Whistling for the Elephants (4 page)

My
homeroom teacher was Mrs Shepherd. She was a nice woman with black glasses
which swept up into great wings at the side of her head. She counted us in and
counted us out again each day and, in her own way, also covered history. I
suspect she even liked history. She was certainly enthusiastic but her broad
Brooklyn accent made all life, past and present, impenetrable to me.

 ‘So,
class, let us awl look again at Waallwor One. It was a tearable wor. Lots of
people doyed all over Yarrup. It was really tearable.’

Yarrup?
I spent the first week trying to work out what Yarrup was. It was only when Mrs
Shepherd showed us a map and combined pointing at it with the word that I understood.
Europe. It was where I came from. Although Mrs Shepherd’s picture of a Britain
where everyone still blessed Yanks for gifts of silk stockings and Hershey bars
was somewhat remote from my own experience. I didn’t tell Mother or Father
about coming from Yarrup.

I got
to grips with school basics quite quickly. ‘Colour’, ‘neighbour’ and all other
words ending ‘our’ lost their U with no grief on my part. I went to baseball
games and learned to shout, ‘We want a pitcher, not a glass of water,’ although
I hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant. I concentrated hard to pick up
everything else. The whole school was too big for everyone to get together each
morning. Instead of having an assembly we sat listening to tannoy announcements
in homeroom.

‘This
is Coach Harding. All football tryouts will take place on the field this
afternoon. Remember — no show today, you don’t get to play.’

‘The
Recorder Group will not be meeting in first lunch period due to the unexpected
demise of Mrs Baxter. Our condolences to the Baxter family and if anyone’s
mother teaches recorder could she please call Principal Markowitz.’

I
learned the pledge of allegiance by the second day and would leap to attention,
hand over my heart, once the announcements were over. ‘I pledge allegiance to
the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it
stands, one nation indivisible before God with liberty and justice for all.’ It
was like the Our Father in English assemblies only a bit shorter.

I knew
my locker combination, I knew the way to the sports field and where to sit at
lunch. It was the big stuff I wasn’t sure about. Suddenly I was supposed to
have an opinion on a bewildering range of things. No one had really asked my
opinion before. America was in a new state of doubt and even as kids we seemed
to have to hold an awful lot of truths to be self-evident. Television was
beginning to have an impact and every night Huntley and Brinkley intoned the
dead of Vietnam. Forty thousand US soldiers dead. Two hundred fifty thousand
wounded. On my second day the whole school had a sit-in. I don’t think Amherst
Elementary was particularly current-affairs-conscious. It was happening across the
country. That year there were more than 1,800 student demonstrations in every
type of educational establishment. Our age didn’t mean we didn’t have to be
involved.

Everyone
in the class wrote off for silver bracelets bearing the name of an American PoW.
You ordered them from the back of some magazine which involved children wanting
a Better World and Mothers Calling for Peace. Lots of kids had a bracelet. Each
one had a different prisoner’s name inscribed on it whom we supported. The idea
was that we weren’t supposed to take the bracelets off until the men got home.
Mine was Lt James Hutton.

Nixon
was campaigning for the fall elections on a pledge to get the US out of
South-East Asia. Although I wasn’t exactly sure where Vietnam was, I learned to
chant, ‘LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’, wore a badge that said
Give
a Damn
and one that said
We Try Harder.
The first was for black
equality and the other was from a car-rental company, but in my mind the
message was much the same. I learned the routine. I was for the Black Panthers,
against the war, for free milk in schools, against the SST airplane, for free
love but against overpopulation. Maybe it was my age, maybe we had travelled
once too often, but for the first time anywhere I wanted to belong. I really
tried.

I
persuaded Father to let me go to school on the yellow school bus. I thought I
would meet people. That’s how I met Gabriel. Gabriel Aloisi worked for Jacobson’s
Garage up on the corner of Palmer and Lindhurst, but in the mornings he drove
the school bus. He was handsome. Italian handsome. Singing-gondolier handsome.
Gabriel wanted to be a racing driver. He drove the big yellow bus fast,
swinging into Cherry Blossom Gardens at a quarter of eight like he was Mario Andretti.
He was nice to me. He always stopped the bus in front of our house and I was
always first on. I’d be standing there as he reached forward for the handle to
unfold the door. I guess he must have been around eighteen because I remember
the morning he got his letter from the Draft Board.

