Yankee Doodle Dandy

I was fourteen. I had an angular face, thin, with a wide nose and pale skin with a smattering of freckles.  I had blue eyes which seemed to go from dark to light depending on the sky.  I stared at myself in the glass.  I had good strong teeth: straight and white.  I wasn’t pretty.  Colm Rourke, down the road, said I was. But he had his reasons.  And Colm Rourke was desperate.  Dark and short, just my height.  He smoked a pack of Carltons a day and had the cough to prove it.  A terrible cough, he had.  He’d lived in America too.

“We’ve that in common anyway, Slaine,” he said to me.

We had little enough in common, him and me, more than most people though.

“Yankee Doodle Dandy,” they’d sing when I went by.  They’d giggle.  “Slaine thinks she’s something special,” my old friend Carmel said.  I couldn’t stick the convent school.  My Mammy pulled me out and put me in the technical school.  I didn’t want to be there.  The girls were slow, waiting to leave school and marry.  Not me:  that was never what I wanted.

I tried talking to my father about it, my father who’d always taken my part, but he wouldn’t listen.  My father wasn’t home often anyhow.  He was on the dole.  He was in the pub.  My brothers ignored Da.  Michelle didn’t seem to recognize him.  But Aishlin was all smiles.  Her da had come all the way from America to rescue her.

“I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, a Yankee Doodle do or die.  A real live….”  they sang when I went past.  The girls from the convent school.  The young fellas from the brothers.  Them from my comprehensive.  “Yankee Doodle went to town just to ride a pony.  Have you a pony?” They asked.  And a few young fellas, sly, “Will you give us a ride, then, Slaine?”

“Yankee Doodle Dandy,” they sang.  Everyone but Colm Rourke down the road.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night

I was learning nothing in school save typing.  We were meant to be learning English and Irish, mathematics for business and accountancy.  We were meant to do more than stare out the window at the sea.  We did fuck all.  I was mad to fit in.  I listened when they spoke, worked on me Kerry accent, kept quiet about New York. After a while it worked and they left me alone.  I brought books into school:  I was a fierce reader.  Maeve Binchy and Edna O’Brien.  James Joyce and Brendan Behan.  Aishlin was doing the playwrights in school and leant me Synge and an American, Eugene O’Neill.  He was my favourite.  I read the “Iceman Cometh” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”.  I could picture them, him, his brother, his Mammy, and his Da.  Nothing pretty in the pictures he created, but I felt I lived them.  

The days were slow and the nights were long.  My parents rarely spoke.  When my father was home he’d sit, staring out the window, like he could see something.  Except for he couldn’t:  there was nothing there.  Maybe the moon or the stars, like that.  But sure you couldn’t even see the next cottage, not in the dark.  My mother sewed or knit.  Aishlin and I did the cooking, washed the dishes, bathed the children.  Then Aishlin did her homework and I thought about New York.  I wondered what had become of Joshua and Christine. 

The nights in my house were deadly and dark.  My father sat, like a stranger, and my mother never made the slightest gesture towards him.  They never touched, but later, I’d lie awake in the bed I shared with Aishlin and I’d hear them.  Fighting they were mostly, the two of them; fighting to the death.  It sounded like that.  Panting and hissing and low moans.  I expected each morning to find one of them bruised or cut or worse.  But each morning they looked grand.  Some nights, the longest ones, they didn’t fight once they’d gone to bed.  I could hear the difference in the sounds they made: the whispers and the moans.  Those nights were the longest ones and the journey towards day seemed to take forever.

Blue and Gold Ribbons

I went with Aishlin and her friend Maire to a social.  I didn’t want to go.  

“Bring Slaine along with you, now,” my mother said.  She mother looked older now, lines in her forehead.  She was very pale and seemed to eat nothing.

“Will do,” Aishlin said.  Aishlin never argued with my mother anymore.  The last time she’d done my mother had taken the belt to her so hard it left scars on her buttocks.  I’d seen them all right, crisscrossed and still scarlet although it had happened nearly three months ago.

“It was worse,” Declan had confided to me.  “Much worse than the other time, Slaine.  I could not stop her.”

