More Sweet Tea

by Deborah Smith

  But on that night Patsy only trusted the wild, quiet backbone of her state, far from the tourist lights, her home territory, where the crystal clear waters of ancient aquifers percolated up through the sand and rock to form springs so magical that swimming in them was like visiting the underwater castle of a princess. She needed a dose of that homegrown fantasy again. She needed a plate of black-eyed peas, corn fritters, and fried trout; she needed to swing slowly in a front porch hammock; she needed a backwoods tent preacher to lay his palm on her head and pronounce her healed without a shred of doubt; she needed refuge.

  Patsy pawed at the radio dial. Screech, scratch, squawk. Saturday night preachers, baseball games, the Grand Ol’ Opry, and rock n’ roll. Finally the tuner struck gold.

  I don’t care if the sun don’t shine, Patti Page sang. Patti was one of Patsy’s inspirations, not just because they shared a similar first name, but because Patti Page had suffered for her art, like Patsy. Patti Page had been born barefoot and dirt-poor in Oklahoma, but was now so rich and famous she even had a title, like some kind of queen. Patti Page, The Singing Rage. Yet Patsy couldn’t bear listening to her newest song, The Tennessee Waltz. It was too heartbreaking. All that lost love.

  Patsy mulled her tongue in a dry mouth. She glanced nervously in the Studebaker’s rearview mirror.

  “I guess if anybody cared enough to chase me they’d have chased me by now,” she said aloud. Patsy clutched the steering wheel hard with her sweaty left hand and fumbled across the seat with her right one, gently coming to rest on Paul’s velvet-skinned forehead. “You just ignore these noises and keep on sleepin’, honey, ‘cause I’m not gonna let nothin’ or nobody get the best of us again. And nobody’s ever takin’ you away from me.” The green glow of the dashboard lights gave the newborn an aquamarine tint, as if he was floating underwater. “You’re the son of a mermaid,” Patsy whispered. “I’ll find us some water to live by.”

  THE FIRST TIME Patsy swam at Weeki Wachee, during auditions for the mermaid show, she looked down happily at the soft, mysterious, turbulent darkness far below. I can almost see China from here, she thought.

  In terms of water power, Weeki Wachee dwarfed the Coohatchee. It’s sparkling depths filled a craggy limestone pool as big as a football field. During the war Navy divers in heavy suits and helmets had explored more than a hundred feet down, but still found no bottom. They were nearly bowled over by currents spewing up from vents in the rocks. They reported that the spring rose out of grand underwater caves tall enough to stand in. Who knew how far those fabulous and mysterious roots might reach?

  Patsy loved everything about working at Weeki Wachee. It was no mean feat to be selected as one of the twenty girls in the legendary swimming troupe. A mermaid had to be able to hold her breath for at least two minutes while smiling, swimming in choreographed sync with the other girls, miming the words to a song, changing costumes behind a rock, and even pretending to eat or drink, a bit of razzle-dazzle that always brought wild applause from the audience.

  A mermaid had not only to be pretty, athletic, and graceful, but also brave enough not to panic when small alligators occasionally joined the show. After all, the show’s auditorium was part of the spring’s open basin. The theater’s pastel wooden structure curved along one shore. Audiences walked down steps to tiers of seats sixteen feet beneath the spring’s surface, where a long glass wall made a window into the spring’s beautiful water, glowing with pastel lights.

  “This place’s like a huge fish tank, and we’re the fish on display,” one girl said with a shudder during the auditions. “I bet some folks tap on the glass just to see if we’ll hide like trout.”

  “I’ll never hide,” Patsy told her. “I’m not a trout. I’m a princess of the water, and people are meant to admire me.”

  Indeed, at Weeki Wachee she became a star. The audience loved her. People wanted to pose for pictures with her; children wanted her autograph, and cute college boys from the University of Florida, over in Gainesville, asked her out on dates, which was against Weeki Wachee policy. She’d obeyed the rules proudly and had dreamed of a long future in the bright lights beneath the water. She’d even worked as an extra in a Hollywood movie filmed at the springs. Mr. Peabody And The Mermaid, starring William Powell. Her scene had been cut from the final movie, but still. There she was, immortalized on film, at least in spirit.

