Gladys Reunited

by Sandi Toksvig

  Many writers tried to capture what they felt after the event but the one who spoke to me most was Ian McEwan. He said that the greatest crime that had occurred on that day, was a failure of the imagination. That if any one of the terrorists had had the imagination to envisage what the victims and their families were about to go through, they would never have been able to carry out their deed. It is a writer’s understanding of the world. Without imagination there is only death.

  It was, as you might expect, a moving place to visit but in a moment the New York character that I have known for many years appeared. Beside the hoardings was an office building. It was the largest and nearest place to the scene to remain unscathed and still in operation. Three wide steps led up to the front door and passers-by were taking it in turns to stand on the top step and take a closer look at the remains of the towers. Signs indicated that the place used to be a photographic shop but now it had been turned into the temporary headquarters of a real estate development company which was offering luxury apartments to anyone interested. A moustached man appeared in the doorway and began screaming at me and Paul.

  ‘We’re trying to do business here!’ he yelled. ‘Get off my steps.’ Then he officiously barged into the street to grab some barricades and drag them in front of his door. How nice for him to be alive to do it. I hoped the apartments he was selling were important in the great scheme of things.

  A block away they were digging up the whole road. I couldn’t tell if it was necessary because of what had happened or because, without any traffic around, this was now a good time to dig up the road. Local people had used the metal barricade around the works to lay flowers. The flowers were rather sad. They were the kind you buy in England at petrol stations. Tight little blooms still wrapped in cellophane. They were all dead now but you knew even if they had been unwrapped and placed in water they would never have looked nice. False, forced flowers. There was nothing joyous about them. Nothing even reminiscent of life. In my mind I kept replaying the images of the people who had jumped for their lives. The man who jumped with an umbrella as if it might have saved him. How impossible to imagine the heat and the horror. To finish your life with not even a DNA sample left.

  At the Red Cross Disaster Relief Center a block away, a man in a Red Cross pinny marched up to us.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he demanded. He seemed brusque and irritable and I couldn’t tell if he meant it or not.

  We politely declined and he stomped off. Perhaps there weren’t enough people to help, perhaps he hated the tourists the place now attracts or maybe he was just having a bad day. Across the road half a dozen people were standing around in gas masks. The door to the centre had many signs offering help, the largest of which was obviously important and was printed twice.

  ‘NO Restrooms!’ it declared with some vehemence.

  And I thought about that. I thought about the general sense of irritation in the area that people were coming to look, to see what had happened, but I think it was a natural desire. If we are all destined to stand shoulder to shoulder and fight the good fight, can we not also be allowed to go and see why? After the planes hit, New Yorkers queued up to give blood, make food and fill the coffers of a charity fund. The Disaster Relief Center would have been happy to help if blood or oxygen or something grand were needed but they didn’t want to help with the small stuff — they didn’t want to let you go to the toilet. The British are the same. Everyone tells you how great the Brits are when their ‘backs are against the wall’ but wouldn’t it be nice if we all helped out when there was no wall there at all?

  We drifted away and found ourselves outside City Hall with its small surrounding park. There were American flags hoisted everywhere but the place was locked up tight. Metal gates and railings hemmed in the park and a large metal barrier had been raised in the road. In bright red it had the word STOP writ large.

  The sun was shining and we needed to get away. We managed to find a cab and headed north. On the way we passed a shop called the Funny Cry Happy Gift Shop, which I liked. I thought how unhappy it would have made my old English teacher. Not even a sentence — just a whole lot of descriptions. In Greenwich Village we passed the Rubyfruit Jungle restaurant, a lesbian hangout where I once heard Neil Sedaka give an impromptu performance because he likes to sing for the girls. Paul was looking everywhere for a road under a road which he had seen on Friends. It is another British image of America — all those jolly Americans bantering with each other and having a lovely cosy time. When we reached Midtown we got out and walked. In a shop selling costumes, a giant plastic rat in the doorway seemed to be grinning at me.

  Q: What is bin Laden going to be for Hallowe’en?

