An expatriate in my own land
In the last year that I went to work, on almost every Monday, I wore the same item of clothing — a pair of red, Royal Stewart tartan trousers that I bought in London. I was not there for vacation, but to attend a memorial service for my husband.
Continue reading “The Magic of Monday Pants”
It is Thursday morning, Day 6 of the capsule wardrobe, Project 333 experiment. My friends and I are recording the month. Some notes.
Monday evening: Cosmetics are not part of the project, but I go through my box of make-up and am delighted to find an iridescent, electric blue eye shadow that I had totally forgotten about. I will wear this tomorrow.
Tuesday morning: I look for my Cholly earrings and can’t find them. Charles made these for me in high school out of a sheet of metal from his dad’s sequin factory. He experimented with different shapes and sold them at a Soho boutique. Most were round and dramatic with connecting parts, but mine are long and skinny, almost like feathers. Remember feather earrings? Remember buttons? I wore these earrings almost every day in 10th grade. I kept track of them through all of those high school sleepovers, sleepovers after parties, sleepovers after my friend’s play, after Trader Vic’s. Taxicabs, Magic Tree, rain, coffee shops, the quiet key in the door. I picture the glass-topped hotel side tables I might have laid them on in January. I am pretty sure I wore them in Atlanta last month. They are a blackish blue, not shiny, but not dull. They would easily be lost on a reflective surface. The edges are worn, distressed metal from summers of corrosive beach air, 30-plus years of being handled. They are a very physical souvenir of all of these years—of a friend who is still making things, of being a kid in New York in the 80s—and completely irreplaceable, so if I left them in the hotel they are gone. I look in the bags I took. Not there. I say goodbye to them.
Tuesday evening: But I am really good about not losing jewelry. In a hotel, I slip things into my purse rather than leave them on the side table. They are very thin and maybe they are actually in the jewelry box, but I just didn’t see them, but I tell myself this is a vain hope. I take the box into good light and there they are, tucked up against the side. What else is in here?
Technically, for Project 333, you are supposed to include your accessories, even sunglasses, in the 33 items you wear but I’m not doing this. Anyway, I thought, in terms of making more space in your life, the jewelry box is going to occupy the same space whether it’s full or only has six items in it.
The box has an upper tray, where I keep earrings. This is where I find Charlie’s earrings. Right where they should have been. A reversal of loss. The tray lifts out and underneath is are bracelets and a small green velvet box. But as with so many other things, clothes, recipes, ideas, we keep skimming the same things off the top. We get used to what is there and we stop seeing. This is why supermarkets rearrange the shelves so often. It’s not more efficient all of a sudden for them to put the napkins in the far back corner, it’s that when you walk your route and lob the napkins into your cart without thinking you are not considering other purchases you could be making. You are not looking for the napkins. Once you devise a pattern, they rework the maze.
I never look under the tray. When I get dressed, I reach for the earrings on top. I forget about the necklace I had bought in the Bermondsey Market one dark and early morning. My new, now old, friend had taken me there, back in the days of her introducing me to London. We had eaten breakfast in a caff, English bacon, then new to me and not what I thought of as real bacon, but would come to love, mugs of strong tea, a place filled with mates and geezers, and always a few tourists on a recommendation from their Lonely Planet guide, “off the beaten path,” or from an expatriate women’s club newsletter (see previous post) or word of mouth among expatriate women, or the sheet of recommendations they typed up for visitors, or a blurb in Time Out.
I knew better to think I would be buying antique silver candlesticks for a song. I do not know enough about English china, nor had then logged enough hours of Roadshow to think I would in any way be able to get a bargain. This was the “thieves market,” where anything sold here, under cover of darkness, was fair game.
But I wanted to buy something, at least a souvenir of having come. Had we brought a flashlight? That was part of knowing what to do. I remember driving out we asked someone for directions and as a point of reference, a man actually said, “Do you know the muffin man?”
Inside the green velvet box are a pair of earrings I bought the first fall we had moved to Alabama. We were downtown and A. was visiting. Before we knew she would be coming, I had signed up for a 5K run for cancer research, something I had never tried before, but I was trying to fit in and be part of the community. After the race we went to an antiques store and I bought them. I don’t think they are even particularly old, but they were pretty and different to anything that I had. Not long after, a stone came loose and they joined the endless list of tasks that, when you are new, take longer because you don’t know where to go or who to ask for a recommendation. It was easier to leave them in the box.
