Wonderstruck

Photo by William Brawley/Flickr

By Andrew Forrester

I’m staring at this fleshy alien, wrapped straightjacket-tight in a swaddling blanket. He’s sort of quietly writhing in a clear plastic box, and I’ve thought about a dozen times that, even for a hospital, this all seems overly clinical. A plastic box? It looks like something from the Container Store, something much more suited to storing winter clothes or high school yearbooks, or maybe small reptiles. But instead, it’s holding my newborn son, and I’m having one of those dad moments that can come off as trite but which are really quite profound: my newborn son, sleeping. My son.

For some reason, when I think of a typical dad on the day of his first child’s birth, I think of Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. I don’t actually know the movie that well, but Jimmy Stewart’s husband-cum-dad persona—businesslike and anxious all at once—seems about right for a day like today. But whereas Jimmy would be rushing in and out of the hospital room for work and occasionally haranguing nurses about his concerns while never quite connecting with his actual child, I am trapped in something that feels more like a thriller than whatever genre It’s a Wonderful Life falls into. I’m frozen, heart pounding, anxious without anything resembling businesslikeness. That’s my baby. James. If I take my eyes off him for a second, what will go wrong? Suddenly, we’re in the movie Speed, but the bus is my child, and I’m Keanu, and the point is that something disastrous could happen if I fail to—what?

I don’t know. But I am a dad now, and my child is sitting in a plastic tub, and his head has turned to the side, and if I know anything about babies, it’s that they can’t control their heads, and I wonder if I should get someone, because what if he can’t breathe in that position? He’s so tiny and vulnerable, and no one in this hospital, not even my wife Megan, seems to care. But I’m also so tired, and I’m not even the one who did the actual having of the baby, so my tiredness seems selfish. But I’m still so tired. And it seems like the best thing would be to pick him up, so that I can control his head for him, but I also want to lie down. I want to lie down so badly, but this couch I’m sitting on is an affront to dads, moms, birth partners everywhere. It’s manufactured to fit maybe a ten-year-old comfortably, and honestly, I should probably have a word with someone in charge, because this is unacceptable—how do they expect fathers of newborn children who have no head control to be able to sleep on this nightmare bench? How do they expect us to sleep at all?

The hospital has a policy of encouraging “sleeping in,” which just means that they want mothers and babies to spend their nights together, I guess because that way they’ll get used to each other. I am a rule follower, so of course I’m determined to align my thinking with the hospital’s. They are the experts. I’m a twenty-eight-year-old grad student, and it’s not like I’m even studying something useful. My qualifying exams on Victorian literature have not prepared me for this moment, except that I can now amuse myself by talking about how Megan’s period of “lying in” is over. No, I don’t know anything about biology or child development, so if this very domineering nurse says James should sleep in the room with us, then the very domineering nurse must be right.

I decide to take a chance and pull my eyes away from James for a moment, because that’s what you have to do. Like watchers on some ancient city wall guarding something precious, fathers throughout history have had to take breaks to eat, to sleep, to use the chamber pot or whatever. I turn to Megan. The clichéd thing to say is that she looks beautiful, lying there in her hospital bed, a soft, angelic glow somehow coalescing through the commingling of the fluorescent hospital lights. (I know nothing of physics, either).

But, while Megan is very beautiful, the truth is that she looks tired. Tired with an edge. Tired like an old person, which is to say, tired with a kind of wisdom, and a kind of impatience. Leading up to the birth, Megan has been understandably emotional and a little fearful about the realities of labor, while I have tried my best to be everything Steve Martin isn’t in the Father of the Bride movies. I am loving. I am supportive. I am calm. I am rational. I am not going to rip hot dog buns out of their packaging in the grocery store or sell my family home to a ruthless developer, only to buy it back at a higher price. But something strange has happened now, and our roles have switched, and I have upped the ante. I am far more emotional than Megan ever was. I’m a quivering mess, and even in these few seconds, even as my head has rotated on my spine to look at Megan, I’ve thought, “I wonder if he’s dying back there.”

Megan can tell. Not that I think James might somehow be dead. But that I am terrified.

“You should go,” she says. Not lovingly. Not angrily. Just a curt statement of fact, stating the obvious. “Murder is bad.” “Two plus two is four.” “You are about to explode into a thousand anxious pieces, so you really should leave this hospital.”

“What?” I say, and suddenly I do sound like Jimmy Stewart, with that steel guitar shock in his voice. What? Mary! You want the moon?

“You should go. You need a break.”

“I need a break?”

If I need a break, then I am an absolute disgrace. This woman has just given birth. Strike that. She hasn’t “just” done anything. This has taken nine months. There has been vomit. There has been vertigo. Uncomfortable below-the-waist exams. A preeclampsia scare. And she still went to work every morning at six-thirty. Then she did this.

I look back at the baby. He’s alive, but now he has hiccups, and they seem far too powerful for someone who is only seven hours old. I make a mental note to check with a nurse when Megan and I are finished talking.

I’m trapped again. I can’t take my eyes off him.

“Yes,” she continues from behind me, “you need a break. You’re tired. You should go home and take a shower.”

“I—what?”

