The Girl with the Mermaid Hair (10 page)

I
T was a mean rain.

It soaked and stung her all at once.

Sukie plodded slowly, fearful, in a night so dark she couldn’t see her own hands.

The garage had no windows to cast a friendly outdoor glow, and in the Hudson Glen residential areas, there were no streetlights. On clear nights skies were spectacular; shooting stars as frequent as Sunday. Her dad even took buyers to view real estate at night. “In this town the moon is a closer,” he’d told Sukie. “If I sense hesitation, I let the moon and the stars make my case.”

Sukie fished frantically in her purse for her phone.
No moon, Daddy. No stars. Dad, I have to call Dad.

“‘Oh, Mr. Moon, moon, great big silvery moon, won’t you please shine down on me,’” Sukie sang in a tiny, tinny voice.

She’d learned the song from her dad. When he sang it, “shine” didn’t mean only “shine,” it meant, “Make the deal go through.” Sometimes he added that in a deep growl, “Make the deal go through,” and they all laughed.

“It’s bad luck to exploit the moon,” her mom had said.

“Phooey,” her dad said. “Phooey.”

Phooey. Phooey. Phooey. Phooey.

Dad, there’s no moon. Dad!

She couldn’t find her phone. Her hand slapped about. Nothing crammed into that big wet purse felt remotely like it.

“Oh, Mr. Moon, moon—” She began walking sideways with her arm extended to prevent collisions. “Oh, Mr. Moon—” Suddenly everything lit up bright as day. Sukie had activated motion sensors tucked along the roof of the house.

Feeling as exposed as if she’d been caught naked in the shower, Sukie cowered. The rain pummeled her. On her nose and cheeks, trickles of black mascara
mixed with smears of foundation the consistency of wet clay. Her red suede jacket bled onto her pants and flesh. She might have escaped from a horror movie, victim or killer, hard to tell.

Possibly she was crying, but her sense of helplessness was so complete, she couldn’t reckon her own misery.

Then, as if someone had energized her with the squeeze of a trigger, she bolted into the street. Abandoning her shoes. Splashing mud. And turned left to the lights and traffic of a main thoroughfare, Hawthorne Avenue. Without waiting for the green, she shot across two lanes of traffic to shelter under a broad gas-station overhang.

At that moment she realized she was still carrying her beer.

She looked around for a trash can.

Even distraught, drenched—her clothes stuck to her skin—cold as a Popsicle, and shoeless, with water pooling around her bare feet, Sukie was incapable of littering. A girl who wanted to mow the ocean couldn’t drop something as discordant as an aluminum can onto the landscape, even when that landscape consisted of asphalt and two gas pumps. Her problem wasn’t really with littering. While she was all for green and cared
almost deeply about global warming—for science class she’d calculated her family’s rather large carbon footprint—and while she’d never throw a banana peel out a car window and she’d even occasionally refused plastic bags at the supermarket, nevertheless, speaking strictly with regard to motivation, an obsession with order and a dread of chaos—these were the forces that drove her.

Besides, littering was bad luck. Sukie was convinced of it.

On a night when her luck could not have been worse, and was about to worsen, she still clung to a belief that doing something as simple as being kind to her environment might alter the course of events.

She poured out the beer, figuring the rain would wash it away, and clamped the can under her arm while she yanked her purse wide open, stuck her head nearly inside, and plowed through. Aha, her phone. Thank God, her phone.

She took it out, turned it on, and dropped the beer can into her purse. The phone shivered. A text message.
FROM MOM
, she read.
SOMETHING STRESSFUL
.

The text had been left three hours ago.

Sukie debated and then dialed her dad’s cell. It
bumped immediately to his voice mail. “Dad.” Sukie meant to act collected, but “Dad” came out in a flood of fresh tears.

Dad. How powerful is that word? Love, safety, comfort, succor. Sukie’s cry for dad was loaded with every one of those meanings. “I need you to pick me up.” She squeezed her eyes to stem the tears. “Please, Dad. I need you.” She clicked off and called home, hoping he would be there and that he would answer.

“Hello?”

“Mom?” Sukie’s voice quavered but held steady.

