The Girl with the Mermaid Hair (3 page)

Isabella, she noticed, remained fixated on her wrist. If she’d been wearing a watch, you’d think she
was having trouble reading the dial. She sure is spacey, thought Sukie. If her wrist confuses her, she might take years figuring out her options.

Issy slid her wrist free of Sukie’s dad as if she were slipping off a bracelet, and stood up to return to her duties.

“If you get any more bugs, let me know.” He gave Issy his card. “I’ve got a good guy I can send out.”

Isabella’s exit and her dad’s carrying his drink to the bar to chat, which Sukie knew was a way to check the score of the Giants game and distribute a few more of his business cards, created a void that Bobo rushed to fill. She started to beat up on herself again about her lame response. She checked her cell. No message.

I am so unoriginal.
Sukie recorded the dreaded feeling in her journal that night while Señor snored next to her, taking up most of the bed. “Do you agree, Señor?”

Señor twitched, indicating that he was dreaming.

Unoriginal. She hoped it wasn’t true but despaired that it was.

She collected stuffed penguins. Was that unoriginal too? Was lining them up in a row on the windowsill a conventional way to display them? They all had names.
She’d started with A, Anton, and worked her way down the alphabet to M, Marshmallow, a very small bird with a yellow bow. Sometimes she thought of them as friends, sometimes as audience. Tonight they sat in judgment. Over their furry black heads the moon was bright white, so low in the sky that it might roll off a rooftop, and perfectly round. A storybook moon, she thought. A wishing moon. She wondered if that thought was especially original; probably not. Could she fake being original, or was that something you couldn’t fool anyone about?
I wish I knew what everyone thought of me, really,
she wrote.
No, I take that back.

Sukie scooted down to the foot of the bed to get off without disturbing Señor.

In her grandmother’s mirror she assessed herself, not trying to appear up or down, glittery or punk, icy or blazing. This was a serious and strict appraisal. Impartial, as if that were possible. Sukie, somber, stood arms akimbo, feet apart and front facing. (Not that clever stance her mom had taught her, where the feet are together with one foot slightly in front. “A model’s pose.” Her mother had demonstrated. “Try to remember to use it when you’re being photographed because you’ll look”—her mother lowered her voice
conspiratorially—“so much thinner.”)

Sukie’s mom hadn’t called. Maybe the spa was one of those ashrams where you meditated for hours and weren’t allowed to do anything normal like use a phone. Sukie had forgotten to ask.

She bore in on her reflection. “What does everyone think of me really?” Her lip curled, snarling at her.

Is that what they think?

She assumed her mirror face, the ultimate in blandness, but in the reflection her upper lip continued to twitch. She tapped it with her finger, stop misbehaving, but it snaked right back up again.

What does Bobo think of me?

My hair might have blinded him, she decided. To what? To whatever that lip of hers was snarling at. Sukie did feel that her hair was spectacular, and right now she calmed herself by pushing some of it from one side of her head to the other.

“Hi there.” Sukie evaluated a variety of waves and smiles, imagining that she was greeting Bobo. “Hi
there
.” She put the emphasis on the second word, how unexpected was that? She tried a brief signaling wave, where her hand popped up for a second, then tried a broader, windshield-wiper move. She left the bathroom
and walked back in, swishing her hips, swiveled to the mirror, and flipped her hand up, “Hey.” Perched on the edge of the tub, legs crossed, she practiced interested looks—sultry and penetrating, concerned and warm, skeptical. Oddly, she favored skeptical, which involved a slight smirk and some eye narrowing.

She tried the whole thing all over again wearing boots. Just black leather knee-high boots and underwear.

Should she send another message?

Sukie recalled a movie she’d seen where a guy left about fifty messages for a girl—trying to correct a previous message, and then correct that previous message, and the next and the next and so on and so forth—until he was worse than an idiot, he was a lunatic. Sukie didn’t want to be an idiot or a lunatic. Well, she might already be an idiot and a lunatic, but she didn’t want Bobo to know it.