I can’t even argue.

It sounds so good. I want to do it. I need to do it. I—

I’m crying. Not hard crying. Sad movie moment crying. The kind of crying you can hide from your boss or people on the street, but not from your wife.

I chance a look back at Megan, who assesses me. I am a suspect, and she is the detective behind the two-way mirror.

“Yeah, honestly, you should probably just go and sleep there. Go home and come back refreshed. I’ll send him to the nursery. People do it all the time.”

Who is this woman?

I cannot send my newborn child to the nursery like some sort of cigar-smoking father from the 1940s. I cannot Jimmy Stewart my baby.

But it sounds so good, too. It sounds so, so good. We have been at the hospital for over twenty-four hours. I spent the night on a different nightmare bench in a different room, while they induced Megan, thanks to the preeclampsia scare.

“Okay,” I say, no longer crying, watching James once more. “I’ll go home and shower. Then I’ll let you know. I’ll probably come back, but I’ll let you know.”

“You should just sleep there,” she says again. Her eyes are narrow, and she has not so much as nodded reassuringly.

“I’ll let you know.”

I drive home in a daze. The hospital is not close, but somehow, I’m already in my driveway. Linda, my mother-in-law, is inside, watching TV on the couch. I give her a quick update and head straight for the shower.

You know how, in movies, when characters are sad, and it’s raining, you feel like, okay, maybe you guys are laying it on a little thick here? And you think back to your high school English class, and remember how your teacher talked kind of patronizingly about “pathetic fallacy,” and convinced you that reflecting a character’s mood in the weather is a little bit lazy, don’t you think? Well, crying in the shower isn’t an example of pathetic fallacy, but it’s in the same vein. It’s bad writing.

It’s still what happens to me.

I turn on the water, strip down, step in, and weep. I mean, weep.

And I talk. It’s kind of like praying, kind of like pleading.

What have we done?

We shouldn’t have done this.

Why did we do this?

I’m not cut out for this.

In the back of my mind, I know that these thoughts, like the glowing postnatal woman and my current state of crying in the shower, are clichés. Every dad thinks these things. But there’s also a part of me that thinks, no, really, I am specifically not cut out for this. Other people can do this. I cannot. I cannot shepherd this tiny perfect human into adulthood. I cannot shoulder that responsibility. I am sure to break him, physically and emotionally and all the other –allys. Megan is so strong and I am so weak, so out-of-control, so ready to lie down and sleep in an actual bed with sheets and a mattress that extends beyond the length of your average park bench.

I want to do it. I want to stay home, and sleep, and go back refreshed, like Megan said.

I dry off and get dressed and decide to run the idea past Linda.

People talk about bad mothers-in-law like it’s a given thing. Like you’re as likely to have an overbearing, judgmental mother-in-law as you are to have an overbearing, judgmental barista at one of those artisanal coffee shops where they expect you to have an espresso preference. But I have a very good mother-in-law. She’s kind and supportive and would rather die—seriously, die—than put her opinions where they don’t belong. She is a good person to run this question by.

“Megan says I should sleep here, but do you think that’s okay, because I feel like I’m failing her in some way if I do that, and if I’m failing her then I’m also failing as a dad, and I just feel really bad for leaving her and bad that she’s sending him to the nursery and I—”

Obviously, I am crying again. Weeping, again, actually, and to my mother-in-law.

There is often shame in weeping. We look at the exaggerated mourning rituals of other cultures, and we judge them. Or at the very least, we wish they would show some dignity. Weeping in the shower is embarrassing, but in a contained way, an I-can’t-believe-I-did-that way. Weeping to a mother-in-law, even a very good mother-in-law, is horrific. I wish I could show some dignity.

Linda jumps to her feet, which are wrapped up in fuzzy white slippers, and pulls me into a hug, and I don’t exactly realize it, but this is what I need. A second strange shifting of roles, for me at least. From father to child. She holds me, only for a few seconds, and she lets me cry, and she doesn’t try to tell me what to do or think, though she does answer my question.

“I think it’s totally fine if you stay here,” she says. “You don’t need to feel guilty.” And it’s like she’s given me permission. No one has given me permission for a long time. I’m a dad now. I’m a permission-giver, but for the last hour, I’ve been silently begging for someone to take authority from me, to take decision-making power from me, to relinquish me of my choices and my worries and the weight of fatherhood, and here, Linda is doing it, and Megan has already done it, and I just have to accept it.

I do.

I stop crying, and we laugh a little, and then I go to our bedroom—the room that Megan and James and I will share for the next six or so months—and I get in bed. I take a break. I read a bit. I check my phone and text Megan. I’m comfortable, and there is no baby to watch, and if, for a second, I am fearful of the night after next, when James is here in this room with us and I can’t take my eyes off him, and no nurses roam the halls outside, waiting to be accosted with questions about the hiccups that shake their patients’ miniature bodies, then it’s only for a second, and soon, I’m sleeping. Hard.

The next day, I arrive at the hospital room before James does. I sit on the nightmare bench, and I tell Megan about the night before. About weeping in the shower and crying to her mom, about realizing that I was overwhelmed and guilty and terrified of failure, and that, even if I’m still all of those things, the break was nice. I’m grateful for it.

