Alcestis
photo by Jonathan Mauer
1.
It is said seamen could foretell the weather by observing the grooming habits of cats. If the feline licks her coat against the grain, it means a storm is soon to arrive.
Is there a storm coming? I cannot tell you. The cat lazes half-dreaming in the window and I am grooming myself against the grain again for a husband
who rarely even says “hello.”
No. That is bitterness like biting my tongue, or how the sea does not conceive of intent. I know this world is full of things we encounter
passing through us like a storm. So
what am I doing?
Encountering loneliness, I guess.
Encountering the four walls of this cabin,
this roof, this hearth, this mud floor,
this windowpane splintered into pieces but still sealing everything in.
2.
Each morning
the husband goes to his worksite
and starts digging. Except on Sundays
when he says
“we should go to church”
but then he goes to his worksite, anyway. He says
digging is a process. He likens it
to laundry—
He says “You remove the excess
with water.”
He asks me, “What are you removing?”
And I want to say, the way we speak
around each other like a chorus.
Instead I mutter something
about searching.
Because here he is: Husband,
who has never once done laundry,
and knows nothing about Alcestis,
sitting across from wife,
who rarely listens to her husband,
and is too tired to help him dig.
3.
I spend the morning cataloging the things I possess: two hairbrushes,
a cracked teakettle, and this copy of “Alcestis”
overflowing with fear. I spend my afternoons
reading about how husband is a thing one must wait for
like a break in the clouds. Later
I will consider the things which own me:
How husband is a sailor lost at sea; how wife
is the story of burying yourself under snow. Eventually,
the roof collapses. And I’m stuck
on an island in Nova Scotia,
while he searches for a treasure
no one can find. But this is a lesson: when men want,
the world lifts itself like sediment. How over dinner
he tells stories about great battles. That he bailed the boat out,
himself, with a spoon. And I just listen,
while wanting something simple
like to say I am lonely, not this process of digging
deeper and deeper holes. Every evening
husband returns silent,
covered over in searching,
it seeps into every crevice
and has grown like a garden
left over for migrating birds.
4.
Alcestis is a play about guilt. Woman: the problem you cannot escape. You see, just because she has chosen to die in her husband’s place
does not mean that she has to die in her husband’s place. Which is the tragedy of the story—how everyone lives
to remember their choices. Like when he gave me chocolates
and I refused to eat them. Sweetness
like digging more holes. Each night over dinner he repeats stories about the treasure. How young boys discovered a depression;
how hanging from a branch above they found a weighted pulley; the way they began to dig with hands and crude tools
and then found gold and silver;
and how the tunnel
collapsed;
and how after, more searchers
dug more tunnels looking
for more treasure.
So what am I trying to say? That fidelity is the same as guilt. See? Alcestis is saved
because of her faith, but who will save her husband from himself? That is always the question: Who will save the husband
from himself? As if faith were a thing I could hold on to; as if guilt could just get up
and walk far away.
5.
Winter brings strong winds sweeping down from the North-Atlantic, so I stay indoors sweeping the floor of the cabin
while considering my mistakes. What was Alcestis’s mistake?
Saying “yes.”
What was her virtue?
Also saying “yes.”
And again that inescapable problem called “woman”—he wants you to be the thing that will kill you, like this sacrilege
of opening my mouth—
the way everything inside
falls out.
So instead I focus on sorting small things I find washed up along the shore: tennis balls, old running shoes, the corner of a lifejacket. What am I hoping to find?
A voice, perhaps.
A voice with which to find a “no”
and not just sweep the cabin
again.