by Edna O'Brien
The wardrobe was empty but we couldn’t hang our clothes because we had forgotten to bring hangers. So we laid them across the big armchair in the corner of the room.
At the gate below a motorbike started up and went roaring down the avenue. Gustav was gone.
In the next room a man began to play a fiddle.
“Jesus,” Baba said, simply, and put her hands to her ears. She was walking around the room with her hands to her ears, swearing, when Joanna knocked and came in.
“Herman, he does to practice,” she said, smiling, when Baba pointed with her thumb toward the other room. “Very talent. A musician. You like music?” And Baba said we adored music, and that we had come all the way to Dublin to hear a man playing a fiddle.
“Oh, nice. Good. Very nice,” and Baba made a gesture which told me that she thought Joanna was nuts. I was still unpacking, so Joanna came over and looked at my clothes. She asked me if my father was rich, and Baba chimed in and said he was a millionaire.
“A millionaire?” You could see her pupils get large behind her thick lenses.
“My charge too cheap then, hah?” she said, grinning at us. Her way of grinning was unfortunate. It was thick and stupid and made you hate her. But perhaps it was the glasses.
“No. Too dear,” Baba said.
“Dear? Darling? Klein? I not understand.”
“No. Too costly,” I said, catching my hair up with a ribbon and hoping before I consulted the mirror that it would make my face beautiful.
“You happy?” she asked, suddenly anxious, suddenly worried in case we should leave.
“We happy,” I said, for both of us, and she grinned. I liked her.
“I give you a present,” she said. We looked at one another in astonishment as she went out of the room.
She came back with a bottle of something yellow and two thimble-sized glasses. They were glasses such as the chemist had at home. They were for measuring medicines. She poured some of the thick yellow liquid into each glass.
“Your health here. Hah!” she said. We put the glasses to our lips.
“Good?” she asked, before we had tasted it at all.
“Good,” I said, lying. It was eggy and had a sharp spirit taste besides.
“Mine.” She put her hand across her stout chest. Her breasts were not defined; she was one solid front of outstanding chest.
“On the Continent we make our own. Parties, everything, we make our own.”
“God protect us from the Continent,” Baba said to me in Irish, and was smiling so that her two dimples showed.
I had put a jar of face cream and a small bottle of Evening in Paris perfume on the table, to make the room habitable, and Joanna went over to admire them. She took the lid off the cream jar and smelled it. Then she smelled the perfume.
“Nice,” she said, still smelling the contents of the dusky-blue perfume bottle.
“Have some,” I said, because we were under a compliment to her for the little drink.
“Expensive? Is it expensive?”
“Costs pounds,” Baba said, smirking into her glass. Baba was going to make a fool of Joanna, I could see that.
“Pounds. Mein Gott!” She screwed the metal cork back on the bottle and laid it down quickly. In case it should break.
“Tomorrow perhaps I have some. Tomorrow Sunday. You Catholics?”
“Yes. Are you?” Baba asked.
“Yes, but we on the Continent are not so rigid as you Irish.” She shrugged her shoulders to show a certain indifference. Her knitted dress was uneven at the tail and sagged at both sides. She went out and we heard her go downstairs.
“What will we do, Cait?” Baba asked as she lay full-length on the single bed.
“I don’t know. Will we go to confession?” It was what we usually did on Saturday evenings.
“Confession. Christ, don’t be such a drip, we’ll go downtown. Oh, God, isn’t it heaven?” She kicked her feet up in the air and hugged the pillow that was under the chenille bedspread.
“Put on everything you’ve got,” she said. “We’ll go to a dance.”
“So soon?”
“Christ, so soon! Soon, and we cooped up in that jail for three thousand years.”
“We don’t know the way.” I wasn’t really interested in dancing. At home I walked on the boys’ toes and couldn’t turn corners so well. Baba danced like a dream, spinning round and round until her cheeks were flushed and her hair blown every way.
“Go down and use your elegant English on Frau Buxomburger.”
“That’s not nice,” I said, putting on my wistful face. The face Mr. Gentleman liked best.
“Christ, she’s gas, isn’t she? I keep expecting that her old arse will drop off. Looks like one that’s stuck on.”
“Ssh, ssh,” I said. I was afraid the fiddler would hear us, as he had stopped sawing.
