The Mermaid Chair (19 page)

T
he morning after I made love to Whit O'Conner, I came into the kitchen and found Mother with the hibiscus scarf draped around the collar of her bathrobe, cooking Gullah rice perlo. Four giant aluminum stockpots of it. Enough for a monastery.

She lifted the lid on the largest pot, and tiers of white smoke wafted out, smelling like shrimp and andouille sausage.

“What are you
doing?
” I asked. “It's seven o'clock in the morning.” I wanted coffee. I wanted to sit in the kitchen all by myself and sip it slowly.

“I'm cooking for the monks. We'll need to get the perlo over there by eleven, before Brother Timothy starts fixing lunch. I'll need to warm it up. Set out some bread and make sweet tea.”

Recipe books were spread across the kitchen table, mingled with onion skins, shrimp tails, and spatterings of Carolina Gold rice kernels. If she hadn't looked so
herself
standing there with an Our Lady of the Miraculous medal pinned to the scarf, waving a wooden spoon in the air as she talked, I might have protested at how crazy it was to cook the dish here and then have to haul it over there.

“How are we getting all this over to the abbey?” I asked.

“We'll drive it through the main gate in the golf cart.” She seemed exasperated at having to point out the obvious to me.

I took my coffee mug to the front porch and sat in one of the wicker chairs with a quilt drawn around my shoulders. The clouds were light and spongy, floating high and soaked in a bronzy shade of gold. I slid my spine low in the chair so I could stare at them.

I'd slept without dreaming, waking once in an icy sweat, permeated by the same terror-struck feeling that had seized me momentarily as I lay beside Whit in the aftermath of what we'd done.

These paroxysms were, I realized later, a kind of aftershock. They would come and go for weeks, moments of violent disorientation in which I couldn't recognize myself, completely breaking apart how I understood my life, all the joints and couplings that held it together. It was the peculiar vertigo, the peculiar humility, that comes from realizing what you are really capable of. Those aftershocks would gradually taper off, but in the beginning they could almost paralyze me.

Last night the feeling had taken much longer to pass than it had on the island with Whit. Sitting on the side of the bed, trying to steady myself, I'd noticed the painting I'd done propped against the wall by the door, the underwater sheen on the woman's face glowing slightly, making her look half alive. The sight unnerved me, and I got up and stood in front of the dresser. The pincushion was there, my wedding rings pinned to it like insects, like specimens of a valuable but discarded life.

Gazing into the mirror, I saw myself as I was—a black silhouette in the room, a woman whose darkness had completely leaked through.

What if I lose Hugh and Whit both? What if I give up Hugh, only to have Whit turn away? I'll be alone, abandoned.

That was the deep, silent terror, wasn't it? The hole that would always need filling; standing there, I recognized how timeworn and venerable it was, stretching beyond Hugh, beyond Whit, going all the way back to my father.

This morning, though, there was none of that reverberating fear from the night before. I watched the clouds from the porch and thought of Whit, the bliss of our lovemaking, this new, other life waiting for me. I had the sense of being out on the furthest frontier of myself. It was, despite those intermittent convulsions, a surprisingly beautiful outpost.

I'd done something unthinkable, and yet I didn't regret it. I felt pulled unaccountably, almost forcibly to Whit, and yes, there was transgression and betrayal and wrongness in it, but also mystery and what felt like holiness, an actual holiness.

 

Driving to the abbey, we spotted Hepzibah in front of the Star of the Sea Chapel. She was holding her Gullah drum, standing on the porch of the little clapboard church talking to about a dozen people.

We'd come upon her Grand Gullah Tour.

I pulled up behind the group and stopped, wanting to hear a little bit of what she was saying, wondering if she actually beat the drum for them the way she used to do for us at the All-Girls Picnic. She was telling them the chapel was built on the ruins of a church for freed slaves.

