Once, as she played jacks on the edge of the pier, a favorite piece fell between the planks. She leaned over to watch as the sparkling red X plunged ten feet into the deep. Instead of the jack, she saw something else that startled her. Treading water effortlessly in a vortex of fish, was Cassia, flanked by silver backed trout, mammoth sea bass, and tiny minnows flipping their shining narrow sides like coins in a wishing well; her hair indistinguishable from the enormous kelp growing all around her.
Vriel was both fascinated and envious. She wanted to tell her mother. She wished she was a fisherman with a huge net to catch her sister and all those cloying, cold-blooded courtesans. Cassia was like the pied piper, her every breath a song indiscernible to human ears.
She did tell on her sister, but her mother only smiled and lay a finger over Vriel’s lips. That look in her mother’s eyes was neither anger, nor fear, nor curiosity, but pride. And it was never directed at her.
Cassia launched herself upon the bed, jolting Vriel out of the past. She rubbed her head against Vriel’s shoulder. A low vibration passed between them, a purring.
“You feel better already don’t you?” Cassia said, “Well enough to eat something? You’ve lost too much weight.”
Vriel hated to admit it, but she felt the first surge of hunger in days.
Cassia’s eyes betrayed a tolerant pity. Beneath it, Vriel could perceive an elusive contentment that she craved. Cassia moved away and the cold crept back up her spine. Cassia snatched up and began to read the latest entry in her journal.
“Surprise, David: what should be beautiful and mysterious is not. You have questions I’m sure. After all, Disney has retold tales of sea maidens, tail-burdened princesses in love with worthy land-loving gentlemen. It’s all bullshit. There was a kernel of truth in the old stories. The little mermaid’s sacrifice was rewarded with betrayal and death, in Irish lore stealing a selkie’s skin chains her to a domestic life, the rusalka weeps for her murdered loves. A litany to women with no will of their own, flung about by the — this is too rich — by the whims of salt water?”
Cassia tossed the book back on the bed where Vriel watched the pages flutter as it landed at her feet.
“I had no idea you were such a poet,” Cassia said with obvious contempt. “Are you out of your mind? Did you actually plan for him to read this?”
“I’m not like you,” Vriel said. “You aren’t dependent on others the way I am, I get tired of lying. You breathe on your own, but I’ll never fit in there.”
“Nor here,” Cassia said softly, “At least you won’t be sick.” “Maybe not physically.”
“If you found a partner like yourself...”
“Who is like me Cassia? You certainly aren’t. Besides, I don’t see you settling down. David and I have a real life together.”
David was the kind of man her father must have been: open, trusting, protective, and deaf to the unseen world. What attracted Vriel to him was that he assumed people were who they pretended to be.
They had met in an organic market. She was sorting through the kale for the freshest bundle. His common approach, “How do you cook that?” made her smile.
She took in his stylish glass frames, neatly creased dockers, sandals, and faded tee shirt. On his left arm, he cradled a basket filled with packaged foods. There was no reason for him to be in produce.
Half way through dessert on their first date, he said: “What…nationality are you?”
Vriel smiled. It had taken him longer than she expected to ask, but she still played dumb.
“What do you mean?” “You look so…”
“Exotic, foreign, anomalous…” She completed his sentence, thinking, you should see my sister. An abundance of brown hair, the exact color of Laminaria agardhii in sunlit water, accented Cassia’s warm yellow skin. Despite the long thin braids she never cut, despite her swimming coach’s insistence that they would slow her time, Cassia was never suspected for being other than what she was. Unless, Vriel amended, she got wet.
Vriel weighed what answer to give him. She knew what he saw. The cropped dark hair luminous as an oil slick, the sloping curve of her eyes that clashed with her sharply angled cheekbones, her full bottom lip, and last, her skin, a dark olive reminiscent of sodden army fatigues. She gave the easiest answer that usually foreclosed further inquiry: My mother was Black.
He nodded; it was what he’d already guessed.
