It was ireland in the sixties. Corset conversation veered very close to immodesty. Michael O'Hehir was the voice of Sunday afternoons in Summer, and a spin in the car seemed like a good idea, but children get bored quickly.
VISITING THE CORSETMAKER
Miss Gately, you know, the corsetmaker;
her cottage
thatched and whitewashed beneath sycamores
ragged with
crows and their bickering. A Sunday
afternoon, my mother
walking to the red door and it opened and
closed and
nothing else stirring for ages but ourselves in the
back of the
white consul with the red roof at the end of the
avenue, just
outside the gate; stone walls and lichen patches
wallpapering
our afternoon. Father dropping off in the driver’s
seat
while Micheal O'Hehir commentated on matches, one after
another, without ever taking a breath in all that pipe smoke;
matches collecting in the ash-tray all burnt to tiny black bird
bones and
the condensation all used up with words and
faces dribbling
pathetically into shapeless bad temper. Over
and over: will she ever come out,
can’t we go now, why do
we always have to come, move
your legs; till eventually she
would reappear, a slap in the
doorway, motor jauntily,
red-headed, back to the car like it’s been five
minutes or
something, and Dad’s awake, reversing from the gate, back
into the
remains of a Sunday afternoon.
And I never knew what went on in there;
never saw who
opened the door, never saw a package, never heard
anything
about it. My father didn’t know either. I remember she
took my sister
with her when my sister was in secondary
school. I wouldn’t
have wanted to join them anyway, it was obviously a woman’s house.
