Now Abby struggled over a short stone wall and hid, squatting, eyeing the sheep warily. She was spacey with jet lag, and when she got back to the car, she realized she’d left the guidebook back on a stone and had to turn around and retrieve it.
“There,” she said, getting back in the car.
Mrs. Mallon shifted into gear. “I always feel that if people would just be like animals and excrete here and there rather than in a single agreed-upon spot, we wouldn’t have any pollution.”
Abby nodded. “That’s brilliant, Mom.”
“Is it?”
They stopped briefly at an English manor house, to see the natural world cut up into moldings and rugs, wool and wood captive and squared, the earth stolen and embalmed and shellacked. Abby wanted to leave. “Let’s leave,” she whispered.
“What is it with you?” complained her mother. From there, they visited a neolithic passage grave, its floor plan like a birth in reverse, its narrow stone corridor spilling into a high, round room. They took off their sunglasses and studied the Celtic curlicues. “Older than the pyramids,” announced the guide, though he failed to address its most important feature, Abby felt: its deadly maternal metaphor.
“Are you still too nervous to cross the border to Northern Ireland?” asked Mrs. Mallon.
“Uh-huh.” Abby bit at her thumbnail, tearing the end of it off like a tiny twig.
“Oh, come on,” said her mother. “Get a grip.”
And so they crossed the border into the North, past the flak-jacketed soldiers patrolling the neighborhoods and barbed wire of Newry, young men holding automatic weapons and walking backward, block after block, their partners across the street, walking forward, on the watch. Helicopters flapped above. “This is a little scary,” said Abby.
“It’s all show,” said Mrs. Mallon breezily.
“It’s a scary show.”
“If you get scared easily.”
Which was quickly becoming the theme of their trip — Abby could see that already. That Abby had no courage and her mother did. And that it had forever been that way.
“You scare too easily,” said her mother. “You always did. When you were a child, you wouldn’t go into a house unless you were reassured there were no balloons in it.”
“I didn’t like balloons.”
“And you were scared on the plane coming over,” said her mother.
Abby grew defensive. “Only when the flight attendant said there was no coffee because the percolator was broken. Didn’t you find that alarming? And then after all that slamming, they still couldn’t get one of the overhead bins shut.” Abby remembered this like a distant, bitter memory, though it had only been yesterday. The plane had taken off with a terrible shudder, and when it proceeded with the rattle of an old subway car, particularly over Greenland, the flight attendant had gotten on the address system to announce there was nothing to worry about, especially when you think about “how heavy air really is.”
Now her mother thought she was Tarzan. “I want to go on that rope bridge I saw in the guidebook,” she said.
On page 98 in the guidebook was a photograph of a rope-and-board bridge slung high between two cliffs. It was supposed to be for fishermen, but tourists were allowed, though they were cautioned about strong winds.
“Why do you want to go on the rope bridge?” asked Abby.
“Why?” replied her mother, who then seemed stuck and fell silent.
For the next two days, they drove east and to the north, skirting Belfast, along the coastline, past old windmills and sheep farms, and up out onto vertiginous cliffs that looked out toward Scotland, a pale sliver on the sea. They stayed at a tiny stucco bed-and-breakfast, one with a thatched roof like Cleopatra bangs. They slept lumpily, and in the morning in the breakfast room with its large front window, they ate their cereal and rashers and black and white pudding in an exhausted way, going through the motions of good guesthood—“Yes, the troubles,” they agreed, for who could say for certain whom you were talking to? It wasn’t like race-riven America, where you always knew. Abby nodded. Out the window, there was a breeze, but she couldn’t hear the faintest rustle of it. She could only see it silently moving the dangling branches of the sun-sequined spruce, just slightly, like objects hanging from a rearview mirror in someone else’s car.
She charged the bill to her Visa, tried to lift both bags, and then just lifted her own.
“Good-bye! Thank you!” she and her mother called to their host. Back in the car, briefly, Mrs. Mallon began to sing “Toora-loora-loora.” “ ‘Over in Killarney, many years ago,’ ” she warbled. Her voice was husky, vibrating, slightly flat, coming in just under each note like a saucer under a cup.
And so they drove on. The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air.
They came to the sign for the rope bridge.
“I want to do this,” said Mrs. Mallon, and swung the car sharply right. They crunched into a gravel parking lot and parked; the bridge was a quarter-mile walk from there. In the distance, dark clouds roiled like a hemorrhage, and the wind was picking up. Rain mizzled the windshield.
“I’m going to stay here,” said Abby.
“You are?”
“Yeah.”
“Whatever,” said her mother in a disgusted way, and she got out, scowling, and trudged down the path to the bridge, disappearing beyond a curve.
Abby waited, now feeling the true loneliness of this trip. She realized she missed Bob and his warm, quiet confusion; how he sat on the rug in front of the fireplace, where her dog, Randolph, used to sit; sat there beneath the five Christmas cards they’d received and placed on the mantel — five, including the one from the paperboy — sat there picking at his feet, or naming all the fruits in his fruit salad, remarking life’s great variety! or asking what was wrong (in his own silent way), while poking endlessly at a smoldering log. She thought, too, about poor Randolph, at the vet, with his patchy fur and begging, dying eyes. And she thought about the pale bachelor lyricist, how he had once come to see her, and how he hadn’t even placed enough pressure on the doorbell to make it ring, and so had stood there waiting on the porch, holding a purple cone-flower, until she just happened to walk by the front window and see him standing there. 0 poetry! When she invited him in, and he gave her the flower and sat down to decry the coded bloom and doom of all things, decry as well his own unearned deathlessness, how everything hurtles toward oblivion, except words, which assemble themselves in time like molecules in space, for God was an act — an act! — of language, it hadn’t seemed silly to her, not really, at least not that silly.
The wind was gusting. She looked at her watch, worried now about her mother. She turned on the radio to find a weather report, though the stations all seemed to be playing strange, redone versions of American pop songs from 1970. Every so often, there was a two-minute quiz show — Who is the president of France? Is a tomato a vegetable or a fruit? — questions that the caller rarely if ever answered correctly, which made it quite embarrassing to listen to. Why did they do it? Puzzles, quizzes, game shows. Abby knew from AST that a surprising percentage of those taking the college entrance exams never actually applied to college. People just loved a test. Wasn’t that true? People loved to put themselves to one.
Her mother was now knocking on the glass. She was muddy and wet. Abby unlocked the door and pushed it open. “Was it worth it?” Abby asked.
Her mother got in, big and dank and puffing. She started the car without looking at her daughter. “What a bridge,” she said finally.