The Opposite of Chance

by Margaret Hermes

  “Being from Beer City?”

  “Elizabeth. A name fit for a queen.”

  “Yes, well, mostly everyone calls me Betsy. A name fit for a social director on a cruise ship. Even if I introduce myself as Elizabeth, as soon as they hear someone hail me as Betsy, that’s what they’ll use. That’s what I’m reduced to.”

  “The cheek.”

  “People think they’re being more friendly or something.”

  “That’s bollocks! You’ll always be Elizabeth to me, no matter how friendly we get.”

  Betsy looked at him more closely. He gave the impression he was winking even with a straight face. He had what could fittingly be described as a shock of red hair. He was younger than she was, probably by a lot. He was desperate for company. And unflinchingly Irish.

  “That’s a fine lad of a backpack you’ve got there,” he said admiringly. “It’s class.”

  If she were going to be absolutely honest with herself, she had to admit that the Emerald Isle had never been on her itinerary chiefly because she was prejudiced against the Irish. Her bigotry was inherited. Her father, of solid German stock and descended from a prominent Pennsylvania abolitionist, harbored no ethnic or racial prejudices that she knew of, but her mother, whose parents came from the mountains of Slovakia, could not keep herself from infecting her offspring with her antipathy toward the Irish, who became established in America before the immigrants from Slovakia made the crossing. According to Mrs. Baumgartner née Ciernik, Irish Americans made the Slovaks feel less welcome than dog excrement on white patent leather shoes.

  When Betsy was quite small, she could have recited the lesson learned at her mother’s knee: All Ireland is divided into two types, the lace-curtain Irish and the shanty Irish. When she grew older she figured out the underlying message: There was really only one type and all those pretended to lace curtains. Her mother warned, “They’re often clever, the Irish, occasionally dull, but eventually they’re all loud.” And it was just common knowledge that the Irish often tippled until they toppled.

  Betsy was comforted by her mother when Bridget Cullen pushed her down on the playground and when Patty O’Laughlin told the boys in their seventh-grade class at Our Lady of Lourdes that Betsy had arrived at school wearing her first bra. Never mind that all her mother’s words of comfort came out sounding like “I told you so” and never mind that Betsy was also shoved on the playground by Angie Romano and that it was Margie Schmidt who took her Snoopy pencil case and Mary Jane O’Malley who returned it.

  According to Doreen Ciernik Baumgartner—who had learned the proverb Bad weed never dies out—Zlá zelina nevyhynie—at her mother’s knee, the oppressors had the nerve to grow up to be the ones bearing hard, flinty feelings with the aid of their elephantine memories. “Irish Alzheimer’s,” Doreen had taken to calling it. “That’s where the only things they can remember are the grudges.”

  As Betsy didn’t think she viewed Jews or blacks or Puerto Ricans through a noticeably warped lens, she let slide this prejudice. Betsy’s bias was something of a family heirloom, tasteless and unsightly, granted, but still one of the first acquisitions her antecedents had made upon landing in the new country. Yet, looking at the wide-open face of Brian John David Samuel Beattie, she decided it was past time to let go of that tradition.

  Betsy didn’t stop to consider that all Ireland was indeed divided into two types—those who considered themselves part of Britain and those who considered Britain their oppressor. She didn’t think about the differences between Northerners and those who lived in the Republic or militant unionists and members of the Irish Republican Army. She just imagined that this much-named young Irishman would be good company for the twenty-two-hour crossing. And he was, at least for most of it.

  After they’d straggled aboard and learned that the cabins were all booked and the chairs all claimed, they dropped down in a less trafficked area of the deck, a safe distance from love-addled Colin and his young lady.

  “Why did you ask me if I’d come from a funeral?”

  “You had a puss that long on you. Like you had just buried your mother.”

  “No such luck.”

  He looked at her sharply. “That would be luck, would it?”

