The day after the equinox the farmer thought that things would go back to normal, but they didn’t. She went about her chores like a thing made of stone. She made the porridge, but she burned it. The animals shied away at her touch. When she looked at her children it was as if she were looking through clear water.
Things went on like this through the summer. The farmer hoped at first that she would change, but when she didn’t he hardened his heart against her. It was the girl who followed her mother when she left the house at night. She’d find her mother curled in a ball between the cows in the barn or wedged between the rocks on the shore, trying to find a place where she could cheat the sleeplessness that seemed to be always upon her now. As the nights grew cooler she saw her mother shivering in her thin nightdress out in the open and she thought that if things went on like this her mother would freeze to death.
It was a night in September—the night before the autumnal equinox—that the temperature, as if in anticipation of the planet’s tilt away from the sun, dropped so low that the girl could see her mother’s breath turn into ice on the rocks around her. The heavy mist from the sea was turning to crystals in her mother’s hair, so heavy that she could hear the strands chiming in the cold sea breeze. If she didn’t do something her mother would be frozen solid by the morning.
She ran back to the house and opened the blanket chest but the farmer had already heaped the extra quilts on his sons’ beds. Her hands scraped against the bottom of the trunk, scrabbling over the rough wood until her fingers bled from the splinters. She dug her nails into the wood just to feel the pain and then, to her surprise, the bottom pried loose and her hands sunk into something warm and silky soft.
She thought it was something alive.
Even when she lifted the heavy fur up and saw that it was an animal skin she still couldn’t believe it was a dead thing. The skin pulsed with warmth and glowed like a burning coal. She held it to her cheek and smelled the ocean in it. She heard the ocean in it trapped in each bristling hair, the way a shell holds the sound of the ocean deep in its whorls.
She wrapped the fur around her shoulders and ran to where her mother lay between the rocks above the beach. Instead of weighing her down, the shawl of fur seemed to float on the wind behind her back and buoy up her steps.
When she found her mother she thought she was too late, that her mother had already frozen to death. A fog was rolling in from the sea and as it touched her mother’s skin it froze in a fine skein of ice so that her mother seemed to be caught in a net strung out of crystal beads. But then she noticed that her mother’s breath was crystallizing too and she knew her mother was still alive. She lay the fur over her mother and crawled in under it, wedging herself between her mother and the rocks. Instantly she felt her mother’s skin grow warm; the net of ice melted and soaked into the soft, heavy fur.
The mother and daughter slept together on the beach beneath the cloak of fur, but even as they slept, the girl could feel her mother’s fingers in her hair, stroking away her fear.
I sometimes fell asleep at this point too. There was a corner of my blanket that had unraveled and then matted back together like a piece of wool that’s been felted. After my mother had gone, I liked to tuck this under my cheek and pretend it was the selkie’s skin or the fur collar of my mother’s coat, the one she wore if she was going someplace special: a party the local college was throwing for her, dinner with her editor across the river in Rhinebeck, or a reading in the city. These things still happened even though it had been years since she’d published her last book and the books she had written—the two of them—sold fewer and fewer copies until finally they went out of print.
Still my mother had her fans. She’d written two books in a trilogy about a fantasy world called Tirra Glynn. The first book, written five years before I was born, was called The Broken Pearl. The second book, written while she was pregnant with me (she always told me that she’d conceived both me and the idea for that book at the same time and that we both took exactly nine months to bring forth), was called The Net of Tears. No one ever knew what the third book would have been called because it never appeared. I remember that it was around the time of my sixth birthday that my first-grade teacher asked me if I ever saw my mother writing. When I relayed that conversation to my mother she had me pulled out of the public school and put into a private school in Poughkeepsie. Two years later I was put back into the public school. Sales from my mother’s books had dropped precipitously. Who wanted to read the first two books in a trilogy if there wasn’t going to be a third book?
Also the hotel had fallen on hard times. It was the 1960s and Americans had discovered air travel and Europe. One by one the big hotels to the south and west of us went out of business. If it hadn’t been for a core of faithful clientele—the families whose grandparents had stayed at the Hotel Equinox and the painters who came to paint the view—we would have closed as well. Who wanted to drive three hours to a resort to swim in an ice-cold lake? The Hotel Equinox, perched on a ledge above the Hudson, was too out-of-the-way and too old-fashioned and then, when my mother left, just too sad.
She left for good when I was ten. She’d been invited to sit on a panel of women science fiction and fantasy writers at a two-day conference at NYU. She was supposed to leave for the city in the morning, but because she couldn’t sleep she asked Joseph to drive her across the river to catch the night train. I heard her arguing with my father in the hall outside my room. “But where will you stay?” he asked. “Your reservation isn’t until tomorrow.”
“They’re bound to have a room for the night,” she told him, her voice light with laughter. I imagined her putting a hand on his forehead and stroking his hair back, something she always did to allay my fears. “You worry too much, Ben. I’ll be fine.”
Then she came into my room to kiss me good night and I pressed my face into the dark plushy fur of her coat collar. Her coat was buttoned to her throat and she didn’t undo it or let it settle down around her waist as she usually did when she was going to tell me a story.