Aishlin never said anything about it.

“I don’t want to go,” I said, glancing up from the novel I was devouring.  Danielle Steel. It was trash.

“Ah, Slaine, don’t be after giving me brain damage.”  My mother waved a pale hand around.  “Sure, it will do you the world of good child.  Get you out and about.  It does you no good to be always moping about the place.”

It was the most she’d spoken since I’d been back.  “All right,” I said.  “I’ll go.”

Aishlin and her friend Maire wore full skirts and white blouses.  They did dancing in school.  They had ribbons in their hair and shared a pale pinky lipstick between them.  I wore one of the skirts Christine had bought me at the Cross County Shopping Center back in Yonkers.  It was gray and short.  I wore a white knitted jumper over it.  I had no ribbons for my hair nor any lipstick.  

Aishlin and Maire rushed ahead of me.  “What’s she doing here?”  Maire complained.  Maire was a fair small girl with small beady gray eyes.  

“Who?”  Aishlin asked, her hair bouncing.  She had green and gold ribbons and Maire had blue and gold ribbons.  They danced in their hair as they walked.

“Your sister.”  Maire exhaled loudly.

“Me mother,” Aishlin said.  “Come on then, Slaine, can you not keep up?”

I walked a bit faster, trying to catch them, but they sped their step up when I got too close.  I wanted to let them get away, to give the social a miss.

“Come on,” Aishlin said again, reaching back for my hand.

They pulled me along that way.  Just behind them. The ribbons:  gold and green, blue and gold caressing my face as we went.

The Kerry Stars

There were plenty of young fellas and young ones at the dance.  Most of them I knew to see.  There were a few from my school, the grotty ones in leather jackets and mini-dresses, huddled in the corner with ill-concealed flasks. 

Maire and Aishlin joined their friends from the convent school.  “You’ll be all right, won’t you, Slaine?”  Aishlin asked, without waiting for me to answer. 

All the girls had on ribbons and some kind of lipstick.  They stood there like a crowd of brightly dressed sheep, all bunched together, bleating away.  Ready for auction.  Or slaughter.

I stood alone.  There was a band in the centre, three old fellas with gray hair and beards.  They were doing mostly the traditional stuff, plus a few Beatles tunes.  When they played rock’n roll everyone pretty much stood around staring at each other:  the boys and the girls.   Waiting for someone to make the first move like.

But when they played the traditional music, pulled out the tin whistles and the violin, the girls all ran up and did the step dancing and the boys made up squares and everyone seemed to be having great craic.  All the ribbons bouncing up and down and the boys, even the ones from the technical school, dancing away.

It was fierce hot in the room and I took a glass of punch from Sister Xavier.  She glared at me like I was a snake swum back over the Atlantic to repopulate Ireland.  I smiled at her broadly.

Aishlin and Maire were dancing up a storm, two boys had partnered them, lads I didn’t recognize.  I pushed the door open and went outside, breathing in the country air and looking up at the stars.  Ah, sure, the stars were grand.  The night was absolutely clear and the stars dotted across the heavens sparkling away.  Back in New York there’d been too many lights, it had been hard to see anything save the North Star, maybe the Milky Way, but here.  The heavens were mine.  All mine.

I could hear the faint strains of the flute through the walls and the violin joining in.  I put down my empty glass and twirled and whirled under the Kerry stars.

The Christmas Pudding

I still had no friends.  Thought it was cold it didn’t snow.  I missed New York, the weather, the sense of seasons.  It was cold and I was colder.  All the time chill in the house.  There was no central heating, no electric blanket, nothing but the fire most nights.  I cuddled beside Aishlin under the blue feather quilt, trying desperately for some warmth.

My father, Brian, was scarce home anymore.  He’d gotten a job driving a lorry from Cork to Dublin and back twice a week.  Most weekends he’d spend in Kerry, but he was in the pub more than in the house.   My mother was like a ghost, thinner and paler every week, haunting us.  It worked its way around to all of us children.  Declan and Aidan sat, silent and wooden, at the table, pushing their Hot Wheels cars back and forth.  The cars never went anywhere, never went off track, never were let go of.  Michelle played with her dolly, muttering to her, singing wordless songs.  Michelle barely spoke.  She sucked her thumb.  She was slow.  I said nothing.

