when I heard the nudist’s back story

…was the Calvin Klein bathing suit I bought in a snit and am really coming to hate.  Dark blue, square necked, deeply unflattering: it irritates me every time I pull it on.  But it cost so much I feel obliged to wear it, amortize my investment in the damn thing.

I’d been swimming in the river and was drying off in the sun, sitting on the grassy bank that the club’s committee members keep nicely mown and weeded. There were three of us, three women in a circle on our towels.  We were talking about one of the committee members, a man called J.  J is a nudist. It’s not a nudist club, it’s just a local swim club on the river that anyone can join, but it happens that the people on the committee who put in the most work – trimming the hedges, maintaining the ladders and the paths – tend to wander around naked. And J, who is tall and imposing, is the most overt and preening of all the nudists, the one with the full body wax, who walks with his shoulders back and his pelvis tilted forward, who leaps aggressively into the river when it’s full of swimmers and who lingers just a little too long on the riverbank when all the other nudies have scattered to avoid being seen by passing kayaks and punts.

I didn’t know what to think about this guy.

He’s very friendly, but how friendly do you want someone to be when he comes and stands over you, naked and hairless, and launches into a discussion about club policy – with all the attendant jiggling every time he emphasizes a point.

We weren’t talking about any of this, though, because one of the women in our ad-hoc trio was J’s wife, Mrs J.

Mrs J is what you’d call a wispy creature. Thin pale hair, a peaky little bird face, small conical breasts – she’s a nudist as well so I’m familiar with her breasts — and a tiny voice; her words trend to trail off.

(I’m a little worried all this talk about body parts and jiggly bits might strike some of you as a tad, well, gamey. I apologize, but the problem, if you consider it a problem, is that by swimming where I do, I’m constantly faced – and I mean faced — with an anatomical parade. This stuff is hard to ignore.  Have you ever watched someone trim a hedge in the nude? With an electric trimmer?  It’s a car crash waiting to happen. You can’t not look.)

Anyway, the three of us were talking.  We didn’t know each other, we just happened to be there that day, no one else around. Which is probably why Mrs J told us what she did — sometimes it’s easier to unburden yourself to strangers.

She (I still don’t know her name) and J had three sons. There were, she said, the usual rebellions and family squabbles, particularly with the two older boys. But the youngest, Tim, was sunny: happy, popular, athletic and kind. As a parent, you’re not supposed to have favorites but J adored Tim, spent more time with him than he had with the other two.  They played football and fished in the river, always ending up in the kitchen together, J sitting at the table with his pint, Tim perched on the counter swinging his legs, the two of them talking, sorting out the world.

Then, age 14, Tim got sick. It was bone cancer. For two years he got weaker and weaker, suffering as much from the treatments as the disease – hard to tell which was worse, the illness or the cure – but in any event, none of it worked.  He died in pain, age 16, and it blotted out the sun for J.

It destroyed him, his wife told us.

He was the apple of his eye.

By now, we were hunched up together, one of us naked, two of us in damp bathing suits.  At some point we had started holding hands.

They had ended up here, his wife said, at the riverbank club. Something in the small tasks — keeping the weeds at bay, pruning the trees that overhang the river, diving to the bottom of the green water to retrieve fallen branches and sodden towels — had given J a new rhythm for life, not quite a purpose, but at least a glimpse of well-being.

You never know, do you?

You make assumptions about someone, you think, Yeah, I’ve got him pegged, and then it turns out everything you thought was right, was actually wrong.

I had thought it was swagger and ego, a strutting peacock or a gorilla pounding his chest.  And it was nothing like that, nothing at all. If anything, it – J — was King Lear, raging at the storm, mad with grief.  The stripping down, the overlarge strides, it was a kind of fearful bravado, an attempt to convince himself there was something left, some merit in the very elements — sun, water, air.

He was walking toward us now, carrying a thermometer on a rope. We let go of each other’s hands.  He nodded at his wife and dropped the thermometer into the water, looping the end of the rope over the ladder.  Every gesture was outsized – the flourish as he knotted the line, the grunt that issued from his mouth as he straightened up. When he said, Another good day, his voice boomed out and we answered, It is, isn’t it, just as loudly, as if we believed him.

when I was home alone last week

…was the exact same thing four days running. With a few accommodations for hygiene.

Black trackies with a raggedy hem, cashmere bed socks and a grey tee from the White Company. A big wool sweater from Brora of Scotland — a Christmas present my husband had discarded on account of holes, shapelessness and the fact the pug likes to nap on it. On my feet were black Dansko clogs, real bruisers.

At night, I exchanged the trackies for my husband’s pyjama bottoms, flannel trousers in a spiritless plaid.

There’s something particularly British about these pyjamas. They’re standard-issue from Marks & Spencer, that most English of emporiums, and you close them with a length of string that’s threaded through the waistband. No buttons, no elastic and no matter how well you tie the bow, there’s always a vast gaping aspect to the crotch.

That gap is less of an issue for a woman. For a man, though, there’s the constant risk of exposure, a furtive glimpse of guy hair and dangly bits. To me, it represents nothing less than the very essence of Britain: the dowdy, unassuming fabric and the inevitability of a coarse reveal.  It’s the homely and the sordid, all in one.

