I couldn't stop laughing as I followed Jack and Sadie's story in Elizabeth McCracken's 'The Irish Wedding' published in the April 2021 issue of The Atlantic. It's really quite a funny little tale, not quite about the cultural differences. It was more of understanding the new family one would be meeting because one's partner or spouse belongs to it.
Meeting the partner’s new family can be rather harrowing, depending on what kind of person you are. For me, it's honestly quite a pain because I'm an introvert and I'm really not interested in having anyone know me better, or get to know anyone else. I don't even care about any possible unintended positive benefits. As far as I'm concerned, there is NONE. Anyway.
Sadie met Jack's rather English family for the first time as they traveled from America to Ireland. It was for the wedding of his middle sister, Fiona. Fiona and her new Dutch husband Piet bought a run-down Currock House near the town of Clonmel. That was to be their marital home, and the venue to host their out-of-town guests, as well as for the reception after the church wedding.
The dog crossed first and they followed, and then climbed through some barbed wire, which caught in Sadie’s hair. She could feel the soggy shoes tugging at her leggings, the waistband of which had fallen below the equator of her bottom. She slid in the mud. At the moment she thought Eloise was purposefully testing or torturing her, but eventually she would learn that this was simply every walk in the country with every English person she would ever meet: mud and injury and a disregard for safety and private property.
Elizabeth McCracken's 12 short stories revolve around domestic life, but not in a patronizing, cloying or cute way. Her writing style is witty and her descriptions come across as very funny. Her observations of human behavior is so on point. I love it. (Reviews here, here, here and here.)
The eponymous story was a bit blah for me. There’s a lot of pain in the protagonist Joanna seeking closure from many open hurt in her life. Her long-term relationship dissipated, she met and married someone else and became a mother; her mother died, then her marriage dissolved, and the last straw was when her father died. She wrapped up her father’s estate to travel to Denmark with her son by another man, in a bid to find her ex-partner Askel who had left without much explanation. (The author really likes Denmark and the Netherlands it seems.) She found him in a fake Viking village. She wanted to give him her father's watch, one that she knew her father would wanted him to have.
Her actual heart found the door behind which her metaphorical heart hid; heart dragged heart from its bed and pummeled it. Years ago she'd wondered what, exactly, constituted love: the state of emergency she felt all ten years of their life together? Not that the building was on fire; to that the ship was about to sink; not that the hurricane was just off shore, pulling at the palm trees: the knowledge that, should the worst happen, she had no plan of escape, not a single safety measure, she was flammable, sinkable, rickety, liable to be scrubbed from the map. That feeling was love, she'd though then, and she though it now, too.
Many of the short stories center around our now-familiar protagonists Jack and Sadie. After a while, I feel like reading about two distant relatives. LOL So they had appeared in 'The Irish Wedding', which is the first story in the book, and they closed the book with the last story is titled 'Nothing, Darling. Only Darling, Darling'. 'The Get-Go' talks about Sadie's mother, and how Sadie brought Jack home to meet her who lived at "a green house on a hill in Swampscott, with its view of the ocean and its cyclone fence". 'Two Sad Clowns' were about them too, telling the story of their youth and how they met in Boston.
Really Jack had renounced puppetry years ago, as a teenager. Tonight he was a mere volunteer who'd carried the puppet's train so that it wouldn't trail in the street. Still, many a man has improved because of mistaken identity. Been ruined too.
She said, "I love puppets." In the bitter cold, her words turned white and lacey and lingered like doilies in the air. That was a form of ventriloquism too.
"You don't," he said. "You fucking hate puppets."
He knew everything about her already, it seemed.
I really like the stories that also aren't about Jack and Sadie. Heheheh. 'It's Not You' is refreshingly written in first person narrative. The sad young protagonist had checked in at The Narcissus Hotel on New Year's Day for a night, in order to nurse a broken heart after breaking up with a man in 1993. She met a radio shrink at said hotel who drank with her, and told her to change her life, get over it. It was indicated that years later, she also became a recognizable voice on air, but still somewhat bitter.
You would recognize my voice, too. People do, in the grocery store, the airport, over the phone when I call to complain about my gas bill. Your voice, they are, are you—?
I have one of those voices, I always say. I don't mind if they recognize me but I'm not going to help them do it.
He kept telling me I had to be kind. Why? Why on earth? When life itself was not.
The last story 'Nothing, Darling. Only Darling, Darling' is sort of a round-up from the first story. After being together for almsot three decades as long-term partners, Jack and Sadie, were now newlyweds on their honeymoon in Holland, first to Amsterdam and then to Rotterdam. By now, Fiona had passed away, and her Dutch husband Piet was back to his home country living in Rotterdam. It wasn’t a happy trip. They married in the wake of a family tragedy, the suicide of Jack's nephew Thomas. They were worried about his twin brother Robin, but he seemed to be coping fine. Then another suicide in the family (Thomas's mother Katie; Jack's sister) seemed to have happened during the honeymoon. And Jack wanted a child, and Sadie wasn’t sure of it. All the emotions in the unspoken. That’s life huh.
Well, he thought, once he’d closed the hasp and slid it home, that, maybe that is anti-Semitic. His phone rang. He assumed it was Sadie, realizing what he’d done: he’d locked his wife in a boat to punish her for being insufficiently interested in Anne Frank. For being insufficiently interested in his feelings. It was a malady of marriage. His malady, he understood. Maybe he could give the boat a kick and send it down the canal, off to the low countries, whatever those were. The phone was ringing. He answered it.
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