Wake, Siren Page 23

  The table is made of wood from the house of my grandmother, from a tree whose width speaks hundreds of years. It was felled and milled after decades and decades of rising from the earth, sinking into the earth, moving toward the sky, at sway in the wind, soaking in sun and rain, for decades it did, and before that, it was thinner and shorter, and before that, thinner and shorter still, so thin you could bend it with your hand, and before that, so small, you could, with a gentle grab and tug, pull it from the earth, its little earth hairs dangling, and toss it to the side, and before that, a seed smaller than the nail on your smallest finger, that sunk into the earth, spread by wind or bird or animal, and cracked and opened and reached down and took what it needed from the soil and took what it needed from the sky. We rest our elbows on the wood that came from that seed that grew and lived and lived again in the house and lives again holding our weight, holding the weight of the food that’s warm in front of us. And when we place our palms on it, we feel the distant hum of its aliveness.

  Over the table our words pass back and forth and we eat. There is meat and bread, an orange we’re saving for later to share with some cheese. There’s water in glasses and wine in glasses. We savor the food and savor the talk. The words change, but always we say the same thing to each other, my brother, my sister, my friend, my love. We tell the same story again and again. The one story we tell, the one story that takes a thousand shapes, tries to answer the same questions. In whatever form we give it, in whatever words we use. How can we make sense of change? What to do about the ends?

  And we ask, Are you with me?

  I knew you when you were a child. I knew you when you were young and soft. You knew me then, too. Even if we met much later. There is a knowing beyond knowing and I see the child in your eyes, my brother, my sister, my friend, my love.

  We made the food together. We stood in the kitchen with knives and spoons and heat and we were happy to be there together in the warmth of the kitchen, in the smells and sounds of the kitchen, the onion in oil, the sizzling fats. We are alive together, my brother, my sister, my friend, my love. And I see the lines around your eyes and the strand of gray or white in your hair. And you can see it in mine. None of us are children now.

  Our poet says, “For all things change, but no thing dies … In this world—you can believe me—no thing ever dies. By birth we mean beginning to re-form, a thing’s becoming other than it was.”

  “You can believe me,” the poet says. I want to. I want to trust the poet.

  “No thing ever dies.” But how do we go on?

  We sit at the table. We talk at the table. We take warm bites of food into our mouths.

  “When you die,” I say, “I would like to eat a bite of you. A small medallion of flesh from your flank or your thigh, cooked over flame. A bite of you to live inside me, to have you move all through my body, and then to release you from me. But not all the way, because some particles of you would get absorbed in my blood, and you would swim inside me and thud through me as my heart thuds. I want you to live on in me.”

  And I say, “When I die, I would like you to have a bite of me, to take me into your body, to live in your blood. I would like to live on in you.”

  “Yes, I want that.”

  And if I have you in me, when I die, I will be put into the earth as body or ash and a seed will sink and split above me and its roots will sink into me, into us, because you are with me, and the roots will take what they need, and we will be in the tree, and the tree will grow and be felled and a house will be built, and the house will be felled, but a board is saved and a table is made and two people sit at the table and take the food inside them and live. And we are in the table, you and I, my brother, my sister, my friend, my love. We are in the tree and the light and the water, in the meat and the bread, in the stones and the eyes of the birds, in the hooves of the creature who gave the milk to make cheese, we are there, in the galactic spiraling grain of the wood, we are there in these things from the beginning of time before things had names. We are there, and continue to be. The ghosts of ourselves, the ghosts of the children we were, we’re there, compressed in the tight grain of the wood.

  And now, tonight, as we sit at the table, it is not just you and me, we are never alone. Time sits with us, too. Time is our host and we are its guests, and it is our constant companion. We inhabit it. We thud through it. We ride the milk river of its flow.

  Time is not a generous host. It is greedy, insatiable, inconstant. Time, our greedy, hungry host. It will eat us, eat all of us. It will swallow us whole and take us in and we will move through it, forward and back, everywhere, all directions. No thing dies. We will move all through it. Milk river time, ocean time, shadow time, nameless time, placed time and placeless time, human time, star time, spider time, bird-wing time, boulder time, wrist time, penis and vagina time, wind time, thread time, flame and flower time, house time, sky time, swan and thunder time, breast time, black time, abyss time, when time, gaping endless all Time.

  It will take us in, you and me, my brother, my sister, my friend, my love, and we will move all through it and we will emerge to become Time itself.

  Eat, talk, laugh in the meantime, tell, kiss, help in the meantime. The place is now, you are here. Time makes space for change. The place is now, you and I are here. An embrace before it’s over. A slice of orange while we’re here. A piece of bread. Chew and chew. Nothing stays the same. We are swallowed up each moment into the whole history of new.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book started on a morning in late February 2018. I’d just finished a season of carpentry, and I hadn’t been writing much. I wanted to get my writing muscles back. I’d been dipping into The Metamorphoses, as I do from time to time. I was reading the Callisto story, and thought it might be a good exercise, a good way to flex those writing muscles, to rewrite the story in her voice. “I am a bear,” I started. “I live in the sky.” I wrote her story and I liked the way it felt. I liked hearing her voice in my ear. The next day, I wrote another—Daphne. After three, it took hold and took off. I read a story, reread it, then spent the day listening to the voice in my mind, trying to hear what this woman sounded like, what story she wanted to tell and how. I moved through Allen Mandelbaum’s elegant, sensual translation (Harcourt, 1993), and told the stories of almost every female figure in Ovid’s nearly twelve-thousand-line poem.

