Frank McCourt - 'Tis

Mike?

Well, actually, my name is Alberta but they call me Mike.

There is no football player outside and she says she has two hours till her next class and would I like to have a drink at Rocky’s?

I have a class in ten minutes but I’m not going to miss this chance to be with this girl everyone is staring at, this girl who picked me out of all the people in the world to say hello to. We have to walk quickly to Rocky’s so that we won’t run into Bob the football player. He might be upset if he knew she was having a drink with another boy.

I wonder why she calls all males boy. I’m twenty-three.

She says she’s kinda engaged to Bob, that they’re pinned, and I don’t know what she’s talking about. She says a girl who’s pinned is engaged to be engaged and you can tell if a girl is pinned when she wears her boyfriend’s high school graduation ring on a necklace. It makes me wonder why she’s not wearing Bob’s ring. She says he gave her a gold bracelet with her name on it to wear around her ankle that would show she’s taken but she doesn’t wear it because it’s what Puerto Rican girls do and they’re too flashy. The bracelet is what you get just before the engagement ring and she’ll wait for that, thank you very much.

She tells me she’s from Rhode Island. She was reared there from the age of seven by her father’s mother. Her own mother was only sixteen when she was born and her father twenty so you can guess what happened there. Shotgun. When the war came and he was drafted and sent to Seattle it was the end of the marriage. Even though Mike was a Protestant she graduated from a Catholic convent school in Fall River, Massachusetts, and she smiles at the memory of that graduation summer when she had a different date nearly every night. She might be smiling but I feel a great surge of rage and envy and I’d like to kill the boys who ate popcorn with her and probably kissed her in drive-in movies. Now she’s living with her father and stepmother up on Riverside Drive and her grandmother is here for a while till she settles in and gets used to the city. She’s not a bit shy about telling me she likes my Irish accent and she even liked looking at the back of my head in class the way my hair is black and wavy. This makes me blush and even though it’s dark in Rocky’s she can see the blush and she thinks it’s cute.

I have to get used to the way they say cute in New York. If you say someone is cute in Ireland you’re saying he’s cunning and sneaky.

I’m in Rocky’s and I’m in heaven drinking beer with this girl who could have stepped down from a movie screen, another Virginia Mayo. I know I’m the envy of every man and boy in Rocky’s, that it’ll be the same on the streets, heads turning and wondering who I am that I’m with the loveliest girl in NYU and Manhattan itself.

After two hours she has to go to her next class. I’m ready to carry her books the way they do in the movies but she says, No, better that I stay here awhile in case we run into Bob who wouldn’t be a bit pleased to see her with the likes of me. She laughs and reminds me he’s big, thanks for the beer, see you next week in class, and she’s gone.

Her glass is still on the table and it’s marked with pink lipstick. I put it to my lips for the taste of her and dream that some day I’ll kiss the lips themselves. I press her glass against my cheek and think of her kissing the football player and there are dark clouds in my head. Why would she sit with me in Rocky’s if she’s kinda engaged to him? Is that the way it is in America? If you love a woman you’re supposed to be loyal to her at all times. If you don’t love her then it’s all right to drink beer in Rocky’s with someone else. If she goes to Rocky’s with me then she doesn’t love him and that makes me feel better.

Is it that she feels sorry for me with my Irish accent and my red eyes? Is she able to guess that it’s hard for me to talk to girls unless they talk to me first?

All over America there are men who walk up to girls and say, Hi. I could never do that. I’d feel foolish saying Hi in the first place because I didn’t grow up with it. I’d have to say Hello or something grown-up. Even when they talk to me I never know what to say. I don’t want them to know I never went to high school and I don’t want them to know I grew up in an Irish slum. I’m so ashamed of the past that all I can do is lie about it.

The lecturer in English Composition, Mr. Calitri, would like us to write an essay on a single object from our childhood, an object that had significance for us, something domestic, if possible.

There isn’t an object in my childhood I’d want anyone to know about. I wouldn’t want Mr. Calitri or anyone in the class to know about the slum lavatory we shared with all those families in Roden Lane. I could make up something but I can’t think of anything like the things other students talk about, the family car, Dad’s old baseball mitt, the sled they had so much fun with, the old icebox, the kitchen table where they did their homework. All I can think of is the bed I shared with my three brothers and even though I’m ashamed of it I have to write about it. If I make up something that’s nice and respectable and don’t write about the bed I’ll be tormented. Besides, Mr. Calitri will be the only one reading it and I’ll be safe.

THE BED

When I was growing up in Limerick my mother had to go to the St. Vincent de Paul Society to see if she could get a bed for me and my brothers, Malachy, Michael, and Alphie who was barely walking. The man at the St. Vincent de Paul said he could give her a docket to go down to the Irishtown to a place that sold secondhand beds. My mother asked him couldn’t we get a new bed because you never know what you’re getting with an old one. There could be all kinds of diseases.

The man said beggars can’t be choosers and my mother shouldn’t be so particular.

But she wouldn’t give up. She asked if it was possible at least to find out if anyone had died in the bed. Surely that wasn’t asking too much. She wouldn’t want to be lying in her own bed at night thinking about her four small sons sleeping on a mattress that someone had died on, maybe someone that had a fever or consumption.

The St. Vincent de Paul man said, Missus, if you don’t want this bed give me back the docket and I’ll give it to someone that’s not so particular.

Mam said, Ah, no, and she came home to get Alphie’s pram so that we could carry the mattress, the spring and the bedstead. The man in the shop in the Irishtown wanted her to take a mattress with hair sticking out and spots and stains all over but my mother said she wouldn’t let a cow sleep on a bed like that, didn’t the man have another mattress over there in the corner? The man grumbled and said, All right, all right. Bejesus, the charity cases is gettin’ very particular these days, and he stayed behind his counter watching us drag the mattress outside.

We had to push the pram up and down the streets of Limerick three times for the mattress and the different parts of the iron bedstead, the head, the end, the supports and the spring. My mother said she was ashamed of her life and wished she could do this at night. The man said he was sorry for her troubles but he closed at six sharp and wouldn’t stay open if the Holy Family came for a bed.

It was hard pushing the pram because it had one bockety wheel that wanted to go its own way and it was harder still with Alphie buried under the mattress screaming for his mother.

My father was there to drag the mattress upstairs and he helped us put the spring and the bedstead together. Of course he wouldn’t help us push the pram two miles from the Irishtown because he’d be ashamed of the spectacle. He was from the North of Ireland and they must have a different way of bringing home the bed.