Miriam, Lula and Teegee fluffed their spangled cloth tail fins into pastel fans on the gift shop's cheaply tiled floor. Teegee, a leathery blonde with a dazzling smile and pink fingernails that matched her lipstick, grinned at me. "I'm the CEM," she said. "That's Chief Executive Mermaid."
"Wha'd'you think? Miriam asked. "We're having our show in a couple weeks. Ten bucks a ticket plus what we make off the gift shop and an open bar. We get a full house of old ex-mermaids, their families, and flipper freaks."
"Flipper freaks?" I asked.
Lula guffawed. "Old dudes who get off on old mermaids."
"Ahab."
"Wha'd'you think?" Miriam repeated, watching me closely. "You're not a hick. You've been places. Is there any hope for this underwater sideshow just `cause we love it?"
"You love it. There's the answer. You love it."
"Yeah, well, I love Jerry Springer, too, but there's no accountin' for taste."
"You have the magic. You simply need money to make the magic spread. You need a good publicist."
"Honey," Teegee said, twirling a long frond of synthetic blond hair between water-wrinkled fingertips, "we need a good plastic surgeon."
"Need some young tits," Lula said.
Joey gasped. Lily covered her mouth and looked at me with laughing blue eyes. I often wondered how she and Mac could have been passionate enough to conceive me, given their general shyness. But now the light of joyful rebellion in her eyes spoke volumes. Once upon a time, Lily and Mac had loved and lived without fear.
She had been a mermaid, at heart.
And now, I would represent her. "I have a way with words," I told the group. "I'll contact some of the larger newspapers and television stations for you."
"Aw, baby, we've tried that," Teegee grunted. "The smug shits just shrug us of"
"But Karen's a lure for good luck," Miriam said.
"Benji gets up early every morning," Joey put in, "just to see what she's doing in the kitchen. If she can make Benji wake up early, she can do anything!"
"She can't lure any reporters here," Teegee insisted. "Nobody can."
"Let me see what I can do," I said.
"They ain't coming less we offer something new"
"How about the debut of a brand new young mermaid?" Miriam said.
"Yeah, like who?"
"Guess. Look at that Irish red hair. We could play some music from Riverdance. Call it `Waterdance."'
"Hmmm. She's not real big in the lung department, but we can pad her."
"Cover them freckles with some waterproof foundation."
They all turned to look at me. The implication began to sink. in, but I played innocent. "Who would this flat-chested, freckled, ingenue mermaid be?" I asked in a small voice.
"You," Miriam said.
"Sedge, I need coverage for my debut as a mermaid. I need publicity so Miriam and Lula and their friends can lure investors. Who do we know in the major media?" I lay despondently across my bed in my daisy room, that night. Mr. Darcy picked peanuts off my Kissme Woomee World t-shirt. "Who in the media owes a Whittenbrook favors?"
"Everyone," he replied.
I smiled.
Maybe this would be easier than I thought.
Ben
I got this thing for mermaids, even the fake ones in gaudy polyester tails and rhinestone bras. Pa would sit outside our trailer beside a charcoal grill full off-bones on Saturday nights, with a beer in one hand and a smoke in the other, and look across at Mama while she arranged paper plates on the picnic table. I could see by the gleam in his eyes he knew she'd given up her special world for his ordinary one. She'd given up being a mermaid to be a cowboy's wife. She'd left the ocean for dry land.
That's what I was waitin' for. A mermaid. A woman who'd trade a kingdom for a chance to be with me.
So that's why, when I looked at Karen in a practice mermaid tail and a snug blue sports bra, floating in the pinkish underwater show lights of Kissme Woomee, behind a foot-thick panel of glass, her hair rising in the water like strands of red silk, one hand clutching a bubblin' oxygen tube while the other gently brushed away a minnow that was trying to taste her lips, my mind ignored everything that was silly about mermaid shows, and all I saw was Karen, mysterious Yankee Karen-beef-not-eatin', Lily-and- Mac-protectin', Estrela-taming, Glen Tolbert-provokin' Karen-swaying in the hot summer water like a brave dream, and I was speechless with want.
Miriam stood beside me in the mermaid theater. "Ben's here," Miriam said into a little wireless mike that led to Karen's waterproof earpiece.
