Tender (3 page)

Catherine looked up to meet it; her mother, folding a tea towel with great precision, looked away again. On the radio, a Shannonside presenter said something about the button accordion.
Fuck the button accordion,
Catherine thought.

“Are you seeing any of your friends from college over the summer?” her mother said.

“Doubt it,” Catherine shrugged. “Most of them are gone traveling to Germany and America and stuff.” This was not true, but it made some point that Catherine had suddenly found herself wanting very badly to make: that her friends had actual lives. That people her age were out there, doing things for themselves, living independently and freely. This was not actually true, for the most part, since most of her friends from college were also spending the summer working in the towns closest to where they had grown up, and were back living with their parents, but this detail, Catherine had decided, was completely irrelevant. They
could
have been traveling; that was the point. If they had wanted to travel—
this
was the point—they would have been able to. Allowed to. Zoe, that girl from Catherine’s art history tutorial, was in Italy, for instance—Zoe was the kind of person who would think nothing of heading off to Italy by herself for the whole summer. And Conor had made noises about bar work in Chicago, though he had not actually gone in the end due to lack of funds, but he had intended to. And James: James had been in Germany for the entire year! Her mother needed to know that Catherine had friends like this. Except that she did not need to know—it would not be helpful or useful for her to know—the actual details, at least not about Conor and James, because that would lead to too many questions—which was precisely, Catherine remembered, what was about to happen now. She sighed heavily.

“What’s wrong with you?” her mother said, her suspicions raised.

“Nothing.”

“I’m just trying to make simple conversation, for God’s sake.”

“I’m not stopping you.”

Her mother took a deep breath. “I was just wondering,” she said slowly, clearly having to work to stop the words coming out sharply, “whether you have any other friend? Anyone in particular?”

“
Other
friend?” Catherine said mockingly. She could not stop herself. When she was home, when she was talking to her mother, she turned into a fifteen-year-old again. It was ridiculous; she needed to snap out of it. She cleared her throat. “What do you mean, any other friend?” she said, more evenly.

Her mother shrugged. She had on the striped navy and white top that Catherine loved on her, its vivid white, its dark navy bands; the sleeves were pushed up on her arms, which were already growing brown—Catherine wished she had inherited her mother’s olive complexion rather than her father’s gene for sunburn. On her mother’s wrist was the Swatch watch that Catherine and the others had given her for her last birthday, her forty-fifth, the strap splayed with colors, the tiny mirrored face glinting, now, as she turned the tea towel again in her hands, laid it down on the table to be folded the other way. Forty-five; her mother was
forty-five
. It seemed impossible, but it was nothing beside the thought that in another handful of years, she would be fifty. Fifty. Her mother, slim and tanned and brown-haired; her mother who wore jeans and runners, who had recently bought a new pair of sunglasses to wear in the car. How could she be nearly fifty? And as for Catherine’s father, that was completely outrageous—he was ten years older, and sixty was not even an age Catherine was willing to countenance for one of her parents. Sixty was, was it not, the point after which nobody much remarked if something happened to you? If, one morning or one evening, you simply slipped away? What the hell was she supposed to do if that happened to one of her parents? It panicked her, the thought of it; it kept her awake at night, staring at the wall. She had told James about this, of course, but James had come nowhere close to understanding; James had thought she was mad. Or, actually, it was not madness of which he had accused her, but something else—something she had forgotten now, a word she had not heard before—dependent somehow, dependent on them in the same way they were dependent on her—anyway, he had given her a right lecture over the phone that evening. He did not even know exactly how old his own parents were, he had said; sixties, maybe? Late fifties? Catherine had been astonished. For his parents to be that old, and for him not to be riddled with the anxiety of their mortality, with the knowledge that the clock was counting down on the very fact of them—how could he go around like that? How could he have felt relaxed enough, for instance, to have gone off to Berlin?
Oh, for fuck’s sake, Catherine,
James had spluttered, and then Catherine had changed the subject. They were so alike, the two of them, so alike in every way—and yet, there were moments when she saw the ways in which they were so different. And she did not like those moments. She found herself moving quickly to chase those moments away.