Megan is warm again. “Of course,” she smiles. “We were totally fine.”

And then the nurses wheel in James, in his little plastic box. And he is totally fine. He’s tiny and helpless. All he really wants is milk, and even that is a struggle. The nurse has to help him latch, which, if I let it, will worry me, too, because what if he’s not getting the nutrition he needs, and what do we do when we get home and the domineering nurse is gone, and and and.

The nurse lifts him from his Tupperware container and brings him to me, so that I can hold him for a moment before I give him to Megan to nurse. The very moment he came into the world, our doctor said, “I think he looks like you,” and she was right. Even I could see it. I see it now. He’s my son, and I don’t know what all that means, but I know that I love him, and I’m afraid of him. I know that I will hurt him, and he will hurt me. I know that I’m proud of him.

He is wonderful, and I am wonderstruck. And I can’t take my eyes off him.

•••

ANDREW FORRESTER is a writer and teacher who recently received his PhD in English literature. His work has appeared in academic journals, Full Grown People, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son.

We Know Where You Live

By Terry Barr

The blinking red light of the phone machine, as usual, unnerves me. Why do I always think that somehow this will be the message that changes my life? It’s all I can do to walk past it, even though I’m holding my baby daughter Pari, even though I need to put her down gently to keep her warm and asleep. Still thinking of that machine, I wait a beat, two. Her breathing is normal, calm. Exhaling now, I walk back to my machine, abandoning my wife Nilly who, as usual, wants to glow in our daughter’s sleep.

There are two messages flashing at me, actually. The first is mainly silence until the very end when I hear “TERRY BARR” in a voice attempting to speak its authority. The message ends there.

The next one begins.

I am standing alone in our living room looking out of the broad picture window at our quiet, connector street. It’s getting late on this Saturday night, ten days before Christmas. Nilly hasn’t emerged yet from Pari’s bedroom, which rests at the back of the house, far from the living room where I stand, and I thank God for that now.

When I hear it, I freeze until the message runs out. I look back towards my daughter’s room. Has Nilly heard? But there is nothing stirring back there, no “Oh my God,” and no footsteps approaching with worry and fear. So it’s only me. Me and my machine.

And those words.

Before I can think this through, I do the one thing that in the light of day I’ll most regret: I hit the erase button. But I want to make this disappear. I want to throw my machine like a discus out into the night. I want to wake up again on Saturday morning for a do-over. I want never to have heard what I heard, and more than anything else, I want to be sure that neither my wife nor our daughter has heard it. Or ever will hear it.

And it’s only in this last desire that I succeed.

•••

We had been to two Christmas parties that night. The first was an Amnesty International gathering celebrating our recent success in our Holiday Card Action campaign. We’d succeeded in sending over one hundred greeting cards to prisoners of conscience all over the world that morning as we took to the main street of our downtown. Stationing ourselves at a cross street with heavy shopping traffic, we would gently accost perfect strangers who’d sometimes smile and sometimes sneer at us as we ask them to send a message of hope to a prisoner of conscience of their choice. We have twenty-five to thirty different prisoners to work for—men and women who have been bound and held in a prison in some remote part of the world for exercising their human right to speak their beliefs, wear what they want, or support some loved one who has run afoul politically of a governmental tyrant.

Mixed in, too, and usually the hardest to get people to sign for, are the death penalty cases. Amnesty unconditionally opposes the death penalty in all circumstances. Sometimes our card-signers want to debate the issue with us. These debates usually get nowhere, and I often refuse to engage because who knows what this other person has experienced? My strong beliefs are my own, and I keep telling myself that I’m not threatening or challenging anyone else’s, or if I am, I’m doing so respectfully. Beliefs can’t hurt, right? I’m aware of the irony here that if I truly think that beliefs can’t hurt, I won’t fully get what Amnesty’s prisoners are suffering.

Still, it turned out to be a good day despite these moments of doubt and conflict. Over a hundred messages of hope that we hope will reach our prisoners. Maybe it’s true that Christmas does bring out “goodwill toward men.”

At our party this night, everyone is in high spirits. We toast each other for our success; we toast those who signed our cards. We toast our prisoners and hope that next year they’ll be free. And we toast the founders of Amnesty, two British students who wanted to change the world, or at least show the hopeless that someone cares.

Our Amnesty group is a diverse lot: teachers, students, lawyers, social workers, and psychologists. Our group leader is a British astronomer, one of the smartest men I’ve ever known. A man, in his sixties, who still likes to climb a good tree.

We eat our potluck supper, raise our glasses one more time, and then the three of us—Nilly, Pari, and me thriving on all the attention—head off to our next gathering, which is a party for the staff of our weekly alternative newspaper. I’ve been writing film and local theatre reviews over the past year, trying to hone my skills and give voice to whatever arts scene our town has.

The party is held at a duplex in an older part of town. As we enter its arched doorway and I see peeling paint on the inner hall walls, I’m reminded of all those grad school parties I attended not so many years ago. Our host, a guy wearing a silken robe and an ascot over what might be flannel pajamas, leads us to a side porch where a pumped up keg awaits. Strings of mismatched Christmas lights are draped haphazardly from room to room, greeting us everywhere we turn, but saying what?

