The American Call

 

Áine Greaney

~~

The American Call 

First published in New Hibernia Review, 2013

~~ ~~ ~~

    The Americans said I had courage.   

They would say it while I stood there reciting the daily lunch specials, dressed in my emerald green shirt, my black trousers and waitress’s apron.  Usually, they said it just as I got to that part about choosing lunch sides (fries or salad or soup).

 “Are you from Ireland?”

“Yes, I am.”

 “How long have you been over here?” 

“Three months.”  Later, “six months.”  Then, “nine months.”  Then, “two years.”

 “Family or alone? Job or college?  Temporary or forever?”

Mostly, the wife asked these first questions. The husband added his own set of queries: “North or south? Catholic or Protestant? Are your French fries hand cut or frozen?”  

    Raising my voice over the Irish music and ballads on the pub stereo, I dished up my story. I watched the eyebrows arch, the eyes widen, the mouth pucker.

   “Oh, my God!” The woman would say. “That must have taken such courage.”

At age twenty-four, in the eyes these chino-clad couples en route to summertime horse races or the family cottage in the Adirondacks, I was that woman who strides through the airport in dusty hiking boots and with nothing between her and the big bad world but a Kindle full of Lonely Planet Guides.  

No. Scratch that. Actually, I was even braver than her.  For us immigrant women, “courage” means looking around at our own country, the country of our mothers and our grandmothers and our great-grandmothers, and declaring, “No. Not for me. Thanks."

Often, as I stood there with my pen and order pad, I heard that American woman’s undertow of regret. I wondered if she glimpsed herself at my age, if my story evoked her own roads not taken, her own botched tests of courage. Did she mourn that job or that lover that her small-town mother had talked her out of?  Had she spent a grown-up life, a marriage, wondering about that man whose cologne and touch she can still conjure?  A man far sexier but riskier than the paunchy husband inquiring about his lunchtime French fries?

For others, I knew that I embodied this woman’s worst fear: that one day, her own twenty- or thirty-something daughter, the apple of their parental eyes, would buy an airline ticket to move three thousand miles away.

 In the end it was easy to defuse use the whole courage thing, to divert this nice couple back to their lunch order and choosing their accompany sides.   It was extra easy if I laid on the Irish accent: “Oh, now, I don’t know would you call it courage or just a streak of daftness.”   

My Lonely Planet courage odyssey--began on that Friday morning, November 28, 1988, when I boarded a double decker bus for Ballsbridge, a suburb just south of Dublin’s City Centre. As I sat upstairs with my top-down view of Merrion Square, I opened my leather satchel for that last, petrified check through all my get-to-America stuff: the Irish passport, my savings deposit book, my appointment letter summoning me to the American Embassy where I hoped to be granted a U.S. visa. I also had a letter from my expatriate friend Mary.

A year ago, Mary had quit her Dublin job to move to the San Francisco Bay Area and now, in her airmail letter, she said that if I really did emigrate, I could crash on her couch until I found my feet.  

On that double decker bus, I was nobody’s image of feminine courage.  I was too terrified to behold anything larger or scarier than that short bus ride and my upcoming interview and the cold, drizzly morning out the bus window. Neither did I know or believe that, when they did the final, retrospective count, I would be among the 200,000 other 1980s Irish who fled our own country. Nor did I consider that I was fixing to become a small addendum to Ireland’s three-centuries’ long emigration saga.

But if these big-picture or long-range views were scary, the immediate alternative was 100 times scarier: If I flunked my Embassy interview and had to stay in my own country? I would be a young woman with no job, no place to live, and just enough money to see me to the upcoming Christmas holiday.

            Up close, the American embassy in Dublin with its glassy, Lego-look frontage didn’t seem like the kind of place that could make or break your Friday or the rest of your life.  

Inside, a woman with a Marcia Brady accent directed me to Consulate Services. The queue? Where was the reputed queue of doleful, desperate people waiting to flee this country of 33,000 square miles, a runaway public debt and inflation rates, and, in some areas, an unemployment rate approaching 20%.     

I crossed the Consulate room with its line of pale desks flanked by giant American flags. My footsteps rang: clack-clack-clack. I stood behind a white line on the floor, a queue of one waiting for that American man in the white uniform shirt to look up and beckon me forward.   

In those days, we collected and passed along our American rumors and factoids.  Of course, the first factoid was that all the Americans spoke loudly, whereas I had been told, and told again, that I spoke way too softly, and if I wanted to seem like the kind of person suited for the land of the free, then I’d better project my voice. 

Right. Well, here I was at last, sitting in the chair across from the American man’s desk, and here came the questions whose answers I had rehearsed and was ready to shout out like a quiz contestant.     