Karen's eyebrows shot up so fast the minnow skittered away. She squinted at the wall of glass between her and me. I been told performers can't see the audience through that wall, but she was sure tryin' to. I guess she felt a little shy about practicin' in front of me. I like to think so, anyway.
About that time, a snap broke on her borrowed sports bra, the bra popped free, and I caught a flash of her pink parts before she slapped one arm across her chest. Then she dolphined to the surface like an underwater rocket being shot toward the moon.
Miriam pressed a red fingernail to the receiver in one ear. "What? Aw. Aw, shit." She dumped the mike in a chair on the front row. "Karen came up too fast under the wooden walkway and hit her head on a nail. She's hurt."
I ran up the aisle and outdoors.
Teegee and Lula hovered over Karen. She hung onto a ladder along the walkway on the auditorium's submerged roof. Blood gushed from a wound in her hair. "Thank God there are no piranhas here," she said with a painful squint. "I'd be nothing but skeletal remains and a synthetic mermaid tail."
I got down on my knees, latched my hands under her armpits, and pulled her onto the walkway. Being a saint, she kept one arm clamped over her bare bosom the whole time. I hoisted her against my chest. With the tail, she weighed about a ton. "Can we strip off her fins?" I asked.
"She ain't decent," Miriam said. "When we zipped her into the tail she shucked her panties and went commando."
"Pull off these fins and wrap me in a beach towel," Karen ordered, bleeding onto my sweaty shirt. "I have no shame. You," she said to me, "have to look the other way or blind yourself."
"I'll squint hard and think about that Greek guy who slept with his mother."
Teegee headed for the gift shop. "I've got a towel to wrap her in. It says, `Kissme Woomee Mermaid World-Where You Can Get Some Mermaid Tail.' We never could sell it."
Wrapped in nothing but that towel, Karen looked up at me sadly as I carried her to my truck. "Promise me, you won't tell everyone about this."
"I won't have to. Miriam and Lula will."
She sighed and put her bloody head on my chest.
Gloria was a nurse practitioner who oversaw the Fountain Springs Emergency Medical Services Clunic. She had a Down Syndrome sister, so she was especially patient with Joey and my ranch crew. She walked out in the waiting room snapping a bloody glove off one chubby hand. She grinned at me. "Puncture wound. No stitches. Tetanus shot, and she's good to go. She offered to pay but I said you got an account. I'll bill you."
"Bless your heart."
"How's Joey?"
"Doin' great." A lie, but he was better since Karen came. At least not getting' worse.
Gloria leaned close and chortled. "That's some tattoo she's got. Don't usually see one there."
Tattoo? Karen had a tattoo? Took me a second to believe it. "Uh, I wouldn't know. I'm just her boss."
"Yeah, right." Gloria hooted and went off to finish some paperwork. Like I was Karen's boyfriend and everybody knew it. Guess everybody thought I was irresistible.
I knocked on the exam room door. Tattoo? And where was `there?' I intended to spend a lot of time thinking about that.
"Entrez-vous," Karen said. "You may enter ..."
"Yeah, that's French for `Come on in.' I know." I stepped into the little room. The front of my t-shirt and jeans were smeared with blood from her head. I'd been scruffing a hand through my hair while I waited, so it pretty m
uch stood up in black whirlwinds slicked with water and probably a little of Karen's blood, too. I wasn't exactly a heal n' sight for sore eyes.
But she looked at me as if I was.
"Thank you for paying my medical bill," she said.
"Aw. You work for me. It's part ofmy employee-benefit package. That and all the popcorn you can eat on TV nights in the barn's rec room."
"Thank you, regardless."
"Aw. Yeah."
I settled on a stool beside her. She smelled like warm liniment and iodine. Not a bad aroma. She sat on the end of an exam table wearing nothing but the Mermaid Tail beach towel, still wrapped around her from armpits to kneecaps. A shaved spot near the crown of her head showed an inch of neat stitches. Her bare shoulders were pink and freckled and smooth, her face a little pale, her eyes big and worried and dark-blue, and her towel just low enough to show some cleavage. Her bare legs, dangling against a white paper cover, were the naked legs of a naked woman sitting on the side of a bed. At least, in my mind.
