WardencliffBy Barbara Daddino
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A proposal:
Suppose, reader, on a cool summer day, you descended a long wooden stair that led through a bluff to a beach - call it Wardencliff - in search of, say a hag, who is rumored to live in a cave by the shore…
And I, a blind woman and a fool, but supposing myself to be said hag, heard your footfall on the pebbles as you stepped off the stair…
I would hide.
You, having seen, perhaps, a flash of white hair, a flap of black fabric might call out.
I listen as your unransomed calls fade, deliciously, in the sea.
Perhaps you persist. You might walk toward the boulder where I wait crouched, barely breathing, my cheek pressed to cold granite, mated to it. I listen as your step slows, as a stone you accidentally kick skitters over the sand and strikes the boulder behind which I hide.
Maybe you stop. You wait for a sound that would signal my presence.
And in this pause, this empty but electrified silence we have created between us, my heart quickens. Flattening my back, I rise along the boulder's wrack-damp wall. After some moments, your footstep resumes. As you draw near, the vein in my neck begins to throb like a lizard’s. I wait until you are near, so near I can hear, not only your footfall, but the sound of your breath. And when I am sure that it is your breath, only then do I step from behind the rock.
The creature that has emerged before you, whether human or hag, is a grotesque. The hair, yellow-white, salted stiff like dried cod; the skin, wind-worn, deeply creviced. She - for you've determined this much - is bone-thin, and taller than you may have supposed. The clothing, the dark fabric you had seen, is not so much black, you discover, but colorless. A collection of loose, tattered fibers you cannot call clothing. It is simply a covering. But it is the eyes, yes, the eyes, I am sure of it, that stop you, for they have neither pupils nor irises. Plates simply, sandblasted clean. Blank corneas that gleam in the head, twin mirrors that reflect the sea and the fog.
Thus, I stand before you, nose keen, ear pitched, straining, for my part, to learn something of you: to catch your scent, to sense your body, to feel its heat, to know the amount of air you displace, trying by the tilt of my head to capture your startled expression in my mirror-eyes so that you may read it for yourself, and reading, become further alarmed. I am radar. I scan for fear.
On the other hand, you may determine that what stands before you is nothing more than a fool, and so you may turn, walk away, perhaps shaking your head...
Or would you take pity on me? You might begin, Ma’am…? [Ha! Ma’am. Rags, bones and the stench of urine - Ma’am! But then, ma’am, madam, my dear madman. Yes. I allow it. Stet.]
Ma’am, your hesitant probe might continue, is anyone with you? Such a long way back. Do you need help with the stairs? I could give you my arm...
[Here you are cloying, conflicted. You hope I refuse, but decency compels you to go on.]
The steps are awful, you say. You take your life in your hands.
[Guilt.]
Were you to go on this way, I would give you my back. And you, having been released from an unwanted obligation, would leave wondering, as you walk away, if you had indeed encountered the hag you had sought. Thus would we preclude anything that might have passed between us. Dissolution by mutual consent.
On the other hand, there is the possibility that we continue together. But for that to occur, we would need some new element to bind us, something of common interest. A house, say. Suppose there were a house on the bluff behind us. A bluff that is nearly eighty feet high. A tired Victorian: worn-white clapboard, sagging black roof. As you turn, it catches your eye. Can you see it there at the top of the bluff? Its turreted porch, its gabled roof? Not a large house, a cottage, really. Something that, were it smaller, might have been termed a folly. Maybe a blanket hangs drying over the rail or a tabby cat has jumped down from the porch swing. Perhaps a potted hydrangea stands tilted against a pile of loam. At the rim of the bluff, a low rainbow might float in the mist where a ticking sprinkler waters the lawn. All these things point to the fact that the house is inhabited, and yet, as with abandoned buildings, every window facing the Sound is covered over with two wide boards and a cross plank. It makes one wonder - that wonderful view, blocked. Why? The absurdity of it may even suggest a connection between me and the house.
Margaret’s house, I answer before you ask. I hadn’t meant to speak. The words leapt from my mouth of their own accord.
If I were to turn from you then, having realized that I spoke unprompted, idiotically… Or if you were to withdraw, as would be reasonable, as one would do, say, from a stray dog, hoping that it wouldn’t follow… that would end it, this shared construct, this nascent story that is still teetering on the conditional. You would retreat to the safety of your own world and take with you an incident, a tiny mystery with which you would amuse your friends: Do you know what I saw today at the beach? An old woman. A loon, really. Strange though, because… Aah!
But what if you don’t shrink from me? What if, instead, you reach, as one would reach, to turn the page of a book, and breaking with all decorum, you touch my hand? What would happen then?
As with light, I am at once flooded with the feel of you - the flesh, the bone, the warmth of your touch, the act of another intelligence upon me and I do not let go. No. I clamp my hand over your wrist, hold you by any means possible. I take on the guise of a helpless, hapless soul in order to draw you in. I pretend to be stranded (though this beach is a habitat so intimate, so much a part of me that should I be removed from it, it too, would disappear.) As you guide me (so you think) toward the beach stair, I explore the hand you have offered and feed on its warmth, while inside I am reeling with joy, reveling in the rainbow-colored dampness we share between the hollows of our palms. It has been years since I’ve felt the thrill of a human touch.
Picture us, can you, stumbling hand-in-hand over the rocks, through the sea mist and the gull cries, the rhythmic wash of water? And you, good soul, have no idea that what you hold onto, what you guide with your sweet and human hand is neither a fool, nor a hag, but a negative.
Perhaps at the foot of the bluff we pause to look up together at the boarded house. Through your grasp, I test the effect its blank gaze has upon you. I feel questions assembling and spreading like ink through your brain until you shake yourself free. Before we walk on, I glance at my cave, a cavity formed by a fortunate assemblage of fallen tree trunks and rocks that lies directly under the house, a shelter too unobtrusive for you to have seen.
At the beach stair you drop my hand. I listen. Perhaps there comes a clambering which I interpret as you climbing the steps. I assume you are going on without me. This, I think, is perhaps for the best, but then I am stunned by your hands gripping my wrists.
The bottommost step, you explain, is unsafe. You direct me to raise my foot high, to place it, not on the first, loose step, but on the second. You hold onto me as I climb. A comfort, the return of your grip. A sweet and pure comfort.
And if you hadn’t reached down to me, if you hadn’t taken me by my wrists as you did, drawing me to you, pulling me to you; if together we hadn’t climbed the long wooden stair that leads up through the bluff, our footsteps echoing our ascent on the boardwalk there; if we hadn’t followed the thin sound of a cricket’s chirp, then another and another until the chirps interwove in a network of song; and then continued, hand in hand, deeper and higher to where the boardwalk ends and a path of bare sand begins, a path that felt increasingly cooler and damper under our feet as it changed from sand to dark, loamy soil; and leaving behind the tall grasses and the beach plum, if we hadn’t entered woods of locust and oak where thick vines of briar choked off the sea noise and the draped air grew hushed; if we hadn’t climbed up still further winding our way through sun-shafts and birdsong until we came to that final steep flight of steps and having climbed them, walked across a car park and out through a gate onto a road, in order to stand, at last, in front of her house, I could have told you nothing about the house, about Margaret or myself.
Nor would you have found out. Suppose you had never come to the beach, never encountered me nor laid eyes on the boarded windows. Suppose, instead, you had come upon the cottage, just as we have now, by the road. Your eye might have been caught by a flutter of tulle through an upstairs window. Maybe you stopped to admire the clematis-cloaked mailbox, the rose-covered arch. You might even have smiled at the arched wooden door, at how the little house stands so earnestly among the oaks and the cedars believing itself to be a cottage. Gazing upon it, you would come to believe too. Standing here under sheltering trees, it is easy to believe in cottages. But the place is a counterfeit. The cottage, spellbound. And you would have been deceived by the rustle of leaves and honeysuckle air.
Eventually, you would walk on, but the cottage would haunt you, for it is an illusion you want to believe in. And the image would attach itself to you and lay embedded in your mind - as you converse over dinner, as the telephone rings, as you run a shower - returning full-force as you drop off to sleep. And all the time you would not suspect that what you had perceived as a haven stands at the edge of a crumbling bluff, exposed to cruel winds and a capricious sky.
Now as we stand here together in front of the house, look close. Lean on my memory while I, who am blind, sharpen your sight. There was once a wire fence - it is still there, isn’t it? I’m sure it is. That element will not have changed. On the other side is a wooded lot. Do you see how new shoots of briar strain through the fence, towards air, towards light. Nearby, no doubt, a wild grapevine tightens around a sapling like a cord about a lover's neck. Wild raspberry bushes, stalky, unpruned, bend under the weight of fruit, and gaudy black pods of Solomon's Seal nod above sweet-smelling loam.
Now look toward the cottage. What in its yard is random, whorish, freely given? Margaret has hacked out the briar, rooted out weeds. The raspberries, if there are any left, have been clipped to a hedge. Those secretive blossoms, jack-in-the-pulpits and wild violets, are laid bare in massed plantings. In this contrived space even the birds are given houses; even the lilies reek of her hands.
