Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (24 page)

Having decided that I’d made him work hard enough, I got in the car. As we pulled up to the apartment, he lingered. I couldn’t make myself leave. Just go, I told myself.

Back in the late summer before school started, Liz had introduced me to her little sister while James stood there holding the girl’s hand. I got drunk, went home to our parents’ house, and swallowed a handful of pills. I didn’t know what I’d taken. I hoped it was a painkiller from a pulled tooth or a sports injury. More likely it was an outdated antibiotic. Ill-conceived and impulsive as this gesture might seem, the relief washing over me as I drifted off was an indication of my sincere intent. The pills were my recognition, not of a failing, but of an innocent mistake of circumstances. Life in my body was too difficult—not the physical part but the almost certain disappointment involving other people, their disappointment in me, mine in them—and I was ready to concede that.

My head floated on my pillow. This was the right thing to do, I thought, just go. Then I fell asleep.

It never occurred to me that Nina, at ten years old, would have been the one to discover my body in the next bed, nor could I foresee a future where wonder and joy might replace loss. Whatever pills I swallowed caused no more than a cramped stomach in the morning. I didn’t tell anyone what I’d done. I’d left little evidence of wrongdoing. There was only my knowledge of having come really close to leaving. If I were to tell someone about it, I would have to relinquish that option.

Now, drunk and alone with James, I could see that if this argument gave way to sex I’d come undone entirely. Sex was the one thing I hadn’t let him take from me, and sex was the only thing I wanted from him by now. Sex and insecurity were propelling this repetitive loop. So I fell back on my oldest defense: I started an argument. Of course James had the better poker face. (The Pillsbury doughboy had a better poker face than I did.) But we were both middle children from large Catholic families, which meant that we had the predatory instincts of serial heartbreakers.

James advanced his position. “I’m thinking of asking out Colette.”

“Colette?”

He nodded.

Colette. Every day I’d rushed home from classes to watch
General Hospital
with Colette. Smoking cigarettes and watching soap operas with an older woman was my idea of being nurtured. That year Luke raped Laura in a disco scene, which was replayed weekly in flashback. Each flashback unfolded a new insight into the couple’s conundrum. Colette and I would ask, “But wasn’t that rape? Why is Laura dating Luke now? How can they be in love?”

Beginning with my first date, Colette had been the older woman I sought for advice on boys and men.

Now I said to James, “Colette. Why not?”

“Yep,” he said, eyes lit with pride.

Spawn of Satan, I thought. Then I said, “Great idea. Come on. She might be home from the restaurant.” An eerie calm masked my rage as I led him up the winding staircase and into the apartment alcove where Colette slept (apparently nude). When she opened her eyes to see me standing over her, James peering over my shoulder, Colette sprang up and cursed us out in both English and French, wrapping herself in her sheets and chasing us off.

James—having had two women gesticulating madly at him in one night—took to the stairs. He loped down in strides of two or three steps at a time. I leaned over the railing at the top of the staircase, howling with laughter. My voice echoed after him in a frenzied cackle until I heard the door slam, at which point I sank to the floor sobbing.

B
y the following summer, Mom had won Dad over. Not only could she manage the household herself, but she had a whole new wardrobe. Earlier that year, my parents had gone away for a romantic weekend on their anniversary and then taken a trip to Ireland, their first time abroad since the trip to Germany when Mom was pregnant with me. Upon their return, Dad moved back home.

This same summer I visited Claire in Louisiana and surreptitiously scheduled an interview at Newcomb College, the women’s school at Tulane University. After an encouraging interview, I came home and announced my wish to transfer schools. My parents quashed that plan instantly. They offered one alternative: a Catholic college with about 100 female students surrounded by cornfields.

In the fall I returned to Joselin Street, moving into the sorority house this time, while Mom and Dad started their lives over by buying a house in a neighborhood where they didn’t know anyone.

I
n January of my sophomore year, Joselin, a slope of a street, was covered in ice. Gretchen and I were on our way to a party. In a pair of clogs, I skidded. Gretchen caught me. The precariousness of my situation was magnified by the surgery I’d been healing from since Christmas break.

The surgery came after Gretchen, now my roommate, had seen the boil. By then it was a golf ball-sized cyst that swelled to the size of a baseball when I wasn’t jamming it into my leg. “You have to go to a doctor,” she said. “Now!”

