by Edna O'Brien
For some reason I always looked upward and backward and therefore could see the dresser upside down, and the contents of it. There was a whole row of jugs, mostly white jugs with sepia designs of corn, or cattle, or a couple toiling in the fields. The jugs hung on hooks at the edge of the dresser, and behind them were the plates with ripe pears painted in the center of each one. But most beautiful of all were the little dessert dishes of carnival glass, with their orange tints and their scalloped edges. I used to say goodbye to them, and then it would be time to close eyes before the ordeal.
She never called it an operation, just an “op,” the same as the doctor did. I would feel the point of the knife like the point of a compass going around my scarcely formed breasts. My bodice would not be removed, just lifted up. She would comment on what she saw and say, “Interesting,” or “Quite,” or “Oh, dearie me,” as the case may be, and then when she got at the stomach she would always say, “Tut tut tut,” and “What nasty business have we got here.” She would list the unwholesome things I had been eating, such as sherbet or rainbow toffees, hit my stomach with the flat of the knife, and order two spoons of turpentine and three spoons of castor oil before commencing. These potions had then to be downed. Meanwhile, Eily, as the considerate nurse, would be mopping the doctor’s brow and handing extra implements such as sugar tongs, spoon, or fork. The spoon was to flatten the tongue and make the patient say “Aah.” Scabs or cuts would be regarded as nasty devils, and elastic marks as a sign of iniquity. I would also have to make a general confession. I used to lie there praying that their mother would come home unexpectedly. It was always a Tuesday, the day their mother went to the market to sell things, to buy commodities, and to draw her husband’s pension. I used to wait for a sound from the dogs. They were vicious dogs and bit everyone except their owners, and on my arrival there I used to have to yell for Eily to come out and escort me past them.
All in all, it was a woeful event, but still I went each Tuesday on the way home from school, and by the time their mother returned, all would be over and I would be sitting demurely by the fire, waiting to be offered a shop biscuit, which of course at first I made a great pretense of refusing.
Eily always conveyed me down the first field as far as the white gate, and though the dogs snarled and showed their teeth, they never tried biting once I was leaving. One evening, though it was nearly milking time, she came farther, and I thought it was to gather a few hazelnuts, because there was a little tree between our boundary and theirs that was laden with them. You had only to shake the tree for the nuts to come tumbling down, and you had only to sit on the nearby wall, take one of the loose stones, and crack away to your heart’s content. They were just ripe, and they tasted young and clean, and helped as well to get all fur off the backs of the teeth. So we sat on the wall, but Eily did not reach up and draw a branch and therefore a shower of nuts down. Instead, she asked me what I thought of Romeo. He was a new bank clerk, a Protestant, and to me a right toff in his plus-fours with his white sports bicycle. The bicycle had a dynamo attached, so that he was never without lights. He rode the bicycle with his body hunched forward, so that as she mentioned him I could see his snout and his lock of falling hair coming toward me on the road. He also distinguished himself by riding the bicycle into shops or hallways. In fact, he was scarcely ever off it. It seems he had danced with her the night she wore the green georgette, and next day left a note in the hedge where she and her family kept their shoes. She said it was the grace of God that she had gone there first thing that morning, otherwise the note might have come into someone else’s hand. He had made an assignation for the following Sunday, and she did not know how she was going to get out of her house and under what excuse. At least Nuala was gone, back to Technical School, where she was learning to be a domestic-economy instructor, and my sisters had returned to the convent, so that we were able to hatch it without the bother of them eavesdropping on us. I said yes, I would be her accomplice, without knowing what I was letting myself in for. On Sunday I told my parents that I was going with Eily to visit a cousin of theirs in the hospital, and she in turn told her parents that we were visiting a cousin of mine. We met at the white gate and both of us were peppering. She had an old black dirndl skirt which she slipped out of; underneath was her cerise dress with the slits at the side. It was a most compromising garment. She wore a brooch at the bosom. Her mother’s brooch, a plain flat gold pin with a little star in the center that shone feverishly. She took out her little gold flapjack and proceeded to dab powder on. She removed the little muslin cover, made me hold it delicately while she dipped into the powder proper. It was ocher stuff and completely wrecked her complexion. Then she applied lipstick, wet her kiss curl, and made me kneel down in the field and promise never ever to spill.
