What Are You Like

by Anne Enright

  No, that is not true. Of course I believed in God. I just didn’t believe he would look after her.

  But if I move Him from one place to the other in my mind, what difference does that make?

  Oh, I still remember that cake – the taste of it. It was a cup-cake with a glacé cherry on top, and blackberry jam to spread on each half. The paper casing was brittle from the oven and it clicked off like a spreading fan, sticky with crumbs that you could suck off later. The pain in my stomach was so warm as I ate it. I could feel blood falling in slow clots out of me, like cream, and the secret lump of cloth I was sitting on changed the whole room.

  The first time I had lemonade was in a hotel in Enniskillen. It was after the war, when the Americans had gone home and there was talk of the flying boats they had sunk in Lough Erne, Thunderheads and Catalinas, a whole fleet of them under water, with fish nosing the controls. We must have been visiting my uncle, who was rich. I don’t know why I wasn’t left at home to mind the other children, so the lemonade had a guilty sort of taste, of freedom, or of luck. Surrounded by the noise of the town that I was too stunned to hear, the bubbles were so quiet and slow, you might even count them.

  I was a lucky child. I found money on the ground and sent off coupons. I entered a Campbell’s Tea competition and we got a map of the world in the post, rolled up in a long, cardboard tube. There is no understanding luck. Berts brought me to the races on the Easter Monday of the spring we met and it was the first time I saw him annoyed with me – all my horses coming home, except one. I could not help it, though. Even the worst things came out right for me.

  The day that Valty ran away from home we found an empty noose hanging in the barn and we stood under it, amazed, looking at his invisible body swinging there. It was a filthy thing to leave behind. Ambrose was too small to climb up along the beam to take it down and my father could not be asked to touch it. Nor could we send for a neighbour, in case people found out. It was my mother’s brother who finally shinnied along the beam and unknotted it, a day later, the bullocks in the haggard frantic for hay.

  I often think of that noose, hanging there as the dusk fell – the sky inside its hoop a shade lighter than the sky outside. The noise of the bullocks went through the night and I could hear John whimpering in his sleep next door because there was too much room in the bed. I listened to the wind and thought of it swaying and waiting, a tear that could not fall. Whose neck was it for?

  Valentine. First born. The first are the quietest, they say, but something went wrong. My father had to strap him three times a week. He fired the stubble one night when he was eight and the flames could have leapt the ditch and on to the house. I saw him once, sitting in the trench where the cows pissed. Just sitting. Another time he put his bare foot into a bucket of milk and we had to drink it and say nothing, because of the trouble it would cause. I know he was just a child; but I saw him that night the stubble went up, with his shirt open and his little white chest rosy in the heat. He was stamping from foot to foot in the middle of the smoke and he was not laughing.

  It was my Uncle Fintan who took the noose down. He was my mother’s brother and this made sense, because Valty was my mother’s child, not my father’s, now that he was gone. I am just saying that there is a tightness to these things, even if it is slight. Had there been nobody, the calves would have been fed, life would have gone on until the rope rotted off the beam. Or my father would have got tired of it and taken it down some quiet morning by himself. But one thing is sure. Even if the noose had hung there for ever, no woman would touch it, or walk under it. She would not have wanted to.

  When Valty left, I got his schooling. They put me on the train with a case full of clothes, my name written on each collar, Anna Kennedy. Anna Kennedy. Anna Kennedy. Even the worst things worked out well for me. I was twelve and in the wide world. I was the luckiest, I was the best girl in the class.

  I fell in love with Berts on Easter Monday. We had met when the frost was on the ground and walked out in the long, slow months before spring. But I did not know, until the world finally started to turn, what it was to love him. The thing I liked about him first was the back of his neck, which was so long on its way up under his hat. A year later it repulsed me, this foolish stretch, the barber never finding the end of it so he could start on the longer hair. I saw him by accident, one afternoon, turning into a doorway, the back of his neck like an apology to the street, and I thought, ‘I cannot love this man.’ But that was because by then it was too late – I did love him, neck or no neck, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  From the front, Berts’ face looked sort of stuck on – long and bony and flat. His hands were slim and easy and somehow not Irish at all – dark like his face and too fine. His teeth were small, they made him look hungry. And he would have been dangerous altogether, loping and foreign, if it weren’t for his eyes.

