We wound back through Kittery with the parade still ringing in our ears. Soon we left the klaxons and the flashes behind and it went silent and dark but I couldn’t stop smiling.
‘We need to buy wine,’ I said, trying to be cheerful. The atmosphere was a little strained. Clearly, I felt, I was no longer to be trusted as a responsible chauffeur. Certainly, I felt, I needed wine.
Kittery is, thank God, not a town which has fallen to the hammer of globalisation. There were no Dunkin’ Donuts or 7-Elevens on the way but there was a tiny glass-fronted shop called Frisbee Market. This was the kind of cracker-barrel grocery store that Europeans imagine New England is full of. It had maple syrup, fresh pieces of pie and an extensive fridge filled only with Chardonnay. I wanted to buy everything but mostly I wanted a small eight-inch-high cloth doll of Mark Twain. I knew it was Mark Twain because he had a small tag round his neck which said so and announced the fact that in 1902 Mark himself had popped into the Frisbee Market for some beer and a slice of pumpkin pie or whatever. I liked the idea of this. Maybe there could eventually be a small doll of myself or, in keeping with .modern marketing methods, twelve ‘collectables’ of all the Gladyses.
‘How much is it?’ I asked the shopkeeper.
‘Mark Twain is $2.99 plus tax,’ she said, reading off a list. The fact that she had to look him up suggested I was not holding a hot item.
I wondered how Mark would feel about being $2.99 plus tax. Mark Twain, the man who once said a cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education. I also wondered about the whole tax thing. In England the price on any goods is the price you pay. In America the tax is always added on at the till. It varies in every town and every state and you can never be sure how much it is going to be. It’s a very disconcerting approach for the shopper. It smacks of Americans continuing to keep their distance from tax which first caused them to throw tea into Boston harbour.
‘Why don’t they put the tax in the price so you know what you have to pay?’ I asked the woman.
‘Because the store keeper doesn’t get that money,’ she replied.
‘Really?’ I said, knowing I would have been too stupid to work that out for myself.
Kittery was named after a Kittery Court in the English county of Devon. Yet another legacy of people from the past seemingly fresh from English shores and homesick to boot. Unless, of course, they were actually all tailors from Italy who thought being English would be a better bet.
Where you come from and who you perceive yourself to be has been an important part of my journey and it was particularly important in Lisa’s house. Lisa and her partner Mandy live in a small house. It is a miniature place much like the English two up, two down. Lisa works for animals and Mandy teaches children with special needs. Neither one is doing the kind of work that makes any money. They are what I think of as classic poor lesbians. Women generally make less money than men. Put two of them together in a couple and you are likely to get caring people with nothing to show for it. I thought about a gay male, millionaire couple I once met who sip champagne on the profit of formatting forgettable television and I wondered who decides the value of things in the world. I decided I was becoming maudlin.
Lisa was framed in the kitchen door at the side of the house. The front door opens straight into the sitting room and would knock over the only armchair. Here, in the small square kitchen, Cambodian music was playing on an old tape recorder. Lisa was warm and welcoming while Mandy was smiling and a little more reserved. None of us, after all, really knew each other. Everyone’s attention was drawn to a tiny pixie-like figure who clung to Mandy’s leg. Lisa introduced us to the tiny toddler with her shining Oriental face.
‘This is Channy.’
Mandy and Lisa’s adopted daughter, Channy is from Cambodia. She is tiny, beautiful, talkative and she lives here with her two lesbian mothers. She has many Western names but everyone calls her Channy. Mandy and Lisa play Cambodian music to her to help give her a sense of her cultural identity. I don’t know if we have music genes which recognise the tunes of our heritage as something other than atonal. I couldn’t understand it myself but then I can’t think of a single contribution Denmark has made to the world of composition. (Please don’t write. I am fine with my ignorance.)
