The Old Ways of Love
My mother told me it was easy to find your one true love. You just had to ask the ocean for it.
“It’s old magic,” my mother said. “Women have been taking lovers from the sea for hundreds of years.”
She said her mother’s mother told her that. She said that’s where her grandfather came from. That my great-grandmother whispered him into the sea and out he came, and now we have saltwater in our blood. She said all the women in our family took husbands from the water.
My mother and grandmother married the common way. My great-grandmother warned both of them against it. They were turning their back on tradition, on the old ways. But my grandmother was stubborn, and my mother even more so. They insisted on husbands made of mud and dirt and bone, men made the normal way. They were modern women who didn’t need magic.
Both of their husbands eventually left them. So much for the superiority of normal men. My mother never admitted she made the wrong choice. She did, however, make sure I knew the words to find my love the old way. Just in case.
When I turned thirty, I decided it was time I settle down. My timing was arbitrary, almost a whim. I simply woke up one morning and decided to marry. I told my mother I was going to spend the weekend at the New Jersey shore house we inherited when my grandmother died. We hadn’t been there in years, not since I was a child, but the house was still there, just a few blocks from the beach. When I came back, I told her, I would bring a husband with me.
My mother wasn’t opposed to me taking a man from the sea. But she was adamant that I choose another place to do it. The man matches the water, she told me. So, you had to pick your water carefully.
“Not the Atlantic, not the sea here,” she insisted. “Go down to the Gulf of Mexico, fly to a Caribbean Island, try the Adriatic Sea. Cold, cruel waters will give you a cold, cruel man.”
My mother was only trying to protect me. But I loved the piece of the Atlantic my family claimed. It was often dark and dingy with seaweed that gripped your shins like fingers beneath the surface. It never got quite warm enough to swim in comfort. And there were those magical, horrifying times of the year when jellyfish would crowd the waters, and even the bravest swimmers would think twice about diving in. The Atlantic I knew as a kid was indeed jagged and icy and cruel, and I felt at home there. I still remembered the thrill of standing at the water’s edge and letting the waves break around my knees until they toppled me into the surf. I would come up gasping and choking on seawater, happier than I could possibly describe.
Yes, I could love a man like the Atlantic, I thought. So, I just told my mother I would call her when I was back home. We would have her over for dinner, I said, my new husband and I.
I arrived at my grandmother’s house late on a Friday night in September. The house had been in my family for generations. It was a light gray, two-story home with white shutters and a wraparound porch. After my grandfather left her, my grandmother had the small front lawn ripped up, removing all the grass. Caring for the lawn was my grandfather’s job, and she refused to take it over. Instead, she covered the space in stones and seashells. It must have rained earlier that day, because the stones were darkened and slick, drops still glistening from the scalloped edges of pearly shells. The air smelled just as I remembered it, the brine seeping into me as I drew a breath, sitting heavy on my tongue.
I walked up the porch steps and paused at the screen door. On the porch sat my grandmother’s old white wicker furniture, a rocking chair and loveseat, both covered with a fine layer of dust and cobwebs. The porch, too, was littered with dead leaves, giving the front of the house a look of neglect. Which, in all fairness, was true. My grandmother died when I was fifteen, and with her death came my mother’s freedom from the town she hated. We stopped coming to the shore after that, and besides a few trips over the years to see to the house’s upkeep, my mother never willingly visited.
I always thought it was funny that my grandmother insisted on living by the ocean. Even though she turned her back on so much of her family’s magic, it was like she couldn’t entirely escape the draw of the sea. As a child, I would stumble on her sitting out on the porch late at night, rocking back and forth slowly and staring at nothing.
“I’m listening to the ocean,” she would tell me, and even three blocks away I could hear the crashing of the surf as clearly as if I was standing right at the water’s edge. “Wherever we go, we’ll always hear the sea,” she said, and she was right. I heard the break of waves with every beat of my heart.
My mom, on the other hand, moved inland as soon as she turned eighteen. She refused to live the half-life her mother did.
“I wanted a clean break,” she told me once when I asked her why she fled. She avoided large bodies of water whenever possible. Oceans were the worst, of course, but even big lakes made her nervous. I think she was afraid that if she got too close to the water she would hear its call, and she couldn’t bear it. When I was young, she made my dad drive me to my grandmother’s in the summer. Once he left, she was forced to do it herself, dropping me off and then immediately turning around and driving home. On the way to my grandmother’s house, we had to pass one street that gave us a sudden and unobstructed view of the ocean. My mother always held her breath when we drove by this road, the way some people do when they pass a graveyard.
Inside, my grandmother’s house looked much the same as it always did. White walls, pale beige carpet, a matching navy blue sofa and armchair in the sitting room to the left of the front door. An oil painting of the sea at night hung on one of the walls. No TV; my grandmother never watched it, and apparently threw it out after my grandfather left. To my right was a cramped set of winding stairs that led to the second floor, and directly in front of me was a short hallway that ended in the kitchen and dining room. Like the porch, there was a gentle air of desertion to the house, the paint chipping, the carpets threadbare, the couch cushions sagging. None of that mattered to me, though. I loved my grandmother’s house. I could think of no better place to spend my first night with my new husband.
I would go to the ocean on Saturday night, I decided. That would give me time to rest, to prepare. Leaving most of my bags in the hall, I carried a few shopping bags into the kitchen. A can of soup, two steaks I picked up from the butcher shop on my way into town, some potatoes, some green beans. Butter and oil and milk. A container of coffee. Sugar, in case my husband decided he liked his coffee sweet. With food in the fridge and in the pantry, my grandmother’s abandoned house began to look like a home again. It was quite late, and I decided to get some sleep. I had a big day ahead of me.
