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.

Unnatural (Braided Essay)

This essay was first published in The Lowell Review, 2023.   

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. 

 ***

Unnatural 

The Aran jumper is a style of jumper (sweater) that takes its name from the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland . . . The Aran stitches have a multitude of interpretations and symbolic meanings. ¹

 

In that tiny room, Sister G. said, “Now, I’m really worried about you two.”  

As she said it, I could smell the nun's breath—that sugary, confectionary smell that, every lunchtime, wafted from the kitchen windows of that small-town convent in south County Mayo. 

It was 1976, and “you two” were my best friend Pauline* and me.  At 14 and a half, I was a year-plus younger than all of my convent-school classmates. Now, standing there in her navy-blue school uniform, Pauline cocked her chin and said, “Why, Sister? What are you so worried about?”

Sister pushed her hands into the space between us, then wove her fingers together.  

“You’re all tied up in knots with each other. There’s … there’s something going on between you two. Something unnatural.”

 Once we were dismissed and back out in that tiled school corridor, I whispered to my friend: “What does she mean?”

“You know,” Pauline hissed, “You. Know.”

 I didn’t know. But whatever I was meant to know, I prayed that it wouldn’t get reported home to our house in the village.

In that house, which sat across the street from Saint John’s Parish Church, I often lay upstairs in my and my sister’s shared room trying to imagine what it would feel like to be cuddled and hugged.  I didn’t imagine Pauline’s arms around me. Nor any of the Chistian Brothers School boys on the yellow school bus. Nor any of the parish men who drove their tractors past our house or who sat along the bar in our village pub.

Instead, my fantasy cuddler had long hair (a ponytail?) and he whispered my name in a foreign, cultured accent—something south Dublin or Anglo Irish. Or, actually, let’s go for full-on Anglo here. His clothes were something between Beatle, Beatnik and high-culture Irish (A collarless shirt? Yes, please). He was a writer or a poet or a musician who, like me, had read and adored the novelists stashed beneath my bed, two of whom--Edna O’Brien and John McGahern--had had their works banned in Ireland.

The (Aran) trellis stitch reflects the small, dry stone-walled fields created to shelter islanders from the Atlantic’s strong winds. ²

The week after Pauline’s and my tribunal, Sister G and the other Sisters of Mercy launched their blitzkrieg. Without warning, they assigned every girl in our class a new desk and a new desk-mate.  Some of us had to sit with girls we didn’t like. Or a few prim town girls had to sit with one of us country kids.

“Why?” Everyone asked between classes.

We shook our heads and shrugged our shoulders. Who knew? Except Pauline and me. We had our suspicions.

These suspicions were confirmed when, during subsequent weeks, we got called up for imagined classroom infractions.  One lay teacher said Pauline and I were always laughing at her. Weeks later, when we scored the exact same percentage grade on a proctored French test, another teacher said that “you two” must have been “cogging” (cheating) from each other.

“But Miss, now we sit at opposite ends of the room from each other,” said Pauline, while I just stood there, still wondering how much of this had been reported to my mother.

That year, Ireland was exactly a decade into our free secondary education and busing system. Since 1967, thanks to the O’Malley Education Act, we girls could now get the post-primary (high school) education that had been denied most of our parents whose own families either couldn’t afford the fees or didn’t have an extra bicycle to get their children from the farm to the town for school.

So here we all were in our navy-blue uniforms. And, every 45 minutes, when our lay or religious teachers swept in for the next class period, here we all stood to bless ourselves and pray.

However, if history tells us anything it’s this: It takes much longer than a decade to dismantle a deeply engrained and post-colonial classism—the kind of classism that clearly favored town girls and that forbade us farm kids (I had a good singing voice, so I had actually asked!) from auditioning for even the smallest part in the annual school musical. 

In their Aran stitches, the islanders used to depict … many elements of their surroundings, such as landscapes, cliff and roads. ³

In the late afternoons, we country girls lined up outside those convent walls, where we paced and waited and gawked up the road to check for that yellow bus. “Magoo,” our grumpy and bespectacled school bus driver, worked double time as a farmer and a driver, but there was always that wild hope that this evening, Magoo might get finished with his cattle and farm chores early.

