The Mermaids Singing (2 page)

At the wake—in a room where my mother's body was displayed in a coffin, her hands contorted in mock prayer, a string of beads tied like a shoelace through her fingers, and a thick red wig lying like a pelt between her head and the silvery pillow—a woman I had thought was dead came to fetch me.

I was sitting alone in the front row watching Stephen, my mother's boyfriend. He was kneeling by the side of the casket, reaching over to finger the sleeve of her dress, and then, with a gentle stroke that made me nauseous when I imagined the feel of it, he touched her earlobe. Behind her head was the wreath of white and yellow roses, draped with a satin ribbon inscribed
Mother
in purple cursive. Stephen had ordered it, as well as a heart-shaped arrangement of pink carnations, that resembled an oversized box of Valentine candy, with a ribbon that read
Beloved
. I'd had this strange
feeling all morning that the ribbons were like flash cards, meant to remind me in all the mugginess of funeral arrangements who I was and why I was there. This is your mother. You are her daughter. Your mother is dead.

The old woman came in by the doorway to the right of the wreaths. She was not exactly fat, but solid-looking, with thick, bleached hair tied in a loose bun. Her face was intricately lined, the deepest wrinkles leading from the edges of her mouth to her chin—an outline like the wooden mouthpiece of a puppet. She was one of those old people that you can tell were once beautiful. She looked briefly at the casket and then at me, and for a moment she looked confused, and I thought she must have come into the wrong viewing room. But instead of turning back, she walked over to me, her puppet mouth hanging open in preparation to speak.

“Is that Gráinne?” she said, and I was surprised, not only that she knew my name, but that she pronounced it correctly. It's the name of a sixteenth-century Gaelic queen, pronounced
Graw-nya
, with a roll over the
r
, but no one ever knows this unless I tell them, and then they rarely remember anyway.

I was too freaked to answer the woman, but she read my silence as a hello and sat down.

“Clíona O'Halloran is my name,” she said. She pronounced it oddly, with a clicking sound at the beginning. Her voice skittered over the syllables so quickly that I couldn't get a picture in my mind of how it would be spelled. “I'm a relation of yours from Ireland,” she said.

There was something very familiar about her voice. It was like the difference between my mother saying my name and a teacher or new friend. In my mother's voice my name sounded musical, like poetry; there was a rhythm that no one else ever seemed to reproduce. All of this woman's words sounded like my mother saying
Gráinne
.

“You're who?” I said. I had no relatives—none in America, let
alone Ireland. It was always just me and my mother. My mother said she came from nowhere and I came from her.

“I'm your grandmother,” the woman said, and she looked over at the casket, where she must have seen my mother's wigged head—and Stephen, crouching beside it. “Your Mum is….” she said, then stopped and looked down, looping the thin black strap of her purse over her fingers. “Grace was my daughter.” Her hands were brown and old, the delicate bones starkly visible beneath the loose skin. Her fingers, though callused, were long and elegant, bare except for a polished gold band. I thought of my mother's long fingers, holding a cigarette like it was a part of her, hovering delicately from her mouth and away from her face and back again. And my mother's waxy fingers now, tied together by the white beads and silver links of what Stephen said was called a rosary, which I'd never seen before.

The woman sighed. “Have you no words?” she said. What did she expect? “Grandmother,” “relation,” these were words that had never had anything to do with me. I hated this woman suddenly, for coming in and changing the silence of this room in which it seemed I had sat for ages.

“I suppose Grace told you nothing,” she said, and I felt a tight sob advancing in my throat. My forehead ached as I tried to stop it, and I saw my mother's and Stephen's faces blur and waver as if under water.

“My mother tells me everything,” I said, my voice breaking. Then Stephen seemed to wake up from his trance, turning around and looking at me with so much pity that I stood up, ready to fight him off. “My mother tells me everything,” I said again, to Stephen this time, and he nodded. I'd said this to him before, I'd said it to him only last month, last month when my mother was still alive. Then too I had known it wasn't true.

I started to back away, moving toward the doorway behind the rows of chairs. The woman stood up and they both stepped forward, as if they were stalking me.

“Gráinne,” the woman said in her musical voice.

