3

So back at home, I put my tea in the microwave for a minute and twenty seconds, a duration of time so internalized that I can walk away, lose myself in thought or in a newspaper article, and return to the microwave just as the bell chimes. I add the Half and Half and in the midst of the first satisfying moment in a long and tiring day, my father yells my name as only my father has ever been able to, driving a quick surge of dread in my gut. 

I walk with tea in hand down the long hall. Oriental throw rugs run the length of the corridor, carpets which took over a year to arrive, and on which we kids were all but forbidden to walk upon for the first three years of their existence.

I knock lightly on the door and stick my head in. My father is seated at his desk and motions for me to sit opposite him. 

Another interview.

“Have you called The Heathman, yet?”

“No, I, uh . . .”

“Why don’t you call them now?”

My father opens up his Rolodex and starts thumbing through the cards. He pushes the “speaker” button on his phone. The dial tone chimes.

“Look, Dad. I . . .”

My head is dizzy. My throat is dry. My heart is beating between my ears. I take a drink of tea.

“I, uh, . . . To be completely honest, um, I . . . don’t want the job.”

He hangs up the phone. “Why not?”

“It’s . . . You see, the job is . . . below me.”

My father says nothing, but the silence is deafening. He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose.

“How long have you been unemployed?”

San Diego. June, 1980. I dove under the approaching wave and swam out into the sea. Salt was on my lips, in my mouth, sand in my shorts, water in my ears. I laughed because I felt alive.

“May, June, July, August . . . About four months.”

“How much money do you have in the bank?”

“Not much.”

“How much?”

“Not much.”

“What are you doing for money?”

An economist was interviewed this morning on National Public Radio about the state of the economy. He said the prospects for university graduates were the dimmest he had ever witnessed. “There is no precedent for anything like this,” the economist said. “For certain sectors of our economy, especially for these young graduates, the situation is worse than the Great Depression.”

I think about my friends, most of whom are unemployed or under-employed, or stuck in dead-end jobs. McJobs, they’ve been calling them. And then, there are unintentional “slackers” like myself. 

I went for a swim in the sea but the current was too strong, the waves too high. The riptide pulled me out.

“I’m collecting unemployment,” I tell my father. 

“The Dole. Never. Never in my life did I ever, ever, take a handout! Not even once!” He speaks forcefully, each word cutting through the air between us. “When I was discharged from the Marines, I had five mouths to feed and no job. I went to the Welfare Office, but I was so ashamed of myself that I never cashed the check. I threw it away! Threw it away, I did! The next day, I knocked on doors until I found a job at five the next evening. The warehouse had a ‘No Positions Available’ sign in the window, but I went on in anyways. The trouble with you is that you expect everyone to do everything for you. You want to do everything the easy way . . . you . . .”

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah . . . My father’s lecture drones on for another thirty minutes.

I couldn’t see the beach because I had been pulled out too far. The waves became stronger and stronger and I was being tossed around like a buoy. One moment I was carried high by a wave and could see the thin white strand of beach and barely, just barely, could I see the small figures of people. I tried to wave but dropped below the water’s surface. When I came up for air, I was hidden in the trough between waves. I lay on my back to try and float with the current. As a large wave approached, I swam with it. As it crested, I yelled for help to the people standing on the beach.

“Swallow your pride, son. Take any job.”

“Dad? I went to college, private college, got in debt doing so. I had to take out an IOU, just to cover my final semester. And now you’re telling me to just take any job? What was the point of going to college if all I am able to do is be a bellboy? Yes, that’s what the position is. Bellboy! Can you believe it? I went to university and studied hard for Chrissakes. I was on the President’s List my last two years! Yeah, so my grades were lousy at the beginning, but they were better than just about anyone’s by the time I graduated and my great reward for busting my butt is being allowed to haul someone’s bags, someone who was fortunate to have been born ten years before me when the economy was good? Really? Really?”

As the wave pulled me upwards I screamed as loudly as my strength would permit: “Help!!! Somebody, help!!!” 

“Don’t come back to this house when the checks stop coming because I will NOT give you any money.”

