Swim to Me

by Betsy Carter

  Alan Sommers was the kind of fellow who would normally hunch his shoulders when he got near a woman like Thelma, and push past her. Never a smile, a nod of the head, an acknowledgment that she existed. Men like him made her feel apologetic about her looks, her clothes, her age. And yet, there he was, sitting across from her, baring his little teeth with something akin to pleading in his eyes. Thelma rarely allowed herself to think about her close call with Hollywood, or the “Jingle Shells” fiasco, but now the memories hit her like a migraine. The smell of mildew filled her head as she thought of more years spent sitting in that amphitheater watching another performance of “The Mermaid Follies” or “The Little Prince.” She’d spent her whole life at Weeki Wachee; everyone there regarded her as a has-been. She had to get out of there. She’d never kidded herself about that. Now her own words came back to her, the words she spoke to her girls before each show: “Finally, the only thing you have to fall back on is intuition,” she’d say. “There’s an inner voice inside all of us that knows when to breathe, how to move our heads just so, so that the hair flows around the head like a cape, the right moment to flash a smile. Pay attention to that little voice—it’s what separates the stars from the hacks.”

  For once in her life, Thelma followed her own advice. “Sommers—you don’t mind if I call you Sommers, do you?” she said. “The girls, the costumes, the bathtub, I’m all for it. Just one thing: they are still my girls, my young beauties. That means all negotiations go through me. What they’re paid, what they say, what they wear—it all goes through me. Whatever you pay them, and I’m sure you’ll want to be generous, I get a fifteen percent commission.”

  Sommers rubbed the shiny spot on his forehead where his hair was beginning to recede. He raised his pen in the air as if to make a point, then put his pen down and smiled. “We are cut from the same cloth, aren’t we, Foote?”

  Thelma thought she had artistic integrity, that she appreciated beauty for beauty’s sake. Slippery Dick clearly couldn’t tell the difference between art and artichokes. He was so clearly what he was: a man about money, and how to make a bundle of it. No, they were not cut from the same cloth, but she knew how to play his game.

  “I’m not finished, Sommers,” she said. “Plus, I want a finder’s fee of one thousand dollars. And I want the girls to be treated like ladies. As I am the only person who can give you the right to use these girls, my offer is nonnegotiable.”

  Sommers clicked his pen a few times, then bit down on his Rutgers College ring.

  “Okay, how soon can they start?”

  WHEN THELMA FOOTE returned to Weeki Wachee the following morning, she called a special meeting of the girls.

  It wasn’t in her nature to be funny or ironic, and the few times she was, she would broadcast it with a wide, gummy smile that made her eyes seem even further apart.

  “I’ve just come back from a meeting with the folks at WGUP, the ABC affiliate in Tampa.” She grinned. “And they’ve made me an offer I can’t refuse.” She waited for the laughter, but none came. Oh hell, she fumed to herself, do I have to explain the damn joke? But her dyspepsia subsided when she visualized how beholden the girls would feel to her for furthering their careers.

  She told them about Mr. Sommers and his idea of having a mermaid do the weather each night. “Our friends at WGUP even came up with the clever idea of having you sit in a bathtub. You couldn’t stand, of course, and if you sat behind a desk, the audience wouldn’t get the full effect of the tail. Our friends came up with a pretty smart idea, if you ask me. So there you have it, my lovelies: the big time, the high life. And mark my words, this is just the beginning.”

  No one knew what to say. Wanting to be a mermaid was one thing; wanting to be a television weather girl was quite another. After Thelma left, Blonde Sheila was the first to speak. “Cool. I’m up for sitting in a bathtub on TV.” Sharlene worried how they would get back and forth from Tampa. “All this publicity,” said Molly. “Who told everyone about us?”

  “Who do you think?” said Scary Sheila. Helen did that thing with her hands, putting her fingers under her chin, and turning her thumb and forefinger into a pair of glasses.

  But nobody laughed. They understood that it was Thelma Foote who had gotten them the fancy costumes, had phoned the papers, had urged them to make their characters believable. These girls, her girls, would be hard-pressed to find someone else who would do them favors unbidden and bring the kind of order and justice into their lives that she had. If they were family, then she was their Don. Although none of them would acknowledge her role outright, this would be the last time any of them would make reference to cow eyes when talking about Thelma Foote.

