The Seas (5 page)

My mother is still in love with him even though he’s been gone for eleven years. She says, “Nothing has changed between your father and me. I just don’t see him as often.” As though he moved to Tallahassee or somewhere else way down south. She’ll say something like that and then ask me, “Why do you hang around with Jude? Why don’t you go find yourself a nice boyfriend?” But all I have to do is not answer her, and she’ll hear how ridiculous that sounds coming from her.

My mother married my father when she was twenty-seven. In those days, this far north, that was old to be getting married for the first time. On their first date my father surprised my mother. Outside the restaurant where they’d eaten he saw something black quickly crawling out of their way. Though he hated to do it, he loved animals, my father leapt, throwing his arm in front of my mother to protect her. With one foot, he squashed the creature. My mother was horrified. “I thought you wouldn’t like spiders,” he said. But when he lifted his foot it wasn’t a spider. It was a cricket.

“Crickets are good luck,” she said.

“You are right,” he said.

“You killed it,” she said getting to the point quickly the way she does.

“You are right,” he said again, shrinking. “I never kill spiders. I love spiders. I did it for you. I thought you might not like them.”

“No, I’m not like that,” she said. “I love spiders too. I love crickets even more but I love spiders too.” Soon after, they were married.

Sometimes if I am soaking in the tub or while I am trying to sleep I picture my father telling me about being a mermaid. I imagine things he might say to me if he were still around. Things like, “You might be living on dry land but all the same you’re still subject to our laws,” and he’d mean the ocean’s laws. I would be relieved to hear this because it would give me comfort. I’d rather be subject to the ocean’s laws than the laws that apply to young girls trying to become women here on dry land. For example, many of the carnies at the amusement park are girls I grew up with. One of them has tattooed teardrops on her face, one tear for every year her boyfriend has been in prison. This doesn’t strike me as wise, as she is quite young. Though still, sometimes, I secretly wish I had teardrops tattooed on my face, as it seems to give the girl a purpose for now. When you are young, living in the north, sadness can make you feel like you have something to do. Sadness can be like a political cause almost or a religion or a drug habit. It is a lot of work to stay sad. I think of the carny girl’s teardrops and I can’t believe that is her purpose, but still I want a purpose so badly that I am envious even of that sad and ugly purpose she has. I suspect that she wants her boyfriend to stay in prison for a long time so that every year she can add another drop until they reach below the collar of her shirt and everyone who sees her will say, “My, there’s a sad girl.” She’s like an animal with her foot caught in a trap. In the wave of pain that rushes over her, she looks to the sky and she is braced by the color blue there. For a moment she imagines she can escape this ugly town and her imprisoned boyfriend, so she tries to use a knife on her bone above her ankle to free herself from the trap. Sadly, the knives they give out as amusement park prizes here don’t have the blade for any real cutting, and anyway she doesn’t have the money to move away.

Sometimes I will spend dusk driving around town. Dusk is depressing and I feel the only way I can get warm at dusk is if the car heater is blowing directly on me or if I take a hot bath, but if I take too many baths in one day my mother will become nervous. She’ll imagine that I am doing secret things in the bathtub, things like masturbating or killing myself.

Even if Jude’s not with me I talk to him. I pretend he is in love with me. “I’ll be cheap, Jude,” I tell him when he’s not there. He meets women employed by the ironworks or he meets girls on the street or in minimarts or they just get into his car if he looks at them. I suppose he is that handsome that that could actually happen. He doesn’t always tell me. Sometimes I find their clothes. Sometimes I find their pictures. Sometimes in the pictures they are smiling at Jude. I look until I think I will be sick or until he finds me and says, “Ah, come on. What are you looking at that for? Come here. I got something for you today,” and he’ll smile. “Come here,” and he’ll lead me out onto his back concrete stoop and point down into a plastic bucket that is sitting there. “It’s a baby,” he’ll say and it is. A tiny baby sea urchin the size of a quarter, covered everywhere with black spines. It is hard to believe something that small is alive.

“That’s adorable,” I say and Jude blushes. “Thanks,” I say and kiss his cheek with dry lips. I carry my baby home in a bucket.

