by Ulrica Hume
I. Little Miss Slip-Slop and the Pussyhat (or How I Met Your Grandfather)
Clarisse and Hesse had flown in yesterday. They were visiting his daughter’s family, in their cramped cottage on the southern coast of England. Clarisse was being billed as Step-Nan-Nan, a dubious role that had been cast upon her, and which she was unprepared for. The daughter’s husband worked for the MOD. (Not an art gallery, he had corrected her, the Ministry of Defense.) It was a desk job—something to do with fleets. Everyone got on though, passing the salt and pepper cellars by intuition and praising poor Moll, who had a new baby as well as the girl-child, a baby that was kept in isolation for reasons unclear. Clarisse’s modus operandi was to shield everyone, each from the other and from themselves, so that no conflict was experienced. She was trying. At the Women’s March she had abandoned this behavior, chanting so loudly she got laryngitis. Hesse had not been in the picture then, but if he had he would have probably insisted that she lie in bed while he serve her. Clarisse had never before been involved with someone like Hesse and still mistrusted the relationship. Although he seemed genuinely mild, she anticipated a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde dynamic that had just not yet manifested, and so remained on the lookout for betrayal.
Did I mention I love your grandfather very much? Clarisse said to the girl-child in her Las-Vegas-style leggings.
The girl-child shook her head.
He is my North Star. Clarisse froze. Had she implied that she was otherwise lost, directionless? It seemed a bad message.
We are each other’s, she corrected herself.
::
Hesse was a retired civil engineer who dabbled in ruins. Today he was off to The Bleardheads, known for its Viking coins, there to mingle with his colleagues. She felt a rush of concern when he couldn’t locate his anorak, then relief when he unfolded it from a pocket of his suitcase. He threw it on, comporting himself as a generous force.
They had met in a Whole Foods parking lot in the States. It was only a glance, an acknowledgment that her life was held together by duct tape and shoelaces, for she was an improviser, and he saw this. His arms had guided the deadweight of groceries into the trunk without seeming to take the bags from her, a sense of goodness radiating from him. The exchange took maybe five seconds. They chatted then about the inauguration, how she hadn’t watched it on TV and he hadn’t either, how it was like a bad dream. They laughed at this bad dream, their shared sounds entwining and drawing strength.
They had not engaged in sexting or online flirtation. Or maybe had done a few of those things. On their first date, Hesse and she had discussed over pizza the #MeToo movement. His response was textbook enlightened male, his chest caving in slightly. Although Clarisse had only ever been groped—what woman hadn’t?—he was dutifully attentive as she explained this, and that was when she noted his discomfort, almost a sadness, or suppression of his own urges. They agreed that it was hard to know who was telling the truth these days—it seemed a daring opinion.
A few weeks later, when they first had sex, she kept the pussyhat on, somehow she did, while he framed her face with his kind hands and rode her with trepidation. They had both claimed to be virgins, but at their age that was absurd. In fact each had had so many past loves they seemed to congregate, to offer a sort of psychic boost. She felt grateful. He promised he didn’t mind the pussyhat (which she had vowed to always wear), even as he took her from behind, was perhaps excited by it. Maybe in some future time she would marvel at her innocence.
Being with Hesse was like a soft but invigorating rain, a reminder of joy—she had almost forgotten—and by his sly smile she sensed that she stirred in him a similar sentiment, and so they relied on each other like trees that sway, their branches amiably touching, fitting together. That two true and separate selves could seem as one was all that could be sensibly asked, and yet it was glorious when the illusion persisted. Neither had wanted the fuss of a public ceremony. She had accepted the token of his late mother’s topaz ring, and come with him to Meabsley.
Clarisse had already made the mistake of sitting in the first wife’s wing chair. It was a soft aqua green, very inviting to someone jet-lagged. Hesse had urgently signaled to her. The wing chair occupied a drafty corner, was flanked by a strawberry aromatherapy candle, but not even the cat went near, so she ought to have guessed. The room had gone quiet—no, more than quiet.