“Well,” her mother said now, more pointedly; Catherine had not given her any answer to her question. “Well? Is there anything you want to tell me? Is there anyone you—”

“No,” Catherine said, pushing back from the table.

“Are you
sure?
”

“Yes, I’m sure,” Catherine said. “And I think that tea towel’s folded now.”

“Don’t be so bloody smart!”

“I’m not being smart.”

“I’m only trying to have a simple conversation with you!”

“About Pat fucking Burke,” Catherine spat.

“Catherine!” Her mother glanced, horrified, towards the open back door. “Watch what you’re saying!”

“Well? That’s it, isn’t it?” Catherine said, crossing to the sink angrily. “He saw me with my friend up at the train station, and he told Daddy, and now I’m in trouble, and I didn’t even
do
anything.” Forget fifteen: she sounded ten, now, and she was dismayed at how easily this had happened, at how automatically her voice had become this babyish whine; but in the next moment, she had decided that she was perfectly entitled to whine, and that she might as well go the whole hog, and she banged down her bowl. “It’s not
fair,
” she said, folding her arms.

“Stop that, Catherine,” her mother said warningly. She put one hand on the table and the other on the counter, blocking Catherine’s way to the door. “I just want to talk to you.”

“I didn’t
do
anything,” Catherine said, and she tried for a contemptuous laugh which would make clear her feelings about all of this, but as soon as she started it she realized that it would come out as a sob, so she swallowed it back down. “Pat Burke is nothing but a creep. Everyone hates him, and yet you all still listen to him.”

Her mother raised an eyebrow, as though to say she could not argue with this, but nor could she openly agree. “He says he saw you with your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Well, you were seen holding hands with him, whatever he is.”

“We were listening to my Walkman, for Christ’s sake!”

“Well, if you’re going to be so public about it, you can’t be surprised when somebody sees you.”

“Oh my God. Oh my God. We weren’t doing anything! He’s a friend! He’s an old friend of Amy and Lorraine’s, and he was going in the direction of the train station anyway, and I wanted to tell him about this song—this song I like—”

She stopped. She could hear how unconvincing it sounded. And, also, she was reeling a little, in shock a little, that already she had pushed an untruth into the story; James had not, after all, been going in the direction of the train station anyway. He had gone there especially for her. To sit with her. To hug her goodbye. To wave her off from the platform, with his arms going madly, not giving a shit who was seeing him or laughing at him, doing it with such glee and enthusiasm that Catherine had cringed. But she could not tell her mother this; she could not tell her mother any of it. Her mother would not understand. Her mother, like her father, had surely never known this kind of friendship, the kind of friendship in which you did not want to waste a single minute, in which every minute was a chance to talk about something more—

“Look, Catherine,” her mother said, shaking her head. “We don’t expect you not to have boyfriends. You’re old enough for that now. You don’t have to tell me lies.”

“Oh, thanks very much,” Catherine said, the words tart with bitterness. “That’s very good of you.”

“I told you not to be so bloody smart!”

“I’m
not
being smart,” Catherine said, and she slammed her hands down on the edge of the sink. There had to be a better way to do this, she thought; there had to be a better way to argue and protest and stand up for yourself. A dignified way; a grown-up way. She would ask James about it the next time she talked to him, she decided; James would know. James would know how to keep your voice level in a situation like this, and how to sound confident, and how to come out the winner with just a few carefully chosen words.

“I
hate
that old prick!” she shouted suddenly across the kitchen, and then she burst into ragged, jerky sobs. Her mother rolled her eyes.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Catherine. Get a hold of yourself. You’re eighteen years old.”

“I
know
I’m eighteen!” Catherine wailed. “That’s my whole point! James is my
friend!
He’s a friend of the girls, and he was in Germany all year, and he’s back now, I mean just for the summer, and we were listening to music, and I was just saying hello to him at the train station, and I’m
sick
of not being able to do what I want!”