We went toward the hospital, but instead of going up that dark cedar-lined avenue, we crossed over a field, nearly drowning ourselves in the swamp, and permanently stooping so as not to be sighted. I said we were like soldiers in a war and she said we should have worn green or brown as camouflage. Her shapely bottom, bobbing up and down, could easily have been spotted by anyone going along the road. When we got to the thick of the woods, Romeo was there. He looked very indifferent, his face forward, his head almost as low as the handlebars of the bicycle, and he surveyed us carefully as we approached. Then he let out a couple of whistles to let her know how welcome she was. She stood beside him, and I faced them, and we all remarked what a fine evening it was. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw his hand go around her waist, and then her dress crumpled as it was being raised up from the back, and though the two of them stood perfectly still, they were both looking at each other intently and making signals with their lips. Her dress was above the back of her knees. Eily began to get very flushed and he studied her face most carefully, asking if it was nice, nice. I was told by him to run along: “Run along, Junior” was what he said. I went and adhered to the bark of a tree, eyes closed, fists closed, and every bit of me in a clinch. Not long after, Eily hollered, and on the way home and walking very smartly, she and I discussed growing pains and she said there were no such things but that it was all rheumatism.
So it continued Sunday after Sunday, with one holy day, Ascension Thursday, thrown in. We got wizard in our excuses—once it was to practice with the school choir, another time it was to teach the younger children how to receive Holy Communion, and once—this was our riskiest ploy—it was to get gooseberries from an old crank called Miss MacNamara. That proved to be dangerous, because both our mothers were hoping for some, either for eating or for stewing, and we had to say that Miss MacNamara was not home, whereupon they said weren’t the bushes there anyhow with the gooseberries hanging off. For a moment I imagined that I had actually been there, in the little choked garden, with the bantam hens and the small moldy bushes, weighed down with the big hairy gooseberries that were soft to the touch and that burst when you bit into them. We used to pray on the way home, say prayers and ejaculations, and very often when we leaned against the grass bank while Eily donned her old skirt and her old canvas shoes, we said one or another of the mysteries of the Rosary. She had new shoes that were slippers really and that her mother had not seen. They were olive green and she bought them from a gypsy woman in return for a tablecloth of her mother’s that she had stolen. It was a special cloth that had been sent all the way from Australia by a nun. She was a thief as well. One day all these sins would have to be reckoned with. I used to shudder at night when I went over the number of commandments we were both breaking, but I grieved more on her behalf, because she was breaking the worst one of all in those embraces and transactions with him. She never discussed him except to say that his middle name was Jack.
During those weeks my mother used to say I was pale and why wasn’t I eating and why did I gargle so often with salt and water. These were forms of atonement to God. Even seeing Eily on Tuesdays was no longer the source of delight that it used to be. I was racked. I used to say,
“Is this a dagger which I see before me,” and recalled all the queer people around who had visions and suffered from delusions. The same would be our cruel cup. She flared up. “Marry! did I or did I not love her?” Of course I loved her and would hang for her, but she was asking me to do the two hardest things on earth—to disobey God and my own mother. Often she took huff, swore that she would get someone else—usually Una, my greatest rival—to play gooseberry for her and be her dogsbody in her whole secret life. But then she would make up and be waiting for me on the road as I came from school, and we would climb in over the wall that led to their fields, and we would link and discuss the possible excuse for the following Sunday. Once, she suggested wearing the green georgette, and even I, who also lacked restraint in matters of dress, thought it would draw untoward attention to her, since it was a dance dress and since as Peter the Master said, “She looked stripped in it.” I said Mrs. Bolan would smell a rat. Mrs. Bolan was one of the many women who were always prowling and turning up at graveyards or in the slate quarry to see if there were courting couples. She always said she was looking for stray turkeys or turkey eggs, but in fact she had no fowl, and was known to tell tales that were caluminious; as a result, one temporary schoolteacher had to leave the neighborhood, do a flit in the night, and did not even have time to get her shoes back from the cobbler’s. But Eily said that we would never be found out, that the god Cupid was on our side, and while I was with her I believed it.
