Swim to Me (11 page)

By 12:55, the auditorium was filled. People stood in the back; little kids crouched in the aisles. The heavy black curtain was drawn across the stage when the seven mournful trumpet notes of “The Godfather Waltz” began to play. As the lights came up, they revealed the words “The Merfather,” painted in the same typeface as the movie logo—only instead of the handle controlling marionettes, there was a hand holding a fishing pole. Slowly, the curtain opened. At first, all you could see were those five-hundred-dollar flowers. As “The Godfather Waltz” swelled to its melancholy crescendo, out flowed Delores in her skintight, pearl-colored gown. The gown was cut low at the bust with a scalloped border. The long sleeves tapered to a V that ended on her knuckles. The tips of the Vs had giant pearls on them. There were sequins sewn all over the bodice and tail so that, no matter where she was, Delores would be as luminescent as a fish in the sun.

Lester played Don Corleone like someone who knows he's been given a short-term gift. Loath to squander a second of it, he calibrated his movements so that his Don was dignified, regal even. When Bonasera (Sharlene in a navy form-fitting vest and navy trousers that flowed into a tail) did a triple somersault and then kissed his hand, Lester held his head just as Thelma had instructed. He moved his arms in graceful sweeps; when he took Delores/Connie in his arms to dance, she became a little girl in the strength of his grip. When, along with Blonde Sheila/Johnny Fontane, he lip-synched “I Have But One Heart,” a song that lasts nearly three minutes, he only had to suck air from the hose one time. Such was the power of his performance that he even forgot about his face.

Years earlier, Delores had saved a clip from
Teen Girl
called “You Can Be Anyone You Want to Be.” The article said that if you could feel inside what it was like to be, say, Goldie Hawn, you wouldn't necessarily become Goldie Hawn, but you would be able to project all the things about Goldie Hawn that you admired, such as her good personality and her ability to look at the sunny side of life. The concept always stayed with Delores, although she could never figure out why anyone would want to be Goldie Hawn. And now as Blonde Shelia/Johnny Fontane sang to her, every flip that she did, every plié she executed, belonged to Connie Corleone, not Delores Walker.

Thelma Foote sat in the back of the auditorium, her elbows resting on her knees. If she felt proud of Lester and her girls, there was no telling from the expression on her face. Her mouth sagged and her eyes were flat. Only twenty minutes later, when the show was over, when the lights went down and the mermaids disappeared and the spotlight went to the surface of the water, where there was a man in a rowboat smoking a cigar, wearing a Fedora and a wide-pinstriped suit and holding a fishing pole with a line that reached down into the tank, did Thelma rise to her feet with the rest of the crowd as the full notes and rueful minor chords of the finale filled the wooden amphitheater. No one was paying attention to Thelma, but if they had been they would have notice that Old Cow Eyes was imperceptibly waving her arms and folding at the waist, the way that she would have if she was in the tank taking a bow with the rest of her girls.

The Merfather” was a hit beyond anyone's expectations. The
Tampa Tribune
ran a story in its weekend “Getaway” section headlined: “Glorious Delores Taurus a Splash Hit in Weeki Wachee's ‘Merfather'” and the
St. Petersburg Times
had a banner on its arts pages: “Weeki Wachee's Delores Taurus Swims with the Fishes and Steals the Show.” Over the next two days, radio stations and newspapers from around the country called, wanting interviews with Delores and Lester. But the most intriguing call came from an Alan Sommers, an executive producer at WGUP, the ABC affiliate in Tampa. He was hoping to meet with a representative of the mermaids.

The latitude and longitude of Thelma Foote's life was the twenty-seven miles between Floral City and Weeki Wachee Springs. A drive to Tampa meant leaving her world, being judged by a stranger who had no reason to fear or even like her. It also meant she'd have to get dressed up. The morning that she was to meet Sommers, she ironed one of the few blouses in her closet, a light blue cotton Indian shirt with purple smocking, which she put on over a pair of new khaki pants. She'd leave the white windbreaker in the car, just in case.

