by Helen Cullen
Now, post-renovations, the rear half-door of the original cottage remained, freshly painted royal blue but still swinging with the same joy as when first hung by Seamus fifty-four years before. Only now it opened to reveal the Moones’ modernized kitchen and the stone archway that led to their new bathroom off to the right. This was a big improvement on the first facilities that they had discovered tucked into the corner of the garden, a miniature stone shed with its corrugated door ajar, a tail of white toilet paper fluttering under its frame. They had paused, giving each other a long look, before slowly picking their way across the soggy grass to peek inside: a claw-foot white tub, toilet and sink all squashed into the five-by-five-foot box, tiled from top to toe in beige. “So, we have to come out here in the middle of the night if we need the loo?” Maeve had wailed. “What if it’s raining?”
“You could try holding on?” Murtagh suggested, struggling to keep a straight face. She shoved him, harder than she intended to, and he lost his balance, toppling right into the bathtub. “Oh, Murty, I’m sorry,” she said, leaning over to kiss him where he lay on his back, his feet sticking out over the end. He pulled her in on top of himself, and as they lay there laughing, a cough at the door made Maeve scream. It was Liamie, squinting in at them. “The rest of your boxes are here,” he’d said, “whenever you’re done.”
To think of it now still made Murtagh smile as he turned back toward the house, his hand pressed into the ache in the small of his back. “How did we ever manage at all?” he asked Maeve, leaning on the lower half of the door, his arms resting naturally in the grooves worn in the wood by the arms of so many others who had rested there before; some to speak to neighbors, others to commune with their own loneliness in the comfort of the black canopy of stars that hung over the island. Maeve smiled. “Naivete about how long it would all take, that’s how!”
Queen played on the radio, and Murtagh watched Maeve shimmy in time to the music as she unpacked the crockery he had made and arranged it in neat rows inside their new yellow cupboards. A green-and-white-striped vinyl wallpaper coated the interiors, like the silk lining of a summer suit. Maeve had sewn curtains to match; they weren’t dissimilar to the loathed ones that had hung in her room back at Trinity, which she now remembered so fondly.
The window ran almost the full width of the back wall, so their view extended to the lowlands of the island below them: the patchwork of green fields dissected by stone walls, expanses of limestone so similar to that of the Burren, and islanders’ cottages that spread across the earth before the island met the sea. With no forestry, tall buildings or lakes, the flatland rolled out endlessly before her. A teacup slipped from Maeve’s fingers, but she caught it in the crook of her elbow before it could hit the shining tiles of their freshly laid black-and-white-checkered floor. “Very modern,” Áine O’Connor had said, after calling in on behalf of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association, ostensibly to offer help, whilst enjoying a good look around so she could report back elsewhere on the result of “the great expansion plan.”
Maeve unpacked jars of preserves and a tin of cocoa from a parcel on the counter. “Why is your mother still sending us food, Murtagh?” she asked, laughing. “We’re not students anymore!”
Murtagh stacked them in the cupboard and smiled at his wife. “How else would we know that she loves us?”
He remembered how he and Maeve had huddled over a map of the island in their flat in Rathmines before they moved, him tracing the roads with his forefinger, following the path that led from the pier to their house on BÓthar Caisleán, the Castle Road, on the hilliest part of the island, in the shadows of the ruins of the ancient Norman castle. Now they were standing where once a red drawing pin marked the spot, and it was hard for him to reconcile what the map appeared to show and the land he now called home—an island that felt less of the modern world and more of an open-air museum of medieval times. The map didn’t identify any of the landmarks that mattered to him: the tangle of blue twine and sheep wool that marked one mile to the lighthouse; the dry stone beehive hut where the road ended and island wilderness began; the moss-covered tombstone in the graveyard where Maeve was shocked to find the barely legible name of Morelli—was one of her ancestors buried here? She liked to visit that grave sometimes, to pull the weeds from its borders, secure a posy of flowers with a smooth stone at its base. Whenever they had a trouble, Maeve would suggest they go ask Morelli what he thought and drop their worries in the cemetery well. The weight they carried on the way home was invariably lighter. Sometimes Murtagh worried if Maeve visited the well more than he knew.
As he watched his wife work, Maeve fiddled with the length of green gauze she used to tie the curtains open. She planned to cover every inch of the terra-cotta-tiled windowsill with Murtagh’s pots, filled with herbs and the cactus plants her mother sent her from Brooklyn. These were a great novelty on the island. “Nothing wrong with a pot of chrysanthemums,” she’d heard more than once. “And you give them names, I hear? How peculiar. Sure, haven’t they the names God gave them? Not that you’d know them, I suppose. Maybe if you lived in Mexico.”
“Why are they so afraid of me having a cactus?” she had demanded of Murtagh as she spritzed her spiky friends with frustrated urgency.
“They take it personally,” he answered, shrugging his shoulders. “If you don’t do the same as they do, they think it’s because you think you’re better than them. Basically, notions.”
