Chapter 1
She finds a flat with a polish roommate. A gay man in his thirties who has been in London for five years. He invites her in for a cup of tea on a warm summer afternoon and compliments her backpack covered with patches. She blushes; she’s perpetually nervous. Always conscious of her accent and adapting it to be better understood. She can’t keep her feet from tapping on the tile floor. This is the first flat she’s been able to see. Housing is at a premium and she’s set her heart on its colorful interior and quirky vintage furniture. It’s a short walk from Finsbury Park in Northwest London. She eyes her host with admiration. He’s adjusted. He’s comfortable. He’s at home. He tells her that Dalston is the coolest part of the city. He shows her the bedroom. They climb the stairs off the kitchen to the third story, the top of the house; the room is quaint with a pointed ceiling. “Four hundred and fifty pounds per month,” he says, “plus utilities.”
She has just enough for a deposit and the first month’s rent. She’s fresh out of college and has zero contacts in the city. Only a grandmother a few hours away by train that she’s been meaning to visit. She thinks having an attic room with windows in the ceiling is romantic. Until she finds she can only stand fully upright in the center of her room. Until she wakes up in the middle of the night from rain dripping onto her face. Until the winter.
She rents his bedroom out to strangers while he’s out on vacation. His room pays for her food, her needs, while she spends all day searching and pining and applying for work. When he’s gone she wears one of his jackets. It’s a denim jacket with a white shearling collar and interior, that she hadn’t expected to need so early on in the summer. People compliment it when she goes out. She pretends she’s acclimated to North London. She talks down to invisible naive strangers, imagines telling them with confidence where the cool spots are. Imagines having her ear to the ground, being connected to the pulsing underbelly of the city.
She finds herself friendless and alone for the first time. Really alone. When you pack up and move your life to a new country, a new city. You expect your new life to greet you with a red carpet. You have entitled notions that your new crowd will welcome you immediately. It doesn’t quite work out that way. She does all of the awkward things you do in a foreign place. She gets an ID. She opens a bank account. She gets a cellphone. She memorizes a new currency; the value of unfamiliar coins, the denominations and colors of the strangely sized bills. She goes to the movies when she’s homesick for American accents.
She needs a job. She tries many. She eats two boiled eggs on the bus to work. Sauceless pasta at night, that costs 2 pounds for a giant portion. She memorizes bus routes, prefering to ride them for fun to learn the city. She dedicates hours to sitting at the best spot of the double decker buses: on the upper level above the driver in front of the giant front facing window. She learns it’s rude to smile too much, rude to make too much eye contact. She tries to pull back her Americanisms. She lands a part time bar job in central London. A student bar with lively coworkers. One who says he was an extra in the Harry Potter movies. On her first shift a pair of drunks try to pull her over the bar counter. When she leaves her night shift in the early morning she takes the night bus. The buses are far and few between, this is the longest of her commutes. She reaches her bed at five am. She misses what it’s like to hear your name called in a crowd.
She gets a second part time job; this time working retail at a fancy American brand. She flew all the way across the ocean to end up working at a mall. She finds friends with her other foreign work friends. London is a city of immigrants, she realizes. She bonds with her Colombian coworker, spending hours discussing Shakira’s discography while folding cashmere sweaters. She goes out drinking with her French coworker, excited by every new East London hip hop club that they discover together. She’s getting good at buying her pint of alcohol from the off license, and sneaking it into establishments to save on expenses. She starts to only feel real when she’s under strobe lights.
She’s terrible at bartending. Clumsy, hard of hearing. Often she has to decipher doubled accents: that is non-native speakers mimicking an English accent. She gives a pair of Polish customers vodka when they ask for water. She heard “vata”. “My mistake,” she says. She puts back the shots, embarrassed as an overlooker realizes the mistake. He smirks when she explains “oh you wanted water,” softening the t and stressing the r. Water. Wa-dur. His ear can smell Americans. They are always tensed. Always primed. He fucks her on a 2 seater living room couch. She’s rented out both her room and her flatmate’s room this time. She loves that when Europeans vacation they are gone for a full month. She’s been able to stay somewhat afloat financially, while her flatmate has been away.
