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.