Adequate financial means to travel and live in the United States?

“Yup. Oh, yeah. Absolutely!”  My voice seemed to boom in that echoey room. But for the Americans boom and loud were good.   

Secure accommodation?  

“All set there. Yes, yes, absolutely.  Not a problem.”

I thought of the airmail letter in my bag and crossed my fingers. 

Valid passport? 

“It’s all there, sir”

Suddenly, he stopped leafing through my paperwork to give me a what-is-your-problem look.  I imagined his next questions: What are you shouting for?  Are you hard of hearing? Do you have a nervous disorder? Some kind of anger issue?    

Good Christ. The American government is going to reject me based on some imaginary infirmities.  So here was my worst nightmare about to come true: I was going to be banished, like Lucifer being cast out of heaven. I was going to be stuck in Ireland.  

  My INS man returned to the paperwork; his face impassive. Then, without meeting my eyes, he stamped my green passport and handed it back to me.

 “Thank you,” I whispered.

 

Back in the City Centre, I walked to the Bank of Ireland in College Green where I presented my bank book and the clerk in her polyester uniform dress handed me some crisp twenty-pound notes and a little pile of fifty-pence pieces—the change I needed for that transatlantic all to arrange my Bay Area landing spot.

That money was the last dividend, the last payout from my job and my heretofore life as a parish schoolteacher. 

For the four years between my college graduation (at age 20) and my American emigration, I had worked as a primary-school teacher in a rural village in the Irish midlands. Then and now, a remote, ramshackle school in a crossroads village was or is nobody’s idea of a promising career start. 

But during my last year at my Dublin teacher-education college, the Department of Education announced that it had admitted and educated far, far more of us than the country actually needed or would need.  In the summer after college, when I moved back into my parents’ house in County Mayo, the school job freeze grew more public and more drastic.  By September, my friends had secured jobs—most of them back in Dublin, where they seemed to live a more grown-up version of our carefree student life. But after a summer and autumn of applicant resumes and my mother’s rosaries and novenas, my only job offer had come from that midland school outside Granard in County Longford where I would become “Miss Greaney,” the parish schoolteacher, and where us three female teachers had to call our school principal, “the master.”   

  The village and the school sat on the lee side of the Northern Ireland border, just forty-seven  miles south of the watchtowers and the British soldiers in their camouflage uniforms and combat boots.

In 1984, two years after my arrival, the town achieved national and international infamy when a local, anonymous press source leaked the story of Ann Lovett, a fifteen -year-old girl who died after delivering a full-term dead baby boy outdoors, in the grounds of the town church and its outdoor statues.  Her school and family denied all knowledge of her pregnancy. 

 

Still, on that drizzly Friday in 1986, I was not supposed to be standing there in that Dublin bank, closing out my Irish savings account so I could buy my ticket and arrange my passage “over.” 

 Ten years after our joining the European Union, Irish country girls like me were supposed to avail of and appreciate what our mothers and our grandmothers had been denied:  a secondary education and a chance to enter the civil service. Or, for the really smart girls, to attend a college in preparation for a salaried, pensionable job. Then, once we had landed those gigs, we were to buy a small, womanly car—say, a Ford Fiesta or a Toyota Corolla hatchback—to take us home to our parents on weekends or to visit our old college or school girlfriends in their own version of this quasi-emancipated life.

I was a teacher; teachers were actually luckier. Teachers had a much longer history of legally sanctioned employment than our counterparts in the banks or other civil service departments. Until 1973, under the so-called “marriage bar,” women in banking or civil service jobs had to immediately resign their positions upon marriage. For primary-school teachers, the marriage bar had been lifted as early as 1958.

 But our singledom was never intended as a life in itself, a life with real intellectual or athletic or creative or sexual promise. It  had little or no public currency, except as the foreplay to a real life. that is, a life of marriage and children and a house. And in 1980s Ireland,, even for those of us women who could keep our job, we knew  they  would always be the second income, the addendum job to that of our husbands.  

   How had this life script become so ingrained in our young heads? Was it how people around us pronounced that word, “spinster?” Or was it the known sell-by date, that time after which the salary and the car and the professional clothes—these trappings of our emancipation—turned liability, a sad defense, a pathetic compensation for the man and the marriage that hadn’t or might not come?   

America offered something else. If all those rumors and factoids were true, America was an Etch-a-Sketch country where you could simply delete what didn’t work, where each job had a clear and unblocked Exit sign, where your surname didn’t ring a bell, where nobody knew or would ever know which side your grandfather took during the Irish Civil War, whether your family farm had been handed down or coveted or acquired from the Irish Land Commission, whether your parents had been a love match or a land-grabbing dowry affair, whether your mother wore a good or a shabby coat to Sunday church. Where, in fact, nobody would know or ask whether or not you even went to Sunday church.  And even if they did ask, you could simply lie and say the opposite to the truth.