  God, she thought. First the Ronald McDonald crack and now mother-bashing. He had to be desperate for company not to be making his way to the other side of the ferry. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  Brian looked at the deck between his knees as though he saw something of interest there. “Ma could give out from the time I got up in the morning till the time I didn’t get up the next. I admit I’m a bit of a dosser but she could make a holy show out of a sock left on the floor. It was three months yesterday she last had a go at me. She called me a bleeding chancer for sticking with our band. I’m drums and Colin there is lead guitar—he’s got the face to play lead guitar and I’m hoping his fingering catches up. So Ma opens up on me and I slam off and she drops dead. Right there on the kitchen floor. Stroke. Trust me ma to make sure she got the last word.”

  “Good lord. I’m sorry. That’s awful. Really terrible. But I hope you’re not blaming yourself.”

  “Only on the odd days. On the even I blame her temper. ’Twas fierce, it was. Now, I take after me da. It took crockery to rile him.”

  “Crockery?”

  “She could eat the head off him, even give him a clatter, and he’d maintain his composure. Until she’d go after the Delph. At the first plate into the wall, he’d be off and no knowing when he’d be back. Could be the next morning, could be the next week. Still and all, they had great craic together. Mad for each other.”

  “Mad, anyway.”

  He shot her a look. Well, she thought, that’s it: three strikes. Not just bashing my own mother, but bashing his barely in her grave. But Brian shifted onto his back and squinted up at the sky.

  “When Ma passed, the undertaker and his mute came to the house to wheel her away and he takes me da aside and asks in a loud whisper—I wonder, do they practice that at mortuary school? that piercing whisper?—about a proper dress and shoes to bury her in, how she can’t go to her Maker in that costume. To be fair, she was wearing an old wraparound and slippers, but Da was feeling low enough without any help from this laudy daw.

  “The old fella tells him we’ll be having a closed casket so there’s no need to tart her up. He says we were all remembering his mother in an open coffin, her hair curled, her face painted like a tinker’s wagon, in a lacy dress and a necklace that had lived its whole life in a drawer. It wasn’t just that none of us recognized her, but the old wan looked so much better dead. It wasn’t proper.

  “The wanker says that even so, they would still be dressing our ma before they put her in the box, open or closed. So Da nods and goes into their bedroom, his bedroom now, and comes out with the blue dress that set off her eyes, now permanently shut, and her open-toed heels.

  “My sister Molly sees him handing over the things in the hallway. She screams, ‘Not that!’ before she can stop herself with both hands clapped over her mouth. ‘Ah, that dress was her favorite,’ she says. ‘I just didn’t want to think of it . . . in the ground.’”

  “‘You’re bang on,’ the old fella says. ‘Your ma would be furious. She’d haunt me. You have it.’ He takes the dress and shoes back from the body snatcher and gives them to Molly. ‘Put these in your closet and pick out something that deserves to be buried. Maybe that green pantsuit your Aunt Eileen gave ’er.’”

  “I think I’d like your father,” Betsy smiled.

  “You might at that. He’s a grand old fella. You’d like my sister too. Not so sure about the brother. I got our ma’s red hair, but Dennis got her feckin’ temper.”

  Betsy grinned and tried on his brogue for size. “I’m after liking the whole family. Even your feckin’ brother.” She particularly appreciated t
hat the representative of the Beattie clan that she had before her refrained from lecturing on how she needed to repair her relationship with her own mother while her old wan was still above ground.

  “Kiss me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but I’m guessing you’re an only child.”

  “You’re wrong. I have one sister.”

  “Well then,” he leaned in for his punishment. She laughed and gave him a gentle shove with the heels of both palms.

  For the next fourteen hours they talked. Rather, she worked a comment in here and there and he talked for twelve hours plus. She managed to insert a story now and then. She told him how her sister climbed onto the roof of their garage with a hose and turned it on the neighbor while Betsy was supposed to be babysitting her. “Ah, would you stop,” he said. So she stopped. He shook his dramatically red head. “That means keep talking,” he informed her.

