The Seas (7 page)

Once I got another job taking care of an older woman. I did it because I had heard that her right foot was flattened like a flipper. I thought that she might be a mermaid too, and I thought it would be a good job because I could ask her questions. I had to help her get into and out of the bath, and on the first day of work she told me, “Nudity is more painful to me than loneliness,” as if to explain what was about to happen, as if to explain her defeat in having to hire me. She was propped up against her sink. I was seated on the toilet tank when she said this. Her dress was loose, with two small clasps at the neck which she herself released. Her naked body was horrible, like bulbed growths on trees. Her flipper foot was twice as wide and long as her other foot. The bones in the flipper foot lifted up out of the surface and the deformed skeleton was visible underneath the skin that clung to it. I stared and stared to get used to the foot and the other lumps of her unusual body. I never did get used to her abnormalities, but began to appreciate that perhaps the roundness of her deformities was filled with the collected wonder of views from the cliff, high above where most people lived.

“Did you ever have a husband?” was my first question for her.

“No. I never married,” she said. “Which is probably no surprise. I am not agreeable.” This answer was what I feared. I have heard all the things people have said about mermaids. Jude won’t marry me and I’ll never be able to kill him and so I’ll never be able to go back to the ocean, and who knows what will happen to me without a husband? My mermaid parts will start creeping out over time, like the woman’s sickening foot.

“I’ve never even had a lover,” she said. “Once I wrote a letter to the university requesting a team of scientists make a study of me. However, they did not. Which I’ve always thought was a terrible waste.”

She let the water out of the drain herself and stretched her arms towards me, above her, waiting to be picked up.

“Are you a mermaid?” I finally asked her, and she lowered her arms, stared straight ahead at the drain lever, and said nothing, as though she hadn’t considered that before and was stumped, or as though that was a sad topic and she had almost forgotten it and wished I hadn’t mentioned it.

My mother works part-time for the public school. There is one deaf child in our town and so the school employs my mother as a part-time interpreter. Karen, that’s the little deaf girl’s name, spends a lot of time with my mother outside of school, too, and some days when I find my mother and Karen signing away in our kitchen, sometimes I feel jealous and I make the one sign I know, my raised middle finger, at Karen behind her back. The public school job does not pay much at all and so my mother sometimes works with me chambermaiding at the tourist motels, or we take on shifts at the sardine factory. They call us when they need us. At the factory, by 4 o’clock our hands are silver and slick from scales and soya oil. If I knit my fingers together my hands become odd fish themselves. They even try to swim away but I catch them.

The factory only hires women, even the foreman is a woman. I work at the end of my line, which is fine because the conveyor belt makes it difficult to hear. There is little possibility for conversation. I talk to the fish, “What’d you do last night?” I ask as they fly past on the machinery. I imagine them swimming in schools, in the deep sea, out for a good time until—swoop—the net closed in. The sardines look up at me with a haughty, empty eye, so I cut their heads off and stuff them into a coated tin. Or else some days, when Jude is on my mind, I can grow inordinately attached to one beautiful sardine. I put it in the front pocket of my apron. Then I grind myself against the conveyor belt, pretending the sardine is Jude. I push it close to me.

The woman who works beside me has been at the factory for 35 years. She talks to herself all day long. She has quite a bit to say.

“Mister,” I once heard her say, starting a conversation that she continued for the entire eight-hour shift. She played both sides of a conversation. The first role was her, the second role was a very mean man. I couldn’t figure him out—he sounded like God or a doctor or a police officer with a sadistic streak. She said, “There’s a lawn furniture set at Zayre’s.”

“And how much is the set?” she, as the man, in a deep voice answered.

“Well I was hoping you could do something about that because its more than I’ve got.”

And then, “Woman!” from the mister’s side of her conversation, “What’d you spend all your money on?”

And then back to her, “Well I never actually got any money to spend.”

Then him, “Why don’t you get a husband first then a patio set.”

“I can’t. I’m fifty-five years old. I’m past fresh.”

“Woman! Trying to take all my money!”

She stuffed her tin. “No better than the slithery snake that got us here,” she said as the mister. And I thought about what was in my apron, the Jude/sardine. I ground it against me and I thought that he, she was right. Those are the choices for women who live here. Dirty. Domesticated. Deaf. Deformed. Slithery. Siren. Psychotic. Silent.