 In America, you could screw up, really screw up, and who would ever know? And better yet: your screw-up would not become part of your own and your family’s permanent narrative.

  In my last year in that midland school, I taught forty-two students in one mixed-grade classroom. Some of my seven and eight-year-olds were so bright that they should have been in programs for the gifted or fast-forwarded into the next classroom.  Others were severely in need of a special school or, better, some kind of medical intervention. But in a school where I bought my own chalk, where some of these freckled little children had never seen the ocean (an hour away in County Sligo), there was never any suggestion or hope of support or special services.  We had no staff bathroom.  One of my prevailing teaching memories is of exiting the school door squirming, holding on until I reached the town of Granard three miles away where I would pound up the stairs to my rented apartment to finally pee.

After the bank withdrawal, I walked around Dublin’s City Centre, past Trinity College and down Westmoreland Street, looking for an unvandalized phone box. When I found one, I opened and shut the door, holding my breath against the inevitable whiff of stale urine.  I stacked my fifty-pence pieces along the phone ledge and took out my San Francisco friend’s letter to dial that long string of digits.

Somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area, a phone rang in a shared house. Brr-brr. I imagined my expat friend Mary rushing across a sunlit patio into the house where, when she heard my voice down the receiver,  when she heard that I was actually, really coming, she’d shriek with delight.  

“Hello?”  The male voice sounded woken up and sleepy. 

“Em … Is Mary there?” I tried for American jauntiness.

“No.” 

“Do ... do you know when she’ll be back?”  

“It’s Thanksgiving,” he said in a duh voice.  “Like, yesterday. So they’ve left for the weekend. Gone to Tahoe skiing.”    

Thanksgiving?  Skiing?  Somewhere in the back of my mind—a Brady Bunch episode?—I pictured a roast turkey, a father with a carving knife, a table of smiley children. What did skiing have to do with all that?

Then, I remembered that lonely looking American man, my inquisitor  at the embassy. Just him and me in that echo room. For him, today was the equivalent of Boxing Day, when he was supposed to be enjoying his leftover turkey sandwiches and watching telly on the couch.  Instead, he had to sit there as a girl from County Mayo shouted at him.

Then, just as that last fifty-pence coin clicked through, I glimpsed the madness, the unplannedness of what I was trying to do.  I had no place to land in America. 

Since leaving the teaching job,  my only replacement gig had been to enroll in one of those commercial “business schools,” where they taught basic typing and word processing on a set of computers that were all the size of washing machines. I signed up for that class because everyone said that late-1980s America was choc-a-block with computers and, if you even knew how to turn one on, you could snag one of those lucrative, etch-a-sketch jobs.  But by now, end of November, I was already flunking both my typing and word processing classes. Suddenly, America, or rather, the notion of me in America, was looking dodgy.  It was starting to match the rest of my life to date: a set of grand daydreams with a poorly wrought plan or no plan at all.   This current daydream, the plot to leave my own country, had landed me in a phone box on a grey afternoon, jobless and almost penniless, and wondering if, rather than joining the freewheeling expatriates—that sub-economy of young Irish who passed along job leads and crashed on each other’s couches—if I should just use my last fifty-pence pieces to telephone across the country to my mother and beg for some names and numbers from the family address book.

Like most West of Ireland families, we had an entire cast of American relatives.

 In the first three decades of the twentieth century, my grandparents’ siblings, some shortly after or just before their sixteenth birthday, had taken the slow boat to New York Harbor.   During our childhood summers, in 1960s and `70s, these elderly emigrants and their American-born children or grandchildren stepped from their rental cars into our muddy, rain-washed farmyard. In their psychedelic clothes and Lucille Ball shoes, they looked more like giant talky dolls or parade characters than real people. They were oblivious to the weeks’ worth of preparations (new linoleum, white-washed walls, shop-bought cake) that had preceded their arrival. 

All the summertime American visits mandated an afternoon of high tea with the china cups and a white tablecloth and shop-bought ham. While our summer hay crop lay abandoned in the meadows, the guests sat around the table and exclaimed over the smell of our turf or peat fire.

After the visit, they got back in their rental cars to voyage on to the other relatives or to go on shopping for sweaters and Claddagh rings.

Between the summertime visits, they sent back packages of brightly colored hand-me-down clothes, including sleeveless, Jackie O’-styled shift dresses and, once, a tulle debutante dress. At Christmas, they mailed photocopied holiday letters with cheery updates on their families.

