Melusine at the Water’s Edge

Suzy Eynon

 

Her 40th birthday on earth coincided with a full moon, and a King Tide which washed a family from where they stood on the rocks into the water. Mel blinked in the colorlessness of a late morning sun as the waves reached the hotel property line, normally far from the water’s edge. It now stopped feet from where she slept inside the room. Today, people surfed atop the exact spot where previously she had napped in the sand, a paperback discarded at her side.

She watched from the bedroom window as the water foamed and swirls of seagrass were sucked into the multiplying eyes and funnels. It was difficult to imagine this was the same landscape she viewed months earlier, now transformed by the water’s spread, both beautiful and threatening. The water wiped the land temporarily from existence with the promise the water would recede, later, to its normal level. Maybe it had come to reclaim her. When she looked out the window toward the horizon she could imagine herself standing not safely on land but in the water. On the water. It was all around her unless she looked down to see her bare feet in a field of carpet.

Mel did not hear about the family pulled into the ocean until dinner that night. She may have noticed the presence of a hovering helicopter, which was not unusual for the populated beach. She tried to not check her phone on vacation days, so she saw no news stories. At dinner, rain pelted the restaurant windows, stretching down the glass in streams. A few locals sat at the bar. She could tell they were locals by the way they greeted the bartender. She imagined, briefly, a life in a coastal town where she slipped onto bar stools for a dinner out, maybe even alone, comfortable conversation with the restaurateurs and bookstore clerks and shopkeepers. No one would ask where she was from as they might a tourist. They’d recognize her as part of their inner circle.

“It’s beautiful when you’re not out in it,” she said to her boyfriend. She nodded toward the windows. She tried to absorb the dim interior of the restaurant which glowed butter yellow. String lights lined the floorboards as if they were seated in a theater.

They ate at this same restaurant each time they visited the Oregon coast from Seattle, and Mel sought to replace her prior memory of the restaurant with this new image. Last time, she had worn a sunflower-patterned dress, and she had felt light and happy as they left dinner. She had paused in front of the restaurant, turned to her boyfriend, and stretched to kiss his lips. Her face had felt warm from the day in the sun, and her eyes still burned from staring at the dance of sunlight on the water, dots blotting her vision when she shut her eyes. The sparkles from the water, like liquid silver, remained as suns behind her lids.

“Sweetie,” he had said before he pulled away and walked down the stone path and away from dinner. When he said sweetie like this, he meant stop, or don’t, or please shut up. Later, when he wanted ice cream cones which they licked in angry silence, caramel ribbons mixing with resentment on their tongues as they watched the sunset, he said he didn’t enjoy putting on a show, as he phrased it, in front of the restaurant. She couldn’t help but see it in a black and white way – this was one of her faults, this absolute thinking – and had concluded he just did not want to kiss her.

She no longer cared about the small rejection. Maybe she was used to rejection now, some adaptation possible after a certain number of years in a relationship, a rhythmic settling into the journey as one might on a long bus ride. Layers built up so the fleshy underneath is no longer penetrable. Like armor. She was self-contained and no longer stretched for lips. She watched the locals seated at the bar as they talked to the bartender.

“Did you see, on the news?” one said. “Those people were swept out.”

“Terrible,” said the bartender.

“We were just down the beach when it happened. Swallowed them right off the rocks.”

Mel reached for her phone and Googled Oregon beach death today. There it was: a family took a walk on the rocks to look at tidepools when the tide surprised them and knocked the mother and child into the water. Mel pictured the rising water’s grasp as it aimed at their human bodies and reached for their ankles, then their knees.

“Some people got swept out at the beach today,” Mel said to her boyfriend. She whispered to cover her morbid gossip. “The tide got them.”

He shook his head. “Sad.”

“But isn’t it weird? The King Tide, the full moon? Maybe it means something.”

“Not everything means something.” He didn’t look up from the menu he held aloft. Mel sat face-to-face with the red-inked catch of the day now obscured by one blocky hand.

▱

It’s nearly imperceptible while it’s happening – the shaping of who a person is by the land where they dwell. Mel can recall the sensation of the powder rubbed between the pads of her fingertips, the exact shade of the dust as it disappears into desert air. Mel never saw the dust elsewhere, anywhere on earth, though it is fair to say she only saw a limited percentage of the earth’s surface. The dust stuck with her.

The powdered desert dust had rested in a field across the street from Mel’s childhood home. No buildings had yet marked the field, but it was leveled in preparation for further suburban expansion, a result of families like Mel’s moving first to the west and then settling at the edges of the city, in a time before the city stretched and stretched to absorb streets and previous barriers until it swelled between major freeways. She attended elementary school in portable trailers because the public-school district was not prepared, did not have enough funds for the growing population of school-age children brought to the valley by their West-moving parents. She attended gymnastics class in a warehouse in the business park across from the local airport. With her sister, she played a diving game in the backyard pool. They slid plastic diving rings up their legs to bind them, then tried to swim to the water’s surface. They altered themselves into mermaids.

