‘comedy as the new rock and roll’ boom had yet to arrive. It would be another year before I first appeared on the opening night of the fledgling Comedy Store in London. Rita and Ron’s apartment was small and my then partner and I slept on a pull-out bed in a sort of corridor between their bedroom and the kitchen. Through the dusty windows you could see the bright lights of the bridge. It seemed a very daring place to live. Down the hall an unbalanced tenant had lined her entire front door with aluminium foil. She lived in fear of a UFO invasion and did what she could to protect herself.

  ‘Aliens up your asshole!’ she could be heard to shout as you tried to pass silently. It was a world away from the quiet halls of Cambridge academia where returning library books late caused shock.

  Rita wasn’t actually working as a stand-up at the time but wanted us to see her act. She stood in the tiny sitting room of the fourth-floor apartment doing her routine.

  ‘Welcome to the Smegma department store where we…’ she started doing a comedy voice. I tried to laugh but it wasn’t going all that well because I didn’t understand all the references and, being a nice gay girl, I certainly didn’t know what smegma was.

  As well as the stand-up, Rita was also co-writing with two others, trying to break into the situation comedy writing field.

  ‘Do you think you’ll make it?’ I asked her.

  ‘Making it’ was a big subject for discussion.

  ‘Success is out there,’ she assured me. ‘You just have to want it enough.’

  Meanwhile, Ron was earning a living as a lighting designer at the Manhattan Light Opera Company. My partner and I went to see one of his shows. It was very light and very pink. Ron and Rita were in the thrust of New York theatre. Their apartment was decorated with posters from shows, they had every musical album ever recorded and there wasn’t anything going on in ‘the business’ that they didn’t know about. Theatre was everything.

  Ron and Rita are now married. I went to the wedding many years ago. It was a sweet affair, the highlight being Rita’s mother reading a poem she had found on a Hallmark card in the local newsagent’s. Sixteen years later and Ron has turned into a ‘good husband’, ‘a marvellous father’ and a man who runs a human resources company. Rita is a mother of three and earns her living teaching computer skills. She lives in the suburbs, about a mile from her childhood home. We are all grown-up.

  After my night of therapeutic television, Richard returned to the flat full of good spirits and bearing morning coffee. He was excited. He was about to meet his first Gladys. Not a concept I had ever thought to hear him utter. We grabbed a cab on Bowery and spent the next ten minutes frying to explain to the driver where the Empire State Building was. We would have been quicker but my Somali is not really up to scratch. New York is a city where cab drivers make a living by simply driving but having no idea where anything is. lf the metropolis wasn’t laid out on a grid system, God knows how anyone would get anywhere. We drove on through the bright morning. Richard was busy trying to take home movies out of the window but I just couldn’t stop looking. It is an incredible place.

  The assault on all my senses, which had started so early, went into a higher gear. Fires and police emergencies erupted around us like small volcanic bursts, steam hissed up from the subway rumbling under the street, while everywhere people seemed to be yelling. On a street corner, a man dressed as a pharaoh in purple and gold silk proclaimed his religion of choice while a soberly suited businessman took time out to shout his disagreement. We passed homeless people wailing in madness, as music poured from shops and passing cars. Scooters and skateboards scratched across the pavements all carrying adults in neat suits wearing trainers. Smart executives roller-bladed to work. I saw hardly any children. It is a place of grown-ups, restless, noisy grown-ups.

  I think life on Manhattan is like that because of four things:

  1. Everyone drinks too much coffee.

  2. It’s an island.

  3. Everyone wears comfortable shoes. Even for the business person, the trainer is king.

  4. Getting a cab is a nightmare.

  So if you put all that together — they are pumped up with coffee, living in a confined space, no one can get a cab and everyone is pounding around in comfortable shoes — you get a hive of bursting activity. If I could think of eight more things
I could turn the whole lot into a twelve-step programme.

  I was expounding my theory to Richard when he pointed out a street sign — Broadway! Just seeing the name again, I could hear Gene Kelly singing. I have a mock Broadway street sign in my office in London, which Rita gave me years ago, but here I was back at the real thing. This was where my ambitions had started. This was showbiz. I felt odd. There was a time when I knew every show in the city and what every critic had said about it. Now all I knew was that Cats had closed — a victim of its own success. No one had known it would run as long as it did and there had been actors in it with ‘run of the show’ contracts. Some had stuck it out for twenty years. The producers couldn’t refresh the show so they closed it. Fair enough. Even cats don’t live that long.

