Maeve in America Read online

  The boat followed the dolphins and we all took up positions along the back deck, ready to jump at the sound of the horn. Suddenly the water was alive with them, all around us. Everyone was giddy with excitement but I absolutely did not want to jump into that gray water with its big, irregular waves. I was furious at myself for being so scared. So what if this wasn’t my dream? I’d gotten this far doing what I thought I should, hadn’t I? This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, I was on the other side of the world, I was a grown woman in a wet suit, and besides, dolphins were just mammals.

  I instructed myself to jump in with such authority that I did, immediately. I jumped before the boat had stopped or the horn had gone off. My first thought was that the water felt like a thousand stabbing knives; my second thought was, SHARK! I thought I saw a shark under the water: the fin, the flank, the flat eye on the side of the horrific head, taking me in. I was not thinking straight. There were no sharks. I couldn’t get a grip on what was happening, but I knew panicking was not the answer. Not realizing I was underwater this whole time, I tried to calm myself by taking deep breaths, but they quickly turned into large gulps of seawater. I managed to surface, getting my head above water just in time to see the boat disappear and realize I’d jumped too soon.

  A wave tucked me under the quilt of the sea again and I saw through stinging eyes that the creatures I was surrounded by were not sharks, but dolphins. They were standing up casually, smiling at me. Apart from the freezing cold and the intense fear, here were two things I hadn’t anticipated. That the dolphins would be vertical under the water, and that they would laugh as they tried to kill me.

  A standing dolphin leveled itself and swam toward me, fast. It swirled under my legs and I felt its firm fish body. Underwater, nobody hears you scream. Then they all rushed at me, brushing off my sides and turning me over, swishing past my hands as I tried to paddle. I kicked and spluttered and tried to remember how to swim. I totally could not breathe. I remember thinking how unfair it was that these dolphins were going to drown me, but everyone would think it was an accident. People would say, “What a beautiful way to go, she left this Earth guided by the angels of the ocean.” They may even etch a couple of dolphins on my gravestone, what horror!

  In what I assumed to be my final moments, there was no Super 8 reel of beautiful moments flickering through my mind. I didn’t remember my dad going around the table and covering our small heads with his big hands and kissing us on the forehead, or my cat Edie’s slow blinks, or a brilliant boyfriend reading out loud to me one warm city morning. I simply thought again and again, These psycho fish are going to drown me and get away with it.

  At the last possible second, I remembered that, back at the presentation, Kate had told us that if we got into trouble to put one fist straight up in the air. “Just do the Black Power salute, and the boat will come and pick you up.” As the dolphins continued to ram me and giggle, I used one arm to hold up the other, and struggled between waves to keep it up. I hoped that, while I couldn’t see them, surely someone on the boat would see me. Those morons all have binoculars, I thought, fully blaming these strangers for my own stupidity, for my own failure to be the master of my own destiny, the captain of my own ship.

  Thankfully, those sweet morons did spot me, and I heard the boat approaching. The dolphins, predictably, fled the scene. That’s when Kate hauled me onto the boat and asked me if I was pregnant. After she’d sluiced the vomit off the deck I lay there wrapped in a towel, face turned away from the happy adventurers who were paddling close to the boat and actively trying to lure the dolphins into any form of physical contact. I stayed there, lying on the deck and shivering, repeatedly counting the row of brightly colored life vests stacked under the seat, as we sailed back to Rotorua.

  With the clarity lent to me by a recently emptied stomach and a blanked-out, restarted brain, I understood that I had to figure out what I wanted to do before I drowned doing something I thought I should do. Back on dry land, I got shakily onto the waiting minibus. My eyes were burning from the salt water, my hair was matted, and, understandably, I smelled terrible. Despite this, I sat one seat closer to the Americans. The wife peered over the seat through her huge bifocal glasses and asked, “How was your dolphin experience, little one?”

  “Great, thanks!” I said, and started to cry.

