The Nature of Water and Air Page 4
“You’re full of tricks, you old cow!”
“What could be wrong with wanting to know something of your girlhood?”
“I had no bloody girlhood,” my mother cried, her anguish now turned to anger.
“Your language, Agatha!”
“Let me ask you a bleedin’ question, Missus! If you never had children o’ your own why are your legs swollen and spidery with the veins?”
The old woman drew a breath. “God give me patience,” she said.
“Is there a child ye left somewhere in the ditches of Ireland?” She was boisterous now, her voice growing hoarse as it climbed in pitch. “Or was it more than one child?”
There was nothing to be said to her in this state. She was like the force that drives the waves. Deaf and stubborn as the spring that would not come. I retreated to Mrs. O’Dare’s skirts, which smelled of potatoes and baking flour. My mother’s eyes darted at me as if she thought I was in some conspiracy with the old woman. My head began to drum. She hated me as much in that moment as she hated Mrs. O’Dare.
“I need the patience of a saint,” the old woman muttered.
Mare’s breaths quickened and grew loud. She scratched the silk skin of the chair with her nails. My mother took her gingerly in her arms and out of the room, Mare disheveled against my mother’s shoulder.
“What’ll we do, Missus,” I asked, squeezing the folds of the old woman’s skirt in my fists, “if the spring doesn’t come?”
• • •
The next morning a piercing ribbon of sunlight entered the room through the side of the curtain. I slipped from bed and went into the hall, my temples aching with the strain of the light. Without shadows, the architecture of the high rooms felt unfamiliar. The walls blasted with brightness looked pillaged, cindery. Dust motes floated like plankton in clear water.
I opened the front door and was rushed with a clean cold smell of sea air, my nightgown blooming like a sail. The field was flooded with sun, the crests of incoming waves lit a blinding white.
· 6 ·
THE SUNLIGHT DID BRING A change. Mare’s lungs began working so quietly, so efficiently, the doctor was stunned and hopeful. “It’s as if something has opened,” he said.
Mare wanted to hear stories about banshees and phoukas. She ran in circles imitating a banshee’s agonized posture and cry, the high-pitched shrieking, the grimacing face and relentlessness of her game designed to torment our mother.
My mother looked startled, pained by Mare’s wildness. The silent, intimate dialogue between them changed. She stared at the floor, bemused. Where was her complacent, beloved girl? The earnest little creature?
In the middle of one of those dry, still nights when we could hear crickets outside in the new clumps of mint, Mare woke me and we snuck into the piano room, switching on the bright overhead light. Riding on her urgency we settled at our appointed places on the piano bench. She began “Sea Turns” and I struggled to follow, the music grazing my still-groggy nerves. Mare did not watch her hand on the piano keys. She gazed up at the wall, staring through it, emanating heat. Her pace quickened until it was almost frenetic. I closed my eyes, washed in the swell, the music lifting and dropping me. We reached the pinnacle of tension in the song, the edge of the crescendo, but she would not allow the piece to resolve, backtracking on one phrase again and again, the music tinkling and begging, repeating its bewilderment at the high registers.
And then she stopped. Extricating her left hand from my right, damp and hot, she got up.
“Come on, Clodagh,” she said, and I followed her to the kitchen where she found an empty jar, then to the front porch where she switched on the light, waiting for the frail insects we called fairy moths to come. Soon, surrounded by insects, Mare dropped the jar and ran back and forth breathlessly grabbing them out of the air, fiercely clenching her teeth, her arms shaking as she squeezed them to death in the palms of her hands.
When our mother arrived at the threshold, crying out for Mare to stop, she kept going, her hands clotted with the smashed moth bodies and broken wings. For a moment my mother turned off the porchlight, thinking that might stop her, but Mare kept moving as if she did not know how to break the momentum that propelled her.
My mother switched on the light again and grabbed her, kneeling down to hold her still. “Stop it now, Mary Margaret. Stop!”
