Cake or Death (24 page)

Americans are friendly people. Even when you dislike them, as you frequently do when you’re on holiday
(I don’t want to talk to people on holiday; that’s why I went on holiday), they don’t get your barbed remarks. A Canadian’s barbed remarks are so sheathed they’re almost ungettable, but even a blatant suggestion that the American should go away quietly will go right over an American’s head. They’re literal. Sometimes it’s annoying. Sometimes it charms the hell out of you.

So at this point, Americans are drinking and saying friendly things and dancing to the best rock ’n’ roll on the planet. We are doing well in our quest to define our love of Americans.

Americans are tall. This is said to be good. I don’t really care how short or tall anyone is, but you know, a long tall drink of water of a human being is an attractive thing. I’m not sure it’s good for the planet, though. I bought a Montauk armchair. It never occurred to me that furniture designed for Americans might not fit into the small ecologically friendly house I live in. The chair is so massive it has to have its own room. We even placed a beautifully embroidered wall hanging behind it to create a sense of occasion, as opposed to a sense of “they shoved this armchair into the front hallway because it was the only empty space they had.” I enjoy sitting in the chair, but am a little lost in it. It’s too far from the TV to be useful, and I always feel as though I am waiting for an uninvited guest, one of those friendly Americans possibly, who will show up with a pie still warm from the oven.

This is my memory of what Loretta Lynn sang in Crisco commercials in the seventies (I must have the lyrics wrong, surely). I suppose the Crisco people were desperate to shift the Crisco image away from its use as a lubricant, but I’m not sure that was necessary. For one thing, any unguent will do. But also, Canadians don’t use lard in their pies. They use butter or margarine.

Anyway, I had this image of a nation of madly happy pie-bakers. This image finally came true in the nineties with the great Martha Stewart, who I defend to this day as a woman who brought good looks and good taste to the home. She restored domesticity, which had had a bad rap since the Second World War. American dining had been deteriorating thanks to the machinations of what I call Big Food (it accompanies Big Pharma in my list of evil cartels). When I say good taste, I mean mouth taste.

That woman’s food tastes good. Her homes look good and are cared for with a precision I admire. You can bet her white picket fences aren’t made of plastic. When she does a domestic task, she does it right. When she cheats on the stock market, she does it wrong. Still.

I said earlier that Americans are tall. They like bigness in all respects, and no, this is not a dig at their weight. They like life on a large scale. The Grand Central Oyster Bar in New York City is a marvellous place. The problem is, the oysters are terrible. All the food at this huge gorgeous gigantesque luncheonette is horrible, except for the tea biscuits. I gobble those tea biscuits. Anything but the sole à la meunière. How do you ruin a sole? You leave it around dead for quite a while, I’m thinking.

So America is good at grand gestures. On the details, not so much. This makes Martha Stewart un-American, but I suspect she is. She has a sternness to her, such a high bar of accomplishment, which blocks her from the world of foodies. Julia Child was highly skeptical of Stewart perfectionism. On Stewart’s Christmas special on which Child was a guest, Stewart’s dessert was a gingerbread house of her own house, of all things. Stewart did that sugar-spinning thing and Child marvelled. “Aren’t we terrific?” she said. Snicker from the audience. Child was a sensualist, Stewart an overachiever.

Nevertheless, Stewart set a standard in a country that makes its own standards, low and heading lower. It can only be a good thing. I could watch Martha all day, doing the things I’ll never do. I’ve been planning to paint my interior window frames in semi-gloss white for a decade now. One day it might happen.

I’m not listing again, am I? Martha Stewart is something of a list all her own.

Americans are generous. I suppose that may be because they have money, but fewer Americans have
money now and they’re still generous. The British upper classes are stingy as hell. Canadians cannot begin to understand the concept of the
lagniappe
, the unexpected gift. The Japanese prefer the expected gift … Look, I’m descending into racial stereotypes here. Americans are generous, easygoing people. I’ve said enough.

They’re also a clean people, or were, and this mattered a great deal to me. I cannot tell you how much I admired it. Now that I have my own house, and probably since I reached the age where my sweat began to smell, I’ve been aware of genuine cleanliness and how hard it is to achieve. Americans once had gleaming vitreous china in their bathrooms, their dining room serving platters sparkled and their laundry was a national fetish.

