Chapter 6 Ruby #2
Erin visited during summer vacation the year after in 2001, but she had changed into a different type of girl.
Outwardly, she was still beautiful, and attracted a lot of male attention, but she had no interest in guys.
She had been such a cheerful, outgoing big sister, but now she wanted to stay home.
Mom had sighed one day when we were both sitting glumly sipping wine on the sofa, ‘I guess I have two nuns on my hands.’ Erin burst into tears and fled to her room.
I was stricken by the thought that I had ruined her future by letting Milo tickle me.
That night, I took Erin out to a bar. I’d never seen her drunk.
I thought it would be good for her to let her hair down, but she didn’t enjoy it at all.
After three drinks she wanted to go home and refused to come to a nightclub with me.
We only made passing references to what had happened in the fall of ’99.
Living in Ireland was weird in the beginning because I didn’t always get the cultural references, but it did seem that America was the centre of the universe for Irish people.
Mom and I went into Dublin city centre when President Clinton visited that first December.
Hillary and Chelsea were there too. I got a glimpse of them through a lowered car window.
There were thousands of people there waving American flags.
I mean, everyone knew that he’d made a big mistake a few years back with Monica Lewinsky, but Irish people were more than willing to forgive.
Dad had tried to protect us from the details when it happened, but Dawn Linskey in Altman told us what a blow job was. Laquanda had said it must be illegal.
After 9/11 in 2001, Irish media went nuts.
It was all everyone talked about for ages afterwards.
I never knew how connected the two countries were.
It seemed like anyone you met in Ireland had only two degrees of separation from someone who lost their life in that terrorist attack.
Everyone in school sympathized with me even though I didn’t know anyone who died.
I felt such a fake, accepting condolences on behalf of New York, a city I didn’t even know all that well.
A teacher, Miss Wallace, took me aside one day and asked me if everything was okay at home.
She had noted that I didn’t mix with my classmates and that I ate my lunch alone.
I insisted that I preferred it that way.
She sent me home with a letter for Mom suggesting that I seemed to be extremely antisocial.
Mom was annoyed at me. ‘For God’s sake,’ she said, ‘could you not make an effort to fit in?’
I think Miss Wallace asked Lindsay Dillon to try to befriend me.
She didn’t seem to have friends either. She was tall with straight hair and still wore an Alice band in her hair.
She was not a cool girl. Her school skirt was long, and she wore socks up to her knees, whereas the other girls rolled their skirts up and pushed their socks down, exposing as much bare flesh as they could.
Lindsay began to seek me out at lunchtimes and occasionally we swapped our snacks.
She didn’t ask why we’d moved to Dublin, although the concocted story was that my mom wanted to be close to her ageing mother.
We became friends, but not like Laquanda or Tasha.
Lindsay was much more serious. We did go for a drink occasionally, but Lindsay always wanted to go home earlier than me.
Mom didn’t mind what hours I kept. It was unexpected, because back home I’d always thought Mom was the disciplinarian in our house but maybe she had been enforcing Dad’s rules.
Lindsay was nice but it was a different kind of friendship to the one I’d had with my American girlfriends.
I learned quickly not to say ‘girlfriend’ when referring to female friends.
Girlfriends were girls who were in a relationship with boys.
But Lindsay didn’t talk about boys or pop music or sex or celebrity gossip.
We talked about movies and books, and I occasionally accompanied her to classical concerts.
I think, from the taunts and whispers of the other girls, they thought we were lesbians.
Lindsay and I went to the theatre together a few times.
They didn’t have anything equivalent to Broadway in Dublin, but sometimes they would put on American plays with actors doing terrible accents.
In January 2002, I had to fill in a form to say what college I wanted to go to.
There was only one course that I was interested in and that was Drama and Theatre Studies in Trinity College.
Lindsay wanted to do Law there. We studied like crazy.
I had to go do an interview. They asked about a show I had seen, and I had to give my critique on the spot.
I talked about musical theatre and the shows I had seen on Broadway.
Riverdance was the only musical Ireland had ever produced as far as I knew.
They asked who were my favourite non-musical playwrights and I was able to talk about Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams and Lillian Hellman.
They were more impressed when I dropped those names.
A few weeks later, I got a conditional offer in the mail, depending on my final exam results.
I had also signed up for English and Philosophy, but I planned to drop those as soon as I could.
I was happy for the first time in many months – I didn’t have to force a smile or pretend.
When I went to tell Mom, I found her in tears in her bedroom.
Dad was looking for a divorce. He had met somebody new. Kathy.
We had held on to the idea that Dad would eventually come and join us, but apart from a week around Independence Day and Christmas, he had never visited.
Mom had gone back to spend time with him every few months, but it wasn’t enough to sustain a marriage.
I held off telling her about my college success, but she and I got drunk together that night while she told me all about falling in love with my dad.
There were details I hadn’t heard before.
How he had charmed her and pursued her and how she made the difficult decision not to go back to Dublin for Christmas that first year, leaving Grandma on her own.
I guess Mom was totally smitten. Poor Grandma.
Now that a divorce was imminent, and after the shock wore off, I think she was relieved not to have to go back to Boston.
Dad had been out of my life for two years, but I was still sad.
Even when he’d come here on vacation, I could tell he didn’t like it.
I got a laptop and an iPod from Dad to alleviate my upset and his guilt.
Mom did a course in basic computer skills and got a job through a friend in a boys’ school as an administrator.
She didn’t need to work, but she liked earning her own money, even if it was a pittance compared to what Dad paid in alimony.
She was single for the first time in her adult life.
I wondered if she would start dating again, but she showed no interest in that, and it wasn’t the sort of thing I could talk to her about.
Grandma was the most upset. ‘Having a divorced child on top of everything else,’ she said. The ‘everything else’ meant me and the incident. Grandma should have been kinder to Mom. None of this was her fault. It was mine.