Gladys Reunited

by Sandi Toksvig

  ‘It needs to be dry,’ the patient waitress was instructed by Rita.

  ‘It just needs to be dead,’ I muttered.

  We drove down to the harbour, where a man could grow old waiting to moor his boat. The weather was worse and the waves lashed against the treacherous ledges off the Cohasset coast. In the distance we could just see Governor Island, Bassing Beach and the light from the 150-year-old Minot Lighthouse. It flashes 1—4—3, a romantic ‘I love you’ signal. I stood there with people from my past and I didn’t belong any more and I just wanted to go home.

  CHAPTER 12

  Fran — Gladys Eight

  There is no God and no universe … there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought.

  Mark Twain

  As this was not Paul’s journey into the past, he was able to return home. Rita had already overstepped the mark in parting from her family and she too returned to her domestic life. I, however, had two more distant calls to make before I was done. Mark Twain and I headed west. Since finding him in that grocery store in Maine I had been carrying him in my pocket. I decided that Twain was good for me. He made me humble because he was such a brilliant writer, but he also made me want to be humble because I knew he had had an ego the size of Bill Gates’ bank account. Unlike me, Twain thrived on the limelight and was fond of saying, ‘I am not an American, I am the American,’ which probably didn’t get him a lot of dinner party invitations.

  It’s an interesting thing to say about oneself. I once sailed round the whole of Great Britain and realised how odd it was that such a diverse group of people, leading such different lives, could all be grouped together as one. A people who faced their foes united. I remember when Margaret Thatcher invaded the Falklands and we were all supposed to be on side. For the life of me I couldn’t bring myself to dislike the Argentinians. I was fairly certain I had never even met one. Now that the forces of the enemy seemed to be gathering round religious flags I wondered for how much longer nationality would be a critical factor.

  When you fly to the West Coast of America from Europe, you fly the same distance over the States as you did over the Atlantic. The place is immense and yet you know that below you the people all have a strong sense of being American. The New Yorker ran an article at Christmas about the American media’s failure to report accurately that Bush actually did not win the election. He was in the White House through error or default or fraud. The singer Cher, who had been fiercely opposed to Bush before his election, was asked this week what she thought about him now. She shrugged and said, ‘He’s the president.’

  There is no doubt that the Afghan war is the best thing that ever happened to him. My travelling has taught me to put to rest the idea that I am at heart American because of my upbringing. I am not. It is a wonderful country but it is not mine any more. Confirming a negative, however, did not help determine who I was.

  When I was en route through Los Angeles Airport to Seattle, Washington, a ‘Notice to Overseas Travellers’ caught my eye. I was an overseas traveller and, finally alone, a nervous one. I read every notice within three miles of an aeroplane. This instruction had a large picture of a whale on it. It said the following:

  MARINE MAMMAL PROTECTION ACT OF 1972

  It is unlawful, with certain limited exceptions, to take or to import marine mammals or any parts of or products made from marine mammals. Whales, porpoises, seals, sea lions, walruses and polar bears are included in this protected group of animals.

  I read this twice and could only hope the seal in my carry-on luggage would be quiet.

  It was surprisingly warm. I was glowing in a ladylike manner and wanted a drink. I bought a bottle of water to take on board the plane not just because I was thirsty but because no one in America ever seemed to be far from one. It is the new accessory. This particular brand of water was clearly designed only as an accessory. It was so viciously sealed with plastic that I couldn’t undo the lid. I never found out if someone had put something in my water, as Rita warned me all that time ago in Central Park, as I never managed to open the damn thing. The newsstand offered several publications to entertain me on my flight north, including a book about black box information gathered from plane disasters. Finally faced with a selection of books, I decided I wouldn’t read at all and merely bought a slim guide to where I was going.

  On the plane I was seated beside a five-year-old who practised rhythmic kicking on my thigh. The on-line booking system had worked nearly perfectly and my requested aisle seat was only two away from me as I sat by the window. I had so rarely in the last few months of travel sat next to an adult that I was thinking the only way round this was to demand to sit next to an infant when I next checked in. Given the airlines’ delight in never knowingly satisfying a customer I thought this might do the trick. I was flying on Alaskan Airlines, a carrier I had previously been unaware of. The captain announced that ‘flight attendants are here primarily for your safety but we’re here to serve you as well’, which was certainly a switch of emphasis from the old coffee, tea or me era. The safety-conscious flight attendants went on to remind me ‘in the unlikely event of landing on water’ not to inflate my lifejacket until after I left the aircraft. This seemed odd to me. It suggested checking the thing once you were in the ocean and I wondered how many people would dare wait.

  We ‘pulled back from the stand’, ‘doors to cross check’ and all that. Out of the window I could see a man walking alongside the plane with an orange stick in his hand so that the pilot could see him. Really, I thought, nothing has changed since men were employed to walk in front of cars waving a red flag.

  ‘Folks, we’re on our way to Seattle and Spokane. Crew please be seated.’

