Getting Lost to Find Home

PREFACE

On a dreary November afternoon, after moving into a retirement center, I sank into an overstuffed chair in the main lounge. Two women with whom I had a nodding acquaintance sat before a large picture window nearby. On the coffee table between them were two cups of tea, the steam having long escaped from them.

Encouraged by the women’s smiles, I opened a conversation. The drizzly weather was my starting point. From there, we offered each other our credentials. Both of my companions were widowed and upper-middle class, as were the majority of the mostly white residents. That I had remained single and childless surprised them. Their expressions weren’t disapproving but they were without understanding. Why would anyone choose to be alone?

I told them I was a writer. I hoped to make myself sound interesting enough to avoid the inevitable question, Why did you never marry?

My revelation impressed neither of them, though one had the courtesy to ask if I were working on anything. Happily, I told them I was writing a memoir about my four years abroad. In my early twenties at the time and with little life experience, I admitted I was obliged to make constant adjustments to my expectations.

 I was a stranger in a strange land, I shrugged. To be honest, I’m feeling like that now.

Really? The second woman, her hair drawn into a bun at the back of her neck, as if to give a lift to the sagging skin, looked at me quizzically. In what way?

Well, settling among strangers. People wonder how to fit in.

The two women stared at one another across the coffee table, their eyes blank, as though I’d spoken Swahili. Do they? asked the woman with the bun.

1

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

At twenty-three, I bought a trunk, filled it with my few belongings, and drawn by love, prepared to leave the United States for Britain. Martin Brooks and I became engaged in my final year at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. In 1959, he was an exchange student from Keele, a red brick university in the midlands of England. When I first spied him, striding across our campus, his long legs moving purposefully toward the library, a furled umbrella swinging before him like a metronome, I became as besotted by him as Scarlett O’Hara had been by Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind.

My affliction for him stayed with me long after the love affair ended, despite my decision to leave the British Isles and wander two tumultuous years through southern and eastern Africa, where political upheavals were changing colonies into sovereign states.

Unfortunately, travel didn’t mend a broken heart. For me, travel meant living among other exiles, be they the ragtag remnants of colonial times or indigenous people who’d been made to feel like strangers in their homeland.

In the beginning, I admit, where I settled in the English Midlands, the only violence I witnessed was the riot of purple heather as it burst into summer blossom on the Derbyshire moor. Later, Africa showed me varied seasons, vast, turbulent, and each of them responsive to a calculus greater than the shedding of human blood.

Despite the span of geography, mine is no continental saga. What began as a love story ended in a broken engagement. The quest that followed stemmed not from a desire to learn, but from a need to be distracted from my wound. What I gleaned during that interval was a few grains of personal revelation.

I suspect, if we are honest, most of us are strangers to ourselves and to the planet we inhabit. It must have been true for the first humanoids, and, for our species, I suspect, it will be true far into the future.

Even so, I’m glad Martin and I broke apart. Over time, my portion of a life, with its sad, funny, and pensive experiences, altered me gently, imperceptibly, so that I barely noticed. Not until I’d returned home, four years later, did I discover a cosmic joke had been played. I was a foreigner in my own country.

2

OUTWARD BOUND

In the fall of 1959, on the day of my departure, I recall standing on the ship’s deck. We glided from the harbor with my hands, knuckle-white, clutching the rails. As the Statue of Liberty grew smaller, I felt a stabbing sensation in my throat. Would I ever see my beloved country again?

The question was far from sentimental. Leaving home didn’t mean losing contact with my mother. An adventurous spirit, she was at that moment driving the Pan American highway with my stepfather on a visit to her native land, Costa Rica. My natural father and I had said our goodbyes during his surprise visit to San Francisco, just before I left for England.

He and I had never been close when I was growing up. The labyrinth of thorny emotions between my parents was too complicated for me to fathom as a child. What I felt was his anger and that made me wary of him. Only as a young adult did I attempt to build a connection between us. Frail though it was, I thought it worth the effort. He did too. He said his goodbye while standing in my shabby apartment. His eyes clouded with tears and too choked for words to speak, he thrust a few hundred dollars into my hands.

No, the leave-taking of my parents didn’t affect me when I stood on the ship’s deck. Nor did I dread leaving my friends. Already, they had exploded to all parts of the country, like effervescent champagne bubbles. They were giving as little thought to me as I to them. So, what was behind the emotion that filled my eyes with tears?

Leaning into the wind, as the horizon faded from view, the answer came to me. Being an American was a privilege. I admit it. I had managed to work my way through a good school and had earned a good education. But as the daughter of a Hispanic mother, I had sometimes felt excluded, too poor, too ethnic to be fully American.

If being willing to work hard was a credential for being a good citizen, my mother earned hers. Getting up at four in the morning, she baked pies for a local restaurant and delivered them on her way to her day job, cleaning abalone at the pier. On weekends, she earned tips as a cigarette girl at a nightclub. Even so, she couldn’t be sure there’d be enough food on the table.

