The Mermaid Chair (3 page)

I
reached for the robe draped on the bedpost. Pulling it around my shoulders, I took the phone while Hugh stood there, hovering, unsure whether to leave. I covered the mouthpiece. “No one died, did they?”

He shook his head.

“Go get dressed. Or go back to bed,” I told him.

“No, wait—” he said, but I was already saying hello into the phone, and he turned then and walked into the bathroom.

“You poor thing, I've gotten you up at daybreak,” a woman's voice said. “But so you know, it wasn't deliberate. I've been up so long, I simply forgot how early it is.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Who is this?”

“Lord, I'm such a blooming optimist, I thought you'd recognize me. It's Kat. Egret Island Kat. Your godmother Kat. The Kat who changed your damn diapers.”

My eyes closed automatically. She'd been my mother's best friend since forever—a petite woman in her sixties who wore folded-down, lace-trimmed socks with her high heels, suggesting a dainty, eccentric old lady whose formidability had thinned along with her bones. It was a great and dangerous deception.

I lowered myself to the bed, knowing there was only one reason she would call. It would have to do with my mother, the famously crazy Nelle Dubois, and judging from Hugh's reaction, it would not be good.

Mother lived on Egret Island, where once we'd all been a family—I would say an “ordinary” family, except we'd lived next door to a Benedictine monastery. You cannot have thirty or forty monks for next-door neighbors and claim it's ordinary.

The debris from my father's exploded boat had washed up onto their property. Several monks had brought the board with
Jes-Sea
on it and presented it to Mother like a military flag. She'd quietly made a fire in the fireplace, then called Kat and Hepzibah, the other member of their trinity. They'd come and stood there along with the monks, while Mother had ceremoniously tossed the board onto the flames. I'd watched as the letters blackened, as the board was consumed. I remembered it sometimes when I woke in the night, had even thought about it in the middle of my wedding ceremony. There had been no funeral, no memorial, only that moment to call back.

It was after that that Mother began going over to cook the monks' midday meal, something she'd now done for the last thirty-three years. She was more or less obsessed with them.

“I do believe our little island could sink into the sea, and it wouldn't faze you,” Kat said. “What's it been? Five years, six months, and one week since you set foot here?”

“That sounds right,” I said. My last visit, on the occasion of my mother's seventieth birthday, had been a disaster of biblical proportions.

I'd taken Dee, who was twelve, and we'd presented Mother with a pair of gorgeous red silk pajamas from Saks, very Oriental, with a Chinese dragon embroidered on the top. She'd refused to accept them. And for the dumbest reason. It was because of the dragon, which she referred to alternately as “a beast,” “a demon,” and “a figure of moral turpitude.” St. Margaret of Antioch had been swallowed by Satan in the shape of a dragon, she said. Did I really expect her to sleep in such a thing?

When she got like that, no one could reason with her. She'd hurled the pajamas into the trash can, and I'd packed our bags.

The last time I'd seen my mother, she was standing on the porch, shouting, “If you leave, don't come back!” And Dee, poor Dee, who only wanted a seminormal grandmother, crying.

Kat had driven us to the ferry that day in her golf cart—the one she drove maniacally around the island's dirt roads. She'd blown the air horn on it incessantly during the ride to distract Dee from crying.

Now, on the other end of the phone, Kat went on playfully scolding me about my absence from the island, an absence I'd come to love and protect.

I heard the shower in the bathroom come on. Heard it over the rain driving hard against the windows.

“How's Benne?” I asked. I was stalling, trying to ignore the feeling that something was perched over my head, about to fall.

“Fine,” Kat said. “Still translating Max's every thought.”

In spite of my growing anxiety, I laughed. Kat's daughter, who had to be forty by now, had been “not quite right” since birth, as Kat put it. The correct expression was “mentally challenged,” but Benne was also peculiarly gifted, given to premonitions of uncanny exactitude. She simply knew things, extracting them out of the air through mysterious antennae the rest of us didn't possess. She was said to be particularly adept at deciphering the thoughts of Max, the island dog who belonged to no one and everyone.

“So what's Max saying these days?”

“The usual things—‘My ears need scratching. My balls need licking. Why do you assume I want to fetch your idiotic stick?'”

I pictured Kat in her house perched high on stilts as all the island houses were. It was the color of lemons. I could see her sitting at the long oak table in the kitchen where over the years she, Hepzibah, and my mother had cracked and picked ten thousand blue crabs. “The Three Egreteers,” my father had called them.

“Look, I called about your mother.” She cleared her throat. “You need to come home and see about her, Jessie. No excuses.”

I lay back on the bed; I felt like a tent collapsing, the center pole yanked out, followed by the billowy floating.

