Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (21 page)

“Come on,” said Peter, reaching out to Ginny. “I’ll close my eyes.”

Ginny giggled nervously, but then her smile turned fearless.

“You’re doin’ it, Gin!” I said, pushing harder than I intended on her thin shoulders, almost knocking her over. In my excitement I tasted something salty, and it was a while before I realized that I was on the verge of tears. Ginny whipped off her T-shirt and stepped out of her shorts. I fingered the tie at the bust of my sailor top as I realized there was no graceful ending to this game for me.

Ginny was in the water now, and Peter latched onto her hips to pull her closer.

I stood staring at James, knowing that the water would be up to my chin while it only met his belly button. “I’ll close my eyes,” he said, putting his hands to his face. My breath heavy, I edged closer to the pool.

“I lean!” said Bessie from the bushes. She lapsed naturally into my mother’s role.

“Oh, shut up,” I said. I pulled the shirt over my head, and with my arms above me, I checked James’s eyes. Pointless, I thought; everyone knows how to peek through their fingers. I had curvy hips, tight breasts, and arms like a tennis player: all in all, not a bad torso. I may never forgive myself for this, I thought. Then I sat down and worked on removing my pants and legs as noiselessly as possible. The time this took dragged out my horror. For the first time that night, James was being patient. I lowered myself into the shallow end and dropped underwater, knowing that above me were my legs in a pair of painter’s pants and Topsiders. Could I just stay down here? When I came up for air, James still had his eyes closed. He wasn’t reaching for me. Was it up to me to show him that it was okay? I gave up and swam to him.

His embrace was more welcoming than I perceived it at the time. The brevity of our kiss might have been due to the fact that all eyes were on us. A blanket of silence dropped over the pool. Finally James’s big teeth broke into a smile, and we kissed again. I felt something hard against my thigh, which offered reassurance along with the standard threat of sex, and we separated.

The drive back to the boys’ car was subdued. Ginny sat beside me, arms folded as if to restrain her contentment. I couldn’t look back at James because I was certain that this must have been a disappointment for him. Why was he being so quiet now? This was the worst torture: guessing at what he might be feeling. I never wanted to see him again, and at the same time I felt trapped by the inescapable fact that I needed something from him. Was it reassurance? Love? I wasn’t sure. Whatever it was, I could bet that he was not about to hand it over.

T
he following week, word spread that Dodi and her best friend, the other Dodi, were organizing the event of the summer. Ginny phoned me with the news. “The Dodis are planning a canoe trip on the Little Miami.” As I weighed the risk, I groaned. Irrational as it might seem, I felt as if the Dodis were holding me over a banister ready to drop me several flights. In reality, they were only planning an outing.

When James called, I picked up in the kitchen. “You coming on Saturday?” he asked.

At the oven, Mom poked a fork into one of her roasts. If only she and I could talk about these problems in a meaningful way. My choices boiled down to two intolerable options: wear my legs and potentially drown in an overturned canoe, or take my legs off in front of all of James’s friends in broad daylight. Even I lacked the daring for this one. When I told him I couldn’t go, James sounded miffed. “You’re sure about this?”

“Yep,” I said, trying to sound pert even as I was telling myself, I will never get over this.

He left me with another clearing of the throat. “Well, goodnight.”

I knew he wasn’t angry
at
me, but that was what frightened me. He might have been angry because he could see the dead end up ahead.

Every friend I had would be out on the river all day, except for Claire, who would be sweltering in a hot dog stand at the zoo. The night before the trip she said, “Don’t worry. There are so many parties. You can miss one.” She was right, I decided. Claire had missed dozens and it hadn’t hurt her.

Still, I awakened the next morning with dread. The whole day it felt as if someone was holding a pillow over my face, allowing me to breathe just enough. That night I washed my hair and put on the bathrobe that Liz had passed on to me. I can still feel my wet hair on the terrycloth collar, soaking into the fabric and drenching my neck as I sat on the basement couch, surfing the television for distraction. Our basement had paneled walls, a bumper pool table, and a wet bar that was Cincinnati red. The place was always freezing.

