The Mermaid Chair

by Sue Monk Kidd

  I couldn’t imagine what it would be like if I took that away. If I tried to relate to more than his fatherly side. Let him be Hugh. Just Hugh.

  On Mother’s Day, Dee called. I stood in the kitchen holding the wall phone, leaning against the refrigerator. At first the conversation was all about happy Mother’s Day and summer plans. She told me she would not be taking classes but going home to be with her father.

  At the mention of Hugh, there was a pause, and then her voice rushed at me, full of anger and incomprehension. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Doing what?” It was such a stupid thing to say.

  “You know what I mean!” she shouted. “You left him. And you didn’t even tell me.” I could hear her crying, these horrible muffled sounds far away.

  “Oh, Dee, I’m sorry.” It became one of those songs you sing in rounds. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  “Why?” she pleaded. “Why?”

  “I don’t know how to explain any of this to you.”

  In my head I could hear Whit in the boat that day, the precise words he’d used. I never could make them understand that what I needed was somehow to be alone with myself. In a spiritual way, I mean. He’d called that aloneness a solitude of being.

  “Try,” she said.

  There was only so much I could say to her. I drew a breath. “This will sound ridiculous, I guess, but my life had started to feel so stagnant, like it was atrophied. Everything shrunk down to the roles I played. I had loved doing them, Dee, I really had, but they were drying up, and they weren’t really me. Do you understand? I felt there had to be some other life beneath the one I had, like an underground river or something, and that I would die if I didn’t dig down to it.”

  Her silence after I’d spoken was a relief to me. I let myself slide down the refrigerator until I was sitting on the floor.

  Back there, somewhere, I’d lost the solitude of being that told me who I was. The whole mystery of myself. I’d been incapable of wearing the earth on my arms and legs, of diving and surfacing in my own erotic depths.

  “Don’t you love Dad anymore?” Dee asked.

  “Of course I do. Of course. How could I not love him?” I didn’t know why I was saying this to her. How much of it was placation, how much true.

  Hugh and I had gone through our days with such good intentions, but with the imagination leaking out of our togetherness. We’d become exceptionally functional partners in the business of making a life. Even in the hidden business of being what the other one needed: good father, good daughter, little girl in a box. All those ghosts that hide in the cracks of a relationship.

  It seemed right to have destroyed all that. Not to have hurt Hugh; I would always be sorry for that.

  “Are you staying there all summer?” Dee asked.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “I just know that I—” I didn’t know whether to say it, whether she wanted to hear it.

  “That you love me,” she said, which was exactly the thing I was going to say.

  I showed up at the monastery in the middle of May. The heat had descended in typical fashion—all at once, an oppressive, woolen canopy pitched across the island overnight. It would not be lifted until October.

  Approaching the Reception Center, I saw a dozen monks sitting on the wide lawn in the abbey quadrangle hand-tying cast nets. They were spread out in orderly exactitude like chess pieces on a great green board, each with a heap of cotton twine in his lap. I paused, taken back momentarily to my childhood, those days when the monks fled the scourging heat of the Net House for the breezes coming off the marsh.

  “The air conditioner quit on them,” a voice said, and I turned to find the bald monk I’d met that day in the gift shop when I’d bought Dominic’s book. He frowned at me from his huge Jack Benny glasses. It took me a moment to remember his name. Father Sebastian. The humorless one. The one who kept the monastery on the straight and narrow.

  “I don’t know how you get through the summer in these robes,” I replied.

  “It’s a small sacrifice we make,” he said. “People don’t want to make sacrifices anymore.” The steady way he gazed at me, emphasizing the word “sacrifices,” gave me an odd feeling, and I thought suddenly of my father.

  I turned to stare again at the monks on the grass.

  “Are you looking for Brother Thomas?” he asked.

  I whirled around. “No, why would I?” I was stunned by his question, and I’m sure it showed on my face.

  “You don’t really want me to answer that, do you?” he said.

