The Nature of Water and Air Read online

  I did not understand that my sister and I had come of a slow process within our mother’s womb. Mrs. O’Dare had told me once that identical twins like Mare and me had begun as one baby that split into two. I imagined that Mare had been the original, that I had come from her body the way the priest described Eve coming from a bone in Adam’s body. Perhaps, coming from her as I had, I’d taken too much of her heartiness and left her with none for herself.

  I went to Mrs. O’Dare’s room and woke her up. She startled and put her arm around me, shaking faintly. “What’s the matter, lass?” she asked.

  “Why is Mare so sick?” I asked.

  It never occurred to Mrs. O’Dare that Mare’s affliction was my fault. “God makes mistakes sometimes as if he were as human as the rest of us,” she whispered, and made the sign of the cross.

  · 5 ·

  MY SISTER AND I GREW used to the comings and goings of the workmen, their tools and tarps and ladders left out, but our mother never did. She was nervous and fidgety over the bumping in the walls.

  Once they’d finished upstairs, they replaced the demolished door. My mother took charge of the keys and once again the upper house was inaccessible.

  Then they began work on the first floor, uncovering the windows so that the dark, once forbidden hallway was now flooded with soft gray daylight. They ripped down moldings and door frames, replacing water-damaged support beams and replastering, careful not to damage the existing stuccowork designs. Once they wired they put in electric fixtures and bulbs so that the rooms looked vast and unearthly.

  They’d grown used to Mare and me, our timid, peering presences. At first they spoke to us, asking our names and such, but we never answered and then they were quiet when we appeared, hammering, turning a screwdriver, swishing a paintbrush. Two men with brown beards and one with a red one.

  Most of their labor was concentrated in the rooms farthest to the back and we were free to visit the piano room, to sit side by side on the bench and explore the sounds of the keys.

  Mrs. O’Dare knew a few songs. “Mary and Her Little Lamb,” and a fragment of one she called “Clair de Lune.” Mare leaned into the old woman, studying the movement of her stiff hands, demanding to see the pieces played again and again, understanding just by looking at the relationship of the keys on the piano that they ran in scales, that she could mimic the melody in a lower or higher register. The two simple pieces rolled from Mare’s hand within half an hour and she was frustrated for something more complex.

  Mrs. O’Dare said she might be able to produce fragments of a piece that required both hands, something she called “The Turning Sea,” or “Sea Turns.” She couldn’t remember.

  Mare picked it up quickly, revising the old woman’s mistakes, elaborating new sounds. Mrs. O’Dare left us to ourselves. I sat to Mare’s left and she labored with me, teaching me the lower notes to the piece, her hands so restlessly adept, so in tune with the gradations of sound.

  I breathed the humid warmth Mare issued, everything she learned flowing to me. Like thoughts that were nonexistent one moment and there the next.

  The lower notes, the ones I played, evoked the boom, the under-rush of the sea, and she played the melody, the higher pitch of the waves, the mood and the yearning, the sparkle of the spume. We held hands, my right and her left, the two resting between us on the piano bench.

  Over many rainy days waiting for spring to come, the music grew into a kind of breathing, her hand moving in a graceful side crawl, her fingers strangely independent of each other, quickening, flexing and slowing. She was the force that sent out and drew back the tides of my playing. Her left hand sweat in my right. She squeezed my fingers. We had grown accustomed to finishing the piece by softening our pressure on the keys until we barely grazed them, and found ourselves in silence, the vast heights of the room remembering the brilliance of the music, vibrant and awash above us.

  I pressed the side of my face to hers. My original. My beloved, knowing in the heat from her hand and shoulder that she was about to draw me after into “Sea Turns” again.

  • • •

  One day in the middle of May, with still no sign of spring, the men were working in the piano room. Mare was restless and fidgety, wanting to play a hiding game. To keep her from exerting herself, my mother suggested that instead we defy the weather and take her out in a wheelchair, rigged up with umbrellas and an oilcloth tarp. But the wheels sank in the blackened ruts of the road and we had a terrible time pulling it loose.

