by Marian Keyes
Because Dad was so starved of male company he had hoped to do a bit of male bonding with him, what with Jim being a more or less permanent fixture in the kitchen along with the oven and the refrigerator.
One evening he came home from work, and as usual found Jim sitting in the kitchen with Mum. Helen went straight to her room as soon as she heard that Jim was on the premises. Dad sat at the kitchen table attempting to talk to Jim.
He said, “Did you see the game?”
Jim just looked at Dad completely blankly.
So that was the end of that: now Dad also thought Jim was a dead loss.
He said that Jim should put his money where his mouth was and stop just talking about killing himself and actually get on with it.
Mum said that Jim was really a little pet, once you got to know him. And that it was a sin to encourage someone to take his own life.
It felt as if Jim was always around. Whenever I came home from London he seemed to be drooped over the kitchen table, with a little black cloud hovering over his head. But I always said “Hello, Jim” to him. At least I was polite.
Even if he totally ignored me.
Then I discovered why he had been ignoring me.
On my second day home from London the doorbell rang and I went and answered it and found a haircut wearing a big long black coat standing on the front doorstep. I wasn’t sure whether he had come to see Helen or Mum, but Mum was out so I called Helen.
“Helen, Jim’s at the door.”
Helen came down the stairs looking puzzled.
“Oh hello, Conor,” she said to the gloomy youth on the step.
She turned to me.
“Where’s Jim?” she asked.
“Well…here…isn’t he?” I said, a bit startled, indicating the boy in the long black overcoat.
“That’s not Jim, that’s Conor. I haven’t seen Jim in about a year. I suppose you’d better come in Conor,” she said ungraciously. “Oh, and by the way, that’s my sister Claire. She’s home from London because her husband left her.”
“Nice one, Claire,” she hissed angrily at me as she herded Conor into the sitting room. “I’ve been avoiding him for the last month.”
There is no doubt but that she will burn in Hell.
At least that explained why Jim ignored me every time I said “Hello, Jim.” Because it wasn’t Jim at all.
But it looked just like him.
Then every time I saw Jim, I would say “Hello, Conor.”
Apparently I was still wrong.
His name was William.
But he was the absolute image of Jim and Conor.
But Adam was a different proposition entirely from Jim and his clones.
Handsome, intelligent(ish), presentable…you know, normal! He had one or two social skills, didn’t look as if he would crumble into dust if he was caught in a direct ray of sunlight, and could do more than just stare glassy-eyed at Helen and dribble.
After he had shaken hands with us all he then said politely to Mum,
“Can I help you to set the table?”
Mum was very taken aback. Not just at the offer of help. Which was indeed remarkable in itself.
But at the suggestion that we set the table at all.
You see, people tend to fend for themselves at mealtimes in our house and eat their dinners in front of the television watching Neighbours instead of at the kitchen table.
“Erm, no, that’s all right thanks, Adam, I’ll do it.”
And looking slightly bemused, she did just that.
“You’re in for a treat tonight,” she said girlishly to Adam. Honestly, it was so embarrassing. A grown woman and she was behaving like a star-struck teenager. “Claire has made the dinner for us.”
“Yes, I heard that Claire was a great cook.” He smiled at me, throwing me into pleasurable confusion. He really shouldn’t smile at me like that while I’m draining the pasta, I thought, as I nursed my scalded hand.
I wondered who had told him that I was a great cook, because I was sure that it certainly wasn’t Helen.
Maybe he was just being charming. But, hey, what’s wrong with that?
“All right, ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats for this evening’s performance,” I called out, indicating that the dinner was ready.
Adam laughed. I was pathetically pleased.
There was a general shuffling and scraping of chairs as everyone sat down.
Adam looked totally incongruous as he sat at the table, completely dwarfing his chair, looking ridiculously square-jawed and handsome.
I placed the salad that I had prepared in the center of the table. Then I put the pasta and sauce on plates and brought them over to the diners. The arrival of the food threw Mum, Dad and Helen into a bit of a quandary.
The fact that it was homemade made Dad and Helen suspicious.
Quite rightly.
God knows they had every reason to be suspicious after the ways they had suffered in the past. I suppose it was too reminiscent of all Mum’s disasters.
And naturally Mum was only too happy to foment trouble. If she encouraged them to refuse point-blank to eat it, it would mean that I wouldn’t cook any more dinners and the old order would be restored, thereby letting her off the hook.
When Helen’s plate was put in front of her she made noises as if she was vomiting. “Uuuugggghhhh!” she said, staring in disgust at her plate. “What the hell is that?”
“Just pasta and sauce,” I said calmly.
“Sauce?” she screeched. “But it’s green.”
“Yes,” I confirmed, not for a second denying that the sauce was green.
“It’s green. Sauce can be green, you know.”
Then Adam came to the rescue. He was tucking in with great gusto.
I suppose he was one of those penniless students who can go for months without getting a square meal and so would eat just about anything. But he was acting as if he was enjoying it. And that was good enough for me.