  How could he possibly know about Whit and me? I couldn’t believe Whit would have confided in him. In Dominic maybe, but not Sebastian.

  “No,” I said, and it was barely a whisper. “I don’t.” I drew back my shoulders and walked away, out into the cloister square toward the abbey church.

  The wind had blown snipped-off bits of twine all over the place. It looked as if the Fates had come through on a binge of cutting. One of the monks was chasing a strand, repeatedly reaching for it just as the wind snatched it away. Something about this filled me with sorrow and longing. I began picking up pieces of thread as I walked, whatever little scraps were in my path, tucking them into my pocket. I could feel Sebastian still there, watching me.

  I hadn’t lied to him. I had not come to see Whit. I was here because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t resist the morbid fascination of seeing the mermaid chair again in light of what I now knew about my father’s dying. But it was also true that I’d come in the morning when I knew that Whit would be on the abbey grounds and not in the rookery. I had washed my hair. I had worn the aqua shirt.

  I hadn’t seen him in almost a month, not since Mother’s hospitalization. The absence had created a strangeness, an incipient, self-fulfilling distance between us that I didn’t know how to confront. Much of our time apart had been necessary, dictated by circumstances. But some of it—a lot of it, really—had not. I couldn’t account for the part of me that remained removed from him.

  The church was empty. I slipped back into the ambulatory, pausing at the entrance to the tiny chapel. The mermaid chair sat alone, the clerestory window behind it siphoning in a frail, trimmed light. My eyes went instantly to the mermaids on the chair arms. Their greens, reds, and golds were the only brightness in the room.

  As I’d painted my father, I’d imagined the chair as maternal—the pietà, the immense lap of dying. I’d envisioned the mermaids like exotic midwives on either side of him, their wings conjuring up images of angels carrying him to heaven, their fish tails making me think of night-sea psychopomps bearing him into the dark mother of the ocean. I’d imagined them singing eerie, plaintive songs, crying—not the fake pebbles in the boxes in Kat’s shop but real tears. I’d thought that when I actually saw the chair, I would be weighed under by all this, but what I felt was the most extraordinary lightness.

  I went and sat down. Leaning my head against the twisting Celtic knot, I let my hands hold on to the mermaids’ backs. What came first to my mind was the time I’d spent as a child scattering rose petals around the island as if they were my father’s ashes, how I’d especially heaped them here on the seat of the mermaid chair. I wondered if I could possibly have recognized the residue his death left behind, the concentration of good-byes.

  Sitting there, I understood so little, and yet much more than I had before. My father had died here, but in a way I had, too. When I’d sat in the chair all those weeks ago, I’d given myself over to loving Whit, abandoning my old life. I had begun then to die away.

  I sensed that Whit had come into the chapel even before I saw him. He called my name. “Jessie.”

  He was wearing his robe and his cross.

  As he walked toward me, I stood up. The knocking started inside my chest.

  “How’s Nelle?” he asked.

  “Much better. She’s out of the hospital.”

  His face was pinched, and I knew in a way I can’t explain that he posses
sed the same removed piece inside that I did.

  “I’m glad,” he said.

  “Yes, me, too.”

  I felt the moat widening and thought how like detachment the sounds between us were. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something.

  “Father Sebastian told me you wanted to see me,” he said, the formality in his voice unmistakable.

  My mouth opened in surprise. “But I didn’t.” Realizing how that must sound, I added, “I mean, I’m happy to see you, but I didn’t tell him that.”

  Whit frowned.

  “A while ago when I bumped into him, he made it perfectly clear to me that he knew about us. He was very pointed about it.” I felt awkward saying the word “us.”

  “I’m afraid Sebastian has a nasty habit of reading my journal.”

  “But that’s inexcusable.”

  The light flickered in the room. I remembered how it had played on his face when he slept. How he’d washed my feet in creek water. I did not understand the mystifying place where our intimacy had flowed back into reserve.

