Cambridge (2 page)

“It’s quicker,” said my father.

“It isn’t quicker if I can’t do it,” I said.

“When you’re learning it, it doesn’t seem quicker. But once you get the hang of it, multiplication is faster.”

“What’s multiplication?” I asked.

“Times,” my father said. “Times is multiplication.” He sighed.

“I’m going to stick with addition,” I said.

I decided to stick with addition mostly from petulance. Addition was Cambridge. Times, multiplication, whatever it was, was England, and I knew which side of the Atlantic was mine.

Arithmetic and language affected me in different ways. Arithmetic had a stately, rhythmic progression that I could appreciate. But something about the static truth of numbers hurt my brain. Numbers felt sharp. Words felt elastic and springy. Language had an unpredictable, quicksilver quality, saying one thing but meaning something else, varying from place to place but maintaining (against all evidence) that it was the same language. Thinking about words was ticklish and amusing. It was also easy, as if they fit into slots and patterns prepared for them in my mind. Numbers, on the other hand, bounced right out of
my mind. The longer we stayed in England, the more words I accumulated for my internal dictionary of synonyms:
lorry
and
truck; queue
and
line; lavatory
and
toilet
—and the last two even had second synonyms on the English side of the column,
crocodile
and
loo
. A
sweet
was a candy.
Jumper
meant sweater.
Ra-ther
meant Yeah! Within a few months I’d acquired an English accent and vocabulary. I never acquired the multiplication tables. Ten was obvious; I could do that one. And something about five was memorable as well. The rest of it left no trace.

The accent was camouflage. I was shamed into it by Miss Gravel, the second grade teacher.

I was a dunce at calculation, but I was far ahead of the others in reading. Embarrassingly ahead, I guess, if you were Miss Gravel representing the British Empire’s side of the Who Can Read Best in Second Grade competition. The class was still at the sounding-out-words stage. Some of them would hesitate and fumble over things as simple as
another
or
because
. I was reading
The Wind in the Willows
and
Oliver Twist
in bed when I should have been asleep.

“Reading aloud,” Miss Gravel announced daily.

Eventually, sometime in the second week, she arrived at me for reading aloud.

“Our American friend,” she said. Nasty, smirking—even a child could tell.

I read aloud. I read the page she indicated. I read the next page. I was prepared to read until sunset to prove that I knew how.

“That will do,” she said, cutting me off.

There was a pause, during which I waited for my praise.

“That, class, is a perfect example”—I held my breath, excited by what was coming—“of how
not
to pronounce your words.”

So we were at war.

I won with the method that’s proved effective over the course of my life, though it’s shut off what are now known as options: I refused to participate.

Each year had a theme. First grade: animals of the British Isles. Second grade: early man. Third grade: Romans. This is a common ploy in schools that pride themselves on being progressive. It doesn’t fool the children. They still have to learn how to read and write and to add and subtract (and, someday, to multiply), whether they’re adding woolly mammoths or abstractions. We were studying cavemen. We spent hours a day learning about bows, flints, pelts. I couldn’t stand it. I had absolutely no interest in cavemen.

Soon after Miss Gravel had disparaged my accent, on a day devoted to how to chip flint to make a spear point, I went up to her desk at the front of the room and announced: “Early man is boring. I am going to read.”

She looked at me. I looked back.

“What are you reading?” she asked.

“Puck of Pook’s Hill,”
I answered.

“Very good,” she said.

This could mean two things. One was a compliment (I doubted that); the other was the English version of
okay
.

I decided it meant okay.

Miss Gravel and I had arrived at an entente, more or less cordial. I could read instead of listening to flint-talk, I could sit mute during the times table, and in return she would never, ever call on me for anything, especially not for reading aloud. I spent second grade with Kipling and Enid Blyton and Schwab’s
Gods and Heroes
. There are worse educations.

First hate, like first love, is unforgettable, and Miss Gravel’s disdain still stings. But much of that English year is blurry, stylized into phrases and stories repeated until they have no texture.
It was the coldest winter in decades; the toilet was frightening; my parents were distracted. That was how things were. I couldn’t do anything about any of it, not even pay enough attention so that fifty years later I’d be able to remember how it really was.

