Waiting Woman

Do you know me? Una wondered. Una was waiting for someone to tell her who she was.

Una and Larue looked at each other as the steady beating of rain on the roof swelled and the windows streamed. "Look down there, to the water," said Larue. "Do you see?"

Uncertain, Una stood up and went to the window. "Yes," she nodded.

"Well, come sit down. But think of it." Una sat. "Down there at the water far below, on the rocks, a woman waited. She waited for a very long time." Larue paused. "Can you imagine that?"

"Yes."

"She sat on the small round rocks and while she sat her hair grew so long she could sit on it too. Her pale skin darkened and her hair turned light from the sun. She sat on the rocks and waited. At night she asked the waves to be quiet so she might hear what she couldn't see." Larue got up and put a kettle on.

"What did she do?"

"She thought."

"Oh."

"She thought a lot." Larue glanced back at Una, seemed to approve of her, and continued.

Gathered

photo by Roshni Robert

Life at home continued as it had when we were children, except that some of us had jobs now, and some of us that didn't were looking. We were disoriented by our own children who looked like ghosts of our childhood lined up at the windows to stare at Opal's tent in the mornings, waiting to see if she'd come out. They stood on the beach together too, passing rocks and crabs and moon snails around, running the length of beached logs and launching light bodies through the air to land, springy and winded, on the rocks. The smallest ones barely kept up, and wouldn't have at all if they hadn't gotten piggy backs from cousins. They learned to walk sooner than usual just so they could tramp up and down from the house to the beach like a string of ants. Each of us caught ourselves confused, thinking we were the children, and wondering who all these adults were. We laughed about it, and it was all right, but every once in a while we wanted to push the kids out of the way of the window so we could see better.

Ghosts in the Water, People in the Trees

Silke was born in winter. Not in new winter, but in midwinter. She grew to life in a summer and autumn womb. She came to life in gray cloud and bleak mist, early in the morning.

If Silke saw anything on her arrival, she did not see that the mists were bleak. She saw that the sky was full of fluid and light and felt comforted by the milky, close-drawn clouds. She knew the lavender and bread smell of her grandmother who carried her from room to room, who took her to the bed where her mother slept as if every hour were night. The voice she recognized first was the grandmother’s voice, the one that began instantly to tell her what the world was made of. Informed by that voice Silke’s swimming infant eyes searched through the gloom of early vision to recognize crow feather, wishbone, sand dollar, and in spring—as the world and her vision brightened— pussy willow, apple blossom, robin’s egg. And in summer, when she looked about her from the fullness of her round contented body she knew and reached for tree frog, cherry, kelp crab, moth.

"Before there were the children"

She wandered and roamed the days away, but she took care to dust the book shelves, scrub the bathtub, brew hot coffee, and keep a supply of food that never entirely dwindled, a roasted chicken turned into a pie, then into a soup, and on again.

Until she came here, she didn’t know she was alone. It’s a gift to know this, but in the beginning, it unsettles everything. After her first day on the beach she wanted to live out of the house. She knew it wasn’t how things were done. She had a snug home and it was for living in. She was pulled out each morning and could not have disobeyed the pull, just as the water in our inlet cannot disobey the tide. Then, she was pulled back in each night. She didn’t know what brought her back at first, but when she came into her kitchen, always at dusk, she’d find a sink of cold dish water, the last of the morning’s tea dark at the bottom of her cup. She shook her head at this, not remembering the moment of departing.

During the day, when she walked on the beach, the inside of her mind was like this:

I love the waves. How many seals are swimming underneath? I’d like to see them. I wonder if we might get a little boat I could row and I could look down into the water—if that’s safe, to go out in a boat alone. If they got used to me, the seagulls might perch on the bow and I could lean back and sleep and when I opened my eyes there would be sky.

She was very young and was just getting to know her own mind. She couldn’t tell if she sounded silly or not. She wasn’t thinking about that. Because she did not have a small boat yet, in those days, she stayed on shore. She got to know certain trees growing on the bank. Some of these grew outward over the rocks with great thick arms like bridges and she’d sit on them, her legs swinging over the water. She knew sunny places where the rocks were sure to be warm if the sun came out at all, even in winter. She knew places where foxes darted out from the underbrush to the beach, or back from the beach to the underbrush, the white tips of their tails last to vanish. All day she followed her nose, and at the end of the day was pulled back to her house where she and Sam lived.

“Thirst”

Once, Great-grandpa teased that my home must be like a big swimming pool, it rained so much. I shook my head. 

“The ground keeps drinking it,” I said.

“So, it’s that kind of thirsty,” he answered. 

I’m not sure, but I think Great-grandpa disapproved of that thirst. He ate and drank sparingly. If water was left in his glass he’d set it aside where it magnified the glints in the countertop, and he’d drink it later. He never complained about the weather. He practiced satisfaction. 