There were times we had so little money, we shared the same toothbrush. When I was eleven and nearer my mother’s height, we wore the same clothes. They hung like wet laundry on me, the hems kissing my ankles. At school, wealthier students poked fun at my attire. Being poor struck them as a character flaw, and they punished me with rude remarks and gestures. I pretended not to care. But I did.

Leaving for England to marry Martin filled me with hope for a fresh beginning. True, living in a foreign country provoked my apprehensions, not the least of which was how to impress Martin’s parents, whom I’d never met. Nevertheless, having experienced moments of feeling like a stranger in my homeland, I was determined to adapt to my new one. After all, I had Martin’s love to rely upon.

I sailed on La France, one of the few remaining luxury liners making a profit, though I was traveling second class. I shared a room the size of a closet with a woman I judged to be in her seventies. Her name I have forgotten, but her kindly face and silver hair, which she tied in a bun, reminded me of Mary See. The widowed mother of the See’s candy company founder, her son had immortalized her image by using it as the logo for his successful company. So, in the manner of sweets to the sweet, I’ll call my cabin companion Mary as well.

I didn’t see much of Mary at meals. My assigned seat was at a table with three young men, a mixed-race beauty from Haiti, and a woman whose dyed brown hair did little to mask her lip lines or sagging chin. I took her to be in her late forties and emotionally desperate. The young men must have sensed that, too, for they hovered at her side like bees hungry for a last sip of nectar before autumn’s chill. What choice did they have? The Haitian girl, coming from a prominent family, held herself aloof, and I was engaged.

A Frenchman from first-class frequently joined us. He was small-boned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed, a neat package somewhere in his mid-twenties. He explained his presence among us by saying first-class passengers were no fun.

Whatever his excuse, he paid me constant attention, which I found annoying, particularly because Francois, as I shall call him, had been married in New York a scant three days prior. His bride, for reasons he never explained, had flown to Paris ahead of him, and over the ensuing three days of the passage, he seemed intent to sow a few wild oats.

Coming from the moneyed class, his self-assurance was grating, like sand in the eye. My disdain heightened his interest, the way an Adults Only label fascinates a boy. Most days, I played hide-and-seek with him, a game I usually lost. I suspect he paid the crew to keep him informed of my whereabouts or enlisted one or two fellow passengers to be complicit in his shipboard romance.

Eventually, I could find no haven except in my windowless cabin. When Mary was present, each of us had to suck in our tummies to pass one another.

I grew disgruntled, like a genie trapped in a bottle. Why should I be a prisoner while this French sly fox roamed free? Where did some men get their feelings of entitlement about women?

My thoughts were strong enough to redden my cheeks, but not wanting to appear rude, I kept my silence. Francois wasn’t a bad person, I argued with myself. He probably assumed I was flattered by his attention.

The evening before we were to dock in Plymouth, I sat down to dinner determined there would be no unpleasantness between Francois and me. I arrived early, hoping to miss him entirely. The waiter obliged by taking my order without waiting for the others to appear. When the meal arrived, I wolfed it down as if it were the first I’d eaten during the journey. The waiter looked amused but said nothing.

I was finishing my coffee when the young Haitian woman joined me. Would Francois be far behind? I wondered. She looked surprised to see me so rattled and nodded in sympathy when I rose, explaining I had a headache.

Not one to confine himself to a single pleasure, I suspected Francois had made advances on her, as well, and that she may have guessed the cause of my headache. I was sorry to abandon her to her fate, but I was determined to spend my last night aboard the ship in peace. I planned to wander the decks, making myself a moving target.

The plan went well until I paused too long at the ship’s stern. The weather was mild, and overhead the stars, pinpricks of light, invited me to consider the vastness of my journey. I had traveled six thousand miles from my home in San Francisco and the dust of New York still clung to my shoes. Tomorrow? Tomorrow, I would arrive in Plymouth to start a new life—a pilgrim in reverse.

Unprepared to feel a pair of arms encircle my waist, I swung around, unable to disguise the tremor of anger in my voice. Go away! I don’t want you chasing me. Francois was close enough for me to slap his face, but I held back, wary of how he might react. The best I could do was to remind him of his honor. Have you forgotten you’re married?

He peered down at me, his eyes narrowing with a question. Why was I hesitating?

He nodded, at last, imagining he’d found a way to make me understand. "Yes, yes, I am a married man. That’s why I offer myself to you, Chérie. I am forbidden fruit. Sin and passion—an intoxicating mix, are they not?"

His smile made him look innocent as if he were a child offering to share his chocolates. But he wasn’t a child. He was a man, an immature one who had read my rejection as a game of playing coy.

