English as a Second Language

by Megan Crane

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

In this wickedly funny first novel-think Legally Blonde in Oxford-a young New York woman exchanges her corporate job for a year of books, blokes, beers, and new best friends in graduate school in England. Alexandra Brennan is fed up with her dead end New York City job-and even more fed up of running into her smug ex-boyfriend. So when he crosses the line by telling her that she'll never get into graduate school in the United Kingdom, that's precisely what she does. Armed with imported cigarettes and extra strength coffee, Alex leaves home and crosses the Atlantic to face all that Great Britain and grad school have to offer, including ill-considered romantic interludes, a red-headed nemesis with intellectual pretensions and ulterior motives, a preponderance of eighties music, and more books than she can possibly read in a year. What she discovers, however, is that instead of running away from home - she may have actually found it. With a cheeky sense of humor and terrific cast of characters, English as a Second Language is a funny and irreverent novel about a young woman's misadventures on the path to adulthood.

Release date: August 1, 2004

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 288

Sample

One

I decided to go to England because of a guy. Pathetic but true. Not just any guy, but an ex-boyfriend. An ex-boyfriend I had, on more than one occasion, vowed never to think of again.

It’s amazing what jet lag can do.

I spent my first night as a graduate student in England not engaged in intellectual pursuits but whacking my elbows into the wall. Repeatedly. I was used to sprawling across the queen-size bed, which had taken up most of the space in my New York apartment, an apartment that seemed vast and extravagant in comparison to my new home. New York seemed very far away. New York was very far away.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, after finally giving up on a laughable attempt to sleep in my economy seat, I had had a flash of inspiration. Graduate school, I decided, was an excellent opportunity for a social experiment. No one in England knew me, and I could therefore be the easygoing, happy-go-lucky creature I’d always assumed I would have been without the disruption of a hideous adolescence and a claustrophobic collegiate environment. I could just relax and be Happy Graduate School Me, or at least that was my plan.

The plane landed and the rest of my first day as an expat went by in a blur. I lugged my baggage through customs and immigration, and then onto various trains, which sped through a rain-soaked country I was too exhausted to properly appreciate. I did get the impression of many, many fields in more shades of green than I’d known existed. The university campus, which was to be my new home, sat a good mile or two outside the walls of an enchanting medieval city filled with twisting little cobbled streets and buildings dating from the Middle Ages and before. From the enclosing walls to the towering cathedral, it was a charming, delightful place.

My university accommodation, in contrast, was in a squat little block of concrete housing even farther out than the sprawling concrete main campus. It was, I was informed upon my arrival, about a thirty-minute walk to the city from my house. So much for that whole “located in the dynamic and ancient city” thing in the brochure. Happy Graduate School Me was looking more like Aesthetically Traumatized Me, but I tried to rally. What this meant was that I hid in my room until dark, and then fell asleep.

I sat up in my tiny cot and looked around my tiny room. It was just slightly bigger than a jail cell. Not that I had any firsthand experience with jail cells. The gray morning light from the single window only highlighted the fact that the room was a perfect square. One wall had a built-in desk space with two shelves, a woefully inadequate wardrobe, and a sink. I was overly impressed with the sink, as if having only part of a private bathroom made the whole place somehow luxurious. I had one surprisingly comfortable chair and one less comfortable desk chair, a telephone, which didn’t allow for outgoing calls without a telephone account, a small cubby, which could function as a bedside table, and the reasonably comfortable if frighteningly small single bed.

The day outside was rainy and cold. Welcome to England, I thought. I was still exhausted, my elbows were bruised, and I was stranded in a foreign country, away from everyone I had ever known. I sank back into my little cot and pulled my comforter up around my ears. Happy Graduate School Me seemed like a fantasy, one right up there with International Rock Star Me. Why had I thought this was a good idea?

Stupid Evan.

This is what happened.

Evan was a nice, cheerful midwesterner who had looked around after graduating from some tiny Michigan college and decided just like that to move to the Big Apple. He made it sound like he’d endured an epic journey, which I imagine it would be, but that’s only because my geography gets fuzzy between Philadelphia and L.A.

