The Tao of Humiliation

by Lee Upton

  What was obvious: they weren’t golden anymore. Their hair had darkened the way blond hair will. But their eyes were the same, and Conor, especially, was a remarkably beautiful person. He struck me as the sort of man who ignores common advice. The sort who’s allergic to routine. The sort who mutters funny comments under his breath at public lectures. His face was wide, unlike his sister’s narrow, bony one. She hardly blinked, which was unnerving. Conor had Glynnis’s pale coloring, her almost translucent skin.

  After I saw them at the bakery I looked up Conor’s wife’s obituary on-line. Then, from earlier editions, the news report. The discovery of a body, drowned. A blurry photograph. The estate’s lawyer had remarked that Conor’s wife had looked a little like me, and he was right.

  For the rest of that first morning when I took possession of the house I ambled around the property. The sky appeared to be a cold opal, the only break in the clouds a nearly undetectable pink sheen. I hadn’t noticed it before, but almost invisible under a shrub next to the old swimming pool was the birdbath that I had loved as a child. Seahorses held up a scallop shell for birds to drink from. That day the shell was dusted with snow. Somewhere there’s a picture of me as an eight-year-old beside that birdbath, with the swimming pool behind me. I’m looking proud, as if I discovered the seahorses and dragged them up from the ocean floor. We hadn’t used the pool often back then. My uncle discouraged me from swimming in it.

  In the afternoon I walked the beachfront east of the town center. The wind made my eyes water. Never turn your back on the sea—one of my uncle’s warnings, after a giant wave pushed me face down many years ago, trapping me as it withdrew. I had been ten at the time, and the wave’s violence seemed human to me, willed. I was more careful after that.

  Two figures in the distance advanced toward me. As soon as I recognized them I looked away and toward the ocean, blood drumming in my temples. Fog began puckering and denting over the water. I was nearly at the boardwalk by the lower dunes when I allowed myself to turn, making sure my eyes were dead in case Conor or his sister glanced in my direction. It felt stupid to be acting the way I had when I was a child, but I wasn’t able to help myself.

  That night I couldn’t sleep for a long time. I lay awake in that peculiar florescent zone of insomnia.

  Then I thought of Ana Su, and cheered myself up. When I lived with my uncle I had made one friend—or one “almost friend”: Ana Su. It wasn’t that Ana Su and I talked. We watched each other. We watched each other with that sure sense some children have, as if we were deadly enemies and yet invested in one another’s lives. Sometimes I’d be walking on the pier and she’d be walking toward me. We walked very slowly until we met and wordlessly passed one another.

  And then so many years later, during the week of my accident—out of the blue—she contacted me, and we began an email correspondence. She was living in Oregon but promised to visit me when I got settled at my uncle’s house.

  The next night I looked out the window of the second-story landing into The Cavern’s parking lot and counted seven cars. Once it was midnight and I had pestered myself for hours about my lack of courage, I threw on my coat and scarf. As soon as I entered the tavern my eyeglasses steamed up, dissolving everything in front of me. I endured the crush of bodies behind me as I was pushed into the barroom. Then I leaned against a wall and wiped fog from the lenses with my gloves and put my glasses back on. The bar assumed a shape. A group of men, three of them with beards, were looking up expectantly. It was in the air—that crimping of the atmosphere—when a woman enters a room where too few women are.

  The couple behind me—they were the ones who pushed me in—maneuvered past, apologizing.

  Tables were clustered in the center of the bar and in two alcoves. A stream of light from a still-illuminated St. Pauli Girl’s sign sped across bottles ranged on shelves. Despite feeling watched the whole time, I examined the bottles. Deep inside each quivered a tiny clay face, wincing in a trick of light. In each bottle: a mermaid.

  My reflection bent in the third bottle, and I was thankful that the scar that runs across my forehead and the light scars that cross from my left ear almost to the center of my chin weren’t visible in that light. For weeks after the accident when I saw myself in a mirror I thought of a paper doll cut apart by a mean child.

