When we got home my mother apologized for being so tardy with saving my soul. I told her that’s OK, since I was a mermaid I didn’t have one anyway. My mother gave my father a dirty look, but when she turned away he winked at me quickly. My mother said, “Well still, I’m sorry. It’s just that I have trouble with church. All I hear before communion is the congregation coughing and it seems all those germs are collecting in the cup of heaven.” She was three months pregnant when I was baptized and she worried about germs. She had reason to worry. She had a stillborn after eight months, and when her water broke the doctors made her deliver the dead baby anyway. She gave birth to a tiny blue girl four months after my father disappeared. In English I said, “She flew away, Mom. Don’t be sad.” But she said, “Flew? She was stolen. Your father came and took her from us.” And my mother doesn’t even know how to speak French.
Once I got another job taking care of an older woman. I did it because I had heard that her right foot was flattened like a flipper. I thought that she might be a mermaid too, and I thought it would be a good job because I could ask her questions. I had to help her get into and out of the bath, and on the first day of work she told me, “Nudity is more painful to me than loneliness,” as if to explain what was about to happen, as if to explain her defeat in having to hire me. She was propped up against her sink. I was seated on the toilet tank when she said this. Her dress was loose, with two small clasps at the neck which she herself released. Her naked body was horrible, like bulbed growths on trees. Her flipper foot was twice as wide and long as her other foot. The bones in the flipper foot lifted up out of the surface and the deformed skeleton was visible underneath the skin that clung to it. I stared to get used to the foot and the other lumps of her unusual body. I never did get used to her abnormalities, but began to appreciate that perhaps the roundness of her deformities was filled with the collected wonder of views from the cliff, high above where most people lived.
“Did you ever have a husband?” was my first question.
“No. I never married,” she said. “Which is probably no surprise. I am not agreeable.” I have heard the things people say about mermaids. Jude won’t marry me and I’ll never be able to kill him, and so I’ll never be able to go back to the ocean, and who knows what will happen to me without a husband? My mermaid parts will start creeping out over time, like the woman’s sickening foot.
“I’ve never even had a lover,” she said. “Once I wrote a letter to the university requesting a team of scientists make a study of me. However, they did not. I’ve always thought that was a terrible waste.”
She let the water out of the drain herself and stretched her arms towards me, above her, waiting to be picked up.
“Are you a mermaid?” I finally asked her, and she lowered her arms, stared straight ahead at the drain lever, and said nothing, as though she hadn’t considered that before and was stumped, or as though that was a sad topic she had almost forgotten and wished I hadn’t mentioned it.
My mother works part-time for the public school. There is one deaf child in our town. The school employs my mother as interpreter. Karen, that’s the little deaf girl’s name, spends a lot of time with my mother outside of school, too, and some days when I find my mother and Karen signing away in our kitchen, sometimes I feel jealous and I make the one sign I know, my middle finger, at Karen behind her back. The public school job does not pay much at all. My mother sometimes works with me chambermaiding at the tourist motels, or we take on shifts at the sardine factory. They call us when they need us. At the factory, by 4 o’clock our hands are silver and slick from scales and soya oil. If I knit my fingers together my hands become odd fish themselves. They even try to swim away but I catch them.
The factory only hires women; even the foreman is a woman. I work at the end of my line, which is fine because the conveyor belt makes it difficult to hear. There is little possibility for conversation. I talk to the fish, “What’d you do last night?” I ask as they fly past on the machinery. I imagine them swimming in schools, in the deep sea, out for a good time until—swoop—the net closed in. The sardines look up at me with a haughty, empty eye, so I cut their heads off and stuff them into a coated tin. Or else some days, when Jude is on my mind, I can grow inordinately attached to one beautiful sardine. I put it in the front pocket of my apron. Then I grind myself against the conveyor belt, pretending the sardine is Jude. I push it close to me.
The woman who works beside me has been at the factory for thirty-five years. She talks to herself all day long. She has quite a bit to say.