I can tell you things. I’ve lived here a long time - as long as Margaret. That is the owner’s name. Had I mentioned that? Forgive me, I’ve forgotten. She lives alone, as do I. But neither of us is really alone. Years ago when I was sighted I would watch her go to the stores and back, to the library and back, to the galleries and back - always returning with packages, always collecting. Things. Incessant. Still does. If anything, it’s gotten worse. My eyes are useless now, but I can still listen. From my cave below I hear her going around in her garden planting this indigenous shrub, that new woodland plant. Day after day, her spade scrapes the soil. She plants grasses, sets trees, tunnels in. In her head, she has created a refuge, but for all of her efforts, her land still falls away.
I’m tired. I want to quit this place and slip back into my cave. I want to be rid of her, and rid of you, for that matter - you with your questions about those windows. However you did take my hand. You tagged the witch. I therefore I must pay a price. So before we part, I will pay my debt and tell you the reason Margaret has boarded her windows.
Running alongside the fence is a path. We will take it out to the crest of the bluff. Once there, I will tell you what you want to know. But I warn you, the path we will follow is steep and deceptive. Use balance, not eyes, for the incline will tempt you to lean. And if you do, you will lean out too far, sway, perhaps tumble... Ah well, come along. You’ll discover that the air lightens as the path opens out to the sea.
We have emerged onto a shelf of bayberry and grass that extends like a crooked finger across the face of the bluff. Beneath our feet, ravines of running sand, bushes and trees set adrift on islands of soil broken off from above. About our ears, wind. Before us, sky. On the face of the bluff a few tufts of grass, poison ivy and grapevine survive. At the base, perhaps goldenrod, switch grass and spurge - no more than a season’s growth. These bluffs bear the brunt of the north wind, suffer the hunger of the tide which, each winter, rises to gnaw at their base. Tiers of sand from above collapse to replace what had been drawn off below. In consequence, Margaret's garden dwindles by a foot each year. and her trees become undermined. They drop one by one from the cliff, and their cracked trunks are driven like pitchforks into the beach.
Erosion is the central fact around which our lives revolve. It makes sisters of us, and that is what terrifies her. It is not against erosion per se, but against our bond that she boards her windows.
Sometimes, late at night, when the wash of the tide licks at my ear, I turn in my cave, put my cheek to its cool, soft wall and listen to the stirrings of the earth. From all over the face of the bluff I can hear the sand loosening under a rock, trickling from a stump. For hours I listen to the rasping. Then comes the slide. Each fall is like a birth. And it’s all so steady: the trickle, the slide, the wash of the sea. She has sealed herself off from the sounds of erosion, but they are the sounds I sleep by.
We have arrived at a new phase, reader. Do you feel it? A turn of the cog? A fitting into the slot? Or is it, rather, a modulation of sorts? But what can be left between us? I have answered your question about the boarded windows, and you have returned me to my bluff. Now that pledges have been kept, duties fulfilled what more can be left between us? Yet there is something - on your part, you may feel my story insufficient; as for me, I sense an impending intimacy, one for which I am unsuited, or at least, unprepared.
Listen. The sea-surge has quieted. There is only a weak, rhythmic collapse at the shore, and fog creeps like ghost-breath about us. On a day such as this, Margaret will surely come. She will come in her little boat. She will come rowing along the shore. She will set anchor before us, in line with the house. In line with my cave below it. A tarp will be hooding her head. Her face, pinched and white and haunted by dread. She will raise a small, brass telescope to her eye in order to check on the state of the bluff. What she will find in her lens is my image.
Will you wait for her then? We can sit here together on this shelf of bayberry. Let your feet dangle. Abandon your eyes. Let blind balance inform you. Meet her with me. Will you? Will you?
***
You are wearing binoculars. I heard them thump against your chest when we were walking, felt the heat of the lenses, sensed the strap chafing your neck. There was a time when I, too, wore them. When my eyes worked. Loved the weight of them, the response of the lens to my fingers, the ridges of the dial, the precision...
Do you see that tilting cedar - just to our left? Any day it will topple. Only a few roots still anchor it to the ground. The rest of the roots have lost their soil and hang mid-air. This is the province of gulls. They are always out there, gliding, diving. Far away one is shrieking. The response breaks over our heads. A sudden fluttering all about us, noise and movement gathering in the west. There must be by now a grainy form on the water, making its way through the fog. Has it materialized yet? Can you see it coming in our direction? Be my eyes and watch as the image takes shape, until you can see that it is, yes, a person in a rowboat, that it is she, that it is Margaret! Take up your binoculars. Train them on her. Tell me, does she appear to be struggling? Are the oars too long for her to handle? Is the water too heavy? Has mist matted her hair? Does water drip into her eyes? Or does she indeed wear a tarp? Is her bearing as miserable as I know it must be? Describe her to me, reader. Tell me. Tell me!
Gulls dip and scream around her like harpies. Their cries mark her progress for us. Listen, now, for the wash of the oars, the change of stroke, the pivot and backwash that stops the boat, and there - the hollow sound of oars drawn through oarlocks like dead limbs. The harrying gulls disband. Fog closes over their calls as the sky presses like a lover onto the sea. We, too, are sealed in that liquid breath, in vapors and swells. We are alike finally, you and I, the two of us fog-bound and blind.
Margaret must be raising her telescope and scanning the bluff. What is the state of her garden she wonders? How badly has that thin spit of soil been undermined? Has the cedar yet toppled? Has some branch or boulder [Oh! please God] stemmed for a while the streaming sand? I feel the sweep of her lens across my own mirror-eyes. The air is filled with her. She shudders and the air trembles. What sight has shaken her - the cedar that is about to topple, or my eyes?
Now is the time, reader, before she puts down her spyglass. Train your binoculars on her. Keep her pinned, your lens to hers. Hold her down while I drink her in. Let me swallow her. Yes, yes!
We three are braced. Bound by lenses and mirrors, and spinning together like elements stirred in a liquid suspension. Faster, still faster, until we reach such a speed that we rip through the fog. It splits like tissue and drifts away. Look, the sky is clear! So clear, even I can see, reader! And the Sound is a sharp and glittering blue. There are boats on the water - I see as a child might see them - rowboats and motorboats, clammers, and sailboats, their bright hulls and braided wakes and pennants fluttering against the blue.
This is the harbor of Gull Haven. I remember it just this way: the Victorian houses, their white porches and gables peeking through trees that line the shore; the rising hill that forms Main Street; the barber shop, the gift shop, the fish market huddled artlessly at its base. Across the street is the harbor itself opening to the Sound where the ungainly ferry is just now pulling in toward the shore. Next to the ferry dock is the town park with its huge oaks and gravel paths. The park benches with quilled iron sides line a section of shore.
The village continues to form in fog's the widening gash, a bright tableau floating between the waves and the sky. We see it all happening before our eyes. Margaret, in her boat, sees it too. She thinks she is watching a memory - but that is not so, not entirely. In the vision a young woman has just left the antiques shop on the corner. She crosses the street, a miniature shopping bag in hand. Pretty girl. Long chestnut hair. She looks to be eighteen or nineteen. Actually, she is twenty-four. Still young. Such a lively walk. Long stride, confident - or over-confident, would you say? One might imagine that she is consciously trying to make an impression - upon whom? An unseen admirer, or upon the world at large? She is not beautiful, but possessed of a tenuous grace, like the grace of an Afghan hound or a unicorn. The same incongruities. Our subject, of course, is Margaret at an earlier time in her life. A carefree disposition - wouldn't you say? The white paper bag swings from the girl's hand as she walks. Precious pink curling ribbons, moss green tissue paper. A gust of wind off the harbor blows back her rich chestnut hair. Sunlight slides along its strands.
- I was wearing pearl earrings.
Ah, a voice from the rowboat! The elder Margaret speaks.
- Always pearl earrings. Mikimoto, pink-tinged. A wonderful luster. I wore them every day.
She is indeed with us then - the Margaret-in-the-boat. As I have said, she regards this scene that has bloomed before us as memory. And, to an extent, that is true. But its immediacy arises from a penetration only my eyes can accomplish - the mirror flash that has parted the veil of time to admit, not only past events, but also possibility, for what my eyes have exposed is life in the process of happening. Though she doesn’t realize it, I present Margaret-in-the-boat a terrible task: not only to watch with her current and life-scarred eyes how she denied the promise life had once offered, but to offer her that choice all over again. Poor dear.
So it is a contest, you see, between me and Margaret, a struggle neither of us is ever free of. To give you a sense of it, let me point out the young woman’s earrings. Margaret-in-the-boat has it that the girl in our tableau, is wearing pearl earrings. Margaret's fabrication entirely. She has adorned the young woman with a symbol of supreme propriety. She has chosen white pearls, pasted them on those young earlobes as if with a glue-gun. Look back again at the younger Margaret who walks toward the park. She is alive, feeling at this very moment the brilliant sun upon her shoulders, upon her bare and slender arms, the sun that we three, as mere observers, cannot feel. Now, while the shore breeze ruffles the young woman’s hair, and those long gleaming strands flicker across her ears, see for yourself what earring is there: a silver star. A simple five-pointed star. A cheerful and guileless star, the kind that is found on the flag, a piece of the Fourth of July glinting there on her right lobe. As she stops and bends down to admire a sidewalk planting of cosmos and cleome, she turns so that we see her full-face, the breeze rises and the other lobe appears. This one tenderly dented by a silver crescent moon. Not pearl earrings at all, but a star and a moon.