She would never know Hesse as the first wife had. They had this daughter, grown, a bit overweight, smiley, and her pretty eyes like small tin funnels. She hesitated to ask, How are you, Moll? because the answer would likely hurt her. The resentment, the particular longing for a mother who had spent her last days in a wing chair. Which Clarisse was now sitting in. She got up abruptly.
Sorry, she said.
Sorry to feel, after such a long time, a sensation like cherry blossoms in my heart. Sorry to love.
The first wife had died of breast cancer. The girl-child showed her a photo. It was in a pearl-encrusted frame. She appeared devastatingly sweet, despite the toll taken by her illness. Clarisse could see (did not want to see) why Hesse had loved her.
Mummy misses her each day, said the girl-child profoundly.
I’m sure she does, said Clarisse, as the shadow grandmother.
She patted the girl-child’s head. The part in her hair was heartbreakingly crooked. This reedy thing in her glittery costume.
The plastic high heels.
A mélange of insecurities and affections: the deceased Nan-Nan offering mute advice, the girl-child studious, her posture erect, the silence in the room like that of a chapel. This weirdly perfect moment.
She has red hair like me, the girl-child said.
This link with what once was. The sense that it had all happened before.
Grandpapa has no hair, she said astutely.
He has some.
Oh.
I’m meeting Grandpapa at the harbor. Would you like to come too?
I have ballet.
The girl-child discarded the portrait then stood, her expression dazed, serene. If Clarisse squinted, she could see the Hesse resemblance, also shades of the wife. The daughter as well. They were all inhabiting the girl-child.
Clarisse wondered if she regretted not having children. She decided she did not. She adored the girl-child but felt no need to own her or to tell her what to do. Being on the outside made her appreciate family more, it provided a certain shelter, and she was made to acknowledge her own limitations, or unique blessings, ever-widening life bursting through time and space to become a promising desolation.
::
The girl-child began to sing. Clarisse encouraged her, remembering that she was supposedly gifted. She sang in chaotic spurts, a bit like rap, and the two inane lines, Slip-Slop, watch me watch me / Slip-Slop, here I go, began to grate. Everything here was a mess, the beams were too low, and the lavender ceiling was hung with English cobwebs. The worrying décor was princess themed. But they were having a grand time. Clarisse was smiling so much her cheeks were aching.
I shall call you Little Miss Slip-Slop, she said playfully.
I mean, Ms.—.
Since the Women’s March, Clarisse had not felt quite herself. This was not a bad thing. She felt wonderfully alarmed and effervescent, heroic on an ant-like scale. It could be said that she was becoming brave. She had found that in darkness much can be accomplished, but only in light did it ever matter.
Also, it seemed that the pointed ears of her pussyhat were picking up metaphysical chatter. She had written some of it down, just to prove to herself that she wasn’t mad, though it was possible that she was. Or if not mad then overly concerned or involved.
Still, try telling a little girl-child that she is the descendant of an ape, an angel. Try telling her that she has value, and this value is to herself alone, which when shared, multiplies, her body being a pink seashell, chamber of kindness, grief, rage. Her body being a beacon held up to the ages, as icon, as target, the thread ever leading to a bloody cycle of possibility, a daffy and ingratiating bull’s-eye, which is her knowing, and which widens to a path that she must follow. And leave, and shed. All for the rebirthing of herself and others, her body transparent, her body imprinted, her body stardust. She is nothing. She recoils, wounded and small. Then returns, full as the tide, holding the moon in her skirts and sensing everything round in the world, in her, and the sharp points that threaten it. On the back of her head there is a bald area, where God her manufacturer has stamped the word “misogyny,” for that is her apparent fate, from which she is still recovering, from which she has secretly recovered already, her roar in dawn’s choir an affirmation of self-trust, self-belief, the ultimate sharing, the past hung in the willows, her fore-sisters tossed in the flames, her sisters in the stars looking down with tantalizing admiration, as if to cheer her on. She is not cheered on. Her ears ring with false compliments, she swats the hand sliding up her leg, she levitates but no one cares but the few others who also practice this same activity. So is the life of a woman, whose inbred wonders cannot help but escape, for the evolution of the many is in the one, and she is obliged, always that, to sweep away lies, to tend wounds, to nourish, but first herself.
