Chapter 2
2
I traveled all over London on the Underground for my SAT-tutoring students, captive time I normally used to read for my master’s program. But today I’d finished the reading—a rare miracle, I was always behind—so I picked up a left-behind magazine from the next seat. The Tube rocked us from station to station, and I passed the time picking through a special travel feature on Cannes. The article itself was pointless and vague, but it was hard to believe the beauty in the photo spreads: that sand could be so pale, that water could be so brilliant, that fields of lavender could feel so soft and swaying on paper.
I’d spent many hours of my youth lost in glossy pages like these— National Geographic s specifically, slipped from the bottom shelf of library stacks and carried to the comfiest chair. I dog-eared the best photos, the most exotic locations. It was a game Mom had invented for me when I was too young to sit still with a book. A game for me to collect and show her the photos at the end, before we left. Later on, it was the internet Mom came to the library for, for Craigslist ads, but in the beginning, it was just the newspapers. She wasn’t looking for jobs; both my parents worked at the nursing home in town, Mom as a health aide and Dad doing maintenance. She was combing the classified ads for blood glucose test strips. Matchstick-sized plastic tabs to measure her sugar levels from a finger-prick of blood. She’d had Type 1 diabetes since she was twelve.
The test strip packs at the pharmacy could be $60 or $70, which didn’t go far, testing so many times a day—morning and night, before and after meals, and whenever Mom’s levels felt off, which seemed to be always. But sometimes other diabetics had more test strips than they needed, or didn’t need to test as often, or someone died, and then they resold the packs for much less, and Mom would scoop them up, even if it meant a long drive with me along for company. When I was older, I discovered that Mom also rationed her doses of insulin, which cost a fortune even with insurance. Later, when it was too late, when she was dying, the specialists said that she had shortened her life by decades, as if it was something she’d done on purpose—weighing not just the sugars in her bloodstream but the dollars in the bank with each injection. Because this one essential thing that other bodies made for free, her body had to pay dearly for.
In those early days at the library, I tried to find three or four beautiful photo spreads to show Mom. She’d squish right into the chair with me and slide her fingers over the pages as if she could feel them; thin, curving beaches; chalky Roman ruins; big skies and craggy seaside cliffs. Whenever there was a road on the page, her fingers had to follow it. “When we retire, I’m going to travel,” she said. It didn’t have to be abroad; Yellowstone was her favorite, the ripples of rock waving like water. Her retirement plans: renting a used RV, driving around with Dad. “We don’t need to live like kings,” she said.
When I was old enough to read real books at the library, I imagined myself traveling, too, into those pages. While Mom disappeared into the classifieds, I disappeared to mythical lands: danced at court with Lancelot and King Arthur, wooed Maid Marian with Robin Hood, stepped lightly off a London windowsill with only Peter Pan’s hand to fly me. Mom talked to the librarians and pulled more books about England off the shelves for me. It was a long time before I realized this magical place was a real country, just across the ocean from Massachusetts. She laughed when I asked her—was England like Neverland?—and soon it became a teasing sort of joke between us. England was a dream place, but one that maybe I would someday get to visit. If I was good, if I did my chores, if I studied hard.
I was in middle school when I found Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice first, then all the rest, read and reread endlessly. Discovering Austen’s England was like returning to Camelot, to that magic. The balls and dancing and dresses, the gentlemen passing you up into a carriage or jumping you down from a sea wall. They were irresistible: the books, the soft dreamlike edges of what passed for struggle and suffering in that world—a broken engagement, an elopement, a disinheritance. No one was sick, or if they were, it was romantic, like in Sense and Sensibility when Marianne Dashwood nearly dies from heartbreak. It wasn’t a mundane hindrance, like co-pays or Craigslist or calling strangers on the phone.
I still went with Mom to the library when I could. She looked for test strips; I researched colleges, studied for the SATs. She was so proud when I got into Smith, right on the hill in our hometown. Dad, true to form, only cared that I’d gotten a full ride. A need-based scholarship that included room and board, plus the option to do what most Smithies did: a whole junior year studying abroad with subsidies and a living stipend. Mom and I pored over the photos in the study-abroad brochures. It was the first time that getting to England seemed possible for a girl like me.
