Not that Canada is unaffected by the hype. There’s a Macy’s in downtown Seattle, and when Merilyn and I walked through it, expecting to be dazzled by the Christmas displays, what struck us most was that it was exactly like any big department store in Toronto or Vancouver. Ralph Lauren perfume and polo shirts, Jones New York dresses and suitcases, Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein, saleswomen made up like supermodels, looking less alive than the mannequins. Raban could have gone into any outlet of the Bay or Holt Renfrew in Canada and said with equal accuracy: “Here was America going by.” We have a prime minister, after all, who does not believe there is any such thing as Canadian culture, that there is only some amorphous, conglomerate thing he calls “North American culture.”
But Canada doesn’t seem to have embraced the fakery as thoroughly, as desperately, as the United States. We have retained an attitude of bemusement toward it. If appearance and reality are two sides of the same flipped coin, in Canada we most often call reality. I see this in our respective film industries. Canada makes documentaries—in fact, the word “documentary” was coined by a Canadian filmmaker, John Grierson, ten years before he was hired to start up the National Film Board in 1939. He was writing in the New York Sun, praising the “documentary value” of Robert Flaherty’s 1926 film Moana. Documentary, as he defined it, was the creative interpretation of reality. America had already opted for Hollywood, the Disneyland of the film world. I think the difference between documentaries and feature films goes a long way toward defining the difference between the two cultures. Recently, America has become infatuated with what it calls “reality TV,” but of course there’s nothing real about reality TV: it offers only the appearance of reality. Coke may be the Real Thing, but nobody ever asks what, exactly, is “real” about it.
America’s is essentially an entrepreneurial culture: the sizzle is the steak, because, after all, if you buy the sizzle, the steak comes with it. Canada’s, in contrast, is a primary-producing culture: we’ll buy the steak and hope to get a little sizzle with it. But we know we can’t eat sizzle.
AS MERILYN and I leave the market and walk along 1st Avenue toward our hotel, we pass six Starbucks locations, including the first one, opened thirty years ago—Ground Zero of the North American coffee explosion. I don’t think there is a spot in Seattle where you can’t see at least one Starbucks, often two or three. Even the coffee packets in our hotel room are from Starbucks. Eventually, we come to an interesting-looking restaurant; through the mullioned windows we can see dark wooden booths and mirrors and small rooms with white tablecloths, heavy silver, and art deco lamps. The kind of place that looks like an old Seattle landmark. At last, I think. The real thing.
“Let’s stop for dinner,” Merilyn says, and in we go.
When Merilyn enters a restaurant, it is never a simple matter of being shown to a table. First she asks to see the menu, which she reads with the concentration of a medieval prioress checking a handcopied manuscript for signs of satanic influences. Then she goes on an exhaustive tour of the establishment; she wants to see all the rooms, scrutinize the staff, possibly look into the kitchen, inquire about the ingredients in the sauces. Finally, she selects a table. I follow her around, and the little maîtred ’ trundles behind, holding the menus against her chest defensively. When we’re seated, Merilyn asks her about the specials of the day.
“Your server will be with you shortly,” the maître d’ says, smiling, and then vanishes.
“This is a great place,” I say, looking around. A long mahogany bar runs down one side of the room, with stools and place settings. Behind it scurry waiters in white shirts and ankle-length aprons tied at the waist, very Cafe-du-Nouveau-Monde. “I’ll bet it’s been here for years.” I can already imagine myself telling friends back home and hearing them say, Oh, you went there!
Meanwhile, Merilyn has found the brochure propped between the salt and pepper shakers. “It’s a chain,” she says despondently. “There are eighty of them, all across the States.”
“No.”
“Yup. Started in Portland in 1977.”
“Eighty? But it looks so authentic!”
“It isn’t,” Merilyn says. “It’s all fake.”
But it’s not like Orhan Pamuk’s fake bakery, I tell myself, wanting to believe. Look at the wait staff: they’re really bustling, they care. Our waitress is very pleasant. The food isn’t bad. And, I remind myself, I’ve never minded eating in a British pub back home in Ontario.
It’s no use. The lustre is gone. The portions are too large, the sauces thickened with cornstarch, the waitress too pointedly chipper as she asks, “And how are your first bites?” then scurries off before we have time to answer. Now I hear our friends when we get home saying: Oh, you went there?
MORE than anything, almost, Wayne and I like books, so it’s no surprise that we end our first day on the road in another bookstore. Elliott Bay Book Company anchors a corner of Seattle’s Pioneer Square, down by the water. It is a sprawl of wooden shelves, bins, and passageways lined floor to ceiling with enough books to last a lifetime.
Wayne heads for the travel section. I look around at the other book lovers. Bespectacled, lean for the most part, mostly female, but not all middle-aged, people with backpacks and cloth shopping bags, sensible lace-up shoes, most of them quietly peering at titles, a few of them chatting, some exclaiming, but no one is pushy, no one is what my mother would have called “loud,” which implied much more than the volume of their voice. If I were teleported into this room, would I know I was in the United States? I don’t think so. I used to say to Wayne that I could tell a Frenchman or a German before they spoke by the shape of their mouths, but these people speak English, with pretty much the same accent as me.
I try to remember my first American. I was born in Winnipeg, just across the border from North Dakota. I grew up in southwestern Ontario, scarcely an hour’s drive from Buffalo. My mind reels back, before school bus trips to Niagara Falls, back before Seventeen magazine and Father Knows Best, before television came to our house, back to when there was only radio and Canada’s Happy Gang, and I realize with a start: until the age of five, I had not seen a single American, not heard an American voice.
The fall I turned five, my father took me by train to Detroit. I don’t remember much about the trip except the train’s diesel snout pointing west, snorting like a beast with a scent. Then me smiling on the steps of my Aunt Mabel’s house. There is a photograph of the two of us standing there, in some Detroit suburb, so maybe it’s not a memory at all, though I do remember her kitchen, the white oak cupboard she called a Hoosier.
“What’s a Hoosier?” I asked.
“A cupboard,” she laughed.
“Why don’t you call it a cupboard?”
“Because here it’s a Hoosier.”
This was my introduction to the foreign language of America and that American specialty, branding. Aunt Mabel’s pantry cupboard— described as “the woman’s workbench” in the Eaton’s catalogue—was about four feet wide and six feet tall, with cupboards above and below an enamelled counter. The largest manufacturer of these efficient baking stations was the Hoosier Manufacturing Company of New Castle, Indiana, which is why such cupboards are Hoosiers to Americans (Indiana being the Hoosier State), just as tissues are Kleenex and all colas, Coke. This is the reward the United States offers for