Later, she would tell him what little she knew of ancestry. That her mother was from a barren archipelago off the West African coast called Cape Verde, no doubt as a joke by some Portuguese explorer. That she and Cassia were born in New Bedford in 1973, days after their parents fled the chaos resulting in the wake of Amílcar Cabral’s assassination. That her father went back for a research trip and never returned. She would not tell him her real name.
Making love to David was like kneading dough: pleasurable, meditative, and monotonous. His skin was too soft, too pliable, against her thin, bony frame. In the dark, I can’t tell the difference between your arms and legs, he whispered. Mostly, she found sex a bizarre exercise. As he lay on top, his hair tickling her chin, she wondered what it would be like with one of them. Cassia made oblique references once or twice, but Vriel hadn’t engaged her, and was now sorry, because she had so many questions. Greek lore was full of men procreating with Naiads, but where are their genitalia, for instance? Sex triggered these thoughts, which inevitably depressed her. The tears startled David.
“What is it? Did I hurt you?”
In a hurry to assure him, she said, “Everything I know about myself is a myth.”
She came to regret the slip. Her distance and obtuseness only encouraged him. Still, she was relatively happy until he raised the stakes of their relationship. It shouldn’t have surprised her; he had been slowly walking the line over the last seven months. First offering her a drawer in his dresser, and then stocking the kitchen with vitamin water and nutrition bars as he converted his apartment into their apartment. It was a rare man who proposed without taking the time to be sure of the answer. He hadn’t come to that yet, but she could feel him steering slowly in that direction.
David returned from work in time to catch her at the door.
Relief and irritability fought in the lines of his forehead. She almost laughed as he struggled to swallow his question, can I come? He looked like a faithful beagle unhappy to be left behind.
She kissed him on his brow, scarcely touching her lips to the fine hair on his forehead. He backed away awkwardly, off-balance.
“Sorry,” she murmured, “It’s this carpet.”
Cassia drove Vriel to her favorite sushi bar. As the car pulled up into the strip mall parking lot she turned to her sister and said, “It’s not real, you know. He seems the glamour, not you.”
“I don’t do that. Not since I was little,” Vriel said.
Not since Curtis Hawthorne, Vriel thought.
Cassia looked sharply at her sister, who recoiled. Guessing the direction of her thoughts, she said, “I know you don’t do it intentionally. It’s always around you. Like a residue.”
“Like soap scum,” Vriel muttered.
Remembering Curtis’ mother’s disbelieving hysteria, how could a child of eight drown in two feet of water with a hundred people within earshot, pitched her backwards to 1983. They were a mob of third graders, holding hands two by two. Vriel and Cassia had been split up, as was always done with siblings. At least they’re easy to tell apart, joked one of the camp counselors, superior in their adolescence. Vriel’s group was called the Tortoi, and they were identified by lime green t-shirts with a huge turtle on the front. Cassia wore ice-blue, bleached almost white from repeated washings, emblazoned with a purple Octopus. A natural leader, she encouraged feats of defiance among her classmates. While the turtles were always the most pliable group of children, counselors drew straws to determine who would be responsible for Cassia’s tentacled compadres.
That day, they were visiting Marinelan
d. When the groups were together, Vriel kept watch for Cassia’s mischief but the exhibits appeared to have wondered her into compliance. She stared in amazement at the shark encounter, hands flat on the glass, nose pushed wide. She leaned far over the rail to touch a sea lion’s cold, slimy nose, and refused to pluck a starfish, averting her eyes as child after child pried them off the coral in the tide-pool.
It began with a dare. Curtis Hawthorne challenged Vriel to stroke the back of a stingray. When she refused, he called her scaredy-cat and sissy. Mortified, because Curtis was the camp’s heartthrob, Vriel dared him back. He marched to the tide-pool courageously reaching out until their guide announced they were going to the arena to see the killer whales, causing all of the children to file out eager to see the famous Tamu. Bereft of an audience, Curtis shrugged. Uncharacteristically, she caught his wrist. Wait, I dared you.
He squirmed away, laughing.