“My excuse,” I said, “is that she doesn't want me there. She's—”

“
Impossible.
I know. But you can't pretend you don't have a mother.”

I almost laughed. I could no more pretend I didn't have a mother than the sea could pretend it had no salt. My mother existed for me with a vengeance. Sometimes her voice would come piping through my bones and practically lift me off my feet.

I said, “I invited Mother here this past Christmas. Did she come? Of course she didn't. I send her things for her birthday, for Mother's Day—things without dragons on them, I hasten to say—and I never hear a word back.”

I was glad Hugh was still in the shower so he couldn't hear. I was sure I'd just shouted.

“She doesn't need your gifts and your phone calls—she needs you.”

Me.

Why did it always come to this, to
me,
to the daughter? Why didn't she call Mike out in California and harangue him? The last time I'd spoken to him, he said he'd become a Buddhist. Surely as a Buddhist he would have more patience for her.

Silence fell between us. I heard the shower go off, the pipes bang.

“Jessie,” she said. “The reason I called…Yesterday your mother cut off her finger with a meat cleaver. Her right index finger.”

Bad news registers belatedly with me; the words come, but not the meaning. They hover in the corner of the room for a while, up near the ceiling, while my body makes the necessary preparation. I said, “Is she okay?”

“She's going to be fine, but they had to operate on her hand at the hospital over in Mount Pleasant. Of course she pitched one of her famous fits and refused to spend the night there, so I brought her home with me last night. Right now she's in Benne's bed, sleeping off the painkillers, but the minute she wakes up, she's gonna want to go home.”

Hugh opened the bathroom door, and a gust of steam surged into the bedroom. “You okay?” he mouthed, and I nodded. He closed the door, and I heard him tap his razor on the sink. Three times like always.

“The thing is—” Kat stopped and took a breath. “Look, I'm just going to say it straight out. It wasn't an accident. Your mother went over to the monastery kitchen and cut off her finger. On purpose.”

It hit me then—the full weight, the gruesomeness. I realized that part of me had been waiting for her to go and do something crazy for years. But not this.

“But why? Why would she do that?” I felt the beginnings of nausea.

“It's complicated, I guess, but the doctor who operated on her said it might be related to sleep deprivation. Nelle hadn't slept much for days, maybe weeks.”

My abdomen contracted violently, and I dropped the phone onto the bed, rushing past Hugh, who was standing at the sink with a towel around his waist. Sweat ran down my ribs, and, throwing off the robe, I leaned over the toilet. After I emptied myself of what little there was to throw up, I went on retching plain air.

Hugh handed me a cold washcloth. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I wanted to tell you myself, but she insisted on doing it. I shouldn't have let her.”

I pointed through the doorway to the bed. “I need a moment, that's all. I left her on the phone.”

He went over and picked up the receiver while I dabbed the cloth to the back of my neck. I sank onto the cane-bottomed chair in the bedroom, waiting for the cascading in my abdomen to stop.

“It's a hard thing for her to take in,” I heard him say.

Mother had always been what you'd call fervent, making me and Mike drop pennies into empty milk jars for “pagan babies” and every Friday lighting the Sacred Heart of Jesus candles in the tall glasses and going to her knees on the floor in her bedroom, where she said all five decades of the rosary, kissing the crucifix on which Jesus had been rubbed down to a stick man from all the devotion. But people did that. It didn't mean they were crazy.

It was after the boat fire that Mother had turned into Joan of Arc—but without an army or a war, just the queer religious compulsions. Even then, though, I'd thought of her as normal-crazy, just a couple of degrees beyond fervent. When she wore so many saints' medals pinned to her bra that she clinked, when she started cooking at the monastery, behaving as if she owned the place, I'd told myself she was just an overextended Catholic obsessed with her salvation.

I walked over and held out my hand for the phone, and Hugh gave it to me. “This is hardly a bad case of insomnia,” I said to Kat, interrupting whatever she'd been saying to Hugh. “She has finally gone insane.”

“Don't you ever say that again!” Kat snapped. “Your mother is
not
insane. She's tormented. There's a difference. Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear—do you think
he
was insane?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.”

“Well, a lot of very informed people think he was
tormented,
” she said.

Hugh was still standing there. I waved him away, unable to concentrate with him hovering over me like that. Shaking his head, he wandered into the walk-in closet across the room.

“And what is Mother tormented about?” I demanded. “Please don't tell me it's my father's death. That was thirty-three years ago.”

I'd always felt that Kat harbored some knowledge about Mother that was off-limits to me, a wall with a concealed room behind it. Kat didn't answer immediately, and I wondered if this time she might really tell me.

“You're looking for a reason,” she said. “And that doesn't help. It doesn't change the present.”

