Maeve in America Page 5
A friend of mine works as a scriptwriter and told me that the name Maeve is popping up more and more in the indie spec scripts she comes across in L.A. She predicts that my name will become a name that hipster parents call their children “in the next five to seven years.” She explained to me that it can be a boy’s name too, which I hadn’t known. Now I look forward to 2025, to hearing brand-new Maeves of any and no gender, with honeyed limbs and minimal inbuilt guilt, being urged to eat their chia puddings in the utilitarian café of whatever shared workspace I find myself in.
Another unexpected place the name Maeve appears is in the equally fictional universe that is Anthropologie. “Anthropology” is the study of humans, past and present, drawing on and building upon knowledge from the social and biological sciences as well as the humanities and physical sciences to attempt to understand the full complexity of humanity. “Anthropologie” is a beautiful store that sells a lifestyle idea to those humans it has studied and deemed wealthy and aspirational enough to buy it. They sell clothes and home décor and accessories for women. Women who love, love, love to travel but can’t because their job keeps them pinned to Manhattan. Women who adore food but don’t eat much, women with a powerful career but a carefree sensibility, rich women who regularly say that money is not the most important thing in the world.
This idea of a life that they peddle so well is one I detest and desire in equal parts. I am simultaneously furious and full of longing as I walk around the Anthropologie store in Chelsea Market, waiting to go upstairs to the Google offices for my free lunch with a friend who works there. My eye is drawn to silk blouses in tribal prints. It’s a good girl’s blouse; a good girl with a secret tattoo, but don’t worry—it’s just a tattoo of a tiny owl!
I finger a chambray dress that cinches in at the waist and falls just right, a dress fit for the heroine of a romantic comedy. She could wear it in that scene at the farmers’ market when she drops a little pumpkin on the hero’s foot—what a sexy klutz! This $228 skirt covered with miniature French bulldogs surely belongs to me, a true individual who could dreamily lose a whole afternoon in a secondhand bookstore. I mean, come on, my name is written all over these clothes! It is, you know. My name is actually written on the label. The clothes that beguile me and torment me with how close to the aspirational bone they are come from, without exception, the Anthropologie “Maeve” line.
With the amount of market research and chilling data that a gigantic company no doubt compiled before naming their quirkiest clothes Maeve, I have come to accept that my name is synonymous with “kooky.” Do I act accordingly? Why don’t you tell me? Right after I place a raspberry on each fingertip and giggle down from my unicycle into a Super 8 camera that’s permanently trained on me. Not true, but to be fair, I am a comedy writer, and I do love listening to radio documentaries while I walk through the snowy woods in my duffel coat and mittens, so perhaps I was infected with the kooky virus the moment my parents named me. Had I been named Kelly, would I be an accountant with a long bob who does triathlons for fun? If my name were Cindy, would I be a big-hearted waitress with a rescue pit bull and a motorcycle? I just don’t know.
I have not met enough of us to confirm my hypothesis that all Maeves are kooky. Strangely, there is a nine-year-old Maeve living in the apartment over mine, and she seems, if not kooky, then downright naughty. I thought it unlikely in a place like New York that my name twin would be one floor above me, but that is what has happened. It’s not a sweet little coincidence; rather, it feels like a small punishment for an unknown transgression against the Universe. It’s happening right now; upstairs Maeve has upset her sister and is being yelled at by their mother. “Maeve! Why do you have to always do that?” At this point in my life, the disembodied voice of a critical mother is unhelpful. I work from home. Working from home can mean many things. Lengthy studies of Action Bronson videos, hours spent gazing at the patterns on the floor, counting down the hours to my next snack. It also means being alone most of the time, trying to maintain some belief that I’m doing a normal thing and am not a madwoman who is alone most of the time. That delicate equilibrium is often rocked by sudden screams of, “Maeve—what have you done now? Say sorry to everyone!”
