Sharp sunlight is reflected
and bounced off the deeply mottled turquoise of the harbor at Marbella - Puerto
Banus - where the jet-setting beautiful people yacht-surf. Even I look like a
beautiful person squinting happily into the camera, my frizzy hair backlit into
a rusty glow.
“You look Irish,” my
Mediterranean daughter says, and needlessly adds. “It doesn’t look at all like
you.” I smile and smooth down the plastic holding the ancient photos in place.
I run through my Irish ancestors, the Fitzpatricks and the Fitzgeralds, until I
bore even myself. No one has ever met any of them, any of their descendents.
There’s just me now, and my Iberian daughters prefer the ounce of Italian blood
I claim.
“The Irish are drunks,” says
my daughter’s boyfriend. I shoot him a look that he doesn’t understand, so I
say:
“Yah, an thass only ta putap
wittallaya that aren’t,” I say in a brogue taken from movies about Boston. The
boyfriend looks up then, his dark eyebrows raised in confusion. The girlfriend
shakes her head, rolls her eyes.
“What were you doing in Puerto
Banus, anyway?” asks my proletariat daughter.
“A friend lent us a place his
parents left him,” I say. “They were movie stars back in the forties. The apartment
was small and ugly, though, so we spent every day in Malaga. We drove back and
forth by the harbor, and one day I noticed a wooden sailboat with blue sail
covers. We rode in to have a look and stayed all afternoon.”
I smile at the memory of those
beautiful, outrageously expensive ships - the yachts and schooners and transatlantic
cruisers - and I smile at the dirt poor couple strutting expansively under the
sharp October sun. They looked a lot like my Mediterranean daughter and her
boyfriend.
“I wonder why I never thought to go to
Ireland,” I say.
The daughter and the boyfriend
look at each other, then get up and leave.
“Fine,” I say. “Erin go
bragh.”
333 words for , including RUSTY 3a : of the color rust ; b : dulled in color or appearance by age and use