We Had It So Good (11 page)

“I keep thinking of all the people I've known in London, all these years of living here, they pass through your life and you have got old and they must have got old, but if you saw them you'd cry, because you'd understand for the first time how old
you
are, and that it's all long gone and we didn't treasure it. We thought there was no way it would not last forever, together with our hair. Isn't it weird that hair of all things turns out to be so important? I look in the mirror and I do not know myself. So I look away. This wasn't supposed to happen. I'm the kid from California who was born in sunshine and I've spent almost all my life in one cloudy day after another.”

F
or twelve hours they have been driving across Missouri and Kansas and Andrea is beginning to hallucinate whole towns, with traffic jams and zebra crossings and Gothic church spires and the melodic trill of ice-cream vans. She is suspended in enduring flatness. The van doesn't seem to be moving, making no progress at all across the unfolded map she holds on her knee, while Stephen is clenched over the wheel behind his sunglasses, locked into a robotic mode of driving. She wonders if his body has been sucked out by aliens and replaced by a husk, capable of doing one thing only: hanging on to the steering wheel, keeping his foot on the gas pedal and occasionally overtaking a slower vehicle.

Earlier on in the journey there had been baffling signs: Ped Xing! Deer Xing! but that was days ago. There have been no peds or deer since—she thinks the signs were as long ago as Indiana. Square white churches, red barns, silos, strange buildings whose agricultural purpose she can't work out. Tiny towns marked with water towers—they look like a few LEGO bricks thrown down on an empty table. Other places are just a marker, uninhabited, devoured by the vast prairie. The sky is immense and filled with milky galaxies, the moon appears as a spherical orb, not a flat disc, its back in shadow. Andrea feels that she and her family are dots, pinpricks, their planet too insignificant to be observed from the stars with the naked eye. No
wonder Americans think big,
are
big (horrifyingly obese), if they need to assert themselves in this vast empty landscape.

The children sleeping in the back, Stephen catatonic at the wheel, make her feel she is the only sentient being in the cosmos. Only her own mind thinks and imagines. They pass other vehicles, cars, trucks, vans, but the occupants are remote, aloof, solitary. Everyone drives alone, she realizes; even when there is someone beside you in the passenger seat, the road itself is your all-absorbing companion. She cannot drive, is unable to help out her husband. Partly this is because of her eyesight. She has astigmatism and has always been too vain to wear spectacles, but she has finally given in at Stephen's insistence and now has a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. But even corrected, the deformed lenses in her eyes make the exterior world a little flat, she cannot make good judgments about spaces and finds it difficult to change lanes. She has failed her test four times.

She remains someone who is mostly comfortable on foot but America is totally different from home. The car is your own clothing. You cannot go about naked. All the family meals are eaten at truck stops, where she feels herself to be a tiny, diminished figure standing, waiting for Stephen to zip up as he closes the door of the rest room, handing the key back, her sheltering in the shadow of the giant wheel of a Mack truck with a scarlet nose jutting out and a far-flung community on the CB radio in which female hitchhikers are beaver and accredited female hitchhikers who can't be messed around with are angel beaver.

The truck stops have the same menus whichever state you are in, she always has a chef's salad and Stephen always has a burger with fries and the children eat off their parents' plates, according to what they fancy, because it is too exhausting to interrogate the many choices available.

But Stephen reassures her that soon they will reach the mountains, the landscape
will
change, he promises. She will see the Rockies, which are almost as good as the Himalayas.

The kids are suspiciously well-behaved, sleeping a great deal as if drugged. Stephen has not told Andrea that he is indeed drugging them, slipping small amounts of sedative, crushed up, into their food. It would have been impossible to do America the way he wanted, flying to New York and then driving in a rented van from coast to coast, without their compliance, even involuntary. Max is a happy child, he can take anything and is easy to cajole or distract with a story. Marianne is the difficult one, cranky and demanding. She has passed through the terrible twos repetitively asking
why
of everything she comes in contact with. Why are there corners? He does not have an answer, him the Rhodes Scholar.

