Seduction of Water

My favorite story when I was small, the one I begged for night after night, was "The Selkie." "That old story," my mother would say. She'd say it in exactly the same tone of voice as when my father complimented her dress. Oh, this old thing, she'd say, her pale green eyes giving away her pleasure. "Wouldn't you rather something new?" And she'd hold up a shiny book my aunt Sophie, my father's sister, had bought for me. The Bobbsey Twins or, when I was older, Nancy Drew. American stories with an improving message and plucky, intrepid heroines. "No, I want your story," I would say. It was her story because she knew it by heart, had heard it from her mother, who had heard it from hers . . . a line of mothers and daughters that I imagined like the image of me and her when I stood by her side in front of the mirrors in the lobby. "Well, if it will help you sleep . . ." And I would nod, burrowing deeper into the blankets. It was one of the few requests I stuck to, perhaps because my mother's initial hesitation came to be part of the ritualpart of the telling. A game we played because I knew she liked that I wanted her story, not some store-bought one. Even when she was dressed to go out and she had only come up to say a quick good night she would sit down on the edge of my bed and shrug her coat off her shoulders so that its black fur collar settled down around her waist and I would nestle into its dark, perfumed plush, and she, getting ready to tell her story, would touch the long strands of pearls at her neck, the beads making a soft clicking sound, and close her eyes. I imagined that she closed her eyes because the story was somewhere inside her, on an invisible scroll unfurling behind her eyelids from which she read night after night, every word the same as the night before. "In a time before the rivers were drowned by the sea, in a land between the sun and the moon . . ." Here she would open her eyes and touch the knobs of my headboard, which had been carved into the shapes of a crescent moon and a sun by Joseph, the hotel gardener, to replace its original broken knobs. We used the bedding and furniture too worn-out for guest useblankets with hems coming unstitched, dressers with rattling drawers, and tables with ring marks where careless city ladies had put down hot teacups without a saucer. The rooms we lived in were leftovers themselves, the attic rooms where the maids lived before the new servants' quarters were built in the North Wing. It's where my mother had stayed when she'd come to the hotel to work as a maid. Even after she'd married my father, the hotel manager, she told him she liked being up high. From the attic rooms you had the best view of the river flowing south toward New York City and then to the sea. "In this land, where our people came from, the fishermen told a story about a man who fell in love with one of the seal women, selkies the peo- ple called them, seals that once a year could shed their skin and become women . . ." "So were they women pretending to be seals or seals pretending to be women?" This interruption my mother would take in stride because I always asked the same question and she had incorporated the answer into the story. ". . . and no one ever knew which they had been first, seal or woman, which is part of their mystery. When you looked into the seal's eyes you could see the human being looking out, but when you heard the woman singing you could hear the sound of the sea in her voice." Still unsatisfied as to whether the selkies were mainly seal or human, I would indicate to my mother that I was ready for heGoodman, Carol is the author of 'Seduction of Water' with ISBN 9780345450906 and ISBN 0345450906.