Writings

In the morning, it hits her. He’s gone…lost. Before she even opens her eyes Maeve sees the pale slant of November sunlight on his empty side of the bed and how the sheets crumple up in floral currents where a body should be. His body, the long muscled rope of his arms and chest, the thickets of dark hair, the heavy-lidded eyes and girlish mouth. He should still be there and she could slide her leg up and over his hip, the feel of her soft bare skin on his—silk and sandpaper and yes.

The worst of it is—she decides as she plods down the hall and turns the shower on, the worst of it is, this is her fault. She is the one who ended it this time. She is the one who said, no…it’s over…and go. She is the one who, just a few months earlier, watched him mowing the front lawn with his shirt off and sunglasses on, the river of sweat slicking down his spine to form a puddle soaking the cotton edge of his shorts waistband and wanted to put her fists through the glass, imagining those shorts thrown in a ball on the floor beside the shower she has just stepped into. Maeve is the one who thought if she had to pick up his shorts again or laugh at his jokes or bite his lip when they kissed, just like he liked, she would die.
***
Every Friday night, they used to drive over to the Rusty Rudder and sit outside by the bay watching the gulls pinwheel down to menace the children huddled on the dock. Their small fists were full of bait intended to lure silver-scaled fish but only conjuring clouds of birds. Watching them, John would always smile at them pointedly and sip his margarita without saying it. This also made Maeve want to do something severe and she’d excuse herself to the ladies’ room to the privacy of the stall. Jimmy Buffet songs pumped proudly through the loudspeakers and bowls filled with bleached shells and seaglass perched on each toilet back to force every woman just minding her own business to think about how lucky she was to be there. Paradise found. Maeve would take her mirror out and line her lips blood red, darker and darker and darker until the woman in the glass revealed a terrifying gash of a mouth and then she’d calmly wipe it clean with a piece of toilet paper, flush politely and walk back outside to where their group of other restless thirty-something locals would be gathering yet again, satisfied that she knew something they didn’t.

Having children, that was one problem.

***
Maeve’s little house by the sea has sloping floors and whitewashed walls and climbing the stairs reminds her of ascending the prow of a ship, the tilted rocking of the foundation unmoored at high tide. The house is drafty. Bitter cold in the winter months when Rehoboth’s streets are thinned out, ruthlessly pruned of all of the summer visitors: the scourge, as her father had lovingly called them, they just don’t do things like sea people, he told her back when the house was his—back when he was alive and needed a house and Maeve didn’t need a thing because she had him.

The house, another problem.

John wanted her to leave it or to sell it, so the developers could raze the gingerbread trim and put up another four-stories-high condo unit coated with pastels and furnished with nautical prints and oil paintings of lighthouses and willowy children in the sand and it was all too much for her then. John and his longing to get married and saddle her with children all across her back, his drive to pull her upstate, out-of-state, anywhere his fresh start might be waiting.

***
For a moment, thinking of all of this and running a washcloth between the narrow hollow between her breasts, Maeve feels freedom hum through her veins, imagines her bones a hive of bees and imagines herself growing older and alone in the house with its bubbled and warped glass, stricken with a desolate joy she cannot name.

She steps from the shower, letting the water pool over the square blue tiles and leaving the towel on its hook by the cabinet. There is no one to see her wandering the rooms of the house, naked, with her solid legs and her saturated drape of hair, a garment itself covering her back, hiding the tall slender length of her. The hair is what John said he noticed first about her. Maeve wonders about this now, since on that first day she also wore a turquoise bikini cut small along the bottom and she walked a few paces ahead of him, all red blonde hair and suntanned curves and it is these John always noticed on every other woman who walked by. But no, he said it was the hair and he ran around the front of her to stop her, to get Maeve to talk, to use one of his lines but what came instead was a reverent, who are you, which caught her off guard and made her smile in spite of herself.

That hair, which Da would never let her cut, “It’s your dear mother’s hair,” he always explained, his eyes growing misty, hands trembling, “To undo that would be a sin, God bless her.” And when Maeve didn’t immediately yield by asking to hear again about how he met her, he’d launch into the story of the sea woman.

“Da, please, not that again,” Maeve said.

“I won’t,” he shook his head, “I won’t…but, remember, that fisherman—he cut off all her hair and hid her magic cap so she could never go back to sea.”

“I know.”

“He stole her from the ocean, Maeve, and she lost her life.”

“It’s a hairstyle,” she protested at ten, twelve and fifteen.

“It’s your magic,” was his standard reply.

A lump wells up in Maeve’s throat bending over the dresser and pulling on her clothes, her hair still wet and raining, still the length her father loved it best.

