The New Yorker, May 14, 2001

In the Bed Department

by Anne Enright

Kitty was suspicious of the escalator, or, more properly, the escalators, as there were
two of them, one falling and one rising, anchored side by side in the middle of the main
shopping floor. She disliked the push of the motor, and, under that, the light clacking
sound of something she could not analyze. A chain perhaps, that ran loose, deep in the
machine.

They were new. The space where they appeared had been boxed in for months, floor to
ceiling, with cheap wooden panelling, painted blue. First, a hole was knocked in the
floor, and then another in the ceiling above, she supposed. They worked at night, but
even during the day men came out from behind the panelling, filthy and smiling, and
went back in again: ordinary Dublin men who worked whenever, and installed
escalators in the middle of the night. She wondered how much they were paid.

Kitty tried to take to them, but she couldn't. She was disturbed by the sight of them out
among the merchandise. She disliked the way they talked to each other loudly and
laughed as if they owned the shop. They interrupted the conversation, somehow. You'd
be selling a bed, talking about springs, you'd be with a young couple, pushing into the
mattress in a cozy sort of way, and who would stroll past but the lean blond one, maybe,
with the dirty-looking tan, adjusting his zip on the way back from the loo.

Not that she minded men. She had two grown sons at home, so she was used to it: the
cheerfulness, the indifference, and the mess. Though sometimes she turned around in
the kitchen and was shocked by the sheer size of them—all that protein and
carbohydrate, the muscle and milk of them, as though she had fed a couple of potted
plants, and grown triffids.

Then, one morning, she walked in and the men were gone. The place was perfect; the
carpets fresh and new, the hoarding dissolved into thin air, and, in the middle of the
floor, a pair of escalators, one going up and the other coming down. The steps tugged
lightly at each other as they passed, snagging and loosening all day long. They ticked in
the corner of her eye, making her feel balanced, or dizzy, depending on the light. They
were so clean. The up escalator always mounting itself, stair over stair; the down
escalator falling like syrup, burying itself slowly in the flatness of the floor.
They were beautiful, and they never stopped, and finally they got on her nerves.
Nothing happened in the Bed Department. People bought a bed, or they did not buy a
bed. Kitty used to like the open space, the hummocky slabs of mattress, the headboards
like tombstones in a giant graveyard. "Who's been sleeping in my bed?" But all her
satisfaction was gone now. The way people lay down and curled up, in the middle of the
crowd. The old couples sitting on either side of the mattress and looking over their
shoulders at each other in a way that was almost coy; the giggles and the silences. Most
people buying a bed were in love, she used to think, or hopeful at least of finding love.
Now they just bounced up and down or put their dirty feet up or looked like they could
kill for a decent night's sleep.

She was at home one evening, washing the dishes, when the phone rang. It was a young
man who said he was looking for a Kevin Daly. Kitty was listed as K. Daly in the phone
book, and she didn't want to give too much away. She said that there was no Kevin Daly
at that number, and the young man asked if she was sure. He said that he was looking
for a Kevin Daly he used to know, a man who had gone to school in Malahide. "I'm
sorry," Kitty said, but they were talking to each other now. He told her that Kevin Daly
was his brother, long out of touch. Then he said that Kevin Daly was actually his father,
but that he did not know he was his father, or he did not know that he was his son. He
said that he was looking for his father because his mother was sick and that was why
she had given him his father's name, finally—Kevin Daly, and the fact that he'd gone to
school in Malahide. "It was a schooltime romance," he said. Kitty just said "Sorry" a lot,
the way you might say "I see."

"Sorry," she said.

"So that's why—you know?"

"I'm sorry."

He asked did she have a brother called Kevin Daly, or a cousin, and she just said, "No,
sorry." But he was quite insistent, as though she might be harboring the man. "No really,
I'm sorry," she said, and put down the phone.

The next day, Kitty expected someone to float down the escalator into the Bed
Department and call her by name. She did not know who it might be. A girl, maybe,
with green eyes, or a slender young boy. She imagined a man in a perfect black suit—
something extra about him, anyway, like Cary Grant. A young man with curly red hair
gazed at her—or through her—all the way from the floor above, and she wondered,
bizarrely, if he was the person she was waiting for. Also what he might say to her, if he
was.

Then a figure did appear that made her heart turn, and it took a while before Kitty
realized that it was her own mother, sailing down from Fabrics and Soft Furnishings like
a queen.

"I didn't recognize you," Kitty said.

Her mother was in town looking for a shower curtain and had thought she would pop in
to say hello. But after that there was little enough to talk about. Kitty was used to seeing
her at home; out in the open, she seemed surprisingly well dressed and mute.

"Well, you always know where to find me," Kitty said to her, with a stranger's smile.

Kitty ended up seducing a man from the local Drama Society, a little to his surprise. He
had been courting her for months, but in an old-fashioned sort of way. He was sixty-
plus, and Kitty was forty-plus; that was the kind of age gap you could expect, with two
nearly grown sons. They were both in a production of "Johnny Belinda," a play about a
deaf-mute who gets pregnant, though it comes out right in the end. Kitty did the interval
coffees and had a walk-on in the final scene; Tom, for that was the man's name, did the
set. He was good with his hands, he said, as he bent over a sawhorse in the scene dock,
and Kitty flicked a glance at him to see what he meant—but all he meant was that he
was good at making things. Nice. In a way. He drove her home after rehearsal most
nights, and one evening they stopped out to eat. After which, Kitty asked him in for a
drink.