I open the box. The stone is fitted back in and I can’t tell where the repair is needed. One back is missing. The post is bent. The box rattles. I shake out a lone earring, whose twin is in the tray, and another pair of earrings that I had forgotten about to such an extent that for a moment I thought they might have come in the box from the antique store. But then I remember them. Why are they in the green box? Had they needed a repair too? Had the earrings mended themselves, left alone in the dark for three years?
There is a lesson here, in this box within a box. Damaged treasures. The friends and places that seem to envelop them, why getting rid of certain clothes or things can be so hard because it’s not the thing itself but all the memories it conjures up.
Wednesday night: Having fewer things forces you to take better care of the things you do have.
Thursday morning: The older daughter is now taking a business and career class, a freshman requirement. One thing they can do for 10% of their grade is wear business clothing one day a week. I lend her a skirt and survey the rest of the clothes I have placed on the other side of the closet and consider what constitutes a business wardrobe for a freshman who has yet to decide upon a career. Will this require the creation of a capsule wardrobe based on anticipating the sartorial standards of a teacher I haven’t met for a career, the idea of which we hope to nurture, but which is hypothetical. For the boys, of course, this will be achieved with khakis and a blazer, whereas for the girls, do I tell her this?, it is much more complicated.
Photo, screenshot of photo of clipping (New York Magazine?) from Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York.
Today I am supposed to be starting an experimental month with Project 333. This was something I stumbled across a few weeks ago and it seemed like a good idea — you create a capsule wardrobe containing 33 items and this, in a variety of ways, sets you free. I floated the idea to a few fashion-challenge-minded friends and so I hope that they are reading this in some clothes that they really love because the challenge is on.
As we firmed up the details—did the 33 items really have to include shoes and jewelry??—one friend backed out, texting from Zara that she was at the point in the winter, where she was thoroughly sick of her wardrobe and, one supposes, the idea of being stuck in the same rotation for even another month would be cruel. She has just moved from L.A. to the Midwest. Earlier in the conversation, she said, despite whatever may be in her closet, she lives in the same 20 items, which I think is true of most of us. It’s the idea of limits and rules which makes the 33 seems austere.
So what about the Petroleum Wives? Where are they?
Now, while we (women), all have moments, however brief, of imagining a simple, stylish, easy wardrobe, the versatile sheath plus stunning and transformative accessories, we don’t believe it’s achievable. (Do men ever think about this kind of thing? A black dress is not nearly as versatile as khaki trousers and a look at the outfits of the audience at last week’s State of the Union address should tell you all you need to know about some inherent fashion inequality between the sexes; thick royal blue dress and jacket sets speak volumes.)
The capsule wardrobe is a nice idea but for most of us it remains a lofty ideal that follows you through the shops: is this your essential white shirt? Are these your indispensable black flats? Catalogs and fashion magazines tap this with their copy, their lists of 10 must-haves, the all-you-needs, but as we experiment with and refresh our wardrobes, and even assuming our weight remains steady, the items accrue and the volume of our closets and drawers increases our hunger for simplicity.
One is seldom forced to be limited to a capsule wardrobe. The first time I did was backpacking in Italy, the second, when we moved from NYC to London. We had whatever we’d brought over on the plane and the rest was in a container. Talk about packing for the unknown. While the plan was that I would take the first month or so off and get settled before I looked for work, I wanted to have work or interview clothes to hand, just in case. Also, it was during this time that I would be trying to present myself as respectable and grown-up, meeting the husband’s work mates, looking for a flat, being interviewed at the lawn tennis club where I would play county league squash, presenting forms to civil servants, registering as an alien with the police, opening a bank account.
When filling out my alien registration booklet, under occupation, they would not let me put writer. I had to choose between unemployed and housewife, and I was advised to put the latter, as it sounded more respectable. Grudgingly, I opted for respectable. Though I insisted, throughout my state of being a trailing spouse, on keeping my name, and making sure I kept our wedding license to hand. It was still in its mailing envelope with the name and phone number of our NYC super scrawled on the front, Tito, who had checked us out of the Tribeca apartment we would never, ever again be able to afford.
