American Shame

Miles came home at four-thirty.

He shut the front door, set his keys and wallet down on the mantel, kicked off his shoes, and shrugged off his bag. On school nights, he left it laying at the bottom of the stairs, right where he could snatch it in a hurry and be off with a granola bar in hand and his water bottle in the other. And this afternoon was no different: he set the bag at the bottom of the stairs and went downstairs, to the kitchen.

“Miles?” his mother called. He stepped from the staircase and walked toward the counter, where she was sitting with their salt and pepper Schnauzer—named London, for some reason—on her lap.

“Hi, Mom,” he said, and stopped there.  He turned to the pantry, opened it, and scanned its contents.

“Hungry?”

After a moment of deliberation, he settled on a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. Miles brought it down, popped it open with a single tug, and began to eat. The crackle was muffled behind his closed mouth. 

He went to sit down in the armchair opposite his mother. London lifted her head to sniff the salt and vinegar.

“How was your day?” she asked.

“Oh, fine.” He ate and tried not to speak with his mouth full. “Mr Zaragoza had a slideshow today with a hidden picture of Brezhnev on every single slide. He

thought it was the funniest thing ever when none of us could find him on one. Said his eyebrows gave him away every time.” 

His mother stroked the dog.

“And this is your—history teacher?”

Miles nodded. 

“Otis wants me to go out with everyone on Friday, as well.” 

He stuffed a crisp into his mouth and chewed for a while, noticing his mother’s stare. It would give him time to think about what to say next—she was waiting, Miles knew. This was the third time he had brought it up in the last week, and twice before it had ended in them not speaking for a few hours until Miles’ father came home for dinner. Now he was going to try again—even though he knew he shouldn’t—simply because he thought she wouldn’t shut him down this time. She couldn’t . . . if he was still talking about it, it clearly meant something to him—that was what he was hoping she would understand. But how to make that clear did not come so easily to him. And so he chewed and waited and thought.

“You want to go?” she asked.  London had put her head back down on his mother’s lap and had gone to sleep. 

Miles finished the crisps, stood quickly to put the packet in the bin, dusted his fingers on his jeans, and sat back down again. 

He nodded.

“It will just be out to the pub, right near Otis’ place. Only for a couple of hours. I’ll be home at midnight. Before, if you want.”

Sometimes, he could hear a tinge of a British accent coming through. His voice was still very American—they always looked at him funny or cracked a joke at school when he said ‘wahdder’ or ‘tomaydo’—but he found that, ever since he had started school here, his accent had lessened. His intonation was different; his sentences longer; his vocabulary altered. One time, he had caught himself saying ‘rubbish’ instead of ‘garbage’, and he had shook his head in what his Texan grandfather might

have called American shame. 

“You’re just—” His mother paused and thought. Miles expected her to say the same thing she had twice before, and she did. “You’re only seventeen, Miles. And this drinking thing is . . . it’s distasteful.”

Distasteful? Miles wasn’t so sure about that. He was, however, absolutely certain that his mother had been going out and bending rules and taking risks when she was his age. Younger, even. Parents had a way of trying to prevent their children from making the same ‘mistakes’ they had when they were kids. Miles didn’t think that was very practical, or true—he had often found that the best way to learn was through firsthand experience, not authoritarian impositions. 

Then he thought of something. Something which he hadn’t during those last two conversations.

“But it’s part of the English culture, Mom.”

She cocked her head, almost like she’d been slapped. Her hand froze on the dog’s back.

“What? Going out, drinking with your friends, underage at the pub? That’s not part of British culture, Miles. It’s not part of any culture. It’s illegal, for crying out loud. You know that, don’t you?”

“Everybody does it here. Doesn’t that mean it’s part of the culture?”

His mother shut one eye, like she was having a mini-stroke of some kind. The vein on her temple was popping out—that was never a good sign.

“You love the English culture,” Miles said. He could hear his heart thumping in his throat.  “You’ve embraced it more than anyone else in the family. You’ve got a Union Jack flag framed in the living room—a picture of the Royal Family on the mantel, beside our own family photos—you named London London.”

The dog, awake now, jumped off Miles’ mother’s lap. She went trotting away from the noise and the unpleasant conversation.

“Are you saying that English people’s culture is drinking and getting drunk every Friday with their friends?” His mother leaned forward. “Do you really think that, Miles?”

He actually wasn’t sure. But any sign of weakness would crush him—he couldn’t let her see it. 

So he said: “Yes. I do.”

“Well.” She made a move like she was going to get up, clutching the arms of the white chair, and planted her heels into the floor. “Then you have a lot to learn about what culture means, son.”

“I just think that culture is more a reflection of people’s behaviour rather than age-old traditions and mystical nonsense.”

“Nonsense?” 

Miles glanced at the Big Ben and double decker bus magnets on the fridge to his left. They had been there ever since they had moved into the house—they may have been stuck there before there was a chair in the house.

“You think what I’ve embraced is nonsense?”

