is very pleasant. The food isn’t bad. And, I remind myself, I’ve never minded eating in a British pub back home in Ontario.
It’s no use. The lustre is gone. The portions are too large, the sauces thickened with cornstarch, the waitress too pointedly chipper as she asks, “And how are your first bites?” then scurries off before we have time to answer. Now I hear our friends when we get home saying: Oh, you went there?
MORE than anything, almost, Wayne and I like books, so it’s no surprise that we end our first day on the road in another bookstore. Elliott Bay Book Company anchors a corner of Seattle’s Pioneer Square, down by the water. It is a sprawl of wooden shelves, bins, and passageways lined floor to ceiling with enough books to last a lifetime.
Wayne heads for the travel section. I look around at the other book lovers. Bespectacled, lean for the most part, mostly female, but not all middle-aged, people with backpacks and cloth shopping bags, sensible lace-up shoes, most of them quietly peering at titles, a few of them chatting, some exclaiming, but no one is pushy, no one is what my mother would have called “loud,” which implied much more than the volume of their voice. If I were teleported into this room, would I know I was in the United States? I don’t think so. I used to say to Wayne that I could tell a Frenchman or a German before they spoke by the shape of their mouths, but these people speak English, with pretty much the same accent as me.
I try to remember my first American. I was born in Winnipeg, just across the border from North Dakota. I grew up in southwestern Ontario, scarcely an hour’s drive from Buffalo. My mind reels back, before school bus trips to Niagara Falls, back before Seventeen magazine and Father Knows Best, before television came to our house, back to when there was only radio and Canada’s Happy Gang, and I realize with a start: until the age of five, I had not seen a single American, not heard an American voice.
The fall I turned five, my father took me by train to Detroit. I don’t remember much about the trip except the train’s diesel snout pointing west, snorting like a beast with a scent. Then me smiling on the steps of my Aunt Mabel’s house. There is a photograph of the two of us standing there, in some Detroit suburb, so maybe it’s not a memory at all, though I do remember her kitchen, the white oak cupboard she called a Hoosier.
“What’s a Hoosier?” I asked.
“A cupboard,” she laughed.
“Why don’t you call it a cupboard?”
“Because here it’s a Hoosier.”
This was my introduction to the foreign language of America and that American specialty, branding. Aunt Mabel’s pantry cupboard— described as “the woman’s workbench” in the Eaton’s catalogue—was about four feet wide and six feet tall, with cupboards above and below an enamelled counter. The largest manufacturer of these efficient baking stations was the Hoosier Manufacturing Company of New Castle, Indiana, which is why such cupboards are Hoosiers to Americans (Indiana being the Hoosier State), just as tissues are Kleenex and all colas, Coke. This is the reward the United States offers for entrepreneurial success: linguistic immortality.
But still no bona fide Americans. My aunt was Canadian. She moved to Detroit to marry her cousin Wheeler, who was dead by the time I went to visit her. Her story strikes an iconic note for Canadians, one that the director Sandy Wilson explores in her poignant coming-of-age film, My American Cousin. There is something seductive and faintly sinful about those people to the south who look like us, talk almost like us, seem to come from the same places, from common mother countries, and yet we desire them, and despise them, too, because after all, they’re family and that’s what we do in families, love and hate in extreme.
Then suddenly I was seven, and Americans were everywhere. I was in New York City, at Radio City Music Hall, in the front row of a balcony overlooking the stage of The Garry Moore Show, where commercials for soap flakes and vacuum cleaners were acted out live on either side of the main action at middle stage so you could see all the parts of the show at once, something that ruined me forever for television.
“The little girl in the green dress in the balcony.” Garry Moore was pointing up at me, at the hand I’d thrust in the air. “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?”
I said something in the end, I have no idea what, and sat down amid a hot rush of laughter. I was alone at the edge of the balcony: my family was leaning back and away, as if I’d brought them shame by pushing myself forward. Just like an American, my mother said.
It was my father who loved Americans. The American multinational that bought the factory in our small Canadian town regularly summoned my father to its headquarters in Niagara Falls, New York (properly pronounced as one long, important word), trips from which he would return to us boasting about the computer that filled a whole room, drinks that no one in Canada had heard of yet, hotels that really knew how to make a man feel at home.
When we moved to Brazil, where my father was to start another factory for the American company, his love affair with the United States intensified. As our ship sailed past Cuba, where Che and Castro were waging war on Batista from their caves in the Sierra Maestra, my father drank Cuba Libres, but it was Americans he raised his glass to, saviours of the world.
In Brazil, I went to American schools, learned the states of the Union and their capitals before I knew the names of the provinces of Canada. I pledged allegiance to the flag of America every morning and sang, “Oh say, can you see . . .” I wish I could say that, like Jimmy Carter, I lusted only in my heart, that I never actually mouthed the words, but I did. I belted out “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “America the Beautiful” at the Fourth of July picnics where all the ex-pats brought their apple pies and baked beans and fried chicken and corn on the cob— food I grew up thinking of as American, though it is the gastronomic heritage of my birth country, too. Everyone at those picnics wore red, white, and blue (also the patriotic colours of Canada’s flag of the time). They talked about how wonderful life was stateside, where roads were smoothly paved (not a string of dusty potholes) and where you could count on your workers to show up on time (not like these lazy South Americans). This is ex-pat patter, I know that now. Americans don’t have a corner on it. I’ve heard Germans in Canada and Canadians in France and Swiss in Italy go through the same loving litany of home disguised as a whiner’s rant.
The Brazilians mistook my family for Americans. The Americans knew better—I entered the schoolyard each morning to taunts of “Canadian bacon”—though the distinction was lost on the coffee-skinned boy who opened his pants and peed on my feet, cursing me as I stood there astonished, stuttering, “Mas no estou Americana!”
I worried my family had become American by association, which, given my dampened shoes, did not seem like such a good thing. Didn’t we beg our friends to send us sticks of Juicy Fruit chewing gum and Hershey chocolate bars in their letters? Wasn’t it Pat Boone and Elvis Presley my sisters shimmied to on their beds?
I realized we’d escaped with our identity intact when we boarded the Air Canada flight for home. I was a teenager by then, but I felt what a baby must feel when, after being handed around, it finds itself safe in its mother’s arms. The stewardesses cut their vowels short and round, the way we did. They were reserved and polite and seemed pleased that we were, too. They didn’t gush, which was a relief. No one talked too loud. Everyone said “Excuse me” and “Sorry,” even when they hadn’t done anything wrong.
There were Americans after that, but they were on my turf, which made it easier to look down my nose. My father still adored everything stamped Made in America—I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island, the Rose