I’m not really a slattern; weather was a factor in all this. It was arctic in Britain — in all of Europe. Rome had its first blanket of snow in 26 years, people were dying of hypothermia in Paris and it was so bitter here in Cambridge that the wheels of my bike froze when I tried to ride into the center of town. Exposing one’s flesh, even indoors, was to be avoided.

Mainly though, with both my husband and daughter away for a few days, I didn’t want to bother with the whole business of fitting myself out. I deliberately chose apparel that was more than anti-sex clothing; it was anti-self clothing. I didn’t want to be thinking about myself and the stuff that usually informs my life: my family, my house, my daughter’s university prospects, clients, parents, bills, the sharp pain down the side of my left arm, the tragic, terrible vacations we take, the dog and her operations, and, most of all, how I looked.  Instead, I just wanted to spend my time thinking about what I was working on, attempting to, well, inhabit the world of the people in the book I’m trying to write.

I’m not sure why I write; the truth is that other than naming and branding things – I do that for clients — there isn’t much else I like doing as much.  Which is not, of course, the same as being any good at it.

when I met my boyfriend’s parents for the first time

… was white.  Everything white, everything new.

And I wasn’t a white kind of girl.

Black, that’s what I usually wore.  Black t-shirts, black jeans, black boots, black leather jacket.  When I wanted to formalize my appearance — dinner with grown-ups or a client meeting — I pulled on a leather mini- skirt and a strand of pearls.  I thought I was being ironic but I was actually just very lazy.  Black was so easy.  Everything matched.  Dirt didn’t show.  It was your calling card at the entrance to clubs and it made you invisible on the subway late at night.

White was work. Finding it – I had no idea where you went to buy  white clothing; I shopped vintage and army surplus – keeping it clean, trying not to feel like a novice nun when you wore it.

That I even considered it suggested a certain commitment on my part, which kind of explains how I ended up living in England, but that’s getting ahead of the story.

I had been seeing this man for less than a month.  Let’s call him N.  He was a Brit, living and working in New York. I was crazy about him but he wasn’t the demonstrative type, so when he invited me to his parents for the weekend, I was unprepared. His parents were also living in New York, in a big house overlooking a cove on Long Island — Great Gatsby country.  Obviously, his parents were also British.  Scottish, to be exact, but at that point I wasn’t attuned to the distinctions, didn’t know because I’d never thought about it, that although people from Scotland, England and bits of Ireland were British, only the English were, well, English.  Wales was in there somewhere as well, but who in America thinks about Wales?  Of course, I wasn’t thinking about any of this at the time, only that I was about to meet the parents and I suspected it meant something.

 I went to my friend Jeanne-Marie for advice.  Jeanne-Marie was the kind of person who understood the etiquette of clothing – the nuances of hem length, the language of undergarments, when and how to wear a hat.  She would have been very successful in Japanese court circles during the middle ages, when you had to decode an individual’s status by the cut of his sleeve.

I said to her,  ‘We’re spending the weekend with his parents.  It’s a first meet.’

Jeanne-Marie nodded.

‘Two words,’ she said.  ‘Wear white.’

So I went out and bought a white sweater, white pedal-pushers, white Keds, even a pair of white anklets with a band of lace around the cuffs.   Under the sweater – baggy, just like the pedal-pushers – I wore a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar and a tiny bow.  In my overnight case was a white nightie with puffed sleeves.

That’s how far gone I was.

On the way out to Long Island, I learned that there would be other guests staying for the weekend, two couples from Scotland, family friends. They were waiting for us when we arrived, the parents and their friends, six young-old people in heather-colored sweaters. There were introductions and hugs for N and then we moved to the living room, which they called the sitting room, for drinks.  I was given the house specialty: champagne and brandy with a sugar cube in the bottom of the glass.  It was lethal.

N’s parents appeared to be worldly sorts, adaptable and well-travelled but their friends were more provincial.  This was their first time out of  Scotland and their native accents — Highland murmurs punctuated with unexpected hoots and barks – defeated me.

Just as confusing, the male halves of the visiting foursome were twins.  Identical twins.  They looked the same.  They had the same mannerisms. They even dressed the same, as if an unseen nanny laid out their clothes every morning.  I thought I might be able to tell them apart by their spouses, but as the weekend progressed, neither man showed any partiality to either woman.  The twins were conjoined, minus the membrane, and they left their wives to their own devices.

That seemed to be the theme of the visit, a mild brand of gender apartheid.  After drinks, N disappeared, leaving me to my own devices.  It was less abandonment than the act of a parent who releases his baby into the swimming pool, on the assumption that all infants are natural swimmers. One minute his hands were there, keeping me afloat in a strange body of water, and then they were gone.

And it was a strange body of water.  The village where N’s parents lived was an enclave, wooded and serene, authentic colonial houses mingling pleasantly with newer models. The winding lane at the top of the bluff brought you down to a private sailing club on the bay with tennis courts and a sunburnt lawn and a clubhouse with white pillars where members signed for their tuna melts and iced teas.  It was all very understated, a place of old families and old money that was never talked about.  What was also never talked about was the category of person who would not own a house in the village, and whose boat would never be moored in that stretch of the cove.  To put it crudely, there was only one Jew who belonged to the club and his name was Rothschild.

