I made a little crack in the space between me and all those people I carry around in my head. I didn’t know the crack was coming. I just heard “Crack!” and suddenly I breathed fresh air and felt free. This happened last Friday.
My 22-year-old niece Kara was visiting me during her midterm break from college. Friday night we were sipping wine in a packed downtown London pub. As usual, however, even with all the loud talking surrounding us, I could still hear my ever-present “how-are-we-doing-here?” internal monitor which all week had pretty much hovered around the “we’re-doing-OK” level. After six years of hosting friends and family in France and the UK, I am still a bit anxious that my monitor will suddenly plummet to the “we-are-so-BORED-with-you” level.
This is not without reason, however, for I was born with the mark of the middle child. In our family that meant the quiet boring one, unlike older and younger siblings who were energetic, fun, social. But what haunted me most about this middle mark was that as the middle child I was destined to be either asexual or gay which is fine if that is what one wants to be, but I wanted to end up married with kids and the outlook, given my birth order, didn’t bode well.
My Aunt Allie was the first middle. She was so shy that her 14-year-old sister dropped out of school a year and waited for Allie to catch up so that they could go through high school together. Nevertheless, while Honey went to dances on Friday night, Allie stayed home and did her nails. Allie never even had the courage to answer the phone until she was twenty and, of course, she never dated or got married. She was, the family determined, asexual.
Bill, my older cousin and the second middle, was gay. He, at least, had a wicked sense of humor which I thought greatly improved my middle heritage, but eventually he found a lover in the Middle East and moved there permanently. I didn’t want to live forever in the Middle East. I wanted to live in the USA. So once, plucking up courage, I asked my mom if she thought I’d ever get married. “Oh, I don’t know,” she replied. “You just have to wait and see.” What I saw plainly was single Aunt Allie.
Not that Allie didn’t have many excellent qualities. She was courageous. As a young woman she answered the call to help with the WWII war effort by signing up with the State Department and heading off to Europe. Thus began her highly successful career working in American embassies around the world. She was smart, competent and rich. But, above all else, she was generous giving family members wonderful opportunities to see the world. She also had flawless skin and absolutely no face wrinkles--ever. But we knew that was because she never had sex or had to deal with a man or a bunch of kids. But no matter how adventurous her exotic foreign life seemed or how smooth her skin was, I didn’t want to end up like her. So I was very relieved when I grew up, got married, had four kids, didn’t become rich and got wrinkles. Against the odds, I had broken the mark of the middle child.
But now here I was in London hosting Kara for a week. By day two while I was trying so hard not to be quiet and boring, it dawned on me that I had nevertheless indeed become Allie. True, I hadn’t turned out asexual, but here I was the old aunt living in London where Allie once lived. Here I was showing the city to young Kara just like Allie had shown it to me some forty years ago. Here I was pulling out my little wallet stuffed with crisp bills to buy cookies for us in the market just like Allie had done for me. And I, too, organized our route, wore a grey raincoat and carried many maps. I might be a smaller, coca-lite version of Allie, but I was Allie.
Then last Friday night Kara and I were in that pub drinking white wine and waiting for a new Indian girl, a friend of Kara’s college roommate, to find her way from south London to Trafalgar Square to meet up with Kara to go clubbing. The room was packed with loud people dressed in blue jeans and baggy sweaters and the tables were sloshing with spilled beer. For the last three hours Kara and Usha had been texting back and forth about how and when to meet up while Kara and I went from pub to pub. It was now 11:30 p.m. and Usha still hadn’t arrived. Sipping our wine Kara and I continued to wait. That’s when I heard the crack. Loudly.
Yes, I am living in London showing my niece around like Allie did. I do look like her and share her name, but Allie would never ever be in her third pub of the night with her niece drinking white wine at 11:30 p.m. on a Friday night. Never. Ever. Not a chance. Long before this hour she would have taken her bath, done her nails and gone to bed.
CRACK! In an instant Aunt Allie peeled away from me and slipped into the darkness. I was just me. Living in London. Drinking wine with my niece. Period.
In celebration and as a souvenir of our evening together I quietly slipped our wine glasses into my bag. Something else Allie would never ever have done.
