you can buy codeine over the counter, keeping in mind that you'll spend the afternoon passed out on your typewriter while the blood oozes from you faster than your tampon can soak it up. That codeine is something else. You awake dazed and cramp-free, if a little wet. Then suddenly it's five o'clock, time to punch out. What are you doing in London anyway? you ask yourself on the tube.
promotion
You convinced your parents to give you a trip to Europe for graduation, but now you just work, get your period, fall asleep, catch the train, walk home, eat dinner, go to bed. You sure as hell don't take advantage of the culture. The problem is, you've been seduced by loneliness. You hope only to recede, to fall backward into the arms of something certain not to catch you.
The sight of you reduces the Indian man at the corner shop to giggles on a nightly basis. "What are you doing here?" he asks in a crisp English accent, and you've stopped telling him, "Working." It only makes him laugh harder, that someone would leave America to find a job in England. "That would be like me leaving Mumbai for Cuba!" he once told you. "You've got your countries mixed up." Despite his perfect complexion and the dreamy thrust of his nose, you hate him. How he knows he's getting your goat. How his shop sells the best Greek yogurt in your neighborhood, and Greek yogurt is what you eat for dinner every night.
You're not Greek. You're Arab-American, which means you check WHITE on any and all race questions, even though most whites assume you're a card-carrying member of Hamas. It's funny to you that, despite this, you get to be white anyway, and you wonder when your country will wise up and give you your own box. In London, you don't feel so separate. Britain was once like a big stinking drunk, wandering the town and impregnating every dark-skinned girl in sight. The result is a bunch of swarthy kids knocking at the door all these years later, looking to crash with Dad. He knows that if he tries to complain, they'll only tell him, "What did you expect?" so he minds his manners when they're around.
America, on the other hand, eschews the taking of responsibility in favor of a self-help approach. When confronted with its own tawdry past, phrases like "Get over it," "You have to move on," and "Let's forget about slavery" rise to the surface. The reality is that if you're a person of color and have any quibble over prior treatment, your only recourse may be daily affirmations.
So it's England you prefer, with its guilt, its nail-biting, the wretched nobility of its terribly long memory. And the British seem to like you, too. Initially they might imagine the standard dealings between their ancestors and yours, but then you open your mouth and you're American and they're instantly relieved. You may be a darkie but you're someone else's darkie. You claim no injustice against them. Let's have tea.
You think, I might as well start taking the codeine when I don't have my period, too. You begin to lead a dizzy life. You never feel pain, not even when you remove too much of your cuticles with your teeth and it takes five or ten minutes to staunch the blood. You bite the insides of your cheeks, too. Your mouth is always moving at top speed, an active participant in the national pastime of ripping oneself to shreds. If you weren't taking so much codeine, you'd feel that your jaws are sore at night; you'd notice in the mirror how something is beginning to block the view of your left ear.
People speak to you in Hindi, Spanish, Italian, Arabic. They think you're from anywhere except the U.S., which you, a poor excuse for a honky, find encouraging. You begin to dream in an English accent, then start using one in real life. "What are you playing at?" the Indian man at the corner shop asks when you try it out on him. "Who are you pretending to be?"
"No one," you laugh, handing over your money.
"Well, it won't work," he says bitterly, tossing your change on the counter so that you have to pick it up coin by coin. It occurs to you on the short walk home that you may have just entered a competition with a lousy prize.
The only place you haven't changed your voice is at work, where you've always been a Yank. This pains you and you contrive to establish a new identity. "Teddy," you say to your young supervisor one day, putting your accent on in the question, "what do you think of me now?" He sits across the room from you in a university office filled with study packets to be sent abroad. Your archaic job, eight hours a day, five days a week, is to type address labels for them. Often the students are named Snoopy or Cinderella, reflecting their Asian parents' flustered attempts at westernization. Teddy's forever favorite will remain the more traditional Yu Kam Fuk.
Occasionally the students call the office from Malaysia or Korea to complain that they have not yet received their materials, and you watch as Teddy willfully perpetuates the stereotype of Brits raising their voices to foreigners who don't understand them. Once he tells you proudly that Hitler planned to make your office building his headquarters after conquering Britain, and you believe it because anyone can see that the woodwork is fine, not to mention the view of Russell Square. You find Teddy a capricious racist which allows for the fact that he's clearly in love with you and suspect that he kisses your head while you nap.
As for your accent, he says, "It's fucking brilliant." Then he says, "What do you think of mine?" and he attempts an American drawl, and it's terrible. "It's fantastic," you say, at which point he becomes John Wayne; you, Miss Moneypenny. This reversal gives him the swagger to overtake you one lunch hour as you stand hunched at the window ledge, enjoying a tempest of leaves. "Just keep a-lookin'," he whispers in your ear, his belt-buckle a holster jangling behind you.
you can buy codeine over the counter, keeping in mind that you'll spend the afternoon passed out on your typewriter while the blood oozes from you faster than your tampon can soak it up. That codeine is something else. You awake dazed and cramp-free, if a little wet. Then suddenly it's five o'clock, time to punch out. What are you doing in London anyway? you ask yourself on the tube.
Britain was once like a big stinking drunk, wandering the town and impregnating every dark-skinned girl in sight. The result is a bunch of swarthy kids knocking at the door all these years later, looking to crash with Dad. He knows that if he tries to complain, they'll only tell him, "What did you expect?" so he minds his manners when they're around.
"Teddy," you say to your young supervisor one day, putting your accent on in the question, "what do you think of me now?" He sits across the room from you in a university office filled with study packets to be sent abroad. Your archaic job, eight hours a day, five days a week, is to type address labels for them. Often the students are named Snoopy or Cinderella, reflecting their Asian parents' flustered attempts at westernization. Teddy's forever favorite will remain the more traditional Yu Kam Fuk.