“Catherine,” her mother said, and she actually laughed. “Stop being so ridiculous. Of course you can”—she made a face—“
listen to music
with whoever the hell you want. Or
say hello
to them, or whatever it is that you call it now. Daddy was just upset that he had to hear about it from Pat Burke. That Pat Burke was able to tell him something he didn’t already know. And something
I
didn’t know.”

“Oh my God,” Catherine said, putting her hands to her head. “Oh my God. I can’t take this. I can’t—”

“Well,” her mother said, laying the tea towel flat on the table and smoothing it as though it was a map she was intending to read. “You’re getting very bloody worked up about something you claim to be nothing at all.”

James was not her boyfriend. No one was her boyfriend. There had been no boyfriend while she was at school, and there had been no boyfriend during the long summer after her Leaving Cert, and there had been no boyfriend during the first year of college, and there was no boyfriend now. How could there be, when she was back living at home? Which was not an acceptable excuse, according to Catherine’s sister Ellen, who was sixteen, and who therefore lived at home all of the time, and who did not let this stop her from having boyfriends, and as many boyfriends as she felt like. It was not that their parents were any less strict with Ellen than they had been with Catherine; it was just that Ellen ignored their strictness, or rather worked around it, with the skill of someone dismantling a bomb. Especially now that she was going into her Leaving Cert year, she explained to Catherine, there were simply certain experiences she refused to go without. So, if she wanted to go to the pub where the people her age drank, she made up a story about maths grinds at a friend’s house, and when their father collected her four or five hours later, she was ready and waiting, chewing gum to hide the bang of cider and equipped with a perfect explanation for why her clothes smelled of smoke. She was never asked for the explanation. Their father, Ellen told Catherine, needed so much to believe that she would not do such a thing, would not go boozing and smoking and shifting fellas in an alleyway in town, that he simply went on doing that: he believed. Their mother knew; their mother, Ellen said, had come into the bedroom and ranted at her on more than one occasion, but Ellen had gone on denying everything, and doing everything, and she suspected, deep down, that their mother respected her for that.

“If she saw Shane Keegan, she’d
want
me to go with him,” she’d said, setting out her case to Catherine earlier that year. “He’s a complete ride. You couldn’t pass up a chance like that.”

“Yeah, right,” Catherine had scoffed. “If they found out you were shifting one of the Keegans, they’d ground you until you were twenty-five.”

“They could try,” Ellen had said, bouncing a tennis ball off the bedroom wall. “Anyway, one of us has to be shifting fellas. It’s a complete waste of time you being up at college if you’re not even going to get together with anyone.
I
would have got together with that Conor fella ages ago if I was you.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“Yeah, I would. He sounds like good craic.”

“Yeah, well,” Catherine said weakly. “It’s not that simple once you get to college.”

“Course it is,” Ellen said, the ball slapping against her hand. “You just don’t know how to do it.”

You’re not even ugly:
that was something else that Ellen had said about Catherine’s ongoing celibacy. Or, not celibacy—when she was out, she often shifted guys, or acquiesced to their requests to shift her; she took their tongues into her mouth and let their hands roam over the cheeks of her arse—but whatever it was. Singlehood.
Gomhood,
Ellen had called it when Catherine had described it that way. Catherine was tall, Ellen pointed out, and she had some nice clothes, and long hair, and her skin was all right, and so what? What was stopping her? All she had to do, Ellen explained, was to go to the cinema with someone, or to the pub, and shift him, and talk to him, and then, once she got tired of him, she could break up with him. It was just what you did. Unless you were ugly, that was.

Not even ugly:
for Catherine, in a strange way, this was enough. In college this past year, it had become clearer to her that boys found her attractive; boys looked at her, they flirted with her, they told her where the parties were going to be. And living with Amy and Lorraine had meant that she had met lots of boys, too. The whole business with Conor they disapproved of; Conor, who was in one of Catherine’s English tutorials and over whom she had been stupidly mooning all year, and with whom she maintained a friendship which consisted mainly of him slagging her, and of her thinking of suitable retorts half an hour later.