Swim to Me (5 page)

“How much will I get paid?” asked Delores, cocking her head to the side so she could get the water out of her ear.

“You'll live here with the other girls.” Thelma pointed at the A-frame dormitory behind them. “You'll flip burgers, you'll clean the pool area, you'll take tickets. And you'll get to swim in the show. You'll make fifty dollars a week plus whatever you pick up in tips. I'd say that was payment enough.”

Delores turned her head upside down and shook her wet hair. Drops of water fell on Thelma Foote's Keds. Delores stood up and flipped her hair backward. “I'll talk to my parents,” she said, still affecting her new coolness.

“You do that,” said Thelma. “That is, if you can reach them while they're traveling.”

B
ACK AT THE MOTEL,
Delores took a hot bath. Bath was a fancy word for it, as the tub was so small her knees were practically touching her chin. She sat with her back to the faucet and let the hot water run over her. She'd never had good news before. It was the first time someone had ever chosen her for anything. Thelma Foote said she was photogenic, said she had earned her tail. It was odd, this feeling. Delores knew how to deal with disappointment. She was as used to that as milk in her cereal. But praise, and getting what you wished for? She wanted to cry for how happy she felt.

She thought about her friend Ellen, and how perfect Ellen's life had always seemed to her. In the light of what had just happened to her, Ellen's life now seemed ordinary, nothing to envy anymore. She thought about her mom and wondered what place she would have in her new life. And she thought about Westie, and the talcumy smell of the top of his head.

Delores got out of the tub and put on a pair of jeans and one of the slinky Halston jersey tops her mother had rescued from the
magazine. She sat outside in the plastic chair in front of her room and let the sun fill her until the chill inside her was gone. Now was a good time to write to Westie. On a postcard that pictured the pink hotel with its orange tiled roof, she wrote:

D
EAR
W
ESTIE
, T
HIS
is where I am staying now. Today I passed my tryouts to become a mermaid. Every day I'll get to swim in the beautiful clear springs. It's a dream come true. I will send you a mermaid doll so you can see what I look like. I miss you. Love, Delores

T
HEN SHE WENT
into her room, closed the shades, and pulled out the bathing cap filled with silver dollars. There were sixty-nine left. After she paid the five-dollar hotel bill, she'd have sixty-four dollars to her name. Delores brushed her hair and packed her bag. Just as she was about to close the lid on Otto, he said: “Hey, kiddo, don't forget about me.” She tucked the bus ticket into the pocket of her suitcase, pleased with the thought that she wouldn't be needing it anytime soon.

It was after two by the time Delores knocked on Thelma Foote's door at the administration building.

“I've discussed it with my parents,” she said. “They think this is a good opportunity for me, so yes, I'd be happy to be a mermaid. Can I put my stuff in the dorm now?”

Thelma Foote's wink was magnified a dozen times behind her thick lenses. “Child, someday I would like to meet those entertainer parents of yours,” she said. “In the meantime, let them rest assured that we will take good care of you here. So c'mon now, let's get you fixed up.”

Delores would never want for water again.

There was never enough water in New York City. Delores craved the water the way a boozer craves drink. Out of it, her large bony limbs were all edges and jerky movements. Under it, her arms made graceful arcs and her long legs rippled. For seven dollars a year, she got to swim in a small, crowded pool at the Bronx YMCA every day after school. Delores would make up stories in the water and act them out. Mostly they had to do with her being a beautiful princess who lived in a castle. She'd turn somersaults and invent little dances to show off to the fish and turtles who lived down there with her. One time, Henry, the cute older guy who taught swimming, even shouted: “Go, tiger!” after watching her wallop across the pool doing the butterfly stroke. He couldn't have known that, the whole time, she'd been pretending to ride on the back of a dolphin.

The lady from Baltimore had sent the Walkers two pictures of Roy holding Delores over his head in front of the obelisk, as she had promised. The pictures were folded into a note-card with a painting of a sunflower on the front of it. In a generous scrawl, the woman had written:
Splendid memories of your time in the sun. You make a beautiful mermaid.

