What Are You Like

by Anne Enright

  Sometime in the afternoon, Rose drifted painfully down to the kitchen. She had a violent need for fried eggs. Two frilly fried eggs, and toast, and a sliced tomato, and a basin full of tea. A bath full of tea.

  The kitchen was deserted, apart from the cats. She ate and went upstairs again and slept like she was eating sleep.

  At nine o’clock she woke and walked down the stairs in the dark. Her parents were home, she could hear their familiar silence, and see the yellow light pushing out through the gap in the door. All right, I was pissed, she said in her head. Yes everything is fine. No I am not in pain.

  ‘All right, love?’

  ‘All right,’ said Rose. Her mother was thin. Her arms reminded Rose of eating chicken wings, the way the meat was attached to the bone.

  Her father sat at the table, surrounded by bits of paper. He spent the days of his retirement writing urgent letters – health issues, committees, the local Labour party. All the lost causes, like he was running faster in fear of the wall.

  He stood up and tested her forehead with the heel of his hand.

  ‘You’ll live.’

  ‘Apparently.’ He grazed her mother’s cheek with his knuckle as he sat back down, and Rose was chastened. Who said there must be something missing in this passionate old house, where people believed small things – lived them exactly and to the brim.

  ‘Anyone for tea?’ she said.

  Back in her own flat, the kitchen smelt of melon peel. Rose opened the window and tied up the rubbish. She put in a fresh bin bag, and the first thing she threw into it was the bag it came in. There was a certain satisfaction to it that made her smile.

  Then she sorted through her head, shuffling her feelings and putting them back where they belonged. She would go to the gym, that was the first thing. She would buy a book on rape crisis counselling and read it. She would write to her father and ask him where he was, or where was her mother’s grave. And when he wrote back to her, she would fly to Dublin and rent a car, and leave the car at a cemetery gate, and walk through the confused rows of the dead, until she found the right stone and the name it held.

  Mother Alert

  Dublin, 21 April 1987

  SINEAD, THE MANAGER, put her head round the curtain.

  ‘Mother alert,’ she said, and smiled.

  Sometimes, when Evelyn came in, Maria took pity on her – this woman who looked around her room and held it all in contempt. Evelyn tried on the clothes like they would strangle her, or make her look working class. Deep down, she was just a snob. She had the snob’s indignant little chin. It did Maria’s heart good just to send her back out into the street, back to her hand-sewn tweeds and the faded velour of home.

  But today, she was very wound up. Maria followed her out of the shop and wanted to explain things.

  It was raining, and Jim on security cursed as he went back inside to switch off the alarm. Maria realised she had half a rail of wool-mix trousers slung over her arm.

  She looked at Evelyn standing there and she didn’t know what to say. She let her walk away, looked at her satisfied backside crossing the street and,

  That’s not it, she thought. That’s not it at all.

  A couple of months before she went to New York, Maria came home and found an envelope on the kitchen table. Her name was written on it, in Evelyn’s handwriting, and inside, she found her blister pack of the pill. She’d only had sex once. In the circumstances, it looked sort of lonely.

  Maria looked around the kitchen, which was immensely clean. She could imagine it all. Berts sitting at the table saying nothing, while Evelyn scrubbed the cooker. Berts giving a grunt or two, while Evelyn swiped the floor with a mop.

  ‘She’s your daughter,’ she might say.

  And Laura, smelling trouble, coming in to put on a couple of slices of toast.

  For the rest of the week Maria came in late, and stayed in bed until after Berts had left for work. On Saturday, she heard the sound of the radio coming from his room, all morning. It was three o’clock before she braved the landing. The sound of her footsteps had Berts out of the bed on the instant, with her hair in his hand. She tried to get past him and through the bathroom door.

  They did not speak. Evelyn was below in the hall, foreshortened by the stairs, a big anxious head and smug little feet. She headed for the kitchen.

