by Dyan Sheldon
“Righty ho,” I said. “If I run into him, I’ll be sure to give him your warmest regards.”
“Just try not to bring disgrace on the family,” said Jake.
As if.
I asked Bachman if there was anything he wanted me to bring him back from across the rolling sea.
“Just you,” said Bachman.
“That’s like that Bob Dylan song!” shrieked Jake, and she started singing.
I took that as my cue to leave.
I looked back before I stepped inside.
Jake was still singing. I could see the Christmas tree earrings Tampa gave her for her birthday (they were really cheap) swinging from her ears. Tampa (all in yellow because it was a yellow day) was standing on one leg in the tree pose. Gallup, wearing his you-are-what-you-eat T-shirt with the photograph of a footless battery hen on the front, was sitting on the floor beside Bruce Lee. Bachman, looking like a squatter, threw me the peace sign.
They all waved (including Bruce Lee), and Tampa shouted “Bonny Voyage!” loud enough to be heard back on Herkimer Street.
I gave them a big smile and waved back.
I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to miss them.
My First Encounters With the Natives Aren’t All Bad, But They Aren’t All Good Either
I wasn’t really what you’d call a seasoned flyer. I was used to travelling by land. Not that I was scared or anything like that (I mean, have you seen the statistics for road accidents?). I just figured air travel would be even less interesting than waiting for an Internet connection (which on a scale of 1-10 is about minus three million). You know, nothing to look at but clouds, nothing to do but watch some dumb movie or try to sleep all squashed up with your knees touching your chin. There wouldn’t even be any of the distractions you get when you travel by trailer (like a couple of llamas in the road or a woman and a wolf pup hitching a ride – the kind of thing that used to happen all the time when we travelled with my dad). So I was pretty much resigned to a long, boring flight while every cell in my body positively vibrated with excitement (which meant hours of really slow torture). But like Sky always says, everything has a price – and the airbus was the price I had to pay to get across the Atlantic before I had to be back in school. I figured it wasn’t really a bad deal.
I sat next to Mrs Beeker. Unlike me, Mrs Beeker was what you’d call a seriously unhappy flyer. She was terrified of being more than a foot off the ground. Mrs Beeker was from a place called Kent that she pretty much wished she’d never left. She told me at least a hundred times that this was only her second plane ride before I even got the peaches box into the overhead locker. She was the only person who actually watched the stewards when they demonstrated how to blow up your life vest and where the light and the whistle were and stuff like that.
“Aren’t you afraid you won’t know what to do if something happens?” asked Mrs Beeker.
I said I figured we’d be dead before we hit the water anyway so it didn’t matter, but she didn’t laugh like I thought she would.
Before we took off Mrs Beeker couldn’t stop talking about how scared she was, but once we were actually in the air she just sat there staring out her window like she wanted to be the first to know if the wing fell off.
I read the in-flight magazine (which wasn’t exactly going to cause William Shakespeare to roll around in his grave) until it was time to eat.
That’s when the first disaster happened. Jake forgot to book me a vegetarian meal. I swore up and down that we’d ordered it and confirmed it and everything, but it didn’t do me any good because they didn’t have any more. Joe, the head steward, was really nice about it. He ran around trying to get me extra portions of salad and cheese and crackers.
That didn’t do me any good either, though, because before he came back with them Mrs Beeker was sick all over me. She was really really sorry. I said it didn’t exactly matter because Bruce Lee already barfed on me in the van.
After Joe tried to clean us off with those little towel things I tried to get some sleep, but just as I was nodding off some guy fell down drunk in the aisle next to me. There was a big hullabaloo about that. By the time Joe got him back to his seat, Mrs Beeker had recovered enough from being sick to let terror take her over again. I spent the rest of the flight telling her all about my family and why I was going to London and how Bart ate my satchel and stuff like that to take her mind off things like falling into the Atlantic like a really big rock.
