The Mermaid Chair (21 page)

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asked for, but artist.
Artist.
I picked up each tube: Yellow Ocher, Indian Red, Cerulean Blue, Rose Madder, Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber, Thalo Green, Ultramarine.

I was only vaguely aware of the others watching me. A spot in my chest had flared up, creating a buzzing sensation like the sparklers Mike and I used to run around waving in the early dark of summer.

When I glanced up, Kat smiled at me. Pieces of her hair fell around her ears. Today it appeared to be ocher red. “So when can I expect to see mermaid paintings in my shop?”

“Art comes when it comes,” I replied.

“Oh. Well.
Excuse
me,” she said. “Let me rephrase that: When do you think your art might be
coming?
”

“As I recall, we had a deal. You were going to talk to Dominic and see what he might know about Mother’s reasons for cutting off her finger—remember? And in exchange I was going to paint mermaids. So . . . did you?”

Kat’s eyes drifted away toward the window over the sink, to the filigree of light on the counter. The moment stretched out. I could hear Benne fooling with the lid on the sugar bowl, clink-ing it up and down. Hepzibah rose from her chair and walked over to the coffeemaker where she poured herself another cup.

“I didn’t talk with him, Jessie,” Kat said, turning to me. “It just so happens I agree with Dominic. I don’t think it does anybody any good, especially your mother, for us to go picking through whatever her reasons were. It’s only going to upset Nelle. And it’s pointless anyway. Look, I’m sorry. I know I told you I’d talk to him, but I don’t think it’s right. I wish you’d take my advice and drop it.”

I felt a surge of anger at her, and yet I was half tempted to do
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what she’d said. Understanding my mother was exhausting, maybe even impossible.

“All right.”

“You mean you’ll drop it?” she asked.

“No, I mean, it’s all right—I won’t ask you to help me.” I said it with resignation, with the anger bleeding out of me. Kat believed she was doing what was best, and I was never going to convince her otherwise.

She cocked her head and gave me a rueful smile, pretending to be contrite. “But you’ll still paint the mermaids for me. Won’t you?”

I sighed. “Oh, for God’s sake, yes, I’ll paint the mermaids.” I wanted to be aggravated with her—I’d tried to sound that way—

but when I looked down at the paints and brushes she’d gotten for me, I couldn’t.

The phone rang, and Kat wandered off to answer it. Hepzibah stood at the sink rinsing out the coffeepot. The room filled with the sound of running water, and I had a momentary flash of my dream from the night before. I wondered what Whit was doing now—this very minute. I pictured him in his cottage, hunched over a desk covered with books, the cowl of his robe cradled between his shoulder blades. I saw him in the johnboat cutting through the creeks, saw that remarkable shade his eyes had turned in the sunlight—the color of denim.

It was adolescent to be thinking about him this way. But I was unable sometimes to think of anything else. I would imagine our bodies pressed together, me lifting out of myself into something timeless and large, where I could do anything, feel everything, where there would be no empty spaces inside to fill.

“Are you going to tell us why Hugh left?” asked Kat, slumped t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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against the counter. I hadn’t even heard her come back into the room.

“He hadn’t really planned on staying,” I answered.

“Not even one night?” She looked at my left hand. “Yesterday you were wearing your wedding rings. Today you’re not.”

Benne stared at my hand from across the table, then at my face. It was that same look she’d given me in the Mermaid’s Tale when she’d informed me that I was in love with one of the monks. The realization that she’d also informed her mother of this fact left me with an irrational need to confess everything.

As Hepzibah wandered over and stood next to Kat, it occurred to me that this was probably the reason I’d come here in the first place. Because I desperately needed confidantes. Because underneath I felt terrified. Because the weight of what I was carrying around was at least ten times heavier than I was, and I had come to the end of my ability to hold it. I wanted suddenly to kneel down in front of Kat and Hepzibah, lay my head in their respective laps, and feel their hands rest on my shoulders.

