The Mermaid Chair Read online

  I switched on a lamp, and a swatch of waxy yellow light fanned across my worktable—a big oak treasure I’d found in a secondhand store. A partially assembled art box was spread across it, covered in dust. I’d stopped working on it last December when Dee was home for Christmas break, and somehow I’d never gotten back up here.

  I was inspecting the floor for puddles when the phone rang. Picking up the portable, I heard Dee’s voice. “Guess what?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Dad sent me extra money, and I bought a navy pea coat.”

  I imagined her sitting cross-legged on her dorm bed, her long hair grazing her shoulders. People said she looked like Hugh. They had that same burnished look.

  “A pea coat, huh? Please tell me this means you’ve given up the Harley-Davidson jacket.”

  “What about you? You had that red suede jacket with all the cowboy fringe.”

  I smiled, the lightness I always felt around Dee fading, though, as I thought of Mother. “Listen, honey, I was going to call you this morning. I’m leaving for the island today to see your grandmother. She’s not well.” It occurred to me Dee might think she was on her deathbed, so I told her the truth.

  The first words out of Dee’s mouth were, “Oh, fuck.”

  “Dee!” I said. A little too indignantly, I suppose, but she’d genuinely shocked me. “That word is beneath you.”

  “I know,” she said. “And I bet you’ve never said it once in your whole life.”

  I let out a long breath. “Look, I didn’t mean to preach.”

  She was silent a moment. “Okay, I shouldn’t have said it, but what Gran did is so twisted. Why would she do something like that?”

  Dee, sharp-eyed in every other way, had always had a blind spot about her grandmother, re-creating her as a wonderfully doting eccentric. I imagined this would shatter her illusions once and for all.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I wish I did.”

  “You’ll take care of her, right?”

  I closed my eyes and saw my mother in the storm tent, the time I’d found her there right after Dad died. It had been a perfect, sunny day.

  “I’m going to try,” I told Dee.

  After I hung up, I sat down at the worktable and stared at the bits of mirror and eggshell I’d been gluing into the discarded box before abandoning it.

  I had said the word. This past December, while Dee was home. I was standing in the shower, and Hugh had slipped into the bathroom, taken off his clothes, and stepped behind me, startling me so badly I’d jerked forward and knocked the shampoo bottle off the shelf that hung from the nozzle.

  “Fuck,” I’d said. Which wasn’t like me. The word was not in my lexicon, and I don’t know who’d been more astounded, me or Hugh.

  After a pause Hugh had laughed. “Exactly. Fuck is exactly what I was thinking.”

  I didn’t say anything, didn’t turn around. His fingers moved along my ribs and brushed the edges of my breasts. I heard him make a tiny groaning sound in his throat. I tried to want him but couldn’t help feeling intruded upon. Standing stiffly in the spray, I must’ve appeared like the trunk of a tree, a petrifying tree quietly going to stone.

  After a few moments, the shower door opened and closed. He was gone.

  For days after that, I went about in a state of severe and earnest trying. I stepped into the shower with Hugh not once but twice, contorting myself into extraordinary yogic positions. The second time I’d emerged with the red mark of the faucet handle on my back. A tattoo that looked remarkably like a crumpled bird.

  One day while Dee was out hitting the after-Christmas sales with her friends, I’d showed up at Hugh’s office after his last patient, suggesting we have sex on his sofa, and I suppose we would have, except his beeper went off. Someone had tried to kill herself. I’d driven home with all the trying knocked out of me.

  The next day Dee had gone back to college.

  I watched her car roll out of the driveway, down the street. After it had turned the corner, I’d gone inside to a stillness that was bewildering in its intensity.

  The same stillness rose now in the studio. I looked up at the skylight. It was papered with elm leaves and a thick, putty-colored light. The rain and wind had stopped, and I heard the quietness for the first time, the way it clotted around my head.

  Outside, the tires of Hugh’s Volvo turned into the driveway. His car door slammed, and I felt the vibration move through the walls. As I descended the stairs, the years between us seemed accumulated everywhere, filling the house, and it seemed strange to me, how love and habit blurred so thoroughly to make a life.