It was the 90s and minimalism was the thing. I had three DKNY black wool separates, a gray Banana Republic T-shirt I would wear until it was a rag, two pairs of black shoes, and so forth. Most of the clothes I still own, 20 years later. I arranged my small wardrobe in several tiny closets over the course of the next two months. It was April. I had only brought two sweaters and these I wore, layered together, for much of the month. I hadn’t counted on the cold.
I landed a job at an international school and it was there that I encountered the Petroleum Wives. At this point, I had absorbed enough of the indignities of expatriation, the various laments, the taking of a taxi to the one newsagent in West London that carried the Sunday New York Times, the pilgrimage to the deli that carried American food (things I hadn’t bothered to eat in America), the quest for a decent cup of coffee or a bagel. One spends part of the time trying to replicate one’s former life and maintain one’s identity as, for example, a New Yorker, and another percentage trying to acculturate, all the time being easily identifiable as a foreigner and trying to at least stake the middle ground of being not a tourist.
In the admissions office of the school where I worked, there was a table of literature from local organizations catering to expatriate families. Women’s clubs abounded. The men, when they finally organized their own club, would call it STUDS (spouses trailing under duress successfully) (really). In one newsletter, the headline, “Attention, Petroleum Wives” caught my eye. The Petroluem Wives/Women have since gone online and their website notes, “Membership is not limited to those associated with the petroleum and energy sectors. ALL women are welcome.” Their newsletter, in 1995, contained an article about how hard it was to find domestic employees who did not destroy your Persian rugs, purchased when you lived in Iran, with ignorance or bad technique.
If my experience as an expatriate housewife had taught me anything, it was that we now existed in a slight throwback era. No longer were both parents working. There were very few single parents. Now, the wives were fulfilling duties to family and children, providing stability, comforting and costly snacks of hard-to-obtain, American junk food, 10 PM dinners for late-working husbands, planning mini-breaks to European cities or the Isle of Wight, reading the Evening Standard to keep up with the gossip. Most of the women in the school’s parent organization had advanced degrees. They planned class parties with excel spreadsheets. A few would apply their knowledge of history or art plus MBA to offering gallery talks or leading book groups.
Another feature of the women’s club newsletters was a gray market of cars, electrical appliances and voltage transformers. I located an address in my A-to-Z in search of each thing we might need, puzzling over the bus routes and tube map to figure out how to get to each place. Everyone had a level of satisfaction and cultural competency, which they shared, whether they meant to or not. I tried to maintain the same minimalist principles in our flat even once our shipment arrived, to not acquire more than we absolutely needed. Most of our belongings were socked away in a storage warehouse. It was a relief to be free of them, but a comfort to know they still existed.
My next capsule wardrobe was when I was pregnant. Again, the limited choice you have once you have retired your regular wardrobe is freeing. I bought the four-piece black stretchy cotton kit that contained dress, trapeze top, trousers and skirt and some days didn’t even bother with accessories. I even had pregnancy shoes, clogs and Converse slides, I wish they still made those. Slip-on shoes and a restricted wardrobe were ideal for the lifestyle of someone who needed to be able to mobilize swiftly to stay on feeding and sleeping schedules, who hung out sitting in circles on the floor or drinking tea at One O’clock Clubs.
I am not sure what makes me want to go capsule at this point in my life. I am not at any particular turning point that I am aware of. In January, a few weekends away, living out of a suitcase of judiciously chosen clothing, almost put me off. And the extreme cold we’ve been having forces you into the same warm things again and again. I am not including my wool baselayer in the 33 items, because I am counting it as underwear. Last weekend, I cleared most of the clothes out of my closet and tidied the shoes and shoe boxes and vacuumed the closet carpet. I think I exceed 33 items. Do I need the red skirt to cheer me up or to wear on Valentine’s Day?
