The Stories Of Mary Gordon Part 10

"I'll get down on my knees to anyone who will show me to my bed," Marty said. Jimmy laughed, and Kathleen could see that pleased Marty. She relaxed; everything would be all right.

Jimmy drove them to the B & B. "We're staying in a gas station?" Joanne said.

"No," Kathleen said. "It's just attached."

But she could see they were disappointed. They'd probably dreamed of a thatched cottage, of their eyes falling on green fields. Whereas what they could see outside their window was a twenty-foot-high sign saying Esso.

The way Brid was acting made Kathleen sick. She was acting like a nervous dog, anxious to please, saying how great it was to have them with her. That she felt she must have built the whole B & B with them in mind. They'd be her first guests. It was a blessing, she said. Bull, Kathleen wanted to say, you had the idea for this two years before you knew we were coming. And as for blessing, Brid never darkened the door of a church.

The girls thought Brid was wonderful. She offered them tea in their rooms. "You must be dead, longing for bed," she said.

Kathleen suggested they'd be better off trying to stay awake, trying to get on Irish time.

"I've never heard of that," Brid said. "And it's that damp, you might want to put on your electric blanket. It's under your sheets; the switch is just at the side of the bed."

"Lead me to it," Marty said. "Sandman here I come."

The way Brid laughed at that was really phony, Kathleen thought. As if she knew what they meant. Kathleen couldn't remember whether Irish people had the Sandman the way they did in America, but she was pretty sure they didn't, and Brid was faking so they'd think she was something great.

Jimmy brought their bags into their rooms and they settled down to sleep. Kathleen was annoyed that they hadn't taken her advice about trying to get on Irish time, and she was worried. If they didn't get on Irish time, they'd feel wretched for days. And the whole holiday was only meant to last a week.

"Your friends are much older than you, except the stout one," Kathleen's mother said. "Haven't you friends your own age, pet?"

She'd made lots of plans for things that they could see; she'd take them to Blarney Castle, to the ruined Abbey, to the Cliffs of Moher, to the Burren.

She asked her mother if she could borrow the car to get what Lois needed for her diet from the store in Ennis.

"You can, of course," her mother said. "We'll try and make a great time for them."

She tried to think what Lois would want to eat. She bought celery and carrots and yogurt. She bought large bottles of diet c.o.ke. But she'd never had to watch her weight herself, so she was guessing.

"I need nonfat yogurt. Don't they have nonfat?" Lois said.

"This was all they had."

"Four percent fat. Sugar, the works. I might as well forget about it," Lois said and began to cry. Kathleen was mortified in front of her mother, but her mother was running the water loud rinsing the carrots and celery and cutting them up small, as if she were going to put them in a soup. That was the wrong way, Kathleen knew, but she didn't know how to tell her mother.

Her mother had made them ham sandwiches for lunch, with raspberries and vanilla ice cream for dessert. When she offered second helpings, Lois took one. Kathleen felt like a fool, making a special trip to buy food for her diet.

It was hard to get them to go on the outings Kathleen had planned with the rain coming down in sheets. They got into the car, trying to be cheerful, but they were all asleep every time Kathleen tried to point something out.

"Is there any way you could remind your friends breakfast's over at nine thirty, Kathleen," Brid said. "It's clearly posted in the rooms. After all they're paying guests, like anyone else."

"You have no others, Brid," Kathleen said. "Maybe you'd accommodate them. They're having a rough time with the jet lag."

"I have my schedule, the B & B's not the only thing. I have the petrol pump and the counter at the convenience store, I'm not on holiday like you. No one's waiting on me hand and foot."

Kathleen said she'd mention it to them, but she never did.

She didn't know what else to do with them except take them around in the car and pretend they weren't sleeping. She'd tried to find a nice place for lunch every day, but she forgot that Irish pubs had a certain limited menu, which repeated itself from place to place.

"You'd make a fortune with a good old Greek diner here," Joanne said. "G.o.d what I wouldn't give for a bacon cheeseburger. I don't know what they call bacon here but it's nothing I'd call by the name."

"It's more like what we call Canadian bacon," Marty said, and Kathleen knew she was trying to be nice.

"Crisp is a foreign concept to them here," Joanne said.

"Crisps is their name for potato chips," Lois said, and they all laughed.

After the drive and the lunch, they'd all go back to bed. They were better in the evenings, and Kathleen was proud of them as they sat around her mother's table. Her father was silent. He'd never heard women talk like this. Her mother seemed to be having a good time, and when limmy drove by he seemed to have a good laugh with them, and that made everyone feel good.

He took them to the pub every night and Kathleen was glad to see how much they enjoyed it. They were generous buying people drinks, and Kathleen wished that the people in the town were equally generous. She tried not to be counting, but she couldn't help noticing that after a while her friends weren't being treated as much as they treated the men. It made her nervous and it made her even more nervous to see Lois deep in conversation with Kieran Donnelly, who was known for nothing good. She felt sick at Lois's excitement when she talked about him.

"I was asking Kieran about how they thatched the roofs and he invited me out to his place so he could show me," she said.