"I feel foolish," she said. "Being a mermaid's much harder than it appears. I'm a certified scuba diver, so the enterprise seemed so simple to me at first, but frolicking underwater with one's legs bound in a fake fish tail and attempting to choreograph every movement in sync with other performers, while regularly sucking oxygen from a bubbling tube, and listening to music through a waterproof ear bud, all the while, smiling. . . it's an astonishing talent. I'll never make light of the mermaid profession again. I failed. I panicked."
"Naw, I'm bad luck to you. First, Estrela dumps you because I spooked her, then I spook you and you take a nail to the head."
"You didn't spook me." She shifted slightly, holding the towel tight with one hand over her breasts. "I'm a bit shy, that's all."
"Don't worry. I didn't see anything."
"Yes, you did."
I exhaled. "Look, I'm tryii' to be a gentleman."
"I know. Thank you."
She gave me a soft little smile that made me think about the tattoo a lot harder. "Why are you shy?" I asked gruffly. "You're smart, you're strong, you're pretty. You got nothing to feel shy about. Except for sneakin' soy milk into the cream pitcher. Repeat after me: Milk don't come from beans. Milk comes from cows. Period. Other than that, you're battin' a thousand."
"I was an overweight child. Short, and fat. I was nearly eighteen years old before I shed the weight through vegetarian diets and extreme exercise. And I stuttered, as you know."
"Kids teased you?"
"Yes. I was teased mercilessly. I come from a . . . a family of overachievers, a family in which physical imperfection was regarded as a sign of character weakness. It was painful. So, perhaps, despite my current state of perfection-" a wry smile shifted her mouth-"I remain awkward under the gaze of handsome men."
"I wasn't always this good-lookin'. I had to grow into it."
"You were never shy?"
"I wasn't ever shy, but a lot of times I was ashamed. Maybe it's the same thing."
"Ashamed of what?"
"Bein' poor. And ... being part-Indian. God help me. But when I was a kid, Indians didn't own casinos and run for Congress. We were looked down on, treated like trash. I heard my mama called names for being a white woman married to an Indian. Pa was half-blood. Big and dark and quiet. Me and Joey could almost pass for white. Sometimes people thought we were Cuban, maybe. Not that bein' Cuban was so good, back then. Look, I don't think I've ever told anybody else this stuff. You keep it to yourself."
"Of course."
"And I was ashamed of Joey. Ashamed but crazy-protective about him, too. I don't know what I'd do without him. Aw, am I maluii' any sense?"
"Yes, you are. I understand your dilemmas. I do."
"Because you have kin who are touched. And because the stutter made you feel a little touched, yourself"
"Touched?"
"In the head. Turned finny. Whatever."
"Yes."
"Do you ever wonder why God put `em here, but at the same you're thinking, `God knows I need 'em?"'
"Yes."
"There's a cartoon. On a card. I saw it in a seashell shop somewhere. `Blessed are the cracked, for they let in the light."
She put her free hand to her throat. Her eyes gleamed with tears. A smear of dried blood and iodine made a brown sheen along her hairline. "I like that sentiment." Her towel slipped down a little. Maybe on purpose.
I saw just the top of a tiny tattoo inside the crease of her left breast. Couldn't see the design, just a thumb-sized hint. God, I wanted to see more. "You got nothing to be shy about showing off," I repeated, craning my head. "Trust me."
"I do trust you," she whispered. The towel slipped another inch.
The exam room's door popped open. Miriam stood there, gasping for air. She waved a cell phone. "Teegee called. The Times is sendin' a reporter to do a big story on our next show."
I sat back, weak in the knees and too strong in other parts. "Always good to get a piece in the Jacksonville Florida TimesUnion," I grunted.
Karen, with pink sprinides spreading over her frecldes, hitched up her towel and looked embarrassed. "Indeed. The Jacksonville Florida TimesUnion is an excellent regional newspaper."
Miriam shook her head wildly. "It's not the Jacksonville Florida TimesUnion that's coming. It's the New York Times."
"Let me just say," I told Sedge that night, from the head-throbbing confines of my daisy bed, "that I'm very impressed and awed by your Machiavellian power. The New York Times? One of the world's most prestigious newspapers. Bravo."
