The Mermaid Chair (5 page)

In the beginning I’d felt so hungry for him, a ravenous kind of wanting that remained until Dee was born. Only then did it start to subside and grow domesticated. Like animals taken from the wild and put in nice, simulated habitats where they turned complacent, knowing exactly where their next meal would come from. All the hunt and surprise drained out of it.

Hugh set the plate of eggs and sausage in front of me. “There you go,” he said.

We ate, side by side, the windows still varnished with early-morning dark. Rain rattled down the gutters, and I heard what sounded like a shutter banging in the distance.

I put down my fork and listened.

“On the island when the storms came, our hurricane shutters used to slam against the house like that,” I said, and my eyes began to fill.

Hugh stopped chewing and looked at me.

“Mother would drape a sheet over the kitchen table and crawl under it with me and Mike and read to us by flashlight.

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She nailed a crucifix to the underside of the table, and we would lie on the floor and stare up at it while she read. We called it the

‘storm tent.’ We thought nothing could harm us under there.”

Hugh reached out his arm, and my shoulder slipped into the groove beneath his collarbone while my head glided into the nape of his neck, an oiled, automatic movement as old as our marriage.

We sat like that, pressed into each other, while the eggs went cold and the odd banging came and went, until I began to feel the ponderous meshing of our lives—unable to tell where his shoulder ended and my head began. It was the same sensation I’d had as a child when my father pressed the length of his finger against mine. As they rubbed together, they’d felt like a single digit.

I pulled away, straightening myself on the bar chair. “I can’t believe what she’s done,” I said. “My God, Hugh, do you think she needs to be committed?”

“I couldn’t say without talking to her. It sounds like an obses-sional disorder.”

I saw Hugh look down at my lap. I’d twisted the napkin around my finger as if I were trying to stop a hemorrhage. I unwound it, embarrassed at how talkative my body was when I didn’t mean for it to be.

“Why her
finger?
” I said. “Of all things.”

“There’s not necessarily any rhyme or reason to it. That’s the thing about obsessions—they’re generally irrational.” He stood up. “Look, why don’t I come with you? I’ll clear my calendar.

We’ll both go.”

“No,” I said. A little too emphatically. “She’ll never talk to t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

27

you about this, you know that. And you have all your patients here to take care of.”

“Okay, but I don’t want you handling this by yourself.”

He kissed me on the forehead. “Call Dee. Let her know where you’ll be.”

After he’d left for the office, I packed a suitcase, set it by the door, then climbed the stairs to my studio, wanting to make sure the roof hadn’t leaked again.

I switched on a lamp, and a swatch of waxy yellow light fanned across my worktable—a big oak treasure I’d found in a secondhand store. A partially assembled art box was spread across it, covered in dust. I’d stopped working on it last December when Dee was home for Christmas break, and somehow I’d never gotten back up here.

I was inspecting the floor for puddles when the phone rang.

Picking up the portable, I heard Dee’s voice. “Guess what?” she said.

“What?”

“Dad sent me extra money, and I bought a navy pea coat.”

I imagined her sitting cross-legged on her dorm bed, her long hair grazing her shoulders. People said she looked like Hugh.

They had that same burnished look.

“A pea coat, huh? Please tell me this means you’ve given up the Harley-Davidson jacket.”

“What about
you?
You had that red suede jacket with all the cowboy fringe.”

I smiled, the lightness I always felt around Dee fading, though, as I thought of Mother. “Listen, honey, I was going to call you this morning. I’m leaving for the island today to see
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your grandmother. She’s not well.” It occurred to me Dee might think she was on her deathbed, so I told her the truth.

The first words out of Dee’s mouth were, “Oh,
fuck.
”

“Dee!” I said. A little too indignantly, I suppose, but she’d genuinely shocked me. “That word is beneath you.”

“I know,” she said. “And I bet
you’ve
never said it once in your whole life.”

I let out a long breath. “Look, I didn’t mean to preach.”

She was silent a moment. “Okay, I shouldn’t have said it, but what Gran did is so twisted. Why would she do something like that?”

