Silent Mermaid
“Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.” – Joan Didion
After a week back at the racquet club, the manager took me aside and told me I was depressing the members. Possibly, it's a result of how slowly I move now because of how much Valium I'm consuming. I'm mostly staring into space rather than reading. Also, I've dropped about twenty-five pounds, resulting in a flurry of compliments until this exchange.
”Are you doing Atkins?”
”No, my sister was killed by a drunk driver.”
There is a kind doctor, a Holocaust survivor with a sexy accent, who stops at the desk. ”Molly, dear, you must take care of yourself.” I nod and smile.
”Is there anyone to care for you?”
I consider this. My parents are embroiled in negotiations with Beckman, devastated by the possibility he might move away. Brigid has her family, but she doesn't like me.
Our relationship has always been fragile. There were two photographs from our childhood, one in winter and one in summer. We fell down in the snow together and rolled around in the sunshine. These document the fact we sometimes played together but those two days were rare. She was desperate to be part of Catherine’s life, to be included in her wild behavior in college, to be accepted as part of Catherine’s clique while I was a loner or turned outwards to friends outside our family. As soon as I could get away, I left. Brigid kept coming home, seeking something from my parents. I never expected unconditional love, unselfish interest, and encouragement.
”I have a boyfriend, I guess.”
The doctor shakes his head and touches my face. “Grief is very hard. Be kind to yourself.”
And then I get fired. The manager says it’s because of cutbacks, but the pay is terrible. They are firing me because my sister was killed and I’m depressing. The members pay lots of money to have a cheerful, sexy, smiling girl behind the desk, but instead, they get me. The linen man has not reappeared at the club but has called several times to ask me to have dinner. He knows nothing of what has happened, and I’m too tired to explain. I delete all his messages. I delete all the messages from concerned friends, some of whom I haven’t spoken to since high school. I talk back to these people, sayings like, “Leave me alone, fuck off, go to hell, I’m fine, I’m skinny finally, who are you?”
I pack a bag and go to Bedminster to see Buck. His friends whisper around me and tiptoe as if I’m a thing that might explode from too much noise. Buck goes to work, and I spend the day shrinking his curtains, wool sweaters, and anything I can find to wash. I hang things on the clothesline dressed in an antique white nightgown, wellington boots, and a surviving unshrunken sweater. The plumbers come to pick up supplies and slowly wave at the mad woman in the snow. The clothes freeze on the line in strange shapes. Then I dust and scrub and make baked goods.
I won’t eat. I snort cocaine and talk incessantly. I take Valium and lie on the couch watching daytime television. I call my parents every day to lie. They don't hear me. They are in hell. Outside, it is freezing, but anything I can feel is good. I am disappearing. I sleep fourteen hours and then awake for days, horror movies at three o’clock in the morning. Women screaming at the sight of the monster. I scream into Buck’s pillow after he goes to work. I take the train to New Brunswick and spend the night at Catherine’s house. We sit at the dining room table with several of her friends, most of whom she has privately savaged to me. My sister was cruel. At dinner time, the doorbell rings. I answer and am met with a smiling couple holding a bottle of wine. I stare.
”Yes?” I finally say.
”Hi. Are you Molly? I recognize your picture.” Beckman, Henry, and several of the visitors are standing behind me. “Hey, Beckman. Catherine told us seven.” We realize these people don’t know what has happened. “She's dead. Catherine died.”
The woman looks frightened. “Why?”
“There was an accident,” I turn around.
Beckman is pale and doesn’t seem like he plans to speak. “She was hit by a car. She died. I'm sorry.”
”We were in Europe.” He hands me the bottle of wine. “Can we do anything?”
The woman is crying.
”No. Sorry about dinner.”
He shakes his head and pats my shoulder. The woman is crying harder. They limp back to their car. We go back into the kitchen and then start to laugh. We laugh for a long, long time. Henry is delighted. Beckman and the others drink the wine. Henry and I play hide-and-seek, our favorite game. His eyes are my sister’s, so I hold him and kiss him until he squirms away. Henry, your mother’s dead.
It starts to feel like spring. My mother calls to say I am to come home for Easter dinner. Apparently, holidays are observed even if the world has ended.
”Maybe we shouldn't do Easter this year,” I say. “We are having lamb,” my mother responds. “Everything will be the same.”
This is madness, but then again, we always had great Easters. First of all, Daddy announced, “The Easter Bunny has risen,” and then we had fabulous baskets filled with forbidden candy, a jellybean hunt, and a delicious dinner. But now there was this terrible understanding of grief, a heavy, sickening insight into loss and devastation. I have been hoarding Valium, filling prescriptions, and saving several pills each time. I keep a bottle in the freezer for a reason I pretend not to know. Now, I take it out and count the pills, some of which I have stolen from my parents. There are forty Valium, which has to be enough to die. There was no internet in 1984, so I can’t check by typing into Google, “How many Valiums will cause death?”