  “I’m a mermaid and a movie actress,” she had taken to telling people.

  And a good mermaid virgin. Truly. Unlike The Little Mermaid, Patsy waited wisely for a prince who wouldn’t ask her to sacrifice her fins.

  One day, she found him. Or thought she had.

  Paul Hampenstein the fourth, of the Massachusetts Hampensteins, came to Florida for the same reason as every other red-blooded college student. Spring Break. Weeki Wachee Springs was supposed to be just a quick laugh stop for him and his fraternity buddies, who were headed to the Gulf beaches after two days of non-stop driving. All they really wanted were some wholesome Weeki Wachee postcards to send Mumsie and Dads as evidence that Spring Break was about something other than beer and sex.

  For Patsy, posing in full fin for visitors and their boxy little Kodaks was usually a great part of the job. She smiled as old men kissed her cheek and teenage boys gawked in blushing arousal; she was super-nice to the women and teenage girls so they wouldn’t think she was a tramp, or stuck-up. She doted on the children, who gazed at her in utter wonder.

  “Every girl is a mermaid at heart,” she’d tell them, “and every boy has to earn the right to a mermaid’s love. Being a mermaid means a girl is true and strong and trustworthy. Like being a Scout, only with flippers.”

  But the college boys were just there to leer and laugh. They showed no respect. Hey gorgeous, what’s hidden in your tail? Is your lipstick waterproof? Let me test it.

  Paul had walked up in the midst of his pals saying such things to Patsy. He frowned then turned to them and said in his stern important-sounding Massachusetts accent, “That’ll be enough, you apes.”

  The jerks shrugged and laughed and wandered off as if they owned the sunshine in their polished loafers and fancy slacks and golf shirts. Patsy’s rescuer smiled at her. “I apologize. You must put up with a lot of junk from ignorant people. Personally, I think you’re the only girl I’ve ever met who looks perfectly happy to be who she is.” Patsy stared at him in hypnotized silence. She felt as if she were floating in ethereal water instead of perched on a blue-painted granite rock by a Take Your Picture With A Weeki Wachee Mermaid sign. She had never been speechless before in her entire life, yet there she was, deprived of a tongue like a demon-strangled woman she’d seen once at a Pentecostal tent revival near Palatka.

  “You’re the smartest boy I’ve ever met,” she finally managed.

  He smiled wider. “May I sit down? Will you tell me what it’s like to be a mermaid?”

  “You bet!”

  He sat beside her on the rock without a shred of embarrassment, and she began to talk to him. And he listened. He really listened. He was special. She knew that from the first moment. An aura of quiet confidence radiated from him. He held her gaze without dropping his eyes to her heavily pleated bra, even once. At least not when she noticed, which was fine. He was tall and lean and handsomely long-faced, with big, sweet, dark-blue eyes and a broad smile.

  Eventually he mentioned that his father was a business partner of the somebody named Joe Kennedy, up in Massachusetts; that meant nothing to Patsy, except that Paul mentioned playing touch football at Hyannis Port with a Kennedy son who planned to run for U.S. Senate.

  “So?” she’d said, flustered. “Running for something and gettin’ it are two different things.”

  “You’re just not impressed by much, are you?” Paul answered, laughing. “Not impressed by money and college boys from Yankee states, for sure.”

  “Nope. Because I kn
ow who I am, I’m an aqua theatrical actress,” she replied with utter seriousness. “I uphold a tradition of mermaid womanhood that is smart and classy and choosy. I grew up in a fish camp knowing how to catch brim and bait a crawdad trap and make hush puppies out of coarse corn meal and lard and a little sugar. I won’t ever go hungry. I know who I am, and I’m a mermaid. So I don’t need to be impressed by much.” She paused, feeling her face turn hot, her eyes wanting to be shy. “But I am impressed by you. Because you know who you are, too.”

  “I’m the guy who’s going to marry you,” he answered.

  After another speechless moment, she agreed that he was right.

  TWO DAYS later they drove east all the way to the Atlantic coast. Near Daytona they honeymooned at a tiny blue concrete motel cabin with a rattling window fan. Sand sifted under the door, and the cypress plank walls smelled like turpentine. Once, when Patsy threw back her hands in ecstasy, she scraped her knuckles on the periwinkle shells glued to the bed’s pine headboard in the shape of palm tree.