  Berts looked at the hank of hair in his hand, and let it go. She slammed the bathroom door on him and sat down to have a pee.

  ‘Hurry up in there,’ he said.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Maria.

  ‘Hurry up,’ said Berts. ‘I have to go.’

  When she heard him leave the landing, she ran across to her own room. He came out then to take his turn in the bathroom, and pissed for about half an hour.

  He came into her room, dressed and shaved. He stood in silence beside the bed.

  ‘When I met your mother,’ he said, ‘she was innocent. We both were. That was the way of it.’

  They both heard his words, bare and helpless in the room. Maria hefted the duvet and turned her back on him. His lovely bride and their lovely love. It was bullshit. It was not her fault.

  He sat on the end of the bed and said nothing. She started to cry.

  ‘Oh Daddy,’ she said. ‘What will I do?’ She was sobbing into the pillow. ‘What will I do?’ Berts sat there, patting her hip.

  ‘Sure, he isn’t worth it.’ When she looked at him finally, he said,

  ‘You know, you have your mother’s eyes,’ checking the door, as they both did, for the sound of Evelyn and where she might be.

  Two months later, she was in New York, taking drugs, emptying the trashcans of the rich. Two months later, although she did not know it yet, she had left home, and college, and the lot. Everyone she met hated their parents. Maria listened to them and did not believe a word they said. She looked at them and thought, But that’s not it. That’s not it at all.

  There was a confusion in her curtain. Maria checked round the side and saw a blind woman stirring the cloth with her cane. She was suddenly shy, just pulled the curtain back and stood aside.

  The blind woman had a companion with her, who had a pile of jackets and coats over one arm. Maria checked through the hangers.

  ‘Seven,’ she said. It was way over the limit. Still, she said nothing, did not even reach for a tag.

  The companion had the smallest eyes. She held each of the coats up behind the blind woman, professionally, taking her wrist and guiding it into the sleeve.

  Maria found herself looking into the blind face, as though she hoped to be seen, or recognised. It was a west of Ireland face, good-looking with fine cheekbones and wavy black hair. She had irises of chilly blue that rolled and fixed. They made her look like she was trying, all the time.

  The companion wrestled her into a tartan blanket coat, then turned her to face the mirror, checking her reflection there.

  ‘Something longer. Then you’re safe.’

  The woman’s eyes rolled at the glass.

  ‘What’s it like?’ she said, her voice light and uncertain. Three more women had gathered to give advice.

  ‘It’s russet. It’s quite nice,’ said one of them.

  ‘Sort of reds and browns.’

  ‘It’s like autumn,’ said a young girl, trying to explain, and the blind woman lifted the lapel, weirdly, to smell it. She felt the stitching of the collar. She ran her hands over the fringes on the front, then over her breasts and down to her waist.

  ‘Very neat,’ said the companion, who rolled her own eyes at the group, in a secret sign. The woman reached her hand towards the mirror and,

  ‘No,’ said Maria. ‘Blue. It should be blue for your eyes.’

  She rustled along the rail for a cobalt cashmere mix, fitted and slightly flared with a black velvet collar.

  She put it into the woman’s arms. The woman felt the collar.

  ‘How much is it?’ she said. And Maria lied.

  When everyone was gone, Maria wiped down the
mirror and tried to forget what she was looking at. The whole place smelled of old sweat and perfume. She went around the changing room, dipping and lifting the ghosts of women who could not make up their minds. She hung them up on the rail: shirts, dresses and pants; discarded futures, other selves.

  Someday she would bring a man in here and make love standing up. She would bring a man in after hours and smile at him until he backed her up against the mirror, lifting her skirt. They would undress each other, they would laugh and discard. Gravity would not work against them. Maria would check his eyes to see when they looked in the mirror and when he looked at her. And after they had finished, her backside would leave a damp mark on the glass, in the shape of a heart, or of a heart turned upside down.

  She picked up a small black dress, and decided to try it on.