To us post-European Union Irish, our great-aunts and their offspring were a living reminder of our grandparents’ era, a time when frightened young girls –some of whom didn’t or barely spoke—English—left their farms because they had run out of marital or financial options. Whether we admitted it or not, they were the flotsam from a colonial and, later, a newly post-colonial country that, for all its jigs and reels, for all its songs and stories, couldn’t feed all the babies on its baptismal registries.

Most important: My parents had educated my siblings and me so that we would not ride the backward-moving history train, so that we would not become a woman standing in a phone box on a dreary afternoon, trying to finagle her passage over, her landing mat in America.

 

I never got to California—at least not to live. In the end, as an act of mercy and just in time to book my flight, a family member contacted a friend of his in upstate New York. The friend, a man named Bob whom I had never met, said I could come and stay with him and his blended family.  So on the day after Boxing Day, 1986, at 24 years old, I landed in JFK Airport with a rucksack, a borrowed $200 spending money, and a set of directions for my three-hour bus journey upstate.

 

Now, almost three decades after that JFK landing, I’m at a dinner party or some evening fundraiser thing, and someone will ask and I will tell and it gets said again: That must’ve taken some courage.  Nowadays I have the benefit of online, psychology lite articles on youthful impetuosity and how a under-24-year old cannot foresee or care about the consequences of his or her actions.   Standing there in my summer linens or my corporate jackets, in my best expatriate patois I say, “Courage? Sure at that age none of us knows what we’re doing. If we did, we’d have done nothing at all.”

It’s another diversionary tactic.  My glib version is guaranteed to garner a counter story about a teenage son who texts while driving, or a daughter who won’t make school-night curfew.

The Irish aren’t as generous with the courage thing.

 By the time my emigration became tellable, by the time I made those visits back to Celtic Tiger Ireland, my four siblings had acquired some new friends and new colleagues who had heard of "the sister in America.” At a pub or party, these strangers had their own set of questions: “When did you go?” “You must miss home.” “Would you move back?” 

If it came up at all, the courage thing came with a chortle, the way we tell about that night when someone, through daftness or drink or daring, jumps into the swimming pool fully clothed. What a cracking good yarn! But of course, hardly something these respectable or educated Irish would actually do themselves.

I’ve always liked the American version better. It was always purer and easier—at least until that day’s restaurant shift was over, when I shed my green shirt and waitress’s getup to stand under the shower to scrub away the smell of French fries.  

Back then and now, the courage thing felt and feels like a private joke.  I am that girl who gets crowned beauty queen when, in fact, it’s all been a secret Botox job.

Can Books Convert Us?

 

For more of Áine's published writing and teaching information, visit her author website. 

© Under U.S. copyright laws, it is illegal to copy or re-use this text without the author's permission. 

***

Can Books Convert Us?

 

I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I lost my homophobia. It was 1983--three decades before my native and adopted countries both achieved historic marriage equality victories.

It was a Saturday morning.  I was lying in my single bed in a third-floor bedroom in my rented flat over the town butcher shop in the Irish midlands.  A year earlier, at age 20, I had graduated from college and moved from my Dublin campus to that one-street town and my first "real" job as a primary school teacher.  That flat was always freezing, so that Saturday, I snuggled under my duvet to finish my current library book, the “The Well of Loneliness.”

“The Well” is an autobiographical lesbian novel that, once published in the U.K. (1928), got banned on the grounds of its "indecent" content (it had none). The novel was eventually released in 1959, but still, I’m baffled as to how a book like that made it into the Fiction stacks of that town library down the street from my flat.

Ever since childhood, I have loved public libraries. Ever since childhood, I had a habit of reading beyond my age and outside the spoken or spoken "lines." The now quaint-seeming Walter Macken novels were my antidote to the anti-men and -sex screed of my convent secondary school.  The works of Irish authors John McGahern's and Edna O'Brien also took me outside the boundaries of what was proper for a young girl. So did the works of German author Heinrich Boll. 

That morning in my flat, I finished my novel and then, I lay there and wept over a fictional love affair that was so sad, so poignant, that it permitted a heterosexual girl like me to empathize with a life that was, in 1980s Ireland, illegal and unspoken. More important, that book had the power to make the alien personal and, by extension, equal.     

Now, let's switch to Massachusetts, where I live now. In 2004, Massachusetts was the first U.S. state to legalize gay marriage. These days, it's tempting to be smug, to superimpose a grown-up, enlightened self and state upon an unenlightened, myopic past. So I want to separate fact from memory here.  I want to avoid a revisionist version of that morning in the Irish midlands in 1983.  

No. In this case, I am telling it straight. I lay there cradling my paperback while knowing, deep in my bones, that me and my life were about to change. Never again could I be the compliant, small-town teacher girl—to quote from Samuel Beckett, “not with the fire in me now.”   

