The Nature of Water and Air Read online

  She began to hum, to say “Oh, oh, oh . . .” I couldn’t stand to listen to her. I couldn’t stand the residue the dress had left on my fingers. I ran back to my bed.

  I thought of how the selkie had been drawn to shore by the human man, lowing like a bull seal from his boat.

  • • •

  When I got up in the morning my mother was with Mrs. O’Dare in the kitchen. I stood dead still in the hall and listened.

  “He wants what he always wants, but I’ll not go off in a bloody caravan and freeze and get ill.”

  “No, of course you should not. I’m glad he’s gone, love.”

  “All the baubles and crockery I’ve collected couldn’t fit in a caravan. He tries to draw me away from the things I own.”

  “And from your daughter . . .”

  There was silence and my heart beat frantically. I waited for Mrs. O’Dare to leave the kitchen before I went in.

  My mother had a penitent look in her eye and she smiled at me as if she was sorry over what had last occurred between us. I moved cautiously, cutting a hunk of bread, looking for the marmalade. We sat together at the table and she watched me thoughtfully.

  Her eyes warned me not to be angry with her. I looked at my bread.

  “Clodagh,” she whispered. “Come here to me.”

  She held me and my heart drummed so hard I could feel it in my head. I wanted to scream at her, to beat my fists against her, but I held everything in, hunching in her embrace.

  • • •

  Two days after she’d reappeared I woke at night to find that my mother was not in bed. I walked quietly through the dark rooms and, hearing the bathwater softly sloshing, stopped outside the lavatory. The door had been left ajar, and a candle burned on the toilet. My mother’s head rested on the rim of the tub. Her eyes were half open and she gazed at it. I could see the locket hanging between her bare breasts. One hand was in the water between her legs, moving almost imperceptibly. Her knees were bent, her thighs open, each resting on the opposite side of the tub. She hummed as she had done with the tinker man. The water stirred faintly with the movement of her hand, the candlelight floating on its surface. The water sloshed as she arched her head back, letting out anxious breaths.

  Her eyes opened and her face was damp with tears. She put a hand to her head as if to stifle the weeping.

  Suddenly she was dead still as if listening hard. She sat up craning her head, her mouth tightened. I moved away quickly into the dark.

  The next day she told Mrs. O’Dare that in my quiet look she recognized a bold and obstinate nature.

  “Not at all, Agatha,” Mrs. O’Dare had said.

  “I swear she knows my thoughts, the little intruder.”

  “You’re dreaming it out of your own guilty conscience.”

  “No, Missus. It’s no dream. The girl’s eyes are full of blame.”

  “It’s sadness I see there,” Mrs. O’Dare said.

  “What’s she got to be sad about?” my mother snapped at her.

  The old woman did not answer.

  There was a pause before my mother said, “The mothers of Ireland can’t always take care o’ their children, Missus.”

  My throat tightened.

  “What are you saying, Agatha?”

  “I can’t take care o’ her, Missus.”

  “Ah! I’ll not listen to that. In a few days you’ll be yourself again and all will be fine between you.”

  “No, Missus. Things are hard between me and that one.”

  “Why, Agatha?” Mrs. O’Dare asked in a soft, pleading voice.

  “She tries to get into my skin with me and I can’t bear it.”

  “Tsk. Agatha, she’s a child. Your own child.”

  • • •

  I woke again to find her gone. I crept from bed and, seeing candlelight through the lavatory door, moved down the hall toward it.

  She lay in the bath in the same position she’d been in the night before. Her head was turned away so that I could not see her face. She traced a rose on the wallpaper with her finger.

  The floor creaked faintly under my feet and she jumped out of the bath and rushed to the door. She stood before me dripping wet, the locket swinging between her breasts. Her arm flew out suddenly and I felt her hand burn the side of my face.

  For a long moment she seemed to fade and I could see through her body. She was like a smear on the air, and through the insubstantial smoke of her, I could see the bathtub with the water still sloshing from side to side, and the white oak cabinet under the sink. I heard myself thinking, “I can see the end of her. There is the place in her that is nothing.”