Aishlin was helpful when she was there, cleaning, cooking, doing the washing up but she was there as seldom as possible.  Out with her mates Maire and Sinead or out with Padraig Kennelly who seemed to be her boyfriend.  Aishlin looked older than I did with her hair short and the lipstick on.

We weren’t a family anymore.  Or if they were then I wasn’t a part of it.  I was apart from everything.  I even missed the fighting, the fierce rows, anything that had provided a connection.

I missed the times in New York when it had just been my father and myself.  Because this year, in the undecorated cold room, I felt as if I was spending it alone.  I spent what money I had on a Christmas Pudding and boiled it up for them.

“Ah, Slaine, love,” my father said, reaching to pat air near my head.  “Lovely.”  He took a mouthful before putting on his jacket.  “Off for a quick one, Liz,” he said, rushing to get out before she finished chewing and could respond.

“Very nice,” my mother said, eating mechanically until her portion was done.  “Thanks, Slaine,” Aidan and Declan said and Michelle muttered something.

“Thank you, sister dear,” Aishlin said with a big false smile.

I pushed around my pudding, appetite gone, me emptier than before.

Aidan pulled out the golden ring and smiled.  “Ah, look, look, look, Slaine.”  He climbed up into my lap.  He held the ring out for my inspection.

I looked from the ring to Aidan’s smile and for a moment the room glowed warm.

Miss America

We were after being very excited.  My da was taking my aa to Cork City for New Year’s.  He’d rented a room in a hotel and all.  “Gorgeous,” he told us.  “All silver and blue with a bed so big yous could all sleep in it.”  He winked at my mother.  A fella he knew from the truck driving had it arranged and my mother had bought herself a new dress.  It was turquoise and brought out her eyes.   She’d looked like a girl when she tried it on for me and Aishlin and Michelle.  Michelle had clapped her hands together, eyes round.  Her chubby little hand reached to caress the material.

“You’re lovely,” I said.

She smiled and when she smiled, she was beautiful.  Liz Murphy, the prettiest married lady in the town.  Seeing her like that I was reminded of the time when my father was in New York and my mother was keeping company with the farmer.  She’d looked like a girl then as well.  My mother put on a smudge of eyeshadow and painted her lips.  “Coral, it’s called,” she said, showing it to us.

“You look eighteen,” I said, carried away with it.  “We could be sisters, so.”

My sisters looked blankly at me.

“What do you think, Aishlin?”  My mother asked.  She twirled towards Aishlin, hands raised up.

Aishlin turned white, the colour of the sea gulls, a dirty, strange white.  She bit her lips.  She looked ready for anything.

My mother slowly lowered her hands.  “My dress?”

“Nice,” Aishlin said, breathing heavily.

“Beautiful,” Michelle said.  Or something like that.  Booful or befull.  Something.

My parents packed an overnight case and set out in the car.  

“You’re in charge, Slaine,” my father said, slipping a five-pound note into my hand.  “Listen to Slaine, yous all,” he told my brothers and sisters.  “You’ll be fine,” he told me.

“Have fun,” I said and we all waved until the car disappeared down the road.

“I’m off,” Aishlin said, doing up her jacket. “Give us a pound, will ya, Slaine?”

“I haven’t got a pound note,” I said crossly.  “And where are you going?”

“Meeting Padraig and Maire for a bit.  Nothing to worry you.”  She whistled a few bars of “Yankee Doodle Dandy”.

“Don’t go, Aishlin,” Declan said.  “We’ve the crackers and the grape juice for later.”

“That’s for kids,” Aishlin said.  Her hand was still out.  It was white and pink.  It was empty.  “Give us something, Slaine.”

I pulled out two shillings and handed them over.  “That’s all I have, Aishlin, the five pound is for an emergency.”

“Or for you to spend, Miss America.  Always for you.”  Aishlin turned and walked away from us.

“Don’t go,” Declan said again and Aidan and Michelle echoed him.

“Go on with you,” I said and went back into the house.