She sleeps in the living room with a big box full of linen and a shelf full of Margaret Atwood novels. Daytime television keeps her company. She hangs out in charity shops on her days off. She walks every park. She explores every tube stop. And then it happens. She’s recognized on a busy street by a coworker. Someone in a crowd called out her name for the first time since she’s moved here.
Men mock her accent to flirt with her. In a country where self deprecation is customary and exalted, ridicule is meant as charm. When she’s bored, she dates. She dates other foreigners, other flight-risks. She finds it hard to meet actual Londoners...in London. It’s a city of tight knit circles. A city of transplants. Don’t smile. Don’t make eye contact. She meets an Irish boy at a Latin restaurant near Angel Station. She bitches when the menu lists “Mexican Garlic Bread,” as an appetizer. Her loyalty to Tex-Mex will not allow for such an egregious offense. She drinks a shot of alcohol called “Monkey’s Brains” before waking up in a German’s bed. She lets a boy from Yorkshire play her Requiem for a Dream on their first meeting, he feels her up as Jared Leto wakes up without an arm.
On dates she finds that she often says the wrong things; presses the wrong combination of body language and diction that gives away her hunger for the adventure she seems so in constant search of. The Fantasy Dream Expectations she’s placed on this entire experience from the beginning. Finish college. Move to London. Start life.
She goes on a few dates with an older man who works in film. He wears a checked shirt and thick rimmed glasses. They meet in Notting Hill at Portobello Road Market and scour the antiques. They make up backstories for all of the shiny old objects. They scour the book stalls and show each other their favorites. They pick out vintage clothing for each other to try on. They have an extravagant Italian dinner and share a kiss in Hyde Park in front of the swimming moors. They agree that “moor” is an awfully aggressive name for a bird. He walks her to the tube after. Her hand buzzes in his all the way to the station. She goes to work after their date and hours later her lips still tingle from the kiss.
She gets comfortable with people too soon, and loses her balance when she’s dumped. She’s not old enough yet to know that in romance, people’s words aren’t always what they mean. He breaks it off at a pub in Chinatown. He hands her the scarf she left at his flat. His ex is back in the picture. He hopes she understands.
She sells sweaters to wealthy women and B-list celebrities. She runs up and down three flights of stairs from the storage room to fetch cardigans for impatient housewives. “Would you like to see another size? Maybe another color?” She rearranges the store basement so that the flow makes sense. She gets assigned to organize the rest of the stockroom; locked in the basement all day away from the debilitating monotony of customer service. She takes her breaks in the emergency stairwell, just for more alone time.
She goes on a lot of bad internet dates. Too leary or too boring, or too pushy or just not what they seemed like online. She shows up to a Shoreditch ice cream parlor to meet a boy from Kent. His curly hair from his online photo is gone, he says that picture was taken ten years ago. She feels slightly above this man even from the beginning. She recognizes a submissiveness in him. He lets her lead the conversation. She rattles on and on and on about everything and nothing. He follows her as she buys the most recognizable item in the corner store, a green tube of pringles. She hasn’t held the floor like this in quite a while. Everything she says to him, he acts as if it’s the most impressive thing in the world. He follows her everywhere and she bathes in the attention. Shew feels like someone has just turn the lights on in a dark room. She mentions how cold her attic room gets, and he takes her to buy a comforter from Ikea. He grabs her hand at a pub and tells her that he thinks he’s falling in love with her. She chokes on her Guinness. It’s comedy night. The comedian jokes that they must be a couple who keeps their neighbors up at night. He moves in within the month. Suddenly she’s someone who has someone. She shows him landmarks in his own country. She realizes he’s not the kind of person who looks around with the same wide amazed eyes that she has for everything. Always looking for the perfect freeze frame moment. He doesn’t have many friends, but she meets his best. He meets her few work friends.
Everyday he travels across the city and walks 20 minutes out of his way to pick her up from work so they can ride home together. It’s a long journey from Chelsea to Harringey. They warn each other not to fall asleep on the bus or they’ll miss their stop. One time they wake up at the end of the line, his head on her cloud of hair, both mad at the other for nodding off. They like a lot of the same things, but more importantly they hate the same things. The city, the cost of living, the weather, their jobs. He makes big public declarations of love and promises to run away together. She’s twenty two, she loves it.