  Paul died the next weekend, as he drove back to college. His friends weren’t with him; they’d gone their own way after he scolded them that first day at Weeki Wachee. At home they told their parents and friends about the gold digging hick who’d snared Paul in a quickie marriage.

  Patsy didn’t have much time to mourn the husband she’d only known for a week. Paul’s family sent a lawyer, the suitcase full of money, and a threat. In a rare moment of fear and confusion, Patsy took the money, buried it, and promised never to tell a soul about the marriage.

  A couple of months later, when she realized she was pregnant, she tried to hide the fact and keep performing at Weeki Wachee. It was easy at first; Patsy’s tummy bulge only gave her a more voluptuous look. She sewed panels into the girdle-like tops of the mermaid tails so they’d expand around her growing waist, and secretly let out the straps of her costume tops to accommodate her fattening breasts.

  She fantasized about giving birth in secret then hiring some nice country woman, colored or white, to watch the baby during the day and going back to work as a Weeki Wachee mermaid, as if nothing had changed.

  But when Patsy was six months along the costume manager caught wise, and Patsy’s mermaid career cruised to a dead stop. Weeki Wachee’s rules of conduct couldn’t be breeched: Only unmarried girls could be mermaids. Unmarried, untouched, wholesome virgins. Period.

  Devastated, Patsy retreated to a boarding house across the bay in Tampa. She told the old lady who owned the boarding house that her husband was away in the Navy, then took a job as a Woolsworth clerk while she waited for the baby to come. She intended to give birth alone in her rented room; she didn’t want to answer any tricky questions at the Tampa hospital. Why get doctors involved in something Mother Nature intended to be, well, natural? After all, she herself had been born in a pine-board cabin at the fish camp, and she had turned out just fine.

  Patsy didn’t count on going into labor two weeks early, while standing behind the Maybelline counter. She watched in horrified fascination as fluid stained her pink maternity skirt and dribbled in small rivers down her nylons, finally making puddles in her white pumps. The next thing she knew, she lay flat on her back on the linoleum floor, clutching her belly, and someone had called an ambulance.

  The next morning, after hours of groaning labor followed by the drugged nothingness of a modern 1950’s hospital delivery, Patsy looked up groggily into the beady, bespectacled eyes of a white-capped nurse. The nurse stared at her over a clip board.

  “I’m fillin’ out a birth certificate for your boy. Name of the baby’s daddy?”

  Patsy tried to focus, but the recovery room kept shifting. Suddenly it faded away, opening like a melted curtain, and there stood Paul stood, tall and sweet-homely and wonderful, smiling at her with the ocean and sky and beach behind him. Just like he had when he was alive, on their honeymoon. She would love him all her life. He had respected her dreams. He had believed in mermaids.

  “Dead,” she said brokenly. Warnings curled through her mind like alligators, but she couldn’t catch one by the tail long enough to heed it. “Dead.” Patsy felt like crying, but the alligators scared her out of it. Mermaids couldn’t cry around alligators. You had to show them who was the boss of the water.

  “Dead, where?”

  “In his . . . Cor . . . vette.”

  The nurse leaned closer. “Where?” Patsy gagged at a whiff of starchy powder.

  “On the highway between . . . here and . . . his school up north . . . called Harvard. You . . . go . . . away, now. You . . . smell . . . dried out . . . to me.”

  The nurse hunched over her. She spoke in a voice that could crack the shell on a snapping turtle. “Look here, Little Miss Wise-Acre, where is your husband?”

  “Up . . . north.”

  “Where?”

  “Where dead people go when they’re angels. I know . . . he’s there. He’s in Heaven.”

  “Where is he buried?”

  “Dead is dead. Wherever they bury you, that’s . . . where you are.”

  A vein throbbed in the nurse’s forehead. “You got a marriage license?”

  “Not . . . anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “He had it . . . with him. It burned up.”

  “Burned up?”

  Patsy moaned. “In the car wreck.”

  “Your husband burned up in a car wreck on the highway between here and somewhere? When?”