The train lurched forward, shaking the magazine in my lap loose. I put a hand out to catch it. A toneless female voice announced, “The next station is Knightsbridge. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform.”
I looked down at the spread of Cannes, still open across my knees. While the train pushed west to my stop, I watched the wind-ruffled Mediterranean rippling on the page. So clear between the waves, the light shone right through it. I found a promenade overlooking the water, a curl of sand-colored stone lined and arched over with palms. I put my finger to it, like Mom would’ve, and traced it till it slipped away into the binding, lost to me.
After my tutoring session in Knightsbridge, I had to catch the Tube back north to Bloomsbury for my next student. For that, it was both quicker and more scenic to walk down to Victoria station. I would’ve liked to extend the walk, enjoy a little more of the sunny day and this classic, storybook part of London. Maybe loop a little out of my way, into Green Park. From the top of the park, I could see Mayfair, the beautiful, posh London neighborhood where Mr. Darcy keeps a flat in Pride and Prejudice . Then turn south along leafy, tree-lined paths, let the growing flow of tourists carry me down to the gates of Buckingham Palace, leave them snapping selfies and continue on.
Instead, I set a reasonable pace, cutting diagonally through Knightsbridge. No tourists here; if I passed anyone, it was a cashmere-swathed woman, eyes on an iPhone, her tiny dog in Burberry plaid trotting ahead at the end of a leash. This was the wealthiest neighborhood in Chelsea, which was itself far and away the wealthiest borough in London.
I was familiar with Chelsea because my roommate Andre and I shared a guilty pleasure: watching a silly reality TV show about the rich young people there, Chelsea Made . Their grandparents were chocolate magnates, kings of banking, shipping tzars. In our dump of a flat, it was irresistible—watching these spoiled early-twenties kids and the small things that passed for difficulty in their lives: fights, fallings-out, strenuous party-planning. They lived in our city, but it was almost impossible to recognize the place through the lens of their lives. We loved it.
As a tutor, I went to the prettiest, poshest neighborhoods, the greenest tree-lined streets, the houses of whitest eggshell stone, the drivers in sleek black livery leaning and smoking on their sleek black cars, idling on the curb. I rang the bell and was ushered in, not by parents but by nannies, housekeepers, personal assistants, cooks, and, occasionally, other subject tutors on their way out—naturally sheepish as we crossed in the doorway, trading our narrow expertise for cash that would never buy us a fraction of what we saw inside. Within, everything gleamed, like shine was shorthand for expensive. Polished wood-panel walls, slick marble floors, glossy grand pianos, gilded mirrors perfectly positioned to catch the liquid light from the chandelier.
But of course, within these homes, I was not a storybook heroine. I was still me; still broke, still trying to leave behind the secret of my own home, tense and worn and working-class. It wasn’t fine homes, fine things I needed. What I needed was more afternoons like this, strolling the quiet side streets, London unfolding before me like the roads my mother traced with her scarred fingertips. More days like this, when I could feel that the future here held more for me. Soon.
My walk brought me to Sloane Street, where I crossed into Belgravia, the buildings there silent and uniformly cream-colored. I had one regular tutoring student in this area, a boy as quiet and pale as the neighborhood itself. My Kramer paperwork said he was the son of Austrian diplomats, but I had never seen them, despite coming and going from their home every week for nearly two months.
The students I tutored were, for the most part, regular teenagers. I liked them. They had acne and awkward too-long limbs and bitten-down nails. Over many tutoring sessions, their shyness would abate, and finally, they’d start to tell me about themselves. Then I could hardly get them back to the lesson, like I was the first adult to listen to them in years. They shared their fears about school or the future, what they hoped for, what they didn’t understand, what they were good at that no one knew or cared about.
It was extraordinary, almost disorienting, to feel bad for a kid whose weekly allowance was probably more than my family’s monthly income. But in a lot of cases, I did feel bad for them. My mother was gone, yes, but for twenty-two years she’d been the warmest, kindest, gentlest part of my day, someone who always listened to me, understood me. Even when she began to wear down and disappear last year, her hugs were still fierce. Fortifying. Even in their palatial houses, my students had never enjoyed even a fraction of something so invaluable.