What the Waves Know (24 page)

The morning of the festival arrived overcast and chilly. Since Remy was up to her ears in things to get done, Grandma Jo, my mother, and I walked the thirty minutes into town past the small tributaries that snaked in from the ocean and swamped over a series of salt marshes. The stagnant smell of dead fish, brine, and muck held tight to the damp air. Tall rangy swamp grass tangled at the feet of an egret poking for crabs.

“I'm just saying,” my mother was grumbling to Grandma Jo, who proudly toted a box of her cheese biscuits, “I don't know why you had to paint her face with makeup. She's a teenager.”

“Exactly.” Grandma Jo patted my mother's arm.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Just that there may be someone other than you that she wants to look beautiful for.”

“Someone? There's a
someone
?” My mother paused in
her tracks, looking back and forth between my grandmother and me. “What someone?”

“I'm just saying . . .” Grandma Jo tugged my mother by the elbow to put her back in gear. “Doesn't she look beautiful?”

“She looks beautiful all the time.” My mother's words hit the day with all the childishness of a pout. “She doesn't need goop all over her eyes to do it.”

At this time of the year, when the blanket of reeds wove densely around itself, a person could walk right over the water of the salt marsh like Jesus without ever breaking through. Libby and I had done it all the time down beside the Tuckertown docks, bobbing along as though we were balancing across her mother's waterbed. Now my feet tingled with the urge to charge toward them and jump right on the surface.

“For goodness' sake, Mother, I can't believe you didn't bring shoes.”

“They smother my feet.” Grandma Jo wiggled her toes around in the dirt.

“Feet do not have lungs. We are going to walk the entire way there and they aren't going to let you in and we'll just have to turn right around and come back,” my mother snapped, waving a hand at Grandma Jo's smudged toes.

“They would not dare lecture a sixty-year-old woman about how to dress.”

“Yes, they would. Wearing clothing in public places is the rule, whether you are six or sixty.” My mother's eyes
flashed to the deep V of Grandma Jo's tunic. That she had left her brassiere at home beside her sandals was clear.

“Oh, for the love of Pete! Who made you so frightened of breaking a rule now and then? You would think you were raised by some hard-nosed son of Sigmund Freud instead of your father and me. They are
my
feet; I will tend my own calluses and pluck my own slivers, thank you very much. It might just do you a world of good to kick your own shoes off and run barefoot through the world screaming, ‘you can't tell me what to do!'”

My mother laughed.

“Really, it's amazingly freeing. Try it.”

“Okay, you can't tell me what to do!” She looked squarely at Grandma Jo as she said it.

“You see? I bet your blood pressure's down ten points already.”

Main Street was
a flurry of activity with a steady trail of people heading toward the square. On both sides of the street, shop owners busied themselves brushing leaves from their awnings and pounding dirt from their front mats. Those stores not selling Yemaya wares had closed for the day. At Merchant's Hardware a young boy fumbled with the lock on the front door then turned to his father for assistance. Mr. Herman sat on a step stool in front of his new window watching people pass, a cane propped beside him on one side and his broom on the other.

We could already see the frenzy of the square when I remembered what Remy had said about Mr. Herman taking forty-five minutes to hobble the short distance to work each day. I recalled the wistful look in Mrs. Mulligan's eyes when she'd talked about not being able to walk to the festival on her tired bones anymore. Mr. Herman's bones were old, too, and I wondered if he got to enjoy the festival or if he just watched everyone else enjoy it. Ever since I'd decided Mr. Herman's grouchiness was really loneliness, he seemed different to me. It was like Priscilla Peabody and the rest of the world ratcheting up the volume when they spoke to me—sometimes the world just decided a thing about a person that was all wrong. The thought of the bottle of soda at the bottom of my ladder came back to me.

Turning around, I grabbed Grandma Jo's arm, stealing a plate of cheese biscuits from her box. By the time I made it back to Mr. Herman, I was huffing and small beads of sweat dotted my forehead. I set the plate on the ground by the leg of his stool and ran to catch Grandma Jo and my mother. I'd only taken two steps before something hard tapped against my leg and I turned to find Mr. Herman bouncing his cane gently against my calf. He touched the plate with a wink and I gave him a smile then raced back the length of Main Street to where my mother and Grandma Jo stood waiting.

