by Unknown
There was once a poor fisherman whose daughter walked to the beach every afternoon to gather seashells. Whereupon she might have thought: a fairy tale is a straight and narrow path; to follow it and no others, the teller must be disciplined. Hence, the daughter’s collection of shells arranged on a black velvet jeweler’s cloth is an indulgent detail, as well as, incidentally, personal: my mother possessed just such a collection on a shelf above her bed and, one languid pink morning, rolling them one by one in her paper-skin palm, as though to activate her memory, the loose hospital bracelet—weren’t they supposed to remove those?—still hanging round her thin bruised tremoring wrist, seemed intent on describing the origin (the beach, her company, the time of day) of each small and ordinary shell. Yet by the second shell—plucked from Stinson Beach during a hopeless quest for one of her girlfriend’s silver stud earrings—my mother stopped midsentence and, heaving a sigh, turned her heavy-lidded gaze to the window as to the dullest interlocutor in the world. I stood. I began to gather up the seashells from her lap. I told her to get some rest.
She made no reply. But does that matter? Being disciplined, I should just leave us there, in that sickroom, with me at her bedside, and the salmon light streaming through her see-through cloud of hair: no need to expand upon or luxuriate in trivialities. Does it really matter that I would, two mornings later, remembering that policemen had lain straw on the sidewalk outside Arnold Bennett’s window, so that the sound of foot traffic would not disturb the dying novelist—does it really matter that I would drape my own mother’s walk with old sheets and rags and tees and pillow cases? Of course not. Nothing, after all, is more indulgent than the personal, and a fairy tale is staunchly impersonal, if not ruthlessly cold.
I stood my leather-bound, cracked-open menu before me on the table, creating in effect a little cubicle in which to write. I wrote: Once, when she had gone a long way without a single shell, a handsome merman broke the surface of the tide and beckoned her to hop in and look for oysters. I found it—still find it—fascinating that my mother’s introduction to the marvelous, the first appearance of the “handsome merman,” was so nonchalant, so casually tossed off, that he might have been, barring his good looks, just another local fisherman, a teenage boy out for a swim, or a canoeist raising a paddle and halloing ashore, especially since she’d been courted as a young woman by a series of handsome, not-so-young men who would remain, until very nearly the end, alive in her memory—like little huts forever burning across the raven-dark countryside of her mind. At eighteen, for example, when she traveled to Italy between the wars, my mother met an officer of the Royal Army named Rinaldo or Rolando or Renato—I disremember—a man, in any event, with brown caterpillar eyebrows, tobacco-scented breath (“The aroma of pipesmoke,” she told me years ago, “still makes me bat my lashes”) and an officer’s cap worn stylishly aslant—a man known chiefly among my mother’s intimates as the one who, on a moonlit beach in Tropea, picked strands of seaweed from her wet and clotted hair. She first told me this story in a Macy’s changing stall, slinking out of (I could see through the door slats) a pale blue dress, and she told it—how could she resist?—as a love story, a brief romance, a tryst. Still, I knew better. I knew in my bones that Rinaldo-Rolando-Renato played in that quaint, lovey-dovey scene a fatherly role; it didn’t matter how she spun it.