She goes home to Texas for Christmas. He visits for New Years. It’s his first trip to America. He asks about Ten Gallon Hats and yellow school buses. He meets her family. Her friends. He eats the food she’s been talking about for months. Her mother drives them to New Orleans so he can meet the Louisiana side of the family. He eats his first bowl of gumbo and by the end of the trip is able to critique different bowls from different places. On midnight of New Years in a Dallas parking lot she tells him she thinks she loves him too.
On one tube journey, post-Holidays, they spot a baby in a stroller that’s been unattended for an alarming amount of time. They vow to adopt the abandoned child. ’I guess we have to raise this baby,” he motions toward the pram. She nods, agreeing, ’We’ll raise it well.” They go back and forth imagining the future of the child. At the next tube stop the baby’s mother gets up from the back and pushes the stroller off of the train.
He says he dreams of them in old age and in rocking chairs one day. Their grandchildren playing on the lawn in front of them. She rests in that daydream. They name each other’s genitals. They talk about them in public, as if they were real people. ‘You won’t believe what Pierre did this morning’ ‘Really? What happened? Sabine is dying to get in touch with him.’ His eyes are the last she sees before she sleeps, hers are the first he see when he wakes.
She feels the itch of being stuck in one place for too long. It is late winter now. For months she has woken up to go to work when the sky is dark and gloomy. When she exits her train to go home the sky is dark and gloomy. She holds her charity shop coat closed, because it is missing buttons. The wind bites at her neck. Puddles invade her boots and leave her with miserably cold toes. Her lease is ending soon, the rent will be increasing. There’s a growing spot of black mold in the corner that the landlord refuses to repair. She now carries a wet cough that her GP can not diagnose. They quit their jobs one by one. Her first, over a fit of tears with her smiley manager one night. ‘I’m sorry, I just have to go home. I need something else,’ She packs all of her items into one large backpack. Her attic room is left as empty as the day she moved into it, and the next tenant is moving in swiftly behind her.
She flies back to America, and he follows. He wears a blazer on a windy beach one night in Mexico. She can’t stop looking at the Moon. He pulls a gold sapphire ring out of his pocket. He bends his knee and she says yes. She wears his ring. They roadtrip from Mexico to Canada, before returning back to Texas.
What do two young people do when they are broke but want to travel? They teach English. They move to a small Spanish town near the beach. It rains for 5 months straight. They walk the mile to work with big umbrellas and trench coats and boots, hers purple and only regionally fashionable. They kiss at the end of the road each morning and separate for their individually assigned schools. They get a kitten. When she’s in heat she screams all night in every room in the apartment. She tries locking the kitten in the kitchen, but her screams are still audible in the dead of the night.
She cleans the apartment incessantly. He watches. She carries their groceries up an impossible hill every week. When they go out they eat cold egg, what the Spanish call tortilla, and red wine mixed with coke, Kalimotxo. They do as the locals and eat dinner after 10 pm and come home at 5 AM. Her work assignment is grueling. She suffers. She hates her new job. Having to explain a language with no language in common. She doesn’t know how to command attention from groups of children. Especially 20 four year olds who don’t understand the language she is speaking.
She falls for one of the teachers at her school. The woman is one of those people who is naturally good at speaking. She envies her, it’s the kind of admirable envy women have for women they love. Do I want so bad to be her or to have her? She’d know this feeling a few more times in life. She starts trouble with her boyfriend. He complains when she begs to travel. She tells him about her hard days at work. He says he is the class pickle. Her wet cough returns. She learns just enough Spanish to call in sick for work. She stays home and sleeps all day, watching American shows with thick lisped Spanish dubbed over it to ease the homesickness. She misses city life. He’s content. She starts anxiously counting down the days until their assignment ends. Her father calls. Her grandmother has died. She never got to pay that visit. She buys a plane ticket home to Texas. She tells him after. She flies.
