The Lace Makers of Glenmara

by Heather Barbieri

  “I didn’t think of that.” Bernie glanced away, her voice light, evasive. She was too good at making arrangements to have overlooked the possibility.

  Aileen regarded Bernie over the rim of her cup as she sipped the tea, the distance between them larger than the span of the table, its oversize damask tablecloth brushing against her legs. Why was Bernie using the damask anyway? She never used the damask. It was for special occasions, christenings and weddings and funerals. Was she trying to impress the girl? Why? What was wrong with the everyday cloth, the one with the faded cabbage roses she put out whenever Aileen came to call?

  Bernie didn’t seem focused on anything she had to say, but Aileen tried to push the conversation forward. “Sile took first in the feis.”

  “She did?” Bernie asked as if she’d never heard about it before.

  “Remember, she was upcoast, performing in the invitational?” Aileen’s prodding had an edge to it. Bernie should have remembered—Sile was her goddaughter, for heaven’s sake. Granted, it wasn’t one of the majors. If it had been, Aileen would have been there herself. She’d stayed home to keep an eye on Rosheen. (Bernie could have asked about that too. She knew how difficult things had been for Aileen lately.)

  “The feis. Oh, that’s right.” Bernie’s mind was elsewhere. “Will Rosheen be dancing for the Glenmara title?”

  “She’s not dancing now, remember? She specializes in carousing.”

  “Yes. I’ve seen her around town.”

  “Smoking, no doubt. The girl will blacken her lungs as sure as she’s blackening our name.”

  “It’s not as bad as that, is it?”

  “Bad enough.”

  “She’s nearly old enough to be on her own.”

  “So she keeps reminding me. To be honest, her outlandish behavior lets me consider the possibility of her being gone without it hurting too much. I wouldn’t mind an end to the daily battles.”

  “She loves you. She just doesn’t know how to show it.”

  “Neither of us is very good at that, always wanting to have the last word. But damn it, I’m her mother, so I’m allowed. To top all, she’s never right. If she were right, that would be one thing. But she won’t admit to any mistakes. She’ll argue herself blue in the face, rather than consider she might be wrong.”

  “Sounds familiar.” Bernie gave her a knowing smile.

  Aileen shook her head. “She’s far worse than I ever was.”

  “They say each generation gets taller—maybe they get more argumentative too.” Bernie got up and looked out the window.

  “Expecting someone?” Aileen asked.

  “I thought Kate might be back in time for tea.”

  Kate again. Kate. Kate. Kate. Aileen was a grown woman, but she felt as if she were in primary school, competing for the role of best friend. This was their time—hers and Bernie’s—just the two of them. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

  “Do you think so? The lanes are narrow.” Bernie’s face was dappled with shadows from the play of sunlight on the lace curtains.

  “We travel them all the time, and nothing’s ever happened to us,” Aileen pointed out.

  “But it could.” Bernie sat down at the table again, poised on the edge of the seat in case Kate appeared.

  “Yes, but it won’t.” Aileen knew what this was about. She’s not her, she wanted to say. She’s not Saoirse.

  Bernie gave her a long, sharp-eyed look, as if she knew what Aileen was thinking. “Your tea’s getting cold.” She topped off the cup, steam rising in a narrow column between them.

  Aileen didn’t dare say more.

  Chapter 9

  Dirty Laundry & Contraception

  Aileen couldn’t open Rosheen’s door, thwarted by a blockade of clothes on the other side. She’d put a moratorium on new purchases until she could at least hoover the rug. Not that Rosheen listened to anything she said. She’d tried threats; she’d tried humor. “You definitely have a disorder,” she said, half-joking, but Rosheen hadn’t laughed at the pun.

  Aileen pushed again. There were so many obstacles these days when it came to dealing with Rosheen. Perhaps she should get a battering ram? She could give up, set the clothes outside the door, but then the mess would begin to take over the rest of the house, and she couldn’t allow that to happen; it must be contained. She glanced at her watch. It was nearly time for the lace society meeting that evening at Bernie’s house. She just needed to complete this last chore—and a chore it surely was.

