The Carnival at Bray

by Jessie Ann Foley

  “I was wondering,” she began, the words coming out in a rush, “is Eoin up for expulsion, too? Because I heard he was. And it’s not his fault. It wasn’t even his idea, and—”

  “We’re not here to discuss his case,” Sister Joan cut her off. “Saint Brendan’s is a different school than ours, and we can’t comment on their business.” Her thick bifocals made her eyes look like two coffee beans, pupilless, cold. Maggie felt like screaming. She had done this to Eoin. She was poison; she had ruined his life.

  “Maggie.” Sister Geneve leaned toward her across the table, the string of her unraveling sweater curled around her wrist. “You can’t control what happens to your friend. Right now, you need to be fighting for yourself, for your future.”

  “But—”

  Under the table, her mother used the toe of her sensible pump to kick Maggie in the leg.

  “Honey,” she hissed.

  “What?” Maggie glared at Laura and turned back to the nuns.

  “I mean, I guess you’re going to do whatever you want with me,” she said quietly. “But before last week, I had pretty good grades.”

  “That is true,” Sister Geneve nodded firmly. “Maggie is a quiet but diligent student. She writes very movingly about poetry.”

  “I love Yeats,” Maggie said. “I thought of that poem you taught us when I was at my uncle’s funeral.”

  “What poem is that?” asked Sister Joan.

  “It’s called ‘A Dream of Death.’ ” Maggie ran a finger along the wavy lines of wood grain on the surface of the table, the way they spread out and came together in parallel lines, marking age. “He wrote it for this woman he loved, about her being buried in a foreign place, and about her grave being marked with cypress trees.” She paused. “When we were in Italy, on the train going through Tuscany, we saw them—cypress trees. The roads are lined with them, like gates or something.”

  “And here’s me, thinking all she cared about was music.” Laura smiled, that open, American smile that laid too many cards on the table, the one that showed the missing molar. There was a silence. Finally, Sister Joan straightened her papers.

  “Well, if you don’t mind stepping out for a moment, Sister Geneve and I are going to discuss this in private. We’ll call you back inside when we’ve reached a decision.”

  “Thank you,” said Laura. They all stood up and shook hands again. “I just want to say again, that, you know, Maggie really is a good kid. Her father left us when she was very young, and ever since then, she’s been my little helper, my little woman.” She hung her head. “Sometimes, I think she’s more of a grown-up than I am. And—and I think stability is what she needs now. She’s already had to start over once.”

  “We’ll keep that in mind,” Sister Geneve said. “We know Maggie’s a good girl.”

  Back in the hallway, they sat in an old pew and waited while the nuns conferred.

  “Jesus Christ, talk about an interrogation!” Laura fanned herself. “Goddamn nuns think they’re so much better than everyone else. Brides of Christ my ass.” Maggie sat next to her and chewed her nails. A clock ticked loudly above their heads. Ten minutes later, Sister Geneve opened the door and leaned out.

  “Pardon me, ladies? If you could come back into the office.” Maggie and Laura followed Sister Geneve back into the conference room and sat down.

  “Maggie, we’ve taken into consideration your unique circumstances,” began Sister Joan. “Normally, this kind of behavior would warrant an expulsion. But as Christians, we must always practice compassion and forgiveness. And we’d like you to remain a student with us at Saint Brigid’s.” Maggie sighed. She felt like an iron weight had just slid from her back. Laura slumped back in her seat, produced the tissue and proceeded to dab beneath her eyes.

  “However, this is going to be a conditional reacceptance,” Sister Joan continued. “One, you’re going to have to work very hard to pull up your grades. You can’t miss any more school, and you’re going to have to do very, very well in all your courses. If you fail any of them at the end of term, we can’t reinstate you.”

  “Okay,” Maggie said. “I can do that.”

  “Good. The second condition is that—and we’re going to need your support on this, Mrs. Lynch—we don’t think it will send a good message to the community about our girls and our school if you continue to be seen tipping around with that boy. We want you to give us your word that you will end your relationship with Eoin Brennan. You’re not to see him anymore while you are enrolled at Saint Brigid’s.”