The funny thing is, I’d been born less than 10 miles away, in a town called Hicksville. Hicksville, Long Island.  Really.  We lived in a Levittown development, a sub-division built on potato fields.  For $1,000 down, courtesy of the G.I Bill, you got three bedrooms and a carport, a patio out back and a couple of starter trees in the front yard.  It was assembly-line architecture, mass-produced, each Levitt house exactly like the one next door and for the returning soldiers of WWII it was a little piece of paradise.  All those city boys who went to war and, hunkered down in a wet Belgium village  or on a destroyer in the middle of the Pacific, said to themselves: If I get out of this alive I’m going to find myself a little house and raise a family – well, this was it.

For my parents, it was more than just a piece of paradise; it was their foot up on the American dream, their release from a fourth-floor walk-up in East Harlem.

The friends N’s parents had acquired in the village all belonged to the sailing club.  At cocktail parties – we went to a couple that first weekend — the men’s faces were ruddy above their blazers and bright polos.  The women wore shirtwaists and Lily Pulitzer shifts in eye-popping florals.

They fascinated me.

They’d always fascinated me,  because they seemed so effortless. They didn’t have to try to be anything, to strive or aspire, they just were. Their clothes and their lives, their unquestioning assumption that this was the way to be – the men in their lime-green trousers and alligator logos, the women with their Alice bands, the afternoons spent wrestling with flapping sails — these were the people and the attitudes that Ralph Lauren made a fortune copying, only with better tailoring.

It’s not as if I (or, for that matter, Ralph Lauren) thought that these people, these scions of America, were better or more worthy than anyone else: it’s their lack of doubt that I admire. They’re so confident, they don’t even seem to mind that they’re not calling the shots anymore – they’ve been supplanted by striving immigrants.  That unconcern is what the preppy mystique is all about and part of the American dream is that anyone can hope to aspire to that effortless confidence, even first generation Americans from the Bronx.

My parents are from the Bronx, just like Ralph Lauren when he was still Ralph Lifshitz.

Of course, these people, these serene and clubby WASPs are, for their part, fascinated by the British.  They really like the English and the Scots, and secretly see them as their role models, their source.

I ended up marrying N and moving to England.  The day of our wedding, the ceremony over, the ring on my finger, my little French hat set just so on the side of my head, the two of us turned to take our first walk together as husband and wife and I suddenly thought – my first perception as a married woman– I’ve cut out the middleman.

((If you like my blog, you might like the novel I’m writing, working title: Immigrant Without Shawl.))

when the plague came

… was a Calvin Klein swimsuit from Saks Fifth Avenue, a one-piece in a blue so deep it’s almost black.  My old suit was all crumbly and worn and with the sales on in the New York stores I decided to get serious about finding what the Brits refer to as a bathing costume.  And never mind those photos of 60-year-old Helen Mirren looking very do-able in a red bikini — restrained elegance, that was my goal.

I didn’t achieve it. I bought the Calvin Klein, but it was snit buying, one of those choices you make when you’re fed up with shopping, fed up with struggling into a succession of nylon garments with plastic lining in the crotch, none of which – the garments, not the lining – looks good in the three-way mirror.  I was in denial about a certain reality, namely, that Calvin Klein doesn’t make clothing for women like me: short women with 1950s’ bodies.  He designs for women with shoulders and height, women like Princess Charlene of Monaco, the reluctant bride, or any number of transvestites.   But that hot day in New York I’d had enough.  I paid what seemed like an awful lot of money (for a bathing suit!) and I pretended it was okay; I would amortize my investment by swimming every day, once I was back to England.

The thing about England, it’s temperate — not too hot, not too cold, just like the perfect porridge. That same moderation extends to the wildlife: no lethal spiders, piranhas or marauding bears, hardly any snakes and unless you’re mooching around Scotland in August, mosquitoes are a non-event.  Mildlife is more like it. Throw in a bit of global warming and you can swim the River Cam through October.  As I did, until the plague hit.

I don’t mean to come off all mysterious and ominous about this plague business, or to trivialize real catastrophes — AIDs, Spanish Flu, the Black Death.  My plague isn’t deadly, but it has meant the end of something special, which is swimming in the river.  Submerging yourself in a dark body of water, fields and trees on either side, is not to everyone’s taste, but for me it falls under the heading of small, keen pleasures.  More and more I’ve come to think that it’s the small stuff that makes for happiness, and now one of those gratifications is gone.  The reason is something called, variously, river itch, swimmer’s itch or duck itch.  It’s a worm, a parasitic flatworm that lives in fresh water.  The actual name is schistosome and what it does is burrow into your skin.  And if that’s not creepy enough, this worm – which lives on snails and ducks – burrows into you in order to die.

This is what happens:  you come out of the water and there are red dots on your neck and legs.  You go home, eat dinner, and by the time you’re stacking the dishwasher, the dots have turned into bumps.  Then you go to bed and three hours later the bumps are itching so badly that you are shocked out of sleep.  Your husband, awakened by all the thrashing around, is unreasonably annoyed.  He turns on the light to see what’s going on and there you are, covered in little red tombs.

You have become a flatworm cemetery.

