When I was 10 I became briefly addicted to milk. We lived in England that year on an exchange program with a British professor and his family, in a big house built for people who couldn’t stand the sight of each other: nothing but doors. The garden had a long lawn and flower beds and stone paths and a shed at the far end that wasn’t nearly as ramshackle or mysterious as I wanted it to be. Every night after dinner we put our empty milk bottles into a wire basket outside the front door and every morning before breakfast we brought in the fresh milk. The bottles were made of glass and went off to some vast factory to be sanitized, but the lids were made of foil, blue for nonfat, red for regular. The regular milk had a plug of cream at the top of the bottle that you could scoop out with the handle of your cereal spoon.
The whiteness, the coldness, the clean boiled bottle. The pleasure was so perfect it felt illicit, like eating your grandmother’s Pond’s cold cream out of the jar. I remember one night watching Dynasty on my mom’s bed and swigging from the bottle like a sports fan with a can of beer. That must have been the first of a harrowing series of growth spurts that left me lanky and achy and nearly six feet tall by seventh grade, but at the time all I thought was, milk.
Sometimes I took my milk with cereal. I tried Wheetabix, a British brand some of the kids at my school ate, but it was like eating a bale of hay. Mostly I had cornflakes. Cornflakes for breakfast, cornflakes for after-school snack, cornflakes for after-dinner snack. Cornflakes and milk. Home and away. Except home was away, someone else’s house that didn’t smell like us (lavender and mince pies), or sound like us (the draft slamming those doors, bang! bang! bang!), or bear any of the marks of our happy, busy, sloppy habits (the lawn was always short. Someone must have come to mow, but I never saw him).
Living in another family’s house for a year never quite stops feeling like house-sitting, and even though I took to hollering MUM! from the top of the stairs instead of MOM!, I was already too self-conscious to take it much further. Jumper, anorak, trainers. I wanted those words to be mine, too, but I was no Brit. I was well on my way to becoming the strappingest of American girls. And man, did I love Dynasty.
Bottoms up.
