“Pet Susie!” Mom keeps saying. “Don’t forget Susie!”
•
James and Denis cross with me to Valentia Island for the fair. The ferry, a small boat low to the water, tears at a slant across the surface of choppy waves. Denis sits staring down into the breaking water without seeming to see it. He glances at me when he feels me looking and I avert my eyes.
Once we dock, we go to a pub and I sit and watch Denis throw darts. James has drifted off to mingle with others at the bar. Denis throws a dart and hits near the bull’s-eye and I clap. He looks at me smiling with surprise and hands me three darts. I throw them, not even hitting the board. We laugh and he buys us another round. I try Smithwick’s, which he drinks, a dark red ale. Denis takes off his red sweatshirt and is wearing a worn beige Aran sweater. He’s from Ballyferriter on the Dingle Peninsula, he tells me, speaking in a low register, mumbling as if he is eating his words.
“I was there,” I say. “I think it’s the most beautiful place in Ireland. Clogherhead Beach. The Three Sisters. Sybil Head.”
He nods, his expression both shy and pleased.
I ask about a cottage I saw in the distance on a hill visible from Clogherhead Beach.
“Yes, I know the place.”
“You do?” I ask, astonished.
“It’s empty.”
“Is it in shambles?”
“Maybe a bit. An itinerant woman lived there for a year or two. No one’s there now but the spiders and the birds.”
“I’d like to move into that cottage so I could always be near those beaches.”
He looks at me sidelong with a little smile. “If I go back and I see a fire lit there at night, I’ll come and check on you.”
•
When it is almost dark we leave the pub and he reaches for my hand and holds it as we make our way to the Dairbhre Fair, where, in case the weather turns, the dancing is being held in a big barn crowded with locals and others who have crossed from the mainland for the festivities. The floor is covered in hay, the lighting dim with storm lanterns hanging on the walls.
A teenage boy in charge of the music changes the records on a rickety-looking Victrola in the corner. He has a limited choice of forty-fives and keeps playing Roxy Music’s “Dance Away the Heartache.” Everyone hooks arms with their partner and twirls around. Denis and I twirl each other fast, gaining a thrilling momentum, so the force throws us a little each time we let go of the other’s arm. Rapt and dizzy, we try to catch our breath, eyes damp with laughter.
•
Mom leads us outside to the backyard after it has rained and tells me to stand near the slender apple sapling and breathe.
“What do you smell?” she asks.
Though it has produced no fruit yet, after the rain, the young tree smells of apples.
•
My father brings Nanny home a carton of Salems and presents it to her with a flourish. “Here you are, Mrs. Tully,” he says.
Taken aback, she thanks him.
“You are very welcome,” he says.
As soon as he turns, she mutters, “Stupid piece of shit.”
He freezes a moment, then continues to move away.
Tracy and I have witnessed this and begin our secret campaign against Nanny. We lie under our beds and write with pencil on the bed boards: I hate Nanny. Nanny stinks. Nanny will go to hell.
•
Among all my mother’s unsorted photographs, there is a studio picture of Nanny and my grandfather, with my uncle Jack, a year old, looking startled and bemused, sitting on Nanny’s lap. Fleshy in a pale chiffon dress, her brown hair carefully arranged, Nanny wears an imperial expression on her face. My grandfather, who looks like a tall James Cagney, stares off to the side as if he is far away in his thoughts.
•
For days before we leave for a vacation to the Grand Canyon, Nanny yells at Mom.
“Let Vincent take the kids! It’s selfish of you to leave me here.”
She throws her dinner on the floor, complains the coffee’s cold and spills it. She holds a lit cigarette to the arm of the swiveling chair.
Mom has hired a woman named Mrs. Janney to stay with Nanny the four days we will be gone. Mom’s stocked the kitchen with Nanny’s favorite foods: cans of chicken a la king, chocolate cream pies.
The morning we are leaving, as Dad backs the car out of the driveway, Mrs. Janney comes out and calls Mom in.
