Happily by Sabrina Orah Mark

Author:Sabrina Orah Mark [Mark, Sabrina Orah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

13

The Silence of Witches

I have a dream my mother is standing at my front door crying. Her hair is wet and tangled in seashells. She’s read a story I’ve written. “How could you,” she says. “Your own mother.” She opens her coat, and out march my husband, his daughters, my brothers, my sons, my father. I try to run away, but they catch me by the collar. “How could you, how could you, how could you?” they chant. “Your very own mother! Your very own us!” I’ll stop writing. I’m sorry. And I do. I stop forever, and instantly my lips and hands are dotted with mold. White threads spread across my face where mushrooms begin to swell. I grow wild with silence.

“Oh, for god’s sake,” says my mother. “Forget it. Enough with the drama.”

“But my silence is real,” wrote the twentieth-century French philosopher Maurice Blanchot. “If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.”

Of all the silences in fairy tales, the most pronounced is the Little Mermaid’s. For a potion that will turn her into a human, she pays the sea witch with her voice. In Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” the sea witch lives where no flowers or sea grass grow, where “all the trees and bushes were polyps, half animals and half plants.” It’s the sea witch’s silence, her exile, her house built from the bones of shipwrecked humans, the toad feeding out of her mouth, and the snakes sprawled like illegible cursive “about her great spongy bosom” that is the silence of poets. It’s Blanchot’s silence. It’s the silence of outsiders and mothers. Once kept it will run ahead and wait for all of us to catch up. And as it waits, it will grow.

The Little Mermaid’s silence is the silence of children. But the sea witch’s silence is the silence of an old woman with a story no one will ever know. The first silence is soft and lovesick and melancholy like sea foam. The second silence surrounds you as water surrounds a drowning woman, transparent and cruel.

It’s been a difficult year. My stepdaughter moved in for seven months and then moved out. She left Mavis, her pet tarantula, behind. My husband and I argued more than ever. My grandmother died so I couldn’t call her up to ask her advice. In an act of grief, I bought a yellow rotary telephone for my desk. It’s plugged into nothing. Sometimes I just hold the receiver up to my ear and listen. Sometimes I talk.

As the date of my stepdaughter’s departure grew closer, I practiced politely biting my tongue. There was so much to say, but I said nothing. I bit and I bit. “Peace,” I once wrote in a story about daughters, “is what pain looks like in public.”

As Blanchot promised, my silence returned “a little farther on.” A tree began to grow right in the middle of my house. Instead of seeds, its fruit had sharp little needles.

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