The English American

by Alison Larkin

  I watch them go. They’re so happy with each other, Mum and Dad. They only met four times before they got married, and they’re still happily married after thirty-four years.

  Lasting love. Isn’t that what everyone longs for?

  I once asked Dad if he thought he and Mum are soul mates. It amused him immensely. He doesn’t believe in soul mates.

  But I do. And I hope, more than anything, that the journey I have just embarked on will somehow make it possible for me to recognize and truly love mine. I find myself thinking about Nick as I head toward the plane.

  I met Nick in the summer of 1999. Neville had somehow made Steeplehurst School’s first eleven cricket team and Mum, Dad, Charlotte, and I were summoned to cheer him on.

  Women in lovely dresses and large English hats sat on blankets, next to wicker picnic hampers and teenaged boys in scarlet uniforms, devouring Marmite and cress sandwiches, with the crusts cut off. And sponge finger biscuits with strawberries and cream.

  I get restless if I have to sit still for too long, so after a respectable amount of time, I took off my shoes and my hat and headed off on my own down the path to the left of the ivy-covered school building that has housed the sons of Britain’s most privileged families for generations.

  I walked past a lush green field and into a wood. I passed a stream with a waterfall on one side and green bracken and endless bluebells on the other.

  Through a gap in the trees I noticed a man leaning against a fence on the other side of the wood. I watched him put out a cigarette as he stared out at an empty paddock. He was wearing an expensive-looking brown leather jacket and a pair of blue jeans, and he was about thirty or so. I was wearing what Charlotte called my “wood nymph dress”—a light, sleeveless green cotton number, with a swirly skirt, which I liked because it was soft and comfy.

  I walked up to the fence he was leaning over and leaned over it with him.

  “Hallo,” I said.

  The man was shockingly handsome, with dark skin that made me wonder if he might be half Indian. He was taller than me, and when he stood up straight, he held himself with absolute confidence, like a prince. He had an extra energy coming out of him that made it hard to look away. There was something about him that I recognized, I wasn’t sure what.

  I bent down, picked a buttercup from the thick green grass at our feet, and handed it to him.

  He took the buttercup in one hand and smiled. Then, without saying a word, he lifted my chin, cupping my face with the palm of his other hand, and stared at me. I couldn’t look away.

  “You do like butter,” he said finally. I was surprised to hear that his accent was as English as mine. He was holding the buttercup under my chin. I couldn’t move.

  If he had been anyone else, I would have said something witty and pulled away. But I couldn’t. It’s hard to explain, but it felt as if the man could see me. All of me. And I wanted to lay my face in his palm and rest it there, breathing in the smell of him.

  “Who are you?” he said, finally.

  “I’m Pippa,” I said.

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I couldn’t stop looking at him.

  Slowly, he bent down and kissed me on the mouth. His lips were soft at first, and he tasted of Polos.

  And then the kiss, which began gently, became something else. Within seconds my body was pressed hard against this complete stranger who I somehow knew. I wanted to make love with him for hours. The rest of the world had already gone away.

  His arm was pressing hard against the small of my back. He was leading me toward the trees, and I was going with him.

  And then I wasn’t.

  If I let myself love a man like this, surrounded by bluebells, in the wood, I knew I would experience the greatest passion I had ever known. But that kind of connection could only bring heartbreak when he left me, as a man like this inevitably would. And that would destroy me. I needed to protect myself. And so I did.

  I managed to pull away from him. I managed to hide everything I was feeling. I managed to step aside, tap my watch, smile, and—giving the impression that I was amused, but indifferent—walk back through the woods to the safety of what I knew.

  A shot of adrenaline hits me as I walk onto the plane. I wonder again if this journey to meet Billie will finally free me to love someone at a level that’s soul deep. Without any kind of fear.

  An hour later, I curl up under my blanket on seat 23B and pretend to be asleep. These are the last eight hours of my life as I know it, and I must savor them.