Pari is sneezing at the party’s cigarette smoke. I barely know the paper’s editor—and he’s the only person I know here—but he’s nowhere to be found at first. Soon I see him and another boy his age tumbling out of the bathroom.

“Hey Terry,” he says, before his momentum, or his friend’s weight, pushes him out the door onto the porch.

“Are we about ready to leave,” Nilly asks. She gives me that look, but it isn’t necessary. Not at all.

I love this paper and am glad it gives no restrictions on what I write about and say. No word count; no demand to simply recount the plot and give a thumbs up or down. There is a star system, though, and for my latest review, I gave Spike Lee’s X four and a half stars out of five. I thought Lee’s ability to capture the complexity of Malcolm in just under three hours was a feat itself worthy of high praise. I appreciated his courage and tenacity. His audacity. And my review said so.

As we drive home, I’m thinking that even though we stayed at this party for barely half an hour, it was worth it to mingle with people who, even in our small town, aspire to a more bohemian lifestyle. In fact, the whole evening for me has been warm and cheerful—an evening surrounded by friends and people who love each other. While I’m not a Christian any more, this time of year is still—and I know of no other word for it—so joyous.

Or so I believe until we get home. Until we walk in the front door and I see that red blinking light. Until I press the “play message” button.

Until I hear his voice.

•••

The next morning I walk across the street to my neighbor’s house. Steve’s a police detective, and he agrees to come over and talk to us. After greeting Nilly, he gets right to the point.

“Why did you erase that message?”

“I don’t know. I just reacted. I didn’t want anyone else to hear.”

“What exactly did it say again?”

“Well, it began with: ‘Terry Barr!!! We know who you are and where you live! We’re watching you!’”

That was bad enough.

“Have you had any other messages like this?”

And then I remember the other late night calls, the ones asking: “Is this Mark, the Art professor at Clinton College?” The same college that employs me.

“He doesn’t live here,” I answer, but the caller hangs up before I can ask “Why do you think he lives with me,” or more importantly, “Just who the hell are you anyway?”

“All I can tell you to do,” Steve says, “is to save any other messages you get, and put call-tracing on your phone. We need to build a case file and collect evidence.”

I must still be in shock. Will this work? Will I even want to answer the phone again? Still, we purchase call tracing, the phone calls stop.

In their place, packages begin arriving. Round, white packages unlike any I’ve ever received. They come from The Bradford Exchange and other such “collectible” outlets. Commemorative plates and coins: things you see advertised in popular magazines or on late-night TV. Places with 800-numbers that don’t ask questions and don’t demand credit cards. Places that allow the “Bill Me Later” option.

Over the next few weeks, we receive BassMaster equipment, Columbia House LPs usually containing the latest from Brooks and Dunn or Toby Keith—musicians I’d never intentionally listen to. We get subscriptions to Rolling Stone, Field and Stream.

Penthouse.

“I’ve never seen a Penthouse,” Nilly says.

When we see him, we ask the postman what we should do with this stuff.

“You didn’t order it, did you?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s all yours then. They can’t do anything to you!”

So we return what we can, refuse what we’ll never want.

And then the first Hustler arrives. We’re anxious now, and ashamed of the pornography, of the violation, of someone we don’t know imagining us holding such a magazine.

I call their 800-number to cancel any other Hustlers and strangely, miraculously, they’ve saved the order card. They mail it to me, and I see the writing for the first time. A hand not only not my own, but a form of printing that I’d characterize as coming from someone who isn’t comfortable holding a pen, someone who stopped paying attention to anything scholastic around the sixth grade.

Next comes an afternoon call from a representative trying to confirm the “escort” I’ve ordered for that evening:

“I have the request right here on my phone tape, though I have to say that the voice really doesn’t sound like yours.”

“Could you play it for me?”

He does. It’s familiar, I think, the same voice: deep, smug, satisfied with itself but in a southern dialect not even remotely close to mine.

I’m from the South, have lived in this region all my life, from Alabama to Tennessee and now here in South Carolina. When I travel to New York or Boston, people there recognize my southern accent immediately. But down here, there are people who believe I’m from New York. Maybe it’s my training in music and theatre back in high school. Maybe it’s that while my mother drawls with the best of them, my father, also a native southerner, has a different slant. A Jewish slant. An accent that seems to defy a specific region.

All I know is that the voice on that tape is truly and defiantly southern. And not “city Southern” either:

“Mah name is Turry Bawhr, an’ I’ed lahke an es Cort for toonaght at sebm.”

He gives our address, and then, in an even more smug tone, he signs off with a “Thaink yew vera much!”

I ask, and in a compliant and law-abiding way, the escort service turns the taped message over to the police. And then, the calls start coming again. Always late at night; always asking for “Mark.” We trace these, turn them over to our investigator. Months have passed since the initial disturbing call, and we have collected diecast cars and random cologne samples and Playboys and US magazines. And more BassMaster stuff. I can’t begin to describe all that we got, all that subsequently made up our massive yard sales.