“It isn’t real,” Miles said. “All this stuff about the King, the nation being this place of united and polite people. It might be something a tourist takes away from being here, but not someone that lives here. No, someone that lives here knows that all of that is just the British surface.”

“So what I’ve embraced is nonsense.” 

His mother stood up, pushing herself off the chair. She thundered away, and Miles thought that was the end of it. But she stopped in the doorway, back to her son, and he watched her look up at the ceiling like something was written there.

“Miles,” she said, softer and sounding less like she was going to punch a hole through a wall, “the English culture which I have embraced are the things which I think apply best to our lives and our values. Are you able to understand that? What I love about this country are the things that I’ve upheld in this household and taken on board by living here—they are the pillars I want to follow.”

“And so you can just ignore everything else?”

She didn’t speak. Miles watched her shoulders raise with every breath. He knew she was trying to keep calm.

“There is nothing to ignore, Miles. I just find it disrespectful to claim that ‘British culture’ and ‘integration’ are why you want to go hang out with your friends in a pub somewhere on Friday—not because you just wanna get smashed and live it up because it’s cool at your age.”

That struck a nerve in him. 

He fired back.

“You can’t just completely admire and worship one part of a culture, and then completely disregard the other part. It doesn’t work like that. It’s either all or nothing, and I think we should be going all out.”

“All out or not,” she snapped, “that doesn’t give you the green light to go and binge drink with your friends because you think it’s part of British culture. Don’t you see an issue there? Are you able to see it, Miles?”

“I think I see the issue,” he said. He began to nod, very solemnly, like an investigator who’s just solved a case. “The issue is that you think I’m going to drink on Friday, and that’s the whole reason I’m going. When I said nothing about drinking, did I?”

“Yes, you did,” she said. She turned around and faced him. Her face was blanched like snow, but her eyes were dark, very dark, like lumps of coal.

“I just want to spend time with my friends, who are British,” he said. “And the way that they spend time with their friends is at the pub, or drinking. And I don’t see why I can’t do the same, if we’re so British.”

“It’s not British,” she said. “It’s teenaged.”

“If we were living in the U.S. right now, the same thing would be happening.”

“It most certainly would not.” She began to shake her head. Then, she grinned, like she realised something so horrendous and yet pleasing at the same time. “No one would be out drinking, because you’re underage. End of story, son! When you’re eighteen, which is the legal age here, you can do whatever you want. And you’re pretty damn lucky to be here, because, if we were back in the States, you’d have to wait until you’re twenty-one!”

They stopped for a second. Catching their breaths, maybe.

“I know.” Miles looked up at his mother and held her gaze for a while. “I know why you won’t let me go.”

“Oh yeah?” That smile of hers remained. “And why’s that?”

“Because you’re holding onto your American culture too strongly.” 

She didn’t say anything—but a glaze twinkled in her eyes. One of anger and yet reflection, intertwined in a shiny stare.

“You grew up in an environment where drinking and going out to the pub with friends was never a thing. Parties were common, I’m sure, but never this kind of thing. And especially in a public environment, it would have been unheard of for you. And so you can’t disassociate here. Your culture’s too ingrained into you. If you really wanted to embrace British culture, true British culture, you’d let me go. You’d know it would be alright, and you wouldn’t be so American-ly scared.”

Most mothers would probably have smacked their son across the face—sent him to bed without dinner—stopped speaking to him for a day, maybe two. But Miles’ mother stood there, waiting, looking at her son and thinking. 

He saw things changing behind her eyes. Though she didn’t like and didn’t want to accept it, things were changing.

“Do you see what I mean?” he said. Silence, then.

“You’re growing up too fast,” She looked down and shook her head. That grin was long gone. “And you’re too smart for your own good.” 

That resigned, ultimate tone—that scared Miles. He didn’t typically hear it from his mother. His father, maybe, when he was trying to get across a point in the most neutral yet impactful way possible. But this was new and unknown to him.

“You’re not going,” she said. Quiet. Almost a whisper. 

The conviction and the strength had gone out of her voice. She was no longer his mother in that moment. She was just an American-British woman, an immigrant, a person who’d wanted the best for her and for her children. And he’d ripped apart her identity—her decisions, her reasoning, her life. All of it, he’d questioned and brought to light. Just to win some argument about going to the pub with Otis. It was important to him, of course it was. But to see his mother, standing in the kitchen, head bowed next to the Big Ben and double decker bus magnets on the fridge—it lifted the hairs on his neck and twisted his intestines.

“I’m—” He wanted to stand. He could not. His voice was purely, strongly American now. “I’m sorry, Mom.” 

But she had turned her back and gone upstairs.

Miles sat there for a while, silent and thinking. He wasn’t sure where to go from there—what to tell Otis, what to tell his father. There wasn’t a doubt that he had crossed a line. He had torn his mother’s beliefs to shreds. And all because he thought he needed to go to the pub on Friday. 

A little while later, London came trotting back into the kitchen. She found Miles, jumped up on the chair, and curled into his lap. 

He stroked her and waited for nothing.

By Finn Deegan