The morning I decide to commit suicide, there is a very chubby gull with an attitude on my windowsill. The gull stares at me and shakes its head violently. It is unmoved by my attempts to make it fly away. “Catherine? Is that you? Are you here?"“
But the gull remains quiet, staring, disapproving. I know I have to call someone, but it has to be someone who won’t start yelling at me or telling me that I have everything to live for. I need someone who doesn’t like me. Buck’s drug dealer is a professional gambler who dates a woman called Ramona, who acts coldly toward me. She is very pretty and well-educated. I don’t know why she would date John, the drug dealer/gambler, but he is very charming and well-read, so that may be enough.
”Hello?” Ramona sounds annoyed. It’s the day before Easter and early in the morning. ”It's Molly, Buck’s girlfriend. I have all this Valium, and I'm thinking about killing myself because my mother’s insisting we have Easter dinner like things are normal, and I can’t.”
Ramona was silent, so I plowed ahead. “I don't think you like me very much, so I called you. I don't want anyone crying or yelling at me.”
”Where are you, Molly?” Ramona’s voice was calm.
”I'm in Hoboken. I live a block away from where the car hit my sister.”
”Jesus,” Ramona sighed. Listen, we’ll pick you up in an hour. Put the pills away.”
I put the pills away and pulled on some clothes. Nothing fit anymore since I’d lost so much weight. Being skinny wasn’t interesting, except total strangers kept asking me out. “Look at my eyes!” I wanted to scream. “My eyes are dead.” Apparently, if your hipbones stuck out far enough, your dead eyes didn't mean much.
John was driving a BMW. The economy might be terrible, but dealing cocaine was very lucrative. ”We’re going to the Meadowlands for the horse races.”
”I wired the Meadowlands.” I climbed in the back.
Ramona looked over the passenger seat. “What do you mean you wired it?”
”All the pay phones. I worked for New Jersey Bell for two years. My gang wired the Meadowlands. I used to visit them there, and they'd hide from me.”
”You are a very complicated person, Molly.” Ramona applied lipstick in the rearview mirror.
We drove to the Meadowlands. I had never been to a horse race. My childhood had been heavy on museums and literary icons but light on gambling, fast food, and trashy novels. I imagined a horse race as a glamorous outing, like the scene from My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburn strolling around holding a frilly parasol at Ascot or maybe many hats. There were hats, but they were worn by worried-looking men, and almost no women bent over their programs trying to choose a winner. No one talked. People’s eyes were glued to the monitors. The horses were far away. I chose my horses entirely based on their pretty names. I won $500 and refused to bet again. I had won and didn't want to lose. I had lost enough.
The next day, I drove to my parents’ house, and we had Easter dinner: leg of lamb, asparagus, new potatoes, and a green salad. My father didn’t say anything about the Easter Bunny. The gull had landed on my windowsill that morning, and I felt she looked less disapproving, although it’s hard to interpret the mood of a seagull. She remained until it was clear I had no fish-flavored snacks, and then she flew away. I wore nice clothes, brushed my hair, and didn't tell them I had been fired. Before I left for Hoboken, my father took me aside.
”Go to therapy. We’ll pay.”
”To talk about Catherine?”
”Among other things.”
When I got back, there was a message from the linen man. “Please call me.”
So I did. I told him exactly what happened, and then I stopped talking. There was a long silence. “That's the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
”Really? I keep thinking other things are worse, like the Vietnam War.”
He laughed. “Yes, but you loved her so much.”
”How do you know that?”
”You talked about her. You said she was magical. Can I take you to the Hamptons when you're ready? Just to be somewhere nice? You don't have to do anything.”
photo by Jeremy Bishop
The Hamptons were less awful than they would become later in the eighties, full of Wall Street millionaires who built mega-mansions that blocked other people’s view of the ocean. They retained some of their original identity as potato fields; a few ordinary houses and people lived there year-round. The ocean was my higher power. Secretly, I thought I would find my sister in the ocean or hear her singing a mermaid song. I had a book about a mermaid when I was little, a story about how she combed her hair with a seashell and called her daddy, King Neptune, on a conch shell. So I said “yes.”
”Call me, and we'll go.” He sounded happy.
“Okay.”