  We stopped abruptly at a traffic light and all around us every piece of street furniture carried some sign, some essential instruction. Americans are sign mad. There are instructions for everything. Even the inside of the cab was littered with notices. Not to mention the hideous recording which goes off every time you get in the back of a yellow cab — ‘This is Judge Judy telling you to be safe. Put your seat belt on.’

  I didn’t know who Judge Judy was but I didn’t do it just to spite her. At this particular light on my right a notice read: ‘Don’t Honk! $220 fine.’

  On the opposite street corner was the identical instruction except this one said: ‘Don’t Honk! $350 fine.’

  Extraordinary. It was $130 cheaper to honk on the left side of the street. I didn’t have time to analyse why. The driver behind us honked to get the cab going. Our driver was being lethargic. The light had turned green at least half a second ago. No one fined anyone on either corner and we moved on.

  In the shadow of the Empire State Building, I carefully watched the office doors where we were to meet Rita — and there she was. Only a little taller than me, and slightly less round, she walked towards me with her arms spread wide and we hugged and hugged. The streams of New Yorkers slipped past, ignoring us. Two mad ladies crying in the street. For that moment at least I was glad to have come, glad to have started my search.

  While Richard carried on filming, we headed off for Central Park. On the way, Rita and I took stock. Thirty years of friendship, thirty years of change. Rita smiled as if she would burst. Her dark hair and olive skin bespoke the thousands of Italians who had passed through Ellis Island to make a life in America. We looked out at the city where she was once going to be a great comic and where I … I didn’t know what I was going to do.

  We wandered to the boating lake and I found myself slipping into our old relationship. I had always been the kid of the group and now I was the one to rent a toy boat to sail, while Rita sat and watched.

  I bought us a bottle of water each and sat down to take great gulps. My boat had drifted off to the far side of the lake and the wind had all but died. I put the remote down and enjoyed just sitting.

  ‘Did you check the seal on your bottle?’ asked Rita.

  ‘Sorry?’ I gulped some more water.

  ‘You have to check the bottle is sealed before you drink it. Otherwise they could put anything in there.’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Richard.

  ‘It was in the papers. People putting stuff in water bottles.’

  The city was awash with unknown dangers. I could have been drinking anything. All around there were signs telling me how to behave, how to ‘protect this lawn’, ‘leash’ my dog, ‘say no to sports’ and so on.

  ‘Why do you have so many signs?’ I asked Rita as my boat crashed once more into the stone retaining wall of the lake.

  ‘You crashed your boat,’ she pointed out.

  ‘I didn’t, I … docked it.’ We were teenagers again. Rita looked at the signs.

  ‘In England you seem to know when something is “not done”. Here, everything is done, so we have very clear signs about what you can and can’t do to keep society civilised.’

  Richard didn’t want water. He was ‘good’. He had already picked up the lingo. It is very important in New York at any given moment to be ‘good’. You can’t walk two yards in the city without someone asking:

  ‘Are you good?’ The answer to which is, ‘I’m good.’

  We’d been in the city a day and a half and already Richard had started saying terrible, ungrammatical things.

  Me: ‘Would you like some water?’

  Richard: ‘No, I’m good.’

  Not even, ‘No thank you, I’m good’. Just being good is enough. There is no need to be grateful as well.

  The wind was poor and I was not Stuart Little so I gave the boat back.

  Later in the day we headed off for dinner. I had taken some trouble to select a restaurant for the evening. Rita and I had emailed back and forth about what kind of place she wanted to eat in. New York is full of fine dining and I wanted to give her a real treat.

  Perhaps I even wanted to show off a little. She had emailed back that, by and large, she was now vegetarian so I had commissioned my sister to seek out something veggie but with class. Personally I think the two ideas are mutually exclusive. I don’t think it matters how smart a restaurant it is — all vegetarian food looks like it’s been eaten once before. But Jeni had come up with something that sounded promising — a vegetarian restaurant with a Buddhist theme not far from the theatre where I got tickets for us to see Kiss Me, Kate, a musical revival that had recently stormed Broadway. The perfect night out for my old theatre buddy and me.