  All three of the women turned toward Maggie to observe how this news would settle. She closed her eyes for a moment, willing herself not to cry, but when she opened them, the tears streaked down her face anyway. Why does my body not know the difference between sadness and rage? Why do I always have to cry when I’m furious? Why do I have to act like a little girl who just got her lunch box stolen instead of standing up for myself and telling them where they can stick their fucking rules?

  “Of course!” her mother’s bright voice cut across the silence. “You know, I was going to suggest that anyway! They’re just too young. There’s nothing worse than getting involved too deep with someone when you’re that young—trust me, I would know.” She put a sweaty hand on Maggie’s shoulder. “Honey, do you understand what this means? No more phone calls, no more dates, no nothing. Can you promise that?”

  Maggie opened her mouth. The saints, Anne and Veronica and Elizabeth and Brigid, stood at attention. She felt their maddening, beatific, stony half smiles, daring her to jump from her seat, point her finger in Sister Joan’s wimpled face and say the kinds of things that good girls and saints never said. And she would have done it, except that she felt the infinitesimal weight of Kevin’s letter folded up, as it always was, in her jacket pocket.

  There will always be time to do the responsible thing. What did he mean by that—was this that time? What would he say to her now? Where did her loyalties lie—with the dead or the living? In her life, Maggie had loved two men. One was a few blocks away, standing before a review board at Saint Brendan’s. And one was now a memory—uncut hair, eyes of burnout blue, seat back in AG BULLT careening down Lake Shore Drive on a bleary summer Saturday morning, cigarette dangling between his fingers and the sun rising blood-orange above Lake Michigan.

  And so she made her choice. She heard herself speaking as if possessed, as stony and passionless as the statues in the corner:

  “I promise.”

  Maggie returned to school the next morning. She refused her mother’s offer of a ride, and left extra early to walk the mile into town, hoping that she might run into Eoin in the quiet chill of the seaside morning when the eyelids of corrugated aluminum were still pulled down over the storefronts and the Saint Brendan’s boys gathered on the misty football pitch to practice their drills before school.

  “You’ll meet someone else,” Laura had said after the hearing, smiling at Maggie apologetically over her West Coast Cooler. “I know it doesn’t feel that way, but you will.”

  But to Maggie, love was like art—you went after it with a singular ferocity, like the monks on Iona, scratching away at their illuminated pages. You didn’t just move on to some other thing.

  She arrived to school before most of the other girls in her class were even out of bed, gathered her books, and headed toward her French classroom. The teachers began filing in, carrying umbrellas and cups of instant tea. As she sat in the hallway and waited for Ms. Lawlor to unlock the classroom door, Maggie daydreamed about where she and Eoin would move one day when high school was finally over: somewhere anonymous and huge where no one knew who they were and no one cared. Tokyo, maybe, or Rio, or Mexico City.

  “Well, hello, Ms. Lynch.” Ms. Lawlor smiled blandly down at Maggie as she turned her key in the lock, balancing a file folder in one hand and a sausage roll in the other.

  “Hey, Ms. Lawlor.” Maggie scrambled to her feet and slung her bag over her shoulder. “You want some help there?�
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  “Thanks.” Ms. Lawlor handed her the folder and her napkin-wrapped breakfast. “I trust you can ask a friend in class to catch you up on what you’ve missed?”

  “Of course,” Maggie said. There was no point in explaining that she had no friends—that kind of personal over-sharing would only come off as cringingly American. As she followed her teacher into the empty classroom, she was struck, as she had been many times since Kevin’s death, with the cruel, odd truth that when your life implodes, it shatters nothing but your own insides. Ms. Lawlor, with her hair-sprayed bun, chalky rouge, and ill-fitting wool pants, looked the same as she always did. So did the posters on the wall declaring “Je parle le français pour dix bonnes raisons!,” the pictures of the Champs-Élysées, the framed reproduction of Renoir’s Girl With a Watering Can. All of this was a realization to Maggie that her life was its own tiny matter, and that the rest of the world carried on, oblivious and impervious to her aftershocks.