Channy was mid-potty-training and there were potties everywhere. We had arrived in the land of perpetual toilet concern. Both Mandy and Lisa had that haunted, tired look that we had at home for years with the children. They were worried they were doing it wrong. They were worried that they weren’t dealing properly with her sleeping. They were, like all new parents, worried. But they were not like all new parents. We sat in their front room surrounded by small toys and plastic lavatories. We tried to play with Bella, their nervous honey-coloured Labrador. Bella was terrified of everything and had survived as a rescue project of Lisa’s. Bella only liked Paul, who we know is not mad about dogs. I think life is like that. I am scared of cats and never met one that didn’t want to sit on my head.
We proceeded with the fast catching-up of history that I have become accustomed to on my journey. How Lisa and Mandy met at a local dance five years before. How Lisa had wanted to do wild life management, but it went wrong. How she ended up going to three colleges because one went bankrupt and then one wouldn’t take credits and it took five years and she didn’t get what she wanted after all that. For a while she worked at a local entertainment agency, booking weddings, college functions, alcohol-free New Year’s Eve parties and such like. Now she runs an animal welfare organisation with twenty staff dealing with the many animals left in cardboard boxes on their doorstep and any other pet rescue problems.
We went through religion. Lisa is Unitarian like Rita. I know this helped make Rita comfortable. To an outsider it is odd. I really like the whole Unitarian approach but fundamentally it is a religion based on letting you believe in anything. It is a dark area for me. Mandy is Catholic. This is a darker area for me but I was interested how the shared Unitarian experience helped to connect Lisa and Rita. I realised that I was more immediately relaxed than I had been for some time. I had felt the same in Anne’s house and I knew instinctively that I felt a bond because of our shared sexuality. It had nothing to do with the past but everything to do with our present living. I’m not saying all gay people get on but we do have a common experience which transcends all nationalities.
Mandy talked freely about her Catholicism. ‘If there is such a thing as a gay or lesbian Catholic,’ she laughed. I have so often felt the hatred and oppression of many organised religions that I always marvel at those who continue to stay within the fold. This brought up the story of Steve Immerman again.
‘Of course he was really Jewish because his mother was Jewish,’ said Rita once more. It is the critical part of the story for her. It was the mother who was important. Rita’s kids have her surname and not Ron’s. I decided she should have been Jewish.
I looked at Channy and wondered about the impact of heritage. Will she end up happily at Traip Academy and cheer for a soccer team her ancestors had never heard of? Mandy and Lisa are delightful people but not perhaps the mostly widely travelled, yet they went to Cambodia to collect a child whom they had never met and bring her home.
‘We put in the application at Christmas,’ explained Lisa, ‘and then we got her in August. It took about nine months.’
This seemed about right.
‘Did they check out your relationship?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Mandy. ‘They didn’t mention it.’ I thought this was marvellous and a sign of the liberal times but it turned out that no one had mentioned it because neither did Lisa and Mandy. Because the law does not allow gay couples to adopt, Mandy decided to go ahead and adopt as a single parent.
‘I knew it would be Channy when she was three and a half weeks old and then when she was five and a half months, we went to Phnom Penh to collect her.’
I could not imagine this kind woman from a small seaside town in Maine flying
to the East to begin mothering a child already on her way in life. I could not imagine doing anything quite so brave.
I was concerned that Lisa’s position seemed vulnerable to me and I talked briefly about my split from the mother of my children. About the plans we had made in case the unthinkable happened and then how we had actually dealt with the reality. Clearly it was not something they could imagine. They asked me what I thought the critical thing was in raising children in ‘unusual’ circumstances and I, foolishly, said, ‘Just one thing — truth. Always be truthful with them and with everyone. It is the secrets that are a cancer on the soul.’
Sounds noble, right? That was when I found out that Mandy isn’t ‘out’ at work and that being in education it was difficult and soon and on. More people, more loving people, being made to live in fear. She teaches eleven-year-olds with special needs. Where the hell is the place for prejudice in that? I felt like an idiot.
