The Girl with the Mermaid Hair

by Delia Ephron

  “Do you like pepperoni?” Her dad addressed the table across the way. “I don’t know. I don’t get it.”

  “Me either,” said the wife. “See, I’m not the only one.” She punched her husband in the arm.

  The husband pretended to be injured and then offered Sukie’s dad some pickled peppers. Sukie’s dad tried one and passed them on to the booth behind, and pretty soon he had all three tables in a three-way conversation about pizza toppings.

  Sukie loved to watch her dad operate. That’s what he called it. Once at Cones, when he’d offered to pay for a woman’s sprinkles (a woman they’d never met before), the woman said to Sukie, “Your father makes everything more fun, doesn’t he?” As soon as they’d left the store, she reported the compliment to her dad, and he whispered (so her mom and Mikey couldn’t hear), “I’m a real operator.” Clearly this was information he could entrust only to Sukie.

  Being a towering six feet four inches, he cocked his head down to listen, smiling as people told him stuff, as if their confidences cheered his heart. “Love it,” he said sometimes for no reason that Sukie could figure, simply because he was enjoying himself. “How’s your back, any better?” “What’d you do about the bee infestation?” “Did you quit your job?” “Still scuba diving?” Warren Jamieson remembered what people told him weeks, even months earlier.

  “How’s Richie?” he asked.

  Isabella sighed, “I may give up men.”

  “Already?” said her dad.

  “I’m twenty-two.”

  “What happened?” asked Sukie.

  “Oh, I don’t know. You know…” Issy scrunched up her face.

  In Sukie’s opinion only a woman with an excellent bone structure like Isabella’s could scrunch up her face and still look cute. On the face description website, which Sukie had committed to memory, the worst bone structure was called “pudding” and the best was called “landscape.” Issy certainly had “landscape”: a determined line to her chin, sweet curves in her cheeks with hollows under them, a perfectly proportioned nose—“ski slope” made more flatteringly severe by a touch of “Greek.” Sukie sighed over the paleness of Issy’s skin. Only the barest blush of pink in her cheeks indicated that she was not dead, her complexion being nearly as white as the cameo Sukie had inherited from her great-aunt. Issy was small and delicate. “Drop me and I break,” she’d once laughed to Sukie and her dad, which Sukie thought was the cleverest way to talk about oneself. She’d tried the line in the mirror later. Since Sukie was tall and strong with arms and legs muscled from playing tennis, she had to admit that the line worked only if you had the looks to go with it. Isabella’s short hair, currently dyed pink (the color changed frequently), hadn’t been chopped with hedge clippers, but if that had turned out to be true, no one would have been surprised. She stabbed it with clips. It stood up every which way.

  Issy grabbed a lock of hair and reclipped it as she shivered over the memory of picking up a bottle of Coors and uncovering the giant bug. Her hands zigzagged as she recounted the bug’s skitter out of the kitchen and through her living room. Sukie became transfixed by Issy’s tiny wrists.

  Her dad caught one of Isabella’s wrists. With his thumb and index finger he was able to circle it nearly twice. “You’re as tiny as a baby bird,” he said.

  Sukie gasped. “I was just thinking that. That’s so weird. We were having exactly the same thought at the same time.”

  Her dad smiled his famous smile. Sukie called it his famous smile because it was good enough to be on a can of peas or a box of oatmeal or a jar of popcorn, to name a few of the products Sukie had seen where a man’s smiling face assured you that this was the one to buy.

  Isabella, she noticed, remained fixated on her wrist. If she’d been wearing a watch, you’d think she was having trouble reading the dial. She sure is spacey, thought Sukie. If her wrist confuses her, she might take years figuring out her options.

  Issy slid her wrist free of Sukie’s dad as if she were slipping off a bracelet, and stood up to return to her duties.

  “If you get any more bugs, let me know.” He gave Issy his card. “I’ve got a good guy I can send out.”

  Isabella’s exit and her dad’s carrying his drink to the bar to chat, which Sukie knew was a way to check the score of the Giants game and distribute a few more of his business cards, created a void that Bobo rushed to fill. She started to beat up on herself again about her lame response. She checked her cell. No message.