I don’t think the term plague is inappropriate.

when I picked the pug up from the animal hospital

… was a sleeveless American Apparel shirt in a sheer grey cotton – see-through but not quite — a pair of hot-pink Capri pants,  FitFlops with black rhinestones and a lot of unnecessary lipstick.

I’m not sure who I was trying to impress with all that lipstick — the dog?  She’d just had eye surgery. We didn’t think she could make out the side of a barn, much less the nuances of lip color.  The surgeon who’d sewn her eye back together? I didn’t have to charm him; he’d done his job. Besides, he and his interns were under the impression that I was a nut case.  I blame the veterinarian for that.  Right before the operation, the vet’s office faxed a letter to the animal hospital.  I happened to read this letter. The first two paragraphs discussed the pug’s condition; the third paragraph discussed me.  It said, and I quote, “the dog’s owner seems very concerned. She fainted over the examining table and is jet lagged.”

These comments struck me as judgmental. Of course I was concerned. The pug was bleeding from her eye.  She reminded me of the bad guy in Casino Royale, the Le Chiffre character who cries red tears at the poker table.  The blood, great splotches of it, is why I fainted. At least I didn’t do it over the dog, collapse on top of her.  Instead, I slithered down the wall, which was conveniently at my back.  As for the jet lag, well, okay, I’d just gotten back from New York the day before, but, really, what did my lack of sleep have to do with any of it? I wasn’t the one performing the operation.

I waited for her in the reception area.  There was the occasional howl from behind the swinging doors, and every now and then a three-legged Labrador stumped by, but the overall atmosphere was calm.

The animal hospital is part of the university vet school, set about a mile from the center of town.  Cambridge is a construction site these days – cranes and diggers and lots of important architecture funded by Saudi princes and Chinese billionaires – but the hospital has been left alone.  It’s an old-fashioned brick building, squat and plain, surrounded by fields. There are animals grazing in the fields, and driving in you think, O, it’s a farm, and then you realize the cows and horses are patients, convalescing in the open air.

Eventually, the pug wandered into the reception area, wobbly on her legs. Her eye was red and pitted, like a child’s model of the planet Mercury. She was snuffling, and when I picked her up, she trembled under my hand. For an animal, a hospital procedure must be the equivalent of an alien abduction: You are taken from your known world and placed in an overly bright chamber.  There, masked figures tie you down, shave off your hair and invade you with cruel and shining implements. You wake in pain. Later, you are made to eat strange food.

The surgeon let me hold her for a while and then he took us into an examining room. He told me about the operation and her recovery, and what I would have to do: eye drops and painkillers, moderate exercise.  I took notes, not very well because the dog was on my lap, and also because I was distracted by one of his interns.

In a teaching hospital there are always interns around, looking young and uncertain in their polyester tunics. This lot – there were four of them – introduced themselves to me, but the one who held my attention was the one who didn’t say anything after that, who hung back and was shy about answering the surgeon’s teaching questions.  She was  Somalian, with fine features and a dark hijab covering her hair.

Looking at her, I started thinking about what it might be like to be a Muslim woman in East Africa, and then I thought about Islamic terrorists and Somalian pirates, and about the famine in her part of the world. Children are starving to death in her country – it’s the worst drought in 60 years — and it was hard not to wonder what she made of the money we spend on our pets in the West, the way we dote on them. It was hard not to wonder what she made of me, in my pink Capri’s and matching lipstick, weeping over a small and non-productive domestic animal.

A part of me wanted to say, look, I know there’s real suffering in the world, wars and children in pain. I have some perspective, I know it’s a dog.  But the truth is – and maybe this is a by-product of being a mother– you get hooked on a certain brand of need-based, unconditional love.  It’s what babies and toddlers give you, and then they grow up.  I’m still gooey-eyed over my daughter, but it’s not mutual (and quite right, too).   She’s nice to me, but she’s a teenager and for her, I’m beside the point. I’m parent as vestigial organ – attached, but basically useless.

The dog is the only member of my household who still thinks I’m completely wonderful, who’s always thrilled when I walk into the room. I’d hate not to have that.

It was a little much to explain to a student intern.

A few years ago I had to go into the hospital – the human hospital. I didn’t know how long I’d have to stay, and neither did the doctors. It was one of those situations where no one seemed to have any control.  I was unhappy about it, but what I particularly remember is how much I wanted my lipstick with me.  I made my husband go home and get it.  Chanel London Bus Red.  That’s what I was wearing that year.  I wanted it next to me on the little bedside table.  It wasn’t about control; it was more like a flag, a means of staking my territory.

when I realized I was invisible to teenage boys

…was a black suit, fairly cool as these things go, with a fitted jacket  and a short tight skirt. High heels. Long hair.

It was after work, a nice Autumn evening and I was heading to the bus stop.  Two boys were there, waiting in the bus shelter.  They were 16 or 17, that sort of age, and every time a girl walked by, they turned their heads to check her out.  Then they’d look at each other, raising their eyebrows if they approved, screwing up their mouths if they didn’t.  I walked into their line of vision, right into it, and something strange happened, which was: nothing. Nothing happened.  They didn’t raise their eyebrows or screw up their mouths.  They didn’t turn away.  They looked straight at me … and they couldn’t see me.

I had become invisible to teenage boys.