  Oh, give me breath enough to describe Berts’ eyes. They were like a place to me. So warm, you would think they were brown, but there was green in them, especially when we were married. After we made love, I would turn on the lamp to go to the bathroom and Berts would lift his head, still asleep, his eyes pure green and the pupils like pins. ‘It’s you all right,’ he’d say, like he was dreaming of me. Another man might be startled and try to flush me out, but I knew by that blind green that I was in the very centre of Berts. It was in that confirmation, rising out of sleep, or falling into it, that I felt most loved by him.

  Brown was the social colour of his eyes, intelligent and light, sharp and mild. That is enough now. Berts’ eyes were, somehow, not like him at all. I felt that, as he aged, the back of his neck would say it all for him and the green of his eyes would speckle and fade. I saw it in the street that day, as he ducked through a door away from me – a future full of evasions. But when I was young, when he turned towards me, I lived in Berts’ eyes.

  He came into the office to check things, when someone tripped on a path or hit their head against a bit of scaffolding. I would sit there with my notes while old Mr Blood-Burke strolled up and down.

  ‘Did she fall off the bus, or on to the path? That’s the question. Did she have one leg on the bus when she fell, or both feet on terra firma? Could you check the leg situation there, Miss Kennedy, like a decent woman. A simple preposition might be all we need.’

  While Berts sat opposite me, leaning back, one leg stretched out and the coat he would not take off draped from the chair to the floor. He gave nothing away, except the smallest wink to me when the old man’s back was turned. Berts was quiet, like a country man, which is what I liked about him. Some of those Dublin men – they would tell you anything at all.

  I fell in love with Berts at the races on Easter Monday when I won too much and he was annoyed. We had walked out for months and he had been kind, and careful of me. But the horses slipping away around the track, the silence of them far away and the yelling when they came close, brought something out in him that he could not help. A sort of sneering when I won (though it was the horse that won, I was only lucky) that seemed to me like family.

  The races were very glam. People wore new hats for spring and knew who each other were, while the rolls of money came out of pockets or were stuffed back in, dirty and exciting. You could see how rich people had bastards and did not care, or took to the drink for a joke. This was the place where men went to the bad – and I realised that I had been searching for my brother all afternoon in the crowd.

  ‘Number nine, Berts. Sky blue with purple dots.’ Everything I said came out in a high voice, as if people were looking at us.

  ‘Look at the form,’ said Berts. ‘Look at the form.’

  ‘But I love blue, Berts.’ I had to wheedle him into putting on every bet for me, and I won four times out of five.

  We got the bus home in silence and he walked me up my street. It was Easter Monday and the whole city felt new, and lonely.

  ‘I had a brother who left,’ I said.

  ‘Really?�
�� said Berts.

  ‘Years ago. You know. I don’t think he was right in the head.’

  I had said what had never been said, either in the family or out of it. Now anyone could look at a Kennedy walking down the street and have themselves a good laugh.

  ‘I think maybe he was gone in the head. Maybe he was too young to tell.’

  I said it to show myself weak for him. But the world had turned and I was lucky. Berts kissed me more fully than he had ever done before. He kissed me even though his serious horses fell and my foolish ones did not. He kissed me even though I was the wrong girl. Because you looked to people’s breed, you looked for pioneer pins, a bit of height – you did not look for the County Home. I ran up the steps and put my key in the door and knew he would ask me to marry him, before the summer was out.

  Those horses, they moved so slowly and so far away. You could not hear them, or believe them fast, until they bundled past the post, all legs.

