Swimming for Sunlight

by Allie Larkin

  Bark whined and nudged my arm.

  “Okay,” I whispered, “we’re okay,” and the spell I was under started to crack. I looked away from the pool and took a deep breath. The patio had inset garden beds along the edge where I’d planted bromeliads and miniature palms during my last summer home from college. I led Bark toward them, away from the pool. My legs still felt like rubber, but they moved.

  “Do you have to pee?” I asked, and waited while he paced in the dirt until he found an acceptable spot behind a concrete mermaid statue. He still squatted like a puppy, even though he was over a year old. The mermaid was new. The red canistropsis he desecrated was not.

  When he was done, we ran to my room like the ground was hot lava and there were monsters lurking in the dark. I slid the glass door closed and shut the curtains. Bark jumped on the bed, burrowing under the comforter. I wanted to climb under the covers with him and be done with the world for the night, but I knew eventually Nan would come find me, and she’d be disappointed if she thought I didn’t want to go to her party at all.

  “Are you going to be okay in here, Barky?” I asked, and saw his tail wag under the blanket. “I won’t be gone long. Promise.”

  On my way out, I caught a glimpse of myself in the pink-framed princess mirror on the back of my bedroom door. I didn’t look like a child pretending to be an adult anymore. I looked like an actual adult, and what troubled me was that the new lines on my face were all carved into my forehead. No crow’s feet, no laugh lines. Worry was all I had to show for the last five years. Worry and Bark.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I snuck to the edge of the living room and sat on the floor in the shadows of the hallway, like I had so many times as a child, sneaking around in my nightgown to watch everyone after I’d been sent to bed. Happy chatter. Ice cubes clinking in the good rocks glasses. Dean Martin on the record player. The warm yellow glow of the dimmed lights creating a barrier against the night. I’d watched Nan and her friends to learn how to be a person, trying to absorb all of it: the way to hold a martini glass, how to touch someone’s arm when they said something funny. It made me an anachronism. Manners and gestures from another era, figures of speech that didn’t make sense to other kids, who spent their free time playing soccer or going to Girl Scout meetings. I don’t know if I would have been a wallflower anyway; if I watched because that’s who I already was, or if watching made it so.

  I spotted Nan’s next-door neighbor Ruth as she handed a drink to her behind-the-fence neighbor, Marta. They were both wearing the same hot pink t-shirt as Nan. In the hallway, I’d only noticed the front of Nan’s shirt, but now I could see that on the back was the silhouette of a mermaid posed like the figure on a trucker’s mud flap. There were at least a dozen women wearing the same shirt. They all looked so fit and fabulous that I wondered if some of the ladies who weren’t familiar were actually old friends in new shape, but I didn’t want to stare and risk someone noticing me. I felt like all the words I’d ever learned were stuck in a small dark place in my chest. The idea of polite conversation was painful.

  Marta chatted up Althea, who lived one street over, and taught me how to change the oil in my car before I left for college, “because there are things a woman needs to know, Kay, and it’s our job to teach each other!” Althea was the director of the Port St. Lucie library, and everyone always teased her about being young. She was sixty-four.

  The men, as always, were few and far between. Lester would probably stay on the lawn smoking his cigar for most of the night. Jack “Call me Uncle Jackie” Mitchell, in his half-buttoned Hawaiian shirt, was laughing too loud at one of Ruth’s jokes, slapping her on the back hard enough to throw her off balance.

  Isaac Birnbaum sat in the blue wing chair at the far corner of the living room, scotch in hand, bewildered. He was still wearing his blue windbreaker and it was close enough to the color of the chair to look like an attempt at camouflage. Isaac showed up to all of Nan’s parties, but his wife had been such a talker that he’d never had to get comfortable with party chatter. In high school, I worked for him at his tailor shop during summers and after school. I loved the comfortable silence he allowed. Once, we spent an entire Saturday sewing hems without ever exchanging more than a smile.