  Rent the Runway

  THE MOST PERFECT FILM in the world is called Now, Voyager and I hope for your sake that you’ve seen it. It’s a Bette Davis film from 1942 about a frumpy spinster who has a nervous breakdown, then gets therapy, loses weight, and plucks her eyebrows, thereby transforming herself into an elegant, independent woman. Bette Davis leaves the sanatorium and goes on a Caribbean cruise, and that is how she meets a charming architect, played by Davis’s greatest leading man, Paul Henreid, a married man who is traveling alone.

  In a fantastically revealing scene, Bette Davis has borrowed her glamorous cousin’s wardrobe for the cruise, and shows up to meet Paul Henreid in the cocktail lounge of the ship. She looks incredible in a gorgeous white gown and an evening cape decorated with sparkling beaded butterflies. Paul Henreid is knocked out, as he should be. They sit and he sees a little note pinned to her back—it’s a reminder from Bette Davis’s cousin about just how and where to wear the cape. He laughs a little, and says something sweet about how birds can borrow feathers and still be beautiful. Instead of laughing along with him, poor old Bette Davis is humiliated. She spirals into an irretrievable funk and runs off to her cabin, tearfully calling out, “This should pigeonhole me for you, all right. They don’t suit me at all. In fact, they’re perfectly ridiculous. You’re quite right someone is playing a joke on me, although it’s far funnier than you realize!”

  Nobody was actually playing a joke on her. It just felt that way when her carefully constructed and still-brittle persona took a small knock and completely crumbled. I think about this scene occasionally, when I can feel myself changing but am not quite there yet. It’s a painful time, straining to reach a version of myself I’ve dreamed up, with only the old version of me to help get there, the one who is determined not to be left behind. And, of course, the scene shows how deceptive appearances can be. I was reminded of Now, Voyager, of a woman unsure of herself on the inside but looking absolutely fine on the outside, the last time I wore a borrowed gown. You see, I went to a ball. I did, you know! And I too was a beautiful bird wearing someone else’s feathers. The ball was a fund-raiser for the Irish Arts Center, a sweet and important little cultural center way over on Eleventh Avenue in Manhattan, with a black-box theater space full of seats rescued from a movie theater in the 1980s. It looks like a narrow three-story house and has a makeshift charm about it. I often perform in the theater space downstairs while upstairs people learn to speak Gaelic and play the fiddle. I adore it there, but also look forward to the fancy new building they are raising funds for.

  As I totted up my expenses in preparation for the ball, I realized I should probably be fund-raising for my own renovation, because my funds were the lowest they’d been since I worked in a skateboard shop and gotten paid in T-shirts. I’m bad with money, but money is worse with me. Some days it pours in on top of me and I have to fling it away to be able to breathe. Other days I look for it everywhere and there is none to be found. I’m embarrassed about my relationship with money, and I often read violent articles online with headlines like “Take control of your $$$ now, ya dumb bitch!” But I can never seem to do what they tell me. My actual fortune keeps changing; as an adult I’ve been so rich I bought a car for cash and never used it, and I’ve been so broke I’ve brought my coins to a check-cashing place on Church Avenue and tried to convince the woman working there to give me a full dollar instead of eighty-eight cents. Money feels like a tide that comes in and out, controlled by a moon I can’t reach. One time I said that to a bank adviser in a Chase branch in East Harlem, and he looked at me like I was crazy, but then he canceled the fee I’d incurre
d for being overdrawn, so I think we all know who won that round.

  The ball rolled around during a month when the tide of money was very far out, and I could not afford to buy a dress. If I gathered all the cockles and mussels left clinging to the shoreline, I could just about afford to rent a dress. There is this wonderful place called Rent the Runway, where, Cinderella-like, I could borrow a dress for a fee, and unlike poor Cinderella, I didn’t have to give it back at midnight. I had the whole next day to lounge around in it too.

  I felt totally fine about renting a dress, although I promised myself I wouldn’t tell anyone I had done so. I resolved to just say thank you if anybody complimented me, as opposed to explaining in too much detail just why they were wrong to do so. In the past, I’ve ruined many a generous utterance by breaking it down and explaining where the lie is. “Oh, this old sweater? Please. I got it from a thrift store and I’m quite sure this here is a bullet hole, it smelled like blood and sulfur when I bought it, believe me, but it was only seven dollars!” Not this time.

