Lydia Millet - Mermaids in Paradise - A Novel

“I’m not hanging out with that guy again,” I said. “I’m not sharing another meal with him. No meals of any kind. And no day trips either, Chip, because I know how you like to invite strangers along. Not him. He made me feel like my toes were prostitutes. Like my toes , Chip, were dolled up in Frederick’s of Hollywood. That’s not right.”

“Your lips say no, but your toes say yes,” said Chip.

I hit him for deadpanning, but it was weak. Still, the words of the toe man haunted me as I tried to fall asleep. I thought to myself: Are my toes sluts? Were my toes asking for it? It kept me up after Chip had fallen asleep, even, because I worry about these questions. In the broadest sense, of course, no woman should have to worry about whether her toes are asking for it — in the most lofty, the most righteous sense. But on the other hand, in the more narrow, specific context of personal choice, was I responsible for debasing my own toes? Were the toes, in essence, fashion victims, like those newborns with lacy headbands strapped around their craniums, fluffy rosettes affixed, to broadcast femaleness? To function as blaring signs that read: I am a female baby, what so many call a “girl”; moreover, it is absolutely vital to my parents that even perfectly indifferent passersby should know this instantly. For that reason, and that reason alone, I have been tagged with this most hideous adornment.

Had I visited that kind of sad, pimpish outrage on ten innocent dactyls?

It wasn’t till the next morning, when I woke up to the sound of steadily plashing waves, and then the sight of Chip bringing me my morning coffee with his shirt off, that I felt completely nausea-free again. I sat propped up on the pillow, drinking my coffee, watching the fan whir overhead, and I reassured myself. The toenails were pink. That was the whole story.

We set off for the Baths not long after, where we spent the morning walking between gray, wet boulders, on top of boulders, and beneath boulders. There were narrow crevices to walk through, sand beneath our feet; there were ropes to hang onto as we climbed; there were wooden ladders. It was a group of boulders, with the ocean washing in and washing out again. That was the situation there.

We sat on top of a boulder, just the two of us, and looked out to sea one time; after that Chip kissed me on the sand, an inch or two of tide lapping at our legs. I had sand on my calves, sand on my knees, and I thought how much I enjoyed the sight and texture of sand on skin, how satisfying it could be to roll the grains beneath my fingertips, two sleek expanses of my skin with sand between them. One day, I ruminated, that skin would be wrinkly. That skin would be baggy as a pachyderm’s, and possibly gray, too. The sand wouldn’t be as satisfying then.

“You think we’ll still like sex when we’re old, Chip?” I asked romantically, while one more time we boulder-sat.

“I’ll take me some Viagra,” said Chip. “I don’t care. I’ll pop it like vitamins, if need be.”

“I’ll be all wrinkled, like an elephant.”

“Me too.”

“Wrinkles get a bad rap. Don’t they,” I said.

“If you think about it, what’s a wrinkle or two,” agreed Chip.

“I think it’s probably an evolution, reproduction-of-the-fittest type thing. I mean we probably want to mate with wrinkle-free people so they’re still fertile, for one thing.”

“Good point,” said Chip, nodding.

I was contented, sitting there with him. And yet I had a sense that nothing was happening — that nothing, possibly, would ever happen to me again.

Curiously it was then, sitting on our boulder, looking out to sea and thinking of being elderlies together, that we caught sight of a small powerboat churning into the harbor from the direction of the reefs. In that boat was a newly familiar figure: the parrotfish expert. She wore a black wetsuit and stood looking off the bow, a kind of rigid tension in her posture; when the boat passed close enough that we could see each other better she jumped up and down, waving wildly. She was yelling, but I wasn’t able to hear the words. Then the boat veered toward the docks.

“That’s weird,” said Chip. “She didn’t seem the excitable type, so much, when we first met her. Did she, Deb?”

We got down off the rock and strolled along the intertidal zone toward the marina. We weren’t in a hurry — we held hands, we held our shoes in our other hands, we looked for crabs and shells, scooping up water and wet sand onto the top flats of our feet, then letting it trail off. It wasn’t long at all, though, before we saw the parrotfish expert again, and this time she was running toward us. She still had her wetsuit on, which made her run in a held-back, goofy-robotic way that looked like a form of slow torture. But she was doing it anyway. That expert was determined. And it was a sight worth seeing.

By the time she got up to us, though, she was huffing and puffing so hard I thought she might be having an attack. The biologist could hardly breathe, much less speak. But she waved us away and bent over, hands braced on her thighs, catching her breath. She shook her head when we asked if there was anything she needed, just shook her head, struggling to breathe. Finally she wrestled the breathing under control and straightened up, her face beet-red. Her cheeks and forehead still bore the deep, bruising marks of a snorkel mask, which made her look deformed.

“In the reef!” she said breathlessly. “You’ve got to come with me! I have to show you! I saw them!”

“Those colorful fish you like so much?” asked Chip, genuinely interested.

She shook her head rapidly, emphatically.

“Mermaids! There are mermaids! Mermaids are swimming in the reef!”

SHE WAS DISTURBED, of course — we hardly knew the woman. Maybe it was a schizoid deal, we figured, or maybe a drug problem, we didn’t have all the info yet, but the situation had to be handled humanely. If there’s one thing Chip is, it’s game. He’s game for almost anything, and so much the better if, later, it might make good material for an anecdote to tell at a party.

So he humored the delusional scientist, and I went along with it cheerfully — because, of all the people we’d had dinner with, she was the only one I kind of liked. That meant that, after Chip, she was my favorite person for a thousand-mile radius.

She said she’d booked a 7 a.m. seat on a snorkel boat, and it turned out she was the only one booked for that slot, so the boat’s captain took her out to the reef by herself, muttering something about swimming in pairs. But he didn’t want to give her money back; it was just snorkeling after all — child’s play. So he took her by herself, without a second paying customer. And that was how she came to see the mermaids. The boat captain hadn’t seen squat.

We were sitting in the boat ourselves by that time, being ferried back out to the reef. She’d offered the captain more money for the second trip; she talked a blue streak while we were motoring. Also she ran around collecting parts of wetsuits for us to wear, a top and bottom for Chip and a one-piece suit in my size. I obliged her by changing in the boat’s tiny bathroom, enjoying the privacy; I figured we might as well get a free snorkel out of her sad mental incapacity.

The night before, when I’d been assuming she was sane — an absentminded type, but with all the usual marbles — I’d viewed her as a normal, if geeky, woman. Now she took on a kind of homeless aspect to me. I studied her face trying to pick out signs of that unhinged quality. She didn’t tweeze her brows: well, that one was inconclusive. A crazed person might tweeze or might not tweeze — might pick the brows off hair by hair, even get rid of them in one fell swoop like those women you see who shave off their brows on purpose, then pencil them on again, making you wonder: grotesquely ironic? Or ironically grotesque?