My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (29 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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“My sister made this dress for me,” Desiree said as Axel undid the buttons up the back, as he kissed her neck. “She took apart a kimono.” Though she’d seen Axel naked on the first day they’d met a year before, and though she’d shown him her scars, she didn’t want him undressing her. She loved him too much to risk being the girl who gave it all up too soon. Boys set girls up for failure all the time, Desiree had heard from one of the teenagers at Rothgutt’s—a girl named Pearl with a broken-heart tattoo on her cheek. “Boys are too stupid to know that’s what they’re doing,” Pearl had said, “but that’s what they’re doing. The boys think they’re just dumb, and they are, but they’re putting things together in their brains by accident.”
Ask me to marry you
, Desiree thought, as she brought her hands to the front of her dress, to hold it against herself. She then put her hands to his cheeks to push his face away, to look into his eyes. She scrunched up her eyebrows into sinister caterpillars, indicating she meant serious business. But she said nothing.
Finally Axel said, “Let’s get a good start on ruining our lives together, huh?”
“A girl likes to get a ring before she says yes,” Desiree said, though she had every intention of saying
yes yes yes yes yes yes,
endless
yeses
, ring or no ring. “So she can have something to show the other girls back at the asylum.”
With that, Axel brought from his pocket the ring he’d bought on the boardwalk from a man’s open raincoat, watches dangling from safety pins up and down the coat’s lining, rings and necklaces tucked into the many pockets.
Give it a bite
, the man had said, inviting Axel to test the diamond’s authenticity, to prove that Axel was being charged far, far too little for such stubbornly authentic jewelry, and Axel had stuck the ring on his pinkie and given the diamond a good hard bite, chipping a back tooth, causing a sharp thunderbolt of ache he felt through his body—in his temples, behind his ears, tingling his bones and back behind his testicles, and curling his toes.
“Give it a bite,” he told Desiree, but before he could put it on her finger, it bounced from his hands and, in classic slapstick, tumbled about them like a clumsy dragonfly, seeming just within fingertip’s reach, even knocking against a finger or a knuckle, then springing away opposite. Finally it joined Desiree’s slipper in the sea with a soft and undramatic
plink
. Axel jumped in after it, but the water was as murky as squid’s ink. Desiree twisted her hair around and around her finger in an effort to console herself as Axel came up for air, then dived back down, then back up, then back down. She made no suggestion that he abandon his search.
But Axel did abandon it after a few more dunks and he swam from the Ferris wheel, with urgency, as if he’d spotted the ring spirited away on the frothy top of a wave. But no, he’d heard something, someone weeping and gasping. The carousel horses, that had been perpetually suspended midstampede in the carnival’s merry-go-round, fell apart with a sudden sweep of stormy weather, and Desiree watched as a white stallion broke away from its team. Its ceramic teeth bared and clenched around a green apple, the pink locks of its mane curled like plumes of smoke, it raced off. A girl’s arms were wrapped around its long neck. Not a girl’s, a mermaid’s, Desiree saw, correcting herself with some delight, a mermaid topless, with long hair, riding away like a bucked-off Lady Godiva.
“She’s alive!” Desiree yelled into the storm that had yet to produce any rain, only wind and howl. And the mermaid was not just alive, but
clinging
for life,
willing
herself to live. “Save her, Axel,” Desiree whispered. Her almost-husband would be the night’s hero, the ring no longer just a ring regrettably lost, but the ring lost on the night Axel rescued a mermaid from drowning.
When Axel reached the carousel horse, the mermaid allowed herself to be taken into his arms, and she held tightly to him, collapsing against him as if her fin were crippled, as he swam toward shore in the hectic waters, the waves teasing the two of them forward, then tugging them back. Desiree climbed from the Ferris wheel and along the creaking boards of the fallen pier. She ran across the sand. By the time she reached where Axel and the mermaid had washed up, Axel had coughed and vomited the ocean from his lungs. He picked up the mermaid and carried her across the desolate beach, her long wet hair coiled around his leg like a vine.
