We left Boston on route 95. Rita was asleep and I stopped to get petrol at a US Petroleum station advertising gas at $1.19 regular. $1.19. Less than a quarter of European prices. Kyoto, Kyoto …
Rita woke up as I was paying and was cross.
‘You mustn’t put that stuff in the car,’ she said.
What, petrol?’ I asked, wishing I was sitting with Webster, bantering words and brandy.
‘Only put Mobil gas in the car or it will stop.’
I drove the delicate Japanese car on to the freeway. I had no idea. I wondered if you could develop Tourette’s syndrome at will. We stopped en route at some outlet shops. Rita did not think this was a good idea.
‘Do you know your prices? You must know your prices in outlet stores.’ I probably didn’t. She warned me that they often sell off substandard stuff.
‘I once bought pants from Liz Claiborne and they were too tight because they were made with less material,’ she explained.
I buy trousers which are too tight because someone has overstuffed my body. Anyway, I didn’t really want cheap trousers, just something to eat. I asked Rita if she thought the place also had food outlets.
She snorted at me. ‘They’re not food outlets …‘ she began confidently and then faltered. They’re … food … sources.’
Food sources. How stupid of me. I bought a revolting hot dog from a food source. I didn’t know my prices but I did know my taste buds and chucked it in the bin.
I had lost the ability to fill up the car, name a fast-food provider, say anything remotely comprehensible and Steve Immerman was Jewish because of his mother so that wasn’t funny either.
CHAPTER 10
Lisa — Gladys Twelve
Now the thing about the next Gladys is that I didn’t particularly want to see her. It sounds terrible but it’s true. I know I’ve gone on about how cosy and lovely it all was with everyone but the fact is with Gladys Twelve that I didn’t really know her. She wasn’t, to my mind, a proper Gladys. You have to understand that I came back from my first term at English boarding school mutated into an entirely different being. It’s what boarding school is for. It’s partly because of the nature of the place. Everyone is the same sex, everyone dresses as if they had no sex and sex is the subject in the forefront of everyone’s mind and, indeed, in the forefront of other places as well. I remember an English hostage being released from some God-awful foreign jail and when he was asked how he had coped he said anyone who had been to a British boarding school would have been fine.
I went to a school where they were paranoid about sex. Well, they had to be paranoid about something and it wasn’t education. We had many rules to stop our bursting hormones from rubbing up against someone else’s. Girls were not allowed to walk arm in arm into town, it was forbidden to sit on the beds unless ‘actually getting in’ and no one was permitted to have a long-handled hairbrush. The last one flummoxed me for some time. I now suspect that the whole concept of educating children in single-sex institutions was conceived by a coven of therapists trying to breed new clients.
The very act of putting on a uniform had begun to straitjacket me. I don’t know if I had been funny before but I was funny now. Following my being sent to Coventry as an opening welcome I had made the discovery of humour as a weapon and I made good use of it. It hadn’t protected me fully. A seventeen-year-old in my boarding house had appeared to make friends with me. She was the first and I was pathetically grateful. Then she seduced me and I was overwhelmingly perturbed. (Please note, all therapists — I’m over it and can’t be bothered to sit in a small room and discuss it.)
My parents, brother and sister were still living in New York. When I returned, after what can only be described as a life-changing three months, what I longed for was my other family —the Gladyses — who had been so overwhelmingly important to me. The first Friday night that I was home for the holidays I went to stay, as usual, at Anne and Sue’s. It had been a Gladys custom for any number of us to share the big bed in their spare room on a Friday night. But that Friday, no one else came. Everyone was busy and it was just Sue and me. We played cards till late and then she sent me to bed in the spare room next to hers. I was scared. I had got used to sleeping in a dorm full of others. I went back in to Sue’s room.
‘Sue, can I sleep with you?’
She rolled over in her bed. ‘You can sleep on the floor,’ she said gruffly. And I did. Before, she had always let me sleep with her. I hadn’t said a word to anybody about what had happened but I determined, in my childish paranoia, that she knew something about me had changed. Something she didn’t like. The next morning another girl came over for breakfast.
‘Sandi, this is Lisa. She’s going to be a Gladys.’
I didn’t know Lisa. She couldn’t be a Gladys. She hadn’t been there. She and Sue gabbed away. Lisa was her new friend. Lisa was a Gladys now and I felt terrible.