An affectation? In our eyes, surely. But let us be generous. She is young and can’t yet tell the difference between the genuine and the disingenuous even in herself. She has had intimations that she is an artist - or that she has an artistic bent at the very least. So as she dresses for a day to be spent at seaside shops and art galleries, she spontaneously adds these earrings, a costume to reinforce her imaginative leanings. Shall we deem the mismatched earrings then a symptom of an unformed personality?
And so from this squabble between the elder Margaret and myself about which earrings our subject is to wear, a more fundamental issue arises: Who owns the story? Which set of earrings will stand? Who is to have the final say - Margaret-in-the-boat, or me? Each of us, after all, has a purpose. Margaret wants to confirm the correctness of her life’s path. I want to torment her with all that her choice has denied.
Then too, it is possible something unexpected will occur… If the young Margaret, for instance, should intervene. If she were to take her fate in her hands. Characters may, in fact, become autonomous... But then even I sometimes hope against hope.
To move on - the miniature shopping bag Margaret carries. What is inside it? As yet, it is a mystery, but to the young Margaret who has chosen the contents, its appeal is so strong that she feels she has to see it again only minutes after purchasing it. Just now, she has entered the park and is seated on one of the benches along the harbor bank, undoing the curly ribbons of the bag, ripping them finally since they won’t untie, and pulling out the moss green tissue paper, which she, despite her haste, takes the time to fold and to slide back down into the bag. She lifts out the trifle she has just bought. At first glance, it looks like an old print. It is, in reality, a framed playing card, a joker from a deck billed as “Depression Era.” An odd illustration, one that has made a lasting impression upon her - a fool dressed in motley. He is sitting inside a soap bubble with his feet kicked up along the bubble wall. His body is posed sideways, but his head is twisted full-face to the viewer. His hair sticks out in wild red tufts from his belled cap. His grin is wide and cynical. One hand rests on a bent knee; the other holds a long, thin clay pipe. The bubbles he has blown, large ones and small, surround him, and he sits amid them in a bubble of his own, rising. Grinning and rising.
Who has put the card in the bag? Since it was purchased out of our sight and before our arrival, it must be something that appealed to the young Margaret, but what possible appeal could it have had, this jaded image, to one who is new to the world, who takes everything at face value, who is interested only in the flowers and geegaws of the little town? Might we have been deceived? Might it not be a sleight-of-hand of Margaret-in-the-boat... she who once felt the very same sun, breathed the same sweet air but who looks back upon the scene from the chill and the drear of where she now sits? Might she not have switched the article that the young Margaret actually purchased (scented candles or potpourri, perhaps) with this playing-card? Then again, what of me? I who have conjured the two Margarets in the first place? It is I who have been your principal guide. I depicted for you the house with boarded windows, lead you to this place on the bluff, burned with my blazing eyes this hole through the fog. Am I not the most likely candidate to have chosen the card? Neither shall I neglect you, reader, who are the occasion for the story. It was you who came to Wardencliff to seek me out. You, too, have brought your lens, and you shall play your hand in this odd contrivance we call a tale.
Forgive my digressions. It is time to move on. The time of seduction has passed. There has been a union of minds. The curtain has parted. Now a gestation, a percolation, if you will, like our fool’s bubbles, rising, filling pages with image and incident. Or if you’d rather, think of it as frog spawn.
So. Let us assemble our imaginings and match wits. As to the rules of engagement, we will let Margaret-in-the-boat lead with her account. I will guide you through by adding my comments to her story. She is watching the tableau before us carefully, shifting her body to find the best angle. There, see the sunlight filtering through trees? It is Margaret who is pouring this honeyed light unto the scene to accompany her younger incarnation along the park’s path. There now, as the girl makes her way, the one in the boat narrates - as if she were watching a home movie:
Yes, I remember the graveled path, the shaded lane that meanders towards the center of the park. Halfway through was a gazebo. I used to imagine the music of oom-pah bands, but I don't know if they ever really played there. The twin lines of oaks, the rustling canopy, the dancing light... They were so beautiful, those tall, full trees...
[Let her run on for a while with this saccharine narrative. Let her smear her descriptions over the scene like marmalade.]
...those full trees that had grown for generations unimpeded and beloved. On the lawn that day a teen-ager was playing Frisbee with his dog. Three little girls sat cross-legged eating ice-cream cones, giggling as I walked by. They looked up at me adoringly, the way little girls do at older girls.
[...says the wet mouse riding the swells. Her honied light illuminates for us what she would like us to think is the unimpeachable past. The boy and his dog, the two little girls, tongues curling about the dripping cones - halcyon images that we watch in silence from our perch.]
From out of nowhere, a drop of water splashed on my hand. Raindrops spattered suddenly on the leaves above me, one on my arm, more at my feet. It was a sun shower!
[The Mouse has begun to diverge. She is changing the story. There was no shower that day. So it begins. I’ll play along. Let’s see. What details might I add? Clammers that pause mid-stroke. Yes, that's good. See them appear before us, their forearms crossed over their long-poled rakes.They look up appraising the clouds and wonder…]
The little girls squealed and ran for cover. The boy wiped the wet Frisbee on his jeans and threw it again onto the sparkling grass, and the dog, pink-tongued and clownish, chased it down. Everything was wet. There was no point in staying, so I decided to leave…
[So this is what she’s up to. She wants to make a quick exit, but I’ll not let her run out on this - I'll intervene.]
It is only a passing cloud, young Margaret. Wait it out. Here's a bench.
Well, yes, there was a bench...
It is sheltered. Dry. [No excuse, now, Mouse, for your younger self to leave.]
...but the bench was taken.
There’s room on it, child, for at least two.
The man sitting on it was a townie. Worker’s clothes. Flannel shirt…
In the summer, Mouse? A tee-shirt, is more apt, don't you think?
Or if not flannel, linty, then. Untrimmed hair at the nape of his neck. Unsavory.
Still, you cannot deny that the young Margaret feels an attraction. Don't you remember, Mouse, how the hairs on your flesh rose?
Thinking back on it, he must have been young and attractive, but at the time he seemed an older man.
Eight years apart, would you say? Look at his hands, Margaret.
Vaguely threatening. He was holding a small block of wood and a knife.
His critical eye examines the wood. Closely. A bird over a worm.
He was turning the wood round and round in his hands, studying it. There was something about him. He was thin. Probably poor. Still, I would have to admit to a certain dignity in his hands, his long fingers and the grace...
Schooled fingers and interesting. Sit, sweet Margaret, and watch for a while. It’s still raining, and this bench is sheltered. Something he does with the knife excites you. Sit, sit, for the whittling movements stir you in such a way- in the same way, Margaret, that I stir you, I who have always been with you, intimate as the blade of a knife.
Although his gaze was fixed on the wood, I felt uneasy. I felt he was watching me indirectly. I was uncomfortable and I might have left then… should have left.
What do you fear, Margaret? The knife? Then let your sister-hag take over the story a while... The rain stops. Sun is playing on his shoulders.
Yes, something warm about him and comfortable, the dappled sun on the fabric of his shirt. Maybe...
A twist of his wrist, now, as the blade cuts a slit in the wood and sunlight slides through the pinions of a bird's wing.
Maybe it was my shadow that made him look up. He did look up ...
He smiles at you, Margaret.
At this point, I might retreat from the tale as well as not, reader, for the young Margaret and the whittler have safely met. The Mouse-in-the-boat is quite capable of continuing the story on her own. She could, no doubt, recount quite accurately the twelve days they spent together. She might recall for you the time and place of their meetings, the weather, the words they spoke, the clothing they wore - all the commonplace particulars of the matter. What would be the point? What follows the whittler’s smile is the simple progression of events that often occur when two people, young, unattached, are attracted to one another. They fall in love. Or think they do. They find themselves involved in a benign and uncomplicated affair - sweet sop. The stuff with which Margaret nourishes herself. He will go on about his art, he will mouth philosophies; she will use words like brilliant, genius perhaps. They will swear that they are closer than flesh. Who can say? Sex? Certainly. There will be the thumb across the lip, the tongue on the clitoris, the rubbings and chafings, the nip on the foreskin. Ah, me. The pet names, the nipple coaxings, the slick sheen smeared on unlikely places along with thin streams of sand and seaweed weavings and seashell decoration. The trading of scent. All of this is of no real importance. I will leave these details to the mouse. Yet I will tell you that what happens later is of real importance, for she will be led to a choice, and that choice is the reason I return again and again to the bluff, the reason I go through this exercise. For each time we recreate the story, she fails. And each time she fails, I drag her before these mirrors set in my head and I force to face what she's done. Call it a reckoning.
Look now as the tableau floats in the fog. See how the lovers play like children running and calling along the shore, this shore that is their constant meeting place, this Wardencliff above which we sit. They leap and trip over sand furrows, dance on beds of beach straw, sea wrack, shells and driftwood. And now, see where their shadows tilt intimately over a piece of translucent quartz. He holds it up to the light, forefinger and thumb bent around the stone. She puts her finger behind the rock and her finger is visible. A miracle - to see through stone. Their world is full of miracles. They eat wine berries, gaze out to sea. They decipher runes in the driftwood and laugh at the sandpipers’ double-dutch at the shore.