I was up against the impotence of being a child. Peeing in the chamberpot, dropping out of second grade, refusing to bathe (in this I was being very English, though I didn’t know it): My rage at England and being plonked down in it as if I were nothing but a suitcase made no difference to my parents. My plan was to keep doing bad things so they would give up and take me home.

I’d had the same plan about the baby, and it hadn’t worked out. Nobody had told me she was coming. Nobody had explained that now my mother would be too busy to bother with me. I hadn’t known that the little room next to my parents’ bedroom, where I liked to read on the loveseat, was going to be her room and that I couldn’t use it anymore.

Several times a week I suggested to my parents that they take her back to wherever they’d gotten her.

“She has very smelly poop,” I said.

“Today her poop is green,” I told them.

“She makes a lot of noise in the night,” I said.

They smiled and chuckled and agreed with me, but they didn’t take her back.

Her name was Miranda. In protest, I refused to use it. I referred to her, if I referred to her at all, as “the baby.” Oddly (maybe not so odd), she didn’t want to use her name either; she didn’t like it. The day she turned eighteen she had it legally changed to Jaye. But when we got to England, she was only three months old and couldn’t even say Mama, and I was pretending she didn’t exist. I became good at that.

All the pretending—that we were going back home, that I was still the center of my parents’ attention—made me cranky
and difficult. To distract me or to cheer me up or to quiet me down, my father proposed a trip to what he called the “real” Cambridge.

Everybody piled into the tiny Hillman, my parents in front, Frederika with the baby on her lap in the backseat with me. Probably we stopped to eat pickles and Cheddar on a terrace overlooking the smooth, boring English hills. My parents had a knack for finding the perfect lunch spot in any country.

“It’s the Cambridge Cambridge is named for,” my father said. “This is the first Cambridge. You’ll see.”

When we got there, it wasn’t Cambridge at all.

I burst into tears.

“Look,” my father said, “here’s the river—not the Charles, it’s called the Cam—and here’s the university, and here are some towers like the tower at home on Memorial Hall.”

None of it was any good.

I gave up. I was a prisoner in England, sentence indeterminate. If I’d known that we were going home the following fall, I might have felt better, but either I didn’t know or, more likely, knowing that meant nothing to me. When you’re seven, one year is the same as twenty.

We’d taken the
Queen Mary
to England. We hadn’t left until the middle of October, which accounted for some of my confusion. For more than a month I’d been walking the two blocks to school every day, then all of a sudden, my mother was putting sheets on the furniture and stuffing clothes into trunks and giving the cat (temporarily, she assured me) to our neighbors the Bigelows, and now, here I was, running up and down the stairs between decks and poking into off-duty ballrooms on a floating vacation that, for all I knew, was never going to end.

October is late for an Atlantic crossing, and we had some bad weather. One night the dinner crew soaked the thick white
tablecloths with ice water from the silver pitchers so the plates wouldn’t slide around as we bumped through the rough seas. I was delighted by the chilly table and the moist impression left by my glass when I took a drink and the way the waiters topped up the dampness with a little tip of the pitcher as they passed by. I was also pleased to be alone with my father. My mother was feeling seasick and had stayed in the cabin with the baby. I was superior, eating in the half-empty dining room. That didn’t last. We were all sick by the next afternoon, stuck in our humid, salty, stinky cabin together.

That night we passed through the storm, and the morning was clear. For the rest of the trip I sat in a deck chair on the sunny side of the boat, looking at the horizon unbroken except by the teak-and-brass railing, listening to the lulling waves. The ship thrummed through the water, moving forward to the future but taking its time getting there. Out in the middle of the ocean there wasn’t even a gull, nothing but high, thin clouds drifting behind us, a wake in the sky.