  Inside Mare asked again to play the hiding game, begging until our mother agreed. Mrs. O’Dare and my mother went to the kitchen and counted to twenty-five.

  In the vestibule were two closet doors, one of them a “dummy.” In various places throughout the house niches and closets had mates: one useful, one dead-ended, put there apparently to give the appearance of symmetry in the architecture. Mare was fascinated by these oddities. She stood before the dummy door, opening and closing it. “This is the tiniest room in the house,” she whispered, “but we can fit inside it and they’ll never know to look for us here.”

  We could barely close the door. I thought they’d find us right away with the noise of Mare’s uneven breathing, amplified by the tight space. But again and again we heard our mother’s bewildered footsteps passing our hiding place, and her calling out, “Where are you? Where are my lambs?”

  Long after I was ready to come out, Mare held me back, lips tight, suppressing her laughter. “She can’t find us!” Mare whispered. “She can’t find us!” Even when we heard anguish in our mother’s voice and the urgent echoes of Mrs. O’Dare’s nailed shoes as she searched, too, Mare was giddy over the deception.

  “I hate her,” Mare whispered, looking elated.

  “You don’t,” I said, stunned.

  She snorted. “I don’t, but I do!” I had to pry her hand loose of the knob to open the door and once I did she seemed relieved, disoriented as she stepped out.

  “We’re here!” I called out, and our mother, followed by Mrs. O’Dare, rushed in to us from the parlor. Our mother took Mare in her arms. “You’ll keep to your little chair the rest of the day, love. Promise me that,” she said.

  Mare rolled her eyes.

  “Promise me!”

  “Yes!” Mare said.

  • • •

  But all that day my sister was restless to play. In the afternoon when the men had gone, our mother walked across the damp field into town and Mare and I visited the piano room.

  They’d finished painting now and the walls were a clean apricot color, the moldings and cornices bleached: fat, snow-white infants peering through vines.

  While Mare stood before the piano moving her hands softly over the high keys, I asked her, wasn’t it an odd thing that our mother had once lived in a cave in the wall of a cliff in the west and that our father had brought her into his house; that she was a tinker and never wore shoes so she’d had dark, leathery feet that had to be scrubbed, and bugs that had to be washed from her hair?

  Mare listened thoughtfully, tilting her head, her fingers running a quiet scale. I reminded her about the two tinker girls who had begged on the roadside and the freedom they’d had to play. I asked her, wouldn’t it be a wild, free life, sleeping outside at night? I described the way they’d rolled about in the grass, and saw my own exhilaration reflected back at me in her face.

  She lay down on the floor and rolled from one end of the room to the other while I jumped over her, both of us giddy. Breathlessly I described the reel the tinker girls had danced together and we held hands spinning until the air swirled around us like water. We had both fallen to the floor joyful, the earth shifting wildly beneath us, when we heard Mrs. O’Dare’s nailed shoes echoing in the hallway. Finding Mare lying on the floor without cardigans and shawls, face flushed and eyes damp with exhilaration, Mrs. O’Dare lowered herself painfully to her knees. “Ah, lass, you’ll not let your mother see you so. Quickly now, let’s fix ye up before she’s back.” />
  She settled Mare in her chair in the parlor, admonishing us softly the entire time.

  That night at tea Mare reached for my hand under the table, squeezing it with the pleasure of our secret. She leaned into me and whispered, “We are wild tinker girls.”

  But for that afternoon of joy, my sister paid with a night of labored breathing, and me awake beside her feeling helpless, the air moving effortlessly in and out of my lungs.

  • • •

  The next morning my mother sent me from the room when Mare had a breathing fit. I sat in a chair in the vestibule listening to the chaotic gasping behind the closed parlor door. Whenever Mare suffered I held myself very still, closing my eyes, my mouth filling with a brackish taste, a pain concentrating itself at the soft point under the arc of my ribs. When I heard her quiet I got up and ran dizzily into the room. Mare’s face was sweat soaked, and though my mother hovered over her, Mare kept her focus on me. I reached with my right hand for her left and heard my part in the “Sea Turns,” and soon felt Mare accompany me.

