The Mermaid Chair (37 page)

I had lost both of them.

Long ago, at the All-Girls Picnic when Mother, Kat, and Hepzibah had walked into the ocean up to their waists, I’d watched them from nearly this same spot. I began to picture them out there, the way they’d giggled as they’d tied their three threads together and thrown them into the waves. Benne and I had wanted to go with them, had
begged
to go.

No, this is just for us. Y’all stay back there.

Who would’ve imagined what would come out of the knots they’d made that night?

I tugged off my sandals and rolled my pants as high as I could. Despite the heat, the ocean was still chilled from the winter. I had to go in slowly.

When the water swelled above my knees, I stopped and dug
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in my pocket for the bits of twine I’d gathered off the lawn at the monastery. I wanted to tie a knot that would go on forever. But not with anyone else. With myself.

All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I’d tried to complete myself with someone else—first my father, then Hugh, even Whit, and I didn’t want that anymore. I wanted to belong to myself.

I sorted through the cotton strands, wondering if something in me had known what must be done even as I’d collected them.

I stood still with the waves cascading against my thighs, elongating as they flowed beyond me toward the shore.

Jessie. I take you, Jessie . . .

The wind moved sideways past my ears, and I could smell the aloneness in it.

For better or for worse.

The words rose from my chest and recited themselves in my mind.

To love and to cherish.

I took the longest string and tied a knot in the center of it. I gazed at it for a minute, then flung it into the ocean at roughly one o’clock in the afternoon, May 17, 1988, and every day of my life since, I return to that insoluble moment with venera-tion and homage, as if it possesses the weight and ceremony of marriage.

C H A P T E R

Thirty-five

pq

On the last Saturday of May, I stood on the ferry dock with Mother, Kat, Hepzibah, and Benne, all of us lined up at the railing, staring at the wind-chopped bay. White ibis were everywhere. We watched them flying in boomerangs across the bay.

My suitcase sat near the gangplank. Kat had brought a basket of purple beach phlox, Carolina jessamine, and pink oleander blossoms, which she intended to toss at the pontoon when it pulled away, like it was the
Queen Mary
. She poured lemonade from a thermos into little paper cups and handed out benne wafers. She had been adamant about its being a bon voyage party.

Having little appetite, I fed most of my wafers to Max.

“Where will you live now?” Benne asked.

I thought of my big, drafty house, the turret and the stained glass over the doorways, my studio tucked beneath the roof.

Home,
I wanted to tell her,
I’ll live at home,
but I wasn’t sure I could claim it now.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You can always live here,” said Mother.

I looked at the faded orange buoys bobbling on the water,
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marking the crab traps, and felt the twisted tie deep inside that tethered me to her, to this place. For a moment I almost believed I could stay.

“I’ll come back,” I said, and abruptly broke down crying, setting off a whole chain reaction: Hepzibah, then Benne, Mother, and finally Kat.

“Well, isn’t this
fun?
” said Kat, doling out paper napkins. “I always said there’s nothing like a lot of bawling women to liven up a party.”

Having the opportunity, we fled into laughter.

I was the last one on the ferry. I stood at the rail, as Kat had instructed, so I could see the flower toss. It rained oleander, jessamine, and phlox for all of thirty seconds, but I have wrapped and contained the sight very carefully in my mind. I am still able to close my eyes and see the blossoms light on the water like tiny firebirds.

I stood there watching after the dock disappeared from sight, and I knew they had all climbed into Kat’s golf cart by then. As the island slid into the distance, I stored everything away—the bright expanse of water, the crushing scent of the marsh, the wind soaring in canticles across the bay—and tried not to think what waited for me.

Hugh was asleep in his leather chair in the den, wearing black socks worn down at the heels, a book open across his chest—

The Portable Jung.
He’d forgotten to close the curtains, and the windows behind him blazed with darkness and lamplight.

I stood unmoving, startled by the sight of him, a kind of fluttering in my stomach.