  She leaned close to me, yelling, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. My face must have been filled with awe, maybe terror, as I peered at her, waiting for her to fade again like a ghost.

  But she didn’t. The burn of her slap spread across my cheek, over my ear, and up the side of my head.

  “Why can’t you leave me to myself? You’re like a bloody ghost following me!” She looked down at herself, crossing her arms over her breasts, then went back into the lavatory and wrapped herself in a towel.

  “Go to bed!” she cried, slamming the lavatory door. I heard her moving about inside, opening and closing the cabinet. She came out a few minutes later in her nightgown holding a comb. I waited, making sure that I could not see through her anymore. She was fully incarnate.

  “I told you to go to bed! What do you want from me, for the love o’ God?” She waved her arm at me with irritation and stomped off to bed.

  I did not go back to bed. I went to the vast blue room at the back of the house and sat huddled at the window looking toward the street-lights that remained on in the distant town. I had seen the end of her. I could not quite explain it to myself any better. My cheek and ear burned. I grew hot like a flame shaking on a candle. I imagined her blowing me out and something black and darkly mineral-smelling wriggling away onto air.

  I cried into the sleeve of my nightgown. A frail vein of light connected my mother’s heart to mine. In the dimness of the moonlight with the world in the pall of sleep, I was certain that my mother was a selkie. I had seen her in her animal skin. I resented her for having come up from the sea with her incomplete humanity, her lack of repentance over the derangement of our births: Mare’s insufficient respiratory system, and my heart, knotted with cords that betrothed me to her in a terrible way.

  I wished now that she would hurry and go with the tinker man or back to the sea; hurry and finish herself. I wondered what would become of me if she did. Would Mrs. O’Dare take care of me or would I be shipped off to an orphanage?

  I curled up on the sill. The window was cold and as I pressed the slapped side of my face against it, I closed my eyes and heard phrases of the “Sea Turns,” soothing in their insistence and in their symmetry. The melody varied itself, deepening into something euphoric, rendering me, for a few minutes, bodiless.

  · 12 ·

  I DID NOT SEE THE fur dress again until a midsummer night when I was twelve years old. I followed my mother at a careful distance as she crossed a neglected field toward the Wicklow Mountains, the inland sky clear and brilliant with stars. Bonfires illuminated the hillside and a brisk wind rushed the grass. In the moments when the wind died, faint reveling voices rose from the tinker camp.

  She stopped suddenly midfield and dropped the bag she carried under her arm. With graceful vigor she lifted the white dress she wore over her head and threw it to the windy grass where it stirred, then she took another out of her bag and put it on. Even in the dimness I recognized the silvery form of it, the pale shells at the hem catching starlight.

  For days I thought I’d smelled it on the air of the house as if it were a living thing that had wandered in out of the weather and hidden itself somewhere. Its proximity had made me anxious, sick to my stomach. She rolled the other dress up and slipped it into the bag then sallied up the hill.

  When she disappeared behind one of the fires I
felt the familiar ache of resentment. But something was different in the feeling: a jealousy of what she was doing; for what she was about to enjoy with the tinker man.

  • • •

  She climbed gingerly into bed beside me in the early light of dawn, controlling her breathing so as not to awaken me. Soon she was asleep.

  I got up and looked for the dress but couldn’t find it. I stood before the big mirror, pulling my nightgown tight at my waist and belly wanting to feel it strain at my hips, thinking of the slopes of my mother’s body in the fur dress.

  At school the nuns had grown vigilant over our collective puberty; the air frenetic with confusion and excitability. They wore dismayed faces, found themselves driven to go on and on about the sins of the flesh and the role of the young Catholic woman to be guardian over her maidenhead. We sang the “Hymn of the Virgin” at the opening and close of every school day.

