The Mermaids Singing (4 page)

“You're too pretty to be sitting all alone, Grace,” he said, and he smiled at me. It was that easy.

I spent the rest of the day with him, sparkling with anticipation. I really barely heard anything he said, I was so caught up in trying to figure out when he would kiss me. I was constantly wetting my lips, checking my breath, sucking in my stomach in case he suddenly put his hands around my waist. It was exhausting, this waiting, and I had moments of doubt, where I would suddenly feel I had been mooning over someone who had no interest in me. Then I would be mean to him, I'd be tough and unreachable, and he would try even harder.

After sunset, we walked to a bonfire, which was on a secluded stretch of beach, beneath high stone cliffs. About twenty kids were there, with radios and blankets, and they all seemed to know each
other. There were a few girls my age who looked disappointed or vicious when they saw Mark's arm around my shoulders, and I imagined they'd come out that night with satin bras on under their flannel shirts, hoping maybe he would notice them.

We sat cross-legged on a rough blanket, drinking Budweisers and lining up the empty cans so they sparkled in the firelight. The beer was bitter in the back of my throat. Mark was getting bolder; he'd given me his jean jacket to wear—it was slimy from too much sea air—and he was leaning into me, speaking with his mouth right up against my ear. The flames of the bonfire shot up toward the night, making a slapping noise like laundry in rough wind. The waves crashed, invisible behind us, and when it was quiet I could hear the foam sizzle down the sand like embers.

When we were drunk we wandered up to the cliffs, out of the light of the fire. It was cold there and I tried not to shiver when Mark passed me the beer can. We sat without saying anything for a while and I felt myself moving beyond impatience—I was desperate. I wanted to shake him and cry out, “Are you going to kiss me or what?” In the moonlight I could see that he no longer looked sexy or confident. He looked cold and his forehead was strained in concentration. I looked away as he slugged the last of the beer, thinking that in a second I'd get up and walk back to the fire. I looked back and he lunged at me. Our lips met, though his didn't feel like lips so much as two fat slugs pressed together. He tried turning his head back and forth, and I did it too, but we were going in totally different directions. I tried to think back to what I'd imagined all day, but eventually it was just me with my shirt shoved up to my neck, my back sticking to the cold sand, my cheeks and chin covered in slobber, and Mark on top of me, clamped around my leg, rubbing up and down so fast I could hear a whizzing noise from the zipper of his jeans.

“Oh,” he moaned into my cheek, “unhh.” The cute boy had transformed into a strange ugly thing that was smothering me. I thrust against him, trying to get him off, but he only moaned louder.
He seemed to like it, so I did it some more, trying to quicken things so it would be over.

“Grace,” he whispered, and for an instant I was alone in my bedroom listening to the sounds of Stephen making love to my mother.

“Ah! Ah!” Mark blurted out then, squeezing his eyes shut, a look of painful disappointment contorting his face. I'd learned, from being with other boys, that this expression was actually ecstasy.

“Shhh!” I hissed, suddenly mortified that we could be heard at the bonfire. He stopped moving, paralyzed on top of me. I heard a giggle in the distance. I pushed at Mark's shoulder and he rolled away.

“Sorry,” he muttered when his breathing was normal.

I wouldn't let him walk me home. I ran most of the way, disgusted and terrified, the sand squealing and singing beneath my rubber soles. When I got to the cottage, a faint blue light was coming up over the water. No one was waiting up for me. I entered the house silently, went into my green-and-yellow room, and peeled off smoky clothes that dropped to the floor with a whish of trapped sand and pebbles. I crawled under the nubby blankets that smelled like mothballs, and the sun rose higher and glowed orange like fire through the white curtain. No one knocked on my door or crawled into bed with me to nap for the rest of the morning.

By July, I hardly saw my mother anymore, though her hair was in the bathroom wastebasket in clumps, like rusty birds' nests. Sometimes I snuck toward her closed bedroom door and listened for coughing or movement. Once, Stephen caught me and said, “You can go in, she's awake.” But I backed off. I wasn't going to catch her off guard, without the straw hat that she wore when Stephen walked her down to the water. I imagined the bald spots on her head were infected, puckered like her missing breast.

“If she wanted me in there, she'd have left the door open,” I said. Which was stupid, because Stephen told her. After that the door was always ajar and I had to tiptoe by to keep it from swinging open.

She wandered the cottage at night. I could hear her pacing, and sometimes she stomped, rattled things, which is what she used to do
when she was mad and wanted me to come out of my room and face something I'd done—like being a wiseass or not loading the dishwasher. That pissy act hadn't worked on me since I was ten. It always worked on her boyfriends, though, and at the cottage, Stephen would eventually come out and whisper, “What's the matter, babe?” and she would follow him back to bed.

Once a week, Stephen drove her into town for chemotherapy. He tried to give me updates: how much she'd thrown up afterwards, that the doctors were debating more surgery.