  The ottoman next to Isaac was open. If I cut through the kitchen and went in the other entrance to the living room, I might be able to sit next to him without fanfare. We could be invisible together, and later, when Nan nagged me about being antisocial, I could honestly say, “I was there the whole time!”

  I started to make my move. A shriek came from the crowd.

  “Oh my god!” A tiny woman charged at me, her shock of dyed auburn hair was short and spiky. The sea of pink shirts parted to make way. “I thought I saw a pretty little face over there!”

  It wasn’t until she leaned in to kiss my cheek that I realized it was Bitsie. It was the scent of Bitsie I recognized. Jean Nate and baby powder. Her flabby underarm “angel wings,” as she called them, were gone. She was sleek and toned, except for a charming little pouch under her chin.

  “You look amazing!” I said.

  “Billy!” she said breathlessly. “But I’m not having an affair with him either.” Bitsie laughed and her face sunk into the folds of her neck like a turtle. I’d always loved the way she didn’t care how laughter made her look. She laughed with her whole self in a way I wished I could. She’d been a pediatric intensive care nurse until she retired at sixty-five, and she’d seen so many sad things that when there was joy to be had, she was all in.

  I wondered if it was Nan or Billy who told her about my grand entrance.

  “I never seem to get used to you all grown up,” Bitsie said, reaching up to mess my hair. “I still can’t believe you didn’t invite me to your wedding!”

  Eric and I were married at city hall on a Wednesday.

  “Sorry,” I whispered. “No one was invited.” I’d assumed Nan told her friends why I was back. I didn’t want to have to say the words: I am divorced.

  “I’m going to be at your next one,” Bitsie said, like it was fact. “With bells on. No excuses. And if you pick a dud, I will shout my objections.” She winked at me.

  “Where were you last time?” I asked, slipping into the old rhythm of our banter. “I could have used a warning.”

  “You only get warnings the second time. You have to make mistakes on your own first.” Bitsie leaned in close. “I was married once before, you know. To a man,” she whispered. “Us divorcées have to stick together.” She looped her arm into mine and called out, “Somebody get this girl a martooni!”

  Suddenly, I felt settled. I could handle a party if Bitsie was my wingman. I watched her pour gin and vermouth into Nan’s old silver shaker.

  “Dirty?”

  I nodded, and she added a dash of olive juice to the mix, before giving it the briefest of jiggles. Her freckled hands were steady when she poured. She passed me a too-full glass and ushered me to the loveseat for a chat.

  “Seriously, how are ya, kiddo?” she asked. “I barely saw you last time you were here.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I should have spent more time—”

  “It meant a lot that you came home for the funeral.” Bitsie patted my back the way you might comfort a baby. “I know how hard that was for you.”

  “How are you?” I asked, embarrassed I’d made any of it about me. She was the one mourning the most. I came home for her wife’s funeral with every intention of being a person she could lean on, the kind who sets out platters of cold cuts and does the dishes at the end of the night. But the smell of embalming fluid at the wake got to me in the worst way, and I never even made it to the funeral. I never made it past the lobby of the funeral home. I told Nan it was a stomach flu, but she knew it wasn’t that kind of sick. I walked six miles home in stiff, sweaty ballet flats to get away from that smell. The blister holes in my heels took weeks to mend and left scars.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so
sorry she’s gone.”

  “I still wake up every day thinking Bunny is going to be there.” Bitsie’s smile was sad and sweet. “I’m scared someday I’ll wake up and already know she isn’t, and that’s when she’ll really be gone.”

  I set my martini on the coffee table and grabbed her hand. She squeezed mine back.

  “If that happens,” I said, “I’ll come over early and bang pans in the kitchen and sing the ‘Good Morning’ song so you can lie in bed and pretend.”

  Bitsie laughed. “She loved you so much, you know.”

  The tears happened fast, splashing on my shirt. Bitsie pressed her forehead to mine.

  “I loved her,” I whispered. I couldn’t even find words for the extent. Bitsie was Nan’s best friend from all the way back when they were teenagers. Bunny always made me feel like I was her friend, like Nan was over to visit Bitsie and I was there to visit her. She kept me from being a kid in tow. She made me feel important.

