by Doreen Finn
I felt my extreme youth, my childishness, like it was a blanket surrounding me. It had never bothered me before, but it chafed now, kept me on the edge of things. Being around Daniel was such a relief, when I no longer had to pretend to know what the Americans were talking about when Judith and Chris offered to make each other a Singapore sling or a pink lady. Daniel had shepherd’s pie for dinner, not panocha with extra sugar, or smothered burritos. It was almost too much at times. I thought that when people arrived in a new place it was they who had to learn to fit in, who endured the feeling of otherness for an indeterminate period of time, and not the other way around. It was a strange thing indeed. The surroundings were the same: the house, its red bricks on fire in the July sunshine, the garden with its familiar borders of herbs, the raspberries on their canes. Our books and our art supplies were in the same places, on the same shelves, yet everything was out of sync. It was culture shock without even leaving the house.
‘What did you do today?’ I asked my mother, who was also toying with her food. Did I imagine a tiny smile ghosting the edges of her mouth? The top she wore looked new, a short-sleeved shirt with pale blue and white checking. ‘Is that new?’ I rubbed my fingers on the sleeve.
‘This? No.’
‘I’ve never seen it before.’
‘I’ve had it for a while. I just haven’t worn it.’
‘Why haven’t you worn it? It’s nice.’
‘Megan, stop. I bought it a while ago and forgot where I’d put it.’
‘But how could you forget?’ I was baffled. My mother had one wardrobe and one chest of drawers. All her clothes were there.
‘When are the lessons starting?’ Sarah asked her, cutting across.
Gemma was going to be teaching art two evenings a week for the rest of the summer, in a small gallery in town. She was excited about it, thrilled to have been asked.
‘Thursday.’
‘Who knows, maybe they’ll keep you on after the summer.’
‘With a bit of luck. God, that’d be great, it really would.’
‘Well, you never know. Keep your head down and work hard.’
Gemma fixed her mother with a stare. ‘I always do.’
Sarah shook salt over her plate. ‘I know you do. That’s why you’re so good.’
Gemma and Sarah slid in and out of conversation while I, alert as a spaniel, kept watch. From the garden, Chris’s voice rose above the drone of lawnmowers and the shouts of Daniel and Stevie next door. Something about dinner, a walk, Beth. I swiped my forehead with the back of my wrist. The heat was dragging on me, making me tired.
Later, when I was pouring the water Sarah had collected during the day over the plants, Chris appeared again. He smiled and raised his second and third fingers to his forehead in a mock salute.
‘How are you, honey?’
I said I was fine. Mistrust caught me unawares. Like the heatwave, it hovered in the air between us. Chris had been out in the garden a lot recently. In this case, he wasn’t gardening, although he had taken over grass-cutting duties from Sarah. He wasn’t reading either, although a book was face down on the striped deckchair he preferred. It seemed as though he was busy waiting to see if my mother would appear. It was all so difficult. Chris was an adult, and I was brought up to respect my elders, not suspect them. Chris was a nice man, a kind man. He was full of smiles and good humour. He asked questions that he enjoyed hearing answered, he sought out details of our days and what we did. He had been our downstairs neighbour for only a short while, but he had slotted in and seemed to genuinely care about what went on. Beth was used to having a father, used to being the centre of his attention, but it was new for me and I liked it. I had little experience of men as fathers. Mine was disappeared. Gemma’s was dead. Daniel’s was lost. The other fathers I had encountered were usually preoccupied with work, with golf, with sports. Children were an irritation, an intrusion. Yet here was Chris, who engaged us, suggested books to read, slipped loose change into our hands if we went to the park or to the canal, which we had been doing with greater frequency lately, something Sarah had yet to worry about. Chris, who had promised Sarah he would find a television for us. The Americans’ surprise when we said we didn’t have one had made us laugh. Chris said he’d sort it out. He knew someone who had a black and white set they didn’t use any more.