I guess the empty closet represents possibility. I think of coming for the first time to Little Venice, to a street of massive white colonnaded houses, flowering trees, the surprise of a canal, so many women in their kitchens selling off blenders and televisions. They were sad to be leaving, or happy. They were returning to their real life or leaving it. They had complicated espresso machines that they were selling at close to cost, because it was unused and they wouldn’t have bought it if they knew that their husband was serious about accepting the new position, or for ten quid, because the movers were coming tomorrow and they’d just be giving everything to the cleaner who had, frankly, ruined the rug, but they didn’t like to say anything.
Photo by Older Daughter, Summer 2011.
He was a cat out of Leytonstone. We found him through the classifieds in the London Loot and I brought him home in an apple box on the tube.
Until recently, we would joke that he was the honey badger of cats. He don’t care. He could fix you with a belligerent stare that said Feed me or That’s my spot, Dog. He was black and white and comical. He had a big head and in his prime he weighed over a stone, about 16 pounds, but when we took him to the vet yesterday he was just under 7 and there was a mass on his spleen and so we did what we had to do.
It is the first day of spring, after unseasonable biting cold, the air is soft and you can feel the warmth of the sun. This seems unfair that he has made it through the winter and missed out on the first evening he could have sat out on the deck.
He was really old. We were in our 20s when we got him. He sniffed the Moses basket with the baby. The girls staggered under his weight as they carried him around and posed for photographs. The older daughter fell asleep holding him in her arms the night before he died, after we had told them we thought his end was near. I came back from tennis and found them both asleep on the living room floor. She was still on the beanbag and he had gone back to his spot on the rug, lying in this facedown posture he had adopted as part of his decline. The thing about pets is that you sign up for this. That kitten or puppy you bring home will get old and die. They teach us about death, I tell the younger daughter after school, before we go home.
The ground around our house is stony and filled with roots. It is an effort just to plant a bulb, the tip of the trowel immediately hitting a dense network of fibers. A box with a cat would be impossible. You would have to dig a deep hole, because of the wildlife, and you might make a good start and hit a rock and have to start all over again. It would take all weekend and be grotesque, like a scene from a National Lampoon movie.
We chose the group cremation and scattering of ashes in the woods or farm of a man who was in the vet’s office that day, who we glimpsed through the door, who wore a fawn colored corduroy coat.
I will not bore you with the charming details of his life, his fear of a certain 70s pop song or his love of chèvre, his last meal, and asparagus; the way he liked to lie on my chest; how kind he was to the second cat or the time he got his head stuck in a can and I thought we were being burgled. It was good of you to read this far, even if you were only skipping ahead to the punch line, the realization that animals are brave because they have no choice.
Readers will know that I do not actually hide things belonging to the members of my family, even if they are unable to find them.
“I didn’t say you’d tidied it,” my husband may say to soften an accusation, “Moving is different to tidying.” It’s the intent, Your Honour. She perverted the course of looking.
Continue reading “Belty-Shelty House”
The other night my husband shared something very personal. It is something that has been present for the past two and half years and he has just now given it words. After a lifetime of considering himself to be a cat person, my husband has discovered that he is a dog person.
Midlife Animal Preference Conversion (MAPC) is not as uncommon as I had thought. The next day my friend reported that she, too, has MAPC. A staunch dog person, she was actually so pro-dog, she was anti-cat, and you know what they say about protesting too much. “I mean, I have even sent cat joke emails,” she confessed. Only in spite or, some might say, because, of her cat aversion, one has arrived at her house and twined its tail ’round her heart. “This cat is making me think that I might actually be a cat person. All of a sudden dogs seem so needy.”
I tell her about my husband. Everyone’s switching teams. I get the appeal of dogs, but I can’t imagine living without cats. I’m playing on both sides.
My husband and I both had cats growing up. We adopted as soon as we were out of school, and even in college there was D-U-G Dug (I named him), an orange tabby with a mean streak, who wandered around the Town Houses looking for food and more interesting or more violent people to hang out with; he was always itching for a fight. We were never sure about Dug, who owned him or what he was all about.
In London, we didn’t qualify for a pet through the RSPCA because we didn’t have direct access to the outdoors. Animals grow old and die in the Battersea Dogs Home, because, as the name suggests, they already have a home, thank you, and a more suitable one than yours, so sod off. We got our first London cat from a classified in The Loot. I took the tube out to a grim, grey street in East London and brought him home in an apple carton. We got him a kitten the following year. He has always been very devoted to her. We’re not sure if the feeling has ever been mutual.