When I met Evan he was cheerfully working in his marketing job—not a sentence you often read. But it was true. He was a happy guy. Evan was like some kind of big, brawny breath of fresh air.

“Does he speak?” Michael asked archly the first time I paraded him in front of my friends, while Evan and I were in our strange almost-dating phase, which involved nightly phone calls but as yet no kissing.

“He doesn’t feel the need to try and impress people with his rapier wit,” I retorted defensively. “If that’s what you mean.” We both looked down the bar to where Evan was leaning, smiling that calm, genial smile of his and not even attempting to intrude on the conversations swirling around him.

“Alex, sweetheart,” Michael said gently, “he’s not really your type.”

But I knew better. Evan was a real man, I thought.

My first clue to the contrary was his troubling virginity, at twenty-six years of age. Evan was not just a virgin, he was essentially untouched. Think about the ramifications of that. He was in love by the second date and rarely out of my studio apartment thereafter.

My second, more alarming clue was the discovery that he cribbed entire lines of conversation from sitcoms. It turned out Evan didn’t actually have a sense of humor, he borrowed other people’s.

Not that it was all his fault. It just got to the point where the very thought of him made me physically sick to my stomach. This was about two months into the relationship, which had included a terrible Valentine’s Day I was still too embarrassed to discuss. (Here’s a hint: what happens if those racy suggestions in magazines fail?) So I dumped him. This was a new experience for me, having spent most of my romantic life as the dumpee, on those occasions when the men in my life actually bothered to dump me before (a) disappearing or (b) taking up publicly with someone else. Since there was no way to really bust out and tell someone they made you cringe and you found them revolting, I opted for the fail-safe “it’s me” explanation with Evan.

I should have just gone with the basics. It’s not you, it’s me. Let him work out the details. Most Top 40 songs exist to help with this very situation. But, naturally, I had to give it my own special spin. I put on quite a performance. I confessed that I was fucked in the head over my tragic past (about which he knew nothing, of course, because it’s not like we talked outside of sitcom re-creations), I was insane, I required therapy, I needed to be alone. It seemed the best way. Until I kept running into him that whole spring and summer and he would ask me in an overly solicitous voice how I was.

Not, “How are you, Alex?” like a normal person upon encountering someone you didn’t really wish to see, and speaking to them just to establish that you were not avoiding them.

Evan went with:

“How are you—”

Pause. Deep, meaningful look, scanning my expression for signs of the internal struggle.

“—feeling, Alex?”

Jerk.

Evan had gotten decidedly less cheerful after two months with me and could therefore infuse that simple question with whole paragraphs of resentment and hurt. He looked at me like I’d just escaped from the nearest mental asylum. Like I was the crazy woman I’d told him I was.

“Who the hell hears some lame excuse about a mental breakdown, which is obviously just someone trying to be nice while breaking up with someone else, and believes it?” I demanded of my friends. Robin smirked, and settled back into the chair she and her boyfriend Zack were sharing, despite the heat and humidity of the June evening.

“Evan, of course.” She exhaled a crisp stream of smoke and shrugged. “Like that’s a big surprise. The guy’s a dork.”

Zack and Robin had been together only a few months, but he was already savvy enough to keep out of any conversation that involved that much gesticulating with lit cigarettes. He only shrugged when I glared in his direction.

“And,” Michael added wickedly from the other side of the table, “you did, after all, deflower him.”

Some months later, I was engaged in a run-of-the-mill existential crisis over my life. Or, to be more precise, my stunning lack thereof. Oh sure, I had friends, but everything else just sucked. I hadn’t had so much as a fleeting crush on anyone in ages, and the longer Evan remained my Most Recent Ex, the more convinced I was that he was somehow hexing my future chances. More to the point, there was my “career.”

I had been working as a paralegal at Smug, Loaded, Mean & Corporate since graduation, which was just over three years behind me that fall. It was fine, as far as dead-end jobs went. Every year there was a new crop of bright young college graduates, most of whom were spending a year or two toiling for demanding and horrible lawyers as a stepping-stone to their own careers as slave drivers of the same ilk. I had figured out pretty quickly that I wanted no part of law school or, for that matter, lawyers of any kind. I just didn’t know what I wanted to do instead.

