And Abby would stare at him and say, “But I don’t know the tune. I haven’t heard it yet. You just made it up, you said.”
Oh, the vexations endured by a man of poesy! He stood paralyzed behind the coffee table, and when Abby did at last step forward, just to touch him, to take his pulse, perhaps, to capture one of his arms in an invisible blood-pressure cuff! he crumpled and shrank. “Please don’t think I’m some kind of emotional Epstein-Barr,” he said, quoting from other arguments he’d had with women. “I’m not indifferent or dispassionate. I’m calm. I’m romantic, but I’m calm. I have appetites, but I’m very calm about them.”
When she went back to her husband—“Honey, you’re home!” Bob exclaimed — she lasted only a week. Shouldn’t it have lasted longer — the mix of loneliness and lust and habit she always felt with Bob, the mix that was surely love, for it so often felt like love, how could it not be love, surely nature intended it to be, surely nature with its hurricanes and hail was counting on this to suffice? Bob smiled at her and said nothing. And the next day, she booked a flight to Ireland.
How her mother became part of the trip, Abby still couldn’t exactly recall. It had something to do with a stick shift: how Abby had never learned to drive one. “In my day and age,” said her mother, “everyone learned. We all learned. Women had skills. They knew how to cook and sew. Now women have no skills.”
The stick shifts were half the rental price of the automatics.
“If you’re looking for a driver,” hinted her mother, “I can still see the road.”
“That’s good,” said Abby.
“And your sister Theda’s spending the summer at your aunt’s camp again.” Theda had Down’s syndrome, and the family adored her. Every time Abby visited, Theda would shout, “Look at you!” and throw her arms around her in a terrific hug. “Theda’s, of course, sweet as ever,” said her mother, “which is more than I can say about some people.”
“That’s probably true.”
“I’d like to see Ireland while I can. Your father, when he was alive, never wanted to. I’m Irish, you know.”
“I know. One-sixteenth.”
“That’s right. Of course, your father was Scottish, which is a totally different thing.”
Abby sighed. “It seems to me that Japanese would be a totally different thing.”
“Japanese?” hooted her mother. “Japanese is close.”
And so in the middle of June, they landed at the Dublin airport together. “We’re going to go all around this island, every last peninsula,” said Mrs. Mallon in the airport parking lot, revving the engine of their rented Ford Fiesta, “because that’s just the kind of crazy Yuppies we are.”
Abby felt sick from the flight; and sitting on what should be the driver’s side but without a steering wheel suddenly seemed emblematic of something.
Her mother lurched out of the parking lot and headed for the nearest roundabout, crossing into the other lane only twice. “I’ll get the hang of this,” she said. She pushed her glasses farther up on her nose and Abby could see for the first time that her mother’s eyes were milky with age. Her steering was jerky and her foot jumped around on the floor, trying to find the clutch. Perhaps this had been a mistake.
“Go straight, Mom,” said Abby, looking at her map.
They zigged and zagged to the north, up and away from Dublin, planning to return to it at the end, but now heading toward Drogheda, Abby snatching up the guidebook and then the map again and then the guidebook, and Mrs. Mallon shouting, “What?” or “Left?” or “This can’t be right; let me see that thing.” The Irish countryside opened up before them, its pastoral patchwork and stone walls and its chimney aroma of turf fires like some other century, its small stands of trees, abutting fields populated with wildflowers and sheep dung and cut sod and cows with ear tags, beautiful as women. Perhaps fairy folk lived in the trees! Abby saw immediately that to live amid the magic feel of this place would be necessarily to believe in magic. To live here would make you superstitious, warmhearted with secrets, unrealistic. If you were literal, or practical, you would have to move — or you would have to drink.
They drove uncertainly past signs to places unmarked on the map. They felt lost — but not in an uncharming way. The old narrow roads with their white side markers reminded Abby of the vacations the family had taken when she was little, the cow-country car trips through New England or Virginia — in those days before there were interstates, or plastic cups, or a populace depressed by asphalt and french fries. Ireland was a trip into the past of America. It was years behind, unmarred, like a story or a dream or a clear creek. I’m a child again, Abby thought. I’m back. And just as when she was a child, she suddenly had to go to the bathroom.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. To their left was a sign that said ROAD WORKS AHEAD, and underneath it someone had scrawled, “No, it doesn’t.”
Mrs. Mallon veered the car to the left and slammed on the brakes. There were some black-faced sheep haunch-marked in bright blue and munching grass near the road.
“Here?” asked Abby.
“I don’t want to waste time stopping somewhere else and having to buy something. You can go behind that wall.”
“Thanks,” said Abby, groping in her pocketbook for Kleenex. She missed her own apartment. She missed her neighborhood. She missed the plentiful U-Pump-Itt’s, where, she often said, at least they spelled pump right! She got out and hiked back down the road a little way. On one of the family road trips thirty years ago, when she and Theda had had to go to the bathroom, their father had stopped the car and told them to “go to the bathroom in the woods.” They had wandered through the woods for twenty minutes, looking for the bathroom, before they came back out to tell him that they hadn’t been able to find it. Her father had looked perplexed, then amused, and then angry — his usual pattern.