Afterward, as the Christian Brothers boys yelped and squabbled in the back of the school bus, I counted the three-and-a-half miles and the minutes until I got dropped off in the village.

I say “village” here, but ours was little more than a stripe of tarmacadam road that ran between 14 detached and mismatched buildings, including our two pubs and shops, a post office, the priest’s house and the church.

Three miles to the south sat the real village of Cong, where the houses were actually stuck together, and where tourists went because, in 1952, John Wayne had played the “yank” in the iconic Irish movie, “The Quiet Man.”

Three-and-a-half miles to our north sat our market town with its shops and pubs and banks, a weekly cattle mart and the Sisters of Mercy and Christian Brothers Schools.   

The town. The school. The village. By or before my 15^th birthday, they had become a trifecta of sufferance.

 

By my 16^th birthday, I knew what Sister G’s “unnatural” really meant. But I didn’t know that knowing is not the same as understanding. For example, I knew that, every night, the moon rose behind the clouds or above the yew trees next to the village church.  I also knew that, in 1969, Neil Armstrong had walked on that moon. But how could my young brain or heart ever imagine or understand what it felt like to step out of a space rocket?   

The Tree of Life stitch is used as a symbol of strong and protective parents, represented by the roots, and healthy children, the branches, overall signifying the unity and harmony with the family.⁴

Before my 10^th birthday we had lived, not in the village, but in a thatch-roof house that sat in a hollow behind the village, on my mother’s ancestral farm. For most or all of their marriage, my father worked double time as a lorry driver and a farmer. So on weekdays, we rarely saw him until about an hour before bedtime, when he arrived home hungry and road-weary. Or, some weeks, there he suddenly was, the man at our Saturday breakfast table.

 Once we moved up to the village, we were a house of girls and women. By the summer of 1978, my older sister and my two brothers had already left for work or college. With few front-door visitors and no household telephone, we rarely or never had outside company.

After our mid-afternoon dinner, we girls were supposed to sweep a floor or mow a lawn or paint a trellis or a gate. Or, when it rained, I baked bread or apple tarts or I sewed something on my grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine. Was it that summer when I converted a set of old drapes into a slipcover for our saggy leather couch?  

During all my chores, I mentally transported myself from that house and village to the big university in Galway City. In my Mitty-esque (as in, Walter Mitty) mind, there I stood:  dressed so groovy and drinking red wine at the college literary and French clubs.

And there was my long-haired, cuddly man. Naturellement, he spoke fluent French and Yeats and, when he discovered that I did, too, he fell madly in love with me.  

The lucky honeycomb stitch is intended to be a wish for good luck and a great catch. ⁵  

    

That July afternoon in 1978, which is when the love thing actually happened, how did I hoodwink my mother into letting me ride my bicycle into town?  Needing to buy tampons usually worked--though only once per month. Changing my library books also worked—but depending on the day and the mood.

  By now, my reading tastes had turned foreign. We had read Guy de Maupassant at school. I loved Taylor Caldwell, the British-born American novelist. I had just “met” William Trevor, the Anglo-Irish short story writer and novelist. Pauline had lent me paperbacks of James Herriot’s novels. I devoured the Galway-born author Walter Macken, and I remember lying in my twin bed weeping softly over his book, “Rain on the Wind.” Amid all these, I stayed staunchly loyal to my Edna and my McGahern.  

That summer, I had convinced my mother to let me attend a few of the Friday night dances in the town hall—but only when Pauline’s father drove us there and back.          

Once I escaped the house, the afternoon bicycle trip to town was just long and free and gleeful enough to set the Mitty-esque mind wild enough to mentally retrofit myself and my long, windblown hair into a femme fatale. And wild and fanciful enough to photoshop that town into a place far grander than it ever was.    