My mother is upstairs looking for something. She is starting to spit words. “Damn. Damn. Where the—” Her search will continue in this vein for a while until she gives up, exhausted. Rarely does she find what she is looking for. The house is just too full to be able to find anything.

My grandfather is working on his dictionary. Often he has to mix and match fonts and sometimes he leaves words out if too many letters are missing. He’s talking to himself but I hear him say, “What’s lost or love without any Ls?” Ost ove I think. He tries to work for a bit without any Ls but then he calls out to me. “I think I have a drawer of Palatino in the attic. Would you, dear?”

“Please no,” I say.

“Come on.”

“It’s scary up there,” I tell him.

“I know,” he says and grunts which means, Will you do it anyway? And then he keeps his chin tucked and rolls his eyeballs up to me, showing the white undersides, looking more like a slow reptile, a turtle whose shell has been crushed by teenage hooligans. He looks like that so I’ll feel sorry for him. It always works.

I take the attic stairs slowly, lifting both feet to each stair before advancing to the next in order to give any scary thing living in our attic fair warning that I’m coming and that it should clear out. There is a row of hanging garment bags and behind them a dark area in the eaves that is blocked by the bags. Anyone or anything could live up here.

Along the shore when I was young my mother, father, and I used to comb through the debris that storms would deposit on the beach. The sand and seaweed coated everything and made each log and shell and forgotten beach towel look the same. The sand hid the valuable things, baseball caps, old photos, canvas bags of money, in with the driftwood. It required a slow and discerning eye to separate the worthwhile from the junk. My father had such an eye. “There’s a work glove,” he said once to me and eyeballed it up ahead. I ran to grab it and clutched it quite close for a minute until I realized that the strange weight inside the glove was not sand that had accumulated there but was rather the part of the glove’s original owner that belonged inside the glove, namely, the hand. I screamed and ran back to my parents. “It’s not a glove. It’s a hand. A HAND!” So my mother and I turned back to run in the opposite direction, away from the hand, screaming. But my father had to see it for himself. That’s the sort of person he is. He walked slowly to where I’d dropped the hand on the beach and he grabbed it as though he were shaking it, saying, “Pleased to meet you.” He felt around on the fingers and decided to carry the hand back to where we were standing, me cowering behind my mother. When he got close enough so that we could see what he was carrying my mother and I turned and ran again, back to the car. That was where we were when he caught up with us. I saw the hand in his hand and I locked all of our car doors, locking him out. He knocked on my mother’s window. She opened the window but only a crack. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“He’s got a wedding ring on,” my father said. “I think we should take the hand to the police.” And then turning to me he said, “He might have kids.”

“Put the hand in the trunk,” my mother said through the window and she reached across the driver’s seat to pop the trunk open. I leaned forward as far as I could away from the trunk. I thought that hand was the hand of death and I didn’t want it to creep through the ventilation system and grab me.

The light in our attic has properties similar to those of the sand after a storm. The gray light coats and obscures things, for example, hands of death or drawers of type, in the gray darkness. The attic is long and narrow, filled with junk from floor to ceiling, so that when I reach the top of the stairs looking for the fonts there is a moment when my eyes have to adjust to the attic’s darkness. That moment paralyzes me because I can’t see so well until my eyes adjust to the light. The moment opens wide like a door, and in that frozen moment I see a man standing in the gray against the back wall of the house. The man looks at me and then cocks his head slowly to the left. He stares like water in a way that lets me know that if I don’t do my job as a mermaid, somebody else will, a bounty hunter from the ocean. He lets me know that the water is coming for Jude or maybe it is coming for me. I know this man. I stop breathing. I try to make a sound for help but with no air there is no sound. Despite being frozen in place, my eyes adjust to the dark and as they do the man dissolves into a lamp with a guitar propped up behind it, an illusion of bad eyesight. I make a mad dash for the drawer of Palatino and the closer I get to the drawer, to the back of the attic where the man had disappeared, I notice something that I wish I hadn’t. I grab the drawer and look once very quickly. I shouldn’t have looked. There are footprints on the attic floor and they are wet. There are wet footprints where I saw the man. I run.