“Then, with the faintest splash,” she told her father that evening, “he disappeared underwater.” And yet my mother, from adolescent onward, told her father nothing more than an occasional neo-Victorian tidbit she had “read” (she invented most of them, frankly) in a women’s magazine: “It is polite to remove your gloves delicately, one finger at a time”; or, “One oughtn’t toot one’s automobile horn at passersby—it is vulgar”; or, “For dark or puffy eyes, the most desirable variety of cucumber is the Lebanese.” She abhorred such remarks, but continued producing them at the rate of about one a week because they seemed to please him—he would lower his fork, his coffee mug, his newspaper, his penknife, his three fingers of bourbon, and fix her with an affectionate, crooked smile—which was, for a man of his generation, quite understandable: it was comforting to know your one and only daughter, even if owing to her embrace of the petty, old-timey conventions of our sex, needn’t look very far—or indeed look at all—to find happiness. Though it was clearly one of the great regrets of her life, I never once looked down on my mother for this long-standing façade. Don’t we all acquire some peculiar means by which to extract from our parents tiny drops—our fix—of love, of affirmation? (I used to lie out my mother’s dresses at night, pairing each with this or that stocking or high heel or scarf or bead necklace.) Don’t our hearts plunge down to Aeneas in the underworld, failing three times to embrace the shade of his father, his arms grasping at nothingness, thin air? Sure—but, still, a fairy tale does not in this sense explore relationships; rather, it is superficial, concerned with observable behavior. Just as a merman appears with neither explanation nor justification, so too does a daughter speak openly, unashamedly, to her father.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a waitress, our usual thin-hipped pony-tailed waitress, who would no doubt ask about my mother, approach. When she arrived tableside, greeting me with an informal “Hey” and the slightest gesture—was I imagining things?—toward the empty chair across from me, it was as though an immense shadow had overtaken me on a narrow sylvan road at midnight. I said nothing. I stared down, trying to bestow upon my notebook, white linen napkin, and paper tablecloth the same heavy-lidded gaze my mother had bestowed upon her window. With her thick endearing accent, our—my—waitress asked, “You want usual?” and I was torn between slapping her in the mouth and weeping against her tiny, crimson-shirted breasts. Instead I nodded, then clapped shut the menu and thrust it into her hands.
Why do fairy tales omit such uncomfortable, coincidental, basically pointless moments that seem to comprise—I was in a cynical mood—the waitress staring down at me, waiting for either an apology or a thank you—half of one’s life? At least fairy tales mention grief: indeed I feel, on that front, thoroughly represented. In “The Burial Shirt,” for example—which I’d encountered several months earlier, perusing fairybooks for a friend’s baby shower on the slow-creaking, book-musty, second-story floor of Green Apple Books—in this tale, the ghost of a mother’s seven-year-old son, holding his moon-pale shirt, sits at the foot of her bed and says: “Oh, mother, please stop crying, or I will not be able to fall asleep in my coffin, because my burial shirt will not dry out from your tears that keep falling on it.” Presently our waitress left the table: the shadow slipped into the forest. Also, needless to say, I didn’t buy my friend that book.
But to return to mother and grandfather for a moment. By the time they began to speak openly to one another, had at last ripped open the reticent, over-mannered fabric of their relationship, it was too late: he was in a home, suffering from leukemia and dementia, and would repeat (as my mother rolled him in his wheelchair round the ultra-green, sprinkler-blossomed grounds) long-buried childhood stories, particularly one about a talent show. For weeks and weeks, my grandfather had practiced in his slant-roofed attic bedroom (with a view of a church steeple and a solemn gray river) a tune called “Beer Barrel Polka,” though in his mind he was on stage, under celestial spotlight, a little unassuming ten-year-old with—what’s that he’s got there? a harmonica? a chromatic harmonica?—oh, boy, this oughtta be good. Then he would play, eyes squeezed shut, rocking back and forth on his heels, his encrimsoned cheeks alternately ballooning and shrinking, producing in his mind endless lush blue fields of sound, his entire body growing larger and larger, taller and taller, until, as though peering down the sheer hoar face of a mountain, he could see his audience—a silent black mass of insects—seated at his feet. “Well, that didn’t happen,” my grandfather would repeat, as my mother rolled him through the contusion-like shadow of a Gingko tree. She would touch his shoulder, and he would tilt his head so that his large cold ear pressed aga
inst the back of her hand. On the late November morning of the talent show, when his name was called, my young shaggy-headed grandfather—I’d seen some ancient photos—walked across a dinky makeshift stage, stared out at the audience shifting in their seats, and instantly (dropping his harp, which resounded through the gymnasium) suffered his first and most serious asthma attack.
Could this experience alone have stoppered his dreams, his daydreams, his imagination? Turned his rich interior life overnight to stone? Seems unlikely. Yet to some degree it must have contributed to his eventual austere and reticent demeanor, to his fear of or inability to express his interiority, and maybe (who knows?) to his long and uneventful career as a bank teller. I supposed my grandfather was—being so consistent, so predictable, so utterly (as far as my mother could discern) unchanging—I supposed he was rather like a character in, or even the very setting of, a fairy tale, where the passage of time brings about little if any change. Of course, characters grow up, grow old, grow out their hair, their nails, their noses; their potbellies grow, their eyebrows (or a third eye) grow, out grow their boils. Nevertheless, their interior worlds, as well as the exterior worlds they inhabit (bucolic, crayon-drawn backdrops, for the most part), remain pretty much unchanged. I believed my mother—by some admixture of her father’s personality and her own peculiar sensibility—must have felt like a child protagonist in a fairy tale: young, isolate, dreamy, inquisitive, beautiful, longhaired. I believed she was trying to share with me, if she could, a modest portion of that magic.