Ten minutes pass before Mom comes out again. She’s agitated and slams the car door. “Let’s go, goddammit!” she yells at my father.
•
It is a clear night full of stars, the clouds having moved far off into the Atlantic. The cool island air still smells of rain from earlier in the day. As Denis and I walk, holding hands, I tell him I am moving to Dublin, that I want to have a life as an actress. I tell him that in Santa Fe I played Cassandra, the prophetess, in The Trojan Women, and made my entrance each night onto a dark stage holding a lit torch. I describe the feeling of looking out, the audience in darkness so I could not see them, nor could I see the walls of the theater itself, so it was as if the entire night sky were open before me. And how as I stood there and lifted my head and spoke a monologue, a prayer to the god Apollo, there was intense silence because everything spoken from the stage seems to mean more. I tell him that I will never forget the feeling of speaking out into that darkness and feeling it listen.
He takes my hand and holds it and looks into my face with a spark of curiosity. He seems moved by what I’ve told him. “You’ll get the job in the theater in Dublin,” he says. “I’m sure of it.”
It’s sweet the way he phrases it, as if there’s something permanent about a role in a play.
Walking along the shore we arrive at a bench, and sit facing the mainland. He kisses me and, after a few moments, with a shaking breath, breaks the kiss. I rest the side of my face against his collarbone, his heart beating against my neck, quick and hard.
If he hadn’t broken the kiss, I would not have.
Still embracing me, he says, “Tell me more about standing on the stage, looking out into the darkness.”
I breathe in his scent and it is familiar to me: like stones in the rain. Though we met only hours ago, we know each other.
“I felt my parents there, watching me.”
He waits for me to go on.
“They died.”
I breathe him in again.
“How?”
“I can’t tell you,” I say, though I have a strong desire to tell him. I want to deepen what’s between us.
I stay quiet and he peers into my eyes, a shadow forming on his brow. “You can. You can tell me.”
Around us the Irish air, Irish darkness over Irish ocean.
“You won’t want to kiss me anymore if I tell you.”
“I will still want to kiss you.”
After a silence I take the risk. “They killed themselves.”
He blinks, waits a moment, then says, “That’s not your fault.”
“But they were my parents.”
He shakes his head. “But they aren’t you.”
He tightens his grip on my hand. I look into his face, then sigh and go quiet. He leans close and kisses me.
“You see? I still want to kiss you.”
A bell rings at the hostel to announce the impending curfew. We walk toward the light that shines over the hostel door, but Denis stops and embraces me while we are still in the shadows. I say to him, “If I ever move into that little house facing Clogherhead Beach, and you see firelight there at night, you’ll come, won’t you, and check on me?”
He brings his face very close to mine so our foreheads are touching, then says something in Irish.
“What did you say?” I ask, our foreheads still pressed close.
“I said if I ever see firelight in that little house, I’ll come up and check on you.”
Because of the fair, the ferries are running late into the night. He has to go back to the Johnny Ruth, b
ut promises to return the next evening. We step into the porch light, holding hands. Just before parting I ask him to speak to me again in Irish. I close my eyes, letting the soft sounds splash over me.
•
Mom talks about being a soldier.
My sisters and brother stare out at the passing desert. We have been driving for hours, but we’re not even halfway to the Grand Canyon.
“And when I die, I want a crew cut,” Mom says.
In the rearview mirror Dad’s mouth looks tight. I watch the moving lines of the highway reflect on his sunglasses.
Sheila whispers something into the bright blonde hair of the doll she clutches to her chest.
•
We go horseback riding at the southern rim of the Grand Canyon. As she has said she would, Mom asks for a spirited horse. Now and then on the trail, Mom takes her horse ahead in a wild gallop. After a few miles, the horse I am on decides it is sick of a slow saunter and bolts. I grasp the reins, the horn, and the saddle. The galloping bumps me up and down, hurls me loose. The hooves pounding against rocky earth send blows through my body until I am sliding sideways off the horse. Through a deafening whistle of wind, I hear Mom scream, “Hold on. Hold on.” And then she is there, her horse galloping alongside mine. She leans into me and grasps me with one arm. I don’t know how she manages to do it, but she gets me off the bolting horse and onto hers.