The girl-child was fiercely pirouetting. When she stopped, Clarisse gave her a hug. The girl-child smelled like violets.
One day, Clarisse said, you will wake up and not recognize yourself. That is entirely normal. Everything always changes, and that is why the scent of rain delights us so, because it is a reminder of what we may lose. When someone asks you what you want to be when you grow up, just say, I want to be myself.
Clarisse was amazed that just six months after meeting Hesse in the relative safety of a parking lot she was sitting on the floor of the girl-child’s room. It was like being in a hologram.
II. The Seaweed Scrapbook
She never did learn the name of the bookseller. Which was strange, considering her buoyant personality. She had complimented Clarisse’s pussyhat, reacting to the bright pink yarn. Clarisse had then passed under the lintel, over which books were precariously stacked. Aside from a desire to get out of the wind, she had ventured into Everhart’s Fine Antiquarian Books for a seaweed app, but it seemed doubtful she would find that here. The bookseller was saying she was useless with the knitting needles anymore. She showed Clarisse her arthritic hands in a friendly, unguarded way, and Clarisse was moved. All the sad and whimsical, the pathetic moments that life gave to one.
Clarisse looked about. No other customers. Everything so dusty. She then politely pondered the shelf of seaweed books. Taking one down, she read: The tribe of the Polysiphonia is large and various; it spreads from high to low tide; some very small and delicate, or long and filmy, and the color from brown to violet in every intermediate shade. This was The Common Seaweeds, published in the 1800s, by Louis Lane Clarke.
Next she leafed through a marked-down copy of Ventriloquism Made Easy. She was always on the lookout for a new hobby, something to amuse her. Maybe this—.
Are you all right? the bookseller said.
No, not all right, Clarisse thought. It was more that she had reached an edge of herself and was peering over. So this was her life.
Once she had worked in PR for a dramatic arts nonprofit, felt important and needed, but she had lost that job, also curiosity had lured her, men with golf clubs, leaky yachts, she had cheated, so then had her husband, a woman’s robe was found in her closet, their formal split was entered into with humility, resulting in a disillusioning free fall. A period of inner questioning followed, then a second marriage, soon annulled. Now she had Hesse. Now she was relatively settled—everyone said she was—and so his charm and boundless goodwill were more a balm than a monotony.
That’s a first edition, the bookseller said.
Clarisse decided against the ventriloquism, not because it was overpriced, but out of respect for the dummy, whom she perceived as being taken advantage of, also she could not bear its alert expression and knew the book would haunt her. On the shelf below was one on dream interpretation. She dreamt sometimes of a sea turtle. These were erotic dreams, in which she was young again and the sea turtle, although endangered, was smiling.
::
The monochrome beach seemed serene through the crown-glass window. But the wind was still wildly blowing. The bookshop felt wonderfully warm, solid, held in place. She explained that she was on a holiday, and the bookseller responded in a way that was dozily congenial. Clarisse was saying too much in her American voice, forgetting that in a village like Meabsley the bookseller would know Moll and her family. Still it was a relief to put down her usual worries. Later she would meet Hesse by the harbor, which was why she had a few hours to kill.
You might like this, the bookseller said, handing her a trade mystery.
Clarisse agreed that it did look interesting. Turning it over she read about the fascinating plot: a woman sees her double in a crowd, then spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out why.
I won’t give it away for you, except to say that it’s about parallel realities, and the other woman is also looking for her, said the bookseller.
That sounds terrifying, said Clarisse.
Indeed.