She walked back and forth while she talked, tapping the drum softly with her fingers. I stared at her elaborate head wrap and caftan made from toffee-colored fabric covered with small zebras. She wore her famous hoop earrings. Kat had said once they were big enough for a cat to jump through, but I liked them on her.

“There's an old Gullah practice,” she was saying. “Before our people can become church members, they go to a sacred place in the woods three times a day for a week and meditate on the state of their souls. We call it ‘traveling,' because we're traveling inside.”

She hit her drum with the flat of her hand and motioned the group into the chapel to look around.

When they were inside, she walked over and hugged Nelle first, then me.

As Mother got out to check the cord we'd used to anchor the pots on the backseat, Hepzibah leaned close to me.

“How are
you,
Jessie?” It was not simply a polite question; her eyes searched mine. I knew she wondered if I'd been with Whit in the rookery, if I'd found the turtle skull she'd left under the canoe.

“I'm fine, everything's fine,” I said. “I wish I could hear the rest of the tour, but we're taking lunch to the monastery.”

“Did you go for that canoe ride?” she asked.

I felt heat rise on the skin of my cheeks. “Yesterday,” I said. “Thank you for the turtle skull,” I added, thinking how I'd left it in Whit's hermitage as a talisman, hoping it would bring me back.

Mother was climbing into the cart.

“Hold on tight to it,” Hepzibah whispered.

 

The monastery kitchen was a bright old room with long, beveled-pane windows and oak cabinets with small Celtic crosses burned into the bottom corners. It had not changed much since I was a child, playing sous-chef to Mother. We'd stood at the worktable in the center of the room while she'd held out her hand and called out, “Potato masher…. Pastry cutter…. Apple corer….” I'd snapped each item into her palm as if she were the surgeon and I the nurse. Our “cooking operation,” as she called it, was serious business. We were feeding the holy.

The sight of the worktable filled my chest with a dull ache. I paused a moment, holding the perlo, staring at the scarred surface. The same dented copper pots dangled over it from the ceiling, catching light from the window. Was this where Mother had done it, where she'd stretched out her finger and brought down the meat cleaver, severing it right through the bone? Here, on our old operating table?

I set the pot on the stove and walked to the large stainless-steel sink, where I ran cold water over my hands. I was dabbing the back of my neck when Brother Timothy appeared, just in time to haul in the last stockpot. He seemed excessively excited by Mother's sudden, unexpected return, chattering to her about egg deliveries and the lack of decent tomatoes. He followed her around the kitchen as she opened and closed drawers, rummaged inside the industrial-size refrigerator, and sniffed several clusters of oregano drying on a counter. He walked with a shuffle, his body pitched forward like someone barreling into a windstorm.

Mother took a clean but heavily stained apron from a peg near the pantry door and tied it around her. She flicked on the gas burners and bent to peer at the blue fire that licked the bottoms of the pots.

“I was told you two were in here,” a voice said behind us. “The entire abbey is in a jubilant uproar over whatever it is you've got in those pots.” Father Dominic stood just inside the doorway, looking flushed and a little anxious. He'd come so quickly he'd forgotten his straw hat. An array of long white hairs were spread carefully over his balding scalp.

I could not remember seeing my mother and Dominic in a room together since the day he'd come to our house bearing the remains of my father's drowned boat. Now I watched them carefully, the way Mother took an automatic step backward when she saw him, her hand coming up to touch the side of her neck.

Dominic looked at Brother Timothy. “Could you go and fill the water pitchers in the refectory? And check the salt shakers.”

Outranked, Timothy shrugged and crossed the kitchen, the scuff of his shoes sounding loud and sullen. When he was gone, Dominic lifted his hand to the top of his head, where he patted the web of hairs, assuring himself everything was still plastered in place. He scarcely looked at me, all his attention on Mother. I watched his eyes drift to her injured hand and take in the flesh-colored Ace bandage that had replaced the bulky gauze.

