Episode One: Notions

There is an article on the internet called "The Confident American Handshake: 7 Steps to Instant Authority," and I have read it eleven times, most recently forty seconds ago in the lift of a building on West Hubbard Street, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America, which is where I live now, apparently, God help us all.

Step one is "initiate with intent." I practiced on the lift railing. The railing did not respond, but neither did it withdraw a job offer, so I'm counting it.

My name is Maeve Malone. I'm twenty-two, from a town in Ireland so small that our traffic light is a matter of civic pride, and as of nine o'clock this morning I am a Junior Content Writer at Lakefront Creative, a marketing agency that sponsors work visas and, as far as I could tell from the website, employs exclusively people with excellent teeth. I have a degree in Creative Writing from Marquette University, which my parents permitted only because it was Catholic and in Wisconsin, two words that soothed my mother like a novena. Four years of Milwaukee, which is America with the volume at a reasonable level. Then graduation, a job offer, and ninety miles south to a city that Milwaukee could fit inside like a coin in a wishing well.

The lift doors opened and I initiated with intent.

"You must be MAEVE." A woman with a plant on her desk the size of a small tree and an iced coffee the size of a fire extinguisher was upon me before I'd fully exited the lift. "Oh my God, say something. Say anything. Say 'thirty-three.'"

"...Thirty-three?"

She clutched her chest. "The ACCENT. Okay. You're mine now. I'm Bex, social media, I sit next to you, and you are officially my emotional support Irish person."

I have notions of being more than that. But it was nice, in a terrifying way, to be claimed within the first minute, like lost luggage.

The office is what an American film thinks an office is, which was disorienting, because I'd assumed the films were exaggerating. Open plan, exposed brick, a man walking on a treadmill while attending a meeting, which surely defeats the purpose of both. There is a gong. I want to be very clear about the gong, because no one warned me, and when a sales fella struck it at 9:47am to celebrate closing a deal, my soul briefly left through the top of my head and hovered near the ceiling ducts, looking down at my body with pity.

"You get used to it," said Bex.

"Do you?"

"No," she said cheerfully. "But you stop screaming out loud."

And let me be clear about one thing, for the record: I am not delicate. I come from a nation that talks as a competitive sport, where a funeral is a social season and the pub doesn't quieten so much as change key. Noise I know. I was simply, always, the quietest person in it — the one at the end of the table, enjoying the roar without adding to it, saving my remarks like coins. No, what's different here isn't the volume. It's the sincerity. At home, if a man closed a deal, he'd tell absolutely no one and be slagged about it anyway within the hour. Here, he strikes a gong. Himself. About himself. And everyone claps, and he accepts the clapping. I'll be studying that for years.

At ten I was summoned to meet Vivian.

Vivian Cho founded Lakefront Creative twenty years ago and has the handshake the article was trying to describe. She hired me herself, back in March, over a video call that lasted eleven minutes — a fact I have replayed many times since and she, evidently, has not, because when I sat down she pulled up my CV and scanned it like a menu in a restaurant somebody else had chosen.

"Creative Writing," she said, reminding herself.

"Yes."

"Thesis on Edna O'Brien."

"Yes."

"Nobody here has read Edna O'Brien."

"That's alright," I said. "She'd have had notions about the gong anyway."

There was a pause. Vivian has a pause the way other people have a hobby — cultivated, practiced, deployed. I couldn't tell if I'd made a joke or ended my career, and I stood in the pause like a woman standing in rain.

"Rick's Riverside Auto Group," she said finally, sliding a folder across the desk. "Six dealerships, northwest suburbs. He wants fifteen social captions for his Memorial Day sale. He wants them, quote, 'more fun but also classy.' You have until Thursday."

I took the folder. I had two questions and asked neither, which is my way. The first was what is a Memorial Day. The second was how can a car be fun but also classy, and honestly I'm not sure Rick knows either.

Back at my desk I googled it, privately, the way you'd google a symptom. Memorial Day: the last Monday of May, honoring American service members who died in service. Also, apparently, the traditional start of summer, and a weekend of barbecues, and — this is where I lost the thread — an occasion for discounted vehicles. In Ireland a solemn day of remembrance would not typically feature zero-percent financing. But then, in Ireland we celebrate summer by pointing at it through the rain, so who am I to judge a nation's customs.

You are wondering, perhaps, how a woman lives four years in America without meeting a single Memorial Day. Easily. Marquette let us out in early May, and every year I was on a plane home before a solitary barbecue was lit, straight into my aunt Nuala's flower shop for the summer — funeral wreaths, June brides, my hands green to the wrist until September. American summer is, to me, a rumor. I've heard great things.

I wrote the captions. I wrote them well, God forgive me. I gave Rick's Riverside Auto Group a sentence with rhythm and a semicolon; a line about summer stretching out ahead like an open road; and one closing sentence — about long June evenings and the particular gold of them — that I privately considered the finest thing ever written about a certified pre-owned Hyundai. If I must do this, I will do it like a woman with a degree.