I try to meet other men but it doesn’t work for me. I get in my car and drive out to the ironworks but the men change shifts. They look at me sideways because I have always been an outcast here. That is what happens to children who lose a parent. They think that I am weird or special or unlucky or just too sad a puddle for them to dip their toes into. So the men at the ironworks look at me and even if they notice that I have come of age, they still get into their own cars and go home. I linger long at stop signs in town but no one ever gets into my car even though all the doors are unlocked.

I develop a plan to make Jude jealous, but in order to go through with a plan I have to call a man named Neil that I know, though not very well. Jude knows him too because the man is the same age as Jude and sometimes they work for the same captains. That is part of my plan. The man and I decide to have dinner together and hear some music in a town an hour west of here. He doesn’t want to go out in our own town. I drive and after dinner, when I return from the ladies room he says, “Pay the tip.” So I do and thank him for dinner. “I’m not taking you out,” he says. “You still owe me half.” This man Neil is an ugly man, and as the evening passes I begin to see how he enjoys humiliating me. He spends the entire evening talking about a girlfriend he once had from California. When I say, “Oh, the Pacific,” he looks at me crossways. “You’re a real nut job. Has anyone ever told you that?” I don’t like this man. His thick lips make me feel sick inside, but I have a plan so I go though with it and later that night the man Neil says, “I like a lot of talk while we’re doing it.” I think of all the unleashed dogs on the streets. Their conversations in howl. “So that’s what a nineteen-year-old feels like,” he says, and I try to imagine the dark words he’ll use to describe this to the sailors he works with, to Jude.

Still later, the ceiling in his bedroom.

The hair on the man’s back.

Jude is very mad about the man. He says he doesn’t want to see me.

I say I am having trouble seeing him too. “I have to go to the eye doctor again,” I tell him, but he has already hung up the phone.

A number of weeks pass. I don’t see Jude. I work a few days at the sardine factory and a few days as a chambermaid. I spend one day watching the square patch of sunlight that enters the bathroom window as it travels all the way across the room. I am in misery. Without Jude I have nothing to do. Finally the eye doctor returns.

At his office a small albino boy waits in the front room. He doesn’t read a magazine so I assume his pink eyes are blind and I stare at him with no regard for manners. Eventually he says, “I can see you, you jerk.”

“Sorry,” I tell him, but the boy won’t talk to me.

The doctor calls me in. He asks me, “What do you see?” with his hand over one of my eyes.

“Jude.”

“Now the other?”

“Jude.”

“I see. Not much change. Well, at least it’s slow-moving.” I think of the patch of sunlight. “We’ll keep an eye on it,” he says

I drive to Jude’s but I don’t go inside. Instead I look at myself in the rearview mirror, looking for whatever it is that deforms me to unlovable—slime or freckles or a tail. I stare and stare. I ruminate, as my mother would say, to the point of destruction, thinking so hard that it feels like drilling. Indeed, I’ve often imagined performing a dissection on myself so that I could better understand what’s going on inside me, but I am too scared to go through with it. Instead I stare in the rearview. Eventually after so much staring I say, “I can see you, you jerk.”

I park and walk down to the water. I walk along the shore a long, good distance. There are no people on the beach this far from town. I walk even farther, over the rocks, so I can be all alone and away from my bad decisions. I think of the man Neil and find it impossible to believe that I let him inside of me. I think of Jude and worry that all the mermaid stories are true, that if he won’t love me, either he’ll have to die or else I will. I think of my father and I stop walking. I take all three of them, the hairy man, Jude, and my father, I ball them up and toss them over my shoulder. I keep walking away from them and, for a minute, I even run along the shore feeling light and lifted. I put one hand on my hip and one hand on the back of my head like a pin-up girl from a 1950s calendar. I swish my hips. Woo woo. Very sexy. After some deliberations I decide to leap. Ready, I prepare myself, start to run and launch into the air. It feels wonderful but halfway through the leap I get scared. I see something squirming up ahead and immediately long to be back on the sand. I abort my leap. I fall back to the ground. There is a creature flapping like a fish without air only it is far larger than any fish. I run to find out what the thing is, and as I approach I can see that it really is not a fish. It is King Neptune on the shore. He is hurt. He is squirming, trying to get back into the ocean. I am scared but I ask him, “King, do you want me to throw you back?”