  This time, I would be a successful adult who happened to choose this dress from a selection of many that hung in her walk-in wardrobe in a separate room from her bedroom that definitely wasn’t a fifty-minute subway ride to Manhattan and definitely didn’t have a salmon-colored sink in it that was left over from when her apartment was a dentist’s office. I would wear the dress with a casual air, maybe even a nonchalance that suggested to onlookers I was a little bit tired of going to balls all the time, but compassionate enough to support the cause.

  As is the anxious person’s way, I did a lot of research online before deciding on Rent the Runway. I was charmed by their website, particularly the review section, where customers give a short biography at the top, listing their size, shape, height, and age, as well as other outfits they’ve rented and how they felt about them. I love these reviews, and the fact that they are often accompanied by photos that were taken on the night, or right before they headed out for the evening, full-length candid shots they snapped in their bedroom mirrors. My favorites are action shots—seeing the girl at her friend’s wedding with her date’s arm slung around her shoulders, or on a dance floor screaming along to the track being played, surrounded by her girlfriends, who all share that wild look of new mothers on the loose.

  Hanging out on the review pages of Rent the Runway is like being part of the biggest and chattiest changing room in the world. I liked the sisterly tone and the safety that comes in an all-femme place online. I spent some time investigating a black sequined romper from the Robert Rodriguez collection. A romper is a top and shorts all together in one piece, like a baby would wear, except black and covered in sequins. One reviewer stated, I wore this outfit to the Beyoncé concert in LA at the Staples Center. All eyes were on me. I doubt that the concertgoers turned their backs on Beyoncé—whom they had bought tickets to see, and who is, after all, Beyoncé—craning to better gaze upon this vision swaying in the audience behind them, resplendent in her temporary sequins. That said, the reviews were unanimously positive, despite repeated mentions of the garment’s tendency to “ride up” and warnings not to dance with your arms above your head, as that would cause a wedgie. The idea of wearing a pre-worn and pre-wedged romper did not appeal to me. Besides, I knew that nobody, not even a princess who was also a baby, could get away with wearing a romper to a ball.

  I paid a visit to the brick-and-mortar Rent the Runway store, located in the middle of the Meatpacking District, a concrete space full of gowns you can try on and feel against your skin and lift your arms and inspect your butt in. From the outside, the store looks like an upscale boutique, with designer gowns in the window and elegant employees in black wafting around inside. It’s only when you’re inside the store and wandering among those dresses, lifting them up and pulling them out, that you notice that they are all a little big or slightly too worn or just a tiny bit used-looking, and that’s when the entire place suddenly feels like the dress-up box at a theater workshop.

  I was overwhelmed by choices, and hurriedly pulled out a few cocktail dresses to try on. They were mostly black, mostly shaped like the dresses a doll would wear in the 1950s, the type of dress that’s absolutely perfect to wear to your grandson’s bar mitzvah. I’m not used to dressing up; my professional life doesn’t allow it. Writers wear grubby, misshapen outfits that eventually mold to their hunched-over bodies, and stand-up comedians are the same, except with an added parka jacket, because they are forced to leave their house for shows. There in the store, surrounded by pretty dresses, that bold woman in my head who envisioned herself in a romper had fled, leaving me floundering. I timidly chose the plainest dresses, the ones least likely to trip me up, until a swan of a girl with blond hair extensions on her little head and a measuring tape around her slender neck came gliding across the floor to my hapless self, offering assistance. I nodded at the creature, in wonder and agreement.

  Ten minutes later, I found myself in front of a trio of mirrors, spinning around and clapping, actually clapping my hands together, as half a dozen women in various states of undress collectively cooed at how stunning I was. The swan had zipped me into a strapless fishtail dress, oyster-colored; a dress that sounds like hell, but looked like heaven. Honestly, I couldn’t get over myself. Was it really me? Could it be true that I was this elegant Grecian statue, animated now through some sartorial spell with the sole purpose of devastating men and inspiring women? I was light-headed at the prospect of entering the world in this powerful form. Or perhaps I was just dizzy from all the twirling.