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My flight had been delayed from Charleston to Atlanta because of thunderstorms, and it was late, close to midnight. I had not told him I was coming. Part of it was pure, cowardly fear, but it was also the hope that I might catch him off guard, and in those one or two moments he would forget what I’d done, and his heart would fill with so much love it would override every justified reason to send me away. That was my foolish, unreasoned hope.

I’d let myself in with the key we kept hidden under the flagstone at the rear of the house, leaving my suitcase in the foyer beside the front door. Noticing the light in the den, I’d thought only that Hugh had forgotten to turn it out when he went to bed. And here he was.

For whole minutes I stood there listening to the puffing noise he made with his mouth when he slept—rhythmic, sonorous, filled with the rush of years.

His arm dangled over the side of the chair. The little bracelet Dee had made was still on his wrist. Outside, there was thunder far away.

Hugh.

I thought of a time long ago, the year before Dee was born.

We’d gone hiking in the Pisgah National Forest up in the Blue Ridge Mountains and come upon a waterfall. It dropped twenty or thirty feet from an overhang of rocks, and we’d stood a moment staring up at the plunging water, the way it flashed and held the sun, hundreds of tiny, iridescent rainbows fluttering out of it like a swarm of dragonflies.

We’d yanked off our clothes, tossing them on rocks and lady ferns. It was hot, the deep of August, and the water still had the memory of snow in it. Holding hands, we picked our way over
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mossy stones until we stood beneath the overhang with the water crashing down in front of us. The spray was like a driving rain, the sound deafening. Hugh smoothed my wet hair behind my ears and kissed my shoulders and breasts. We made love pressed against the cliff face. For weeks I felt the water hitting the earth inside my body.

Watching him sleep now, I wanted to pull him back into that niche of wild rock. I would have been happy just to pull him into the ordinary niche we’d carved out together with little domestic tools for all these years, but I didn’t know how to return to either one of those places. How to make them the same place.

I felt amazed at the choosing one had to do, over and over, a million times daily—choosing love, then choosing it again, how loving and being in love could be so different.

Rolling his head to the side, he shifted in the chair. Sometimes I think it was my remembering that woke him, that the waterfall spilled out of my mind and caused him to open his eyes.

He gazed at me with sleep and confusion. “You’re here,” he said. Not to me, I realized, but to himself.

I smiled at him, but I didn’t say anything, unable to scrape my voice up out of my throat.

He stood. He lifted his shoulders. I don’t think he knew what to feel any more than what to say. He stood in his stocking feet and stared at me, a private, unreadable expression on his face. A car went by out on the street, the motor gunning and falling away.

When he spoke, the words sounded curled up and wounded.

“What are you doing here?”

I think now of the ten thousand things I could have said to t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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him, whether it would have made any difference if I’d gone down on my knees and canted all my transgressions.

“I . . . I brought you something,” I answered, and, raising my hand as if motioning him to wait, I went to the foyer for my pocketbook. I returned, digging through it. Unzipping my coin purse, I took out his wedding ring.

“You left this on Egret Island,” I said, and held the ring out to him, grasping it between my right thumb and forefinger, lifting my left hand so he could see I was wearing my ring, too.

“Oh, Hugh, I want to come home,” I said. “I want to be here, with
you.
”

He didn’t move, didn’t reach for the ring.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry I hurt you.”

He still didn’t move, and it began to feel as if I were holding the ring across a chasm, that if I dropped it, it would fall through the earth. But I couldn’t draw back my hand. It was held by that mysterious quality that appears in cats when they’ve climbed to the top of the tree, to the end of the limb, and then, seeing with horror where they are, simply refuse to come down. I went on holding the ring out to him.
Take it, please take it
—

hoping so hard I pinched the imprint of the ring into the pads of my fingers.

He stepped backward before turning and left the room.

When he’d gone, I set the ring on the table beside his chair. I set it beneath the lamp, which I could not bear to switch off.