  Folks? It seemed a casual mode of address but I let it go and decided to presume a captain of this obscure airline knew what he was doing. It was more than I could say for myself. I was travelling as far west and north as a body can go on the main continent of the US. There are other more geographically distant parts in Alaska and Hawaii, but to my mind those states have always been slightly wild cards in the pack. I knew where I was going but I was not sure why. As usual, left to my own devices, my planning had been poor. I had managed to make vague email contact with Fran after Lori found her for me on the internet. I had also made a last-minute booking on the phone at LA airport for a Seattle hotel, selected only because it was the first one in my book. Fran was not definitely expecting me. The hotel was, but it could be terrible.

  Of all the Gladyses, Fran had moved the furthest from home and from her old life. She had been the stage manager at school, a serious girl with long dark hair which hung down over her owl-like glasses. She was very organised and I don’t recall ever seeing her without a clipboard covering her chest. Fran had been particular friends with Joyce and Rita and not really with me. We had got to know each other better when, for reasons I can’t fathom, Rita, Fran and I had joined the French club trip and gone to Montreal for a few days. Certainly Rita and I weren’t members of the club. Fran might have been but she kept it very quiet. We’d had a great time staying in dorms at the university and doing a small show for the local club. Presumably they were an English club as they already spoke French but I don’t remember.

  ‘I can’t sing! Are you crazy?’ protested Fran, when Rita and I had asked her to perform with us. ‘I do stage management. I’m a techie, backstage only.’

  Rita and I were determined. We had a whole routine which we mimed to a recording of ‘You Could Drive A Person Crazy’ from the musical Company. It needed three people. Normally Cathy was in the group but she definitely wasn’t in the French club so she wasn’t coming. Patiently we had spent hours in Rita’s parents’ sitting room teaching Fran her part and it had been a triumph. I don’t recall speaking a word of French but it had been splendid till I tried to cross the American border in a pair of Red Chinese jeans. I had bought them in Canada and the others had been
aghast.

  ‘You can’t wear Red Chinese jeans in America!’ Rita had said in her emphatic way.

  ‘Why not? I bought them in Canada.’

  ‘Yes … but Canadians are … different.’

  There had been a great hoo-ha on the bus home as we crossed the border, with Fran and Rita refusing to let me stand up in case customs saw the label on my arse. I did get over. No official stripped me of my illegal garb but I never wore them again. Much too nerve-racking.

  Now on the plane to Seattle I realised what a terribly anxious and hopeless traveller I was — really a very bad quality in a travel writer. At the start of the runway an enormous sign instructed the air crew: ‘After take off — no turn before coastline.’

  This worried me. It suggested pilots could take off without a sufficiently clear idea of either the rules or where they were going. It seemed like an interesting metaphor for my entire journey. Flying blind into the past without proper preparation.

  I had nearly finished the journey I set out on some time ago. I had travelled thousands of miles across land and sea and journeyed far into the past. I think many people travel without really seeing. Oddly, I felt I had seen too much and I didn’t know if I could absorb any more. I’m not sure it’s a good thing that so much of the world can be covered so quickly. Bring back steamer trunks and the hours wasted at sea.

  A vast strip of narrow sunshine-coloured beach appeared below us almost as soon as we took off. I couldn’t see where anyone could have made a turn any sooner. The mountainous coastline of California spread out along the endless seas of the Pacific … in the unlikely event of landing on water …

  For some reason the plane was full of small orthodox Jewish boys, all wearing dangling strings from their waist and round black cloth circles on the back of their heads. One of them was about four. His identity had been chosen for him. Poor old Steve Immerman.

  Once we were aloft I calmed a little. The sky was that brilliant blue which threw the American painter Georgia O’Keefe into a creative frenzy when she first flew above the land. I never see that light through a plane porthole without thinking of her. There are no clouds over Los Angeles and if you ever do see one it is disc-shaped and isolated like a UFO checking for signs of intelligent life. It was not long before we saw snow below and an endless wilderness of trees. The air began to turn grey. A dark green landscape under a carpet of low cloud. As we neared Seattle, I could see a range of snow-covered mountains in the distance. The Olympics, I think. Below there were endless inlets of water where it seemed as though the ocean had been clumsily spilled on to the land by a shaky giant hand. Here you could see the islands and lakes left behind when the Vashon glacier buggered off so many thousands of years ago, from the Puget Sound basin. Small parcels of earth which were uninhabited till humans decided to cross the bridge of land that once linked Asia and Alaska, and then drifted south to what is now Washington State.

  The waters of the Sound were incredibly still. A single boat trailed a white line across a small bay. I thought I could see a glacier in the distance but I didn’t know if that was possible. I had never been to this part of the world. Twenty-five other states in my time but not this one. A ferry crossed from one of the many islands, but I couldn’t see where it had come from or where it was going. Snap. I was exhausted and I couldn’t remember why I began what I was trying to finish.

