by Edna O'Brien
“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” I said. In my daydreaming I had let the sack of sugar fall sideways and the sugar was flowing onto the floor. The wood floor was dusty, so I couldn’t recover the sugar. He sent me into the kitchen for the brush and the dustpan.
Mrs. Burns was drinking tea and she had an open tin of fancy biscuits on the table. The hams were simmering in big black pots on top of the coal range. She had put apples and cloves in the water and the smell was delicious.
“I came in for the dustpan,” I said.
“It’s over there beside the range. Are you doing a little cleaning, darling?” Her eyes brightened.
“No. I spilled sugar.” I wouldn’t have told her but I was afraid that Mr. Burns might mention it when she asked him in bed that night what he thought of me.
“Oh, darling angel, how much sugar?” Her face changed its expression and once again her lips disappeared.
“Just a little,” I said placatingly.
“Now you must learn to be careful. Mr. Burns and I never waste a thing. Now, darling, you will be careful?” Never waste a thing and she stuffing herself with biscuits.
“I will,” I said. I wasn’t looking at her suet-pale face but at the top button of her yellow jersey dress. It was an expensive dress but stained all over. She had a pencil over her ear and the point of it showed through her gray-black hair. She was about fifty.
Later on in the morning the daily help came. Mr. Burns introduced me to her. Her name was Joe. A withered little woman in a black coat and a black hat that was going green. She disappeared into the hallway and I heard her coughing. She had a bad cough. A cigarette cough, she told me afterward.
The messenger boy came at eleven.
“Willie, you’re late again,” Mr. Burns said, looking up at the railway clock that was fixed to the wall.
“My mother is sick, sir,” Willie said, saying mudder for mother.
He had a comb and a mouth organ in his breast pocket, and he got the sweeping brush and began to brush the floor languidly. That was the entire household, except for the sleek black cat, which I dreaded. Mr. Burns told me that he locked her into the shop at night as there were a lot of mice around. At half past eleven he went inside for a cup of tea.
“Hello,” Willie said, winking lightly at me. We were friends.
“Is she up?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Mrs. Burns.”
“Oh yes, hours ago.”
“She’s a right old hag. She wouldn’t give you a fright.” (“Froight” was the way Willie pronounced it.)
“Do we get tea?” I whispered. I was thinking of the biscuits and the one I would choose first, and if she was likely to pass me the tin twice.
“Tea, my eye.” (Moy oy.) A customer came in for a large packet of corn flakes and Willie got them down for me. They were high up on a shelf and he had to mount the stepladder. It was a shaky-looking ladder and I got dizzy just watching him climb.
Then he showed me where things were kept, cloves and Vicks and currants and packet soups and all the little things that I might miss. On a postcard I wrote down the prices of obvious things like tea and sugar and butter, and the morning dragged on slowly until the Angelus rang. Willie laughed while he was praying. Then he took a pinup girl out of his pocket and said, “She’s like you, Miss Brady.” I was four or five years older than Willie, so I didn’t mind what he said.
“Peckish, darling?” Mrs. Burns asked as she came out. I said yes, but in fact Willie and I had eaten two doughnuts and sugar barley while Mr. Burns was having his tea. I put the money for them in the till. It was an elaborate metal till, and every time you opened the drawer it gave a sharp ring, so that you couldn’t open the drawer secretly. Across the front of it were little buttons with numbers on them, and you had to press the numbers, depending on how much money you put in.
My fingers were sticky from weighing sugar, so I asked if I might go upstairs to wash my hands. I was dying to see upstairs. Their bedroom door was half open. I could see part of the carpeted floor, and the unmade bed with the pile of fluffy, soft, pink blankets on it. There was a box of chocolates beside the bed, on a wicker table, and copies of a magazine called Field and Stream.
The bathroom was untidy, with towels thrown on the floor and two open tins of talcum powder on the washbasin ledge. I washed myself and had a free sprinkle of lavender talc.
Downstairs in the hall, while I was putting on my coat, I could see Mrs. Burns examining two plates of dinner which Joe, the cleaning woman, had got ready. There was chicken and potato salad on both plates. Mrs. Burns took the breast of chicken off one plate and put it on the other plate. Then she put a leg on the plate which she had raided. She sat down to table and began to eat from the plate that had the white delicate meat. I coughed to let her know that I was there.
“Tell Mr. Burns to lock up and come in for dinner. The creature, he must be starved,” she said. The creature, I thought, and wondered if he ever caught her fiddling with the dinner plates.
“All right, Mrs. Burns. ‘Bye, ‘bye now.”
“Goodbye, darling.” Her mouth was full.
I went over to my new home, wondering about the Burnses and their life together. I bet that she ate chocolates in bed and had three hot-water bottles, and while she was eating, Mr. Burns was turned on his side reading Field and Stream, and the sleek cat downstairs was devouring frightened mice in the dark.
16
Easter was a month later. There were lilies in the window of the flower shop at the corner and there were purple sheets covering the statues in the chapel. On Good Friday the shops were closed and every place was sad. Purple-sad. Death-sad. Baba said we might as well be dead, so we cleaned our bedroom and went to bed early. I liked reading but Baba couldn’t bear to see me reading. She’d pace about the room and ask me questions and read a passage over my shoulders and finally say it was “bloody rubbish.”
