The Seduction of Water Read online

  By the time I leave Tea & Sympathy I’m almost surprised that Phoebe Nix still wants to publish “The Selkie’s Daughter” in Caffeine. But she’s given me a sheaf of galley proofs, which I’ve slipped underneath my raincoat to keep dry, so I suppose she still means to go ahead. I feel, though, that I’ve totally muffed my first editorial luncheon. The rain doesn’t help. My umbrella—having acquired an energetic life of its own at Tea & Sympathy—promptly turns itself inside out and wings east toward St. Vincent’s Hospital. There’s nothing to do but bow my head to the onslaught of rain and head west on Jane, toward the river, where all this rain and wind seem to be coming from.

  By the time I make it home the galley sheets are limp and water-stained. I read over my essay, which instead of gaining stature in set type seems to have shrunken and withered. The little that still sounds good to me feels appropriated. I’m telling a story told to me by my mother, who heard it from her mother. When I wrote it that seemed to be the point—the way fairy tales are handed down from mother to daughter. But instead of a sense of matriarchal bonding there is now a whiff—like the dead fish smell coming off the river tonight—of theft. Aren’t I just stealing my mother’s story? Even the title, “The Selkie’s Daughter”—which Phoebe admired and which I thought was an original variation on “The Selkie”—rings false to me, as if I’d heard it somewhere else. I even search Amazon.com for other books with that title but the closest match I find is The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty.

  The rainy weather lifts in the next weeks, but instead of lightening my gloom it just makes me too edgy to sit at my desk. I make no further progress writing about my mother and fall shamelessly behind on my grading. I feel bad because my students were truly excited by the fairy-tale assignment and each time I come to class empty-handed they look disappointed not to get their papers back. I decide, one Monday toward the end of April, that I simply have to finish grading the papers before that night’s class at Grace, but when I read Mrs. Rivera’s paper, which retells a Mexican version of “Rapunzel,” I suddenly have an overwhelming urge—like the pregnant mother in the story—for fresh greens. There’s no witch’s garden to steal from so instead I head across town to the Greenmarket in Union Square. I tell myself that I’ll just pick up some salad for lunch, but I know I’m also hoping to run into Jack.

  Instead I run into Gretchen Lu.

  She’s standing by a vegetable stall, taking two large plastic garbage bags from a young woman in overalls.

  “Professor Greenfeder,” she says, holding up her bags in two white-gloved hands. “Are you coming to the opening tonight?”

  I rack my brain for knowledge of an opening, but give up.

  “I’m sorry Gretchen, I don’t remember . . .”

  “The student show, Professor. My installation piece was inspired by your fairy-tale assignment.”

  Oh yes. Dead fish. “That’s right. You did ‘The Little Mermaid,’ right?”

  “Oh no. Too Disney. I changed my mind. Haven’t you read my paper?” I picture Gretchen Lu’s paper at the bottom of a stack on my desk, but she’s gone on, oblivious to the slothful practices of her English Comp teacher. “I wanted something more connected to my major—you know, textiles? So I reread Hans Christian Andersen and you can guess which fairy tale I came up with.”

  I can? I run though my list of Hans Christian Andersen stories in my head—“The Snow Queen”? “The Little Tin Soldier”? “The Ugly Duckling”?—but can’t come up with a textile motif. I’m distracted by the piles of fresh greens all around us, lying in damp bunches as if just picked in a dewy field somewhere in the country.

  “The Wild Swans!” Gretchen says. “You know, this little girl Elisa? Her eleven brothers are changed into swans? And she has to knit eleven shirts to change them back? And she can’t talk to anyone until she finishes knitting? And her mother-in-law makes it look like she’s killing her babies by smearing her mouth with blood? And she can’t defend herself because she can’t talk?”

  Although she ends every sentence with the upward lilt of a question, Gretchen doesn’t pause for answer, so I find myself nodding, spellbound, along with a small circle of farmers and shoppers here in the Greenmarket also drawn in by her story.

