When the wave of silence finally reached her, she looked first to Eli, puzzled, and then, at last, to me.
“Jubilee,” I said, but my throat constricted and it came out in a whisper.
She stared at me. I waited for some sign of recognition. There were murmurs in the crowd by now, but I did not shift my gaze, nor did Eli speak. All these years, the memory of Jubilee had lingered in the flesh of my hands, emblematic, finally, of everything I had squandered once, then lost. Do you love her? Eli had asked, and I had burned his hands for my reply.
When she finally moved she did so swiftly, handing her child to the bearded man. She was gone before I could even think to follow. They closed ranks as she went, filling the space she had vacated, and then the crowd shifted and blocked my way as Eli resumed speaking. I knew that no matter how long or hard I searched, I could never reach her now. Still, I went after her. I left the tent and ran until pain stitched my side and I could run no longer, until I fell into the tall grass at the side of the road. Jubilee. I lay panting, breathing dust and the bitter scent of wormwood, and my two hands burned deeply with the lack of her. As it was, I thought, staring at the sky, vast and blue and infinitely empty. As it is. As it ever shall be.
Thirst
THE BEACH IS AS WHITE AND SMOOTH AS THE CURVE OF A moon. I sit with an empty glass cradled in my hands, watching the waves slide their thin tongues along the shore. Late afternoon light escapes beneath low clouds, shooting through the surface of the water, making the waves glow for an instant before they lick the land and then grow dark, seething through the pale, gritty sand and disappearing.
My three daughters play just at that point of convergence, squatting where the sea and land meet, digging. When the waves recede, they write their names in the wet sand with sharp sticks, then stand and run, chasing each other, laughing, silhouettes against the sun. They grow serious again quite suddenly and concentrate once more on the tower they’ve been building. It’s an intricate and fragile edifice rising out of the sand, taller than the youngest. My daughters, all slender limbs and bright cheeks and flashing hair, decorate their creation with flowers and shells. They shape fanciful turrets and bridges. They are far away, but I hear their laughter, their voices calling softly, each to each.
When the boy comes, they are too absorbed to notice him at first, and when he beckons to my oldest, whose schoolmate he is, she looks up, startled. I imagine that she flushes, seeing him there, for she is at that age when even the most commonplace boys take on a sense of mystery. And this boy is not ordinary. He is wild and he has strange and fanciful perceptions. He lives nearby, and they have played together from the time they were very small. He has always been there, as constant as the sea and sun and sand, but now that he has taken on these new qualities he seems suddenly elusive to her. I have watched her watching him, reacting as she does this very minute, holding herself aloof, brushing sand from her palms and tossing her hair, which catches the light like new wheat, green and gold. He has some discovery he wants her to see; he calls her to come with him. Her sisters protest and she looks at them, wanting to stay, wanting as much to leave.
“I’ll be right back,” she promises. “I’ll just be gone a moment.”
She runs off, then, leaving them behind, and follows the boy to where a jellyfish is beached, thick and translucent. For a moment she is in two places at once, glancing back at her sisters and the magnificent tower, then turning her attention to the boy with his discovery. But when she leans over to study the jellyfish more closely, when she tilts her head and pokes at it, gingerly, with the edge of a shell, a wave from the turning tide lifts from the others a hundred yards out and begins to travel, gaining size and speed. It hits the shore with force, and it spreads far beyond the lovely castle, undermining its foundation. My smaller daughters cry out as the foam rushes around bridges, fills their moats, floods the first story. The eldest turns back in time to see the castle crumbling, and then it’s her own cry on the air, above the waves. She’s running back, but already their edifice—all imagination, sun, and air—has crumpled into dust.
Disappointment crests in her face. They all sigh and kick at the ruins. After a few minutes, my oldest glances down the beach to the boy by the jellyfish, but he, too, has disappeared.
My glass is empty. So is the pitcher, and the maid is nowhere in sight. But who can blame her? No one would expect a woman to drink so much so quickly. Even to me this thirst seems excessive and somehow shameful, a secret I should keep. For I have been drinking water all week, all month, all night, and all day, and still this thirst of mine seems only to grow. I wake in the night with my lips cracked and parched, my tongue rough and dry on the roof of my mouth.