I had a surprise a few evenings later. Eily was lying in wait for me on the way home from school. She peeped up over the wall, said “Yoo hoo,” and then darted down again. I climbed over. She was wearing nothing under her dress, since it was such a scorching day. We walked for a bit, then we flopped down against a cock of hay, the last one in the field, as the twenty-three other cocks had been brought in the day before. It looked a bit silly and was there only because of an accident: the mare had bolted, broken away from the hay cart, and nearly strangled the driver, who was himself an idiot and whose chin was permanently smeared with spittle. She said to close my eyes, open my hands, and see what God would give me. There are moments in life when the pleasure is more than one can bear, and one descends willy-nilly into a wild tunnel of flounder and vertigo. It happens on swing boats and chairoplanes, it happens maybe at waterfalls, it is said to happen to some when they fall in love, but it happened to me that day, propped against the cock of hay, the sun shining, a breeze commencing, the clouds like cruisers in the heavens on their way to some distant port. I had closed my eyes, and then the cold thing hit the palm of my hand, fitting it exactly, and my fingers came over it to further the hold on it and to guess what it was. I did not dare say in case I should be wrong. It was, of course, a little bottle, with a screw-on cap and a label adhering to one side, but it was too much to hope that it would be my favorite perfume, the one called Mischief. She was urging me to guess. I feared that it might be an empty bottle, though such a gift would not be wholly unwelcome, since the remains of the smell always lingered; or that it might be a cheaper perfume, a less mysterious one named after a carnation or a poppy, a perfume that did not send shivers of joy down my throat and through my swallow to my very heart. At last I opened my eyes, and there it was, my most prized thing, in a little dark-blue bottle with a silverish label and a little rubber stopper, and inside, the precious stuff itself. I unscrewed the cap, lifted off the little rubber top, and a drop of the precious stuff was assigned to the flat of my finger and then conveyed to a particular spot in the hollow behind the left ear. She did exactly the same, and we kissed each other and breathed in the rapturous smell. The smell of hay intervened, so we ran to where there was no hay and kissed again. That moment had an air of mystery and sanctity about it, what with the surprise and our speechlessness, and a realization somewhere in the back of my mind that we were engaged in murky business indeed and that our larking days were over.
If things went well my mother had a saying that it was all too good to be true. It proved prophetic the following Saturday, because as my hair was being washed at the kitchen table, Eily arrived and sat at the end of the table and kept snapping her fingers in my direction. When I looked up from my expanse of suds, I saw that she was on the verge of tears and was blotchy all over. My mother almost scalded me, because in welcoming Eily she had forgotten to add the cold water to the pot of boiling water, and I screamed and leaped about the kitchen shouting hellfire and purgatory. Afterward Eily and I went around to the front of the house and sat on the step, where she told me that all was U.P. She had gone to him, as was her wont, under the bridge, where he did a spot of fishing each Friday, and he told her to make herself scarce. She refused, whereupon he moved downstream, and the moment she followed, he waded into the water. He kept telling her to beat it, beat it. She sat on the little milk stool, where he in fact had been sitting; then he did a terrible thing, which was to cast his rod in her direction and almost remove one of her eyes with the nasty hook. She burst into tears, and I began to plait her hair for comfort’s sake. She swore that she would throw herself in the selfsame river before the night was out, then said it was only a lovers’ quarrel, then said that he would have to see her, and finally announced that her heart was utterly broken, in smithereens. I had the little bottle of perfume in my pocket, and I held it up to the light to show how sparing I had been with it, but she was interested in nothing, only the ways and means of recovering him, or then again of taking her own life. Apart from drowning, she considered hanging, the intake of a bottle of Jeyes Fluid, or a few of the grains of strychnine that her father had for foxes.
Her father was a very gruff man who never spoke to the family except to order his meals and to tell the girls to mind their books. He himself had never gone to school, but had great acumen in the buying and selling of cattle and sheep, and put that down to the fact that he had met the scholars. He was an old man with an atrocious temper, and once on a fairs day had ripped the clothing off an auctioneer who tried to diddle him over the price of an old Aladdin lamp.
