Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (22 page)

Of course, I knew that I was being completely unreasonable, but I was not able to stop myself. I was afraid. Afraid that the miles would forge a distance between us, even though I had evidence to the contrary, because it was only after Niamh had moved away from Achadh Mor and up to Dublin that we had become friends.

I held on to her too tightly while she was growing up. All through her childhood and adolescence, we fought. She was feisty. I saw myself in her and tried to contain her, to keep her safe. By the time she left for university to study English, I was exhausted from fighting with her. We disagreed on everything, her clothes, her hairstyle, her boyfriends. When she went into Swinford to the cinema with her friends, I would shake with fear until she came home again. James always offered a voice of reason, “She’ll be fine, Bernadine. She’s an intelligent, sensible girl.” His attitude infuriated me. Sometimes, I wished he would be more authoritarian, keep Niamh prisoner, and scold her like other fathers did. Then I could be the gentle, easygoing parent and she and I could outnumber him, instead of it always being the other way around.

Niamh had thick wavy hair like mine and curves like a woman from the age of thirteen. Her bones were delicate and refined, like James’s, but she had my large blue eyes. They were such windows on her innocence, her fear, her unsullied delight, her awakenings, that I often found it hard to look into them.

Niamh was artistic, messy, emotional, expressive. She was beautiful but uninterested in the way she looked; she was bewildered when people admired her—she inherited that humility from her father. She laughed readily, and her body was always open and stretched out in friendship. Her voice was loud and hearty, and her open passion gave voice to how I had felt all my life, but had never been able to express.

Sometimes I felt she was so perfect that I could scarcely believe she was a part of me, and my heart would collapse with fear that somebody might carry her away and hurt her. Other times, when she was being stubborn or spiteful, she reminded me too much of myself and I would struggle not to hit her.

In a corner of my mind, I was jealous of her joy, but my heart was hers completely. Though we became closer during the three years she spent in Dublin at university, I worried myself sick about her. It felt unnatural that I did not know where she was and what she was doing every minute of the day and night. I remember grating potatoes for boxty one afternoon and becoming so lost in a terrified reverie of what tragedy might have befallen her that I tore off the side of my thumb. Later that night, she telephoned and her father mentioned my accident to her.

“You should be more careful, Mam,” she scolded me. I wanted to tell her how worried I was about her, ask what exactly she had been doing all day, and whom she had been with. But I didn’t dare. I had learned that my instinct to smother her made her run from me.

So I waited for her to offer me information on the details of her life, greedily snatching each new fact and squirreling it away to help me build a picture in my mind. A vision that would help me know that she was safe, that would make me feel more involved in her life. In those years that she was away in Dublin, I learned to pretend that I thought she was a capable adult. I gave Niamh her independence, but in name only. I never believed in her ability apart from me. Reality told me she was an adult woman with a strong young body and a determined will. But if perception is truth, she was still an infant clinging to my breast, only truly protected and warm while in the cave of my soft arms.

In my pretending not to care too much, I was rewarded over the coming years with my daughter’s friendship. Niamh got a place teaching English in a school in Galway. She came home every other weekend through choice, and those times were the best we ever had together. We became closer then, and she felt able to share more details about her life, although she surely omitted things that might hurt or distress me. Watching Niamh mature as a woman gave me more pleasure than watching her grow into an adult. The speed at which a child grows is alarming; you grieve one passing stage to another with barely time to enjoy in between. But from her late teens to mid-twenties, Niamh turned from a headstrong girl who I worried for daily into a warm young woman.

She started to paint, and I was astonished by her work. Powerful splashes of nothing in particular, but I loved them and I told her so. She started to bring home friends. Sunny, interesting young people who admired my cooking and appeared interested in my opinions. One was an English boy with hair down to his shoulders who was studying law and said his wealthy mother had never cooked him a meal in her life. There was a girl from Dublin with a pale, terrified face who sang like an angel and entertained us after supper each night. James and I welcomed them as if they were our own children because they brought our daughter with them. Niamh was delighted that we liked her friends, but more delighted, I think, that they liked us.

