In the Fog
by Tutt Stapp-McKiernan
I had risen before dawn on the day I was to graduate from college, and for reasons I could not explain—even after I met the woman—I put on a trench coat against the thick morning mist, slipped silently out of the house, and walked through town to the river. The chill and roiling whiteness touched my face like a cool hand the moment I stepped outside, and I wondered briefly if this was how sleepwalkers felt—drawn forward, almost against their will, into a murky world that would fully evaporate in the light of their waking day.
It seemed I was the only person about in the city, and the graveyard I passed near our house was no quieter than the blocks of tall Victorians or the deserted downtown. Shrouded by both fog and the lingering remnants of the night, the city felt untethered in space and time; despite traveling familiar streets, I was disoriented in the swirling air. But soon enough I stood at the edge of the cold grey Rappahannock, flowing straight and true, with the steady, soothing purposefulness for which rivers are well known.
Still, I could not help wondering why I had come. I was not overwrought; I was neither thrilled nor nostalgic about being through with college; I really didn’t require soothing. Yet here I was, shivering by the river without a thought in my head, and on a raw, dank morning in this uncommon fog, feeling my unruly hair corkscrewing itself into a frenzy in the humidity until it had lifted right off my shoulders and was standing out around me like Medusa’s snakes on the spine of my old Edith Hamilton, the one my mother had started reading to me when I could barely talk, along with “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and Tom Sawyer, the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and other favorites of her own—setting mythology’s archetypes within easy reach, vaccinating me against vapid children’s books, tuning my ear early to cadence.
After a few more vaguely disappointing minutes, when no inspiration or suddenly-revealed purpose for my inconclusive walk presented itself, I turned and headed home; my housemates would be awake by now, wondering what I could have wandered off for at the leading edge of such a big day. As I climbed towards the college and our street, I left the Victorians behind, the houses becoming ever more modest. I turned onto the street with the graveyard at the end, and as I passed the low brick home on my right I was startled by movement just ahead of me. I stopped. A delicate riffle of apprehension touched my neck, light as a breath.
Yet all I saw ahead of me was an old woman—a woman with thinning, grey-brown hair in a khaki raincoat. She was in the yard near the street, her back to me, and improbable though it seemed given the hour and the weather, she was trying to push an old lawn mower up a steep bank. There had been no sound because this was not a mower with a motor, just a double helix of blades that spiraled around each other like DNA strands between the two tires. The bank was too steep and slick and the spring grass too deep for the mower to even be moved forward, let alone cut—and yet the woman was struggling against it, in the eerie muffled silence of the early morning fog. It was barely six a.m. I could not think when I had seen an odder sight.
I moved further down the sidewalk until I was abreast of the woman, and I said, “Excuse me—but would you like some help with that?”
The woman startled and drew in her breath, looking up quickly at me and taking a step backwards. Her eyes flickered nervously as she shook her head no, in little quick jerks.
Thinking for the first time of how I must look to the woman, with my writhing hair and bedraggled wet coat and skirt and sagging socks, I tried to give my most warm and reassuring smile. “I’d be happy to help—that bank looks very slippery.” I paused, then risked adding, “It actually may be too wet to mow just yet.”
Again the woman shook her head no, quick and sharp, but this time she spoke. “No—no thank you,” she said. That was all. Her voice was a breathy flutter. It was not unfriendly, and not precisely fearful. But her tense bearing cloaked her in a willful self-containment I saw I could not penetrate, making her response final.
I would have liked to linger, to find some other path to conversation, but I had nothing with which I could build a bridge to her. So I just smiled again and murmured, “Alright. Take care, then. Have a nice day.” I walked on. It seemed the woman might have wanted to smile back—the potential for a quick nervous smile was there under the surface, flickering by like a fish in deep water—but somehow she simply could not. Too anxious, too shy perhaps. Could not let herself be in a position of receiving help.
A nerve deep inside me reverberated faintly, like a barely-plucked string.
What an exceptionally peculiar experience, I thought to myself as I continued on my way. Why on earth was a woman her age even out at this hour and in this weather? Why was she struggling so at something that was clearly impossible? What had made her so uneasy and jumpy? And, it had seemed, so specifically unnerved by me?
I asked these and more questions as I walked on, puzzling over my unexpected encounter. But the thing I did not do, did not think to do, was to look back. I did not look back over my shoulder, to see what the woman was doing, to see her being swallowed up by the whiteness, or to see if she was also watching me as I continued down the street and vanished into the mist. Many times in coming years, I would ask myself this question—why didn’t I look back?
But then I was home, and I was putting the key into the door to begin a busy and exciting day, the start of a new era. And I forgot all about the woman I had met in the fog.