Maybe Chris was being kind so he could look good in my mother’s eyes. Kind men were thin on the ground, I’d heard Gemma say to her friend once. Yet here was a kind man, living downstairs, always being nice. But a married man all the same, with a wife who drank wine from a bottle and a daughter who had become my friend. And there was, behind it all, the fact that Chris had already strayed with a student. What was there to stop it all happening again? His hand on her hair. Her hand on his. My mother didn’t need anything that would make her unhappy, anything that would cause more gossip about our family. And yet. And yet, really, my suspicions were just that: suspicions. A hand on hair could mean nothing. My mother did it to me all the time, to keep my hair off my face. It didn’t have to mean anything.
A family of spiders was disturbed by the spray of water from my bucket. Like crabs, they disappeared into dark corners, behind stones, up walls. I shivered. Years of being Daniel’s friend had thwarted in me the desire to squash creepy-crawlies, but I still didn’t like spiders.
If Chris had noticed my reticence, he was gentleman enough not to comment on it. I watched him part the voiles and go inside. Music started up on the record player, and over it, his voice called to Judith. A pizza, he was saying. Let’s go out and get a pizza. A reply, something muffled, then Chris’s voice again. No, just a pizza. I’m not in the mood for anything else. Something else inaudible, then Chris’s voice again, louder this time. Jesus, all right. Don’t bother. Then his voice, raised. Bethy! Beth’s head materialised from over the wall in Daniel’s garden.
‘Yes, Daddy? Oh, hi, Megan,’ she said, giving me a little wave when she saw me, standing there, bucket in hand, my bare feet wet and dusted with clay.
‘Why are you in there?’ I asked.
‘Just hanging with Stevie. What do you want, Daddy?’
Chris reappeared on the patio. ‘I’m going out to get a pizza. Want to come?’
Beth hoisted herself up on the wall, swinging her long brown legs deftly over and dropping like a dancer onto the grass. ‘Sure!’ She put her hand on her father’s arm. ‘What’s Mom doing?’
‘Oh, she’s making bagels.’
‘Bagels? But it’s evening time, Daddy! Why’s she making bagels now?’
‘I have no clue, honey bee. But she wants to, and what Mommy wants, Mommy can do. Megan, would you like to come too?’ Chris had his hands in the pockets of his jeans. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, the shirt itself crumpled, his bare feet tanned in his flip-flops. He looked like a father from the television.
I touched my shoulder, hot and pink under my fingers. I’d been hoping Beth would ask me in to watch some television. She would never guess how desperately I wanted to watch something. Anything, really – but the Olympics in particular. The games were underway and they were showing highlights of the gymnastics after the news.
I shook my head. ‘No, thank you. We’ve already eaten.’
I had seen Beth and Judith sit outside, plates on their laps, glasses of water on the ground beside them. Sometimes Beth didn’t eat breakfast, if she didn’t feel like it, and Judith never seemed to worry that she would starve to death. Starving to death was a preoccupation for Sarah, and our meals were eaten with military precision, always at the table, always at the same time. Deciding to go for a pizza was something that would never enter Sarah’s consciousness. She wouldn’t even know where to go. It simply wasn’t done. Even in a heatwave. Thinking about it, Sarah was the one person who seemed least affected by the heatwave.
‘Next time, okay?’ Chris winked at me, slung his arm around Beth’s shoulders. ‘Ready, baby girl?’
They vanished and I returned to
my watering. Even though it was only old water, clouded by washed dishes and rinsed clothing, the plants soaked it up, the arid earth crackling as the water disappeared. Despite the weight of the heat on the garden, the flowers seemed perkier after being watered, their scent more defined. A butterfly, its wings tattered, flitted from flower to bush and back again. Daniel called to his sisters. The watermelon sky stretched above me, not a hint of cloud to disturb its perfect canvas. Downstairs, Judith baked bagels, whatever they were, and upstairs my mother wore a shirt that she claimed to have bought a while ago and magically forgotten about. It was definitely a new shirt.
It was exhausting, wondering about Gemma. To distract myself, I decided I would paint. There were too many colours swirling above and around me that evening, and the only way to make sense of them was to paint them. That’s what Gemma did. I retrieved my watercolours from a basket I’d left on the mantelpiece in the front room, decanted an inch of water into the bottom of a jar, settled myself on the deck and watched the thick paper suck up the water wash, pulling colours in all directions across its surface.