I capitulated. An elderly doctor took me as his last patient before retiring from surgery. He studied the wound through his Coke-bottle lenses, incredulous. “Two years?” he asked. Even as he chastised, Dr. Perlman seduced my mother and me. Turning to Mom, he said, “She’s had this cyst for two years, Joy?”

“I know it, Dr. Perlman. I wanna wring her neck.”

He squeezed my mother’s hand tenderly, as she fought a grin and tried to look soberly into his lenses. “Don’t wring it just yet,” he said.

Mom gulped audibly; he turned back to me. “Eileen, Eileen,” he said, lifting my chin so that I faced him. “Promise me you won’t ever do anything like this again.”

Mom and I exchanged glances. “Don’t you just love this man,” our expressions said.

It was his next statement that made the deepest impression: “You might have lost the rest of your leg.”

Now, with my wound barely healed, Gretchen and I raced to keep up with our girlfriends. We were on our way to a party over in the med students’ apartments. We’d already been to a series of parties that day and during one of them, I would soon find out, I was apparently drugged. Back in high school, my mother had warned Liz and me: “Don’t ever let anyone slip you a mickey.” We’d laughed in Mom’s face.

When we pulled into the apartment complex, I cowered in the car as a silver German shepherd, on its hind legs, scraped the glass and growled at me with a vengeance. Gretchen got out and called to me from her side, “What are you waiting for? We’re here.”

“But that dog,” I said, pointing and shrinking. She had to be nuts to go out there with that beast charging us. “Get back in the car!”

“What dog?”

“You can’t see it?”

“Eileen, there’s no dog.”

“No dog?”

“My god,” she said, “did someone slip you a mickey?”

“But he’s right—” The animal salivated as I gazed into his shimmering blue-gray eyes.

“Let’s go,” she ordered. She came around to my side, standing right where the dog had stood. “No dog. See.” She extended an arm. “Come on. I’ve got you. And why you have to wear those damn clogs is beyond me.”

Inside, Gretchen found a clearing along the wall and propped me up. “Don’t move. I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. I was wearing a trench coat with jeans and a cashmere sweater. Leaning against the wall, I rocked in my clogs. Someone handed me a drink. My hair was a tangle of curls, with combs jammed in at odd angles to pull it off my face.

I wasn’t on the wall a minute before I sloshed David from Buffalo three times. “A tie?” I said, and spilled. “Oh, clogs,” I said, then splashed. “And what’s that?” I squinted into his round glasses to find ... what? Brown eyes. Oh, boy. I pressed my index finger to the bridge of those glasses and said in all earnestness, “Are you Woody Allen?”

“A jokester,” he said with a laugh. “Naw, I’m his good-lookin’ brother.”

“You’re from the twenties,” I said. “The eyes of Dr. What’s-his-name?”

“Eckleburg. Dr. T. J. Eckleburg.”

“A medicine man who knows Gatsby?” My jaw dropped. I leaned forward. “Snazzy, remember?” I asked him this as if he and I had once driven through West Egg together and stopped by Myrtle’s husband’s gas station for a cool drink.

“Right, old sport. And how ’bout Gatsby?” he said. His voice softened, and he leaned into the wall so that our faces were inches apart. “Am I Jay Gatsby?”

“Mmm.” I jerked my head back to check him out and banged it on the wall, then steadied myself to reach into my pocket for my cigarettes. After fumbling with the lighter, I doused him and my trench coat again. He took the drink from my hand. “I think you finished it off that time.” He put the cigarette to his own lips to light it, stifled a cough, and handed it back to me. I inhaled and focused on his face again: too dark for Gatsby. But those eyes? “Maybe Nick,” I said. “Yeah, I like Nick. You’re Nick.” I leaned back, proud of pegging him so neatly.

“Which would make you Jordan.”

Oooh. Jordan, I decided, was now my favorite of the Gatsby characters: the sultry Jordan. I leaned forward to stare into his eyes and whispered, “You know her, too?”

Then I blacked out.

Later, David and his friend drove me home while Gretchen followed in her car. They carried me up the frozen staircase into my sorority house. Gretchen told me this the next day, adding that David insisted on waiting downstairs until I was safely in bed. “Watch her,” he’d said, to which Gretchen said to herself, “Now, there’s an idea.”

He called the next day to see if I was all right and to ask me out.

