59 She lies there, watching the daylight through the flowery bedroom curtains. She sets herself the usual mind test. Day: Monday. Date: The thirtieth of May. Year: 2002. And then, the final test: Pain? No, not so bad today. Most mornings, she hears Ned’s step in the back kitchen, then the kitchen presses opening and shutting. He comes, mar dhea, to look for cattle doses or a syringe for a weakling calf. He has started this pretense, this malarkey because he knows that she’s sick again, that the cursed cancer’s back. She lies there waiting for him. Not a sound. Or has he come already? Has she slept through it all, his rattling around the kitchen? One day last week—was it last week?—she woke to him standing there in the parlor doorway. First, she thought it was a dream, a vision. But there he was, in his stocking feet, the tweed cap scrunched in his hand, like a man tiptoeing into a church. Did he think that she was dead and that he’d have to ring someone? She shut her eyes, pretending to be still asleep, but breathing extra loudly so he’d know, so he could tiptoe away again. She must bring a clock in from the parlor. What the devil use is it out there on the parlor mantel where no one ever sees it? She never had a bedside clock before. A country woman wakes with the birds, the daylight. Up with the lark and gets on with the work. But these days, she’s asleep when she should be awake. Asleep like a wino. Up, up, up. She commands herself. Her clothes are looser now, her body thinner than ever before. But her body feels weighted, ballasted like a bag of drowning kittens. 60 * Áine Greaney Up, up. Through the open bedroom door she watches the shaft of sunlight across the parlor, over the brocade couch and the glass-fronted china cabinet where her wedding china sat for years and years. Up, up. Her eyes flutter shut. In this dream, Jo Burke is waiting for her turn at the mirror, waiting among all those chattery and giggly girls who stand on tippy toe to dab at their faces from a powder compact. Jo’s sister, Kitty, stands next to her, spraying her hair. A girl called Rosaleen Dunphy is laughing and asking if there’s any chance of a bit of that hair lacquer. The girls wear cinched dresses and high-heeled court shoes. Everyone knows everyone. They know each other’s parents and sisters and brothers. From the ladies’ toilet they can hear the strains of Jack Power and his Sunshine Swing Band. “On a day like today / we’d pass the time away,” the man croons, while another man plays the clarinet. Among this group of Saturday-night girls, there is a kind of valiant desolation . These are the Gowna girls who have stayed, waited it out, stayed put in their own parish while their classmates and sisters have taken the boat to England to train to be clerk-typists or hospital cleaners or nurses. When their faces are perfect, their hair scooped up into side combs, the girls leave together for the dance floor, some of them hanging back for the final check: Are the seams in my stockings straight? When the fellas arrive, the band is in full swing and the girls are dancing with each other. The coy ones watch the door and wink at each other as the fellas parade past in a cloud of fags and a whiff of drink. Kitty Burke, Jo’s younger sister, is always among the first asked up to dance. Always swept off her feet. And there she is now, her face flushed under the lights, her eyes wild, her scarlet dress fluttering around her as she does a two-step with yet another handsome, Brylcreem young man. Jo is tall and plain. She is only twenty-five years of age, yet she takes her place on a bench along the wall with the older women, the Gowna spinsters who, week after week, sit there with their hopeful smiles, their features set in valiant sufferance. Some are plain—big noses or too tall or mannish shoulders like Jo has. Another has poor eyesight. Four of them are passable in [3.85.85.246] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:53 GMT) Dance Lessons * 61 looks, but their families...