There are a couple of well-known, now-dead Maeves for me to look up to. Maeve Binchy is probably the most famous Maeve in the world. She wrote best-selling, heartfelt books like Circle of Friends, complete with romance and family and great dialogue that never felt unnatural to read. I felt a sadness when she died because she seemed wise and kind and determined to have fun, and her books all had happy endings. Maeve Brennan grew up in Dublin and ended up in New York, writing short, brilliant observational pieces for The New Yorker as well as short stories and novels. The map of New York that she drew out of moments that were otherwise unseen, a map of sparkles and horrors in the form of her “Long-Winded Lady” column, is a friend and a guide to me now.
It would be remiss of me not to curtsy as I mention Queen Maeve, the “Warrior Queen” of the West of Ireland, said to have existed sometime between 50 BCE and 50 CE, if in fact she did exist. It’s not known if she was even a real person to begin with, or just a complete myth. Here is what we know for sure about that real person, or myth, from the Internet. Queen Maeve was queen of the West of Ireland and she had a Sheryl Sandberg attitude about gender equality and the pay gap. She leaned all the way in. Under the Brehon laws of ancient Ireland women had equality with men: they had the power to raise their own armies, hold their own property, participate in the court system as lawyers and judges, as well as pick their own partners. Marriage was a contract, not a sacrament, and so could last as long or as short as the couple wished. So you could just try it out for the day, and if it was too annoying, you could call it a day, a daylong marriage, with no hard feelings.
Queen Maeve had five husbands over the course of her life, and one of them was a real troublemaker. He was rich, too, and she got mad, she wanted to be at least as rich as him, to get her “man-share.” When she found out he had one more bull than she had she started a war to get her own bull. She conducted a cattle raid and she got her bull! She snatched that bull. Total hero. She had many children, including seven sons, all of whom she named Maine. George Foreman, the former heavyweight champion of the world, who named all five of his sons George Edward Foreman, said it was so that they’d have something in common. Queen Maeve did it because a Druid predicted her son Maine would kill one of her enemies, a creep called Conchobar. At the time Maeve didn’t have any sons called Maine, so just to be sure she went on to have five and named them all Maine. Eventually, one of the Maines killed Conchobar, which goes to show us two things. The first is that Druids are more useful than we give them credit for, and the second is that four out of five Maines will disappoint their mother. I could do much worse than have my life goals informed by Queen Maeve. I don’t mean “learn to speak Spanish and find that perfect risotto rice.” I mean she was a staunch character, a feminist who had a lot of sex with young warriors and was buried standing up, facing her enemies.
I love my name now, ever since I changed it to Charise. No, I haven’t changed my name to Charise, although that was my dream name as a child, and if I really was brave, if I truly was Maeve the Brave, I probably would change it. Perhaps if I get married I’ll change my name, but just my first name. I’ll take my husband’s first name. Particularly if his name somehow turns out to be Charise. For now, I’m stuck with Maeve, and Maeve is stuck with me. We’ve stayed together through it all, the missed connections, the embarrassing mix-ups, and the sweet little compliments from strangers that come glinting into our day from time to time, making us feel special for a minute, saying, “Ooooh, pretty name!”
Aliens of Extraordinary Ability
IN JANUARY of 2014, a girl who had left from Cobh in Ireland (formerly known as Queenstown) journeyed across the Atlantic, and skipped rosy-cheeked off an airplane at John F. Kennedy Airport to start her new life. Th
at was me, compensating for my indoor ghost face with too much blush in a shade aspirationally entitled “orgasm.” In January of 1892, a girl who had left from Queenstown (now known as Cobh) skipped rosy-cheeked off a boat at Ellis Island to start her new life. That was Annie Moore, flushed with embarrassment at the unexpected fuss being made over her by the officials on the island. She was the first immigrant through the new processing center that opened its doors on January 1 of that year.
