Mermaid in Chelsea Creek

by Michelle Tea

  Sophie didn’t know what felt more unreal, that her grandmother was a gazillionaire, or that she had the power to make herself a gazillionaire. Sophie had often daydreamed that maybe she was really the child of some other family, one with money, money like a key to unlock the door to the world. Sophie could go to school, travel, eat delicious food. Now she had the means to such a life, but it didn’t seem like such a life was available to her. When all this is over, I’m going to boarding school, Sophie decided.

  “Does Kishka know?” Sophie asked. “Does she know she has the wrong girl?”

  “Yah.” Hennie nodded. “Yah, I think she is figuring it out.”

  “Why is she so stupid?” Sophie asked snarkily. “How come she couldn’t figure that out if she’s such a big deal?”

  “Kishka not stupid,” Hennie warned. “Do not endanger yourself to think that. Witches powerful, but imperfect. All beings imperfect, all creatures. Only the good is perfect, perfect good. And the bad, too. The bad is perfect bad.” Hennie sighed. “You could be Harvard professor now, child. You be philosopher. I know this all confusing for a small girl.”

  “I’m not small,” Sophie challenged. Though she had felt tiny only moments ago, her anger, this injustice, it had filled her heart. She felt giant with feeling and with purpose.

  “No, dear,” Hennie agreed. “You not so very small. Your heart very, very big. You must care for it, keep pure. You must eat much salt. You go with Syrena, the mermaid, she live in the salt, she teach you very much.”

  “So, I guess I’m not going to high school,” Sophie said.

  “Oh, no, child. You will have to go to high school! Cannot be— what you say—drop-out! You spend summer with Syrena, you come back for school.”

  “Hennie,” Sophie said. “That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.”

  “No worry now,” Hennie brushed the topic away. “You go, do what you must do right now.”

  “Can I take this?” Sophie’s eyes had continued to catch on the gleaming bar of gold on the wooden table. It looked like a candy bar made to look like gold, a fat bar of chocolate wrapped in foil. “I want to give it to my mom.”

  “I think that would be fine.” Hennie nodded. Sophie picked up the thing, which weighed as much as she thought it would, and slipped it into her magic pouch. The bag sagged with its heft.

  “Okay, then,” Sophie said.

  Beside them, on the straw mattress, Laurie LeClair twitched in her sleep, coming awake slowly, then quickly. She felt the foreign room around her, the strange, rough bed she slept upon, and sat bolt upright, her eyes flashing like a cornered animal. Carl growled a low growl and moved closer to Hennie. Laurie looked the witch square in the face, her face alive with the absence of the Dola.

  “Who the fuck are you?” she demanded, and Alize began to cry.

  Chapter 19

  Outside Hennie’s, Sophie was greeted by the pigeons. They swooped down from the wire above, arranging themselves at Sophie’s dusty feet. Roy spoke.

  “We will escort you to the creek tonight,” he told her. “And we will escort you home now, but at a distance, for there are people around.” He looked nervously to Livia, who nodded warmly.

  “Thank you, Roy,” she said. Roy, relieved to be free of his messenger duties, dashed into the sky, his wings aflutter with nervous energy.

  “Wait,” Sophie said, something clicking. “Is Roy your son?”

  Arthur stepped forward, his breast jutting out above his limping feet, bands of heather gray and charcoal ringing his throat like strands of kingly jewels, the whole feathered length of it gleaming green, then fuchsia. “Roy is our son.” He stretched his wing around Livia, who relaxed into the curve of it, exulting, for a moment, in being beloved.

  “How great,” Sophie said, grinning at the little family, their pride and love and close work.

  “He hatched a year ago this spring,” Livia said.

  “Wow,” Sophie said. She looked at Livia and Arthur. “How old are you guys?”

  “Birds,” Arthur corrected. “We’re not guys, we’re not humans. ‘How old are you birds?’ “

  “Okay, so.” Sophie waited.

  “We’re five,” Livia said. “Arthur and I are five years old.”

  How long do pigeons live for? Sophie wanted to ask, but it was a rude question, a cruel question, and one that Sophie wasn’t sure she wanted answered.

  The birds took off above her, and Sophie shuffled down Heard Street, toward home. It was only three blocks away, and the blocks were not long, but they could feel interminable. Sophie’s belly clenched with dread as she spied the familiar heap of dirt bikes laid out across the sidewalk, their nubby black tires spinning, the sun shooting like lightning off their silver spokes. Sophie tried walking past the house with her eyes cast down. Maybe if she ignored them the boys would ignore her or, even better, not see her at all. But this never worked; all it ever did was make her look scared. Sophie knew that she didn’t have the luxury of being scared of anything anymore. She couldn’t afford to be scared of a bunch of stupid human boys when she was about to hop into the sea with a mermaid.