  I am so unoriginal. Sukie recorded the dreaded feeling in her journal that night while Señor snored next to her, taking up most of the bed. “Do you agree, Señor?”

  Señor twitched, indicating that he was dreaming.

  Unoriginal. She hoped it wasn’t true but despaired that it was.

  She collected stuffed penguins. Was that unoriginal too? Was lining them up in a row on the windowsill a conventional way to display them? They all had names. She’d started with A, Anton, and worked her way down the alphabet to M, Marshmallow, a very small bird with a yellow bow. Sometimes she thought of them as friends, sometimes as audience. Tonight they sat in judgment. Over their furry black heads the moon was bright white, so low in the sky that it might roll off a rooftop, and perfectly round. A storybook moon, she thought. A wishing moon. She wondered if that thought was especially original; probably not. Could she fake being original, or was that something you couldn’t fool anyone about? I wish I knew what everyone thought of me, really, she wrote. No, I take that back.

  Sukie scooted down to the foot of the bed to get off without disturbing Señor.

  In her grandmother’s mirror she assessed herself, not trying to appear up or down, glittery or punk, icy or blazing. This was a serious and strict appraisal. Impartial, as if that were possible. Sukie, somber, stood arms akimbo, feet apart and front facing. (Not that clever stance her mom had taught her, where the feet are together with one foot slightly in front. “A model’s pose.” Her mother had demonstrated. “Try to remember to use it when you’re being photographed because you’ll look”—her mother lowered her voice conspiratorially—“so much thinner.”)

  Sukie’s mom hadn’t called. Maybe the spa was one of those ashrams where you meditated for hours and weren’t allowed to do anything normal like use a phone. Sukie had forgotten to ask.

  She bore in on her reflection. “What does everyone think of me really?” Her lip curled, snarling at her.

  Is that what they think?

  She assumed her mirror face, the ultimate in blandness, but in the reflection her upper lip continued to twitch. She tapped it with her finger, stop misbehaving, but it snaked right back up again.

  What does Bobo think of me?

  My hair might have blinded him, she decided. To what? To whatever that lip of hers was snarling at. Sukie did feel that her hair was spectacular, and right now she calmed herself by pushing some of it from one side of her head to the other.

  “Hi there.” Sukie evaluated a variety of waves and smiles, imagining that she was greeting Bobo. “Hi there.” She put the emphasis on the second word, how unexpected was that? She tried a brief signaling wave, where her hand popped up for a second, then tried a broader, windshield-wiper move. She left the bathroom and walked back in, swishing her hips, swiveled to the mirror, and flipped her hand up, “Hey.” Perched on the edge of the tub, legs crossed, she practiced interested looks—sultry and penetrating, concerned and warm, skeptical. Oddly, she favored skeptical, which involved a slight smirk and some eye narrowing.

  She tried the whole thing all over again wearing boots. Just black leather knee-high boots and underwear.

  Should she send another message?

  Sukie recalled a movie she’d seen where a guy left about fifty messages for a girl—trying to correct a previous message, and then correct that previous message, and the next and the next and so on and so forth—until he was worse than an idiot, he was a lunatic. Sukie didn’t want to be an idiot or a lunatic. Well, she might already be an idi
ot and a lunatic, but she didn’t want Bobo to know it.

  Señor stretched, stiffening his legs. With one jump, he stood up on all fours and blinked.

  “You’re right. You are so right. A bath. I need to take a hot bath. Thanks, Señor.” Only a hot bath could calm the jumps, her special word for the way her body felt when she was agitated.

  While the tub filled, she strode around the bathroom in her boots and underwear. “Where are the documents, Jim?” she said for no reason whatsoever and saluted her reflection. She scrunched up her face and said to the mirror, “Oh, you know,” in Issy’s scratchy voice. But unlike Issy’s darling scrunch, Sukie’s face simply wrinkled. After lighting two candles, vanilla scented, and shutting off the bathroom lights, she stripped and lowered herself slowly into the hot bath; then, lying flat on her back, she submerged just enough for her hair to float around her.

  Her cell rang.