The evening emptied itself onto the watercolour block on my lap. The only sounds were the brush rinsing in the jar, the quiet slosh of paint, the sweep of bristles across wet paper. As I painted, an understanding about art came to me. It doesn’t have to be anything specific in order for you to enjoy it, and you don’t have to talk about it unless you want to. I liked that. It was like hiding.
20
Sarah made curtains. Proper curtains with lining and intricate hemming. She kept her sewing machine in the dining room, which we only ever used for dining in at Christmas, or if there were people over. It was an old machine, a Singer, and she kept it under a dust cover when it wasn’t in use. The folding doors that divided the front room from the dining room had been opened when the weather got warm and hadn’t been closed since. It kept the flow of air moving, especially when the windows were open.
Now, Sarah had an order for six pairs of curtains. A woman from Rathmines had asked her to make them for her, so Sarah had taken over the dining room. Great swathes of fabric surrounded her. Tiny boxes of pins and foil sheets of needles were always within arm’s reach. She used the collar of her blouse as a holding place for needles and pins, their razor-fine sharpness winking in the sunlight like some kind of modernist brooch. As though Picasso had designed it, Gemma remarked, laughing.
My mother was laughing a lot. Sarah was happy for her. ‘A bit of sunshine does everyone a world of good,’ she said, as I stood beside her, holding out a length of heavy velvet while she measured it, wrote feet and inches down in her notebook, moved the measuring tape further along the fabric.
I wasn’t so sure it was the sunshine, though it was good to see Gemma happy. She used to be like that all the time, when she was young, Sarah said. Full of life. She was still full of life, Sarah had added, possibly discerning something in my face. It’s just different being a mother, that’s all. The responsibility makes you more serious, more aware of all that can go wrong. ‘You’ll see that when you have your own children,’ she added, taking the velvet from my outstretched hands and folding it carefully.
The thought of having my own children at that time was as foreign to me as space travel. Some girls in my class already spoke of being mothers, but I couldn’t imagine it. I wanted to do lots of things first. What, exactly, I had no idea, but I knew there were many things I would experience. Mostly, they took on the unfocused shape of dreams, these ideas of mine, but I would do them. Being someone’s mother wasn’t top of my list, wasn’t even on my list. Few mothers I knew gave me the impression that motherhood was anything but drudgery and sacrifice. Children weren’t important, not really. There were too many of them, of us, too many mouths always open for food, talking too much, making demands, fighting. Mothers seemed to prefer the company of other mothers, talking over garden walls, outside supermarkets, in groups at the school gates. Often, they smoked cigarettes, laughed and said things like I wish or if only or chance would be a fine thing. I had no inkling of what it was they longed for, these mothers, their heads covered by scarves knotted under their chins, shopping bags in their hands, coats buttoned hastily over house dresses in a vain attempt to conceal their true roles. In school-friends’ houses, it was the same. Mothers sending their numerous offspring out to play, shooing them out to the garden as though they were cats.
Men were more important, it seemed to me then. Men who came home, took off coats, read newspapers, were asked about their day by their combed, lipsticked wives. Because I didn’t have that, it made me all the more curious, so I watched these fathers, gods in their domains, rulers of the domestic roost. They shed suits like onion skins, wrestled with sons, chucked daughters under their chins, then removed themselves again, away to home offices, fireside seats, the black and white sanctuary of broadsheet newspapers. My friends’ fathers decided where their families went on holidays, what programmes would be watched on the television, accepted cups of tea without having to ask for them. They absented themselves from the family home for the greater part of the week, but made themselves known the minute they returned, lest anyone should forget the pecking order.
Even though Gemma was different to every mother of my limited acquaintance, I knew she wanted me and loved me. It was something I accepted, like an extra layer of clothing in cold weather, something that was always there and that I didn’t have to question. Those other mothers, with multiple children and husbands who sat like military commanders in their favourite armchairs, probably didn’t lie with their children at night like my mother did, reassuring me of how special I was, what a joy I was to have in her life.