  The taunts were a white noise of kissy squeaks and dog barks and facetious wolf-whistles. Sophie raised her head to face her harassers and found herself looking straight at Ella. Ella, with a cigarette in her hand, sitting on the lap of the smoking boy, who also held a cigarette in his hand. The two of them were encased in a fog of smoke, the boy’s arm slung around Ella’s middle, anchoring her to the slope of his lap. Ella looked away quickly. Is she going to pretend she doesn’t know me? The boy she sat upon joined his friend in a braying howl, and Ella winced at how close the sound was to her ear.

  Sophie stopped short before the mound of bikes, and took in the scene.

  “That’s the bitch who hissed at us!” the big one yelled, excited. “You gonna do that again? Hiss again, pussy!” The boys thought that was hilarious. Their guffaws filled the air, sounding to Sophie like donkeys, which made her think of Pinocchio, of so many fairy tales where boys were turned into animals. She could do that to them. She could make them a pack of mules, crammed onto a crumbling porch in Chelsea, looking ashamed, their long ears drooping. But Sophie thought of her grandfather. He didn’t even know he was cursed, he was just a dog. Sophie wanted to hurt these boys. And Ella. She wanted to hurt Ella, too.

  “Hi, Ella,” she said to her friend. Best friend, Sophie thought.

  “You know that freak?” the big boy asked, surprised.

  “Yeah,” Ella said blandly. She took a long drag from her cigarette, buying time.

  “Yeah, she’s my best friend,” Sophie blurted possessively. The boys cracked up.

  “That your bestie, Ella?” the boy whose lap she sat upon said, in that high, annoying voice certain boys used to imitate girls. He tickled Ella in the stomach, and she bent over, slapping his hands away, laughing.

  “Ella.” Sophie stared at her intensely.

  “What, Sophie?” she snapped, suddenly mean. “You happy now, Sophie? I know you, okay? Sophie, Sophie, Sophie.”

  “You know me?” Sophie was outraged. “You more than know me.”

  The boys howled at this, warping it into an unintended innuendo.

  “Oh, yeah?” a short boy in a low baseball cap asked. “You lez-be-friends?” The others sounded their approval.

  “Cut it out!” Ella squealed, sounding like a fake girl too, like an imitation of her own self. “Gross!”

  “Ella’s my best friend,” Sophie announced. “I’m her best friend.” She looked deeply at Ella. “Do you even know these jerks?” she demanded. “What are you doing?”

  “Junior’s my boyfriend,” she said with a stiff pride.

  “Yeah, Junior’s her boyfriend, not you, lez-be-friend!” Baseball Hat quipped, and was rewarded with claps and back slaps at his wit. Sophie rolled her eyes. She felt trapped, there on the sidewalk. If she was just her regular self, her old self, she’d be scared. Scared Sophie. But she wasn’t
regular. She was a witch, a znakharka, she had just restarted time. If it wasn’t for her, they would still be frozen, an arrangement of statuary on a porch.

  She pushed into the boys, one by one. Their interiors were jungles, emotions growing upward and outward, restless leaves of feeling unfurling, poking Sophie in the face, and making it hard to see. The feeling of them was a wild energy, rising. But sunken beneath the branches of their bravado, Sophie could feel their tenderness. She seized on it like a bat to swing at their heads. The big one’s father had left him, had said mean, drunken things on the way out the door, and the boy thought about it when he should be falling asleep. It kept him up, the mad, sad cruelty of it.

  Baseball Hat was terrified. He felt so small and lost among the boys, he feared they would turn on him like a pack of dogs, he was powered by an anxious need to keep them laughing, if he kept them laughing they’d keep him around, their laughter was the sound of pure relief washing over him, but the moment it faded the anxiety returned: make them laugh, do it again, again again again. Baseball Hat was exhausted.

  And Junior, who held Ella on her lap. The raw desire he felt for the girl took Sophie’s breath away; he wanted to eat her. His heart was shaking with excitement, like he was sliding down the top peak of a roller coaster, like he had won the lotto. He had to work to keep his arm loose around her belly, he wanted to squeeze her, never let her go. And under this, fear. Junior had hardly even kissed a girl. He’d kissed a cousin, felt like a creep because of it, and had kissed no one else, ever. He’d kissed Ella but once, and he feared he did it wrong, that his mouth had moved incorrectly; he wasn’t sure what to do with his tongue, and what about his nose, and what about his teeth?