I was beginning to think that we took a wrong turn somewhere and were never going to get to London when the captain finally said, “We’re about to begin our descent into Heathrow, ladies and gentlemen. I’m afraid it’s a typical summer day in London – rain and more rain.”
“Oh my god, we’re there!” I couldn’t help it, I just screamed out loud. I had to lift myself up to look out the window next to Mrs Beeker. Rain! Just like Mr Scutari said. I couldn’t have been happier if the Queen had been down on the landing field waving her tiara at me.
Mrs Beeker disentangled a couple of my earrings from her hair. “Thank God, you mean.” She said that with real feeling.
I patted her arm. “Don’t you worry, Anne, we’re almost there.” And then I remembered something I’d learned from English shows I’d seen on PBS. “As soon as you get home and have a nice cup of tea you’ll forget all about this.” Have a nice cup of tea! I was practically a Limey already.
Mrs Beeker patted me back. “And you’ll want to get something to eat, love, you must be famished.”
I said it was OK because the food wasn’t really worth eating (even if you could keep it down), and anyway I’d had Mrs Scutari’s Oreos to keep me alive.
Mrs Beeker was still weak from being so scared and sick and everything so even though I wanted to get off the plane as fast as I could, I had to hang around to help her get her stuff from the overhead.
It was like hours before I finally got to the door.
Joe shook my hand. He said I was a real trooper and wished me a brilliant holiday.
I made a mental note to remember that the English say holiday for vacation and brilliant for great. I figured I was a natural at intercontinental travel.
The woman who checked my passport was called Araya Sparrow. She said Cherokee Salamanca was almost as unusual as her name, and I said I’d rather have hers because hers sounded kind of magical while mine sounded like something that had just crawled out from under a rock. Araya was really interested to find out that I’d never really been out of the States before unless you counted Mexico, which I didn’t.
“Now fancy that. You must be well excited.” She hoped I had a good time.
“I am well excited,” I told her. “And I’m going to have a brilliant holiday.” I hadn’t even left the airport and already I was speaking another language. I figured there had to be some English blood mixed in with the Irish martyrs.
I got to where our bags were being unloaded just in time to see my duffel moving away from where I was standing. There were so many people all huddled around the carousel that there was no way I could push through them to grab it. But I didn’t want to wait for it to come back around. I was in a hurry. So I dumped my box on the floor and sort of launched myself at the carousel. You couldn’t say I landed gracefully, but it was still a pretty good dive (even if I say so myself). I scrabbled over a couple of suitcases that were in my way and grabbed the strap of the duffel. Unfortunately, it didn’t really solve my problem since my bag was still going around on the belt – only now I was going around with it.
I was trying to figure out how to get off in a dignified way (you know, without actually knocking anyone over or my skirt riding up to my chin or anything like that) when someone grabbed me with one hand and my duffel with the other and hauled us to the ground.
This was Kev. Kev was a big guy with really short hair and he was wearing a Nike hoodie, trackie bottoms, a Las Vegas T-shirt and a gold hoop in one ear. For a second I almost thought I was back in New York, but th
en he spoke.
“That was some leap.” He was definitely not American, even if he wasn’t wearing a dress and didn’t sound anything like Mr Young when he puts on an English accent. “Do you do kung fu, or are you a gymnast?”
I told him I do yoga. “It keeps me flexible.”
Kev got me a “trolley” and threw my duffel aboard. Kev said I was going to love London. He said it had some great street life and all these really interesting markets and graveyards and stuff like that. “Trust me,” he said. “I can tell you’re going to take to it like a duck to water. It’s a cert. It’s a dead cool town.”
I repeated all my new words over in my head as I steamed towards customs. Holiday… brilliant… trolley… cert… dead cool… Holiday… brilliant… trolley… cert… dead cool… I couldn’t wait to get out of the airport. I picked up speed.