‘What’s
it say?’ Gabriel thrust the letter at me. He wasn’t exactly a high-school
graduate. Gabriel knew cars, not words. I read the letter over.

‘It’s
from the Draft Board.’

‘It’s
from the Draft Board, right?’ Gabriel was a little slow.

‘You’ve
been called for your “pre-induction physical exam”,’ I continued.

‘Pre-induction
physical exam. Geez.’

‘Tuesday
the fourteenth.’

‘God
damn. God damn. I am a good American, you know that?’ I nodded. I knew this.
Being American came with a presumption of goodness. ‘I am a goddamn good
American but I am not going to fight no goddamn foreign war. You know what you
need to know to be a good American?’ I shook my head. The other kids were
piling on the bus and I leaned forward, desperate not to miss what he was
saying. This was information that I needed. ‘All you need to know is that the
Chevy is a primo car and Bud Harrelson is the greatest shortstop of all time.
Gabriel slammed the door shut and took off.

Since
1964 draft dodgers had been gathering force in the US. They had a fairly
straightforward slogan which even Gabriel could come to terms with: ‘We won’t
go.’ Gabriel was not the type to run to Canada. It was too far and too foreign.
So he just decided not to sleep any more. It was not an uncommon dodge. He
figured if he didn’t sleep for ten days or so he would fail his physical and go
back to the garage. Gabriel was about four days into his plan when it started
affecting his driving. At first we helped him out. The kids took turns standing
beside him and steadying the wheel as he drove. Unfortunately our house was the
first one on his route (pronounced ‘rowt’). There was no one else on board to
correct Gabriel as he made a wide turn into the Gardens, ploughed right through
our holly hedge and came to a stop next to our front porch. It so happened
Father was sitting there that morning, reading the
New York Times.
To
give him credit he never flinched.

‘What,
may I ask, is going on?’ he demanded.

‘It’s
just Gabriel,’ said Donna Marie, who had been waiting on the corner. Donna
Marie lived next door but one. She was the one who thought I had cooties so I
never sat with her on the bus. She attempted to unjam our mailbox from the bus
door and get in.

‘He
probably fell asleep at the wheel again. Asshole,’ Donna Marie’s cousin, Dirk,
volunteered. Dirk lived over on Hampshire. He was a senior and he didn’t exactly
approve of Gabriel. Dirk had very short hair and wanted to be a Marine. I tried
to explain to Father.

‘No one
else’s house would have been a problem. You see, we’re the only ones with a
hedge around our lawn. No one else has anything on their lawn that Gabriel
could have hit and it’s only that he hasn’t been sleeping so the Army will say
he can stay home. After all, the escalation of the Vietnam War was done without
the will of the American people. It’s up to the goddamn Commies to sort
themselves out, not the US Marines.’ I took a deep breath. Normally the word ‘goddamn’
would have caused a stir but Father wasn’t listening. He was only fixed on one
thing.

‘He
doesn’t want to do his military service?’ Father’s quiet disgust cut through
the noise of the bus horn which Gabriel had chosen to rest his head on.

‘He
doesn’t want to kill people he doesn’t know,’ I explained. ‘It’s… uhm…’

‘Un-American,’
said Donna Marie. We nodded to each other in political agreement. It was
thrilling. Father folded his paper and came quite close to slapping it down on
the porch railing.

‘But he
appears perfectly happy to kill people he does know.

Father
drove the bus that day and forbade me to wear my Vietnam PoW silver bracelet
any more. I felt disloyal to Lt Hutton, but it was probably just as well. The
inscribed bangle had already made my wrist go a slightly green colour. It was
odd seeing Father drive a bus. I don’t believe he’d ever been on a bus in his
life. He sat rigid, driving on the right with disapproval, and never said a
word.