David tended to greet me with a gift, usually a book—Sartre, Joyce, and Faulkner being among his favorite writers. He read up on all of Cincinnati’s best-kept secrets and courted me on Valentine’s Day in an Italian restaurant as small and intimate as a grandmother’s parlor. He collected wine, learned how to cook Vietnamese dishes, made his own yogurt, and wore bow ties. On weekends he wooed me with jazz. He taught me that Cincinnati had a vibrant jazz scene, and introduced me to a network of back alley clubs. The scenes of my stories began to include a philosophical Sartre-like character with Woody Allen’s voice, hanging out in jazz clubs.

It was on one of those evenings of discovery, of seeing my city and myself through David’s eyes, that I decided I was ready to face sex. We’d gone to see Mr. Spoons in a club downtown, and I made this call on my second gin and tonic while Mr. Spoons thrummed on the table next to us before working his way up to a waiter’s elbow. Actually, I’d been toying with the idea earlier that night. I’d worn a black skirt, a white silk blouse, and perfume behind my ears. With my hair now cut in a Cleopatra bob, I tried to convince myself, as I brushed on mascara, that this is how a woman faces up to sex: in bangs and mascara.

On my fourth drink, Mr. Spoons played his utensils to a bass rhythm on my head, moving down my neck and arms. I never took my eyes off of David. Perceptive young man that David was, he rushed me back to his apartment. On the sofa, he cradled me on his lap. I felt dizzy.

He kissed me as he worked the minuscule buttons on my blouse. He’d taken his glasses off, but he had the eye–hand coordination of a surgeon already. I looked up at those gentle brown eyes and saw two Davids looking back at me. I closed my eyes as he went under my skirt to peel off my tights. At this I let go of his neck and pretended to fall asleep.

“Ah, jeez,” he said. “Are you out?”

No answer.

He whistled in my ear.

Nothing.

He froze there, with a warm palm pressed to my belly. Would he pursue this thing even though I was drunk? I turned limp as a rag doll on him—my test. I’d learned the “limp act” from trying to dress Nina as a toddler. (It’s impossible to dress an infant in the midst of the limp act, and Nina was a pro.) He waited. I waited longer.

“Okay,” he said, finally pulling his hand out of my skirt.

Then, just to throw him off, I pretended to be coming to and said, “Hmmm?”

“You awake?” he asked optimistically.

I opened my eyes, saw two baffled Davids staring back at me, and closed them again. “I don’t feel so good.” This was the truth.

“Okay,” he said, flustered. “Okay.” He lifted me up and carried me into the bedroom. “I’m going to put you in the bed, you understand? I won’t do anything. It’s just to sleep.”

I nodded.

He set me on the edge of the bed. I opened my eyes as he knelt in front of me. “I’m just taking the blouse off so you can sleep.”

“Mmm.”

Then, in a sort of package deal, he yanked the skirt, legs, and tights off at once. He held them momentarily as if someone had handed him their baby before jumping off a bridge. What to do? Finally he just tossed them aside. When he tucked me in, I was down to pearls and panties. I closed my eyes again as he whispered in his gravelly Buffalo accent, “Ya dodged a bullet this time.” He kissed my forehead. “You’re a beauty.” I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

In the morning, he showed me things about a woman’s body that I hadn’t known existed. I would never again rely on popular literature for advice on sex. And what was all this nonsense about sex in wooden legs? In this man’s bed I would become a treasure spit from the ruins.

A
fter that, I spent most of my nights with David, coming back to the sorority house only for clothes and mail between classes. We studied for hours in the library. While he rose to first in his class, I began to see that it wasn’t so hard to make the dean’s list. All you had to do was open your books and read them—not just the ones you enjoyed. It didn’t hurt to show up for class. From there it was merely a matter of organizing assignments.

Soon David was walking me through my upcoming appointment at the student health center. I would get started on a contraceptive. He read up on the different forms to help me decide which one to choose. Did other girls have boyfriends who studied the side effects and the efficacy of birth control? I doubted it. This time, I told myself, this time I’m not going to mess it up. David was about the best boyfriend a girl could have, and I was finally mature enough to appreciate my good fortune.

In the spring, David took me to New York City. We stayed with his college roommate in Soho. Because it was my first time in the city, David planned for me to hit all the tourist spots. We visited the Metropolitan Museum, saw
A Chorus Line
, ate dinner in Chinatown followed by cannoli in Little Italy, and shopped on Fifth Avenue. I never wanted to leave. “We’ll come back,” David promised. Then he bought me a sexy dress with a plunging neckline and thin straps, “Because you have to take something of New York home with you.”