Life Swap (26 page)

For Miss Cynthia takes her ballet very seriously indeed. The curriculum is that of the Royal Ballet School in England, and most of the mothers believe Miss Cynthia to be English, and rumour has it she is a distant cousin of the Queen. Deborah, however, being English herself, realized upon meeting Miss Cynthia that her accent, familiar though it was, had a distant ring to it that almost certainly wasn’t English.

This was at one of Miss Cynthia’s group meetings, for prospective parents of prospective star ballerinas to come and see the school and meet Miss Cynthia. Unlike the Highfield Academy of Ballet which will take anyone who phones up and registers their child, Miss Cynthia insists on vetting the parents first, followed by the children.

She holds these meetings at 4 p.m., serves English Breakfast tea, cucumber sandwiches with the crusts removed, and scones, and she speaks in upper-crust tones that would put Camilla Parker Bowles to shame.

Still, Deborah, clutching her cup of tea in one hand and her crustless cucumber sandwich in the other, concentrated fiercely as Miss Cynthia gave her speech, and suddenly, when Miss Cynthia was in the middle of describing the dress code for ‘her ballerinas’ – the girls are never girls, always ballerinas – Deborah got it.

‘Any questions?’ Miss Cynthia asked at the end, with a gracious smile, her feet perfectly turned out in first position, her head cocked just so, the chic chignon at the base of her head just visible.

Deborah raised her hand. ‘Where are you from?’ she
asked pleasantly, in her much less grand, but distinctly English accent.

‘I was trained at the Royal Academy of Ballet in Richmond,’ Miss Cynthia said, although the more perceptive among the audience noted the tension in her voice. ‘Any other questions?’ She looked around the room, but Deborah wouldn’t be put off.

‘Sorry, I meant where were you born? It’s just that someone told me you were English but I definitely hear some kind of an accent and I can’t figure it out.’

‘I spent most of my life in Richmond,’ Miss Cynthia said, through gritted teeth.

‘But you sound ever so slightly Australian,’ Deborah said. ‘Or am I completely wrong?’

Miss Cynthia sighed. She’d never been publicly outed before, but now this irritating English girl had put her on the spot, and what was she supposed to say?

‘My grandfather was English,’ she said. ‘But yes. I was born in Sydney.’

‘Ha! Knew it!’ Deborah whispered to Amber. ‘Anyone who speaks with that many marbles in her mouth is definitely a fake. Cousin of the Queen indeed. Her grandfather was probably a burglar.’

‘So will you be sending Molly to Miss Cynthia?’ Amber asked Deborah after the tea, noting the filthy looks that Miss Cynthia was shooting over at Deborah.

‘Are you joking? So that pretentious old bitch can victimize her because I’ve got her number? No chance. I’m signing up for the Highfield Academy tomorrow. What about you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Amber frowned. ‘I think Gracie would love it here, and I do kind of like how seriously she takes it, how she refers to all her girls as “ballerinas”.’

‘It’s up to you,’ Deborah shrugged, ‘but Molly is never going to be a ballerina anyway, not with that bottom of hers. Gets it from her mother, I’m afraid, nothing I can do, but the last thing I want is for her to feel inadequate at four years old because her ballet teacher makes her be a tree or something in the recital.’

‘A tree? What are you talking about?’ Amber started laughing.

‘Look at these thighs.’ Deborah gestured at her legs. ‘Even when I was four they were the same, only, obviously, smaller. I was about a foot taller than everyone else and chubby. I was desperate to be a fairy ballerina but my ballet teacher made me feel like a fairy elephant and, to make it worse, every year at the recital I had to be a tree. All the other girls got to wear pink sparkly tutus and tiaras and dance around prettily, and Harriet, who was also rather large, and I had to stand at the back dressed in green tutus, with crowns made of branches and tissue-paper leaves. It was a fucking nightmare.’

‘Oh my gosh, that’s terrible,’ Amber said, wiping the tears of laughter away. ‘No really, I mean it’s funny, but it’s awful. What a horrible thing to do to a child. But honestly, I don’t think Miss Cynthia would do that. I heard that everyone’s in pink at their recitals.’

‘Okay, so maybe she wouldn’t make Molly be a tree, but I’d still rather she went to the other one. I’ve heard
it’s much more creative, and they focus more on the kids having fun than on the serious ballet stuff. Gracie’s little and delicate and Miss Cynthia will love her.’