“I'm glad you feel well enough to cook for us again, Nelle. We've missed you.”

It came back to me, how he'd said “our Nelle” the last time we'd talked, as if he possessed some part of her.

Mother wiped her hands back and forth on the front of her apron. “I'm glad to be back,” she said, her words frosted, clipped off on the ends—that tone she got when she was repelled. I knew it well. She whirled around then and began savagely stirring the rice.

Dominic folded and unfolded his hands several times. His knuckles were enormous and splotched with redness. Arthritis, I imagined. He offered me a strained smile. “Knock, knock,” he said.

I stood a moment wondering how to respond to this silly, relentless game of his. The rice started to sputter over the heat. “I don't think I want to play,” I told him, borrowing a little of Mother's tone.

It would've been absurd to go along, but I also felt I was being loyal to her; clearly she wanted no part of him. And yet she turned around, embarrassed, I suppose, by my rudeness, my refusal to humor him. “Who's there?” she said, and cut her eyes at me.

After all her showy repugnance, it was the last thing I expected. Now I felt she'd been disloyal to me.

Dominic hesitated before going on, but I realized later it was only because he was discarding the joke he'd had in mind for me and coming up with a fresh new one meant only for her. Something daring and strangely intimate.

“Orange,” he said.

She pressed her lips tightly together and lifted her chin a little. “Orange who?”

He walked within an arm's length of her, positioning himself so I could not see his face. He dropped his voice, hoping I would not hear him, but I
did
hear, barely: “Orange you ever going to forgive us?”

Mother's face was taut, giving nothing away. “And
orange
you ever going to leave so I can cook in peace?” she responded. She hustled into the pantry and returned with a bag of cornmeal. “Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to make hoecakes.”

“Hoecakes!” Dominic exclaimed. “Saints preserve us! We don't deserve you.” He sauntered toward the door but after a few paces paused and looked back at me. “Oh, Jessie, I almost forgot. There's someone in the library who would like a word with you.”

 

I crossed the cloister quadrangle, forcing my limbs to move with unassuming casualness—the stroll of someone wandering over to the library to browse around, that was all.

I paused inside the door before a small statue of St. Benedict holding his rule and made myself read the wall plaque beside it the way I imagined a devout visitor would do.
LISTEN, MY SON, TO YOUR MASTER'S PRECEPTS, AND INCLINE THE EAR OF YOUR HEART.
My own heart was buffeting around in my chest, hammering wildly. Pellets of light from a window over the door bounced around on the pinewood floor. I took a long breath, trying to find my equilibrium.

I began to wander up and down the tunnels of books, pausing once in a while to crook my head sideways and read the titles:
On Contemplating God
by William of St. Thierry; Lucretius's
Nature of the Universe; The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross.
I listened for footsteps. Where was he?

By the time I arrived at the reading area in the back of the library, the charged feeling inside had only intensified. I sat down at one of three tables that faced an expansive window. The tabletop had been polished with such enterprise that I could see myself reflected in the buffed wood. My hair was a mess. I smoothed it down with my hands, then changed my mind and tried to fluff it up.

I gazed through the window, and the scene outside formed in my mind like a canvas—splotches of fuchsia azaleas tucked against the whitewashed house where the monks made nets. A Japanese maple, blue-tinged grass, a tiny knoll creased with shadow.

A door creaked behind me, and I turned to see Whit standing in the entrance of a small office that was situated just off the reading room. Father Dominic's office, it turned out.

He was wearing his robe and his rookery boots. My eyes went to the place on his neck I had kissed.

When I stepped into the office, he closed the door behind us, clicking the lock, and we stood for a moment in the cramped space with the smell of paraffin drifting from a candle on a wall sconce behind him. A fluorescent light hummed nosily over our heads. I noticed that the blinds were closed against the only window, and the artificial glare felt glowering and oppressive. Impulsively I reached over and flicked the switch, watching his face as the room plunged into a soft dimness.