::
One leaves a mark, rarely knowing what it will be. Clarisse felt awash with affection, not for the bookseller exactly, but because traveling had opened her, her little holiday. The extravagance of feeling so much so quickly, of being accepted, for the most part, by the cool-eyed daughter, her precious exchange with the girl-child, that the weather had held, that Hesse and she had managed silent sex in the guest room. For all these reasons she knew herself to be contented.
They discussed Brexit. They disagreed, Clarisse defending the EU and biting her nails. The bookseller had lived through World War II and so was hopeful. A return to what was. Their grand opinions. They agreed that the world was run by strange forces now.
There was a sign by the till—And hath been tutor’d in the rudiments / Of many desperate studies. The bookseller gently informed her this was Shakespeare.
::
Soon Clarisse was juggling a warm cup of milky tea and a soft digestive biscuit, which was coated in chocolate. The window seat was cozy. Perhaps too much so. It was claustrophobic. True, she had nowhere to be until four, but she felt vaguely trapped. Also, a bird was flying at the window, over and over, a demonstration of futility, which Clarisse could relate to. It exhausted her to watch the tiny mighty thing.
He’s protecting the nest against a perceived rival, the bookseller said.
Spring has come early this year to Meabsley.
Thwack thwack thwack.
Clarisse tasted the biscuit. It was perfect. A certain forsaking of the ordinary to be a guest, to be anyone. A temptation to lie.
The phone rang. It was the bookseller’s nephew, Blaine. Some trouble with a school science project—he needed an onion.
Blaine was half Black (the father a highly regarded Caribbean poet), had dabbled in drugs, thieved, reformed, was now living with the bookseller and doing peer counseling. Also he was gay.
A gentle soul, really.
Her favorite.
The onion was because he was studying tears under a microscope.
Magnified tears looked like city maps or swirls of seaweed, depending on their cause. Tears of rejection, the ache of loss—these left a unique watermark on the slide.
The boy had apparently cried quite a bit in his short, uprooted life.
He hoped to go to Cambridge.
As the bookseller spoke about The Young People Today and how they do not know the names of birds or trees or what it is to read by the light of a candle, how they are always on their iPhones, peering down as if they were monks in procession, do not know their history, or how to properly woo, or what the poppies are for, or who Lloyd George was, have never played in a timeless way among the bluebells, whose hands are pale, whose eyes show no compassion but are wide and clear, who know no manners, who want everything but the thing they already have, which is here—she pointed to her heart—who are vindicated only by accumulation. She slipped the sign on her door to Closed.
Clarisse smiled, her upper lip sticking to her teeth. She decided the bookseller must be lonely, why else would she keep saying she felt that she could trust her? But that anyone should trust her seemed absurd. Clarisse had after all betrayed a close friend by sleeping with her husband, but only once, a regret not for the indiscretion but because it had awakened the siren aspect of herself, which was mortifying for its power. That she could be so disruptive, that she could enjoy it, that it could tease from her a new formation, a sublime dissonance, and yet the pleasure of being so degraded, the little bird meanwhile flinging itself against the hard and slightly bloody glass, all such decisions were errors of instinct. It was her old story.
He’ll tire himself out eventually, said the bookseller, nodding at the robin.
Yes, said Clarisse, for she was seeing life for what it truly was: a mangled gift. No one knew why they were here, Blaine, the bookseller, the girl-child, Hesse, Shakespeare was right, we are merely players, even she was confused by the way her own body seemed but a disguise for the jellyfish soul, this made the hard work of living problematic, one desire conflicting with another. She was left with an uncomfortable symmetry.
The bookseller belonged to a genealogy club. She had traced her ancestry to a great-grand-aunt on her mother’s side. She was called Horatia P. Highmore, or sometimes just Posey. A silhouette proved her existence, though it could have been anyone with an aquiline nose, high forehead. And those curls—. What was most interesting about Horatia was that she had once passionately collected seaweeds.
