Brooklyn

She had been keeping the thought of home out of her mind, letting it come to her only when she wrote or received letters or when she woke from a dream in which her mother or father or Rose or the rooms of the house on Friary Street or the streets of the town had appeared. She thought it was strange that the mere sensation of savouring the prospect of something could make her think for a while that it must be the prospect of home.

Rose, she knew, would have an idea in her head of what a plumber looked like and how he spoke. She would imagine him to be somewhat rough and awkward and use bad grammar. Eilis decided that she would write to her to say that he was not like that and that in Brooklyn it was not always as easy to guess someone’s character by their job as it was in Enniscorthy.

“You know what I really want?” he asked. “I want our kids to be Dodgers fans.”

He was so pleased and excited at the idea, she thought, that he did not notice her face freezing. She could not wait to be alone, away from him, so she could contemplate what he had just said. Later, as she lay on the bed and thought about it, she realized that it fitted in with everything else, that recently he had been plan­ning the summer and how much time they would spend together. Recently too he had begun to tell her after he kissed her that he loved her and she knew that he was waiting for a response, a response that, so far, she had not given.

Ellis worked out in her head that the wedding was four days after the planned date of her departure; she also remembered that the travel agent in Brooklyn had said she could change the date as long as she notified the shipping company in advance. She decided there and then that she would stay an extra week and hoped that no one in Bartocci’s would object too strongly. It would be easy to explain to Tony that her mother had misunder­stood her date of departure, even though Eilis did not believe that her mother had misunderstood anything.

And two years ago, Eilis remembered, when Jim Farrell had been openly rude to her, she thought it was because she came from a family that did not own anything in the town. Now that she was back from America, she believed, she carried something with her, something close to glamour, which made all the differ­ence to her as she sat with Nancy watching the men talk.

Upstairs on the bed Eilis found two letters from Tony and she realized, almost with a start, that she had not written to him as she had intended. She looked at the two envelopes, at his handwriting, and she stood in the room with the door closed wondering how strange it was that everything about him seemed remote. And not only that, but everything else that had happened in Brooklyn seemed as though it had almost dissolved and was no longer richly present for her—her room in Mrs. Kehoe’s, for example, or her exams, or the trolley-car from Brooklyn College back home, or the dancehall, or the apartment where Tony lived with his parents and his three brothers, or the shop floor at Bartocci’s. She went through all of it as though she were trying to recover what had seemed so filled with detail, so solid, just a few weeks before.

She could not stop herself from wondering, however, what would happen if she were to write to Tony to say that their mar­riage was a mistake. How easy would it be to divorce someone? Could she possibly tell Jim what she had done such a short while earlier in Brooklyn? The only divorced people anyone in the town knew were Elizabeth Taylor and perhaps some other film stars. It might be possible to explain to Jim how she had come to be married, but he was someone who had never lived outside the town. His innocence and his politeness, both of which made him nice to be with, would actually be, she thought, limitations, especially if something as unheard of and out of the question, as far from his experience as divorce, were raised. The best thing to do, she thought, was to put the whole thing out of her mind […].

“She has gone back to Brooklyn,” her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmine Bridge on its way towards Wex­ford, Eilis imagined the years ahead, when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more.