Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel (3 page)

Gina claims the term
failed academic
is redundant. That’s why she uses it.

She promised me no male strippers, ironic or otherwise. Gina’s the type who, left to her own devices, would have to raise the stakes on male stripping—regular male strippers would never be enough for her, she’d shake her head in boredom at that idea, instantly dismissing it. Gina would have to get some paraplegic ones or maybe amputees. And she’d probably end up making out with at least one of them in a broom closet. Gina’s got game.

She and I brainstormed awhile, with her arguing at first for a pilgrimage to the theme park Dolly Parton owns. She said the infantile or pedophile aspect of weddings made Dollywood the perfect place to go—a whole family amusement park, with millions of visitors a year, based on the image of a woman known for abnormally huge breasts. The whole thing doesn’t fit together unless you factor in its standard deviation, what Gina calls SD. SD is the perversity of everyone, Gina says, which
everyone totally ignores. “We’ll fly on the wings of an eagle,” she quoted (Gina loves to quote). “Dollywood, sweet promised land of giant breasts,” she rhapsodized, “the land of friendly, singing breasts. Land where the large breasts sing.”

Gina is fond of perversion, although, since her fondness is ironic, you can’t pin her down for being an actual pervert. Quite probably, you’ll never know. That’s the hard part with irony. But I said no to Dollywood; we’re keeping it local, Gina, I said. Chip would be heartbroken if I went without him to not only an amusement park but also Middle America. Tennessee has to count as that; the name of the town is Pigeon Forge. Meanwhile Chip would be clambering over spirals of razor wire. He’d feel left out, and I couldn’t do that to him.

“I’ll take a rain check,” said Gina D. briskly. “Oh, I know—we’ll go when Chip’s busy doing his midlife thing. There’ll be a free week in there, maybe a few, while you’re deciding if you should go the couples therapy or divorce route.” She flicked on her phone, opened the calendar. “Hmm, seven years. I’m putting a reminder in. Back to the party, then. You sure about the travel ban? Because Precious Moments
^™
has its own chapel in Missouri.”

WHILE GINA WAS
planning my party, my almost-mother-in-law was also making plans: Chip had asked me to let her help. Chip’s an only child, and his mother had retired the previous year from what was, as far as I could tell, a Nurse
Ratched-type position. She worked at an old folks’ home where, before she left her job, we used to drop in on her sometimes; I saw some elderlies who quaked at the sound of her footfall. Around the time of our engagement and wedding her main hobby was going to hear motivational speakers, and after each one of them she’d bear some pearls of self-help wisdom home to share with Chip and me. Chip’s mother brings motivation to the table, that’s for sure. She buckled down to setting up our reception, and if she wasn’t bringing me a swatch of this it’d be a forkful of something else.

I told her that I didn’t want certain so-called traditional aspects of wedding receptions, that is, the aspects that are repulsive. No feeding each other wedding cake, for instance, then mashing it around the oral region like giant babies. Strict pedophile/infantile thematic. Also no disturbing miniature bride and groom dolls perched upon the cake with glassy smiles, a serial killer’s dream of love.

Chip’s mother wasn’t happy about this, of course, she feared the opinions of the other relatives, some of whom would be hailing from Middle America or Orange County. I shouldn’t say she
feared
, on second thought, since Chip’s mother has never been one to frighten easily; more like she shared their views and stoutly wished us to conform to them. People don’t even perceive the standard deviant quality of wedding receptions—to them it’s cute, the cake-on-face smearing, the frozen serial killer dolls with tiny startled eyes and pink slashes where the mouths should be. Not for one second is your wedding-going public bothered by things’ actual meanings—and by
public
I
mean those women who pass amongst each other all the information about what weddings and receptions should be, spattered across the generations like so much female deodorizing spray across the shelf at a Walgreens. These women are the clear standard-bearers of the nuptial industry a.k.a. basic wedding perversion.

To them a wedding theme is “starry night,” “angel” or “antique vanilla.” Yes, they firmly believe vanilla is a theme, along with warm yellow, mauve and tangerine. To them the sight of a full-grown man and woman mashing white-frosted cake into each other’s nostrils and chin pores is traditional plus heartwarming. If it were tradition to eat human intestines at wedding receptions they’d garnish the plates with curls of spleen. When these ladies happen to glance at the food-ravaged faceholes during the cake-on-face smearing and feel a shiver of revulsion, they simply disregard that shiver and smile as though, somewhere within the floral centerpieces, iddle fairies are giggling.

Gina maintains the standard deviance is Freudian. To her, breastfeeding is non-ironic, earnest and the child-raising equivalent of making macramé wall hangings; also to her, all children wish to nurse at their mothers’ breasts until the age of at least six, and not being able to do so makes standard deviants out of them. Gina’s not bothered by her own conflicts of opinion, though: another benefit of the irony position. You can be a walking pastiche of opinions, if you’re deeply committed to irony. If Gina is drunk she’ll get even more into it, telling all those who care to listen—and many who would prefer not to—how our free nation is a carnival of stunted mental growth.
“Arrested
adolescence
? We
wish
,” she’ll slur loudly, Gina, my wedding helpmeet, when she’s in her cups. “We never made it out of elementary school, buddy.”

It’s not always clear what Gina’s referring to.

Chip’s mother kept trying to shoehorn items into the reception, slip in repulsive elements without me noticing. For instance, party favors such as star-shaped fairy wands with a label on them inviting guests to
WISH UPON A STAR
. When I said no to that one she left me five messages, each one more indignant. Then she wanted bottles of bubble bath with swans on top, their necks disturbingly entwined; then a white-silk flower with
CONSIDER THE LILIES
stamped on the stem in gold.