  Berts was an only son, which is what made him so indifferent and ready to be loved. But the sisters surprised me. Joan, the second, hissing ‘He got the best of everything’, making me feel like I was second best. He betrayed them by marrying me – his mother first and the rest in a line. And Dada. Dada was a little humpy man with a child’s smile, who caused a stir and a clearing of the best chair any time he walked into a room, and then was ignored by the lot of them. I liked Dada best of all.

  They were city people. The house we grew up in was just a gateway to the farm beyond, but Berts’ house was like walking into the neck of a sack. His mother was always in the good room pouring tea that had to be brought in specially and it was the sisters that did the running. I could never bear a sickly woman. Berts’ mother seemed withered and soft, in the middle of all her things. She hated me on sight and, when we were married, she did not come to call.

  I stood by the window and watched them finishing the houses on the other side of the street.

  I was not pregnant – not when the slates spread up the roof, nor when the guttering was fixed in its iron brackets. I was not pregnant when they cleared the drive or sprayed the garden wall with pebble-dash, the stones thundering out of the machine. I thought I was pregnant, all the time, but I was not.

  So I stood by the window and watched the other people moving in. There was something about the bareness with which they arrived that made us friends. You would see them being driven into the street, bumping along in the mud, the way the driver stood back – a brother or a friend – and let the couple walk up the path by themselves. Then later the van would come with a few things: sheets to tack over the windows, a chest of drawers that would double as a baby’s cot. There was something about Mrs Brophy coming back from the shop with a bale of briquettes in an empty pram, with her big stomach pressing against the bar and ‘Look at me!’ she said. ‘Putting in the practice. You think I could have used the bike.’

  We had chop wars. ‘A chop for his tea.’ ‘Oh, a chop for his tea.’ ‘I thought I’d just get a nice lamb chop, for his tea.’ Mrs Brophy talking about sausages with a laugh. We never called when the men were home. If your mother was from Dublin she would come during the day, on the bus, and you would clean the place together if she was that kind of mother, or she would sit and watch you clean. Mrs Hegarty standing on the windowsill at eight and a half months, with a wad of newspaper soaked in vinegar, and the other hand gripping the iron window frame, swinging her clear. The grass was seeded and the trees planted, and the front doors were always open, when the babies came.

  They came one by one in taxis, or new cars. They came wrapped in woollen shawls that were yellow, or white. I wanted to know what it felt like, but all they said was: ‘Fourteen hours and a D and C,’ or, ‘They let her go twenty-three – can you imagine it.’ Or nothing was said at all, because we were shy about these things. We were shy about our husbands, apart from their lamb chops, and we were shy of the lives we had left behind. Mrs Lovett, Mrs Hegarty, Mrs McCarthy, Mrs Barr, Mrs Delahunty, all new names, even to ourselves. We were there for a new life, and it might well be a long one. We expected, somewhere unsaid, that one day we would see each other die.

  Berts came home on the bicycle and kissed me. I listened to the radio. I spent too much time at the window, and went too often to the shops. Once I caught myself walking up and down the hall, talking about chops like I was Mr Blood-Burke. I read a lot – rubbish mostly. The house was still a shell and the dust was fierce. I got polish for the furniture we did not yet have, I got sodium bicarbonate in the raw and steel wool for the pans. I was getting it ready, getting it ready, laying down carpet, putting paper on the walls – building up a debt to the bank that only a baby could pay.

  Not that I wanted one all that badly. I wanted one so badly it hurt, but I wasn’t sure if the hurt was real.

  But if I move the hurt around, from one place to another in my mind, what difference does that make? There was nothing else for me to do.

  I was bothered by memories: the smell of hay rotting, the class we had at school where a woman in a white turban explained the right way to sit into a car, the way my father killed the dog, by tying a stone to its legs and hanging it from the cowshed roof.

  I remembered one day at school, I passed Sr Maolíosa, who was standing by a flowerbed on the curving front drive. She said a line to me in German, without glancing up.

  ‘Translate, Anna.’

  ‘Sorry, Sister?’