  She sat in the back row and took out her notebook, waiting anxiously for her classmates to arrive. When the bell rang, Aíne and her new friend, Bea, were the first to walk through the door.

  “Good morning, Ms. Lawlor,” their bright voices called in unison. When they saw Maggie, they stopped short. She lifted her hand in a small wave, but the girls sat on the other side of the room, as if Maggie’s delinquency might infect them. Class began at 8:00, and Maggie took notes furiously, not just to catch up on her conjugations but to keep her mind off the gossip that bubbled around her.

  That was how it went, from French to physics to history. Maggie kept herself busy taking notes, ignoring the stares of her classmates. In her free moments, she doodled absently in the margins of her notebook and wondered where Eoin was, what he was doing, whether he had returned to Saint Brendan’s, whether was thinking of her. The morning dragged by, and as she headed to the canteen for lunch, Maggie realized that she was about to become one of those high school clichés she’d always just managed to avoid: the pariah who eats lunch by herself. But just as she was about to sit down at an empty table next to a row of garbage cans, telling herself to keep her head up and show them how little she cared, the unthinkable happened: she was approached by a smiling Nigella Joyce.

  Maggie had been a student at Saint Brigid’s for six months, and in that time had never been even a remote blip on Nigella Joyce’s radar. And why should she? Nigella was the most popular girl in her class. She always led the charge to town in warmer months when the hunt for boys was on, and rumor had it that she was not a virgin. This fact no longer impressed Maggie, who, after Rome, could quietly count herself among that crowd, but Nigella was reported to have slept with at least four boys, one of whom was twenty-three and a star halfback on the Kilkenny County hurling team. But because she was so stunningly beautiful—endless legs, bouncy, vivacious hair, and heavily made-up eyes that somehow conveyed both innocence and distilled sex, Nigella was exempt from the high school judgment machine. Unpopular girls who were reported to be promiscuous were dismissed as “slappers” or “hoors.” But someone like Nigella seemed endowed by the Creator to have fingers inside her, hands in her hair, mouths on her thighs. For her, sluttiness wasn’t a source of shame, but a birthright.

  “Maggie, where are you going?” Nigella demanded, her rose-cheeked face pouty and concerned.

  “I—I was just going to sit down to eat,” Maggie said, putting her tray down on the empty table.

  “Come sit with us!” Nigella said, slinking in the direction of a table where the powerbrokers of third class were opening their lunches.

  Maggie hesitated before picking up her tray and following the pert flap of Nigella’s skirt, reminding herself that she’d been among real women—in Dublin, in Rome—and she didn’t need to feel so grateful for this sudden and unexplained act of goodwill from a girl who was, at the end of the day, just another high school teenager with good hair and polished nails. But she had just come so close to the bottom of the social food chain, a lonely misfit bowed over a limp ham sandwich, that despite her best efforts at cool nonchalance she tripped along behind Nigella’s heels toward the popular table like an eager puppy. On the other side of the lunchroom, Aíne and the other honors girls watched sourly.

  “So,” Nigella asked as they took their places, “is it true you ran away to Rome with some fella who works at the Quayside?”

  “Well, not exactly,” Maggie said, peeling the crust off her sandwich. “We didn’t run away. We went there for a Nirvana show.”

  The girls tittered.

  “That is so fantastic.”

  “So,” Nigella said, “did you two fuck or what?” She propped her chin on her hands expectantly. Maggie looked around the table at their glittering, greedy eyes, the word fuck a piece of bloody meat dangled in the water.

  “No,” she said quickly. “It wasn’t like that at all.” That word didn’t come close to describing what she and Eoin had done together. And besides, her memory of Rome was not something she was going to waste on these girls.

  “Well, I just think it’s so romantic,” said Fiona O’Connell, biting into a shiny pink apple. “So chivalrous. The way he sacrificed himself for you!”

  “What do you mean?” asked Maggie.

  “The deal they offered him,” Fiona said impatiently.

  “What deal?”

  Nigella Joyce leaned in even closer, so that Maggie could smell her lip balm.