The pitcher, blown glass, swings heavy in my hand. At the door I pause. My two younger daughters are rebuilding the castle, but the oldest stands alone at the edge of the sea, her arms folded, studying the waves that rush across her feet. All I can see on her face is yearning. Still, given my own condition, I must wonder if this is what is really happening, or only how it appears to me from my own particular vantage point of thirst.
My husband sees things differently, I know. He is arriving even now, a hand waving in the sun-washed air and a voice cascading, and then his feet in their dark leather shoes, polished to a shine, descending the staircase to the beach. A purposeful man, my husband, an important one. Ask him what he sees below and he would give a calm and straightforward answer: three girls, sand gleaming whitely against their tan and healthy skin, playing happily on the beach. And the boy would be just another playmate, a cheerful friend, the jellyfish a scientific study, the sandcastle built precisely so it might be destroyed, the loss inherent in its construction essential to the delight in its creation.
Yes, my husband is pragmatic, a man practiced at calm assessment, at managing disasters, at cutting losses. He’s a prince, my husband, born to take the larger view, to seek the greatest good. When we came here, he anticipated how much I would miss the life that I had left, and he did what he could to assuage longings I had not yet even begun to feel. Two walls of every room he fitted with aquariums, floor to ceiling, and these he filled with the wavering plants I had loved so as a girl, the sea fronds and spiky urchins on a sandy floor, great turtles swimming high, revealing the soft pale undersides of their bellies. He did this at some sacrifice, for he loves the sunshine, and as a consequence of his great kindness we live in a watery light, the colors both subdued and made more intense by the darkness of the house. I was grateful to him; I am. For as the years passed and I grew more lonely, these tanks became my solace. I added fish, one by one, to cheer myself up. I collected them, such an array of dazzling shapes and colors, their scales so vivid, their puzzled and skittish yellow eyes.
On my way back to the veranda, I pause before the two glass walls, watching the flicker of tails, the sidelong, uncertain glances of these fish. Yes, pleasure—water in a pitcher and glass, smooth and heavy in my hands, and everything connected in a chain. This pitcher, once sand itself, was fired and so transformed. These fish, too, have had their lives completely altered. They are puzzled and wary, and they suspect me even now. One sudden movement and they will dart away, seeking refuge in the shadows. But I move slowly, and when I leave it’s a shaft of sunlight that startles them and makes them scatter, bumping the glass walls in their haste to get away.
On the raw beach, my husband has taken off his shoes and socks and rolled his trousers to the knees in order to help with the castle. He squats before it, his handsome toes digging into the cool, wet sand. He approves of this, the purposeful building, the earth clinging to our daughters’ hands. He sits back on his heels, considering, and makes suggestions for a larger, deeper moat, a drawbridge.
They set to work. Even the oldest has joined in, pushing her long, wet hair behind one ear. I pour one glass of water and then another, watching my husband, so intent and hardworking, so earnest and industrious, wielding authority and dispensing his ideas with a steady, judicious ha
nd.
Perhaps the only time he abandoned himself completely was on the day he first saw me. I was standing on the beach, water still streaming from my hair, a dark and startling green. My legs were as white as bone against that whiter sand, my feet great weights I had hauled a few inches, then dropped. I remember feeling giddy at the pressure of sand between my toes, at the way the wind rushed up the skirt I’d fashioned, touching my thighs, the soft new skin between.
I remember that I stood still, watching. This man had been, for weeks, my great desire. And finally, to satisfy this yearning I had transformed myself, leaving everything behind to follow him. Although he had never seen me before, he knew me, for I had sung to him from where I floated on the surface of the water or clung like seaweed to the crevices of rocks. I had seen him turn, startled, searching for the source of my song, as delicate as the wind in his ears, as haunting as light caught inside a jewel. Fire in a stone, a voice in the sea. The songs of sirens burn within, a happiness so great it feels like pain, and when those songs stop, their absence is vast and even more painful, as if you have inhaled a starless sky. His handsome face grew lean with longing. And so I, still hardly more than a child, decided. I did not, in those days, understand the concept of exile. I was young enough to believe it was possible to discard one’s past. Possible to leave a world, yet keep it alive in the heart. I never imagined longing for what I’d always had, and so when I looked up from my feet, so new and astonishing and pale, to find him watching me, stunned and somewhat repulsed by my rippling green hair, by my walk like a fish thrown on land, I opened my mouth and I sang to him once more.