Why should this patrician think otherwise? He was handsome, rich. And, he was a Frenchman, formed by centuries of breeding and sophistication. These gifts he was prepared to lay at the feet of an American girl traveling second class.

Nothing in my background, not four years of pickaxing through philosophy books, had prepared me for his overweening hubris. He was offering me one night of unbridled sex, the kind found in any drug store paperback.

The corners of my lips began to twitch. Compared to my fiancé, this man-child with outstretched arms was a buffoon. Whatever seductive skills he imagined he possessed, they were clumsy. He lacked words that could color a woman’s cheeks with pleasure. His touch was cloying, reminiscent of an infant tugging at its mother’s breast. By comparison, Martin’s caress was gentle enough to make my heart race with impatience.

What is sex weighed against love, after all? One musical note compared to a lullaby. Without tenderness, passion’s hunger feeds upon itself and is never satisfied.

What I saw in the man who offered himself to me that night was a porcupine bristling with appetites. I imagined him stumbling toward the adulterer’s bed with his trousers pooled about his ankles.

Perhaps I surprised the little Frenchman for when I heard his proposal, I broke into laughter. Hearing me, he flinched as if a pane of glass had shattered above his head. Next, his mouth hung open swinging from its hinge like an abandoned gate.

My second peal had an even greater effect. This time, Francois blinked, then disappeared before my eyes as if he’d been a feat of magic. I never saw him again.

Activity on the ship’s deck was frenetic as we docked at Plymouth. Passengers threw their belongings into their luggage, scrambled to locate their passports, and hugged their goodbyes to newly minted friends.

Despite my eagerness to see Martin again, parting with Mary proved more difficult than I imagined. We hadn’t spent many hours as companions while on board, but having shared a cramped accommodation, few secrets existed between us. I knew she was frail and making this journey to England to see family, probably for the last time. In turn, she reveled in my happy but precipitous leap into a new life with love as my sole safety net.

Being a self-centered bride-to-be, I did most of the talking. Each night, before the lights went out, I plied her with details about Martin. I assured her he was handsome, of course. And that he had a golden mane of hair. He was intelligent, naturally, and courteous to a fault. If the Queen’s rules hadn’t already been written, he would have been the man to do it.

Her patience was endearing. Never once did she shake her head to suggest my expectations of married life were naïve. Her blue eyes shone with kindness, instead, allowing me to imagine I was a tonic to her. Two women at opposite ends of life, we shared a comradery for Mary had loved. If she basked in my euphoria, I suspect she was recalling her own and perhaps for the last time.

Exiting our cramped quarters, we climbed the ship’s stairs that led to the main lobby arm-in-arm. We found customs officers standing behind tables in an uneven row waiting to process our papers. My companion and I had been slow to gather our belongings, so when we arrived at this melting pot, long lines had formed ahead of us. Not wanting Mary to drift far, I took charge of her floral night case. We needed to give each other a final hug before parting. She was my last link with home.

Around us, passengers grumbled about the lack of progress. I saw two incidents of shoving, but the customs officers in white hats knew no haste. They opened luggage randomly, scrambling underwear and tampons together with an indifferent air. I could imagine them on the deck of the Titanic persisting in their duty with stolid faces as the ship went down.

Mary, whom I’d tucked in front of me, was a model of patience. I was not. I was hungry because, in my excitement at reaching Plymouth, I’d forgotten to eat lunch. Craning my head from side to side, I saw neither a fruit bowl nor a dish of mints nearby. If I could have broken free, I might have found a muffin from breakfast that had rolled under a chair. Or a stick of sugary gum. Anything would do because I was feeling lightheaded. Perhaps I should sit down.

No hope of that I discovered as I scanned the horizon. Every couch, every chair, every uncluttered tabletop supported an exasperated passenger with arms and legs akimbo as if he or she had been tossed and landed like a rag doll.

For a moment, I imagined I’d heard someone call out my name. Some customs officer urging me forward perhaps. But no. I’d been pushed too far to the back of the line. From where I stood, I could barely see those official white hats. Had I fainted among the milling herd, doubtless, I would have been trampled.

Yet, there it was again, my name, little more than a whisper but certain. How many of my fellow passengers answered to Caroline I didn’t know, but I was one of them. Craning my neck for a second look around, I saw nothing of importance. Mary had a sharper eye, however. She’d spied a mane of golden hair bobbing and weaving in our direction.

Look there, my dear, she pointed. I believe that’s your Martin.

I’d instructed her well. When I looked where she’d gestured, it was my Martin, the man I’d traveled six thousand miles to marry. That chiseled nose, those thin yet sensuous lips, that lock of hair so mischievously falling across his forehead, how could I have missed him? More to the point, how did he board the ship with its churlish crowd threatening to trample us both?

A moment later, these questions didn’t matter. Satisfied he’d found me, I burst into tears.