When Delores had shown the photograph to her friend Ellen, they
noticed how her father was staring into the camera with his lopsided gap-toothed grin. “He looks like Alfred E. Neuman,” Delores said, and laughed.
MAD
was her father's favorite. He kept back copies of it in the bathroom. In fact,
MAD
magazine was the only magazine she'd ever seen in the house. “God, he
does
look like Alfred E. Neuman,” said Ellen. “I wonder if he knows it?”

“He must,” said Delores.

Her mother had seemed to accept her father's disappearance as another of life's inevitable disappointments. For the first few weeks after he'd left, she'd say to Delores, “He'll be back. He always comes back,” as if she were talking about a runaway cat. Sometimes, she'd stare at the phone, willing it to ring; it never rang. “There's probably someone I should call,” she said one night, “but I'll be darned if I know who that is.” As the weeks went by, her husband's absence seemed to inhabit her. Dark circles, like pits, formed under her eyes. She developed a nervous cough. Some days she didn't even bother to put a comb through her matted hair. She'd forget to buy food for dinner. If Delores didn't bathe Westie, he'd go to bed unwashed. Then late one afternoon, about six weeks after her father took off, her mother began to settle into an unsteady peace. “The son of a bitch is really gone,” she said to Delores. “But the real pisser is, he took the car.”

West didn't seem to notice his father's absence. The house was quieter, that was for sure. His mom was distracted, but Delores played with him, fed him, and kept him clean. Delores had assumed that her father would send for her and West as soon as he got to wherever he was going. She felt a little guilty for imagining that life might be easier with him, that away from her mom he'd be more relaxed and kind of fun. She imagined he'd driven the old Pontiac somewhere out west. He'd settle down in a private house. The house would have a screened-in porch and a swing in the backyard. He
would be tanned and happy, no more bad temper. He'd lose weight and grow honey-colored sideburns, and he'd still wear his Yankees cap everywhere. Behind the house would be a pool. Nothing fancy, just big enough for her to swim laps. There would be a barbecue in the backyard. He'd cook steak and baked potatoes. It would be sunny all the time.

To make ends meet, her mother took on a second job at night. During the day she worked at the checkout counter of a nearby Gristedes. After that, she'd go to her job cleaning fancy offices in a steel and glass office building on the west side of Manhattan. Often she would bring home souvenirs. Once it was the suede jacket with fringes that she found at the fashion magazine in the building. “It was in the corner by the trash,” she explained to Delores. “I'm sure they meant to throw it away.” Another time she brought home a clock that had an airplane as a second hand and showed the time in places all over the world, like Halifax and the Azores. It had fallen off someone's desk at the insurance company, she said, though remarkably it hadn't broken. She kept the clock on top of the television and seemed to take some pride in always knowing what time it was in Zaïre. Over the next few months, she brought home a leather briefcase, a pair of Biba suede boots, a man's Timex with a slightly bent catch, a Betsey Johnson dress, and two pairs of bell-bottom jeans. “God, those people at the magazine are such slobs,” her mother would complain, pulling the scavenged items from a Macy's shopping bag. She'd try on all of the clothing first, and anything that didn't fit (which were most things), she'd hand off to Delores.

Every morning before school, Delores would bring Westie to the woman who lived three floors beneath them. She was pale and thin and slightly stooped. She had no kids and no husband. Delores only knew her as Helene. Helene wore her hair in braids pinned to the top of her head. She was of an indeterminate age and never wore
makeup or perfume. The most distinguishing thing about her sparse and spotless apartment was the giant globe that sat in the middle of the living room. On one of those mornings, Delores spun the globe and arbitrarily stuck her finger on a spot somewhere outside of Guatemala. As she squinted to see where she was, she turned to Westie, and said, “Don't worry, no matter where I go, I'll always take care of you.” Helene studied the globe while Westie wriggled in her translucent arms. “You've got moxie, dear,” she said to Delores in a thin voice. “And moxie will get you a long ways.” Delores didn't know what
moxie
meant, but liked the sound of it. It sounded foreign, and vaguely aquatic.

Just before school was to let out for the summer, and with no sign of her father, her mother said to Delores: “We can't go on like this, hon. I can't support the three of us on what I'm making. You need to get a job. Maybe you could wait tables or bag groceries, something to cover some of the bills we pay around here.”