From the expression on the face of the customs inspector, I figured his job was a grim and unhappy one, and that his life outside of Terminal Three probably wasn’t much better. He waved me over with a flick of his fingers as soon as I stepped through the doorway.
“You don’t mind if I take a look in your bags, do you?”
I did mind. My destiny was waiting for me. I said that to tell him the truth I was kind of in a hurry.
He nodded. “I noticed that.”
I said that if it was all the same to him I’d just as soon skip it this time because not only my destiny but the Pitt-Turnbulls were waiting for me.
He nodded again. “We’ll start with the box of peaches, shall we?”
I tried to reason with him. I said I took the green lane because I didn’t have anything to declare.
“Look at me!” I cried. “Do I look like I’m smuggling drugs or guns or stuff like that?”
He said I’d be amazed what he’d seen in his hundreds of years of going through other people’s belongings. He said he reckoned that anything was possible.
I said I’d be willing to swear on the Bible that he could trust me. But reason never works with most adults I’ve tried it on, and it didn’t work with him.
He waved at my cart. “We’ll just have a little look to make certain.”
Nothing ever goes the way it’s supposed to with my family. When you live with people like that you learn to take disaster pretty much in your stride. It’s why I’m so adaptable. “OK,” I sighed, “but I really hate to see you wasting your valuable time.” I heaved the box onto the counter.
“I’ve only ever been searched once before,” I told him as he started to untie the string around the box as if he was defusing a bomb. “When we drove into Mexico by mistake. My mother has no sense of direction.”
“Is that so?” He took out the presents from Gallup and Tampa.
“She’s totally hopeless. She can’t even find Brooklyn without a map, and we’ve lived there for six years.”
He looked at Gallup’s painting for a few seconds, then he opened Tampa’s box.
“Anyway,” I went on, “even though we were only in Mexico for like ten minutes they tore the whole van apart.”
He moved on to my CD player and CDs. “And did they find anything?” he asked without looking up.
“Of course not. We hadn’t been there long enough to buy a taco.”
Next he took my make-up and toilet bag and the books I’d brought along for all those quiet English afternoons sitting in the garden sipping tea.
“It was all pretty traumatic. They kept asking us how long we’d been in Mexico and Jake kept saying five minutes.”
Next came my jewellery bag and the candles and charms I use for my altar to the Earth Goddess.
“I believe in keeping my spiritual self in touch with the cosmos,” I explained. “You can’t live just on bread, can you?”
The inspector said, “Ummm.” Then he reached in and took out the woven bag Sal brought me back from Thailand.
“You’d don’t have to look in there—”
He pulled out a strip of rag and held it up. It looked pretty grubby hanging from his hand like that. “And this is?” There were long, dark hairs wound around it.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried to warn him. “That’s for my hair. You know, to make it wavy?”
He dropped the rag back in the bag. “In this country we have curlers.”
He finally came to the black velvet bag covered with stars that Sky gave me for Christmas. “And what have we here?”
“That’s my herbs and oils and stuff like that.”
The oils were in tiny blue bottles and I’d put the herbs in old film canisters.
He opened one of the bottles and sniffed. “I think you’d better come with me.”
He took me into this windowless room with fluorescent lights like in some cop show. The only furniture was a big formica table and a couple of plastic chairs. It was about as cheerful as a morgue. I figured I was lucky I was in the most civilized country in the world or I might really be in trouble.
He took everything out of my duffel (including the stuff I hadn’t exactly had time to wash before I left and my yoga mat) and spread it all out on the table. All the while he was doing that he was asking me every dumb question he could think of.
Where was I going?
(Well, where did he think I was going, Katmandu? Um, duh… Don’t tell me I got off at the wrong stop?)
I said London.
Where had I come from?
(A night of passion between my parents sixteen years ago near the Cherokee Reservation – I’m lucky they weren’t near a Ford plant.)
I said New York.
Who packed my bag?
(The upstairs maid – couldn’t he tell I was way too busy having my summer designer wardrobe fitted to do it myself?)