It was 1872. But unlike the other young women then, Horatia did not adorn herself with brooches and bracelets and unnecessary lace. Instead she entered the verge plainly, and so was judged for her elusiveness, slips of etiquette, the embroidery in its hoop unfinished, the croquet game half played, the wind through her hair as she cycled to the headlands, as she escaped the slavish pleasantries, drudgeries, the fetching and boiling of water. Traversing sand-drifts, her guard now up, now down, awakening, she did not feel herself as separate but in an earthly weave, this skittish freedom.
And how did the bookseller know this? How did she know that Horatia had spent long hours outdoors, enjoying the novelty of being unchaperoned, this at the turn of the century, when a woman was hardly allowed to breathe? Because she was herself uncannily wise, perhaps in her spare time an empath. It explains my own preoccupation with the sea! she brightly said, glimpsing the magenta smudge of clouds in the distance, the central heating on, strains of Marcello’s adagio in the background, history the knot that one tries to untie but cannot untie without disturbing it. This frightened Clarisse, it seemed so true and uninvented, and so they bonded, but consciously and irresistibly, the way women will do when confined in tight spaces, where a certain freedom is discerned but not yet accessible.
Tea, always more tea, the bookseller competently pouring. She had once been a primary school teacher, old boys and girls were always coming back to visit, hence her so-called “rations of caring.” Which made Clarisse cringe for its artlessness, even as she selected another digestive, this one plain. Horatia was a bit radical for her day, the bookseller went on. A lover of nature surely. But perhaps too she was a suffragist, being born too soon to join Emmeline Pankhurst and her gang of lovelies. Deeds not words! they would shout as they set their fires, broke windows, went on hunger strikes—or slashed Velázquez’s Venus, whose derrière was offensive to those who wanted their equality. I tell you, Horatia may have kept her gaze steady on her seaweeds, but she knew to her core what was possible.
So Horatia was one of us, thought Clarisse, and she chastised herself for underestimating the bookseller, who clearly also was. To be. To be and do. It seemed not much to ask, or not enough. She fondled an ear of her pussyhat.
Outside the sky turned a black pearl color, which was at once beautiful, oppressive, and full of consequence. It was almost raining. Clarisse was maybe being held hostage by the amiable bookseller. The robin was gone.
::
Meabsley was famous for its Bottleworks factory and horseshoe-shaped beach. But only the chapel for the workers had survived, and a few chimneys. The beach was still littered with colorful sea glass though. The bookseller produced a handful of this sea glass, for Clarisse to admire. Such a fuss was made about a frosted pale blue one, that the bookseller told her to keep it.
A lull as the bookseller unlocked a display case. Then a cumbersome tome with a fantastic marbled cover was placed on Clarisse’s lap.
Horatia’s seaweed scrapbook.
It felt unusually heavy, like a bar of gold, or lost treasure that had been dredged up, and its “dear” patina seemed riddled with the gentle curses of a Victorian young woman whose dreams were still quite active. The bookseller was waiting for Clarisse to open it, so she did.
On the first page was written, Call us not weeds, we are flowers of the sea. There was an air of defiance about the penmanship, a fierce slant. A few pages were loose due to age and water damage. The perils of seaweed hunting were listed, beginning with ignorance & frustration and ending with chafing. Sometimes in the margin a hand-drawn sun appeared. There were pithy descriptions of leaf, stem, and cluster. Also color:
The Olive.
The Red.
The Green.
But the seaweed specimens (mounted on cards, whose corners were tucked into slots) were dry and brittle now, morbidly faded, no longer vivid. Some were falling apart.
Clarisse did not yet know that water had played an important part in Horatia’s death. Not until she was on the plane back to the States, Hesse zombie-like beside her, their hands clasped, his sleep mask on, would she regard the ocean far below as a repository of the world’s tears.
She regarded the splayed seaweeds, a primitive calligraphy. It’s exquisite, she said. And the bookseller smiled, but the smile seemed forced, and so the once-exquisiteness of the now-degraded seaweeds took on a tawdriness that Clarisse just couldn’t shake. It was like looking into the future and realizing that everything one hoped for had come to pass, but was wrong. Oh to turn back—to change it all. But time cut two ways.