  I floated on up to the cash register to secure my future happiness. A different swan, older and sophisticated, smiled at me as she secured the dress in its special case. I blushed in anticipation of it all, the way my butt looked in the dress, the snipped-in waist highlighting my abstention from carbohydrates for the past six weeks, and the thrill of stepping into an actual ball looking like a sexy goddamn Cinderella. Then the magic stopped. The dress cost $320. Not to buy, you understand. Three hundred and twenty dollars to rent for a couple of days, after which these swan fairy godmothers would disappear, forsaking me as I turned back into a scullery maid.

  The rental cost was determined by the retail price and this dress was a Vera Wang number, expensive and unforgettable. I’d heard the name before, but until that moment of unrequited longing, until that impossible dream of a dress had her exquisite fingers around my throat, I’d failed to understand its meaning. I’d been Wanged. I was willing to be Wanged, even wishing to be Wanged, but I just couldn’t do it. I don’t mean that I couldn’t bring myself to pay that much money for a one-night stand with a dress. I mean I couldn’t pay for it. I tried all of my credit cards and they were rejected one by one. I frantically scanned my phone for Venmo accounts and online bank statements, but that did me no good, for any waves of money were long gone and there I was, stranded on the rocky shore. The women waiting to pay for their dresses in the line that formed behind me were quiet and respectful throughout the process, unusual in a city of hurry-uppers, but they had seen me in the dress. They understood. I stepped aside, pitifully putting my cards back into my wallet as the older swan motioned to the younger one to unpack the dress, since, after all, she was no longer going to the ball.

  I was going, though, I had committed to it. I felt like throwing a fit, the way Bette Davis did when her new persona was exposed as a fraud. I wanted to run to my cabin, and scream at the other customers about how this was all a joke played on me, a thirty-three-year-old woman who looks like she’s made it, but can’t even afford a rented dress! Oh, who did I think I was? Sure, I had a two-bedroom apartment in a fancy part of town, but every month was a race to pay for it. Yes, I’d left a small town in a small country and come to the big city to see my name in lights, but here I was, shielding my eyes from those very lights! “That should pigeonhole me, all right,” I said, Bette Davis–style.

  I didn’t scream at anyone, of course; I simply stood
by the counter uselessly until a lesser bird, one of those teenage ones with gawky plumage who you can’t quite believe will ever become a swan, led me back to the fitting rooms. There, the light seemed different than before. Harsher, somehow, as were the faces of the other people in the changing room, now that I wasn’t wearing my oyster-colored super-shell. With a heavy heart I hauled on some of my initial options, the black ones, and settled on a peplum affair with a gold damask design on the bodice. A mourning dress in transition, with a thigh-high slit. Not a bad look—I would go to the ball as a widow trying to get back in the game. Seeing myself in the mirror, stripped of my first choice, I felt a new sensation, a phantom pain, the sort of pain an amputee feels in a limb no longer there. It was just an aftershock of being Wanged, I told myself; it would fade with time. Eyes cast down, I paid up, and left.

  The ball was held on the Upper West Side, in a fancy hotel of the old-school variety. Nothing hip about it; instead they had heavy wool carpets and comfortably worn-down banquet halls, a reliably moneyed aesthetic. I’d gotten my makeup done at a Sephora in downtown Brooklyn, by a woman with hot little hands and a talent for cat’s eyeliner. “Even though you got those heavy lids, I can make ’em look wide open, surprised.” I blinked at her appreciatively, using all my energy to lift those deadweight lids of mine. I did my hair myself, straightening the curls, then making them into largely successful waves held in place by enough hair spray to hold a litter of kittens as still as statues for a day. Ideally I would have taken a car to the hotel, one of those low, purring cars driven by a rapper who’s more on the business side now. There was no such opportunity—my carriage was the Q train to the C train, at rush hour, so I wore my hoody and rolled my dress up in its plastic shroud, slipping it into my backpack with my shoes. I looked like one of those doll heads that hairdressers practice on, balanced atop a body dressed for a nap.