Of course, the problem arose when we went to find our car, or should I say, Mrs Henderson’s car. It was a long way from a one-acre car park, there were cars as far as the eye could see. We also came out a different gate from the one we went in, so we were well and truly lost.
Charlie could fly off an aircraft carrier in the middle of an ocean, find an enemy ship, sink it and return to a cruising carrier all in the middle of the night. But this miraculous talent did not operate in a car park.
I remembered there was a red tartan travelling rug on the back seat. We knew the car was that year’s Buick and dark blue, but unfortunately for us it was the car of the year. And it seemed all the purchasers were Army–Navy football fans: there were more dark blue Buicks in the parking lot than at the Buick assembly plant. We spent hours peering in the back windows looking for a tartan travelling rug. You would be surprised how many Americans with dark blue Buicks have red tartan travelling rugs!
After many cars didn’t open when we tried the keys we finally, after a few hours, hit the jackpot. As the key turned the lock and opened the door, a hand came down on Charlie’s shoulder, and a policeman asked for identification. It seemed he had been following us, watching our unusual behaviour. Charlie explained we had forgotten where we parked the car and were looking in the windows for the rug on the back seat.
When he asked why we had tried to open so many cars, Charlie told him we didn’t know the licence number. Well, apparently in America everyone knew their licence number. Not knowing your licence number was the equivalent of a suspect spy not knowing who won the world series in baseball during the war. The policeman asked for a driver’s licence, but Charlie only had an international one; social security number then? … nope, hadn’t been in the country long enough to apply for one; car registration? … didn’t seem to have it with us. We ended up at the downtown police station while the police called Mrs Henderson to ask if her son and his wife were driving her car to New York for the Army– Navy game. They then escorted us to our car, waved us goodbye and hoped we had a pleasant stay in New York! When we left our friends at the stadium it had been arranged to all meet for dinner later; by the time we arrived at the restaurant, they were sipping coffee.
In every field I found myself readjusting and learning; some fields were fun and amusing. At the supermarket in the country town where we lived (this was considered a small supermarket, only about four acres inside area) there was a very nice Afro–American man. His job was loading groceries into the cars. Even thirty years ago in America, these shopping centres were open twenty-four hours a day, and always seemed full and busy. So there were many parcel loaders at the kerbside to help keep the traffic moving. He was the parcel-loading assistant I would seek out; he was always cheerful and chatted away. I was fascinated with his Southern way of speaking; he was fascinated with my Australian accent. Each of us would prolong the conversation on weather and so on, just to listen to each other. But we soon got into swapping different words each of us used for the same thing. This game started the first time I managed to get out of the supermarket under four hours, and knew where I had parked the car.
He told me to ‘go bring der or-toe-mo-beale to the kerb, an he would load it, yes um’. When I parked the car he asked me where would he put the groceries.
I said, ‘In the boot.’
He smiled and asked again where I would like the groceries.
‘In the boot.’ So he opened the rear door and stacked them all on the back seat.
The next week I opened the boot and said, ‘In here.’
‘Oh, in the trunk!’
So we started comparing things like bonnet and hood, petrol and gas, automobile and car, footpath and sidewalk, lift and elevator, to mention a few. Each week I would tell him one or two new words, and he would pull out a piece of paper and ask me what we called something. One time he asked me what we called ‘pork belly and grits’, and I told him ‘nothing’.
‘Nuthin’? Why’s you calls it that?’
‘No, we don’t call it that, we don’t eat pork belly and grits; it’s not food we eat in Australia.’
He walked away mumbling to himself, ‘No pork belly and grits, strange place.’
When we left to come back to Australia, I said goodbye to him on our last trip to the supermarket. He said he would miss the children and me a lot. His parting words were, ‘Darn, and I wers jest gittin’ u-stir that “boot”, yes um!’