  Chapter Fourteen

  IAM HIT BY A WAVEof intense heat and humidity as I step across the gap between the air-conditioned plane and the air-conditioned terminal building at JFK. These are my first footsteps in America, and I am taking them toward my mother.

  After twenty-eight years, it isn’t the agonizing red tape, or the guilt, or comments like “But why would you want todo something like this? Did you have a bad adoption?” that brings me closest to breaking point. It’s something as mundane as a delayed suitcase at the airport.

  My mother is less than forty feet away, and my luggage doesn’t come through and doesn’t come through. I watch every other passenger pick up their bags and head toward the exit. Mine still doesn’t come through. I try taking deep breaths to calm myself down, but it doesn’t work. I’m terrified my bag will take so long she’ll think I changed my mind about coming.

  I leave my body. I’m watching myself from afar. I’m wearing a baseball cap with my hair pulled through the back as identification. It doesn’t exactly go with the Laura Ashley dress, but Charlotte isn’t around to be upset by this. I watch myself, waiting to pounce at the first sight of my luggage, like an impatient hawk.

  Finally, a red squashy bag tied together with a pair of tights comes bumping through the hatch. I watch myself run toward it and walk at top speed toward the gate.

  As I walk through customs, and the final barrier between us comes down, I return to my body again. The adrenaline has subsided. Nothing can stop us now.

  A tall, extremely pretty woman with short, curly strawberry-blond hair is waving enthusiastically at me from amid a five-foot-deep wall of men holding up taxi signs. From a distance she looks about thirty-five. She’s wearing a T-shirt and overalls.

  Now she’s coming toward me at top speed.

  Now she’s standing in front of me. Her perfume is strong and sweet. She’s got a gorgeous smile and the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen.

  First she says, “You didn’t need the hat.”

  Then she says, “My God. I didn’t expect this! You look exactly like your father.”

  “Thanks,” I say, grinning. “I travel all this way, across the years, and the first thing you say to me is that I look like a fifty-year-old man.”

  Billie laughs loud and long.

  “That, dear daughter, is exactly the kind of thing your father would say.”

  Her accent is soft and pretty, and sounds even more southern than it did during our one brief phone call. I like it.

  Billie picks up one of the handles of my bag and, with me holding the other handle, starts walking quickly toward the gate. “We’ve got to hurry,” she says. “I overshot temporary parking and parked the car in the tow-away zone.”

  She catches sight of the tights holding my bag together.

  “Pantyhose tied around your bag!” she says. “What a brilliant use of your resources!”

  She gets it. We grin at each other.

  We arrive at her red Chevrolet seconds before the traffic cop, who shakes his head and waves his pad and pencil at us as if to say “Next time!”

  Billie ignores him and looks at me.

  “Same eyes as your father,” she’s saying, shaking her head. “I didn’t expect this.”

  We climb into her car. And I do mean climb. Not having been in America since I was a baby, I don’t yet know that, in America, a car you don’t have to climb into is probably French.

  When the engine turns on, so d
oes the music, at top volume. I know it well.

  “The Bach fugues,” I say, surprised.

  “Yes,” she says. “They help me think. They’ve done research. People of our nature are real right-brained; it’s good for us to listen to Bach. It helps us develop our left.”

  People of our nature. At last.

  The lady at the exit barrier smiles at us and we head out onto the road that leads north from JFK to Adler-on-Hudson, where Billie has lived for the past twenty years.

  I’m thinking: She’s real. And she’s here. I can reach over and touch her if I want. She’s not a phantom anymore. Oh Nick, I tell him in my heart, I know what you meant.

  I watch my hands at the end of her arms turning the steering wheel.

  “Your brother Ralphie wanted to come with me, but I said, ‘No, honey, this is something I need to do on my own. I waited until he turned eighteen before I told him about you. Weird, that you should show up less than a year later.”

  “Yes.”

  I have never heard the word “weird” uttered by anyone over the age of eleven before.