I couldn’t find a good movie. Even the couch I was lying on made me think of James. Once when we made out on this sofa, we discovered the “babies” spying on us. We’d chased them off, all three giggling and racing in separate directions. As they ran up the stairs shrieking, we went back to kissing. Minutes later we heard faint laughter and looked up to where they had climbed into separate window wells, crouching and gaping. Now, in an odd way, the image of three children squished into three wells reminded me of a row of fetuses in jars. I’d seen anti-abortion propaganda hanging in the breezeway at Saint Vivian. James had once told me that his sister’s class talked about euthanasia and someone brought up my name. I hadn’t the nerve to ask what the class had decided about my life. At a time such as this I hated to imagine how I would vote on my life, given the choice.

My mind had gone straight to every fear that haunted me: fears that I’d been putting off, stumbling onto again, and shoving away once more. Aside from the issue of sex, there was the issue of motherhood. In biology class, Sister Theresa had discussed various causes of birth defects. She told the guidance counselor to ask me if I wanted to be dismissed from those sessions. I’d looked at this guidance counselor, who had been trying to resuscitate my academic potential for two years, and said, “Why would I do that?” If only I had trusted the guidance counselor enough to tell her I was terrified, not only of biology class, but of life.

Months ago I had been sitting on this same couch watching
Butterflies Are Free
on television, riveted, when James’s call interrupted the movie. I desperately wanted to get back to it except that James was on the line, so I watched and told him what was going on in the film. That was the closest we had come to discussing my “disability.” I didn’t tell him that I saw myself as the blind man and James as the Goldie Hawn character. I felt certain that Goldie was going to leave the blind man, but I didn’t tell James that. I said, “Goldie just told the man’s mother to back off,” though I didn’t mention that Goldie also told the mother that her son needed to have sex, and lots of it. I definitely withheld Goldie’s opinion that this same son needed to have his heart broken so that he might grow up, and that probably she would do just that, break his heart. So I told James that it had gone to a commercial and turned the television off. I couldn’t face Goldie’s departure. Except for conversations I’d had with Claire—at times heavily intoxicated—this was the most intimate conversation I’d ever had about my legs.

All of this was going through my mind when a call came in. Mom answered it in the kitchen. “Eileen?” I heard her say. “Dick, where is that girl? Did she go out?”

“Down here.”

I was breathless as I lifted the receiver. “Hello?” I said, trying not to sound too eager.

“Uhleen?”

I was afraid to speak. James’s voice quivered uncharacteristically. Then he went silent. Finally he said, “I can’t talk long, but I won’t be able to do anything tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said, holding my breath so he wouldn’t hear me wheezing.

It seemed he would never speak, until finally he blurted out, “You should know that I, well, I made out with a girl today.”

“Oh.” In the months we’d been dating, James had never given me cause to feel jealous. That a boy from what was rumored to be a long line of ladies’ men had never stirred this emotion in me was probably more shocking than the news that he had just broken his clean streak. More troubling was the idea that he might have had sex with this girl, and it was not so much jealousy that I felt as a profound sense of loss. I didn’t want to ask him the next question, except that everyone else already knew: “Who was it?”

He cleared his throat, I bristled, and he told me the name of a girl in my circle of friends, not a close friend but a pretty good friend. “Oh,” I whispered.

“She feels really bad about it. We don’t. It wasn’t. You know? I was drunk. They put her in my canoe!” He stopped.

“What are you saying?” If he was trying to put this off on the Dodis, I could see right through that. “I thought you—” I wanted to say that I thought he cared more for me than this, but his behavior suggested otherwise. “I’m so confused,” I said.

“You weren’t there! It wasn’t like we planned it ...”

Someone picked up. “Mom?” I asked. How childlike I sounded. Instead of my mother, a man cleared his throat, and James immediately said, “Yes, sir! I’ll be right off.”

There was a click. Had James hung up?

“James!” I said, panicked.

“I have to go, Uhleen.” Another silence. “I can’t see you for a while.”

“You’re kidding me? I should be saying that to you!”

“No. It’s not that ... I have no choice. I’m grounded. That was my father. I’m not even allowed to talk on the phone.”

“What now?”

“I wrecked a car on the way home. Two, actually. I sideswiped someone.”

“Are you all right?”

There was a pause. “Sure. I’m fine. Look, I have to go.”

“James,” I said, and although it was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, I imagined my mother saying, “Hang up right now and never speak to that boy again.” I said, “Listen, maybe we should break up?”

I wanted him to beg me to change my mind. There was only more silence.

“So, you agree?”

“This thing that happened wasn’t because I wanted to be with someone else. We were drunk. It wouldn’t have happened if—”

A tear dropped at the base of my neck, startling me. I pulled my robe closer to my throat. My hair was almost dry but still cold against my back, and I fought a shiver. Since I couldn’t make myself hang up, I held the phone away from my mouth, preparing for the inevitable clearing of his throat, but that didn’t come this time. Finally, he said, “If you want to break up, I guess that’s best. I can’t go out anyway. I’m not even supposed to be on the phone.”

I couldn’t answer because I didn’t want him to hear me crying.

“I have to go,” he said. “Goodnight.”

CHAPTER 15

When a Pop Diva Comes in Handy

A
t seventeen I was the oldest girl at home, driving myself to a summer job, and so preoccupied with my own life that I completely missed the signs of chaos roiling in my home. Claire and I had been working in a concession stand in 100-degree weather that weekend. As I pulled in late on a Sunday night, I didn’t notice that Dad’s car was gone.

I entered the kitchen and found my mother in her sleeveless pink-and-white-checked dress, leaning against the countertop at midnight. Every light was on. What was she doing up so late? Mom usually fell asleep by ten. Was I in trouble? I’d mentioned I was going to Claire’s after work.

Calmly, she said, “Your father’s left.”

“What time’s he coming back?” I asked warily.

“Eileen, I’m telling you he left. He packed up and moved out.”

I stopped just inside the door, my head tilted. “What?” Was this a joke? I went to the kitchen table and sat. “Just start from the beginning. What happened?”

On a Sunday evening not so long ago I had seen Mom, in this same dress, storm out of the house after dinner. Snatching up her keys, she told Dad that she was “leaving for good.” As I followed her out the back door, I couldn’t help but notice how her olive skin radiated against the pink. If I looked that good in a dress I might just leave for good, too, I thought, as she zoomed away in her Scirocco. Was she just blowing off steam? Why wasn’t Dad chasing after her?

An hour later she came back and tossed her keys hard into the cabinet where she kept her cigarettes. Dad glanced over his glasses from his station at the kitchen table. “So you’re back” was all he said. I’d thought that was the end of it.

Now Mom explained what she knew. For years, Dad had been trying to run a business and hold the family together. He shielded us from the effects of skyrocketing interest rates on his business. The Midwest was suffering, the auto industry among the hardest hit. The Beetle generation had been replaced with “Buy American.” Dad now owned two foreign-car dealerships. Because he rarely spoke, no one knew the pressure he was under. He announced to Mom that, while he would never abandon us financially, he could no longer call this his home. In fact, he said, he’d prefer to never set foot in our house again. He took an apartment, something temporary until he could figure things out.

“Never again?” I asked. “An
apartment
?” Was she talking about the same man who had stayed up all night to take my broken leg apart and put it back together so I could go on a field trip with my fourth-grade class? That was my Dad, not a man with an apartment.

Mom shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“He’s not going to see us anymore?”

“He’ll be by on Sundays for the babies. I’m supposed to bring them outside.”

“Huh?” I slapped the tabletop. “What about the rest of us? He’s just gonna wave as he passes by the house? What did we do wrong?”

In her church clothes with her hair coiffed, Mom looked both fragile and elegant. On the night she left, she had stood in the same dress right where she was currently standing, but she’d been angrier then. Now, with her hands on her hips, she looked for a moment as if she might have the grit necessary to weather this crisis, but in an instant she started waving her arms, revealing the strain it took to match her words to her racing thoughts: “What’ll I cook for dinner tomorrow? Who’s gonna pick Tim up from baseball? Has Matthew been to the dentist lately? I don’t know anything anymore, Bridget. I mean, what’s your name, Liz? Oh, Eileen! My I-lean. What’ll I do, Lear dear?” She reached into the cabinet and took a pack of cigarettes from a carton. Without warning she pitched them to me. “I know you steal ’em, anyway,” she said. “You might as well smoke in front of me.”