Almost everything about America was new, different or bigger. I had to get used to heated houses, which were rare in Australia. Our house in Sydney, where I grew up, was cold and draughty away from the open fires in the winter. But I had been away from the cold weather for fourteen years, living in the tropics; I had almost forgotten the need for heating. Maryland in the winter was very cold, so I soon became acquainted with the furnace in the basement which provided the heating for the house.
I always kept the temperature in the house low, but most people had their houses so hot you could wear light clothes inside quite comfortably while it was well below freezing outside. I found this out the hard way, early in the piece. We had been invited to dinner and I wore a black angora wool dress, also a woollen spencer, insurance against the chill; unfortunately. The hostess kept the house at 80° Fahrenheit (27° Celsius). After the first hour I was the colour of a ripe tomato and feeling extremely uncomfortable, so I went to the bathroom and removed the spencer, next trip my slip, then stockings. Progressively, as the hours passed, I took off everything down to my briefs and bra, but perspiration was still running down my back. To cool down, I stepped out onto the porch and did a quick freeze at regular intervals for the rest of the evening. I’m amazed I didn’t end up with pneumonia as a result. That most unpleasant experience always stayed in my memory, and a light blouse became part of my attire, giving me the option to strip down to it if my hostess maintained hothouse temperatures.
I found American hosts a challenge and very different; being married to Charlie, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I just thought he was the exception to the rule, not the norm. My host at this particular dinner party was a jovial, ruddy-faced, loud-speaking, man. After introductions (I had met his wife only) he asked what I would like to drink; when I replied scotch and dry, he silenced the room with a roar: ‘What?’
Everyone waited; I wondered what I had done wrong. He then informed the whole room that there was no way he was going to desecrate good whisky. If people couldn’t appreciate good scotch they shouldn’t drink it, and he glared at me, eyebrows rippling and bristling. He was an attorney, and I soon learned he always performed, in and out of the courtroom.
So I asked him, ‘What about freedom of choice? I thought America upheld this belief.’ He was about to deliver a presentation when his wife came over and told him to shut up and just serve my drink. He marched off with a haughty, contemptuous air, and I noticed his wife finally brought me the drink. I made sure it lasted to dinner. So, along with being abused for my choice of drinks, sweating it out inside the house, and cooling down outside in the snow, it was a night to remember.
From the television exposure I had had to America in the 1950s, my impression was that all Americans were cigar-smoking, loud-speaking, floral-shirted, white-panama-hat-wearing tourists, with all the latest technology as part of their everyday life. I soon found out how wrong I was.
During the four years in Talbot County I never met a cigar-smoking, floral-shirted, panama-hatted man. The farmers of the area were quiet-spoken, polite, hardworking people, mostly of German descent. It was a pleasure to see their neat, clean, well-run farms. They were so self-sufficient it was amazing. One farmer in the county was visited by the Internal Revenue because they said they did not believe his family could live on the amount of income he had declared in his tax returns. But the investigator went away amazed that their declaration was indeed true. The family grew their own vegetables and fruit, raised chickens for eggs and meat, also had pigs and cattle for meat, milk, butter,
cream, buttermilk and cheese, fished in the river for fish and crabs, and hunted deer. The wife had a cellar full of preserves of everything you were able to preserve. She knitted pullovers, scarves, socks, beanies, gloves, plaited floor mats out of old clothes, made all her dresses, curtains and covers and all her husband’s work clothes. His Sunday best suit was purchased about once every ten years. They bought very little, only coffee, sugar, tea, a few tropical fruits, and anything extra for a special occasion that they couldn’t make or grow.
The tax man returned to the big city, and to his computer which had told him the neat, efficient, pleasant home and farm he had just spent the afternoon inspecting with its proud happy owners, could not possibly exist. The computer probably refused his report and continued to spit out reports rejecting the possibility that there were still people like this in America.
Rural areas seem to produce characters no matter what the country, and America was no different. One farmer had never travelled further than the nearest large town of Salisbury, all of three hours’ drive. He was honest, religious, hardworking, kind and helpful to any living thing, and his theory was, ‘Ifn the Lord wan-turd him some-waaar else, he would harv put him thur!’
