by Colm Toibin
“In Ireland no one looks,” Eilis said. “It would be bad manners.”
“In Italy it would be bad manners not to look.”
Later in the week Miss Fortini approached Eilis in the morning to say that the bathing suits were to be delivered in the afternoon and Eilis could try them on in the fitting room after work when the store had closed. Since the store was busy towards the end of the working day, Eilis had almost forgotten about it until she found Miss Fortini hovering around her with the package. They waited until everyone had left and then Miss Fortini informed the security that they would be there for a while longer, that she herself would turn the lights off and they would leave by a side door.
The first bathing suit was black and appeared the right size for her. Eilis pulled the curtains back and moved out of the changing cubicle so that Miss Fortini could see it. Miss Fortini seemed uncertain as she studied it carefully, putting one hand over her mouth as though this would help her to concentrate better and as though to emphasize that getting this right was a most serious matter. She walked around Eilis so that she could inspect how it fitted from behind and, moving closer, put her hand under the firm elastic that held the bathing suit in place at the top of Eilis’s thighs. She pulled the elastic down a fraction and then patted Eilis twice on the bottom, letting her hand linger the second time.
“My, you are going to have to work on your figure,” she said as she went to the package and took out a second bathing suit, which was green.
“I think the black might be too severe,” she said. “If your skin was not so white, it might be fine. Now try this.”
Eilis pulled back the curtain and changed into the green bathing suit. She could hear the humming of the harsh lights overhead but otherwise was aware only of the silence and the emptiness of the store and the intensity and sharpness of Miss Fortini’s gaze as she appeared in front of her once more. Without speaking, Miss Fortini knelt down in front of her and once more put her fingers under the elastic.
“You’ll have to shave down here,” she said. “Otherwise, you’ll spend your time on the beach pulling the elastic down. Do you have a good razor?”
“Just for my legs,” Eilis said.
“Well, I’ll get you one that will do the trick down here too.”
Remaining on her knees, she turned Eilis around until Eilis could see herself in the mirror with Miss Fortini behind her, running her fingers under the elastic, her eyes fixed on what was in front of her. She was, Eilis thought, fully aware that she could be seen in the mirror; she could feel herself blushing as Miss Fortini stood up and faced her.
“I don’t think these straps are right,” she said and motioned to Eilis to put her arms through them and unloose them. When she did, the entire front of the bathing suit folded down and, for a moment, until she held the suit up with her two hands, her breasts were exposed.
“Is this one not all right?” she asked.
“No, try the others,” Miss Fortini said. “Come here and try this one.”
She seemed to be suggesting that Eilis not go behind the curtain again but change from one bathing suit to another beside the chair as she watched. Eilis hesitated.
“Quickly now,” Miss Fortini said.
As Eilis lowered the suit she put one arm over her breast and bent over as she took it off, facing towards Miss Fortini so she did not feel so exposed. She put her hand out to take the suit, but Miss Fortini had lifted it and the other one that she had not tried, holding them up for perusal.
“Maybe I should go behind the curtain,” Eilis said. “If one of the security men comes in.”
She took both bathing suits and brought them into the cubicle and pulled the curtain. She was aware that Miss Fortini had been watching her carefully as she moved. She hoped that this would be over quickly and they would choose one of the suits and she hoped also that Miss Fortini would not say anything else about shaving.
Having put on the next suit, which was a bright pink, she opened the curtain and appeared again. Miss Fortini seemed immensely serious, and there was in the way she stood and gazed at her something clear that Eilis knew she would never be able to tell anyone about.
She stood still with her arms by her sides as Miss Fortini discussed the colour, wondering if it were too bright, and the cut of the suit, which she thought too old-fashioned. Once more, as she walked around, she touched the elastic at the top of Eilis’s thighs and let her hand move over the rise of Eilis’s bottom, patting her there, allowing her hand to linger.
“Now try the other,” she said and stood where the curtain was, thus preventing Eilis from closing it. Eilis removed the bathing suit as quickly as she could and, in her haste to put on the last one, began to fumble, putting her leg in the wrong place. She had to bend to lift the suit and had to use both her hands to find the right way of putting it on. No one had ever seen her naked like this; she did not know how her breasts would seem, if the size of the nipples or the dark colour around them was unusual or not. She went from feeling hot with embarrassment to feeling almost cold. She was relieved when the suit was on and she was standing up once more being inspected by Miss Fortini.
Eilis did not think there was any difference between the suits; simply, she did not want the black one or the pink one, but, since the others fitted her and their colours were not extreme in any way, she felt happy to take either of them. Thus when Miss Fortini suggested that she try each of them on again before she finally decided, Eilis refused and said that she would take either and did not mind which. Miss Fortini said that she would send all of them back with a note in the morning to her friend in the nearby store and Eilis could go herself at lunchtime and collect the one she had chosen. Her friend would make sure, Miss Fortini said, that she got a good discount. When Eilis was dressed and ready, Miss Fortini turned off all the lights in the store and they left by a side entrance.
Eilis tried to eat less but it was hard, as she could not sleep if she was hungry. In the bathroom, when she looked at herself in the mirror, she did not think she was too fat, and when she tried on the bathing suit she had selected she was much more worried about how pale her skin was.