  Maria let her skirt fall. Skirt first. She took off her blouse. She had two veins running down the inside of her arm where one should have been. She had slept with a medical student once, who told her this. We all have our mistakes, he said.

  She ducked into the dress and as she straightened up, Maria caught a glimpse of her own eyes.

  All this happened slowly to Maria, her eyes snagging on themselves and then sliding across the smooth surface of the glass. It happened so slowly, Maria did not know if she was in pain. She stood with one foot still in the crumpled circle of the skirt and the other outside.

  She was someone else again.

  She was a woman in a little black dress.

  She closed her eyes.

  Maria stood in front of the mirror and closed her eyes. Some days she was just nothing. Some days she was a woman who was just waiting for herself to walk in the door.

  Birth

  London, 27 April 1987

  Dear Miss Cotter,

  In sorting through the files of the Regina Coeli Adoption Agency, I came across your papers, which were unfortunately misfiled after a fire some years ago.

  Please find enclosed a copy of your birth cert, as requested by you in 1986. Tragically, your mother died in childbirth in 1965. I enclose her death cert, with my deepest sympathy. Your natural father is, as far as we know, still alive. Unfortunately I cannot give you any identifying information about him. I can tell you that he and your mother were married at the time of your birth, and that he was employed in an administrative capacity in Dublin. If you should wish to make contact with him, the Catholic Adoption Agency in London will be pleased to act as intermediary.

  Yours sincerely,

  Sr Maura Reynolds.

  Rose looked at her birth cert. There was a U of rust in one corner; the paper was thick and light blue. All the headings on the form were printed twice, once in English and once in what Rose assumed to be Irish.

  Father

  Athar

  Albert Delahunty

  She traced the difficult letters in her head.

  Ainm, Sloinne Cheile agus Sloinne Athar, na Mathar

  Mother?

  Anna Delahunty

  Inion

  formerly

  Kennedy

  6

  Berts’ Head

  Summer, 1987

  EVELYN FOUND HERSELF looking after Berts’ head, as though it were the surprising child of their old age, a package someone had left on the doorstep wrapped in grey.

  Even he was afraid of it. She could see by the careftil way he carried it; by his puzzled look. They ate their dinner and turned on the telly and sat with it, Berts’ head and what was poised inside his skull, like a yolk about to break. They both cradled it, Berts’ poor head and the pain that would not go away.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing.’ So they sat in front of the television and kept very quiet, the two of them, because there was something wrong with this baby, it was deaf perhaps, you needed to sign to it that you were in the room, that you were about to approach, that it would be fed.

  She might mention it to the doctor, get a prescription for anti-depressants. She could say they were vitamins, or mash them up and put them in his dinner.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Out.’

  Evelyn started to spring-clean; did not know she was looking for something until the cupboards were sorted and the curtains washed and rehung. It was not possible that he was having an affair. Even the word made her laugh.

  She had relined the drawers with new paper and was sorting through old cheque books and dead phone bills when she came across a letter with handwriting so like Maria’s that she read it without thinking.

  Then she finished cleaning the house.

  A week later Evelyn cried into the washing-up and Berts watched her, or averted his eyes as she wiped her nose on her forearm.

  This is where women cry, thought Evelyn. They cry into the sink. They cry into the dirty water and they keep crying as they rinse and stack. Where should she cry so that he would see her? She should climb up on top of the fridge and cry there. She should climb up on to the roof and roar.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re crying for,’ said Berts.

  ‘For you,’ said Evelyn. ‘For the lump I married.’

  She blew her nose with a bit of kitchen paper wet from her hands and followed him into the sitting room.

  ‘Twins,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I couldn’t take them both.’

  She sat down then and they waited in their separate chairs, the fire rug between them and the television flashing in the corner they faced, each from their own angle. There was a film on, a man searching through a house in the dark, and the light from the screen opened and shut into the room, while they watched without seeing and thought about the two babies asleep in their glass box.