Grandma and I didn’t say much last year in the weeks after he died. I suppose we talked in the way animals do, soft sounds of parting and greeting, syllables about the weather, small nods and brushes and blinks, murmurs regarding the food Grandma knew we still needed to eat. She and I looked around a lot, more bewildered than comforted by the world that hadn’t changed when a man who had been a solid fact for the entirety of both our lives became a figment supported only by memory and guesses roving between belief and superstition about what he had become. We sat on the back porch every night after dinner and stared. I don’t know what Grandma was hearing in her head, we didn’t talk about those things. But I kept hearing Great-grandpa saying “You’ll never be able to add them up, Claire.” He’d tell me that, it seemed like every summer, when he’d see me gazing at the blades of prairie grass growing right up to the walls of their house and out to the edge of the world where the sky came down. He said it softly though, and I knew he wasn’t mocking me. 

“Willa and June”

When she was nearly three years old June waded into the saltwater on a beach south of Glen Cove and took off her clothes. Willa and her old friend Oliver sat on the rocks, just beyond the shadow of fir trees, watching. June's clothes washed up miles down shore at the feet of a lone seagull. She never got dressed again. Willa allowed June’s nakedness because their house stood alone at the end of a long, wooded driveway on their skinny peninsula in the Puget Sound. And she allowed it because June never asked her permission. Before Willa's mother and father embarked on their world tour leaving Willa and June alone in the house indefinitely, Grandma would laugh as June ran through the kitchen with her chin tucked and her stomach leading the way. Grandpa would lean forward from his easy chair to swat June's soft bottom, or to poke her belly, to which June would reply with a short grunted "hey." Willa watched how they both loved to hold June on their laps, their freckled hands cupped beneath her warm thighs. She didn't join in the laughter, in the poking and squeezing of her daughter's body.

“Alone with Rabbit”

Every morning gray gulls circled the steeple of the church across the street. They swooped, crying, into the bell tower, dove deeply across the doorway, finally rose in a discordant chorus to the ridgepole and settled there in time to ignore the attendants of morning mass. Maple heard the gulls and mistook them for her brothers in her sleep, Their sound caused her to dream of home. She dreamed she was the water. She saw the gulls, not in their staggered line on the ridgepole, but as a floating flock on her surface, fishing her, rising and settling on her innumerable waves. Then she would wake, get out of bed and put the kettle on as the neighbor’s hound dog began to bellow.

Meanwhile, Rabbit would come in under the fence, her paws scrabbling the smooth dirt in the shallow hole. When she was through, her big ears stood straight and she shook her bristling fur. 

“Good morning,” Maple would say as she moved from the stove and opened the back door for the dog. After that, there wasn’t much more to say most days.

“Minnesota Stubble Field”

Her legs struck such a quick, steady clip she’d passed everybody. Her body, keeping its urgent pace was the only distinction in the landscape. Her scrawny child’s frame rose like a giant’s over the stubble. There was not even a bird in the sky to offer companionship, no tree for one to roost in, no sprout of green to draw its eye.  She squinted in vain over the gray earth and rotted stalks. She scanned a vista with no variation, no cloud. It neither threatened snow nor offered sun. No Brown Thrashers dipped or swerved low across on the horizon. No Sharpshinned Hawk  glided a loose spiral overhead. Her feet, double-socked inside her boots, trip-tripped along while Frances thought of yesterday when Sarah had caught up and invited her to ride Mash. Mash was Sarah’s gray pony she sometimes rode home from school. Frances had climbed onto his broad warm back behind Sarah’s black braid with the feeling of a holiday. She had patted his firm flank, tapped a soundless beat there with her mittened hand and got Sarah to sing with her.

“Freya, Alden, Eyrie”

Alden saw Freya’s thin waist-length hair disappear behind the first wave of huckleberry and rhododendron and he didn’t budge. He sighed as one sighs at the first snow, at a crescent moon. “I am captured and recaptured,” he thought and then he went downstairs to make the oatmeal.

Eyrie was already making the oatmeal. She’d watched her mother for eleven years and now her own hands mimicked Freya’s. Her palms scooped up and brought in a tight fist the same quantity of oats to the steaming pot. Her thumb and two fingers took the same pinch of salt from the saltbox and sprinkled it. She guided the spoon around the inside edges of the honey jar and gathered there just the right amount of sweetness to drizzle in letters and pictures into the bubbling oatmeal. She rummaged in the sack of dried apricots, chopped, and stirred. The meal, once it was mounded into crockery bowls, set on the table next to the milk and spoons, was the same in each particular of taste, and scent, and appearance as if Freya herself had prepared it. Eyrie poured a mote of milk around the oats in her bowl and looked at her father for the first time that morning. Alden made a lake of milk in the center of his bowl, and ate. 

When Eyrie had eaten her last bite Alden reached for her bowl and took it to the sink. 

“Mom left,” she told him.