Señor stretched, stiffening his legs. With one jump, he stood up on all fours and blinked.

“You’re right. You are so right. A bath. I need to take a hot bath. Thanks, Señor.” Only a hot bath could calm the jumps, her special word for the way her body felt when she was agitated.

While the tub filled, she strode around the bathroom in her boots and underwear. “Where are the documents, Jim?” she said for no reason whatsoever and saluted her reflection. She scrunched up her face and said to the mirror, “Oh, you know,” in Issy’s scratchy voice. But unlike Issy’s darling scrunch, Sukie’s face simply wrinkled. After lighting two candles, vanilla scented, and shutting off the bathroom lights, she stripped and lowered herself slowly into the hot bath; then, lying flat on her back, she submerged just enough for her hair to float around her.

Her cell rang.

Sukie shot up, splashing water out of the tub.

Silence. Was there no call? Had she imagined it?

She waited a moment in case there had been a call and it had failed. Then the person would hit redial.

Nothing.

Sukie reclined, again submerging only deep enough for her hair to float around her. This pastime was her favorite, an invention, maybe even an act of originality. She’d given it a name: the mermaid float.

“T
AKE a book. A book. B-O-O-K.” Mr. Vickers shoved them into his students’ arms as they walked into class. “These books are not made with recycled paper,” he told Ethan, who was handing out flyers about pollution in the Hudson Glen reservoir. “Are people who recycle more sensitive than those who don’t? Are they less likely to beat their children? Here, Sukie, Frannie, take copies of this magnificent novel.” He turned and wrote on the board in his weird slanting handwriting, the letters seemingly flattened by a stiff wind:
Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert. “I’ll tell you whom this book is for. Lovesick girls and boys who watch porn on the web. And I’ll tell you why. Because Madame Bovary lived for her fantasies. She lived so
much for her fantasies that reality could never measure up. Whatever happened was a disappointment.”

Sukie felt an instant kinship with Madame Bovary.

While not stuck in a convent as Madame Bovary was as a teenager, but trapped nevertheless in a brand-new development home with deep-pile carpeting blanketing room after room like sand in the Sahara, Sukie wondered about her own fantasies. Could Bobo the person ever measure up to the Bobo of her dreams? Perhaps it was just as well that he hadn’t texted her again.

I guess he’s over. I hate this weight on my chest,
she wrote that night in her journal. She put a little arrow and inserted
sad
between
this
and
weight,
then crossed out
chest
and put
breast. I hate this sad weight on my breast.
She blacked out the entire sentence with a solid crisscross of horizontal and vertical lines so that no one could ever see through the crossout. Her inability to express herself poetically piled despair upon despair.

He is gone. Believe it.

“If only I could believe it,” she told Señor, “he would turn up again.”

Why was that true?

Sukie knew with a sudden and rare clarity that it was. She was lying on her bed with her journal and a pile of different-colored Sharpies. (She liked to switch depending on what she was expressing—everything about Bobo was written in deep purple.) She had bitten into a crisp juicy apple and wondered if the bite and the thought were connected—one never knew what went together, and seemingly random acts could be cosmically related. Or perhaps the gnash of her teeth had backfired into her brain producing a surge of perceptivity, because Sukie now awed herself with a deduction: Nothing happens if you want it to.

He is gone. Believe it.

If you can believe it, he will turn up again.

Nothing happens if you want it to.

She wrote the lines in red. It was practically a poem. How cheering was that?

She ripped the page from her journal, went into the bathroom, taped the near-poem to the wall next to her beautiful mirror, and quickly memorized it.

