Mother of Pearl
by Molly Hume
Mother-of-pearl from Mother of Mother. Born in the midst of the bacterial bubble bath that got Grandma sick after she fished out the oyster for Granddaughter and went home to cook samphire greens seasoned by her sea-foamy fingers. She boiled them in a spuming tall pot and served them in a slough of butter and vinegar.
The adults were saved by an aversion to anything reminiscent of their upbringing; the children by their picky appetites and the belief instilled by older cousins that samphire greens were actually sea monster hairs in disguise. Instead, their cottage diet was mostly beige: white wine for grown-ups and buttered noodles for grandchildren, while Grandma skinned the hairs of sea monsters through her gap tooth. When she was done, she was left with a plate of skeleton branches and an upset stomach.
“This is what happens when you eat half a pound of butter for dinner, Mum.” Aunt Kathy shoved Grandma away from the double sink. Butter had taken her father with type 2 diabetes, and now it was coming for her mother. “Go lie down.”
“I’m fine, dear.”
“Maybe sapphire greens really are sea monster hairs,” Matty bellowed out the backdoor to squealing baby cousins.
“Samphire greens, dear,” Grandma corrected with her salty tongue, loving the botched pronunciations of sea-removed grandchildren.
Two weeks was never enough for her to soften their snark, and she could feel their time together sifting through her fingers from the second they arrived. She thought of the fourteen-day-long line in the sand washed away by another year’s tide, and how they’d soon be back in “The Big Smoke”—their freshly permed humidity curls blown straight in the winds of subway tunnels. the sea salt that brined the lining of their lungs turned to soot and ash by exhaust clouds and cigarette smoke—Grandma left alone again to her neighbours with their nasally “ay’s” and “ee’s” as if their nostrils were permanently waterlogged. The thought swelled in her throat, so when she tried to speak it came out a seasick gargle.
“Are you going to be sick? Mum? Mum?”
Aunt Kathy gripped her Mum’s shoulders as if to hold down her gag reflex. Grandma swatted off her overanxious daughter and turned to the sink. But the mouth of the pot that was foamed like sea spume, like the steaming baths she used to give her grandchildren, was making her sick. The swell in her throat grew to a bubble pushing at her insides, inflating her stomach and choking up her esophagus. She felt it molasses-thick, like the bog water she used to play in as a little girl in Newfoundland, and stretched air-tight like the yellow rubber of her galoshes.
“Mum?”
It burst with a thousand small bubbles through her veins, like out of the mouth of a clam buried in the deep-sea centre of her heart. Bubbles that streamed away from her like warnings to the whirlwind of grandchildren in her garden, like her children on jet streams back to their new homes. She wanted to expel them. To erupt like a shaken can of club soda. So she tried spitting them up with a retching cough, then spewed vomit into the sudsy sink. She was couch-ridden for the last week of the family visit, the tall pot by her side now bubbling with puke, still foaming like sea spume.
She spent her sick days polishing the oyster she had picked out of the surf until it glistened like the glass top of the ocean on morning walks she could no longer take. Not just because she couldn’t stand without fizzing with dizziness, but because the beaches were closed and overflowing with foam that the waves kept throwing up onto the shore. The shell barely made it through her brain fog to pass onto Granddaughter before everyone left for home.
Grandma held it out with a wink and,
“Take good care of it, hey?”
And Granddaughter took it with a nervous smile, eyeing Grandma’s cracked lips, puckered like the centre of a barnacle around her black and swollen gums.
~~~
Granddaughter, now slipping back into the smog, the exhaust clouds, the still lake that settles bacteria in a skim of surface slime rather than the ocean’s bubbling broth. The oyster reminds her of sandy toes, salty hair, and sickly samphire greens. Days stuck together like seaweed to sunburnt skin now crumbled like the imported grocery store squares that Matty was stuffing into his mouth.
“You’re not supposed to eat it like that,” she said. Granddaughter snatched back the empty package which was half-full ten seconds ago.
“I’m hungry.” Matty coughed up a flurry of half chewed seaweed and singed phlegm.
“Then get your own, dick! That was $5.50. Disgusting.”
She didn’t like Matty. It was his smoker’s cough, which puffed up every sentence until she thought the polyps in his throat would burst. And that their mom didn’t seem to notice it. Or his greasy curls that dripped like he’d just come out of the water, or the dandruff that covered his scalp like algae on a hermit crab shell.
It was better in the summer; when he couldn’t get his weed past airport security and they went swimming every day, so his hair was actually wet most of the time. She missed how easy things streamed through their family when they were out East. How Grandma’s presence seemed to chisel at their sandstone-layered resentments until there was space for flow. She knew the sediments were piling up thick again and that Grandma might be too weak next time to even try for a trickle, if she pulled through at all.
“Grandma’s been sick before, she'll be fine,” Matty said in an empty attempt to still the gyre tightening on his sister’s face. Granddaughter nodded, and hoped that they'd at least be able to percolate the barrier with Grandma gone.
~~~
The tides fluctuated for months with the rise and fall of the heart monitor and stilled with a flatline too far away to hear. Granddaughter tried drowning it out by closing the iridescent valve over her ear to listen to the hush of the ocean that was really the rush of her cardiovascular system. Instead, she let through a reflux of nostalgia that filled her like the SodaStream machine Grandma had refused to use, standing by her Canada Dry cans. Smoothing her thumb over the surface of the oyster to diffuse herself, Granddaughter felt an air bubble stuck in time under the syrupy resin; filled with beach breeze and spit from the sea.
She decided to immortalize the shell with armour from the tangled bin of leftover yarn in her basement; she chose a scraggly brown wool with wisps of white that could have been plucked from Grandma’s head and spun a soft chain mail through her crochet hook. Granddaughter cast it over the oyster to catch the slipping summer memories, like flies in the mesh of Grandma’s screen porch door, or the ones in the spiderwebs coating the withered hydrangea in Grandma’s garden. Withered because Grandma had been too sick to tend to them. Withered from the sprawling yard fires hosted by the next-door neighbor Grandma had been too tired to argue with.
At the Leslieville Christmas market she bought a baby white pearl from a New Brunswick-based jewelry stand and attached it to a keychain on her belt loop next to its adopted mother; expecting the shell to hang still and stagnant as her summer memories. But when she stepped, it swung like her seven-year-old self on the sand dune swing set at the beach. The chain succumbed to unraveling like the bloodline that tied her to the sea, la mèr, the mothers.
“No.”
The baby pearl on her hip shivered with a shaky breath while the oyster lay broken-boned on the pavement, deflated from its wool skin like a collapsed lung. She emptied the dusty remains onto the sidewalk, sifted them through her fingers and found one shard still intact and marbled purple and white like a bruise. A small air bubble rose out of the centre of the resin. Grandma’s seafoam fingerprint the rippled ocean floor underneath.
She popped it like a pearly blister and let out sick air like methane from a bog. Sick air seeping into her pores like Grandma’s bony fingers did into wet sand at the beach, churning in her stomach like the puke-stained clothes in the washer-dryer machine that had rocked her air mattress every night, bubbling up her throat like the vinegar and butter solution she couldn’t stomach. Her eyes stretched like spiderwebs over singed hydrangea and tears started to drop like flies down her ashen cheeks, then like a torrent of petals shaken loose with a stick when Grandma had warned her not to.
Granddaughter broke open like the two valves of an oyster and spewed vomit over the starry shell dust, leaving it to settle like silt under the effervescent pool of puke. Opalescence without essence; mother-of-pearl without the mother.