Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (3 page)

The blue light came back.

Dad gripped the wheel, his jaw set. He was already putting distance between himself and this memory. My gaze followed the blue light, watching it grow dimmer with distance.

CHAPTER 2

Rosa’s Game

A
s a teenager I would scoff at Mom’s volubility whereas Dad said only what was necessary and took no questions. For a while I felt certain that his silence was part of an elaborate scheme to keep us guessing, thereby distracting us from some covert mission he and Mom had cooked up. Perhaps I read too much into the incongruity of tension on the face of a man of so few words. Maybe he was merely trying to stay afloat. What about my mother and her singsong language? She made “silly” an art form. While I was studying Dad’s brooding silence, I might have taken Mom’s simplicity too literally.
Joe Joe from Kokom
o
... Was this some sort of code?

The first of my mother’s secrets was revealed in the summer before I turned five, on a morning when Aunt Gert stopped by, envelope in hand, on her way to play tennis. Gert was two years older than Mom, and although Mom shook a disapproving head at Gert’s lackluster fashion sense, it was clear which one was the big sister. Gert and her friends dominated the tennis courts at our swim club every summer, some in tennis dresses and ankle bracelets, though Gert favored sun-bleached golf shirts and baggy shorts. While my aunt teed off or chased down a wicked serve, Mom played bridge or shopped. The one time Gert coaxed Mom to play the fourth in a golf game Mom picked up the ball after a few holes and chucked it, not toward the hole but out of sheer frustration. Afterward in our kitchen, Mom said, as if making a pronouncement, “I’m stickin’ to bridge!” Gert clamped her chipmunk cheeks tight in an effort not to laugh in Mom’s serious face.

Despite their different sensibilities, Mom called her sister daily while still in her nightgown, newspaper tucked under an arm, to say, “Mornin’, Gert. Didja read the bridge column yet? No? Well, go get it ... I’ll wait.”

Frequently Gert popped in for a cup of coffee on her way to the A&P, but on this day Mom was shopping. I spotted the envelope in my aunt’s hand and looked around to find the oldest child in the kitchen. Rosa stepped forward; my heart plunged.

Out of some hope that Aunt Gert would give those photos to me, I stood on my chair at the kitchen table and reached out. Rosa stepped between us. “I’ll take those,” she said.

I slumped down in my seat while Aunt Gert considered Rosa’s offer. She kept the photos in her right hand, folded her arms, and said, “I’ll just wait for your mom.” Then she settled against the copper-and-gold-flecked Formica countertop to wait.

There were about five of us eating cereal at the table, many in the swimsuits we lived in from June through August. Mine was faded pink and worn at the bottom. I had liked it better two years before when it belonged to Liz. Everything looked better on Liz, who shared Mom’s looks and tastes. On that day Liz was wearing the swim team’s red-white-and-blue-striped tank suit. The suit itself was a reminder of what I could never possess—membership on the swim team.

Since Frankie was often playing baseball in the summer while others were at swim practice, this left me in the company, and care, of Rosa. The third child of eight siblings, Rosa had to compete with Bridget and Michael for authority. The two eldest siblings viewed themselves as the residents in this town that we knew as family, and they tolerated us younger children as townies might accept that their economic power came from tourists, even if the tourists did clog Main Street and gum up the village green with taffy. Rosa craved Michael and Bridget’s “townie” status, and for us middle children she ran the show. She even wrote and directed plays, which we performed for the Jesuits and Girl Scouts.

Later she would direct a play in which I provided the “commercial break” by squiddling onstage to eat a bowl of Corn Flakes before exiting stage right. Kevin, behind the curtain, lifted me into my wooden legs before I re-entered stage left and said, “Tall up with Kellogg’s Corn Flakes!” This was among the better roles Rosa assigned to me. Typically I played the naïve hausfrau to Liz’s cosmopolitan woman. My lines always fell flat while the audience roared with every impatient roll of Liz’s eyes. Afterward I would chide myself for agreeing to play these roles, while Rosa was handed flowers at the curtain call.

Now, at the counter, Rosa and Aunt Gert exchanged notes on their favorite soap opera. During the school year Mom and I were to be found in front of the television set, where she chain-smoked, bouncing a baby on her knee or folding laundry, while we watched the soaps. This was crucial bonding time. Mom’s eyebrows were always screwed into a knot of puzzlement, and she would stop bouncing to ask me, “Now, why would Erica say such a thing to her mother?”

And I would think to myself, “Because she’s Erica Kane, of course!”

“Erica is the devil!” she’d say. “I just love Erica.”