  The Metamorphoses, translated into English for the first time by William Caxton in 1480, and dozens of times since, recounts over two hundred myths of transformation; it is a history of the world from its creation out of chaos through Julius Caesar. It is a book about time, which means it is a book about change. It is beautiful and brutal. It is earthy, aetiological, ethereal, of our world and otherworldly. I read through the poem and listened to the voices of these women as I moved about my day and went for long runs and it was a time unlike any other in my life. In three months, there was a book.

  Some stories rose out of only a few lines of poetry; others emerged as condensed bursts from episodes that unfolded over hundreds of lines. Some hew to Ovid; others veer away from him. (Certain lines are lifted directly from Mandelbaum’s translation, too good not to include: “My shaft is sure in flight,” from Daphne’s story; when Phoebus says “I am the world’s eye” to Leucothoe; and “the gods help those who dare” in the story of Atalanta.) Some of the figures called out with voices that seemed lodged in a time of gods, goddesses, nymphs, and satyrs; others seemed to speak in a language closer to our own time. As in Ovid, these women vary in age, in background, in experience.

  There are a few stories I did not include, about a dozen, because their plots or themes rang too similar to other stories, or because I wasn’t able to hear the voice as well when I tried to listen. I left out the ones whose stories eluded me, to whom I couldn’t do—or bring—justice. I wish I’d listened harder to some of them. All of them have something to say, if I’d listened closely enough. I reworked the order of the stories, too, mostly in
an attempt to let the women’s voices be in better conversation with one another—so that we could not only hear them speak their own stories, but maybe hear what might happen if they could hear each other, too.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It is a deep and distinct pleasure, an actual thrill, being both understood and pushed, and Jenna Johnson, as editor of this book, did both. For her intelligence, intuition, and humor, I am hugely grateful and feel so, so lucky. Thanks, too, to Lydia Zoells for her wise and sensitive feedback, as well as the close attention of Nancy Elgin and Frieda Duggan. Boundless thanks to my spirited agent Gillian MacKenzie, and all of MacKenzie Wolf, for helping this get to exactly where I wanted it to be. To Matt Buck for the electric cover. To Lauren Roberts. To all of FSG. Thank you.

  Deep thanks go to my family. To my parents and Pam; especially to my brothers, Will and Sam, without whom I would be lost; and to Molly and Miranda. I am grateful to Alicia Simoni for her understanding and insight, and to DeFo for so many years of hugs. Thank you to soul friend Sharon Steel; to the curious, engaged, engaging, and singular Éireann Lorsung; to comrade and correspondent Phil Connors for his friendship and support. To Professor Sheila Murnaghan and her class The Odyssey and Its Afterlife, which changed everything. To Leona Cottrell. To Gini Jonas. To Paul Makishima. To Lisa Gozashti. To Rob in the period of revision. To Matt Weiland for helping me learn how to tell a story. To Allen Mandelbaum (1926–2011), whose translation of The Metamorphoses has had a lasting impact on my life.

  Thank you to Ledig House/Art Omi, where this book was finished, for one of the most magic months of all, and the wild-minded heroes I encountered there: Justin Go, Tishani Doshi, Hanna Bervoets, Martí Domínguez, Ida Hegazi Høyer, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Liliana Colanzi, Carol Frederick, Gisela Leal, Amy Sohn, Rich Benjamin, Edie Meidav, and Manuel Becerra. How lucky we all were.

  I have gratitude also for the Harvard Book Store, Porter Square Books, the Brookline Booksmith, the Charles River, and Shays.

  Profound thanks to Jenny White for over three decades of friendship.

  And thank you, John, for the exchange.

  ALSO BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN

  Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter

  A Note About the Author

  Nina MacLaughlin is the author of the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter. Formerly an editor at The Boston Phoenix, she is a books columnist for The Boston Globe and has written for publications including The Paris Review Daily, The Believer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and Bookslut. She was also recognized in Refinery29’s list of “21 New Authors You Need to Know.” She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPHS

  DAPHNE

  ARACHNE

  CALLISTO

  AGAVE

  TIRESIAS

  SYRINX

  ECHO

  MYRRHA

  Io

  SCYLLA

  SIBYL

  SEMELE

  MEDUSA

  CAENIS

  ARETHUSA

  THE HELIADES

  ALCMENA

  PROCNE AND PHILOMELA

  BAUCIS

  IVORY GIRL

  DRYOPE

  CANENS

  ALCYONE

  THETIS

  SALMACIS AND HERMAPHRODITUS

  EGERIA

  NYCTIMENE

  LEUCOTHOE

  ATALANTA

  IPHIS

  HECUBA

  POMONA

  SIRENS

  EURYDICE

  AFTER OVID

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALSO BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  FSG Originals

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  120 Broadway, New York 10271

  Copyright © 2019 by Nina MacLaughlin

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2019

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-72109-1

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