And the pages still smelled of sea-water.
::
Horatia P. Highmore had spent that summer colleting, drying, and labelling her seaweeds. She had done so dutifully, also compulsively. Her prose shone with an odd impartiality, almost a coldness. It is freeing to stride about unhampered.
She would have been different, feisty, a loner. Not interested in the domestic arts. Preferring to poke about the rock pools with a stick.
And a basket—she would have carried one over her arm.
Her petticoats like sea foam. Or maybe hitched up.
No pussyhat for her. Just the possibility that she would find something novel. A gloomy kindness.
The bookseller suspected that Horatia had not always been alone. That she had met someone—a fancy man—perhaps from the Bottleworks, or a tradesman passing through. All that was known of her alleged suitor was that he had black hair. Here was a well-preserved lock of it, tied with red ribbon and tucked inside a paper pocket. Clarisse took it from the bookseller with apprehension. She had made contact, touched the strange man’s hair. A little jolt of electricity, an unclear reminiscence.
Her theory—and that’s all it was, a rainy-day theory when the custom was slow—was that they had engaged in amorous congress.
Really, said Clarisse in a sophisticated way.
Under the featherlike Desmarestia viridis, Horatia had dashed off: Found between the tide-marks. A foxy colour, soon green when kept from water. Thus exposed, it becomes soft and slippery, but becomes itself again when dry. I believe it is my favorite.
The breezy placement of the seaweed specimens suggested that Horatia had cared more for aesthetic appeal than for taxonomy. By one flattened pouf was written, Legions of pink flames, like Chamuel. Here the scrapbook changed. It became sweeter, darker, more inwardly focused. There was no mention now of family or species. Only this wild hope that love was transcendent, offering itself without damages. Hints of lifted skirts, merino stockings rolled down, his talk of glass blown, profit. A charmer, probably married. Of course he was.
Truly I am possessed, Horatia had written on 4 June.
And then, a poem:
I must needs know you, to know myself
Driven on with especial penury
Pierced by Cupid’s spear—
And through, and through.
Horatia seemed to have lost her interest in seaweeds because all the pages after that were blank. Clarisse kept turning though. The bookseller offered her the tin of biscuits. She spoke in her dogged way of genealogy. But that such intimacies could be reduced to teatime chat was devastating to Clarisse. It did not matter what one did or said or even thought, if there was always this drift toward the away-time. She felt unmoored. There was no place on a family tree for the rebellions of the heart: for the sympathies and incongruities, the fond masquerade, love was like a sand castle, ever in danger of collapse. But this danger was what most interested Clarisse. She was perhaps too fascinated by what could go wrong, the little negativities. The challenge of bodies a principled yearning, the sanctuary of flesh a disappointment so grave and painful that one pursued such beauty yet again. It was her habit to believe. But there was no safety.
She was almost too afraid to ask what had happened to Horatia, but she had to know. Especially once the scrapbook was taken from her lap, leaving only a ghostly feeling, like warmth that is not warmth at all, but rather the absence of something.
The bookseller looked forlorn when she said, Horatia met an early end, I’m afraid. That is, she killed herself.
It was rumored that she had walked into the cold waves like a white witch and not come back. Her body was never recovered. Here the bookseller heaved a sigh, adding that she had come across a tiny death notice for Horatia, titled “Melancholy Death by Drowning?” which paid tribute to her “household nobility” but little else. It did not mention her seaweeding, an oversight that niggled.
She wore boy’s boots, the bookseller said.
She always ate an apple in a certain cave.
Not even high-water stopped her.
Well, this was sad. And all for some fancy man apparently. Such promises he must have made.
Archive of the impossible, a fleeting passion—.
And that she should be remembered by me, thought Clarisse. Someone who jets about, all on a gamble.
Clarisse ended up with an illustrated seaweed primer and the mystery one. The bill came to thirty-two pounds, which the bookseller discounted slightly, giving her the “friend” discount. Which seemed more than fair. And so a big thank you as she arranged the books in her canvas bag. A sense of pathos, brilliant good luck, and undeservedness as the bells on the door rang behind her. She had not noticed these bells coming in.