He was breathless from his struggle to find me, but when he did, he reached out for my hand and clung to it like a drowning man to a buoy. I bribed the tugboat captain, he shouted above the din. I couldn’t wait.

Mary’s sniffle was audible. How lovely. And you’ve brought chocolates.

Knowing the time for her and I to part was near, I gave Mary her night case and introduced her to Martin. Looking down at this tiny woman, he was gentle when he shook the gloved hand she’d offered.

Thank you, for taking care of Caroline during the crossing. I can’t tell you how much I’m longing to do the same.

Mary’s eyes filled with tears, smiling at the pair of us. Her gaze was steady as if she were committing our faces to memory. I could almost read her thoughts. The words were from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s song, Hello Young Lovers. I’ve had a love of my own like yours. I’ve had a love of my own.

The roiling among passengers grew more intense. Suddenly, Mary was tossed forward by the human wave. For a moment, I lost sight of her. Then she reappeared, one gloved hand signaling above the crowd that she was all right. Martin and I watched helplessly as she faded into the distance. Then, like a bubble, she vanished from my life.

3

THE BOAT TRAIN

Once I’d passed through customs, I remember little about my arrival in Plymouth, except Martin’s impatience. Fearing we’d be late to connect with the boat train to London, he dragged me through a thicket of my fellow passengers, all of whom seemed intent upon climbing aboard with us. The many unfamiliar sights and sounds left me feeling giddy, like a sea creature unable to find purchase on dry land.

Hunger held the greater part of my attention, and as we approached the boarding area, I scanned for evidence of a dining car. There was none. The hop from Plymouth to London, I learned, was too short to accommodate the luxury.

Martin pried open the door to the first empty compartment he could find. It accommodated six passengers, three on a side, so he was quick to bundle me into a seat by the window where I could view the passing landscape. My night bag he shoved into the opposite overhead rack. Next, he took a seat beside me.

We’d barely had time to smooth down our disheveled garments before strangers joined us—two men in suits and a middle-aged woman wearing a porkpie hat. The fashion was new to me, and I was fascinated by this purple, felt creation that teetered on her head like a crown made of pie crust. She seemed comical, like a character from the nursery rhyme, Old Mother Hubbard, perhaps because her grey hair had wriggled free from the brim and had given her a frenzied appearance as if she’d spent the afternoon attempting to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

I would have liked to have begun a conversation with her, but she was quick to open her book, an Agatha Christie novel, I imagined, while the men, likewise, hid behind their newspapers creating a wall that seemed impenetrable.

Martin had brought nothing to read but behaved as if he had. Barely settled, his eyes focused upon my overnight case, staring fixedly at it, as if a message might be inscribed on the handle or as if he feared it might sprout wings and fly out the window.

For the time being, I left Martin to his vigilance. I was listening to my stomach rumble and eyeing the box of chocolates on my lap. Dare I open it?

Before I could answer my question, the train gave a jolt. Several cars ahead, the engineer tugged at his whistle, and slowly, the platform we’d been standing upon minutes before seemed to pull away. Likewise, the outside landscape became a slow-moving ribbon. Like words typed on a page, trees and houses moved uniformly to my left and then became a blur as the engine picked up speed.

Overhead, clouds were forming, not white, frothy pillows, but dirty sponges, enough to suggest a squall might be brewing. I’d grown up in a beach town so this sudden change in weather didn’t surprise me. Nonetheless, given the chilly atmosphere of my traveling companions, I’d have been cheered to see a slant of light penetrating the window.

Rain began to tap on the pane soon after my surmise about clouds. The downpour was intense enough to erect a wall of water on the glass which blocked my view of the outside world. So, with nothing to distract me from my hunger, I gave Martin’s arm a nudge.

He stiffened at my touch as if he’d been hit with a cattle prod. Even so, the shock wasn’t enough for him to turn his head in my direction. Instead, he continued to fix his eyes upon my overnight case. What could be the fascination?

Uncertain, I dropped my hand to my side where it landed with a thud on the box of chocolates. Whether the rumble that followed was the result of the weather or my stomach, I ‘don’t know, but I was hungry and growing more so by the minute. Should I tear open the protective cellophane?

Was there some etiquette regarding food on English trains? I’d be willing to share, of course. My mother had taught me that much. But how was I to begin a conversation? Should I crackle the wrapping to draw the attention of my companions? Or should I take a cautious approach and clear my throat?

Martin’s advice would have been helpful, but he continued to behave like a character from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. He was the very model of a modern English gentleman.

I decided to chart my course and tore open the box. Would anyone care for a chocolate? By now, I’d lifted the cover and was holding the exposed candy toward the center of the room.

Seeing what I’d done, Martin’s chin swung sharply as a pickaxe, in my direction, his lips forming a tiny megaphone to one side as if he hoped I, alone, might hear him.

"Put those