‘Penny for them,’ Sarah said, through pins she had held between her teeth. She gestured to me to pick up a bolt of lining, which I did, unrolling it across the table. ‘You’re very far away.’
‘Just thinking about the gymnastics.’
Beth and I had watched Nadia Comaneci the previous night, on our new television. Chris had arrived at our front door two days earlier, an old television set in the back of Brad Zimmer’s car. Not sure if you need this, he had said, but you might get some use out of it. Sarah hadn’t wanted it, not really. Reservation displayed itself in the set of her mouth, the smile that was bright but not real. However, good manners and a wish to not hurt Chris’s feelings had allowed her to clear a space in the corner of the room for Chris to carefully place the set on a small table that had been liberated from its weight of newspapers and back issues of magazines.
Gemma and I were delighted with the new television. Of course we were. Even Sarah, for all her hesitation, was late with dinner two days in a row because she’d been watching a man called Charles read the evening news. Another shooting in Belfast and two buses hijacked. Violence and rioting in the townships of South Africa. Idi Amin in Uganda. A new government for Spain. Gemma watched with Sarah, heedless of me, her daughter, lurking in the doorway, eavesdropping on this man, this Charles, with his BBC voice and all the bad news falling effortlessly from his well-trained tongue. Sarah eventually shooed me away, asked me to check on the lamb chops under the grill, which I knew was just a ruse, a ploy to keep me from knowing about the darkness engulfing the world. Leave her, my mother said. She’ll find out sooner or later. The news on the telly was just the same as the news on the radio, but now it had pictures. Smoke, flames, the shells of cars. Crowded streets. People crying.
As we watched the Olympics, Beth had kept up a relentless stream of chatter throughout Nadia’s routine, starting with her disbelief that anyone could have a black and white set, and how difficult it was to know what colours the gymnasts were wearing when everything just looked grey. Back in New York, as in Dublin, Beth had a colour set, and the New York one was huge. You should see it, Megan, she said, demonstrating with her hands just how enormous this television was. It’s like being at the cinema, almost. I felt defensive about our new, humble set, compelled to stand up for it. Later, Beth had shushed me as Nadia w
on the first round. We watched in silence as she bent her head towards her coach, her tracksuit hiding her muscled legs, her ballerina’s body. Her hair was neat and shiny, and she smiled and waved. ‘She’s only two years older than me,’ Beth announced. ‘That could be me in four years.’
‘What could be you?’
She nodded at the television. ‘There. In the Olympics. That could be me at the next ones.’
‘But you don’t do gymnastics.’
‘I could do them. I’m going to start.’ Beth had folded her arms and stared at me, a sign I had come to understand as the end of a discussion.
Sarah removed the pins from between her teeth and hooked them through the hem of the piece she was working on. ‘I’ll have to watch them with you the next time. What did I miss?’
I wrapped a piece of fabric around my hand. It was fraying at the edges. ‘Nadia Comaneci got the highest score in the first round.’
‘Isn’t she a great little thing?’
‘Beth says you can’t see properly with only black and white.’
Sarah rummaged in her work basket for her scissors. A fabric measuring tape fell out and unspooled as it hit the floor. ‘Don’t mind Beth. Of course you can see properly. That child has too much, and it’s not a good thing.’
Sarah started cutting through the velvet. Her scissors made sawing sounds in the quiet room. Beyond the open sash window, the heat had settled down for the day, the air heavy with pollen and the sullen yellow dust of the summer gardens. A bee trapped in a spider’s web droned in a corner of the window. The frightened sound of the captured insect vibrated on the quiet air. For some reason, I thought of Judith. I turned to Sarah. ‘I’m roasting. Can I go outside now?’
Sarah kept her eyes on the straight line she was cutting through the dense fabric. ‘Of course you can, but put your hat on.’
I slipped outside through the kitchen, deliberately forgetting the campero. There had been a piece on the news the previous evening about sunstroke and it had provoked Sarah into insisting again that I wear something on my head. No way, José.