By the time we reached the village square, the smell of brine was fixed in my nose and most of the island was already there.

Mr. O'Malley was leaning against the hood of the Great Purple Monster, puffing his pipe and watching with interest. When he saw us coming down the walk, he stood upright, knocking the tobacco from his pipe with the heel of his boot.

“Mr. O'Malley,” my mother said.

“Tom,” Grandma Jo greeted him sweetly.

“Well, good day, Zorrie, Izabella, and the lovely Josephine. You've made it just in time to see the tribal dancers.”

Mrs. Mulligan was right about the festival. The square had been transformed into a magical bubble of lanterns hanging from every branch. Artists' booths dotted the lawn like drops of dew, selling African wares—everything from woven baskets to clay-dyed clothing. String puppets of lions and sea witches dangled from dowels. A mud circle with a bonfire in the middle had been set up in the center of it all, and dancers dressed in kente cloth were painting their faces beside it. African music wove through the air like a needle stitching the fabric of the town together. The strong scent of ginger and curry burned from fire pits. In the center of it all, Yemaya seemed to be watching over the people of Tillings.

A young boy brushed between Grandma Jo and Mr. O'Malley carrying a cloth full of fresh herbs and fish bones.

“Offerings,” Mr. O'Malley said.

Grandma Jo took Mr. O'Malley by the elbow, dragging
him along to the ring of fire. The image made me wonder about Mrs. O'Malley. I'd been waiting to meet her since we arrived. I looked around for her now and was wondering where she was when Riley walked into view carrying a stack of grape pies. He set them on a counter strewn with everything from Niagara grape kuchen to grape seed facial scrubs to apple butter. His eyes caught mine over the white cardboard boxes, sending butterflies flittering in my stomach, then he turned back to the woman behind the counter with a comment that made her laugh. I watched him walk away until my thoughts were cut through by the deep steely thrumming of African drums. Turning around, I made my way to the edge of the fire pit, next to my mother.

A man with black and red stripes painted across his face began to stomp a ring around the fire, speaking in a deep, melodic voice:

“Orphaned as a child, the Great Mother, Yemaya, wandered alone for many moons. As she grew into womanhood, she crafted a daughter from clay to keep her company and, on the sixth rise of the sun, breathed life into her, creating humankind. Through her belly were we all born, and in her hand do we live—great goddess of our dreams. She alone can reveal the secrets of the universe.”

Holding on to Mr. O'Malley's elbow with one hand, Grandma Jo softly patted her feet in rhythm with the drums, which sent a grin skittling over my mother's face. My grandmother tilted her head to the sky, closing her
eyes, and I knew while her body was right there in front of us, she was soaring away to someplace faraway.
Someday I'm going to fly like that . . . ,
I heard my father whisper from some corner of the night.
Me, too,
I answered with a smile.

“In seven skirts of blue and white, she walks the shores wearing cowry shells in her hair and pearls around her neck as she watches over her children. Her voice sings out from the throat of every shell and she lies down every night on a bed of sea stones, unburdening her children of their secrets. Her breath is the storm raging over the ocean, guiding everything connected to the sea. Yemaya is the sea. . . . She sinks ships and carries sailors home. Ruler of all, mother of mothers
.
”

Grandma Jo stomped a slow circle, ducking under Mr. O'Malley's arm.

“She is the tiger shark hungry for flesh, the seagull soaring on sturdy wings; she is the fish and the whales, the egrets and the oysters. We drink from her breast and offer her our precious gifts in return.”

The man reached into a lambskin bag, pulling forth a fistful of fish bones and shells, and sprinkled them around the flames. The drums picked up velocity, sending his black feet into a frenzy, until the ground became a drum of its own and the red streaks on his face were a blur spinning around and around and around. Grandma Jo stomped the earth along with him, reaching her free hand out to call my mother in.

“Mom, no!”

Dragging Mr. O'Malley with her, she danced a circle around my mother, who had begun to laugh despite the blush moving over her nose. On the second round, my mother's feet started to stomp the ground, too, and before I could figure out what she was doing, she'd grabbed ahold of me and we were all spinning slowly in circles around one another, stamping the grass flat beneath our toes.