Then and since, I’ve often wondered: How does one book covert us from one set of beliefs to its antithesis?  Are we writers really that evangelical?  Or does the conversion factor depend not on the writer, but on some secret symbiosis between the text and the reader?

Exactly three years after that Saturday morning, I emigrated from Ireland to New York (where “The Well of Loneliness” had, following an unsuccessful lawsuit, won the right to be published in 1929).

  

Two months after landing at JFK Airport, I bought a second-hand copy of “The Middleman and Other Stories,” a collection of short fiction by Indian-born author Bharatee Mukherjee. When I finished those stories about southeast Asian expatriates, I wanted to telephone this Calcutta-born woman to personally thank her for teaching a girl from County Mayo that, far from being the provenance of the Irish, immigration is a worldwide condition. More, her writing granted me a much-needed language for the confusion and terror I was feeling in a new country. Most important, those stories gave me permission to start writing. 

     

While still working a hodgepodge of low-wage jobs, I went back to college to study for a master’s degree. In one evening class, we were assigned Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.” As white folks, that (white) professor promised, Morrison’s novel would be our window into “the American black experience.” 

It was. 

Over 10 years later, in 2010, journalist Rebecca Skloot  published “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," a non-fiction narrative about a black woman who died of cervical cancer in the Negros-only section of Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951. Unbeknownst to Henrietta or her children, her malignant tumor cells were harvested and cultured to create the first known human cell line for worldwide medical research.  Skloot’s depiction of Ms. Lacks' girlhood and marriage and death broke my heart. 

Mind you, Mukherjee’s, Morrison's and Skloot’s books were more enlightenment than all-out conversions. I didn’t and don’t profess to know what it's like to be non-Caucasian in the USA or anywhere else. But I’m not, I hope, a xenophobe or a racist. I do not, I hope, presume that these stories are less-tellable than my own. And I wonder: How much can I credit my world view to all the authors, past and present, who had the power to change how one country girl (me!) saw and sees her local and larger world?

Still, I had my blind-spot prejudices, and one was the American military.   For years I blamed our slashed arts education budgets, our unequal healthcare access and a boatload of other national problems on America's inflated national defense budget. In the absence of a World War II-styled conscription, doesn’t every military man and woman willingly sign up for their government-paid job and that job’s inherent risks? So how, I reasoned, can you throw a national and nationalistic pity party?

Then, I read Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s “The Watch,” a huge and haunting novel about a group of soldiers in an isolated military base in Kandahar. In “The Watch,” the plight of the civilian Afghan woman with no family and no legs (she lost both when her mountainside village got American bombed) is no less or no more heartbreaking than the plight of the young soldiers trying to hold it together amid the chaos and trauma of war. This book, too, made me cry. 

The U.S. defense budget still ticks me off.  But, just like the “Well of Loneliness,” the exquisiteness of Roy-Bhattacharya’s writing let me transcend the governmental for the personal. Now I see a service man or woman--from any country--sitting in an airport departure lounge and I worry, á la Tim O’Brien, about the things that soldier carries.   

Walk by any urban playground. Visit any gay or heterosexual bar or nightclub, and it’s clear that we are often forced (or we choose) to ghetto-ize, to stick with our own kind. From Manhattan to Mullingar to Melbourne, how many of us go entire seasons without sharing a drink with folks who look, act, speak, worship or love differently from ourselves?   

Until we do, we must have books. 

This essay was first published in the hard-copy version of "Books Ireland."  

 

A Faithful Heart - An expressive writing micro essay

 

Photo Credit: Šárka Krňávková on Unsplash

This expressive writing piece was published in "Who Am I Today?" The book is an anthology of 40 women's writing from the Women's Writing Circle, Center for Health and Human Rights, Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts. 
 
For more of Áine's published writing and teaching information, visit her author website. 

© Under U.S. copyright laws, it is illegal to copy or re-use this text without the author's permission. 

***

A Faithful Heart 

Today I am sitting on the sea wall watching four swans and watching the hours and minutes until it’s time to drive my husband to the hospital for another outpatient surgery.

A new swan glides into view.  Now they are five.

Today will be the fifth hospital trip.

From those other visits I remember silly things, like that Saturday-night ER waiting room where none of us met each other’s eyes. Or that snack machine where the potato chips jammed and that I body slammed to release a food I don’t like.  An office where I did my day job work with the cell phone set on high. When it rang, it was not the surgeon, but someone calling across state lines because, she said, she hated to wait for these things.  

Good waiting makes good hospital.  I really wanted to tell her that. 