  EXHILARATED BY ALL that had happened, Delores called her mother to wish her a Merry Christmas. Just as she had for the past couple of months, her mother answered the phone with that lilting bend in her voice.

  “Hay-llo,” she said.

  “Hi, Mom, it’s me. You all right?”

  “Oh, hello.” Her voice flattened. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine, really fine. We had our Christmas extravaganza, and I played Connie Corleone from The Godfather. People seemed to like it a lot. Merry Christmas, by the way. How’s Westie?”

  “Westie’s fine. He’s talking already.”

  “I miss him. I miss you, too.”

  “I’m sure he misses you, too. He likes all the postcards you send.”

  “Are you having a good day?”

  “It’s all right. No work today, that’s good. But some bad news. Helene has breast cancer.” She whispered the words, breast cancer.

  “That’s terrible, will she be all right?” asked Delores.

  “Not sure—it doesn’t look good. Poor woman. Oh, one more thing. Are you near Boca Raton?”

  “Sure, I guess. Why?”

  “Well, we might be coming down there somewhere in the middle of April.”

  “You and Westie?”

  “Me, Westie, and Avalon.”

  “Who’s Avalon?”

  “Come on. Surely you know who Avalon is.”

  Thelma Foote had a rule about long distance: no calls before nine p.m., because that’s when the rates changed. Any charges beyond the first three minutes were deducted from the girl’s paycheck. Delores’s three minutes were up.

  “Honest, Mom, I have no idea who Avalon is. But I’ve gotta go.”

  “Okay then, good-bye.”

  Ten

  The night before Delores made her debut as a weather girl on WGUP, she wrote a postcard to Westie with a picture of a flamingo on it. Our father used to think I looked like one of these birds. Tomorrow I am going to be on television as a weather-girl in a bathtub. I will explain it more when you get older. Things happen that you can never have imagined in your whole life. You’ll see.

  Delores had spent twelve dollars on postcards and toys for Westie, money that she took from the silver coins that were still in the bathing cap she kept in her suitcase underneath her bed. By now, she was making fifty dollars a week plus as much as twenty dollars a week in tips. Each week, she’d send twenty dollars to her mother, keep thirty dollars to spend on movies and what few clothes she bought, and put twenty dollars in a plastic Weeki Wachee shopping bag that she also kept under her bed. The shopping bag was filled with money she was saving for Westie. She would add to it each week, hoping that when he grew up, he’d never have to do anything just for the money. It was a comforting ritual because it implied that she would be part of Westie’s future. The role of being somebody’s big sister was her lifeline to the real world, which was seeming further away than ever.

  Late the next afternoon, Thelma and Delores got into the van to drive to Tampa. It had been wet and humid all that March, and Thelma made sure that each of her girls had a plastic fold-up rain bonnet. Her thinking was puzzling, since the girls spent most of their time underwater, but once Thelma got a notion like that, there was no talking her out of it. Before she started the car, Thelma shook out her bo
nnet, folded it up, and put it into its plastic case. Delores did the same. Thelma then opened the glove compartment and drew out a pair of leather camel-colored gloves with brown sweat stains on the palms. “I am many things around here, but chauffeur is not one of them,” she said, pulling the gloves onto each hand and snapping them closed at the wrist. “You can bet your sweet ass that Dick Pope doesn’t spend his days driving water skiers hither and yon.” Thelma shifted to reverse and released the clutch. The car hiccuped before stalling, causing both of them to bounce off their seats. “Just this once,” said Thelma, starting the engine again. “I’ll make the introduction and then the ball’s in Sommers’s court.” Delores wondered if Thelma even knew she was there. “What does he think, that my girls will swim to Tampa every day?” The car lurched forward now. “He wants my girls, he provides car and driver. End of story, that’s all she wrote.”

  Then, as if she’d just noticed Delores, Thelma turned to her with one of her waxy smiles. “So my pet, you’re it,” she said. “You’re our first TV star. I chose you because you’re the only one among them who’s got more sense than a mackerel. Now’s the time to put Mommy and Daddy’s show biz genes to the test.” She winked. “Don’t mess up, you hear?”