*****
That afternoon we had a graduation party at our house for our parents and boyfriends, Susan’s and Libby’s and my families and beloveds mingling easily together, the parents giddy with pride. The surface of frivolity would not bear too close inspection. Susan watched me these days with sharper and sharper scrutiny—she did not trust Wren, especially now, as we all prepared to move on in different directions and Susan and I would live apart again for the first time in years. It was the last day of its kind.
Sometime past the invisible midway point of the festivities, my mother came up to me and asked to speak to me alone. I was struck by the oddness of the request, but I gestured to my bedroom, which opened, just like the other three rooms of the house, directly onto the living room, and then closed the door behind us. The music and voices eight feet away were barely removed.
I sat on the edge of my bed, which only moments ago I had thought of when I had snuck a glance at my watch, idly wondering how long it would be before our guests would depart and Wren and I could retire into its creaking depths, the afternoon light slanting through the lace curtains. I shook away the thought and gave my full attention to my mother, perched on the edge of a trunk, elegant and trim as usual in a slate blue suit, her hair crisply set, pearls at her lobes and throat. The financial privation of the last fifteen years, and all that had come with it, never ever showed when my parents turned themselves out for a party.
My mother looked both eager and nervous. “I had to tell you something,” she said, then began again with, “Well, I wanted to ask you something.” I nodded encouragement, but could do no more—I had absolutely no clue what to expect. My parents and I had lived so closely that such preambles to speech were unheard of—you didn’t talk about talking, you just did it, saying every single thing that popped into your head without any planning or forethought at all. I felt uncomfortable and mildly embarrassed. Surely there was not some big confession coming, or worse, some latter-day motherly admonition—was I really sleeping with Wren? Had I forgotten my mother’s many warnings that men do not respect girls who are too easy to kiss?
But no—what my mother said was, “I had a dream last night that I have to tell you about.”
I smiled slightly at this unexpected direction. I leaned my elbows forward onto my knees and nodded again. To my surprise, my mother adopted the same uncharacteristic pose. In the tiny room these small re-adjustments of posture put our faces bizarrely close, and made me feel as if I were inspecting myself in a mirror.
Staring down at her clasped hands, my mother said, “I dreamed last night that I was out in the rain, and I was trying to push an old lawn mower up a hill.”
I felt my eyes widen in amazement. The shock I felt at her words left the back of my neck crawling with my visceral astonishment, and the woman I had met in the fog that morning, and then promptly forgotten, came rushing back to me, pressing herself upon me. I shook my head, thinking perhaps I had simply had more champagne than I had realized, though I knew that was not the explanation. But if not that, then what?
Still looking down, my mother continued, “It was one of those old-fashioned mowers with just blades. I was wearing a raincoat and some old boots. The hill was way too steep, and I couldn’t push the mower because my feet kept slipping on the wet grass, and there was no way I could mow anyway because it was raining. But I just kept pushing and pushing. It was like I couldn’t give up.”
My mother looked up at me and I saw that she was troubled for some reason by this apparently innocuous dream, though she could have had no idea of the seismic effect her story was having on me.
“So I just felt I had to ask you—right away, today. Why would I have dreamed such a thing? What does it mean?”
It seemed that something big was happening, something that came from an unknown beyond whose influence I had never encountered and whose existence I barely credited. And yet here was its evidence right before me, incontrovertible, as if I had suddenly stumbled upon the secret door to another world that I had yearned to find in childhood. Eager to include my mother in unraveling the mystery, though, as it clearly involved both of us, I gathered myself to launch into the tale of my remarkably parallel experience that morning.
But I had barely drawn breath to begin when a calm voice of wisdom, an inner knowing —a voice that was not my own, yet not unfamiliar, either—arrived clearly in my head. Though imbued with kindness, it spoke firmly and with immediacy, and it said distinctly, “Don’t tell her.” A brief pause, then an addition: “You can never tell her.”
I had never before experienced an internal directive of this type—the baffling aspects of the day were accruing dizzyingly. My mother sat looking at me expectantly and I knew I must respond, though I did not know even as I opened my mouth what I was going to say. On this dicey matter the calm voice of wisdom remained mum; I would have to fend for myself.
Thinking back to my impression of the woman I had met, I began with, “Well, perhaps it has something to do with…with allowing yourself to be helped?"
My mother frowned very slightly, as if this were an exceedingly strange answer. I fumbled on. “You and Baba live so closely together that you are like two parts that make a whole, and it lets you seal yourselves off in some ways from others. Maybe…” I hesitated. “Maybe it was a sort of vision of a time when Baba might not be with you. If you were alone you would have to not be so sealed off. You would have to let other people—me, others—help you, make things work. Maybe it was about letting more help into your life.”
My mother smiled a sort of wondering smile, as if the idea of herself alone was so farfetched that only a farfetched dream could have conjured it. Her urgent desire to discuss it showed that she had felt the dream to be a significant one; surely there was more to it than just that? I could see my mother invalidating my interpretation even as she sat there. “It’s fascinating, isn’t it?” she said. But still there was that doubting smile.