The police have enough evidence now to confront our harasser. He hasn’t actually committed a crime, but they think they can at least scare him, intimidate him. Make him stop. And just as they’re ready to do so, we put it together, or at least together enough to see how this started, to understand what set him off.

I had asked Nilly before if she remembered any crank calls, anything suspicious, even anything that seemed innocent. It’s usually the thing you’ve forgotten, the thing you say to yourself, “It just couldn’t be.”

“You know,” she says, “there was this time when I got a call asking if you were the same Terry Barr who reviewed movies. I said ‘yes,’ but that he’d have to call back to speak to you. He was polite and thanked me.”

“But he never called back.”

“No, he never called back…Why did I tell him who you were?”

“It’s okay. You couldn’t have known.”

A few days later, our investigator checks in. He and another officer paid our caller a visit. They told him they knew what he was doing and that if he didn’t stop, we might press charges. He never actually denied anything, but he didn’t admit his guilt either.

“We warned him pretty good. You should know, though, that he’s in his late thirties and still lives with his parents. And, of course, he has a record.”

“For what?”

“Indecent exposure.”

They even tell me his name, and later, I look him up and find out where he lives—an area of town notorious for its less-than-progressive thinking, though of course I’m just stereotyping now. It does my soul—so committed to human rights—no good to know the truth behind every stereotype, or to be right in my stereotyping. Is it good to know who this man is, though? Can knowing bring peace?

“Well, that’s all we can do for now,” our investigator says. “Let’s hope he doesn’t bother you again.”

I understand. I’ve watched enough episodes of Law and Order in my life to get it. To get that the best we can do is to change and unlist our phone number, and so we do. The phone calls stop, but the packages still come.

A year or so later, after our second daughter is born, we move to a larger house in a different zip code. The packages stop then, and after a few months, I finally get out of the habit of looking out our window at night when random cars come driving by.

It’s obvious, too obvious to say—though I will anyway—that though I erased that tape, I can’t erase its memory, its message. I can’t erase the fear or the harassment of those many nights in our young life.

I did tell Nilly, as well as the police, what the voice on that tape said. But thankfully, neither Nilly nor Pari ever had to hear that voice, so if they have any memory of that night or that time, at least it won’t be what I remember. At least I protected them from that. And if I did put them at risk by liking Spike Lee’s X, or erasing a hate-filled tape, I’m as sorry as I can be, as I’ve ever been. We didn’t deserve this; of course we didn’t. But then, does anybody?

“Terry Barr!!! We know who you are and where you live! We’re watching you! Remember. WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE! SIEG HEIL, SIEG HEIL, SIEG HEIL!”

•••

TERRY BARR is a regular contributor to culturemass.com and has had essays published or forthcoming in such journals as The Museum of Americana, Hamilton Stone Literary Review, Fat City Review, Sport Literate, and Melange Press. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Greenville, South Carolina.

Land of Shannon

O'Connor's Pub in Doolin — By Suzanne Van Atten

By Suzanne Van Atten

Bone tired and drunk on whiskey, I was wedged in the corner of a booth at Gus O’Connor’s Pub in the small seaside town of Doolin, Ireland. I watched my three girlfriends chat up an international coterie of men who had flocked to our table, drawn to the trio of boozed-up beauties. A decade older than my friends and more plain, I was excluded from the sexual energy that emanated from their flirtatious repartee, and I turned my attention to the musicians who filled the air with the sometimes jaunty, sometimes mournful sounds of their guitars, fiddles, and accordion. I recently had grown accustomed to my place in the periphery of my friends’ mating dance.

For years I had been a suburban divorced mom, occupied by working as an arts editor for the local newspaper and raising two sons mostly on my own. But that all changed when my youngest son left home for college. I decided my life needed a shakeup, so I broke up with my boyfriend of twelve years and moved into the city. Although a mere ten miles separated my former home (a ’60s ranch house in a working-class neighborhood) from my new abode (a shabby Victorian duplex in the shadow of glass-and-steel high-rises), they were worlds apart.

The moving van had barely pulled away from the curb when I found myself thrust into a lifestyle more like that of a college freshman than a divorced mom in her late-forties. A simple invitation to a colleague’s house party was my entrée into a lively social circle of mostly thirtysomething journalists and publicists who threw raucous parties, went to clubs to hear bands, and closed down bars three and four nights a week. Seemingly overnight, my phone was ringing with invitations to meet my new friends for drinks, dinner, and more. I soon developed an impressive tolerance for alcohol consumption and a constant quest for the perfect concealer to hide the permanent dark circles beneath my eyes.

One night after work, I met my friend Shelly for a beer at our favorite neighborhood bar. A flirtatious redhead with a penchant for floral print sundresses and red lipstick, Shelly is the most extroverted of my friends and the ringleader of our social activities. Her perpetually cranky boyfriend had recently moved out of the duplex they’d shared for six years and taken up with an art school student nineteen years his junior. Since her breakup, we occasionally lamented our single status. We missed having someone to share our beds, to kill our bugs, to carry out our trash; lately what we missed most was our traveling companions. That’s when we came upon the idea of taking a trip together. I had been dreaming of Ireland, and that suited Shelly, so we decided to book a trip in March.