“Go down and ask, and stop this ssh-ing business.”
Joanna was pouring a kettle of scalding water over a dead Rhode Island Red chicken. When the bird was completely wet she began to tear the feathers away. I was in the kitchen watching her, but she hadn’t heard me because there was ceilidh music being played on the wireless.
The dead chicken reminded me of all our Sunday dinners at home. Hickey would wring a chicken’s neck on Saturday morning, leave it outside the back door, and it would stir and make an effort to move itself for a long time after it was killed. Bull’s-Eye, thinking it was alive, would bark at it and try to chase it away.
“Mein Gott! you give me a fright,” she said, turning around, as she held the chicken in one hand. I said I was very sorry and asked her the way downtown. She told me, but her instructions were very confusing and I knew that we would have to ask somebody else on the street.
When I came upstairs Baba had gone out to the bathroom, and without her the room was cheerless and empty. Outside in the avenue it was evening. The children were gone. The street was lonesome. A child’s handkerchief blew on one of the spears of our railing. There were houses stretching across the plain of city, houses separated by church spires, or blocks of flats, ten and twenty stories high. In the distance the mountains were a brown blur with clouds resting on them. They were not mountains really but hills. Gentle, memorable hills.
As I looked toward them, I thought of lambs being born in the cold and in the dark, of sheep farmers trudging down across the hills, and afterward I thought of the shepherds and their dogs stretching out in front of the fire, to doze for an hour until it was time to go out again and face the sharp wind. Our farm was not on the mountain, but four or five miles away there were mountains, where Hickey brought me once on the crossbar of his bicycle. He put a cushion on the bar, in case my bottom got sore. We went for a sheep dog. It was early spring, with lambs being born, and you could hear them bleating pitifully against the wind. We got the sheep dog. A handful of black and white fur, asleep in a box of hay. He grew up to be Bull’s-Eye.
“Will you come a-waltzing, Matilda, with me; waltzing, Matilda,” Baba sang behind my back, and drew me into a waltz.
“What in the hell are you thinking about?” she asked. But she did not wait to hear.
“I’ve a smashing idea. I’ll change my name. I’ll be Barbara, pronounced ‘Baubra.’ Sounds terrific, doesn’t it? Pity you’re going to work in that damn shop. ‘Twill cramp our style,” she said thoughtfully.
“Why?”
“Oh, every little country mohawk is in a bloody grocer’s. We’ll say you’re at college if anyone asks.”
“But who’s to ask?”
“Fellows; we’ll have them swarming around us. And, mind you, Christ, if you take any fellow of mine, I’ll give you something to cry about.”
“I won’t,” I said, smiling, admiring the big wide sleeves of my blouse and wondering if he would notice it and wondering, too, when he and Mrs. Gentleman would return home.
“Your cigarette, your cigarette,” I said to Baba. She had left it on the bedside table and it had burned
a mark in from the edge. You could smell the burnt wood.
“Mein Gott! what you mean?” Joanna said, bursting in without knocking.
“My best table, my table,” she said, rushing over to examine the burn mark. I was crimson with fear.
“Smoking, young girls, it is forbid,” she said; there were tears in her eyes as she threw the cigarette into the fireplace.
“We must have an ashtray,” Baba said, and then she looked at the little bamboo table and got down on her knees to look under it.
“It’s useless anyhow, it’s reeking with worms,” she said to Joanna.
“What you mean?” Joanna was breathing terribly hard, as if she were going to erupt.
“Woodworm,” Baba said, and Joanna jumped and said it was impossible. But in the end Baba won and Joanna took the table away and brought it out to a shed in the yard.
“Please, ladies, not to lie on the good bedspreads, they are from the Continent, pure chenille,” she said imploringly, and I promised that we would be more careful.
“Now we have no table,” I said to Baba, when Joanna went out.
“So what?” she asked, as she took off her dress.
“Was it wormy?” I asked.
“How the hell would I know?” She began to spray deodorant under her arms. Her neck was not as white as mine. I was pleased.
We got ready quickly and went down into the neon fairyland of Dublin. I loved it more than I had ever loved a summer’s day in a hay-field. Lights, faces, traffic, the enormous vitality of people hurrying to somewhere. A dark-faced woman in an orange silk thing went by.