What I give you of those first days they spend together are only fragmented images. I cannot recall each meeting individually nor can I recall certain details. I cannot, for example, remember the sound of his voice, that particular timber. Even his phrasing escapes me. How I once hung upon every word - for I was there with her. I lived within her. And she will not steal this joy from me - to savor life when we were vibrant and tender and whole. Though I am checked, now, and brittle, I will hang on. She will never be rid of me.
We rode bicycles along a private road, then onto a wooded path that led to the beach entrance.
The flash of sun on the bicycle spokes arcs and transforms time. You, Margaret, are entering that alternate realm visited only by lovers.
We hid the bikes behind briar. The lock on the beach gate was broken. Next to the gate was a sign, a long list of No's.
You and the whittler are trespassers here, children running hand in hand down the beach steps of Wardencliff.
We laughed at the ruler-makers. How they must have debated over the cause and prevention of litter, discussed bon-fires without permits, and dogs that might wander… Who, in their concerns, had forgotten the conchs and the sea wrack, the driftwood and quartz, and the sun-tipped wings of the gulls.
At the bottom of the steps, the two of you pause to fill your greedy eyes with the ruffling blue sea, the pale, aching length of beach.
We spent some time skimming rocks on the water.
You wove seaweed through his hair.
He found a brownish-red rock, a paint pot he called it. He raised the sediment inside it with seawater, and with the ink he drew a line on my brow
Over the bridge of your nose
and another line on each cheek. Then I took the stone and traced
he colors your lips red and kisses them.
a long snaking line down his chest, below his navel, inside his thigh.
He takes your breasts in his hands, licks and kindles the nipples.
I thought we would make love then. Instead, he closed my eyes with his fingers.
The wind takes your hair.
He brushed the hair from my face,
And follows the curve of your neck,
his touch was too cool on my flesh...
“Come with me,” he whispers.
... and his gaze slid past me.
The whittler leads Margaret eastward along the beach. The two stop directly under this spot where you, reader, and I are now perched. Look down. Do you see them emerging from the tableau? They are present at this very moment and real just below us. The whittler looks up in our direction. He does not see us, for we are in separate realms - but he points to the tree, the leaning cedar above us. Taking hold of her hand, he leads the young Margaret up the bluff guiding her, teaching her, despite her awkwardness and fear, to play with elevation and gradient, to tip and to lean, to love altitude and, turning back, to love the descent. They take long, bounding strides going downward, tilting backward from their knees, finding their center of balance, skidding on rivers of sand that rise and trail from their heels like moon-dust. Then they turn and climb up again. Breathless, they stop and rest on a shelf of sand just a few feet from where we now sit.
On that last day we sat high on the bluff watching the gulls skate across the sky.
Always and now: the gulls’ cries, the shore wash, the reed rush...
We sat on the bluff for a long time wrapped in our own sea-washed silences.
...and all around, the knitting bayberry branches,
and wrapped, too, in each other’s arms. At some point he locked my eyes with his.
He takes her wrists in his and leads her to stand.
and held me close. Then
With his touch, oh Margaret, which I can still feel...
he put his lips beside my ear
...this lizard heart warms, and my parched skin grows supple
his voice lured me into a vision,
as if I bask upon a sunlit leaf.
And he began, “There we will sit upon the rocks...
With those gentle words the young Margaret leans into the whittler's arms
“..A belt of straw and ivy buds
as his whisper enters and warms her like liquor.
“Come live with me and be my Love.”
See how gently he slides off her shirt;
And it seemed to me as he spoke
his breath like a frond.
that I was both spirit and flesh,
Her long hair flutters and catches on the briar rose.
and as I clung to him I thought somehow...
Kneeling, he pushes the bayberry aside to make a space in the sand
...that I, too,
and eases her down.
might lead a life …that I might go with him…
The mingling scents of the sea and the roses and love.
After making love, they sit huddled together. He reaches over to her
He put a hand on my stomach,
and looks at her as one would read the pages of a book.
with the other, he lifted my by my forearm..
His seed stirring inside her....
We stood at the edge of the bluff; I was afraid of the crumbling crest, but he said, “Don't look down. Look ahead. Give yourself to the wind. Go where it takes you.” I wanted to do it. I wanted to feel free and alive, but I laughed and kissed him instead. He looked down at his hands then and said, “It's the wind I carve, not the wing.”
She rises to stand and the wind comes alive. His continuing voice washes over her like the tide carving a corridor to her deepest place, awakening the spirit that has lived there all along. His voice, along with the beach light, the wind, the sea - all of it whittling her, paring her; and all the time I am waiting within, coaxing her, singing, singing.
I saw above me the clouds rushing across the sky and below, their reflection scudding over the sea.
Her eye traces the line of a gulls' flight, a jet's trail, a deer's footprints in sand, a boat's wake - all the lines drawn by every order of things as if they are stating their mission - the streaks of carbon in granite, the beach grass rolling with the wind, the tide running along shore. Pattern after pattern opens to her, and it seems that each could be assigned a symbol, a punctuation mark or a musical notation - yes! And she can read chords and hear echoes and construct the earth’s song and with it, finally, her own soul’s song. This is the stream that runs through her, the life that stirs in her, the song I once sang to her. The song, reader, I offer her still.
Even now...
[Says the she still wearing the tarp.]
... I struggle with a desire to be something other... How can I explain it? That there is something else. Something I vaguely remember. It's like when a gull rises up from a boulder out in the Sound, tucks its feet into its chest, tents its wings and circles over the water - I long to go with it, I wish I could lift and lean on that wind and wheel over the the sea. I think for a moment I can grasp what the whittler meant.
And this is when I have reason to hope. See how below us Margaret stands in her boat. Bareheaded suddenly, she lifts her arms to the sky. Against her still-lovely neck, the sea's steady air. Her whole body feels it, and I continue to croon. My song entering, ripening, opening her like a husk. Meanwhile, the young Margaret watches the gulls. For the first time in her life, she is able to take on their glide and their power. She edges out to the rim of the cliff...
But then his meaning escapes me. Why was I standing so close to the edge? I might have been swept away.
A shudder like the wall of a bubble.
A gust of wind brought me to my senses. A gull hovered for a moment and hung so close I could have reached out and touched it. How clearly I saw the strain of its wingbeat. It's craning neck. Its feral gaze. In that flat eye I saw my own image reflected and trapped.
And so the trump card is played.
There is the hooked yellow beak that hangs over my boat. I think of him whose arms I once leaned into. I see again the ragged fingernail, the worn flannel shirt, the beads of sweat that formed on his lip. A artist's gaze, too, is indifferent and feral. I was not fooled by his scavenger eye. What had he offered really? And how much more had he meant to take?
See how the Mouse drops into her seat. The rowboat wobbles, and the younger Margaret looks down at her toes. With this single self-conscious act, a rock shifts, the rim she stands on begins to crumble.
He was a dreamer, a whittler, after all, and his arms no more a than a falling-away bluff... It was a madness. A madness.
As the slide quickens under her, she looses her balance. She does not take his hand that is outstretched to save her. Instead she reaches for a tree limb, which cracks. One of her legs slides down the bluff, but as she falls, she leans and tumbles onto our perch. From here, she manages to scramble back up and run, blind with fear away from the whittler, away from the bluff, to where her cottage now stands.
Even before the slide, I felt the quake of her fears, and I shuddered with dread. I knew I had lost, so I slipped away. A separate creature entirely, I watched her run off as the sand coursed around me. Then, from above, there came a terrible groaning of tree limbs. The tree she had grabbed for toppled over the bluff and I was trapped.
Sand sifted through the branches and briar that held me. It stopped up my ears and filled my eyes. I tried to blink it away, but it kept coming. Hour after hour of running sand. Sometimes a trickle, sometimes a downpour. I was pinned face up as my eyes were scoured, and in a kind of a trance, I gave myself to the rasping.
I was finally awakened... by quiet... by sea-wash. I remember the scent of crushed leaves, and the chill of night air. I managed somehow to get free and climb down to the beach. Caked with mud and blood, I lay down at the shore and let the tide wash over me. I emerged from the water as if I'd been hatched.
***
The fog has lifted, reader, and a pale sun has fallen upon us. It is a weak, uncommitted warmth, indifferent to my cold shoulders. It does, however, throw enough light for Margaret to see what she has come for - the undermined ledge, the cedar that will soon tumble. She is gratified, I think, more than fearful. When she gets home, she will do what she can - anchor the tree, put up a wattle embankment. She will take measures. But I welcome the trickling sand. My eyes are polished by it. See how brightly, how truly they shine! Look into them, reader. Examine carefully all that you see and tell me, who is the hag you seek?
Margaret has put down her lens and drawn up her oars. With the very first stroke, our story wrinkles and sinks in the raveling wake. You, too, will go now, and with your departure, I will fade into never-ness. But oh, reader! had I a knife and the skill of a whittler, I would carve a pipe out of driftwood, dip it into the sea, and fill the night sky with bubbles. In the largest of them I would rise... rise all the way up to her boarded windows where I would float and listen as each bubble pops.
The End
Suppose, reader, on a cool summer day, you descended a long wooden stair that led through a bluff to a beach - call it Wardencliff - in search of, say a hag, who is rumored to live in a cave by the shore…
And I, a blind woman and a fool, but supposing myself to be said hag, heard your footfall on the pebbles as you stepped off the stair…
I would hide.