  Okay, the restaurant was a disaster. However desperate you are for some vegetables, I wouldn’t recommend it. It all looked very zen when we arrived and met up with Jeni and Richard. All very calm and oriental fusion but the muzak was disturbing. It was very un-zen.

  ‘What the hell is that music?’ I asked Jeni, who is younger and knows about these things.

  ‘It’s the soundtrack from Titanic,’ she whispered.

  ‘Why?’ I managed before noticing that there was nothing on the menu any of us wanted to eat. I don’t have anything against vegetables as such — it’s all that horrible pulse business served with it. Fundamentally I disapprove of any food which has to be soaked overnight before you can eat it. None of the descriptions shouted ‘eat me’.

  There were dishes like:

  Basiled Vegetarian Ham — Vegi-Ham (Soy Protein) Low-Cal Conjex, Fresh Soy Bean, Black Mushrooms in a Basil Sauce with Brown Rice.

  Low-cal conjex? What the hell was conjex when it was fattening? Whatever it was, it was popular. I narrowed down my choices to anything without conjex in it but it was hard.

  Moo Shu Mexican Style — Kidney Beans, Soy Gluten Served in Spinach Crepes with a Guacamole Sauce, Carrot Coleslaw and Cous-Cous.

  Apart from an intense desire to achieve regular bowel movements I could not imagine why any chef would put that list of ingredients into one dish.

  ‘How long have you been vegetarian?’ Richard asked Rita. I think she detected a hint of blame in his voice.

  ‘Actually, I eat fish and chicken,’ she replied.

  While the music assured us that ‘life will go on’ the waiter came to see if we wanted a drink.

  ‘Yes,’ I said emphatically.

  ‘What would you like?’ he enquired.

  ‘Why don’t you just show me the wine list,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he replied.

  He wasn’t being difficult. They didn’t have a wine list. In fact they had no alcohol at all. Visions of missed chicken and fish mixed with an evening of iced tea swam before my eyes. Jeni and Richard went outside for a very zen cigarette. Rita and I were laughing by now.

  ‘This is awful and it is all your fault,’ I told her.

  ‘Absolutely,’ she agreed. ‘I tell you what, you come out to Westchester and I’ll take you to Walter’s for a hot dog.’

  Walter’s Hot Dog Stand is famous throughout the county. I was aghast. ‘Don’t tell me you eat hot dogs as well?’

  ‘Sometimes, but only at Walter’s;’

&n
bsp; That kind of vegetarian I can understand. I asked her if I had changed and she said ‘No!’ and then laughed. I find it hard to believe. I feel like an entirely different species from that child in the yearbook picture.

  Jeni and Richard came back in, grinning. Jeni slipped two small vodka miniatures into my iced tea and the whole evening progressed rather pleasantly. Oh, one more thing: never allow anyone to serve you pickled aubergine. Even the aubergine would sit up and tell you it’s a mistake.

  We went on to the theatre. Richard was relentlessly filming and I had the strange sensation of actually being in a film of my life. I passed under the great lights of the marquee at the Martin Beck Theater where the stars’ names, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Marin Mazzie, were emblazoned in lights. I used to wonder if my name might ever be up there. Now it never crosses my mind. I didn’t know yet if Rita was disappointed with her lot.

  After the show we dropped her at Grand Central Station. There was a little time before her train so we had a drink on the wide stone terrace that overlooks the main concourse. The station has been completely renovated and it is a fantastic building. A marble hall of marvel with its vast green ceiling decorated with golden stars showing astrological signs. Large boards indicated the general direction of Trains to Poughkeepsie while people came and went to points north, south and west. No wonder so many movies have scenes set there. It is a wildly romantic place.

  The drinks terrace was advertised as part of the Michael Jordan Steakhouse. A curious establishment that includes a gift shop selling, among other things, dog bones signed by celebrated basketball players. Everything, I was discovering, is a consumer opportunity. The waiter was relentlessly cheerful and chatty. It is the New York trademark of those who serve.

  ‘Those gifts for the dog,’ I said, ‘tell me, does Michael come in often to sign bones?’

  The waiter paused in his service and took my question very seriously. ‘Michael’s not the actual owner here. He’s a franchise.’

  I doubted that Michael himself was actually a franchise but we let it slide.