Swim to Me (6 page)

Dear Miss Walker,

We appreciate your enthusiasm and your interest in Weeki Wachee. We are always interested in new applicants and would be happy to interview you and observe your swimming skills. Let us know when you will be able to visit us at the Springs, and we will set up an appointment.

Sincerely,

Thelma Foote

Director

As hard as she had wished for this, it had never occurred to her that it would really happen. Now what was she supposed to do? She had no money, no way of getting to Florida, and besides, how could she abandon West? Still, she called up the Greyhound bus company just to find out how much the fare would be to Weeki Wachee Springs.

“Wow, there's a first,” said the man on the other end. “Lemme see.”

The man seemed to be talking to himself as he read the names of cities on the map. “Orlando, St. Petersburg, Gainesville. Ah, here we go, Tampa. Round-trip, New York to Tampa, fifty dollars. One way, thirty bucks.”

Delores barely had the composure to thank him. Thirty dollars? Might as well be three hundred dollars. Three thousand dollars. She could never lay her hands on that kind of money. She thought about
her father and how he was wily that way, always having enough money to buy the clothes he wanted or take himself off to a Yankees game. It was odd, him being gone for so long and still not a word from him. She missed the familiarity of him.

She went into her mother's bedroom and opened the closet. His clothes were still hanging on the left side, same as if he were still there. She touched the sleeve of one of his white shirts, gone a little yellow with time. Maybe he had left some money in his pockets. Sticking her hand inside each of his trouser pockets, she came up empty, except for a half-full box of Sen-Sen. Suddenly, she could smell the sharp licorice candy. It was his smell. She pushed the pants to one side and started to go through his shirt pockets. Behind the pants were some shelves where her parents kept things like suitcases and hats. She'd often snooped into those shelves hoping to discover a secret, something in the house that she didn't know was there. She'd never found anything, and it had been years since the last time she'd looked.

She moved aside the suitcase and her mother's collection of hats. There was a box filled with old papers, official-looking envelopes with glassine oblongs where the address was meant to be. She found her mother's fox stole with the pointy face and beady eyes of an animal in flight.

Tucked into the back corner of the shelf was something purple, something she never remembered having seen before. She pulled it from the shelf. It was a bag, a heavy purple bag with gold piping and the faded words
SEAGRAM'S CROWN ROYAL
written across it. Delores took the bag from the shelf and wiped the dust from it. Then she sat on her mother's bed and pulled open the yellow string. The bag was filled with silver coins that were thick and heavy. She shook them out of the bag, and they made a jingly sound before rolling across the bed and falling on their faces. She studied them
all: the bald eagles, a man who looked like President Eisenhower, a woman whom she took to be Lady Liberty. They were silver dollars from as far back as 1898 and there had to be close to two hundred of them. This had to be her father's sack. If her mother knew there was a bag of coins in her closet, she would have already spent every one of them.

For nearly sixteen years she'd seen her father every day and night and knew what little she knew of him. Now in his absence, she saw a whole other side of him. She imagined him holding one of the coins in his hands, maybe flipping it in the air a time or two and enjoying the weight of it, and how it felt smooth and cool as he closed his fist around it. It got her wondering why he hadn't taken the coins with him when he'd left. Had he forgotten they were there? Or maybe he'd left them, knowing that someday she'd find them and this would be his parting gift to her and her brother.

She'd take what she needed, plus a little more, and figure out how to leave the remainder of it for West. Delores went into her bedroom and found one of her old bathing caps. She brought it back into the bedroom and filled it with a hundred of the coins. She held the cap by the chin strap; it must have weighed as much as her own head. That reminded her of Otto and his empty head. That's where she'd hide the letter from Thelma Foote at Weeki Wachee. She put Otto and the bathing cap in the valise that she stored under her bed, then stuck the now half-filled Crown Royal bag behind her mother's fox stole and the hats and the boxes full of paper.

When her mother came home from the grocery store that night, Delores met her at the door. They would have two hours together before she had to report to her other job.