  “You know, I wasn’t sure until now that he’d actually read it,” he said. “I only suspected.”

  “I had the feeling when Sebastian was talking to me that he was really asking me to leave you alone—without really saying it. I can only imagine how hard he’s made it for you.”

  “You would think so, but the truth is, he’s been kinder to me since then. Like he wanted me to really do what’s best. He told me I should ask myself why I came here, what it means to me to be hidden here with God. I guess he got tired of waiting for me to figure it out.” He shrugged. “Sebastian is a great believer in facing things head-on.”

  People don’t want to make sacrifices anymore.

  I think beginnings must have their own endings hidden inside them. Gazing at Whit, I knew that the end had been there the first night we met, back when he’d stood on one side of the monastery wall and I on the other. The sturdy bricks.

  Whit knew it. I could tell by the way he’d slid his hands inside the sleeves of his robe, the sadness caked in his eyes. I could see he’d already made the sacrifice.

  We stood there staring at each other. I wondered if I would’ve fallen in love with him if he’d been a shoe salesman in Atlanta. It was a bizarre thought, but it seemed somehow the most sensible thought of my life. I doubted I would have, and it was disillusioning to me in the sense of stripping away the last remaining illusions. My falling in love with him had had everything to do with his monkness, his loyalty to what lay deep within him, the self-containment of his solitude, that desire to be transformed. What I’d loved in him most was my own aliveness, his ability to give me back to myself.

  It felt cruel and astonishing to realize that our relationship had never belonged out there in the world, in a real house where you wash socks and slice onions. It belonged in the shadowed linings of the soul.

  I had come to the irreducible thing, just as I had with my father, and there was nothing to do but accept, to learn to accept, to lie down every night and accept.

  I closed my eyes, and it was Hugh I saw. His hands, the hair on his fingers, the Band-Aids on his thumbs. How real all of that was. How ordinary. How achingly beautiful. I wanted him back. Not like before but new, all new. I wanted what came after the passion had blown through: flawed, married love.

  Whit said, “I honestly thought I could go through with this, I wanted to.” He shook his head and looked down at a fraying place on the dark, carpeted dais.

  “I know. Me, too.”

  I didn’t want him to say anything more. I wanted the letting go to be silent, to go quickly.

  Whit nodded. A deep, emphatic nod at something I could not see or hear. He said, “I will miss you.”

  “I’m sorry.” My words cracked as I spoke. I felt I’d been the seducer. I’d sat on the sea rocks like one of Homer’s sirens and lured him. Even though he was ending it as much as I, I felt I was really the betrayer. That I’d betrayed my confessions of love to him, my promise of anniversaries.

  “I don’t want you to be sorry,” he said. “The thing is, I needed”—he reached out and touched my face, a place near my jaw—“I needed to love you.”

  He could have meant a million things, but what I wanted to believe was that his grief over his wife had deadened his heart and falling in love with me had resurrected it. I wanted to believe that now he would give his heart back to the monastery. He would go on foraging in the rookery, waking to the sound of frogs in the bent island oaks, to the smell of Brother Timothy’s bread, catching these little bits of God showing through.

  “It’s true of both of us, then. I needed to love you, too.” It came out with so much awkwardness, so much ineptness, I felt as if I should go on explaining, but he smiled at me and stepped closer.

  He said, “I told you we’d be damned and saved both. Remember?”

  I tried to smile back at him, but it moved painfully on my lips for only a second before evaporating. I reached for him. We held each other without the slightest worry of someone’s wandering by. I did not cry, not then. I held him and felt the tides sweep out from the marsh island where we’d made love. I felt a place inside open up, the secret place where I would carry him. And when he’d left, and I was there alone, I felt the pull that must happen inside the egrets when the moon rises in the early dark—that unbearable tug home.

  I walked to Bone Yard Beach and sat on a piece of driftwood that arched out over the sand. I stared at the ocean, where shrimp boats were roosting in thick, green waves. The tide was coming in instead of going out, which seemed backward and ironic to me. It seemed everything should be leaving. That there should be stretches and stretches of emptiness.