  One more shove, and the door finally yielded. Aileen stumbled into the room, hopping over a pile of jumpers and boots, laundry basket balanced precariously on her hip. The things she had to go through just to put away some clothing. She stared at the wreckage within and shook her head. It was worse than usual. She snatched a scrap of notebook paper and pen off Rosheen’s desk and scrawled a single word: “Clean!” so that Rosheen would know what was what. It was meant to be informational, that note, not a reproach, not entirely.

  Now, where to put it? There weren’t many choices. The vanity was out, with its open pots of eye shadow, liner, and lip gloss, depressions where her daughter’s fingers had dipped into the war paint (she wore too much, in Aileen’s opinion). Ditto the desk, with its cairns of half-completed homework and seldom-opened books. Too late to earn high marks now.

  She’d try the dresser. She set the pile there carefully, as if she were playing Rosheen’s favorite childhood game, Jenga, taking care not to upset the balance. Aileen thought she’d completed the maneuver successfully, but the moment she turned her back, the pile slid to the floor. She swore under her breath, thought of leaving it there, one mound among many, but to do so was to admit defeat. She was as inclined to neatness as Rosheen to disarray, yet another way in which they seemed the opposite of each other, no matter that people said Rosheen looked just like her when she was young. (Rosheen didn’t take it as a compliment. Aileen wasn’t sure she did, either.) The same high spirits too. Aileen wondered how they could see the resemblance, given her daughter’s make-up and tattoos and piercings.

  She studied the lines of poetry (most of it illegible) Rosheen had written on the walls, along with pictures of rock bands and glittery stars, trying to gain insight into her daughter’s mind.

  “It’s the history according to me,” Rosheen had said.

  Aileen didn’t think Rosheen had lived long enough to have much of a history—the most recent entries to the volume of her life being one colossal muck-up after another.

  There had been better times. Happy memories tucked in photo albums with scuffed edges and fading pictures in the bookshelf downstairs, where sometimes, late at night after the rest of the family was asleep, Aileen pored over the snapshots of those joyful moments—the day Rosheen first rode a bicycle, or celebrated her first birthday (she’d shampooed her hair with frosting), or modeled her costume for the feis, where she won first prize at the age of four.

  Aileen sighed over the drifts of garments littering the bedroom. This is what her daughter wore now. Not the neat skirts and shirts of her St. Agnes uniform. Rosheen said she was finished with school. She was smart enough to continue. Or she would have been, if she’d bothered to apply herself. She’d gotten good marks until the year she turned fourteen. It went to hell after that. Aileen nagged and cajoled and threatened. Nothing did any good.

  Rosheen had apparently acquired more thongs over the past week. “I love my cabana boy,” announced the crotch of one pair. Lovely. Aileen didn’t know how she could stand to wear them—they were uncomfortable, creeping up the bum, whatever Rosheen claimed about their eliminating knicker lines. A zebra-print bra hung from the doorknob. Her daughter had the lingerie of a stripper.

  She refolded the jeans, shirts, and underwear, one by one, taking solace in the meditative process of smoothing and tucking, as if Rosheen were somewhere in each strap and sleeve. Aileen could care for her in this small way, though her daughter might see it differently, the precisely arranged garments standing out a
mong the rest as an accusation. These are neat. You are not. Or maybe she wouldn’t notice, the laundered items swallowed by the nest of sheets (the girl never made her bed) and cast-off clothing. Aileen suspected she probably ended up doing twice as much laundry as necessary, because Rosheen couldn’t tell which were clean and dirty and chucked them all into the hamper.

  A foil packet glinted on the floor. The cold medicine Aileen had gotten for her at the druggists in Kinnabegs, probably. She picked it up, intending to set it on the vanity where Rosheen might have half a chance of finding it.

  Wait: It wasn’t cold medicine at all. It was a package of birth control pills. Aileen supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised, and yet she was. The pills were another indication of how far Rosheen had moved away from her. She couldn’t have gotten them in the village—or anywhere nearby for that matter. Where had she gotten them? Galway? Who was she having sex with? That lout Ronnie? She hoped not!