"They merely agreed to send one of their regional correspondents, my dear. And I can't guarantee the coverage will be positive. Only that there will be an article. Promise you won't go to any extremes for the performance. You could end up seriously injured."
"I'll try not to ram any more nails into my scalp. As long as Ben doesn't startle me ..."
"Ah hah, the intriguing Ben, again."
"Ah hah, yourself."
"My dear, are you certain your secretive efforts at charity would please him? Men tend to be a little defensive about women taking care of them and their friends. There have been some sad relationships within the Whittenbrook family. I recall your great aunt Etienne and her failed marriage to a third-rate German prince among them ..."
"This isn't charity. It's an investment."
"I doubt Ben wants to think you're buying shares in him."
"I don't want to buy him, Sedge. I want to possess him. One entails money. The other is far harder to accomplish."
"What are you hinting at, my dear? You're leaving the ranch at summer's end, agreed?"
"I ... don't know what I'm telling you. I have a gash in my head and ... I hear footsteps. Lily and Mac are coming to check on me again. Good night."
"They are happy with their life, my dear. They were happy before you came, and will be happy after you leave. Remember that. They are content. Please continue to remember all that."
"Trust me. I never forget it. Good night, Sedge."
"Good night, my dear mermaid."
Chapter 14
Kara
On a hot June night when screech owls giggled in the woods and moths the size of bats swooped in the yellow security lights, I painted my eyes and lips with waterproof cosmetics, pinned three feet of wavy, synthetic red hair over my healing scalp, wiggled into a sequined bra and twenty pounds of leg-binding, lavender, sequined latex with a tailfin of filmy lavender-and-gold fabric, and made my debut as a Kissme Woomee mermaid.
The gravel parking lot outside the submerged auditorium was filled with sedate sedans, sensible SUV's and handicapped-equipped minivans. Among the two-hundred people seated in the theater the average age was seventy, and the majority gender was male, by far. The whiff of loneliness, widowhood and eternal romance filled the air like poignant cologne. A great deal of gentlemanly whooping and applauding occurred as the audience anticipated the overture. There would be a lot of flirting at a cocktail party afterwards, beneath te
nts rented from the Fountain Springs Funeral Home.
"Hear that?" Miriam said in the ersatz dressing room, which was merely a brightly lit wooden cabana atop the auditorium with swim-up access via a large hole in the plank floor.
I listened to the muted rumble coming from the audience beneath us. "What is it?"
"The applause." Her eyes gleamed. "Listen close, when you're underwater. It's like a vibration. You can feel it. It's a tonic, hon. It keeps us perky. The audience, and we love them."
Yes. I thought about Lily and Mac. They were so excited about my show. The whole ranch crew was excited. They were all out there watching, with Joey and Ben.
"Here's to Karen, our new mermaid sister," Miriam said. She and the others held up cups of spring water. A kind of christening ceremony. "She'll need a new name. A stage name like ours. I'm Athena. Lula's name is Sirena."
One by one the other women rattled off liquid and dramatic monikers, some from romantic mermaid lore-Loreli, Aphrodite, Venus-and others born of sparkling Hollywood glamour-Ava, Marilyn, and Ariel, of course. When the circle came to Lily, who could not swim but had been granted honorary mer status, anyway, she said solemnly, "June."
June, the mermaid.
"Why, June?" I asked gently.
"Because that's when daisies start to bloom. And I love daisies."
Miriam poked me on one arm. "Tell us your mermaid name, Karen. Come on. Hurry up. We got a show to do." Everyone lifted their cups in anticipation. I took a breath. So many identities to juggle. Kara. Karen. Tolbert. Whittenbrook. And now this. "Atargatis," I announced.
They all stared at me.
"Atar-who?" Miriam said.
"Atargatis. A Semitic goddess worshipped by the Babylonians. She's the oldest known female deity figure portrayed with a fish tail. In a sense, the first mermaid of historical record."
Lula sighed. "Oh, hon. All that Babylonian stuff'll worry the Baptists. Dale'll be praying for you in church. How about we name you, uh, `Esther?' After Esther Williams." This brought nods and sloshing of cups.