So Lisa was a Gladys because Sue had said she was and I had to include her. The only thing I knew about the grown-up twelfth Gladys was that she, like Anne, was gay. That between us, we three had upped the homosexual statistics from a rather random group of women to 25 per cent. My first attempt to contact Lisa was via email. Richard had conceived a notion that it would be terrific if the women-loving women of the group met somewhere with an interesting backdrop. He became determined that we should convene at a women’s rodeo event in Arizona. It would look great, it would be full of American icons and he wanted to get a picture of the three of us riding into the proverbial sunset. Richard made the plans and I started to make contact. On reflection it was an insane idea to fly two people, one of whom you don’t know at all and the other whom you haven’t seen for years, three thousand miles to get together on a horse. For a while, however, everything went splendidly. Anne wanted to bring Barbara. We couldn’t afford to pay for her but they had air miles so that was good. Lisa was surprised to hear from me but seemed open to the idea of meeting. Richard booked our flights, which were cheap and unchangeable, and started sending me material from a surprising selection of cowboy websites where some of the best moustaches were on the women. I continued to email Anne and Lisa and now I mentioned the fun idea of the rodeo. Anne was still fine (although the air miles were proving to be the wrong kind for the airline we had selected but Richard would sort it) but Lisa had a problem. Actually, I think it was an understandable problem. It transpired that she was a senior figure in an animal welfare organisation and she didn’t include bucking up and down on a wild bull as entertainment. I didn’t like to tell her that we had now also discovered an event in gay rodeo called ‘goat dressing’ which involved puffing a pair of Y-fronts on an animal that would rather eat them. I was mortified and had that same sinking feeling I get when I accidentally wear leather shoes to a wildlife charity meeting.
Still, Richard and I felt it could be amusing. I could write something censorious about rodeo and the involvement of animals to please Lisa, and Anne could still come. One Gladys was better than none. Two days before we left and Richard was going demented with air-mile options for Barbara and possible times for flights. A week later Richard and I were in Arizona on our own and I was being forcibly introduced to the American medical system. As I lay, strapped in a CAT scan, I knew that if I wanted to see Lisa, which I didn’t really, I would have to go to visit her.
We could not go anywhere without sending word ahead so that life might be put on parade for us.
Infanta Eulalia of Spain, 1864—1958
The next part of the trip was an all-round American experience. Within twenty-four hours I had taken part in a parade, tried to find the tune in Cambodian music and purchased a Thai meal from a German bier-keller. As a result Rita was very agitated, Paul somewhat surprised and I was beside myself with delight. We had driven north of Boston, up through a corner of New Hampshire and on through the state which eats up all the remaining East Coast land to the Canadian border. Maine is a bigger place than you might think. They say there are so many d
eep bays along the Atlantic here that all the navies of the world could find safe harbour together. Sounds like an idea worth trying to me. What else can I tell you? It is the land of the lobster, the home of the blueberry and the producer of 90 per cent of the country’s toothpick supply. It is also as far north as I will be going on the Eastern seaboard.
We had driven about fifty miles north of Boston under pleasant New England skies and past an endless array of English place names. Near our destination of Kittery (Est. 1647 — the oldest town in Maine), Paul, Rita and I checked into a motel. Paul was thrilled as the motel was very Norman Bates: long, low buildings with individual parking spaces in front of each room. The next morning I was up for my usual early perambulation. I drove across the Memorial Bridge which straddles the Piscataqua river from Kittery, and into New Hampshire. Here giant neon lobsters were luring me to consume at a waterfront restaurant. I think I will forever associate lobster with loud humming concluded by unexpected violence, so I headed instead for breakfast in the Friendly Toast café. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, like the Portsmouth of home but smaller, hums with the sounds and smells of the sea. The clang of halyards against aluminium masts echoed in the empty streets. A seagull, the size of a reasonable Christmas dinner, blocked the road as it stood defiantly holding an entire slice of abandoned pizza in its beak.
Settled in 1623, the town has the distinction of being America’s third oldest city. It doesn’t feel like a city. It is ‘quaint’ and certainly at sunrise there aren’t enough bodies around to make up a quorum at bridge. The Friendly Toast was very 1950s which, I have to remind myself, is the decade in which I was born. Unlike me, however, this was not the real McCoy but a deliberately themed eating experience. Not actually old but very like. I sat at a chrome-edged Formica-topped table under a lamp where a bright woman in a 1950s swimsuit waved confidently to me from her water skis. No doubt she would soon come ashore for a menthol cigarette which she would believe was good for her. The Andrews Sisters sang brightly about some girl and the band and how great life would be when she finally heard church bells chime.
Despite the early hour I was not alone. In the next booth a male student was eating a gargantuan breakfast, just with the aid of a fork. Without further cutlery skills he seemed to bring his mouth to the food rather than the European system which is the other way round. The choice thing was upon me again. The menu offered many options including:
Vegetarian Bacon at $2.25 or
Bacon at $2.00.
I couldn’t account for the difference in price and could only presume that vegetarian bacon must be more difficult to make. Certainly it would require a very cooperative and somewhat zen pig. My waiter offered many kinds of bread with which I might enjoy my friendly toast.
‘I don’t really want toast,’ I said, looking at the ring through his nose and still thinking about the pig.
‘Everyone has toast,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s the Friendly Toast.’ He was clearly under strict ‘No toast is not an option’ instructions. It reminded me of a story, possibly apocryphal, which was circulating the States.
Apparently the crime column in the Ann Arbor News in Michigan reported that a man walked into a Burger King in Ypsilanti, Michigan, early in the morning. He produced a gun and said, ‘Give me your money.’
The clerk said he couldn’t. ‘I can’t open the cash register without a food order,’ he explained.
This stopped the would-be robber for a moment who finally ordered some onion rings. The clerk shook his head. ‘Can’t do that, sir, they’re not available for breakfast.’
The man, frustrated, walked away.