Once while at the Phoenix Zoo with her Brownie troop, Mel noticed a shack atop one of the caliche-bolstered hillsides. “What’s that?” She would never make it to status of Girl Scout, and only stayed a Brownie as long as she did because she enjoyed holding the tiny turtle Summer’s older brother kept in a glass bowl in their rec room where the meetings were held.

“Oh, many things used to be here, on this land,” said Summer’s mom. Mel could still remember their home phone number, and recite it in her head like a mantra, seven numbers before there were ten.

Mel picked up a seashell as small as her fingernail. “Why would seashells be here? In the desert?”

Summer’s mom smiled. “This all used to be ocean.”

Nothing was in its original form. This desert was once an ocean floor, which felt impossible as the asphalt emitted waves of heat. The temperature threatened to break out of the nineties and into the triple digits.

Mel had known she was different as far back as her memories stretched, which was not to birth. She couldn’t find any baby photos in the family photo albums. Mel traced the mermaid decoration on the cover of one such album with her fingertips and forced her skin against the sharp crescents of the aquamarine sequins. When she asked her parents about the absence of photographs and keepsakes, they pretended not to hear.

She was different in ways both charming and not. She felt a sense of loss, the reasons for which were unclear. She felt a call to another place. She wanted to be near water, and not the Salt River or the manmade lakes of the desert empire, but the sea she saw in television shows and read about in books. Mel and her little sister shared a bedroom in their house, though there were three bedrooms so they could each have their own space. They elected to sleep with their twin beds pushed together, to fit into the bedroom farthest from the street and from a broken front window. They felt protected by their proximity to each other. They watched the Home Shopping Network together until 2 a.m. and fell asleep to the gentle murmur of the host. A capitalist lullaby. Genuine sapphire, 24 carat gold band, this deal is just for you.

Mel was unable to overlook the nighttime shifts and sighs of her sister. Mel slid a flattened moving box between their beds to obscure her sister’s face. The top flaps of the box relaxed with time and flopped into what Mel viewed as shelves, so she thought of the cardboard wall as a life-size dollhouse prop, no different from the cardboard she taped together to create dollhouses for her plastic people. The cardboard shelves would not bear weight and therefore held no items of home like vases, but Mel still thought of them as shelves.

Mel wondered if she was not from or meant to dwell in the desert. Her parents claimed she was raised in the house across from the dirt field, but she felt no attachment to the field or the cacti or the artificially cooled interiors of her youth. Likewise, the searing of her leg flesh against errant metal seat belt buckles reminded her of the uninhabitability of the desert. She decided then: she must have come from the water.

▱

Mel watched the water pull away from the grassy edges of the hotel property. Its fingers unfurled their grip on the shifting land. They took a walk in the water’s absence under the still-blank sky. The ocean had left notes for them, tokens, reminders of its fluctuating body: clumps of seaweed, burnt logs, empty crab shells, chunks of translucent jellyfish like torn gelatin. Crows gathered to pick through the wreckage.

“I’ve been thinking about moving home,” Mel said to her boyfriend.

He stiffened. His reaction to confrontation was to freeze as if he might remain undetected if he made no movement, any forward momentum prevented by his refusal to acknowledge the request. Sometimes he would stop in place as they walked, as they bickered, as if his entire trajectory was thrown off or halted in its tracks by the sound of her voice.

“I just miss it,” she said.

“And what about me? You’d just leave me?”

“We could go together,” she said.

“You know I can’t get work there.”

His facts were indisputable. Mel wished she had facts: but I want to go home, but I miss the desert now, but I don’t belong on the coast. But these were all feelings, so she didn’t speak them. She looked down the beach, toward where she knew the prior day’s tragedy had occurred and expected to see some indication of death. It was unfair that the land and water, though they’d changed shape, were able to pull back into themselves all while erasing the marks of the previous day. There should be a mark on the indifferent rocks, or a tint to the violent foam, to indicate that something had been taken in exchange for what the water left.

The short seawall had been tagged with white spray paint. Mel couldn’t be sure when it had happened. It could’ve been there for years without her noticing. The words were already wind-worn. Shaky loops said She’s not dead but she’s never coming back.

At the waterline, Mel pressed a big toe into saturated sand, then pulled back, and sea water immediately filled its absence. A sand flea bobbed in the tiny pool.

“You’re pulling on my arm,” Mel’s boyfriend said.

“I’m not,” Mel said. “I’m just walking.”

She recognized they were fighting at the shoreline, which felt ridiculous, that they could bicker on the edge of beauty and disaster like that as if they’d travelled to the beach just to be unhappy. She pulled her arm away and turned to face him.

“I’m going home.”

“What?” her boyfriend asked. “How are you getting there?” Here, he probably thought he had her. She was so far from home. “That makes no sense.”

“My real home,” she said.

“Phoenix? Really?”

Mel turned to the ocean. She pictured the shack, the caliche-slashed hill she would need to climb. She moved into the water.

 

Suzy is from the desert and lives in Seattle. Her fiction has appeared in Overheard Lit, Hungry Ghost Magazine, King Ludd’s Rag (Malarkey Books), and others. Find more of her work at https://suzyeynon.com/ or on Twitter @SuzyEynon.