“Hi, friend,” she said to her reflection, playing Bobo, puffing herself up with a sharp intake of breath, letting her head loll forward and her shoulders hunch ever so slightly, achieving his arrogance and slouch all
at once. “Hi, there,” she growled, but then, with a saucy toss of her head, she switched over to being Sukie, not giving the time of day to the SOB (an expression her dad was fond of using for people he didn’t like). She strutted, catching quick shots of herself at every angle as she moved in and out of reflection. “I’m in a restaurant—emerald-green walls, matching velvet upholstery, lit with a thousand candles so I’m bathed in the world’s softest flickering amber, perhaps my hair appears so coppery and shimmering that the light dances off it.” Was that possible? She wasn’t sure, but she was tripping on the notion. Sukie’s senses were so aroused, the fantasy so real, that in the mirror she saw herself through gossamer ribbons of smoke drifting upward. She felt the hushed curiosity of all present as she haughtily snaked between tables past a booth where Bobo, huddled with his buddies, drank Diet Coke and munched fries, unlike all the other diners, who sipped red wine from chic glasses, ones Sukie had seen at Restaurant Danielle in New York City on the occasion of her parents’ anniversary. Those delicate crystal glasses, which people cradled, holding them gently underneath as if supporting a fragile blossom, were the essence of elegance. Bobo didn’t have a clue,
sitting there swigging soda out of an aluminum can. With a superior tilt of her chin, Sukie ignored the star quarterback, believing she was the first young woman in history to do so. To emphasize her disdain and to glory in it, she threw a backward glance over her shoulder into the mirror and saw her butt as wide as the back of an ox. It expanded further, stretching from one side of the mirror to the other. It was practically a planet. Sukie screamed.

Her father took the stairs two at a time. Mikey scrambled up behind him. He charged into her bedroom, halted—confused—then spied her in the bathroom. “What happened, baby? What’s wrong?”

Sukie stood there woodenly.

“Sukie, talk to me.” Her dad snapped his fingers, and she blinked, offering no explanation except to nudge him aside. He was blocking her view.

In the reflection, her backside now appeared neat, round, and tightly packaged in jeans, waist size 27. In other words, its normal self. Nothing like the twenty-pound ham hocks she’d witnessed a minute before. Nothing like Mars, or even a moon of Mars. Her dad tracked her gaze into the mirror, where he saw nothing unusual, then surveyed the room for clues to
her behavior: the stubby vanilla-scented candles; her crowd of moisturizers, balms, and bath oils arranged around the edge of the tub by height as if someone were taking their class picture; the fluffy lavender bath towels folded and hung, with hand towels, also folded, centered over them. Sukie took pride in the presentation of her towels.

“Is this mirror, like, distorted?” asked Sukie.

“What are you talking about?”

“Is it a trick mirror, like in a fun house?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s your grandmother’s mirror. It’s an antique.”

Sukie continued to view with suspicion the slim reflection of her backside.

“Boy, it’s smelly here.” Mikey held his nose.

Her father blew out the candles. “Why did you scream, Sukie? You scared the hell out of me. I want an explanation.”

My butt grew. It spread like batter on a griddle. Before my eyes. She thought that but didn’t say it. Instead she waited for the mirror to play its tricks again.

Señor, lying on the floor with his legs splayed out, his tummy resting on the cool tiles, took no notice. Her dad contemplated the dog’s lack of interest. “If Señor’s
not concerned, I guess I’m not either.” He started out and stopped. “Don’t ever scare me like that again.”

“I won’t, Daddy.” Sukie used her squeakiest voice. She stuck her tongue out at him too, knowing he would find that simply adorable.

S
HE aimed at Vince’s chest, smacking the ball as hard as she could. He hopped sideways and popped it short, just over the net. Sukie sprinted. Grasping her racket in both hands, she slammed a backhand winner past him down the line.

“Time to stop, and that’s a great shot to stop on,” he called.

Sukie clamped her racket between her legs to have both hands free to refasten her hair in a clip. Her shirt stuck to her chest. She pulled it out and flapped it, wafting in cool air from the October day, then she swung the racket around and around, whipping it through the air. Sweat glistened on her forehead and dripped down her neck. She reveled in being utterly
spent. Wearing herself out playing tennis brought her a sense of calm that nothing else did.