You, having seen, perhaps, a flash of white hair, a flap of black fabric might call out.
I listen as your unransomed calls fade, deliciously, in the sea.
Perhaps you persist. You might walk toward the boulder where I wait crouched, barely breathing, my cheek pressed to cold granite, mated to it. I listen as your step slows, as a stone you accidentally kick skitters over the sand and strikes the boulder behind which I hide.
Maybe you stop. You wait for a sound that would signal my presence.
And in this pause, this empty but electrified silence we have created between us, my heart quickens. Flattening my back, I rise along the boulder's wrack-damp wall. After some moments, your footstep resumes. As you draw near, the vein in my neck begins to throb like a lizard’s. I wait until you are near, so near I can hear, not only your footfall, but the sound of your breath. And when I am sure that it is your breath, only then do I step from behind the rock.
The creature that has emerged before you, whether human or hag, is a grotesque. The hair, yellow-white, salted stiff like dried cod; the skin, wind-worn, deeply creviced. She - for you've determined this much - is bone-thin, and taller than you may have supposed. The clothing, the dark fabric you had seen, is not so much black, you discover, but colorless. A collection of loose, tattered fibers you cannot call clothing. It is simply a covering. But it is the eyes, yes, the eyes, I am sure of it, that stop you, for they have neither pupils nor irises. Plates simply, sandblasted clean. Blank corneas that gleam in the head, twin mirrors that reflect the sea and the fog.
Thus, I stand before you, nose keen, ear pitched, straining, for my part, to learn something of you: to catch your scent, to sense your body, to feel its heat, to know the amount of air you displace, trying by the tilt of my head to capture your startled expression in my mirror-eyes so that you may read it for yourself, and reading, become further alarmed. I am radar. I scan for fear.
On the other hand, you may determine that what stands before you is nothing more than a fool, and so you may turn, walk away, perhaps shaking your head...
Or would you take pity on me? You might begin, Ma’am…? [Ha! Ma’am. Rags, bones and the stench of urine - Ma’am! But then, ma’am, madam, my dear madman. Yes. I allow it. Stet.]
Ma’am, your hesitant probe might continue, is anyone with you? Such a long way back. Do you need help with the stairs? I could give you my arm...
[Here you are cloying, conflicted. You hope I refuse, but decency compels you to go on.]
The steps are awful, you say. You take your life in your hands.
[Guilt.]
Were you to go on this way, I would give you my back. And you, having been released from an unwanted obligation, would leave wondering, as you walk away, if you had indeed encountered the hag you had sought. Thus would we preclude anything that might have passed between us. Dissolution by mutual consent.
On the other hand, there is the possibility that we continue together. But for that to occur, we would need some new element to bind us, something of common interest. A house, say. Suppose there were a house on the bluff behind us. A bluff that is nearly eighty feet high. A tired Victorian: worn-white clapboard, sagging black roof. As you turn, it catches your eye. Can you see it there at the top of the bluff? Its turreted porch, its gabled roof? Not a large house, a cottage, really. Something that, were it smaller, might have been termed a folly. Maybe a blanket hangs drying over the rail or a tabby cat has jumped down from the porch swing. Perhaps a potted hydrangea stands tilted against a pile of loam. At the rim of the bluff, a low rainbow might float in the mist where a ticking sprinkler waters the lawn. All these things point to the fact that the house is inhabited, and yet, as with abandoned buildings, every window facing the Sound is covered over with two wide boards and a cross plank. It makes one wonder - that wonderful view, blocked. Why? The absurdity of it may even suggest a connection between me and the house.
Margaret’s house, I answer before you ask. I hadn’t meant to speak. The words leapt from my mouth of their own accord.
If I were to turn from you then, having realized that I spoke unprompted, idiotically… Or if you were to withdraw, as would be reasonable, as one would do, say, from a stray dog, hoping that it wouldn’t follow… that would end it, this shared construct, this nascent story that is still teetering on the conditional. You would retreat to the safety of your own world and take with you an incident, a tiny mystery with which you would amuse your friends: Do you know what I saw today at the beach? An old woman. A loon, really. Strange though, because… Aah!
But what if you don’t shrink from me? What if, instead, you reach, as one would reach, to turn the page of a book, and breaking with all decorum, you touch my hand? What would happen then?
As with light, I am at once flooded with the feel of you - the flesh, the bone, the warmth of your touch, the act of another intelligence upon me and I do not let go. No. I clamp my hand over your wrist, hold you by any means possible. I take on the guise of a helpless, hapless soul in order to draw you in. I pretend to be stranded (though this beach is a habitat so intimate, so much a part of me that should I be removed from it, it too, would disappear.) As you guide me (so you think) toward the beach stair, I explore the hand you have offered and feed on its warmth, while inside I am reeling with joy, reveling in the rainbow-colored dampness we share between the hollows of our palms. It has been years since I’ve felt the thrill of a human touch.
Picture us, can you, stumbling hand-in-hand over the rocks, through the sea mist and the gull cries, the rhythmic wash of water? And you, good soul, have no idea that what you hold onto, what you guide with your sweet and human hand is neither a fool, nor a hag, but a negative.
Perhaps at the foot of the bluff we pause to look up together at the boarded house. Through your grasp, I test the effect its blank gaze has upon you. I feel questions assembling and spreading like ink through your brain until you shake yourself free. Before we walk on, I glance at my cave, a cavity formed by a fortunate assemblage of fallen tree trunks and rocks that lies directly under the house, a shelter too unobtrusive for you to have seen.
At the beach stair you drop my hand. I listen. Perhaps there comes a clambering which I interpret as you climbing the steps. I assume you are going on without me. This, I think, is perhaps for the best, but then I am stunned by your hands gripping my wrists.
The bottommost step, you explain, is unsafe. You direct me to raise my foot high, to place it, not on the first, loose step, but on the second. You hold onto me as I climb. A comfort, the return of your grip. A sweet and pure comfort.
And if you hadn’t reached down to me, if you hadn’t taken me by my wrists as you did, drawing me to you, pulling me to you; if together we hadn’t climbed the long wooden stair that leads up through the bluff, our footsteps echoing our ascent on the boardwalk there; if we hadn’t followed the thin sound of a cricket’s chirp, then another and another until the chirps interwove in a network of song; and then continued, hand in hand, deeper and higher to where the boardwalk ends and a path of bare sand begins, a path that felt increasingly cooler and damper under our feet as it changed from sand to dark, loamy soil; and leaving behind the tall grasses and the beach plum, if we hadn’t entered woods of locust and oak where thick vines of briar choked off the sea noise and the draped air grew hushed; if we hadn’t climbed up still further winding our way through sun-shafts and birdsong until we came to that final steep flight of steps and having climbed them, walked across a car park and out through a gate onto a road, in order to stand, at last, in front of her house, I could have told you nothing about the house, about Margaret or myself.
Nor would you have found out. Suppose you had never come to the beach, never encountered me nor laid eyes on the boarded windows. Suppose, instead, you had come upon the cottage, just as we have now, by the road. Your eye might have been caught by a flutter of tulle through an upstairs window. Maybe you stopped to admire the clematis-cloaked mailbox, the rose-covered arch. You might even have smiled at the arched wooden door, at how the little house stands so earnestly among the oaks and the cedars believing itself to be a cottage. Gazing upon it, you would come to believe too. Standing here under sheltering trees, it is easy to believe in cottages. But the place is a counterfeit. The cottage, spellbound. And you would have been deceived by the rustle of leaves and honeysuckle air.
Eventually, you would walk on, but the cottage would haunt you, for it is an illusion you want to believe in. And the image would attach itself to you and lay embedded in your mind - as you converse over dinner, as the telephone rings, as you run a shower - returning full-force as you drop off to sleep. And all the time you would not suspect that what you had perceived as a haven stands at the edge of a crumbling bluff, exposed to cruel winds and a capricious sky.
Now as we stand here together in front of the house, look close. Lean on my memory while I, who am blind, sharpen your sight. There was once a wire fence - it is still there, isn’t it? I’m sure it is. That element will not have changed. On the other side is a wooded lot. Do you see how new shoots of briar strain through the fence, towards air, towards light. Nearby, no doubt, a wild grapevine tightens around a sapling like a cord about a lover's neck. Wild raspberry bushes, stalky, unpruned, bend under the weight of fruit, and gaudy black pods of Solomon's Seal nod above sweet-smelling loam.
Now look toward the cottage. What in its yard is random, whorish, freely given? Margaret has hacked out the briar, rooted out weeds. The raspberries, if there are any left, have been clipped to a hedge. Those secretive blossoms, jack-in-the-pulpits and wild violets, are laid bare in massed plantings. In this contrived space even the birds are given houses; even the lilies reek of her hands.
I can tell you things. I’ve lived here a long time - as long as Margaret. That is the owner’s name. Had I mentioned that? Forgive me, I’ve forgotten. She lives alone, as do I. But neither of us is really alone. Years ago when I was sighted I would watch her go to the stores and back, to the library and back, to the galleries and back - always returning with packages, always collecting. Things. Incessant. Still does. If anything, it’s gotten worse. My eyes are useless now, but I can still listen. From my cave below I hear her going around in her garden planting this indigenous shrub, that new woodland plant. Day after day, her spade scrapes the soil. She plants grasses, sets trees, tunnels in. In her head, she has created a refuge, but for all of her efforts, her land still falls away.