  “Wait a moment—you don’t know about it?”

  “No.”

  “They offered him the same deal they offered you—but he refused! He said they couldn’t tell him who he could be with or who he should love. So they kicked him out of Saint Brendan’s!”

  In unison, the table of girls sighed at the romance of it all, drooping over each other like wilting flowers.

  “I’d steer clear of those Saint Brendan’s boys if I were you,” Fiona warned. “You’re their enemy number one right now. It’s not so much that everybody loved Eoin Brennan—but he was one of the best footballers on their team.”

  Maggie didn’t care if every boy in Bray despised her. It only mattered whether Eoin did. She thought about running to the nurse’s office, pretending she needed to call home, calling the Quayside instead, asking Auntie Rosie if it was true. But if it was, then Auntie Rosie probably hated her now, and so, most likely, did Eoin. After all, she’d gotten him caught up in the drama of her life, and as a result, she’d shamed him and derailed his future. That night in Rome, as they lay together under the blankets, skin to skin and listening to the rain, she’d read him Kevin’s letter. Her only hope was that he would remember it now and understand why she’d done what she’d done. Pressed up against the ancient walls of the Coliseum in the rain, he’d told her he loved her. Did he still? He’d forgiven his mother once; could he forgive her now?

  In the seven months that Maggie had lived in Bray, she’d grown to love Dan Sean O’Callaghan and his little cottage on the hill. It had become an emotional monastery for her; a place where she could sit across from the old man with a mug of tea or hot port in her hands, the dingy cat on her lap, the turf fire blazing and the clouds low outside his curtained windows. He always gave Maggie the best advice—he was so far removed from his own teenage years that he was always able to look at her problems with perfect objectivity and healthy perspective. When it came to romance, he explained, the old ways are usually the best ways. When five weeks had come and gone and the only place Maggie had seen or spoken to Eoin was in her daydreams, Dan Sean advised her to write him a letter. “Short, plain, and honest,” he told her. “You can give it to him at my birthday party.”

  Because, of course, Eoin would be there. Everyone would be there. Dan Sean was everybody’s friend and neighbor, but he was also a holdover from an older time, a protector of the old ways, from long before modernity had roared across Ireland with its cranes and its cable TV. His hundredth birthday party was a celebration not just of Dan Sean but of all the things that had transformed the islan
d in his lifetime—and no one in town was going to miss it. On top of that, one of the perks of growing old in a country as small and familial as theirs was that every citizen who lived to be a hundred received a government check for one thousand pounds on his centennial birthday. Dan Sean had already divided these proceeds into three accounts: one, for a summertime pilgrimage to Lourdes; the second to the parish church, and the third, to pay for a party with Guinness, champagne, and a three-course dinner at the Beaufort Hotel. Nearly everyone in Maggie’s corner of Bray was invited: and that meant that she would finally get her chance to tell Eoin how she felt.

  A few days before the party, while she sat sprawled on the carpet, slogging through her physics homework, someone knocked softly on Maggie’s bedroom door.

  “Yeah?”

  Laura stuck her head in the room, holding a white package close to her chest.

  “Can I come in, honey?”

  “Sure.” Maggie looked up from her notes.

  “I got you a dress from Clery’s.” She put the package on Maggie’s pillow. “Thought you might want something new for Dan Sean’s party.”

  “Cool. Thanks, Mom.”

  “You’re welcome.” Laura lingered in the doorway of Maggie’s room. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore a Chicago Bulls sweatshirt over an old pair of jeans. She’d put on some weight since they’d moved to Bray, a result of fried breakfasts and sugary wine coolers, and the extra pounds had made her face moony and round, a little slack around the cheeks and neck.

  “Mom?” Maggie said. “You okay?”

  “Maggie, I need to talk to you.”

  “Okay.”

  “About something important.” Laura sat down on the carpet and began fiddling with the zipper on Maggie’s backpack.

  “Okay.”

  “I want to be honest with you from here on out. I learned my lesson.”

  “Okay, mom.” Maggie kept her voice casual, but she could feel her heart pounding. Serious talks were never good.