Why are you here? people would say, and sometimes I would say: Because I have a passport! or Because I like it! or Because I can’t bear George W. Bush! or maybe even Because it’s my home now! But what I didn’t say was the truth: I was there because I had once been in love, because I had then been left behind by the person I loved, because I was stubborn. I lived in London because I wanted to be a writer. London seemed liked a good place to do that.
2
I met Paul in Paris, in the spring of 2002, when the city fulfilled its reputation of being a leading destination to fall in love, in that particular season. I was at the end of my third year of university in Montreal; ten days before my departure I had at last ended my relationship with the young man who I had loved throughout most of my undergraduate degree. This relationship had existed somewhat in spite of his best efforts: he’d attempted to break up with me at the end of every semester, only to capitulate each time when I cried.
Somehow I believed that the best thing to do in university, besides getting an education, was to find a husband. My adolescence was spent in a whirl of emotional horror that was eventually calmed by the daily application of Prozac. My psychiatrists, always men, would look at me across their offices, my frowning but composed face, my well-groomed hair, and say things like: It’s a chemical imbalance. Because of this, by the time I was in my early twenties, I had come to accept that I was just one of those women who felt too much. I wanted my romantic feelings to have purchase, to feel sure. Perhaps I believed that ticking that particular point on my life’s checklist meant that I could focus on the other things in life that interested me. Perhaps I was not wrong. Perhaps finding a lifelong partner as an undergraduate would have meant I saved many hours of my life that were spent staring at cell phones, willing text messages into existence, or staring across tables at men whose names I could never remember.
I went to Paris for ten days, visiting my friend Lisa, who had been on exchange there all year, studying at Sciences Po. Now when I think about that scenario – I went to Paris for ten days, I slept in a pull-out cot in Lisa’s dormitory bedroom right next to her single bed, I caught a terrible cold on the flight over and undoubtedly spent the nights doing all kinds of terrible snoring, TEN DAYS, I feel embarrassed. But I guess that was a normal thing to do with your friends when you were twenty and twenty-two.
And so was falling in love with a boy you met in Paris. We were at Man Ray, a nightclub co-owned by Johnny Depp and John Malkovich – who knew they were even friends? – and that staging of our first encounter sounds very glamorous indeed. But the truth is that Paul was a very gifted and devoted student of political philosophy, on his Erasmus year from his university in Ireland, and I was wearing some black wool boot-cut trousers and a black mohair sweater with a ruffle, my very best sweater from Zara. Along with ten or so other exchange students we sat squashed together on a couple of couches and drank the single drinks that we could each afford on a balcony while below us, rich beautiful French people ate dinner and had cocktails and danced, and we watched them through the railings like opera-goers in the cheap seats, which I suppose, in a way, we were.
Paul winked at me a few nights later, at the end of an evening when we’d boiled pasta with some other students in Lisa’s halls of residence during a rainstorm, and by the end of the ten days (TEN DAYS) Lisa and her other friend Adam conspired to leave Paul and me in a bar where all the Sciences Po students went to make out with each other, and then Paul and I made out. We were drinking sangria, he was wearing a red sweater with black stripes, and later I went back with him to his monk-like room in a northerly arrondissement, a development that was probably much appreciated by Lisa as I had already spent NINE NIGHTS sleeping next to her in her tiny room.
Let’s save something for later, I said to Paul by way of politely refusing sex, because at twenty I still wasn’t all that much in the habit of having sex, and certainly not with strangers, and of course by the morning I was pretty much in love with him, even though I had to sprint to catch my flight and threw up sangria-hued vomit for most of the journey back to Montreal, where I still had to finish my last year at McGill. An email arrived from Paul, and then more emails, and then a February week spent in Dublin where he lived with his family, and then six weeks after I’d finished university my father drove me to Albany International Airport with my two permitted large pieces of luggage and my newly minted British passport, so that I could catch a bus to take me to another airport, a bigger one from which I could actually take a plane, because the international part of Albany International Airport was only in reference to a single flight to Canada. And because moving across an ocean to be with a man when I was not-quite-twenty-two seemed, as much as any of my other options, a reasonable thing to do.
I had a British passport because my mother had me naturalized when I was two years old. In 1981 if you were born to a British father abroad then you were automatically British, and if you were born to a British mother abroad she had to fill out forms to prove that you belonged to her, and should belong to Britain, too. I’d guess it felt quite important to my mother that her children born in America were also from her country. I was a teenager before I learned that these British citizenship rules were the opposite, in a way, to rules of my father’s ancestors: that if you’re born to a Jewish mother you’re Jewish, regardless of who your father is, but if you’re born to a Jewish father, distant members of his extended family will occasionally regard you with pity and say things like, Too bad you’re not really Jewish. You will go to the bat mitzvahs of cousins but when you turn thirteen no one will tell you that you have become a woman or write you cheques.