He stuck his tongue out at her as she fumed. Cassia was nowhere in sight. Why were the others so eager to see her cowed but they did not doubt Curtis’ courage? Vriel was quiet during the show; she didn’t clap or cheer when the black and white behemoth sprayed the first four rows with water. Instead, she glared at Curtis while humming one of her mother’s songs to herself. Sib u odja c’ ma um dia. Di mi bout a bem squice. Midjor bou cham more. Sem sufri es ‘gonia. The melody calmed her, even though it was not a lullaby.
She repeated that snippet in her head, mouthing the shapes with her tongue, emitting no audible phrase, just a low symphonic shudder.
As the show came to the close, Curtis was no longer watching the whale and her daredevil trainer; his eyes were stuck on Vriel. And she, lulled inward by her song, seemed oblivious to him. He could not turn away. She was singing a lovely song, a coaxing song. It was like passing a note, just for him, under their teacher’s nose. He couldn’t help but read it, even if it meant the principal’s office, because the note, the song — pointed out the irresistible beauty of the rays, their long sword-like tales, the sweeping reach of their fins beneath the surface, their smooth, pale underbellies. He wanted to swim with the rays, he was hungry for their company. They would welcome him.
When it was time to leave, the counselor gathered their charges, counting pigtails and braids, flattops, and crewcuts. One of the “sharks” was missing. Who was it? Curtis? Later, a woman was screaming and Cassia was looking at Vriel with something like awe.
Cassia passionately defended a sullen Vriel as their mother calmly listened to what happened and assured Vriel that it was not her fault. For the first time, as she warned her to be more careful in the future, Vriel saw something new in her mother’s eyes: a strange admiration. There was wonder in her voice as she kissed the top of her daughter’s shaking head and said, “Who would have thought it? A siren that can’t swim.”
“Vriel,” Cassia said.
The waiter paused at their table, pen poised. “I’ve already ordered the chef ’s combo.” Vriel looked at the untouched menu.
“Um…I’ll have two hamachi, two toro, and one tamago…” she said.
Suddenly ravenous, she contemplated the Emperor’s boat, but restrained herself.
“…and a seaweed salad.”
They sat in silence. Cassia sipped her miso, catching the tofu on her tongue, flicking the seaweed from between her teeth, while Vriel prodded her salad. Small bites slowly restored her until she felt like her usual defiant self.
“Our mother had to make such a choice,” Vriel said.
“She chose wrong. Too selfish to care what would become of us.”
“We wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t.”
“At least she came to a decision, and stuck to it. You refuse to choose, and that’s the tragedy, what’s making you ill.”
“I don’t see the point in fighting. I let it take me; I ride it out.
It passes,” Vriel said
“Eventually, you won’t even feel the call. It will be like a phantom limb and then and there will be nothing I can do for you.”
“Alleluia. Do you remember when Mom took us to see Splash?
That scene where Daryl Hannah fills a tub with warm water and Morton’s to soak her tail? I was once that desperate,” Vriel said.
Cassia gave her a peculiar look, as if she wasn’t sure whether to laugh or slap her.
“What happened?” Cassia said.
Vriel looked away. The grains had irritated the webbing between her toes and no amount of Visine could get the redness out of her eyes.
The waiter returned with their sushi. “Can I get you anything else? More tea?”
They nodded. The sushi glowed like a cache of jewels on rice. Vriel quickly cleaned her plate and ogled Cassia’s untouched spider rolls. Her sister slid her plate across the table, and Vriel finished what was left, including the fresh, nearly transparent slices of ginger.
The waiter brought two bowls of green tea ice cream, blushing. “Dessert is on me,” he said.
Cassia paid the bill and handed the receipt, on which “call me” was scrawled beside a phone number, to Vriel.