We changed the subject and Lisa and I went to collect a take-away from a Thai restaurant a couple of miles up the road. It was a curious place. It had been built as a sort of German bier-keller with a fake barn-like interior and a vast mural of Hansel and Gretel heading off into the woods. Sadly, it seems the people of Maine did not want to party like The Student Prince and now the place was devoted to delicate Oriental fare. Pictures of King Bhumibol and Mrs Bhumibol of Thailand hung gilt-framed, below Gretel’s feet. I am particularly fond of King B and indeed named my dog after him. While being guided through Bangkok, I once asked a petite Thai gentleman what the Thai people found funny. He smiled and half bowed. ‘We laugh a great deal at many things,’ he explained, ‘but never at the royal family. It is forbidden to make jokes about the royal family but that is very easy for us for there is nothing funny about them.’
I looked at the unfunny royal couple and realised I had never expected to see them here in an American tavern of das Vaterland. Somehow the whole collage of nationalities in the take-away was a symbol of the America I was trying to come to terms with.
Lisa, the person I had not wanted to meet, was a delight. She and I chatted as we drove, the car steaming up with hot noodles and satay sauce. I realised that, under different geographical circumstances, we could have been friends. That she was a fine Gladys.
At home Channy ate stir-fry noodles and listened to music played on some plucked string. At pre-school she has a friend who is also from Cambodia and also has lesbian parents.
By chance, the next morning the New York Times had an article about Cambodian adoptions in the US. It made uncomfortable reading. Until recently almost a hundred babies a month had passed through Phnom Penh to a new life in the States. Now the US government had stopped the traffic completely. The concern, apparently, was about corruption. The article was full of stories of Cambodian mothers given tiny amounts of money, perhaps $100, for their healthy children on a promise that the child would grow up in better circumstances and then be returned to help them. The child would have a richer life and a good education which it could bring back to Cambodia. The mothers did not know about the $10,000 to $20,000 being paid by Americans to adoption agencies for the same children who, in fact, they never saw again. I didn’t know if Channy was an orphan or if somewhere she had a mother waiting for her to return. What I do know is that Channy may look Cambodian just as I look Danish but that will not necessarily be enough to define her. If there is an advantage to be found in the endless breakdown of barriers across the world, it is that each one of us should be able to settle in the place we can find comfort in calling home. Will Channy have a better life than she might have had? I don’t know. She will have a good life.
CHAPTER 11
Regina — Gladys Seven
People who are always praising the past
And especially the times of faith as best
Ought to go and live in the Middle Ages
And be burnt at the stake as witches and sages.
Stevie Smith, English poet
I suppose if the Gladys Society had existed in the infant America of the late seventeenth century we might well have been accused of witchcraft. A secret society of girls getting up to all sorts of no good. We headed south from Maine en route to visit Regina, Gladys Seven, the drama teacher who had first brought us all together. Anxious as I was to see her, I could not in all good conscience allow us to bypass the extraordinary town of Salem. (It is one of the advantages of being the driver. You can ignore instructions and join parades or whatever else you fancy.)
Churches dominated the centre of each town scene we passed through. Always white, stark white. You could find a New England church in the dark. Religion at the very heart of every community — religion but not tolerance. Rita was having troubles. Every phone call home seemed to contain some fresh drama —homework, homesickness, home something. Her family were not used to her absence. Julie, her daughter, emailed me to thank me for helping her to be more independent by taking her mother away but still the calls kept coming. I felt there were perhaps mixed messages being sent and it was hard for Rita. How the world has stood still since my mother and even my grandmother’s day. Women should be at home. Women should be more careful.
The story of what happened in Salem, Massachusetts, is one every American schoolchild learns early on. It is a story of religious intolerance and hysteria. In the summer of 1692 a group of young girls, stimulated by voodoo tales told by a West Indian slave called Tituba, claimed they were possessed by the devil. They accused Tituba and two other women of practising witchcraft. Special trials were set up and soon the list of accused grew and grew. In the end nineteen innocent people were hanged, only to have the fanatical court itself finally repent and recognise the injustice of what had occurred. Frankly, I think it could have happened to anyone.