  In one bottle, a mermaid, her tail glittering with mirror scales, was propped against a tiny ship. Inside another bottle a model of the same ship was tilted under paper waves, a tiny mermaid huddled next to the hull. At first I imagined that the bottles dated from at least three or four decades ago—given the faded little figures inside, orange-red. Then I realized that probably the figures were only crafted to look old. Something about the bottles was powerful, as if they fizzed with bees.

  I navigated to an empty table, and before I could extricate myself from my coat, a stranger was walking toward me. “From Conor,” he said, setting down a beer. Conor, his back to me, was busy at the cash register.

  The beer was dark and thick-tasting. I felt cold and put my coat back on.

  By the time I finished my beer I was waved over to their crowded table by the couple who came in behind me. I landed among talkers, and I was relieved that I didn’t have to do anything but listen, or pretend to listen. I pulled off my coat again, helped with the sleeve by one of the men. There was an instant’s quiet. Embarrassed, I looked down. The copper color of my shirt appeared fleshlike. I crossed my arms.

  There was a discussion about the McCaff Bridge, the bootery, the Condoms Galore Store in some town I’d never heard of. Another beer appeared at my elbow. I looked around to see whom to thank. Someone tapped my arm and said, “Don’t try to imagine who that’s from.”

  It was then that Glynnis appeared. The skin under her eyes looked darker and more sunken than ever, the rest of her face more translucent. “Have you been defecting to Squalls?” she asked. “I’ve never seen you here before.” Two of the men at the table pushed their chairs back. One swung up a chair from another table for her.

  “No,” I said. “Squalls must not have what you have. I bet they don’t have mermaids.” The skin around her eyes crinkled. “Do you know who made them?” I asked. “Did you?”

  “Those bottles on the walls?” she said. She took a while before answering, long enough for me to wonder why. “No. No, I don’t know who made them. Can I take your photograph?” She unzipped her coat, and there her camera was, hanging around her neck like a giant cowbell. After she finished taking my photograph and then taking pictures of everyone at the table she said, “Come over to the house sometime. I mean it. I’ll show you my work. I’ve photographed everyone in town.” She printed her address on a napkin.

  I hadn’t meant to wait until the bar closed, but I did, and I was glad when Conor offered to walk me across the lot to the house. His face was perfectly molded, his eyebrows paler than his hair under the streetlight. In the night air, the chill tightened everything. Further inland there would be snow.

  “What happened?” he said. “Something happened to you.”

  “You mean my face?”

  “What about your face? You’re alone for some reason. Divorce?”

  “No. Not that.”

  “I remember you. The kid with the big glasses. You seemed superior—self-contained. Scary.”

  It was easy to laugh with him. “The picture you’re painting is so different from my memory,” I said. “I remember the house most—and my uncle. I saw your sister again tonight. I didn’t know she was a photographer. She’s a mainstay at the bakery, right?”

  “Muffins don’t fight back. It’s a good job for her. She’s not exactly commended for her patience. She doesn’t have what used to be called a trusting nature. The trouble is that more than half the time she’s right. But only a little more than half the time. She’s always been like that. Suspicious. She won’t even drive. I have to drive her everywhere.”

  “She doesn’t trust herself?”

  “She doesn’t
trust other drivers. It makes her nervous that they’ll cross the center line.”

  I thought of my accident. “Maybe not trusting other drivers—maybe that’s smart.”

  We stopped on the walkway next to the swimming pool. The blue tarp covering the cement looked frosted and billowed in the wind. “I nearly drowned in there,” Conor said, laughing. I remembered what I knew about his wife. It felt odd laughing with him about a drowning. “I was never in any real danger,” he said. “Your uncle was there—and my mother and Glynnis were there too.”

  “That would have scared everyone to death. Especially your mother.”

  “My mother never quite forgave Dewey for letting me in the pool. She was very good at holding a grudge.”

  The kiss was so sudden and quick that I drew back, stunned. Conor laughed and so did I. Laughing was easy with him.

  Since the accident I had been having headaches. The headaches and/or the dizziness could come on at any time. The worst thing wasn’t even the headaches or the dizziness. It was the accompanying nausea, and then the depression. I felt very fragile and, at the same time, angry at myself for being fragile.