  Sukie shot up, splashing water out of the tub.

  Silence. Was there no call? Had she imagined it?

  She waited a moment in case there had been a call and it had failed. Then the person would hit redial.

  Nothing.

  Sukie reclined, again submerging only deep enough for her hair to float around her. This pastime was her favorite, an invention, maybe even an act of originality. She’d given it a name: the mermaid float.

  The Mirror

  “TAKE a book. A book. B-O-O-K.” Mr. Vickers shoved them into his students’ arms as they walked into class. “These books are not made with recycled paper,” he told Ethan, who was handing out flyers about pollution in the Hudson Glen reservoir. “Are people who recycle more sensitive than those who don’t? Are they less likely to beat their children? Here, Sukie, Frannie, take copies of this magnificent novel.” He turned and wrote on the board in his weird slanting handwriting, the letters seemingly flattened by a stiff wind: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. “I’ll tell you whom this book is for. Lovesick girls and boys who watch porn on the web. And I’ll tell you why. Because Madame Bovary lived for her fantasies. She lived so much for her fantasies that reality could never measure up. Whatever happened was a disappointment.”

  Sukie felt an instant kinship with Madame Bovary.

  While not stuck in a convent as Madame Bovary was as a teenager, but trapped nevertheless in a brand-new development home with deep-pile carpeting blanketing room after room like sand in the Sahara, Sukie wondered about her own fantasies. Could Bobo the person ever measure up to the Bobo of her dreams? Perhaps it was just as well that he hadn’t texted her again.

  I guess he’s over. I hate this weight on my chest, she wrote that night in her journal. She put a little arrow and inserted sad between this and weight, then crossed out chest and put breast. I hate this sad weight on my breast. She blacked out the entire sentence with a solid crisscross of horizontal and vertical lines so that no one could ever see through the crossout. Her inability to express herself poetically piled despair upon despair.

  He is gone. Believe it.

  “If only I could believe it,” she told Señor, “he would turn up again.”

  Why was that true?

  Sukie knew with a sudden and rare clarity that it was. She was lying on her bed with her journal and a pile of different-colored Sharpies. (She liked to switch depending on what she was expressing—everything about Bobo was written in deep purple.) She had bitten into a crisp juicy apple and wondered if the bite and the thought were connected—one never knew what went together, and seemingly random acts could be cosmically related. Or perhaps the gnash of her teeth had backfired into her brain producing a surge of perceptivity, because Sukie now awed herself with a deduction: Nothing happens if you want it to.

  He is gone. Believe it.

  If you can believe it, he will turn up again.

  Nothing happens if you want it to.

  She wrote the lines in red. It was practically a poem. How cheering was that?

  She ripped the page from her journal, went into the bathroom, taped the near-poem to the wall next to her beautiful mirror, and quickly memorized it.

  “Hi, friend,” she said to her reflection, playing Bobo, puffing herself up with a sharp intake of breath, letting her head loll forward and her shoulders hunch ever so slightly, achieving his arrogance and slouch all at once. “Hi, there,” she growled, but then, with a saucy toss of her head, she switched over to being Sukie, not giving the time of day to the SOB (an expression her dad was fond of using for people he didn’t like). She strutted, catching quick shots of herself at every angle as she moved in and out of reflection. “I’m in a restaurant—emerald-green walls, matching velvet upholstery, lit with a thousand candles so I’m bathed in the world’s softest flickering amber, perhaps my hair appears so coppery and shimmering that the light dances off it.” Was that possible? She wasn’t sure, but she was tripping on the notion. Sukie’s senses were so aroused, the fantasy so real, that in the mirror she saw herself through gossamer ribbons of smoke drifting upward. She felt the hushed curiosity of all present as she haughtily snaked between tables past a booth where Bobo, huddled with his buddies, drank Diet Coke and munched fries, unlike all the other diners, who sipped red wine from chic glasses, ones Sukie had seen at Restaurant Danielle in New York City on the occasion of her parents’ anniversary. Those delicate crystal glasses, which people cradled, holding them gently underneath as if supporting a fragile blossom, were the essence of elegance. Bobo didn’t have a clue, sitting there swigging soda out of an aluminum can. With a superior tilt of her chin, Sukie ignored the star quarterback, believing she was the first young woman in history to do so. To emphasize her disdain and to glory in it, she threw a backward glance over her shoulder into the mirror and saw her butt as wide as the back of an ox. It expanded further, stretching from one side of the mirror to the other. It was practically a planet. Sukie screamed.