I know she was rosy-cheeked, because The New York Times said so, back in the day. I’m only guessing as to the reason. Maybe she wasn’t mortified by the attention and the redness was simply caused by the icy wind whipping through the harbor. Maybe she just lit up with the anticipation of seeing her parents for the first time in years and the relief of no longer being her little brothers’ sole guardian, as she had been on their voyage. I have no idea. I grew up knowing all about the people who left my hometown, but nothing about what happened next.
I come from Cobh, an island in the mouth of Cork Harbor, the departure point for more than two million Irish people between 1845 and 1945, the last place Titanic stopped before it—well, I don’t want to ruin the movie. While other children went to amusement parks, our school trips were to replicas of coffin ships, so named because of the high death rate as they transported people to America during the Irish famine. My classmates and I filed into the wooden bowels of a ship to listen to audio of people groaning, and look at wax figures leaning over buckets. So, you see, this whole leaving thing, it’s in me.
I first came to America on a P-3 visa, an “Artist or Entertainer Coming to Be Part of a Culturally Unique Program.” The Culturally Unique Program I was invited to was the Kansas City Irish Fest. Kansas City is exactly bang in the middle of America and it’s not even in Kansas, it’s in Missouri. That’s one of my go-to facts to tell guys I’m trying to impress. It never works. Often, they already know. More often, they don’t find it interesting and are confused as to why I told them.
The festival was a mishmash of Americana and Irishness and Irish-Americanness. With signs on the walls stating guns were not allowed inside the festival grounds, haggis from Scotland for sale at the food trucks, and Appalachian bands fiddling wildly on the big stage, I couldn’t fully get a grip on where I fit in. I woke up, jet-lagged, to a thunderous sound coming from the hotel corridors. Unclear about what I was hearing, I blearily poked my head out and watched, amazed, as young American girls in elaborate dresses and huge wigs pounded the carpet in socked feet, practicing for their Irish dance performances later in the day.
The sun beat down outside, and the water in the fountains in the square was dyed green. You know, like the green water that runs throughout Ireland. Extraordinarily friendly residents, volunteering their time at this huge event, told me about their visits back to Ireland, and explained how Irish they were, and how important this festival was to them and their children. These children, red-haired and grinning, were also Irish? Yes, just one more generation removed, making it five generations ago that the family moved there from Leitrim, a stony little county in the Irish midwest with a population that is currently less than a fifth of what it was before the famine, a place that, today, has more sheep than people.
Annie Moore was on my mind during my first few days in the U.S. Her story was told to me by the genealogist Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak. The reason she has two last names is that she took her husband’s name. He too was a Smolenyak, but no relation. Anyway, Megan had figured out a key mystery in the Annie Moore story. For almost fifty years, another Annie Moore was thought to be our girl Annie, the first immigrant through Ellis Island. This other Annie Moore had actually been born in Indiana, and moved to Texas, where she married a man descended from the Irish patriot/heartthrob Daniel O’Connell, the man who had spearheaded Catholic emancipation back in colonized Ireland and was very handsome, in a James Gandolfini kind of way.
That Annie Moore and her star-dusted husband owned a hotel in New Mexico and all was well, until he died and a few years later, on a trip back to Texas, Annie was hit by a streetcar and died too. It was that Annie Moore’s story that caught on, probably because it’s such a classic American tale, full of dreams and going west and social mobility. She was held up as a brave little immigrant, who worked hard, snatched herself a good life, and died in an appropriately dramatic fashion. Her descendants were honored in a ceremony at Ellis Island before Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak discovered that she was, in fact, the wrong Annie.
The right Annie, the seventeen-year-old who left from Cobh, never went west. She lived her whole life in America just a couple of miles away from Ellis Island, on the Lower East Side. The tenement home she arrived to on her first trip, her entire family sharing a couple of rooms in a noisy, overcrowded building, was the complete opposite of what I experienced, alone in my oversized hotel bed ordering room service, with plump white pillows and soft woolen blankets to cozy up in as the air-conditioning chilled the huge room around me.