I sighed at the same moment Hugh stepped out of the closet wearing a long-sleeved blue oxford shirt buttoned all the way to his neck, a pair of white boxer shorts, and navy socks. He stood there fastening his watch onto his wrist, making the sound—the puffing sound with his mouth.

The scene felt almost circadian to me—methodical, daily, abiding—one I'd witnessed a thousand times without a trace of insurrection, yet now, in this most unlikely moment, just as this crisis with Mother had been dropped into my lap like a wailing infant, I felt the familiar discontent that had been growing in me all winter. It rose with such force it felt as if someone had physically struck me.

“So,” Kat said. “Are you coming or not?”

“Yes, I'm coming. Of course I'm coming.”

As I said the words, I was filled with relief. Not that I would be going home to Egret Island and dealing with this grotesque situation—there was no relief in that, only a great amount of trepidation. No, this remarkable sense of relief was coming, I realized, from the fact I would be going away
period.

I sat on the bed holding the phone, surprised at myself, and ashamed. Because as awful as this situation with Mother was, I was almost glad for it. It was affording me something I hadn't known until this moment that I desperately wanted: a reason to leave. A good, proper, even noble reason to leave my beautiful pasture.

W
hen I came downstairs, Hugh was making breakfast. I heard the hiss of Jimmy Dean sausage before I got to the kitchen.

“I'm not hungry,” I told him.

“But you need to eat,” he said. “You're not going to throw up again. Trust me.”

Whenever a crisis of any kind appeared, Hugh made these great big breakfasts. He seemed to believe in their power to revive us.

Before coming downstairs, he'd booked me a one-way ticket to Charleston and arranged to cancel his early-afternoon patients so he could drive me to the airport.

I sat down at the breakfast bar, pushing certain images out of my head: the meat cleaver, my mother's finger.

The refrigerator opened with a soft sucking noise, then closed. I watched Hugh crack four eggs. He stood at the stove with a spatula and shuffled them around in a pan. A row of damp brown curls skimmed the top of his collar. I started to say something about his needing a haircut, that he looked like an aging hippie, but I checked myself, or rather the impulse simply died on my tongue.

Instead I found myself staring at him. People were always staring at Hugh—in restaurants, theater lines, bookstore aisles. I would catch them stealing glimpses, mostly women. His hair and eyes had that rich autumn coloring that reminds you of cornucopias and Indian corn, and he had a beautiful cleft in the center of his chin.

Once I'd teased him that when we walked into a room together, no one noticed me because he was so much prettier, and he'd felt compelled to tell me that I was beautiful. But the truth was, I couldn't hold a candle to Hugh. Lately the skin on either side of my eyes had become etched with a fine weave of crisscrossing lines, and I sometimes found myself at the mirror pulling my temples back with my fingers. My hair had been an incredible nutmeg color for as long as I could remember, but it was twined now with a few strands of gray. For the first time, I could feel a hand at the small of my back nudging me toward the mysterious dwelling place of menopausal women. Already my friend Rae had disappeared in there, and she was just forty-five.

Hugh's aging seemed more benign, his handsomeness turning ripe, but it wasn't that so much as the combination of intelligence and kindness in his face that drew people. It had captured me back in the beginning.

I leaned forward onto the bar, the speckled granite cold on the bones of my elbows, remembering how we'd met,
needing
to remember how it once was. How
we
were.

He had showed up at my first so-called art exhibit, which had taken place in a ratty booth I'd rented at the Decatur Flea Market. I'd just graduated from Agnes Scott with a degree in art and inflated ideas about selling my work, becoming a bona fide artist. No one, however, had really looked at my art boxes all day, except for a woman who kept referring to them as “shadow-boxes.”

Hugh, in the second year of his psychiatric residency at Emory, came to the flea market that day for vegetables. As he wandered by my booth, his eyes lit on my “Kissing Geese” box. It was an odd creation, but in a way it was my favorite.

I'd painted the inside with a Victorian living-room scene—English rose wallpaper and fringed floor lamps—then placed a velvet dollhouse sofa in the box with two plastic geese glued onto the cushions, positioned so they appeared to be in the midst of a beak-to-beak kiss.

I'd been inspired by a newspaper story about a wild goose that had dropped out of the flock during migration to stay with his mate, who'd been injured in a mall parking lot. A store clerk had taken the hurt bird to a refuge, but her mate had wandered around the parking lot for over a week, honking forlornly, until the clerk took him to the refuge, too. The article said they'd been given a “room” together.

The news clipping was decoupaged around the outside of the box, and I'd attached a bicycle horn to the top, the kind with the red ball that sounds like a honking goose. Only about half the people who'd seen the box had actually squeezed the horn. I'd imagined that this said something about them. That they were more playful than the average person, less reserved.