Dee, sharp-eyed in every other way, had always had a blind spot about her grandmother, re-creating her as a wonderfully doting eccentric. I imagined this would shatter her illusions once and for all.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I wish I did.”

“You’ll take care of her, right?”

I closed my eyes and saw my mother in the storm tent, the time I’d found her there right after Dad died. It had been a perfect, sunny day.

“I’m going to try,” I told Dee.

After I hung up, I sat down at the worktable and stared at the bits of mirror and eggshell I’d been gluing into the discarded box before abandoning it.

I
had
said the word. This past December, while Dee was home. I was standing in the shower, and Hugh had slipped into the bathroom, taken off his clothes, and stepped behind me, startling me so badly I’d jerked forward and knocked the shampoo bottle off the shelf that hung from the nozzle.

t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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“Fuck,” I’d said. Which wasn’t like me. The word was not in my lexicon, and I don’t know who’d been more astounded, me or Hugh.

After a pause Hugh had laughed. “Exactly. Fuck is exactly what I was thinking.”

I didn’t say anything, didn’t turn around. His fingers moved along my ribs and brushed the edges of my breasts. I heard him make a tiny groaning sound in his throat. I tried to want him but couldn’t help feeling intruded upon. Standing stiffly in the spray, I must’ve appeared like the trunk of a tree, a petrifying tree quietly going to stone.

After a few moments, the shower door opened and closed.

He was gone.

For days after that, I went about in a state of severe and earnest trying. I stepped into the shower with Hugh not once but twice, contorting myself into extraordinary yogic positions.

The second time I’d emerged with the red mark of the faucet handle on my back. A tattoo that looked remarkably like a crumpled bird.

One day while Dee was out hitting the after-Christmas sales with her friends, I’d showed up at Hugh’s office after his last patient, suggesting we have sex on his sofa, and I suppose we would have, except his beeper went off. Someone had tried to kill herself. I’d driven home with all the trying knocked out of me.

The next day Dee had gone back to college.

I watched her car roll out of the driveway, down the street.

After it had turned the corner, I’d gone inside to a stillness that was bewildering in its intensity.

The same stillness rose now in the studio. I looked up at
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the skylight. It was papered with elm leaves and a thick, putty-colored light. The rain and wind had stopped, and I heard the quietness for the first time, the way it clotted around my head.

Outside, the tires of Hugh’s Volvo turned into the driveway.

His car door slammed, and I felt the vibration move through the walls. As I descended the stairs, the years between us seemed accumulated everywhere, filling the house, and it seemed strange to me, how love and habit blurred so thoroughly to make a life.

C H A P T E R

Four

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Ihesitated as I stepped onto the ferry, one foot on the floating dock and one on the boat, caught momentarily by the rush of light across Bull’s Bay. A half-dozen great white egrets flew up from the marsh grass nearby with their low-pitched throat calls. I moved on board and watched them through the plastic windows, the familiar ribbon they made crossing the bay, how they turned in unison toward Egret Island.

The ferry was actually an old pontoon boat named
Tidal
Run.
I propped my suitcase beside a dirty-white cooler, beneath two red cardboard tide clocks nailed onto the wall. I sat down on a bench. Hugh had arranged for a driver to take me from the airport to the ferry landing in Awendaw. I’d made it just in time for the last run of the day. It was four o’clock.

There were only five other passengers, perhaps because it was winter and the tourists had not descended in full force. They usually came in the spring and summer to see the marsh brimming with egrets, how they teemed into the trees along the creeks, sitting in heaps of brightness. A few tourists—the hard-core history crowd that trickled over from Charleston—came to take Hepzibah’s Grand Gullah Tour, which included a visit to the slave cemetery. Hepzibah was the culture keeper on the island
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or, as she liked to say, the African griot. She knew a thousand folktales and could speak perfect Gullah, a language the slaves had fashioned out of English and their native African tongues.

I studied the passengers, wondering if any were islanders I might recognize. Fewer than a hundred people, besides the monks, still lived on the island, and most had been there since I was a girl. I decided that everyone on the boat was a tourist.