I was infatuated by the fact that Niamh seemed to consider me so worthy of her friendship that she was proud to show me to her friends. The feeling between us moved on from the love of mother and daughter to a mutual respect. So much more than I had with my own mother. It felt a miracle that we should like each other as well as love each other. James cleared out one of our old cowsheds and put a skylight in the roof to make a studio for Niamh to paint in, and it was after she had been painting there every weekend for about six months that she announced she was moving to New York.

I was devastated, and I did react badly. But ultimately, I knew I had to let her go.

*

A short time before she left, we rented a caravan in Enniscrone and all three of us went there for a week, to say our good-byes. I sat on the dunes one windless day, and watched as James and Ni-amh walked the strand arm in arm, like lovers. She teased him into rolling up his trousers and taking off his shoes. As I watched them jump the shredded lace of the tiny waves, I felt my heart tear open that this chapter of our lives would soon be closing. We were family, we three, and I thought we had arrived. I had always hoped that our family might grow, if Niamh married, but had trusted that, no matter what, we would be together, like this. It seemed unfair to be adjusting again in the autumn of our lives.

A gentle breeze blew across the dull, muggy day—a whisper from the sea flapped through from one ear to the other and made me feel hollow. Once again, I stared out at the Atlantic in search of a shadow from the other side. But there was only flat gray silk spread out in front of me and then sky, sky, sky. The edge of the world. Perhaps it was true and there was no such place as America after all, and Niamh would never come back. Perhaps Michael had fallen over the edge of the world. The end of the world.

Later that evening, Niamh and I made boxty, and she gently coaxed the grater from me as she saw me grate the potatoes too close to the edge.

We had only a few days, and I wanted to say so much. That she had started her life as everything I had ever wanted, and then become so much more than that again. That I would miss seeing her every week, that I wished I had looked at her harder, listened more intently to her worries; that I was sorry for the years that I scolded her; for not having shown her enough love, and for loving her too much.

“I’m only going to America, Mam.”

She took my hand and held it until I loosened my grip, then she hugged me—taller, finer than I was now, or had ever been—and I cried for her. With her long arms wrapped around me, she told me not to be afraid, that America was only around the corner. I dabbed my eyes with a tea towel, and felt it as an old matronly act.

“Thanks, Mam,” she said.

“For what?” I asked.

“For not asking me to stay.”

*

Niamh departed in the morning. She insisted that we not go to the airport to wave her off, but leave it as a normal good-bye. As if we would see each other again soon. As I watched her back, bag hooked over her shoulders, legs marching in her strong, confident stride, I felt angry again that she was leaving. For the rest of the day, I was irritable. James went swimming and brought his wet clothes into the caravan. Then he put muddy wellingtons on the clean floor. As I was starting to prepare supper, he decided he wanted a drink and I tripped over him as he reached for the icebox. I had a vegetable knife in my hand, and it sliced his shoulder by pure accident.

“You stupid, stupid old man!” I shouted, in fear of having hurt him.

I pushed him down on the corduroy cushions of the bench, and opened the cabinet above him to get the first-aid box. The short sleeve of his T-shirt was wet with blood, and I lifted it up and applied an antiseptic cloth to the small wound. James blanched and I looked at his face. Long and ghostly white, his eyes staring at me like saucers. They were full of sadness and fear.

Time and proximity had carved enough knowledge of each other’s faces that we didn’t need words. We looked and each of us was thinking that all we had left now was the other: he with a woman who seemed barely able to tolerate him, even after all these years, and I with a man who looked delicate and old, and whom I had never cared to love.

Yet James was the only person who could ever equal my love for Niamh. The sadness in his eyes was his grief that she was gone. The fear was that I would no longer need him, that my reason for loving him was gone. But, old and fragile as he was, I did need him. We had grown to be a part of each other. I had no choice but to be with him. Like two trees, resolutely separate but whose roots and branches have intertwined.

I was stuck with him, and had no choice but to accept it. All other excuses had been pared away.