“Gráinne,” Stephen echoed, flatly, though he'd always put more effort into saying it correctly than any of my mother's previous boyfriends. “Why don't we go back to the apartment and discuss this over lunch,” he said. “You should eat something,” he added, when he saw I was glaring at him, “before we come back for the evening service.”

I shrugged and let him take hold of my arm. He'd been trying so hard, for so long, to coordinate the little things, as if by doing so he could make me believe everything was normal. He guided me outside, the tips of his fingers a gentle pressure against the small of my back. I imagined the old woman was watching Stephen's hand, as acutely aware of its position as I was.

When we reached the car, Stephen put her suitcase in the trunk and went around to the passenger side, to hold the door open for her. I got in the rear seat by myself. When he climbed in and started the coughing motor I watched the backs of their heads, thinking about how many times I'd viewed Stephen and my mother from this angle. Before, when her hair was a mass of silky, rust-color curls, and later, when the knotted end of a scarf covered the base of her bald skull. I stared angrily at this woman's cheaply dyed blond bun and thought:
I
should be sitting in the front now.

The woman shifted around and caught me watching her. She smiled queerly and made a gesture with her fingers to her hair. I realized she was referring to mine and I reached for my neck, plucking at the meager strands.

“Gráinne Mhaol,” she said, “was the pirate queen's nickname. It is told that as a young child she begged to be taken along with her father's ship sailing to Spain. When her mother told her that ships were not the place for young ladies, Gráinne cut her hair like a boy's. They called her Gráinne Mhaol, bald Gráinne, after that.”

I ran a hand through what was left of my hair. At the last minute that morning, Stephen had trimmed it, trying to even out the mess I'd made when I'd cut it all off, myself. In the end there was not much he could do to fix it, so I had slapped some of his gel on my
head, and combed it down. I knew I looked ridiculous and I certainly didn't need to be reminded.

“What's your point?” I snapped, and Stephen jerked his eyes up to the rearview mirror.

“Gráinne!” he said, and the woman turned back around, putting her hand in the air to quiet him, as if I were some poor little orphan who needed to be humored. I crossed my arms and slumped back in the seat, watching the featureless highway whiz by. I wondered if this woman thought she was moving in with us, if she had come to replace my mother out of some guilty obligation. If she thinks I'm going to make it easy for her, I said to myself, she knows nothing about my mother, and even less about me.

 

“Please eat something, Gráinne,” Stephen said. “You've got to be hungry by now.” He had stopped by Legal Sea Foods on the drive home and picked up clam chowder, salad, and warm rolls. He must have remembered that, last year, this had been my favorite meal. But in my bowl the thick soup looked like curdled milk, littered with chunks of potatoes and clams. Orange grease amoebas floated on the surface.

“I'm not hungry,” I said, but he kept watching me, so I selected a relatively clean piece of lettuce from the mound of overdressed salad and forced it into my mouth, letting my saliva well up so that when I chewed, the taste wouldn't be too strong.

Mrs. O'Halloran, who had insisted on setting the kitchen table and doling out the food, was now eating with such spare movements that I waited eagerly for her to slip up and dribble chowder onto her suit. Stephen was hunkered over his bowl, his eyes darting guiltily back and forth between the two of us.

When they had finished eating, and my soup had cooled to a custard, Mrs. O'Halloran cleared the dishes and made us tea. She had to search through the cupboards to find my mother's old ceramic teapot, which she rinsed with boiling water from the kettle before dropping in the Salada bags. She brought cups and saucers and tea
spoons to the table, as well as the milk carton and a cereal bowl she'd filled with sugar. Stephen and I watched her in silence. She seemed to be performing some sort of religious ritual, like the priest I'd once seen on Sunday cable, with white crackers, water, and wine, all laid out in preparation. My mother, when she drank tea, poured water—before it boiled—into her “#1
MOM
” mug, plopped in a tea bag, and, without waiting for it to steep, added skim milk. She sipped it still standing at the refrigerator, a cigarette in her other hand, the Salada octagon hanging out of the mug like a price tag.

