Opals and Oracles

I was looking at the three of our hands, mine, my aunt’s, my mother’s, all resting on the lightly stained wood of an inexpensive kitchen table, the kind one finds in a condo in Florida on the Gulf side, which is where we were. My aunt has a heftier frame than my mother, but their hands look the same, sharing petite palms with slender fingers. They were raised in a small town on Lake Michigan, spending every day of the summer months lying on docks, sand, and rafts, jumping in the water when it got too hot, then lying back down in the sunshine to soak. I think their hands absorbed so much sun that they shed the pudgy layer of muscle between their outer skin and inner bones. At least that is the explanation I give for the way their skin rests loosely over the bones of their fingers. It is the paperiness that makes their hands soft. Somehow the rays of the Michigan sun made their way into their genes, altering them and passing the same hands to me, the niece, the daughter. I inherited the same hands, small and strong with spidering blue veins that grow more prominent each year. I like what my hands are becoming. 

My mother is named Marilyn. Marilyn Jean the Queen, the nickname her father Earl called her, eyes crinkled with a smile. Her older sister is named Mary, a strange choice on their mother’s part, to choose names for daughters that are derivatives of each other. Their older brother is John, the disciple to whom Jesus spoke to as he was hanging on the cross. Here, your mother, he said to John. And to Mary, their namesake, no longer a young virgin visited by angels but a mother cloaked in agony, here, your son, Take care of her. 

In first grade the children in my mother’s class were given an assignment to write a list of words that rhymed with their name. The students had the option to use another name if theirs was too difficult to find rhyming words. My mother stubbornly stuck with “Marilyn” and could only come up with one rhyme, “Caroline.”

When I went to college I started going by the nickname Cat. It was a choice that, in retrospect, was a pointed affront to my mother, my own personal rebellion. Catelyn, my full name, was a name carefully chosen. The letters of it were lovingly selected to create a spelling imbibed with the name of her best friend, and the ending of her own name “lyn”. She chose a name that was just on the cusp of becoming popular, and throughout the mid-1990s and 2000s grew wildly more so. My mother loves the name. But I grew tired of being one of the many Catelyns, Katelyns, Kaitlins, Caitlins, Caitlyns, Kaitlyns, etc. in the room. So, I changed it. 

When my parents first were getting married my mother gave my father a gift. It was a wire cage that had a taxidermy chicken poised in the corner, hay covering the bottom, and a small nest of eggs. She went to my father’s family farm in Indiana and asked her future father-in-law to help her wring the neck of one of their chickens. She took it to a local taxidermist and had it stuffed. It is a strange gift, but the farm was in my dad’s bones and she knew it, honored it, and tended to it. He grew up watching vegetables, corn, grain, and soybeans grow, twice a day collecting eggs from their chickens. The wire cage, with the chicken inside, was in our basement for years. 

It is hard for me to be close to her. Maybe we have opposite poles of magnets inside of us, pushing against each other. In February, I wrote a letter to her, it said I always want to be your daughter, and other things. I said what I have trouble articulating to her in words and through my actions.

One of the weeknights of my spring break at the condo in Florida, after my aunt and uncle had gone to bed my mother and I held hands, talking for an hour until they went comfortably numb. I asked my mom if this is the hardest thing she has had to go through. By far, she said, looking at me and then looking away. I asked the question because I was thinking about life spans and cycles, about the trajectory of pain in my own life, and how things are whole, then fall apart, and then we pick up the pieces. I was thinking in that moment that perhaps, because of her sixty-three years, she was just moving through another cycle. Maybe this type of hurt is something that becomes easier as one moves through. In August I found out that an old friend, someone I hadn’t talked to in nine months but whom for a time I cared deeply for, had been killed in a car accident in the middle of the night. He was a painter. I told my mom the news on the phone, my voice collapsing, and she said, It’s almost too difficult to bear, isn’t it? Those are the words that come from novels, or Shakespearian soliloquies. It is almost too difficult to bear. Yet they were the words spoken tenderly into my ear through an invisible phone line. 

  My mother has always worn a small opal ring. My sisters and I will eventually argue over who is to inherit it. Her mother gave it to her. I remember my mother's hands as having her wedding ring on her left hand, and the opal on her right. 

