Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel (2 page)

Anyway, hoax or no hoax, it’s all the same to me, isn’t it, in one sense, since I was never going to meet the blogger in real life anyway. Still it soured me on the ancient temples of Cambodia, or Khmer, as they apparently call it, I knew I’d be there eyeing mangoes suspiciously. The memory of the travel blog woman, first stoical, then dead, would make me wonder about other maverick fruit, sudden misadventure generally.

Chip yearned for daring exploits; I didn’t so much yearn as just not want to have any. My vision of a honeymoon involved some relaxation, possibly spa treatments. I suggested he could do his adventure on a separate trip, a trip for bachelors—or men, at least, supporting his final bachelor days, wanting to flex their muscles, commit some acts of bravado. They didn’t have to be unmarried themselves, although, let’s face it, the trip would be more exciting if they were.

Chip’s very friendly, most everyone agrees on that, but still he doesn’t have what you might call a group of close friends—not exactly. He has pals he plays racquetball with, he has his coworkers, and he does some multiplayer online games with guys from college who live in other cities.

One of the racquetball players is an anger-management student, that is, he goes to seminars on anger management, to learn
to manage his anger. Chip says the racquetball can get a little edgy because of this, when the managing isn’t going smoothly. I ask Chip why he even plays with him, he shrugs and grins. His name was in the racquetball pool at Chip’s gym, Chip picked him at random and got into the habit so now he doesn’t want to disappoint the man. You have to wear goggles in racquetball anyway, Chip said, or you could lose an eye. I said, But Chip, aren’t there some other places an angry racquetball could hit? Do you wear goggles on those too?

Just your typical Nutty Buddy, says Chip.

This guy, Reznik, he really likes to win whereas Chip’s mostly playing to get a good workout in, so Chip hits energetically till near the end and then he misses on purpose. Still though, he didn’t want Reznik managing anger at his bachelor party.

Chip’s coworker buddies, well, in terms of other men there’s Sandy, which sounds like an easygoing blond woman but is actually a man and not a blond at all, and there’s Tariq. Sandy is delicate, a germaphobe who buys his antibacterial hand gel in bulk—probably not the type for derring-do. Tariq is married to a woman his family sent to him. He’d never met her before the day of their wedding but the two of them are stuck like glue. He doesn’t go on trips, or even out to restaurants. He’s more of a homebody. You’ll see him at office functions, but only because they’re mandatory. He’ll be the one over beside the water cooler, holding a nonalcoholic beverage and smiling nervously. The unasked question in his mind is,
Can I go?
You see it when you look at him.

Chip likes Tariq a lot, he admires him; he always mentions
Tariq when the talk turns to Arabs and terrorists. Then it’s “Tariq tells me,” and “according to my man Tariq.” If anyone has a negative word for an Arab, a Muslim or that situation there, Chip rises to their defense. He trots out Tariq to show that not all Arabs are religious hysterics. We have them too, is what he likes to say, each country has its own hysterics, doesn’t it, its own growing majority of straight-up insane people? Let’s throw them all together on an island, a big one like Australia or they wouldn’t fit, and then take bets.

Chip’s usually hamming it up at that point, admittedly. He likes to play the fool, sometimes, likes to act less intelligent than he is. It makes other people feel
more
intelligent than they are, and then they find themselves liking him. Liking him quite a bit.

Look at the fundamentalists
we
have, says Chip, they may not put incendiary devices in their body cavities but they get up to their own shenanigans. They try to gaslight the whole culture, claiming the dinosaurs were here last week, going around to the museums—when they come into the cities—and scoffing at a T. rex skeleton.

Chip says he talked to a guy once who insisted T. rexes hung around in pilgrim times, hiding behind the trees so Founding Fathers didn’t see them, probably—slapping their tails at Pocahontas, stepping on teepees and roaring.

