London, When We

Abstract

London, When We Katherine Robb (bio) When I broach the subject, my husband and I are tucked into the quilt of our home, a home that sits on a street lined with trees. One being the Ginkgo biloba, a living fossil with its dichotomous venation, its male and female trees separated, like people’s memories when they stand face-to-face and look over each other’s shoulders. Outside, giggling children run up and down the sloping sidewalks for which San Francisco is a mantra. “When, when, when,” he says. The girls I lived with in London, whom I don’t know anymore, whom I haven’t spoken with in years upon years, were my friends then. When we were young. When we lived in London. When we lived in London, we cooked everything in a pot someone swiped from the sidewalk. It was encased in rainwater next to a decrepit refrigerator whose door we couldn’t open until we could, which was immediately regrettable. When we lived in London, we memorized café menus like golden treasure maps until, through unanimous vote, the Pret A Manger egg-salad sandwich won best calorie-per-pound investment. We stole toilet paper from Starbucks when we lived in London. When we lived in London, all our possessions fit into one backpack. [End Page 143] Even then we knew we carried too much. When we lived in London, we hauled pots of boiling water down the stairs, steady, steady, don’t spill, pouring it swiftly into the calcified bathtub, splashing the two inches of warmth up over our curved bodies, over our youth. We submerged what we could of ourselves and waited, hunched at first, eventually placid, as the water cooled to tepid and then to cold, our lips and bellies and breasts all islands in the puddle. When we lived in London, the kitchen was sticky from toast slather remains, the jam congealing into a sweet strawberry lacquer and more than a few arguments. When we lived in London, we ate bangers at a street faire where someone bought patchwork pants and I threw up behind a stall. We weighed less and dreamed more when we lived in London. We drank Ribena at the house of a girl whose father made suits for the Beatles. We smiled when people asked if we were Canadian. When they realized we were American, we explained we didn’t understand why he was reelected either. When we lived in London, we still hadn’t decided who we wanted to be. Or so we told the others, and ourselves, sometimes. When we lived in London, a boy flew all the way from Cincinnati to ask a girl to marry him amidst the wafting Indian spices of our landlady’s cooking, and when the girl said no, when she said, “Go home,” and shut the door on his proffering, he flew back, across the sun. When we lived in London, I wore knee-high black leather boots with heavy buckles and four-inch lug platforms. Late at night, when we lived in London, we ate shawarma from carts after watching glitter-encrusted men prance on stages high above throbbing crowds. When we lived in London, we walked hard and fast down unlit streets, taking unsafe short cuts, whispering to ourselves: if they come at least they won’t have guns because this is London, this is not America, and here they have to look you in the eyes if they take you, which felt like something significant. We asked the boys, when we lived in London, the friends of the friends, how to take the absinthe with the sugar and the flames, how to take it in the Bohemian Method, because Bohemia, we thought, might be the answer, but we woke in the morning with black tongues and no hallucinations except the ones we brought with [End Page 144] us from across the pond. We were less magnetism, more bohrium when we lived in London. We didn’t know, when we lived in London, that absinthe, like so many other things, wasn’t what it used to be. When we lived in London, I invited someone, not you, for...