I've been thinking about The Quiet Girl.
BY RICK THYNE
During this summer of Barbie and Taylor Swift, I was captivated by a nine-year-old Irish girl named Cait. She is the central character in the film THE QUIET GIRL, Ireland’s entry in this year’s Academy Award competition for Best International Feature Film. She lives in a working-class farm family in rural Ireland, but it is the world inside her – alone, afraid, confused – that first drew me to her.
She is one of the older of four children of a poor farmer and his wife who is about to give birth to yet another child. Given their precarious perch on the edge of poverty, it is not surprising that her father uses alcohol to numb himself from his grinding work, while his wife is overwhelmed with caring for these young children and fending off the squalor that encroaches on their modest life. As an older sibling, Cait gets the least affection and the most scolding, not because she’s a troublemaker but because there is so much trouble in her parents’ lives that it spills over on to her. She is not physically abused; she suffers more from a lack of attention and her father’s cutting criticisms. It costs a lot to feed you, he reminds her at mealtime, as if she’s the burden that weighs him down.
No wonder I was drawn in: I grew up the eldest of five in an Irish American working-class family where dinner every evening was provided by what my father earned that day. He, like Cait’s father, used alcohol to numb the pain of a difficult life he had neither the education nor the opportunity to rise up out of. And like her, I got the brunt of his anger in ways more physically blunt than her father inflicted. Though he’s been dead for nearly fifty years, I still wince when a man in my life is angry at me, still expecting that slap or punch. Certain pain is indelible.
Cait gets the least affection and the most scolding, not because she’s a troublemaker but because there is so much trouble in her parents’ lives that it spills over on to her.
Cait hides herself from as much of this as possible. We first meet her curled like a baby under tall grass while her school friends, who tease her and mock her poverty, call out Cait, Cait, trying to find her to abuse her yet again. But where Cait more regularly hides is in her silence. She lets the taunts of her friends and the din of the family table fill the air as she sits, withdrawn, waiting for the criticism which is the only way her friends and father interact with her.
Cait is quiet, not because she has nothing to say but because, even if she were to speak, no one is listening. Her parents are overwhelmed with other, younger children and the pressures of poverty; her school friends disdain her because of her strange silence and unkempt, unbathed appearance. She spends her free time by herself, unable to make her way in the company of other little girls.
Our granddaughter is almost exactly Cait’s age, and we watch her thrive in school and with her soccer friends, constantly encouraged by parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who hug her and cheer her from the soccer sidelines and, since she first blurted out Dada and Mama, listen to whatever she has to say. She’s is among the lucky little kids who go to bed each night with someone lying beside them saying, Tell me about your day, in all of its little-kid particularities. And the only response to a story about how she broke her shoe lace and had to tie a knot to get through recess is to say, Tell me more. No teachable moments, no reminiscences of When I was your age and this happened to me, no parable to help explain the moral importance of the moment. Just Tell me more, until she falls asleep realizing that the most important person in her world thinks her little-girl experiences matter, which means of course that she matters.
Cait’s is also a story about how poverty can damage a kid’s development as it crushes the hopes and possibilities of her parents. They lack the education and emotional maturity to succeed in their farming, and with so many mouths to feed and so few resources to provide, it’s not surprising that their father neglects his work, so he never gets their crop of hay to market in a timely manner, depriving him of whatever its highest value might have been. Around the family dinner table, we watch Cait’s frenzied mother try to get everyone fed while Dad broods in the shadow, a defeated witness to the hungry family he has created.
I got lucky when I was exactly Cait’s age. In the gym at the church next door to my house, I met the youth minister who took an interest in me. He taught me how to shoot a basketball and read the Bible, how to take however much time I needed to tell my stories and how to pray as I knelt beside him in his office. In the massive confusion about abusive clergy, he is a glaring exception. He became another father to me. He introduced me to the faith that has guided and sustained me since then, gave me a voice in our conversations when I was still a young boy, made me a leader among my childhood and adolescent peers, pushed me to get the education my parents could never afford, and showed me what goodness can do to transform even a troubled child’s life. Lucky little boy.