Kathleen knew Kieran's house; it was an old whitewashed house he lived in with his father. But his father was dead now, so he must live alone. The house was in a dark patch of trees a quarter mile from the Gort Road. She was quite sure it hadn't a thatched roof.

But she told herself that she hadn't been there for a long time, maybe she'd misremembered. Still she thought she should give Lois a warning about Kieran. He was a drinker and he was known to bring a not nice type of woman back to his house when he went to Limerick for the day. He was a good plumber but unreliable, everyone was always complaining that you couldn't trust him to show up.

"You just think anyone who's interested in me would have to have something wrong with him," Lois said, bursting into tears. Kathleen didn't remember that in America she'd cried so much.

"No, that's not it, Lois. Only I've known Kieran all my life."

"Well, I'm not planning on settling down with him. Don't worry about that. I'm not that bad off that I'd land myself in a place like this."

Kathleen didn't say anything, but she felt bad for what she wanted to say, "Find out yourself then what he's up to," to Lois, who was her best friend. She wouldn't have said anything like that to Lois before. Everything was topsy-turvy now.

Lois came back from Kieran's looking sullen and disappointed, but she didn't say a word about what had gone on. It was after that she started taking out her Weight Watchers' books and writing things down on the blue-and-white charts.

"I don't even want to think about the number of points I'm over," Lois said.

Kathleen and all the girls knew Weight Watchers was on a point system: you got a certain number of points for everything you ate, and you were supposed to lose weight if you didn't go over the weekly points.

"But I don't see what I could have done. There's nothing to eat here that I can eat. There isn't any way I could get to a supermarket and buy some of the things I need, is there?"

"You can, of course," said Kathleen, ashamed for her country and its famously poor cuisine. "We'll go to the big market outside of Limerick tomorrow."

The idea of going to a supermarket cheered the girls up; they invited Kathleen to do the Ouija board with them in their room, but Kathleen said she was tired. She was glad she was staying in her mother's house instead of the B & B. She was glad she had somewhere to go.

By the morning, the plan had grown and bloomed: the girls had decided they were going to make a meal for Kathleen's family to show their grat.i.tude. A real Italian meal. Had Kathleen forgotten they all had Italian blood?

They were going to make it a surprise. So they didn't want Kathleen involved in it, not even the shopping. They'd worked it all out with limmy in the pub the night before. He'd drive them into Limerick to do their shopping. Kathleen would have the day to herself.

"The day to myself." She was ashamed at the joy that spread over the whole of her skin when she heard the words. It had been a long time since she'd had a day to herself. Years. But how many?

She saw the girls off waving from the parking area between the doorway to the B & B and the petrol pump. There was no car available to her, but she didn't mind the half-mile walk back to her parents' house, even though it was along the main road with nothing to look at but a few new houses, which looked as if they'd stolen the land from the trees and stood there glancing at the road, shamefully naked. As she walked on the side of the road, she was a bit worried at the cars whizzing by. She was sure there hadn't been that much traffic when she still lived here. And it was only five years ago she'd left. What would it be like five years from now? Crossing the road, she had to remind herself to look the opposite way from the way she looked in America. It always took her a few days to get that straight. She wondered which was the better way of doing it, driving on the right side or the left. She reckoned that each side probably thought their side was right, and each of them probably had good arguments.

She borrowed her mother's Wellies to walk through the fields to the stream she always liked. She enjoyed the squelch her rubbery feet made in the wet gra.s.s and the low bellow of the cattle and the foolish bleating of the sheep. She'd hoped the girls would take this walk with her, but they hadn't the footwear for it, their sneakers would be ruined, it was that wet. She wondered should she have told them to bring some sort of boots, but they would have been heavy in their luggage, and there was nothing like Wellies in America. Nothing that would really have served.

She felt that the light rain on her skin was doing her whole body good, her insides, not just her skin. She didn't know why people made such a thing about suns.h.i.+ne. If you just put your head in the right place gray skies and a soft rain and wet gra.s.s could be just as beautiful. It was just that suns.h.i.+ne had better PR.

She sat by the stream and threw stones in the water, enjoying the look of them sinking in the clear. Maybe I am young for my age, she thought. She imagined how nice it would be sitting there with Maggie throwing stones and twigs into the water. Then she worried that Maggie wouldn't like the wet weather, and would fuss about having to wear her raincoat all the time. She'd take her to Gort and get her a new raincoat. Your Irish raincoat, they'd call it. It would be something to show her friends back home. Kathleen wondered if she wore a raincoat when she was a child. She couldn't remember, but she couldn't remember having been wet. It would be great when Kevin and Maggie came here next week. In two days, the girls would be gone and she'd have three days with her parents. She looked forward to that.

She could hear the girls giggling when limmy stopped the car. The sun was s.h.i.+ning, it was beginning to be warm; they'd driven with the windows open. limmy looked pleased with himself, and the girls looked more like themselves, laughing and teasing like she was used to.

Kathleen and her mother watched out the kitchen window.