III. The Different Sorts of Tears
The tide was out. Soon she would meet Hesse. She looked forward it. He was not like the others, not a game-player. He was gallant, attractively recalcitrant, tender. And yet—. Always this doubt.
I feel like you’re cheating on me, with her, she had told him this morning.
With my late wife? Looking off, keenly proud. He was maybe proud of his loss, which was insincere, because if he had never really let go then there was nothing to mourn for. So it was artifice, this grief, and Clarisse was reminded how a straying man could seem so pleasant. He was gloating over the refuge of another and she hated him for it. Hated herself. She had not met the late wife, knew her only through that photo (head scarf, wan smile) and Hesse’s reverent stories. His love for her was thus superior. His love for Clarisse was rootless and fantastical. Her pain she hid, while suspecting that the vulnerability she guarded was the bridge to something real. She glanced now at the waves, which were grey and energized, mysteriously rising, and there was a violence too, a force barely tamed. Later, Hesse and she would prey upon each other, and nothing would come of it, the eggs already gone, or tainted, the fish that he deposited in her more mythological than viable. They would prey upon each other and in the preying some new form would be released, motes of logic, impudence, a wild serenity. And in the morning they would all sit down together, and it would go on: the heartbreaking function, the dreamy distress.
The sand was not like sand at all, but rather some ephemeral substance. As she walked along the same beach Horatia once had, it occurred to her that the scrapbook had been a decoy. Horatia clever after all. Her fancy man—perhaps the Bottleworks owner?—in his gay plaids, with a wife at home, ten children. The amateur algologist.
A cruel disappointment when he didn’t show, her embers cooled, and the sunset seemed so foreign, all that she would leave but which would go on without her.
The irrevocable act, which implied a certain misguided bravery. The crime of loving too much too deeply. For not loving oneself as much as the world. For loving less the insufficiencies, the lexicon of feelings, miracles too imperfect to be endured. An irreducible compassion.
Until it was just she and the sea feeding into the channel and on into the ocean, a bitter, a scorned sense of rightness in that, one thing flowing to the next, bound by universal truths and unobstructed.
Clarisse paused as some gulls swooped down. A sense of grasping—but to what? And then she knew: Horatia hadn’t committed suicide. No, she wouldn’t have. She had maybe stayed on in the cave. Waiting for him.
The consolation of hope a terrible thing. Horatia’s fugitive love, her stubborn agency. That holy moment when the tide poured in…
But what if he had come, smug and lordly in his greatcoat. Her woolens hiding petticoats hiding her. That she was once flesh. Very narrow; irregularly forked; young shoots springing from blunt tips… She with her basket, a stick—her peculiar ecstasies.
It must have been a tragic accident involving the two. Seawater unexpectedly rising, the suitor holding Horatia to him protectively, a swift tumescence. Possibly they had died without ever knowing a kiss.
Clarisse feared she had never cared so deeply, not as they had, his hand in her hair, an acknowledgment of doom, but shared, but with each other, no time, did not properly know how, love being a thing to have and keep, but also to risk. When there is not this, when there is only minor regret, stillness, a certain purity, there is yet a desire to apprehend, to press life in a book, this unsavored love.
What would she say if she met Horatia, she wondered.
Met herself.
That women are meant to ripen and open and change. Which seemed impossible. For wouldn’t they—we—wouldn’t she always feel a certain clash? Perennially dissatisfied and ashamed, but oh, this fire.
Clarisse walked on. The pooling around her. The drizzle giving her an appreciative shiver. She thought of her messy life of loose ends and constant readjustments and vapid insecurities, which she strangely cherished. A philosophy of kindness was all she had, but purposeful and bearable. The struggle ongoing. Then a gentle poke with the tip of her umbrella—she was making a bouquet of the various seaweeds for the little girl-child.
Call us not weeds, we are flowers of the sea.