  The day we’d received the lectures about reproduction it was in the convent all-purpose room where a large wood carving of the Pietà presided, the brokenhearted Mary holding the body of her dead son across her lap.

  A nun called Sister David showed us graphs of the female reproductive system: the uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries depicted bright yellow and glowing like some elaborate light fixture in a dim purple sea.

  Hazy, poorly photographed slides were shown of a luminous egg being rushed by sperm, or “frog spawn,” as Letty Grogan would later say. One slide showed a sperm having broken into the egg, decapitating itself in the process. The next two or three slides showed the egg in various stages of bubbly mytosis.

  This, we were told, was what sex was all about. This was all we really needed to know.

  The following weekend when Letty Grogan had stood scrubbing the frying pan in sudsy water I’d approached her, dying to talk to someone about the slides and the lecture.

  “Did you notice,” I asked her, “that Sister David has a little mustache?”

  As if her own mind was occupied with the same things, she’d turned to me without a beat and asked, “Did you see how it twitched when she talked about the sperm?”

  “Yes!” I cried.

  “It was obscene the way she pointed that pencil at the cervix. ‘This is the course that the sper-sper-sperm takes!’ ”

  I burst into shrill laughter and she went into an energetic tirade about the red-faced nuns who had attended, flustered and sweating. “Another minute and they’d all have to have been carted off to the hospital for palpitations!”

  Talking about it made me lightheaded. I helped her with the washing up, my hands shaking as I handed her each sudsy cup or utensil. We whispered covertly about things the nuns had not shown us or told us. She had a reliable source who told her that the first time a man puts his thing in a girl it hurts something terrible and that when they’re going at it there’s a great deal of moaning and crying out to the Holy Family in Heaven.

  We made an agreement to try to find out other things about sex that we had not known so that we could share the information every time she came over to help her aunt. Letty came through far more often than I did, having more resources in cousins and friends. I was forced to look in encyclopedias at school and once came upon a picture of a fetus. It shocked me with its overblown head and praying hands, suspended like a sea creature in water.

  Over the years Letty and I had grown easier in each other’s company. Once when we were eleven, we’d walked together on the beach and had thrown stones and shells into the waves. After that I looked forward to her coming and helped her with her chores.

  She’d often stay for tea and sometimes spend the night. My mother bent her head and put her hands over her ears as we shrieked over our shared confidences. Mrs. O’Dare would set up mattresses for us in the far room with the blue walls. When we were certain that my mother was asleep we’d share a cigarette, blowing the smoke out the casement window.

  I’d seen the way Letty tormented her own mother, sneaking into her things, using her lipstick and powder and scent. Letty reveled in the animosity between them. Once she’d taken me in her mother’s room and showed me a garter belt with a frill of lace along the elastic. “Can you believe the fat cow wears this thing?”

  There was something in the battle between Letty and her mother that made me envious. Their animosity was full of recognition. They gave each other cautious, serious attention. They occupied each other’s thoughts. I longed to elicit such a battle between my mother and me.

  I looked for ways to incite her impatience and irritation, even while I suffered a fascination with her secrets. And now with the boldness of adolescence upon me, I emulated Letty, talking back to my mother, saying “bloody” this and “bloody” that. Calling her a cow half under my breath, looking for a fight.

  I went into her drawers, borrowing her jewelry, or came home wearing Letty’s mother’s lipstick and nail polish. I felt a pleasurable sensation if she yelled or went into a huff. I laughed quietly with satisfaction even as my eyes filled with tears.

  As I stood that dawn before the mirror with my mother so heavily asleep I could have thrown her soup tureen through the window and she’d not have stirred, I took off my nightgown and stared at my body. The tuft of hair between my legs was ginger colored like my mother’s eyebrows and eyelashes, like the hair in her armpits. I was restless, standing outside the mysteries of sex but so close, the promise of it swimming in me.

  Impatience caught in my chest each time I breathed. I wanted a man to be overcome with me as the tinker man was with my mother. “Oh, Christ,” I remembered him saying as if my mother’s beauty had brought him to the end of himself.