Maeve filled her spritzer at the sink, water overflowing onto her hands as she looked at him over her shoulder, her hair escaping from a loose braid she’d tied with a strip of fraying white cotton. “But that’s madness. They can have anything they want on their windowsills—what do I care? What are they so afraid of?”
Murtagh stood behind her and turned off the tap. “You asking those questions, that’s what they’re afraid of. No one wants to have to defend choices they made without ever thinking about it. Why do you think they all go to Mass every week, get their children baptized? How many of them do you think ever even considered whether it was what they wanted or believed? It’s automatic, learned behavior. But you didn’t get indoctrinated in the same way, so it’s not implicit to you.”
Maeve leaned into him and nuzzled her cheek against his. “It’s not like I wasn’t dragged to Mass back home,” she said.
Murtagh kissed the top of her head. “But you knew plenty of people who weren’t, saw lots of folks making alternative decisions, and that’s the difference.”
Now, as Maeve fussed with her curtains, she admired the new view of their garden with its sapling apple trees and vegetable beds, and ignored the tomato plants awaiting her attention. All she could feel was a sense of achievement that they had reached this milestone; it had been a long time coming. It was a relief that their home had expanded to accommodate not just their new family but the idea of how life might be if they stayed here, permanently. Murtagh’s pottery business was thriving, and the studio had quickly become his own.
Situated behind their little shop on the seafront, Makes of Moone, the studio retained many of its original features. A slab of sandalwood, six feet long, lay on top of black iron supports in an uneven rectangle, carved as it was from one tree by Seamus himself. His pottery wheel sat in the window, venetian blinds pulled to the top of the glass, overlooking the ocean. “Where else would you put it?” Maeve had said while she helped him to settle in, leaning out of the window to breathe in the sea breeze. Now, a record player also sat on a three-legged table in the corner, a battered wooden fruit box beside it crammed with vinyl disks.
On the walls were bulletin boards covered in photographs of work and pictures cut from magazines. Inspiration seemed to strike him from the strangest of places—war photography, vegetables in the soil, the aquatic world, human faces, animals, fashion, architecture, pop stars, the Seven Wonders of the World, the Amazon. He was obsessed with ceramics as stories and loved to compare what pots
they were making in Ireland, Japan, Israel, Germany, Africa, Australia, India at the same moment in time of ancient history. He examined how they were all so different, and yet how often their stories were the same; the universal human truths of existence.
Maeve still loved to sit with him while he worked, to help him mix the glazes, trying to anticipate the secrets that the kiln would reveal. It was because of small comforts such as these that Maeve remained grateful for the particular peace the island gave her. Her plan to commute to Galway every week for rehearsals with the Salthill Players had proved futile when her ability to travel was controlled by the elements; a definite decision to stop was never made but slowly her life evolved away from this as an essential plan. With each passing season, the stage she had dreamed of seemed further away, but she found she was relieved not to endure the intensified anxiety that also accompanied the adrenaline of performance. Was it a fair exchange? She thought so. Most days. And on the days when the injustice of it penetrated her resolve, she walked it off, stamped it out of the soles of her feet as she wound around the back roads of the island until she collapsed exhausted at the foot of the lighthouse and watched its beam sweep across the craggy rock she’d learned to love. When she was out walking, Murtagh always left the porch light on, their own beacon to call her home.
With Maeve’s manner that was so atypical of the traditional island women, she carved out a place for herself in their society. She joined a Saturday-morning knitting circle, sitting among the women unraveling their yarn, and refused to indulge the silence that fell as she entered until they slowly thawed. Maeve loved to ask questions that mortified them but that they all relished in hearing the answers to, whispered as they were into sleeves and with one eye on the door. When Maeve learned that many of the island women couldn’t swim she was shocked; so many families had lost people at sea and had become afraid. Immediately she ordered inflatable rings from Dublin and started lessons on Sunday mornings before Mass and cajoled them to join her one by one. Father Dónal couldn’t understand why the parish women started arriving for Mass so giddy and flushed; it was the Maeve effect. The ease at which she made real human connections, how naturally she found fun with others despite their differences, remained a mystery to Murtagh. He envied her open mind that his shyness couldn’t always replicate but the island made them both more patient, less concerned with meeting like-minded friends, and more appreciative of how the diversity in their community helped it harmonize.
In the summer, Maeve taught drama classes to the young people of the island; releasing their inner demons, helping them connect with their bodies in the loving way she never could at their age.
Let those magic fingers dance, look at them move, they’re electricity! Dance, faster, faster, FASTER and shake, shake, shake. Love your limbs, let them feel your blood racing through your veins!
In the afternoons, she sold Murtagh’s ceramics in Makes of Moone. She sat in Seamus’s old rocking chair under the shade of a blue-and-white-striped awning and read two books a week, waiting for the custom of their island neighbors, or the tourists stepping off the ferry to experience what they called “Ancient Ireland,” where children could still be found running barefoot and no cars were driven. She kept her camera on a shelf under the counter and always asked if she could take a photograph of each new customer; most agreed, and she usually got her best shot while they were busy preparing themselves for it. She had the black-and-white films printed in Galway city and placed them all with their names and the date of their visit in blue photo albums that she lined up on a shelf in the shop, some open and on display, so visitors could flick through. Occasionally folks wanted to buy one, but they weren’t for sale. “Purely a private collection,” she explained, before asking if they would then pose for it. Sometimes holidaymakers returned years later and would find themselves in an album; sometimes they teared up to see themselves even just a few years younger. A lot can happen in two years. Or two months. Or two minutes.