Not all Muslims even believe women should live in sacks, says Chip: sure, we all know that in some sandy, oily countries women walk around wearing baglike garments over their whole bodies, including their faces, with just a slit over the eye
region, because without that slit you’d have these women bumping into things and breaking their noses. In those countries the women look like boulders, walking around like that. Long boulders, Stonehenge style. Crowds of these women in their dark sacks are like a field of oblong rocks.

Of course, it’s not a bad look, those dark robes, says Chip. Although the face covering, he could do without that. Chip’s confused about why the women agree to the face-covering part. Seems punitive, says Chip, pretty hard to rub your nose, if you needed to for an itch, though on the upside, it wouldn’t matter at all to have a piece of food stuck in your teeth. Those women don’t need to worry about that
ever
.

He’s an open guy, but he’s been reluctant to bring up the face-covering issue with Tariq, rightly fearing it might offend. He’ll ask Tariq about the politics, but not so much the face-covering.

Tariq’s a paragon of virtue, he does the prayers, he kneels on a small rug, and his wife doesn’t dress in sacks or look out of an eye slit; she wears regular U.S. clothing—though, since I’m being honest here, she could use some fashion tips. I know because I met her one time at an office party; it was St. Paddy’s Day, and people were lurching and weaving around vats of green punch and beer, floating shamrocks and leering cardboard leprechauns. There’s no one Irish who works at Chip’s company, the closest they ever got to Ireland was making fun of Riverdance, but Chip’s boss says it’s a U.S. holiday now and the point of it is License to Drink. But Tariq doesn’t drink and neither does his wife, so at the St. Paddy’s Day party she stood beside
him at the watercooler, wearing that same trembling smile. It begged us all to release her.
Just let us go now, please,
that smile said.
Please and thank you. I do not wish to be at this “party.”

It was a bittersweet situation, I guess, because I looked at her and even as I knew exactly what she was thinking, I also knew she wouldn’t be released—no, she would hover painfully for at least another ninety minutes before she was set free. Everyone has to stick around, at these office parties, until Chip’s boss, drunk as a lord, blearily notices their presence and marks it on his list of reasons not to arbitrarily fire them. She would hover there politely, her eyes as dark and wide as a deer’s, trying to fathom the vulgar customs of her adopted country.

If Chip could, I’ve thought sometimes, he’d carry Tariq around with him for showing off when the talk turns to terrorists, since Tariq’s a guy who’s attractive and very warm. He smiles a lot; with Tariq you almost wish he’d hang out more, he seems like such a sweetheart. But Tariq has other fish to fry and by the time Chip’s bragging about him, he’s off being his usual homebody.

Then for Chip’s college friends, you’ve mainly got Rocket, Eight-ball and BB3 (short for Beer Bong Three, as I recall). In their day those guys liked to tie one on and get into a hazing mentality, which could work well in a bachelor party setting. But Rocket tweaked his back on a mechanical bronco in a bar and doesn’t do much physical these days, Eight-ball is in recovery and avoiding old patterns, and BB3’s afraid of velocity. He doesn’t travel much. That’s a phobia of its own, I guess, the fear of velocity; BB3 doesn’t get into anything that goes faster than
walking. If he gets into a car and it speeds up past about 5 mph, he starts to squeal like a four-year-old on helium. Chip says he pictures an impact, can’t help it. Even a bike ride is too much for him, if BB3 gets on a bicycle he immediately pictures his face pulpy. No skin on it at all.

Nothing specific happened to BB3 to cause this, Chip tells me, he just woke up one morning frightened of velocity.

So in the end Chip couldn’t get a group organized. Instead he signed up for an extreme half-marathon in the mud with obstacles—barbed-wire fences, tunnels you slither through on your belly, flaming bales of hay and 10,000-volt electric shocks.

But for the honeymoon, we decided, we’d go in a simpler, more tropical direction.