A is for Aishlin

My parents came home from their weekend like lovers, always touching.  My mother bloomed.  My father skipped the nights in the pub and sat beside her, the two of them talking together.  So quiet I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

It was as if winter had lifted.  The boys were wild, running about like two Red Indians, whooping and hollering.  No one scolded them.  Michelle began to smile now and again and her speech became more clear.  I started to teach her the alphabet.  “A,” I told her.  “A is for apple and alphabet and Aidan.  A.  B is for boy and Brian and biscuit.  B.  C is for Christmas and Cork and…what’s wrong?”

Michelle was bawling away.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I don like Cork,” she said.  “Daddy,” she said, pointing to his empty chair.

“That’s right, pet, he’s off in Cork.  But it’s for the money.  To buy the sweets and a new dress for your dolly.  “D,” I said to her.  “D is for dolly and Declan and druid. D.”

“D,” she repeated, then patted my knee and went into the bedroom.

My mother was at work.  I had lamb stewing.  Declan and Aidan were outside, chasing each other like madmen.  Aishlin wasn’t home.

Aishlin was rarely home, always off with Padraig.  When she did come back her clothes were buttoned wrong, her jeans were unzipped, her smile was crooked.  She was always smiling, Aishlin was, through pink-coated lips.  She’d whisper to me at night, “Slaine, the things I know….” But she would never tell me what they were.

In school the boys had begun to approach me.  They assumed, wrongly, that my life in America had made me more experienced than the local girls.  “Ah, come on now, honey,” Brendan or Paul would call to me.  “Give us a taste of American pie.”  They’d laugh, they would, and the other lads as well.  Only Colm Rourke was quiet, turning away from them, frowning.

The girls still left me alone.

Aishlin came home with her blouse inside out.  My mother was home two seconds afterwards.  “Aishlin,” she called out, voice, steel.

Aishlin looked wildly around the room.  She looked at me.  I looked away.

  “Aishlin,” my mother said again.

My father was away, driving the lorry.  Declan and Aidan hung in the doorway.  Michelle peered out from under the oak dining table.

I rested my palm on the table.  It was sturdy and cool and hard.

“Aishlin, come here,” my mother said and Aishlin went towards her.  My mother looked at the blouse, at Aishlin’s disheveled hair, at the jeans which were half unzipped.  She stared into Aishlin’s wide scared eyes.

“Mammy,” I said, bracing myself against the table.

“Go on out of here, Slaine,” my mother said, her gaze steady on Aishlin.  “Take the children and go outside now.  Now,” she said again, when I hesitated.

My hand was glued to the table, my feet stuck to the floor; I couldn’t go.

“Aishlin,” my mother said again, “Slaine.  Out.”

I grabbed Michelle and went through the door, pushing Aidan and Declan ahead of me. Declan was crying and Michelle and Aidan began screeching as well.  I wished my father would get home.  He’d come all the way from New York to protect Aishlin and now he was gone.

I didn’t want to hear anything. I didn’t want to know.  The sun was low in the sky.  There was a mist come up.  “A,” I said to Michelle.  “A is for apple and America and angry.  A is for Aishlin.”

A Right Good Liar

When my father came home, he nearly killed my mother.  With words though, he never raised a finger.  Aishlin was in bed, lying there with her eyes shut.

“Is her dead?”  Michelle asked loudly.

I shook my head.  D is for Declan, I thought, and danger.  And defiant.  I slept in Michelle’s cot, crowding spoon like against her.  Aishlin stayed home from school.  She stayed home for days, so many I lost count.  She stayed silent and motionless.  My father stayed away, down in the pubs.  My mother drank the vodka that looked like water and smoked cigarette after cigarette.  She became pale and wraithlike again.

It was March.  Time for spring.  Time for the Patrick’s Day celebration, the time off from school.  I was walking home when I heard my name called and turned around. “Slaine,” the boy said.  “It is Slaine, is it?”

“Yes,” I said slowly, nodding.

“Padraig Kennelly,” the boy said.  “You’re Aishlin’s sister, you are?  Is she all right?”  He looked at me with wet blue eyes.  “Tell her I was asking.  Tell her I sent this.”  Padraig leaned over and kissed me on the lips.  It was a sweet kiss, tender and brief.  He looked into my eyes a moment after then took off in the opposite direction.

