So Long Been Dreaming (9 page)

I get up from the bed and pretend to steal another motel soap. When you have webs between your fingers, you can’t cry.

And what if you are the kind of woman who slips from world to world, slides through sewers and between the walls, propelled by will alone? This is not just a metaphor for a black woman with a white father, a lesbian who likes a little cock now and then, a vegetarian who craves Alberta beef. This is a question of heredity.

If you are the kind of woman who slips from world to world, slides through sewers and between the walls, propelled by will alone, the more you travel the in-betweens, the more you play an either/or tourist, the more you realize home was never really home.

When Matricia reached the shore, pulled her blubbered body up onto the jagged rocks, she peeled off her skin. Not like a banana because you can’t peel banana skin back on. More like the ripping of a membrane, a hymen; a hymen can be unripped. Her skin tears from her body; the grey silver black speckles of her slick skin rip away like so much sausage pelt and there she stands. Her black skin, not black like coal or chocolate or velvet, her black skin, black.

Matricia pulls on her pants-suit and Italian shoes. Tucks her skin in her bag. My blackness in the middle of the white prairie makes me an easy target. My marriage, job are water-soaked; panic flush, slip of fingers, suck of whirlpool. Vulnerable desire.

Matricia paints her nails algae green.

But then there are the other women in my family.

Never before in the history of this family, says my grandmother, have the women had to fake orgasms.

My grandmother strokes the scaly patch of skin on her wrist. The scales glitter like seed-pearls, scratch like sand-paper against our faces. She also has scales behind her ears, in the small of her back.

Eczema, says my mother. She will not believe anything not in the science books.

Selkie blood, says my grandmother, and she lights another cigarette, her mouth pursed fish-like against the paper tube.

Of course, my mother won’t believe this either. There’s no ocean where she comes from. She was born in Saskatchewan. Grandmother’s skin is the colour of the teak coffee table.

The scaly patches prove love, my grandmother says.

What they never talk about in that selkie story, says my grandmother, is the bed. How important the bed is. If the man’s nonexistent in bed, then why would you stay?

According to the rules, if my grandmother, being a selkie, ever retrieved the skin, she would leave immediately. But she’s the one who left the water, saw the liquid muscles of her future lover’s forearms, the silver bubbles trapped among the hairs. Watched her fisherman up through the waves and fell in love with the vibrations in his throat, the cracked skin on his fisherman’s hands. And he stared back at her in water, couldn’t believe his eyes.

Mixed marriages never work, people say, but my grandmother stumbled up into air, her addiction to cigarettes and wearing men’s trousers more a problem than the fact that she enjoyed her fish still gasping. Scales, gut, and open fish mouth pulled down her throat.

Toot sweet, she says, and smacks her lips.

She kept her skin like a wedding gown wrapped muslin, stored in cedar to keep away the bugs. Kept the key on a chain around her throat and as far as we could tell, never opened the chest again for as long as she lived.

I, on the other hand, open her chest again. And again. And again.

Matricia slides in and around and among the neighbourhoods like a crocodile in a sewer looking for me. Too much time in the world and she looks at her watch.

Matricia comes for me. She smells exactly like the ocean.

We were the only two black kids in the junior high school, Matricia and I, and then her father kidnapped her and I was the only one. Or so the legend went.

The legend goes like this: We are the only two black girls in the school. Matricia wants to be my friend, but this is against the rules. I ignore her. She disappears. Her father stole her, everyone says. My horror mouth open because I didn’t save her. I remember the dandruff flecks in her hair, the green tinge on her fingernails, the seaweed smell of her skin.

I will eventually be kidnapped by water for good. This is how all women in my family die. When the water finds me, when it inflates my lungs, it will be crammed with the faces of drowned relatives. Women in our family avoid river banks, cliffs, wave pools, backyard fish ponds, sinks too full of water, they move to the centre of islands, high on mountains, buy dishwashers, but water always finds us.

I am not safe anywhere.

I kick my rubber boots hard against the polished floor of the museum, the security guards run, their basset-hound jowls and full bellies bouncing, navy-blue security jackets streaming past glass cases, marbles of naked women, paintings of ornate gardens, and they try to grab me by the collar of my shirt, my sleeves and legs, try to pull me from the canvas-painted oily storm. I will hang in the water for hours before they can retrieve my body. My pockets filled with priceless, deformed pearls.

I die for love. Matricia, body sleek in waves. I die for love.

Her skin is the same. Her skin is the same as mine. She is my ghost. Digging for treasure, I found mismatched pieces, assembled and resuscitated her. She tastes like licorice. Water beings always have the faint aftertaste of licorice. I have tasted licorice myself on their lips when they come up from between my thighs to kiss me.

I wanted to steal her skin. Force her to marry me.

When Matricia left, I got up from my bed and pretended to steal another motel soap.

They say fish never blink; selkies don’t cry. I wait for the diamonds to come trickling from my eyes. I have not been a maid since I was sixteen and she stole my maidenhead.

In love with the ocean through my rubber boats.

Asthma returns with a splash on the cheek. I am allergic to hairy animals. This is how I know she is for real.

And how girls can say
No Thanks
from the safety of their mermaids’ tails or selkie skins. Dust sifts through the air. A desire for the parts of other women. Skin brown even in the womb, eyes grey until they ripen into Caribbean brown. An appetite for other women. I pull her up piece by piece from the muck and memory. Assemble her into the ex-lover who gave the clothes to the Salvation Army, swept up the mouse turds, cleaned out the closet, who left with my heart in the trunk. Of her car. She comes to life in the prairies, in the murky river that drowns prize begonias.