The thing is, I was only 34.  I was married,  but every now and then a random male would ask me out for a drink, and not in a guys-together kind of way.  In other words, I was still what would be considered  presentable.

But not, apparently, to teenage boys — not anymore.  Of course, in itself, this was no great loss.  It’s not as if I was interested in teenage boys; that would have been creepy and probably illegal.  Nonetheless, the implications were disturbing.  If I was no longer visible to this segment of the population, was I going to start fading, incrementally, from the view of the rest of the male world?  Would it be like one of those horror movies where bits of the heroine keep disappearing — an elbow one day, an ear the next — until nothing’s left but a set of teeth?

According to a recent survey, women think that 46 is the age when they become invisible to men.  I’m sure there’s some truth there, but I also don’t think it’s that simple and precipitous,  that you wake up one morning in the middle of your fifth decade and discover you’re wearing a Harry Potter invisibility cape.  Instead, I suspect that it — let’s call it the Female Invisibility Factor, FIF for short – is a gradual phenomenon, a three-phase process:

The Three Phases of FIF 

Phase 1: Failure to register on the retina of teenage boys.  One day you’re trying to ignore coarse comments from mini-males with gym kits and acne; the next day they’re ignoring you.  This shift is easy to dismiss, in fact, it’s something of a relief.  Even better, it can be viewed as one’s full flowering into womanhood.

Phase 2: The hot guy calls you ma’am.   This is when men in their mid-to-late twenties start offering you their seat on public transport– and you’re not even pregnant.   Even worse is the accompanying “Ma’am?”, which makes it painfully clear that this is not a charming pick-up gesture but an act of courtesy towards an older woman.  This phase is marked by a severe reduction in attention from construction workers, truck drivers and those mildly tipsy men who hang out on street corners. The coup de grace is the day you acknowledge to yourself that it has been some time since a fireman flipped you an appreciative glance.

Which brings us to:

Phase 3: The edge of the cliff.   This is not to say it’s all over, but the signs are hard to ignore. Things just don’t seem to happen. There’s the sense that you might be occupying a sort of negative space.  If older men notice you, it is now most definitely in a guys-together way. When repair men come to the house, they repair, no messing.  What you anticipate about parties is the chat as opposed to the chat up. And there’s a definite change in a key — but rarely discussed — strand of the  FIF phenomenon, which is visibility to other females.  For most of our lives, most of us are checking out other women — lightning assessments of style, appeal, success and shoes.  Younger girls, whether they’ll admit it or not, are always clocking not just each other, but the previous generation for tips and clues, how to be and what not to do.  Forget invisibility to men: the failure to register on the retina of teenage girls is  the true beginning of the end.

And the end itself?  That comes on a trip to Italy. You’re walking, alone, through a small village in the southern tip of the country. Three old boys are seated at an outdoor cafe. They’re leathery and ancient, with  crooked cheroots shoved into the corner of their mouths. Every time a female walks past, they smack their lips and mutter “Bella.”   You come into their line of vision and … nothing.  Nothing happens.

Now that’s invisibility.

when I met the king of Greece

… was the most expensive piece of clothing I ever bought with my own money, a dark blue Domingo Rodriguez dress with long sleeves and a severe notched collar.  It had the formal, trussed-up look of a gown in a Velasquez painting, stiff and soberly grand.  

 I met King Constantine through work.  I was creative director at a public relations agency in London and I had to produce a documentary about him.  It was for Canadian TV.  Apparently, Canada has a large Greek population and the king had a message for them.  Unexcitingly, it concerned his tax status.

The agency I worked for dealt mainly with corporate clients.  Banks and brokerage houses.  Food and beverage manufacturers.  Oil companies.  If a tanker hit a reef off the coast of Australia, a rep from my agency would be second on the scene, advising the CEO of the oil company to act humble and concerned, to let his five o’clock shadow sprout and to get himself photographed cleaning the slick off a sea tern.

But there were also a handful of what I called vanity clients, that is, clients we took on to flatter the vanity of our CEO, who was hoping for a knighthood.  Prince Charles’ charity was one of them.  I had just moved to Britain and the idea of working with the Prince of Wales seemed appealing, the sort of thing you’d cross an ocean for.  I thought it might lead to tea at Buckingham Palace.  It didn’t.  I never even saw the Prince.  The project with Constantine was different.  As producer, I would be spending the day with him and the film crew I had yet to hire.  The King and I were to have lunch together at the big table in the conference room.

I’d never met a royal before.  I barely knew any Brits, let alone a Greek king.  I had never produced a documentary before either and I wasn’t sure what a producer did.  (I’ve since come to see that it’s a lot like being a party planner.)  Eventually, I found a director. To my relief, he said he’d bring his own crew.  Things seemed to be sorting themselves out.

Then I had a visit from the protocol person.

The protocol person was a female in a grey suit who went around telling people how to behave in the presence of royalty.  This seemed like a great job to have.  She said that when I met the King I was to curtsy and address him as ‘your majesty’.  After that, it was ‘sir’.  I had to wait for him to speak first.   Most importantly – for some reason this was the big no-no – I was to never, ever show him my back.  If I had to leave the room, I was supposed to shuffle out in reverse.  (This reminded me of a boyfriend I used to have who would pounce and then say, “Don’t you know never turn your back on a country boy?”)