“Aishlin,” I said, standing beside her bed.  “Will you have some soup?”

She didn’t answer me.

“Her’s dead,” Michelle said firmly.

“Outside with ye,” I said.  “Aishlin, will you not?”

Ever so slightly she shook her head.

“You’ll waste away then, will you?  And die.  I have news for you.  News from the boyfriend,” I tempted, holding the bowl out.

“What?”  Aishlin asked, through clenched teeth.

“You’ve to eat something first.”

Aishlin used her elbows to sit up.  She was very pale, her brow furrowed, her lip stretched tight with the pain.  She took the bowl and spoon from my hands.  I knelt beside her.  She took a tentative first sip, then another one and on until the bowl was half empty.  She thrust it back towards me.  “I’m done.”

I put the bowl on the floor.  “I saw Padraig today.  He said to tell you he was asking for you.”

“What did you say?  What were you after telling him, Slaine?  That I was all right.  Peachy creamy.  Never better.  Did you make up a lie for him, you did?  She’s on holiday.  Gone to Dublin.  Gone to Rome.  Moved to America with her father.  To Sunnyside, New York.  Did you tell him that, Slaine?  Something believable like?  Her father that loves her so much took her away.”  Aishlin clenched her teeth, sweat pouring off her forehead.  “Her mother that loves her so well.  You’d want to be a right good liar for that one, so.  What did you tell him?”

I was silent a moment, waiting for anything else she had to say.  “I told him you were all right.  He sent you this.”  I leaned over and placed his kiss on my sister’s lips.

Her lips were dry and feverish.  Her eyes were vacant and far away until she closed them and lay back down.

“You’ll be all right,” I said.  I promised.  I lied.

Right Side Out

Aishlin returned to school.  The back of her legs, her buttock, her breasts were scarred.  And that was just what showed. Aidan and Declan pushed the toy cars back and forth in the dirt.  Michelle stopped speaking altogether.

I finished my school year and got a job for the summer.  A junior file clerk in the realtor’s office.  It was all right.  They paid me thirty pound a week.  I gave my mother ten of them.  I got my hair cut short with a fringe.  I turned fifteen.

Aishlin finished her year and left school.

“You fool, you,” my mother shrieked, her eyes finding the board on the wall.

My father turned on her, spit, “You’ve nothing to say about it now, Liz.  Keep your trap shut.”  He found Aishlin a job in Cork City, a place in a boarding house.  She worked in a woolen mill.  My father said she was well. She sent back a jumper for Michelle.  A pretty green sweater with sheep on it and a rainbow.  Declan took a photograph of Michelle and we sent it on to Aishlin.  She never wrote or rang.

It was extremely hot that summer, in the eighties nearly every day and my legs itched in my tights. I longed to be outside in shorts getting a sun tan.

I saw Padraig Kennelly and Aishlin’s friend, Maire, together.  They never spoke to me and I said nothing to them.  Once in a while Colm Rourke would take me to the fillums and hold my hand on the way home.  Twice he kissed me and once he tried to go a bit further.

“Please, Slaine,” he begged, standing off the road, under the tree.  He took my hand and lead it back to my chest.  “Please, just let me see you.”

I thought of Aishlin.  Of the inside out clothing.  Of buttons undone and zippers unzipped.  I wondered how she was getting on, away from us all, living in the city on her own.  “No,” I told him and pushed things away.  

I did everything possible, I told myself, to keep things right side  up.

About

Faith Miller has been published in a number of literary magazines including Hanging Loose, Chicago Quarterly, Prism International, The Mississippi Review and most recently in Libretto, Africa’s leading literary magazine and the spring 2024 issue of A Door is a Jar. Her work is forthcoming in Bull and Down in the Dirt. Faith lives in New Jersey and is a member of writing groups affiliated with the New York Society Library and the Boston Athenaeum. After years in the public and corporate world, she is working on a master’s in fiction at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School at Spalding University where she was awarded an Emerging Writer scholarship.

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