This has changed. Corporations changed it with their mania for the lowest possible price. I don’t necessarily think the lowest possible price is the best possible price, not if the hotel room no longer offers facecloths, the coffee maker is in the bathroom, of all places, and the whole set-up looks a bit … worn. I remember seeing a large chip of plastic sealant/paint that had come off the frame of an airline seat on Northwest Airlines ten years ago and thinking, no decent international airline would do that. They would and they did. Now Air Canada offers me hard, chipped seats, junk food for a price, blankets covered with human hair and, worst of all, no heavy-duty paper towelling on the headrests. I’m amazed we don’t all have lice.

The theme is, I suspect, that the things I love about Americans are being betrayed. That nation has lost so much to the corporation. That’s why it’s pleasing to see
American corporations sag, to the benefit of everyone including its citizenry. Here’s the most pathetic example.

A proposed merger is in the works involving General Motors and Renault and Renault’s affiliate Nissan. David Olive, an accomplished Canadian business writer, explained what that meant. GM, he said, the people who created Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick and Cadillac, now sees its Chevrolet division valued at the same amount as America’s second-ranked mouthwash. That’s Listerine.

The great American journalist David Halberstam wrote a book about GM’s humiliating decline. It was called
The Reckoning
. The problem is, it was published in 1986. This means GM had twenty years to fix itself and it didn’t. While Toyota was making well-designed and hard-wearing cars at low prices, GM was looking to the short-term, turning out cheapo gas-guzzling SUVs at zero-percent financing. They were paying Americans to buy their cars. No one else was going to buy crap like that.

Once again, I name something about America I like and it turns out to be a pale shadow of its former self. In this case, it’s a fine, albeit belated, blessing for the environment. But still …

So I ask an American friend living here with her Canadian husband what she loves about her country. She responds by e-mail after several days’ thought. “I love that American quarters are big enough so that I can differentiate quarters and nickels.”

I can’t even give her name. She works for the U.S. federal government and Homeland Security is already keeping an eye on me. Let’s just call her Valerie Plame.

She adds the standard qualifier: “Right now, I like that I don’t have to live in America … just visit sometimes.”

Thanks, Val.

Your home is your nest. It’s your Howards End. Stay inside it when you feel small. Venture out when you’re feeling tall, knowing you can always flit back to the nest.

Be a perfect aunt. There are no perfect mothers, but aunts can manage it. The pleasures of being a magnificent aunt, a giver of gifts, a praiser of nieces, cannot be quantified. But I know that the heart expands. If you are an imperfect niece, I congratulate you. Your aunts will still adore you.

Everything that has gone wrong in the Western nations was caused by Rupert Murdoch, the introduction of air conditioning into the American South and the triumph of plastic over metal, wood and stone. This will end, perhaps not in time, but it will end.

In 1998, the famously self-effacing British writer Alan Bennett was offered an honorary doctorate at Oxford University. He turned it down, telling Oxford that if the university thought it was appropriate to establish the Rupert Murdoch Chair in Communications, why not approach Saddam Hussein to found a chair in Peace Studies. Bad money for good ends is all very well, Bennett wrote, but there’s a limit. Reading this, I found it noble and wonderful by any measure. And such gestures are easy to make. Yet almost no one makes them.

Ferragamo court shoes are excellent and will last. There is much goodness in buying well-made shoes. Cheap shoes are false economy.

Not so with purses. A big well-designed lightweight nylon purse with a central zippered compartment and flat shoulder straps is all you need. If you ever find such a purse, buy five. It took me decades to learn this; you have it for the price of a book.

Venice is overrated. Paris is not. Many will disagree but it is the weight of tourists that is making Venice sink and perhaps this judgment will help a little with that. Also,
Venice is a stage set. People actually live in Paris. They’re quite disciplined about it.

Men look best in dark suits, white (or pink) shirts with spread collars and elaborately patterned ties. All else is dross. You know this is true. Mmm, baby. How glorious is a man in a good-looking suit.

The most soothing thing in the world is to give all your extra money to Amnesty International. Somewhere, somehow, while you are doing the dishes or going on with your doggy life, your money is offering balm to a thin, frightened bleeding person you will never know of and never meet.

As Loretta Lynn once suggested about what she called the “deely-bob,” I do think the clitoris should have been placed closer to the opening of the vagina. How about in the vagina? Still, one does one’s best with given placement, and one’s best is often quite spectacular.

When I pay my dues, the Writers’ Union of Canada sends me a small certificate declaring me to be a Member in Good Standing. Think of that. With whom else are you in good standing for an entire year? How many people? Institutions? Bosses? I regularly fall out even with magazines I subscribe to. The Writers’ Union fees are cheap at any price, I say. If only all harmonious relations were so easily obtained.