Cait got lucky, too.
With school out and a long summer stretching ahead of them, her beleaguered mother and father send her to spend these summer months with a childless older couple who are her mother’s cousins. Cait spends the three hour drive silent in the back seat as her father, interested not in her but in radio reports of the scores of local soccer teams, speeds through the Irish countryside to deposit her with these relatives. His one comment while leaving her is, It’s expensive to feed her, she eats so much. He is so eager to rush off that he forgets to leave the suitcase with Cait’s clothes that were to dress her through the summer.
And with that, her new world opens up.
We know immediately that these older farmers are not poor. Their property and home are large and manicured, and as soon as we enter the home, we note the comparison between the near-squalor of her parent’s shadowy kitchen and this tidy, spacious room illumined with sunlight through plentiful windows. The woman wears pleated slacks and a proper long-sleeved blouse, is well groomed and, most importantly, welcoming from the moment Cait’s father speeds away.
Eibhlin is the motherly person we wish every child, and especially every little girl, was raised by. She bathes Cait’s dusty limbs with a soft cloth, dresses her in oversized boy’s pants and a flannel shirt, and kindly invites Cait into their first conversation. She is gentle, careful to be quiet when Cait is speaking; shy in the earliest of their conversations, Cait soon responds with more than single words when Eibhlin and Sean ask about her world. (Their names, like the sub-titled dialogue in the film, are Irish Gaelic.)
Soon Eibhlin invites Cait to help her prepare meals and side by side they stir and beat and cut, their continuing conversation entwined with their common task. When our granddaughter comes for dinner every Wednesday, she and Becky bake cookies while her father and I chat and wait to taste them fresh and warm out of oven. She’s taught all three of our grandchildren to do crossword and Sudoku puzzles, which is a revelation to me. Both my grandmothers and one of my grandfathers died when I was a tiny boy and my remaining grandfather treated me and all his grandchildren as if we were interruptions to his reading.
As the father of a daughter and now an eleven-year-old girl’s grandfather, I fixed my attention on the relationship between Cait and her summer father. Sean is awkward at first, as if he doesn’t quite know what to make of this little girl. Like her, he’s a quiet person. So rather than engaging her in conversation, as his wife does, he invites her to help with his chores: taking a bucket to the well, sweeping up the cement floor of the cows’ barn, seeing how fast she can run to the end of the lane and back to fetch the daily mail. He’s teaching her how to relate to someone who, unlike his gentle and soft-spoken wife, communicates with action and not language. A quiet girl and a quiet man figuring out how to make her feel safe.
On one occasion when she disappears into hiding, his fear erupts in anger when he finds her; he is too brusque with her and she retreats into silence. Not knowing how to explain his fear at losing her or how to apologize for his outburst, he leaves the dinner table without speaking. After dinner, Cait finds the cookie he's left for her on the corner of the dinner table.
Her relationship with Sean drew me back time and again to think about my own relationships, especially about how I can be a frightening presence. Sean’s flare of frightened temper when Cait disappeared was a blunt reminder that I still have work to do. I’m a big, loud man and when I get frustrated or afraid, I amplify my voice and become too monster-like for others, especially little people, to feel safe around. I learned long ago to soften my voice and get down on my knees to talk to little kids. But there are still moments when I regress into impulsive anger and become frightening, especially to children. In a recent dinner-table conversation when his daughter was present, my son and I got into a disagreement and, without notice, my voice rose. My granddaughter’s face froze, fear filled her eyes, and her father glared at me, That’s enough! I continue to learn to be quieter with everyone I relate to, especially kids, so that my inflated presence doesn’t reduce them to a silence from which they cannot express whatever it is that they want with me.
The film’s final, wrenching scene is a reminder that even bruised and dented relationships can be repaired. When Sean and Eibhlin return Cait to her family at the end of summer, we can feel the heartbreak in each of them as they make their way up the long driveway. The tension is etched on Cait’s face: a little girl standing between two families, two possible futures. I won’t spoil the final, overpowering emotional moments, but Cait’s last, tearful word is Daddy, and it’s unclear which of her two fathers she will wind up with.