  He talked. About politics—“Your man in the White House, the actor fella . . .” About questions of cultural import—“So, Elizabeth, you can tell us. Did you know who shot J.R.?” And international affairs—“I expect you flew over to attend the wedding of Charles and Diana.” About his relatives—“Cousin Christey’s a gas but she’s the worst driver in County Antrim. Her idea of parking the car is to abandon it somewhere within view of a curb.”

  But there was one topic on which he could have lectured the whole of their crossing if Betsy had let him. “Can you believe New Zealand invited the Springboks to play the All Blacks this month?” He shook his head in disgust.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  His eyebrows rose. “I know you come from a country where football is called soccer. And the Yanks play a peculiar game you call football and we call run-with-the-egg. But still, do you not recognize the sport?”

  Betsy offered a shrug in reply.

  “Rugby.”

  “I don’t really follow any sports. Not even baseball, which is supposed to be our ‘national pastime.’ I didn’t even know there’s a players’ strike in the Major Leagues until someone mentioned it in Florence the other day.”

  “The cheek of you.”

  “I gather Springboks are an all-white team playing against an all-black team?”

  He whistled at the depth of her ignorance. “You got that half right. The Springboks are all white all right. They’re the national team of South Africa. And the All Blacks are mostly white.” He grinned at her confusion.

  “Where are the All Blacks from?”

  “New Zealand.”

  Betsy’s frown deepened. “But if the team is named for the indigenous population, the Maori are Polynesian. They don’t have African roots like the Aboriginals of Australia,” the former anthropologist instructed. “So why are they called ‘Blacks’?”

  “The team gets its name from the color of its jerseys.”

  “Seriously?”

  “That’s the way they talk rugby in New Zealand. ‘The whatevers versus the All Blacks.’ All the other teams’ jerseys have two colors, see. Anyway, the Kiwis are up in arms about the Springboks being invited to play. There’ve been massive protests.”

  “Because?”

  It was Brian’s turn to frown. “Apartheid.”

  “Oh! Of course. Like South Africa being banned from the Olympics.”

  “So you do follow sports a bit.”

  “The Olympic games are more spectacle than sporting events.”

  “So they are.”

  From time to time they napped companionably, snugged up to each other against the breeze. But eventually the wind changed direction and the waves swelled and tumbled all the way up to the ferry’s gunwales as if the big boat were being slapped from side to side by an enormous unseen hand.

  “Ah, that God fella, quite the practical joker,” Brian managed between gritted teeth. No longer lying on deck, he sat cross-legged and bolt upright, as if his posture could save him. He finally stopped talking. After nearly an hour of stiff bravado, he announced, “I’m sick as the plane to Lourdes,” before running to the rail and joining his friend Colin, Colin’s girl, and the scores of others puking their guts over the starboard side.

  Betsy discovered something consoling about herself that day: she was seaworthy.

  She got into the long queue for the women’s restroom and was still in line when the ferry docked. When she finally squeezed inside, she could barely wait to get out again. Tissue and toweling were strewn everywhere and the stalls reeked of vomit. By the time she returned to their spot on the deck, the area had emptied. She plunked down and waited awhile, hoping but not expecting that Brian would be coming back. She supposed he had been only too eager to plant his feet on dry land.

  Betsy bought a train ticket to Dublin at the Rosslare Station. She presumed Brian and Colin were heading to their homes in the North. She had no desire to go where the Irish and the English Irish were lobbing bombs at each other. That much thought she had given to the political situation. She figured she’d spend a few days in the capital, seat of the parliament, pubs, and legendary littérateurs, before heading home. She might look for a walking tour—the places where the ghosts of James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, and Oscar Wilde could be found.