The original opal was foggy and pearly. It looked like there was a tiny light shining in the middle, displaying a vibrant, miniature rainbow. The twenty-year old opal fell out of its bezel a few years ago, and my dad replaced it for one of her birthdays. A few months later it abruptly broke into two pieces. My mom has kept the two little halves in a Ziploc bag in a little ceramic dish on her bathroom counter. Opals are a soft gemstone. They tend to shift around in their settings, and can break easily.

When I was thirteen I asked my parents for a gold ring. Just a band, with my initials and the year engraved on the inside. I usually wear the gold ring on my right ring finger, and a silver ring that my sister gave me on my left middle finger. Sometimes I switch them around or wear them on the same hand. I have worn them for years. They are my emblems, treasures, shields, amulets, good luck charms. They are signifiers of my specific body, my specific being. I think I wear them because I want to be like my mom. 

The first day in Florida that it was warm enough to wear shorts I got a terrible burn down the fronts of my thighs, shins, and tops of my feet. I was too eager for the sun, not wary enough of its sting. The wind coming in from the ocean at the beach tricked me, casually flicking off the familiar signals of being burned with an easy caress that cooled the heat from my skin. My legs were scorched red, and the burn made me feel feverish and achy. 

I patted down my legs with white vinegar, a home remedy of my grandmother, as my aunt suggested, then rubbed on some of my mom’s coconut lotion, as well. Its coolness felt good. I tucked the smells of vinegar and coconut between my sheets and slept uncomfortably. Even the slight pressure of the sheets felt punishing to my skin. 

In order to get to the beach from my aunt and uncle’s condo, we had to walk back through the neighborhood to arrive at a boardwalk, with railings on both sides of it. When you started on it, it faced you towards the ocean. Walking on it felt like walking down the aisle of a cathedral. It framed the altar of the ocean, and when I emerged on the beach to the open water and sand, it felt like something, maybe the world, was opened up to me, like summiting the top of a mountain peak to find pastel mountains fading into fictional distance.

As vast as the ocean is we only ever touch its edge, the crescent of a fingernail. 

On our last morning in Florida my mother walked ahead of me, wearing black leggings and a gray tank top. Against the horizon and the endless ocean she was a tiny figure. The clouds arced overhead in a sweeping, cumulous diagonal against a sharp blue sky, and my mother stood against it. 

We began our walk. The sand at that particular beach is packed firm because the beach allows trucks to drive on it. It is easy to walk on, not like the small hills of soft sand that buries your feet with each step, forcing you to lift your legs, making walking an uncomfortable and laborious task. A few paces from our start we saw the blacks shapes of dolphins in the surf, closer than I have ever seen them. We paused to watch their fins and heads and tails flipping in and out of the water. 

The dolphins kept pace with us as we continued our walk, a mile and a half down the beach. First there were two, then three, then four. Sometimes they were further out in the ocean, sometimes they were close enough to make out the curves of their snout or the slick rubber shine of their bodies. We would stop as they paused to play, then move on, cautiously wondering if they would continue with us. Three different times I saw one jump completely out of the water, belly flopping sillily into the salted waves.

Each time this happened, I audibly exclaimed, unable to suppress an expression of wonder. When we passed by walkers and families I asked if they had spotted them, with the excitement of having seen Poseidon emerge from the cresting waves with a trident and riding dolphins like skis.

Shortly after seeing the dolphins, I read the word Delphic. I knew that the word in some way inferred an oracle, or one that speaks a prophetic word. When I looked up the origin of the word it was muddled. Delphi was an ancient city in central Greece, originally the place where Gaia, the goddess of fertility, dwelled. When the Greeks claimed the city it became the site of an oracle of Apollo, a priestess named Pythia who was believed to be possessed by the spirit of Apollo. She advised the Greeks how to fight wars and plant colonies. In Greek myth, Apollo was born on the island of Delos. He turned himself into a dolphin to escape. Upon reaching the mainland he went to the site of Phythos, where Gaia lived, killed the oracle serpent guarding it, and took it for himself. The name Phythos was changed to Delphi because Apollo had arrived there by becoming a dolphin.

Something that is Delphic is prophetic. So often in the past few months I have felt burdened by a veil of pain, my world colored by sorrow. As I walked the beach with the dolphins I thought somewhere, sometime, there must be the inverse. Eventually my mother and I turned and began making our way back, the dolphins going on in the surf, releasing the moment we had been holding together. 

An opal is like the ocean, but with a fire burning inside. You can hold the world on the slope of your finger, in a tiny earth whose diameter is an eighth of an inch. 

Excerpt from “Love Hours”, 2018