My father has nothing more to say, so I stand up to leave his office. At the door, I turn around and say, “You know, Dad, sometimes I still feel like I’m at that beach again. Only this time, I’m alone. I yell, but no one hears me. And it’s scary as hell.”

I return to the kitchen and dump my lukewarm tea into the sink.

My mother is sitting at the counter on the island. She’s got my father’s reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose as she tries to thread a needle with those big fingers of hers.

She looks up at me over the rims of the glasses and says, “You know where you can find sympathy?”

“Huh?”

“You know where you can find sympathy?”

“No, Mom. Where?”

“In the dictionary.”

Water washes over my head, washes down my throat, and I sink like lead into the deep blue, inhaling water.

2

So now I am following my mother with the shopping cart, talking to her as she drops food into it and ticks “t’ings” off her shopping list. I can’t remember the last time I have done this. Ever since I could reach the handles of the shopping cart, I would push and she would lead, her left hand on the front of the basket showing the way. Steering, I always thought, but actually she was only trying to keep the cart from crashing into her poor calves.

I think aloud about everything under the sun, about how I’d like to just get on a plane and go anywhere, anywhere but here, and escape. 

“Sometimes I think about moving to Brazil or Japan or Hungary and living there until I get tired of life and then moving on to another place. Sometimes I make plans to go to Mexico and never return.”

My mother drops a box of Stash’s decaffeinated tea into the basket and stops the cart.

“If you could go to graduate school next fall, would you?”

It’s a question I have asked myself many times, but it’s one I can’t really answer.

“Yes,” I say, “I’d love to be back in school.”

Only last weekend I bumped into a friend from those ancient and nearly forgotten years of high school. He told me that it was so good to be back in school—Dental School, in his case—as if it were a legitimate excuse for him to not be doing something else, something more productive with his time, something like, well, work. And then there was my old childhood friend Mike who, upon entering Lewis and Clark’s Law School, confided: “It’s not that I really want to be a lawyer. It’s just that I’ve been going to school since I was five years old, and, well, I’d like to stick with the ‘tried and true’.”

“Mom,” I say, barely able to keep my irritation at bay. “You know very well that I’d like to go to graduate school, but at this point it’s impossi . . .”

“Nothing’s impossible.”

“Mom, it’s August. One, it’s too late. And, two, I am in debt up to my feckin’ ears. Until I pay off a good chunk of that debt I cannot get my transcripts freed from the Registrar’s Office so that I can start the application process. So, unless you know of a way that I can earn $10,000 over the next three weeks, I’ll listen to you, but if you can’t, then don’t tell me nothing’s impossible.”

If anything, the conversation comes to an abrupt halt, and my mother reverts to being a mother, saying something vacantly about chicken breasts being cheaper at Fred Meyer. I head towards the dairy section to fetch some Half and Halffor myself and as I’m checking the expiration dates I spot Mr. and Mrs. Ahern in front of the eggs.

The parents of an old friend, I greet the two and tell them that their tips were of great help to me when I traveled to Ireland two years ago.

“I’ve been meaning to bring my photos over.”

Predictably, the conversation turns to their two boys, Fergus and Dermot, both of whom attended the same Catholic schools as I did.

“Fergus, you might have heard, has recently gotten engaged,” Mrs. Ahern tells me.

“Actually, I didn’t hear . . .”

“They’re to be married next spring. It would be grand if you could come.”

“I will certainly try . . .”

Fergus of all people getting married, I find it almost too hard to believe. Poor Fergus was eternally and hopelessly in love with a certain flat chested second generation Irish girl, who was so pure in mind and body that it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she had become a nun. The closest Fergus ever came to getting this girl of his dreams was in junior high school when they square-danced together once in P.E. The thought of Fergus getting married almost makes me want to laugh.

“You tell Fergus I said congratulations. What is Fergus doing these days, anyways?”

They tell me he is working on the election staff of some congressional representative or another. They too ask me what I’m doing, so I wing it, tell them about graduate school and the pursuit of a higher degree and, well, it’s all bullshit, but I have my self-respect on the line and besides I wouldn’t want to bore them with the sorry state that my life is in.

Mr. Ahern puts a warm hand, big as a milker’s, on my shoulder and says, “Peadar, they can take away your money; they can take away your home; but, they can never take away your education.”