  CHAPTER Four

  I hesitated as I stepped onto the ferry, one foot on the floating dock and one on the boat, caught momentarily by the rush of light across Bull’s Bay. A half-dozen great white egrets flew up from the marsh grass nearby with their low-pitched throat calls. I moved on board and watched them through the plastic windows, the familiar ribbon they made crossing the bay, how they turned in unison toward Egret Island.

  The ferry was actually an old pontoon boat named Tidal Run. I propped my suitcase beside a dirty-white cooler, beneath two red cardboard tide clocks nailed onto the wall. I sat down on a bench. Hugh had arranged for a driver to take me from the airport to the ferry landing in Awendaw. I’d made it just in time for the last run of the day. It was four o’clock.

  There were only five other passengers, perhaps because it was winter and the tourists had not descended in full force. They usually came in the spring and summer to see the marsh brimming with egrets, how they teemed into the trees along the creeks, sitting in heaps of brightness. A few tourists—the hardcore history crowd that trickled over from Charleston—came to take Hepzibah’s Grand Gullah Tour, which included a visit to the slave cemetery. Hepzibah was the culture keeper on the island or, as she liked to say, the African griot. She knew a thousand folktales and could speak perfect Gullah, a language the slaves had fashioned out of English and their native African tongues.

  I studied the passengers, wondering if any were islanders I might recognize. Fewer than a hundred people, besides the monks, still lived on the island, and most had been there since I was a girl. I decided that everyone on the boat was a tourist.

  One wore a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt from Cancún and a red bandanna tied around his head. I imagined he must be freezing. He saw me looking at him and asked, “Have you ever stayed at the Island Dog?”

  “No, but it’s nice. You’ll like it,” I said, having to raise my voice over the boat engine.

  A two-story, pale blue house with white hurricane shutters, it was the only B&B on the island. I wondered if Bonnie Langston still owned it. She was what Hepzibah called a comya, Gullah for somebody who comes from another place. If your ancestry was on the island, then you were a binya. Comyas were rare on Egret, but they did exist. My sole purpose after the age of ten had been to leave the island. “I want to be a goya,” I’d told Hepzibah once, and at first she’d laughed but then stopped and looked at me, down into the heartsick place that made me want to leave. “You can’t leave home,” she said with her gentlest voice. “You can go other places, all right—you can live on the other side of the world, but you can’t ever leave home.”

  I felt now I’d proved her wrong.

  “Be sure to eat at Max’s Café,” I told the tourist. “Order the shrimp and grits.”

  Actually, if he wanted to eat, the café was his only choice. Like the B&B, it’d been named for Max, the black Lab whose mind Benne could supposedly read. He met the ferry twice a day without fail and was something of a local celebrity. In warm weather, when the tables spilled out onto the sidewalk, he would trot around with an acquired sense of canine entitlement, giving mere human beings the opportunity to adore him. They would scramble for their cameras as if Lassie had come onto the set. He was famous not only for meeting the ferry with uncanny accuracy but for his immortality. Purportedly he was twenty-seven years old. Bonnie swore to it, but the
truth was, the current Max was the fourth in a string of them. I’d been loving various Maxes since I was a kid.

  There was a sand beach on the front of the island called Bone Yard, so named because driftwood formed huge, contorted sculptures along it. Hardly anyone ventured there, though, because the currents made it too dangerous for swimming and it was full of sand gnats. You only had to stand there to know that the ocean would take the island back one day.

  Most of the tourists came for the guided tour of the monastery, St. Senara’s abbey. It was named for a Celtic saint who’d been a mermaid before her conversion, and it had started as a simple outpost—or, as the monks said, “a daughter house”—of an abbey in Cornwall, England. The monks had built it themselves in the thirties on land donated by a Catholic family from Baltimore, who’d used it for a summer fishing camp. In the beginning the place was so unpopular that Egret Islanders—all of them Protestants—called it “St. Sin.” Now Protestants were more or less extinct here.