  I think you can guess that I wasn’t feeling great. It wasn’t terrible. I wasn’t rushing home to check into a clinic or anything but I was feeling depressed. Before I left New York I had taken the time to stop in at the old high school. I know that reunion is quite the thing at the moment but be careful of confronting your childhood dreams in case you don’t like what you find. My dreams weren’t big but I was still clinging on to some. One in particular was that I still really wanted to wear a high school graduation ring. You can sweep the board at an English institute of education but no one gives you anything to commemorate the event. I wanted what American high school graduates get — a great ruby-infested piece of gold with illegible Latin on it. A grotesque display of academic achievement. The English have nothing like it. Nothing so ostentatious. We don’t even like Ph.D.s who call themselves doctor. We know the truth. Ph.D. doctors may be able to quote Chaucer but that won’t save you at the scene of a major accident.

  I had pulled into the high school car park, suddenly feeling very grown up: The ubiquitous American yellow school-buses stood waiting outside. The exterior of the school looked as imposing as I remembered — vast buildings with huge pillars screaming of academic respectability. Inside, things were less impressive. The halls were deserted and everything seemed much grubbier than I recalled. Times had clearly changed. Posters advertising a gay help group were prominently displayed as were advice lines to help with bullying related to sexuality. A computer-generated sheet had been stuck up on the walls:

  The average high

  school student

  hears an anti-gay

  slur 25 times

  per day.

  Help change this statistic

  Join the Gay-Straight

  Alliance

  I had never even heard of gay people when I was at high school. Some of the advertised activities seemed less than gripping. The Students Against Drink-Driving Lunch was probably not a barrel of laughs. Long tiled corridors led on to other long corridors lined with steel grey lockers. Past the coke machines, past the gymnasium (now renamed the rather trendy Sports Hub) where I stumbled across the principal, Dr Mark P. Orfinger. A trim man with a neat grey moustache, he made me slightly nervous. There was a hint of the Ichabod Crane about him. For once I had planned ahead and he was expecting me. We went into New York speak straight away.

  ‘Are you coming to see me, Sandi?’

  ‘Sure. When’s good for you?’

  ‘Now’s good.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Good.’

  We went and sat in his office feeling very good. I’d never been in the principal’s office before because I was never in that much trouble. The truancy thing had been dealt with by my guidance counselor and my rather irritated parents. The principal and I sat and talked about old times. I felt quite nostalgic and even began to believe if I had but stayed I would have received an actual education. I was still thinking about the ring so I asked the good doctor, ‘I never graduated from high school. Is there any kind of test I can take to graduate?’

  He smiled at me. ‘Did you go to college?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There’s no test that you can take. You could probably get some kind of honorary diploma, given the fact that you went on to college. You’d have to write me a letter and we could look into it. What college did you go to?’

  ‘Cambridge.’

  There was a pause. Finally he nodded. ‘I think that would do.’

  It was quite satisfying. I felt it put the old Alma Mater neatly in its place. Having realised how ridiculous I had been I decided to stop in and see the old school theatre. Now named the Maclean Auditorium, it was here that I had made my first entrance through the house as Gladys Antrobus. I had waited in the corridor till my mother (played by Ginger — Gladys Four) had yelled from the stage, ‘Henry! Put down that rock! Gladys! Put down your dress.’

  Then I had run down the red carpeted aisles, past the blue velveteen seats and on to the stage with its huge red tabs and wooden floor. I thought things were supposed to look smaller when you grew up but the place still looked enormous. How bizarre it was to stand at the very spot my career had begun, the very spot from which I knew what I wanted to do. I mean, if you were a surgeon would you remember the precise moment someone first let you have a sharp knife and something to cut into? Probably.

  ‘Theater’, as the Americans call all performing arts, was taken very seriously at MHS. Backstage there had been a small room where I had spent more time than anyone on the school staff had thought sensible. During my absences from class I had sat in that back room wishing I were mor
e grown up than I was. Sitting and watching a boy called Coad draw on the walls in black and red felt tip. Coad wanted to be an artist and he took the room as his canvas. I climbed on to the stage and into the small room. I flicked on the light and stepped back in time. There, still swirling across the white paint in a psychedelic pattern, was Coad’s masterpiece. No one had had the gall to paint over it. The only thing missing was the slogan which Lori had scrawled above the mirrors, ‘Welcome to the theater. You fool, you’ll love it so.’

  And I did love it so back then. A passion which had sidelined almost everything else. Suddenly I was confronted with a rather heart-lurching realisation. Something had been niggling at me for some time, and there, in the room where my career had effectively begun, I knew what it was. I’d had enough. What had been niggling at me was that if I could, I felt I would give up my career. I wouldn’t mind at all no longer doing the thing that had driven me for so many years. Ever since Ginger called out ‘Gladys put down your dress’ I had been prancing about in public showing my knickers. Maybe this journey was about growing up. About realising that I didn’t need to do it any more. Certainly in that moment I had lost the thirst for it.

  I went to the loo. In the bright lights of the many cubicled facility I noticed, for the first time, three or four grey hairs on the top of my head. I am blonde so they were hard to spot but there they were. I looked at my face. I had recently been told by a senior BBC producer that the corporation needed only new talent now; that no one wanted to work with people over thirty who were, in her words, ‘tainted with experience’. I looked at my face. Twenty-one years of broadcasting. Not so much tainted as vigorously deformed.