Mare stilled a moment, fixing our mother with her eyes, before fidgeting to get free. Our mother tightened her hold on Mare’s upper arms and it must have hurt because my sister winced and let out a little cry before spitting in our mother’s face.
They both froze. Our mother let go of her, wiped her face with her forearm, then dropped her arm to her side. Mare breathed heavily. “Mother,” she said weakly and touched her arm, but our mother’s face was hard and quiet, the porchlight hitting it as if it were made of crockery or glass.
Our mother got up from her knees and Mare grabbed the hem of her nightgown. “Mother,” she said again, but our mother pulled the fabric loose of my sister’s hand and uttered, “Don’t touch me, you devil.” She turned and went inside, a few flurrying insects in her wake throwing themselves at the lightbulb.
• • •
My mother went out and was gone all the next day, something she’d never done before. In the afternoon Mare and I sat next to each other at the piano pressing the sides of our faces together. We held hands and she led me in “Sea Turns,” our hearts beating out of tune with each other’s. The edginess of the previous night was still with her. She had difficulty concentrating. She’d begin a phrase and would lose it halfway through. She huffed and brought her fist down on the keys in exasperation. She was set on the task and overcome with it at once, fast shallow breaths coming through her nose. Perspiring, she focused hard on the keys, and clenched her mouth like our mother did when she was tense.
Our mother came home in the evening with an old-fashioned chiffon gown she’d bought at Rafferty’s. She put it on and looked at herself for a long time in the big parlor mirror. The numbness that had come into her face the night before was still there. She didn’t join us for tea.
She got out of bed in the dark that night and put on the dress. She stood before the mirror circling a votive candle around her waist, the clear and silver beads glimmering in the flame’s light.
• • •
At the evening meal my mother would not meet Mare’s eyes.
“Mother,” Mare said once. My mother’s lips tensed and she asked Mrs. O’Dare had she put butter or cream into the potatoes. She was quiet, ate only a little, and left the room. I reached for Mare’s hand under the table but she pulled it away. I felt her bafflement like a pain in my side. She’d never fallen from grace with our mother before. She’d never known my mother to be as cold as stone.
After the meal Mare isolated herself in the piano room. Through the closed door I could hear her humming and playing random notes. I wanted to sit next to her, to press the side of my face to the side of hers, to hum with her. When I walked in she stopped and I could feel the terrible drumming of her heart in my side.
She told me to go but I wouldn’t, staring at her across a mute field come up between us. I didn’t understand then that she was trying to break from me. That it was only me now holding her like a weight to the earth.
The whole right side of me, the side of me that was partly her, felt bereft.
That night she left the bed and went back to the piano room. She chose one note high on the keyboard that she played again and again. When she played it a last time and the sound faded, its tension remained on the air like a question that had been inadequately answered.
• • •
Mare complained of being tired early the next evening. My mother asked Mrs. O’Dare to put her to bed and Mare hung her head as the old woman led her out.
“Good night,” my mother said to her hesitantly.
I started to follow but my mother said, “Stay with me, lamb.” There was a nervousness abo
ut her, an urgency as she held her hand out to me. I could not move, polarized between her and my sister.
“Would you like to see a lovely trinket I bought, Clodagh?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Then come here.” Her tone was soft but insistent. She drew something out of a box in one of the cupboards near the sink, then opened her hand, showing me a little black dog made of glass. She let me touch it with the tip of my finger.
“ ’Tis so lovely a creature, Clodagh,” she said in a low voice, strange with sweetness. “ ’Twouldn’t it blind you?” She looked into my face with a kind of appeal.
“Yes,” I whispered.
We sat down and she put the dog on the table between us, light gleaming in its dips and curves. It emitted a tranquil din. I lay my head on the table and gazed at the dog, shifting my eyes from it now and again to my mother’s face, which was soft with contemplation.
• • •
That night my mother slept heavily. She did not get up to check Mare’s heart.