  “Bun always wanted you to have her sewing machine.”

  “I couldn’t . . .”

  “Why don’t you take her whole sewing room? You still have a key, right? Come over tomorrow. I have a project for you.”

  “What are you old biddies carrying on about?” Nan called from across the room, dancing over to us. “Get up! Get up! It’s a party, for Christ’s sake!” I used my leg muscles to stand while Nan went through the motions of pulling me to my feet. She gave a little shimmy and bumped her hip to mine. She was at least two drinks in. “Isn’t my granddaughter gorgeous?” she said to Bitsie as she squeezed my cheeks, forcing a fish face.

  “Gorgeous!” Bitsie said. “You know, Billy is single!”

  “I do know!” Nan said.

  “Oh, what a beautiful couple!” Bitsie shouted, giving me an exaggerated wink.

  “You’re both the worst!” I said, smiling. “The absolute worst. And I love you.” My glass was almost empty, and it had been a long time since I’d had anything stiffer than chardonnay. I kissed them both and went to the kitchen for a glass of water before anyone could hand me another martooni.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was almost one o’clock when the last of Nan’s friends filed out the front door, leaving lipstick marks on our cheeks.

  “What’s with all the pink t-shirts?” I asked as I helped Nan hand wash martini glasses.

  Nan took the next clean glass from me, drying it with a dishcloth. “Bitsie and I started an exercise group. We decided it was about time we were mermaids again, so we’re teaching the others.”

  “You were dancers, right?” I asked, remembering a yellowed black-and-white photo I’d seen when I was little: Nan and Bitsie, young and glamorous, in matching seashell tops, applying lipstick side by side at a dressing room mirror.

  “No, Kay, we were mermaids. Underwater.” She put down the glass and walked out of the room.

  I froze, remembering how Homer Lampert used to come for drinks on Fridays and tell us crazy tales about his days at sea. At first they were old sailor stories. A girl in every port. An epic bender in Bora-Bora. But over time, his tales grew more fanciful. Sirens and sea creatures. A fierce battle with an octopus I was fairly certain came from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. One time he asked me what a girl like me was doing in a place like this, as if he were still a twenty-year-old boy in a sailor suit.

  We all took care of Homer as long as we could, trading shifts watching war movies with him on his tiny old Zenith. The first time I drove without Nan in the car was to take Homer to his doctor’s appointment.

  I liked when it was my turn. I’d bring my homework with me, but I always ended up doing it on the bus the next morning so I could listen to Homer’s stories. The way he lived in his mind and shared it with us, the way he got to be young again even though his bones were old and brittle, was sad and awful and beautiful at the same time.

  I cried the day Nan called Homer’s daughter in Oklahoma City, after he slipped out on Bitsie’s watch and tried to swim in the water trap at the golf course. I helped Nan pack up Homer’s things and finally got to see pictures of him as a sailor: young, smiling, strong enough to wrestle an octopus.

  When his daughter came, tight-lipped and unamused by Homer’s new penchant for racy jokes, we moved martooni night to Tuesday so he could join us one last time. We toasted to Homer and Homer toasted to the sea, and then he left with his daughter the next morning. Landlocked for the rest of his life.

  A few weeks later his daughter called Nan to say that Homer had a stroke and passed away. We all felt awful. We could have kept taking care of him until the end. He would have been happier with the family he had with us than the one in Oklahoma.

  I placed the martini glass in the sink and held on to the counter to steady myself. Bitsie and I would make a list of who to ask for help watching Nan. Maybe Billy could continue her training so she could keep her body fit even if her mind . . . I gasped for air.

  Nan walked in carrying a big black photo album and dropped it on the kitchen table with a smack, sending dust from the pages. She flipped the cover open. “Look!” she said. I joined her at the table, hands at my sides so she wouldn’t see them shake. There she was: a mermaid. Smiling wide, bubbles escaping from her nose, her long blond hair curling around her face in weightless tendrils.