Dogs, like cars, are impractical in a city. Oh, people said, when we were making plans to move to the US, are you going to get the girls a dog? What are we, we replied, the Obamas? They had just moved to the White House.
But the girls have always liked dogs. They have, I can see this in retrospect, been repressed dog people, living in a cat household. The older daughter went through a major dog phase. We learned how to ask “May I pet your dog?” in French as part of our small arsenal of vocabulary, like straw and vacuum cleaner, which they never teach you in school, not anticipating that you will travel with children or rent a house.
“Are you sure the verb is caress?” my husband asked nervously as the older daughter strode over to strangers in cafes, parks and markets.
The younger daughter really wanted a dog when we moved to America. In the same way that parents respond to requests for a guinea pig with, “But we have a fish,” so too, did “But we have cats” begin to sound a little hollow.
We got a dog.
We spotted the mother lolling by the side of a road as we were going to a friend’s house on the outskirts of this little town in the more agrarian part of Alabama. That looks like a nice dog, we all remarked, seeing dogs the way that women trying to get pregnant notice babies: everywhere.
“She just had puppies,” our friend said, “and I bet they’d let you have one. They’ve been giving them away.” And so we drove out of town an hour later, with a puppy, making an emergency stop at the dollar store for food. It was a bit like coming home from the hospital with the older daughter. I can’t believe they are letting us do this. We have no idea what we’re doing.
I found dog mentality a little frustrating at first, their need for hierarchy. We’d watched our share of The Dog Whisperer, which in retrospect should have tipped me off to my husband’s latent MAPC, and I knew that the root of all dog problems was the owners’ inability to establish dominance. Housebreaking was tedious, but the mental energy was in letting him know you were top dog. Cats just don’t care about all of that and throughout this business of puppy training they were like our elegant, childless friends, stretched out on the couch enjoying an elaborate cocktail while we carried dessicated meaty dog treats in our pockets.
You start thinking like a hackneyed sexist. Cats are aloof, capricious women, with psychic powers, slinking around in designer gowns. Dogs are boisterous, 9-year-old boys who will do anything to make the team and expect that you will be their firm coach who knows all the rules.
“Dogs are on your side,” my husband says. It is a revelation after he sees that the dog charging the cat when she reaches up the shred the sofa some more. The dog knows this is not allowed. She couldn’t care less. It feels good. She was bored. The dog is a great smelly beast and not graceful. Eats my food. And worse. I could go under the couch and get your tennis ball but then you would just run around some more.
“We’re never getting another cat,” he says.
We are leaving the farmers market when we see people in the parking lot of the Liquor Express with a box of tiny, brindled puppies, the mom on a leash. “Oh,” we all cry, “puppies!”
“Should we get one?” my husband asks.
“Yes!” we all shout. Even me.
“Ha!” he exclaims. “You would, wouldn’t you? You said yes.” I mean, it’s like the worst idea ever, obviously. Two elderly cats and a stable, happy dog. Let’s see, let’s push one or all of them over the brink of one thing or the other.
Later, when we are all bundled together on the bed—humans, cats, dog—it occurs to me that pets, cats and dogs, most animals, with their shorter life spans offer up a science fiction kind of tragedy, going from small, skittery kittens and soft, warm, wiggling puppies to old souls, with ginger tread and deep sighs, within the scope of a human childhood. More themselves than ever and moving past you and away to the end of their own days.
My husband spent last week in London and returned home with treats for everyone. It’s funny how reductive our tastes can be: tea, biscuits, Smarties and the Queen.
There were also requests for Rescue Remedy, a particular facial toner my daughter uses and tea tree oil, all of which I’m sure we could find at the healthy supermarket if we could be bothered to drive for 25 minutes. These were emotional touchpoint requests not deep desires in and of themselves. We miss our old life enough to want some visual reminders.
When we had just moved back, I bought Twinkies. The girls had never had one. It would be educational and I wanted to see if they were still as delicious as I thought they were in my teens. They weren’t. No one liked them.
This story on food Americans miss when abroad includes things which, except for Mexican food and hamburgers, aren’t very good, but they signify home.