“Mister,” I once heard her say, starting a conversation that she continued for the entire eight-hour shift. She played both sides of a conversation. The first role was her, the second role was a very mean man. I couldn’t figure him out—he sounded like God or a doctor or a police officer with a sadistic streak. She said, “There’s a lawn furniture set at Zayre’s.”
“And how much is the set?” she, as the man, in a deep voice answered.
“Well, I was hoping you could do something about that because it’s more than I’ve got.”
And then, “Woman!” from the mister’s side of her conversation, “What’d you spend all your money on?”
And then back to her, “I never actually got any money to spend.”
Then him, “Why don’t you get a husband first, then a patio set.”
“I can’t. I’m fifty-five years old. I’m past fresh.”
“Woman! Trying to take all my money!”
She stuffed her tin. “No better than the slithery snake that got us here,” she said as the mister. And I thought about what was in my apron, the Jude/sardine. I ground it against me and I thought that he, she was right. Those are the choices for women who live here. Dirty. Domesticated. Deaf. Deformed. Slithery. Siren. Psychotic. Silent.
OST OVE
My mother is upstairs looking for something. She is starting to spit words. “Damn. Damn. Where the—” Her search will continue in this vein for a while until she gives up, exhausted. Rarely does she find what she is looking for. The house is just too full to be able to find anything.
My grandfather is working on his dictionary. Often he has to mix and match fonts and sometimes he leaves words out if too many letters are missing. He’s talking to himself but I hear him say, “What’s lost or love without any Ls?” Ost ove, I think. He tries to work for a bit without any Ls but then he calls out to me. “I think I have a drawer of Palatino in the attic. Would you, dear?”
“Please no,” I say.
“Come on.”
“It’s scary up there.”
“I know,” he says and grunts which means, Will you do it anyway? And then he keeps his chin tucked and rolls his eyeballs up to me, showing the white undersides, looking more like a slow reptile, a turtle whose shell has been crushed by teenage hooligans. It always works.
I take the attic stairs slowly, lifting both feet to each stair before advancing to the next in order to give any scary thing living in our attic fair warning that I’m coming and that it should clear out. There is a row of hanging garment bags and behind them a dark area in the eaves that is blocked by the bags. Anyone or anything could live up here.
Along the shore when I was young my mother, father, and I used to comb through the debris that storms would deposit on the beach. The sand and seaweed coated everything and made each log and shell and forgotten beach towel look the same. The sand hid the valuable things—baseball caps, old photos, canvas bags of money—in with the driftwood. It required a slow and discerning eye to separate the worthwhile from the junk. My father had such an eye. “There’s a work glove,” he said once to me, and eyeballed it up ahead. I ran to grab it and clutched it quite close for a minute, until I realized that the strange weight inside the glove was not sand that had accumulated there but was rather the part of the glove’s original owner that belonged inside the glove. The hand. I screamed and ran back to my parents. “It’s not a glove. It’s a hand. A HAND!”
My mother and I turned back to run in the opposite direction, away from the hand, screaming. But my father had to see it for himself. That’s the sort of person he is. He walked slowly to where I’d dropped the hand on the beach and he grabbed it as though he were shaking it, saying, “Pleased to meet you.” He felt around on the fingers and decided to carry the hand back to where we were standing, me cowering behind my mother. When he got close enough so that we could see what he was carrying my mother and I turned and ran again, back to the car. That was where we were when he caught up with us. I saw the hand in his hand and I locked all of our car doors, locking him out. He knocked on my mother’s window. She opened the window but only a crack. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“He’s got a wedding ring on,” my father said. “I think we should take the hand to the police.” And then turning to me he said, “He might have kids.”
“Put the hand in the trunk,” my mother said through the window and she reached across the driver’s seat to pop the trunk open. I leaned forward as far as I could away from the trunk. I thought that hand was the hand of death and I didn’t want it to creep through the ventilation system and grab me.