The back of the van has been laid out with wall-to-wall mattresses that the kids can bounce around on and if they stand on boxes they can see out of the window, except, as Andrea points out, there's nothing
to
see, everything is the same same same.

“Look! The mountains,” Stephen cries when they finally reach the Rockies. And the children stare, unable to understand what it is they're supposed to be looking at. They feel vague and placid; Marianne holds her brother's hand and sucks his other thumb, which she is not allowed to do to her own thumb. Max sees his sister as a strange swirl of color. His thumb sends waves of pleasure up his arm and down into his body, and he gets a little erection. This is all he will remember from the great trip across America. He is only two and still working on the interesting mechanical difficulties of fastening shoes, which come with more than one option, such as the lace and the buckle.

The whole family finds Utah curious. The Great Salt Lake looks to Marianne like snow, which she has seen over the course of a couple of London days, and Max closes his eyes against its dazzling whiteness. It reminds the adults of the moon. Then they cross the penultimate state line into Nevada, spend a night in Reno, drive on, and finally Stephen is home.

The border is Lake Tahoe. Beyond that, the promised land, the
land of milk and honey which God, he believes, must have made a covenant to grant to people like his father, the travelers who go on moving until they run out of land to cross and find themselves on the rim of the world, the mountains finally behind them. The beach is where a person can be happy and the sea our original home. This is always the destination, the sand, the scrubby grasses that grow in it, the birds gliding in the thermals.

All the money they have saved by sleeping in the van is to be splashed out on a hotel in San Francisco. Now here, Andrea thinks, she could live. She loves all the ups and the downs and in particular the afternoon fogs coming in from the sea, the place is atmospheric. Stephen shows her the neighborhood of Victorians which survived the 1906 earthquake, everything is so charming and everyone seems so middle-class, which is not what they are at all because, he explains to her,
middle-class
means something different and there is no word in the language for what the people are who live in these Carpenter Gothic houses.

On the other side of the bay they find Sausalito, where blond couples are roller-blading about the streets and she cannot help but notice how incredibly healthy everyone looks, all lightly tanned without being bronzed, and sitting out-of-doors in cafés eating large sandwiches with what looks like bushy clumps of thin grass poking out of the sides. She can see her children growing up here lean and fit, with American accents. Her chief anxiety is how she would resume her work, because her consent to this exploratory trip, this monthlong visit to the U.S. to size up the opportunities for Stephen's career, had been based on his reassurance that she could not find a better place in the world to pursue her new profession than America.

There had been days when Stephen was walking toward the tube, navigating the windy roundabout at Highbury Corner on a tepid
summer morning of intermittent weak showers, when he was engulfed with crushing nostalgia. For the parents he had not seen in nine years, for the balmy Los Angeles weather with its lack of extremes, for the ocean which he'd taken for granted, for the suburban home lounging on its lot with the palm tree growing out front and his bedroom with its childhood chemistry set and college textbooks, his mom in the kitchen baking chocolate cake and his father pulling up in his automobile after work, the smell of the pelts on his skin, going straight into the bathroom to wash, and
The Ed Sullivan Show
and the passionate rows that sometimes broke out between husband and wife in which each would revert to their native language in their helplessness to fully express themselves, and his big sisters who smelt of woman. The two girls, as he still thought of them, both taking after their mother with Latina looks, high-breasted, slender ankles, the shadow of a double chin, taking hours in the bathroom, reading movie magazines, ignoring their little brother, the pest… he often felt he could not tell them apart, they morphed into each other. But one had a mole on the side of her chin, from which she plucked dark hairs with tweezers despite their mother saying she had read in
Reader's Digest
you could get cancer that way.