I told her no favors, since Chip and I had passed beyond that phase. We were adults, I told her calmly but firmly: when we attended a party we didn’t expect to go home with sparkle-filled bouncy balls or a handful of Tootsie Pops. We were no longer impressed, like so many gentle natives on the wrong end of a cargo-cult trade, by the magical wonder of the monogram. Black and silver matchbooks, floaty pens, even high-priced cake knives or serving spoons engraved with
Jon & Minky
or
Dick & Billy
left us completely unmoved. My personal impulse, upon receiving such items as a guest, was to hurl them into the nearest trash can as soon as I exited the function.

No, we were perfectly pleased to leave a party empty-handed, our blood alcohol content somewhere above .08.

BY THE TIME
the various events fell into place, my party was slated for the day after Chip’s race. He’d need some time to recover before the ceremony, with morphine derivatives for pain. Then the rehearsal dinner and then, on a Saturday in late July, our small ceremony and reception.

It wasn’t going to be easy to spectate, at the mud marathon, but I drove with him anyway; the course had been set up at a ski resort in the San Bernardinos. Once we were up there in the pines, checked into our hotel room, I took a shower while Chip listened to rabble-rousing music with his earbuds in. Then we went outside and I watched as runners milled around at the starting line for what seemed like an eternity, stretching, high-fiving, chugging sports drinks and eating astronaut food.

The weather wasn’t sunny, in fact a thunderstorm was threatening, which seemed to please those extreme sportsmen and sportswomen: they sought every encumbrance possible. Many would happily have run the distance on hot coals. A number sported rubber bands around the thick parts of their arms or rings from multiple piercings—rings that, I imagined, could easily get snagged on the barbed- or razor-wire entrapments and rip off a lobe or a nipple. Several participants bore large ink designs from previous years’ events, one on the top of his shaven head; I saw two others comparing mud-race burns and scars, one on the neck, the other across the ribs.

“Chip,” I said—as Chip, standing on one leg like a stork, pointed and flexed the airborne foot repeatedly, writing the alphabet upon thin air with his toes to loosen his ankle—“are you completely sure? I’ve got a great idea. How ’bout you just
don’t
do this race, and we can tell everyone you did?”

“I’m not going to wuss out,” protested Chip. “Babe. Babe! Are you kidding?”

“It wouldn’t be
wussing
,” I said. I hated the thought of Chip with a tattoo on his head. Till death do us part, and all, but with the head tattoo I wasn’t sure. It didn’t appeal to me. “Not in the least. This would be more like, you doing me a solid.”

“Now honey,” said Chip, de-storking his muscular legs and coming over to put his arms around my waist, “I know you support me taking this on. It’s going to rock. It’ll totally rock, OK? You’ll see.”

When I first met Chip, on a speed-dating lark that Gina dragged me to as an ironic gesture after I’d gone through a bad breakup, I had the impression he was a handsome guy but seemingly indifferent. It turned out he wasn’t indifferent at all; when Chip gets a far-off look in his eyes it’s not coldness, it’s more like an echoing. He forgets what’s in front of him sometimes, does Chip—goes to a dreaming place, a dreaming environment. In that land flags are flying over tall-grass meadows; men are Vikings, women like ornaments on the prows of ancient ships, their hair long and wavy. Chip’s a dreamer and if he could, he’d make the world a place where questing videogames became reality, where he could wear breastplates and a deep battle horn would sound over the white-peaked mountains and lush green valleys. Stags leaping in the woods; fording of streams by warriors and their warhorses, decked out in glorious regalia; possibly mythological creatures.

But if you can’t make the world into a videogame, and if you’re not a full-on geek but fifty-percent jock too, I guess the next best thing is a mud marathon.

“I do support you, Chip,” I sighed. “Just—would you do something for me? Don’t get a head tattoo. Look at that guy. With the name of the race beneath that stubble on his scalp? He looks like he’s here to kill minorities. Chip, I don’t favor a man with head tattoos.”

“You’ve got my word on it, sweetcheeks,” said Chip. He disentangled himself from my embrace and returned to his warmup/stretching routine.

“Chip,” I went on, as he storked on his second leg and peeled back the wrapper on an energy bar that looked like something dark nestled in cat litter, “you know, while we’re on the advisability subject, I sometimes have a thought. My thought is that, with the planet at seven billion people and counting, hundreds of millions in abject poverty, my concern is that extreme sports are maybe a red herring. If people want to put so much effort into testing their toughness, if they want to prove they’re not afraid of hardship, why not travel as Good Samaritans to famine-ridden or war-torn countries? Or for the rebel, punk-rock types, maybe bomb missile factories? You know—do something productive?”

“Huh,” said Chip, looking surprised and a little worried as he chewed the protein bar with his mouth open. “Man, Deb. Should I not have booked the honeymoon package for Virgin Gorda?”

“Honey, my point is—”

But the pre-starter sounded then, a five-minute warning. Chip gulped down his soy protein, kissed me, took off his ultra-featherweight jacket, adjusted the tube on his backpack
hydration kit (giving it a practice suck or two) and the angle on his headlamp, and made for the starting line. I raised my phone and called out to him as he went, snapping a picture when he turned to smile at me. He looked like a combination football player/spelunker/Green Beret, his broad grin a Cheerful Chip special.