  ‘Did you answer it?’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘Marie.’

  He did not move in the chair.

  ‘Who called her Marie?’ she said. ‘Did you call her that?’

  ‘I called her nothing.’

  ‘Well, someone had a good laugh.’

  She looked at Berts, who looked at the television. She got up to dry the dishes and left him there, in his own mess. Cleaning up. All her life she had been cleaning up. And Berts had watched and never told her what thing it was that had been spilt.

  Evelyn lay in the dark. She could hardly believe that Berts was not down on his knees, or prostrate on some bar floor, but flat on his back as he always was flat on his back, with Evelyn beside him as she always was, waiting for the first high, flabby snore.

  They had gone through the ritual of the evening, and with it, all the other evenings of their marriage: the clocks wound and the bottles left on the doorstep, though the clocks worked on batteries these days, and the milkman did not call. They walked through the ghosts of old routines as they performed the new ones, switching on timers, setting alarms.

  Evelyn slipped in under the blankets. She watched Berts as he came in and took off his watch and his wedding ring, and put them on the locker. She looked at him as he let his trousers fall. She saw him step out from one leg, then lift the other foot. She saw him dip down to take the hem and pull. She looked at his body, the pockets of grey, the loops and lozenges of yellow from the light on the landing. She saw his nipples, the fat around them gone for years. She saw the flesh that flowed down from his ribs to a belt around his waist. Every inch of him was a mystery to her. Every soft noise he made was a pang to her, as he sat into the bed, as he rolled into his dent in the mattress, as she kept her eyes open and listened in the dark for the exact and astonishing moment that Berts would fall asleep.

  Twenty-four years ago, she went into Clery’s for the January sale and bumped into Joan. It was in the lingerie department and the place was stuffed with nuns, she remembered, in for the annual corset – and, it had to be said for them, never much more than a glance at the lacy stuff, never so much as a smile or a look of regret. They had a fierce grip on themselves.

  Evelyn, on the other hand, lacked grip. She had the best of Berlei, she had silk and
artificial silk. She had plenty of time for regret, because modestly, sinfully, underneath, Evelyn was all style.

  She was all style that day, as she saw Joan slowly touch a sateen nightie, and pull her hand away. Then Joan spotted her too and pulled a big smirk.

  ‘Would you look at you?’

  Look at her indeed. Sometimes Evelyn took comfort in these girls from school, all married and fat, and sometimes they made her feel like crying. But Joan did neither. Joan said she had three of them, and it was murder. And her mother had some disease, which as far as Joan was concerned was called sitting on your fat backside.

  ‘And yourself?’

  There was little enough to say. Her parents still ambled along and Evelyn still ambled home to them, to a father who still called her his lamb and smoothed the back of her hair, to a mother who spent her days in prayer. Evelyn’s father was given to sudden disappearances, and to sudden charm. He was also subject to humiliations of dress, to occasional incontinences. Apart from that, he was the sweetest drunk you could wish to find. By mid-afternoon he was silent. Things started to break under his gentle touch and his glasses missed his nose. There was a trail of snot, perhaps, on his lapel. Evelyn always knocked before entering the toilet, but sometimes she might find him there, slouched over, or leaning back with his flies open, oblivious. In any state you like. It was all politely, delicately done. As though his body were too good a friend – he would not presume to prevent it from doing what it pleased.

  He reared a daughter who went to meetings of the Legion of Mary and the Dublin Film Society, who had fluent Irish, who could swim in the coldest weather, in Killiney or in Dublin Bay. He reared a daughter who fled from men – was bitter when she should flatter them, and silent when they wanted her to speak. That was the thing about family secrets – they made you awkward in company. Her father had reared a daughter who was so lonely she could die. There was also a son on the missions, and a younger daughter who was as gentle and sweet as he was, a novice with the Poor Clares in Leeds, with a doubt over her final vows on account of her fits.