  While talking, Billie looks at me and then back at the road and whoops loudly. “Honey, I did not expect this! You look like your father in a Laura Ashley dress!” And then she laughs. It’s my laugh, coming out of someone else.

  Billie turns to the right, at top speed, down a big American freeway. She drives even faster than Dad, and that’s saying something.

  “Ralphie spent the whole day vacuuming in your honor. He’s never picked up a vacuum before in his life.”

  We drive for an hour, my long-lost-mother-now-found. And me. By the time we turn off Route 10, we’re the only car on a country road with enormous trees on either side of it. Billie tells me we’re going to spend the night at her house in Adler-on-Hudson. I’ll meet Ralphie, and then tomorrow we’ll hit the road for Georgia.

  People love to ask, “Yes, but how did youfeel when you met your birth mother?” And they clearly expect a satisfying answer.

  The truth is, I went completely numb. People do go numb, I’ve been told, when they’re in shock. In order to protect themselves from the intensity of what they’re feeling.

  So what feelings was the numbness protecting me from? Part of me is hoping that as I finally tell the truth about all of this—the truth that has been trapped inside me for years—somehow I’ll be able to figure it out.

  There are people who don’t want me to tell the truth about any of this. There’s a lot at stake. But you can’t stop the truth from coming out, any more than you can stop kin from finding kin.

  There’s a natural law with secrets. It’s the same law that applies to kettles. If you block the ventilation hole, there will, eventually, be an explosion.

  Chapter Fifteen

  BILLIE’S HOUSEis made of dark wood and is built on stilts. It looks out over the Hudson River. You could park a car in the garage under the house, if it wasn’t full of furniture, a motorbike, and other stuff Billie’s bought from garage sales over the years. Collecting other people’s junk is obviously genetic. I’ve been shopping from the boots of people’s cars for years.

  If you’re English you’ll know all about the car boot sale. If you’re not, a car boot sale is exactly the same as the garage sale, only the secondhand Tupperware is sold from the trunk of someone’s car, in a remote field, by English people—standing next to dozens of other English people—drinking cups of tea from plastic Thermos flasks in the pouring rain.

  “We’re here!” Billie’s voice rings out loud and strong.

  At the top of the steep staircase leading to the sitting room is a young man in torn jeans and a black T-shirt, with long blond hair tied back in a ponytail. He doesn’t look remotely like me, but I like his face. He’s smoking a cigarette. He’s my brother Ralph.

  “My God!” I say. “I have never ever walked upon such a clean carpet in my life!”

  He’s got a sweet, high laugh. Quite different from Billie’s and mine.

  “So, Ralphie, do you think she looks like me?” Billie says.

  “Kinda—without the hat,” Ralph says, smiling. “But then I don’t look a whole lot like you either. You must have weak genes, Mom!”

  “Ralphie’s father plays the cello,” Billie says. “He ran off with a violinist when Ralphie was five. I raised Ralphie on my own. But we’ve done okay, haven’t we, Ralphie?”

  “I’ve got the coolest mom on earth,” Ralph says. He picks up the bags. “I’ll just take these to your room.”

  Sitting rooms in England are usually filled with antique furniture: old drapes, carpets handed down from generation to generation. When I walk up the stairs and turn left into Billie’s sitting room, I am struck immediately by the fact that everything—and I mean everything—looks new. By new I mean modern, by which I mean as if it’s been bought within the past fifty years.

  At the center of the sitting room is a cream-colored leather couch, a beige rug, and a large square glass table. To my astonishment—nay, delight—I note that her home is as messy as mine.

  A furry blue sweater with a cat on it is thrown over a chair, one shoe is at one end of the couch, another on the floor. The room is cluttered with piles of newspapers, magazines, books, coffee mugs, ashtrays, cigarettes, and, in an oddly shaped rose vase, a small bunch of purple flowers.

  “Those are pretty,” I say.

