O EAT AN OYSTER, it is best not to anthropomorphize. Forget for the moment that an oyster, too, has a mouth, a stomach, a heart.
THE FIRST TIME I can remember eating an oyster I was drunk, standing on a picnic table, noting the beauty of the Skagit River. I remember the beauty, but I don’t remember the river. I remember the oyster. Huge, I’d later learn, and in cocktail sauce. The menu said it was from Samish Bay.
The oyster was a shooter. I shot it. Then I chewed it. Cream brine, mineral melon, horseradish, tomato. I wasn’t supposed to chew, someone said. I kept chewing. The satisfaction I craved from the first moment of being satisfied was one I could only achieve with teeth. I swallowed the little creature, stomach and all, and repeated aloud what I had heard and now believed, that raw oysters are a perfect food. “A perfect food!” I said. “I can’t believe it!” I said. “Get off the table,” someone said. “You’re going to fall.”
IN SOME SELKIE TALES, the fisherman steals the selkie’s skin so that she must stay human on land and love him. Over the years she bears him many children but longs for her seal family. One day, as she watches a pod of swimming seals, her youngest child notices how sad she looks. She belongs with the seals, she tells him, but his father has stolen her sealskin. The boy runs to the chimney where his father has hidden the skin and retrieves it for her. She kisses her boy, tells him she loves him, then slips into the waves. She never returns.
The polypi barnacled to the cave of the sea witch in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” are, like selkies, half animal and half something else. If they have feelings, they are the two halves of one feeling: to want and to keep. Their arms or feet (“it is scarcely proper to call them either,” wrote the Scientific American in 1858) sprout in a ring around their mouths, which is at the center of their bodies. What they catch they do not release.
A real live oyster, on the other hand, has no appendage that might be called an arm, but it does have a kind of foot. After two or three weeks swimming free in the water column, having been ejected in a milky plume from their father-mother, oyster larvae metamorphose a “foot” they then use to “walk” over rocks and sand while searching