“Tell me the selkie story,” I asked. She pressed her hand against my forehead, as if checking for fever, and brushed my hair away from my face, combing the tangles out with her fingers. I waited to hear her reply, That old thing? But instead she said, “Not tonight.” She told me to close my eyes and go to sleep and when I had kept my eyes closed for several minutes I heard the clicking of the pearls around her neck falling against the buttons of her coat as she leaned forward and kissed me good night. And then she was gone.
When she got to New York she did not check into the Algonquin where her editor had made reservations for her even though we found out later that they did have rooms available for that night. My mother never went there at all. Instead she checked into the Dreamland Hotel—a run-down hotel in Coney Island near the site of the old Dreamland amusement park. It was the last weekend in September 1973, the weekend that the Dreamland burned to the ground. It was weeks before we knew for sure what had happened to my mother because she hadn’t registered under her married name, Kay Greenfeder, or her pen name, K. R. LaFleur, or even her maiden name, Katherine Morrissey. She, and the man she was with, were registered under the names Mr. and Mrs. John McGlynn. The investigating officer who saw the registration guessed who it was because his wife was a fan of my mother’s who had read that she was missing and she recognized the name McGlynn because my mother had named her fantasy world Tirra Glynn.
He’d come all the way from the city to show my father a charm bracelet, which my father identified as the gift he and I had given her for Christmas the previous year. They met in the library and I hid in the courtyard outside the library windows and listened to what was said. My father asked him if they had identified the man she was with, but the officer said they hadn’t found the man’s body. That my mother had died alone.
For years after I could only fall asleep listening to the story of the selkie girl. I would ask my aunt Sophie, who took care of m
e after my mother left, to tell me the story.
“That old thing?” she would say, using the same words my mother had, but meaning something else entirely, “That morbid story?” She said morbid the way she said dirty when I was little and tried to eat a treat that had fallen to the floor or a pastry left on the rim of a saucer by one of the hotel guests. Morbid thoughts were what I had when I wasn’t attending to my chores or going to bed promptly so she could attend to hers. Morbid was what my mother had been before she went away. But like my mother, my aunt could be convinced to tell me the story if she thought it would put me to sleep. I would fold the felted nap of the blanket against my cheek and imagine it was the fur collar of my mother’s coat and I would imagine my mother’s hands stroking my hair, just as the selkie’s daughter could feel her mother’s hands in her hair even as she slept. My aunt could tell the story word for word because, as I knew by then, it was the first chapter in my mother’s book, The Broken Pearl, but if I squeezed my eyes tight enough I still heard the story in my mother’s voice.
“In the morning, when the selkie’s daughter awoke she was alone on the beach. She’d heard her mother’s voice in her sleep thanking her for returning her skin. ‘Now I can go back to the sea where I belong and where I have five selkie children, just as I have five human children on the land, whom you must watch over now. You mustn’t weep for me but instead, whenever you miss me, come stand at the water’s edge and listen for my voice in the surf. And on the first day of spring each year, and the last day of summer, you’ll see me as you know me now, a woman in a woman’s skin.’
“The girl went back to her father’s house, determined to keep her promise to her mother even though every step she took away from the sea felt heavy, as if her feet were caught in a net that was dragging her out with the ebb tide. Even her hair, which had frozen in the night, seemed to drag her down. But still she went home and lit the stove and made the porridge and when her brothers awoke she explained to them that although their mother was gone, she would take care of them now, and that twice a year she would take them to see their mother again.
“It wasn’t until later, when she still felt the weight of ice in her hair, that she looked in the mirror and saw her mother’s parting gift. She remembered her mother’s hands stroking her hair through the night. Her mother—who couldn’t knit a stitch, or tat lace, or even tie a knot—had woven a wreath of sea foam frozen into bright stone: caught in its net, a single green tear the color of the sea.”
My aunt would turn out the light, then, and straighten the covers and smooth my hair away from my face. I’d feel her dry lips brush my forehead and then I’d be alone in the dark, listening to the sounds of the old hotel settling. On a windy night the beams and floorboards would crack and pop like logs in a bonfire and I’d imagine that the hotel was on fire. But on a still night, if I listened closely enough, I thought I could just make out the sound of the river far below us. I would think about my mother following the river south that last night and I would imagine that the ocean at the end of the river had called to her—that she hadn’t died in the fire at the Dreamland Hotel, but that instead she’d gone back to her other family under the sea—that it was only fair that they have their time with her now. I only had to wait and she would come back to me when their time was up.
Chapter Two
WRITING ASSIGNMENT #3
Write about your favorite fairy tale from your childhood. Retell the story, but also say who told you the story and what you thought about it then. What did you learn from the story? What did it tell you about the world you lived in?
I always try to model the writing assignments that I give to my students. So I wrote the piece about the selkie girl for my remedial composition students at Grace College. I thought it was pretty decent. The best thing I had written for a while.