We were heading for the Salem Witch Museum but I felt compelled to take a detour first to ‘America’s Oldest Living History Museum’, Pioneer Village, which lies just outside Salem. Now I think I have made it clear that I have a definite fondness for the American way of presenting the past and this place has to be up near the top of my list. Calling it a Pioneer Village is something of a stretch: it’s more of a Pioneer three houses and a blacksmith. The small clearing is surrounded by chain-link fence, on one side of which is the sea and on the other the local baseball field. The place consists of three small two-storey log cabins and a covered forge. Each house has a solid wooden door and tiny windows with very little light bleeding in. To be fair to the living interpreters we did arrive at the very end of the season. No doubt they had all been busy being living interpretations and they were tired. Certainly the blacksmith was almost too exhausted to fan a flame into usefulness. He stood in his leather apron and looked at us. Me, Paul, Rita and a woman from Idaho who was killing time till she met her sister. The blacksmith took a long chug of liquid from a leather tankard and put it down with a bang.
‘I only answer questions,’ he barked. ‘I don’t give a long talk. Ask me a question.’
As we knew nothing about him this was a little tricky. The woman from Idaho sidled off to see if perhaps her sister was early. The blacksmith glared at us.
‘What are you drinking?’ I managed.
‘Water. Only water. I need to rehydrate. You think I can do that with beer?’ he barked.
That was, in fact, exactly what I thought. I thought I had read that they always drank beer. That the children drank beer. That everyone drank beer because it was water with the impurities brewed out of it. Indeed, I had imagined pilgrim life as being rather a pleasant state of continuous intoxication. I also thought, while we were busy living history, that rehydrate perhaps wasn’t a word on every pilgrim’s lips. Meanwhile, the handful of other interpreters were occupied trying to make the smallholding look busy. Ample-hipped women in long skirts kept brushing past us, saying ‘Excuse me’, and then coming back the same way two minutes later. I found it rather irritating. No one in the past seemed to have any sense of body space. Having learned what little we could from
the blacksmith we moved on to some of the houses.
Downstairs, in the largest property, a woman dressed in a long skirt and sombre bonnet was sitting beside a giant slab of uncooked raw beef.
‘That’ll be some time cooking,’ I commented.
She looked up as if she had seen a ghost. Then she rose and went over to the small four-poster bed in the corner.
‘This was … like … a bed,’ she said, fingering the mattress. It was in fact so like a bed that I thought it could only have been a bed which made me realise why I would never make a living history interpreter. She had lost the will to live and sat down to stare at the large chunk of mad cow on the table. Upstairs two Pilgrims were drinking coffee in cups from Dunkin’ Donuts.
They seemed to be deep in conversation so we trooped into the empty room opposite. Unlike the other rooms, this one had no fireplace and was entirely empty save for a large barrel in the corner.
One of the men with hair down to the middle of his jerkin, appeared in the doorway. He had finished his coffee and stood with the incongruous empty container.
‘Do you have a question?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Paul and I couldn’t have been more delighted that someone did. ‘Was this a storeroom?’ We all looked at the solitary barrel and thought it was a good question.
‘Yes,’ replied the man and went downstairs to find a bin. We stood and looked at the room with its single barrel. It was a storeroom. Who would have guessed?
Outside, a concession to the notion of a village needing livestock had been satisfied by the enclosure of two goats behind a handmade wooden fence. The female was butting her head against the fence post while the male rather solemnly licked his balls. I knew just how they felt. If life was like this in the seventeenth century, it’s no wonder they turned to a bit of devil worship. The place was getting crowded as two French people had turned up, so we headed into town.
Gladys Reunited Page 25