  “Mary brought them for you. She lives down the road. She’s a recluse, and her son’s a kleptomaniac, but she’s just wonderful with flowers.”

  I’d be willing to bet that a sentence like that has never been uttered in England.

  Hanging on all the walls are original paintings. Some of people, some of plants, all vivid, remarkable in their own way.

  “These are from my art-dealing days,” she says. “Here’s the Marfil! Oh that was a heady time, discovering Marfil! The whole of New York was talking about it.”

  She told me she worked with artists, but I didn’t know she discovered one of the greatest artists of our time. I can’t wait to tell Nick.

  While Billie makes us some coffee, I stare at a print of Marfil’s most famous painting, hanging above her piano. It’s a small oil painting of an old woman walking down the streets of New York. She has a craggy face and bright blue eyes that penetrate my soul. I’ve seen the painting hundreds of times before; I’d found it so compelling I hung it on my bedroom wall at university. How amazing to find out that my own mother was partially responsible for getting it there.

  Nick was right. There’s magic in the air.

  I read an article, framed, on the wall leading to the kitchen, about Billie. It talks about how she first met Marfil, then a street painter. The article says Billie had a gut feeling about him, knew he was a great artist and felt she just had to do something about it. And so she beat down doors until people took notice. Then she became a well-known art dealer. “After that,” Billie says quietly, “I became an alcoholic and dropped out of the game.”

  “People drink for all kinds of reasons,” she says. “Mainly because it’s in the blood. In my case, after years of therapy, I came to realize I was drinking to drown out my grief.” Then, “Losing you was real, real hard, honey.”

  I look over at her. There are tears in her eyes. I find myself responding instantly and instinctively by crossing the room and hugging her.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. She hugs me back. She doesn’t smell of alcohol. She smells of sweet perfume.

  “What sort of drink do you—er—drink?” I say, finally.

  “I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol in eleven years,” she says.

  “Oh good,” I say.

  “I take it one day at a time,” she says.

  “How sensible,” I say. We laugh as we pull away.

  Soon the adrenaline is back. I’m looking at another painting I know. Only this time it’s mine. It’s the forest painting I was thrown out of art class for drawing again and again. I’ve been doodling it on telephone pads ever since. The l
eaves are orange and green, and in the rain forest scene in front of me they look like teardrops. They’re my leaves. Bursting across a canvas, in a sitting room on the other side of the world. Almost legible, in the bottom right corner, are the initials ND.

  “Who’s ND?” I ask.

  “Your grandmother,” Billie says. “That was one of hers.”

  “Was she a painter?”

  “She didn’t start painting till she was forty. She always got so into her work, she was scared that if she started before we were old enough to be left on our own, she wouldn’t notice if one of us kids fell off a ladder or something. It’s called hyperfocus. It’s in my nature, too, and probably in yours. It’s common in artistic types.”

  I come from artistic types. My heart soars.

  “Is your mother still alive?”

  “Yes. And no.” Billie’s movements are quick, like my own. In under three seconds she’s left the room and come back into it, lighting an unusually thin cigarette with a sparkly pink lighter.

  “Mother has Alzheimer’s now.”

  “Oh. I’m so sorry.”

  “Turns out it’s got its advantages,” she says. “Each time I tell her you’ve found me, she’s all the way to thrilled.”

  I smile with her. “What was she like before—well, you know…?”

  “Real creative and beautiful, and she just adored your father. But, as I told you in my letter, she was not an organized person. Most highly creative people are that way. Einstein used to leave his house wearing odd socks. God, who’d want to be neat!”

  I start to grin again. She’s everything I dreamed she would be. And she thinks I’m wonderful too. I tell her about the rain forest I drew again and again at school, and for years afterward. Billie listens intently.

  “Honey,” Billie’s voice is low and quivering with intensity, “you’re highly intuitive. It’s not something to be scared of. It’s a gift. Mother has the gift. I always swear your father does too. Just make sure you trust your instincts and let them lead.”