I wasn’t sure if I was cheating on Buck, but things were getting strange with him. While he’d been very understanding about my shrinking his curtains and sweaters, he’d adopted a deranged doberman who slept on the floor on his side of the bed and lunged at me, snarling when I got up to pee at night. Also, I was pretty sure he’d started seeing his old girlfriend again, but I didn’t care. He was purely about safety; my being in Bedminster with him helped me stop thinking things were going to keep happening in the city: buildings would fall, I’d walk into traffic, and someone would cut my throat. Awake, hearing things bump in the night, I’d pick up his arm and snuggle into the place where I was safe. And then one night, we had sex without birth control, in fact, the first sex we’d had since Catherine died, and I knew immediately I was pregnant because, well, just because it seemed inevitable. I had been so cold towards him once we started that I didn’t have the heart to make him stop while I got my diaphragm.
Then, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. He took it hard, and when I confirmed my pregnancy and told him I was getting an abortion and needed money, he refused to give me any. I think it was the cocaine and all the bad things that had happened since we met, but I could not tell my parents. It was too sad and stupid. I finally called his mother and she was very kind and sorry, and he gave me the money. ”I'm sorry I had to tell your mother.”
”I’m sorry I acted like such a dick.”
”Listen, you had this semi-normal girlfriend, and then I turned into Adele H.”
”Who's that?”
”Victor Hugo’s daughter. She went bonkers in the nineteenth century.”
”I love you, Molly.”
”Yeah, but I'm nuts. It’s okay if you date Natalie again.”
”I don’t want to do that.”
I hugged him. He was so handsome and had great muscles, but the linen man was right. He wasn’t going to survive. Buck liked things simple. He wanted a happy girl who liked to party, not the strange woman who wandered around his house in the dark, unable to sleep, her eyes brimming with constant tears. I had many things to do. I needed to get an abortion, find a therapist, and maybe kill myself, but not the latter as it would upset my parents too much. So I’d go to the Hamptons with the linen man. I had nothing suitable to wear, but it was late winter, and I was skinny. Everything looked good if you didn’t get too close and notice my flats were from Chinatown and cost eight dollars, my skirt was from a flea market, I hadn’t had a haircut in a year, and my fingernails were all bitten.
The linen man called, and I told him I had to get an abortion. He offered to take me, but I thought that was a bad idea, and then he offered to pay, which was also unsuitable. ”Is it the plumber’s?”
”Yes.”
”I'm sorry.”
”It's okay. I felt sorry for him.”
”Well,” the linen man cleared his throat, “maybe that’s it for now. No more heartbreak.”
This time, I wasn’t just sad but ashamed. Oscar Wilde's quote kept running through my head.
To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
I completely supported a woman’s right to choose, but the second abortion made me feel awful, more awful than I felt already. I cried through the entire thing, returned to my dark, chilly house with the Madonna in front, and swore if I lived long enough, I would have a child I would cherish and teach how to negotiate the world. I made an appointment with a psychiatrist recommended by a friend of my parents and packed a bag for the Hamptons.
The linen man picked me up in a Mercedes sports car, which probably cost tons of money, but I didn’t care about that. My habit was to choose lovers based on qualities that had little to do with success. I tended towards lost lambs and angry or sad men with complicated feelings about their mothers. I didn’t know if the linen man had a mother. We drove mostly silently, his fancy radio playing Mozart piano concertos, which I recognized because my father had that record. His house was in East Hampton on a famous street whose name I forget, but near his house was some billionaire’s house that the linen man considered a greedy putz.
I was familiar with this level of condemnation from one wealthy person to another. Someone might be wealthy, but the richer person was vulgar and greedy, had terrible taste, or lacked historical knowledge, which caused them to desecrate the traditional architecture of the graceful rich with their ill-conceived imitation of a Versailles castle in the middle of a potato field. We had to stop and pick up cocaine from the linen man’s carpenter, who was also a drug dealer. Apparently, blue-collar workers nationwide were enjoying a second career as coke suppliers. '“He’s an excellent carpenter,” he told me, leaving me in the Mercedes with the Mozart.
I leaned back against the leather seat and considered my priorities for the weekend. I did not want to have sex with him, and I wanted to go swimming. I didn't care how cold the ocean was. I needed to go into the waves briefly and see if that was where my sister was hiding. The carpenter/coke dealer’s house had picture windows, and inside the kitchen, a woman, his wife, one assumes, was feeding something to a baby in a high chair. It seemed like another world. I looked at ordinary life and wondered why the world was so disjointed. The linen manufacturer’s house was very nice and modern, with wood and glass and leather furniture, a sub-zero refrigerator, marble countertops, and decorated a bit sterile. We went upstairs, and he opened a door to the master bedroom. I recognized his linen duvet cover, which topped the enormous bed. ”Where's my room?” I asked.