Her one advantage over Cassia was that she could have nearly any man she wanted. All she had to do was form a melody in her mind and they flowed towards her as easily as the fish that hailed Cassia every time she dipped her toes in wild water. These easy conquests ultimately bored her with their selfless devotion, their perplexed love. Intelligent, capable achievers lost their drive, inspired only by the prospect of pleasing her. She feared to see that abject yearning in David’s eyes; she couldn’t justify another restraining order or another Karlton. He had overdosed on sleeping pills shortly after their break up. Out of courtesy, she braved the cold stares of his parents at the hospital. The sight of him -- pale, despondent, hooked up to an IV— was devastating. Still, he clung to her hand and begged. Then, only last week, nearly a year later, she ran into a friend of his at the Coffee Bean catty- corner from her apartment.
“Hey.”
She quickly ordered her drink, pretended to study the menu.
But the voice caught up and held the door to the shop open. “Aren’t you that bitch Karl used to fuck with?”
His face was a snarl. She held her breath as customers in the shop steeled themselves for a scene.
“Vriel, right?”
She froze. Taking her silence for assent, he let the door fall shut, and stood in front of her as she waited for her coffee. Barely lowering his voice he said, “You know his mother had to put another 72-hour hold on him just last month? He lost his job, apartment, everything.”
She reluctantly met his eyes. He seemed to be searching her face for something. She could feel the recrimination, the disbelief coming off him, in waves.
She was nothing special, what had she done?
“Hey dude,” the barista said, sitting her latte on the counter, “Chill, ok?”
The spark inside her flared to life and the anger in his face slowly drained away.
“Can I talk to you?” he said, bewildered by his own sudden shift. She took her drink and fled.
“Let’s go for a drive,” Cassia said. It was not a suggestion.
They got on the freeway at Lincoln and headed West on the 10 until it turned into the Pacific Coast Highway. The little beach towns abutting the hills of the Palisades, the crowds drinking pineapple daiquiris at Gladstone’s, faded away as they drove into the sherbet-colored sunset. Vriel had to shade her eyes against the glare. The road narrowed to a one-lane highway as the traffic thinned. She knew where Cassia was taking her. Every year at the same time, their mother drove them to a secluded lagoon far up the coast, past Zuma and the other beaches famous for their titanic waves, to a cove where the inshore waters were calm, deserted, lucid, and pestilence free. No traces of bonfires or teenage litter in the sand. The first time they went, Vriel and Cassia were thirteen. That’s when their mother had told them. Cassia, it was clear, seemed to already know. In Vriel’s adolescent opinion, it was another strike against their mother.
&
nbsp; Shading her eyes from the sun, their mother seemed to be waiting for something.
“When I was a girl in St. Antao,” she said, “we would ride the ancient sea turtles into the coves at Ponto do Sol, dodging the jagged roots of the sheer cliffs. We capsized the boats of the fishermen in the shallows and stole their beautiful pipes.”
They drank in her words. These were the crumbs they used to piece together their mother’s rarely spoken of childhood. The wistful recollecting stopped.
“One can’t really hear what I’m telling you. It’s better to see for yourself,” their mother said.
Vriel hesitated to join her mother and sister in the tide-pool, which was shielded by a half circle of rocks from the sloughing currents.
Vriel waded in. Cassia promptly took her hand, while their mother vanished. Vriel looked to Cassia, who as always, only evinced calm disinterest. Only her own fear kept the Vriel’s raw envy contained. Cassia sank beneath the water, submerging Vriel, who managed to gulp one deep breath before she went under.
What she saw, because she forgot to close her eyes, astonished her.
The salt did not burn and she could see
as clearly as she if she was wearing goggles through waters that possessed a luminescence so brilliant, it appeared as if someone was shining a huge flood light from the depths. Then, still holding 45 seconds of air in her fully extended cheeks, she finally saw what her mother was.
Her brown skin was altered, by what Vriel at first believed to be a trick of wave and light. Then, she realized it was her mother that was the source of the underwater luminosity. The upper part of her torso took on the reflective gloss of a golden oyster shell, while the lower part of her body appeared to be swathed with ropes of black-green-purple opalescence. Her legs were moving in swift undulation so that they appeared conjoined. In horror, Vriel parted her lips and the rest of her air rushed out. The last thing she saw was Cassia pulling her close.
Sycorax's Daughters Page 4