I called the director to relay this information to him (excluding the boyfriend detail).  When I finished, there was a snort at the other end of the line, which I interpreted to mean that he could not believe an American was lecturing him, an Englishman, on royal etiquette.

On the day, the CEO and I waited for King Constantine in reception.  He arrived.  I curtseyed, a cross between a crouch and a bob.  The king took my hand.   “How delightful,” he said.   I don’t know if he meant me, the curtsy or the occasion but it was very effective.  I felt swooney.  I wasn’t the only one; as we were filing out, the receptionist grabbed my sleeve and mouthed, Wow.

I once saw Robert Redford at a bar in Utah. He was never one of my crushes, and he was already getting on in years, but when he walked in, time seemed to stop.  He was golden, he actually radiated a golden aura.  It was amazing, the ‘it’ factor in action – that indefinable combination of charisma and an accumulation of everyone’s fantasies.  Constantine had it as well.  He’s a king without a country – the family was booted out of Greece ages ago –a monarch without power or wealth.  Nonetheless, the air around him was charged.

In the afternoon, we gathered around the screen to review the morning’s footage.  Constantine removed his jacket.  He slid down on to the floor to get comfortable.  He bummed a cigarette off the lighting guy.

The make-up girl looked stunned.

She was a pro, someone who had worked for years in movies and theatre,  but when she leant over to light the king’s Marlboro, her hands were shaking.

 

 

 

when my daughter had a party for 40 teenagers

   … was the fake-fur Russian hat from H&M, a North Face parka – one of those fitted numbers   with sleeves like a wet suit — and black trousers with an embarrassing brand name.  Not Your  Daughter’s Jeans.  That’s what they’re called.  It’s a terrible label to wear on your ass but they’re  actually very flattering, and that night, 40 sixteen-year-olds stomping through my house, I  needed the ammunition.

My daughter was hostess.  I was bouncer and official grown-up.  We’d been in tense negotiations  over this party for weeks.  This was the agreement we finally hammered out:

1.  I was permitted to greet her friends and make subtle anti-drinking noises.  We had not  succeeded in defining what subtle meant in this context.  A phrase such as, Is that a bottle in  your pocket or are you just glad to see me, while nicely informal, was probably inappropriate.

2.  Her father was not permitted to be home.  He had been sent out to play poker.

3.  In deference to the neighbors, the sound system – an i-pod linked to an amp – would go silent  at 11.30.  Guests out by 12.15.

4.  The upper floors and my office were off limits to guests.  The rooftop terrace was a grey area.

5.  The party room and the courtyard were off limits to me.  Once the majority of guests had arrived I was to go to my room, and stay there.

I knew I would hate every minute of it.

The noise, the antics, the prospect of breakage — all reasonable things to hate, but it was more than that.  My American sensibility, which is law-abiding and somewhat Puritanical in nature, was about to come face to face with the lax and louche realities of British culture.  And by culture, I mean the drinking culture.  It’s practically a competitive sport here — extreme guzzling — and if there were a Booze Olympics, the U.K. would medal up.  And it’s official: British teens, particularly the girls, are classified as the worst (or best, depending on your point of view) binge-drinkers in all of Europe.  But there was something else, not as bad as the drinking but still discomforting. I’ve lived here a long time, but I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the class system, the idea that there are these three tiers – lower, middle and upper, each one broken down into subgroups and few of them able or inclined to mix with any of the others.

I grew up in a small town in New Jersey, a starter suburb carved out of farmland. Everyone went to public school (in England, the term is state school).  Everyone had an after-school job.  We were normal teenagers, we messed around, but if you broke a window at a party, you paid for it yourself.  If you got drunk and wrapped your car around a tree, the cost of the tow came out of your own pocket.  A boy might spend the night puking in the toilet, but he still had to get up at six, pull on his helmet and pads and run 20 laps on the football field.  His Rotary Club scholarship depended on it.  We weren’t better or nicer than other teenagers, we were just more worried.

My daughter goes to a girls’ private school.  (In England, private schools are called independents.  With typical British irony, the fanciest independents are known as public schools – it’s something to do with Henry VIII.)   No one forced us to send our girl private; we made that choice.   It’s a very rigorous and academic school, you have to pass an exam to get in, but it’s still a class-bound cloister, a hothouse, where her friends call their mothers mummy with a certain confident lilt, and learning to sail and ski are givens.  Every September at least two girls show up with their arms in plaster, broken when their horses refused a jump at pony camp, and after Christmas vacation there’s always one anecdote about a younger brother losing control on the slopes and snowplowing into a surprised Prince William and his entourage.

These schools are a world away from the local state schools.  They’re a universe away from Pascack Valley Regional High in Hillsdale, New Jersey.  That’s where I went.

I called my mother ma.

This was the stuff I was thinking about, standing in the cold outside my front door, waiting for the guests to arrive.  The H&M hat gave me an extra four inches of height and the heels of my boots another three, but the boys coming down the street still loomed over me.  They were carrying plastic bags.  The bags were clanking.