“Am I a killer?” she asked Vince as they picked up the balls. Sukie had a special way of collecting them. She lightly bopped a ball twice with her racket, it bounced up, and she caught it. To make a ball pop up off the ground took technique, and that as much as anything made her feel like a master of tennis. “Am I?”

“Potentially,” said Vince. “But you’ve got some work to do deep down.”

Boring. She didn’t dare say that out loud, but deep down that is exactly what she thought. She walked over to fetch a ball that had landed way in the corner. When she turned around, Vince was toe-to-toe.

He poked a finger into her forehead. “There’s marshmallow in there. But I like that you fired that ball straight at me. That’s a good sign.”

“Dad,” she said. “His idea.”

She could see him playing three courts over. He was easy to spot because he was tall and always wore an elasticized white terry band around his head. Sukie had tried to wear one once but it gave her a headache. Because he was in the middle of a point, she didn’t wave. Sometimes she lifted her racket, signaling him, “Hey,
I’m here,” a holdover from when she was little and her dad regularly took her to the amusement park. Every time she came around on the carousel, she waved and he waved back, and the carousel kept turning, carrying her again into the unknown and again back to Daddy.

Sukie loved the tennis club. There were precision-cut square hedges between courts and freshly mowed grass all around. When Sukie arrived for her private lesson at ten on Sunday morning, she always saw the mow marks. Sukie loved any way that anything could be made to look more orderly, including nature. She didn’t like the ocean, a poetic deficiency she would rather die than admit. A walk on the beach gave her a severe case of the jumps. Those tumbling waves rushing toward her, the endless water, God knows what underneath.

If only the ocean could be mowed.

While she zipped her racket into a canvas bag and pulled on a sweatshirt, Vince gave her a pep talk. Sukie suppressed the inclination she had at every lesson to recommend sunblock, SPF 60. It was late for that anyway. From playing in the sun for years—Sukie guessed he was ancient, practically sixty—Vince’s face was a leathery brown and creased in every direction. Even fine lines around his eyes and across his entire
forehead crisscrossed, fascinating her. How did that happen?

“Who are you playing next week?” Vince scratched his potbelly.

“Copley Hills. They’re tough.”

“Picture yourself winning. That’s the ticket. Visualize. Are you paying attention, missy? Look me in the eye.”

Sukie focused.

“Do you see your opponent crumbling as your shots whiz by? Are you walking around with your arms aloft holding a trophy? Is the crowd cheering? Tell me.”

“I’m holding a trophy.” What an embarrassing thing to say.

“Eh, what?” Vince cocked an ear forward.

“I’m holding a trophy,” she declared more boldly, still feeling idiotic.

He opened a cooler, handed her a water, and unscrewed one for himself. He took loud gulps. Sukie quenched her own sizable thirst silently, taking little sips, lots of them. She didn’t like it when her body made noise.

Vince snapped the cap between his fingers. It flew through the air into the garbage can. “It won’t
happen unless you believe it.”

Sukie choked. Some water came out of her nose. “What?”

“It won’t happen unless you believe it. Nothing ever does.”

“Is that true?”

“Ace true. Repeat that.”

“Repeat what?” She pretended not to know because she didn’t want to say it.

“Nothing happens unless you believe it.”

“Nothing happens unless you believe it,” she said.

“Like you mean it.”

“Nothing happens unless you believe it.” She verbally committed but quaked inside. What a nightmare. Wasn’t that in conflict with “Nothing happens if you want it to,” the truth Sukie had unearthed, the one that provided psychic comfort or potentially could if only she had mastered the not wanting part? Could love and tennis be polar opposites? Did you have to want it to win a game, but not want it to win love? Her brain clouded up. She was getting mixed up about which was which. Nothing happens if you want it to. Nothing happens unless you believe it. Suddenly they sounded the same but they weren’t. How could she
keep them straight? Should she do one and not the other? Which one?