Once I opened my eyes and saw Mare’s face close and gazing into mine, and once or twice that night through my sleep I thought I heard “Sea Turns”; felt the melody pulling at me, backtracking, refusing to resolve.
In the morning I awoke to a soft commotion.
“She’s dead,” my mother said quietly. “She’s dead.”
“Holy Mother of God,” the old woman whispered, holding Mare’s forearm in her hand. The light hit the curves of Mare’s face. It was all surface and weight, with no fret and agitation. Her half-open eyes were brilliant.
“She’s dead,” my mother said again quietly.
But I heard the noise of Mare’s disembodied breathing as if she were resting her head on my shoulder, and as I got up and backed away from the bed it stayed with me, soft and steady.
· 7 ·
THE SMALL CASKET WAS PLACED on the piano bench in the vacant music room, the windows open because the day was so still. But a wind came up later and set the long gauze curtains luffing and stirring and blew out the two candles at the casket’s head. Mrs. O’Dare relit them and closed the windows.
She had just set up chairs for the people who would soon come, when my mother appeared in the hallway in her antique dress. The old woman pleaded with her to change into the black woolen one she’d laid out for her on the bed. But my mother would not be persuaded and seemed to take satisfaction from the old woman’s distress. Her face was flushed as if with fever.
The room stank of lilies. I turned quickly away when I saw Mrs. O’Dare manipulate Mare’s fingers around a white Sunday hymnal. When a few people came from town my mother disappeared. I hid as well, walking restless circles in other rooms. I could not bear their horror and intrigue. Once when I came to peer in at them from the doorway I heard a townswoman say to a woman accompanying her that the poor innocent had been too young to make a perfect Act of Contrition. But to Mrs. O’Dare’s weeping face, she spoke of the happy deaths of children called home to the breast of God.
“She’s the Holy Mother’s little girl now,” the woman said to me, clutching my hand in her two damp ones. “You shall meet her again, dear girl, if you stay the right side of God.”
When the priest arrived to bless the body, everyone assembled in the chairs. My mother looked like a bride as she walked in, all ice and light with sprigs of lily of the valley in her hair. Even the priest looked up from his book and hesitated. She stood suspended on the hush that rose around her, a soft look of elation on her face.
Mrs. O’Dare took her arm and led her to a chair. Throughout the Mass people looked at her stunned, embarrassed.
I sat heavily in my chair trying to keep my eyes open, all the while seduced by the hypnotic steadiness of my sister’s breathing.
Once when no one was talking to her I saw my mother let go of a shallow sigh. She hunched forward and looked into her hands.
• • •
Near the end of the day when we thought no one else would come, two women from the Marion Society knocked at the door holding a loaf of soda bread and a small pot of stew. Mrs. O’Dare took the provisions and thanked them, trying to explain that my mother was not up to taking visitors, when she appeared in the doorway in her incandescent dress. She looked rapt, her skin bright.
“We’re praying for you, Mrs. Sheehy,” one of them cried out.
“God is good to the wee ones He takes unto His breast,” said the shorter, younger one, who wore a blue serge hat.
“What a lovely blue hat, Miss,” my mother said.
“Oh, thank you,” the short woman said, touching it nervously. “It’s the color of Our Lady’s mantle.”
My mother nodded faintly, and as everyone seemed afraid to breathe, she withdrew.
“She’s beside herself,” Mrs. O’Dare apologized, red to the roots of her hair.
“Of course she is,” said the taller woman. “Of course.”
“God bless her,” said the other.
• • •
At the burial service a priest read from a little white book, something about Resurrection and the cycles of suffering coming to an end. Three old women in black stood just outside our small circle. As the gravedigger shoveled earth in over the coffin the women began to keen, a wild, grief-driven shriek that chilled me and brought poor Mrs. O’Dare to her knees with the tears.
My mother stared off at the Wicklow hills, transfixed, and when the keening stopped she watched the women depart.
A flash of anger broke in me and I shook, holding back the urge to rush at her, to hit her with my fists. She must have felt something because she switched her focus to me. There was lethargy and strangeness in her face and when I looked at her, my anger dimmed. I ached for her, and when she looked away from me I was bereft.
