Free The Shelter of Neighbours by Eílís Ní Dhuibhne Page A

reading the books I had brought with me: Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa , and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques . Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (a long shot, anyway). Instead, I started browsing through Morgan’s Cosmopolitans and Vogues , and began to eye hungrily the paperbacks she’d stocked up with for the holidays and which so far she hadn’t opened.
    Morgan wasn’t the one to dispel my low self-esteem. She was a medical doctor, and anthropology students probably weren’t much higher up the social scale than hired help, as far as she was concerned. The day after we moved up to Lake Elizabeth, she asked me what my father did for a living. I considered redeploying him there and then – he was a plumber, but I could say, ‘He’s a chemist’, for how would she know, ever, one way or the other? But I didn’t have the guts to lie.
    â€˜Eoow!’ she said, with a little smile. ‘Interesting!’
    Before this conversation I had only babysat, but after it, I was asked to do some little chores – wash the clothes and put them in the dryer, and clean up the kitchen. Vacuum. Morgan didn’t even ask ‘Do you mind?’ She just said, ‘Ew! Rosemary! Um could you just um vacuum the bedrooms, and maybe the living room? They’ve gotten so dusty I can hardly breathe!’ And she wafted her hand in front of her nose like Lady Bracknell when she hears about the handbag. I was to do the dusting and the rest of the housework when the Roleys were down at the lake swimming, or playing in the woods. But I was happy enough to be left alone in the cabin, even if it meant doing chores.
    Anyway, I’d get through the hoovering or whatever it was I was supposed to do as fast as I could – which was pretty fast – and then I’d sit on the porch and delve into Morgan’s holiday reading. As well as women’s magazines, they had the New Yorker and Time Magazine . And her books were brand new ones, just out – Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room and Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid . I started with Marilyn French because it was a novel, which I always liked better than short stories because you can get right into a novel and live in it, sort of, whereas a short story is, I don’t know, sort of in and out before you’ve really got used to it. Lost in it, which is what I wanted then, when I was reading. I pulled a deck chair out of the shade, where the Roleys usually sat. They hated the sun and were always trying to escape from it, but I sat where the sun was strongest, because more than anything I wanted to get a tan that would make me look more American, make me smooth and suave. Like them. I ignored the fact that my lines would never be right: I had a potato face and a blob of black curls like a crop of blackberries on top of my head. Everything about me was round. That was my problem. I was a racoon, whereas the Roleys were racehorses: fine-boned, narrow, their brown limbs like sticks of cinnamon.
    Out on the porch I pulled up my skirt – Morgan liked me to wear a skirt, more maidy – so the sun could get at my blancmange legs, and I started reading, letting the sun and the breeze from the lake wash over me. I loved that, the feel of the warm air on my skin. It set things stirring, deep inside me, vague but powerful feelings and longings that I couldn’t identify. Before I came here, to America, the name I put on all those yearnings was just that: America. But here I was, with as much America as anyone would ever want, and the yearnings hadn’t gone away. Now they seemed to be a hunger for warm breezes, for silky water, for happiness, which was still just out of reach, just around the corner. If only I knew what it was.
    So I was sitting there, my legs in the air, engrossed in an article on how to examine your genitalia with the aid of a hand mirror – it was absolutely disgusting