you’ve gone all bashful. You’re even blushing!’
‘No, stop, what? Nothing, no. I just. Saw a crane. Last night.’
‘. . . by “crane”, do you mean “prostitute”?’
‘No! Jesus Christ, if you must know, a crane landed in my garden.’
‘. . . And?’
‘And nothing, go make the calls!’
‘Fine, watch me walking.’
‘And quit sighing like that.’
‘Customer, Mr Duncan.’
‘What?’
‘I said, customer, George. Behind you.’
‘I didn’t hear the door–’
‘. . .’
‘. . .’
‘. . .’
‘Can I . . . ?’
‘My name,’ she said, ‘is Kumiko.’
People were always surprised to find out that George was American, or at least that he had started life that way. They told him he didn’t ‘seem’ American. When asked what exactly this entailed, they would look uncertain – not uncertain about what ‘seeming’ American might mean but uncertain about how badly they wanted to offend him.
These people, friends even, many of them highly educated, many who had visited America several times, were surprisingly difficult to budge from their assumption that, George aside (of course, of course), his 300 million compatriots were all of them passport-less, irony-hating Jesus-praisers who voted for apparently insane politicians, all the while complaining that their outrageously cheap petrol wasn’t nearly cheap enough. ‘America is,’ they would say, and so confidently, without fear of contradiction or rebuttal to anything that followed.
‘The New Yorker,’ he would reply. ‘Jazz. Meryl Streep.’
This usually just prompted them to try out their approximation of an American accent, all wheedling brightness and too much blinking. At least it had morphed over the years; for a full decade after he’d moved to England, people would dive ecstatically into J.R. Ewing’s worst twang. ‘I’m from Tacoma,’ he would say.
No one wanted to hear that people other than themselves might be complicated, that no one was ever just one thing, no history ever just one version. It was oddly hard for them to accept that, though American, he was neither from the Deep South or the East Coast, that his upbringing was in the Pacific Northwest, where the accents were mild and nearly Canadian, and even though his parents had ticked a stereotypical box by being regular church-attenders – which, all right, it was difficult to find American Protestants who weren’t – they’d been slightly laissez-faire about it, as if it were a duty, like vaccinations. His father had been a secret smoker, for example, even though the church was of an evangelical strain and frowned on such things. George also knew from a startling, never-to-be-discussed accidental sighting that his parents occasionally rented pornography on VHS from the gas station down the road. ‘People are legion,’ he would insist, ‘even when it’s inconvenient to a worldview.’
Take his one anomalous school year. Even that wasn’t a simple story, as if there were any such things. He had sailed through kindergarten (though who doesn’t sail through kindergarten? he thought. Wasn’t it basically just showing up and not choking on things?) and performed above his level through first and second grades – indeed, occasionally being sent up to fourth grade reading groups just to keep the boredom from setting in. The teachers loved him, loved his big blue eyes, loved a compliance that bordered on the slavish, loved a complexion that looked like he was about to grow a beard, aged six.
‘Sensitive’, they called him in Parent/Teacher Conferences. ‘Dreamy, but in a good way.’ ‘Always with his hand in the air.’ ‘Such a special, tender little guy.’
‘Not special at all,’ said Miss Jones, in the first Parent/Teacher Conference of third grade, a scant two weeks after he’d started. ‘And far too much of a smarty-pants. No one likes a know-it-all. Not the other students and certainly not me.’
George’s parents had sat there in polite astonishment, his mother clutching her handbag as if it were a dachshund about to leap down and soil the carpet. His mother and father exchanged a look, his mother’s face especially retreating into that shocked expression she always got when unexpectedly confronted by life. Which essentially was every time she left the house.
George knew all this because 1) they were the kind of parents who would go to every Parent/Teacher Conference (he thought it might be the ‘only child’ thing; they didn’t want to miss even a moment, lest they irreparably screw something up) and 2) they’d been unable to get a sitter that night, despite the vast squadron of teenage girls usually on offer at the church, so he quietly drew with coloured pencils at a spare desk while his mother and father crouched, comically low, in the plastic children’s seats before Miss Jones’s desk.
But Miss Jones was only getting warmed up. ‘I just cannot tell you how tired I am,’ she said, lifting her eyes to Heaven as if praying for an answer to her tiredness, ‘of every single parent coming in here and telling me how their little Timmy or Stephanie or Frederico’ – she said the name so scornfully even George knew she was talking about Freddie Gomez, the only other boy who’d gone up to higher-grade reading groups with him and who smelled eye-wateringly of soap – ‘is special and talented and God’s gift to third grade knowledge.’
His father cleared his throat. ‘We’re not the ones saying it, though,’ he said. ‘The school–’
‘Oh, the school, is it?’ Miss Jones leaned forward, coming nearly all the way across her desk. ‘Let me tell you something, Mister Duncan,’ she said. ‘These boys and girls are six and seven and eight years old. What do they know about anything except how to tie their shoes and not wet themselves when the bell goes? And not that all of them are so great at that, I can tell you.’
‘Well, what does that have to do with the price of milk?’ his mother said, in a tense, strangled tone that made George’s ears prick. She was a nervous lady, his mother. She’d clearly been thrown off balance by Miss Jones’s forthrightness, her volume, her – let’s face it – blackness, and already he could see that things weren’t going to go well. He went back to colouring every quadrant of Snoopy the same shade of green.
It was just this moment when Miss Jones made her mistake. ‘Now, you listen to me, Mrs Duncan,’ she said, and she stuck out her finger and shook it in George’s mother’s face. ‘Just because your boy doesn’t eat paste doesn’t mean he’s gifted.’
George’s mother’s eyes never left the end of the dark brown finger wagging so close to her nose, following it as it bobbed up and down in righteous instruction, invading George’s mother’s space in a way that even George found obscurely upsetting, and just as George’s father said, ‘Now, you listen here,’ in his authoritative, construction foreman voice-of-doom, George’s mother leaned forward and bit the end of Miss Jones’s finger, snapping it hard between her teeth and hanging on for a surprising second or two before all the screaming started.
Now this