It was one of those moments when I wished I wasn’t a mother.  I didn’t want anything to do with this party, didn’t want to think about my house being wrecked, about dealing with a bunch of drunken lads and ladettes– some of them no older than 15 – and the inevitable sobbing girls locked in my bathroom.  (Every teen party has them, these weepers.  They work as a triad — one girl to do the crying, mascara running down her cheeks, the other two girls to do the clucking and patting.)  I didn’t want the stress and the noise, the spills and the vomit and the sheer boredom of being stuck in my bedroom, waiting it out.

The problem is, I love my daughter.  She works hard, she’d done her exams, and she wanted a party.  I, in turn, want her to be happy, so I agreed.  The fact I resented it made me feel mean and inadequate, a bad mother.  I’d rather be mother to no one than that.

I said hello to her guests and pointed to their bags.  I said, “ I hope that’s not liquor.”

Have you ever asked a teenager if he’s packing drink?  He’ll lie right to your face.  Politely, though.  They’re all polite, these boys.  They answered, ‘Oh, no,” with great seriousness and ducked their heads; it was like being conned by a row of Robert Pattinsons in Twilight.

I wasn’t about to call off the party at this juncture, make a scene and embarrass my girl.  So I waved them into the house, the tall boys with their six-packs of beer and the girls with long hair and tiny skirts, bottles of flavoured vodka tucked into their handbags.  (Later, my daughter told me that Skittles are the sweetener of choice, a handful of them dropped down the neck of the bottle.)

After a while, I went up to my bedroom.  I had my laptop and a pile of DVDs: Mad Men, series 1-3.  But I couldn’t get into the troubles of Don Draper and his psychotic wife. The party was too loud and intrusive; it came up through the floor and the windows.  Music thumped, girls screeched – why do teenage girls screech? – glass broke.  I lay on my bed and thought about whether this was as bad as having my house invaded by non-murderous Cossacks, or if it was more like a root canal session at the dentist.

I decided it was like having root canal while Cossacks invaded the dentist’s office.

Having sorted that in my mind, I got off my bed and wandered downstairs.

The rope I had tied across the landing, designed to bar guests from upstairs, had been removed.  Someone explained it was because they needed to use the bathroom on the top floor; three girls had locked themselves into the first floor bathroom.  I put my ear against the door and heard sobbing and murmured consolation.  The party was in full swing.

It was dark and crowded downstairs, the music at blast level, liquid all over the floor.  There were a few couples locked together on the sofa but the main activity was drinking, drinking to get drunk.  The primary screecher, a girl with a haystack of blond hair and a striped crop top was trying to peel off her top, still screeching.  And then I saw my daughter.  She was lifting a glass of wine to her mouth.  She was holding a cigarette.  There’s the primal scene, the first time a child sees his parents entwined in bed.  Is there a term for the first time you see your child engaged in acts of vice?

In retrospect, it was relatively minor vice, a paper cup of supermarket merlot and an unaccustomed cigarette.  But at that moment, amidst all that noise and disorder, I thought my heart would break.  I gestured to her, the scary international symbol for Come here, and she walked over, mouthing, “What?”

We went to the front hall, and had a huddled conference under the harsh light.  We argued back and forth in angry whispers.  Throughout it all I kept thinking:  I raised you wrong, I should have bundled you up and carried you back to America, away from this world of drinking and entitlement.   Sad and exasperated, I finally said, spitting out the words,  “What’s wrong with you kids?  Why do you have to get drunk at parties?  Why can’t you just smoke dope and have sex like we did?”

Bad mother.

when Donna described what her surgeon was wearing

… was the forest green dress from Tesco’s, £12.00 for a flammable wool synthetic with a scoop neck and three-quarter length sleeves, and a pair of vintage ankle boots from a shop so great I won’t reveal the name.  They’re black and tight – second-skin tight — with square toes, the kind of footwear a hot witch might wear on a second date.  Donna, stretched out on the long sofa, was wearing Levi’s — once fitted, now loose – her Prada specs and the Paul Smith shawl Tom gave her.  From the neck up, she looked like one of those marble busts of a Renaissance scholar: pale, elegant and completely hairless.

In the movie, she’d be played by Sigourney Weaver — Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3, all skull and cheekbones.

We were talking about her surgeon Dr B and what he was wearing the morning of her operation.  He had shown up at her hospital room while they were prepping her and for a little while he stood in the doorway, watching.  He was wearing a suit.  That may not sound like much, but it was a revelation for Donna.  All the other times she’d seen him, he’d been shrouded in his white coat, that blank, protective garment worn by doctors and butchers – people who work with blood and innards.  The suit was beautiful, dark blue and double breasted, with a lavender shirt and a lavender tie.  He’s a big man, Dr B, 6’4”,  broad, with long arms and wide hands.  His suits are made for him by a tailor on the Upper East Side, the same tailor who dresses all the New York basketball players, the Knicks and the Harlem Globetrotters — big men of style.

Lying there on the hospital bed, the nurse fiddling with needles and tubes, Donna looked at Dr B, at the jacket fitted just so, and the toned-in shades of lavender, and she thought: Well, well.  The man is a dandy. Who knew.

That’s the thing about Dr B; he keeps surprising her. He had been the last in the series of surgeons and oncologists that she’d met and most of the others had said things like, I’m not going to pull any punches, and, You’re stage 4, there’s no stage 5, as if they were all coaches and she was the player who was letting down the team.  Dr B, though, had sat and listened to what she had to say and when she’d finished he took those big hands of his and placed them over her heart.  Then he said: This must be so humiliating for you.

