Abigail Carlson

Like Silk

I know about skinning yourself alive. The way the flesh sloughs off the bones, shining with fat, gleaming like an oil slick where it peels away from you. The tearing of membrane, sticky and wet. It hurts. Of course it hurts. Your skin is meant to be your last defense from the rest of the world. To remove it is to open your eye, stare at the needle’s point coming to your center.

I know about being of two bodies. The split self, the one who laughs and swims and circles and the one who dances and cries her own seawater. We love those stories, women in the water who steal your husband and give him back damp. Those women are never whole, though. Strikes me wrong. All these women with their bodies split apart.

So let me say it this way: I know this kind of pain. Self in twain, skinned and stolen. And because I know this pain, I know about restoration.

                                                                            **

My husband was a fisherman and he loved the sealwife before he loved me. I knew what she looked like because he came home and told me the way her waist was the curling slope of a wave, how her skin was dappled with the spots from her seal coat, how her body was one long sleek line. I was the motherwife. The two of us were never meant to meet.

But he told tales of her, and I’m sure he told her about me. We were moon and earth: she was cold where I was warm, she was smooth where I was rough. And he was the sun, the gravity that held us both in orbit around him. He should not have told me about her, not if he was being smart, but he felt comforted, reassured by the space of the land between her and me. She could not move far from the ocean, and I was bound to his house, our children. Sometimes he brought another baby back with him from the water, squalling for their other mother with salt crusting in their hair. There were seven children, hers and mine and his, before the flow of babies stopped, and they kept me sleepless, bone-tired for seven years.

I will not say I disliked my life. My husband was distant but he was mine, and it was good to have a home of my own. I had nothing before him and his house near the ocean, the rooms, the dishes, his heart. I loved him in the way one loves a plant that is difficult to grow, and I loved him in the way one loves to sleep under a press of heavy blankets. I loved him in both of these ways. My husband was a man of pattern. I loved the steady repetition of my days in his house.

The children were very sweet, and there was satisfaction in cleaning a pot, in seeing the household settle into gentle breathing. I remember standing in my kitchen one day, the same lulling rhythm of cleaning and comforting and cooking and cycling, and I looked out through my eyes as if another woman operated within my skin, filled me out like a puppet and moved my limbs. It was early spring and the snow was still melting from the mountains behind our house. I could see the glimmer of the sea from my kitchen window, the cold gray of it like a ribbon of silk out beyond the dunes that divided the worlds of my husband’s wives. Her world separated from mine. In that moment, meltwater dripping through a leaky patch in the ceiling that I would later mend, my hands soft and crinkled from the water I’d been immersed in as I washed, I wanted the ocean, and the sealwife, for mine. I wanted to touch that silk, feel a different kind of water on my skin, in my wounds.

That night I asked my husband to take me to meet his otherwife. His sealwife. She should see how our children grow, I argued. She should know the calluses of my hands, as I know yours, my husband. As I wish to know hers.

No, my husband said. She is not a wife for work. She serves me and makes the sea calm so that I might fish it, and otherwise she is a beast and nothing more. Her hands are worn like gloves; mostly she is a seal deep in the coldest waters, and only sometimes she is a woman fully, with soft palms and delicate fingernails. She is not for you. My sealwife belongs half to the sea and half to me, just as you belong half to our children and half to me, my husband said. If the moon and earth were to meet, then the world would be ruined and both bodies would be wrecked. Leave it, my wife of the land, mother of our children. Ask not to meet my sealwife again. 

He kissed my hair and held me, then went to our oldest son, gave him a hug. He began to tell our son stories of his fishing, of how the sealwife would swim alongside his boat and herd fish into his nets when he visited with her. This child was our first, the fisherman’s and the sealwife’s and mine. I loved him, his bright eyes and careful way of navigating the world, walking like he was swimming through thick water. He was a clever boy who listened to what his father said and then looked to me for the truth of the words.

We had dinner, our children and the fisherman and me, and he regaled our children with stories about him and the sealwife, their other, ocean mother, how they roved the coast together, how she wore pearls in her hair as a woman and how her sealcoat gleamed smoke-gray when she slipped through the waves. I listened to these stories, meant to remind the children of their sea-soaked heritage, and I wanted the sealwife for myself more than before.