When we arrive back at the stables, I am still shaking so violently I can’t stand. The astounded trail guides compliment my mother. No one mentions the fact that at eleven, I am almost as tall as she is, and probably weigh the same.
After rescuing me she seems restored, rejuvenated. Everything after that feels heightened, as if we are breathing extra oxygen.
•
It’s a hot July day and the four of us kids have been swimming and playing for hours in the motel pool, which we’ve had virtually to ourselves. Jerry throws an army man into the deep end at the six-foot mark. I gulp in a big breath, then go under, my feet splashing as I descend. The soldier is in a standing position, drifting about an inch above the pool floor, and I am able to snatch it. I surface, my arm raised, clutching my prize.
When I get out of the pool there are chlorine haloes around everything: the big umbrella, the towel, and the tube of Coppertone. Tracy walks, waist-deep, in the shallow end with Sheila on her shoulders. The aqua pool water shimmers around them like a million particles of light.
•
The weather is clear, but I am anxious for the hours to pass until I see Denis again. I rent a bike and ride around the island, and I stop at a big gray house, in an area called Ballyhearney. There is a plaque on it that says it was once a famine hospital. I try the door, but it is locked. I walk in a circle around it. I can see inside the smudged windows a spooky emptiness. In one otherwise bare room, a narrow iron headboard leans against a wall.
I ride the bicycle up a dirt hill and stop when I come to an overgrown field where a white horse stands grazing.
•
We are driving past acres of dry fields when Mom spots a big black horse standing at a fence and asks Dad to pull over.
“He’s a giant!” Dad says.
Us kids crowd Mom as she gets an apple out of a bag in the trunk. “You have to hold your hand out flat like this, then the horse won’t nip your fingers by mistake.”
Just as we’re approaching the fence where the horse is waiting, a lady in a cowboy hat and jeans appears, coming out of a stable. She pulls a hose that runs with water, and puts it into a trough to fill it. She nods at us and says it’s okay to give the horse an apple.
“What’s his name?” Mom asks.
“Angus,” she answers.
Mom and Dad look at each other, smiling and surprised.
“Who is Angus?” I ask.
“It’s a name out of Irish myth,” Dad says.
Angus laps the apple off Mom’s hand. While he crunches it, juice spilling from between his teeth, the lady says, “He’s gentleness itself!”
Mom strokes his neck, then leans in and kisses the side of his face.
At home I look in the book of Irish myths and read that Angus is the Irish god of love.
•
As evening sets in, I gravitate toward the pier, my heart pounding as a ferry comes in. The closer it gets, the clearer it is that Denis is not on it. I sit down on the bench where I sat with Denis the night before. The ferry leaves and returns a little later, but again Denis isn’t on it.
“Je reviens,” I whisper, eyes set on the ferry’s path across the water.
Maybe he has thought about how my parents died and finds it too terrible. I read in an old book about the British Isles that the Irish drove stakes into the hearts of suicides.
The night passes and Denis never comes.
•
From behind our half-open door, Tracy and I spy on Nanny as she walks down the hall in the middle of the day and stops outside the bathroom. Instead of going in and closing the door, she opens her legs to a wide stance and waits, then strains and pushes, grunting. A few moments later she calls, “Ba’bra. Ba’bra.”
•
In our closet behind the dresses and coats, Tracy and I write all over the walls in pen: I hate Nanny. Nanny stinks. Fuck Nanny. I want Nanny to die and go to hell.
We wrack our brains to come up with some trick we can play on Nanny, some way to scare her.
•
“Uncle Michael loved my mother,” I say to Nanny.
I notice the slight acceleration in the rise and fall of her sunken chest.
“My mother was his favorite.”
She glares at me through the filthy lenses of her glasses.