“Don't you want to know how your mother is doing?” he asked me when I showed no reaction.

“My mother tells me everything I need to know,” I said, although this was no longer true.

“What are you waiting for?” he said. I thought it was a funny thing to say. I wasn't waiting for anything.

To make him feel better I let him give me piano lessons again in the mornings. We sat with our hips and elbows brushing together. After practices, we went swimming, and I let him lift me above the incoming waves and drop me down, his hands under my arms and almost around my breasts. I imagined that he was trying to seduce me. I pictured him showing me things like he showed me piano.
Like this, Gráinne
, he would say, and his lips would be perfect on mine.

I didn't go back to the bonfires. I was afraid someone would remember me. I spent my nights at a little diner downtown where mostly old people hung out. I chain-smoked and drank coffee until my hands shook, copying down poems in my notebook. I hadn't brought any books with me, so I tried to remember the poems on my wall at home.

My mother started leaving me notes on the refrigerator; I would find them early in the morning before I went out on the beach.

She typed these notes on the old Corona that sat on a desk in the corner of the living room. They were creepy, those tiny letters on a large white page, like an anonymous threatening note. She had never mentioned my father so casually, and without bitterness. It frightened me, though I wasn't sure why. I imagined her stealing out of bed in the night, peering at my toes and composing notes while I slept.

One morning I turned the paper over and scribbled a line from Anne Sexton:

My mother's next note was longer, chatty, like a postcard about her trip to the beach. I began to leave her quotes every morning, typing them up on fresh white paper that she left for me.

I imagined that my mother was taping these pages neatly on the wallpaper next to her bed. If she knew the poem, she left me an answer:
I do not think that they will sing to me
.

At night we glided by one another like blind ghosts on our ways to and from the bathroom. In the white porcelain sink, I occasionally found blood clots clinging on the edge of the drain, like miniature marooned jellyfish. I ran the water until they lost their grip and swished away.

 

Halfway through the summer, the doctors stopped my mother's chemotherapy—and I couldn't eat anymore. Stephen was cooking like some mad gourmet, meals which he and I sat down to alone because my mother slept through them. Everything he put in front of me looked rotten, curdled, or regurgitated. I started seeing microscopic insects shifting all over my vegetables, maggots eating their way through my steak. The bites I managed to take refused to go down, I was always gagging. Stephen would jump up and run behind my chair like he was going to perform the Heimlich maneuver. I had to spit into my napkin when he wasn't looking, finishing the meal with a handful of crud seeping through the paper. Eventually, I stopped showing up for dinner. He didn't ask why, just left me a plate of food, sectioned perfectly into food groups, a film of plastic wrap smeared across the top. When I came in I would scrape the contents into the garbage can outside, covering the evidence with crumpled-up paper towels.

I began shrinking. My breasts were lost in my C-cup bra, my stomach became concave. I looked at myself naked in the mirror every morning and it looked good, my fleshlessness, my ribs strong and sharply pressed against my skin. The yawning emptiness in my middle warmed me, energized me, made me want to swim, which
I did, for hours, in the waters below the sandbar. I was growing smaller and smaller, disappearing. Stephen noticed me less, stopped leaving me plates of food, forgot to say good morning when I passed by him as he practiced at the piano. I was invisible.

One morning I walked out the sliding door and almost tripped over Stephen, who was sitting hunched up on the steps. He was rocking himself, his arms wrapped around his knees, and he didn't move when I let the screen door slam behind me. I walked halfway down the steps. He was crying, or close to it; his face was screwed-up and twitchy, though there were no tears. I tried to walk past him but he stopped me, slapping his hand down on my sandal.

“I don't want to talk about anything,” I said, “but I'll sit here with you if you want.” Stephen nodded and half smiled up at me, and I sat down and scooted over so our shoulders almost touched. He didn't say anything at all for so long, I wished I hadn't asked for quiet. I cleared my throat and leaned sideways, peeling the leg of my cutoffs from the back of my thigh. This made him look over at me, at my legs, and he moved his hand and played on my kneecap with his fingers like I was a piano. It made me glad I had shaved my legs earlier. The old longing returned, instantly.

“Thanks for sticking around,” I said after a minute. Stephen snorted and pulled his hand away. He looked out at the shoreline; the waves were huge that morning, loud and crashing, each one trying to be bigger than the last.

“How could I go?” he said, threading his hair back behind his ears.

“You could go,” I said. “I mean, you could be in lots of places right now.” I wanted to tell him about the list I'd once made in my notebook: options of who I would live with if my mother didn't get better. There was my mother's friend Lucy, who lived in California; she had no kids and had always been jealous that my mother had me. I could track down my father with a private detective. My first choice was to stay with Stephen. I thought that when I was
eighteen he might want to marry me, but I wasn't going to tell him that part.

