The American Call

 

Áine Greaney

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The American Call 

First published in New Hibernia Review, 2013

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    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.