Not all bagels in NYC are good. Most aren’t. Favorite place? Brick Lane Beigel Bake, London, their bagels, small and chewy, still warm and filled with cream cheese and lox. And Carmelli’s, a place up in Golders Green, North London, did decent bagels, too. It just takes a while to find what you think you want or need.
That we bring back teabags (and of strong builders’ tea at that) instead of loose tea may indicate a lapse or lack of standards. There is, it turns out, a place downtown that sells freshly roasted coffee beans and a selection of loose tea. That is where we should be shopping. We have known about it the whole time we have lived here but have thought, oh, it won’t be that good, it’s inconvenient, the hours are stupid. (They don’t open until 9 AM on weekdays!) And maybe so, but if and when we ever move or it closes this will be the kind of place we pine for.
While he was there, I pictured the shops along the street where his hotel was. The things I would have asked for couldn’t have been brought home: the thrill of discovering an obscure book in the Oxfam used book shop, a sausage roll from The Ginger Pig, smelling soaps in Ortigia, the beautiful packaging of Rococo chocolates (I will ask for a tea towel next time), browsing for ribbon for my work ID badge in V. V. Rouleaux, getting picnic provisions at Waitrose and passing from a summer street into the coolness of a park in an ancient city.
The older daughter asked for Smarties, but what she really wanted him to do was ride the new Metropolitan Line, which she has seen on YouTube, and tell her about it. Even for me, the irritants of tube travel, the repetition, the black snot formed by breathing particles of burnt rubber train wheels, the Metro and its sensationalist headlines, the arrival at your stop, the series of escalator journeys up towards Big Ben that was a stage in my commute, become the stuff of dreams.
Night is falling. We are sitting in our friends’ back yard watching their next door neighbor light a bonfire for our children to tend. His are at the beach with his wife. Since the storms last year, the bonfire has been a popular activity.
Our friends’ German house guests call to report a flat tire, but the evening is fluid, dinner safe to wait. It is a perfect night to sit outside. Fireflies, but not mosquitoes. The children gather sticks and organize themselves.
The neighbor hands me his phone with a picture of his younger son in the dark, in front of a rectangular fire.
“Forget Chuck E. Cheese,” he says. “For X’s 10th birthday, we had all his friends over and burned down the climbing frame.”
Continue reading “The Biscuit Tin”
St. Patrick’s Day is an American holiday, but I’m not sure what it’s about. It is about the color green to be sure, with cupcakes stuck with plastic shamrocks and foil-wrapped coins, a string of green Mardi Gras beads to ward off pinchers and/or wearing a green shirt. It is not about Ireland. It is not about religion or politics or being Irish.
We’re at the outside mall yesterday and nearly everyone is in green. It was like stepping into a movie set, a sensation that was only enhanced by the gigantic synthetic stone horse in front of an upscale chain Chinese restaurant and the buskers and the early summer weather.
St. Patrick’s Day in NYC was about jubilance, police barriers, green beer and Kiss Me pins, it was about Irishness in a city then full of Blarney Stone bars. In London, it was a theme in pubs and, with the city still in the clutch of winter bleakness, offered a reason to drink Guinness or Harp.
Here, in Alabama, or at least in our town, it seems to be a symbolic thing about a color. What’s striking about the green shirts that everyone’s wearing is that they are just that: green shirts. There are no slogans on them. Normally, on a Saturday at the mall, you would see people in team colors, commemorative National Championship jerseys, crimson, orange, navy, purple. And T-shirts, athletic or otherwise, normally are about something, teams or 5K charity runs. There is restraint and unity in so many plain green shirts. And the fact that they are in so many shades and styles have a charm almost akin to a homemade Halloween costume.
I had worn a green, more of a teal, shirt by accident, but out there in the agora, I blended in. Lucky accident, I thought, but why? Because I resembled a person who was sharing a rare moment of zeitgeist? If I had worn pink, would I be making a statement against the idea of green? Why did the Japanese couple we recognized from my daughter’s school wear green? Did they discuss it that morning? Had someone told them it was an American tradition? So for them maybe green was worn out of respect for local culture?