  Her father took the stairs two at a time. Mikey scrambled up behind him. He charged into her bedroom, halted—confused—then spied her in the bathroom. “What happened, baby? What’s wrong?”

  Sukie stood there woodenly.

  “Sukie, talk to me.” Her dad snapped his fingers, and she blinked, offering no explanation except to nudge him aside. He was blocking her view.

  In the reflection, her backside now appeared neat, round, and tightly packaged in jeans, waist size 27. In other words, its normal self. Nothing like the twenty-pound ham hocks she’d witnessed a minute before. Nothing like Mars, or even a moon of Mars. Her dad tracked her gaze into the mirror, where he saw nothing unusual, then surveyed the room for clues to her behavior: the stubby vanilla-scented candles; her crowd of moisturizers, balms, and bath oils arranged around the edge of the tub by height as if someone were taking their class picture; the fluffy lavender bath towels folded and hung, with hand towels, also folded, centered over them. Sukie took pride in the presentation of her towels.

  “Is this mirror, like, distorted?” asked Sukie.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Is it a trick mirror, like in a fun house?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s your grandmother’s mirror. It’s an antique.”

  Sukie continued to view with suspicion the slim reflection of her backside.

  “Boy, it’s smelly here.” Mikey held his nose.

  Her father blew out the candles. “Why did you scream, Sukie? You scared the hell out of me. I want an explanation.”

  My butt grew. It spread like batter on a griddle. Before my eyes. She thought that but didn’t say it. Instead she waited for the mirror to play its tricks again.

  Señor, lying on the floor with his legs splayed out, his tummy resting on the cool tiles, took no notice. Her dad contemplated the dog’s lack of interest. “If Señor’s not concerned, I guess I’m not either.” He started out and stopped. “Don’t ever scare me like that again.”

  “I won’t, Daddy.” Sukie used her squeakiest voice. She stuck her tongue out at him too, knowing he would find that simply
adorable.

  Dad

  SHE aimed at Vince’s chest, smacking the ball as hard as she could. He hopped sideways and popped it short, just over the net. Sukie sprinted. Grasping her racket in both hands, she slammed a backhand winner past him down the line.

  “Time to stop, and that’s a great shot to stop on,” he called.

  Sukie clamped her racket between her legs to have both hands free to refasten her hair in a clip. Her shirt stuck to her chest. She pulled it out and flapped it, wafting in cool air from the October day, then she swung the racket around and around, whipping it through the air. Sweat glistened on her forehead and dripped down her neck. She reveled in being utterly spent. Wearing herself out playing tennis brought her a sense of calm that nothing else did.

  “Am I a killer?” she asked Vince as they picked up the balls. Sukie had a special way of collecting them. She lightly bopped a ball twice with her racket, it bounced up, and she caught it. To make a ball pop up off the ground took technique, and that as much as anything made her feel like a master of tennis. “Am I?”

  “Potentially,” said Vince. “But you’ve got some work to do deep down.”

  Boring. She didn’t dare say that out loud, but deep down that is exactly what she thought. She walked over to fetch a ball that had landed way in the corner. When she turned around, Vince was toe-to-toe.

  He poked a finger into her forehead. “There’s marshmallow in there. But I like that you fired that ball straight at me. That’s a good sign.”

  “Dad,” she said. “His idea.”

  She could see him playing three courts over. He was easy to spot because he was tall and always wore an elasticized white terry band around his head. Sukie had tried to wear one once but it gave her a headache. Because he was in the middle of a point, she didn’t wave. Sometimes she lifted her racket, signaling him, “Hey, I’m here,” a holdover from when she was little and her dad regularly took her to the amusement park. Every time she came around on the carousel, she waved and he waved back, and the carousel kept turning, carrying her again into the unknown and again back to Daddy.