“We honor the Great Mother and wait for her to gather her children beside the sea to celebrate in preparation for the Great Feast.”

The drumming stopped with the force of a head-on collision, dropping the man to the ground like a fallen marionette. When he rose to his feet, a thunder of applause surrounded us.

“I feel so . . . ,” my mother puffed.

“Alive?” Grandma Jo asked.

“. . . okay.” My mother laughed, as beautiful as she'd been the afternoon she'd come out of the bathroom on my sixth birthday and stolen my breath away.

“The legend says that all Yemaya's children will gather around her skirts and eat from her hand on the twenty-sixth day of October, and so in her honor we hold the Great Feast on that date each year,” Mr. O'Malley explained. “Chief Tankin is the Yemayan storyteller here on Tillings. He works at the library.” Mr. O'Malley nodded toward the man, who was wiping sweat from his brow.

“He's wonderful,” my mother said to Mr. O'Malley.

“And look, he's not wearing any shoes!”

My mother shook her head at Grandma Jo. “You're impossible.”

“Nothing's impossible, not even me.” Grandma Jo winked at me before her eyes cascaded down my arm to the hand my mother was still holding.

Leaning against a table selling hot cider, Riley stood watching us and he didn't try to hide it when my eyes caught his.

Grandma Jo nudged my mother's arm. “Come on, Zorrie. Let's stroll over to the art exhibition. We can still see the dancers from there. Izabella doesn't need to be saddled with two old sea witches of her own.”

“Excuse me?” My mother raised a brow in Grandma Jo's direction.

“Come to terms with it!” Grandma Jo laughed, pulling her toward the tent strewn with carvings, paintings, and weavings of sea witches. “We're aging gracefully, but aging nonetheless.”

“I thought we came here for a big day of family togetherness.” My mother studied me hesitantly for a moment, in my new tinted lip gloss and the stroke of mascara and blush that Grandma Jo had snuck on me that morning.

“Oh, Zorrie,” Grandma Jo patted her hand, “that was just a ruse to get you out of the house. I thought you knew me better than that. Come on, now. Give her a little room to breathe; no kid wants her mother chasing up her heels. It's embarrassing.”

“Tell me about it.”

Feeling a tap on my right shoulder, I turned to find a man studying the festival map with a confounded look on his face. “Excuse me. Can you tell me where the art tent is?”

“She doesn't spea—” My mother started to intervene before Grandma Jo pulled her back around.

I gazed at his map and pointed across the fairway to the sailcloth set up a hundred yards behind the concession stand.

“Thank you.” He waved, making his way through the crowd. Behind my mother's amazed face, Grandma Jo winked with a proud nod.

“Dance, Zorrie!” she sang out and began moving her feet. My mother looked as though she might lob one more objection, but the drums started up again, cutting her off. This time three dancers, all women, stomped into the circle, spinning in different directions, crisscrossing paths, then pushing violently away from one another as they went. I could not help but think that this was what it was like with the women in my family. We bounced off one another, passed by, then circled back around in a chaotic dance. At fourteen, I was only beginning to learn the steps.

Pulled in as an unwitting accomplice, Mr. O'Malley added, “I'm sure Remy could use some backup pawning her preserves and apple pies.” He chuckled heartily. “And if she doesn't move at least half of 'em, I guess we'll know
what everyone on Tillings Island is getting under their trees for the holidays.”

I turned, searching for Remy's booth as Grandma Jo led my mother away. It wasn't long before I spied her behind a stack of jarred apple butter and made my way to the table.

“Are you here to work or scavenge? “Remy ran a knife through one of the pies and began plopping slices onto paper plates. I stuffed a wine biscuit in my mouth. “That's what I thought. Here.” She shoved a piece of pie into my hand. “Watch the booth for me while I get more compote.” I nodded and ducked under the counter to sit down in an empty chair. “That's Mrs. O'Malley's chair. Grab one of the folded seats over by Riley,” she called, before jogging over to the taxi. Letting my eyes flick to the back corner where Riley was straightening a stack of empty white cardboard boxes, I snatched a chair and pried it open.