One evening when she came home from work she found an envelope for her on the side table in the kitchen. It was an official letter from Brooklyn College to say that she had passed her first-year exams in all subjects and if she needed to know her precise grades she could contact them. They hoped, the letter said, that she would be returning the following year, which would begin in September, and they provided dates by which she should register.
It was a beautiful evening. She thought she would miss supper and walk down to the parish house and show the letter to Father Flood. Once she had left a note for Mrs. Kehoe and made her way into the street, she began to observe how beautiful everything was, the trees in leaf, the people in the street, the children playing, the light on the buildings. She had never felt like this before in Brooklyn. The letter had lifted her spirits, given her a new freedom, she realized, and it was something she had not expected. She looked forward to showing it to Father Flood if he were at home and then, when she saw him the following night as arranged, to Tony, and then to writing home with the news. In one year she would be a qualified bookkeeper and she could start looking for a better job. In a year the weather would grow hotter and unbearable and then the heat would fade and the trees would lose their leaves and then the winter would return to Brooklyn. And that too would dissolve into spring and early summer with long sunny evenings after work until she would again, she hoped, get a letter from Brooklyn College.
And in all of her dreams, as she walked along, of how this year would be she imagined Tony’s smiling presence, his attention, his funny stories, his holding her against him at one of the street corners, the sweet smell of his breath as he kissed her, the sense of his golden concentration on her, his arms around her, his tongue in her mouth. She had all of that, she thought, and now, with this letter, it was much more than she had imagined she would
have when she arrived in Brooklyn first. She had to stop herself smiling as she moved along in case people thought that she was mad.
Father Flood came to the door with a sheaf of papers in his hand. He ushered her into the parlour at the front of his house. As he read the letter he looked worried and even when he handed it back to her he remained serious.
“You are marvellous,” he said gravely. “That is all I have to say.”
She smiled.
“Most people who come to this house without notice need something or have a problem,” he said. “You hardly ever get pure good news.”
“I have saved some money,” Eilis said, “and will be able to pay my tuition the second year and then pay you back for last year when I get a job.”
“One of my parishioners paid,” Father Flood said. “He needed to do something for mankind so I made him pay your tuition for last year and I’ll remind him soon that he needs to cough up for this year. I told him it’s a good cause and it makes him feel noble.”
“Did you tell him it was for me?” she asked.
“No. I gave him no details.”
“Will you thank him for me?”
“Sure. How’s Tony?”
She was surprised by the question, how casual and unworried it seemed, how freely it suggested that Tony was a regular fixture rather than a problem or an interloper.
“He’s great,” she said.
“Has he taken you to a game yet?” the priest asked.
“No, but he threatens to all the time. I asked him if Wexford were playing but he didn’t get the joke.”
“Eilis, here’s one piece of advice for you,” Father Flood said as he opened the door to see her into the hallway. “Never make jokes about the game.”
“That’s what Tony said too.”
“He’s a solid man,” Father Flood said.
As soon as she showed Tony the letter when they met the next evening he said that they would have to go to Coney Island the following Sunday to celebrate.
“Champagne?” she asked.
“Sea water,” he replied. “And then a slap-up dinner in Nathan’s afterwards.”
She bought a beach towel at Bartocci’s and a sun hat from Diana, who said that she did not want it any more. At supper, Diana and Patty produced their sunglasses for the season, which they had bought on the boardwalk at Atlantic City.
“I read somewhere,” Mrs. Kehoe said, “that they could ruin your eyes.”
“Oh, I don’t care,” Diana said. “I think they’re gorgeous.”
“And I read,” Patty said, “that if you don’t have them this year on the beach people will talk about you.”
Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan fitted them on and, openly ignoring Dolores, passed them to Eilis to try.
“Well, they are very glamorous, I’ll say that,” Mrs. Kehoe said.
“I’ll sell you that pair,” Diana said to Eilis, “because I can get another pair on Sunday.”
“Can you really?” Eilis asked.
When they discovered that Eilis had bought a new swimsuit, they insisted on seeing it. Eilis, when she came upstairs with it, deliberately handed it to Dolores first to hold up in front of her.
“You’re lucky, Eilis, to have the figure for it,” Mrs. Kehoe said.
“I can’t go out in the sun at all,” Dolores said. “I get all red.”
Patty and Diana began to laugh.
On Sunday morning when Tony collected her he appeared surprised by the sunglasses.
“I’ll have to tie a rope around you,” he said. “All the guys at the beach will want to run away with you.”
The subway station was packed with people going to the beach and there were cries of horror as the first two trains went through the station without stopping. The air was stifling as everyone crushed together. When finally a train stopped it seemed that there was no space for anyone and yet everyone began to crowd into the compartments, laughing and shouting and demanding that people move over and make room for them. By the time she and Tony, who was carrying a folded beach umbrella as well as a bag, found a door, there was no room at all in the train. She was amazed when Tony, holding her hand, began to push against the crowd in the compartment to make a space for both of them before the doors closed.
“How long is it going to take?” she asked.