“This is absolutely delicious,” he said, charmingly cutting through Helen’s histrionics. “You should really try it, Helen.”
Helen glared at him. “I’m not touching that. It looks revolting.”
Dad, Mum and Helen stared, with held breath, their faces frozen with horror, at Adam as he swallowed a mouthful of food, obviously waiting for him to die. And when, after about five minutes, he was still alive and not rolling around on the floor like a victim of the Borgias, screaming to be put out of his misery, Dad ventured a try.
Now, I would love to be able to tell you that one by one every member of my family picked up a fork and despite their earlier prejudices were won over to my fancy cooking. But I can’t do that.
Helen, with great shudders and contorted face, noisily refused to touch it, in spite of the beautiful Adam giving it his seal of approval.
She made herself some toast.
Dad ate a little bit and declared that no doubt it was lovely but that his tastes were humble. That he couldn’t possibly appreciate such exotic and sophisticated food. As he said, “I’m a simple man. I never even tasted lemon meringue pie until I was thirty-five.”
Mum also ate a little bit but with a martyred air. She made it very clear that to waste good food was a sin.
Even horrible food.
Therefore she ate it. Her attitude seemed to be that we were put on this earth to suffer and that this dinner was sent to her as some kind of penance.
But at the same time she was hard-pressed to contain her glee at Dad and Helen refusing to eat it. Every so often she would catch my eye and it was obviously a bit of a struggle for her to maintain her poker face.
Though she would rather have died than admit it, she was thrilled.
Then Anna arrived home.
She wandered into the kitchen looking very pretty in a rather ethnic, ethereal kind of way, all trailing scarves and long crocheted see-through skirt and colorful jewelry.
She had obviously met Adam previously.
“Oh hi, Adam,” she said breathily, obviously delighted, flushing with pleasure.
Does he make every woman he comes into contact with blush? I wondered.
Or was it just our family?
Somehow I suspected not. What hope could there be for a man so young who had such an intense effect on women? He could only grow up to be a complete and total bastard.
Expecting women to weep, faint, scream and fall in love with him as easily as breathing. He was far too handsome for his own good. A disfigurement or two wouldn’t have hurt at all.
“Hi, Anna.” He smiled at her. “Nice to see you again.”
“Er, yes,” she muttered, blushing even more and knocking over a cup.
Conversation wasn’t exactly scintillating at the dinner table. Helen, never the hostess with the mostest at the best of times (unless we include the hostess with the mostest rudeness), had picked up a magazine and read through dinner.
“Helen, put down the magazine,” Dad told her sharply, obviously embarrassed.
“Shut up, Dad,” said Helen in a monotone, not even looking up.
But every now and then she would look up at Adam and give him a witchy little smile. He would look at her, totally enchanted, and after holding her gaze for a little while, smile back at her.
You could have cut the sexual tension with a breadknife.
Anna, never a great conversationalist at the best of times, seemed to be completely struck dumb by Adam, such was her awe. Any time he addressed a question to her, she just simpered and giggled, hung her head and acted like some sort of village idiot.
It was quite annoying, to be honest with you. He was only a man, and a very young one at that, for God’s sake. Not some sort of deity.
Mum and Dad pushed their food nervously around their plates. They didn’t talk much either.
Dad made a brief stab at talking to Adam.
“Rugby?” he murmured at him, as if he was in a secret society and he was trying to find out if Adam was a member also.
“Sorry?” said Adam, looking quizzically at Dad, desperately trying to figure out what he was trying to say to him.
“Rugby?”
“Em, er, sorry, but what do you mean?” “Rugby? Do you play it?” Dad decided to lay his cards on the table.
“No.”
“Oh,” Dad sighed like a deflating balloon.
“But I like watching it,” said Adam gamely.
“Ah pshaw!” said Dad, practically turning his back on him, making his disappointment felt with a dismissive wave of his arm. And that, I suppose, was the end of that fledgling friendship.
For some reason I felt that it was my responsibility to talk to our visitor.
Maybe it was because I had gotten used to being in civilized society, where guests were treated like guests. Where if someone invites you to dinner they don’t throw you in with a crowd of strangers and completely ignore you.
“So you’re in Helen’s class in college?” I asked him with false brightness, desperately trying to kick-start some kind of conversation.
“Yes,” he replied. “I’m in her anthropology group.”
And that seemed to be the end of that topic.
“This is really delicious,” he said, smiling at me. “Any chance of some more?”
“Of course,” said Mum coquettishly, almost knocking over her chair in her haste to serve him. “I’ll get it for you. And would you like another glass of milk?”
“Thanks very much, Mrs. Walsh,” he said politely.
He was so nice. And I’m not just saying that because he was the only one who ate the dinner I made. He was so boyish in a manly kind of way.
But even though he was alarmingly good-looking I felt very relaxed with him, because I knew that he must be only about eighteen or so. Although he looked and behaved with a lot more maturity.
To be honest, I nearly felt a little bit jealous of Helen, landing herself such a hunk. I remembered vaguely what it was like to be young and in love. But I told myself not to be so silly. I’d fix things with James. Or else I’d meet someone else as nice.