He turned to look at me and when he did the sun caught the auburn strands in his hair. I was thinking how much more beautiful he was than any boy I'd ever kissed.

“I liked it better when we weren't saying anything,” he said, and he reached up and touched me lightly, with his index finger, right below my eye. “Look how pretty you are,” he whispered. “Just like—” Then he stopped and frowned. “Just right.” His face was so close and he was looking at my mouth, then my eyes, then my mouth again, and I thought he wanted to kiss me, was probably just a second from kissing me, and I felt like crying just at the closeness of his face.

Then the screen door squeaked. We turned and my mother was there, in her purple kimono and that floppy straw hat. Stephen stood up and brushed off his butt.

“Hey, babe,” he said. “Want to walk down?” She wouldn't look at him. She was looking at me. If I could have, I'd have bolted right down to the water and into it.

“Hey, kiddo,” she said in this phlegmy voice, and then she coughed. Her face was yellow and bruised under the eyes, her forehead went up way too high before it hit the hat, and I could tell she was now completely bald. Her collarbone, like mine, was deeply outlined, though hers looked like there wasn't much keeping it from popping out and falling down the front of her robe. The wind blew up from the water and the purple fabric lifted briefly above her ankles. I saw a half inch of black stubble on her legs. I thought of how we used to shave our legs together, sitting on the edge of the tub with our toes on the wall grip, writing our names in the creamy soap on our calves.

I stood up and bounded down the stairs. “I have to go to the G.S.,” I said.

“Gráinne,” my mother said weakly, “wait.”

“We're out of milk,” I said, backing away. I never should have sat down.

“Maybe tonight we can all have dinner together,” she said. The sun glared off the skeletal lines of her face.

“I have a date,” I said. I don't think I'd ever said that to her, not in all the time she'd been saying it to me. I hurried off down the beach. I could have sworn that I heard my mother's musical laughter behind me, though it might have been the wind and the sea.

 

One night in August it was unusually cold, like autumn was beginning early. When I came home my mother and Stephen weren't there. The car was gone, the house was silent, the porch lights had been left on for me. I took my time getting into the kitchen to check for a note. The black rotary phone by the piano rang like a fire alarm throughout the cottage. I had never heard it ring before and decided to ignore it. I sat on the navigation couch, took my sandals off and cleaned the sand from between my toes, letting it fall into the seams of the round braided rug. The phone kept ringing, so I got up and went into the dark kitchen, opened the fridge, and took out the lemonade. I was so thirsty I couldn't stand waiting for a glass, so I guzzled from the pitcher, and the sticky liquid spilled out over my jaw and into the neckline of my shirt. It made me sick and dizzy, the foreign thickness coating my empty stomach.

I closed the refrigerator door and pulled the ceiling light string. Tacked to the usual spot on the freezer was an ordinary piece of lined notepaper, with the logo of the local Mariners newspaper, a dolphin, printed in blue across the top. The handwriting was miniature and messy—it was not my mother's.

There was a phone number. I took the note off and turned it over. That was all.

The phone rang again, or maybe it had never stopped, and I went into my bedroom and closed the door. I would read some poetry from my notebooks and wait. The phone rang sixteen, twenty-two times. It rattled so loud in its stand that I could hear a faint vibrating hum from the piano. I lay down on my bed and felt paper crinkling beneath me. I turned on the light and pulled the page out from under my butt. It was clean white typing paper, four lines in faded ink down the middle.

For a second I thought it had to be some sort of joke. It wasn't a poem but a silly little song she used to sing whenever she'd broken up with a boyfriend. She'd always sing it loudly, gesticulating, trying to make me laugh. It usually worked. I had no idea why she'd left it for me now. Did she think this was funny? Was she pissed at me? I wasn't the one going anywhere, for Christ's sake. I squeezed and twisted the paper until no words were showing and dropped it on my bed. I left my room and walked toward the bathroom, past the phone that was still ringing—but softer, like it was losing its voice.

In the bathroom, I opened the medicine cabinet and took out my mother's bandage scissors. I used them to cut my hair, as close to my head as I could get it. Masses of it, like little black animals, skittered over the countertop. In some places, I ended up with uneven tufts, like the brittle hair that used to poke from my mother's hat. When I was finished I washed my face, and then wrapped my shrunken chest in some gauze which I found under the sink.

I went into my mother's room and looked at myself in her full-length mirror. I put my face right up to the glass. “Gráinne,” I said, and I repeated it over and over until I did not know that voice, until
even the eyes were unrecognizable. I went over to the closet and took out Stephen's flannel shirt, my mother's jeans, and her running sneakers, the soles of which were caked with sand. When Stephen had first moved in, I'd seen my mother sipping tea early in the morning, pulling the collar of his shirt over her nose and inhaling deeply. I did that now. It smelled of sea air, smoke, and sage. It smelled like my mother.