  “Oh, Christ.”

  • • •

  I had grown, over the last year, expert at watching her and remaining undetected. Even listening from another room I knew what she was doing. It was the temper and odor with which she infused the air; a faint heat or coolness. Or certain sounds she made: sighs, whispers, the hesitation of her footsteps. The springs in the bed when she sat on it or rose from it. The cough of the brush in her hair. And when she was changing I even knew which dress she was putting on by the sound it made as she pulled it over her head. Wool and crinoline and cotton each produced distinctive sloughing noises against her body.

  • • •

  At night when my mother’d sleep, I’d touch myself the way I had seen her do in the bath. The first few times I did it, it felt as if my heart had sunken down between my legs and was pressing hard against my pelvic bone. I imagined myself a tinker, and as if that gave me ease to be wild in my thoughts, the uneasy, fidgeting pleasure intensified.

  The sensation made me malleable, and I attributed the sudden and swift changes in my body, my elongating waist and the swelling of my hips, to the heat that burned between my legs. I practiced it more and more and it transformed me like a glassblower’s fire. One afternoon, touching myself under the covers, the pleasure built until it was excruciating and the muscles pulsed of their own volition. I knew that I had unwittingly come into one of my mother’s secrets; something outside of language. I had opened an archaic door where an old fire was kept alive.

  Early one morning I trespassed into the upper house, my purpose making me strong enough to move the cast-iron range alone. I moved slowly through the second-floor hallway, overwhelmed by the profusion of stuccowork bodies: naked white nymphs emerging from decorative waves, some with arms, some without. Sunlight filled the rooms and the white of the stucco made me snowblind. Flecks of electric dust swam and shimmered on the air. The floors creaked. The farther I went into the hall, the more the nymphs stretched and arched away from the walls that held them. Spines twisted. Rib cages lifted into the air, arms reached to one side or the other. There was a series of girls who held their hands delicately around their faces as if to present them in their rapturous states. Each was different. While one cocked her head, another touched a round shoulder to her cheek. Each appeared intoxicated, lost in the langorous condition of her own beauty.
Parted lips, tongues stirring faintly in the shadows of white mouths. One with half-open eyes softly clenched her teeth.

  Clusters of girls were decoratively interrupted by the bodiless heads of Bacchanalian boys garlanded in grapes, wickedly smiling. Not like the despondent, isolated soul downstairs in the kitchen above the glass niche. A few stuck out little pointed tongues. One was depicted smiling with tears running down his cheeks.

  • • •

  I sensed Mare watching me from the foot of the bed as I touched myself. What I was doing made her lonely. It was inscrutable to her. I felt ashamed and the sadness between us interrupted the pleasure.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, wishing her to disappear.

  I was moving steadily farther and farther away from her; the child I’d once been breaking at the seams like an old dress.

  • • •

  On my thirteenth birthday I walked south of the convent school to a rock beach where I saw a group of seals lying on a large stone. Their barks made my eyes dampen; a fierce chorus more forlorn than the keening of gannets or petrels riding the swells. I was captivated by the way they slept on each other’s bodies, restless sleeps from which they constantly disturbed each other, barking, snipping, small heads resting on glossy backs as if their necks were broken.

  The selkie story lurked always in the back of my thoughts, though it no longer threatened me. It was less immediate, less real than it had been to me when I was small, yet it pulled at me, an invitation to mystery.

  That night I looked everywhere for the fur dress, which I was certain was sealskin. I associated its brackish, unsettling odor with sex, at once repulsed and drawn, reaching into dark places, almost afraid to feel its glossiness against my fingertips and palms. I imagined being insulated in its warmth.

  My mother had passed no secrets of womanhood to me as Letty Grogan’s mother had to her. It had been Mrs. O’Dare I’d gone to when I’d gotten my first period. It had been Mrs. O’Dare who had straightened out the cockeyed information Letty had given me about reproduction.