Between the garage and the barber’s shop, I dismounted my bike to wheel it down Main Street between the street’s terraced houses and shops.  I walked past a religious goods shop and its window display of ceramic Blessed Virgins and plastic Irish colleen dolls. Next was a drapery with its window-full of summer blouses and packets of high-waist panties and nylon support stockings.  The next place sported touristy Aran sweaters that were rumored to be discounted seconds from the Gaeltarra knitting factory over in Tourmakeady by the lake.

 Half-way down Main stood Mrs. M's, where the summer mannequins were still in their winter woolies. Some weeks, a mannequin's plastic head was flopped sideways or forward, as if the poor thing had just been shot.

Also, if you pinged that drapery door open at the wrong time—as in, while Mrs. Murphy was still on her knees at her midday rosary--she yelled out from her kitchen to just stand there at the counter and wait.  

That Thursday, I parked my bike outside Murphy’s and then crossed the street to McCormack’s Shoes, who always had the grooviest summer sandals.

 “Hi there!” The 20-something man called out to me as he closed the stretch of footpath between us.  Dark hair. A clean, brand-new Aran sweater in natural, báinín wool. Levi’s jeans.    

  American. Not British. Not fancy Dublin. Not French. But hey, foreign was foreign. America was Taylor Caldwell. 

As we chatted and flirted, my American with the monosyllabic name (Chad? Thad? Todd?) asked: “So, what’s there to do around here?”

Nothing. Nothing unless you count the Wednesday cattle mart. Or the annual town musical and the Saint Patrick’s Day céilí, both of which are chaperoned by the nuns.

 On that footpath, I blathered on about our two trout-fishing lakes and our Quiet Man movie village and Ashford Castle, built in the 13^th century, and once home to the Guinness family.

“And, of course, there’s the seaside at Westport,” I said, with a swish of the hair, while I already cast and saw us there—he with his Aran sweater tied around his Levi’s waist, and me in my long hair and peasant-styled skirt as we strolled, hand in hand, along Clew Bay.  

He asked, “Yeah, but how's the night life around here?”

“Well, we've the dance in the town hall. Every Friday night!”

A smirk. “Is … that where you go?”

“Oh, yeah. Every single Friday.”

“Will you be there this Friday, like tomorrow night?”

Tilt the head. Make him wait for your answer. That’s how the Dublin women on TV chat shows do it. “Ye-ees. I will.”      

“--Cool! See you there!”

The local folklore states that the pattern one’s family used was so distinct that, if a fisherman happened to die at sea, he could be identified by the sweater he was wearing.⁶

We south Mayo women excelled at stealth surveillance—at watching the dance-hall door while looking like we were not watching that dance hall door. The first tactic: Beeline it to the Ladies toilets to comb the hair and to check out the competition. Next tactic: After the toilets, snag a good, high-visibility spot along that wooden bench on the left-hand side of the hall.  Third tactic: Whether it was rock or pop or old-people’s country, jig along and pretend to be enjoying the band and not watching for a man in a brand-new, Aran sweater, so shiny clean that he’d be dead easy to spot or identify. 

That July Friday, the town pubs were still open and serving, so not many men came through that door—or none you’d ever want to be seen with. Some girls were dancing with each other, their faces dappled in the dance hall’s colored lights.

11:30. Pub closing time. Any minute now.

11:45. The men were starting to dribble in. By midnight, more men pushed and jostled through, then stood along the right-hand side, just like in Trevor’s “Ballroom of Romance.”  Women on the left. Men on the right. In between us stretched that dance-floor wonderland.

I needed to pee. But if I returned to those bathrooms, into that fog of hair lacquer, wouldn’t my American think that I’d stood him up?

The men were beginning to cross that floor. From my bench, maybe I should make eye contact with one and, if asked, accept a dance from a local. Then, when my American finally arrived, he would have to wait. Or he’d have to cross the floor to claim me. Then, we would sneak out that dance hall door, hand in hand, like illicit lovers in the French Résistance. 

Outside, I would lead him downtown to a shop doorway—not the religious goods shop with the peering statues, and not Mrs. M's, with her decapitated mannequins. We needed someplace romantic and discreet where he could wrap his arms around me and where I could lay my cheek against that Aran sweater and where we could get all tied up in knots with each other.  