  A: Dead.

  Paul asked me, ‘What was the best thing to be for Hallowe’en when you were a kid?’

  ‘Catholic,’ I said.

  ‘Catholic?’

  ‘Yeah. The next day is All Saints’ Day and you’d get that off as well.’

  It was 1 November and Paul and I sat at a pavement café and drank coffee in the sun. Beside us two women were chatting in German, while across the way a French couple and a friend were sharing a copy of Le Monde. Something terrible had happened, but a few blocks away life went on. I knew New York would survive when we saw the first piece of hoarding around Ground Zero. On it someone had neatly stencilled, ‘Osama bin Laden missed us, don’t you make the same mistake. The Dakota Steakhouse. Honor America. Join us for cocktails.’ My sister rang my mobile. I was five minutes from her and she rang me via London. We headed down to South Street Seaport for lunch and for a brief moment to pretend that everything in the city was normal. The setting was great — a café on a wonderful wooden boardwalk, ancient tugs tied at the dock and a most authentic smell of fish. The lunch was less great. Plastic cutlery, plastic plates, plastic cheese — the whole plastic experience.

  Afterwards we couldn’t resist the gadget shop on the pier. Here I quite fancied a pair of dull metal glasses, which were for sale for hundreds of dollars. They were not just ordinary spectacles. Inside each eyepiece was a tiny individual screen for watching television. A young sales assistant was keen to assist.

  ‘Aren’t they great?’ he enquired.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But they wouldn’t be much good if you were having friends over to watch the game.’

  He thought about this for some time and then nodded. ‘No. You would each need a pair of glasses.’

  Indeed. He didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand him. We weren’t about to bomb each other over it but of these small acorns …

  CHAPTER 8

  Sue — Gladys Five

  Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers.

  Let Freud and Wordsworth discuss the child,

  Angels and Platonists shall judge the dog.

  Delmore Schwartz, American poet

  I don’t know what that poem means. I’m heading for New Jersey to see a woman about a dog. As the horizons of my trip expand geographically so too do the occupations of the Gladyses concerned. Sue moved to New Jersey some years ago to open a dog-training centre and boarding kennels, a notion in the parade of possible professions that never even crossed my mind. As usual I had left everything to the last minute and even as we headed towards her canine world I wasn’t at all sure that we would be able to hook up. Every time I called I got the answerphone message which reminded callers that the kennels insisted ‘humans must be accompanied by a dog’. It went on to say she was probably out with the dogs and would the caller please leave their own message. I left one saying I too was gone to the dogs but could we have dinner anyway. It was only after I hung up that it occurred to me that she might not find that funny — she might even find it offensive. It’s very tricky with people you knew but don’t really know now. I was also a little nervous about Sue. She was a comfortable-looking person even in her teens with long, dark centre-parted hair and a penchant for wearing what appeared to be the same clothes every day. Sue had been one of the techi
es in the high school drama department. One of the slightly grubby technical people backstage who climbed ladders a lot and always had a pair of pliers about their person. Although she was not the oldest in the group she always seemed to be in charge — certainly everyone did what she said. Rita and I once went out with Sue on her family’s small motorboat in the waters of Long Island Sound. It was the summer of ‘72 and I remember it as incredibly hot, although that memory may be faulty. I think lots of people recall their childhood summers as being bathed in golden sun.

  The boat was a ubiquitous craft in the area known as a Boston whaler. A stubby little flat-bottomed affair noted for its stability in the water, it was about twelve foot long with a central seat for the steering wheel and not much else. It was a boat used for fishing or idle day trips. Sue took me and Rita out on one of those hot days. Rita wanted to tan and I wanted to drive but Sue had other plans.

  ‘Sandi, throw that boat cushion in the water!’

  ‘Why?’

  She looked at me and gripped the wheel of the boat. ‘Just do it!’