  Nothing was spinning the next morning, which was good, given that so many things in the antique and craft store where I was wandering were made of glass: blue willow plates so faded they look smudged, salt and pepper shakers in the form of roosters, ducks, beagles, pickles, Liberty Bells. I thought that there might be something that Ana Su would like as a gift.

  The shop owner was ignoring me in a way that seemed purposeful as I scrutinized beer steins decorated with wolves. There were two shelves of what appeared to be local craft projects: candle holders glued with gingham ribbons and bespattered with glitter, giant jugs decorated with silver thimbles and golden bells. It struck me as pretty wonderful that the imagination is so entertainingly weird, addicted to making beauty or acquiring beauty or what seems like beauty. Beauty being so various.

  Behind a row of cocktail decanters, something came into focus. A terrarium?

  Then I understood: it was a bottled mermaid, like the ones in the tavern. Under golden clouds a mermaid rode inside a ship with ragged sails. The mermaid’s face was tiny, beadyeyed. It was the same face as those on other mermaids in the bottles at The Cavern. The mermaid’s arms were raised. In joy? Triumph? In the foreground, white-capped waves glittered in frosting-thick paint next to a tiny lighthouse. It was a clever little lighthouse—primitive, sweetly sloppy, tilting.

  The owner sidled up beside me, his white mustache lifting. “It’s original art. Locally made. It’s a pretty fancy piece, huh?” He sucked in his breath as I examined the glass. In the lower left corner, cracks rayed outward like a spider’s web. “There’s a discount,” he said.

  I ran my fingers around the base and peered into the low shoreline of sand and pebbles for a signature. Nothing. I already knew that I would rescue the mermaid from her dusty obscurity, rescue the wonderfully silly lighthouse and the paper ship.

  “Where did you find this?”

  The shop owner cleared his throat before announcing, “It’s called The Underwater Dance.” Sensing a sale, he stepped closer. “There was a set of these. But this one—the man who bought the others didn’t have room.”

  I knew he was lying. There was room at the tavern. My uncle didn’t buy this mermaid because he must have predicted that the crack eventually would grow, covering the face of the glass.

  “You sold the set to The Cavern?”

  The man blushed. “You must have heard all about this.”

  “No. I didn’t. Can you tell me the name of the artist?”

  “You’re not superstitious are you? Tell me you’re not superstitious. Sometimes troubled people are especially creative.”

  “I’m not and I’m buying this—if you’ll tell me.”

  “There’s no need for bribes.”

  Given that I suspected Conor’s sister had lied to me at the tavern I took a guess. “A woman named Glynnis Alberon made this.”

  “No. Alberon wasn’t the last name. Her name was Ellemenz. There used to be these bottles for sale in a lot of places. This is probably the last one left anywhere. There’s a light inside, by the way.”

  On Thursday morning as soon as I got up I noticed that the bottled mermaid was missing from the foyer’s buffet. I had placed it there, visible from the window, visible from the tavern.

  There were suspects. The oil company workers had been in on Wednesday, three of them, with buckets and lights, equipped like miners to do the furnace cleaning. To make it easy for them to come and go, I had left the front entrance unlocked. Nevertheless, only one name kept returning as the culprit: Glynnis, who might rationalize stealing the bottled mermaid, believing that she was the true natural owner because her sister-in-law, Anita Ellemenz, had made it. After all, Glynnis had lied to me in the tavern, saying that she didn’t know who made the bottled mermaids. Somehow she still seemed as enraged and needy as when we were both children.

  At the tavern she had asked me to visit her. Which is what I did. I must have thought I could retrieve the bottled mermaid—and possibly present it to Conor as a gift, even though if Glynnis had stolen the thing it would already be in the house they shared. It was an odd fantasy I was having. I wanted to give Conor something, and it seemed that the bottled mermaid was rightfully his. Actually I don’t entirely know what I was thinking when I headed out.

  The house was a small ranch-style place. Hanging from the porch were pots of dead gray ferns that must have frozen weeks ago. I felt a blast of guilt and also a shameful blast of self-satisfaction. The house I had inherited was so much more welcoming.

  Glynnis answered the bell.

  “Conor didn’t mention you’d be coming,” she said. “He’ll be home soon.”