Books I’ve read. Pages I’ve written. Grants I've edited. Deadlines I’ve met because it’s amazing what you can do while the machines bleep and your patient sleeps and while you keep busy because, really, nobody wants to deal with a bothersome wife.

New swans have arrived. Now they are nine.  

There’s an old, Irish ballad about two island swans.  It’s that one about how swans mate for life, and—oh, yes—there’s a line about the male swan’s “faithful heart.”  

Sitting here on the sea wall I think: Easy for the bloody swans.

Sitting here on the sea wall I ask: Who the heck gets to define ‘faithful?’

Sitting here on the sea wall I think how, once, I thought I could list the component parts (of a faithful heart).  

As I leave the sea wall, I think how, some days, faithfulness is a to-do list that gets done; this thing and then this next thing, one by one by one.

London A - Z: A Memoir (Hermit Crab Essay)

 

This essay was published in New Hibernia Review, Volume 27, Issue 3, 2023.  A previous, shorter version was published in Litro, UK. 

 For more of Áine's published writing and teaching information, visit her author website. 

© Under U.S. copyright laws, it is illegal to copy or re-use this text without the author's permission. 

***

London A - Z: A Memoir  

Alsation. That first night in London, you opened your bedroom door to find a dog lying on that landing, just beyond the threshold. Alsatian. As you stood there in your floral nightie, the doggie breed name dinged through your sleepy brain, conjuring those photos from your old school textbook chapters on Nazi-occupied Germany.

 
Bladder. This dog thing happened in autumn 1986, just after your twenty- fourth birthday. Even though you were in your nightie and your bladder was full, this wasn’t really your bedroom. Instead, that second-floor room with the pale pink walls came with your new barmaid job, and you had woken and stumbled across to that door because you needed to pee. Now, with this dog (see “A” above) lying there, you tiptoed back to your single bed, where you lay listening to the north London night traffic.
 
Country, n. The United Kingdom, where you had just landed, has four component countries. Though, according to Wikipedia, “the descriptive name one uses for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland can be controversial, with the choice often revealing one’s political preferences.” Country, a. In your  native (southern) Ireland, teachers, college pals, and Dublin bus conductors heard your rural accent and tagged you as being and sounding “country.”
 
Donegal. Your pub boss man, who lived in an apartment at the other end of that upstairs landing, hailed from County Donegal. However, from his English accent, to his politician’s haircut, to his Anglo-only drinking friends, most folks could never detect his Irishness (see “P” below).
 
Emigrant. Sometimes an emigrant departs their own country in order to stay alive. Other emigrants leave because the leaving is less painful, less shameful than staying. Since the 1700s, the Irish have been particularly good at emigrating.  In your own family, two great-aunts and three great-uncles left for America. One great-aunt never came home again. One great-uncle got shipped back home to die. A whole generation later, your two uncles left for the United Kingdom. 

As a child in County Mayo, you heard many euphemisms for this act of leaving your own country.  Later, in the twenty-first century, you will know that none of the euphemisms did justice to the actual process of living a life overseas. Neither did the euphemisms—or the  Hollywood  movies—do  justice to the emotional firewall between those who left and those who stayed behind.
 
Fear. Since graduating from your Dublin college, a slow boil fear has thrummed inside—both while working your Irish government teacher’s job and while figuring out how to flee that job. After you fled, you moved back into your parents’ house down the country. There, in the daily newspaper, you spotted an advertisement for this London pub job. Live-in, free accommodation. These magic words (free accommodation) made you fantasize about future mornings when you could eat your breakfast without fearing or watching the disappointment, the disgust in your parents’ eyes.
 
Glasses. In your second-floor with the pale pink walls and the rosier pink corner hand basin, your night dreams were populated with falling and shattering pint glasses, G&T glasses, half-pint glasses, brandy glasses, whiskey glasses, et al. In those dreams, you were sloshing something into or over the wrong glass—all while the boss man watched from his barstool (see “F” above and “S” below). In real life, during your lunchtime and evening bar shifts, he often departed his barstool to come behind the bar to fix your latest mistake. Out of the bar cus- tomers’ earshot, he hissed: “You’re going to run me bloody bankrupt.”

Home. The morning cleaning woman, also Irish, tossed this word (home) around too much. Sometimes she meant your native land. Sometimes she meant the nearby flat where she and her (also immigrant) husband and kids lived. Over morning tea, you learned that their London-born kids were called “shandies,” as in, half beer and half lemonade, as in, first generation. Sometimes you silently begged this woman to ask: “Fancy coming home to ours for a bite of supper tonight?” 

PS: You didn’t know this in 1986, but after London, for the rest of your life,  you will always pause before you say that word, “home.”