And at once I saw her on the other side of the Klamath River, just standing there in an oversized yellow T-shirt and Birkenstocks, staring up at a small dark gap in the line of pine trees—see her morph into the girl from the fairy tale, then into a white-tailed doe who, turning her long neck in my direction, morphs once more back into my mother. Then she starts up the embankment toward the gap in the trees, where a wide shaded path curves into the distance; for a split second, on the lip of the embankment, she pauses, the breeze lifts her dark hair, and her chin rises as though following a scent. I’m up on my knees in our forest-green tent, panicked, fourteen years old, watching her through mosquito netting. My mother, my lodestar. Where are you going? How long will you be gone?
Weeks later the girl brought home an oyster and told her father the merman had given it to her and said he would surface again when the oyster opened. Well, then, since nothing ever changes, there would be no need for my mother to have mentioned the sudden drop in sea level, allowing the girl to paddle clear out to the barnacled rock a half-mile from shore—a slice of cling-wrapped plum cake on the thwart across from her—and there for the first time unfold the long-ignored letter (at least she assumed it was a letter) her own mother had left for her on their pinewood kitchen table, would there? But she began instead with the plum cake, setting it on a flat of the rock and, cross-legged, unwrapping the cling-wrap slowly, delicately, with pursed lips, as though practicing her form. Then she shoved half the cake into her mouth and just let the wind whoosh up the wrapper and fling it at once further and further, tiny and tinier, out over the bottle-green water. After a moment, as the crumbs tumbled down her shirtfront and into her lap, the fisherman’s daughter unfolded the letter—or, wait, it wasn’t a letter—it was a sketch, a pencil drawing—the very drawing, incidentally, that I had once found under a rust-orange pouch of potpourri in my mother’s sock drawer: a self-portrait in which the left eye, the right half of the nose, the upper lip, and the very tip of her Woolfian chin had all been so often sketched and erased, then sketched again and erased, and again sketched and then erased again, that the face was nothing but a tornadic lead-gray blur littered with eraser dust—a face disappearing behind a mask of smoke. And yet I supposed—as the other half of plum cake rose between thumb and forefinger toward the young girl’s opening mouth—I supposed this was a fitting image. After all, in fairy tales, certain family members (mothers in particular) are often altogether excised.
Looking up from my notebook, I saw before me a cheap metal teapot and an empty, willow-pattern teacup. How long had they been there? How had I failed to notice an actual human being traipsing over and setting them down?
Mystery, the unknown, is at the center of the fairy tale. That its reader-listeners must suspend their disbelief is, in my view, a vulgar truism; far more interesting is the fact that they must suspend their desire to know what’s omitted, what’s hidden, so to speak, behind its teller’s back. Can a fairy tale be restored, returned like a medieval painting to a previous compositional moment, a road not (or only briefly) taken? Can some bedandruffed Hungarian scholar please peel back this or that sentence like overpaint and reveal, behind a littoral, centuries-old boulder, say—though this is not at all the tenor of my mother’s imagination, I realized, pouring myself a cup of tea—a jealous mermaid, pink coral dagger in hand, lying in wait? One must walk gingerly through a fairy tale; each step may detonate a new slew of questions. The father, still unconvinced, lobbed the oyster into the fireplace. Why is the father unconvinced? What is he unconvinced of—the existence of merfolk, or the merman’s invitation to look for oysters? The adverb “still” implies that he’s been unconvinced for some time, but have they discussed the matter, or has he kept his skepticism all to himself? (I could go on and on with such questions.) In any event, for the father to lob the oyster, seemingly without deliberation, into the fireplace, I thought it fair to presume that their relationship had incurred at least a minor fracture.
