owner’s name in gold lettering swimming inside the rich crimson waves of the blown glass.
“It’s for ye all,” he said, and Kitty took it and began to polish it with the swag of her dipping sleeve.
It was she who proposed getting in the water for a paddle. I didn’t want him to see my white legs, which was why I volunteered to mind the things, the shoes and stockings, his overcoat and the jug. Sitting there on a knoll of scorching sand, people all around so carefree and loud, men in awful flannel swimsuits smoking pipes and women in knickerbockers lifting their backsides to be photographed, not minding how foolish they looked, yet the whole world when I looked at it through the waves within the jug seemed rose-colored.
When they came back, so glowing, he said I wouldn’t be able to say I had been to Coney Island unless I got in. I was alone with him then, the water so silken over the ankles, but my footing unsteady because of the shifting sand and seaweed tangled in the toes. Across the bay was a jut of land suspended in sunshine that he said was named after a flock of sheep that once grazed there. Then he asked where I came from and if I missed it. Was I homesick for Ireland? No. His mother and father had been youngsters when they left, meeting up on the boat, sweethearts from then on, but they had died young, too young, and so it was in his bones. He knew the locality, which was near a mountain named after a warrior. He asked me to repeat the names of the townlands where I came from, as they were poetry to him, which they weren’t to me and yet as I recited them I could see drills of cabbage in our bit of garden at home, slugs on the green and blue-green outer leaves, and into my head came the bawling of stray cattle on a road.
Torick
Derry Gnaw
Kilratera
Coppaghbaun
Pollagoona
Bohatch
Derrygoolin
Glenwanish
Alenwanish
Knockbeha
Sliabh Bearnagh
Sliabh Aughty
We’d waded far out. I saw the breakers vault up and head toward us and I knew that I was falling and so was he. Inside the water he held me. I held him. Swaying like dancers but clumsier and that wild happiness, hoots of laughter all around, people getting drenched, keeling over, a woman’s shout, “Pick her up, Dwight, pick her up,” the child hoisted up, the waves like big barrels rolling in over us, the foam in our faces and he saying, having to shout, “You’re all right, we’re all right,” borne back in, half swept, half cresting, without ever letting go of one another.
They were raging. Mary Kate ran to squeeze the water out of the tail of my dress, saying I’d catch pneumonia, and Kitty remarking that a person could be excused for thinking we’d got engaged out there. He laughed it off and sat to put on his shoes, half smiling, already gone, thousands of miles distant, to the untamed world of the bush, to the wilds where he worked as a lumberjack, far from us and the hurly-burly and the cheek-to-cheek dancing on the open marquee.
Only by a sort of hidden smile when he stood in front of me to say goodbye could I tell that it was not nothing out there in the ocean, that it was something. How I longed to be alone, to relive every second of it, the swoop of the waves, the way he held me, the spume over our faces, my wet clothes wetting my ribs, clinging to each other and the water trying to suck us down.
“I bet he’s not going out west … it’s too early for logging,” Kitty said, reckoning that he would be somewhere in the city
that night, seeing some old flame or going to a dance, whereupon she and Mary Kate sparred over the different girlfriends he’d had, a Rita Thing-um-bob who’d given him Irish lessons, a barmaid the time he worked in a bar, a nurse from Roscommon, different girls, different Gabriels, and guessing at my elation, Mary Kate thumped me and said, “Don’t you go getting soft on him, he breaks hearts he does,” as poor Noreen hailed some drunken passersby to say, “Aaragh, shure, isn’t Gabriel
“It’s for ye all,” he said, and Kitty took it and began to polish it with the swag of her dipping sleeve.
It was she who proposed getting in the water for a paddle. I didn’t want him to see my white legs, which was why I volunteered to mind the things, the shoes and stockings, his overcoat and the jug. Sitting there on a knoll of scorching sand, people all around so carefree and loud, men in awful flannel swimsuits smoking pipes and women in knickerbockers lifting their backsides to be photographed, not minding how foolish they looked, yet the whole world when I looked at it through the waves within the jug seemed rose-colored.
When they came back, so glowing, he said I wouldn’t be able to say I had been to Coney Island unless I got in. I was alone with him then, the water so silken over the ankles, but my footing unsteady because of the shifting sand and seaweed tangled in the toes. Across the bay was a jut of land suspended in sunshine that he said was named after a flock of sheep that once grazed there. Then he asked where I came from and if I missed it. Was I homesick for Ireland? No. His mother and father had been youngsters when they left, meeting up on the boat, sweethearts from then on, but they had died young, too young, and so it was in his bones. He knew the locality, which was near a mountain named after a warrior. He asked me to repeat the names of the townlands where I came from, as they were poetry to him, which they weren’t to me and yet as I recited them I could see drills of cabbage in our bit of garden at home, slugs on the green and blue-green outer leaves, and into my head came the bawling of stray cattle on a road.
Torick
Derry Gnaw
Kilratera
Coppaghbaun
Pollagoona
Bohatch
Derrygoolin
Glenwanish
Alenwanish
Knockbeha
Sliabh Bearnagh
Sliabh Aughty
We’d waded far out. I saw the breakers vault up and head toward us and I knew that I was falling and so was he. Inside the water he held me. I held him. Swaying like dancers but clumsier and that wild happiness, hoots of laughter all around, people getting drenched, keeling over, a woman’s shout, “Pick her up, Dwight, pick her up,” the child hoisted up, the waves like big barrels rolling in over us, the foam in our faces and he saying, having to shout, “You’re all right, we’re all right,” borne back in, half swept, half cresting, without ever letting go of one another.
They were raging. Mary Kate ran to squeeze the water out of the tail of my dress, saying I’d catch pneumonia, and Kitty remarking that a person could be excused for thinking we’d got engaged out there. He laughed it off and sat to put on his shoes, half smiling, already gone, thousands of miles distant, to the untamed world of the bush, to the wilds where he worked as a lumberjack, far from us and the hurly-burly and the cheek-to-cheek dancing on the open marquee.
Only by a sort of hidden smile when he stood in front of me to say goodbye could I tell that it was not nothing out there in the ocean, that it was something. How I longed to be alone, to relive every second of it, the swoop of the waves, the way he held me, the spume over our faces, my wet clothes wetting my ribs, clinging to each other and the water trying to suck us down.
“I bet he’s not going out west … it’s too early for logging,” Kitty said, reckoning that he would be somewhere in the city
that night, seeing some old flame or going to a dance, whereupon she and Mary Kate sparred over the different girlfriends he’d had, a Rita Thing-um-bob who’d given him Irish lessons, a barmaid the time he worked in a bar, a nurse from Roscommon, different girls, different Gabriels, and guessing at my elation, Mary Kate thumped me and said, “Don’t you go getting soft on him, he breaks hearts he does,” as poor Noreen hailed some drunken passersby to say, “Aaragh, shure, isn’t Gabriel
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