One wore a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt from Cancún and a red bandanna tied around his head. I imagined he must be freezing.

He saw me looking at him and asked, “Have you ever stayed at the Island Dog?”

“No, but it’s nice. You’ll like it,” I said, having to raise my voice over the boat engine.

A two-story, pale blue house with white hurricane shutters, it was the only B&B on the island. I wondered if Bonnie Langston still owned it. She was what Hepzibah called a
comya,
Gullah for somebody who comes from another place. If your ancestry was on the island, then you were a
binya. Comyas
were rare on Egret, but they did exist. My sole purpose after the age of ten had been to leave the island. “I want to be a
goya,
” I’d told Hepzibah once, and at first she’d laughed but then stopped and looked at me, down into the heartsick place that made me want to leave. “You can’t leave home,” she said with her gentlest voice. “You can go other places, all right—you can live on the other side of the world, but you can’t ever leave home.”

I felt now I’d proved her wrong.

“Be sure to eat at Max’s Café,” I told the tourist. “Order the shrimp and grits.”

Actually, if he wanted to eat, the café was his only choice.

Like the B&B, it’d been named for Max, the black Lab whose t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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mind Benne could supposedly read. He met the ferry twice a day without fail and was something of a local celebrity. In warm weather, when the tables spilled out onto the sidewalk, he would trot around with an acquired sense of canine entitlement, giving mere human beings the opportunity to adore him. They would scramble for their cameras as if Lassie had come onto the set. He was famous not only for meeting the ferry with uncanny accu-racy but for his immortality. Purportedly he was twenty-seven years old. Bonnie swore to it, but the truth was, the current Max was the fourth in a string of them. I’d been loving various Maxes since I was a kid.

There was a sand beach on the front of the island called Bone Yard, so named because driftwood formed huge, contorted sculptures along it. Hardly anyone ventured there, though, because the currents made it too dangerous for swimming and it was full of sand gnats. You only had to stand there to know that the ocean would take the island back one day.

Most of the tourists came for the guided tour of the monastery, St. Senara’s abbey. It was named for a Celtic saint who’d been a mermaid before her conversion, and it had started as a simple outpost—or, as the monks said, “a daughter house”—of an abbey in Cornwall, England. The monks had built it themselves in the thirties on land donated by a Catholic family from Baltimore, who’d used it for a summer fishing camp. In the beginning the place was so unpopular that Egret Islanders—all of them Protestants—called it “St. Sin.” Now Protestants were more or less extinct here.

The local guidebooks played up the monastery as a minor Low Country attraction, mostly because of the mermaid chair that sat in a side chapel in the church. A “beguiling chair,” the
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books always said, and it was, actually. It was a replica of a very old, somewhat famous chair in the abbey’s mother house. The arms had been carved into two winged mermaids painted with jeweled colors—vermilion fish tails, white wings, golden orange hair.

As children Mike and I used to slip into the church when no one was about, lured, of course, by the titillation of the nipples on the mermaids’ exposed breasts, four shining inlaid garnet stones. I used to give Mike a hard time about sitting with his hands cupped around them. The memory of this caused me to laugh, and I looked up to see if the other passengers had noticed.

If the tourists were lucky and the chapel wasn’t roped off, they could sit in the mermaid chair themselves and say a prayer to Senara, the mermaid saint. For some reason sitting in it was supposed to guarantee you an answer. At least that was the tradition. Mostly the whole thing came off like throwing pennies into a fountain and making wishes, but now and then you would see a real pilgrim, someone in a wheelchair rolling off the ferry, or someone with a small oxygen tank.

The ferry moved slowly through the salt creeks, past tiny marsh islands waving with yellowed spartina grass. The tide had ebbed, laying bare miles of oyster rakes. Everything looked undressed, exposed.

As the creeks widened out into the bay, we picked up speed.

V’s of brown pelicans lapped alongside us, outpacing the boat. I focused on them and, when they’d vanished, on the lifelines hanging in sloppy coils inside the ferry. I didn’t want to think about my mother. On the plane I’d been saturated with dread, but out here that lifted some, maybe because of all the wind and freedom.