We invited two friends to join us: Amy, the marketing director for the newspaper where I worked, a short, curvy blonde with an infectious giggle and dimples to match, and Scottie, an advertising executive at a global marketing firm, a tall, willowy, strawberry blonde. Amy recently had broken up with her boyfriend, a cute bald-headed boy and utilities trader who had become so obsessed with online gambling he no longer left his apartment. Scottie had been on her own for years, having yet to recover from the day she returned to her elegant, antiques-and-art-filled home to find her trust fund-baby boyfriend of seven years in bed with another woman.

Over a round of drinks one night, we raised our glasses to toast the fact that we were independent women with disposable income who didn’t need men by our sides to see the world.

•••

Our journey began in Dublin, where we spent our days touring the usual sights—museums, churches and shops—and our nights were spent in the pubs where I often found myself shuttled to the side as men elbowed their way in to chat up the girls. Sometimes I would return to the table from a visit to the restroom to find my chair taken by another potential suitor. There was a time when I would have been in that game, I thought, but it appeared that time had passed.

But then, I’d look at these men—overgrown boys really—with their drunken swagger and imbecilic conversations laced with crude double entendres, and I’d wonder why my friends bothered. Especially knowing the night would end on a sour note when the pub closed and the men realized my friends were just having a bit of fun and were going home alone.

After a couple of days in Dublin, we planned to spend the rest of our stay in Galway, but first was the leg of our trip I had anticipated most. I was leading the charge on a 250-mile roundtrip driving tour south of Galway through the picturesque Dingle Peninsula and back north again to spend the night in Doolin, a tiny seaside town famous for its pubs and the local musicians who gather there to play traditional Irish music.

The day of our journey, we woke up early and went to the hotel dining room for breakfast where I scanned the morning paper over a plate of bacon and eggs. “Listen to this,” I said, as I relayed the lead story. A man convicted of raping a divorced mother of three had been set free on probation, and his victim, Mary Shannon, had gone public to renounce the light sentence. Activists were rallying around her, and a protest march was planned in her hometown of Ennis. We studied the photograph of Mary Shannon, her long brown hair framing a face etched with anger.

“Unbelievable!” I said. “He was found guilty!”

“I guess you can get away with rape in Ireland,” said Shelly.

We finished our breakfast and the girls sipped a round of mimosas in the hotel lobby while I negotiated the terms with the car rental agent, a blustery, red-faced man straight out of central casting whose brogue was so thick, I barely understood a word he said. After his interminable lecture on the car’s operating systems, we took our positions—me behind the wheel, Shelly in the passenger seat with a map on her lap, and Amy and Scottie in the back seat. Off we set.

“Stay left, stay left!” “Watch the curb!” were Shelly’s constant refrains the first hour or so of our drive. Any other time I would have been annoyed, but mastering the art of driving on the left was no easy task and I welcomed her warnings. It couldn’t have been a more beautiful, sunny day, despite the March chill, and we admired the lovely green countryside, the low-slung stone walls and the charming little towns we passed as we headed south. But traversing the narrow, winding roads proved more time consuming than we had imagined, and three hours into our journey we found ourselves in a quandary. Our progress had been slow and time was passing; we began to wonder if we could cover all the ground we had hoped to in one day.

We stopped in the village of Camp, the northern gateway to Dingle Peninsula, and studied the map. It indicated a coastal road that looped around the land mass and a cut-through that dissected it called Conor Pass, at the end of which was the village of Dingle. If we drove the circumference of the peninsula, could we get to Doolin in time to make it to the pubs?

“Well, we’ve made it to Dingle Peninsula. We could just turn around and go back now,” said Shelly.

“The point was not to just come here,” I protested. “I want to actually see it. Maybe we could just drive along the northern route a bit, then turn around and head back.”

As precious minutes ticked by, Shelly and I debated our options and studied the map while Amy and Scottie sat quietly in the back seat. The more laid-back half of our quartet had been content so far to let the two alpha-chicks in the front seat call the shots. But we had reached in impasse.

“We’ve come this far. I think we should at least drive through Conor Pass,” Scottie said.

So we all agreed and proceeded along the northern route of Dingle Peninsula, speeding as fast as the narrow road would allow and climbing dramatically in altitude. Before long we noticed there was not another car in sight, not a house, not a road marker, not a sign of civilization anywhere.

“Look behind us!” Amy shouted, and we all looked back at the sunny, grassy, low-lying plains rimmed by the sea now far below us. It was a splendid sight, but it did not prepare us for what was to come. No sooner did we fix our eyes back on the road ahead that we rounded a sharp curve that revealed a vastly different vista.

Like some sort of eerie, lunar landscape, Conor Pass lay before us: a rollercoaster of massive stone mountains as far as the eyes could see. One after another, they rolled toward the horizon, all gray and rounded and rocky. We wound our way through the mountains, around enormous boulders that looked poised to roll over on us at any moment. Along the way were wide spots in the road where we pulled over to get out of the car and run up and down natural stepping-stones that led toward barren mountaintops. We rubbed our fingertips over thick carpets of fuzzy mosses and teal-colored lichen that grew in nooks and crevices around the rocks. We wet our hands in natural spigots of rushing cold water that splashed out of holes in the mountain, creating small pools and streams.