The light in our attic has properties similar to those of the sand after a storm. The gray light coats and obscures things; for example, hands of death or drawers of type, in the gray darkness. The attic is long and narrow, filled with junk from floor to ceiling. When I reach the top of the stairs looking for the fonts, there is a moment when my eyes have to adjust to the attic’s darkness. That moment paralyzes me. The moment opens wide like a door. I see a man standing in the gray against the back wall of the house. The man looks at me and then cocks his head slowly to the left. He stares like water in a way that lets me know that if I don’t do my job as a mermaid, somebody else will, a bounty hunter from the ocean. He lets me know that the water is coming for Jude or maybe it is coming for me. I know this man. I stop breathing. I try to make a sound for help but with no air there is no sound. Despite being frozen in place, my eyes adjust to the dark and as they do the man dissolves into a lamp with a guitar propped up behind it. I make a mad dash for the drawer of Palatino and the closer I get to the drawer, to the back of the attic where the man had disappeared, I notice something that I wish I hadn’t. I grab the drawer and look once very quickly. I shouldn’t have looked. There are footprints on the attic floor and they are wet. There are wet footprints where I saw the man. I run.
THE Cs
I think I will never make it back to the stairs. I am running and so the letters are spilling out of the tray. A B D E F H H H H H H. Some letters spill under my feet while I run. An H is my two legs, my two arms, and the bridge between. A whole compartment of Cs bumps from the tray and they roll under my feet. At the top of the stairs I trip on the letters. I Z, Y, N. I C on my back at the bottom of the stairwell. I hit my head, slamming it straight into unconsciousness.
When I wake up at the bottom of the stairs my mother and grandfather are there petting my head, saying, “Honey, honey, wake up, honey.” I try to move. The drawer of type has spilled below me, cutting letters into my skin. The attic stairs creak and the spilled letters cut me.
“Oh,” I say. “Ouch.” They help me up. My grandfather is old and not too strong, but he gets me into my bed. “You guys, someone was up there, something wet,” I tell them.
“Probably the rain,” my mother says.
“No,” I say. “Go look for yourself.” But they don’t. They are scared. My head hurts so badly that I want to close my eyes. My grandfather pets my head so I do close my eyes. I fall asleep and even though my mother wakes me up once an hour making sure that I don’t have a concussion, I sleep through until the following morning.
The bruises that form one day later are in the shape of the letters I fell on. By afternoon they grow into one big black and blue, like an entire essay. These bruises are so odd that I think I will use them to write a note for Jude that says m’aidez, Mayday.
I drive over to Jude’s house that afternoon once the boat he is working on has come in. I want to show him my letter bruises. I want Jude to touch the bruises as if they are Braille letters, as if he has to use his fingertips to read the words on my hips and back.
It doesn’t work out that way exactly. He lets me in but I become too shy to mention the bruises when I see him.
The curtains of his living room are drawn closed, a sliver of sunlight sneaks in and illuminates all the particles floating in the air of Jude’s house. I sit down in the light and so does Jude. He tells me a few stories about things like a type of fish caught in schools and used in the fabrication of ladies’ makeup. He tells me about an idea he has for an opera where all the gods of all the religions of the world battle it out in song. He tells me about a fisherman he knows who loves the ocean so much that he had a tidal wave tattooed on his back. But Jude almost never tells me about the war, even if I ask, so I fear it won’t ever go away, it won’t ever get washed out to sea. Jude pours himself a glass of brown whiskey. Finally my shyness dissolves. “Look,” I say, and lift just the back of my T-shirt.
“Fuck,” he says. “What the hell happened?”
“I fell,” I say.
And then he does touch me just as I had imagined, very lightly with his fingertips. He reads the weird words on my back. He stares and reads and finishes another drink. And when he is done reading he says, “That’s scary.” The words look dark and bruised.
“It’s even scarier than you think,” I say. “There was a man in the attic. That’s why I fell.”