  The local guidebooks played up the monastery as a minor Low Country attraction, mostly because of the mermaid chair that sat in a side chapel in the church. A “beguiling chair,” the books always said, and it was, actually. It was a replica of a very old, somewhat famous chair in the abbey’s mother house. The arms had been carved into two winged mermaids painted with jeweled colors—vermilion fish tails, white wings, golden orange hair.

  As children Mike and I used to slip into the church when no one was about, lured, of course, by the titillation of the nipples on the mermaids’ exposed breasts, four shining inlaid garnet stones. I used to give Mike a hard time about sitting with his hands cupped around them. The memory of this caused me to laugh, and I looked up to see if the other passengers had noticed.

  If the tourists were lucky and the chapel wasn’t roped off, they could sit in the mermaid chair themselves and say a prayer to Senara, the mermaid saint. For some reason sitting in it was supposed to guarantee you an answer. At least that was the tradition. Mostly the whole thing came off like throwing pennies into a fountain and making wishes, but now and then you would see a real pilgrim, someone in a wheelchair rolling off the ferry, or someone with a small oxygen tank.

  The ferry moved slowly through the salt creeks, past tiny marsh islands waving with yellowed spartina grass. The tide had ebbed, laying bare miles of oyster rakes. Everything looked undressed, exposed.

  As the creeks widened out into the bay, we picked up speed. V’s of brown pelicans lapped alongside us, outpacing the boat. I focused on them and, when they’d vanished, on the lifelines hanging in sloppy coils inside the ferry. I didn’t want to think about my mother. On the plane I’d been saturated with dread, but out here that lifted some, maybe because of all the wind and freedom.

  I tilted my head back against the window and breathed the marsh’s sulfurous smell. The boat captain, in his faded red cap and wraparound metallic sunglasses, began to speak into a microphone. His voice coasted through the little speaker over my head in a memorized oration designed for tourists. He told them where to rent the golf carts that would take them around the island, gave them a little spiel about the egret rookery and fishing charters.

  He closed with the same joke I’d heard the last time I’d come: “Folks, just remember there are alligators on the island. I doubt you’ll see one this time of year, but if you do, keep in mind that you can’t outrun an alligator. Just be sure you can outrun whoever you’re with.”

  The tourists chuckled and nodded at one another, the whole business of venturing onto a Carolina barrier island suddenly thrust into a new and slightly dangerous light.

  As the ferry slipped into the narrow waterways interlacing the marsh on the island’s back side, I got up and walked out onto the deck. Swells of water glided past, the color of darkly steeped tea. Looking back at the wake, at the distance we’d covered, I realized how isolated I’d been growing up on an island without a bridge. I’d been thoroughly caged in by water, and yet I’d never felt lonely until I started high school on the mainland. I remembered Shem Watkins taking all of us kids, probably fewer than half a dozen of us, across Bull’s Bay each morning in his shrimp boat, then picking us up in the afternoon. We’d called it the “shrimp bus.”

  Mike and I had imagined ourselves like the Swiss Family Robinson, he rowing his bateau through the creeks, stopping to bog for fiddler crabs, which we’d sold for bait at fifty cents a pound on the ferry dock. We’d known every channel and sandbar, exactly where the shell rakes might snag the boat’s bottom during low tide. The summer I was nine, before everything collapsed, we’d been dauntless, scavenging for turkey tracks and alligator drags. At night, with the palmettos rattling wildly around the house, we’d slipped out through the window and gone to the slave cemetery, where we’d double-and triple-dog-dared the ghosts to come out.

  Where had that girl gone? Staring into the tannic-looking waters, I felt a terrible craving for her.

  I was surprised by the weight of memory, the awful contagion of family, of place. I remembered my father steering his twenty-foot Chris-Craft, the meerschaum pipe I’d bought him clamped between his teeth, and me tucked between his chest and the wheel. I could almost hear him calling, “Jessie, the dolphins are here,” see myself racing for the rail, listening for their breath to spew, the slit of darkness as they broke the surface.