The ABC offices were in one of the new beige office buildings in downtown Tampa. Thelma parked in the lot and went inside. As she waited in front of the brushed-metal doors of the elevator, she
could hear the humming of the air-conditioning. They were powerful, these new systems. Best not to take a chance. Before the elevator came, she ran back outside to the car, grabbed the windbreaker, and zipped it up to her neck. When Mr. Sommers greeted her in the eighth-floor reception area, he said, “Nice to meet you, Miss Foote. May I take your jacket?”

“Oh, no thank you,” she said, crossing her arms in front of her chest. “I'll just keep it on for now.” Mr. Sommers brought her into an office with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked over Tampa Bay. “I'll have my girl get you some coffee,” he said. “Some view, huh? I'm so close to the water, I could almost be a mermaid myself.” He laughed and shook his head. “Sometimes I slay me,” he said. Then he sat on the chair across from Thelma, laced his fingers together, and stared straight at her. “Look, I'm not going to beat around the bush, Miss Foote. I saw the show last week, and those girls are sensational.”

Mr. Sommers articulated every syllable as if he were speaking into a microphone.

“Sennn-saaational! And not bad on the eyes, I might say.” He smiled a quarter smile, then tried to sneak a glimpse of his own reflection in Thelma's eyeglasses. But as Thelma clutched the mug of coffee, the steam from it clouded her glasses. She tried to make eye contact with Sommers, but she might as well have been looking at dough rising, for all she could see.

“They are very special girls,” she said, placing her cup on the table and staring at nothing. “I handpicked each one of them, and each one of them is a star in her own right.”

“That's exactly what I was thinking,” said Sommers, running his hands through his black curly hair. “You and I, Thelma, are obviously cut from the same cloth.”

As the fog cleared, Thelma studied Sommers the same way she would a new girl auditioning in the bell. He moved with the jerkiness
of someone who had memorized the motions of grace but had no understanding of what they meant: the handshake, more like a quick pinch; the smile, more of a wince; the discursive small talk. A short and trim man with a perfectly tailored double-breasted suit and gleaming shoes, he had the look of one of those fish she'd seen darting around the reefs at Weeki Wachee. Thelma knew her fish. This one, with his pointed features and sharp, small white teeth was a “Slippery Dick” if ever there was one.

Sommers continued, drumming his finger on the arm of his chair. “As you are well aware from your business, Thelma—you don't mind if I call you Thelma, do you?—complacency is death. For us at WGUP to remain new and vital, we are constantly reinventing ourselves, upping the ante if you will. When I read about ‘The Merfather,' I said to myself, ‘Sommers, there's your ticket. Get your ass over to Weeki Wachee and see that show. It was almost—and I say this with all due modesty—like divine intervention. After I saw those girls in action, I told my station manager: ‘If we don't sign up those mermaids right now'” (Thelma flinched as he snapped his fingers for emphasis), “‘then you can bet your bottom dollar that those louses at WTAM will be nipping at their heels before they even have a chance to dry their hair.' Every now and then, the perfect moment and the perfect idea come together, and the result is, like . . . wow!”

Sommers threw up his arms into the air like a conductor winding up a symphony.

“So what I was thinking, Thelma, is this. How about if, every night, we use one of your girls in full mermaid regalia to deliver the weather report? I know what you're thinking—believe me, we've covered the bases on this—mermaids can't stand up in their tails, right? No
problema.
Who says you have to be standing to do the weather? First we talked about having them suspended by wires from the ceiling so they'd look as if they were floating. But the lawyers
quickly nixed that idea: back problems, injuries, all that crap. But then I had this great idea.” Sommers leaned forward in his chair, and Thelma recoiled in anticipation of more finger snapping.

“Why don't we have them reclining in a bathtub? They'd be in water; you know, it would be a little sexy. Well, I can tell you this, everyone loved this idea. Just
lllllovvedd
it. It'll do wonders for the station, and frankly, I'm sure you people are feeling the squeeze from that new Disney World in Orlando. With the free publicity you'd get from us, it couldn't hurt you either. Whaddya say, Thelma?” He aimed his pointy-toothed smile at her.