“A man?” he asks. “What man?”
I do not answer. Jude is touching my back. Jude does not know that I am a mermaid.
He thinks the words are a warning, that something frightening or dangerous is lurking nearby. To him it is probably the U.S. Government wanting him to reenlist. To me, I don’t tell him, it is my father.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says, and stands looking down at me. “This town,” he says, “Let’s go.” He walks away to find the keys to his truck. “Really,” he yells from the kitchen. The truck’s engine turns over and I run outside. Finally, I think. I don’t even bother to close the door to his house.
I am happy to leave town, to take a drive. I feel weightless and free, even if we don’t go too far. But ten miles outside of town on the road an eighteen-wheeler carrying liquid oxygen has jackknifed, then toppled, then cracked open on the road in front of us. As the liquid hits the warmer air it evaporates in a cloud of thick steam. The idea of liquid oxygen makes me so thirsty, as though water or even the bottle of whiskey Jude brought along for the drive will never do after having sampled liquid air. The spill is evaporating and a police officer waves Jude’s truck into the steam of it. There is a dip in the temperature. I roll down the window because the police officer is a boy I know from grade school. I ask him, “Is love like oxygen?” It is a song I thought he would have remembered. I thought he would have remembered me too, but he doesn’t seem to understand and asks me, “Are you with the union?” he speaks above my head, addressing the question to Jude.
“No.”
“Well then I suggest you and your vehicle turn around and head back to town. We have got a highly flammable situation here.”
Jude says to me, “I see how it is. We can’t leave town.”
“This highway is going to be closed for hours. I suggest you head back to town,” the policeman says very slowly.
Once I was pulled over by another police officer. The only thing I could think to tell him after he gave me a ticket was that he must have been born in the Sucksville County Hospital. The problem I have with authority isn’t because I’m particularly wild, but the idea of supervision. I know the way I see the world is more super than a policeman who charges me $55 for a U-turn in a dead intersection. If they asked him what he saw he’d say, “a car, a light, a solid line.” That’s not super vision. But ask me what I saw. From here he looks like, Head. Brick. Head brick. Headbrick headbrickheadbrick
.
“You hear me?” the policeman says. “Back to town.” Jude doesn’t answer but turns his truck around. We head back to town, defeated, silent, scared.
NO NAME
Even though Jude is much older than I am he still seems just right. I try to convince him of the fit by saying, “See that old man? He eats dinner alone at Friendly’s almost every night,” or, “You’re an Aquarius too? All this time. You’re an Aquarius too? Jude, I’m Aquarius. I never knew,” or when he traces a path of blue blood just below the skin on my face I say, “I have got more just like that one. I’m nineteen,” I tell him and I mean I’m old enough. “I’m nineteen,” I tell him, and he groans.
There is a woman in town who once was so in love with Donny Osmond that she became a Mormon to be like him. Now that she is in her thirties she is still a Mormon, and Donny Osmond hasn’t cut a popular album in years.
This woman’s story makes me feel rot in all things I touch. I try to distract myself from thinking of Jude because I don’t want to end up like her. I read books or instruction manuals or cereal boxes all day. I take baths to wash him off me, but then eventually I do end up thinking of him and I’ll try to finger that Beatles song on my mother’s piano so that I can sing his name underneath my breath while I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to make it taste like metal type that would spell his name.
I spend most of my time here waiting. Waiting to grow up. Waiting for my father to return. Waiting for Jude. Waiting for something big to happen. I wait in the water of my bathtub. I lie curled on one side under the water. In elementary school a teacher told me our bodies are ninety-five percent water. I don’t see how this could be true. Still, I’m keen to believe him. Under the water I open my eyes. Because of the ocean we don’t have wells. All the groundwater here is salty. We have town water that they add chlorine to so no one gets sick. The chlorine burns my eyes and some days my bath smells like a swimming pool.
The Seas Page 6