Then suddenly I was seven, and Americans were everywhere. I was in New York City, at Radio City Music Hall, in the front row of a balcony overlooking the stage of The Garry Moore Show, where commercials for soap flakes and vacuum cleaners were acted out live on either side of the main action at middle stage so you could see all the parts of the show at once, something that ruined me forever for television.
“The little girl in the green dress in the balcony.” Garry Moore was pointing up at me, at the hand I’d thrust in the air. “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?”
I said something in the end, I have no idea what, and sat down amid a hot rush of laughter. I was alone at the edge of the balcony: my family was leaning back and away, as if I’d brought them shame by pushing myself forward. Just like an American, my mother said.
It was my father who loved Americans. The American multinational that bought the factory in our small Canadian town regularly summoned my father to its headquarters in Niagara Falls, New York (properly pronounced as one long, important word), trips from which he would return to us boasting about the computer that filled a whole room, drinks that no one in Canada had heard of yet, hotels that really knew how to make a man feel at home.
When we moved to Brazil, where my father was to start another factory for the American company, his love affair with the United States intensified. As our ship sailed past Cuba, where Che and Castro were waging war on Batista from their caves in the Sierra Maestra, my father drank Cuba Libres, but it was Americans he raised his glass to, saviours of the world.
In Brazil, I went to American schools, learned the states of the Union and their capitals before I knew the names of the provinces of Canada. I pledged allegiance to the flag of America every morning and sang, “Oh say, can you see . . .” I wish I could say that, like Jimmy Carter, I lusted only in my heart, that I never actually mouthed the words, but I did. I belted out “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “America the Beautiful” at the Fourth of July picnics where all the ex-pats brought their apple pies and baked beans and fried chicken and corn on the cob— food I grew up thinking of as American, though it is the gastronomic heritage of my birth country, too. Everyone at those picnics wore red, white, and blue (also the patriotic colours of Canada’s flag of the time). They talked about how wonderful life was stateside, where roads were smoothly paved (not a string of dusty potholes) and where you could count on your workers to show up on time (not like these lazy South Americans). This is ex-pat patter, I know that now. Americans don’t have a corner on it. I’ve heard Germans in Canada and Canadians in France and Swiss in Italy go through the same loving litany of home disguised as a whiner’s rant.
The Brazilians mistook my family for Americans. The Americans knew better—I entered the schoolyard each morning to taunts of “Canadian bacon”—though the distinction was lost on the coffee-skinned boy who opened his pants and peed on my feet, cursing me as I stood there astonished, stuttering, “Mas no estou Americana!”
I worried my family had become American by association, which, given my dampened shoes, did not seem like such a good thing. Didn’t we beg our friends to send us sticks of Juicy Fruit chewing gum and Hershey chocolate bars in their letters? Wasn’t it Pat Boone and Elvis Presley my sisters shimmied to on their beds?
I realized we’d escaped with our identity intact when we boarded the Air Canada flight for home. I was a teenager by then, but I felt what a baby must feel when, after being handed around, it finds itself safe in its mother’s arms. The stewardesses cut their vowels short and round, the way we did. They were reserved and polite and seemed pleased that we were, too. They didn’t gush, which was a relief. No one talked too loud. Everyone said “Excuse me” and “Sorry,” even when they hadn’t done anything wrong.
There were Americans after that, but they were on my turf, which made it easier to look down my nose. My father still adored everything stamped Made in America—I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island, the Rose Bowl Parade—but when I looked south, I saw only racists, warmongers, and assassins. The Americans I admired—John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr.—seemed not to rise from that country’s soil so much as hover above it, where they were blown to smithereens. On a cold October day in 1969, I stood on the Ambassador Bridge, which spans the river between Windsor and Detroit, the busiest border crossing on the continent, and pounded my fists on the hoods of cars lined up to enter the United States, denouncing the war in Vietnam, the treatment of blacks in the South. I was in a permanent rage.
Now, thirty-five years later, I’m cruising the shelves of a bookstore in one of America’s biggest cities. I feel oddly at home, bending sideways to squint at the titles, moving through fiction to biography, past the children’s section.
That’s where it comes to me. My first Americans were two kids: a blonde girl in a pink dress and a brown-haired boy in shorts. They had a dog, Spot, and a kitten, Puff, and a baby sister, Sally. I loved them with all my heart. They ran through the pages of the first book I ever read, exuberant, laughing. I admired them even when they wept, for they weren’t afraid to cry. Maybe they knew, as Americans seem to, that things will work out for them in the end.
“Fun with Dick and Jane!” I exclaim. Wayne looks at me over the shelf, as if unsure whether to acknowledge me. But it’s too late to sidle away. I’m pulling at his sleeve. “I figured it out, and wouldn’t you know it? My first Americans were characters in a book.”
WE continue south the next morning on Interstate 5, a fine drizzle making itself noticeable on the windshield, the wipers giving a cozy kind of syncopated rhythm to the passing parade. Merilyn is in the co-pilot’s seat, navigating with the aid of two maps spread out on her lap, one American Automobile Association map of the entire United States as it appeared fifteen years ago and a smaller, more recent MapArt book open to the state of Washington. Various brochures and booklets are also arranged about her half of the car, but neatly, like the cymbals on a set of drums. She is marking our actual route on the larger map with a yellow highlighter and various alternative routes on the smaller map. Merilyn is both a dedicated planner and a Libran, which means that (a) there must be a plan and (b) every plan must be balanced by an alternative plan. Three alternative plans are better than two, but since that would upset the balance, a fourth plan is required. The small map soon becomes cross-veined with yellow marker lines. In my view, if you aren’t going anywhere in particular, it doesn’t much matter how you get there. To which she replies that if the destination isn’t important, then the route to it must be.
“We could stay on the I-5 to Portland,” she says, “and from there cut over to Highway 101 and go down the coast to San Francisco. I’ve never been to San Francisco.”
“That sounds good,” I say. “In Portland, we could visit Powell’s City of Books. It’s supposed to be the biggest bookstore in the world—a whole city block of books.” I mentally calculate how much room we have in the trunk. Not enough.
“Or we could turn east here and go down the 82 and the 395, which would eventually take us into Yosemite.”
“I’ve never been to Yosemite,” I say. In this state, all the minor route numbers are printed on a portrait of George Washington’s head. The I-5 is lined with the first president’s head on a stick.
“Neither have I,” she says, “but we can also get there from San Francisco. Or we could get off the I-5 and drive over to the coast. Find a romantic little motel somewhere overlooking the Pacific Ocean.”
“Let’s do that.”
As