"Mother of G.o.d, they've bought enough food to feed an army," Kathleen's mother said. "How many do they think they're feeding and what size do they think my kitchen is? Where am I going to put all the stuff?"

Kathleen felt worried about the size of the refrigerator. It hardly came to her waist; it was less than a quarter as big as her fridge in New York. There was no way the girls would understand that.

But they were in their best moods, and showed Kathleen and her mother out of the kitchen. "The Irish are banished. Italians rule," Marty said, holding two cans of tomatoes over her head. "Kathleen, would you believe, we had to go three places for parsley. Apparently they think it's a gourmet item here."

"Yes, they would so," Kathleen said, realizing she never used "so" at the end of the sentence like that when she was in New York.

She wanted to go for a walk with her mother, but her mother was jittery about strangers in her kitchen.

"They work in a kitchen, Mam," Kathleen said. "They're professionals."

"But they don't know our ways. I'm not fond of their saying the Irish are banished."

"It's their sense of humor."

"Funny kind of joke. More like an insult to me."

"They wouldn't have meant it that way, Mam. They'd be mortified if they thought they'd insulted you."

"Aren't there any nice Irish girls in New York for you to be friends with?"

"They are Irish, Mam. All of them have Irish blood."

"Funny they didn't mention it. You think Maggie's all right without you?"

"She's fine. Kevin's with her. They're having a ball, they'll be here in three days."

"I'd never have left you at three years old."

"Do you think I'd have done it if I thought it was bad for her?"

"Don't you be talking to me like that. D'ye think I'm one of those Americans? Getting tanned and playing tennis at my age? The sky's the limit with that lot."

Kathleen didn't know exactly what her mother was talking about. They walked along in silence. Kathleen asked her mother if she wanted to go to the movies.

"See a fill-um in the middle of the day with the sun cracking the pavestones?"

"l.u.s.t for a change, Mam."

"All right then, for a change." Kathleen knew her mother agreed because she didn't want to fight and couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't start a fight. They drove into Gort. It was an English movie. People said it was supposed to be funny. She didn't think her mother would like it, but she hoped it would take her mind off what was going on in her kitchen. But she didn't like it, and she said, "I guess you have a different sense of humor if you're from a different place."

She dropped her mother at Brid's and said she'd go home to set the table. She was walking in the gra.s.s at the back of the house; she could hear the girls through the kitchen window.

"I've been in trailers that had bigger kitchens than this," Joanne said.

"I knew it was simple, but this is depressing as h.e.l.l. The poor baby. No wonder she couldn't wait to get out," Marty said. "I mean that shower. I think it was made of Styrofoam, and if that's their idea of hot water."

"They're very nice, though," Lois said.

"I like that Brid. She's got gumption. More than her husband with his big blue eyes," said Marty.

"We ought to get something for them, to thank her. Brid, I mean."

"Do you think there are really stores that we could go to that sell stuff that's tacky enough? That lamp made out of fake sh.e.l.ls. And the fabric on the sofa. I thought I was going to die it was so itchy."

"I don't think we have the right to complain. We're staying there for free, so we have to be nice about things."

Kathleen felt terror in the middle of her chest, as if she'd been stung below one of her ribs. They thought Brid was letting them stay for free. Where had they gotten that idea? She was sure she'd never said that. Should she have told them right away what the cost would be? She'd hoped she'd be able to work that out with Brid, that Brid would give them a break. But she'd never dreamed of asking Brid not to charge them.

She'd have to make up the money. She couldn't imagine how she'd do it. She thought of telling them they'd have to pay. But their faces when she told them were a horrifying prospect. Anything would have to be better than that.

She'd have to call Kevin. She tried to make herself walk slowly to Brid's house and say calmly that she'd told Kevin she'd call at this time, but that she'd reverse the charges, like it was normal she was doing it from here instead of her parents'.

"Fine then," Brid said. She was standing behind the counter at the convenience store, being oh so pleasant to an American couple who were buying candy and soft drinks.

"Isn't it great for you the weather broke?" she said, smiling. Kathleen saw she'd spent a fortune at the dentist.

"Oh, we didn't come to Ireland for the weather, or the food. It's the spirit of the people," the woman said. She was wearing a turquoise running suit and her husband had an identical one in teal. They both wore immaculate white sneakers. Trainers, they were called in Ireland, Kathleen remembered.

When she heard Kevin's voice she burst into tears.

"I suppose I could tell them they have to pay for it, but, oh, Kevin, the thought of it kills me."

"No, no, I understand," he said.

"Only, how will I get the money?"

"Not a problem. Put it on the Visa. Tell Brid the girls gave you a certain sum of money and you deposited it in your bank in America."

"Brid would never believe me. She'd know something was up. I'd never hear the end of it. Isn't there anything else? Couldn't we borrow money off the Visa?"

"Go see Martin Cunningham in the Ennis bank. Tell him you need five hundred pounds off the Visa."

"What'll he think I need it for? He'll think I need to go to England for an abortion."

"He'll think no such thing, Kathleen. Besides, what do you care what he thinks?"

"He'd have it all over town."

"Of course he won't, he's a professional. Don't make it a problem, baby."