Birds of America by Lorrie Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

went next door to look at the Kinsale smocks and wool sweaters—tiny cardigans that young Irish children, on sweltering summer days of seventy-one degrees, wore on the beach, over their bathing suits. “So cute,” said Abby, and the two of them wandered through the store, touching things. In the back by the wool caps, Abby’s mother found a marionette hanging from a ceiling hook and began to play with it a little, waving its arms to the store music, which was a Beethoven concerto. Abby went to pay for a smock, ask about a bathroom or a good pub, and when she came back, her mother was still there, transfixed, conducting the concerto with the puppet. Her face was arranged in girlish joy, luminous, as Abby rarely saw it. When the concerto was over, Abby handed her a bag. “Here,” she said, “I bought you a smock.”
    Mrs. Mallon let go of the marionette, and her face darkened. “I never had a real childhood,” she said, taking the bag and looking off into the middle distance. “Being the oldest, I was always my mother’s confidante. I always had to act grown-up and responsible. Which wasn’t my natural nature.” Abby steered her toward the door. “And then when I really was grown up, there was Theda, who needed all my time, and your father of course, with his demands. But then there was you. You I liked. You I could leave alone.”
    “I bought you a smock,” Abby said again.
    They used the bathroom at O’Hara’s pub, bought a singlemineral water and split it, then went on to the Drumcliff cemetery to see the dead Yeatses. Then they sped on toward Sligo City to find a room, and the next day were up and out to Knock to watch lame women, sick women, women who wanted to get pregnant (“Knocked up,” said Abby) rub their rosaries on the original stones of the shrine. They drove down to Clifden, around Connemara, to Galway and Limerick—“There once were two gals from America, one named Abby and her mother named Erica. …” They sang, minstrel speed demons around the Ring of Kerry, its palm trees and blue and pink hydrangea like a set from an operetta. “Playgirls of the Western World!” exclaimed her mother. They came to rest, at dark, near Ballylickey, in a bed-and-breakfast, a former hunting lodge, in a glen just off the ring. They ate a late supper of toddies and a soda bread their hostess called “Curranty Dick.”
    “Don’t I know it,” said Mrs. Mallon. Which depressed Abby, like a tacky fixture in a room, and so she excused herself and went upstairs, to bed.
    It was the next day, through Ballylickey, Bantry, Skibbereen, and Cork, that they entered Blarney. At the castle, the line to kiss the stone was long, hot, and frightening. It jammed the tiny winding stairs of the castle’s suffocating left tower, and people pressed themselves against the dark wall to make room for others who had lost their nerve and were coming back down.
    “This is ridiculous,” said Abby. But by the time they’d reached the top, her annoyance had turned to anxiety. To kiss the stone, she saw, people had to lie on their backs out over a parapet, stretching their necks out to place their lips on the underside of a supporting wall where the stone was laid. A strange-looking leprechaunish man was squatting at the side of the stone, supposedly to help people arch back, but he seemed to be holding them too loosely, a careless and sadistic glint inhis eyes, and some people were changing their minds and going back downstairs, fearful and inarticulate as ever.
    “I don’t think I can do this,” said Abby hesitantly, tying her dark raincoat more tightly around her.
    “Of course you can,” said her mother. “You’ve come all this way. This is why you came.” Now that they were at the top of the castle, the line seemed to be moving quickly. Abby looked back, and around, and the view was green and rich, and breathtaking, like a photo soaked in dyes.
    “Next!” she heard the leprechaun shouting.
    Ahead of them, a German