I’m tired. I want to quit this place and slip back into my cave. I want to be rid of her, and rid of you, for that matter - you with your questions about those windows. However you did take my hand. You tagged the witch. I therefore I must pay a price. So before we part, I will pay my debt and tell you the reason Margaret has boarded her windows.
Running alongside the fence is a path. We will take it out to the crest of the bluff. Once there, I will tell you what you want to know. But I warn you, the path we will follow is steep and deceptive. Use balance, not eyes, for the incline will tempt you to lean. And if you do, you will lean out too far, sway, perhaps tumble... Ah well, come along. You’ll discover that the air lightens as the path opens out to the sea.
We have emerged onto a shelf of bayberry and grass that extends like a crooked finger across the face of the bluff. Beneath our feet, ravines of running sand, bushes and trees set adrift on islands of soil broken off from above. About our ears, wind. Before us, sky. On the face of the bluff a few tufts of grass, poison ivy and grapevine survive. At the base, perhaps goldenrod, switch grass and spurge - no more than a season’s growth. These bluffs bear the brunt of the north wind, suffer the hunger of the tide which, each winter, rises to gnaw at their base. Tiers of sand from above collapse to replace what had been drawn off below. In consequence, Margaret's garden dwindles by a foot each year. and her trees become undermined. They drop one by one from the cliff, and their cracked trunks are driven like pitchforks into the beach.
Erosion is the central fact around which our lives revolve. It makes sisters of us, and that is what terrifies her. It is not against erosion per se, but against our bond that she boards her windows.
Sometimes, late at night, when the wash of the tide licks at my ear, I turn in my cave, put my cheek to its cool, soft wall and listen to the stirrings of the earth. From all over the face of the bluff I can hear the sand loosening under a rock, trickling from a stump. For hours I listen to the rasping. Then comes the slide. Each fall is like a birth. And it’s all so steady: the trickle, the slide, the wash of the sea. She has sealed herself off from the sounds of erosion, but they are the sounds I sleep by.
We have arrived at a new phase, reader. Do you feel it? A turn of the cog? A fitting into the slot? Or is it, rather, a modulation of sorts? But what can be left between us? I have answered your question about the boarded windows, and you have returned me to my bluff. Now that pledges have been kept, duties fulfilled what more can be left between us? Yet there is something - on your part, you may feel my story insufficient; as for me, I sense an impending intimacy, one for which I am unsuited, or at least, unprepared.
Listen. The sea-surge has quieted. There is only a weak, rhythmic collapse at the shore, and fog creeps like ghost-breath about us. On a day such as this, Margaret will surely come. She will come in her little boat. She will come rowing along the shore. She will set anchor before us, in line with the house. In line with my cave below it. A tarp will be hooding her head. Her face, pinched and white and haunted by dread. She will raise a small, brass telescope to her eye in order to check on the state of the bluff. What she will find in her lens is my image.
Will you wait for her then? We can sit here together on this shelf of bayberry. Let your feet dangle. Abandon your eyes. Let blind balance inform you. Meet her with me. Will you? Will you?
***
You are wearing binoculars. I heard them thump against your chest when we were walking, felt the heat of the lenses, sensed the strap chafing your neck. There was a time when I, too, wore them. When my eyes worked. Loved the weight of them, the response of the lens to my fingers, the ridges of the dial, the precision...
Do you see that tilting cedar - just to our left? Any day it will topple. Only a few roots still anchor it to the ground. The rest of the roots have lost their soil and hang mid-air. This is the province of gulls. They are always out there, gliding, diving. Far away one is shrieking. The response breaks over our heads. A sudden fluttering all about us, noise and movement gathering in the west. There must be by now a grainy form on the water, making its way through the fog. Has it materialized yet? Can you see it coming in our direction? Be my eyes and watch as the image takes shape, until you can see that it is, yes, a person in a rowboat, that it is she, that it is Margaret! Take up your binoculars. Train them on her. Tell me, does she appear to be struggling? Are the oars too long for her to handle? Is the water too heavy? Has mist matted her hair? Does water drip into her eyes? Or does she indeed wear a tarp? Is her bearing as miserable as I know it must be? Describe her to me, reader. Tell me. Tell me!
Gulls dip and scream around her like harpies. Their cries mark her progress for us. Listen, now, for the wash of the oars, the change of stroke, the pivot and backwash that stops the boat, and there - the hollow sound of oars drawn through oarlocks like dead limbs. The harrying gulls disband. Fog closes over their calls as the sky presses like a lover onto the sea. We, too, are sealed in that liquid breath, in vapors and swells. We are alike finally, you and I, the two of us fog-bound and blind.
Margaret must be raising her telescope and scanning the bluff. What is the state of her garden she wonders? How badly has that thin spit of soil been undermined? Has the cedar yet toppled? Has some branch or boulder [Oh! please God] stemmed for a while the streaming sand? I feel the sweep of her lens across my own mirror-eyes. The air is filled with her. She shudders and the air trembles. What sight has shaken her - the cedar that is about to topple, or my eyes?
Now is the time, reader, before she puts down her spyglass. Train your binoculars on her. Keep her pinned, your lens to hers. Hold her down while I drink her in. Let me swallow her. Yes, yes!
We three are braced. Bound by lenses and mirrors, and spinning together like elements stirred in a liquid suspension. Faster, still faster, until we reach such a speed that we rip through the fog. It splits like tissue and drifts away. Look, the sky is clear! So clear, even I can see, reader! And the Sound is a sharp and glittering blue. There are boats on the water - I see as a child might see them - rowboats and motorboats, clammers, and sailboats, their bright hulls and braided wakes and pennants fluttering against the blue.
This is the harbor of Gull Haven. I remember it just this way: the Victorian houses, their white porches and gables peeking through trees that line the shore; the rising hill that forms Main Street; the barber shop, the gift shop, the fish market huddled artlessly at its base. Across the street is the harbor itself opening to the Sound where the ungainly ferry is just now pulling in toward the shore. Next to the ferry dock is the town park with its huge oaks and gravel paths. The park benches with quilled iron sides line a section of shore.
The village continues to form in fog's the widening gash, a bright tableau floating between the waves and the sky. We see it all happening before our eyes. Margaret, in her boat, sees it too. She thinks she is watching a memory - but that is not so, not entirely. In the vision a young woman has just left the antiques shop on the corner. She crosses the street, a miniature shopping bag in hand. Pretty girl. Long chestnut hair. She looks to be eighteen or nineteen. Actually, she is twenty-four. Still young. Such a lively walk. Long stride, confident - or over-confident, would you say? One might imagine that she is consciously trying to make an impression - upon whom? An unseen admirer, or upon the world at large? She is not beautiful, but possessed of a tenuous grace, like the grace of an Afghan hound or a unicorn. The same incongruities. Our subject, of course, is Margaret at an earlier time in her life. A carefree disposition - wouldn't you say? The white paper bag swings from the girl's hand as she walks. Precious pink curling ribbons, moss green tissue paper. A gust of wind off the harbor blows back her rich chestnut hair. Sunlight slides along its strands.
- I was wearing pearl earrings.
Ah, a voice from the rowboat! The elder Margaret speaks.
- Always pearl earrings. Mikimoto, pink-tinged. A wonderful luster. I wore them every day.
She is indeed with us then - the Margaret-in-the-boat. As I have said, she regards this scene that has bloomed before us as memory. And, to an extent, that is true. But its immediacy arises from a penetration only my eyes can accomplish - the mirror flash that has parted the veil of time to admit, not only past events, but also possibility, for what my eyes have exposed is life in the process of happening. Though she doesn’t realize it, I present Margaret-in-the-boat a terrible task: not only to watch with her current and life-scarred eyes how she denied the promise life had once offered, but to offer her that choice all over again. Poor dear.
So it is a contest, you see, between me and Margaret, a struggle neither of us is ever free of. To give you a sense of it, let me point out the young woman’s earrings. Margaret-in-the-boat has it that the girl in our tableau, is wearing pearl earrings. Margaret's fabrication entirely. She has adorned the young woman with a symbol of supreme propriety. She has chosen white pearls, pasted them on those young earlobes as if with a glue-gun. Look back again at the younger Margaret who walks toward the park. She is alive, feeling at this very moment the brilliant sun upon her shoulders, upon her bare and slender arms, the sun that we three, as mere observers, cannot feel. Now, while the shore breeze ruffles the young woman’s hair, and those long gleaming strands flicker across her ears, see for yourself what earring is there: a silver star. A simple five-pointed star. A cheerful and guileless star, the kind that is found on the flag, a piece of the Fourth of July glinting there on her right lobe. As she stops and bends down to admire a sidewalk planting of cosmos and cleome, she turns so that we see her full-face, the breeze rises and the other lobe appears. This one tenderly dented by a silver crescent moon. Not pearl earrings at all, but a star and a moon.
An affectation? In our eyes, surely. But let us be generous. She is young and can’t yet tell the difference between the genuine and the disingenuous even in herself. She has had intimations that she is an artist - or that she has an artistic bent at the very least. So as she dresses for a day to be spent at seaside shops and art galleries, she spontaneously adds these earrings, a costume to reinforce her imaginative leanings. Shall we deem the mismatched earrings then a symptom of an unformed personality?