(If you’re a woman who is married to a man called Edelstein in the 90s in upstate New York, if you change your surname to share his, your child’s teacher will ring you up in December to ask you if you’ll come in to demonstrate Jewish holiday traditions. If you’re my mother you’ll pause for a moment and shrug and say: Sure. Why not? And then you’ll go in to the school and tell a rapt audience of children about Chanukah. You’ll grate potatoes. You’ll heat oil. You’ll spin dreidels.)
In school, when we learned about immigration, we learned that the people who had come to the United States – the tired and the poor – were lucky. The United States of America was the greatest country in the world, and our ancestors who had gained admission were the most fortunate people in the world. Because of this education, as a child I always felt a little sorry for everyone who didn’t live in America, even though I knew better than many of my classmates that there were other nice places in the world to live.
Every two or three years we went back to Scotland for our summer holidays, where my grandmother lived in a sweet sandstone bungalow in Dumfries and my aunt and uncle and cousins lived in a beautiful house in a smaller town nearby, with sweeping views of the Solway Firth. When we went to Scotland my mother doubled our pocket money and threw out our bed times. At home we drove everywhere but in Scotland we walked up hills and climbed over stiles, picked our way through fields splatted with big wide puddles of cow shit. In Scotland we were sent to the corner shop on our own with a pound coin to buy bread and milk, and when we got a little older, we were allowed to walk in to the town centre by ourselves to buy copies of the Beano and sherbet fountains, which we loved not because they were delicious (they were mostly inedible) but because of what Roald Dahl wrote about them in Boy. In Scotland we ate hot dinners at lunchtime and banana sandwiches and cake at dinnertime. And on days when it rained in Scotland, which were most days, we were allowed to watch a great deal of television.
In Scotland, life was wonderful and free: the air was fresh, the chips were thick. And yet when we went back to school in America in the autumn, when we returned to our usual lifestyle of driving everywhere in cars and only seeing livestock when we watched our VHS tape of The Sound of Music, we would learn about immigrants in history class and I would start feeling sorry for my cousins, who hadn’t gotten to come to America, who were trapp
ed in a place where it rained for so many days in the summer and where, in the late 80s, there seemed to be only four television channels and two flavours of ice cream: vanilla, which was sliced from a brick, and rum & raisin, which was disgusting. I understood that the narrative of the American Dream that I learned in my classroom meant that it was right to feel a little bit sorry for anyone who did not live in America, even if they had never shown any inclination of wanting to leave wherever they were from.
My mother was one of the people who had not shown that inclination, not especially: she wasn’t a person who’d had a strong ambition to leave the country where she’d grown up. And my father loved Scotland, too. My mother moved to America because my father’s career required it, and she moved to a small city where there was no community for expats like her, just a small branch of a club for people of Scottish heritage that didn’t admit women, though I believe when she made her enquiries they did say that my father would be welcome to join.
My mother chose to remain on her Green Card. Her document said Resident Alien, and that made us laugh – our mother was an alien! – for twenty years, because my mother was happy to be British. At a mother–daughter Girl Scouts dinner when I was about six, everyone stood to say the Pledge of Allegiance and put their hands over their hearts, the protocol that we’d been taught. Everyone except my mother, and the mother of one of my friends, who was from Tehran. I noticed. Why didn’t you say the Pledge? I said to my mother, afterwards, and my mother said: I’m not an American.
I hadn’t been taught that it wasn’t for everyone.
When my middle-school social-studies teacher asked us to bring in photographs of our immigrant ancestors for display on a bulletin board, my mother laughed a laugh that in hindsight might have been weighed with irony. She gave me one of her with my brother and father in the late 70s, shortly before their emigration. It was a beautiful photo, black and white, in which they were young and smiling and fashionably dressed.
I’m wearing a headscarf like a Russian grandmother, she said, handing me the photo, your teacher will like that.
But in the photo she looked very happy, which was somewhat incongruous with the general aesthetic of the display: hard lives in the old world that allowed us to have good ones in the new.
When my mother did at last become naturalized, more than twenty years after arriving in the United States, it was less because she felt a pull to be part of the greatest country on earth, more because my parents were updating their wills and the lawyer advised it. Furthermore, the laws had changed since my mother’s emigration: now, she could become an American without abandoning her British citizenship or saying anything negative about the Queen. She studied hard for the examination, learned facts about American history and culture that I believed I had once learned in school, but couldn’t remember why or when or how.
As a pre-teen, shopping for school clothes, my mother refused to buy me fashionable pieces with American flags on them – disrespectful to the flag, she said, although now I wonder if they would have been a little disrespectful to her. But in advance of the occasion of her naturalization, American friends and family showered my mother with an incredible array of American flag-motif gifts, a stream of packages in the mail: umbrellas, stationery, wall hangings, that kind of thing. My mother regarded the gifts with a mixture of gratitude and amusement, and when we went to the courthouse to watch her be sworn in, my mother – then in her mid-fifties – agreed that if called upon to do so, she would bear arms for her new country. In a pew a few feet away, my father and sister and I laughed. We were free to: we were disobedient and nonchalant Americans who were born this way. Americans who had never had to prove their knowledge of the first thirteen states or the name of the first President in order to earn our right to belong.