Then for a long time I stared out through the rain-pocked, misted-over picture windows, and remembered the mystery at the heart of Citizen Kane. After his second wife leaves him, the enraged and dying Charles Foster Kane destroys her ornate, over-furnished bedroom, but is suddenly calmed by the sight of a snow globe. He walks toward it. He picks it up. He utters the word “rosebud,” and at that moment the little globe slips from his hand, bounces down a few stairs, and shatters. The remainder of the film is at least in part concerned with the mystery of that word. Rosebud. Rosebud. What could it possibly mean? Soon a nurse enters and, kneeling in the sharp-edged noirish shadows over Kane’s dead body, crosses his arms across his chest. In the film’s final scene, Kane’s childhood sled, on which the word “rosebud” has been carved—a rather anticlimactic discovery, no?—is chucked into a blazing furnace, where we are all made to watch it burn.
I blinked. Orange rain fell slantwise in the lamplight. Cars and scooters and fixies shushed by. I sipped my tea.
Sipping my tea, I thought principally of the first time I crept out of my house—twelve years old, in the seventh grade—and hurried along pitch-dark back roads and narrow winding creekside paths to a boy’s house; or, rather, to the small barred bedroom window of a boy’s parents’ apartment. I ought to have worn a red hood, to have carried a cake and a little pot of butter. I tapped on the glass. I leaned my head languidly against the cold bars. And when he appeared, bleary-eyed, tousle-haired, glancing back just once (stealthy, not scared) over his shoulder at his light-framed bedroom door, and eased open the prisonish window, I said—and my naïve suavity even now flushes my neck—I said: “Hey there, handsome.” Beyond this, however, I don’t remember much about that night at all, except that he kept scurrying toward the door and listening for footfalls and motioning with his hands for me to duck my head—like a mock-frantic performance in a silent comedy—and that afterward I strutted home through the dark verily brimming with self-satisfaction, the night air cool on my skin, the owls hooting unseen overhead, and yet resigned absolutely to this absolute fact: I would be caught. I would turn the final corner onto our street and see, up ahead, in a pool of olive-shaded light, my mother knitting in the half-curtained living room window, a cup of scalded milk in her lap. Yet it was worth it, totally worth it, wasn’t it? To sizzle with adrenaline, to fatten with pride, to glisten with hot-sticky accomplishment?
Years earlier, making a wish (and I’ve always wished, like a proper Aristotelian, for happiness), I dropped an Ei
senhower dollar down a well, then stood motionless, waiting for the coin to plink against the stone sides or else plop satisfyingly into the water. But the coin just dropped into blackness—just dropped down through a hole in the earth—no sound at all. When I at last turned onto our street, our house was full dark, my mother was no doubt snoring under her green-and-yellow afghan, and I felt again that hollow, heart-stopping disappointment: I had wanted, I realized, my mother to know how courageous (though she would certainly have favored the word “stupid”) I had been. I had wanted her to catch me, to punish me, to prove I had not separated myself from her, that I was not like a Muisca chieftan who, washing away the anointed gold, glares round and round him at an empty shore, his onlookers vanished, maybe a white-bellied heron lifting off the water, the mist pinkening. Now, for the first time in my life, a secret stood between us: my mother had not witnessed, or known about, or caught me at, or followed behind a safe distance from, this most momentous of steps.
The waitress who I had ignored lowered a large serving bowl of wonton soup onto the center of our table. Then she set before me, beside my notebook, which I had upside-downed lest she spy my psychotic scrawling, a little matching individual bowl and a Chinese soupspoon. With silent dignity (good-postured, chin high, the back of her small left hand pressed to the small of her back) she began to ladle the soup from the serving bowl to the individual bowl, and I at once regretted having taken—though there didn’t seem to be, at the time, another option to take—a bewildered, wounded approach to our interactions. I should have pretended I was meeting my mother; I should have fished out my clamshell cellphone after ten or so minutes of sitting there alone and pretended, a little too pixieishly perhaps, to talk to her: “No, it’s fine, I totally understand… Yes, of course, you will make it up to me.” I would laugh. “Talk to you soon. Feel better, okay? Ta-ta.” Then I would sit there for all to see, a smile (or the ghost of a smile) still on my face as I clapped shut my cell and placed it back in my purse, knowing I had—or had had, to be precise—even grammar can inflict pain—a good mother.