Easter Saturday night, after I got paid, I went to confession and then came down to Miss Doyle’s drapery and bought a pair of nylons, a brassiere, and a white lace handkerchief. The handkerchief was one I’d never use, never dare to; it was a spider’s web in the sunlight, frail and exquisite. I looked forward to the summer when I would wear it stuck into Mama’s silver bracelet, with the lace frill hanging down, temptingly, over the wrist. While I was out boating with Mr. Gentleman, it would blow away, moving like a white lace bird across the surface of the blue water, and Mr. Gentleman would pat my arm and say, “We’ll get another.” There was still no news of him, though Martha said in a letter that he had come home and was as brown as a berry from all the sun.
The brassiere I bought was cheap. Baba said that once brassieres were washed they lost their elasticity, so we might as well buy cheap ones and wear them until they got dirty. We threw the dirty ones in the dustbin, but later we found that Joanna brought them back in and washed them.
“Christ, she’ll resell them to us,” Baba said, and bet me sixpence; but Joanna didn’t. She put them in the linen press and said that they would be useful. We thought she’d put pieces in at the side and make them bigger, so that they fitted her. But she didn’t. Next time, when the woman came to scrub, Joanna gave her the brassieres instead of money. She was thrift itself. Mending. Patching. She ripped an old faded cardigan that had shrunk and used the wool to knit bedsocks for Gustav. Her knitting was under the cushion of the armchair, and one day when Herman was drunk he disturbed the knitting. The stitches fell off the needle, crawled off the needle like little brown beetles, and settled on the cushion.
“Mein Gott!” Joanna flew into a temper, her blood pressure soared, and her head began to spin. We carried her (oh, the weight and the indecency of it) onto the sofa in the drawing room. The drawing room was never used. There were preserved eggs in a bucket on the floor and along the window seat there were apples. Some of them were bad, and the room had a pleasant cider smell. Herman gave her a spoonful of brandy, and she recovered and flew into a fresh rage.
/> “This room is sumptuous,” Baba said to Joanna. Baba went across to speak to the porcelain nymph in the fireplace. Joanna had rouged the nymph’s cheeks and put nail polish on her fingernails. She was a lollipop nymph.
“Will you fit on the brassiere, Miss Brady?” the shopgirl asked. Pale, First Communion voice; pale, pure, rosary-bead hands held the flimsy, black, sinful garment between her fingers, and her fingers were ashamed.
“No. Just measure me,” I said. She took a measuring tape out of her overall pocket, and I raised my arms while she measured me.
The black underwear was Baba’s idea. She said that we wouldn’t have to wash it so often, and that it was useful if we ever had a street accident, or if men were trying to strip us in the backs of cars. Baba thought of all these things. I got black nylons, too. I read somewhere that they were “literary” and I had written one or two poems since I came to Dublin. I read them to Baba and she said they were nothing to the ones on mortuary cards.
“Good night, Miss Brady, happy Easter,” the First Communion voice said to me, and I wished her the same.
When I came in they were all having tea. Even Joanna was sitting at the dining-room table, with tan makeup on her arms and a charm bracelet jingling on her wrist. Every time she lifted the cup, the charms tinkled against the china, like ice in a cocktail glass. Cool, ice-cool, sugared cocktails. I liked them. Baba knew a rich man who bought us cocktails one evening.
There were stuffed tomatoes, sausage rolls, and simnel cake for tea.
“Good?” Joanna asked before I had swallowed the first mouthful of crumbly pastry. I nodded. She was a genius at cooking, surprising us with things we had never seen, little yellow dumplings in soup, apple strudel, and sour cabbage, but how I wished that she didn’t stand over us with imploring looks, asking “Good?”
“Tell jokes, my tell jokes?” Herman asked Gustav. He had taken a glass of wine, and always after a glass of wine he wanted to tell jokes.
Gustav shook his head. Gustav was pale and delicate. He looked unemployed, which of course was proper, because he did not go to work. He suffered from a skin disease or something. I was never sure whether I liked Gustav or not. I don’t think I liked the cunning behind his small blue eyes, and I often thought that he was too good to be true.
“Let him tell jokes,” Joanna said; she liked to be made to laugh.
“No, we go to pictures. We have good time at pictures,” Gustav said, and Baba roared laughing and lifted her chair so that it was resting on its two back legs.
“There no juice at pictures,” Joanna said, and Baba’s chair almost fell backward, because she had got a fit of coughing on top of the laughing. She coughed a lot lately, and I told her she ought to see about it.
“No juice” was Joanna’s way of saying that the pictures were a waste of money.
“We go, Joanna,” Gustav said, gently nudging her bare, tanned arm with his elbow. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up and his jacket was hanging on the back of his chair. It was a warm evening and the sun shone through the window and lit up the apricot jam on the table.
“Yes, Gustav,” Joanna said. She smiled at him as she must have smiled when they were sweethearts in Vienna. She began to clear off the table and warned us about the good, best, china.