Desiree ran to keep up, gnawing at the heel of her palm to get at a sliver that pained her, as Axel rushed the mermaid to the empty lot near the casinos. There, a nurse was stationed to attend to drunkards and other overindulgent parade revelers in a collapsible medical shed slapped together for the weekend and painted orange. But just before reaching the lot, her hand to her mouth, Desiree heard the first suggestion of her bracelet’s tyranny—the tiny but piercing squeak of the tightening of a spring—and her heart pounded and her feet stopped. She stumbled backward and fell into the sand, pinching and scratching at her legs to assure she still had feeling. She did. She lay on her side to wait for Axel to come back for her, watching the lightning outline the black clouds.
 
“I’d eaten some peaches I found,” the mermaid ghost told Desiree as they dangled there from the hanging branch. Though Desiree could hear her clearly, the mermaid spoke with a click and an awkward knocking in her mouth, as if she were only just learning her way around the stump of her tongue. “I’d been swimming for hours to reach Mudpuddle Beach, and I was so hungry I was half-sick.” The mermaid told Desiree that she’d rested on some rocks beneath the boardwalk in the hours before Axel rescued her. Up above had been people dancing, paper lanterns strung about and casting tall and jittery shadows up and down the walls of the casinos of red sandstone. In among the trash littering the rocks were tins with the lids cut open and jagged but with peaches still inside. The mermaid hadn’t known the story of the tins, of course, of the summer tradition of cocktails mixed from their nectar, so she’d eaten all she could find.
The tins, every parade, were hauled out from a warehouse where thousands had been stored ever since a national recall. But the botulism-tainted juice, if consumed only in tiny spoonfuls, would produce a slightly out-of-body euphoria without causing illness, so bartenders added the toxic syrup to the Bruised Peach, a summer drink that also called for gin, ginger beer, and a cough drop to give it a tint of purple-black. The mermaid, however, had devoured the peaches by the fistful and, woozy, she’d fallen from the rocks and back into the sea. It was as if the carousel horse had stretched out its neck just for her as she’d floated past, allowing her to grasp the brass ring in his nose.
The nurse in the medical shed could not legally treat a mermaid in an emergency situation without filling out a kit of forms, getting it all notarized, submitting it to a government panel, and receiving in the mail (within sixty to ninety days) a permit to be posted within public sight. Fortunately for the mermaid, the nurse on duty that night had been a sympathizer, having worked for years alongside Dr. Penelope Clapp, a great pioneer in mermaid medical research (the Penny Valve, a cellophane innovation that partially humanized the mermaid’s esophagus, was invented by her and named in her honor). The nurse undid the pins that kept her paper cap to her hair, unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse, rolled up her sleeves, and locked the shed’s door. She put on a pair of magnifying spectacles and ran her fingers along the rims of them, clicking through the various lenses for the correct degree before peering down the mermaid’s labyrinthine throat.
“Bring me the satchel that’s in the bottom drawer of the corner cabinet,” the nurse ordered Axel, but he stood still, too startled by all that was going on before him. The nurse reached out and grabbed his elbow, her fingers digging into his skin. “I need your help,” she said, scolding.
The bag was heavy and awkward—bottles of elixirs jostling around inside—and he nearly dropped it before reaching the bed. The nurse took from it a mask and a pump, syringes and scopes, all equipment that had been jimmied to best fit a mermaid’s insides. As she gently snaked a ribbed tube up the mermaid’s nostril, she handed Axel a square green-glass bottle. “Heat this up on the burner,” she said. “To exactly one hundred degrees. There’s a thermometer in the drawer.” Together they worked in lamplight that the nurse had dimmed away to practically nothing, becoming so quickly intimate that they hardly had to speak at all, relying on gestures and glances, grunts and sighs.
Finally the mermaid breathed easy, snoring with little puffs of breath at her lips, like blown kisses. Axel had never seen anything more beautiful. She must dream of handsome sailors, he thought. Exhausted, the nurse lit a cigarette and began to strip from her sweaty uniform, down to her bra and slip, her back to Axel. A few scars ran across the skin of her thin, pale back and you could see the segments of her vertebrae. “Get her out of here,” she said. “I could lose my license.” She handed Axel her blouse. “Cover her breasts with this. Do you have money for a rickshaw?”