  Delores wondered why everyone was always telling her not to mess up. That’s what her mother had said when she told her she was going to Florida, and now Thelma said it, too. It seemed to Delores that, of all of them, she was the only one who hadn’t messed up.

  When they arrived at the studio in Tampa, they took the elevator up to the eighth floor. Delores was impressed that the receptionist seemed to recognize Thelma. “Hey, Miss F. I’ll call him and let him know you’re here.” Delores couldn’t imagine anyone calling Thelma “Miss F,” but noted that Thelma seemed pleased and nodded demurely in her direction. Delores heard the receptionist say into the phone, “She’s here,” then whisper something that sounded like “Oh, you.” She told them that Sommers was expecting them and they should go right into his office.

  Thelma had talked about Alan Sommers in a way that made Delores expect he would be as handsome and polite as Dick Clark. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He was short and skinny and didn’t have that neat pompadour that made Dick Clark look so suave. He had tight knots of ringlets, the kind of hair that Teen Girl declared could be easily tamed by ironing. His brow was deeply lined, but his skin was soft and pink. He was a jumpy fellow who talked in rapid jabs of words.

  “Mr. Sommers, I’d like you to meet Delores Taurus, our number one mermaid,” said Thelma.

  Sommers grabbed Delores’s hand and blinked his gray fisheyes at her.

  “So you’re our new weather gal,” he said, pumping her hand. “How do you do? Mmmm, you look a little hot and humid to me.” He pelted her with his laugh, then turned to Thelma. “Faan-tasstic bones! We’ll need to play down the teeth and do something about the tits. Big is super. Too big is cheap.” No one had ever said these kinds of things in front of Delores, and she didn’t know where to look.

  Thelma took off her glasses and blew into them before wiping them on her jacket. “Delores is from a family of entertainers,” she said, glaring in Sommers’s direction. “She understands how to play to a camera.”

  “Excellent, excellent,” said Sommers. “We sure could use some professionals around here.” He looked her up and down. “You’re perfection. We’ll just do a touch of hair and makeup, and then we’ll be ready for our run-through. Be back to you in a jiffy, Miss F.” Sommers took Delores by the arm and led her to a small white room, bare except for a large mirror rimmed by blazing light bulbs, something that looked like a dentist’s chair, and a makeup artist named Brandy.

  “Our first sea goddess,” said Sommers, gently shoving Delores into the chair. “Make her beautiful; dewy, as if she’s just been washed ashore. Inspire me.” He gave Brandy the thumbs-up.

  Brandy wore a pink smock and had a silk scarf tied bandana-style around her straight black hair. She spilled some foundation onto a small piece of foam rubber and began dabbing at Delores’s face. She used her pinky to rub in a little blush. She kept pulling bottles and tubes from what looked like a giant tool kit, only its sliding trays were filled with brushes and lipsticks and tiny pots and tubes in colors that were shadows and whispers of other colors. She didn’t say much, just kept cupping Delores’s chin in her hand and turning her from side to side as if she were a piece of sculpture. “Tawny works your cheekbones,” she said at one point; and “Burgundy is flattering to your natural skin tone,” at another. Delores watched her own face in the mirror as the blotches of color blended into one. She thought about Ellen and how many times they’d sat together in her room, trying to follow the makeup tips from Teen Girl. Now she was sitting before a professional makeup artist who was telling her how to maximize the fullness of her lips and matte the shiny parts of her nose.

  For a moment, Delores looked beyond the reflection of her own face in the mirror. Through the open door, down the hall, she could make out Thelma Foote’s profile. Thelma was backing away, the way she might have if a German shepherd had come lunging toward her. She could make out Sommers’s bristly head of hair and saw him leaning in toward Thelma, his face up close to hers. He said something. Then Thelma stood up straight and tugged at the tips of the collar on her windbreaker. Whatever she said back, she punctuated by wagging a scolding finger at him. Sommers’s shoulders slumped, as if her words had leveled him. He reached in his pocket. He pulled out something, a cookie maybe. Yes, it was a Fig Newton. He popped it into his mouth. Delores had no idea what she was seeing or what they were saying, only that some kind of a showdown had occurred, and it looked as if Thelma had won.