“I have a surprise for you,” said Delores, smiling.

Her mother's eyes lit up. Surprises of a positive nature didn't often come her way.

“Why don't you relax and take a bubble bath? I'll run it for you, and keep you company. Then I'll make dinner.”

“To what do I owe this honor?” her mother asked, slightly embarrassed by the attention.

“You'll see,” said Delores, as she turned on the faucet. Her mother undressed in the bedroom, then tiptoed naked into the bathroom. As she slid into the warm bath, she sighed: “Ahh, my feet.” It always came down to her feet, to standing all day in the grocery and at night in the office building. Delores could see how red and crusty they were at the heel. And her bunions, big as doorknobs. Her breasts floated to the surface as she lay back. Delores was always surprised by the sight of her mother's nipples. Her own were tiny and rosy; her mother's were cocoa-colored and the size of saucers. But she recognized how much she and her mother looked alike. They both had the same big hands, feet, breasts, and teeth. They were both tall with long faces like stretched rubber bands. Delores's eyes were big and nearly black, just like her mother's. Her mother closed her eyes and relaxed her head against the porcelain. Delores recognized that with the tension and exhaustion gone from her face, her mother might be a pretty woman.

“Thanks, hon,” said her mother. “This is just what the doctor ordered.”

Delores crouched next to the bathtub and put her face close to her mother's. “I got a job today.”

“Oh yeah, that's great,” said her mother, eyes still closed. “How much does it pay?”

“I don't know yet.”

“When do you start?”

“As soon as I can get there.”

“Get where?”

“To Florida. Weeki Wachee Springs.”

Her mother sat up so quickly that bubbles flew overhead like snow.

“Weeki Wachee Springs? Where the mermaids are?” she asked.

“Yup,” said Delores.

“How did that happen?”

“I wrote them a letter and they wrote back saying they would send me the money to come down and be a mermaid.”

“You wrote them a letter?” It was inconceivable to her that her daughter was capable of writing a letter to as far away as Florida.

“Yes, and they're paying for my trip down there,” she repeated. “Fifty dollars, round-trip, on the Greyhound bus.”

“Do you have the money?”

Now that she'd told the first lie, every one that came after would be easier.

“No, they already bought me my ticket. All I have to do is get on the bus.”

Her mother lay back in the tub. She was bewildered, angry, proud, scared. Delores was just sixteen, not ready to leave home. Who would look after West? So many emotions, they were bumping into each other.

“What about school?” she asked. “You've got to finish high school.”

“School? All the mermaids live together, like in college, and they all go to classes together. I'll still go to school.”

Lying was fun. It came naturally to her. Delores wondered why she hadn't tried it sooner.

“If you go, why do West and I need to be here?” asked her mother. “Maybe we'll go down to Weeki Wachee and I'll become a mermaid, too.” She folded her hands behind her head and swished her legs back and forth in the tub the way she thought a mermaid might.

“That's funny, Ma,” said Delores.

But she didn't laugh. By now, the bubbles had thinned out and her mother was a sad sight, lying in the bath wiggling her legs like that. She had a defeated air about her, and Delores was afraid that if she stayed in this house long enough, she would turn out the same way.

“Yeah, I'm nothing if not funny,” said her mother, running some hot water. She got a distracted look in her eyes, as if overtaken by a thought that displeased her. She became conscious of her nakedness, and wrapped her arms around her knees. “What if I say you can't go?”

Delores was prepared for that question. “There's no job for me here,” she said. “I'll make enough money down there that I'll be able to send some home each month.”

“That's certainly a plus,” said her mother. “When would you go?”

“Next Friday,” said Delores. “It's the last day of school. I thought I'd leave on the four o'clock bus. That way, I get in around three on Saturday.”

