Mind the Gap
I said to my father yesterday afternoon, “Do you fancy my new jumper?”
When he answered, “Huh?” I was like, “‘Jumper?’ It means ‘sweater’ in England.”
“Right,” he said, adding that it was ninety-two degrees out and that if I didn’t take it off I was guaranteed to get heatstroke or at least a rash, and wasn’t that the last thing either of us needed at a time like this?
“Ninety-two degrees or not, I still think it’s the most brilliant jumper I’ve ever seen,” I told him.
My father made some joke about giving it an IQ test, but honestly, by that point, I’d stopped listening. We were in the driveway at the time. He was watering his dried-out hydrangeas, and I was sitting on the bonnet of the car, just waiting for him to call it the hood or some such thing. He’s so stupid, my father is. My mum wasn’t much brighter, but now that she’s dead I’m just trying to concentrate on the good things, like how she paid for me to go to England with my school’s history club. I’m not a member—it’s actually one of my worst subjects—but the adviser, Mrs. Carkeek, let me come anyway because she needed a minimum of twelve students and only had eleven after Kimberly Shank got a B in German and tried to kill herself. It was my first time out of the country, and it really opened my eyes to what stupid cunts the people are here in the United States.
“How can I be a cunt when I’m a guy?” Braydon Hoyt asked when I saw him at the funeral on Tuesday. He didn’t know that the word means “idiot,” so the more times he asked, the more of a cunt he became. (And to think I once dated him!!!) The problem with Braydon, and with all American blokes, really, is that they’re so literal. And it’s not just me who thinks that way. Fiona, who’s my best mate in England, said that except for me she won’t go anywhere near an American because they don’t know what irony is. She and I met outside the Globe. Mrs. Carkeek had taken the group to see The Temptress, I think it was, but the play was so bloody boring I snuck out at intermission. In front of the theater is a walkway that faces the river, and that’s where I met Fiona. “Fag?” she asked.
That’s how I got practically addicted to Mayfairs, which, unfortunately, you can’t get in the States. I ask everywhere, and people look at me like I’m crazy. “Blue box? Big picture of a diseased lung on it?” You can’t find Walkers Prawn Cocktail crisps here either, which is another thing Fiona turned me on to. She and I talked for almost ten minutes before she realized I wasn’t English. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You’re a Yank? Really? You?”
At first she was thrown by the way I talk. I don’t notice it myself, but according to Dad and everyone at the funeral, I completely picked up an English accent during the week I spent there. “It’s not just that though,” Fiona said. “It’s your Union Jack jumper, your Doc Martens, your whole way of being.”
By this she meant my attitude—the way I can look at something and automatically see that it’s complete bollocks. Fiona has that same ability, and we agreed that it’s a double-edged sword. “I mean, sometimes, McKenzie, don’t you look at all these stupid gits and just wish you could be that easily satisfied?”
It was crazy how much the two of us had in common. Both of us love London, for a start. She wasn’t born there but moved from Coventry when she was fifteen to live with her granny in Barking. I think “granny” is absolutely the most brilliant thing ever to call your grandmother, but unfortunately it doesn’t work in the United States. My mum’s mother just wants me to call her T.J. “I’m sixty-two years old, for God’s sake,” she said on Tuesday when I saw her at the funeral. “I’m young and I’m active, and if you ever call me that again, I’ll wash your mouth out with soap.” I’ve never seen her so mad. “And don’t tell me that in England the soap is called ‘chuff’ or something, or I’ll wash it out twice.”
My other grandmother—the one on my dad’s side—had a stroke last winter, so I honestly don’t know what she said when I called her granny, but she didn’t look too happy about it. She’s out of her wheelchair finally, but if it were up to me, I’d put her back in it. My God, was she slow—took her twenty minutes to get from our sofa to the loo. That means “bathroom” in England. Our ground-floor loo has an old person’s bar next to the toilet. Dad put it in at Easter when Mum got really bad, and I told him I’m not going back in there until he takes it out again.
“Why?” he asked.
“It makes me feel like I’m in hospital,” I told him.
“In a hospital, you mean,” he said.
Six days earlier I’d had the same conversation, but in the other direction.
“My mother’s been in the hospital for almost three weeks now,” I’d said to Fiona.
And she said, “‘In hospital.’ We leave out the ‘the’ here.” She offered me another Mayfair. “So what’s she in for?”
“Cancer of ovaries,” I told her.
The Globe was on a Thursday. On Friday we took a day trip to Oxford, which the history club wankers practically wet themselves over, and just as we returned to London, at half six English time but twelve thirty in Missouri, my mother died. We were scheduled to fly home on Saturday, so rather than ruin the rest of my trip, my dad didn’t tell me until we saw each other at the airport. I actually can’t stand anyone in the history club so didn’t really mind that they saw my stupid father weeping like a girl at the baggage claim. I said to him later in the car, “Do you have to be so American about this? I mean, really. It’s not like you didn’t know it was coming.”
Something Fiona had noticed and I completely agree with is that people in the States are entirely too sentimental. They really will cry at the drop of a hat, partly because they’re babies and partly because they’re too attached to things. Not me, though. “Keep calm and carry on,” that’s my motto. I bought a mug that says so, and it’s absolutely the only thing I’ll drink my tea out of. I’m mad for tea.
Due to the jet lag, I was knackered out of my mind for the funeral. Not that it mattered, really. Like I wrote to Fiona, it was absolute rubbish. There I was, dying for a Mayfair, while all these people who hardly even knew my mother came up to say how much they were going to miss her. If I had a dime for every time I heard “Look how big you’ve gotten!” I’d have enough for a first-class ticket back to London and a whole year’s rent on a flat. Two years’ rent if I shared it with a flatmate.
After the funeral, scores of perfectly dreadful people came by the house. Luckily my grandmothers were there to help. Well, one was a help, the other just sat there like a toad and blinked. I only had a few chances to slip away, and when I did I went to my room and checked to see if I’d gotten any e-mails. I’ve written Fiona eighteen times since returning home but haven’t heard anything back quite yet, probably because she’s uncomfortable. English people are completely different than we are, especially about money. While Americans are all “Look what I’ve got!” the Brits are a lot more British about it, a lot more stoical and private. It wasn’t easy for Fiona to ask me for that loan. The whole subject was a complete embarrassment for her, I could tell. Especially given that she was so much older than me, in her thirties at least, not that that makes any difference. Due to my maturity, I have all kinds of older friends, or could if I wanted to. Fiona walked me to three different ATMs in order to get the money—so while the history club was at the Globe, being tourists, I was seeing the real London and falling desperately in love with it.
I was hoping that after graduation two years from now I could go to college there, but it turns out I’m already in college. Brits call high school “college,” and what we call college they call “uni.” Fiona says it’s strictly for gits and arseholes, but at least it would be a foot in the door. My father won’t like the idea one bit, but he’d better start getting used to it. He’s too preoccupied to realize it now, but in a lot of ways, I’m already gone.