  Just then Rosheen walked into the room, headphones clamped as usual over her ears. For a split second, her eyes widened with fear when she saw Aileen holding the pills, then she reverted to her habitually sullen expression. “Why are you in my things?” She snatched the packet away.

  “I was trying to put your clothes away, and everything came tumbling down,” Aileen said. “Where did you get these?”

  Rosheen didn’t reply.

  “Answer me.” Aileen felt her irritation rising. “Unless you want to get grounded for a month of Sundays.”

  “Does that mean I don’t have to go to mass?”

  “Don’t be smart.”

  “Isn’t that what you’ve wanted me to be?” Rosheen stared at her, defiant.

  “You know what I mean. I could call Reena’s mother. Perhaps she’d have the answer for me.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t I?” Aileen moved toward the door, in the direction of the phone, downstairs in the hall. “Watch me.”

  “Fine. A clinic. Satisfied?”

  “No place around here.” Aileen wasn’t done yet.

  “Yeah. We had to drive for them.”

  “You didn’t have permission.”

  “It’s not like you’d have granted it—or I have to ask. This is private. It doesn’t involve you.”

  “I’m your mother.”

  “Give the woman a prize,” Rosheen said, adding, “You might be my mother, but you’re not me.”

  “Thank God for that. I do, however, have certain rights and responsibilities. You wouldn’t understand that. You’re too young.”

  “I’m not a child anymore.”

  “If your father, if Father Byrne—”

  “What do they have to do with it? It’s my body. It’s not like they have to worry about getting pregnant. I’m not going to rely on the rhythm method or whatever it’s called, fat lot of good it’s done you.”

  “That’s enough.”

  “Well, it’s true. I’ve seen the look on your face. The fear. Don’t tell me you didn’t think about it yourself.”

  “It’s against the Church. There are values, choices. You shouldn’t be doing these things. You shouldn’t—”

  “I’m sixteen,” Rosheen said. “I can’t stay a virgin forever. Did you save yourself for one guy?”

  Aileen didn’t answer.

  “See. My point exactly.”

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Why don’t you tell me, then?”

  “Some things are private.”

  “Exactly. You should be glad I’m taking care of myself. You should too. Then you wouldn’t have a scare every month.”

  “Yes, you’re sixteen. Sixteen, Rosheen—and while you’re under this roof—”

  “Well, I might not be much longer,” she interrupted. “I might just fecking leave.”

  “Watch your language.”

  “Why don’t you watch what’s going on around you? You’re only forty-eight, and you’re already old.”

  Aileen resisted the urge to slap her. “You’re yelling so much you’re drowning yourself out.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you can’t even hear yourself anymore. If you could, you wouldn’t say these things, you wouldn’t—”

  Rosheen cut her off again. She was forever cutting her off, not allowing Aileen to finish a sentence. “No, you’re the one who can’t hear me. You don’t get it, do you?”

  “That’s not what I meant—”

  “All you do is sit there making lace every night, looking at me over the top of your glasses.”

  “That’s such utter shite.”

  “Now who needs to watch their language?”

  “Don’t you take that tone with me. I’m a human being, damn it. Being your mother doesn’t make me less of one,” Aileen said. “Or have you somehow overlooked that fact?”

  “Doesn’t it? You act like being my mother puts you in line for sainthood. A martyr to the cause.”

  “That’s not true, and you know it.”

  “All I know is that I have to get out of here.”

  “Rosheen.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? My name is Jane.” She stomped out of the room, down the steps.

  “No, it isn’t!” Aileen yelled after her. “It’s Rosheen. And if you were going to change your name, you could have at least picked something more interesting!”

  The only response was the slam of the front door. Aileen wilted against the wall, beneath the crucifix of the long-suffering Jesus, nails in his hands and his feet, and closed her eyes, the fight gone out of her. Aileen hardly recognized this girl with her lips curled back, speaking with such vehemence that spit flew through the air between them. Her throat hurt from shouting, shouting so loud, she wondered if the whole neighborhood had heard them. Sound carried easily over the hills. It had been quite a row. One of their best. At least they could excel at something, she thought bitterly.