Irish Republican Army. Two years earlier, in September 1984, the Pro- visional Irish Republican Army (IRA) had bombed the Brighton Hotel while then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her conservative party cab- inet were staying there. That bomb killed five people and injured thirty-one. Thatcher escaped. Back (pause) home, in southern Ireland, you had known or learned or cared very little about the sectarian war up north. Ditto for all previous, offshore IRA bombings.
 
Job. As well as the free bedroom, the agreed price for that London job included a breakfast and lunch of warmed-up sausage rolls or Scotch eggs—or whatever hadn’t sold at yesterday’s pub lunch. Some days, when you worked the lunch counter, you wondered if all the food got sold, what would you eat next morning? Thankfully, this never happened. Over and over, you told yourself that this job was infinitely better than your old job, teaching children in a freezing parochial school.
 
Kid. We kid ourselves about all kinds of things. Even in the worst of setups, we don’t interrogate our own fallacies and fantasies. “You’ve honestly got to be kid- ding.” Back then or now, who actually says that to themselves?
 
Lunge. After that first night with the Alsatian, you tried again. And again. But every night, that dog lay stretched out there, just beyond your bedroom thresh- old. Where was this dog during daylight hours? One Saturday night, you heard the tick-swish doggie sound on the back stairs. From your bed you pictured him (her?) down there, patrolling from pub window to window. Who had he (she?) been trained to look for, to lunge at? Another night, after the boss man let you and the live-out barmaid have an after-work drink, you were really, really burst- ing to pee. So you set your hand on the door jamb and arched your leg high to step over. The hackles rose and the Alsatian gave a low growl—the precursor to a doggie lunge? You didn’t wait to find out.

Mathematics. You have always been bad at maths. Still, you wonder if most of life can’t be reduced to a balance sheet of what you are now and what, someday, you hope to be or to acquire (see “E” above). Life could also be boiled down to a set of math puzzlers. For example, if a dog’s girth measures XYZ meters, just how many meters high would a girl need to arch her leg to climb across? Or: how many milliliters of urine can accumulate in a human bladder before it causes cystitis? Or: thanks to her country-girl skills at climbing up  and  hoisting  her- self over acres of dry stone walls would she be equally adept at, say, hoisting herself up onto that pink hand basin to pee?
 
Navvy. Early in this job, the seasoned, live-out barmaid issued the boss man’s no-serve rule: “No serving anyone in boots.” You asked. She clarified. Ah! Just as you’d suspected, this rule was not about footwear. Instead, it referred to Irish  navvies (construction workers). Daytimes, due to the size of that bar and the issues of distance and depth perception, this no-boots rule was hard to apply or enforce. Night times, you rehearsed the scene for that dreaded day when you would have to cite this rule to a navvy, a thirsty man who smelled or looked like  your father.
 
Object v. Years later, in your twenty-first-century woke-ness, you will wonder why you did not do this (object), or why you did not become a conscientious objector, n. Nope. Fear is not an alibi or an excuse here. But how about that free room with its pink walls and hand basin-turned-night-toilet?
 
Passing. Speaking of “wokeness,” you will learn that there is a term for what your boss man was doing. He was “passing” as English. Later, in a hateful part of your heart, you will also say that he was passing as human. Later too, you will do a little of this (passing) yourself, in America. Not because you don’t want to be Irish, but because some days, you will be too busy rushing from job to job to answer the “what-county-are-you-from?” question.
 
Quintessential. From its cottage-styled windows to its dark-wood bar and banquettes, the Rose & Crown pub, where you worked and lived, was quintessentially English, such as one might see in a tourist brochure or website.
 
Race, racism. On your afternoon rambles around north London, you saw how, in contrast to 1980s Ireland, there were many Black and brown faces. Why did none of these faces appear at the bar in the Rose & Crown? Oh, wait. Once, halfway through a busy lunch, a Black man appeared in that pub doorway. He glanced inside, then retreated back outside as if he’d seen enough to know.
 
Surveilled. Afternoons, when you walked to the corner shop for cigarettes and salty snacks, the lady shopkeeper watched your every move. When you asked for your brand of cigarettes, she made a grand pantomime of wincing at and retreating from your accent. Mornings, when you and the cleaning woman stood whispering, you listened for the boss man’s footstep on the back stairs. At night, when you tried to fill and tabulate someone’s drinks order, you knew he was watching from his barstool. Amid all these, the Alsatian kept watch—or surveilled—at your bedroom door.
 
Stiff. This is American slang for the act of not paying, as promised, for an agreed service or job. One morning the boss man summoned you to his office. There he said that, due to tanking pub sales, he could no longer afford a full-time, live-in   barmaid. You could keep your free room for two nights, and he would leave your final paycheck under the bar cash register or till. Next day, after a fitful, sleepless night, you checked for your money.
 