  I had lost both of them.

  Long ago, at the All-Girls Picnic when Mother, Kat, and Hepzibah had walked into the ocean up to their waists, I’d watched them from nearly this same spot. I began to picture them out there, the way they’d giggled as they’d tied their three threads together and thrown them into the waves. Benne and I had wanted to go with them, had begged to go.

  No, this is just for us. Y’all stay back there.

  Who would’ve imagined what would come out of the knots they’d made that night?

  I tugged off my sandals and rolled my pants as high as I could. Despite the heat, the ocean was still chilled from the winter. I had to go in slowly.

  When the water swelled above my knees, I stopped and dug in my pocket for the bits of twine I’d gathered off the lawn at the monastery. I wanted to tie a knot that would go on forever. But not with anyone else. With myself.

  All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I’d tried to complete myself with someone else—first my father, then Hugh, even Whit, and I didn’t want that anymore. I wanted to belong to myself.

  I sorted through the cotton strands, wondering if something in me had known what must be done even as I’d collected them.

  I stood still with the waves cascading against my thighs, elongating as they flowed beyond me toward the shore.

  Jessie. I take you, Jessie…

  The wind moved sideways past my ears, and I could smell the aloneness in it.

  For better or for worse.

  The words rose from my chest and recited themselves in my mind.

  To love and to cherish.

  I took the longest string and tied a knot in the center of it. I gazed at it for a minute, then flung it into the ocean at roughly one o’clock in the afternoon, May 17, 1988, and every day of my life since, I return to that insoluble moment with veneration and homage, as if it possesses the weight and ceremony of marriage.

  CHAPTER Thirty-five

  On the last Saturday of May, I stood on the ferry dock with Mother, Kat, Hepzibah, and Benne, all of us lined up at the railing, staring at the wind-chopped bay. White ibis were everywhere. We watched them flying in boomerangs across the bay.

  My suitcase sat near the gangplank. Kat had brought a basket of purple beach phlox, Carolina jessa
mine, and pink oleander blossoms, which she intended to toss at the pontoon when it pulled away, like it was the Queen Mary. She poured lemonade from a thermos into little paper cups and handed out benne wafers. She had been adamant about its being a bon voyage party.

  Having little appetite, I fed most of my wafers to Max.

  “Where will you live now?” Benne asked.

  I thought of my big, drafty house, the turret and the stained glass over the doorways, my studio tucked beneath the roof. Home, I wanted to tell her, I’ll live at home, but I wasn’t sure I could claim it now.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You can always live here,” said Mother.

  I looked at the faded orange buoys bobbling on the water, marking the crab traps, and felt the twisted tie deep inside that tethered me to her, to this place. For a moment I almost believed I could stay.

  “I’ll come back,” I said, and abruptly broke down crying, setting off a whole chain reaction: Hepzibah, then Benne, Mother, and finally Kat.

  “Well, isn’t this fun?” said Kat, doling out paper napkins. “I always said there’s nothing like a lot of bawling women to liven up a party.”

  Having the opportunity, we fled into laughter.

  I was the last one on the ferry. I stood at the rail, as Kat had instructed, so I could see the flower toss. It rained oleander, jessamine, and phlox for all of thirty seconds, but I have wrapped and contained the sight very carefully in my mind. I am still able to close my eyes and see the blossoms light on the water like tiny firebirds.

  I stood there watching after the dock disappeared from sight, and I knew they had all climbed into Kat’s golf cart by then. As the island slid into the distance, I stored everything away—the bright expanse of water, the crushing scent of the marsh, the wind soaring in canticles across the bay—and tried not to think what waited for me.

  Hugh was asleep in his leather chair in the den, wearing black socks worn down at the heels, a book open across his chest—The Portable Jung. He’d forgotten to close the curtains, and the windows behind him blazed with darkness and lamplight.