Everyone But The Mad Hatter

After my first day at Higashi High School I was accosted after my last class by the head English teacher and told that I was meeting some of her friends. She strapped her foreign plaything into the car, locked the door and off we sped.

“Don’t worry about your bike, my friend will bring you back to the school so you can go home,” she said as we zoomed toward the direction of my house. It was a remarkably stupid procedure as her friend lives far closer to my apartment than is the high school. Afterwards, I would be driven miles and miles back to the high school and would have to bike back exactly from whence I just came.

Her friends turned out to be the “International Music Club” that my predecessor had told me about. We turned down a long, narrow driveway, got out of the car and walked up to a very large house with an undeniable western flair. If the yard was westernized, the interior was even more so with coo-coo clocks and European artwork decorating the walls. There was something very rococo and baroque about the entire place.

Two ladies pranced out of the dining room to greet us. One was wearing a frilly, flouncey pink flowered dress. Her hair was cut in a short tom-boy, pixie style and her mouth never faded from a very prim, proper, disturbingly symmetrical smile made up with bright pink lipstick that matched the blossoms on her dress. The other woman was wearing some sort of skirt and blouse ensemble but I admit I forget exactly what it looked like since the frilly frock captured most of my attention. I functioned as Alice, or rather the Door Mouse (after a very long day at school) in their subsequent little tea party. If only they would have let me fall asleep in the teapot.

In amazing, very prim, almost Victorian English I was invited to join their music club. Sachiko-san plays the flute and Hideko-san plays the piano. I am to do a Bach duet with the flutist.

“Can you play something for us now?”

Being completely put on the spot I attempted to pull something from my memory but it wasn’t great. But apparently it was good enough for them to feed me ice cream, fruit and tea on delicately flowered china while a musical clock played a different tune every fifteen minutes. Over tea we chatted about different countries, traveling, my impressions of Niihama and their impressions of New York (they have decided that they value their musical, tea-party feted lives far too much to venture into the dark, bleak, dicey city of New York where people steal things and murder babies left and right).

The pianist was an English literature major in college. As she drove me back home we chatted about books. Or rather she chatted and I realized that I have a very limited knowledge of English literature.
“Have I read “The Grapes of Wrath”? Of course…. Well, no, I haven’t.”
Her English was far too good for me to be able to bullshit her as she easily could have called me on it. Nodding saying “ahh sooodesune” really wasn’t going to work this time around. I liked that. It was an actual conversation instead of my pointing to the mountains and going “YAMA!” or holding up a banana whilst shouting ‘BANANA!!!” and looking entirely too pleased with myself.

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Published:
9.21.06 / 5pm
Category:
amusing incidents, what i call life, culture, unschoolish