“My ear almost fell off.”

“What?”

“I was putting on my sunglasses, and you know that part that goes over your ear? Well, it went into a stitch and snagged it. My earlobe was dangling.”

“Oh my God, Mom. Are you okay?”

“I practically wasn’t. I had to drive, which is against the rules. To the hospital. They sewed it back on, thank God there was a plastic surgeon on duty or I would have ended up looking like a scarecrow. Also my nose is unusually tender for some reason, I must have banged it in my sleep. They rebandaged it, and I have to keep it this way for weeks. Is your father with you?”

“No.”

“I can’t find him anywhere. He called after golf and said he was going to look at an office building in Croton. Oh.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I thought I felt a twinge. Mikey, make this change channels.”

“Mom, I’m stuck. I need a ride.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sakes.”

The line seemed to go dead. “Mom?”

“Call a taxi.”

T
HE rain had lightened to a drizzle and Sukie decided to walk to the mall, a half mile down Hawthorne Avenue. She had twenty-five dollars. Perhaps at the Kmart she could buy a pair of flip-flops and something warm to wear like a sweatshirt before calling a cab.

Fleur’s father owned the Hudson Glen Taxi Company, and while he didn’t drive one of the six cabs himself, Sukie worried that if she got into a cab in this condition, Fleur might hear of her humiliation. “I picked up a girl who looked like she’d been spit out of a washing machine.” “Cliff picked up a girl who looked like she’d been spit out of a washing machine. Lived on Lilac Drive,” and eventually somehow or
other more details would come out, how exactly was murky, even what exactly was murky, but her fear was profound.

She passed Clementi’s. The Christmas lights that twinkled in the window all year round beckoned. Maybe Issy was on duty. “Hey, I got caught in it,” Sukie would say laughing, but probably she wouldn’t. Probably she’d take one look at Issy’s friendly face and cry.

At Kmart she found what she needed, summer flip-flops on sale for $2.99 and a gray hooded sweatshirt, $10.99. After paying, she retired to the restroom and surveyed the damage in the mirror.

With her exhausted, glassy-eyed stare coming back at her, hair soaked and plastered to her head, shoulders so limp she might have been tossed up by a wave and slammed against rocks, Sukie had to admit she looked demented. She peeled off her red suede jacket, determined that it was wrecked beyond salvation, rolled it into a ball, and stuffed it into the trash bin.

The red dye had even stained her neck, an effect so bizarre it could be the mark of an alien. “Are you one of the evil Polyesters?” she asked her reflection,
bolstering her spirits with a bit of role-playing and a poke at her mother at the same time. For her mom, polyester was only slightly less agitating than cellulite. She imagined Bobo, bare-chested with the most attractive light sprinkling of body hair. “Prove you’re not a Polyester,” he commanded. “Show your neck.” He ripped off her jacket and top to reveal the truth.

Bobo.

How quickly he’d snuck back into her fantasy life.

She spritzed some sickeningly sweet-smelling liquid soap onto her hands and managed to eradicate the red and restore her normal skin tone.

Two women came in when she was throwing away her layered tops stained beyond redemption. “I’m all wet,” she explained needlessly. “What a downpour.”

“I like your bra,” one said before going into a stall and then calling from inside, “Did you get it here?”

“Does the underwire hurt?” asked the other, sticking her face close to the mirror and picking at a tooth.

“No,” said Sukie. “No to both things. I got it at Victoria’s Secret.”

She felt a tiny bit better getting a bra compliment and having almost a conversation. She bit the price tags off, pulled on the sweatshirt, and slipped her feet into the flip-flops. She walked to the wall and back, five steps, testing them. Flip-flops always hurt for a while from the thong. With an exhale of exasperation, she did what she could with her hair, slicking it back off her forehead and behind her ears, and fastening it with a rubber band she kept in her purse for hair emergencies.

“Cheer up,” one of the women said as they left. “You can’t fool me.”

Sukie hit the air blower, lifted one leg and then the other. Hit it again, turned and poked her butt out under the hot air. After several hits, turns, and butt-and-leg gyrations, she managed to get her jeans dry enough to separate from her skin. While stiff and still damp, at least they were no longer pneumonia inducing.