  I picked up one of the flat boating cushions by the cloth handle on the side. When we had first arrived at Mamaroneck Harbor, my brother and I had both taken our motorboat driving and boating safety licences. I knew that these flat cushions were not just to keep your bottom from chafing on the seats. They also floated and could be used as temporary lifesavers. I threw the cushion in the water and it bobbed up behind us in the wake.

  ‘Hold on!’ shouted Sue, as she spun the boat round, neatly grabbed a boat hook from the floor of the craft and scooped the cushion out of the water without slowing down.

  ‘Neat!’ I said.

  ‘Sue, could you warn me in advance when you’re going to do that?’ asked Rita, looking up from the seat where she was reclining.

  Sue looked at her and slowed the boat down to idling.

  ‘Rita, get in the water.’

  ‘No!’ Rita shook her head.

  ‘Rita, get in the water.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Rita! Jump!’

  So she did. I was very glad it wasn’t me. Rita bobbed up behind us. Sue gunned the boat away and seemed disinclined to turn back and scoop Rita out of the water. I didn’t want to annoy Sue but I was sure this wasn’t a great idea.

  ‘I don’t think she swims that well, Sue,’ I managed, hoping that would help. Without a word, Sue swung the boat around and headed back to Rita. We fished her out and went home. I never really knew what that was all about. That was the trip Sue told me I should shave my legs. I was wearing shorts and had tiny blonde hairs on my bare thirteen-year-old legs. I went home and shaved them and cut myself badly. I was starting to be a grown-up. Being a bleeding grown-up.

  So everyone did what Sue said but underneath the tough exterior and barking orders was one of the kindest women I’ve ever met. It was Sue who got me up early one Easter morning to deliver baskets of sugared eggs secretly to all the other Gladyses. It was Sue who persuaded me once that we should deliver anonymous roses to Ginger because it would make her feel better. I always dragged along behind Sue — a kind of Robin to her Batman. When I left for England she and her mother came to say goodbye. Sue did not say much but she handed me a cushion on which she had embroidered the quintessential American dolls, Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy — rag dolls in American red, white and blue that carry a secret message. Underneath their clothes they have a heart embroidered with the words ‘I love you’.

  Sue’s mother shook her head. ‘I didn’t even know she could sew,’ she said.

  Wherever I have settled over the years that small cushion has always found an important place.

  So you understand I approached seeing Sue again with a mixture of caution and delight. I also approached in something of a roundabout way.

  New Jersey

  More chemical products are made in New Jersey than in any other state.

  Carole Marsh, My First Pocket Guide to New Jersey

  The New Jersey Turnpike is aptly named for it goes from New York to New Jersey. Paul kept singing the Paul Simon song about how we’d all gone to look for America and trying to remember what Simon had said about his home state highway. Paul was still excited about seeing as much as possible. As we hadn’t actually heard from Sue we had decided to drive right across the state first and visit Philadelphia. On the map it didn’t look that far. The fad that we had bought the book of maps for $3 from a man on the corner of Lexington Avenue who was also willing to sell us his grandmother and the Tower of London should have been a warning. It was really too thin a book to have as many as fifty states in it. Even California didn’t look that far away.

  I entered the Garden State, as New Jersey is called, thinking about my great-aunt Signe, the one who was friends with the Algonquin crowd. She was a remarkable woman who had graduated from Cornell University in New York in 1916. This was unusual in a girl and even more unusually she became a writer. She married Francis Hackett, an Irish poet from Kilkenny who had emigrated to America when he was eighteen. For many years they lived in the States and they did that rather clever thing of having patrons to look after them while they wrote. As we drove past Hopewell, New Jersey, I recalled that this was where Charles Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped in 1932. I had visited Signe at the home of Lindbergh’s wife Anne. A fine writer in her own right, Anne Morrow Lindbergh was charming and the house was grand. Signe was living there while she scribbled. How wonderful. Fed and watered and given clean paper. No need to deal with the grinds of life. What more could a girl desire?

  My trip was dotted with great women whose stories leapt out at me with every passing mile. Stories I had been told in my American schooling.

  ‘Monmouth,’ I pointed out to Paul as we drove south.