And with that the Ahern’s turn and walk towards the cheese section and I’m wondering what the hell that was supposed to be about.

Pint of Half and Half in hand, I go and search for my mother, up and down the aisles, until I find her in the cereal section.

Breathless, I tell her that Fergus is getting married.

“Yes, I know. I spoke with the Aherns after Mass a few weeks ago.” 

“You did?”

“That Fergus is a fine boy. He’s marrying a nice girl from college.”

That my mother already knows is hardly surprising: the woman is a core member of a network of housewives who collect and disseminate information far more efficiently than the CIA. What does surprise me (Gobsmacks me even!) is the suspicion I have that she approves of old Fergus’s marriage at the young age of 24.

“She’s not one of us, mind you, but she’s a sweet girl from a good Catholic family.”

“Jaysus, I don’t know how anyone could get married nowadays.”

“I hope you’re praying,” she says, disapproving of my blaspheming the Lord’s name. 

“No, really,” I continue. “It boggles the mind that people my age are even thinking of getting married.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Why? Because the world is so goddamn screwed up’s why. The economy is in shambles; there’re no jobs for people my age. And don’t tell me there are, because I have been looking. If I were wrong, I’d have found one by now.”

“You could always go back to your job at the university.”

“That assumes that I want to go back. No thanks!”

“I can’t believe you and your generation.”

“My generation? What’s not to believe, Mother? It’s beyond hope and that’s a fact. None of your positive thinking mumbo-jumbo is going to change that.”

“Peadar, when I was your age . . .” My mother stops the cart to look up at me squarely in the eye. “When I was your age, we already had so many responsibilities: three kids, a mortgage . . .”

I try to imagine my parents at twenty-five with those three kids—I wouldn’t pop out of my mother’s birth canal for another ten years—my father was fresh out of the military, trying to get an education. But, life was much simpler back then. There was a promise that if you worked hard, you could make it in America, even if you had been immigrants like them.

It’s 1991 now and the rules have changed. I can’t imagine what it would be like to try to support a wife and kids. My mother implies that I am irresponsible, but from my perspective, the most responsible thing I have managed to do all these years is to keep from becoming a husband and father. 

1

So here I am standing among my parents and sister, my hair cut, my body in a suit fit for burial, and an empty attaché case hanging from my left hand. I feel like an idiot, yet here they are telling me how “sharp” I look.

“So, you had an interview?” my mother asks.

“Yeah. Two to be exact.”

“Where?” asks my father, putting his Wall Street Journal down on the kitchen counter.

“Downtown.”

“What companies?”

“The Heathman . . .”

“Aah, The Heathman,” says my sister Maire. “It’s nice there.”

My mother asks what position I applied for.

“Um . . . administrative?”

“I know the General Manager,” my father says. “I’ll give him a call.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“Connections are everything.”

“You know what I do,” Maire says. “If I have an interview. I call the place back after I get home to see if they have any questions. See, that way they have to get my résumé out and, well, when they’re finished with it, they put it back on the top of the pile of résumés. 

“That’s a grand idea,” my parents chime in chorus. 

“You should do it, too,” Maire encourages needlessly. “It always works for me.”

“Why don’t you do it now,” Dad nudges.

“Yeah, well, maybe, you know . . .”

“Really. Do it now.” Now he’s pushing. “Make the call from my office.”

This suggestion actually has quite a bit of weight: normally, my old man would kill me if he found me talking on his personal phone line. 

“No. I, uh, just left the place about half an hour ago. I think I’ll let it wait.”

“Wait, huh? You know, you’ll never get anywhere in life if you keep waiting like that.”

“I’ll call the Heathman, alright?”

Christ, I don’t even want the feckin’ job. 

My father breaks off into a long tangent that embraces the Universe, God, His Only Begotten Son, “Jaysus”, the Value of Never Giving Up, and concludes with the Grand Unified Theory: “I’ve never been a quitter, son. If I didn’t push every single day, why, we wouldn’t have this roof over our heads.”

Meanwhile, I’m digging through the cupboards, looking for tea. Where’s the Earl Grey? No Earl Grey? Who drank all the feckin’ Earl Grey. Ah, there you are!

