I walked to the record store to get some blank cassette tapes for my trip. “Erase that thought. Erase that thought. Erase that thought,” I said to the beat of my Converse high-tops to protect myself and my family from intrusive thoughts about spontaneous combustion. “Healthy, whole, and safe. Healthy, whole, and safe. Healthy, whole, and safe,” I whispered to myself, trying not to move my lips. I taped my favorite punk albums and Heart so I could take them with me on the plane to England.
When I landed at Heathrow and stepped onto British soil for the first time, I felt a lightness in my head. Dazzled by the sunlight, I searched myself for signs of depression, but my depression had retreated. The voices outside my head, speaking in British accents, suddenly resembled the voices inside, and I achieved equilibrium. I’m here, I silently told the women in my head. I’ve come all this way to find you. I never once bothered to ask myself if I was crazy to have come this far for two voices. Women communicating with me from inside with no separation between our thoughts felt intimate, and our connection ran deeper than blood.
Exeter is two-and-a-half hours southwest of London by British Rail, and Devonshire is the greenest, rainiest borough in the country. The day I arrived with my guitar and suitcases at Exeter St. David’s train station and saw the surrounding green hills and hedgerows full of brilliant flowers, I thought I’d died and landed in paradise.
I lived on the university grounds in Duryard Halls in a women’s residence house called Jessie Montgomery. My room, B320, complete with an electric fire, wardrobe, desk, and single bed, was on the top floor. The grounds had once been botanical gardens and these had been preserved as much as possible. To get to school, I walked through woods full of wild blackberries. To reach the English department, I passed beautifully kept gardens with different flowers each season. I luxuriated in the richness of daffodils, violets, tulips, bluebells, rhododendrons, azaleas, primroses, and crocuses. A statue of Cupid was poised for takeoff against the balustrade in front of Reed Hall. In winter, a dusting of snow on his wings kept him earthbound.
I got on well with the other girls in Jessie Montgomery House and made friends right away. I was always in someone else’s room drinking tea because I didn’t have an electric kettle. And I was a hit with their boyfriends down the road in Murray House, the boys’ residence, because they liked the assertive way I played guitar. The two women in my head were always with me, and as I became more knowledgeable about regional accents, I could tell that the younger one was from the north of England. My OCD static faded to the background.
The walkway from my residence hall to the refectory was lit up with pink autumn leaves. I loved English food—chips with every meal—and the customs at Jessie Montgomery House. By rotation, we were invited in pairs to sit on the dais at the high table with the warden and her guests. It was supposed to be an honor and quite formal. Before tea, there was sherry at the warden’s house. When the girl who lived next door to me at Jessie Montgomery House and I went, we dyed our hair blue with bottles of ink and left blotches on the walls of the warden’s sitting room by accidentally leaning our heads against the white paint. Later we sorted out some proper hair dye, and for a change I wasn’t the only person with punk hair at my school.
On the first afternoon of the school term, I lugged my green-and-white Exeter University book bag up the hill to the university coffee bar on my way to an E. M. Forster tutorial. The town of Exeter and the river Exe were shining below me, and I looked across at the neon-green hills and pastures of grazing cows and sheep. Later I took a bus into town in the afternoon drizzle. In the city center was a billboard I loved advertising meatballs. It said “Surprise ’em with Faggots for Dinner!” I thought, Yeah, that’s right. Put that billboard up in America and everyone will be surprised.
I walked past the small shops lining the High Street and a big indoor market with fresh-cut flowers, fish, and vegetables. I had fish and chips at a nearby chippy. Sitting in the orange plastic booth, I thought about the women in my head as I always did when I had an idle moment. I imagined Melissa’s brown hair smelling of rain and petunias and the other woman’s dark hair curling softly against her collar.
After eating, I headed toward Marks and Spencer, the department store people called Marks and Sparks. Boots Chemists had pink flowers in window boxes and baskets hanging over the pavement. The local buses were bright green. I sprinted up the High Street and caught one back to campus. I liked to ride on the upper level so I could watch the countryside and look down on the traffic.
In between my mostly neglected studies and lectures, I went to London and looked up the places I’d been told about by Melissa and her friend. Everything was where they said it would be, like the roses in Queen Mary’s Gardens at Regent’s Park. Like a detective, I searched for traces of them all over the city. On the rare occasions when I was alone in my room at Jessie Montgomery House, I wrote songs to them. And when I played guitar, it was for them because they inspired me.
Exeter was my Eden, and I was the lesbian Eve. There was even an apple tree outside the window of my room. Of course I knew that the forbidden fruit of the Torah was not an apple in Hebrew, but I enjoyed the symbolism anyway. With my OCD and ritualistic thinking, the universe was constantly sending me messages, and the apple tree was only confirmation of what I had already known. This was my home. And when I lay down to sleep, instead of grotesque OCD images of body parts falling off, grisly car accidents, and bodies mutilated by explosions filling my head, I saw pretty things, like the way the sunlight sometimes bounced off the hills turning them an almost unreal lime green.