I never
heard what happened to Lt Hutton. Gabriel made 4F (Physically Unfit for
Service) and wasn’t made to join up. Dirk reported for duty a week later on his
eighteenth birthday and was thrown into uniform. He ended up as a stores clerk
at a supply base in Santa Monica. Ten days in, he was killed when an unstable
consignment of baking powder collapsed on him in the warehouse. After that we
used to watch the news with a slightly different atmosphere in the house. Every
night Huntley and Brinkley would start by telling us how many Americans had now
been killed in action. I would feel sad for Dirk, while Father sat upright with
his gin and tonic. I couldn’t help feeling he saw them all as a bad lot and did
not mourn.

Father
was coming to grips with America in his own way. Each night after dinner he
would spread a US map out on the dining-room table. He had blocked out the
names of all the states and he and I would sit trying to remember their names.
It was a British Empire attitude.

That
which can be mapped can be ours. Within a week I could have made my way across
the Midwest blindfold, but it wasn’t enough. Once we had done the States we
moved on to county Ordnance Survey. Through the evenings Mother slept and my
fingers passed over new frontiers.

I
carried on making my adjustments. I gave up ham sandwiches for lunch and moved
on to peanut butter with Welch’s grape jelly, marshmallow fluff and baloney
stuffed in a brown-paper bag. That part was easy. Mother never looked at what
we were buying anyway. I never drank someone else’s soda without wiping the
top off first, I put a peace symbol on a rainbow up on the inside of my locker
and I learned all the words to ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ by Peter, Paul and
Mary. I still didn’t have any friends. I tried hanging around my locker
between classes to see if anyone would bump into me. There was one girl who
looked hopeful. Connie Emerson. She was in my homeroom and I often caught her
looking at me. One day I was just turning my combination when she leaned on the
locker next to mine.

‘Hey,’
she said.

‘Hi,, I
responded, trying not to look too pleased. Cool, I needed to be cool.

‘Can I
ask you something?’

‘Sure.’
God, it was going so well.

‘The
others want to know if you’re a boy or a girl.’ I looked across the hall. A
small group of giggling girls were watching. I flushed.

I
pulled my peaked cap low over my short hair. ‘Dorothy. My name is Dorothy.’

‘Yeah,
but the tie and everything. We thought you must really be a boy.’ Connie
collapsed into laughter and ran off with the others. I watched them run. Their
arms flailed out sideways and their legs looked all bendy. It was a hopeless
girly gait and somehow I knew I would never be able to run like that. I did
make one or two other friendship efforts after that but it was no use. I
thought about giving up the tie but before I had had time to make all the
necessary changes the summer vacation came and I didn’t know anyone. It was
only June. The unoccupied months stretched interminably ahead of me.

Like a
colour-blind chameleon, I fumbled at adapting. Mother, however, refused to play
the game. As I let my accent grow as wide as the American continent itself,
hers shrank to a small town in Kent. She began making pinched little noises as
if she were simultaneously speaking and unwrapping toffees with her bottom. I
think everything was too big for her and so she withdrew further and further
from life. I suppose if she liked anything about America it was the ephemera.
She was particularly taken with the concept of the Dixie cup. A childhood in
the war had taught her never to throw anything away. She had spent a lifetime
hoarding and counting. Until the Dixie cup. It was a very American concept. The
Dixie cup was a brand-name paper cup. It was quite small and came in many colours
with a matching dispenser. The Dixie company encouraged the notion of a
different-coloured dispenser in each room in the house. We had yellow in the
kitchen, blue in the bedrooms and, rather shockingly, the all-new avocado in
the bathroom. If you wanted a glass of water or a glass of anything in any room
you simply reached for a Dixie cup, used it and threw it away.

Quite
often Mother had drinks for no reason at all, so if we shopped, when we
shopped, we always stacked the trolley high with multi-coloured cups. About
twice a week Mother would make the effort to be up and out before the banks
closed and we would go to town. It was a small circuit that we did. First to
Johnny on the Spot, the dry cleaner, to collect Father’s shirts, where I got a
free Bazooka bubblegum. Then on to the A&P supermarket, which Mother
patronized because you got free pink and white dinner plates with any purchase
over $10. She would let me buy Oreo cookies and Kool Aid in different flavours
just to make sure we got the plate. It wasn’t long before we had enough plates
for twenty people to be able to drop in unexpectedly for dinner but they never
did. I liked the A&P because of the fruit and vegetable man, Alfonso.