Now the tide is coming in and the waves pound harder. A new castle rises out of the earth. My oldest pauses, curling her feet into the wet sand, glancing down the beach to the place where the boy stood earlier and beckoned.
She is learning now what it took me years to understand: that there is always a cost, that the past can be transformed but not discarded. I thought it could, for many years. If my last life was gone, well, there were other distractions, the continuing miracle of legs, and with those legs the miracles between them. In those days I could walk across the room to where my husband stood, absorbed, perhaps, by some state business. I could whisper the sea in his ears and dazzle him with the memory of light flashing on the surface of the water. One touch of my hand and he would look up at me, his hazel eyes going a deeper green with desire. I had not dreamed, never had I imagined, that by giving up the sea I would discover this, that legs were akin to wings, meant to flutter and to open and to carry me back to what I’d loved and left. When I woke up later and felt the surf pounding through the house, trembling through my flesh, I lived in both places, and I was happy.
What changed? I cannot say exactly. Perhaps it began with the birth of my daughters. In a rush of salt and blood each one pushed into the world. I held them in my arms, as slippery as fish, and watched them breathe. And it was in those first moments, seeing how easily they lived in this place, how much they were a part of it, that I realized my own world was something they would never know, my own language a tongue they would not speak. Just days after their births, alone at dusk on the beach, I put my infants into the water to see if they would know what to do. And one by one they did; they swam as they had within me, a reflex as sure as breathing. But one by one they forgot. Each day I would try, and one day they would know and the next day they would not. And then they would learn to walk and run, and they would play a game with the waves, a game whose purpose was to avoid the touch of water.
And so it came to happen that at night I would leave my husband dreaming and lean against the railing of the balcony, lean as far as my body would allow without falling. Or on those bleak days when we fought or when he traveled, I would wander as far as the edge of the water; I would wade in and let the waves lick my ankles, the backs of my knees, the soft skin of my thighs, until my skirts grew damp and I knew that in another step I would never stop. In those moments I would close my eyes and breathe deeply of the salt air. I would imagine my husband, and when his image rose up in anger or in the everyday blankness that must sometimes overcome all humans, no matter how fine or good they are, then I would think quickly and urgently of my daughters, my three small girls with their waves of hair, dark and light, splashing against their necks, with their small, perfect ears in the shapes of shells. My girls who had been born to walk on land.
I thought then that I could never leave them.
Yet desire creates itself from nothing, out of air. Seeking, we cast a light and the shadows rise up around us, flickering, elusive, and yet with cores as round and powerful as iron bars. What we long for defines us, finally. We are caged by our own desires. Until, yearning, we cast our lamps into the black and invisible sand, we open our arms, embracing loss, and never, and we give ourselves over to that night.
Or so, anyway, it is with me. My husband plants a flag in the tallest turret, my daughters laugh and smile, and on some unseen, distant border, the unthinkable merges with the irrevocable.
I step back into the cool, watery light of the house, where fish swim in the walls and where the air is blue, so subdued. I go to the buffet where the crystal is stored and take the glasses out, their sides and edges as thin as paper. One night last week, as I drank glass after glass of water and yet craved more, I grew terrified of my own dark longings, and I began to weep. A tear fell on my tongue, and for an instant my great thirst was quenched. Then I knew. I went to the ocean. Like someone about to die from thirst, I pressed my lips to the surface of the water and I drank. I drank so deeply and for so long that I came up coughing, salt rushing through me like a wind.