•
Dad is working and Mom is at a PTA meeting. Nanny and Sheila are watching Liberace play a rhinestone piano on the Lawrence Welk Show. Tracy and I try to interrupt Nanny’s enjoyment by mocking his nasal voice: “I love the pyano. I love the pyano.”
Nanny waves her arm at us. “Sssshhh!” she says.
It isn’t enough. We want to do something more.
The fuse box for the entire house is in our room. I switch off the power, and, in sudden darkness, Liberace goes quiet midmeasure. From the doorway of the den, where Tracy has been waiting, holding a big powder puff loaded with dusting powder, she rushes into the dark and feels for Nanny’s face, then slaps her with the powder puff, all the while Nanny and Sheila are screaming.
When we switch the power back on and go in and look at them, Sheila is clinging to Nanny, whose face is white with powder. Nanny blinks, opening and closing her mouth, trying to push the powder out with her tongue. Sheila has powder all over the top of her hair and on her dress. I start to laugh, though my stomach spasms with remorse.
“I hate you guys,” Sheila says. She’s crying.
•
The trees have grown high all around the house.
“A grove,” Mom says. “We’re living in a grove.”
•
I have thought of staying an extra day on Valentia Island but the idea of waiting another agonizing night for Denis and him never coming is not bearable.
I find two Americans, Philip and Jan, to hitchhike north with.
While we are on the ferry back to Cahirciveen, I see the Johnny Ruth docked there, Denis on the pier bent over a mass of heavy wet rope, organizing it into a damp coil. He stands the last few minutes, watching and waiting for the boat to come in, and when it aligns itself with the pier, he reaches in and helps me climb out.
Philip and Jan drift off ahead and wait for me a few yards away.
“You didn’t come last night,” I say, struggling to keep my mouth from trembling.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “We had to go out with the nets.” They just got back an hour ago, having gotten no sleep the night before.
He told me the night on Valentia that a fisherman is dependent on weather and the mood of the water, that conditions all around the western coast of Ireland are rocky and dangerous,
that sometimes they’re forced to wait a week before they can fish. When the weather is with them, they have to go out.
James appears and catcalls from the deck of the boat. Denis waves his hand dismissively at him.
I want to press my face against his neck, smell his skin and his Aran sweater. But we are in the daylight and there are other people around us.
He glances over toward Philip and Jan.
“Some Americans also traveling north,” I say.
“I’m coming to see Dublin,” Denis says.
“When?”
“Three weeks, when we’re finished here.”
I give him Theresa’s address and phone number. “I may be there,” I say, “but if not, she’ll know where I am.”
I watch as he writes his parents’ Ballyferriter address and phone number in my address book and hands it back to me.
“I wrote it in Irish,” he says.
•
In Limerick we stop at a pub for lunch. After eating, Jan spreads her map out on the table before us. Yeats country is about six hours to the north. They suggest we stop two hours to the northwest in Doolin or Lisdoonvarna, where the best Irish music in the world is played in the pubs. Though I’m feeling a little anxious to get to Yeats country, I want to hear the music. And I don’t want to lose them as my traveling companions. Before we go, though, they express interest in looking around the town of Limerick, so I tell them to leave their packs with me at the pub and I’ll guard them. I’m feeling sad about Denis, and wouldn’t mind an hour or so alone.
There’s a man staring at me from the bar, a rugged-looking character, heavyset with shaggy black hair. After a few minutes he approaches and hands me a weighty metal plaque, around five inches by five inches, with the words God Bless Our Home engraved into it.
“For you,” he says.
Taken aback, I thank him.
“I made this,” he says. “Forged it with my own two hands.”
Turning it over, I see in small words at the bottom right corner: Made in China, and a registered trademark symbol stamped into it. I pretend not to see this. “Beautiful!”
He eyes the backpacks. “Are your friends coming back straightaway?”
“Yes, any minute now.”
He gazes dreamily at me and says, “Sure, you must look lovely in nothing but your pelt.”
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