With the last of their unpacking now done, Maeve, bored of her own domesticity, retrieved her journal from the cutlery drawer and considered whether she could scribble a few lines. A thought struck her as she found a blank page. Perhaps she would consider rousing the adult islanders into doing a play with her; a winter performance to break up the shock of the dark? Could she convince them? She felt the flicker of inspiration spread through her before rational thought could douse it. Murtagh slipped out of the front door and returned with one of Alma’s yellow roses. He placed it in one of Seamus’s old sea-green vases on the kitchen table. “In honor of the great people who invited us to make this our home.”
In years to come, he would look back on those days and realize they had just experienced their longest period of uninterrupted happiness and yet, while they were living it, they thought there was so much to worry about.
As he watched Maeve hold Alma’s flower to her nose, laughing at the series of sneezes that followed, loving the slight swell of her belly as she stretched, he could never know how in times to come he would pine for something so simple, so sweet, as this.
Inis Óg: December 1984
“OH, YOU’RE CARRYING to the front, it’s definitely a girl so.”
“Is it ice cream you’re craving? You need more calcium.”
“I hope you’re not thinking about breastfeeding. Sure, you’ll never know if it’s being fed enough. Put it on the bottle and none of that messing.”
“Breast is best—it really is your motherly duty.”
“Don’t be jumping up now every time the baby cries, or you’ll spoil it rotten.”
“Babies need their mammies. Keep the cot right beside your bed so you can reach it whenever it stirs.”
“I hope you’re not taking hot baths. You’ll scald that baby inside you.”
“There’s nothing better for you now than a long soak with a drop of chamomile.”
“You’re tidy all the same. Only for the bit of bump you’d never tell.”
“A glass of stout is what you need now, to thicken your blood. Full of iron.”
“You’re mad to be out swimming in your condition! You should have your feet up. You’ll get a cold in your kidneys.”
“A bit of gentle exercise now will do you the world of good.”
“Have you a name decided on yet? It’ll be American, I suppose.”
“I heard you’ve terrible heartburn. That baby will have a grand full head of hair so.”
Maeve couldn’t move for all the advice that was thrust on her every time she ventured out into the island. Women who had barely nodded at her before now felt compelled to put their hands on her belly, lean in close and offer nightmarish tales of their own terrible labors, or beloved old wives’ tales. Where were all the old husbands’ tales, she wondered. Maeve had been initiated into a club that she didn’t remember applying to join, and this secret society was dedicated to educating her on how to become the perfect mother. The island was suddenly too small; there was no escape, but she had unwittingly found the golden ticket for acceptance among the inhabitants. It was a pity they all contradicted each other; or that no one acknowledged how scared she was; how sometimes she felt as if her body had been invaded by an alien that drained her of all her resources.
It made her miss her own mother dreadfully and miss her in ways she’d never before felt. She read and reread her letters, committing her advice almost to memory. “There’s nothing more special than a boring pregnancy, remember that,” and “Don’t forget to take care of you. A happy mammy is a happy baby.” What Maeve really wanted, though, was to sit across from her mother in Romano’s deli, look her in the eye, and speak to her woman-to-woman. Instead, she sat on the floor in the pottery shop, closed for the month of December, and spread before her the photos she had taken since September. The baby kicked her bladder repeatedly until she surrendered and hoisted herself up to the bathroom at the rear of the shop. Sometimes the
baby frightened her, as if she could tell her mother had doubts and was trying to kick them out of her. Maeve was sure it was a she, and not because she craved sweet things, or because, as Aíne O’Shea said, the gray in her face was her daughter stealing her beauty. She just knew, the same way she knew she was pregnant before any real evidence presented itself.
Maeve pulled out the high stool in front of the counter and sat on it with her back to the window so as not to catch the eye of any passerby. She reached under the counter for Murtagh’s good fountain pen, the one he was always losing, despairing over, and finding again, and began a letter to her unborn baby.
Dear daughter, hello, it’s me, your mama,
And what a shock it will be if I am wrong and you come kicking and screaming into the world insulted that I thought you were a girl. How could your mammy get it wrong? Well, if that comes to pass, I’m sure it will only be the first mistake of many. I think, though, on this point, I am correct, and we will know for sure soon.
Your father is so excited; any nerves he has are drowned out by the joy he has that we’ve created you, a little human who will be a strange mix of him and me somehow mingled together. At night we lie in bed and fantasize about which elements of us will be passed down to you in genes or blood. I play along, pretending I care if you have my gray eyes or his golden hair, but really all I pray for is that you’ll have your daddy’s peace of mind, and not be tormented by the old crow that sometimes sits on my shoulder, squawking in my ear.