  The silence settled around her, pressing in on all sides. She sobbed, crossing her arms over her chest. Loud, heaving sobs, part frustration, part sadness. The children could reduce her to tears more quickly than anyone except her husband.

  This wasn’t the person she meant to be.

  She’d told herself she was going to keep her temper, that she would say the right and wise thing, the phrase that would penetrate the churlish attitude Rosheen carried before her like a shield, a new coat of arms, that consisted, not like the family crest of a hawk on the wing, from the days the Flanagans had been warriors, full of power and promise, but of blades and beer bottles and pills. Tolerance and patience had been one of Aileen’s Lenten intentions, but she’d broken it more than once, and now Easter had passed without progress. Maybe that meant she was going to hell with the other mothers who’d failed their maternal duties.

  The tears started again. She sounded like a child. She wanted her own mother, with whom she’d fought, yes, when she was a teenager, especially when she was sneaking out to see Rourke. (Oh, yes, her mother did watch, did come out of her room and try to offer guidance, sometimes. Though it was too late by then, and there was nothing she could do but hold her tongue over the worst things and not say I told you so.) Her mother was dead now. Heart disease. Five years ago.

  Aileen wondered if she had it too. She felt pains sometimes, by her left breast, as if she were being stabbed by little knives. Rourke said it was heartburn. She wasn’t so sure. One of these days, she thought the frustration of being Rosheen’s mother might kill her—the blood pumping in her skull would trigger an aneurysm, and she’d fall down dead in her rose-patterned apron, there on the kitchen floor.

  How to reach Rosheen? How to let her go? The question kept Aileen awake at night, her mind spinning like the toys the children used to love, purchased on a seaside holiday on the Dingle Peninsula. There had to be some separation, it was necessary, natural, and yet couldn’t it be more gentle than this brutal wrenching that felt as if her heart was being torn in two? H
er family had no idea how Aileen felt or who she was. Did it even occur to them to wonder? Did they care? To them, she was the cook, the nagger, the worrier, the chauffeur, the nurse, the laundress, the accountant. They didn’t realize she’d been at the top of her class, a champion camogie player. That she lived and breathed and felt just like them. That they were a part of her and she of them. Always. Always.

  She took a ragged breath, quieter now. She was grateful that no one else had been home to witness the screaming match. Rourke was off, making deliveries—there were benefits to him being on the road so much. And her youngest, twelve-year-old Sile—who didn’t mind the spelling of her name and would, if she’d been home, have given Aileen the hug she desperately needed—was staying the night at a friend’s house in the next village.

  Aileen was alone in that house in which she’d raised five children. How would it feel when they were gone? What would she do? “You’re nearly free,” her friends said. Though at the rate things were going, she could be a grandmother soon, if one of the boys settled down, or if, heaven forbid, Rosheen continued in this reckless manner. (The pills weren’t 100 percent, were they? Nothing was.) No, Aileen wouldn’t think about it. She would pray. She supposed the saints rolled their eyes at her too, from their seats in heaven—not her again. She imagined their floor in God’s high-rise: the Department of Saints, a door just for her: Desperate Mothers & Whiners Division.

  There was a part of her that wanted to strangle Rosheen—oh, that sneer, that eye roll, she had the gestures of disdain, of disregard for parental guidance, down cold—that could imagine, even anticipate, her departure. Without the rebellions and arguments, her leaving would have been too hard to contemplate. But there was another side that yearned to hold the girl in her arms and sing Irish lullabies and rock her to sleep. Oho oho oho mo leanbh / Oho mo leanbh is codail go foill / Oho, oho oho mo leanbh / Mo stoirin ina leaba ina chodladh gan bron. It didn’t seem that long ago that Rosheen was a baby, crying for hours, yes, raging against the world even then, but in the end consoled, face pressed into Aileen’s neck, surrendering at last to sleep.