“Nobody will come and bring opportunity to you,” my father continues. “No, you have to find the opportunities yourself and pursue them relentlessly . . . Relentlessly.”

A little deeper in the cabinet, I find a Ball jar full of raw sugar and start to set up shop next to the instant hot water dispenser. 

“Nobody ever gave me anyt’ing. I had to start from nothing when your mother and I came to this country. And if I sat back on my arse all these years, that’s where we’d still be. You’ve had too much of the good life . . .”

I drop the tea bag into the mug and turn the knob on the dispenser, water comes out, spitting violently, a cloud of steam rises to my face. I place the mug on the counter and let the tea steep. 

“That’s the problem with you, I spoiled you, gave you too much.”

I raise my eyes to see if my old man is serious. He is. Dead serious.

My mother echoes my father: “We’ve given you too much.”

“You don’t know how lucky you are, boy, how many t’ings you’ve got going for you . . .”

I’ve heard this homily so many times I could mouth the words as he says them.

“You were born in this great country America; you’re white; you’re Catholic. You’ve had the privilege of an education few can afford . . .”

Nor can I, Dad. Nor can I.

“And you were born into this family. Your mother, God love her, is the best woman . . .”

“I know, Dad. I know.”

When the phone in my father’s office rings, Maire takes off in a sprint down the hall to answer it. A moment later, she shouts that my father’s partner is on the line.

My father starts for his office, but just as he is about to leave the kitchen he stops, turns around and says, “I want to talk to you after this call. In my office.”

I’m left with my mother, who sums up her discontent in three words: “Your father’s right.”

I take the tea bag out of the water, add my raw sugar, then search the refrigerator for the Half and Half. There’s only non-fat milk and I moan: “We’re out of Half and Half! Do we have any whole cream?”

“You know your father can’t eat the fat.”

“Well, I can’t drink this tea if there’s no Half and Half or . . .”

“There’s some milk.”

“That?” I say, pointing at the gallon jug of non-fat. “That is not milk.”

I have to resign myself to drinking the sweetened tea without milk, and as I’m sipping it, I wonder what my old man wants to talk to me about, other than the usual harangue I’ve heard countless times before. And then my mother tells me that I’ve got a number of messages.

“Rowland called. He said he would call again tomorrow. Sorry, that call was yesterday. He said he’d call you this morning.”

“Damn.” I was out all morning getting the haircut and being interviewed. “Must have missed him, then. You want to talk about lucky. That guy is one lucky bastard.”

“That mouth of yours,” says my mother, punctuating her displeasure with a loud tsk.

I look through the messages. A call from the Educational Loan Servicing Center.

“They keep calling,” my mother tells me. The tone of her voice tells me even more.

Citibank . . . a call from the Unemployment Office . . . Wonder what they want . . . Rowland’s call.

“Rowland landed a job in Frankfurt,” I explain to my mother. “He’ll be making fifty-four thousand dollars a year. Fifty-four thousand bucks! That’s an unbelievable amount of money.”

“You’re too negative.”

“Negative? Who’s being negative?”

“You are. You’re too negative.”

“That comment, my dear Mother, is very negative,” I joke, but the woman isn’t laughing back. “Look, I’m just saying I’m happy for my friend. Not only is going to make a ton of money—only two years out of college, no less—he’ll be one of my few friends who has a real job. It’s damn near criminal the salaries and positions my friends have.”

My mother shakes her head. Another loud tsk. 

“You want to come to Safeway with me, Peadar?”

“Yes!” Anything to get out of the house and away from my father and his I-want-to-talk-to-you-in-my-office malarkey.

Note

I am often asked why I came to Japan, to which I usually reply: “It’s a long story. Ask me again when you feel like listening to me grouse for an hour or so.”

Don’t worry: this short story won’t demand nearly as much of your time, but it will provide you a glimpse into the milieu from which my decision to leave America was borne.

I wish I could say this was fiction, but—alas—much of it did happen. The names have been changed, however, to fit with the narrative of my alter ego, Peadar (Peter), who first appeared in the novel A Woman’s Nails and A Woman’s Hand, and the yet to be finished A Woman’s Tears.