“Oh, dear. If you could,” he says.

I edge up to him slowly. I don’t want to alarm him any further. I am surprised that someone as powerful as King Neptune could be hung up by something as shifting and dirty as a beach. “What happened?” I ask while trying to lift his back.

“It’s embarrassing,” he says.

“You don’t have to say if you don’t want to. You are the king of the ocean.” He is a tremendous creature, like a whale. So large I could be crushed if a wave rolled him onto me. I am getting quite wet in my efforts to assist the King.

“No. It’s all right. I’ll tell you,” he says. “Broken heart.” King Neptune uses his arms to push toward the water. “There was a young girl,” he says. “Here, on the beach. I wanted to get closer to her. But as soon as I came in to the shallow water she stood up and ran away.”

“I’m sorry. That’s sad.” I don’t really think it is that sad. I wonder what an old man was doing chasing a young girl but I don’t say anything. “Do you know my father?” I ask him.

“What? A sailor?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry,” he says.

“No. It’s not your fault.”

King Neptune smiles like God. Like ninety-seven percent of the world’s water is in ocean. Like seventy-five percent of the world is covered with ocean. Like everything is his fault.

“What about Jude? Do you know him? He’s down here a lot,” I say.

“Yeah. I think so. He’s friends with that girl who has lost her mind? The one who thinks she’s a mermaid?”

I stop helping King Neptune get back into the water. I stand back from him while he continues talking. “What I can’t figure out,” he says, “is why she’d want to be a mermaid. All mermaids do is swim around and kill sailors. It’s not a great job.”

I stop helping him and when I start again I push hard. “I’m going to be a different kind of mermaid,” I tell the King.

He turns and looks at me. His eyes are just as pale as mine. “You don’t get a choice,” he says. “There’s only one kind of mermaid,” he says and then, “Don’t forget that the ocean is full of everything except mercy.”

I shove his back so that he’ll awkwardly be forced to bend at the hips. He is an old man and I am certain that he won’t have the flexibility in his bones, that it will hurt him. I push so hard that the vertebrae in his back cut me.

Fuck King Neptune, I think, because growing up as a mermaid was a hard way to grow. When I was younger other children would not befriend me, but instead they would say loud enough for me to hear, “That house, that house is rotten in and out. That girl, that girl’s got bugs in her hair.” I’d fake to pick a bug from my scalp and eat it. Delicious. When I was younger I’d go down to the water and each wave would ask in a thug accent, “You want I should take care of those kids? You want I should tell your father?”

But I’d let the children live. See, I have mercy.

I push and push King Neptune and then I give up. And then I can see clearly. King Neptune isn’t, and underneath my cut hands is a rock shaped like a king, a rock deposited on this beach when the ice age flowed home, beaten, in retreat.

The beach where the sea channel opens into the salt marsh is usually less crowded because the smell of sulfur can be strong when there is no wind. The mouth of the channel expands in a tongue so that it is uncrossable and children have drowned trying.

Jude has brought three blankets, and at the edge of the dune he uses one and a few pieces of driftwood to make us a tent. Jude has forgiven me. He didn’t have much choice. Neither one of us really has any other friends.

I fold my pants and sit cross-legged back down on the sand with a deep curve in my shoulders. I watch him unfurl the blanket. I am worn out by desire for him like a girl in some book.

He removes his shirt but sits directly in front of me tucking his arms across his chest because of his weird scars there, scars that look like someone once tried to write Jude a message on his torso with a razor blade, but then changed his or her mind and scribbled the letters out instead. They don’t look like gills. Jude resembles a very unhealthy version of Snow White, with black hair and red lips, like a Snow White after years spent drinking in bars.

I put my toes on his back, right where his jeans end and walk each toe, one by one, up his vertebrae, as if he were a bony fish. No one else is on the beach. No one is here to see that he is with me. He could take full advantage of me if he only wanted to. When I sit up, I sit around him, one leg on either side of Jude’s. I touch his back with my stomach. I lift my hips until they touch him like I am a barnacle on his back. But after he exhales three times, I can feel it, he stands up and says, “Let’s go down to the water.” Maybe, I think, he is still angry about Neil.