  Afterward when she slept I lay with my face beside hers on the pillow, and smoothed her hair. Watching nervously from the doorway, my mother told me to leave her, but I wouldn’t get up. I told her I was tired too, and closed my eyes. There was in me, that day, a wildness to be near Mare; an unquenchable loneliness for her. With “Sea Turns” between us we were almost one; and on the verge of sleep we remembered who we once were: something singular and faceless. Drenched in light.

  • • •

  The doctor came and examined Mare that afternoon. Afterward when he sat down in the foyer, Mrs. O’Dare gave him a cup of tea. He sighed, holding his cup in one hand, his saucer on the palm of the other, gazing distantly at the wall as if he were staring out the window.

  My mother waited for him to say something and when he didn’t she pleaded, “Will she be all right?”

  He turned his head, and the daylight coming through the vestibule window pooled on his glasses, obscuring his eyes. “She’s weak. Keep her comfortable, Mrs. Sheehy.”

  When he left my mother fretted and sighed, guilty over having let her play the hiding game.

  • • •

  After helping Mrs. O’Dare do the washing from breakfast, I stood before the parlor door. Mare sat on the bed while my mother knelt at the foot of it, ransacking the drawers of her small oak chest, usually forbidden to us.

  When she’d first come to Mercymount Strand my aunts in the west had, over the telephone, set in place for my mother an account at Rafferty’s Antiques and Acquisition Shop in Bray so that she might furnish the mostly empty house. But instead of buying furniture she had bought knickknacks and crockery and jewelry; little charms and novelties of all kinds, and hoarded them in chests and presses.

  From the doorway I could see a selection of her precious keepsakes laid out before my sister, my mother leaning with her elbows on the perennially unmade bed, examining something in her hand, speaking in a whisper as if she were in church.

  “Clodagh! Come in here,” Mare cried. A shadow crossed my mother’s face when she saw me, but she looked back at the object in her hand.

  The window was open a crack, the air mineral-smelling from dim blasts of lightning breaking over the sea. I came in slowly and stood near the bed.

  The object in my mother’s hand was a watch with a cracked crystal and a little garnet like a bead of blood over the twelve. The metal that encased it had turned green.

  “It doesn’t tick,” Mare said when my mother offered it to her.

  “It doesn’t matter, Mary Margaret,” my mother said. “Look at the beauty of the thing.”

  “Yes,” Mare said and passed it to me.

  I did not see the beauty of it. I must have made a face because my mother took it from me and said, “You have to develop a taste for beauty.”

  She held it again, seeming to cradle it in her hand. Everything about her slowed down. It seemed to be the stillness, the steadfastness of the thing, that captivated her. And I thought then that if it had ticked she might have liked it less.

  Her mood and the soft noise of Mrs. O’Dare sweeping in the hallway made me feel sleepy.

  “A beautiful thing like this will outlive us all,” she said, holding it to the globe of the lamp. “Such little things are slow to change.”

  I wanted to understand her reverence for things kept in the locked chest, taken out into light only on occasion, fawned over and returned to airlessness.

  In Mare’s lap I saw a hair comb with a satin ribbon attached to it, and the porcelain Dutch girl my father had given to my mother. My heart constricted in my chest. I knew somehow that my mother had given these things to my sister. But I told myself that Mare deserved special treatment. Her tie to the world was so tenuous and mine so strong. She deserved the tenderness of our mother. And I told myself that whatever our mother gave to Mare she also gave to me because the cords that once connected us in the womb still kept their phantoms in our sides. In spite of all these thoughts, my face burned.

  I ran my fingers roughly over the tangle of necklaces and jewels on the bed and my mother stiffened.

  “Stop that now!” she admonished in a harsh, quiet voice.

  I looked angrily at her, holding back tears, stirring the necklaces again roughly before withdrawing my hand.

