LaMatina, Sonny LaMatina,
Ding dang dong, Ding dang dong.
I was five, a kindergartner. The song was pure sound, its hushed opening lines building to a pitter-patter and then to the crash-bang onomatopoeic finale that we liked to yell, hitting the terminal g’s like cymbals. The French teacher didn’t force meaning on us. She let us revel in the strangeness of the syllables, which made us feel special, since we were only just old enough to be able to discern that they were strange. Sonny La-Matina sounded to me like an exotic but approachable friend. I imagined him as a car dealer, like the ones I had heard on WWQQ 101.3, Cape Fear’s Country Leader: “Come on down to Sonny LaMatina Honda Acura Mitsubishi. You can push it, pull it, or drag it in!”
The school occupied a low-slung brick building set back from the highway on a lot of sand and pine. I had lived in Wilmington, a beach town wedged between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic Ocean, my entire life. My parents, who came from Philadelphia and Long Island, rendering them lifelong newcomers, had moved to North Carolina seventeen years earlier. My father was a criminal defense lawyer, handling everything from speeding tickets to murders. My mother worked from home—from our kitchen table, more precisely—tutoring high-school students in geometry and trig. We had a redbrick house, with green shutters and a picket fence. We knew exactly one person—a Korean-born woman with whom my mother played tennis—whose first language wasn’t English.
I loved where I came from. Wilmington was anything but a soulless suburb. Its inhabitants proudly extolled its claims to fame—hometown of Michael Jordan, headquarters of the North Carolina Azalea Festival, the largest port in the state. Dawson’s Creek was filmed there. The Venus flytrap, a carnivorous plant with leaves like the jaws of a rat, grew natively only within a sixty-mile radius. You could swim in March. June brought lightning bugs, and August, jellyfish: Portuguese men-of-war, sea wasps, cabbage heads.
My family’s idea of a good vacation was to spend a week in a rented condominium 4.7 miles from our actual place of residence. My mother would drive home every day to water the grass. My brother, Matt, and I would ride bikes to a hot dog stand where the owner had shellacked a quarter onto the counter as an honesty test. We’d each get a North Carolina (mustard, chili, and slaw) and a Surfer (mustard, melted American cheese, and bacon bits), with pink lemonade that looked as if it had been brewed by dropping a highlighter inside a cup of water. Fall was oysters, roasted by the bushel and dumped on a table made from two metal drums and a piece of plywood, with a hole sawed out of the middle for the shells. When ACC basketball season arrived, church let out early. Teachers trundled televisions into the classrooms, blaring Dick Vitale.
People who live in big cities get people who live in small towns wrong: they don’t want out. Wilmington was a place where people, considering their habitat unimprovable, tended to stay put. Only one member of my family had ever been abroad, once, but by local standards we were considered suspiciously urbane. We subscribed to the newspaper, which many Wilmingtonians detested, because it was owned by the New York Times. (A popular bumper sticker read “Don’t Ask Me, I Read the Wilmington Morning Star.”) We drove to Pennsylvania every year, in a Volvo, to visit my grandmother. (Another sticker, aimed at tourists: “I-40 West—Use it.”) My parents encouraged us to pursue outside experiences. They were rarely illiberal, even in matters of which they had no direct knowledge. They were both keen readers, especially my mother, whose tastes in fiction were as sophisticated as they were simple in her everyday life. Their horizons were wider than those of many of the people around us, but they extended only a few hundred miles to the north.
Soon the school discontinued French in favor of Spanish, deeming it more practical. I became Laura, not Laurence. Roosters crowed cocorico instead of quiquiriki. On Wednesdays the record player crackled out “La Cucaracha” and, regardless of the season, “Feliz Navidad.”
One day our English teacher asked us to write a poem. My parents found mine not long ago. They were coming to London for my wedding to Olivier, the night before which we were planning a big dinner in a pub. Yorkshire pudding was on the menu, and they weren’t sure what it was.
My father flipped to the Y section of the family dictionary. A piece of loose-leaf paper fluttered to the ground. I had completed the poetry assignment with a fuzzy orange marker:
I wish I could travel around the world, and s-e-e-e all the th-i-i-i-ngs.
Oh, I would see all the countries and beautiful customs.
Oh, I would see all the countries, Romainia Greece and all.
I would see all the beautiful cultures. I wish I-I-I could.
Oh, it would be so interesting. I wish I could travel around the w-o-o-o-o-rld. Oh!
THE FIRST PLACE I ever went was Disney World. We crammed into the car with one tape, Jack Nicholson and Bobby McFerrin doing Kipling’s story about how the elephant, on the banks of the “great gray-green, greasy Limpopo River,” got his trunk. The drive took nine hours: Myrtle Beach, where we stocked up on bang snaps and Roman candles; Savannah; St. Augustine; Daytona Beach. Finally, we arrived at Polynesian Village, a longhouse-style resort with koi ponds and a tropical rain forest in the lobby.
I pulled on tube socks and white sneakers and slung a purple plastic camera across my chest. Disappointment quickly set in. I was too scared to ride Space Mountain. Cinderella’s castle held little allure—I was more interested in foreign countries than magic kingdoms. To a first-time traveler with dreams of high adventure, Main Street, U.S.A., seemed a scam, a staycation in the guise of a trip down memory lane. The windows of the shops were filigreed with the names of fake proprietors. I clocked a barbershop and some fudge kitchens. Where were the ziggurats, the cassowaries and the cuneiform tablets, the temples of marble and pillars of stone?
The next morning, we took the shuttle to Epcot. As we crossed into the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—even now, my impression of exoticism is such that the dome marking its entrance seems less a golf ball than a crystal ball, or at the very least a Scandinavian light fixture—I was transported, exported, by some freaky wormhole of globalization in which one could see the world by essentially staying at home.
We boarded Friendship Boats, approaching the World Showcase Lagoon on the International Gateway canal. We took a left into Mexico, where we rode a marionette carousel before proceeding southwest to the tea shops of China. We strolled around a platz. We listened to a campanile toll, saw the Eiffel Tower. We were after the epoch of Equatorial Africa (which Disney had planned, but never built) but before the dawn of Norway (whose pavilion would open in 1988, featuring a Viking ship and a stave church). Pubs and pyramids were coeval. Time seemed to scramble, as though it had been snipped up and pasted back together, like the map.
“All areas of Morocco are wheelchair accessible,” the literature advised. In the medina, we followed the twang of an oud to a courtyard fragrant with olive trees and date palms. A belly dancer shimmied, her abdomen a bowl of rice pudding whose meniscus never broke. One of the musicians grabbed my hand and pulled me into a sort of conga line. Then and forever shy of crowd participation, I let completely, uncharacteristically loose.
French braid flying, I started doing something that would have looked like the twist, were it not for the way I held my left leg in a tendu, the dutiful habit of a longtime ballet student. I was the center of a scrum of guys wearing scarlet fezzes. This, to me, was the magic kingdom. In Italy the Renaissance statues were hollow, impaled on metal rods to combat the Florida wind, and in Canada the loggers’ shirts were made of mock flannel to combat the Florida sun. I didn’t know. Simulations sometimes anticipate their simulacra. If I was ever going to go to Morocco, it was because I had already been.
IN THOSE DAYS my parents