‘I am probably going to put her into Miss Cynthia’s,’ Amber nodded, ‘but I do agree Miss Cynthia seems like a bit of a cow. Maybe for Christmas I’ll give her a jar of that disgusting Australian stuff that they all eat. What’s it called? Marmite?’

‘No, not Marmite, that’s English. It’s Vegemite!’ Deborah started laughing. ‘Oh God, would you, please? Give her a jar of Vegemite and a didgeridoo to remind her of home.’ And with that the two of them started shaking with laughter, until tears were streaming down their faces.

Meanwhile Gracie does love her ballet classes. And Molly does love hers. Amber has her reservations about Miss Cynthia, particularly after one of the little girls, Hannah Greenberg, disappeared in the middle of last term. She had been getting a little chubbier, and Suzy said she’d bumped into Hannah’s mother, Rachel, who said Miss Cynthia had asked her to try and watch what Hannah was eating, and Rachel had been so horrified she’d pulled Hannah immediately from the class.

But who knows whether it was actually true or not, and until Miss Cynthia did or said something unforgivable to Amber, Gracie was going to continue going there, even if it did mean getting in line at the ungodly hour of 6.23 in the morning at the beginning of every term to ensure your spot.

‘Amber!’ Amber looks up and spies Nadine from the League standing a few people in front of her.

‘Hi, Nadine!’ Amber says. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m great,’ Nadine says. ‘How are you?’

‘Incredibly busy,’ Amber laughs. ‘Life is going crazy.’

Nadine smiles and there’s a long silence which always makes Amber feel uncomfortable, and she does what she always does when people just stand and look at her silently, as if in expectation: she gets verbal diarrhoea and starts talking, nineteen to the dozen, just to fill the silence.

‘I’m off to London tomorrow,’ she says. ‘For four weeks, which is completely insane, but I’m doing this Life Swap piece for this English magazine where I swap lives with a single girl and she comes and sees what it’s like to be married with children, and now I can’t believe how much I have to do and I haven’t even packed although frankly I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to bring because I’m meant to wear all the other girl’s clothes and she’s supposed to wear mine, and now I just don’t know what I’ve let myself in for.’ Amber takes a breath. Shit, she thinks. As usual, too much information.

‘You’re doing
what
?’ Nadine says, as the other women in between them also turn round and look at Amber.

‘Did you say you’re doing a life swap?’ one of the other women says, and suddenly they’re all riveted.

‘You’re leaving your husband and children for four weeks?’ says a blonde woman in a green cable cashmere sweater who Amber doesn’t know, and Amber suddenly
has an incredibly strong temptation to turn around and run away.

‘I am
so
jealous,’ continues the woman in the green sweater. ‘Oh my gosh, you are so brave! You get to go to London and pretend to be single for four weeks? Can I come with you?’ And she laughs as Amber exhales in relief. For a moment there she was terrified they’d all start berating her: how can she leave her children, what kind of a mother must she be, what is she even thinking of, letting her husband share a house with a single woman, doesn’t she know what kinds of thing happen in situations like this?

Not that any of these women have ever had a situation like this, but Amber thinks she knows what they’re thinking because she’s been thinking all these things herself, and even now, now that Richard is driving her to Kennedy tomorrow lunchtime to get the flight to London, she still can’t quite believe it is happening.

The line of women, who a couple of minutes before seemed to be half asleep, sipping at their Starbucks and trying not to catch one another’s eye, now comes alive as they all turn to one another and repeat what they’ve heard, and soon they are all gathered around Amber, shooting questions at her, wanting to know what made her do it, what her husband thinks, whether she’ll miss the children.

‘Of course!’ Amber says. ‘That’s the hardest thing about all of this. I’m going to miss them enormously, but I just want to remember who I was before I had a husband and children. When I think back to before I
met Richard, when I worked in the city and had an apartment, it’s not even that it feels like a lifetime ago, it feels like it happened to someone else. I’ve always said I’d love, just once in a while, to be reminded of who the real Amber is, who she was before she was defined as solely a wife and mother, and now I have this great opportunity. Does that make sense?’

And everyone agrees. Everyone agrees, and is clearly envious, and for the first time Amber stops feeling guilty and starts to feel excited. This is finally going to happen.

‘I’ve come to say goodbye.’ Deborah walks in the back door and comes straight into the kitchen carrying a box wrapped in Union Jack wrapping paper.

‘What’s that?’ Amber asks, eyeing the box warily.