“Christ, they’re in their underwear here,” Baba said. The woman had enormous dark eyes, with dark shadows under them. She seemed to be searching the night and the crowd for something poignant. Something to equal the beauty of the shadows and her carved, cat-like face.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” I said to Baba.
“She’s like something dug up,” Baba said as she crossed over to look in the glass door of an ice-cream parlor.
A doorman opened it, and held it open. So there was nothing for us to do but to go in.
We had two large dishes of ice cream. It was served with peaches and cream, and the whole lot was decorated with flaked chocolate. There were songs pouring out of a metal box near our table. Baba tapped her feet and swayed her shoulders, keeping time with the melody. Afterward she put money in the slot herself and played the same songs over again.
“Jesus, we’re living at last,” she said. She was looking around to see if there were any nice boys at the other tables.
“It’s nice,” I said. I meant it. I knew now that this was the place I wanted to be. Forevermore I would be restless for crowds and lights and noise. I had gone from the sad noises, the lonely rain pelting on the galvanized roof of the chicken house; the moans of a cow in the night, when her calf was being born under a tree.
“Are we going dancing?” Baba asked. My feet were tired and I told her so. We went home and bought a bag of chips in a shop quite near our avenue. We ate them going along the pavement. The lights overhead were a ghastly green.
“Jesus, you look like someone with consumption,” Baba said as she handed me a chip.
“So do you,” I said. And together we thought of a poem that we had learned long ago. We recited it out loud:
From a Munster Vale they brought her
From the pure and balmy air,
An Ormond Ullin’s daughter
With blue eyes and golden hair.
They brought her to the city
And she faded slowly there,
For consumption has no pity
For blue eyes and golden hair.
There were people looking at us, but we were too young to care. Baba blew into the empty chip bag until it was puffed out. Then she bashed it with her fist, and it burst, making a tremendous noise.
“I’m going to blow up this town,” she said, and she meant it, that first night in Dublin.
15
It was a clear spring day when I drew back the dusty cretonne curtains to let the sun into our bedroom on Monday morning. The room seemed shabby, now that I knew it better. The linoleum was worn thin, and Joanna had brought up an orange box and stood it on end between our two beds. She had covered it with a strip of cretonne that matched the curtains, but no matter how it was covered, it was still only an orange box.
“Breakfast,” she called as she knocked loudly on the bedroom door. Baba was asleep. She said she was going to miss college the first day because we had been dancing the night before and went to bed late. The room was untidy, there were clothes strewn all over the floor, and already the dressing table had a film of powder on it. It was nice to see the room so untidy. We were grown-up and independent.
I came downstairs and found Herman, the bald-headed lodger, eating some raw minced steak.
“Good for a man,” he said, smiling and tapping his chest to show how healthy he was. He did physical exercises morning and night, and Baba and I listened outside his door while he counted and thrust his arms and legs into the atmosphere.
“No egg, thank you,” I said to Joanna when she brought it in to me. Baba said that all the eggs in the city were rotten, and more than likely we’d find a dead chicken inside soon as we topped one. I took her advice and developed a disgust against all eggs, even against the little brown pullets’ eggs that Hickey coddled for me, long ago.
I ate quickly and set out, just before nine. Gustav wished me luck and saw me to the door.
“Gustav, come watch your toast,” Joanna called, so he waved and shut the door very quietly.
The grocery shop was only a five-minute walk. There were trees along the footpath, and it was a soft day. The buds had thrust their way to the very tips of the thin, black, graceful birch branches. The buds were lime-green and the branches black, slender branches stirring in the wind. There were pigeons on the chimney tops, and pigeons walking assuredly over the gray, sloping roofs. They were cheeky pigeons who didn’t mind the traffic. It was funny to watch them do their droppings, it squirted out easily and happily. I had never been so close to pigeons before.
My shop was in a shopping center, between a drapery and a chemist’s.
TOM BURNS—GROCERY was written over the door, and painted crookedly on the window was a sign which read HOME-COOKED HAM A SPECIALTY. There were fancy biscuit tins in the window and posters of girls eating crunchies. Nice girls with healthy teeth.
I went in nervously. Behind the counter stood a stout man with a brown mustache. He was weighing bags of sugar, which he scooped out of a big sack.