And so from this squabble between the elder Margaret and myself about which earrings our subject is to wear, a more fundamental issue arises: Who owns the story? Which set of earrings will stand? Who is to have the final say - Margaret-in-the-boat, or me? Each of us, after all, has a purpose. Margaret wants to confirm the correctness of her life’s path. I want to torment her with all that her choice has denied.
Then too, it is possible something unexpected will occur… If the young Margaret, for instance, should intervene. If she were to take her fate in her hands. Characters may, in fact, become autonomous... But then even I sometimes hope against hope.
To move on - the miniature shopping bag Margaret carries. What is inside it? As yet, it is a mystery, but to the young Margaret who has chosen the contents, its appeal is so strong that she feels she has to see it again only minutes after purchasing it. Just now, she has entered the park and is seated on one of the benches along the harbor bank, undoing the curly ribbons of the bag, ripping them finally since they won’t untie, and pulling out the moss green tissue paper, which she, despite her haste, takes the time to fold and to slide back down into the bag. She lifts out the trifle she has just bought. At first glance, it looks like an old print. It is, in reality, a framed playing card, a joker from a deck billed as “Depression Era.” An odd illustration, one that has made a lasting impression upon her - a fool dressed in motley. He is sitting inside a soap bubble with his feet kicked up along the bubble wall. His body is posed sideways, but his head is twisted full-face to the viewer. His hair sticks out in wild red tufts from his belled cap. His grin is wide and cynical. One hand rests on a bent knee; the other holds a long, thin clay pipe. The bubbles he has blown, large ones and small, surround him, and he sits amid them in a bubble of his own, rising. Grinning and rising.
Who has put the card in the bag? Since it was purchased out of our sight and before our arrival, it must be something that appealed to the young Margaret, but what possible appeal could it have had, this jaded image, to one who is new to the world, who takes everything at face value, who is interested only in the flowers and geegaws of the little town? Might we have been deceived? Might it not be a sleight-of-hand of Margaret-in-the-boat... she who once felt the very same sun, breathed the same sweet air but who looks back upon the scene from the chill and the drear of where she now sits? Might she not have switched the article that the young Margaret actually purchased (scented candles or potpourri, perhaps) with this playing-card? Then again, what of me? I who have conjured the two Margarets in the first place? It is I who have been your principal guide. I depicted for you the house with boarded windows, lead you to this place on the bluff, burned with my blazing eyes this hole through the fog. Am I not the most likely candidate to have chosen the card? Neither shall I neglect you, reader, who are the occasion for the story. It was you who came to Wardencliff to seek me out. You, too, have brought your lens, and you shall play your hand in this odd contrivance we call a tale.
Forgive my digressions. It is time to move on. The time of seduction has passed. There has been a union of minds. The curtain has parted. Now a gestation, a percolation, if you will, like our fool’s bubbles, rising, filling pages with image and incident. Or if you’d rather, think of it as frog spawn.
So. Let us assemble our imaginings and match wits. As to the rules of engagement, we will let Margaret-in-the-boat lead with her account. I will guide you through by adding my comments to her story. She is watching the tableau before us carefully, shifting her body to find the best angle. There, see the sunlight filtering through trees? It is Margaret who is pouring this honeyed light unto the scene to accompany her younger incarnation along the park’s path. There now, as the girl makes her way, the one in the boat narrates - as if she were watching a home movie:
Yes, I remember the graveled path, the shaded lane that meanders towards the center of the park. Halfway through was a gazebo. I used to imagine the music of oom-pah bands, but I don't know if they ever really played there. The twin lines of oaks, the rustling canopy, the dancing light... They were so beautiful, those tall, full trees...
[Let her run on for a while with this saccharine narrative. Let her smear her descriptions over the scene like marmalade.]
...those full trees that had grown for generations unimpeded and beloved. On the lawn that day a teen-ager was playing Frisbee with his dog. Three little girls sat cross-legged eating ice-cream cones, giggling as I walked by. They looked up at me adoringly, the way little girls do at older girls.
[...says the wet mouse riding the swells. Her honied light illuminates for us what she would like us to think is the unimpeachable past. The boy and his dog, the two little girls, tongues curling about the dripping cones - halcyon images that we watch in silence from our perch.]
From out of nowhere, a drop of water splashed on my hand. Raindrops spattered suddenly on the leaves above me, one on my arm, more at my feet. It was a sun shower!
[The Mouse has begun to diverge. She is changing the story. There was no shower that day. So it begins. I’ll play along. Let’s see. What details might I add? Clammers that pause mid-stroke. Yes, that's good. See them appear before us, their forearms crossed over their long-poled rakes.They look up appraising the clouds and wonder…]
The little girls squealed and ran for cover. The boy wiped the wet Frisbee on his jeans and threw it again onto the sparkling grass, and the dog, pink-tongued and clownish, chased it down. Everything was wet. There was no point in staying, so I decided to leave…
[So this is what she’s up to. She wants to make a quick exit, but I’ll not let her run out on this - I'll intervene.]
It is only a passing cloud, young Margaret. Wait it out. Here's a bench.
Well, yes, there was a bench...
It is sheltered. Dry. [No excuse, now, Mouse, for your younger self to leave.]
...but the bench was taken.
There’s room on it, child, for at least two.
The man sitting on it was a townie. Worker’s clothes. Flannel shirt…
In the summer, Mouse? A tee-shirt, is more apt, don't you think?
Or if not flannel, linty, then. Untrimmed hair at the nape of his neck. Unsavory.
Still, you cannot deny that the young Margaret feels an attraction. Don't you remember, Mouse, how the hairs on your flesh rose?
Thinking back on it, he must have been young and attractive, but at the time he seemed an older man.
Eight years apart, would you say? Look at his hands, Margaret.
Vaguely threatening. He was holding a small block of wood and a knife.
His critical eye examines the wood. Closely. A bird over a worm.
He was turning the wood round and round in his hands, studying it. There was something about him. He was thin. Probably poor. Still, I would have to admit to a certain dignity in his hands, his long fingers and the grace...
Schooled fingers and interesting. Sit, sweet Margaret, and watch for a while. It’s still raining, and this bench is sheltered. Something he does with the knife excites you. Sit, sit, for the whittling movements stir you in such a way- in the same way, Margaret, that I stir you, I who have always been with you, intimate as the blade of a knife.
Although his gaze was fixed on the wood, I felt uneasy. I felt he was watching me indirectly. I was uncomfortable and I might have left then… should have left.
What do you fear, Margaret? The knife? Then let your sister-hag take over the story a while... The rain stops. Sun is playing on his shoulders.
Yes, something warm about him and comfortable, the dappled sun on the fabric of his shirt. Maybe...
A twist of his wrist, now, as the blade cuts a slit in the wood and sunlight slides through the pinions of a bird's wing.
Maybe it was my shadow that made him look up. He did look up ...
He smiles at you, Margaret.
At this point, I might retreat from the tale as well as not, reader, for the young Margaret and the whittler have safely met. The Mouse-in-the-boat is quite capable of continuing the story on her own. She could, no doubt, recount quite accurately the twelve days they spent together. She might recall for you the time and place of their meetings, the weather, the words they spoke, the clothing they wore - all the commonplace particulars of the matter. What would be the point? What follows the whittler’s smile is the simple progression of events that often occur when two people, young, unattached, are attracted to one another. They fall in love. Or think they do. They find themselves involved in a benign and uncomplicated affair - sweet sop. The stuff with which Margaret nourishes herself. He will go on about his art, he will mouth philosophies; she will use words like brilliant, genius perhaps. They will swear that they are closer than flesh. Who can say? Sex? Certainly. There will be the thumb across the lip, the tongue on the clitoris, the rubbings and chafings, the nip on the foreskin. Ah, me. The pet names, the nipple coaxings, the slick sheen smeared on unlikely places along with thin streams of sand and seaweed weavings and seashell decoration. The trading of scent. All of this is of no real importance. I will leave these details to the mouse. Yet I will tell you that what happens later is of real importance, for she will be led to a choice, and that choice is the reason I return again and again to the bluff, the reason I go through this exercise. For each time we recreate the story, she fails. And each time she fails, I drag her before these mirrors set in my head and I force to face what she's done. Call it a reckoning.
Look now as the tableau floats in the fog. See how the lovers play like children running and calling along the shore, this shore that is their constant meeting place, this Wardencliff above which we sit. They leap and trip over sand furrows, dance on beds of beach straw, sea wrack, shells and driftwood. And now, see where their shadows tilt intimately over a piece of translucent quartz. He holds it up to the light, forefinger and thumb bent around the stone. She puts her finger behind the rock and her finger is visible. A miracle - to see through stone. Their world is full of miracles. They eat wine berries, gaze out to sea. They decipher runes in the driftwood and laugh at the sandpipers’ double-dutch at the shore.
What I give you of those first days they spend together are only fragmented images. I cannot recall each meeting individually nor can I recall certain details. I cannot, for example, remember the sound of his voice, that particular timber. Even his phrasing escapes me. How I once hung upon every word - for I was there with her. I lived within her. And she will not steal this joy from me - to savor life when we were vibrant and tender and whole. Though I am checked, now, and brittle, I will hang on. She will never be rid of me.