Then, after just one kiss, he would declare that, to heck with the rest of his tourist’s driving tour through Ireland. He would just stay here, in south Mayo, with me.    

The band played on. The last of the older men staggered in. The dance floor was crowded with couples sweating and jiving; a head on a shoulder; a hand under a blouse.  

  Any minute now, I will look up to see him standing right here.  

  The music stopped. The band unplugged. The hall lights went up, harsh and florescent against those dance-hall walls with their acne of black mildew.

When a (knitting) mistake is not too far away (say, a few stitches or rows back), one option is to unknit back to the problem. You don’t have to take your knitting off the needles, or worry about your knitting unraveling.⁷

  

Eight months later, in the spring of my final school year, Sister D, the career guidance nun, summoned me to her room. Sister D did double duty as an Irish language and career guidance teacher.

She had also taught us religion.

A year earlier, I had reduced this nun to tears when I raised my hand to interrupt and argue against her recitation about the one, true, apostolic church.  

  Based on her hypothesis (I said), we Catholics were supposed to be the lifelong, 10-to-one favorite in every horse race (my father loved the thoroughbred races).    

“And sure, that’s logistically impossible, Sister,” I added, watching the tears fill and her bottom lip quiver. “Sure, there’d have to be loads of days when all the others, the Jews, the protestants, the Muslims, et al, would, at a minimum, become the short-odds bet or even the high-stakes favorite? Sure, how can we Catholics always be the one to race past that winning post, like, into Heaven?”

Now, in the career guidance room, Sister inquired about my plans for college and life. I said I was thinking about English and French (and drinking wine) at the big university in Galway. Pauline was going there, too.  Or, actually, I had read about this University of Limerick degree course on international marketing. International marketing. In that room I said it so grandly, relishing her puzzled, clueless expression.

At last Sister said, “Whaa-at? Oh, God no. Not for a girl like you.”

 Then, she presented the real choices and paperwork: nursing, a secretarial course and a small, teacher-education college in Dublin. The college was run by the Sisters of Mercy, and, just to snag a bilingual (Irish and English) entrance interview, you needed high grades and a good singing voice.  Plus, this was where my mother wanted me to go, and getting in there would make the school look good.

That afternoon, when Sister D pushed the teacher-ed application into my hand, my 16-year-old heart knew that an issue had been decided. No, not decided. Settled.      

 

If the knitting mistake was made a long time ago, and you need to correct the mistake, you will have no other option but to rip out your knitting to that place. ⁸    

Three years on, I graduated into high-unemployment Ireland (some of our rural areas saw a 20% unemployment rate) to eventually land a job in a tiny midlands village that sat about 40 miles south, or on the lee side, of the then-Northern Irish border. 

One year, I had 42 first and second grade children jammed into my classroom with its shiny green blackboards and rows of old, broken desks.

In an island nation, some of my little students had never seen the ocean.  We had no special education services, and, when the winter winds blew underneath those windows, I wore both a lambswool and one of my hand-knit sweaters.    

By now, all my grandiose, Mitty-esque daydreams had crashed and stalled. By now, in a school with no staff bathroom, the only thing I excelled at was holding my pee.

Pauline and I drifted apart. Decades later, it was rumored that Sister G, our “something unnatural” accuser, had quit the nunnery and someone claimed to have spotted her in sunny Florida. 

One December afternoon in 1986, I joined one of the very long queues in the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) processing room at JFK Airport, New York. Most of us in those queues were 20- or 30-something Irish. Most of us had country accents. I had been warned about the New York winter, so I stood there in one of my hand-knit wool sweaters. In the broiling heat of that INS room, the sweater made the sweat trickle down between my breasts.

  The heat, the fear, the slow-moving queues—they all felt inevitable, as if leaving our own country was the most natural thing in the world.     

 

¹ Wikipedia

^{2 -6}  10 Aran Stitches You Need to Know. Tara Irish Clothing Blog

^7-8  How to Fix Knitting Mistakes: Three Stress Free Solutions

*The name is changed to protect the subject’s privacy. 

For more of my published writing and teaching information, visit my author website.