Jean Sheppard

Empty Tubs and Oilskins

She had loved the sea. Silky and slippery, she could dive, circle, swish, sparkle, but there was something magical about land, too, especially that night after the storm, the beckoning breeze, the rocks that laughed when they rubbed against them to loosen their pelts. They were eager to sport with the moon, to risk the air.
And when they had dropped their skins they crawled, lurched, stumbled on new legs until they could dance to the music of the waves. They did not sense danger: they were drunk on dreams. She did not see the fisherman steal behind the rock and steal her skin.

—but that is not how it happened. I am writing to set the story straight. The folk tale is wrong.
I am the selkie, the seal woman. Life in the sea had been too hard to bear since the lightning tip of a harpoon plunged into her neck. I saw red bubbles churn and burst and could not help. She escaped the net, and the weapon came free, but the wound would not heal.
I lost my mother.
I learned that life could change in the whistle-splash of a sharpened stick.
I learned that water was the enemy: bliss could make one forget the spear.
The fisherman is not a villain. I handed my skin to him—I traded it. He averted his eyes, but he must have felt me shiver as I saw my self disappear into a weather-beaten leather bag. The yellow oilskin he gave me smelled of dead fish and thunder, but the colour recalled the sun. My new waterproof skin was stiff, bulky, but it made me safe. It could not be too high a price to pay.

My husband gets behind the wheel. “Have we checked everything?” I ask.
He nods, patiently. Each time we leave our house for a weekend (or, often, an hour), I check and recheck, if only in my mind, because disaster lurks in many places. We could be done in by a stove with a grudge.
“Fastened your seat belt, my darling?” I ask my daughter.
“Yes, Mom,” she answers patiently. “I already told you.” At nine, she is used to the routine. I glimpse the shiny rims of her glasses from the corner of my eye, hear the flick of a shiny black ponytail, but she is not really in the car with us. She has already arrived.
Emma Grace is a water baby. How many times have I watched her burst from water into air, seen her grin under thick, fogging goggles, rubber snapped snug around a silky head? She had dreamed for months of visiting the themed resort that boasts one of the country’s largest in door water park. So now we head out for the weekend. We will be able to splash the day away, the website says. Oh, God, I think again. I know my Umberto Eco. I know a simulacrum when I see it. I know plastic. I know it doesn’t breathe. I won’t either.
The hotel, just off the main street, simulates a rustic lodge deep in northern woods, and it’s huge. People pile out the front doors as others edge their way in. There are suitcases on dollies, kids sprawled on duffle bags. Men hike up drooping shorts and women tug at halter tops as bags are loaded or unloaded, as cars and vans pull up, pull away. The energy is the pulsation of shrewd marketing, but, still, it sounds like pleasure. Emma Grace’s eyes are huge. I feel queasy.
We tug our bags into the cavernous lobby. People in tightly cordoned lanes check out or check in. There are bright canoes suspended on the walls and plastic wolves high on ledges, their gazes fixed. There is a real- life mechanical bear watching a fake wood fire in a fake wood setting. Suddenly the bear speaks. A startled child stares up at it and drools.
Emma Grace dances down the hallway to our room. I take a deep breath: I do want to share her enthusiasm, but it’s hard. Kevin unlocks the door. Our “camp” is long and narrow to accommodate the bunk beds enclosed in a cabin made of plastic wood. Emma Grace squeals and climbs onto the top bunk. Kevin and I laugh. She cannot believe she has her own TV, just like the pioneers.
The two of them throw on their bathing suits and head for the water park. I stay in our room: there are too many people here too close for comfort. The buffer is thin. I will have to work up my courage. I fill a plastic tumbler with wine and open a book.
Trailing chlorine clouds, my husband and daughter bring their face-splitting smiles back a couple of hours later. They go back to the water park after dinner. I drink more wine. “Will you come and watch tomorrow, Mom?” Emma Grace asks from her bunk that night. I tell her I will. I tell myself I must. My sweet husband nods, reassures me.

I have little choice but to follow my fisherman to his house on the cliff above the sea. The chill air numbs me, makes my footsteps slow, heavy.
In time he takes me as his wife. I cook the food, do the dishes, sweep the floor, tend the fire.
I give birth, and I love my children dearly though they are only human.
I know he still has my skin. He would not have thrown it away: he knows what it means. He has hidden it because I asked him to. I cannot trust myself.
When I look out to the sea from the edge of the cliff, my salt tears taste like loss.