Tom. He said all he needed was a couple of hours to fit two dimmers where the old light
switch was, but she'd need to redecorate, after. He looked at the photos on her
mantelpiece. He was recently bereaved. His daughter had told him to join the Drama
Society, so there he was. In a moment, Kitty thought, he would tell her about his teeth,
that they were all his own. Faded brown eyes, silver hair, a handsome where-did-it-all-
go-wrong face. They were on the sofa, safe enough. Kitty's older son lumbered in from
the pub, and stayed to be introduced. Her younger one was upstairs with his own TV.
They were nice boys. They did not expect their mother to seduce old geezers in the front
room, and neither did the geezer. It was awkward all the way through, and quite
satisfying. Kitty did not tell him about her ex-husband, as he did not talk about his dead
wife. She did not tell him that her husband had strayed, that she had done everything to
keep him, up to and including porn videos in the bedroom, and that, when she finally
left, the judge held that desertion against her and awarded him the house. She did not
tell him how her husband had moved a woman in, two weeks after walking out of court.
She did not tell him how the boys had followed her eventually to her bedsit and looked
after her, as only young boys can, how together they had made their way here, to the
outer suburbs and a decent life. Nor did she tell him that she was pregnant, when she
realized that she was pregnant. She just let him, and the Drama Society, lapse, soon after
the curtain had rung down on "Johnny Belinda," and before anyone could be surprised.

At first, she thought it was the change of life. She stood in the Bed Department and
waited for hot flashes. She did not mind growing old as long as it meant growing easy,
but it did not seem to be working out that way. There was an agitation, a turbulence in
her blood. She rode all the way up to Accounts to query her pay slip, and she landed
back down in the Bed Department with a thump. She walked the floor and sat on the
beds. She had a terrible need to lie down on one of them. One Monday evening, during
stocktaking, she actually did lie down. She simply reclined. She let her back sink into a
double-sprung Slumberland, and felt she might never rise again.

It was not until she bought three pots of apricot jam that the penny dropped. She did not
even bother to take a test. She felt that swooping blankness she had felt with each of the
boys, so delicious, like diving into a pool and finding you can breathe. The child was no
bigger than a pip in the flesh of her stomach. She took it for walks and little outings.
She gave it a go on the escalators and on a park swing, scuffing the coarse sand under
her feet and feeling a little mad. What would she tell the boys? As for the people in the
Bed Department—Jackie, who shared the floor with her, and the customers who came in
to look or buy—they all looked empty to her, like husks. As though she were the only
real thing left. It was like that film with the pods, and she wanted to run away
somewhere, to a deserted lighthouse, or a shack by the beach, and sit in a shaft of light
while her baby grew.

Tom rang. His voice was a shock.

"I just thought I'd check up on you." He sounded close, he sounded right inside her ear.
Kitty had to remind herself that there were miles of cable between them, a maze of
electricity and static.

"I'm fine," she said. "How are things?"

"Good. Good."

In the pause, she felt sorry for him. He wasn't used to this kind of thing.

"And yourself?" he said.

"Oh, flying," she said. "Flying form." And he took the hint and let it go.

Then, one morning, the down elevator sighed and stopped. People clumped down the
steps carefully, almost aslant, squinting at the lines that were strangely solid now,
though they still seemed to shift beneath their feet. Kitty was glad she wasn't on the
thing when it ground to a halt. It would make you look so foolish. As it happened, the
escalators were empty, apart from a young woman on the other side, who seemed to
surge suddenly up. Whoosh.

Kitty knew it didn't mean anything, but she feared for her baby, which was now just
eleven weeks old. She could not bear the lopsided sight of the stalled steps; they were
like someone endlessly limping at the other end of the shop floor. She took a very long
lunch, and when she came back a man had taken the panel off the bottom of the broken
side. She was right about the chain—there it was, looping around the steps that were
wedges, actually, when you looked at them side-on. They packed around the central
pivot like big slices of metal pie, then separated out on the way up, dangling their
triangular bases into space.

The escalator man glanced at her as she stared into the works, and then went back to his
phase tester, tipping the metal gently here and there. He had hair on the backs of his
hands, fine and light: one of those furry men with cushioned muscles and uncertain
eyes. Kitty stood for a long time, making him uneasy. He glanced over his shoulder
again, but he did not really see her—which was fine.

Kitty lost the baby at thirteen weeks, or lost something, at any rate. She looked at the
blood on the wad of toilet paper and wondered if she was in the change of life, after all.
Perhaps she had imagined the baby, perhaps it had never been there in the first place.
She called in sick and went to bed and could not cry.

At the weekend, she drove her younger son to his soccer game in the Fifteen Acres. She
had to park a distance away, because he was embarrassed by the car. Also, he did not
like having his mother on the sidelines anymore, so Kitty, amused, went for a walk
instead. She thought she might look for the deer. And, almost as she thought it, there
they were, a herd of does and their fawns, standing or lying, and all of them chewing,
watching, as she now watched, a pair of children and their toy plane buzzing at the other
end of the glen.

She felt sure now that it had been a baby—that she had not been fooled. Her stomach
was still warm and aching from it. The deer chewed on and did not mind her, while the
toy plane buzzed and sputtered and fell to the ground.

The change of life.

Her life was changing, that was for sure, though she seemed to be standing still. But up
or down? she wondered. Up or down? The children threw the plane back into the air,
and it circled again on the end of its wire. Kitty walked on. It had been a baby, she knew
it. She had been visited. How could it be down, when she felt such joy.