When summer came, Rosa and Bridget horned in on our routine and talked as if only
they
understood Erica’s evil charms. Now, as Rosa and Aunt Gert chatted, I wanted to join in so I jumped up again. Rosa shot me a look that said, “What do
you
want?”

I wanted to talk, but if I did, Rosa would smirk at Aunt Gert, and they would both go silent. “Nothing,” I said, skidding down again—time to mind my own business, or
try
to mind it, but then I caught Rosa’s eyes flickering to the envelope and back.

Everyone finished breakfast. The crowd thinned as kids rushed off to swim practice or a friend’s house. I stuck around. So did Rosa. Aunt Gert saw the clock on the oven and said, “Uh oh.” She grabbed her cigarettes. “My court time’s in ten minutes.”

She started for the door, stopped, and gave Rosa a measured look. “These are for your mom,” she said, handing Rosa the envelope.

“I’ll make sure she gets them,” said Rosa, sober-faced under a bubble perm, adolescent thighs fighting the seams of her cutoffs.

As soon as Aunt Gert’s Keds hit the back porch, Rosa ripped into the envelope and shrieked, “What!” I scrambled over to the chair at the head of the table, stood up crookedly, and, because of the differing lengths of my legs, leaned into Rosa’s forearm, which she yanked away. I stumbled and grabbed one of the little horse heads on the back of the chair to regain my balance.

Mom had chosen this kitchen set at the suggestion of the father in another Irish Catholic, larg
ish
(only six kids) family, the Keatings. While our parents clucked their tongues at our neighbors’ Lincoln Continentals and chauffeured limousine, Mom carefully studied Mrs. Keating’s clothes. After Mass Mom would say, “She didn’t buy that dress here. Not even at Giddings. I’ll bet Mary Elaine bought that dress in New York. Heck! I’ll bet she went to
Paris
.” This would have been after the eleven o’clock, a Mass we always attended because of what some in our town called “The Mary Elaine Keating Show.” When Mom was really impressed she’d put Rosa or Liz up to spying: Get the lowdown. Were the Keatings in Paris?

“Why? Are we going to Paris?” Rosa would say.

And I’d be thinking, “Why do the Keatings live
here
? Why haven’t they joined the ‘filthy-rich’ families in Indian Hill?”

Mom waved it off when the
nouveaux riches
bought planes or toured Europe. We were above all of that. And yet it was hard not to see that Mom was fixated on Mrs. Keating. I suppose this obsession dated back to when they were girls.

They were ten-year-olds at Fort Scott Camp when my mother first took note of Mary Elaine. Mom would have been at the camp on money that her mother had squeezed from a meager “budget.” Mom would also have been trying to hide her first period, which she believed was the result of riding too roughly on a horse. She hadn’t had the birds and bees talk yet. Mary Elaine would have stepped onto the porch of the opposing cabin wearing spanking-white shorts with a matching sailor top. Mom even guessed at the amount of starch in that collar, for she respected a stiff collar.

As for this kitchen set, it was one of at least three suggestions made by Charlie Keating to my mother. The first was his teenage daughters’ swim camp, which took place in the Olympic-size pool in their backyard. Mom enrolled Ted and me in the camp. I learned to swim there, but not until after another girl toppled my raft and climbed onto it, trapping me underneath. The second suggestion was this table and chairs with little horse heads shaped like knights on a chessboard. Charlie explained that his kitchen table’s ends could be extended and more horse-head chairs could be added as the family grew. This was the smartest thing Charlie Keating ever said, according to Mom, and she rushed out to buy a kitchen table just like theirs. I wouldn’t learn about the third suggestion until years later; it concerned a class action lawsuit over a drug called thalidomide. Mom dismissed it because she said she’d never taken thalidomide.

Now steady on my knees, I peered past Rosa’s elbow to the sepia-tinted photos. “Can I see, too?”

“These are for Mom,” said Rosa, curling her shoulder to block my view. “Now, squiddle on.” To make her point she poked me hard in the ribs, but I was tenacious and caught glimpses of some of the photos while she riffled through the stack.

Rosa’s hands were one clue to her nascent beauty. She had clean nails on tanned, shapely fingers. Often, at my urging, she manipulated her hands into silhouettes of darting serpent heads using a flashlight in a darkened room, and—because the serpents lunged to an ever-approaching hissing noise she made—I always begged her to stop. From there her hands became shackles around my wrists to go with her favorite made-up song:
You can fight; you can pinch; you can do anything, but you’ll never, you’ll never be free ...

Now she might just squeeze out the full story of Mom’s past.