  Ella, Sophie could barely look into Ella. It was too painful to feel. As bad as it felt to be betrayed, Sophie discovered, it felt differently awful to betray someone. When you betrayed a person you betrayed yourself as well, and Sophie caught the edges of Ella’s guilt and fear and hurt and confusion, anger, frustration, and among it, something bright and exciting, something meant for Junior. Sophie caught only the radiance of these emotions, like the last glow of a sunset, before pulling away from her friend.

  Sophie knew what she wanted to do. Your father hates you, she would say to the biggest boy. She would repeat the parting words the man drunkenly spat, that the boy was weak, maricón, a shame; he would be left with his mother and aunts, with the women, where he belonged. She would say to Baseball Hat, They’re not going to laugh much longer. Your jokes are getting boring. They’re not laughing with you, they’re laughing at you, idiot. And Junior, Junior would be the best. Ella told me you kiss like a fish. Your mouth is disgusting; it’s like you’re sliming her face. You poke your tongue around like an eel. She hates making out with you, you cousin-kissing creep. To Ella, her grand finale: Your boyfriend’s lap is filthy. And a zagavory, the simplest, easiest one, to make Junior’s legs swarming with every disgusting thing she could think of, maggots and excrement and rotting swill and creek filth, all of it running down his legs and Ella perched in the middle of it, soiled.

  But the problem with feeling a person’s feelings is, you feel their feelings. Sophie felt sad about the boy whose father had hurt him. He was just drunk, she wanted to say, he didn’t mean it, get some sleep. She wanted to assure Baseball Hat that everyone liked him, that he was quite funny, that maybe one day he could be a comedian, even. To Junior she would tell the truth, that Ella loved his kisses, replayed them in her mind over and over just to feel a ghost of the warm thrill that flushed her body when their mouths had touched. How it had felt like a conversation, a puzzle or a dance, a wonderful game they both were winning. To have such information and to use it to wound was the deepest betrayal. And to betray anyone was to betray yourself. Sophie felt bad, but she had peeked in on Ella’s feelings and found them even worse, a new kind of sadness Sophie was not interested in experiencing. She would stick with her own small sadness, the familiar feeling of being shut out from love. She realized she was crying. The boys realized it too, and Ella, and there was a split second when there was a hush upon the porch, where they wondered, Did we go too far? and the better parts of themselves buckled inside, softened at the face of someone vulnerable before them, but the feeling was too hard to hold. It hurt. Why did it hurt? Sophie wondered. Baseball Hat was the first to break, unable to hold it, to hear it harmonize with his own sad feelings. He began to fake cry, big, blubbering sounds like the biggest baby in the world, howling and rubbing his eyes, his lower lip stuck out in a parody of a pout, and the others joined in.

  “Waaaaaaa, waaaaaaaa, waaaaaaa!” the biggest boy wailed, burping dramatic hiccups between phony sobs.

  “Booo hoooo,” Junior sounded. “Boooo hooooooo.”

  Sophie looked at Ella, her head hung just enough for her hair to curtain her face. She remembered what Hennie had told her, how she didn’t even have to speak if she didn’t want to, how she could think her thoughts into someone’s mind. She looked at Ella, her shoulders hunched around the bad feelings churning her up, and she beamed her thoughts into her friend. I’m leaving tonight, I’m going far away, I don’t know when I’ll be back but I will find you again, I love you, you are my best friend, I’m sorry you had to do all of this, I hope you feel better. And Ella’s head shot up as the words entered her, her hair flipped away from her face and Sophie could see that she was crying, too.

  Chapter 20

  Sophie crept back into her house. She was not looking forward to the spectacle of her own mother on the floor. It was humiliating for Andrea to be knocked down by her very own daughter, and the guilt Sophie felt at her zagavory throbbed alongside a somber respect for her mother, as if the woman had died or something. And she had, Sophie thought. Part of her mother had died before she had ever come to know her.

  As she walked through the house, Sophie smelled smoke. Cigarette smoke. And something else, the smell of a meal—an actual, cooked meal, the smell of meat and spices, a warm smell. A foreign smell in this house, where dinner was often a bowl of cereal. She headed for the kitchen.