I waited for my husband to fall asleep to sneak to the ocean. It was midsummer and he was home for a stretch. The fish traveled to colder waters during these months and he hung around our house like a stink, underfoot and unhelpful. Watch the baby, I told him, slice the bread, go to the market and bring back salt and flour. But he was worse at helping me than our oldest son, and I knew he was clever enough to pretend at helpless uselessness. Mostly he would hunt in the dunes with a child’s slingshot, looking for rabbits and small lizards to stone to death. He brought back his prizes like our sons and said Look what I hunted for us! He turned up his nose at my snares, how I could patiently catch what he preferred to chase. Women’s traps, he said, and gathered more pebbles for his sling.

So I waited for him to sleep and I planned to go to the sealwife. I lay beside him in our bed, listening to the sound of his breathing. When I became his wife, I loved him first for his description of the ocean. Glamorous, it sounded, the way he described near death, the waves, what it was like to be held in the arms of something unending. I learned only later in our marriage how he was describing the sealwife, her tempers and calms, her arms, her arms. Listening to the steady rushing of his breath, I wondered if she thought of his arms as he described hers. I wondered if she wondered about me.

I slipped from our bed, checked on our children, and began my walk to the sea. I could see the ocean miles away over the sand dunes; I knew my fisherman husband could walk there in only an hour or so, and with the moon making clear the path, I walked through the dunes. It was like stepping through the sleeping forms of my family, the dunes heaped on the land like there were bodies hidden under the shifting mounds of sand. I jogged through them, rushing to her.

Many times I wondered if she would know me when I found her. If the line of my body, though uncurving, would seem beautiful to her. If our husband had described me to her in the same way he described her to me. He made her seem a myth, a magic unto herself. A magic I wanted to bask in. I hoped he was kind in his description of me. Even though my magics were woven of our children, their lives, I wanted to seem magic of my own to her.

I was almost to the ocean. The stars were shavings of iron in the sky, glinting and hard, and I could see their light caught in the sea. Up close the air felt cool and damp, like someone else’s tears falling onto my cheek. I lived so near the ocean and yet so rarely could emerge from my house, tied to children and food and cleaning. My husband forbade our children from coming to the sea. Some were hers, he said, as if I did not know. She could not bear to see them, then have them pulled away from her again. If she sees her children, he told me, she will try to bring them back to the ocean with her, and they would drown, all of them, because they are not only hers, but yours and mine, too.

I wanted to move our house closer to the ocean, to her, but he told me it would only distract his wives from their separate, specific work. He would be furious seeing me now, so close to her and her realm. But I needed to meet her, and his ire was the last thing on my mind as I approached the shore, the dampness of the water.

I stood with my ankles in the surf, looking out into the water for her. There were seals in the waves, some on the rocks further out, but none seemed to pay much mind to me. I am the motherwife, I called out over the waves. I have raised our children as his otherwife. I am here to meet the sealwife.

If any of the seals in the water believed me, they did not move closer or further. I sighed and began to walk down the beach. Perhaps she was not in a straight line from my house, though looking back, I could see its dark shape over the dunes, watching from a distance, a single candle lit in the window.

I saw the sealwife for the first time when I found her with her sisters, dancing under the moonlight. They had shed their sealskins, revealing women beneath, skin gleaming and wet with the shift of splitting selves. A dozen sealskins dried on a rock as the women danced, and I could see which one was my husband’s otherwife instantly: the long and wild tumble of her black hair, pearls catching starlight, the dark eyes that met mine across the sand. She froze and the other sealwomen did, too, looking to me as the stranger in their ceremony. My cheeks burned and I held out a hand, reaching toward her. The sealwomen watched me and I wanted to tell them that I too had a pelt to shed, that if I could be with them, dance with them, I would never return deeper inland again. I wanted to tell his sealwife that I would stay here with her, that I would bring her children to her, that I wanted to reach for her slim fingers and promise marriage, lifetimes together.

My husband’s arm slipped around my waist and I whirled as he placed me back on the path to home. He must have woken soon after I left; he breathed hard, as if he’d run the whole way here.

Foolish woman, he spat, trying to learn things you were not meant to know. He scolded me all the way back to our house. Our children were alone, he said. While you were gone. What were you thinking? Foolish, stupid mother.

His words were like oil, sliding around me but not touching me. I met her eyes, I saw her. He dragged me to the house by my elbow, and it ached for a week. But the ache was her eyes looking back at me, the ache was a reminder of how I had seen her. How I knew her for who she was, felt her as surely as if I’d put my hand on her hip and drawn her close to me. My husband left to the ocean the next morning after my visit to the sealwife and he told me darkly to be well, to watch the children, to keep the home alive. Because without this place, he said, where will our children live? Where will I return to your arms, so solid and warm?

