Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

At the restaurant he put his phone facedown on the table, so I did the same, as if for me, too, this represented a professional sacrifice.

People who’d gone to Oxford would tell you so even when it wasn’t the question.

In Ireland, I said, you didn’t “date.” You hooked up, and after a while you came to an understanding.

“You’ve ‘never been’ to London.” “No.” “Ever?” “Never,” I said, pausing long enough to satisfy him that I’d tried to change this fact about my personal history upon his second query and was very sorry I’d failed. “Ava,” he said, “that’s incredible.” “Why?” “It’s such a short flight from Dublin.” I was disappointed in me, too. He’d never been to Ireland, but it would have been redundant to tell him it was also a short flight that way.

I’d been sad in Dublin, decided it was Dublin’s fault, and thought Hong Kong would help.

My TEFL school was in a pastel-towered commercial district. They only hired white people but made sure not to put that in writing. Like sharks’ teeth, teachers dropped out and were replaced. Most were backpackers who left once they’d saved enough to find themselves in Thailand. I had no idea who I was, but doubted the Thais would know either.

Because I lacked warmth, I was mainly assigned grammar classes, where children not liking you was a positive performance indicator. I found this an invigorating re...

For Brits, class was like humility: you only had it as long as you denied it.

There were, as a rule, three sorts of man in TST and LKF: tech, corporate, rugby wolfpack.

Madison’s also-ran touched my arm. I flinched, and he asked if I liked girls. I wanted to say: my chief sexual preference is that I don’t like you.

I’d read that the art critic John Ruskin had been disgusted by an unspecified aspect of his wife’s body on their wedding night, which made me realize I’d always had that exact fear about anyone seeing me naked.

You could go manless entirely, and I saw a great deal of elegance in that approach, but enough people felt otherwise that I thought it best to have one. You had to pretend to feel sad if you’d been single too long. I hated doing that because there were other things I was actually sad about.

never knew what to do when someone had obviously asked me a question to include me in the conversation. How much could I say in response before I was abusing their generosity?

Victoria had large teeth. They made it difficult for her to smile without scaring people, which was why Victoria smiled a lot.

The men around me talked about their schools. As an adult with a job, I did not find the topic altogether piquant—but British men were resourceful, and found school not only interesting, but the most interesting thing they’d ever done.

When we’d finished eating, Julian said: “I remember the first time I saw you. You were walking so carefully in your heels. I was wondering what this shy person was doing having so much hair.”

A few days into January, work started again. Madison from Texas greeted me by launching into a description of her new-year new-me fitness regimen. “I’m going to be me, but worse,” I said.

The week after Julian’s birthday, one of his Oxford friends threw a soirée at their split-level open-plan eco-friendly flat. The more compound adjectives describing an apartment, the higher the rent.

Some mornings I didn’t leave the bed because then I’d have to brush my teeth, followed by a series of actions that amounted to living my life as the person I was.

hated wielding authority. The kids could tell that, and responded poorly whenever I tried.

In Russia, Edith had said, you could get Putin’s face on anything. Vodka, bread, you name it. In Hong Kong, the same was true of Hello Kitty. This was, Edith speculated, in part because Hello Kitty came from Japan and so betokened resistance to mainland China. A vending machine in her apartment lobby stocked Hello Kitty toy pianos and candy dispensers. There were also Hello Kitty tampons, though she was less certain what they stood for.

Edith was calm about things she couldn’t change. Her firm was full of horrible men and she had to be nice to them. You did in every job, and at least hers paid well.

Mam told me Dublin was hot for April. “Next the Arctic will melt,” she said. “And we’ll be living in bunkers.” I said I hoped there’d be intermediary stages.

I enjoyed conversations where I wasn’t attempting to persuade anyone, where I just said precisely what I thought. I got tired of making myself acceptable.

Edith’s present to me was a printed scarf by an LA-based eco-feminist collective. I was skeptical of its claimed carbon neutrality when it had been shipped from California to Hong Kong, but it was soft against my neck—and it was wrapped, which suggested she’d known it was my birthday.