She is lonely. That’s the truth of it. Maeve wants to love this solitude, she wants to be happy to have let John go, narrowly escaping his permanent grasp, because there were days when she practiced saying Maeve Fabian to herself, imagining it. There were days when she looked at John’s blue eyes and pictured them nested in the sweet round face of their daughter or son and she groaned, if only his eyes had been brown or green, anything. But, she coveted that lavender-indigo. She wanted it and was thrown. Almost enough to give up the house by the sea and her magic, almost.

So, for the eighth time in as many minutes, she thinks of picking up the phone and calling John home. The cool black cradle of the receiver would curve like a cupped palm over her cheek, a benediction—oh, Maeve, I was waiting for this. But, she doesn’t know if he is anymore. Rumor has it now that he’s been seen with Clarissa and Maeve’s been picturing him lighting her cigarettes and it makes her wince.

“A walk,” she says to the empty house, “To clear my head.”

Her heart is a bird beating its wings against her ribcage, flightless only due to her unforgiving bones. Her pulse races and then eases off, anxiety intoxicating her. Is she losing it or finding something inside of herself? Maeve can no longer be certain of this now. But, she laces up her boots and pulls a woolen beret over her still wet hair, trudging over the sidewalk the block to the ocean.

November—Maeve’s favorite month to live where she does, too chilly now even for the day-trippers, so she’ll have the whole shoreline to herself this early in the morning. By the time she clears the dunes, there is sand in her boots and a biting wind blowing the birds off-course overhead. It isn’t much, but Maeve feels like it is a good sign to have them as blown about as she is. It is lucky to not be the only one feeling so adrift.

John never got this either. Sometimes, Maeve didn’t want to debate, sometimes, she wanted him to see how she saw: to view life in all its whirling complexity in a way even vaguely like her own. She wanted him to respect her history, her heritage and her father’s stories. To which John once said, “Maybe the sea woman wanted to be stolen,” setting off a blistering fight.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—how did the fisherman find her? What did your Da say?”

“She was on a rock,” Maeve spit, venom in her voice, “Singing, combing her hair, enjoying the sun on her skin.”

“Yeah, well…I say she wanted that big guy to wrap her up in his arms and carry her to land.”

“Ugh, men always think things like that,” she said.

“It’s just a story,” he raised his thick dark eyebrows, “Maeve, all of it is just fairytales. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you live your live by old Irish myths and fantasies.”

“You don’t know anything,” she stood up then and walked from him, but he followed and they fought harder. This was always their way, John advancing, Maeve beating a hasty retreat.

Gratitude for her new single status floods her again at the top of the shoreline. Low tide and the sand is littered with stones and broken shells, splintered driftwood shards and gusts of sepia foam. She watches the skies, waiting for the birds to find their steady rhythm. An empty innocuous beach, Maeve should have nothing to worry about there on her native ground but, a hole left behind by someone’s ruined sandcastle rises up to snag the sole of her shoe and she falls, knowing on impact that the ankle has snapped. The jagged tension of muscle and sinew gives suddenly around its lonely split fragments—bone rendered from bone along a hairline, faultline of division—and Maeve sits, gasping in wonder at the pain of it and the chill of the ocean seeping through her jeans and her coat.

There is a lesson in this, she knows, if only she looks harder for it. She tries to stand and falls fast, a sinking stone, unable to bear her own weight. Tears of frustration ebb and flow; tears for the sharp throbbing radiating down her ankle through each toe. How many thousands of times has she walked this same stretch of beach in her lifetime, Maeve could never say. But what she does know is this, no one is waiting for her at the house. There is no one to miss her today if she is stuck out on the edge of the world like this, cold and with a snapped bone. Just minding her own business.

A gull lands at her side, mistaking her inertia for an invitation to dine on some scattered bits of bread, but Maeve has nothing to give and so she shoos the bird away. Then, off the point of her left index finger when she waves her hands at the mottled gray bird, she sees him.

A man walks toward her with an Old English sheepdog bounding in and out of the waves. The dog happily chases a stick the man throws again and again into the coursing breeze. A small figure at first, he comes closer and closer to where Maeve perches awkwardly, uncertain, right until she sees the flash of his white teeth against his still-tanned face. Then, she sighs, pulls her hair forward, fanning it out over her arms and breasts beneath her damp clothes. Maeve waits for this man to find her, singing softly to herself about battered wings, lost loves and unexpected bad breaks.

C. Delia Scarpitti, Columns Editor of Literary Mama Magazine, is a freelance writer, poet and mother of three. Her poetry, fiction, essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in a variety of online and print publications, including Mothering Magazine, The We’Moon Anthology: Love, SageWoman Magazine, Literary Mama Magazine, Mamazine.com, Mom Writer’s Literary Magazine, MotherVerse Magazine, The Apple Valley Review, Flashquake, and Natural Family Magazine. A 2008 recipient of an Emerging Artist in Fiction Grant from the state of Delaware, Delia is at work on a novel, dreams of poetry and teaches reading and writing at a local college. Her website is here

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