I didn’t bring a bathing suit to the lodge, though I have one in a drawer at home, hidden under some sweaters. It is pretty, white with flowers in brilliant shades of blue and green, but I haven’t worn it in almost twenty years, and the elastic is no longer supple because it has dried out. The suit is decorative—once upon a time it made me decorative—but I no longer expose that much skin. The next morning, I go to the water park in jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and shoes.
When I follow them through the doors, I am hit by a wave of humid air, and I start to sweat. A sign tells me to take off my shoes. I never go barefoot, but I want to be a good mother and so, with great regret, I place my sandals at the base of a wall. Why is it such a big deal? What am I concerned about? It isn’t just the innocent splat of little-kid vomit my husband accidentally slides through. Well, yes, it is. Skin needs to be covered. Skin cannot be trusted. It does not protect.
The water park echoes with screams, whoops, and giggles. There are gigantic plastic tubes, water slides, suspended from the ceiling—blue, red, green. Water spouts from the floor, whooshes from barrels above my head. There is a pond, a couple of lakes. I stare at my feet. My hus band, always alert to my discomfort, suggests I get some flip-flops from the store tucked into a corner at the entrance. I buy the cheapest pair I find, put them on and breathe. I have a buffer. Plastic has its pluses.
I have brought a book and take a chair near the pool where the rafts land when people come flying out of three huge water slides. The pool empties into a river that winds through the park and then wends its way back to the pool. I sit and watch people of all ages float by in bright rafts. A yellow one recalls the sun. A toddler bounces in a lap. Girls giggle and dream. A grey-haired woman rubs a shoulder and smiles to herself. Some dangle from a raft and tumble, sputter, laugh. They all look for ward. Look back. Call out. Their skin is smooth and firm and puckered and droopy, but each and every one of them glistens. I start to cry.
I am dry inside. I am drier than plastic wood.

Only rarely do I go down to the sea. The pain is too great, and the water, too tempting. I fear I have lost the ability to swim and am sure I would drown.
My children love the sea, always urge me to join in as they giggle with the waves that tickle the shore. I surrender my shoes to the sand, but I will not get my feet wet. I will simply watch them frolic, hear their squeals of delight, and for a few moments be lulled into forgetfulness, but then the bright red sun makes me remember, and I beckon to them to return with me to our house on the cliff.
I make sure I do not weep when I comb their salt-stiff hair.

Water had once been breath. Twice a day in small-town summers, we’d line up outside the pool and chatter and chant and stamp our feet: “We want in. We want in.” I remember string straps on a sunburned neck and white cotton underpants rolled up in a bright beach towel. Wire baskets and floating Band-Aids. Water gilt and glitter.
And how many other pools at how many motels? How many lakes? I have a sudden memory of my mother, her head cocked as she watched out for me from the shore of a lake still churning after a storm. That day—I must have been nine or so—my air mattress and I surfed high waves under an oyster sky for hours, and I swallowed so much water that I threw up all night in the trailer. I shivered on a narrow bunk, thankful for my mother’s cool hand on my hot forehead, her voice soft in the dark. I was safe.
And then I wasn’t.
There were five of us in the car late that summer night on that country road, my mother, father, and I in the back seat behind my brother and his fiancée. I was fourteen. An old man coming the other way had a heart attack. Moments after he crashed into us, I pushed my way out of the car and started to scream. My brother and his fiancée were barely conscious, a punctured lung, concussions. The deep cut in my father’s head oozed blood into his white hair as he tried to tend to my mother. She was in the back on the floor of the car, her head cocked at an odd angle. Her skin was white. Her eyes were closed. It was a hot night, but I went cold. Somehow I knew it was my fault. If I had been a better daughter, kinder, if I had been more careful, had not so often lost myself in play, the accident would not have happened: the unforgiving gods would not have been roused.
The old man died. We all survived, but we all were changed. And I don’t remember swimming after that. I had lost the mother I knew.

The shouts and laughter receded as I sat still very still on my white plastic chair. By the time Kevin and Emma Grace checked in with me, I had wiped away my tears, put the memory aside. The next day we went home.

Not long after we returned from our holiday, I was standing in our tiny bathroom after a shower, trying to prettify toes that have never made me happy, and I lost my balance. I fell backward, my legs hooked over the edge of the tub, the back of my head cracked on the tiled wall, and I heard my brain slosh. Seconds later, I shot up. I was not seriously injured, but I was seriously startled. Once again, my loving husband comforted me.
I have forgotten how the headache felt, but I see Freud smirk: my swimmer self fell into an empty tub. And now even I must laugh. Life is meant to be wet. We are meant to immerse ourselves, to play, dive deep, belly-graze ocean floors. Do I really want to leave myself high and dry?

So many years pass, the tide comes in and goes out—does it mock me?—and then I discover the rusted trunk that hides my skin. My fisherman has left it out for me to find, the key on the downy bed we share.
I open the trunk and look down at what I had relinquished.
I hesitate—will it fit?—but when I put it on, it breathes.
Now each day my children come to the sea’s edge, scamper, wade. I know they celebrate my silky-wet whiskered self.
My fisherman says nothing, but he smiles sweetly, almost shyly, as he sits on his stool and tends his net as if it were a second skin.

Jean sheppard

is a writer, teacher, and Jungian coach living in Toronto, Canada. Her fiction and CNF have appeared in Memoir Magazine, Immanence Journal, The Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, and other publications.