Alan Sommers was the kind of fellow who would normally hunch his shoulders when he got near a woman like Thelma, and push past her. Never a smile, a nod of the head, an acknowledgment that she existed. Men like him made her feel apologetic about her looks, her clothes, her age. And yet, there he was, sitting across from her, baring his little teeth with something akin to pleading in his eyes. Thelma rarely allowed herself to think about her close call with Hollywood, or the “Jingle Shells” fiasco, but now the memories hit her like a migraine. The smell of mildew filled her head as she thought of more years spent sitting in that amphitheater watching another performance of “The Mermaid Follies” or “The Little Prince.” She'd spent her whole life at Weeki Wachee; everyone there regarded her as a has-been. She had to get out of there. She'd never kidded herself about that. Now her own words came back to her, the words she spoke to her girls before each show: “Finally, the only thing you have to fall back on is intuition,” she'd say. “There's an inner voice inside all of us that knows when to breathe, how to move our heads just so, so that the hair flows around the head like a cape, the right moment to flash a smile. Pay attention to that little voice—it's what separates the stars from the hacks.”

For once in her life, Thelma followed her own advice. “Sommers—
you don't mind if I call you Sommers, do you?” she said. “The girls, the costumes, the bathtub, I'm all for it. Just one thing: they are still my girls, my young beauties. That means all negotiations go through me. What they're paid, what they say, what they wear—it all goes through me. Whatever you pay them, and I'm sure you'll want to be generous, I get a fifteen percent commission.”

Sommers rubbed the shiny spot on his forehead where his hair was beginning to recede. He raised his pen in the air as if to make a point, then put his pen down and smiled. “We are cut from the same cloth, aren't we, Foote?”

Thelma thought she had artistic integrity, that she appreciated beauty for beauty's sake. Slippery Dick clearly couldn't tell the difference between art and artichokes. He was so clearly what he was: a man about money, and how to make a bundle of it. No, they were not cut from the same cloth, but she knew how to play his game.

“I'm not finished, Sommers,” she said. “Plus, I want a finder's fee of one thousand dollars. And I want the girls to be treated like ladies. As I am the only person who can give you the right to use these girls, my offer is nonnegotiable.”

Sommers clicked his pen a few times, then bit down on his Rutgers College ring.

“Okay, how soon can they start?”

W
HEN
T
HELMA
F
OOTE
returned to Weeki Wachee the following morning, she called a special meeting of the girls.

It wasn't in her nature to be funny or ironic, and the few times she was, she would broadcast it with a wide, gummy smile that made her eyes seem even further apart.

“I've just come back from a meeting with the folks at WGUP, the ABC affiliate in Tampa.” She grinned. “And they've made me an offer I can't refuse.” She waited for the laughter, but none came.
Oh
hell,
she fumed to herself,
do I have to explain the damn joke?
But her dyspepsia subsided when she visualized how beholden the girls would feel to her for furthering their careers.

She told them about Mr. Sommers and his idea of having a mermaid do the weather each night. “Our friends at WGUP even came up with the clever idea of having you sit in a bathtub. You couldn't stand, of course, and if you sat behind a desk, the audience wouldn't get the full effect of the tail. Our friends came up with a pretty smart idea, if you ask me. So there you have it, my lovelies: the big time, the high life. And mark my words, this is just the beginning.”

No one knew what to say. Wanting to be a mermaid was one thing; wanting to be a television weather girl was quite another. After Thelma left, Blonde Sheila was the first to speak. “Cool. I'm up for sitting in a bathtub on TV.” Sharlene worried how they would get back and forth from Tampa. “All this publicity,” said Molly. “Who told everyone about us?”

“Who do you think?” said Scary Sheila. Helen did that thing with her hands, putting her fingers under her chin, and turning her thumb and forefinger into a pair of glasses.

But nobody laughed. They understood that it was Thelma Foote who had gotten them the fancy costumes, had phoned the papers, had urged them to make their characters believable. These girls, her girls, would be hard-pressed to find someone else who would do them favors unbidden and bring the kind of order and justice into their lives that she had. If they were
family,
then she was their Don. Although none of them would acknowledge her role outright, this would be the last time any of them would make reference to cow eyes when talking about Thelma Foote.

E
XHILARATED BY ALL
that had happened, Delores called her mother to wish her a Merry Christmas. Just as she had for the
past couple of months, her mother answered the phone with that lilting bend in her voice.