  “So she’s going to be burned as a witch? But she keeps on knitting and finally she’s finished all eleven shirts except for the sleeve on the last one and her brothers fly into the town square where she’s going to be burned and she throws the shirts over them and they change into boys again except for the youngest one? The one who gets the unfinished shirt? He has a broken wing instead of an arm.”

  Gretchen takes a deep breath and I notice that the little circle we’ve drawn also seems to take a breath and turn back to their purchases of herbs and goat cheeses and fresh-picked wildflowers. Are there really wildflowers like this growing somewhere? I wonder. Is the pine forest around the lake—Tirra Glynn, my mother called those woods—full of violets? Are there lady’s slippers growing by the pool below Two Moons? Is it really almost May?

  “Isn’t that the creepiest detail? The winged arm?” Gretchen shivers with pleasure and the garbage bags in her gloved hands shake like cheerleader’s pom-poms.

  “Yes,” I say, wondering what she’s made of this detail in her installation piece. It’s got to be better than dead fish, right?

  “What time is the show, Gretchen? I’d love to see your piece.”

  Gretchen holds up her left hand to look at her watch. I notice, for the first time, that what I had taken for gloves are in fact bandages.

  “Eight,” she says. “Only seven hours away and I’ve got three more shirts to knit. No one’s going to burn me,” she says, giggling, “but I know how Elisa felt.”

  “What are you knitting them from . . .” And then of course I remember. I don’t have to look into the garbage bag that Gretchen has obligingly spread open with her scratched and bandaged hands. Nettles. That’s what Elisa knitted the sweaters out of in the story. Stinging nettles.

  “Jesus,” I say to Gretchen, touching her right hand gingerly. I notice that above the white line of bandage the skin is dotted with red pinpoints, like tiny drops of blood. I fell into a patch of nettles once. The rash was so bad my mother had to soak me in oatmeal baths for a week.

  Gretchen only shrugs at my concern and smiles. “You know what they say, Professor Greenfeder, ‘You have to suffer for your art.’ ”

  Chapter Seven

  Considering that she has maimed herself in the execution of my assignment, I figure that the least I can do is go to Gretchen’s show. The only problem is that my class at Grace doesn’t end until eight-thirty. It occurs to me, as I hurry through the rest of the papers I have to grade, that it might be pedagogically defensible to dismiss my class early and invite them to the student show at The Art School. Gretchen has given me a handful of flyers and I see that the theme of the show is Dreams and Nightmares: Childhood Memories. Someone has drawn a picture of a leering wolf in granny bonnet underneath the location and time of the show. I know that at least a few of my students will have done pieces based on fairy tales, so really, it ties in beautifully with the assignment my Grace students have just completed.

  By four o’clock I’ve finished all but one of the papers—Mr. Nagamora’s, which I’ve saved for last because his English is so faltering that it’s painful to read and agony to correct. I decide to take a break and make a light dinner before trying to untangle Mr. Nagamora’s knotted syntax. I sauté the rhubarb chard and dandelion greens I bought at the Greenmarket in olive oil and garlic and toss them into a bowl of capellini. I rarely go to this much trouble to cook for myself, but the fresh greens seem to demand some extra respect. I don’t actually have a kitchen table (I certainly don’t have a dining room table!), just a counter and one wobbly bar stool, so tonight I eat at my desk, looking out the window. Although the stretch of Jersey shore I face is mostly warehouses and docks, I think I see a bit of green in the shoreline to the north. The last few train ride
s I’ve taken to Rip Van Winkle have been on rainy days, so I hadn’t noticed the greening of the forested parts of the Palisades. Nor have I spoken to Aunt Sophie since she told me the news that the hotel was up for sale. Surely, though, it would be a little while before the hotel was sold or before anyone decided to tear it down. Time enough for me to go up there when classes are done and spend some time walking in the green woods behind the hotel. Time to swim in the lake.

  I finish my pasta and greens and although full I realize I’m not sated. Like Rapunzel’s mother, this longing I have for greenery transcends carnal appetite. The green I’m longing for is the translucent dappled green of a forest glen, pale fern green, shadowy pine green, sunstruck lake green. Although I’ve always felt I belonged here in the city, I hadn’t realized until now how much I depended on that pocket of country a few hours north to retreat to—if only in my mind.