“Yes, it is,” I said, and meant it. “It is definitely a fascinating dream. I’m glad you told me about it.” Though it was clear that I had said nothing that my mother found even remotely useful in understanding her dream, we both stood, and the breaking of our mirrored body positions broke too the speculative space into which we had briefly crossed; things were back to normal. And yet the core of the event remained unexamined, the proffered glimpse behind the veil squandered. This was the price of my silence, of keeping the secret that intuition had, for reasons of its own, prompted me to conceal from her.
“You know I will always be there to help you, don’t you?” I said, and my mother reached out her cool hand and squeezed mine lightly. “Of course I know that,” she said, and we hugged and moved towards the door. But much lay thick in the air. Different as our vantage points were on whatever had just transpired, it seemed we each sensed that the real point had been missed.
What exactly had happened in the fog that morning? Somewhere, I was sure, the source of the still, calm voice of wisdom was disappointed at my superficial conclusions.
*****
Nearly 30 years later—in deep autumn, the time when the veil between worlds is known to be its thinnest—I would wake suddenly in the night. I was alone in my same creaking walnut bed, as usual. The years of waking up with Wren were an increasingly distant memory, his many liaisons with other women finally having led him into a relationship he could not say no to. He had been gone five years.
My heart’s movement told me I had had a vivid dream, one that had roused me from sleep with its sharpness, but I could not recall its content, only the feeling of some loss, of aloneness. Of whom had I had to let go yet again in my dream? My father, gone seven years now? My mother, gone for just over a year? A dog, a cat, any of dozens? Wren, for the hundredth time? One of the friends I had alienated with my introvert-workaholic’s neglect?
This was a common beginning point for one of the vicious cycles of self-recrimination that could often keep me awake for hours, and I turned in bed, grasping about for a thread of some problem I had to work out, some thorny matter at my job, that would divert my mind from starting to sift through the undone, unsaid things of my life.
But instead, in the random non-linear way of the half-awake, what I thought of was an email I had written that day—about a recipe-exchange invitation, of all things—and then of my mother, of my mother’s and father’s cool granite stones out under my oak tree, and of how very quiet it was, out there and in here, and of how my life used to contain more noise.
These threads were, I could feel, converging on something, and I tried to stay focused enough to remain awake and yet relaxed enough to let my thoughts continue to migrate to their shadowy destination. I tried to retrace my steps: Noise. Noise versus silence. My email declining the recipe exchange (because I lacked the required 20 contacts to add to the chain). Absence. What was that poem by…was it Beckett? Who may tell the tale of the old man? / Weigh absence on a scale? / Mete want with a span? My father had predicted my aloneness, predicted it twice, and Susan had warned me about Wren. Yet despite warning here I was, helpless as Oedipus as he fled the oracle’s prophecy only to run directly into its arms. Would I, too, wish to blind myself if I finally glimpsed the truth of my own solitude?
There was a snagging, then an acceleration, in the movement of my thoughts. Some wire had been tripped, some sensor alerted to my presence nearer and nearer to something long unseen. What was it? Something about glimpsing. I peered as if through a fog—and with that idea I accelerated even more, until I felt the rocketing of my thoughts through their synapses as an actual physical sensation. What was it? A glimpse of the truth. Fog. A glimpse through the fog.
And then suddenly it was upon me, and rather than my seeking it, I felt as if it had been seeking me, stalking me for who knew how long, the thrum of a deep growl in its throat, not threatening, but simply filled with import, a lithe and powerful beast about to leap from the shadows and be seen and recognized in all its fearsome actuality. I sat up and gasped, feeling instantly nauseous, the room spinning and tilting.
The fog. The woman in the fog. My mother’s dream, her smile of muted dissatisfaction at my interpretation. Wrong, all wrong! My mother had indeed dreamed of herself in the identical situation of the woman I then met hours later in the fog. But the woman I met had not been an evocation of my mother! My half of the experience had never been about my mother.
The woman I met in the fog had been me. She had been my own self, reaching backward towards me through time like a cast shadow, through means I could neither understand nor explain. And as soon as I saw this—when I awoke to finally recognize myself in that solitary figure engulfed in swirling mist—I saw at last her warning: Beware. It is so easy to lose your way. See me—see yourself—and beware.
BIO: Tutt Stapp-McKiernan lives in Rappahannock County, Virginia, and worked her entire 39-year career teaching English at the same small independent school. Now retired, she works on her own words. "In the Fog" is an excerpt from her in-progress memoir The Introverts-Only Recipe Exchange: Aloneness, Writing, Inheritance, My Mother, and Me. Two other segments, her first-ever published pieces, are forthcoming this winter, from Streetlight Magazine and Persimmon Tree.