“Something awful has happened,” I said, directing my attention to the bowl, then the tabletop. “Hugh and I have— I think we’ve separated.” Shifting my eyes a little, I saw the hem of Hepzibah’s dress, Kat’s pointy shoes, a trellis of shadows falling from the window. The faucet was dripping over in the sink. Coffee smells drifted around like ground fog. I went on. “I’ve fallen in love with . . . with someone else.”

I didn’t look up. I wondered if their expressions had flattened out with shock. I hadn’t felt ridiculous saying it to them, as I’d imagined I would. I
did
feel shame, but, I told myself, at least I was a woman having a real experience, unwilling to pretend about it, ready to take myself, my feelings, seriously.

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Kat said, “Benne told us.”

It was generally true that Benne was never wrong, but it astonished me how easily they’d accepted her word on this.

“She told us this ‘someone else’ is one of the monks,” Kat added.

“Yes,” I said. “Brother Thomas.”

“He’s the newest one, isn’t he?” Hepzibah asked.

I nodded. “His real name is Whit O’Conner.”

“Did you tell Hugh?” Kat wanted to know.

“No, I . . . I couldn’t.”

“Good,” said Kat, and she let out a breath. “Sometimes being honest is really just being stupid.”

My hands, I noticed, rested in front of me as if I were praying, my fingers laced so tightly they were actually hurting. The tips of them were pulpy and red.

Kat sat on one side of me, while Hepzibah plopped down on the other and draped her brown hand over both of mine.

“When I think of Hugh, I feel terrible,” I said. “But I can’t get over the feeling that Whit is someone I’m supposed to be with. We went out in his boat a few days ago, to a place out in the rookery, and talked. He had a wife, who died.” I stopped.

“I’m not making sense.”

“First of all, you don’t
have
sense when you fall in love,” said Kat. “And no one here’s judging you. Not in this house anyway.

Lord knows you won’t see
me
throwing stones. I’ve been exactly where you are.”

I looked at her and blinked. The arches of her eyebrows had traveled up on her forehead, and her mouth had taken on a bitter amusement. “Now, the man wasn’t a monk. God—bless her heart—spared me that bit of humor. He was a harbor pilot in t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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Charleston who used to come over here to fish and buy cast nets.

God, I loved that man—despite the inconvenient fact I was married to Henry Bowers. I was just about your age, too, just old enough for the bottom to start falling out of things, you know? You look around and think, So this is
it?
I’d been married twenty years.
Twenty.
Which is about when the marriage glue gets so old it starts to harden and crack.”

I felt my throat tighten a little. Hepzibah began to rub her thumb back and forth across mine. The friction, the rhythm of it, was soothing. My fingers unknotted, drooping toward my palms.

“I’m just saying I know what it’s like to love somebody you think you shouldn’t be loving,” Kat went on. “There probably isn’t a woman alive who doesn’t know what that’s like. Half of them fall for their gynecologists and the other half for their priests. You can’t stop your heart from loving, really—it’s like standing out there in the ocean yelling at the waves to stop.

“But you’ve got to hear this, too,” Kat added. “I wish now I hadn’t acted on those feelings. There was a lot of hurt caused, Jessie. To be honest, I’m not sure I could’ve done anything else but what I did, given how I felt and all, and how little I knew.

I’m only saying I know what you’re feeling and that you should think this through.”

I sank back in my chair, hearing the croak and tick of wood in the seat. I turned and looked at Hepzibah. Her eyes were partly closed.

She said, “When I was forty, back before I started studying Gullah ways, I fell in love with a man in Beaufort who could quote you entire slave narratives passed down by word of mouth for a hundred years. I never knew anybody who cared so much
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about preserving their roots, and of course what I was loving was mostly my own hunger to do the same thing.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“I was already divorced by then and wouldn’t have minded remarrying, but he had a wife already. Kat is right, that didn’t stop me from feeling what I was feeling. I decided, though, to love him without . . . you know, physically loving him, and it was hard, about the hardest thing I ever did, but I lived to be glad about it. The thing is, he got me exploring my roots, and so much came out of that.”

Benne was leaning up on both elbows listening to these revelations with her lips parted and the bangs of her plain brown hair falling a half inch below her eyebrows. “I loved somebody,”

she announced with glowing eyes, and we all turned and stared at her.