“Ladies come nightclub with me?” Herman asked jokingly.
“Ladies have date,” Baba said. She lowered her chin onto her chest, to let me know that it was true. Her hair was newly set, so that it curved in soft black waves that lay like feathers on the crown of her head. I was raging. Mine was long and loose and streelish.
“More cake?” Joanna asked. But she had put the simnel cake into a marshmallow tin.
“Yes, please.” I was still hungry.
“Mein Gott, you got too fat.” She made a movement with her hand, to outline big fat woman. She came back with a slice of sad sponge cake that was probably put aside for trifle. I ate it.
Upstairs, I took off all my clothes and had a full view of myself in the wardrobe mirror. I was getting fat all right. I turned sideways, and looked around so that I could see the reflection of my hip. It was nicely curved and white like the geranium petals on the dressmaker’s window ledge.
“What’s Rubenesque?” I asked Baba. She turned around to face me. She had been painting her nails at the dressing table.
“Chrissake, draw the damn curtains or they’ll think you’re a sex maniac.” I ducked down on the floor, and Baba went over and drew the curtains. She caught the edges nervously between her thumb and her first finger, so that her nail polish would not get smudged. Her nails were salmon pink, like the sky which she had just shut out by drawing the curtain.
I was holding my breasts in my hands, trying to gauge their weight, when I asked her again, “Baba, what’s Rubenesque?”
“I don’t know. Sexy, I suppose. Why?”
“A customer said I was that.”
“Oh, you better be it all right, for this date,” she said.
“With whom?”
“Two rich men. Mine owns a sweets factory and yours has a stocking factory. Free nylons. Yippee. How much do your thighs measure?” She made piano movements with her fingers, so that the nail polish would dry quickly.
“Are they nice?” I asked tentatively. We had already had two disastrous nights with friends that she had found. In the evenings, after her class, some other girls and she went into a hotel and drank coffee in the main lounge. Dublin being a small, friendly city, one or the other of them was always bound to meet someone, and in that way Baba made a lot of acquaintances.
“Gorgeous. They’re aged about eighty, and my fellow has every bit of himself initialed. Tiepin, cuff links, handkerchief, car cushions. The lot. He has leopards in his car as mascots.”
“I can’t go, then,” I said nervously.
“In Christ’s name, why not?”
“I’m afraid of cats.”
“Look, Caithleen, will you give up the nonsense? We’re eighteen and we’re bored to death.” She lit a cigarette and puffed vigorously. She went on: “We want to live. Drink gin. Squeeze into the front of big cars and drive up outside big hotels. We want to go places. Not to sit in this damp dump.” She pointed to the damp patch in the wallpaper, over the chimneypiece, and I was just going to interrupt her, but she got in before me. “We’re here at night, killing moths for Joanna, jumping up like maniacs every time a moth flies out from behind the wardrobe, puffing DDT into crevices, listening to that lunatic next door playing the fiddle.” She sawed off her left wrist with her right hand. She sat on the bed exhausted. It was the longest speech Baba had ever made.
“Hear! Hear!” I said, and I clapped. She blew smoke straight into my face.
“But we want young men. Romance. Love and things,” I said despondently. I thought of standing under a streetlight in the rain with my hair falling crazily about, my lips poised for the miracle of a kiss. A kiss. Nothing more. My imagination did not go beyond that. It was afraid to. Mama had protested too agonizingly all through the windy years. But kisses were beautiful. His kisses. On the mouth, and on the eyelids, and on the neck when he lifted up the mane of hair.
“Young men have no bloody money. At least the gawks we meet. Smell o’ hair oil. Up the Dublin mountains for air, a cup of damp tea in a damp hostel. Then out in the woods after tea and a damp hand fumbling under your skirt. No, sir. We’ve had all the bloody air we’ll ever need. We want life.” She threw her arms out in the air. It was a wild and reckless gesture. She began to get ready.
We washed and sprinkled talcum powder all over ourselves.
“Have some of mine,” Baba said, but I insisted, “No, Baba, you have some of mine.” When we were happy we shared things, but when life was quiet and we weren’t going anywhere, we hid our things like misers, and she’d say to me, “Don’t you dare touch my powder,” and I’d say, “There must be a ghost in this room, my perfume was interfered with,” and she’d pretend not to hear me. We never loaned each other clothes th
en, and one worried if the other got anything new.
One morning Baba rang me at work and said, “Jesus, I’ll brain you when I see you.”
“Why?” The phone was in the shop and Mrs. Burns was standing beside me, looking agitated.
“Have you my brassiere on?”
“No, I haven’t,” I said.
“You must have; it didn’t walk. I searched the whole damn room and it isn’t there.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m in a phone booth outside the college and I can’t come out.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m flopping all over the damn place,” and I laughed straight into Mrs. Burns’s face and put down the phone.
“Oh, darling, I know how popular you must be. But tell your friends not to phone in the mornings. There might be orders coming through,” Mrs. Burns said.
That night Baba found the brassiere mixed up in the bedclothes. She never made her bed until evening.