My mother came to sit with us, and this alarmed me, since my mother never took the time to sit, either indoors or outdoors. She began to talk to Eily about knitting, about a new tweedex wool, asking if she secured some would Eily help her knit a three-quarter-length jacket. Eily had knitted lots of things for us, including the dress I was wearing—a salmon pink, with scalloped edges and a border of white angora decorating those edges. At that very second, as I had the angora to my face tickling it, my mother said to Eily that once she had gone to a fortune-teller, had removed her wedding ring as a decoy, and when the fortune-teller asked was she married, she had replied no, whereupon the fortune-teller said, “How come you have four children?” My mother said they were uncanny, those ladies, with their gypsy blood and their clairvoyant powers. I guessed exactly what Eily was thinking: Could we find a fortune-teller or a witch who could predict her future?
There was a witch twenty miles away who ran a public house and who was notorious, but who only took people on a whim. When my mother ran off to see if it was a fox because of the racket in the hen house, I said to Eily that instead of consulting a witch we ought first to resort to other things, such as novenas, putting wedding cake under our pillows, or gathering bottles of dew in the early morning and putting them in a certain fort to make a wish. Anyhow, how could we get to a village twenty miles away, unless it was on foot or by bicycle, and neither of us had a machine. Nevertheless, the following Sunday we were to be found setting off with a bottle of tea, a little puncture kit, and eight shillings, which was all the money we managed to scrape together.
We were not long started when Eily complained of feeling weak, and suddenly the bicycle was wobbling all over the road, and she came a cropper as she tried to slow it down by heading for a grass bank. Her brakes were nonexistent, as indeed were mine. They were borrowed bicycles. I had to use the same method to dismount, and the two of us with our front wheels wedged into the bank and our handlebars askew, caused a passin
g motorist to call out that we were a right pair of Mohawks and a danger to the county council.
I gave her a sup of tea, and forced on her one of the eggs which we had stolen from various nests and which were intended as a bribe for our witch. Along with the eggs we had a little flitch of home-cured bacon. She cracked it on the handlebars and, with much persuasion from me, swallowed it whole, saying it was worse than castor oil. It being Sunday, she recalled other Sundays and where she would be at that exact moment, and she prayed to St. Anthony to please bring him back. We had heard that he went to Limerick most weekends now, and there was rumor that he was going out with a bacon curer’s daughter and that they were getting engaged.
The woman who opened the side door of the pub said that the witch did not live there any longer. She was very cross, had eyebrows that met, and these as well as the hairs in her head were a yellowish gray. She told us to leave her threshold at once, and how dare we intrude upon her Sunday leisure. She closed the door in our faces. I said to Eily, “That’s her.” And just as we were screwing up our courage to knock again, she reopened the door and said who in the name of Jacob had sent us. I said we’d come a long way, miles and miles; I showed the eggs and the bacon in its dusting of saltpeter, and she said she was extremely busy, seeing as it was her birthday and that sons and daughters and cousins were coming for a high tea. She opened and closed the door numerous times, and through it all we stood our ground, until finally we were brought in, but it was my fortune she wanted to tell. The kitchen was tiny and stuffy, and the same linoleum was on the floor as on the little wobbling table. There was a little wooden armchair for her, a long stool for visitors, and a stove that was smoking. Two rhubarb tarts were cooling on top, and that plus a card were the only indications of a birthday celebration. A small man, her husband, excused himself and wedged sideways through another door. I pleaded with her to take Eily rather than me, and after much dithering, and even going out to the garden to empty tea leaves, she said that maybe she would, but that we were pests, the pair of us. I was sent to join her husband in the little pantry, and was nearly smothered from the puffing of his pipe. There was also a strong smell of flour, and no furniture except a sewing machine with a half-finished garment, a shift, wedged in under the needle. He talked in a whisper, said that Mau Mau would come to Ireland and that St. Columbus would rise from his grave, to make it once again the island of saints and scholars. I was certain that I would suffocate. Yet it was worth it. Eily was jubilant. Things could not have been better. The witch had not only seen his initial, J, but seen it twice in a concoction that she had done with the whites of one of the eggs and some gruel. Yes, things had been bad, very bad, there had been grievous misunderstandings, but all was to be changed, and leaning across the table, she said to Eily, “Ah sure, you’ll end your days with him.”