And then, with the memory of his sisters Carole and Rita overwhelming him with nostalgia, reminding him to write more often on blue airmail paper, he would open his eyes and here he was, in London, under those interminable brown skies.

He was doing okay in London. He had a good job as a staff reporter on
New Scientist,
he had a family. But Stephen Newman was not born under blue skies only to do “okay.”

“I want to go home,” he said one night, when they lay in bed and the children were rocking their way to dreamland. It was 1978. President Carter had declared an amnesty, the draft dodgers were free to return to America without retribution.

“This
is
home,” she said.

“This? It's just a rented flat.”

“But what difference does that make? Look, all our things are here, our pictures, the children's toys.”

They had the whole floor of the house now. Every time someone moved out, they went to Ralph and asked him for the room.

Stephen said, “We'll get new things, kiddo, better things, much better, you'll see.”

“But I don't understand what we're going to do in America. I can't envisage our life there.”

“Look, I can find a job no problem, probably back in the research field, a university job, I bet. As for you, whatever you want! Whatever you're doing here. Whatever makes you happy. That's the whole
point
of the country, it's where people come to make a fresh start. We'll all be American, our kids will be American.”

“I don't want to be American, that's your
shtick,
not mine.”

He always smiled when she used such words, which came out of her mouth daintily in what was to his ears her cut-glass accent, as if the
shtick
was presented on a doily resting on a porcelain cake stand.

“Hold my
shtick,
” he said, cupping her breasts. “We'll talk about this tomorrow.”

Their sex life together was still very good. He was clumsy but when that happened, she thought of something else.

“But what exactly do you have here?” he began again, the next evening, when he got home from work. “Your parents who write to you once in a blue moon? Crazy Grace? Our friends? We'll make
new
friends. We can do anything we want, but I never, ever said I would stay here. We got married because you were prepared to do me a favor and save me from the draft, and we made a real marriage out of it. Thank you. But I really do have to go home.

“And the other thing,” he said. He had reached his clinching argument. “You've spent all this time training to be a psychotherapist and if there's one country in the world where they're crying out to hand over half their paychecks to shrinks, it's America. The Jews are neurotic.”

There was a theory that psychoanalysis was a Jewish science; many of her tutors and mentors at the clinic in Hampstead where she went to lectures were Jewish. She had had to submit to being analyzed herself for several years, the crows had been thoroughly excavated, and the hanging rabbit and her parents' abandonment.

Her years of therapy, paid for by part-time receptionist work in hotels, had allowed her to make her peace with her parents. She had taken the train to Keswick and spoken to them about how they had failed her. The confrontation resulted in no recognition on their part, they acknowledged nothing, she had never thought they would. Hope was not the same as reason. But she felt the weight of a coal truck lifted from her back as she walked away from the small, stifling house.

Her mother had dusted ornaments the whole time she was talking and looked round occasionally to correct some small detail in her daughter's account of each incident. Her father was drunk.

They had turned themselves into walls and doors. The doors had been carefully locked. She knew she had to proceed on her own from now on, the hotel and all its horrors were metaphors more than memories. There was no alternative.

Stephen said that over in Europe it was inevitable that all the Jews were screwed up, they lived shadow lives, neither one thing nor another. Once you got out of there, all that kind of thing should have just stopped more or less automatically. Emigration was the cure for European ills. And yet it turned out that when they got to the land of plenty, all they wanted to do was go back down into the darkness. There would be more than enough work for her, dealing with their neuroses.

Here in London, psychotherapy was still a new career. The talking cures—not cures, that sounded like the clients (not patients, the therapists did not dare call them that)
were
sick—the talking therapies were there to help people through life's crises and the usual, ineffable sadness of merely living. The English wept in private,
frightened to reveal themselves in case of the sudden appearance of the straitjacket and the chemical cosh. Andrea had seen her father do so. It was a shame culture. Therapy was an American self-indulgence, she had heard it said over and over again when she was introduced to someone at a party and they asked what she did.