She put on some lipstick and realized she was starving. She hadn’t eaten all day.

Her mom could pay the taxi when she got home. She would spend the rest of her money on a grilled cheese sandwich at Andee’s Diner. She’d call the cab
while she ate and meet it outside Andee’s, which had an exit straight to the parking lot. “That’s a plan,” she said to herself in the mirror. She clenched her hand in a fist and said it again. “That’s a plan.”

When Sukie recorded events later, snug in her bed, she stopped here, laid her journal aside, and buried her head in her arms. This was the beginning of the hardest part to tell. She had jumps so severe her legs were bouncing. Señor rested against them, providing warmth, and Sukie lifted her head, heavy with pain and confusion, and began writing again.

Andee’s was closed for renovation, and, after calling a cab—twenty-five minutes, they said—I got on the escalator. It seemed as if I were adrift alone on a great ocean liner. I don’t know why, but there was something about the way that escalator traveled from one floor to another offering views from one end of the mall to the other that gave me the most unpleasant feeling that by accident I had ended up at sea, the last place I would ever want to be. My mind jumbled with thoughts. How often Mom and I had shopped here from the time I was little. “Try this.” She would seize something by the hanger and hold it against me. “Yes, I am brilliant, I am so brilliant,” she would exclaim when I tried it on and it was perfect. Mom does have the most amazing taste. She
would always quiz the salesladies, “Is this polyester?” And when they’d say no and show her the tag, 100% cotton, Mom would say, “Do you swear? Because if I touch even a fiber of polyester…” She never finished the sentence, leaving horrendous near-death possibilities to their imaginations.

Señor’s nose twitched, and Sukie stopped writing. Yes, it is ironic that I was thinking of Mom on that escalator, she agreed with him. He continued to hold her gaze. Yes, recalling fun memories, even more ironic—that might even be a foreshadowing, she acknowledged.

MEG. BITCH. SLUT,
she printed in large letters and then, after a scolding from Señor—involving baring top and bottom teeth—forced herself to continue on.

Walking toward Joe’s Caffeinated, I passed the glasses store where Bobo had picked me up. How rude was he to horn in on my shopping?
When she wrote the word
rude
, she found herself grinning. “I wonder if he missed me.” Sukie imagined him rolling away from the couch back to discover her MIA, his intense dismay and disappointment expressed by a flick of his tongue or by holding the blink of his eyes an extra nanosecond.
He’s one expressive dude,
she wrote, and crossed it out.

“Tell it, tell the rest,” she urged herself on. “To face the truth, I have to record what happened in minute detail,” she told Señor, and yet no sooner did she begin than she omitted.

She couldn’t admit her vanity, how ignorant, perhaps blissfully ignorant she’d still be if it weren’t for the fact that after ordering a mochaccino and selecting one of the few remaining bagels strewn about on the shelf, she took a selfie. And it was because of the selfie, because she couldn’t see the photo clearly and turned away from the café window to eliminate glare…and by the way how surprised she’d been at how nice she looked. I went from “drowned rat” to “fresh from the swimming pool” was exactly what she was thinking when she raised her head and noticed a couple at the back table.

Location. This matters. Sukie had moved from the front of the counter, where she’d placed her order and paid, to the back of the counter near the tables to wait for her coffee. The woman making drinks gyrated to the piped-in music of the Fugees while she worked the espresso maker and poured the foaming milk. Sukie noticed the tip jar. A piece of paper secured with a rubber band said “love”—“love”
in thick felt-tip marker script.
I dropped in change,
she wrote,
for good luck.

She put the bagel down (on a napkin, of course), not important except that’s how she ended up leaving it behind.

The tables at Joe’s were small and round with Formica tops, stylish in a retro way, with chrome bands around the edges and matching chrome-colored chairs, and at the farthest table, nearly hidden in the corner, a couple had pulled the chairs around so that they were sitting side by side, facing the wall. The man’s arm stretched along the back of the woman’s chair and then lapped over her shoulder, and the woman had laced her fingers through his. Even with a view solely of their backs, