Displacement of Bodies in Time
They’re all dead now.
The horizon of my life is shaded with the tones of their long-vanished voices.
Once we walked these elemental shores as barefoot children, rockhounding for agate, amethyst and jasper on the dark basalt beach while our parents held hands as gulls spiralled overhead. When the ocean was still, I skipped stones with my little sister, disrupting the calm waters with our unearthly velocity. The shape of those early years hold me even now that I am old. It’s curious how time reshapes our form in the material world. The small warm stones sooth my stiff hands. My fingers are like small pieces of twisted driftwood shaped by water, stone and time. Seasons have come and gone just as the tide ebbs and flows.
My thin silvered hair lifts in wings on the breath of the ocean, here where we played on this summer beach, where saltwater roses bloom pink, where land meets the primal Bay of Fundy shore, this body of water with the highest tidal range in the world. It’s close to high tide—then the brief slack water, when there is no movement in the tidal stream. The ocean of ensorcellment glints, a mirror of things past.
I remember the heaving cold bay at low tide under the sapphire sky when I was fourteen. Early spring. Slack tide—the enormous ocean briefly rested before the turning tide flooding inward from the Gulf of Maine.
Already I’d forgotten the vast green waves of winter, the lashings of stiff sea foam hurled through the frigid air, then frozen upon the rocky beach. Last year’s dead grass was masked with tender green new growth. Dandelions popped out amidst last year’s soggy dark leaves, leaves left upon the garden bed like rotting wishes turned to mush.
“If we keep her quiet for a spell, your mother might settle. Take it one day at a time. Get some sleep into her.” My father spoke to me as though sleep was a remedy we could pour into my mother’s mouth. My father’s words were framed in thick resignation. “I don’t want her to go to the hospital again, Thalassa. She’s been fine through winter.”
He knew we couldn’t continue this way. But that final step he could not take, not even for me and my sister. He had a radiant conviction that all would work out in the mythical future he always spoke of. Camelot was just on the other side of the horizon.
This day my father spoke as though the hospitalization would be final. He didn’t understand that she had already left. The mother of enchantments who held our hands as we walked on the beach, who plaited our thick hair into French braids with purple satin ribbons. The mother who told us bedtime stories by the fire and came with comfort when we had bad dreams. This mother was gone and something else inhabited her.
“I called 911,” I said. Nyxa, my twelve-year-old sister, stared at me, compelling me with her dark eyes. I was only two years older. My father exhaled.
For the last month Nyxa had prayed quietly so our parents wouldn’t hear her through the thin walls covered in faded flowery wallpaper. But I heard Nyxa from her bunk in our room. She prayed to the tapestry of gods and fairies she had woven—
Jesus, Athena, Buddha, Odin,
Glooscap, Sungmo, Shakti,
Saraswati, Lí Ban.
I heard whispered chants, pleas, mouthfuls of hushed air.
Nyxa had already auditioned-to-do-an-audition, sending in a dance video and a reference. She wrote an essay on why she wanted to study at the national ballet school.
My mother stood in the front yard facing the ocean. The western sky heaved with grey storm clouds. Wind rushing in on the back of the incoming tide. The soft new grass undulated with swaying dandelions. My father smoothed his hair with trembling hands, a bit of dirt smeared on his wrist.
It first began, my father said, when I was a baby in Quebec. My mother started losing her way on familiar Montreal streets, brought home bewildered by the police. He stopped drinking and moved us to Nova Scotia, what he called his homeland, to a ramshackle old house he had inherited from his bachelor Irish uncle. We had no homeland, Nyxa would say.
My father hoped eternal that the sea air and solitude would restore my mother. He never mentioned his own restoration.
When we moved from Quebec to the Bay of Fundy, my mother loved rambling in the Acadian coastal boreal forest. She took us with her then, singing as we walked. We were never afraid, as she moved thorny brush away, carrying Nyxa when she was tired.
My father was steady out-of-work for the first five years. He poured rum in his coffee in his little greenhouse back near the woods where he bred hardy hybrid roses in the hopes of making some money. He had built a glasshouse from old windows and it went through the winter heated by a woodstove and homemade solar panels.
My mother had threatened to take us to Montreal so he drove down the mountain to an AA meeting every Sunday night, an hour each direction. He got a job teaching horticulture at the community college. My mother baked cookies and cakes. She made bread and peach jam and heart-shaped pancakes. She roasted chicken and made radikia—young dandelion greens boiled and served with lemon and olive oil, a dish she learned from her Greek mother.
Away from the city she settled down.
My father was right.
She was restored.
He was sober.
We were headed to Camelot on the back of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Then two years later she had an episode. She did not sleep for a week. We drove her to the hospital in the valley where they kept her for three months. My sister and I went into temporary foster care. To give my father a rest.
The months passed. My mother came home. We came home. A year passed.
We overlooked the warning signs as a sailor might overlook the changing sky.
How still and silent she became. We pretended any changes were enchantments cast by a mermaid. Spells we could break.
She was eccentric.
She was poetic.
She was a seashore prophet.
Our flimsy stories broke apart as her euphoria ramped. No more walks in the woods along the shore. No bedtime stories. When Nyxa had night terrors, I went to her.
Back to the hospital for eight weeks. We stayed at home this time. They gave her treatments she called lightening which stole her memories.
She returned in the early spring. My father promised her that he would never send her back. Her walks grew longer as the days grew longer. She wasn’t waiting when the school bus dropped us off at the end of the lane. I explained it away to sobbing Nyxa—we couldn’t expect her to be waiting anymore because we weren’t helpless babies. My little sister was bereft.
A few days later my mother wasn’t home by dark. My father had a staff meeting after work and he wasn’t home either. I cooked supper while Nyxa practiced. Our mother had attached a bar and mirror in our bedroom and there Nyxa did her barre exercises—her pliés and dégagés, her arabesques and pirouettes. When my father came home, he wanted to know why I hadn’t called him at work. I was the oldest, he scolded. I knew he lied. He wanted me to make it clean and tidy, to let him exist as a far off celestial body.
Moments later my mother came in from the dark with a basket full of curious things, mud splatted on her face, long red scratches on her arms from brambles. Her clothes and hair were wet. She proclaimed she was a newly baptised celebrant of the sea. She had treasures, she said—shells, stones, old pine cones, a small bundle of mayflowers, dry pine needles, tender wild mint, dulse and early fiddleheads. She kissed my father and made mint tea, humming all the while. He put his face in his hands. The fire crackled in the old woodstove which we used for heat and cooking.
My mother made soup with her gatherings. Her sounds became murmuring—an incantation we didn’t comprehend. My father threw her brew over the cliff when she was having a candlelit bath. From the bathroom came a stream of whispering. If we listened closely we could make out a language that no one but my mother spoke or understood.
After that night she stayed up later and later. She slipped out in the dark. A tiny tinkle woke us. My father had hung a bell on the door. The creak of the stair as my father thudded down. My mother singing and dancing on the lawn. Nyxa climbing up the ladder to my bunk without me even knowing until I felt her cold feet on my legs as she huddled next to me. From our bedroom window we saw the porch light fall on the yard. My father’s low imploring voice calling her name, Demetria.
She was up early the next morning making tea from the first dandelions and seaweed. My mother didn’t need sleep. That night the bell tinkled again. My father was sleeping downstairs to be door side before she could step out. My mother roared how her father was waiting outside. He wouldn’t stay long, she barked. But our grandfather had died years ago in Montreal, both our grandparents dead of cancer, the Greek grandpa and the Latvian grandpa. They spoke German and French to each other and never learned a word of English, my mother said, the few times she spoke of them.
My mother thought Nyxa was a sea fairy who had stolen away her dance. We end as we begin, she chanted. We end as we begin. She sipped her strange tea and muttered spells.
My father waved at Nyxa. “That’s your youngest. Nyxa, the dancer.” He pointed at my mother’s leg. He pulled up her dress and pointed at the long scar on her thigh where they had put in a huge plate and stainless steel pins. It held the crushed bone together, and she eventually walked again with a slight limp. On her way to rehearsal, a car had hit her on a Montreal street. The accident, the end of her professional dance career, was a catalyst, awakening some waiting spirit in her.
It was almost suppertime now and they needed to leave soon or else Nyxa would miss her audition. We were still in the kitchen. Nyxa kept stamping her foot. Her pink satin toe shoes hung over her shoulder. My father was exhausted, up with my mother at night, dozing off on the sofa and then waking up when the door closed, following her out into the spring night, coaxing her back in the house, reading her poetry, and playing guitar, singing love songs.
My father didn’t want to leave me alone, to greet the ambulance and deal with my mother. She would refuse to go. But you couldn’t un-call 911.
“Give me a moment,” my father said. His eyes were redder than usual.
Now my mother was twirling on the lawn, only a small wooden fence between her and the thirty-foot drop to the rocks below. She did not seem afraid.
She wore a white skirt and the silk spun out when she twirled and her graceful thin arms arched in the air. Her long black braid ran down her spine and rested at her sacrum. She always used the anatomical words for bodies and so did we. For a moment it seemed she was a music box ballerina who had sprung to life. Until she turned and looked at us with her wild eyes. She stood with her feet in third position, the heel of her front foot by her arch, her port de bras perfect, arms extended in second position. Terms spoken so often in our house I knew them as though I too had been dancing all my life instead of just watching with my clumsy feet and thick arms.
My mother announced she was metamorphizing from an invisible chrysalis into the form of a goddess.
She was Hera.
She was Aphrodite.
She was Artemis.
“I can’t miss my audition. It’s my only chance,” Nyxa yelled at our father, at me. My father wrung his hands. Nyxa didn’t care that our mother was having one of her episodes again, her senses accelerated, that our mother was a seashore prophet and muse of the woods who heard the mermaids singing as she sniffed out tiny mayflower blossoms under the snow and branches and dead leaves.
“She’s making us all crazy. You’re an alcoholic and she’s a crazy lady,” Nyxa hissed.
I knew my father remembered my mother still believing in him when he could not stop drinking, when he felt cursed like his father, his ancestors. But my mother never lost faith. He couldn’t abandon her. He could not forsake her. Someone else would have to.
My father shook his head.
I pointed at my sister, struggling to keep my voice calm. For all her talking to spirits and nature and ghosts, my mother was particular about our upbringing, manners, and polite language, our hair always combed and braided like hers.
“There’s nothing to be done, Dad. Take Nyxa for her audition. I’ll stay with Mumma until the ambulance comes.” My father blushed, as though I were an old lady reprimanding him.
Nyxa ran outside. The thud of the door startled my father and me. We went outside after her.
A far-off siren. I hadn’t told the 911 operator exactly what the emergency was. I had hung up when the operator had ordered me to stay on the line, instantly full of regret and shame for calling in the first place. Closer.
The ambulance arrived.
We stood together as the ambulance parked. Nyxa’s pink legs stuck out like straws from her rubber boots where she stood in the road, arms crossed. Our mother stood on the front step while the two paramedics talked to her, but she was singing opera, dancing down the steps and then a circle around them.
My mother danced on the lawn among the young dandelions. She hid behind a large growth of ornamental grass from the previous summer, dry and brown but still standing six feet tall. The tide was coming in and the prevailing wind with it. The top of the grass whipped and bent as my mother leapt out, her white skirt swirling up. Was she summoning a force from the deep?
I thought of my mother in better days, in the spring when the dandelions were finished blooming, how she showed us how to blow on a ripe one, making a wish and watching the seeds sail away.
I wished for you, she said. I wished for my babies, each of you.
“I don’t know what to do,” my father confessed, tears streaming down his cheeks, his composure dissolving with the arrival of official outsiders. “She hasn’t slept or eaten in days. I wish I could just snap my fingers and she’d be back in herself.”
Despite his exhaustion my father had been able to maintain his composure, and the illusion of normalcy around us, but not in front of sympathetic adults.
The short paramedic pursed his lips, his voice calm and measured as he ran through ways to get my mother in the ambulance.
My mother leapt through the air, impossibly high. She didn’t need sleep when she was manic and didn’t seem to feel pain. Her spirit fed her all she needed, she said.
The paramedics watched with cautious blank faces. “We’ll need to sedate her, to tame her enough to get her in the ambulance.” They spoke of her as though she was a wild woodland creature they had never before seen.
My mother danced around the house to the field next door where the paramedics and my father followed. Nyxa stood by our father’s old pick-up truck with her fingers on the door handle.
The prevailing cool westerly gusted. My mother wasn’t wearing a bra. The paramedics looked away, an ingrained sense of propriety. She performed a series of leaps, each one interrupted by her awkward landing on her stiff leg. Would she try a grand jeté, the kind Nyxa could land on the sandbar at low tide, the kind which broke my mother’s heart over and over again? The old hay cut her but she didn’t notice her bloody feet.
Nyxa ran over and grabbed my hand.
The tall paramedic approached my mother but she spun away. The paramedic saw me watching and waved, as though he could reassure me this was nothing he couldn’t handle. He walked over to my mother. They had a hushed conversation.
But my mother ran off. Then she was screaming. The paramedic walked back into the ambulance. My mother unbraided her hair and the breeze picked it up, fanning it around her, as though she really was Aphrodite rising on a shell in the sea.
My father came around the house holding my mother’s hand. Her froth of black hair swirled around her face. He led her to the ambulance and he stepped in. She must have thought that he was coming—he was the injured one. He was the only one who could trick her.
I wanted an adult to take charge, not someone in uniform with a name tag but a relative, someone who could do the right thing. I wished on all of the dandelions growing in the lawn for a long-lost relative to appear and turn towards our suffering.
My father held out his hand and my mother took it without hesitation, like a child. He helped her up and inside the ambulance. She put her arms around him and my parents stood in an embrace in the doorway of the vehicle. She wiped his face with her hair as though it was a handkerchief and dried my father’s tears.
Nyxa crossed her arms. No pity for our mother. She ran off towards the greenhouse.
Day was rushing towards evening. There was hardly time to get Nyxa to the audition. I watched my father’s back as he slipped out of the ambulance. My mother scrambled after him, calling his name, her voice shrill. The tall paramedic appeared, restraining her.
He waved my father away. My father obeyed, ignoring my howling mother.
The paramedic stuck a needle in my mother’s arm. She wilted even as she called my father’s name over and over.
Calum, Calum, Calum.
He didn’t turn around or wipe the tears from his cheeks.
My father stopped briefly and then kept walking even though the yearning in my mother’s voice was as heady as one of his roses in full bloom.
Then she was shouting again to my father as the door closed. We end as we begin. The ambulance slowly drove away.
It was then I realized Nyxa hadn’t come back.
I ran back to the greenhouse, toward the sound of shattering glass.
It now seems impossible that a small thin girl could have broken so many windows and hacked so many roses apart.
Nyxa was screaming, her toe shoes around her neck like a strange necklace.
My father appeared at the door. His foot crunched on broken glass. My sister stopped and turned. She was covered in soil and drops of blood stained her leotard where the rose thorns had dug in.
Nyxa threw her hammer on the floor. “You liar,” she screamed. “You’re just as powerless now as you were before and your life is a horrible disaster.” She hurled a rum bottle at my father. It bounced off the door frame and smashed as it hit the floor.
Nyxa pushed by him. “It’s all your fault, Dad, and that bitch!” She ran to the road.
My father and I followed her. The heavy clouds had moved in with the tide.
The surging wind was tremendous, as though it was trying to push us back in time.
Nyxa stood in the road. My father came and stood beside her. She cried into his chest. He patted her hair. The grimy pink toe shoes slung over Nyxa’s shoulder danced in the gusting air. Neither of them noticed me.
Nyxa ran over the lawn to the small trail which led down through the trees to the seashore where high glassy waves cascaded into veils of silver foam breaking on the beach and soaring up into the salt air, one after another, after another, relentlessly pounding the rocks. The clouds were black now. We end as we begin. My mother’s voice was alive in the thick salt air. I followed my sister and stood beside her on the beach, the cliff and dormant rose brambles behind us. Nyxa didn’t pull away when I took her hand. Together we watched waves galore. An incandescent pink glow seared the sky—a quiver of lightening, the roar of thunder, the spring rain weeping down.
An old woman, alone on the beach primeval. Me. The summer bay is deceptively smooth these many years later. Grey clouds waltz overhead and soon the weather will disturb this waterbody. The briny warm air brushes my face, marking me with salt lines. The water is slack and the tide will turn in a moment.
I skip round black stones over the inscrutable sea, stone skiffing as my father said his Irish family called it. One for Callum, a stone for Demetria, and one for Nyxa—my family who became ash dissolved in the bay. Each thin stone bounces over the water until it breaks the surface and the stone vanishes leaving only waves spreading out in wings over the water. This adult remembers these defining childhood moments. The girl I was, that I still am, remembers the magic of the tides, and infinite possibilities. These parts of me, this whole of me, will endure. I will not follow my small family in their Shakespearean end. No Ophelia, this one. My eternal mind will follow my creaky body, and together we will live on in this old strange life. A seal pops up close to shore. We regard each other. It slips away, the dog of the sea. Yet I am still here on this beach, a dog-eared old woman who understands the trick of moving from now to then, and back again.
Photo graciously provided by Zacharie Elbaz from Unsplash.
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