He looked slightly miffed but went down the hallway and opened another door. The room was smaller but nice and had its own bathroom. I put down my canvas telephone bag that I used as a suitcase. “Thank you for this.”
”You’re welcome,” he said. “Come down when you’re ready.”
I lay on the bed, admiring the duvet cover, which was linen and lace made by the linen man's company. My last conscious thought was I needed to take off my shoes. I fell into a dreamless sleep until just before I woke up. I was in the ocean, riding waves. Catherine was beside me, and the water was very rough. “Hold my hand,” I screamed above the sound of the waves. I felt her fingers, but then they were gone.
I woke up, and the sky was dark. I had no idea what time it was. I went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. My cheekbones were awesome, and the bags beneath my eyes had retreated. I could hear Sade on the stereo, Smooth Operator, and smell a wood fire. The clock in the kitchen said “seven-thirty.” I had slept for two hours. I was actually hungry. I could feel his hope for sex, but it was a hope, not a threat, and I felt nothing, no guilt or fear.
”I'm not going to sleep with you,” I told him as we sat in front of the fire after dinner, take-out from a gourmet store.
”I can wait.”
”It might never happen.”
”I'll take my chances.”
I closed my eyes and felt nothing, no grief, no fear, no anger or regret. The sound of the fire, the heat, the smell of leather, all senses except those I’d felt since Catherine's accident – fight or flight and panic – were missing. The wire in my gut, the iron bar across my shoulder, the constant pain I had experienced in the space behind my eyeballs had disappeared. Melting into the expensive leather chair, the waves of exhaustion began at my feet and moved through my entire body. If I didn’t go to bed, I’d never move again.
As befit a linen manufacturer, the bedding was gorgeous, ironed linen sheets, heavy and smooth, smelling of lavender. For the first time in months, I slept without waking, without screaming, without crying, without terrible dreams. Maybe money was the answer. If I remained thin and young, I could live in this glass and leather house, eating expensive take-out meals and sleeping on ironed linen sheets. “Who ironed them?” I wondered. Was this place like Beauty and the Beast, the French film, not the cartoon, with white hands performing all the housework? I could wake up alone after sleeping on his perfect sheets, take walks on the beach, and collect smooth pebbles I could drop into a tall glass vase. Grief might be glamorous, with enough padding to remove sharp edges. I’d be seen walking along the beachfront wearing billowing linen, gaunt, alone yet content. The linen manufacturer could visit on the weekends.
Fresh squeezed orange juice, kiwi fruit, bagels, and delicious coffee are downstairs. I wear my bathing suit under my sweater and sweatpants. The linen man brings down a blanket and a towel. “The water is still freezing.”
”I used to swim in Maine. It was always in the fifties.”
We drive to the beach, and he leaves the car running for the heat. I stand at the edge of the tide; it's going out, and the water has hints of blue but mainly green and brown, a winter ocean. My feet feel the shock, and then, as always, I dive into a wave, the cold water, ice and life and some kind of penance for my sins. Under I open my eyes and I call to my mermaid sister to come back to land, that I will walk on knives for her, I will cross the river Styx to bring her back, I will remain there to give Henry his mother again, my cries are silent and while I feel her with me, her response is “no,” she must stay and I must go back. She is already gone.
I stay until my lungs ache and then to the surface, gasping, weak winter sun. He stands holding the towel like I am Cleopatra, but that queen would never be caught dead in that water, and he is not a slave, but another man waiting for what he imagines must be good. I am not the queen of Egypt.
”How was it?”
”Cold.” My teeth start to chatter.
There was the second night. Somehow, an understanding that we would sleep together has been reached. The linen man goes to the store while I wander around the house, opening the door to another room. It seems unoccupied, but this closet is full of women's clothing. The garments are expensive: linen, cashmere, silk, and in a size I wear now. He liked thin women. I wonder whether he has lied about his divorce, and then I realize I’m curious but indifferent. I justify this lack of feeling by telling myself I am empty because of grief. If this possibly married man with tons of money wants to take care of me and sleep with me on ironed linen sheets, who am I to refuse? The world is awful and dangerous. I am alone. But if I once had a list of non-negotiables, a list I had violated repeatedly, sleeping with a married man was one of the top ten.
As we drove back to the city, I decided to ask. “Are you married?”
He looks at me. “Why are you asking that?”
”The other room has a closet full of women's clothes.”
”We're divorced. She uses the house sometimes.” I sense this is a big lie, but I don’t care. My sister’s dead. The sex we had was edged in violence; his hands on my body left marks. He whispers words, but I am silent.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach