Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (20 page)

Dear Eileen

all my friend think you are party and I do to

sorry

Love

Nina

During my early childhood, when I wasn’t in legs, people viewed me with horror, or worse, sorrow. Many looked away, which made me want to be invisible. Now the message was conflicting. On the one hand I had a hideous defect, and on the other I was frequently told I was beautiful. I didn’t know how to reconcile this disparity, so at times I convinced myself that I was better than ordinary: I was extraordinary. And why not? Fairy tales are full of “blind men” who see into others’ souls. There had to be something that made me special. The tolerance of pain, I decided. Secretly I scoffed at my peers who worried about things like B.O. or bad hair. I had to keep my head intact, which was hard after a night of boys flirting with me, because I still had to go to sleep that night without legs. The humbling facts always chased me down in the morning. That was when reality hit extra hard, requiring me to talk myself out of bed as if going into battle.

I never thought to tell anyone what was going on in my head. Who would understand?

Simultaneously, I reveled in the sheer joy of being almost sixteen. My girlfriends and I cruised for parties. When we came up short we masterminded capers. One night while we sat in my friend Meg’s convertible, looking for something to do, she mentioned that there was an underground house nearby. Meg was the equestrian in our group, and I imagined that she was used to jumping fences. I said, “An underground house is built that way so people can walk on it, right?”

“I’m not so sure they had that in mind,” said our cautious friend Gretchen from the back seat.

I glanced over at Meg, who revved up her engine.

Viewed from the road, the underground house was all but invisible: a mound of earth with cylindrical chutes coming up from its core. Supposedly a pond butted up to it, and the people inside watched an underwater scene through a glass wall. Meg and Gretchen pulled me over the fence while a third friend hoisted me up from behind. We had not expected the dog that charged out from a chute, although we did make it back over the fence intact.

Skinny-dipping also involved breaking and entering. We had friends with pools. Meg had her own lake. But that was beside the point. We craved the risk: dancing naked in starlight, water lapping our bodies.

What I loved most about skinny-dipping was that we were alone. I could swim among girlfriends and no one stared at me. I’d learned to ignore the gawking eyes of strangers, but it still undermined the one time I felt utterly free. In a pool I moved without a single compromise because I was liberated from my legs. Without them I became an elusive mermaid, the Venus de Milo spit from the ruins, or a comet firing across an endless sky.

Not far into the summer, I faced my first obstacle with respect to swimming. My latest pair of legs consisted of a hard synthetic surface with metal parts underneath. There was a hollow area behind the knee of my below-knee leg. In a pool it would have filled up and sucked me under like wading boots in whitewater. Whenever a party took place at a house with a pool, every girl was thrown in before the night was over. The boys I knew would not have tossed me in because I might drown in my legs, but I would never admit to a strange boy that I didn’t have legs. One time Liz threw herself over the threshold of a sliding door to block a varsity football player from taking a running leap into a pool with me in his arms. Both she and I were too embarrassed to tell him that I had artificial legs. Another time, while James was grounded, his friend Peter snatched me from a boy preparing to hurl me sideways into a diving well.

Maybe because James was grounded the night that Peter stepped in to save me, I hadn’t considered the problems that swimming posed for us. I wasn’t ready to have sex, so I’d never imagined how James might react to seeing me without my legs. Now swimming—the one sport I loved and could perform with grace—posed a threat.

That summer James and I double dated a lot with Peter and my friend Ginny, the math whiz. They were making out in the back seat of James’s van when we passed other friends on the road and pulled onto a side street. James got out, talked to them, and climbed back into the driver’s seat. Briefly he hesitated.

“What did they say?” asked Peter.

“A bunch of people are pool-hopping at the country club,” said James, rather somberly, I thought, for such a festive topic as pool-hopping.

I turned self-consciously toward my window.

“We don’t have to,” he said to me.

“It’s okay,” I said, facing him.

He started the engine. “Are you sure?” he said, making a U-turn toward the club.

“Yes.”

We both grew quiet. As we neared the parking lot he said, “Maybe you should stay in the—”

“Right.” But I kept turning it over. Why? Was Ginny going to do it? If other girls were doing it, why couldn’t I? “Maybe.”

His mouth dropped open, then snapped shut.

I would at least go onto the deck to see for myself. But there would be boys combing the place to throw the girls in the pool, maybe boys who didn’t know about my legs. James pulled into a space. Peter stopped making out with Ginny and glanced around the empty parking lot.

“Maybe we missed it,” he said. “Nobody’s here.”

“We could go by ourselves,” said James.

Silence filled the van. I was the one to open the door first, and we all shuffled across the parking lot toward the pool. Ginny and I exchanged nervous glances while James and Peter led the way. Then a night watchman stepped out from between a group of pine trees and held a flashlight to James’s face. After a brief exchange, the watchman let us go, but not before it came out that James’s father was the president of the country club. “Uh, oh,” I whispered, as it occurred to me that, like me, James negotiated two worlds within this homogenous town: one in which, as a Cuban American, he belonged to a minority group, and one in which he was a privileged citizen. That connection probably eluded James, though. He seemed to view himself almost exclusively as a privileged citizen. And for that, I envied him.

O
n a Sunday night during the same summer, Mom asked me to do the dishes while she stuck around. I’d never known her to be calculating enough to have an agenda, but with Mom, it was best to exercise caution. As far as motherly guidance was concerned, she tended to operate by the seat of her pants or, in her case, girdle, for Mom never went anywhere without one.

“It’s not good to date just one boy, you know,” she said. She was wiping down the table so I couldn’t see her face. Still, I knew that voice: Mom’s attempt to get inside my head.

From the window over the sink I watched Frankie and his friends. The thud of their basketball was now a droning noise, child’s play as far as I was concerned. Except for Stilts, who was stalked by girls because of his prowess on the basketball court and his blond, square-jawed good looks, the other boys were light years from dating. I heard Mom’s sponge scraping the red-and-white-checked vinyl tablecloth, smelled the steak fat clogging the disposal, and felt the oily soapsuds on my hands. “Well,” I said, trying to sound casual, “you met Dad when you were fourteen.” Even that story, which had once been my favorite fairy tale, was now as trite and false to me as
Cinder
ella
.

“Your father wasn’t the only boy I dated,” said Mom rather boldly. She was still wearing her clothes from church, pearls and a mint green suit. Why did she never dress like this when my boyfriends came to the door? The woman who greeted James could have escaped from a locked ward, and everyone knew that Mom had done time on a ward. Because of my own experiences with rejection, I could not allow myself this one teenage girl’s rite of passage: the fantasy of shoving one’s mother off of a cliff. Instead, I mostly felt sad for Mom. My inability to express my outrage crippled me, though. On top of that, Mom had been so damn pretty and popular at my age. Tears pushed against my eyes. I never allowed myself to imagine what my life might have been like if I’d been born with legs. Not a ballerina, just a happy-go-lucky girl. What I needed was a woman who could put herself in my situation and just listen, without judgment, to my rage and my sorrow. Did my mother have an inkling of what I was up against? I turned back to the suds and admitted to her in a barely audible voice, “No one else asks me out.”

“And that’s exactly my point,” said Mom, throwing down her sponge. “They won’t ask you out.”

“Mom?”

“It’s true!” She tossed her arms up in frustration. “They won’t ask you out if you’re just dating one boy.” She lowered her voice. “They’ll think you’re going steady.”

“No one ‘goes steady’ anymore.”

“Well, isn’t that what you’re doing?”

“No. We’re just, well, going out.” Even as I said it, I doubted my own words. A boy at a party had recently asked, “Are you and James getting serious?” His tone hinted of warning, and I understood that this was based on the Cabrera men’s popularity with women. But I decided that if I was about to go down I would do it my way: flames ablaze, fireworks, and ashes. Wasn’t that, after all, a sort of grace under fire?

And yet, because of my dramatic and flighty nature, this conversation with my mother was taking root. Even as I told myself I was emotionally more advanced than my peers, I couldn’t quite trust that I knew anything about myself, or boys, or sex. My mother held the advantage of experience.

When James called that night, I told him I was going out with my friends. I tried to sound nonchalant, even reluctant about seeing him. Mom was within earshot so I took the phone into the den, where I glanced back to see her straining to listen.

James offered to bring Peter along for Ginny, so we could all meet up.

“Hmm,” I said. “We’ll see.”

“What’s up with you?” He sounded miffed.

“I don’t know,” I said. My neck was suddenly hot. “Maybe we see too much of each other.” I said this loud enough for Mom to hear.

“You think so?” His voice was almost inaudible.

“Maybe.” I said this with a mixture of guilt and glee as I imagined myself the one who would now dictate orders.

He had only to clear his throat. Something about that gesture made me doubt myself each time he did it, and this time the message rang as clear as a door slamming in my face. I was no match for James.

That night my girlfriends and I drove in circles. Bored by ten, we caved in to meet up with James and Peter. The minute we pulled up to them, I saw the difference in James’s face. The half-sneer was now a crumpled squint, as if he were weighing his prospects. He seemed torn between hurt and a desire to punch something. Still, the two boys climbed into our back seat with a twelve-pack between them. James immediately wrestled for the advantage, obviously uncomfortable in the back seat of a car, much less one driven by a girl. My friend was driving her ancient Buick sedan with a front seat that stretched like an old sofa to fit the three of us. She called her car Bessie. Since she never drank herself, she ordered James to “drink up.” Now James was calling my friend Bessie, which made Ginny and me laugh. We patted her shoulder. “Bessie! You’re Bessie now.”

James took a languorous swig from his bottle right in her line of vision in the rearview mirror. “Do you always drive thirty miles below the speed limit?” he asked. “Step on it, Bess.” He clapped her on the opposite shoulder. Bessie was our glee club’s best soloist, but she had a tendency to snap at us like a grandmother in her efforts to stay on the right side of every choice. Our mothers loved her. If they wavered on whether to allow us to go somewhere, we only had to mention that Bessie was driving. From beside her in the front seat, I smelled the beer from James’s breath clash with her White Shoulders perfume.

“Where are we going?” she asked. “I’ve been driving all night. Gas ain’t cheap, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Pool-hopping,” said James. He took another swig and sat back to stare out his window.

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t have to go,” said James, dismissively.

Peter shot him a corrective glance, and James bit his lower lip.

“You’re right. I don’t.” She jerked the wheel to whip into a parking lot, where she slammed on the brakes, even cranking the emergency brake. James leaned forward again, whispering, “We need you, Bess.”

“Tunes?” She shot me a pleading look.

“I don’t know,” I said. I glanced bitterly over my shoulder at James, who fell back against his seat as if shot down from his throne. He wouldn’t look at me.

Ginny popped a huge bubble out her open window. “Well,” she said, “where’s a pool?”

“Riordan’s in Michigan,” said Peter, whose eyes twinkled at the thought of skinny-dipping with Ginny on a lavish estate.

“Riordan’s house,” I said, remembering that Peter had wrestled me from the arms of a boy who wanted to throw me into the Riordans’ pool. “Hmm. A place like that would have a caretaker, wouldn’t it?”

“And when were
you
there, Tunes?” James asked in an imperious tone.

“When
you
were
grounded
,” I said, turning back to glare at him. He could be so haughty.

He slumped down, folded his arms, pulled into himself.

“I don’t know,” said Bessie, her eyes flickering back at James as if she expected him to argue with her, but James was lost in his sullen mood. Suddenly, she threw the car in reverse and said to Peter, “Which way to Riordan’s?”

We drove about twenty minutes. Halfway there, James eased out of his sulk and talked us into going to an apartment complex instead. “It’s closer and less risky.”

Minutes later, we stood on the deck of a pool that would have been pitch black except for the moonlight shimmering on the water. I looked up with regret. That moon might as well have been a floodlight pointing accusingly at my legs. We girls were hanging back near a low brick wall while the boys peeled their shirts over their backs.

“You’re going to keep your skivvies on,” Bessie ordered them.

James and Peter looked at each other.
Skivvies?
Then James threw off his pants and dove in before we could get a good look at him. Peter followed, a stockier silhouette. The boys came up from the water, hair swinging. James’s spongy mop hardly released a drop. Ginny and I stood speechless on the deck. Now it was our turn. Behind us, Bessie must have burrowed into the shrubbery while Ginny and I stared at each other before glancing longingly at our boyfriends. They had inched toward us to wait in the shallow end. I was relieved to see that they’d kept on their underwear, and I told myself that underwear was no different from a bathing suit. Or was that even my concern?