I slept in the guest room, or, to be accurate—I
lay awake
in the guest room. As atonement I kept forcing myself to see him in that moment as he’d turned to leave, his profile against the
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gleaming windows. The hardness he felt toward me had risen to his face and tensed in his cheek.

Forgiveness was so much harder than being remorseful. I couldn’t imagine the terrible surrender it would take.

It rained much of the night, coming down in great black wheels and shaking the trees. I saw dawn push at the window before I finally fell asleep and woke not long afterward to the aroma of sausage and eggs, to the overwhelming smell of Hugh cooking.

There are things without explanation, moments when life will become arranged in such odd ways that you imagine a whole vocabulary of meaning inside them. The breakfast smell struck me like that.

That was where our marriage had left off, that day back in February—February 17, Ash Wednesday, the day of ashes and endings. Hugh had cooked breakfast, sausage and eggs. It had been the final thing before I’d left. The benediction.

I went downstairs. Hugh stood at the stove, holding a spatula. The frying pan was crackling furiously. He’d set two plates on the breakfast bar.

“Hungry?” he said.

I wasn’t at all, but knowing his abiding faith in the power of such breakfasts, I nodded and smiled at him, sensing the tremor of some quiet new rhythm wanting to establish itself.

I climbed onto the bar chair. He spooned half of a vegetable omelette onto my plate, sausage links, a buttered English muf-fin. “There you go,” he said.

He paused, and I felt him just behind me, breathing in an uneven way. I stared into my plate, wanting to look around at him but afraid I would ruin whatever was about to happen.

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The moment seemed to hang in the air, revolving, deliberate, like a bit of glass lifted to the sun and turned slowly to refract the light.

Suddenly he laid his hand on my arm. I sat still as he slid it slowly up to my shoulder and back down.

“I missed you,” he said, leaning close to my ear.

I clutched his hand almost fiercely, pulling his fingers to my face, touching them with my lips. After a moment he gently pulled them away and put the other half of the omelette on his plate.

We sat in our kitchen and ate. Through the windows I could see the washed world, the trees and the grass and the shrubs silvered with raindrops.

There would be no grand absolution, only forgiveness meted out in these precious sips. It would well up from Hugh’s heart in spoonfuls, and he would feed it to me. And it would be enough.

Epilogue

pq

As the ferry nudges against the dock on Egret Island, the captain blows his horn a second time, and I go out to the railing. I remember the flowers spilling into the water as the boat pulled away last May. The sad little bon voyage party.

It seems now like a piece of history starting to sift into dust and, at the same time, as if I have only just been here. As if the petals will still be floating on the water.

It is February now. The marshlands are floods of golden yellow. The color settles on me like the heat and light of the sun.

The island will always be the fixed point of the migrating world.

Out there on the dock, Max is barking. I think of the mermaids hanging from the ceiling in Kat’s shop, the egrets flying above Caw Caw Creek, the bare rosebushes in the monastery garden. I picture the mermaid chair alone in the chapel. The whole island rises up to me, and I have a moment when I honestly don’t know if I can step off the boat. I stand there and let it pass,
knowing
it will pass. All things do.

When I told Hugh I needed to come and see Mother, to be here on Ash Wednesday, he said, “Of course.” Then a moment later, “Is it just your mother you’re going to see?”

Not that often, but once in a while, the sorrow and mistrust
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will form across his eyes. His face will close in. And he will be gone. His mind and body will still be there, of course, but his heart—his spirit, even—will go to the outer banks of our marriage and camp. A day or two later, he will be back. I will find him cooking breakfast, whistling, bearing more forgiveness.

Each day we pick our way through unfamiliar terrain. Hugh and I did not resume our old marriage—that was never what I wanted, and it was not what Hugh wanted either—rather we laid it aside and began a whole new one. Our love is not the same. It feels both young and old to me. It feels wise, as an old woman is wise after a long life, but also fresh and tender, something we must cradle and protect. We have become closer in some ways, the pain we experienced weaving tenacious knots of intimacy, but there is a separateness as well, the necessary distances.