Except for some stock lines about growing up in the Depression, Mom had only told us that her mother could barely feed the six kids crammed into their tiny house. Yet, here were photos of a mansion with stained-glass windows, chandeliers, and sculpted gardens. This wasn’t the modest house Mom had pointed out to us in the middle-class neighborhood in Pleasant Ridge. Rosa spread these photos like a croupier showcasing a deck of cards, before collecting them in a neat stack. She rubbed an index finger down one side and slipped them back into the envelope.

Our actions needed to remain clandestine; we knew that. What we didn’t know was why.

Photos safely tucked away, we parted without a word, both of us already plotting how to get the real story. I squiddled into the family room, but I kept my eyes fixed on the kitchen, waiting for Mom. Rosa marked her territory there by doing a load of dishes.

Finally Mom came through the back door, two stuffed bags in her arms. Rosa took them from her, unloaded the car, and even stocked the shelves with all ten bags of groceries.

Mom’s pregnant belly was just beginning to show through her white blouse and red skirt. Her tan came from walking to and from her car, and she took pride in the fact that she rarely set foot in the swim club, where we spent our summers in the care of older siblings. But she was one day shy of her Friday morning ritual at the beautician’s, so her hair had gone from its lacquered state to a matted one. Her eyes had a dull sheen against brows crumpled to fight off a frown.

Based on our mother’s hair, I could see that Rosa’s job would be a cinch. Mom would brew a pot of coffee and plant herself at the table with a sigh. Rosa would merely nudge the envelope toward her.

When that happened, I couldn’t see Mom’s reaction to the photos because her back was to me. On my elbows I slinked past her chair and under the kitchen table. This was easy to do without drawing attention to myself because everyone was used to having me underfoot. Besides, Mom often boasted that she survived by “tuning kids out.” Some days I listened to her chat with Aunt Gert for hours, and Mom never called me on it. I couldn’t say if she didn’t see me or if she did, but I didn’t count. Maybe she didn’t mind that I eavesdropped.

In fact, I was there to spy. If I didn’t get this news firsthand, I’d have to rely on Rosa. She’d sit me on her lap and divulge family history as if she had been present for all of it. As young as I was, I could tell the difference between a bedtime story and the truth, and I was greedy for the truth. I wanted to know what happened when I came into the world without legs. Rosa always told the story as if she had been in the delivery room at my birth. “You just slipped out like a piece of raw meat,” she’d say. “Out of what?” I’d ask, and she would plant a sloppy kiss on my cheek.

I would press her even when she said things like “Eileen did nothing but scream as a baby,” a story that Mom would back up, adding, “All day and all night,” while lolling her head as if she were on an endless bus ride, although Mom would grant that my grumpiness came from the body cast I wore for the second half of my first year. “That dickens,” Mom would say, her birdlike voice trailing off, “who knew she could already roll off the bed? But I guess without legs ...”

Rosa was now seated at the head of the table, the captain’s-chair arms snuggling her waist, horse heads flanking her shoulders. She faced my direction as I came in, but was too busy with the pictures to notice when I slipped under the dark-stained oak table into my foxhole, where I rested my chin in the cradle of its crossed legs. Below me were Rosa’s feet with their fingerlike toes, which she often used to pinch, then twist, the tender flesh under my arms, bringing me to tears before she’d say, “See what I mean? Always crying.” Right now her feet were dormant.

Mom’s legs, to my side, were crossed with one foot rocking. She pointed at the photos and reminded Rosa that her widowed mother, Ida Bruehl Fanger, the saint, would be canonized when the Pope got around to it. I was dying to climb up and see Ida. I loved the “visitation from Mary” story. But if I joined them at the table the conversation would end.

Rosa ignored the saint routine. “I thought you said you were poor,” she said.

“I
was
poor,” Mom said, as if she were recalling her old life for the first time in years. She said the mansion was in East Walnut Hills, which in the twenties was the poshest neighborhood in Cincinnati. My ears perked up. I loved that part of town, with its intricate architecture. Now, in the sixties, it was one mansion-turned-tenement after another. I fantasized about its grand entrances and even its trash. In later years I would imagine Frankie and myself as inner-city orphans roaming its streets, while he sported a James Dean slicked-back hairdo and a leather jacket. In reality we lived in a place that included a lot of empty squares, a few crowned with brick-and-siding colonials and the rest ironed flat—a landscape that threatened the city’s claim to seven hills supposedly reminiscent of Rome. The city had been named for Cincinnatus, a Roman farmer who rose to dictator status as a fierce opponent of the power-hungry forces known as the plebeians.