Axel reached into his pockets, pulling the damp lining inside out, demonstrating that any money he’d had he’d lost in the ocean. The nurse gave him some dollar bills she’d had tucked in her bra strap. “There’s a cab stand in front of the fried jellyfish parlor down the street,” she said. “Tell him to take you to the nuns. He’ll probably say it’s not on his route, so you’ll tell him you’ll pay double.”
“Don’t I need something to disguise her fin?” Axel asked, as he buttoned the mermaid into the nurse’s blouse.
The nurse took a drag off her cigarette and exhaled heavy. “It’s the Mermaid Parade,” she said. “The place is crawling with people dressed up like her.” She gave Axel a corked vial of a green liquid. “The nuns will know how to administer it.”
“Tell
me
,” he said. “In case they don’t know how.”
“They’ll know how,” she said.
“In case they don’t,” he said.
The nurse sighed, shook her head, stuck her cigarette in the corner of her mouth, and squinted from the smoke that rose into her eye. She wiggled her finger toward the satchel. “Get the little red tea tin out of there,” she said, through clenched teeth. He did, and she showed him the double-pronged syringe inside. The tip of the needle was slightly curved. She demonstrated, on a vein of the mermaid’s arm, how to give the shot. “A shot in the morning, at noon, and at night.” She gave him more money from her bra and advised him to check into the flophouse at the corner of Atlantic and Pacific, “where the landlady don’t ask questions.”
But the landlady did ask Axel a question: “Need a drink?” She stood at the door to the room she’d assigned him and his mermaid, leaning against the jamb with a slouch intended to seduce. She wore a fuzzy, pink housecoat, roses embroidered on the lapels. Her dentures somewhere in a cup, her mouth sucked in on itself with a rhythmic smacking, and the downturned corners of her frown seemed to sag off her face entirely.
“No thank you,” he said.
“Well, you might as well start scratching now, you prissy little thing, because those bedbugs will itch like hell.” She slammed the door behind her.
But Axel and the mermaid did not sleep in the room; there were no other boarders on the second floor those first few nights, so Axel drew the mermaid a bath down the hall, and he lay on the floor beside her, the cold tiles cushioned only by a threadbare beach towel promoting a brand of cigarettes called Sailor’s Lung—
Like having your head in a stormy cloud
, the slogan promised.
Her hair spilled over the side of the tub and began to slowly spring with curl as it dried. He combed his fingers through her golden locks. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” he whispered, “let down your sweet hair.” He practically chanted it, in a soft monkish drone, easing his anxious stomach with its rhythms and repetition. He then turned the chant into a song, his sleepiness rendering it nonsensical and poetic, a song about spotted pears and senile dogs. He wrote many songs those few days at Rapunzel’s side, songs he then sang on the boardwalk when she got better, a hat overturned at his feet for coins, as the tourist season crept to an end. He bought Rapunzel a wicker wheelchair and a crocheted quilt to hide her fin, and she jiggled a tambourine he’d made from grapevine and sand dollars. As people stumbled from the casinos feeling they’d struck it rich, they took pity on the pretty girl in the chair, and would empty their pockets of coins into the hat. His banjo he’d bought with money he’d made working for a few weeks as a nanny to the sideshow’s monkey boy, who’d really been nothing more than just a hirsute infant with wild yellow eyes.
Though the boardwalk crawled with private gumshoes investigating infidelities and runaways, Axel was not recognized by any of the men his parents had hired. The ocean air and summer sun had quickly turned his face craggy and dry and his blond hair had gone as white as rice noodles. He’d never before even been able to grow peach fuzz on his chin or upper lip, but his concern for Rapunzel had led to a full snow-white beard in only a week or so, concealing a weak momma’s-boy chin.
Rapunzel’s first drawing was of Axel looking years younger, though it depicted him from only a few weeks before: Axel swimming against the raging sea, as beautiful as a young prince, to rescue her from the drifting carousel horse. Axel had known from the beginning that she’d been unable to speak due to the tongue cut from her mouth, the primitive stitches of which he could feel with his own tongue when he kissed her, but he had not initially noticed she’d been unable to see clearly—when he brought her glasses bought from the drugstore, it was as if it improved her mind’s eye as well, her backward glance blossoming in color and clarity. Her drawings looked as if torn from the pages of a book of fairy tales, the characters with eyes so round they consumed their faces.

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