  ‘So?’

  ‘The battle of Monmouth? Molly Pitcher?’ He didn’t know.

  Nearly a hundred battles of the American Revolution were fought in New Jersey. From the turnpike it’s hard to see why. Certainly the garden part of the state is not entirely visible. Nor can you see why it is also known as the Clam State. We didn’t stop at Monmouth because I don’t think there is anything to see, but it was there that Mary Ludwig Hayes got the nickname Molly Pitcher. It was during a particularly hot battle on 28 June 1778 and she was helping by carrying pitchers of water from soldier to soldier and cannon to cannon. At one point she stopped to help load one of the cannons. The story goes that while she was reaching for a cartridge she had spread her legs apart in the effort and a cannon ball shot from the enemy went right through, carrying away the lower part of her petticoat. She is said to have looked down calmly and observed, ‘It was lucky that didn’t pass any higher or it would have carried away something else,’ and gone back to work.

  The world needs women like that. Actually, the world is full of women like that but we just don’t get to hear about them.

  I was waxing lyrical on this when Paul yelled, ‘Mind that car!’

  This is not necessarily a helpful remark on a turnpike which is full of cars all of which need minding. It didn’t take me long, however, to realise he was anxious about the car in front. In almost every country in the world the traditional way of proceeding down an eight-lane super-highway is to drive your car in just one lane at a time. The driver ahead seemed to prefer to try many lanes at once in a great sweeping move.

  ‘Driver must be asleep,’ I said, and attempted to pass him. Indeed, he was asleep. Absolutely off the planet, leaning against the window in that attractive open-mouthed position that all sleepers have. Now here is the dilemma. If you are driving next to someone on a busy American motorway who is asleep do you

  A. Hoot your horn and wake him up?

  B. Drive on?

  Actually not an easy decision. Choose A and he may startle awake and crash, choose B and you have failed your Good Samaritan test. We chose B and drove on. I can’t say I felt happy about it but we did see him some time later at a rest stop. I don’t know why he needed the rest s
top. He had had plenty of sleep on the road.

  I was beginning to feel tired myself. My beloved Dorothy Parker was born in New Jersey two months early because her mother was exhausted by the trip from New York. I knew how she must have felt. It was just as well that I was not heavy with child or I would have dropped several at the service station. Due to her accident of birth, New Jersey claims Parker as one of its own but I have no idea if she ever went back. I can’t say it’s a place it had ever occurred to me to visit. First, however, Philadelphia.

  I’d rather be here than in Philadelphia.

  W. C. Fields’ tombstone

  We arrived at the Alexandria Inn in downtown Philly through some ingenuity and very little map reading. The place was full of mincing, lisping boys.

  ‘Hi,’ said the concierge, Greg, in the sort of high-pitched voice that can make dogs gather. ‘God! You’re from England and how is that Queen of yours? How is her mother? Isn’t she amazing? Say,.

  have you seen the new Ab Fab series yet? We just can’t wait.’ Greg went on for some time about all things British so that I had leisure to read his many tattoos and admire his small triangular badge with a rainbow on it.

  ‘Sorry, Paul,’ I apologised quietly to my straight English companion. ‘It seems to be a gay hotel.’

  ‘How can you tell?’ he asked.

  I am going to skim through Philadelphia as, basically, I shouldn’t have been there in the first place but if you’ve never been then here are my quick tips for the place. Don’t eat dinner at Inn Philadelphia, however much Greg at the Alexandria Inn begs you to, but do visit the Benjamin Franklin Museum. I think by now you will have guessed that I am a big fan of both the poorly presented place of history and the unique object found nowhere else in the world. I am as likely to travel hundreds of miles to see the world’s largest tin chicken, as I am to seek out a holy fingernail which bleeds on alternate Tuesdays in Lent. For someone who loved the Margaret Mitchell Experience, the Benjamin Franklin Underground Museum is well worth the detour. I had actually been there once before, when I was twenty-one, and now again because it stuck in my mind. Really, it’s an absolute must.