Continued from A Transatlantic Love Story, Part I …

I’d barely been out of my own state before, but there I was in another country. I could go back to my journals and give you the sweeping details of finding freedom for the first time in my life, but I really only have one memory, written on a heart-shaped postcard, and mailed back home to my mom and step-dad:

I’m standing on the stoop of a fruit stall in the center of London, peeling a satsuma—which I’ve found is a delicious sort of little orange—and feeling like the luckiest girl alive. I love you and thank you so much for this opportunity. I promise I won’t waste it.

I spent a few happy days in London probably touring Buckingham Palace and riding those ridiculous open-roofed buses, but I honestly can’t remember. I know that the pound equaled $1.75, which meant I would live in poverty while in Great Britain, and that almost every accent made me giggle. I know that my new-found exchange student friend from Boston (who we’ll call Laura) and I told the cab driver that we needed to go to Liverpool station, not knowing that Liverpool Street Station, where we actually needed to go, was an entirely different place. I know we missed our train, got the next one, and ate some cookies with a hilarious name that kept us laughing all through our journey to the east coast of England. They were Milk Chocolate Digestives and are divine, but there’s one very good reason why I’m vague on all of the other details. I stood on the cusp of meeting the most wonderful person in the whole world and, as Mary Poppins blew away all of the other nannies on the wind that carried her in, so did he, blowing away every memory in my mind that did not have him in it.

That’s getting ahead. Backing up, once at the university, Laura and I got shuffled to separate housing lines, losing track of each other. A student housing representative showed me to my dorm, which turned out to be a twelve-person house with private bedrooms and bathrooms and a shared kitchen. At twenty-years-old, that combination was the very essence of heaven. I sat, basking in the glory of my very own private bathroom, when I heard a knock at the door.

No one knew me. No one knew I was there. What could anybody want with me? Someone knocked again so, timidly, I opened the door.

A small girl with frizzy hair and a quiet smile introduced herself as my neighbor, pointing to the door straight across from mine.

“You have a phone call,” she said.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

She laughed. “Yeah, you’re the only new person in our building.”

“Oh,” I said, still thinking that the call couldn’t possibly be for me.

“You can take it downstairs,” she said, “next to the kitchen.”

Yep, I had my own private bathroom but a public telephone. I trudged downstairs to where the receiver dangled from its cord in midair.

“Hello?”

“Hi, it’s Laura,” she said. “You’ve got to get over here quick. There are real life English boys in my kitchen as I speak.”

Real life English boys in England! Imagine it! It was the thing we’d spent our lives dreaming of. I dashed upstairs, put on black knee-high boots with black tights, a black skirt, a black shirt, and my black leather jacket. At twenty, I believed this outfit to be the height of sexiness. Sex appeal in check, I headed ten doors down to her house.

Two real life English boys sat in her kitchen with eight American girls flocked around them. One of those boys wore a winter coat with the hood pulled up and the strings drawn tight trying to fight a hangover and the uber attention of the Beatles-like mania that had descended on his house. Girls tittered and questioned and leaned in to reveal healthy American breasts, but one little fact lingered in the ether that meant none of those girls had even the slightest little cat’s meow of a chance with that boy. That English boy was destined to be my husband.

When asked what he remembers about that night, he says, “I remember a pretty girl with bouncy hair.”

That’s me. What’s also me is not sticking around to fight over boys. After about an hour where I didn’t say one word to him, I went back to my house to continue my love affair with my own private bathroom, the first and only one I’ve ever had.