I was no one’s idea of an exemplary employee. Six months into my first job and I was less than impressed with the whole “work for a living” deal. I hated the hours, the drudgery, the having to be nice to people you disliked. You could say I had an attitude problem, one that did not go unnoticed by my supervisors.

I was floating a handful of boring cases and tried to pretend that they filled my days, but this wasn’t true. My supervisor trolled the halls for evidence of slackers and caught me out one time too many. She sat me down and told me that it was time to shape up, and as punishment she sent me to Jay Feldstein, the high king of assholes in a firm boasting a roster of hundreds.

No one ever pretended it was anything but a punishment. In return, I didn’t pretend to misunderstand the truth: they were giving me to Jay to run me out of there.

Unluckily for them, he liked me.

Jay Feldstein took over my life. I became, for all intents and purposes, his property. I worked only on his cases, subject only to his mercurial moods and unreasonable demands. The most immediate benefit of this was that it made me untouchable as far as my supervisors were concerned. Unfortunately, it also meant I had to field Jay’s phone calls night and day, be available around the clock, and jump when he bellowed. And the man did a lot of bellowing.

After two and a half years of his shit, I was well beyond burned out and into a whole different realm. Cue the existential panic.

“Evan is not hexing you,” Zack assured me around his drink one October night as I was bemoaning my singlehood while dodging calls from Jay on my cell phone. “Why are we still talking about that guy?”

“Maybe it’s not such a shock that you haven’t been doing so well in the romantic department,” Robin offered, watching my phone vibrate across the tabletop as if performing an electronic belly dance for the overflowing ashtray. “For all intents and purposes, Jay is the man in your life.”

A wake-up call if ever there was one.

Except—wake up and do what? All I knew was what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to stay in the mess and mayhem that was New York. I loved New York, don’t get me wrong. I thought everyone should be lucky enough to live there at one point or another, but you could definitely stay too long. Something happened after too many years in New York: you curdled, or maybe it was just the last dregs of your optimism drying up, and then the next thing you knew you were a forty-two-year-old “career woman” too mean to even bother with cats.

But I didn’t know where I wanted to go. Or what I wanted to do when I got there. I had dreams, but they were vague things with no real substance. I wanted to be famous, or really rich, or wildly successful, but that was as far as the dream went. My whole life was fill-in-the-blank.

It was coming up on Thanksgiving when I ran into Evan in a bar I would have told you was far too cool for the likes of him, something Michael was quick to reiterate. This was due to Evan’s mild yet pervasive homophobia, and Michael’s avowedly fragile loser threshold. Nonetheless, I was feeling like a beacon of friendship—the result, no doubt, of tequila.

Poor Evan, I actually thought, as I unwound my scarf from my neck.

“You look good,” I said. This was technically true, given what he had to work with. He still repulsed me. It was unimaginable that I had ever allowed him to touch me. I could tell that Michael was entertaining much the same thought.

“I feel good,” Evan said, as if agreeing. “You look tired.”

“Work,” I said lightly, shrugging.

Over Evan’s shoulder, Michael was rolling his eyes. You look tired?! he mouthed. I ignored him.

“I thought you wanted to quit?” Evan asked, in a tone that suggested I had lied to him and he was onto me.

“I don’t know,” I said breezily. “I’m thinking I might go to graduate school.” I hadn’t thought much about graduate school one way or the other, but Evan had always been intimidated by the college I’d gone to, so why not attempt to be intellectually superior?

“Huh,” he said. “Graduate school. Where?”

“Who knows?” I asked grandly. Robin and Zack, who refused on principle to speak to Evan, were off down the bar trying to con free cocktails from Nigel, the British bartender of indeterminate sexual orientation. “I’m thinking about Oxford,” I drawled, aiming for blasé. “In England,” I added, as if I didn’t expect him to recognize the name.

And Evan laughed.

Evan, who had attended an unknown college somewhere in backwater Michigan and found tabloids intellectually challenging, laughed. He tilted back his great big dork head and let out a hoot of laughter. Derisive laughter, it goes without saying.

“What?” I said then, edgily, my eyes narrow. I felt like punching him. Michael pursed his lips as his eyebrows inched even higher.