The unadorned shirts surely are imprinted with an invisible ink message, but I have left my decoder pen in my other bag. We leave the mall, having this day fulfilled the societal obligations of sports and shopping, as well as an inadvertent participation in something that unifies a diverse group of people with a range of national origins and beliefs.
Back when the girls took swimming lessons at the Kensington Leisure Centre, we had a Saturday routine. The pool was in the back of a public housing estate under the Westway flyover. There were orange brick houses with tiny patio gardens. You had broken windshield glass on the path, but also unsnapped tulips under the pale sun.
We took our Rolser, an upright shopping basket on wheels, and into it would go the wet towels. We wheeled ourselves over to the Portobello Road for English breakfast at S&M (sausages and mash), which did a nice bubble and squeak. Fortified, we’d work our way down the market, piling food into the Rolser as we went.
We stopped at the family-run Spanish Grocery, at the fruit man, the rude salad and herb ladies, the Halal butcher with the winking cow sign (“Ask about our special beef.”) We were pretty sure it meant bush meat.
The mother and grandmother of one of the older daughter’s former classmates sold veg at one stall, so we might stop and say hello and swap notes on the state of the educational system, the schools and our mutual challenges. There was the coffee plant, the Oxfam book store, the schnitzel cart, the cashmere shop, the bagel stall. And then there was the candy man.
The candy man sold traditional English sweets out of old fashioned jars. The girls were drawn, as you would be, to the colors, shapes, twists, the many manifestations of sugar: striped ribbons, flying saucers, rhubarb and custard, lemon drops, wine gums. I would name an amount they could spend and they would choose, but invariably they would choose something that the candy man didn’t want them to have. Why? Why not?, we’d cry.
“Won’t like it,” he’d say. “Have this.” He would indicate something which by definition they didn’t want. Something ordinary, like jelly beans. Sometimes we’d insist. We must have these. “Won’t like it,” he’d threaten, eyes narrowing.
How, we’d wonder, could you be a candy seller at a market and be so unwilling to part with the goods, so unjolly, such a crank? And why are you selling candy that people won’t like? Other than atomic red hots there really wasn’t going to be anything they wouldn’t like. “She likes licorice,” I would tell him.
We had this idea to freak him out and make him think twice that next time we went the younger daughter would hold up her fingers like devil horns and hiss savagely at him. We practiced with her on the way home. The next time we approached the stall, still out of earshot, my husband and I would incite her. Candyman, we’d murmur, Candyman. SSSSSSssss. HHHAAaaaagghhhHHH!
But nerve failed us all, time and again.
Candy man was like the soup man, made famous by Seinfeld, based on a real person, whose soup my husband ate regularly when he worked in Midtown. One day he took an exuberant friend with along him. He briefed the friend on the particulars of ordering and moving along, but, unable to resist, the friend broke the rules. He was punished, just like George Costanza was: “No bread for you!” cried the soup man.
Being denied bread is a sad thing. If it were in France, our small city would be designated SB (Sans Boulangerie), a ghost town, where the agriculture has died out and all the people moved away, rather than a city on the up. So many people are living without access to this basic staple, a fresh loaf, a metric of economic health, like a pulse, but they don’t even know they’re missing it.
Costco is our Portobello Road, the car our Rolser, laden down with wet towels, produce, meat. And so I buy the loaves of artisinalesque bread. They come two to a pack, of course. I slice one and freeze it for later in the week.
Oh, how my husband laughs when I do this.
Back when the movie Titanic came out there were posters in the tube of Celine Dion, who sang the soundtrack, which someone tagged with a speech bubble that read, “My mother freezes bread.”
Even the toaster has foretold my downfall. Look, it has a “frozen toast” setting, a setting for a thing that does not exist, which I had not even noticed until recently, like seeing your gravestone.
Now you can buy soup man soup in the freezer section. A display of candy, the color and combinations particular to every holiday, greets you on entering any food store or pharmacy. The supermarket bakery produces cakes and cupcakes piled high with technicolor frosting. A good baguette you buy in the morning is past its prime by the evening. It is ephemeral, like the chocolate-covered, raspberry-flavored marshmallow Peep hearts that are offered in a limited seasonal edition. Put your devil horns back in your pockets, kids, it’s all yours. Except for the bread.
The Other Side 