“An hour, maybe more, it depends on how many stops it makes. But cheer up, think of the big waves.”
The beach, when they finally arrived, was almost as packed as the train had been. She noticed that Tony had not lost his smile once during the journey, despite being deliberately squashed against a door by a man, encouraged by his wife. Now he seemed to feel, as he studied the crowd on the beach, where there was no place for newcomers, that they had been put there for his amusement. They moved along the boardwalk, but the only solution, Eilis saw, was to take a tiny spot that was empty and see if, by their very presence there, they could expand it so they both could unpack their belongings and lie in the sun.
Diana and Patty had warned her that no one changed on the beach in Italy. Italians had carried to America with them the custom of putting their bathing suits on under their clothes before they set out, thus avoiding the Irish habit of changing on the beach, which was, Diana said, ungraceful and undignified, to say the least. Eilis did not know if they were joking so she checked with Miss Fortini, who assured her that it was true. Miss Fortini also insisted that she should lose more weight and brought in a small pink-coloured razor for her and told her that she need not return it. Despite all this preparation, Eilis was nervous about taking off her clothes and appearing in her swimsuit in front of Tony; her efforts to pretend that it was nothing made her even more embarrassed. She wondered if he would notice that she had shaved and she felt she was too white and that her thighs and her bottom were too fat.
Tony stripped down to his bathing trunks instantly and, she was glad to see, nonchalantly looked at the crowds around them as she wriggled out of her clothes. As soon as she was ready, he wanted to go into the sea. He arranged with the family beside them that their things would be looked after and they made their way past the crowds down to the water’s edge. Eilis laughed when she saw him recoiling from the cold; the water, compared to the water in the Irish Sea, seemed quite warm to her. She waded out while he struggled to follow her.
As she swam out, he stood helplessly up to his waist in the water, and when she motioned for him to follow her, shouting that he was not to be a baby, he shouted back that he could not swim. She did a gentle breaststroke in his direction and then slowly realized, by seeing what the couples around them were up to, what his plan was. He wanted, it seemed, the two of them to stand up to their necks in the water, holding each other as each wave crashed over them. When she embraced him, he held her so that she could not easily swim away from him. She could feel his erect penis hard against her, which made him smile even more than usual, and, when he wanted to put his hands on her bottom as he held her, she swam away from him. The thought had come into her mind of telling him who the last person to touch her bottom was. The idea of his reaction to this made her laugh so much that she did a vigorous backstroke, letting him presume, she hoped, that he was being too free under the water with his hands.
All day they moved between their place on the beach and the ocean. She put on her sun hat and he raised the umbrella to prevent sunburn and he also produced a picnic that his mother had prepared for him, including a thermos of ice-cold lemonade. In the water, the few times that she swam out on her own, she felt that the waves were stronger than at home, not so much in the way they broke but in the way they pulled out. She realized that she would have to be careful not to swim too far out of her depth in this unfamiliar sea. Tony, she saw, was afraid of the water, hated her swimming away from him. As soon as she returned to him each time, he made her put her arms around his neck and he lifted her from below so that her legs were wrapped around him. When he kissed her and then held her face back and looked at her, he s
eemed not to be embarrassed by his erection at all but proud of it. He was all boyish as he grinned at her; she, in turn, felt a great tenderness towards him and kissed him deeply as he held her. As the day waned, they were almost the last remaining in the water.
When Eilis complained of the heat at work they told her that it was only the beginning, but one day Miss Fortini told her that Mr. Bartocci was about to turn on the air-conditioning and soon the place would be crowded with shoppers seeking relief from the heat. Her job, Miss Fortini said, was to make them all buy something.
Soon, Eilis looked forward to going to work, and longed, as she woke sweating in the night, for the air-conditioning in Bartocci’s. In the evening Mrs. Kehoe put chairs out in front of the house and they sat there fanning themselves even in the shade, even after dark some nights. On Eilis’s half-day Tony took a half-day too and they went to Coney Island and came back late. When she asked him if they could have a go on the huge wheel or one of the other amusements, he refused, managing each time to find an excuse why they could not. He gave her no hint that he had lost his previous girlfriend because he took her on the wheel. Eilis was fascinated by this, the easy, casual way he prevented them from going there, his sweet duplicity in giving no sign of what had happened before. She was almost glad to know that he had secrets and had ways of calmly keeping them.
As the summer wore on he could talk nothing except baseball. The names he told her about—names like Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese and Preacher Roe—were the names she also heard about at work and saw mentioned in the newspapers. Even Mrs. Kehoe spoke about these players as though she knew them. She had gone the previous year to the house of her friend Miss Scanlan to watch a game on her television, and, since she was a Dodgers supporter, as she told everyone, she intended to do so again if Miss Scanlan, who was also a Dodgers supporter, would have her.
It seemed to Eilis for a while that no one spoke of anything else except the need to defeat the Giants. Tony told her with real excitement that he had secured tickets for Ebbets Field not only for himself and Eilis but for his three brothers and it was going to be the best day of their lives because they were going to get revenge for what Bobby Thomson had done to them the previous season. As he walked through the streets with her Tony was not alone in doing imitations of his favourite players and shouting about the hopes he had for them.