Delores considered her skills and came up blank. She lay on her bed and looked at her feet. Size 10. Would she always feel like this, she wondered, trapped in this small house, with her sad mother, her baby brother, and these big feet? Then she remembered what Helene had said to her. She had moxie. She wondered what a girl with moxie could do. She thought about the thing she loved the most. Her body flushed with pleasure as she imagined diving into the deep end of the pool. Just thinking about the smell of chlorine made the back of her throat tingle. Maybe she could get a job at Miramar pool. No, no, of course she couldn't do that. She didn't even have her Senior Lifesaving Certificate.

Under her bed in an old Miles shoebox, Delores stored her “treasures.” Aside from Otto, there was the picture of her father and her at Weeki Wachee and a birthday card with the face of a black bear that glowed in the dark with the words: “Goodness gracious sakes
alive, can it be that you are five?” It was signed: “Your mother and father.” Delores had kept it these past eleven years because it was the only birthday card they had ever given her.

And then there were the sacred pamphlets from Weeki Wachee Springs. Printed on thick glossy paper with colored pictures of the mermaids in various costumes, the pamphlets promised “crystal-clear blue waters,” and “the most beautiful women on land or sea.” The paper was limp now, and the creases were nearly slits from the many times she had bent the brochures this way and that to study the photographs. As she stared at them again, she noticed something she had never seen before. Down on the bottom, under the driving instructions, was a telephone number and address. Because Weeki Wachee occupied such a large part of Delores's imagination, it had never dawned on her that it would actually have an address and a phone number. It would be as if, by calling information, you could actually dial up Oz.

A phone call to Florida was out of the question. Her mother talked about “long distance” as if it were an ermine coat. “Well, I'm glad
she
can afford long distance,” she once said, after a neighbor bragged about calling her son in California. Delores would have to write a letter, which was another skill she most certainly did not have. She went through her back issues of
Teen Girl,
because she remembered that they'd once run an article on how to write a letter. The article had eight tips for good letter writing including: “Be dignified.” “Be courteous.” “Be friendly.” “Avoid sounding too self-centered.” “Make your points quickly.” She tore out a page from her loose-leaf notebook and began to compose.

How do you do, Sirs,

My name is Delores Walker. Ever since I visited Weeki Wachee nearly three years ago, I have wanted to become
a mermaid at your park. I am a good swimmer. My coach says I am good enough to become a professional, no bragging intended. Please advise me about what I have to do to qualify for the position. I am nearly seventeen, which seems to me a perfect age for a mermaid. I look forward to hearing from you.

It occurred to her that maybe they'd want to see her picture. She rummaged through her box of treasures and came up with one taken two summers earlier at Orchard Beach. She had on her white bathing suit with the strawberry print. At the last minute, she'd put her father's Yankees hat askew on her head. The brim of the hat obscured her face enough so that you couldn't really see her teeth. She lay on a blanket, elbow propped in the sand, chin cupped in her hand. Her father was standing above her and his shadow lay by her side. Delores was just over five feet nine inches. She had breasts that jutted out like Dairy Queen ice-cream cones, and her high waist made her long slender legs look even longer than they were. When her father had seen a flamingo at Cypress Gardens, he'd turned to her mother and said, “Delores looks like one of them things.” The way the camera caught her that day at Orchard Beach made her look taller and leaner than she was. Delores was pleased, and thought she looked as much like a mermaid as any civilian could.

P.S. Here is a picture of me that I hope will be useful.
Before she sealed the envelope, she kissed her picture and crossed her fingers.

Two weeks later, a letter arrived addressed to her and postmarked Weeki Wachee Springs, Florida. Delores sat with the envelope in her lap and ran her fingers back and forth across it, as if by doing so she could divine its contents. It was four thirty in the afternoon. The days were longer now, and it was the time of year when the soft
light and gentle air held promise. She closed her eyes and thought about what her life would be like if they said no. She pictured herself working alongside her mother, sweeping popcorn kernels off of office floors and filching a cardigan here, an umbrella there. “Please let them take me,” she whispered as she ripped open the envelope.