  The makeup artist was poofing the final touches of powder to Delores’s face when Sommers stuck his head inside the door. “Hi, gorgeous,” he said, as sweet and sour as lemon candy. “Brandy, you are beyond belief. A-maazing. We still need to work out the bathtub logistics.” He tapped on the face of his watch. “Time’s a tickin’.”

  Brandy ran her tongue over her teeth. She took Delores’s thick brown hair into her hands and let it fall through her fingers like mud. “Manageable, just needs a trim.” She snipped Delores’s bangs until they were about an inch long—“Let’s open up that pretty face of yours”—then rummaged through her tool kit until she came upon a tube of VO5. She squeezed a quarter-sized dollop into her hands and rubbed it into Delores’s hair. “That’s it; now every part of you glows. Break a leg . . . uhh . . . Snap a tail.” She helped Delores into her costume—a green bustier made to look as if it were covered with fish scales, and a thick black wetsuit bottom, which the TV audience would never see but was meant to keep Delores warm as she sat in the bathtub. When she was dressed, Sommers put his hand on the small of her back and nudged her onto the set.

  The set was very cold. There were no windows. The walls were insulated so that no noise would bounce off them, which made everyone sound as if they were talking in a jar. The anchorman sat at a desk that was a streamlined console made of Formica, which had been grained in order to make it look like wood. The background, which looked on the screen as if it were a live shot of Tampa’s historic Ybor City, was actually a blown-up photograph. Even the plants were made of some artificial material.

  Next to the console was an antique claw-foot bathtub. It was deep and round, with a roll trim and shiny brass fixtures. Unlike everything else on the set, it was real. The old bathtub, filled with water, was an anachronism in the midst of the sleek newsroom, and it gave the whole set the feel of a garage sale. Sommers cupped his hand around Delores’s elbow. Two cameramen were poised behind their lenses, waiting to see how the new weather segment would play out on the screen. The anchorman, Chuck Varne, a legend around Tampa, was seated at his desk going over his script. Delores recognized his face from the billboards that were all over Tampa: “WGUP’s Chuck Varne Tells It as It Is,” the signs said.

  When Chuck Varne looked up at Delores, he bit his lower lip
and narrowed his eyes. “So you’re the new weather gal,” he said in a rotund voice. “At least our viewers won’t just have to look at us old guys anymore.” But privately, he was thinking: Good God, it’s come to this. Now we’re putting young hookers on the show. The guy who did sports, Lloyd Graf, was also on the set. He was a big man with a wide head and a low forehead. Like most sports reporters, he came off as affable and eager and not particularly brainy. “Welcome aboard,” he said, eyeing Delores’s costume. “Well, this is something different.” With mock courtesy, Sommers held out his hand and said to Delores, “Let me help you onto your throne, Miss Taurus.”

  Everything about this felt wrong. The bustier was too tight, making it hard for her to breathe. She felt as if someone were trying to laminate her breasts. With all that makeup caked on her face, she worried that if she opened her mouth too wide, it would all slide off. And the bathtub! It had seemed like a funny idea from afar—delivering the weather from a bathtub. But now that she saw it standing there like a clown with a fat stomach and floppy feet, Delores realized that it was all part of a big joke. The joke was that she was young and half-naked, and the bathtub implied something less innocent than bubbles and rubber ducks.

  The cameramen smirked at each other and raked their eyes across her body in a way that made her want to cover up. Sommers was being cloying and overly solicitous. She knew she could walk out now, before she placed a single toe in the tub. But not quitting had become a habit with Delores: the bus to Tampa, her tryout in the bell, cleaning the tank again and again. Now she had the chance to be on local television. Something would come of this, take her to the next place, wherever that was. She was not about to let two leering cameramen and some frizzy-haired clod stand in her way.

  Delores put one foot into the water. It was tepid. Since there was no plumbing in the studio, two interns had spent the afternoon dumping buckets of water into the tub, both of them wondering, no doubt, why they had decided to major in communications. She stepped in with the other foot, acting as if what she was doing was the most natural thing in the world.