Her mother sank back underneath the bubbles. She knew she was supposed to want the best for her daughter and that she should recognize an opportunity when she saw it. Instead she felt angry, as if Delores had jumped the gun on fate, as if Delores had won and she was the loser being left behind. People came and went in her life with no consideration of what it would mean to her. She tried to hide her fear of being abandoned, of maybe disappearing altogether.

“This water's getting cold. Hand me a towel, hon.” She stood before her daughter, wrapped in her towel and lost in thought. She looked down at Delores, who was sitting on the closed toilet seat. She looked so much the way she had at her age. Delores was only two years younger than she was when she'd had her.

“You do what you need to do. You got a whole big life in front of you. Just don't mess up.” She was aware as she spoke them that these were the most difficult words she had ever said.

Delores smiled up at her. “I won't mess up, Ma. I promise.”

That night, as Westie slept in his crib beside her, Delores wrote him a note. It would be years before he was able to read it, but Delores felt like setting the record straight.

Dear Westie,

It is not because I don't love you that I am leaving. I've never not loved you and I will always love you. My dream is to go to Florida and be a mermaid, and now that dream has come true. There are things I want to tell you, and when you get older and learn how to talk, we will talk on the phone once a week, I promise. I never thought that this could happen to me, and I hope when you grow up your dream will come true, whatever it is. Here is the best picture I have of myself, and I hope you will look at it often and remember that you have a big sister who loves you.

She took the Miles shoebox from under her bed and found the picture of her father holding her aloft like a prize cup in front of the clamshell at Weeki Wachee. On the bottom of the note she scribbled:
P.S. The man in the picture is our father. He was very funny sometimes.

Folded up in a teensy knot of paper in her wallet was a quote Delores had ripped from
Teen Girl
years earlier. “If you have your self-esteem, you have everything,” it said. It had seemed profound to her at the time.

In the three months that Delores had been at Weeki Wachee, she'd been giving her self-esteem the workout of its life. She'd been thrown in with six other girls who were different from anyone she'd ever met in the Bronx. There was Molly, of course. Then there was an impenetrable clique of three girls: Sheila, Sheila, and Helen. They were all from nearby Sebring and had been there the longest. Molly had a grudge against Helen and wanted Delores not to like her. Helen was the self-appointed class clown, the kind of girl who calls attention to herself by telling jokes in a shrill voice, then laughing wildly as if everyone were having as good a time as she was. Sometimes, when she'd bump into Molly at the park and there were other people present, Helen would stretch out her arms in a theatrical manner and announce for everyone to hear: “Good Gowee, it's Miss Mowee!” Then she'd laugh in a way that always started out sounding like a wail. Helen sang the same way she did everything else: loud and showy. One evening, as all the girls were in Thelma Foote's van driving into Tampa for a movie, the radio was playing Barbra Streisand singing “People.” It became clear from the
way Helen closed her eyes and put both her hands to her mouth, as if she were praying, that she felt a special connection to Barbra. By the time Streisand got to the second verse of “People,” Helen was belting out the words with her, the two of them sounding for all the world like two cats in a rumble. Thelma Foote pulled over to the side of the road and brought the van to a jerky halt. “For heaven's sakes,” she shouted, turning in her seat to look at Helen, “if I wanted to go joy riding with Ethel Merman, I would have invited her myself.” Delores had never heard of Ethel Merman, nor had Molly or any other of the girls. Still, it made them laugh until they cried just to know that Thelma felt the same way about Helen's singing as they did.

The Sheilas were purportedly Helen's best friends, but it didn't stop the one who was known as Scary Sheila from saying to the others: “Ethel Merman, whoever she is, would take a gun to her head and shoot herself if she ever heard that.” Scary Sheila had eyebrows that ran together like a shoe brush. When she got angry, she'd raise one of the eyebrows and say anything that came into her clever brain. Everyone minded themselves around her, and of all of them she was the only one who didn't think being a mermaid was a dream come true. “I'm just here picking up a little extra bread until I go to back to the University of Florida next semester,” she'd say. But so far, six semesters had come and gone, and Scary Sheila was still there.