All those blank pages at the end of the scrapbook.
A certain unsteadiness.
And yet so much beauty! Winged and ruffled, twisted, coiled. Yes, there were so many different types of seaweeds, she realized. And the tide moves not on its own accord, but is guided to erase.
It is nature’s requiem, to be born, to thrive. To be dashed down.
The late wife in her wing chair, twitching her foot.
The girl-child thinking the world is hers.
The world is hers.
The stars also.
She feared Hesse would not come.
The cave filling with darkness.
They were strangers too.
She felt so angry.
Her clothes constricting. She would have flung them off.
Petticoats.
Ribbons of seaweed.
This obligation to live.
Rock pools.
Temptation.
Error.
We are saved, not by drift or icon, scramble or fall, vane or silk, but by pure, occasioned surprise.
::
Hesse was not yet at the harbor. But in the distance the figure of someone was striding with purpose, tall and willowy. Maybe him. The moment before finding anything lost, its absence prevails, and the rush of water, of discovery, is like the blood in one’s veins, but hushed. Slosh and pull, tendril, gift.
She found some sea sorrel, added it to the slimy bouquet. It was perfect. The girl-child would definitely appreciate this.
Moll she was still unsure of. She did not dare try to mother her, could only ever be a friend. Maybe she would knit her a hot-pink pussyhat.
Remember me by this hat I wear, she told the clouds. For I resist all that is a threat to my expansion. Here she corrected herself: our expansion. And with that, she felt overcome by a whirlwind sense that she must fight for everything—flowers, bats, whales. Otherwise all would become a dystopian marvel.
Yes, stay, she thought. Stay, lost loves, creatures at the end of their evolving, a sense of eternity turned in upon itself like a dried and curled leaf. All of it, stay. Let the waters run clear, let the air be sweet, let the birds fly about with supernatural velocity, their songs louder than greed. Let life return to the homely ball of yarn it once was. Let the sky not fall but rise.
But she knew. Nothing would change, and everything would. For a time Hesse and she would love. But even that would end. They would drift apart, by death or some deceit, like cirrus clouds they would shapeshift until there was nothing.
A dog was running helter-skelter, without a lead. She whistled at it in vain, then she carried on over the damp beach, wondering if it was low tide, high, imagining how it would feel to be swept away.
She bent down, claimed another piece of seaweed. Had not realized she was crying, but was crying, but softly, and so it was not like crying at all, just a pinch of something, or a sting. She kicked a stone, watched it skip, a tiny violence, like the potato thrown by a suffragette at Churchill’s window, once upon a time. It was the quiet activism that had won in the end. The waves breaking apart, becoming something more. A stillness then, the damp on her skin, the wind a slap. She thought of Blaine and his microscope, how common tears became like city maps or swirls of seaweed. Some tears could not be captured, remained in the deep well inside. Bliss springing up like a daisy, these were alchemical tears. She didn’t know why she was crying.
Because Horatia had left behind so much, but also so little.
Because Hesse’s late wife was enshrined in pearls.
Because—.
She slogged on. Her shoes were wrong. Only the pussyhat was appropriate, it protected her well, while sending a defiant signal, which could probably be seen for miles.
A question of petticoats … necessary draperies!
At last she approached the harbor. She waited there while pretending not to, for they were still in the early phase of their relationship and she didn’t want to seem too eager. Horatia would have done the same, reminding herself of impropriety, but still the gentle need. Just being alive was maybe indecent.
She turned. She could clearly see him now, leaning into the wind. The anorak’s hood was raised up, against the cold or failure. But he was smiling. His eyes like sea glass.
::
Ulrica Hume writes at the intersection of women’s issues and spirituality. She is the author of An Uncertain Age, a novel, and House of Miracles, a collection of stories, one of which was selected by PEN and broadcast on NPR. Her work appears online, in literary journals, and in anthologies. Find her @uhume.bsky.social
Image: Joan
ID: seaweed on the shore.
Psaltery & Lyre 