  The train was crammed, as if the fifteen hundred passengers on the Saint Killian had been funneled directly on board. And perhaps they had. Betsy saw the three cousins from the merchant marine hotel seated opposite each other at the same moment the one with the bug eyes saw her and pointed to the fourth seat piled with their belongings. She looked around the car for Brian before nodding. Betsy struggled through the packed aisle. “How did you know to save a seat for me? How could you know I’d be on this train? In this very car? It must be some kind of magic! You can’t be leprechauns—they’re all male, right?” The ladies tittered as she plopped down on the seat they had emptied, her backpack swung round to her chest. “But then how do leprechauns reproduce, I wonder?”

  “Sure listen, pet,” the one with the bobbing curls leaned forward, “we weren’t savin’ the seat for you, though we’re that glad to see you. We were savin’ it from them.” She nodded in the direction of a clump of leather-clad twenty-somethings of assorted genders with numerous piercings and gravity-defying Mohawks. “Imagine sittin’ next to the loiks of that all the way to Dublin. Jaysus! It put the heart crossways in me,” she shuddered. “Would you look at that filthy article?” She inclined her head at a fellow passenger within hearing distance who was wearing a T-shirt with several strategic rips, including one over his chest, showing the safety pin skewered through his nipple to its best advantage.

  “It’s a pure relief to see you, though,” said the cousin with the dried corn for teeth, speaking into her raised palm. “We were that worried about you when we didn’t see you out on the pier. We thought maybe you’d been captured by one of those pirates back at the hotel. And we worried that if you had escaped, you were all on your own on the Killian with every sort of ruffian on the prowl.”

  “Ruffians and a rough crossin’ too,” lamented the cousin next to Betsy. “I had a dose.” She shook off the memory. “Did anythin’ happen to you on board, pet?”

  “No. Nothing. Nothing at all,” she said, disappointing her audience, who settled back in their seats and began their inventory of Cousin Nola’s furnishings. Throughout their chatter, her thoughts kept returning to young Brian John David Samuel Beattie, who was in the toilet in the next car—the only available seat—having a wank to her image painted on the inside of his closed eyelids.

  The North

  12.

  The train from Dublin to Lisburn was not crowded, so Brian and Colin could sit together, which turned out to be a mixed blessing. The only thing Colin wanted to talk about was his sweet Aislin, her sweet face, her sweet voice, her sweet smile.

  Brian stood it for the first hour. “Colin, I’m speaking as your best man now. Do yourself a favor an
d start rationing. Talk about her one sentence out of five. Then cut down to one out of ten. I’m not asking you to go cold turkey, but the sooner you get her out of your system, the better for us all.”

  “I’m off me nut about her.”

  “Sure it was all croissants and crepes suzettes while it lasted, but she’s back in her world now and you’ll soon be back in yours. It won’t be long before your Aislin starts wondering how she came to get mixed up with a culchie. You’re a gorgeous feen and all, but you’re not in her class. You’d need a hape o’ silver and years more schooling to climb that ladder. It’s time you start to forget that hussy.”

  “Watch yourself, Brian. She’s the one I’m going to marry someday.”

  “Would you ever cop on? Her father’s a Dublin 4. Her mother pisses Chanel No. 5. Her and her brothers were nursed on Harvey’s Bristol Cream. She’s too posh for the likes of us. Not to mention she’s a papist.”

  “I am, I tell you. Marrying her.”

  “It takes two to foxtrot, Colin.”

  “She feels the same.”

  “Did she say she would marry you?”

  “As good as.”

  “I repeat: when the subject of marriage came up did she say she would marry you or did she say, ‘Grand weather we’re having’?”

  “She said she wished we could be together the rest of our lives.”

  “There’s a great deal of room between a wish and a promise. About the length of a horse, I’d say. You get the promise from the horse’s mouth. The wish comes outta the horse’s ass.”

  “Aislin loves me.”

  “No doubt. No doubt. I love you too, but—prepare for it—I’m not going to marry you. And I’m a Prod. But I don’t suppose her parents will even notice you’re not Catholic with all that lovely love floatin’ about.”

  “You’re jealous,” Colin said, as though a light bulb had just gone on over his head.

  “She’s a rare beauty and all, but not my type. I like a girl who talks as well as she snogs.”