Hugh bent over the box and read the article while I waited to see what he would do. He honked the horn twice.

“How much do you want for it?” he asked.

I paused, working up the courage to say twenty-five dollars.

“Would forty be enough?” he said, reaching for his wallet.

I hesitated again, bowled over that anyone would pay that much for kissing geese.

“Fifty?” he said.

I kept my face straight. “Okay, fifty.”

We went out that same night. Four months later we were married. For years he kept the “Kissing Geese” box on his dresser, then moved it to a bookshelf in his study. A couple of years ago, I found him at his desk meticulously regluing all the pieces.

He confessed once that he paid all that money just to get me to go out with him, but the truth was, he loved the box, and his honking the horn really
had
said something about him, hinting at a side of Hugh few people saw. They always thought about his prodigious intellect, the ability he had to dissect and anatomize, but he loved to have fun and often instigated the most unexpected things:
We could go out and celebrate Mexican Independence Day, or would you prefer to go to the Mattress Races?
We'd spent a Saturday afternoon at a contest in which people attached wheels onto beds and raced through downtown Atlanta.

People also rarely noticed how deeply and thoroughly he felt things. He still cried whenever a patient took his own life, and he grew sad at times over the dark, excruciating corners people backed themselves into.

Last fall, while putting away the laundry, I came upon Hugh's jewelry case in the back of his underwear drawer. Maybe I shouldn't have, but I sat on the bed and went through it. It held all of Dee's baby teeth, tiny and yellowed like popcorn kernels, and several drawings she'd done on his prescription pad. There was his father's Pearl Harbor pin, his grandfather's pocket-watch, the four pairs of cuff links I'd bought him for various anniversaries. I slipped the rubber band off a small bundle of papers and found a creased photograph of me on our honeymoon in the Blue Ridge Mountains, posing in front of the cabin we'd rented. The rest were cards and little love notes I'd sent him over the years. He'd kept them all.

He
was the first one of us to say I love you. Two weeks after we met, before we'd even made love. We were in a diner near the Emory campus, eating breakfast in a booth by the window. He said, “I hardly know anything about you, but I love you,” and from that moment his commitment had been unyielding. Even now he rarely went a day without telling me.

In the beginning I'd felt so hungry for him, a ravenous kind of wanting that remained until Dee was born. Only then did it start to subside and grow domesticated. Like animals taken from the wild and put in nice, simulated habitats where they turned complacent, knowing exactly where their next meal would come from. All the hunt and surprise drained out of it.

Hugh set the plate of eggs and sausage in front of me. “There you go,” he said.

We ate, side by side, the windows still varnished with early-morning dark. Rain rattled down the gutters, and I heard what sounded like a shutter banging in the distance.

I put down my fork and listened.

“On the island when the storms came, our hurricane shutters used to slam against the house like that,” I said, and my eyes began to fill.

Hugh stopped chewing and looked at me.

“Mother would drape a sheet over the kitchen table and crawl under it with me and Mike and read to us by flashlight. She nailed a crucifix to the underside of the table, and we would lie on the floor and stare up at it while she read. We called it the ‘storm tent.' We thought nothing could harm us under there.”

Hugh reached out his arm, and my shoulder slipped into the groove beneath his collarbone while my head glided into the nape of his neck, an oiled, automatic movement as old as our marriage.

We sat like that, pressed into each other, while the eggs went cold and the odd banging came and went, until I began to feel the ponderous meshing of our lives—unable to tell where his shoulder ended and my head began. It was the same sensation I'd had as a child when my father pressed the length of his finger against mine. As they rubbed together, they'd felt like a single digit.

I pulled away, straightening myself on the bar chair. “I can't believe what she's done,” I said. “My God, Hugh, do you think she needs to be committed?”

“I couldn't say without talking to her. It sounds like an obsessional disorder.”

I saw Hugh look down at my lap. I'd twisted the napkin around my finger as if I were trying to stop a hemorrhage. I unwound it, embarrassed at how talkative my body was when I didn't mean for it to be.

“Why her
finger?
” I said. “Of all things.”

“There's not necessarily any rhyme or reason to it. That's the thing about obsessions—they're generally irrational.” He stood up. “Look, why don't I come with you? I'll clear my calendar. We'll both go.”

“No,” I said. A little too emphatically. “She'll never talk to you about this, you know that. And you have all your patients here to take care of.”

“Okay, but I don't want you handling this by yourself.” He kissed me on the forehead. “Call Dee. Let her know where you'll be.”

After he'd left for the office, I packed a suitcase, set it by the door, then climbed the stairs to my studio, wanting to make sure the roof hadn't leaked again.

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.