As we walked from the cemetery to Mrs. O’Dare’s little car, I felt as if I were floating. “I’m dreaming,” I told myself. “I’m having a dream.”
When we got home I complained to Mrs. O’Dare. “She doesn’t cry for Mare at all.”
“I don’t know where she goes in herself, Clodagh,” the old woman said, shaking her head.
But a few minutes later I walked into the parlor and found her sitting on the bed gazing out the window. She did not seem to hear me. Her mouth hung open like the wind had been knocked out of her.
• • •
For a few days I let Mare bring me with her into quiet, often dreamless sleep. We drifted above the town, carried along on currents of air. Below we could see the tides moving in and away on the strand. It seemed we moved aimlessly together a long time until I found myself flooded by the smell of the trees coming from a bit of forest in the Wicklow hills and had a sudden, terrible hunger to be located again, to be weighted. I was shepherded back to the ground in a storm of leaves while Mare remained above me, rising and drifting.
I awakened from dreams in which Mare was alive again, shivering and barefooted, smelling of evergreens. Death had been a kind of journey for her. It had exhausted her, left her frail and full of terrible knowledge.
I stopped sleeping at night. I lay in the dark thinking of the night just a week or so ago with the moths when our mother had gone cold to Mare. I let myself feel the anger that had flared up like lightning for a few moments at the burial. I let myself feel it cautiously, looking at my mother’s sleeping figure.
• • •
While placing Mare’s death certificate in a folder of papers and family records, Mrs. O’Dare found a never-before-seen photograph of my father in an envelope: a sad-faced man gazing placidly into the camera like someone looking through a window, the background complicated with shadows.
I wondered if he would recognize Mare if there was a place where the dead walked among other dead. I prayed to him with the same reverent, pleading tone of voice that Mrs. O’Dare used to pray to Christ, to find Mare, to console her. But like Christ, my father was elusive. Reticent. I could not feel him there. My sister remained with me, my system flooded now an
d then by her excruciating sadness; her bafflement at our mother’s withdrawal.
“Sssshhh,” I’d say, when I heard Mare stirring uneasily. I curled up, rocking myself, imagining our mother touching her face. “Ssssh, girleen.”
I asked the old woman to tell me all the tender things that had been there between my mother and Mare, and then I’d work hard to imagine them, to reconjure them. Mare did not have the energy to remember. I had to help her.
• • •
For a while, a few weeks or a month, Mare stayed with me; sleeping much of the time so I could hear her hoarse, steady breathing. Once the shock had settled, I imagined her drifting, traveling out into death. Days passed where she was fully gone from me. I could not sense a pulse or an intake of air or an uneasy thought that was not my own. Sometimes I could not remember her face, strange as that was since her face was so much like my own. I could not quite fix her in my mind.
It was at such times, when the loss of her had grown easier, her memory diffused, that she would return to me with a sudden, visceral power. A pressure in my chest. An aching in my fingers that caused them to shake. I struggled to soothe her, concentrating on our mother’s love for her.
I was afraid to approach the piano. Mare had consecrated it; and now like the music that came from it, Mare traveled on air. She swelled and ignited, then dimmed and faded. She was weightless, infiltrating.
I stood at the door of the piano room watching the stiff linen curtain move, afraid and in awe of air that could move things and separate the dead from the living.
If I gazed a long time at the piano so that I was seeing past it and through it, I could almost see Mare there at the sides of it, and the fear that filled me in those moments felt like a betrayal.
• • •
In the visible world my mother and I were left to each other. I found myself possessed by a hunger for some pure, original memory of who we were to each other. A wild notion came into my mind that now my mother might fall in love with me. I left the little bed I’d shared with Mare and got in beside my mother. I longed for her to press her ear to my chest and listen with faint desperation for my heartbeat. Or to gaze into my face, appealing to me as if my existence might sustain the world.