Mrs. O'Halloran sat down to pour the tea, and we passed around the sugar and milk in silence, Stephen and I swirling our teaspoons carefully, as if they were dangerous weapons. The gentle clinking was like some foreign music around the table. The tea spread with an unbearable heat through my throat and stomach, while Stephen asked Mrs. O'Halloran a few stupid questions about her flight—how long was it and did she spend much time at Logan, blah, blah, blah. It was becoming more obvious to me that Stephen had something to do with this—that he'd known this Irish woman was coming for me. He asked her if she was tired and told her she'd be staying in my Mom's room.

I hadn't spoken yet, but when the woman stood up, ready to go settle herself into the room like she belonged there, I couldn't stand it anymore.

“Are you leaving tomorrow?” I said. The funeral was tomorrow; maybe she was just here to say good-bye. She looked at Stephen before answering me.

“Not tomorrow, no,” she said. “I'm staying on awhile, to sort out your mother's affairs and…” She stopped, began clearing the cups and saucers.

“And what?” I said. I was really getting fed up with this take-charge crap. Who the hell did she think she was?

“Sure, we'll talk this through later on,” she said. “It's rest you should be getting now.”

“No,” I said, ignoring Stephen's don't-be-rude look. “What else
do you think you need to sort out?” The woman sighed, putting the cups back on the table.

“I'm sorry, Gráinne,” she said. It was the beginning of the same speech I'd been hearing the last two days: I'm sorry, Gráinne, that your mother died…. “It's obvious that Grace did not tell you much about where she came from. But the only family you have now is in Ireland. I think arrangements should be made for you to come back with me. When you're ready.”

“My mother didn't have any family,” I said. “Just me.”

“It's your grandmother I am, I tell you.”

“My grandmother died when I was three years old.” As I said it, she looked pained, and I was glad, in a vicious sort of way, that I'd hurt her.

“That's what your mother thought, yes,” she said. She sounded exhausted.

“So, what, you've been pretending to be dead for twelve years? And you're just showing up now?” Mrs O'Halloran looked at Stephen again. I was getting tired of this conspiracy shit, I really was.

“No, Gráinne,” she said. “I haven't been pretending, your mother has. She wanted me dead, so.” She said it like it was nothing. As if she hadn't just told me my mother had been lying to me for most of my life. I looked at Stephen. He was sitting down again, holding his forehead with one thin hand.

“How long have you known about this?” I said. He dropped his hand and looked up at me. He looked exhausted, too. It seemed everyone was exhausted but me—exhausted
with
me, maybe.

“Not long,” he said.

Well, fuck you both, I thought, but I couldn't say it. I just left the two of them in the kitchen, went to my room, and slammed the door. I could hear my mother's response in my head.
Why don't you slam it a little harder
, she always used to sing after me.
Maybe you'll convince me your anger justified
.

 

That night, after we had returned from the evening “viewing,” and Mrs. O'Halloran had gone to bed, I opened my door and walked across the dark living room. Stephen was lying on the couch, with a blanket covering his body and his feet sticking out at the end over the arm cushion. He'd let his long brown hair out of the ponytail and taken his shirt off. He had one arm flung across his eyes but I could tell he was awake by the careful way he was breathing. When I stepped up next to him, he peeked out from beneath his wrist, then sat up, swinging his feet down to the floor to make room for me on the couch. He was wearing his New England Conservatory sweat shorts, the ones my Mom always teased him about. (“What do a bunch of wimpy musicians need with gym suits?”) I sat down on the warm cushions, stretching my nightshirt over my naked knees, and Stephen sighed, attempting a sad smile. He smelled like he'd been drinking, and I saw on the table the bottle of whiskey my mother opened only when she had a cold. I could barely see his features, but I could fill them in from memory, I'd been looking at him for so long.

“Can't sleep,” he said, a statement for both of us rather than a question. He combed a hand through his hair. At the evening service, while we stood in the receiving line, I had focused on that hand, watching him clasp the palms of my mother's friends and the long procession of her former boyfriends. I had felt that the motion of his fingers squeezing and releasing, was what sustained me, that it was his hand that was powering mine to do the same. I had never been to a wake before, never suspected that my mother would have wanted rosaries and little prayer cards. But she had decided on the arrangements; Stephen had told me so. Maybe she had even imagined me standing in that line, had predicted that when I shook hands with the priest I would have to listen to Stephen to know to call him “Father.”