Donna’s no sentimentalist.  She’s not the kind of person who looks for comfort and answers in crystals and sound bites.  Even so, she said to herself, He knows.

So it’s Dr B we’ve ended up discussing, off and on throughout my stay.

We’ve made up a chart, Donna and I, almost a Venn diagram of what we’re calling Cancer Dicks and Cancer Darlings. The Dicks are those people, medical and civilian, who say stupid things, who call up to lecture her on her medication or to suggest that her lifestyle choices might be responsible for her condition. Just saying lifestyle choices is enough, we think, to place such people firmly in the Cancer Dick category.

Dr B, of course, is a Cancer Darling.

These are some of the Dr B-related topics we’ve covered:  His beautiful suits.  His ties – does he choose them himself, or is there a Mrs B?  Those hands of his.  You’d assume a surgeon’s hands would have to be thin and nimble, athletic without being brutish – a sailor’s hands, accomplished at tying knots, or a golfer’s, used to diddling around with tees and small, pocked balls.

On one level, this is not an unusual conversation for us to be having, to be talking about what a guy we know wears, his attitude toward style, his physical attributes.  We’ve been having this conversation for years.  There’s always a subtext, but it’s never been as hidden, as coded as this one.  We both know the code.  It can be broken down as follows: if Dr B knows the key to the perfect tie, does he also have the key to the perfect – and this is the point where the conversation goes as deep underground as a Chilean miner.  The word we’re both thinking, and not saying, is cure.

when I went running in a Cambridge mud field

…were torn leggings from la Redoute and various pieces from the a/w anti-sex line:  a granddad raincoat, a jumper my husband rejected, Virgin Atlantic flight socks – the ones they hand out on board with a toothbrush and a cheap pen — and an iridescent pair of Nike trainers, which my daughter says are sad and hideous.  The pug, lolloping at my side, was chic.  She was wearing her leopard-print halter and the black leather leash I got in Manhattan.

 

The shop where I bought the leash was in the West Village, the gay center of the universe.  Coincidentally or not, the pet accessories on offer looked like bondage gear: studded muzzles, spiked collars, leather harnesses and tight little butt-baring sweaters.  Originally, I had planned to get her one of those wool-and-nylon affairs with Velcro straps, the kind of proper dog coat you see on whippets and greyhounds in English parks.  I thought it would make me more acceptable to the other dog walkers in Cambridge, that it would help me pass.  But standing in the pet shop in New York a few hours before my flight back to the UK, surrounded by pint-sized bits of chain and leather — it was like being in an S&M bar for midgets — I realized I didn’t care about fitting in.

 

The first year I lived in Britain I worried about it, constantly.  At the time, fitting in was all mixed up in my mind with how lonely and homesick I was.  I had discovered that English society was governed by a host of unwritten, unspoken rules, all of which I kept breaking.  I was too earnest, too outspoken, too eager, too friendly, like one of those big yellow dogs with a lot of saliva — a lab or golden retriever — that’s always leaping up and getting its wet paws all over everything.  I believed that people were thinking badly of me: my co-workers, my husband’s colleagues, the man who fixed my bike.  I resolved to conform.  I bought wool skirts and pale cardigans, and a pair of fat green Wellies – gumboots — in which I clomped around like a pygmy farmer.  All of this only made things worse; I was trying too hard, and the Brits hate that.  So exhausting, they say, with a horrible little laugh.

 

So I gave up.

 

I reverted to my New York self.  I wore my sunglasses and my leather jacket and stopped trying to control my American accent.  I pushed ahead in lines, and refused to call them queues.  If I didn’t want to do something I said no, instead of that long drawn out we-ell the English use to show their scorn and distaste.  To my surprise, the more I snubbed the British way of life, the more my acceptability quotient rose.

 

People started hanging around my desk at work.  The grande dame that lived down the street, the one who terrified all the kids in the neighborhood, chatted me up in the supermarket.  I acquired women friends — English women who had previously frozen me out with their thin smiles and clipped syllables.

 

It took a bit of time, but I finally worked out what had changed, what was different in the way people saw me.  It was simple: I had become a licensed eccentric.

 

It’s still a shame culture here in Britain.  People embarrass easily, and they’re scared of it.  Even the most drunken lout is squeamish about speaking up, doing anything that might call attention to him.  That’s probably why he drinks so much; he needs to be legless in order to feel free to talk above a mumble, barrel through a crowd and complain about lousy service in a shop.  When he’s completely loose, he throws punches that don’t connect.  But an eccentric, like an idiot savant, is free to do all that, in fact, is licensed to do just about anything  — without judgement or a hangover.  And the Brits like that; begrudging about so much else, they secretly admire anyone who doesn’t seem to give a toss.

 

I don’t jog seriously; it’s a start-and-stop business with a certain amount of hand flapping: girly running.  The pug is better at it but after 20 yards she starts to retch and pant like a drunken asthmatic.  It requires effort to run through muddy grass, I’m either slipping or losing a shoe in the muck.  After one length of the field – it’s a short field — I decided to go home; any more was trying too hard.