I met a continuous stream of wonderful people in America, and some really extraordinary characters. One helped me with the children and house cleaning. She was very religious and quite a card. Whenever she stayed with the girls at night she preached them religion every chance she got. The girls were about six and eight and they had asked quite a lot of questions. One question Marlee had was about the statement, ‘When the big fire came it would go around and leave unharmed all of her faith’. Marlee wanted to know how the fire knew who to go around.
It was against this woman’s ‘ligon’ as she called it, to give gifts at Christmas, but it didn’t seem to have any definite ruling on receiving gifts, so every Christmas she would leave with a carload of gifts for herself and ten children, with a smile and a thank you. There was a very funny incident one night when we were out to dinner and she was staying with the children. On the stove was simmering a pot full of all the leftovers, boiling down to a nice stew for Prince. She went to serve the dog’s stew to the children for dinner. Instead of saying it was leftover dog stew, the girls said, ‘We can’t eat that; Mummy is cooking it for Prince!’
So the talk went around that I fed the dog only the best of food and the children weren’t allowed to have any. When my maid told her friend who was Mrs Such-and-Such’s maid, and she told her friend who was Mrs Henderson’s maid, Mrs Henderson had a serious talk with me about growing children’s need for the very best of good food. She had believed this silly tale! The next morning I had a serious chat with my daily help and she went home that night satisfied that the dog’s stew was indeed leftovers of a meal my children had had a go at first. I managed to convince her the children always had first choice, then the dog. She then told her friend who worked for Mrs Such-and-Such, and so on down the complicated chain of the gossip network, until it reached the maid who worked for Mrs Henderson, and everything was straightened out. But to avoid more gossip spreading every time I had a dog stew of leftovers on the stove, I put a little sign in front of the pot before I left: LEFT-OVERS STEW—FOR PRINCE.
Of course, the children loved Prince and considered him so much a part of the family, they would have shared their food with him straight off their dinner plates if I didn’t stop them. He was indeed considered human, and the one thing he did eat with us regularly was icecream. On the way home from school we passed a wonderful small drive-in place; I think it was called Wendy’s. They had good fast food, something very new to me, and the very best icecream. We would stop on the way home from school. Oh boy! did Prince love his icecream. The girls could have taken out a world record as icecream eaters, but Prinie-Boy could even beat them.
He always sat on the front seat next to me. The moment we drove into Wendy’s, he would get a very concentrated look on his face, one side of his top lip would get caught on the fang, but he would be so intent on watching the icecream approach, the lip would stay there, giving him a very quizzical expression. He rested his paws on the door-ledge with his head out of the car. I held the icecream while he politely licked around and around it, stopping the drips, just as the children did. The people at Wendy’s got to know him and he became quite an attraction; people stood and watched this dog eating icecream in a very civilised manner, hanging out of a car and quietly licking it, with two little girls hanging out the other window doing the same. The owner liked Prince so much he would often give him an extra icecream, on the house.
When Prince was two he started his duck-retrieving lessons. The trainer was very taken with Prince, and put a lot of effort into training him. He also believed Prince could win shows purely on his looks, which made me smile when I remembered my arguments with Charles and the breeders about Prinie being ‘a freak’. So on a few occasions I allowed the trainer to show Prince. He came home with the first prize every time; he sometimes also took ‘Best of Breed’ and ‘Best of Show’. Charlie boasted about Prince to all who would listen, completely forgetting his statement when Prince was a puppy, that he didn’t even look like a Chesapeake.