We rode bicycles along a private road, then onto a wooded path that led to the beach entrance.
The flash of sun on the bicycle spokes arcs and transforms time. You, Margaret, are entering that alternate realm visited only by lovers.
We hid the bikes behind briar. The lock on the beach gate was broken. Next to the gate was a sign, a long list of No's.
You and the whittler are trespassers here, children running hand in hand down the beach steps of Wardencliff.
We laughed at the ruler-makers. How they must have debated over the cause and prevention of litter, discussed bon-fires without permits, and dogs that might wander… Who, in their concerns, had forgotten the conchs and the sea wrack, the driftwood and quartz, and the sun-tipped wings of the gulls.
At the bottom of the steps, the two of you pause to fill your greedy eyes with the ruffling blue sea, the pale, aching length of beach.
We spent some time skimming rocks on the water.
You wove seaweed through his hair.
He found a brownish-red rock, a paint pot he called it. He raised the sediment inside it with seawater, and with the ink he drew a line on my brow
Over the bridge of your nose
and another line on each cheek. Then I took the stone and traced
he colors your lips red and kisses them.
a long snaking line down his chest, below his navel, inside his thigh.
He takes your breasts in his hands, licks and kindles the nipples.
I thought we would make love then. Instead, he closed my eyes with his fingers.
The wind takes your hair.
He brushed the hair from my face,
And follows the curve of your neck,
his touch was too cool on my flesh...
“Come with me,” he whispers.
... and his gaze slid past me.
The whittler leads Margaret eastward along the beach. The two stop directly under this spot where you, reader, and I are now perched. Look down. Do you see them emerging from the tableau? They are present at this very moment and real just below us. The whittler looks up in our direction. He does not see us, for we are in separate realms - but he points to the tree, the leaning cedar above us. Taking hold of her hand, he leads the young Margaret up the bluff guiding her, teaching her, despite her awkwardness and fear, to play with elevation and gradient, to tip and to lean, to love altitude and, turning back, to love the descent. They take long, bounding strides going downward, tilting backward from their knees, finding their center of balance, skidding on rivers of sand that rise and trail from their heels like moon-dust. Then they turn and climb up again. Breathless, they stop and rest on a shelf of sand just a few feet from where we now sit.
On that last day we sat high on the bluff watching the gulls skate across the sky.
Always and now: the gulls’ cries, the shore wash, the reed rush...
We sat on the bluff for a long time wrapped in our own sea-washed silences.
...and all around, the knitting bayberry branches,
and wrapped, too, in each other’s arms. At some point he locked my eyes with his.
He takes her wrists in his and leads her to stand.
and held me close. Then
With his touch, oh Margaret, which I can still feel...
he put his lips beside my ear
...this lizard heart warms, and my parched skin grows supple
his voice lured me into a vision,
as if I bask upon a sunlit leaf.
And he began, “There we will sit upon the rocks...
With those gentle words the young Margaret leans into the whittler's arms
“..A belt of straw and ivy buds
as his whisper enters and warms her like liquor.
“Come live with me and be my Love.”
See how gently he slides off her shirt;
And it seemed to me as he spoke
his breath like a frond.
that I was both spirit and flesh,
Her long hair flutters and catches on the briar rose.
and as I clung to him I thought somehow...
Kneeling, he pushes the bayberry aside to make a space in the sand
...that I, too,
and eases her down.
might lead a life …that I might go with him…
The mingling scents of the sea and the roses and love.
After making love, they sit huddled together. He reaches over to her
He put a hand on my stomach,
and looks at her as one would read the pages of a book.
with the other, he lifted my by my forearm..
His seed stirring inside her....
We stood at the edge of the bluff; I was afraid of the crumbling crest, but he said, “Don't look down. Look ahead. Give yourself to the wind. Go where it takes you.” I wanted to do it. I wanted to feel free and alive, but I laughed and kissed him instead. He looked down at his hands then and said, “It's the wind I carve, not the wing.”
She rises to stand and the wind comes alive. His continuing voice washes over her like the tide carving a corridor to her deepest place, awakening the spirit that has lived there all along. His voice, along with the beach light, the wind, the sea - all of it whittling her, paring her; and all the time I am waiting within, coaxing her, singing, singing.
I saw above me the clouds rushing across the sky and below, their reflection scudding over the sea.
Her eye traces the line of a gulls' flight, a jet's trail, a deer's footprints in sand, a boat's wake - all the lines drawn by every order of things as if they are stating their mission - the streaks of carbon in granite, the beach grass rolling with the wind, the tide running along shore. Pattern after pattern opens to her, and it seems that each could be assigned a symbol, a punctuation mark or a musical notation - yes! And she can read chords and hear echoes and construct the earth’s song and with it, finally, her own soul’s song. This is the stream that runs through her, the life that stirs in her, the song I once sang to her. The song, reader, I offer her still.
Even now...
[Says the she still wearing the tarp.]
... I struggle with a desire to be something other... How can I explain it? That there is something else. Something I vaguely remember. It's like when a gull rises up from a boulder out in the Sound, tucks its feet into its chest, tents its wings and circles over the water - I long to go with it, I wish I could lift and lean on that wind and wheel over the the sea. I think for a moment I can grasp what the whittler meant.
And this is when I have reason to hope. See how below us Margaret stands in her boat. Bareheaded suddenly, she lifts her arms to the sky. Against her still-lovely neck, the sea's steady air. Her whole body feels it, and I continue to croon. My song entering, ripening, opening her like a husk. Meanwhile, the young Margaret watches the gulls. For the first time in her life, she is able to take on their glide and their power. She edges out to the rim of the cliff...
But then his meaning escapes me. Why was I standing so close to the edge? I might have been swept away.
A shudder like the wall of a bubble.
A gust of wind brought me to my senses. A gull hovered for a moment and hung so close I could have reached out and touched it. How clearly I saw the strain of its wingbeat. It's craning neck. Its feral gaze. In that flat eye I saw my own image reflected and trapped.
And so the trump card is played.
There is the hooked yellow beak that hangs over my boat. I think of him whose arms I once leaned into. I see again the ragged fingernail, the worn flannel shirt, the beads of sweat that formed on his lip. A artist's gaze, too, is indifferent and feral. I was not fooled by his scavenger eye. What had he offered really? And how much more had he meant to take?
See how the Mouse drops into her seat. The rowboat wobbles, and the younger Margaret looks down at her toes. With this single self-conscious act, a rock shifts, the rim she stands on begins to crumble.
He was a dreamer, a whittler, after all, and his arms no more a than a falling-away bluff... It was a madness. A madness.
As the slide quickens under her, she looses her balance. She does not take his hand that is outstretched to save her. Instead she reaches for a tree limb, which cracks. One of her legs slides down the bluff, but as she falls, she leans and tumbles onto our perch. From here, she manages to scramble back up and run, blind with fear away from the whittler, away from the bluff, to where her cottage now stands.
Even before the slide, I felt the quake of her fears, and I shuddered with dread. I knew I had lost, so I slipped away. A separate creature entirely, I watched her run off as the sand coursed around me. Then, from above, there came a terrible groaning of tree limbs. The tree she had grabbed for toppled over the bluff and I was trapped.
Sand sifted through the branches and briar that held me. It stopped up my ears and filled my eyes. I tried to blink it away, but it kept coming. Hour after hour of running sand. Sometimes a trickle, sometimes a downpour. I was pinned face up as my eyes were scoured, and in a kind of a trance, I gave myself to the rasping.
I was finally awakened... by quiet... by sea-wash. I remember the scent of crushed leaves, and the chill of night air. I managed somehow to get free and climb down to the beach. Caked with mud and blood, I lay down at the shore and let the tide wash over me. I emerged from the water as if I'd been hatched.
***
The fog has lifted, reader, and a pale sun has fallen upon us. It is a weak, uncommitted warmth, indifferent to my cold shoulders. It does, however, throw enough light for Margaret to see what she has come for - the undermined ledge, the cedar that will soon tumble. She is gratified, I think, more than fearful. When she gets home, she will do what she can - anchor the tree, put up a wattle embankment. She will take measures. But I welcome the trickling sand. My eyes are polished by it. See how brightly, how truly they shine! Look into them, reader. Examine carefully all that you see and tell me, who is the hag you seek?
Margaret has put down her lens and drawn up her oars. With the very first stroke, our story wrinkles and sinks in the raveling wake. You, too, will go now, and with your departure, I will fade into never-ness. But oh, reader! had I a knife and the skill of a whittler, I would carve a pipe out of driftwood, dip it into the sea, and fill the night sky with bubbles. In the largest of them I would rise... rise all the way up to her boarded windows where I would float and listen as each bubble pops.
The End
Barbara Daddino holds an MFA from NYU where she studied under E.L. Doctorow, Breyten Breytenbach, and Francine Prose. She has taught English and creative writing in the Suffolk County school system and creative writing at NYU as an adjunct. Her essays and movie reviews have appeared in Newsday and on PBS. She was also featured in two PBS interviews about late-life divorce. She is currently working on a novel inspired by her story, "Floaters," a finalist in Glimmer Train's New Writers' Short Story Contest. She lives in Shoreham, Long Island where she works in a tower overlooking the Sound. From there, it is easy to hear the hag singing.