I said that in my family, if you wanted something done you did it yourself.
Was my bag with me the whole time?
(No, it went to the airport by itself.)
I said of course not, they put it in the hold with everybody else’s luggage.
It went on like that for about a hundred and fifty years. I was just about to walk out and find a toilet when the door opened and another customs guy came in.
He smiled at me. “I’m Mr Wottle.” He didn’t smile at the inspector. “What’s going on here?”
The inspector told him what was going on.
Mr Wottle looked at all my stuff and then he looked at me and then he looked at the inspector again. “Have you gone mad? She’s just a girl.”
The inspector said that they have soldiers in Africa who are only eight years old.
“Not wearing lace skirts they don’t,” said Mr Wottle.
The inspector held up my velvet bag. “She’s got some suspicious substances in here.”
I said I didn’t. I said what I had was essential oils and the herbs I use when I’m making spells. “Change can be stressful,” I explained. “I figured I might need some help from the Earth Goddess.”
Mr Wottle had a sigh a lot like my mother’s. “I’ll take it from here,” he said to the inspector. He nodded towards the door. “You go back to your station.”
Mr Wottle was a lot more user-friendly than the inspector. I told him all about how I’d come to London because I was swapping lives with Sophie Pitt-Turnbull, just like in a reality TV show.
“Her parents are Robert and Caroline,” I said. “He’s a writer and she’s a painter. Just like my parents.” Which was just about all I knew about them except that Caroline used to drink Pimms and lemonade and like ABBA and Robert doesn’t write travel books (which is what Sal writes) but novels.
Mr Wottle was worried that the Pitt-Turnbulls might have thought I’d missed my flight and given up and gone home.
“I’ll go with you, see you’re all right,” he said as he helped me repack my stuff. “If they’re not there, I’ll put you in a cab myself.”
To tell you the truth, I’d been a little bummed out by the inspector and all his questions and his sniffing and him giving me the evil eye an
d everything. I’d started to think that maybe I should’ve stayed in Brooklyn after all if this was the kind of reception I was going to get. But Mr Wottle restored my good spirits. Except for the accent (which also wasn’t anything like Mr Young’s) and the fact that he was bald as a pool ball Mr Wottle reminded me of Grandpa Gene. I was sure that everything was going to be totally Boom Shiva from then on.
Living up to the reputation the English have for being gentlemen, Mr Wottle insisted on pushing my cart.
“She was a lot like you when she was your age, our Gem,” Mr Wottle was saying as we stepped into the arrival area. “The hair and the clothes and the make-up and all. Had to go all the way into London to get her a pair of Goth boots for her birthday one year. Sprained her ankle twice the first week.”
That’s when I spotted the Pitt-Turnbulls standing behind the barricade. They didn’t look like a writer and an artist (not any writer or artist I’d ever lived with). He was wearing slacks and a jacket (a jacket in July – I figured that was what Mr Young meant by civilized) and she was wearing this flowery dress and a string of pearls. They looked like they were going to a wedding (which is the only time either of my rents would ever get that dressed up). If Caroline hadn’t been holding a sign that said Cherry Salamanca on it in really neat lettering you would have thought that they’d wound up at the airport by mistake. This wasn’t really what I was expecting. What I was expecting was a couple pretty much like Jake and Sal (only English of course and not so financially challenged). But I could tell right away that the Pitt-Turnbulls weren’t anything like the Salamancas. They looked so straight and totally normal that they could have stepped out of a fifties sitcom (you know, where nobody ever shouts or argues or has a really bad day). I wasn’t discouraged by this, though. First of all, I figure that everyone has hidden depths. You think you know what a person’s like by looking at them, but you don’t. You just know what they look like. A person can look like a bum but have the heart and soul of a saint. And a person can look like the most respectable person in the world and be a total, lying crook. Second of all, I decided that this normal thing was really a bonus, since I was used to abnormal.