  The rain deepened outside and the light from the sea seemed bright and dark at once, the shadows of the rain moving over the bed where everything lay, and making the little novelties on my sister’s lap appear to shiver.

  • • •

  That night while Mare slept I went into the kitchen where my mother and Mrs. O’Dare sat at the table smoking.

  “Clodagh!” the old woman said when I appeared in the doorway in my nightgown.

  The back of my mother’s chair was against the wall. She leaned one arm on the table and her legs were crossed. I approached her quietly, watching her face. “Can I have one of the presents my father gave you?” I asked.

  “What?” she asked impatiently.

  “You gave Mare the Dutch girl.”

  “You’re rough with things, Clodagh,” she said, looking away from me and puffing on her cigarette.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  She would not look at me.

  “I’m sorry if I was rough with the necklaces,” I said.

  “Go to bed now, Clodagh,” she said.

  But I did not move, hungry, uncertain.

  “Agatha, love!” the old woman said. “Give the poor creature a kiss!”

  My mother stiffened. “Go to bed, Clodagh!” she said in a soft, angry voice.

  I walked from the room and stood in the darkness of the hall listening to them.

  “Why must you always intervene between myself and that one?” my mother cried.

  “For the love of God! Don’t you see how much that child needs you?”

  “Yes, I see it! I bloody well see it. She watches me like a cinder that won’t go out.”

  “Why can’t you offer her any comfort?”

  My mother let out an exasperated sigh and the certainty left her voice, replaced by something faintly desperate, regretful sounding. “I don’t have enough in me for the two of them, Missus.”

  A moment of silence passed before the old woman said, “You do, love.”

  “Things’ll be better when we have a bit of sunlight again, Missus. Mare will get better and I’ll be better in myself.”

  I crept up the hall and got into bed.

  A few minutes later I heard the door creak open. “Clodagh,” my mother whispered and I sat up. She put her arms around me and I felt her heart beating against my throat.

  “Good lass,” she said in a light, high-pitched voice, tender with guilt. She kissed the top of my head. I lay down and she pulled the blanket up around me and moved away in the dark to her own bed.

  • • •

  Mrs. O’Dare drove to the shops in the morning for fresh bread and sausages. She stopped at Bourke’s, the new
sagent’s for the Irish Press, and after breakfast she read it at the table, muttering, making little interested sounds as she turned the pages.

  “Bless us, Holy Mother! It says here that the weather is about to turn!” she announced.

  “I’ll not believe it until I see it,” my mother said, her voice still softened by confusion as if the old woman’s words from the previous night had not left her. She looked plaintively at me, then away.

  “The seasons always change, Agatha,” Mrs. O’Dare said.

  “No, Missus,” she said and gazed into her teacup. “There was a spring once in the west of Ireland . . . that did not flower.”

  “Maybe there were no flowers in the very rocky places . . .”

  “Even in the rocky places the maidenhair ferns and the little purple flowers come up between the stones,” she said slowly. “But one year I was there they never came up at all.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Mrs. O’Dare said.

  “ ’Twas before I met you, Missus,” my mother said softly.

  The old woman lowered the newspaper from her face and gazed at my mother.

  “That particular year the rain destroyed the Brigid’s Beds,” my mother said.

  “Brigid’s Beds?” the old woman asked.

  “Have ye not heard of such things?” my mother asked.

  “No, love,” the old woman breathed.

  “A grave for an unbaptized child. The rain was terrible that year, exposing the infants in their awful privacy, sending them adrift in the washes.”

  Mare fidgeted in her chair.

  “Tell us, love,” Mrs. O’Dare said. “Was it before you were alone in the cliffs?”

  My mother held her breath. For a moment she looked so much like my sister that I could have believed Mare was her own twin and not mine. She seemed to be considering how she might answer and if the old woman’s voice had not suddenly rushed with insistence, maybe she would have.

  “Tell us, love,” the old woman piped, leaning toward her. My mother’s forehead tightened and the graceful vein that ran there appeared and imposed itself, casting a shadow.