  I startle out of my reverie of green, realizing I’m going to be late to class. And I still haven’t graded Mr. Nagamora’s paper. All the work I’ve done today will be worthless if I can’t hand back all the papers at once. I decide to read his paper quickly without correcting anything, just to get a feel for it.

  At first I’m surprised at how hard it is for me to read without the red pen in my hand. I reach for it twice, but then the sheer beauty of the story, visible like the warp thread in an elaborate brocade, wins me over and I sit reading with my hands clasped in my lap. I know when I’ve finished that if I were to subtract for every error Mr. Nagamora has made—every crime against English usage—he would get a failing grade. So instead—because the story is so beautiful and because I am out of time—I scrawl a large A on top of his paper and shove it into my book bag before I can change my mind.

  On the way to class I justify Mr. Nagamora’s A by deciding to have him read the story out loud to the class. The story about a poor Japanese weaver who marries a mysterious woman who is able to weave a magical cloth for sails will be a perfect introduction to how textiles figure in fairy tales. There’s “Rumpelstiltskin,” of course, in which the miller’s daughter has to spin gold out of flax, and “The Three Spinners,” whose heroine also finds a surrogate spinner to do her work—but instead of a dwarf she finds three deformed sisters to do the work for her and when the prince meets the hideous threesome on the wedding day and learns that their deformities are caused by years of spinning he forbids his young bride from ever spinning again. There seems to be a subversive thread running through these stories protesting the drudgery of women’s work. I think of the banishment of spindles in “Sleeping Beauty.” I think of the selkie in my mother’s story who is unable to knit, but weaves a wreath out of salt spray in her daughter’s hair as her parting gift. I think of Gretchen Lu’s maimed hands. It will be perfect, I think. We’ll hear Mr. Nagamora’s story and then go see what Gretchen Lu has made of “The Wild Swans.”

  When I tell the class we’re ending early and going on a field trip there’s an agreeable ripple of excitement but also a slight frisson of anxiety. I have to assure Mrs. Rivera that she’ll be able to catch the nine forty-nine back to Great Neck (the family she lives with expects her back to sleep in the house even on her days off—in case one of the children wakes in the night) and give Amelie alternate subway directions so she can make it back to Queens without walking back across town. Aidan is quiet through all this, but it occurs to me that there’s probably a curfew at the detention house where he stays. I tell him it’s all right if he can’t go to the show, but he grins and tells me he wouldn’t miss it.

  I hand back their papers during this flurry of negotiations—grateful really that the noise cloaks the disappointed sighs and the little gasps of pleasure with which my students react to their grades. After all these years I am still not comfortable being the giver of grades, the passer of judgment. I worry I’ve been too harsh with the poorly graded and too lenient to the ones getting good grades. When I hold out Mr. Nagamora’s paper I almost decide to pull it back—so sure I am now of the recklessness of that A—and the pages quiver midair between us for a moment before they float down to his desk. I see the creased lines of his face tighten as he looks down at the grade on top and for a second I think he has misunderstood. Does an A mean something else—something shameful like Hawthorne’s scarlet letter—in Japan? But then I realize that the tension in his face is only his attempt to stem the smile that finally floods across his face.

  “So many mistakes I’m sure I make . . .” he begins, looking up at me.

  “But the story is so beautiful,” I say. “Would you read it to the class? I think if you read it aloud you might be able to correct the errors yourself later.”

  See, I say to myself, I haven’t totally abandoned the cause of grammar. I’m sure I read somewhere that this reading-the-text-aloud-as-proofreading is a legitimate rhetorical procedure.

  Mr. Nagamora blushes so violently that I fear he will be too shy to read his paper to the class, but he rises instantly to his feet, electing on his own to stand before the class where the only sign of his nervousness is the slight trembling of the pages in his hand as he tells us the story of “The Crane Wife.”