  She was fingering a peony rose, deep red. She said the line again for me and I tried,

  ‘Neither childhood nor the future will get smaller, Sister.’

  ‘Will diminish, Anna, will diminish.’

  It seemed to me odd that I knew what the words meant in German, but did not have the English for them, as if the world was peeling away in different layers. The peony dipped in front of her, a vegetable rose, and she stroked the bursting head, her hand translucent to the veins.

  I was sixteen. I thought, ‘None of this will diminish, will ever diminish.’

  Now, I planted things in the garden and watched for them to grow. Words started to follow me about, and I scribbled some of them down on scraps of paper, but they were just themselves and did not join with anything else.

  I was always pregnant. I was never pregnant. I walked from room to room, ambushed by all these things. The past and the future were as big as they ever were, with nothing in the middle, except this empty, waiting house, my blank body in the centre of it, like a gap in the middle of a hole. I was bothered by memories, I was bothered by things that had not happened yet. I was squashed between two unshiftable things and I started to rearrange the house, moving the furniture from room to room.

  One day a Corporation lorry pulled up and two men walked up the path carrying a mirror between them that reflected the other houses as they walked. I never thought Berts was the kind to steal, if that was what you call it. The mirror was from a demolition in the city centre, eighteenth century maybe, cracked along the corner, and with one side of the frame completely gone. I liked it, secretly. They left it in the hall.

  It leant there all day, the gilt extravagant against the wallpaper, the glass rolling down in folds. I felt sorry for the left-hand side that was missing its rim, and I wondered what the mirror had seen over the years, who had looked in it, and were they ever pleased.

  When Berts came home he said he knew a man that could cut it down and sell it on and I did not know what to say. So I said nothing and the mirror stayed in the hall. I passed it back and forwards all day, and took out a cloth to give it a clean. I felt how the glass was too heavy for itself, had sagged over the years, so that it was thicker now at the base. I waited for Berts to get rid of it, wondering what would happen next, and did I know my husband at all.

  One afternoon, I took off my clothes and stood in front of it. It was a silly thing to do. I looked at myself in the liver-spotted silver, the glass flowing over it, buckling like water, and I did not know what to think. I don’t know if I had seen my
body before, full length. At school we washed under a shift, and when I was in digs, the long mirror was in the hall. But I am not a complete fool. I had seen all kinds of things before. None of it helped. I looked at the body in the mirror with no baby inside or with a baby inside. I looked at Anna Kennedy starkers in the middle of the afternoon, with her dress around her ankles, and I could not find the words for it. Pink. White. Hill. Cunt. Move. You move the tea cosy from the pot to the table, you move it to the side of the range, you turn the cosy inside out.

  Move

  I wrote words down and I buried them in the garden, the names of flowers: wallflower, phlox, peony rose, dog rose, tea rose. A twist of baking soda, sugar, a wick, two wicks, a bar of soap cut down the middle so it leaves itself on the knife.

  I knew I was pregnant now. I knew the words would never grow. There was something wrong with me, but I could not stop myself. I wrote words down and I ate them, but I knew they would not keep me alive. I did this, I did that. Berts brought me to the doctor. I looked at AnnA, who was the same, any way you looked at her. And when I died the mirror went blank.

  Nothing hurts the dead, they say, they say. Nothing hurts the dead, they say. Except maybe the life they had to live. But I could not say it was a bad life.

  When I died Katie came into my room; she said, ‘Come stay with me. I have a split-level condo in Maine.’ When I died Valty came into my room and said, ‘Shit Bitch.’ When I died my mother ran all the way to the shops, crying.

  I am in hell. This is what I see, this is what I see, I see the turd, I see the rope, I see my own private parts that I never saw and Berts’ private parts that I never saw, I see them clearly. I shift them around the room. I give my husband breasts. I am not ashamed. I shit through the noose and I cry through my backside. I am in hell. I rearrange my life in hell. Berts’ member that is bigger than my own body that surrounds it, I let it creep up the back of his long neck and tip off his hat.