I was enjoying time to myself. Time to think about who and what I had become. After so many years in British broadcasting it is not always easy to be anonymous and I was relaxing into it. Trying to decide who I was beyond the accidental nationality I had inherited. I wanted to look at what I had done with my life so far. Trying, presumably like Steve Immerman, to find a true identity. I wandered out into the waking town. Here there were yet more claims to history. The North Congregational Church where George Washington once worshipped on a November day just like the one I was experiencing but back in 1789. The memorial to the town sons William Whipple and John Langdon, who both signed the Declaration of Independence. The Music Hall Theater, standing on the site where leading black abolitionists once spoke with passion as the anti-slavery movement banged the table for the right to freedom. I was feeling very liberated. Beginning to believe that I had returned to my past in order to free myself of old conceptions and move forward. I liked wandering by myself in a place where I knew no one and where no one knew— ‘Excuse me, are you Sandi Toksvig?’
I was walking past the open doors at the back of the theatre when a woman called out to me. She was wearing the obligatory black of a theatre technician. Great chunks of scenery were being moved on to the stage at this early hour. Clearly there was to be a show tonight. I was sure I had never seen this woman before.
‘Yes, yes, I am.’
‘I thought so. I’ve seen you on Whose Line is it Anyway?. Great show.’
Thanks.’ Small world and all that.
We had arranged to meet Lisa at her house for dinner after she finished work at the ‘rescue facility’, her partner had come back from teaching and they had collected their daughter Channy. We might be travelling round the world but they had lives to lead. It was dark by the time we pulled out of the motel car park and headed up the main road to Kittery. The area reeks of New England with quiet streets, small attractive bays and neat wooden houses. There were no street lamps and things were already a little tense. There was a large ‘rotary’ or roundabout that had to be negotiated. I know these are unusual in America but Rita did give me quite a long talk about how to deal with them. I was probably not feeling at my most charitable when I suddenly glimpsed a red light in my rear-view mirror. Then we heard the sound of a siren.
That’s a fire engine,’ said Rita from the back.
‘Yes,’ I said. By now I could see many red lights in the mirror and the noise was getting louder.
‘In our country we pull over for a fire engine,’ explained Rita.
I pulled over into someone’s drive on the narrow, country lane. The red lights were still some way off but by now I could see that it was not one fire engine but about six and, despite the urgency of the flashing lights, they were all driving at no more than ten miles an hour. I could only presume that the local tax office was burning down and no one much fancied lending a hand. The cacophony of sound was increasing as I noticed that the tortoise-like engines were being followed by a large bus, several trucks and about a hundred cars flashing their lights and tooting their horns. I let the engines pass, then the bus and pulled out into the front of the line of cars.
‘What are you doing?’ yelled Rita from the back of the car.
‘It’s a parade,’ I said. ‘No one goes to a fire this slowly, not even at a crematorium.’ I put on my hazard lights, started bashing the horn and rolled down my window to yell at passers-by.
‘You don’t know where you’re going!’ pleaded Rita.
‘I do,’ I said, pointing to the bus directly ahead of us, ‘I’m following that bus.’
The parade wound through smaller and smaller streets and got louder and louder. Soon I couldn’t hear objections in the car at all. At last we pulled into a large car park outside a vast modern building called the Traip Academy which appeared to be some kind of high school. The noise was deafening now as the emergency services let rip with every decibel at their disposal and the car drivers leant on their horns with every calorie-fuelled ounce of their bodies. Lights flashed, sound meters were broken and Englishmen were left open-mouthed. Rita had been speaking in the back but I couldn’t hear. Finally I caught the tail end of something.
‘… and you don’t even know why we’re here.’
I got out of the car to find out. By now many nubile young girls were descending from the bus to wild adulation. I stoppe
d to speak to a man who had an accent like one of the Kennedys.
‘It’s the Traip Academy girls’ soccer team,’ he shouted in my ear. They just won the state championships.’
‘Fantastic!’ I enthused, having no idea who the hell they were but delighted by even the mention of a local triumph.
‘It was real close,’ screamed the man and proceeded to give me all the scores of the last six games at voice-breaking volume.
‘Great school!’ he enthused. ‘Brought back the Pledge of Allegiance, you know.’
I didn’t know and I doubted they had done it on their own. Standing up with your right hand over your heart each morning to pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America was something I had done every day of my American school life. It had been done at homeroom each day. The homeroom teacher would tick off the fact that you were there and then the crackling tannoy would spring into action. Inevitably the principal would lead the chant of the pledge which would then be followed by various announcements about cheerleading practice and requests not to leave old gum on the underside of your desk.
They stopped it because some people didn’t want to say “One nation under God”.’ The man was still yelling in my ear. ‘But after 9/11 I think people know we need him now.’
This suggested it had not been a matter of belief for people but God’s usefulness which had been in question. Someone started singing what I could only presume was an old Traip classic. Despite my enthusiasm I was unable to join in as I didn’t know the words so I got back in the car to share the good news.
The Traip Academy girls won the state championships!’ Maybe it was a serious lack of team sport in their lives but no one else seemed as thrilled as me.
Gladys Reunited Page 24