  “In Japan too we have a story of a man who marries a woman who comes to him in much mystery like your Irish farmer who marries his seal bride. Your story reminded me of a story my father told me and for many years I thought it was a true story. That is because the story is about a silk weaver and that is what my father was back in Japan.”

  Mr. Nagamora takes a deep breath and looks at me. I nod for him to go on. What amazes me is that the grammatical errors I know are there on the page are vanishing as he tells his story aloud.

  “The silk weaver in the story, though, made sails for boats and my father wove silk for kimonos. There was one pattern that my father was most famous for—a pattern called Dancing Crane—and when he worked on this pattern he would tell this story about the sailmaker.

  “ ‘Once there was sailmaker who lived by himself,’ my father told me.”

  I notice that Mr. Nagamora’s voice changes now that it’s his father telling the story. Also his spine straightens and the pages in his hand cease to tremble.

  “And he was very lonely because he had no bride. In spring he watched the cranes dancing their mating dance together and although their dance was beautiful it made him sad because he had no one to share his rice with at night, no one to help him weave his cloth or admire how light and fine the sails were when they were done. One autumn night he heard the lonely cry of the cranes flying south for winter and the sound made him so sad he stood at his door for a long time—far into the night—watching the birds fly across the moon. He raised his arms and the long sleeves of his kimono flapped in the wind. It reminded him of the way the cranes flapped their wings in their dances and before he knew what he was doing the weaver was dancing on his doorstep, turning in great circles, dipping up and down, just like he had seen the great birds do.”

  One of the younger women in the back giggles and Mr. Nagamora lowers the paper and looks at her. I start to shush her but Mr. Nagamora grins and says, “Yes, I thought this sounded silly when I was young too and I always laughed at just this part. ‘Oh you think that’s funny,’ my father would say and I would be scared that my father was angry but then he would leap up from his loom and dance around the room like a crazy man.” Mr. Nagamora waves the pages above his head like a tambourine and swoops down to the giggler who shrieks with surprise and delight. He takes a spin around the room, flapping his arms so that the sleeves of his baggy cardigan flutter like wings. Aidan Barry claps a rhythm and for a moment I have the unsettling feeling that my class has slipped out of my control, but then Mr. Nagamora glides back to the front of the class, clears his throat, and continues reading as if nothing has happened. The class, which was whooping and shrieking at Mr. Nagamora’s dance, falls silent instantly, as if under a spell.

  “The weaver danced so long into the night that he slept through half the next day and when he awoke h
e felt ashamed that he had wasted a day of work. He was supposed to deliver a sail the next day to a ship’s captain, which he had not even begun to weave. But then he heard the sound of the shuttle knocking against the loom in the weaving room. He thought he was dreaming but when he tried the door he found it was locked. A voice from inside—a beautiful voice, a woman’s voice—called from inside. ‘Please wait and all will be well.’ The weaver was confused, but also tired and hungry, so he boiled water for tea and waited. All through the night the door remained locked and the sound of the shuttle knocking against the loom went on without a break. ‘Whoever is in there is the strongest weaver there ever was,’ the weaver thought. ‘Even if she is ugly, I will ask her to marry me.’ But in the morning, when the weaver awoke, the woman who knelt by his side, holding the finished sail, was not ugly. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, with skin as white as down, and eyes black as night. She held out to him the bundle of white silk, which when he took it in his hands was so light it was as if he held the wind.

  “ ‘This is my dowry,’ the woman said to him, ‘if you’ll have me as your bride.’

  “Of course, the weaver was delighted to have this woman, who was not only beautiful but skilled and useful, as his bride. When he delivered the sail to the ship’s captain he was paid twice what he had been paid before because the sail was so fine and light.

  “The weaver and his bride lived happily all that winter on the money from that sail, but in the spring the money was gone and the weaver knew he must make another sail. A messenger from the ship’s captain had come to ask for another sail like the one he had bought before. A sail that seemed to coax the wind out of the sky.

  “ ‘Only you can make a sail like that,’ the weaver told his bride. ‘Will you make me another?’