The wind grew fierce atop Conor Pass, so we pulled out every coat, scarf and cap we could find in the trunk to bundle up, and we ran around in circles like little kids to warm up, snapping pictures in every direction. The bitter cold and bizarre beauty made me feel drunk and giddy, and I was struck by the sensation that we were alone in the universe, plunked down in a place completely otherworldly and wholly our own.

Back in the car, we descended down the road, and the landscape gave way once again to lush green pastures and views of the southern coastline on the horizon. We stopped in the town of Dingle, where we shared a round of pints at Dick Mack’s Pub before starting along the peninsula’s southern route. That was when hunger pangs grabbed hold, reminding us that our breakfast had been so many hours ago.

As we approached the end of Dingle Peninsula, we entered the town of Annascaul and spotted The South Pole Inn. It was a ramshackle, two-story pub with fires burning in the hearth and walls lined with vintage photographs and newspaper clippings chronicling the South Pole expeditions of local explorer Tom Crean. Several photographs depicted the big strapping adventurer dressed in parka and pelts standing on a stark, vast landscape as seemingly unworldly as that which we had just left behind on Conor Pass.

Mindful of the time, we ordered our food to go—four toasted ham and cheese sandwiches and a single pile of fried chips. As we sped down the road, we perched the box of potatoes on the console between the front seats and devoured the warm, mushy triangles of meat and cheese.

The sun was no longer visible in the sky but daylight clung on, and I sped as fast as I could, hoping the light would last until we made the River Shannon, where we had to catch a car ferry.

“Um,” Amy uttered from the backseat. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her nose buried in the ferry schedule. “Yeah,” she said solemnly. “The last ferry is at 7:30 p.m.”

“What?” I cried. “It can’t be! The schedule says there’s one at 8:30 and 9:30, too!” But I was wrong. I had misread the timetable, mistaking the summer schedule for the shorter off-season one. I looked at the dashboard clock while my toasted ham and cheese sandwich tumbled uncomfortably in my stomach.

“It’s 6:30 now.” I said. “There’s no way we’ll make it.”

I was answered by silence.

“We can make it!” Shelly finally said with forced cheer. She studied the map for a few minutes. “Yeah, we can do it.”

If we missed the ferry, it would add ninety minutes to our drive over unfamiliar roads in the dark and would mean missing out on the pubs in Doolin, which closed promptly at midnight. We had no choice but to fly as fast as we could. I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and said a silent prayer: “Please don’t let us die trying.”

Between towns we zoomed past slow-moving vehicles and straddled the middle of the road on straight-aways at a fast clip. Outside Tralee, we came upon a moving roadblock. Despite our haste, we delighted at the sight of it: a man and his two children herding a trio of black-and-white cows down the road to a fresh pasture.

The clock read 6:43.

Our progress was slowed as we passed through the tiny towns along the way—Tralee and Listowel and Tarbert. We navigated our way around the confusing roundabouts. In Listowel we exited on the wrong road, but realized our error and backtracked through the traffic circle and headed the right way.

It was 7:12.

The last glint of light left the sky as we passed though Tarbert and headed down the final stretch to the ferry docks — a long, narrow, winding road with hairpin turns along the way. Everyone was silent and tense with concentration as though we could propel ourselves there by the combined force of our will. The clock read an impossible 7:24. The road was thickly wooded and our high-beams cut a swath through the darkness as I took curve after curve. My arms and shoulders were as tense as steel rods as I gripped the wheel and negotiated the tight turns.

“Maybe they’ll see our lights coming and wait,” I offered hopefully.

As we came around the last curve, the woods gave way, and we spotted the brightly lit station where the ferry waited, idling quietly at the dock. I shouted with joy as I zoomed on board and eased on the brakes, slipping into our space in the orderly row of cars and trucks calmly waiting to cross to the other side.

It was 7:31.

I rolled down the glass as the ticket-taker briskly approached my window, and I started to fumble with my purse to find my pre-purchased ticket.

“May I take your pulse, please?” he said with a wink.

We piled out of the car to stretch our cramped limbs. While the girls ran off to the restroom, I braved the fierce wind to climb up the steps to the viewing deck and watched the lights of the ferry dock fade into the night as we motored toward the north shore. My heart was still racing from the harrowing drive and my nose and fingers were numb with cold, but I relished the few minutes alone. I could barely believe we had made it. It was just a ferry crossing, but it felt like something more—like a test or a challenge, and I had won. Age may be robbing me of whatever grace and beauty I might have once had, I thought as I stood in the middle of the dark river, but I had guts and drive to spare, damn it. And that counted for something; in fact, it counted for a lot. For the first time I had the freedom and capacity to live a life of my own design, and I was just now realizing what an immense gift that was.

The tension that had chased us to the River Shannon had lessened somewhat, but we were still fighting the clock. The pubs closed at midnight and it would take us at least two hours to get to Doolin. Luckily, the roadways were nearly empty, and I straddled the middle line to avoid the low-slung rock walls that lined the streets and threatened to stop us, literally, dead in our tracks.