Terrorist. In that corner shop, where a stack of Evening Standards sat between you and the lady shopkeeper (the one who winced at your accent), you wanted to ask: “From my thick hair to my green eyes to my soft voice, who exactly do I really, really look or sound like to you?”
 
Ugly. There are plenty of ugly cities, but London is not one of them. Millions of folks travel to see its Trafalgar Square, its British Museum, et al. In fact, years later, you will fly from Boston’s Logan to London’s Heathrow Airport to join these tourists with their cameras and their A–Z guide maps. On that trip, Lon- don will feel cinematic, not real, as if you had never been there before (see “V” below).
 
Vantage point. How you experience a place depends on what parts you are allowed or have the leisure or the cash assets to see. It also depends on where you have flown (see “H” above) from. All cities look different when a tourist’s  hotel room key sits snug in your pocket.
 
Waste. Later, you will regret all of your wasted months and years and botched attempts at a grown-up life. You will want to erase or photoshop that girl standing there in her nightie, staring at an Alsatian dog.
 
Xenophobia. See “P” and “R” above. 
 
Yearn. There’s not much to say about “the ‘y’ word,” except that the Bible (“the greatest of these is love”) and the Beatles (“All You Need is Love”) were really,   really onto something—like, something basic but big. The truth is this: Much more than the spatial or architectural or geographical place, we all yearn for an existential home or home base. Or when we’re away from home, we all yearn for  an emotional blankie to keep out the cold.

Zonked. On your London departure day, your money hasn’t been left under that cash register or till (see “S” above). When you knocked (and knocked) on the boss man’s apartment and office doors, there was no response. Still, even without your paycheck, you splurged for a taxi (not the Tube) to the British Rail night train to take you to the night ferry to take you back across the Irish Sea and (pause) home. In that taxi, after a jittery, sleepless night in that pink room, you were bone-weary tired, aka, zonked. Tonight, would the Alsatian automatically sense that there was nobody behind that bedroom door—nobody to protect or protect against? Tomorrow, would that woman in the corner shop wonder where you were or if you’d just given up junk food and smoking? You didn’t bloody care. Neither did you care that, while your black cab nudged through the afternoon traffic, your middle-aged London cabbie kept gawking at you in his rearview (see “S” above). 

Outside Euston station, your gawking, middle-aged cabbie swiveled all the way around to face you. He said, “Look, I have to ask you this, love: Are you . . . are you all right?”
Zonked as you were, and although this cabbie with the kind eyes did not quite fulfill either the Bible’s or the Beatles’ love quotients, you managed to smile and push out four words: “I’m fine. Thank you.”
 
Yearn. There’s not much to say about “the ‘y’ word,” except that the Bible (“the greatest of these is love”) and the Beatles (“All You Need is Love”) were really,   really onto something—something basic but big. The truth is this: Much more than the spatial or architectural or geographical place, we all yearn for an existential home or home base. Or when we’re away from home, we all yearn for  an emotional blankie to keep out the cold.

Zonked. On your London departure day, your money hasn’t been left under   that cash register or till (see “S” above). When you knocked (and knocked) on the boss man’s apartment and office doors, there was no response. Still, even without your paycheck, you splurged for a taxi (not the Tube) to the British Rail night train to take you to the night ferry to take you back across the Irish Sea and (pause) home. In that taxi, after a jittery, sleepless night in that pink room, you were bone-weary tired, aka, zonked. Tonight, would the Alsatian automatically sense that there was nobody behind that bedroom door—nobody to protect or protect against? Tomorrow, would that woman in the corner shop wonder where you were or if you’d just given up junk food and smoking? You didn’t bloody care. Neither did you care that, while your black cab nudged through the afternoon traffic, your middle-aged London cabbie kept gawking at you in his rearview (see “S” above).
Outside Euston station, your gawking, middle-aged cabbie swiveled all the way around to face you. He said, “Look, I have to ask you this, love: Are you . . . are you all right?”
Zonked as you were, and although this cabbie with the kind eyes did not quite fulfill either the Bible’s or the Beatles’ love quotients, you managed to smile and push out four words: “I’m fine. Thank you.”
 
A native of County Mayo, Áine Greaney was part of the 1980s emigration wave, when an estimated 200,000 Irish left for the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Since then, in addition to her published books, her writing  has appeared in New Hibernia Review, Books Ireland, the Boston Globe Magazine, the New York Times, Another Chicago Magazine, and many other publications, as well as on Salon and WBUR/NPR. Her fifth book, “Trespassers,” a collection of short fiction set in greater Boston and Ireland, is forthcoming. 

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