THIS TIME didn’t me ma and I talk in Irish while we were preparing the meal and me da outside folding the tables and chairs after them poor dear tourists had left. I know You’re an Irish speaker, so I don’t have to translate for You, like I’d have to for me poor dear Dermot. You also know what a terrible indirect language Irish is. Yet wasn’t me ma more direct this time than when we talked about it in English? And didn’t she start the conversation herself?
“Don’t they say that there’s passionate hunger inside of every woman, no matter how prim and proper she might pretend to be?”
“Haven’t I heard that said, too?”
“Them that knows more about it than I do tell me that until a woman is able to satisfy that hunger, the marriage won’t be everything that it should be?”
“Don’t you know that yourself?”
Wasn’t that an awful thing to say, and meself in a mood to be difficult?
“Well,” she says with a toss of her head, “I’m certainly not one of them prim and proper women, am I?”
“I never said you were.”
“ ’Tis wrong they say, for a woman to think that it’s up to her husband.”
Hint, hint.
“Why would it ever be up to him, poor dear man?”
“ ’Tis true.”
Silence.
“Don’t the prim and proper women spend their whole marriage waiting for their husband to be a magician?”
“And some of themselves pretending all along that everything is fine?”
Wasn’t that candid of me now? Am I really a prim and proper woman?
“Well, isn’t there a bit of the prim and proper woman in all of us? Aren ‘t we afraid of what will happen if we abandon ourselves completely? Sure there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“Och, there is not.”
She did say “abandon.” She really did. That’s the key word, isn ‘t it now? To give yourself is one thing; to abandon yourself is something else again. I guess there is a lot of the prim and proper woman in me.
“But aren’t we only half a woman until we overcome that fear?”
Wow, as me poor Dermot would say.
Meself half a woman? And pretending all the time that I’m a full woman. And getting away with it because I’m such a focking faker.
It has to stop. Help me, please.