  When the northwest side of the island came into view, I was already thinking about his boat exploding. About the clipping in Mother’s drawer. “Police speculate that a spark from his pipe may have ignited a leak in the fuel line.” I let my eyes sweep over the the water, remembering where it happened, then looked away.

  I walked the length of the ferry rail and watched the island draw closer. It was only five miles long and two and half across, but it seemed even smaller from the boat. The rooftops of the shops behind the ferry dock came into view, laughing gulls looping over them, and beyond that the live oak, palm, and myrtle thickets that filled the green heart of the island.

  The engine throttled down as the pontoon approached the dock. Someone threw a rope, and I heard the creaking of old wood as we were hitched tightly against the pilings.

  On the pier a few people in beach chairs dangled rods over the side, fishing for channel bass. But no Kat and Benne. Kat had promised they would meet me. I went back inside the boat, collected my suitcase, then stood at the window as the other passengers debarked.

  A few moments later, they came hurrying up with Max trotting behind them. They were holding hands, and Benne appeared to be half dragging Kat, who was wearing her high heels with the thin socks. Her hair was pulled up into a dark red top-knot, a color my mother referred to as “port wine.” Pieces of it were starting to unravel around her face.

  They stopped at the edge of the dock and looked up at the boat. Max sat between them, wagging half of his tail as if it were jointed.

  When Kat spotted me at the window, her chest rose visibly. “Well, don’t just stand up there! Come on down here!” she yelled.

  Benne sprang into a funny jig, lifting her feet and marching in place. “Jes-sie, Jes-sie,” she chanted, and Max started to bark, which created an eruption of gulls along the edge of the dock. The other passengers paused to stare, then glanced at one another, embarrassed.

  Home. There was nothing to do but collect my suitcase and wade into it.

  There were half-moons, like pale, yellowish shadows, under Kat’s eyes. She embraced me at the same moment the aroma of the island penetrated, a powerful brew of silt, old crab pots, salted air, and black, gooey mudflats alive and crawling with pungent creatures.

  “You made it,” Kat said, and I smiled at her.

  Benne laid her round face against the sleeve of my coat and clung to me like a barnacle. I put my arm around her and gave her a squeeze.

  “You didn’t want to come,” she said. “You hate coming here.”

  Kat cleared her throat. “All right, Benne, that’s enough.”

  Benne was not finished, however. “
Mama is standing on the bloodstain,” she said.

  I looked down. We all did. The dark, spattered edge of it was visible beneath Kat’s shoe. I pictured the frenzied dash they must have made to the ferry dock, the ride across the water, Mother’s hand wrapped in a JC Penney bath towel.

  Kat slid back her foot, and we stood in the late afternoon, in a moment of perfect stillness, and stared at my mother’s blood.

  CHAPTER Five

  We piled onto Kat’s golf cart, parked at the end of the pier. Benne sat on the back with my suitcase, and I climbed into the front seat, glancing warily at the air horn, thinking of the last harrowing ride in her cart.

  “Don’t worry,” Kat said. “I won’t use the horn unless someone is crazy enough to step out in front of me.”

  “I hate that odious thing,” I said.

  “Yes, well, hate it all you want, but it has saved the lives of countless tourists.”

  “Mama used to aim for tourists,” Benne said.

  “Oh, I did not.”

  “I believe it’s impossible for Benne to tell a lie,” I said, and Kat huffed as she pulled onto the narrow pavement.

  Overhead the sky was turning orange. I had the sense of darkness pressing in, pooling behind the brightness. As we swept past the island shops, no one spoke, not even Benne.

  The storefronts all had window boxes gorged with lavender pansies, even the tiny post office. Shem’s Bait & Tackle had been painted the color of persimmons, and the carved wooden pelican outside Caw Caw General Store now wore a pony saddle, I imagined so that children could sit on it. We passed a handful of tourists in front of Egret Expeditions, signing up for boat tours and bird walks. Even at the nadir of winter, the place seemed alive.

  I pointed to a small store wedged between Max’s Café and the Island Dog B&B. It had a blue-and-white-striped awning and a sign in the window that read THE MERMAID’S TALE. “Didn’t that used to be a fish market?”