Prince’s training continued, along with his success at the shows. I finally had to put a stop to the show circuit: Prince won all the shows in Maryland, so his trainer wanted to start showing him interstate. The two afternoons a week for retrieving lessons had now stretched to his staying over on the Thursday night after the second lesson, then travelling to shows interstate on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Suddenly I was seeing my dog Tuesday, Wednesday and two mornings a week. We all missed him and I felt Prince was getting more reluctant to leave. He really liked Glen, his trainer, and at the beginning would bound out and get in the car to go to lessons, but when show-time was added, although he went quite freely to the car, the bounce was gone. I told Glen, No more shows, just the duck-training, and our family was a lot happier, including Prince.
The big day arrived when Prince was ready to show off all his acquired retrieving skills. Glen sang his praises to the sky. He was what is called a triple retriever; this in the bird-retrieving world was very good, I was told. Charlie was suitably impressed. The big show was held at Lloyds Landing, down the sloping lawn on the river. It was a beautiful day; we walked down the lawn, along the avenue of box bush. At the bottom of the lawn was a tiny sand beach and off to the left was a long wharf reaching across the shallow water and out to the deep channel of the river. We walked along the beach and stopped near the wharf. Glen’s wife went out onto the river in a boat to throw the ducks into the water. The ducks were veterans at training dogs; they had special little covers over their wings so they couldn’t fly away, but could swim and paddle around in the water. They had been retrieved so many times that being brought back to shore in a dog’s mouth didn’t seem to faze them, because after Prince deposited them on the shore they stood up and calmly shook their ruffled feathers, as best they could with their wing-jackets still in place. Glen had Prince on the beach ready to command him once the ducks hit the water. Charles had invited his mother down to watch the trials, and Glen had a few friends along also. Anyone from ‘the Shore’ was an expert on the performance of a bird dog, except maybe the children and me.
Glen explained the signals to me, and everyone waited patiently. Prince, he told me, was going to retrieve a triple; this made him a very smart dog. The three ducks hit the water in different places, Prince would watch their movements then go downstream of the ducks, swim out and intercept. He had to retrieve the duck furthest downstream first, and if everything went according to plan, the other ducks just floated to him as he swam towards them. Sounded like a pretty tall order for a dog to me, but everyone else present nodded profoundly, a sage expression blanketing the group. So I kept quiet and waited.
Prince certainly had retrieving in his blood. I could see he was alert and full of anticipation, a slight tremor passing through him, the same effect
that driving into the icecream parlour produced. The boat was in position, Glen gave a shout and the first duck was thrown out of the boat; it arced in the air then hit the water with a plop.
Glen, with arm alongside Prince’s head, and finger pointing to the duck, said one word as the duck hit the water, ‘Mark!’ This was repeated quickly for the next two ducks.
Then he said loudly, ‘Back!’ On the word ‘Back’, Prince was supposed to plunge into the icy waters, swim quickly to the duck furthest downstream and then retrieve the other two and come back to us.
The command had been given, all eyes were on Prince, everyone awaited action. Prince surveyed the scene, saw the ducks floating down the river towards us, and instead of swimming out to intercept, he ran up to the wharf, ran the full length of it, did a beautiful swallow dive off the end, then paddled slowly out to wait for the first duck. A few more strokes and the second and third ducks floated to him. He swam back to shore and put the ducks at the trainer’s feet.
‘Oh what a clever dog!’ squealed the children and I.
All the experts were silent.
‘He was not supposed to use the wharf’, was Glen’s solemn statement. I couldn’t believe they were disappointed with the performance, but they were. He would be disqualified in a trial, they all said. Not done in trial circles, they said. Well, I told them I thought Prince was extra-smart to work out he could save a lot of swimming by using the wharf, and if a judge would disqualify that type of smart thinking, then Prince would not be going in any trials. And despite the trainer’s many requests for me to let him compete, with statements like ‘it would be safe as there are no wharfs at this particular place’, he didn’t change my mind. I never did relent: Prince was our family dog and we wanted him home with us, not travelling around the country on the show and trial circuit. So we turned his back on fame, kept him at home to play with the children, pull the little red wagon, to guard us when Charlie was not there, and when he was, and to eat icecream on the way home from school.
Some of My Friends Have Tails Page 8