  “Actually I came to see you.” I didn’t want to pretend I was clueless about her lie to me at the tavern. I was hardly inside the house before I said, “I found out who made the bottled mermaids. When we were at the tavern why did you say that you didn’t know who made them?”

  “I didn’t feel like talking about Anita then. Is that hard to understand?”

  She didn’t sound like someone who mourned her sister-in-law.

  We walked through a formal dining room—blond wood, a low chandelier over a table, brocaded chairs—and into a narrow hall. We passed into what looked like a den. What stopped me short: shelves lined with clay figurines rose to the ceiling. Shelf upon shelf of a frozen city, tiny statues clustered, like fertility objects. The figurines were the same tint as the mermaids in the bottles. When I peered closer it became clear that each figure was at least subtly different, each incised to reflect an original soul.

  “Are there any statues of men?”

  “No. Anita always said she couldn’t do men’s faces. She felt safer with women’s faces. Big mistake there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Women are every bit as unsafe as men.”

  “There aren’t any mermaids.”

  “She thought the mermaids needed to get out of the house, I think. She probably would have made a lot more to sell if she could have—if. Well, she was a mermaid herself—a beautiful swimmer.” She gasped and muttered, “What am I saying?” She pulled a figurine from the shelf and held it out to me. “Isn’t this one cute? It’s my favorite. That’s exactly what I looked like as a kid. Anita worked with photographs. Not just actual people. Old photographs too. She collected them from anyone who would hand them over. I don’t think these are like voodoo dolls at all—although I used to.”

  I was sure that I had come upon something telling, that these legions of figurines were made to protect those whom Conor’s wife loved. Possibly she made them to protect herself. The opposite of voodoo—not to harm others but to protect them. Good luck totems. An army of Amazons.

  A tightening sensation around my forehead began. I needed to leave before the dizziness started. Glynnis protested, “Why do you have to go so soon? Look at this. There’
s a box of the photographs she used for some of these. Here. It’s pretty inspiring.” It was on the third shelf, a photograph box. “You’d be surprised. The whole town is here.”

  I hurriedly glanced through the photographs without, at first, recognizing anyone.

  “This is my mother.”

  “What did you say?” Glynnis asked.

  “Just that they’re beautiful.”

  It was a washed-out snapshot. A close-up. My mother’s soft eyes, startlingly dark. A smile about to skim over her face. The photograph was probably taken by my uncle. I recognized the porch pillars at the house. My uncle would never have parted with such a photograph. Someone must have stolen it.

  I don’t think that Glynnis saw that I took the photograph. Although later it became clear that she’d wanted me to see it. That day, she hadn’t offered to show me any of her own photographs.

  By the time I stepped outside the sky was dark. A dog howled in the distance. Walking toward my car, I felt pushed to hurry by an invisible hand. I was at the base of the driveway when I was caught in headlight beams. Conor pulled alongside in his truck before I could get into my car.

  “Hey,” he called. “You’re here. Come on up.”

  “I was just up,” I said. “To see Glynnis. I have to leave.” I wanted to stay, of course—for him—but not while Glynnis was at the house.

  Time passed slowly for the next few days. Conor didn’t stop by, and I couldn’t find enough energy to cross the lot and see him at the tavern. I was a sick woman who knows she is a sick woman, and I couldn’t understand why. There’s nothing wrong with me other than headaches—I have no reason to be like this. The bromides, the pep talks I gave myself, all the bracing level-headed advice, the stoic urge toward self-forgetfulness—none worked. I went into the city and saw my doctor. She gave me another prescription for the headaches, but I got dizzier and decided it was better just to sleep as often as I could. Which I did.

  It was a Friday night when I heard something inside the house—a low, scuffing sound, as if an animal had gotten in through an upstairs window. I had been warned at the realtor’s office that squirrels once invaded the attic, although a pest control agent inspected the place before I moved in. I climbed to the third floor and stopped inside the smallest bedroom, taking in the air of use: the rumpled coverlet, the bedside table with the lamp drawn to the edge. On the shelf above the bed, on its side, rested a tiny ship with paper sails. I searched the shelves above the bed, opened the drawer on the bedside table, pulled back curtains, ran my hand along the windowsill.