Getting confused, Sukie instinctively reached for her phone, her security blanket. She snapped a picture of Vince, then of herself. She’d found that if she took a photo of the person she was with, the person never found it odd that she’d snapped a selfie as well. “Are you keeping a photographic record of our classes?” asked Vince.

“I may.”

“Shoot, I left my hair at home.”

Vince cracked that joke a lot. It must be hard to be bald, thought Sukie.

As soon as he greeted his next client, she deleted the photo of Vince and checked her selfie. She zoomed in on her mouth. Beads of sweat are sexy, she decided, admiring herself. Sweat was sexy if it didn’t smell and was sprinkled as opposed to saturated (i.e. damp circles under the arms). Sukie never smelled because she was virtually laminated. Every morning and after every shower, she started in the middle of her arm, rolled the deodorant up to her armpit and then down her side halfway to her waist. In the sweat sense she was smell proof, but she was pleased to see delicate pearls
of perspiration and a flattering pink in her cheeks.

Shouldering her heavy bag, she headed over to her dad. His match was over. Sukie was sure he’d won, he usually did, and he was chatting at the net with Frank, the man he always played with. Frank, divorced, was dating the club bartender, Marie, who always gave Sukie and Mikey free Cokes and as many pretzel sticks as they wanted. She frequently leaned across the bar to kiss Frank, and everyone turned to look. It drove Frank crazy. “Cut it out,” he always said. “You’ll get me thrown out.”

“I flashed him once,” she told Sukie and Mikey.

“What’s that?” said Mikey.

“My boob. I flashed my naked boob at him. It was Sunday morning and all these uptight people were drinking Bloody Marys, and none of them noticed.”

Mikey had fallen in love right then and there.

Whenever they came to the club, he snuck into the bar to see Marie, which wasn’t allowed unless you were with a parent. Sukie always found him perched on a bar stool, waiting to see that boob, praying that she would flash it once more. No one had any idea of the fantastic amount of time Mikey spent thinking about Marie’s boobs, or in what improbable context they figured.
The other night he’d built his mashed potatoes in the shape of a boob, Marie’s, before he ate them.

Sukie suspected Mikey was hanging with Marie right now.

Her phone vibrated. She stopped. She had a text. Had she had it a minute ago and not even noticed? She tapped. It was from her mom.
HOME BY THREE. DON’T BE SHOCKED. XOX MOM
. Shocked? Why would she be shocked? Had her mom dropped a ton of weight at the spa? Did Dad know she was coming home today? “Hey, Dad!” Sukie clapped her hand over her mouth. What was she thinking? No one ever shouted near the courts. It could startle a player into missing a shot. She hurried instead while the phone vibrated again. She glanced down. Bobo.

Sukie slowed as a sense of gratitude suffused her, gratitude to whom she didn’t know, but it was the most peaceful feeling. Probably the thanks were to herself for believing or not believing, or wanting or not wanting, or getting into whatever mind-set necessary to make this happen.

She was in no rush to read what he’d texted. She knew it could set off fireworks of anxiety or confusion.

Letting her duffel bag slide off her shoulder, she savored the moment, drinking in the letters identifying the texter, B-o-b-o.

That was her state of mind, looking inward with joy, not outward. It was a glorious autumn day. The leaf colors, vibrant oranges and yellows, might have been selected by Sukie’s mom after studying swatches for months, the sky picked for its intense high-contrast cobalt blue. The outdoors mixed and matched, each element popped. “I could sell this day,” her dad sometimes remarked when it was especially nice out, and, no question, today he could sell fall. And that is why it was even more remarkable that Sukie looked straight ahead and saw nothing but the happiness in her heart, and certainly not the man in the red Windbreaker who walked onto her dad’s court. She didn’t notice him until he punched her dad in the stomach and, when her dad doubled over, slugged him in the face. Her dad toppled as if he weighed nothing at all, the way Mikey’s toy soldiers did when her brother once got into a rage and kicked them.