In Kansas City, surrounded by Irish-Americans, I felt like I had met them before, but where? Because of my hometown’s history of emigration, every summer the promenade and cafés would fill up with American tourists, arriving by liner into the harbor or by the busload from Cork city. They were usually elderly, and as children we regarded them with a fond sort of mockery. Occasionally they would ask for photos with us, particularly of my freckled friends. They bought soda bread and Aran sweaters, anything that was for sale, really. We joked that you could sell them stones, if you convinced them that the stones were Irish enough. Some American tourists would break away from their guided tours and go driving around the island. They sometimes came knocking on our door, asking to look inside the house, thinking it was a replica of where their ancestors may have lived. Perhaps they were right: we lived in a pretty, old farmhouse, with a half door wreathed in honeysuckle, that would have looked the same one hundred years before. My mother was polite to them, but didn’t usually let them in, saying to us at dinner that “those poor Yanks were demented.”
The thought that, generations later, their descendants might return to the harbor town they had departed from would surely have amazed Annie and the millions who left with her. People only ever left, and perhaps it was a shadow of that amazement that darkened our feelings toward these perfectly lovely Americans. As a child I certainly couldn’t fathom why they would bother to visit a boring seaside town in a tiny nation, sitting on hot buses for hours as they wound their way around the countryside, taking photos of some plain old fields full of cows. America was so cool! Their ancestors had left Ireland for a reason, and now they were reaping the rewards. I didn’t know what they thought they were missing. In America, they had Michael Jackson and pizza and money, so much money! Not like Ireland, where the only music we made sounded like sad mermaids singing and I had to share a pork chop with my sister and nobody had any money.
As an adult, when I witnessed this little city in the middle of America drop everything for two days and piece together a version of an Ireland that doesn’t exist anymore, I suddenly understood the impulse. I felt sorry then for not being kinder to the visiting Americans, for sighing on the inside when someone told me in a loud American accent they were Irish too. In Kansas City, I began to empathize with those “poor demented Yanks” a lot more. Whoever it was of theirs that left Ireland all those years ago took with them a snapshot of the country, its people, and its culture. The details on that picture faded throughout the years, and it could never update itself to show the changes in the country it portrayed. That picture’s opaque story was all they had to go on, except perhaps some Aran sweaters and soda bread handed to them by bemused Irish people a century on down the road.
The place where their ancestors landed was at best a blank slate; at worst, an active genocide site. In their new country, America, they did not have a culture stretching back hundreds of years. There was no set of memories to explain who they were and how they got to be tha
t way; no music, no stories, no jokes, except those that came with them across the Atlantic. Of course they clung to the trappings of a culture they’d left behind, and who am I to begrudge them a bit of corned beef, a stick of salty Irish butter? That’s probably just the kind of thing Annie would have felt homesick for. Family lore says her coffin was too wide to fit down the narrow stairs of her tenement house, and had to be hoisted out the window.
It’s easy not to think about these questions of Irishness and Irish-Americanness, until something big comes along that forces you to. The first year I lived here, I covered the Saint Patrick’s Day parade for The Irish Times. Not the big parade, not the one where thousands march and millions watch, the biggest annual parade in the city and the only one that uniformed firefighters and police are allowed to participate in. Not the one that banned gay people from marching under their own banner up until 2015. Not the Fifth Avenue parade, the one that shuts midtown down and marches past visiting dignitaries who sit in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, led by ranks of white men in black suits and sashes.
Instead I went to Queens, to see about their Saint Patrick’s Day parade. A couple of weeks before the event I went to see how preparations were going, and found myself in a small kitchen two blocks away from the last stop on the Q train—it smelled like caramel and clean laundry. I sat chatting with the owner, Tom Moulton, a full-time pediatric hematologist oncologist and part-time baker. He was making soda bread, scones, ginger snaps, and oatmeal cookies. That old soda bread again, I thought, what would we do without it? Everything he made was for a bake sale to raise funds for St. Pat’s for All—a parade founded by Tom’s husband, Brendan Fay, then in its fifteenth year. The title explains it: it’s a parade for everyone, for anyone who wants to join in.