“Well, do tell,” said Kat. She seemed genuinely shocked by the declaration. “Who was this lucky man—your gynecologist or your priest?”

“Mike,” she said. “And
I
couldn’t get myself to stop feeling love either.” She sat up straight and smiled, pleased to be one of us. “I told him the day he left for college. Everybody was on the dock, saying good-bye to him, remember? And I said, ‘I love you,’ and he said, ‘I love you, too, Benne,’ and then he got on the ferry.” Kat patted her arm.

The room grew quiet. I realized what Kat and Hepzibah were doing, worrying about my getting hurt, trying to give me a big picture, some perspective I hadn’t considered. I could understand in a way the point they were making, but I couldn’t let it in. Maybe it’s human nature to think one’s own situation is the unique and incomparable one, the transcendent exception.

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Maybe the impulse I felt inside was wiser than all their opinions.

I realized I was shaking my head and feeling slightly petulant.

“What if I’m really meant to be with him and I let this slip away?” I said.

“You
are
meant to be with him,” said Benne.

A Benne truth? Or was it an outburst of romantic, wishful thinking by an adult who was mostly a child?

“Nobody can tell you what to do,” Kat said. “This is your life. Your decision.”

“E come a time when eby tub haffa res pon e won bottom,”

said Hepzibah, then translated: “At some point in life, you have to stand on your own two feet.”

Kat stepped closer to me, her forehead rippled with little fur-rows. “Just be careful,” she said.

I stood up. The paint tubes, the palette, the brushes were piled around the fruit bowl as if they’d fallen out of a cornu-copia. I gathered them back into the shopping bag.

“I have been careful my whole life,” I said.

I smiled at them, feeling like I
was
standing there on my own two feet.

“I saw your canoe on the dock in the rookery,” I said to Hepzibah. “Do you mind if I borrow it?”

“Help yourself,” she said.

She didn’t ask why I wanted it. Neither did Kat. They knew already.

C H A P T E R

Twenty-three

pq

The day I paddled Hepzibah’s once-red canoe through the winding creeks, I heard an alligator roar. It was mid-March, four days till spring, but warm enough that a few bulls had begun bellowing for mates out on the marsh banks. It sounded like distant thunder. By April there would be enough roaring to shake the creek water. Mike and I used to row the bateau through the hairpin turns when the ruckus was at full tilt, shouting at throngs of sunning turtles to head for the mud holes before they were all eaten.

Earlier, when I’d arrived on the rookery dock and flipped over the canoe, I’d discovered the turtle skull from the table on Hepzibah’s porch propped beside the paddle. She’d obviously left it there for me. I remembered how she, Kat, and Mother had passed it back and forth all those years, a reminder of the way they’d knotted their lives together. The skull sat now on the fraying wicker seat at the bow, looking quite ancient, staring levelly ahead as if guiding the boat.

The mint green tint was climbing back into the blades of spartina grass, and around each curve an egret or heron stood like yard sculpture in the shallows. Their patience was unnerv-t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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ing. Just when I would give up on their ever moving again, they would spring to life, spearing a mud minnow.

I snaked along with the tail end of the ebb tide, making two wrong turns before I located the dead-end tributary where Whit had taken us the day we’d come out here together. When the corridor of grass opened into the cove of water where we’d sat in the johnboat and talked, I pulled the paddle across my lap and gave myself over to the breeze. It washed me up onto the tiny marsh island where Whit had built his hermitage on a hillock beneath a sole palmetto palm.

I wore the pair of old bogging boots Mother used to wear to harvest oysters on the shell reefs, going out with Kat and Hepzibah, picking bushels for their New Year’s Eve roast. Stepping out of the canoe, I sank over my ankles into mud. It was the exact consistency of cake batter, and it emitted a rotten stew of smells that I had grown up loving.

I dragged the canoe up into the grass. Sweltering, I peeled off my sweatshirt and tied it around my waist, then stood in my black T-shirt listening for the whir of Whit’s johnboat. It had been at the dock when I’d left. I looked at my watch. I’d come at the same time we’d come before—when I thought he would be making his rookery rounds.