I think I will never make it back to the stairs. I am running and so the letters are spilling out of the tray. A B D E F H H H H H H. Some letters spill under my feet while I run. An H is my two legs, my two arms, and the bridge between. A whole compartment of Cs bumps from the tray and they roll under my feet. At the top of the stairs I trip on the letters. I Z, Y, N. I C on my back at the bottom of the stairwell. I hit my head, slamming it straight into unconsciousness.

When I wake up at the bottom of the stairs my mother and grandfather are there petting my head, saying, “Honey, honey, wake up honey.” I try to move. The drawer of type has spilled below me, cutting letters into my skin. The attic stairs creak and the spilled letters cut me.

“Oh,” I say, “Ouch.” They help me up. My grandfather is old and not too strong, but he gets me into my bed. “You guys, someone was up there, something wet,” I tell them.

“Probably the rain,” my mother says.

“No,” I say. “Go look for yourself.” But they don’t. They are scared. My head hurts so badly that I just want to close my eyes. My grandfather pets my head so I do close my eyes. I fall asleep and even though my mother wakes me up once an hour making sure that I don’t have a concussion, I sleep through until the following morning.

The bruises that form one day later are in the shape of the letters I fell on. By afternoon they grow into one big black and blue, like an entire essay. These bruises are so odd that I think I will use them to write a note for Jude that says m’aidez, mayday.

I drive over to Jude’s house that afternoon once the boat he is working on has come in. I want to show him my letter bruises. I want Jude to touch the bruises as if they were Braille letters, as if he has to use his fingertips to read the words on my hips and back.

It doesn’t work out that way exactly. He lets me in but I become too shy to mention the bruises when I see him.

The curtains of his living room are drawn closed, a sliver of sunlight sneaks in and illuminates all the particles floating in the air of Jude’s house. I sit down in the light and so does Jude. He tells me a few stories about things like a type of fish caught in schools and used in the fabrication of ladies’ makeup. He tells me about an idea he has for an opera where all the gods of all the religions of the world battle it out in song. He tells me about a fisherman he knows who loves the ocean so much that he had a tidal wave tattooed on his back. But Jude almost never tells me about the war, even if I ask, so I fear it won’t ever go away, it won’t ever get washed out to sea. Jude pours himself a glass of brown whiskey. Finally my shyness dissolves. “Look,” I say and lift just the back of my T-shirt.

“Fuck,” he says. “What the hell happened?”

“I fell,” I say.

And then he does touch me just as I had imagined, very lightly with his fingertips. He reads the weird words on my back. He stares and reads and finishes another drink. And when he is done reading he says, “That’s scary.” The words look dark and bruised.

“It’s even scarier than you think,” I say. “There was a man in the attic. That’s why I fell.”

“A man?” he asks. “What man?”

I do not answer. Jude is touching my back. Jude does not know that I am a mermaid.

He thinks the words are a warning, that something frightening or dangerous is lurking nearby. To him it is probably the U.S. Government wanting him to reenlist, to me, I don’t tell him, it is my father.

“Let’s get out of here,” he says and stands looking down at me. “This town,” he says, “Let’s go.” He walks away to find the keys to his truck. “Really,” he yells from the kitchen. The truck’s engine turns over and I run outside. Finally, I think. I don’t even bother to close the door to his house.

I am happy to leave town, to take a drive. I feel weightless and free, even if we don’t go too far. But ten miles outside of town on the road an eighteen-wheeler carrying liquid oxygen has jackknifed, then toppled, then cracked open on the road in front of us. As the liquid hits the warmer air it evaporates in a cloud of thick steam. The idea of liquid oxygen makes me so thirsty, as though water or even the bottle of whiskey Jude brought along for the drive will never do after having sampled liquid air. The spill is evaporating and a police officer waves Jude’s truck into the steam of it. There is a dip in the temperature. I roll down the window because the police officer is a boy I know from grade school. I ask him, “Is love like oxygen?” It is a song I thought he would have remembered. I thought he would have remembered me too, but he doesn’t seem to understand and asks me, “Are you with the Union?” he speaks above my head, addressing the question to Jude.