So I can see why it was important for my mother to make me a British citizen. Unlike my father’s people, who had departed from various hostile corners in Europe and the Caucasus on boats in the early part of the twentieth century and even earlier, my mother had not come to America because she was yearning to be free.
Perhaps that’s part of why, when I decided to use my privilege to get a British passport so that I could leave my parents behind to follow a boy across the ocean, my mother looked on with approval on the evening when my dad took my passport photo with his digital camera. Get it done at a photo studio? No need, said my father, we’d work on it together. He looked up the parameters on the internet and positioned a piece of white posterboard against the dark wood panelling of the basement for me to stand in front of. In the photo I had shoulder-length curly brown hair that I’d blown out to a frizz, eyebrows plucked so that there was too much space between them. Dad told me to smile, but like most of the immigrant ancestors in our school display, I didn’t.
3
Paul was a very nice young man: it seems important to note that, what kind of person that he was, to make it clear that my parents’ support of me moving across the Atlantic to be with him was not a crazy thing for them to be doing, or at least not crazy in its entirety. Because although when I say that I met a man in Paris and shared a night of passion with him and as a result decided to move across the Atlantic, it sounds very dramatic and a little bit dangerous, the truth is that Paul’s greatest ambition was to be a professor of philosophy. He had a very sweet face and bright blue eyes and prematurely thinning light-brown hair that he wore in a buzz cut close to his scalp, and he wore a wardrobe of clothes that were still for the most part selected by his mother, a lovely woman, with whom, at the time that we met, he still lived (Paul also lived with his father, a lovely man, and his sister, who was also a lovely person).
The plan had been set when I’d visited Dublin during my last Reading Week break from McGill: Paul and I had both been accepted to study at graduate school in London, so I would move to Dublin to spend the summer with him and work until October, when we would move over to London together to start our master’s degrees. In Dublin I lived in a shared house, not with Paul, because he still lived with his parents, and also because I felt like it was important for me to maintain some kind of independence. Even though I was far from independent: my parents had bought my plane ticket to Dublin and Paul’s mother invited me to dinner with the family six nights out of seven. The room in the Dublin house share was a sublet from a student who was gone for the summer, and the other occupants were another subletter, a nice woman who was studying accountancy, and an older, unsmiling Irish couple – they may have been as old as twenty-eight – for whom the house was their permanent home. The couple regarded me with a coolness that made me think that they saw me as a kind of invasive foreign stranger, which I suppose is exactly what I was. I could hardly blame them for their obvious desire, after a long day at whatever jobs it was that they did, to boil their pasta and eat it off their laps on their sofa while watching reality television.
That was a summer when Big Brother was very popular. ‘It’s 4 p.m. in the Big Brother house,’ the narrator would intone in his distinctive northern voice as I crept up and down the stairs, from my room to the kitchen, as if I, too, was being monitored. Such was the unsmiling nature of the couple that I went to great lengths to avoid them, though I don’t know what I feared since I already knew they didn’t like me. Nonetheless I listened to their movements so that we rarely met. In three months of cohabiting, I set eyes on the woman three times; her partner, only once. I’d fetch my milk and Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut cornflakes and carry them back upstairs, where I ate sitting on the floor of my bedroom, leaving white splashes on the carpet that had likely been fitted a decade before.
Milk in Ireland is treated differently from milk in America, less pasteurization, and so on the third or fourth morning I poured the milk on my cornflakes and it came out in solid, clotted, sour chunks. It was unlike anything I had seen before in my whole American life and I recoiled as I would have from a stranger’s vomit.
When we’d bought my flight to Ireland my father had insisted on getting
a return ticket, not a one-way, that would get me back to America within a month.
Just in case, he said, clicking on the Aer Lingus website. A return ticket is cheaper, my father said, and it also means that you can come home if you’re not happy.
I am sure that I rolled my eyes or maybe even said: DAD, because he surely did not know what it was to be not-quite-twenty-two and in love, or at least could not recall. The suggestion that I might want to come home felt insulting. Of course, in retrospect, I know that it is precious: one thing I had in all of my years of living far from my parents was the confidence if all else failed, I could go home.
When I looked at my bowl of ruined milk-chunked cornflakes that morning in Dublin I thought about whether I had known what I was signing up for when I had fallen in love. I thought about the return flight, which was still two weeks in the future, and I thought maybe my dad knew what he was doing when he bought it. But then I got up from the carpet and picked up my bag and went out to catch the 46A bus, to sit on a plaid-upholstered seat on the top deck, to look out the window as the bus wound itself from the Dublin suburbs into the centre of the city, towards O’Connell Bridge and the Millennium Spire, to wonder what my life had become, or would. I was not yet old enough to realize that I’d never really know, that there would never be a time when I could think: I am here. This is me, without becoming uncertain again a moment later.
This Really Isn't About You Page 7