“I’m the new girl,” I said.
“Oh, you’re welcome,” he said as he shook hands with me. I followed him into the back of the shop. It was very untidy, with cardboard boxes littered all over the floor. Sitting on a high stool, copying bills from a large ledger, was a woman whom he introduced as his wife. She was wearing a white shop coat.
“Ah, darling, you’re welcome,” she said, as she swiveled around on the stool and faced me.
“Isn’t she lovely?” she said to him. “Oh, darling, you’re as welcome as the flowers in May. Gorgeous hair and everything.” She stroked my hair and I thanked her. Outside in the shop someone tapped the glass counter impatiently with a coin and Mr. Burns went out.
“Any empty boxes?” I heard a child’s voice ask, and he must have shaken his head, because light footsteps went out the door.
Mrs. Burns was smiling at me. She had a pale, round face and sleepy, tobacco eyes. She was fat (though not as comically fat as Joanna) and lazy-looking.
“Darling, did you bring your shop coat?” I said that I hadn’t heard about one and she said, “Oh, darling, how terrible, he should have told you. He’s so forgetful, he forgets to charge people for things.”
I said that was a pity and tried to look sympathetic.
“Darling, there’s a drapery two doors away. Maybe you’d like to nip out and get one. Tell Mrs. Doyle I sent yo
u.”
“I have no money,” I said. I had spent ten shillings at the dance the previous night. (It cost me five shillings to go in, another shilling to put my coat in the cloakroom, and I drank three minerals because nobody asked me to dance after I fell. I fell dancing a barn dance. I must have tripped over my partners shoes; anyhow, I fell, and my flared skirt blew up around me, so that people saw my garters and things. Baba looked away as if she didn’t know me, and my partner slunk off toward the bandstand. It was an awful moment. Then I got up, smoothed my skirt, and went upstairs. I sat on the balcony and drank minerals for the rest of the night. I tried to look casual as hell, to show that I wasn’t interested in dancing anyhow. Down below, Baba was drifting under the soft pink lights, and hundreds of boys and girls were dancing cheek to cheek up and down the ballroom under the twists of colored papers that hung from the ceiling and moved to a music of their own. Waltzing was forgetfulness and I wished that Mr. Gentleman would suddenly appear out of nowhere and steer me through the strange, long, sweet night, and say things in my ear and keep his arms around me, even when the music stopped and the girls went back to their seats until the music struck up and they were asked for the next dance.)
“Well, darling, you better wait then, until you get paid on Saturday,” Mrs. Burns said churlishly. She folded her thin lips inward so that you thought she had none. She was displeased.
Mr. Burns told me to weigh bags of tea and sugar, and after that he said I could weigh half pounds of streaky rashers.
“Tom, I think I’ll make the bed now and get a few hams on,” his wife said, and disappeared for the rest of the morning. He filled the shelves with tins of peas and bottles of relish, and all the time he talked to me. He told me he was a country man and how much he loved the country, and the Sundays long ago in Galway when he played hurley. Very long ago, I thought to myself.
“I go back there every year. Last year I helped them cut the turf,” he said. And in that instant I saw Hickey’s boot on a slane, cutting a sod from the black-brown turf bank. When he dug the slane into the bank, water squelched out and flowed down into the pool of black bog water. I saw the bog water and the bog lilies and the blackened patches of ground where we had made fires to boil a kettle, and the heather which brushed my ankles and the great limestone ridges that rose out of the brown and purple earth. Often, while Hickey was cutting or footing the turf, I used to wander away over to the bog lake, picking my steps from one limestone rock to the next. The edge of the bog lake was fringed with bulrushes, and at certain times of the year their heads were a soft brown plush. And at other times of the year, flowers came on the water-lily leaves. Wax flowers, swaying, on the flat green saucer leaves. Pretty flowers that no one ever saw because the men cutting turf were too busy. The rushes were lonesome; when the wind cried through them the cry was like the curlew, and the curlew was the Uileann pipe that Billy Tuohey played in the evenings. At the far edge of the lake there was a belt of poplar trees, shutting out the world. The world I wanted to escape into. And now that I had come into the world, that scene of bogs and those country faces were uppermost in my thoughts.