The best wedges of words were the ones my eight-year-olds wrote: I like her face. With her I am happy. I wished I’d never learned more advanced grammar and could only make sentences like that. It would give me an excuse to say them aloud.

I wondered which was better: a first date after three months of knowing someone, or moving into their apartment after three but still being “friends” with them half a year later. Neither seemed wildly successful, but I was too happy about Edith to mind.

Through the walls I heard the other teachers giving stern instructions, and wondered if my problem was that I didn’t want to teach like they did, or that I didn’t want to be a teacher at all. I hated being in charge.

We ate fruit and watched an old film with Judy Garland. I wondered if other people watched movies when they asked someone around to do that, or if our actually doing it meant things were going horribly wrong.

“You keep yourself to yourself, Ava,” Ollie said.

The fact that “over a month” brought Edith and me into meeting-the-family territory, whereas I had known Julian for months before he’d even mentioned Miles, told me all I needed to know about dating gay women versus straight men.

“Sorry for not calling last night,” I said. “I was having dinner with a friend.” “Which friend?” Mam said. “You don’t know her.” Mam’s assumption that she’d already be acquainted with any friend of mine had started in Junior Infants and, seemingly, endured after I’d moved continent.

Sometimes the children had questions about my life. The younger ones wanted to know if I slept in the school, and if Ireland was the same as England.

The older ones asked if I had children of my own. I found this question horrifying, but knew that around ten percent of my salary was for projecting a nurturing aura, so I just smiled and said no.

The restaurant had exposed red brickwork and clipboarded menus that called every item “artisan,” “percolated,” or “deconstructed.”

Ollie from Melbourne had left Hong Kong without notice to avoid paying income tax. TEFL teachers often did that.

What the heck have the Irish got against Ireland?” I said: “You know we can’t get abortions?” I did not always feel I was Madison’s favorite Irish person.

They were Anglican, Miles said. My childhood impression was that Protestants sang a lot and were either more or less literal about wafers, depending how you saw it.

told Miles about mass in Ireland. My parents didn’t believe in God and were Catholic to boot (I explained this wasn’t contradictory, and was in fact the case for most Irish people), but Mam had made me go to the important services because if you didn’t you’d never be Mary in the nativity play.

The truth is, you like Julian because he enables this perception you have of yourself as a detached person. Plenty of people are willing to offer you intimacy. That terrifies you. You prefer feeling like no one will ever love you.”

This was why people became teachers, I thought. It wasn’t to help people. It was to be the cleverest person in the room, always, or at least to have people sufficiently confident you’d be that they’d call it your job and pay you for doing it. Really, it was more impressive that my eight-year-olds knew Mona Lisa existed than it was that I knew who’d created her.

Madison from Texas made to say something. I interrupted her. I felt Edith had taught me much about stoppering morons, and that the morons were lucky we’d broken up before I’d honed this skill to the point of never letting them say anything.

We discussed when they’d call the abortion referendum. I hoped they’d give enough notice for me to get my flight cheap. I told Mam my British friend—she didn’t know him—had refused to believe me when I said I had to fly back to vote. “That can’t be how a country functions,” he’d said, and then he’d spent half an hour researching the matter before coming back and explaining that I had to fly back to vote. “That’s Brits,” Mam said.

(I felt Brits loved two things more than life itself: showing they knew foreign words, and avoiding having to say “Republic.”)

We mutually agreed, through certain expressions, to pretend I wasn’t about to cry. I thought that was generous of us.

it was a fact of leaving that one person knew before the other did.

I’d seen online that Julian’s ex Charlie lived in Shoreditch and said without elaboration that she “created.” If your work was an intransitive verb then that meant your trust fund subsidized it.

For me, whatever paid rent was the decision.

He laughed. I could always make him laugh by saying something cynical in a thicker Dublin accent than I actually had.