I waved him off to the ocean, rubbed my elbow, and planned.

The last time, I brought my children with me to the sea. She needed to see them, I reasoned. My fisherman husband had been gone for nearly a month, and any day he’d return again to the shore, with the sealwife. We would go to meet them when they returned, and we would walk with my husband back to our house. Our oldest son was eager, helped herd his siblings through the dunes, carrying the youngest baby on his back.

The day was overcast, sun hidden behind the clouds, when we arrived at the shoreline. Our children laughed in delight, running through the waves and playing in the sand. The ocean must have called to them as it did to me; they embraced the sea as if it was someone they remembered, a friend, an aunt. Even my most timid child, the youngest, walking and babbling quietly, was not afraid, giggling as she sat in the surf, smacking at the wet sand with her fat palms.

My husband’s boat was not docked, so we waited by the shore, eating the food I’d packed us, skin warming in the diluted light of the sun. I leaned back into the sand, listening to the water and my children’s sounds of play, thinking of what would happen when we met the sealwife. Maybe we could all live on the shore together. The children and I could walk down each morning and evening, it was not so far, and we could all of us be one family, united, our duties and chores overlapping. My life could be a part of hers, and hers a part of mine, our husband no longer bearing the weight of being a bridge between us. I could touch her, and she would know me as her other half, the part of her that had walked on the shore. She’d feel complete, that sense of emptiness filled at last.

My husband’s boat approached the dock close to sunset, our children waving from the shore to him. There, on his boat, I could see the round, smooth head of a seal peering over the gunwale. With a gesture, the head bent back like the hood of a cape, and a woman stood naked beside my husband on the boat, looking toward the shore, toward me. I waved my arms to them, drawing them closer. My husband did not look at me, but as I climbed to the dock, my children still swimming in the water, I could read his expression better. The anger there, looking at their bobbing heads in the foam.

Husband, I called, and wife, I have brought our children to meet you. This once, I added hastily, in case this was what angered my husband. But I knew that once a door was opened, it would be difficult to close, and he could not make our children forget the waves, the salt, the way their hair dried wavy and textured with sand. I tilted my chin at him. He’d been gone for weeks and must have thought I would forget. He’d been gone and must have thought I would return quietly to my mother’s work.

But she was the one I was looking toward, she was the one I wanted to know. As the boat and the wife drew closer, I could make out more of her, the softness of her legs, the round and unblemished skin of her stomach. I tried to make out her hands, if she had calluses like mine, but they were wrapped tight around her body. She stood proud and straight, no stoop to her back from years of digging in the garden or following after children. She looked as young as I was when I first married my husband, youthful and bright and pearly-smooth. She looked like silk made alive, flowing and soft.

The boat approached the shore and the noises of my children, their cries and laughs, died to silence. What have you done? my husband cried. Coming to the ocean when I told you that you never could. How could you do this?

He said it like it was a question of my ability. Like he did not know the strength of my legs to carry me to disobedience.

I boarded the boat and went to the sealwife. She was younger than me, dark haired, but I felt a chill at the sight of her. In some ways we were shades of the same woman, my skin rough where hers seemed smooth, my body hidden under layers of ill-fitting clothes where hers was clean and bare.

Hello, I said to her. The wind picked up, rushing around me, and I wobbled on the boat as the waves began to grow bigger. She reached out and I took her hands in mine to steady myself, gripping her gently. I could sink into her with the lightest touch, like she was a blanket I could fall into. My husband was speaking, I could faintly sense the timbre of his voice, but the wind, the water, her eyes, I could hear nothing else but these. 

Hello, motherwife, she said. She sounded like me, but gentler. Thank you for bringing my children and my skin back to me.

I do not understand, I said. My husband gave a shout and fell from the boat into the water. I could not move my arms, my legs, could barely turn my head to see him scrambling to the sand. Where were the children? The tide was coming in, waves hitting the sand like fists beating flesh, and my husband was struggling to make it out of their reach. I saw dark heads of hair in the water, bobbing, faceless. Children, or seals? Facedown, no mouths to the air, inhaling only water now, only salt, only sea. Our husband fell into the sand, the water washing over his legs, his head, hair and clothes plastered to his body, embracing him with dampness. The houses the children built in the sand crumbled into the waves.

My sealwife pulled me close to her and wrapped her arms around me. I felt the reclamation, then, like eating after a long fast and finally, finally being full. Something missing being restored, something stolen placed back where it belonged.