“Like you could get into Oxford,” Evan said dismissively.

Which was how I decided, right then and there, that I would.

Not that it was that simple.

Evan—and I can’t stress how much this annoyed me—turned out to be right about Oxford. I would eventually announce to an old college professor that I had been rejected from Oxford, which would make him cackle. “You’re in very good company,” he told me.

But first things first.

I woke up the morning after running into Evan with my mind made up. This was a new sensation—maybe the first time in my twenty-five years I’d ever felt a sense of purpose.

“I think I should go to grad school,” I announced at a very hungover Sunday brunch. “In England.”

“Of course you should,” Robin agreed. Despite being dragged out of Zack’s bed for this summit meeting, she was looking perfectly composed—her specialty. “It’s perfect for you.”

“And it beats the hell out of working,” Michael contributed in a surly growl from behind his dark glasses. He was opposed to rising before 3 p.m. on weekends and was there under protest.

“I could escape from Jay,” I mused.

“You could find Mr. Darcy,” Michael said, rallying. “That’s reason enough.”

And that was that. I requested application materials from the top ten British universities and started firing off applications to those that had master’s programs I found even vaguely interesting. With my applications headed across the ocean, it was time to turn my attention to the more pressing issue of funding. I could apply for a loan from any number of places, but I thought the best interest rates and repayment schedules were likely to be offered at Bank Dad. With that in mind, I spent hours when I should have been filing Jay’s cases writing up a graduate school proposal I thought might appeal to my father, Captain Corporate America. I took it home with me for Christmas—the actual day of Christmas, which was all the free time Jay would begrudge.

“What do you need another degree in English for?” my father wanted to know. He looked stern and disgruntled. Possibly the effect of his jolly red and green sweater, which I was trying to ignore. “Are there actually jobs if you do more of it?”

“Well.” I went for a pensive expression. “There’s teaching.”

His fantasy of a comfortable dotage spent in style at my expense took a serious hit. His brows lowered.

“Teaching,” he said, eyeing me. The way someone might say “grave digging.” We were sitting in his study, on opposite sides of his desk, almost as if I was applying for a job. “And why exactly do you have to go to England?”

I was actually prepared for that one. “Master’s programs in England are only a year long,” I told him. “So if I hate it, I’m not trapped for two or three more years.”

He liked that. He’d had to foot many a bill over the years, and he knew a little something about my attention span.

“I’ll have to think about it,” my father said gruffly, which, historically, meant yes. “Let’s see if you get in anywhere. Wasn’t there some problem with your grades?”

“My grades were fine,” I said through my teeth, and then returned to what remained of Christmas Day.

Oxford was the only rejection I got, having been too chicken to apply to Cambridge. I then had to choose between two northern British cities I’d never seen—one I’d never even heard of. My parents had been to the more famous of the two and vouched for its beauty. The university there offered the most exciting program I’d located across England. The campus, moreover, was arranged around a small lake in the glossy brochure, which reminded me of my undergraduate days. So that was that. All I had left to do was wait for school to begin next fall.

I took great delight in giving Jay a month’s notice on an airless August day when he was already in a foul mood, and even enjoyed training my terrified replacement.

“You must be kidding me,” Jay bitched on my last day. “Why are you doing this? What kind of money are you going to make with an English MA? At least go to law school.”

“I’m not so impressed with lawyers,” I said. He let out the bark that was his version of laughter. This was probably the closest we ever came to having a moment.

“Well,” he said gruffly, the moment over with a flick of his cunning little eyes, “good luck to you. And send that moron in here on your way out.”

I spent my last days packing up my small, cramped studio apartment into boxes and sweltering in the summer heat.

The closer I got to my departure date, the more at ease I felt, which went against the grain. I was nothing if not a coward. I’d been a disaster before leaving for college. The unknown usually filled me with panic. But for some reason, maybe because it was all still too huge and too unimaginable, the prospect of going to England was nothing but exciting. As if I’d finally located the path to my destiny and knew it, and could therefore simply relax into it.

“Are you nervous at all?” Robin asked. She was taking one of the rare lunch breaks her workload allowed her.

“I guess so,” I said, although I wasn’t. “But I think I’m going into it with the right attitude. . .