At four o'clock Vivian read them in silence at her desk while I stood in the doorway experiencing every emotion available to mankind and inventing several new ones.

She deleted the semicolon. She cut my favorite sentence — the gold June evenings, gone without ceremony, the way you'd deadhead a rose.

"Nobody reads, Maeve," she said. "They scroll."

But here is the thing I will be examining for the rest of my natural life: she kept the open-road line. Kept it. Moved it to the top, even. She said nothing about it, and I said nothing about it, and I walked back to my desk with my face arranged in a neutral expression while inside me a small crowd cheered.

Bex leaned over. "How'd it go? Blink twice if she used the pause."

"She kept one of my lines."

Bex went very still, the way you would at a rare bird. "Day one? Okay, Ireland." She held up her iced coffee and I clinked it with my tea, and it felt, briefly, like having a small circle again — like my Marquette girls, one of whom — Priya, thanks be to God — is still up in Milwaukee, ninety miles and one Amtrak away, while the rest are scattered to Minneapolis and med school and, inexplicably, Guam. I miss them with a low hum I don't examine too closely on work days.

I got home at six, wrung out like a dishcloth, dreaming of my bed and a book and a closed door.

I should explain about home. In four years of Wisconsin I came to Chicago exactly twice, both times on a college coach to the Art Institute, where I admired the Monets, ate a packed lunch, and got back on the coach. So when the job came through, I was choosing a neighborhood the way you'd choose a husband from a photograph. I live in a neighborhood called Lakeview, in a flat I found in February, when the streets were gray and quiet and a man at the corner shop told me it was a "great area, super convenient to Wrigley." I thought Wrigley was a chewing gum. I signed a twelve-month lease.

I opened the front door to find my roommate, Jordan, in a blue jersey, sunburned across the nose, with three other people also in blue jerseys, all of them holding drinks at half six on a Tuesday, and all of them hoarse.

"ROOMIE!" Jordan grew up on the South Side of this city, works at a bar three streets over, and adopted me at the lease signing with the same non-negotiable warmth as Bex. I appear to be a person that loud American women collect. "First day! How was it? Doesn't matter, tell me later — we WON. Cubs-Cardinals, day game, walk-off. I've been screaming since four o'clock. We're going out to celebrate and you're coming."

"A day game," I said, carefully. "On a Tuesday. Do none of ye work?"

Four Americans looked at me with the tenderness you'd show a lamb.

"Oh honey," said Jordan. "It's May. There's a game, like, every day. Sometimes at lunch. You take a half day. It's called priorities."

Through the window behind her, the street below was still a sea of blue, all of it flowing out from the direction of the stadium, some of it singing. Forty thousand people had spent the working hours of a Tuesday three streets from my bed, being delighted at full volume, and nobody thought to mention this to me before I signed anything.

I pled first-day exhaustion, promised Jordan the weekend — "MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND," she said, in a tone that suggested I should be training for it — and escaped out the back way with my notebook, three streets in the other direction, to the coffee shop I found last week.

It's a small place with mismatched chairs and no televisions, which in this neighborhood makes it a religious site. The girl behind the counter is starting to know my order. And at the corner table, same as last Thursday, same as the Saturday before, there is a man reading.

Last week it was Steinbeck — Cannery Row — so I'd concluded he had a soul. Tonight it is East of Eden, which means it wasn't a fluke; the man is working through Steinbeck chronologically, or at least thoroughly, and I don't know what to do with that information except that I have now memorized how he holds a book, one-handed, spine gentled against his palm like it's owed tenderness.

I did not speak to him. I sat two tables away with my tea and opened my notebook.

It started as scraps — lines I liked, things Bex said. It is becoming, I can admit this now, a journal. Partly to keep myself sane, because a woman needs somewhere to scream that isn't a rooftop full of Cubs fans. And partly — God forgive me my notions — as a field study. Somebody ought to be documenting these people. The gong. The fire-extinguisher coffees. The daytime sporting events attended by grown adults of working age. I record it all like an anthropologist among a warm, loud, baffling tribe, in the full knowledge that they are surely, somewhere, recording me.

Mam rang as I was leaving. Sunday is the proper call, after Mass, but she rings midweek when her radar goes off, and her radar is Vatican-grade. She asked how the job was, and was there air conditioning, and had I found a parish yet, and then, lightly, the way a customs officer is light: "Any news?"

I said no. No news, Mam.

This is not strictly true. There's a man who reads Steinbeck three streets from my flat. My boss kept one of my sentences and pretended she didn't. And I live, it turns out, inside a sporting event that occurs almost daily, at lunch, until October.

I have notions about all three. But sure, she'd only worry.

The Mad Notions of Maeve Malone