  “Last . . . summer.”

  “Then how’d you get in the family way?”

  “I didn’t know I was . . . in the way. Family way. When he . . . when he died. He didn’t know. We didn’t know. We met when he was spring break. It hadn’t been long.”

  “Uh huh. I see. Where’d y’all get married? What county? What town?”

  “Daytona Beach. Justice of the . . . peace.”

  “Then there’ll be a certificate on file.”

  “No. Not anymore.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “His family . . . they got rid of it. Got rid of me, too. Told me to . . . go away.”

  “Uh huh.” The nurse stared into Patsy’s eyes. Patsy tried to stare

  back but could only make out a pair of blurry, mean eyeballs framed by the twin wings of black reading glasses. The nurse snorted. “You better come up with a better story than that, or I’m callin’ the county welfare office to come see whether you’re really married. Whether you’re fit to raise a child.”

  Patsy panicked. The alligators were breathing right in her face. They had bad teeth and chewed peppermint gum to hide the stink. “Paul,” she said brokenly.

  The nurse scowled. “That your husband? Paul? Paul who?”

  “Paul . . . Hampenstein.”

  “Hampen what?”

  “Stein.”

  “Tine? Like a tine on a fork?”

  Patsy maneuvered her tongue slowly and spelled stein. “Paul. Crispin. Hampenstein. The fourth.”

  The nurse straightened with a huff. She scribbled heavily on her clipboard. “What kinda name is that?”

  “A rich one.”

  “Huh.” The nurse shoved her pencil behind one ear and turned to leave. Patsy wobbled upright in bed, swaying. “Where’s my baby?”

  “He’s being fed in the nursery. You’ll get to hold him when you’re more awake.”

  “I want to see him now. I’ll feed him. You bring him.” Patsy waved in the direction of her breasts. “I’ve got milk. Gallons of it, feels like.”

  The nurse rolled her eyes. “This is a modern hospital. Only animals feed their young that way. Only white trash.”

  White trash. Fightin’ words to a fish camp girl. Patsy straightened slowly. “I’m a mermaid. Mermaids know what . . . what titties are for. You’re so damn dumb you don�
�t even know . . . that you got a pair.”

  The insult hit the nurse right between the eyes and trailed down her face like spit off a hard rock. Her crow-winged eyes narrowed to slivers. “White trash,” she repeated. “Dead rich Yankee husband, my hind foot. Harvard. Hampenstein. We’ll just see about all that. If you got in-laws, they’ll want to know about their grandbaby.”

  The nurse stomped out.

  Patsy pushed herself out of bed. Her legs collapsed. She sat down hard, spreading her hands on the cold tile floor, searching for something to hold onto. Paul’s people had shoved money at her, had told her to get lost and never use his name as her own, but what if they found out he had a son? Would they want the baby? Would they try to take him?

  Patsy swore softly. “I’m not givin’ up anybody else I love.”

  She crawled to her purse and overnight case, perched atop a metal dresser. It seemed to take hours but she finally managed to pull on a plaid blouse, pink peddle-pushers, and penny loafers. Patsy staggered down the hall to the nursery. A dozen babies were asleep in their bassinets, and all the nurses were busy elsewhere. Holding onto an empty incubator for support, Patsy rolled straight to a tiny baby boy with a pale fluff of red hair. She knew it was her baby before she lifted the tag on the bassinet.

  Baby McGee, Boy, the tag read.

  Nurse No-Titties hadn’t had a chance to correct the last name, yet. Hadn’t had a chance to call any rich, mean Hampensteins, yet. Patsy carefully lifted the baby into her arms. “Time to head for warmer water, sweetie,” she whispered. “This is a cold, dry world you’ve been born into.”

  Patsy toted her son out a back door, weaving as gracefully as a tired angel fish under the hot Florida sun.

  “I WILL NOT sink to the bottom,” Patsy shouted as she drove, half-fainting, through the night.

  Paul uttered a soft, smacking sound then yawned without opening her eyes. Patsy looked at him anxiously. His head was shaped like a mashed orange and his complexion had the pink, vein-speckled appearance of boiled shrimp. But he was the most beautiful sight Patsy had ever seen.