When I realized I had not said I was sorry, it was a great revelation to me.

I waited for Dan to get dressed and come back downstairs, then I ambushed him with my apology. “Dan, I am really,
really
sorry about what happened.”

He ignored the apology and walked out the door, saying, “I don’t know what time I’ll be home. Don’t bother cooking.” It took me the whole morning to talk myself through the rage.

God, I hated him. The self-righteous pig. He was milking this for sure—not accepting an apology? How low could you get? All I had done was kiss Ronan—hardly more than a handshake in this day and age, and at least I had been honest about it. What did Dan think? I was a virgin before I met him? It’s not like Ronan was a complete stranger. An old flame; these things are complicated. If he couldn’t be bothered to work this out—well, we might as well forget it.

The parting shot—
“Don’t bother cooking.”
That finished me off altogether.

Fact: I cooked for him every single night, the lucky bastard.

Fact: The way he threw it away—as if he was doing me a favor, letting me cook for him.

Fact: He was living in the 1950s, a woman cooking a hot meal for him every night, and him not even noticing, the mollycoddled, unappreciative ass. He
so
did not deserve me. Apologize? To him? He should be apologizing to
me
for taking me for granted. I’d be gone when he got back. Packed. I’d move back to the apartment. There were plenty of people I could stay with while the sublet ran its course. No dinner? I’d give him no dinner—
ever again
! Let him come home every night to an empty house, and see how he liked it. To this fabulous kitchen,
my
kitchen, empty, unloved, unused.

Somewhere around that point, in my thinking about the empty, unloved kitchen, I managed to turn back around. Having whipped myself up into a frenzy of justified fury, I slowed the blades down to mill gently around the horrible truth again. This was my fault. Dan felt hurt and betrayed, and he was bound to snap.

What I had to do was take control of this situation and create a solution. I had to make it clear to him that I knew how wrong I had been, and how very sorry I was. No excuses, no “buts”—just an unreserved apology. Dan
would
forgive me, and everything would be all right. We could get back to how things had been before, except that this time, I would appreciate Dan properly, because I had learned an important lesson about commitment, fidelity, and marriage.

I had been drawn to Angelo and Ronan because I was looking for an answer, and now I had found it.

Wisdom. What a fantastic thing it is when it finally hits you.

*

So I went and bought the ingredients for a shepherd’s pie—Dan’s favorite. And, significantly, I made another batch of boxty cakes. I could tell that morning that he had been almost fatally attracted to them, which was why I had taken his final rejection of them so personally.

I kept my spirits up for the rest of the day. In between preparing dinner, I got around to weeding a ferocious patch of tangles near the lettuces that I’d been avoiding and painted a few plant pots. I did some ironing, potted some seeds, and lined the kitchen drawers in gingham oilcloth: jolly, housewifey things that made me feel virtuous and homey.

I set the table with a posy of garden flowers delicately drooping from a glass tumbler, and used retro mint-green plastic-handled cutlery for a Doris-Day-pleasing-her-man style. The potato cakes were for nibbling while the cheddar cheese crust was toasting on the shepherd’s pie. Normally, I would do a light dessert with such a heavy main, but tonight was Dan’s night, so there was a comfort food dessert of apple tart and—the ultimate compromise for me—Ben & Jerry’s.

I am not one of nature’s self-pampering females, so styling my hair and applying makeup is usually an either/or decision. That evening I did both and put on a print dress I had worn on our honeymoon. I dusted my arms with a glittery powder my friend Doreen had given me on my wedding day.

Seven o’clock came, then eight, and there was no sign of Dan. It was OK, I told myself. He had to come home sometime. It doesn’t matter how late. I’d be waiting; I’d be ready for him.

At eight-thirty, he came in.

My heart was thumping ten to the dozen. I was all excited and shaky, and in a weird way it was like I was falling in love: a powerful, messy feeling, where I didn’t know if I was terrified or elated. It was anticipation, I suppose. Knowing that soon, one way or another, this mess would be resolved.