  I sat across from her, trying to catch my breath. I didn’t understand, but at least it was a real memory, not made-up. She had a fin.

  Nan turned the book to face me and flipped the page. “And here’s Bitsie, and remember my friend Bernadette?” She pointed to a photo of two identically dressed brunettes underwater, their arms around a man in an old-fashioned diver’s suit. She turned the page again and pointed to more mermaids. “Audrey, and Hannah, and Woo Woo.”

  “Woo Woo?” My hands stopped shaking.

  “Her name was LouEllen, but underwater it sounded like ‘Woo Woo.’ ”

  “Nan, what is all this?” I asked, pointing to LouEllen’s picture. I’d never even seen the album before.

  “It was a mermaid show at a roadside attraction shack off Highway One, and we were the stars. The Caloosahatchee Mermaids.”

  “Mermaid show?”

  Nan grinned, nodding. “There were dozens in Florida back then. Entertainment on the way to someplace else. Mermaid shows, alligator wrestlers, fortune-tellers, mystics. There was something at almost every exit.” She turned the page and touched a picture of her young face. “Mr. Crozier, the owner, built a huge tank with windows for a dolphin show. But then he couldn’t get dolphins, so he got us girls instead.” She laughed. “We weren’t the only mermaid show, and we certainly weren’t the biggest. But I like to think we were the best.”

  She flipped the page to another picture: Nan and Bitsie, arms around each other, blowing bubble kisses toward the camera.

  “Why did you stop?”

  She shook her head. “Your grandfather was embarrassed. Like he’d started dating a gypsy or a burlesque star. Swimming around and breathing from tubes, having people see me in a shell bra . . . He convinced me it was something to be ashamed of. But now”—she smiled and her blue eyes sparkled—“now I look back and I’m amazed at myself. At all us girls. We were strong. It took guts for us to do what we did. It took skill and practice.”

  “Where did they all end up?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Nan said. “Bernadette was in West Palm Beach until she passed away, but the others . . . they got married and moved on. We used to send Christmas cards, but eventually they came back without forwarding addresses.” She sighed, and I realized how close she was to crying. “I still miss Woo Woo. Me and Bitsie and Woo, we were a team. The three of us rented a teeny-tiny studio apartment and slept on camping cots. We were so broke. But it was the most fun I’ve ever had.” She touched a photo of Bitsie pulling off a bathing cap to shake out her hair. “I miss swimming like that. Mermaid class isn’t quite the same.”

  I stared at a picture of Nan underwater, arm curled like Rosie the Riveter,
looking straight at the camera, offering up a dare.

  “We could look for Woo Woo,” I said. “On Facebook. I’ll set up my old computer tomorrow so we can search.”

  “I can do it on my cell phone, I think,” Nan said, pulling her phone from her pocket, holding down the home button until it chimed. “Siri, open the Facebook.”

  She handed me her phone with the blue Facebook sign-in on the screen. “Now what?”

  “Do you have an account?” I asked.

  “Can’t I just look?”

  “You need an account.”

  “I don’t want an account. I just want to see if Woo Woo is there.”

  “Fine,” I said, typing my log-in into her phone because mine was almost out of battery power.

  “Is she there?” Nan asked before my account finished loading.

  “Well, I can’t type ‘Woo Woo’ into Facebook and find her!”

  “LouEllen Griggs,” Nan said. “LouEllen is one word. Capital L, capital E.”

  “Do you think she has a married name?”

  “That is her married name,” Nan said. “Her maiden name was Welsh.”

  “Woo Woo Welsh?”

  “Pretty great, huh?” Nan smiled.

  I typed LouEllen Griggs into the search bar. “Where did she last live?”

  “Atlanta.”

  “There’s a Lorna Griggs,” I said, pointing to a photo of a woman with salt-and-pepper hair and a sweet smile. “Atlanta, Georgia. But she’s only fifty-three.”

  “That’s her daughter. Let me see!” She pulled her folding reading glasses from her pocket and squinted through them. “It’s so tiny.”