Driving as fast as I could, we passed through the dairy lands of County Clare in dark silence. But when we entered the last town before our final trek along the isolated back roads to Doolin, our progress was stopped cold at the town’s main crossroads. My intent was to turn right, but if I had, we would have been thrust headlong into an approaching procession of women and children slowly marching toward us carrying lit candles in their hands. Flanked by two women carrying a banner that read, “Stop domestic abuse,” I could just make out the unmistakable figure of a tall thin woman with long brown hair leading the way.

“My God, it’s Mary Shannon,” I said.

Struck by the solemn dignity of the women’s flame-lit faces as they silently approached, I was overcome by a sense of solidarity. I shared their outrage and admired them for claiming their right to be heard. And I identified with their desire for safety. I was suddenly aware that we were a group of women traveling alone in a foreign land, tempting danger as we sped through the night over unfamiliar roads and chatted up strangers over one too many pints. Our concerns were focused on making sure our money held out and cramming in everything we wanted to do before our time was up—not just in Ireland but in our lives back home, too.

We were city girls who lived in sketchy neighborhoods where panhandlers, car break-ins, and unwanted attention were daily occurrences. We patronized convenience stores buttressed with bulletproof glass to withdraw twenties from ATMs so we could go to dive bars where we stayed out too late. Afterward, we walked to our cars alone in the dark, returning to our burglar-barred homes, where we slept soundly in our beds, secure—however falsely—in the notion that we were safe.

“Quick, turn left,” Shelly said. “We’ve got to get around them.”

I followed her commands as she directed me around the women and back on our route north. Soon Mary Shannon and her band of supporters were far behind, along with the fears they embodied—of physical harm, vulnerability, financial instability, loneliness—the fears so many single women suppress everyday without even thinking about it in order to get through the day.

Eventually we began to descend into the tiny coastal town of Doolin. It was not difficult to find the Sea View B&B; there were only three streets in town. When we spotted the little dormered house stuck in the side of a hill, I couldn’t park the car and empty the trunk fast enough. Being the most eager to hit Gus O’Connor’s Pub—happily visible just across the creek not 100 yards away—I was the first one to clamber up the steps of the house and drop the brass knocker on the wooden door.

A post I’d read on a blog back home about a traveler being turned away from the Sea View for arriving too late flickered in the back of mind.

Again I dropped the knocker.

I heard rustling inside and a stomp or two, then the door flung open to reveal a very angry proprietress, wearing a thin floral bathrobe cinched tight to her waist with one hand, her blonde wiry curls bunched wildly in tufts on her head.

“You might have called,” she barked.

I apologized profusely as the others trundled in behind me, heavy with bags and fatigue.

“You’ll be heading to the pubs I guess,” she said.

We dropped our bags in our ruffled, rose-print bedrooms, ran combs through our hair and flew out the door, down the steep steps, over the stone bridge and into Gus O’Connor’s Pub. Finally! The time had come to toast our adventure and hear some Irish tunes.

The tightly packed bar was teeming with people, young and old, who were not just looking for a good time but had clearly found it. A fire burned in a hearth in the corner of the anteroom, and on the walls were scores of photographs of musicians and instruments.

We stepped into the large, main room, lined on one side by a long bar on the left. On the right, the space was filled with small tables and chairs, every one occupied. In the center of the room seated on chairs and benches were five musicians playing guitars, fiddles, flutes, and an accordion. We lingered by the bar with our first round, soaking in the music, before grabbing a booth just as a large group left.

We weren’t there long before we were joined by a revolving cast of young men, all travelers from various parts of the world. There was much talk about an upcoming rugby match they were eager to see the next day. We chatted and laughed, stepped outside to share cigarettes, and drank rounds of Guinness and whiskey. The muscles in my shoulders burned a bit as they slowly began to unfurl, releasing the tension that had gripped them all day. The whiskey was warm and soothing in my belly.

My mind soon wandered from the boys and their brash talk about where they were from and where they were going. I turned my attention to the music and grew fascinated by the deep red accordion as it wheezed and moaned its sad, lovely songs. A young woman smitten with its player had convinced him to let her fondle the instrument between songs. I had a powerful desire to wrap my hands around the mysterious contraption, to finger the small knobs and gently pump its lung as it wheezed. I wanted so badly to join them so I, too, could get a turn to touch the buttons and curious folds. Instead I just watched them from afar as they manipulated the instrument and felt my throat thicken with longing.

When the band was done for the night, I turned back toward my friends. Scottie was deep in quiet conversation with a beautiful, dark-eyed Italian, their heads so close together they nearly touched. Amy giggled as two animated Brits told her an elaborate story that required frantic hand gestures. Shelly, her eyes bright and her lips awash in a swipe of red, was snuggled up to a very tall Irish man with a goofy mustache. So I drained my glass, pulled on my coat and walked back to the Sea View alone in the dark.

•••

SUZANNE VAN ATTEN is a features editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a creative writing instructor, and a travel book author. Her essays have been published in the Gettysburg Review and The Chattahoochee Review, among other outlets. She is working on a collection of essays called Everything Is Temporary.