  Kishka was smoking a cigarette at the kitchen table, lazily ashing into a dish smeared with grease and gravy and sharp, charred bones. Little bones. Kishka looked at Sophie and smiled, a wide smile that showed teeth stuck with meat.

  “Nana,” Sophie said dumbly. “You have something in your teeth.”

  “Do I?” Kishka smirked. She pushed the bones around her plate and came out with a single gray feather. Like it was a toothpick, she cleaned her teeth with it, the summer sun glinting off of it, shining an iridescent purple and green. A pigeon feather. Sophie looked frantically at the remains in the dish. Who was it? Who was it? Her heart sprung with panic and dread. Beside her, there was a whimper, a dry sound scratching at the edges of a throat.

  On the floor was Andrea, right where Sophie had left her, though something about her was different, different and wrong. The zagavory had been a simple sleeping spell; Sophie had left her mother supernaturally pranked, but at peace. But Andrea was not peaceful. Her body was tensed in a rigor mortis clench, her fingers curling and uncurling, her legs kicking stiff little kicks, like a dog that dreams of running. Mostly it was Andrea’s face that tore Sophie open. Her mother’s face, so much like her own—more freckles and more wrinkles, the graffiti of time tagging her skin—her face was a twisted mask, a response to some terror that Sophie could neither see nor imagine. It was a grotesque joke of a face, something a teenage boy throws over his head on Halloween night as he rushes out into the street to pummel children with eggs. Andrea’s jaw was open in a scream that never came, or perhaps had come and gone. It appeared unhinged, and the strain of it had ripped the corners of her mouth; a few drops of blood, like tears, sprinkled her chin. Sophie’s heart seized in fear for her and fear of her—what was this crazed statue, where was her mother? Oh god, her eyes, how they bulged, in pain or disbelief. When eyes bulge in shock it’s just a tic, a moment, then they go back to normal. Andrea’s eyes were fr
ozen that way, horrible and blank, unblinking; how dry they looked, it hurt Sophie to behold. The flutter of an eyelid would be excruciating on an eye that bulged and dry. What had happened to her mother?

  A cloud of smoke blew lazily from Kishka’s chapped and lipsticked mouth, around Sophie’s face, like a bank of clouds tumbling with the weather. It broke her mother’s awful grip on her, and Sophie turned away, her own mouth hung nearly as wide. She could taste her grandmother’s cigarettes on her tongue. “I didn’t do this,” Sophie said. “I didn’t leave her like this. What’s happening to her.” It was not a question, but a demand of the old woman.

  Kishka took a long, thoughtful drag on her turd-colored cigarette, arching an eyebrow, contemplating how much to share with her granddaughter. A smirk played at the edges of her mouth. So, it was going to be like this, then, Sophie fumed, furious. “Nana!” she screamed. Against the windows, a soft, insistent thud. Sophie looked up. Pigeons, flying into the glass, bouncing lightly off the pane. A rain of them, body after body, pillows of gray bouncing off the glass.

  “I’m surprised you’d still call me that,” the woman said dryly. “After all you’ve learned.” The cool sarcasm left Kishka’s lips on a bubble of smoke.

  “Well, you’re still my grandmother,” Sophie said awkwardly. “Technically or legally or whatever.”

  “You have no idea what I am,” Kishka said. And then she showed her. Never had Sophie been so forcefully yanked into a person’s interior. Kishka grabbed onto Sophie with the paralyzing grip of a headlock and dragged the girl into her dark and fathomless heart. It was the records of a history of human despair and Sophie sensed all of it, feelings the color of the earth, muddy brown and dark, jagged black, streaked with clawed slashes of red. She plummeted through the despair. Despair at loneliness, despair at cruelty, despair at a torture that sees no earthly end. Despair at the death of a great beloved, oh, so many great beloveds, dying and dying and dying and Sophie felt every one, the impossible anguish of no more not ever gone gone gone forever. She felt terror at mortality, the terror of an eternity of mortals facing the great empty nothingness. Sophie tumbled as if down a well, each shade of tragedy shifting slightly in its flavor and hue as she plummeted through its next ring. She was in an outer space of agony, the pure agony of the human heart. She felt the sickening need of addictions like a rain of arrows in her gut—hopeless and spiraling, mad with repetition. As she entered what felt to be a sprawling, infinite chamber of war she wondered if perhaps this was where her mother lay, for surely Sophie’s own face was as contorted, her body as rigid with resistance, saying no no no no to the psychic onslaught of impossible cruelty.