Colm Tóibín - Brooklyn

"That's what Tony said too."

"He's a solid man," Father Flood said.

As soon as she showed Tony the letter when they met the next evening he said that they would have to go to Coney Island the following Sunday to celebrate.

"Champagne?" she asked.

"Sea water," he replied. "And then a slap-up dinner in Nathan's afterwards."

She bought a beach towel at Bartocci's and a sun hat from Diana, who said that she did not want it any more. At supper, Diana and Patty produced their sunglasses for the season, which they had bought on the boardwalk at Atlantic City.

"I read somewhere," Mrs. Kehoe said, "that they could ruin your eyes."

"Oh, I don't care," Diana said. "I think they're gorgeous."

"And I read," Patty said, "that if you don't have them this year on the beach people will talk about you."

Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan fitted them on and, openly ignoring Dolores, passed them to Eilis to try.

"Well, they are very glamorous, I'll say that," Mrs. Kehoe said.

"I'll sell you that pair," Diana said to Eilis, "because I can get another pair on Sunday."

"Can you really?" Eilis asked.

When they discovered that Eilis had bought a new swimsuit, they insisted on seeing it. Eilis, when she came upstairs with it, deliberately handed it to Dolores first to hold up in front of her.

"You're lucky, Eilis, to have the figure for it," Mrs. Kehoe said.

"I can't go out in the sun at all," Dolores said. "I get all red."

Patty and Diana began to laugh.

On Sunday morning when Tony collected her he appeared surprised by the sunglasses.

"I'll have to tie a rope around you," he said. "All the guys at the beach will want to run away with you."

The subway station was packed with people going to the beach and there were cries of horror as the first two trains went through the station without stopping. The air was stifling as everyone crushed together. When finally a train stopped it seemed that there was no space for anyone and yet everyone began to crowd into the compartments, laughing and shouting and demanding that people move over and make room for them. By the time she and Tony, who was carrying a folded beach umbrella as well as a bag, found a door, there was no room at all in the train. She was amazed when Tony, holding her hand, began to push against the crowd in the compartment to make a space for both of them before the doors closed.

"How long is it going to take?" she asked.

"An hour, maybe more, it depends on how many stops it makes. But cheer up, think of the big waves."

The beach, when they finally arrived, was almost as packed as the train had been. She noticed that Tony had not lost his smile once during the journey, despite being deliberately squashed against a door by a man, encouraged by his wife. Now he seemed to feel, as he studied the crowd on the beach, where there was no place for newcomers, that they had been put there for his amusement. They moved along the boardwalk, but the only solution, Eilis saw, was to take a tiny spot that was empty and see if, by their very presence there, they could expand it so they both could unpack their belongings and lie in the sun.

Diana and Patty had warned her that no one changed on the beach in Italy. Italians had carried to America with them the custom of putting their bathing suits on under their clothes before they set out, thus avoiding the Irish habit of changing on the beach, which was, Diana said, ungraceful and undignified, to say the least. Eilis did not know if they were joking so she checked with Miss Fortini, who assured her that it was true. Miss Fortini also insisted that she should lose more weight and brought in a small pink-coloured razor for her and told her that she need not return it. Despite all this preparation, Eilis was nervous about taking off her clothes and appearing in her swimsuit in front of Tony; her efforts to pretend that it was nothing made her even more embarrassed. She wondered if he would notice that she had shaved and she felt she was too white and that her thighs and her bottom were too fat.

Tony stripped down to his bathing trunks instantly and, she was glad to see, nonchalantly looked at the crowds around them as she wriggled out of her clothes. As soon as she was ready, he wanted to go into the sea. He arranged with the family beside them that their things would be looked after and they made their way past the crowds down to the water's edge. Eilis laughed when she saw him recoiling from the cold; the water, compared to the water in the Irish Sea, seemed quite warm to her. She waded out while he struggled to follow her.

As she swam out, he stood helplessly up to his waist in the water, and when she motioned for him to follow her, shouting that he was not to be a baby, he shouted back that he could not swim. She did a gentle breaststroke in his direction and then slowly realized, by seeing what the couples around them were up to, what his plan was. He wanted, it seemed, the two of them to stand up to their necks in the water, holding each other as each wave crashed over them. When she embraced him, he held her so that she could not easily swim away from him. She could feel his erect penis hard against her, which made him smile even more than usual, and, when he wanted to put his hands on her bottom as he held her, she swam away from him. The thought had come into her mind of telling him who the last person to touch her bottom was. The idea of his reaction to this made her laugh so much that she did a vigorous backstroke, letting him presume, she hoped, that he was being too free under the water with his hands.

All day they moved between their place on the beach and the ocean. She put on her sun hat and he raised the umbrella to prevent sunburn and he also produced a picnic that his mother had prepared for him, including a thermos of ice-cold lemonade. In the water, the few times that she swam out on her own, she felt that the waves were stronger than at home, not so much in the way they broke but in the way they pulled out. She realized that she would have to be careful not to swim too far out of her depth in this unfamiliar sea. Tony, she saw, was afraid of the water, hated her swimming away from him. As soon as she returned to him each time, he made her put her arms around his neck and he lifted her from below so that her legs were wrapped around him. When he kissed her and then held her face back and looked at her, he seemed not to be embarrassed by his erection at all but proud of it. He was all boyish as he grinned at her; she, in turn, felt a great tenderness towards him and kissed him deeply as he held her. As the day waned, they were almost the last remaining in the water.

When Eilis complained of the heat at work they told her that it was only the beginning, but one day Miss Fortini told her that Mr. Bartocci was about to turn on the air-conditioning and soon the place would be crowded with shoppers seeking relief from the heat. Her job, Miss Fortini said, was to make them all buy something.

Soon, Eilis looked forward to going to work, and longed, as she woke sweating in the night, for the air-conditioning in Bartocci's. In the evening Mrs. Kehoe put chairs out in front of the house and they sat there fanning themselves even in the shade, even after dark some nights. On Eilis's half-day Tony took a half-day too and they went to Coney Island and came back late. When she asked him if they could have a go on the huge wheel or one of the other amusements, he refused, managing each time to find an excuse why they could not. He gave her no hint that he had lost his previous girlfriend because he took her on the wheel. Eilis was fascinated by this, the easy, casual way he prevented them from going there, his sweet duplicity in giving no sign of what had happened before. She was almost glad to know that he had secrets and had ways of calmly keeping them.