I’M GETTING AHEAD
of myself, though, skipping ahead to honeymoons when Chip and I weren’t even married yet. Chip’s training for his race took up a few hours every day, at first just mornings and then evenings too; at times he’d come home bleeding from the earholes, with dirt leaking from his nose. He had one elbow in a sling, then fractured toes; his kneecaps were scab pancakes. He called it “necessary toughness” and told me men who finished the race often got the name of it tattooed on their biceps.

We had the bachelor party issue decided, so the next thing was my side of the schedule. I’d never been a fan of bridal showers, or baby showers either, really. A shower of any kind
seems like a place for brain deficiency—women squeal during those showers, squeal at the sight of trivial objects. A bridal shower features frilly underwear to make the new wife look more like a prostitute; a baby shower peddles frilly bonnets you drape around a newborn’s face to make it look less like a garden gnome. I skipped right over the shower option to its faux-raunchier counterpart the bachelorette party, whose most revolting facet is the name
bachelorette
. I’m as fun as the next California gal, or try to be at least, but what I don’t appreciate is the infantile aesthetic. Lacy frills, voluntary brain deficiency and words like
bachelorette
, what they add up to, let’s face it, is basically an infantile or possibly pedophile aspect.

I’ve got no problem with the male-stripper custom. It’s a conundrum though, or maybe a complicated joke—sometimes I’ve thought the whole thing is 100 percent gay, style-wise, with all those middle-aged women smiling and clapping as though the gay male spectacle was just exactly what they came out for. Because let’s face it, in most cases the stripper dance moves are cruel and unusual punishment, for your typical straight woman. Other times I’ve thought maybe the moves aren’t gay at all, maybe they’re designed to be embarrassing. Maybe
no one
likes them. Maybe the point of them is male abasement, female pity/superiority. Could that be it?

Thankfully, none of my friends insisted on the stripper theme. They were OK without strippers, also without a gigolo.

Once I knew I was safely clear of the acrylic talons of the sex industry I handed the planning over to my maid of honor, Gina D. She wasn’t a maid of honor in the traditional sense, after all
she’s a grown woman, as many of us are, nowadays, who choose to get married. There isn’t a maid around. The only one who
called
her a maid of honor was Chip’s mother, who I could write a book about. Chip’s mother also called me “the bride,” just every chance she got. As in “Well here’s the blushing
bride
!” when I walked in the front door in gym sweats with dark armpit stains, lugging five heavy bags of groceries and a case of beer. Or “Is the
bride
a little bit under the
weather
?” when she heard me in our bathroom during a bout of Thai-restaurant food poisoning. She said that through the bathroom door, where she hovered while I was in there making noises like a chimpanzee screaming.

But she was my second in command, Gina D.—my best friend from way back and my wedding lieutenant. I call her Gina D. because when we met, in seventh grade, there was another kid named Gina, Gina B., and so we used their last initials. But they were oh so different, those two Ginas. Gina B. later became a successful quilter. Her quilts are everywhere, at least, if you’re the type that visits community centers, women’s art cooperatives and crafts conventions. If you’re a person who notices quilts, you’d certainly notice hers. Hard to miss them. The quilts have quotes, such as, for instance,
I dream of giving birth to a child who will say to me: “Mommy, what was war?”

Gina D., though, is starkly opposed to quilts—really to most things that are handmade. She openly despises pottery. I saw her laugh in a potter’s face. I was relieved she didn’t spit; to Gina D. the stink of earnestness is worse than rancid milk. Gina D. wants household items to be mass-produced, ideally of a polymer, and if they’re not she tries to throw them out.
One time she walked through my kitchen and trashed three items in five minutes flat: a potholder decorated by another friend of mine’s kid, a floral apron sewn by a long-gone great-aunt and a glazed ceramic planter I really kind of liked.

She’s funny, Gina D., with a carrying personality that makes you half forget she’s harshly obliterating your possessions. Everything’s performance art with her, she lives in a world of irony. If a gesture’s not ironic, why make it at all, is her philosophy. Gina’s a failed academic—at least, that’s what she calls it. Last time I checked she made a decent salary and had tenure in American Studies.