Upstairs, there were two small bedrooms. One had belonged to my grandmother, the other to me whenever I visited. I decided to sleep in my grandmother’s room. A queen-sized bed took up most of the space, the walls the same chipped white as the downstairs. There was a tiny dresser, and when I opened a drawer to put my clothes away I swore I caught the ghost of my grandmother’s perfume. It was a strange scent, sharp and clean but with an undercurrent that brought to mind saltwater, like she carried the sea on her skin. I breathed deep, trying to capture all of the lingering pieces of her inside of me. Then I settled myself into bed, and was asleep almost as soon as I turned off the light.
I spent most of the next morning cleaning. I swept the porch and dusted every surface, inside and out. I made sure the kitchen was tidy, and tried to plump up the sofa cushions the best I could. I was pleased with my work; the small house now felt cozy, lived-in and loved once more. We would spend a few weeks here, I decided. My husband would want to stay by the water, at least in the beginning. Maybe we would move here permanently. My mother wouldn’t mind; it wasn’t like she used the house. I imagined living by the beach, my husband teaching our half-ocean children how to swim, my daughters growing up knowing the secrets of the water.
And then, it was time. The sun had just set; twilight was the perfect time for water magic. I packed a small bag with a shirt and pants for my husband. I took a cardigan for myself, as the nights were beginning to grow chilly. Most of the tourists had left by this point, leaving only a handful of locals. As I walked to the ocean, lights began to wink on in the few houses still occupied on my street. I reached the beginning of the beach and kicked off my shoes. I wanted to feel the sand beneath my feet as I walked along the narrow path through the dunes, the grasses on either side of me swaying in the breeze. I walked slowly; there was no need to rush. I savored the smell of the seawater, which overpowered me more and more the closer I got to the water’s edge.
I stopped right at the brink of the ocean, the water just beginning to curl around my toes. I looked around, but I was completely alone on the beach. I dug my feet into the wet sand, savoring the feeling of the damp grit between my toes. I was rooting myself, and the ocean responded, the tide changing so that more and more water lapped around my ankles, then my calves. It tried to pull me in, the tug growing more insistent, but I stood firm.
“Not today,” I told the ocean, “not yet. Maybe one day. Today, I need something from you.”
Growing up, my mother always laughed at magic in movies or storybooks, the elaborate rituals and potions and wands and smoke and candles.
“That’s not real magic,” she said. “Magic isn’t that complicated.” It was just a matter of having the courage and the will to know what you wanted, and to ask for it. All the women in my family knew this. When my mother first told me the words to claim a husband, I was shocked by how simple it was. Of course, simple does not always mean that sacrifices aren’t required.
As I stood there, now knee-deep in the surf, I did exactly as my mother told me. I spoke my life into the water. Every fear, every moment of love, every bit of sadness and pain and joy. I cried and I raged and I laughed, and I told it everything. And as the waves grew larger, as the ocean roared, I roared back, shouting the story of myself and demanding what my heart wanted until my throat grew hoarse. A wave suddenly reared up, slamming into me. I was pulled under, water flooding my lungs. My world was a confusion of murky blue until I saw what I thought were a pair of eyes, there one moment and gone the next. My head broke the surface and the water retreated quickly, leaving me to vomit saltwater onto the wet sand around me. As the tide pulled back, I felt something inside me move with it, as though there was a string anchored in my chest that the ocean was tugging on. That thing, that piece of me, whatever it was, moved up my throat and into my mouth. I choked and gagged and felt it slip away, invisible, into the surf.
I crawled away from the water, collapsing when I reached my bag, only a few yards away. Struggling to sit up, I pulled out my cardigan and wrapped myself in it, still dripping wet and covered in sand. And then I waited.
I waited for one hour, and then two. The sky grew darker and darker, until the only light came from the stars above me. I sat there through the night, never taking my eyes off of the sea. As the sky began to lighten, I started to accept that perhaps my husband would not come. Maybe the ocean was angry at my mother, my grandmother, and was punishing me for their choices. Maybe I had done something wrong. Maybe I had asked for far too much, or not enough at all, and had insulted it either way.
I struggled to my feet, my muscles stiff and aching from sitting on the cold sand all night. I picked up my bag, heavy with the clothes I thought I would give to my husband. I took one last look at the sea, and then turned away, looking back up the beach and towards my grandmother’s house. How could I tell my mother I had failed? That, perhaps, that gift deep in our family’s blood was dead and gone, and eventually our daughters would no longer have the echo of the sea in their hearts. The grief of that loss hadn’t caught up to me yet, it was still too unthinkable. But I felt it coming on, howling like a storm.
And then, behind me, came a splash. Then another, and another. It sounded like someone moving through the water. Like a body pushing itself against the tide. Like a lover striding through the surf, eager to return to shore.
Then, footsteps on the sand. I did not turn around as they came closer, too afraid of being wrong. What if it was a coincidence, an early-morning swimmer I had not seen. Would the ocean be that cruel? Could my heart bear it if it was?
And then, light as a dream. The dripping wet soaking through my sweater. A hand on my shoulder.
Shaun Byron Fitzpatrick (she/her) lives in Philadelphia with her husband and black cat. Her fiction has appeared in Maudlin House, Ellipsis Zine, New Gothic Review, and Coffin Bell Journal, among others. You can find her on Instagram at @shaunyfitz or on Twitter at @shauny_fitz.