When I read
The Magic Mountain
for the first time a decade later, I recognized the rest cure—in a recliner, swaddled by a blanket on a balcony looking at the Alps—as a variation on the
Queen Mary
’s deck. Alps, Atlantic—not much difference. The point was to be immobilized, by blankets and circumstance, to be cold while being warm (the boat had huge steamer blankets smelling of brine piled beside each stack of chairs), and to have a view so panoramic, so nearly limitless, that it made any idea or worry trivial: tranquilization by landscape or, in this instance, seascape.

But when we got there—and so forth.

In the end (and even at the time it was an embarrassment to me after all the complaining I’d done) I settled into English life. I found a couple of things to like.

The candy was the main thing. It was much sweeter than American candy. Compared to Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, a Hershey bar seemed like a sketch of chocolate, a description of a candy bar rather than the thing itself. Dairy Milk was so startlingly sweet that it put me in a swoon, with black dots darting around my eyes and my head spinning in a sugar fog.

The other thing I liked was that one time, for less than three seconds, I managed to fly.

Maybe I was tanked up on chocolate that day. I’d tried flying hundreds of times before, jumping off a rock and willing myself to stay airborne, or running across a lawn as fast as I could, copying the take-off technique of a duck in the water. I could get very close to it but I never got
up
. I was a diligent student, though. Sometimes I’d repeat my effort ten or twenty times in a row. If I just tuck my legs in, if I hold my arms closer to my body, if I jump one inch higher. I was always refining my practice.

It was November. I was sitting on the wall outside the school, apart from the others. I didn’t have friends, but I’d been careful not to get enemies either. I stayed in my private reading world and avoided conversation. The wall was about three feet high and, like the toilet, required a hop if I wanted to get onto it. The school was at the top of a hill and the wall got higher as it progressed down the street, so by scooting along the top I could sit farther above the ground than I could hop up to.

We all sat there every day after school waiting for our mothers or nannies or chauffeurs to pick us up. Frederika would come for me, pushing the rattly black pram with the baby, and we’d walk the six blocks back to home.

I’d tried several times to fly off that wall, with my usual result: not flying.

One day, something in the universe bent a little and gave in to me for a few seconds. I jumped off the wall, knowing I’d bang
onto the ground but at the same time hoping that maybe today I’d get it right. And there it was, finally, what I’d been after: the sensation of rising. My chest pressed against the English air as if it were water, and I was buoyed up, going forward instead of down. I took a breath and hung by my full lungs for one more second. Then, boom, I was scrambling with both feet on the pavement, winded and thrilled.

I was so excited I had to say something.

“I flew,” I said.

My classmates, perched like so many crows (they called them
rooks
), turned to look. Quickly, before the law of gravity could be reinstated, I jumped again.

Is there anything today that I would pursue with such fervor?

When Frederika arrived she was surprised and worried by my knee.

“You hurted your leg badly,” she said.

“It’s just scraped,” I said. But bits of English gravel had got stuck in it, and my knee took a long time to heal.

I’d read Barrie. The idea of Peter Pan—and the fact that the real Kensington Gardens was just across town—had something to do with my determination to fly and with whatever did or didn’t happen on the day I did or didn’t fly. Giving up flying was therefore freighted with an extra sadness: Now I was a grownup.

It was a nasty winter. Everybody said so. There was no snow, just ice and grimy puddles and a damp that seeped into our coffin-house and made things cold in a way that was much colder than winter at home in Cambridge. Sometimes the only warm place in the house was bed, where I’d curl up under damp blankets and read or sleep. I hid in sleep. Because I slept so much, I was rarely tired at bedtime, and I lay staring through the gloom of the streetlight-twilight of my bedroom at an elaborate plaster knot in the center of the ceiling for what felt like hours, waiting
to conk out. Strange things began to happen while I lay there, odd sensations and thoughts. It took a while—several months—for them to gain enough momentum to become Something.

It began with falling. Falling asleep, but slowly, being aware of falling asleep, the stages of it enfolding me, and a sense of dropping into it, as if “it” were a place. I realized I could resist and suspend myself above sleep, or even now and then go into it and rise up out of it again. I experimented with that for a while, dipping into sleep as if it were a body of water and I a giant toe.