I share the piece with my students when I give them the assignment. Of all the places I teach, Grace is where I’m most comfortable sharing personal material. Many of them are recent immigrants to this country. Some have been referred through Grace’s prison work-release program. It’s not just that their limited proficiency in English makes them less intimidating or that they are unlikely, given their unfamiliarity with the American university system, to treat me, an untenured, part-time adjunct, with less respect. In fact, sometimes their naÏveté leads to embarrassing questions, such as, why don’t I have an office? Or why isn’t my mailbox alphabetized with the rest of my colleagues? No, if I’m willing to share more of my personal experiences with my students at Grace it’s because it’s part of my directive from the administration.
“You might be the most literate person they meet all day,” my dean told me at the fifteen-minute interview at which I was hired. “Or at least, the most literate person willing to take the time to talk to them about something other than how to make little Ashley’s lunch or how much starch to put in the Brooks Brothers button-downs. Engage them. Talk about where they come from—then have them write about things they care about.”
Of course I was thrilled to receive such a humanitarian, caring dictate from the dean of English. It wasn’t until I realized that my students’ final essays would be graded by a panel of tenured professors—and that nine out of ten would fail—that I began to question this charitable approach to teaching.
“I thought I was doing so well in your class,” Amelie, a twenty-nine-year-old nanny from Jamaica who was trying to earn enough money to bring her own children to New York, said to me. She held up a bluebook dripping with red ink, a huge D scrawled across the top page.
I learned quickly that I was doing my students a disservice by not making them write every class, and not correcting every run-on sentence and fragment. Even then, half of them would fail to pass through the reading committee’s gauntlet. Sometimes, I wondered if my own written work would survive their firing line.
Still, I try to find assignments that will interest them. I liked the fairy-tale idea because of its multicultural value, because the language of fairy tales is usually simple, and because I’ve always loved fairy tales. I chose them for my dissertation topic. I was raised on them. My mother could always be lured away from her desk by a request for a story. Later, when I was old enough to read her books, I realized that she had woven fairy tales into them. Maybe she was still looking for new fairy tales to incorporate into the third book that she never finished. It would have been good research—reading to me from the Grimms or Andersen. I learned early with my mother that if something could be connected to her writing she’d be more likely to go along with it. A walk to the falls would be welcome if I presented it as a quest to an enchanted locale. She must have started it—this idea that the woods around the hotel were inhabited by spirits of wood and water, that each spring and tree had its resident naiad—but I became adept at finding and identifying the nooks and crannies where magic hid. Where cobwebs grew over the violets in spring were fairy tents, the crevices in rocks embroidered with velvety moss were fairy quilts. My mother had named each rock and spring: Half Moon, Castle, Evening Star, Sunset, and Two Moons. Later Joseph built gazebos—or chuppas as he called them—on these spots, following my mother’s ideas for their design. Sometimes I think that if she had spent less time pouring her creative energies into her surroundings and more time writing maybe she would have finished that third book.
“So your mother was a writer too?” asks Mr. Nagamora, an elderly Japanese man who works as a tailor in a local dry-cleaning store. “So you follow in her footsteps?” I didn’t remember telling this class that I was a writer. Maybe they thought all English teachers were closet novelists.
“Well, my mother wrote fantasy novels,” I tell Mr. Nagamora. “I tend to write more realistic fiction.”
“Can we read your books in class?” Mrs. Rivera, who rides the Long Island Rail Road in every night after caring for three children in Great Neck, asks.
This is why I promised myself I wouldn’t tell my students that I was a writer.
> Because if there’s anything harder than explaining why I’m not a real professor, not Dr. Greenfeder, but Iris Greenfeder ABD (and then explaining what “all but dissertation” means), it’s explaining that there are no books. Some magazines, I am always quick to point out, hating my own fawning wish to impress this group of recent immigrants and paroled prisoners, but no, not ones you could actually find on a newsstand. And truthfully, even if they could find the little magazines and pale saddle-bound literary journals that have published my poems and stories, I’m not sure I’d want my students to read them. Just imagine Mr. Nagamora reading the one about the teenage girl who follows a rock band around the country and ends up marrying a rodeo clown in Arizona. Or what would Mrs. Rivera make of the clitoral imagery in some of my early poetry?
In fact, “The Selkie’s Daughter” (as I called it) is the first thing I’ve written in years that I’m not embarrassed to have my students read. Mrs. Rivera is interested in the fact that I grew up in a hotel where my mother worked as a maid. She worked at one of the big resorts in Cancún and says the ladies were just like the guests I described—always wanting something extra, always ruining the furniture with some carelessness. Amelie, who is taking my class over after failing it in the fall, asks how I felt being raised by my paternal aunt and it comes out that her children are with her husband’s sister in Jamaica and she worries that they are being “poisoned against me by that woman.” Mr. Nagamora is interested in the use of seashells for garden paths. They all end up relating the stories they were told as children and they are so involved in writing that we are the last class to leave the building. Hudson Street is unusually deserted and, as I turn west toward the river and home, I feel for the first time in a long time that I’m actually looking forward to reading what my students have written.