(Nice? I thought in alarm. Did I just say nice? That was hardly the right word to describe James at that moment.)
But Adam, the hero, saved the conversation.
Mum asked him where he lived. This was part of a routine inquiry and was the first question in a set of two that Mum religiously asked gentlemen callers. The second question involved finding out from the young man what his father did for a living.
And thereby assessing the approximate wealth of the family just in case Helen happened to marry into it. And so that Mum would have a rough idea of how much she would be expected to spend on the “mother-of-the-bride” dress.
But Adam managed to head Mum off at the pass and avoid being asked to produce a recent copy of his father’s payslip by entertaining us all with snippets of his life story. Apparently he was from America. Both his parents had recently returned to New York, so he lived in an apartment in Rathmines. Although both his parents were Irish and he had lived in Ireland since he was twelve, he still looked American.
It must be something they put in the air in America, I thought. Fluoride, or something, that made them grow so big and beefy.
Adam amused us all with stories of what it was like for him when he first moved from New York to Dublin. And how the native children welcomed him by calling him “fascist imperialist Yank” and acting as though he was personally responsible for the U.S. invasion of Grenada, and beating the crap out of him for calling tomatoes “tom-ay-toes” and for calling his mother “Mom” instead of “Mammy.”
And how, when he tried to defend himself by beating up some of the native children he got called a bully because he was so much bigger than the other boys.
We all nodded sympathetically, sitting around with our elbows on the kitchen table, looking at Adam, our hearts breaking for the poor lonely twelve-year-old boy who couldn’t do anything right. You could have heard a pin drop. The mood had suddenly changed from a lighthearted one to a somber one.
Even Dad looked on the verge of tears. He was obviously thinking, “He might not play rugby but that’s still no way to treat the lad.”
Then Adam turned the full force of his attention onto me. He twisted around in his chair and fixed me with an intense look. In a funny way, he made me feel as if I were the only person in the room.
He was so eager and enthusiastic about everything. Like a little puppy.
Well, like an enormous puppy, actually.
“So, Claire, tell me about your job,” he said. “Helen tells me that you’ve got a really important job working for a charity.”
I bloomed under the warmth of his interest—like a flower in the sun—and started to tell him.
But before I could, Helen interrupted. “I didn’t say it was important,”
she said sourly. “I just said it was a job. And anyway, she had to give it up when she had the baby.”
“Oh, the baby,” he said. “Can I see her?”
“Of course,” I said, delighted, but wondering why Helen was being so nasty. Why she was being even nastier than usual, I mean.
“Kate’s asleep at the moment but she’ll be awake in about half an hour so you can see her then.”
“Great,” he said, looking at me.
Honestly, he was gorgeous. His eyes were a kind of navy blue. And he had the most beautiful body. I thought this purely from an objective point of view. He was my sister’s boyfriend, so it was all right for me to admire his beauty just aesthetically speaking, as it were.
I felt a bit like a wise old woman admiring the handsome young men.
Realizing how gorgeous they were while acknowledging that my day of dalliance with them was long gone.
For dessert I produced the chocolate mousse, which was greeted with a great deal more enthusiasm than the dinner was. The jostling and sc
uffling that broke out among Anna, Helen and Dad for the biggest piece was nothing short of shameful, and us with a visitor in the house.
But Adam just laughed good-naturedly.
After a while I took him to see Kate.
We tiptoed into the room.
“Can I hold her?” he asked reverently.
“Of course.” I smiled, very touched by his awe.
I thought it was the sweetest thing I’d ever heard that such a big tough man wanted to see my baby, sort of like a huge burly truck driver crying at country and western songs. Incon- gruous and touching. I handed Kate gently to him and he took her and held her gingerly.
She didn’t even wake up.
The idiot! What kind of daughter was I rearing? Being held, for the first time, by a beautiful man and she slept through it. It made such a beautiful picture. The huge young man holding the perfect little baby.
“What color are her eyes?” he asked.
“Blue,” I said. “But all babies have blue eyes first. Then they usually change to another color.”
He continued to stare at her with an expression of wonder on his face.
“You know, if you and I had a baby its eyes would definitely be blue,”
he mused, sounding almost as if he was talking to himself.
I jumped with shock. Was he flirting with me? I felt a surge of rage.
I had thought he was so innocent and nice. A sweet young man.
The nerve of him!
Not only was I old enough to be his mother…Well, very nearly. But he was here with my sister and was doing a very good impression of being her boyfriend.
Had he no respect?
No sense of decency?
But I was wrong. I looked at him and our eyes locked for a minute. I could see that he was really deathly embarrassed.
He definitely knew that he had made a faux pas.
The room was full of tension and embarrassment.
“Well, I’d better get back to Helen and the essay,” he said hurriedly, practically flinging Kate back to me and rushing from the room without a second glance.
I sat on the bed feeling a bit funny.
Was I feeling foolish for overreacting?
Was I feeling sad at my cynicism for just jumping to the wrong conclusion?