I forced myself to stop, of course. A woman cannot live on salt. But all week I have been dreaming of this decanter with its delicate etchings, which I filled with seawater, just to know that it was near. And now I cannot stop myself, nor do I want do. I fill all of the eight glasses, and I drink from each one, slowly, with great care and deliberation. I imagine salt sifting into my flesh, crystallizing every cell. I imagine my blood growing thick, and then ceasing, until I am a pillar of salt, a woman frozen in the flesh. I imagine how a touch would shatter me then, and I think of my heart, so complex and multichambered, grown as bleached and hollow as shell.
I drink, and from that moment on I move fluidly through the days, water hidden everywhere. In the cool jars on the buffet, old bottles tucked inside my drawers. I wake in the morning and stumble into the bathroom, turn on both faucets. Screened by the shower of rushing water, I drink from a discarded bottle that holds the sea. I slip back into bed before my husband wakes, and when he turns to kiss me, he licks my lips and murmurs that I taste like the ocean. His tongue is muscular, moving like a fish in my mouth, caressing all those dark curves, that wavery cave of flesh with its high, arched roof and stones of coral teeth. I sigh a song across my tongue and rise over him like a wave. And for a time, a little time, my thirst is gone, and his.
He is a very busy man, and he does not notice when, little by little, I begin to change. You look pale, he says one night. Are you wearing too much makeup? My fingers, touched to my lips, come away streaked white. Salt. I lick my fingertips slowly, one by one. In the bathroom, I squint, studying myself, these fluid waves of hair, the dark green eyes, all familiar and yet strange to me. And then there are footsteps on the stairs and my three daughters burst through the door, clamoring, their tiny fingers moving like anemones, touching me and plucking at my clothes while they chatter. They have brought me gifts: shells, smooth coral, the bony spines of crabs, the exotic zebra swirls. Their soft hands brush against my flesh, which is so brittle I fear it will crumble at their touch.
Listen, Mama, they say, and hold the shells to my ears. Listen to the sea.
Days pass in this way. Salt begins to drift from my skin. When I walk white crystals scatter, floating to the lawn, burning the grass beneath my feet. Trails appear on the ground, so that anyone looking could follow my path, where I run and where I linge
r, the wilted flowers I have touched.
It is fearful, what is happening. Yesterday I bit into a piece of bread and two back teeth shattered into dust, the bitter joy of salt.
Yet I do not stop drinking. I cannot.
One night my husband, arriving late, touches my shoulder as he climbs into our bed. By then it hurts to breathe and so I hold my breath. Anything could happen: My lungs might shatter into dust. I might dissolve beneath the kiss he places on my cheek. But nothing changes. I listen to his soft breathing as he drifts into sleep. Then I go downstairs and stand before the glowing walls of fish. In the beginning I encompassed him like a wave, I whispered my songs into his ears, I was the sea incarnate. In the beginning he could not bear to be without the salt of me, the steady pulse of me. I pulled tight around him and I spread out flat to let him rest, and my breasts rose like waves against his skin, and fell away, and rose. In those days this was enough, and our other longings we kept hidden.
But gradually, his eyes drifted to another, so lush and round that she might have been sculpted from the earth. My hair, so green and full of light, was suddenly too familiar. The taste of me grew stale. What he wanted I could not give him: a flesh that wouldn’t yield, an embrace full of friction and resistance. He craved women with bare feet the color of earth, so firmly planted in the ground that the wind moved through their hair as if through leaves. Women with hands like soft branches, women who stood rooted in one place waiting for him to arrive, to stroke the delicate, white bark of their calves and branching thighs, so supple. Again, and yet again, he went to them, yearning for the earth.
I followed him, quiet as rain, as barely visible as mist. And after a time, when I could bear it no longer, I rose right over the ground around these women and embraced them with the sea.
It stunned them, the transformation that ensued. You can see that they are puzzled still, their yellow eyes glinting to all sides of the aquarium, as if they might understand a mystery that eludes them. Their tails flicker, they turn. I touch my fingers to the cool glass and imagine the feel of scales brushing lightly against my skin, the inward rush of seawater. They are beyond his reach, of no interest to him now, but I take no satisfaction from this. I watch them breathe, their rainbow scales moving slowly with each shift of gills, each pulse of water, and I envy them.