‘This is your London Survival Kit,’ Deborah says gleefully. ‘Come on, open it now and I’ll explain.’

Amber opens the box and pulls out first an
A to Z
. ‘That’s your map of London,’ Deborah says. ‘So you’ll never get lost.’

Next comes a phrasebook of cockney rhyming slang. ‘Trust me, there’s much more to it than just apples and pears, but this is for you to understand when the cabbies talk to you. Don’t, whatever you do, try and incorporate any of it yourself because it’s just unspeakably naff when Americans try and speak cockney rhyming slang.’

‘Naff?’ Amber raises an eyebrow.

‘Cheesy.’

There are bags of cat treats, ‘so you can make friends
with Vicky’s cat because I know you’re not a cat person and cats can sense that, so this will hopefully get you off on the right foot’; DVDs of
Little Britain
and
Coronation Street
, ‘even though it’s Manchester, not London, it’s a British institution and you ought to watch some of it’; and a red and white football scarf saying Gunners. ‘First, soccer is called football in England, and everyone in England has a team, and your team must be Arsenal,’ Deborah says very seriously.

‘But shouldn’t my team be whatever Vicky’s team is?’ Amber asks. ‘And she doesn’t strike me as someone who would be interested in football.’

‘I don’t care. You must support Arsenal or you can’t be my friend, and when you’re talking about them you can refer to them as the Gunners, pronounced “Gooners”. Okay?’

Amber shrugs. ‘If you say so, although I can’t imagine myself having conversations about soccer. Sorry, football.’

‘And finally,’ Deborah pulls a small black notebook out of the bottom of the box and gives it to Amber, ‘these are my very own English notes to help you fit in.’

Amber flicks through the notes and starts laughing. ‘You’re not serious?’ she says.

‘Which bit?’ Deborah cranes to see which bit Amber is reading. ‘You mean, say “fuck” a lot in everyday sentences whenever you can, unless of course you’re talking to young children.’

‘Yes. That bit.’

‘No, I’m serious. I know it sounds weird but we swear a lot in England. Seriously. Nobody bats an eyelid over the word fuck. It’s a great word. It can be an adjective: you’re fucking bonkers. A noun: you old fucker. Or, obviously, a verb: I was fucking him – but hopefully you won’t be using it in that sense. Although you can also say, I was completely fucked last night, which might mean you had sex, or might also mean you were very drunk, or very tired.’

‘Please tell me you’re joking.’ Amber is no longer laughing, but looking very confused.

‘Wish I fucking was.’ Deborah grins. ‘Just wait and see. But you don’t have to read the whole thing now, just remember some of the key points. Don’t ever say to anyone, “Have a nice day,” ever, because everyone in England thinks Americans are all mad, and they all take the piss out of them for saying “have a nice day”. Also, do not tip, unless in a restaurant or a black cab, and ten to fifteen per cent is the norm, never twenty, and don’t talk to strangers.’

‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘Sure.’

‘If everyone in England says fucking, fucked or fucker all the time,’ Amber swallows, unused to using those words at all, let alone three times in one sentence, ‘how come I never hear you use those words ever?’

‘Because, my darling, when I first started living in America I was effing and blinding with the best of them, and then I quickly realized that it was not going at all well, so I had to consciously cut it out of my
language. Now I consider it offensive if someone says oh my God, rather than oh my gosh.’

‘Well…’ Amber is dubious. ‘I’m not sure that I’m going to be able to curse like that, but thank you for the warning. At least I won’t be shocked if I hear it from other people.’

‘And the other thing is,’ Deborah walks over to the kettle and flicks it on, knowing that Amber won’t mind if she makes herself a cup of tea, ‘you, Mrs Winslow, are quite the talk of the town.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I ran into Erin Armitage at Stop and Shop and she was asking me all about Life Swap. Then I went to get some new underwear in town and Suzy Potts was there and she wanted to know all about it, and then I went to Hallmark to get you a going-away card, and the sales assistant in there asked if it was for the lady who was doing Life Swap.’

‘No!’ Amber is horrified.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Oh God,’ she groans. ‘Richard is going to hate being the talk of the town.’

‘Well you’d better tell him not to go out for the next four weeks, then,’ Deborah says. ‘But you really trust him with having another woman in your house? I mean, I know you trust him and I’m not saying I wouldn’t trust him or that I don’t think he’s trustworthy, but you’re really okay with this?’