Maeve in America by Maeve Higgins

Author:Maeve Higgins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

Are You My Husband?

I REMEMBER ONE SATURDAY that was filled up with jobs around the house. My brother was chopping wood, my sisters were baking, and I was washing the car. What a cute little team, the seven dwarves to my mother’s Snow White! We children always did jobs, it was unquestioned, and my main task was minding the baby. That was a fun job, because the baby in this case was my sister Daisy, who was and is pure sunshine. I was around fourteen then, so she was almost four, and required less looking after than before. I guess that’s why I was washing the car. I certainly wasn’t happy about it. Lest you think it was a sexy kind of washing, like in that Jessica Simpson music video where she has tiny jean shorts on and is using an extremely large, possibly spermicidal, sponge, I will set you straight.

There was nothing sexy about me washing the car. I had an ancient vacuum cleaner, a yellowed plastic bucket that I’d filled with water from the kettle. I had braces, acne, and was carrying my customary extra forty pounds. I was dawdling, taking too long, so long that the water in the bucket got cold and the detergent fizzled out to the point of becoming a gray scum on the surface. My brother played our Best of Bob Marley CD through the open kitchen window, but even that wasn’t improving my mood. My hands were wrinkled and red as I crossed them and leaned heavily on the car roof like a trucker taking a break from his long-haul journey. Our house is tucked within a garden that was, at that time, unruly and overgrown, and that garden is divided by a short avenue on an incline that leads to the front door. I looked down that avenue at the closed iron gates and felt an overwhelming longing for adventure, for something to happen, anything. This longing was underpinned by a deep sense of boredom, that dark sense unique to teenagers that descends without warning and stays for five years.

Idly, I imagined my school crush appearing on his bike at the bottom of the hill and shouting my name. It was unclear if he knew my name at that point—we had never spoken—but this was not based in reality. Even in this fantasy, I wouldn’t want to bother him by expecting that he cycle up the hill. I would run to join him, hopping on my bike too, leaving the car’s windshield streaked and Bob Marley singing plaintively after me, “Could you be, could you be, could you be loved?” What would happen next was unclear to me, but scarcely mattered. My main thrill came from getting away from this humdrum rural existence crowded with my five sisters and brother, all of whom had the same face as mine, in a house where I always knew what was about to happen next. Of course, today that sounds like paradise, but back

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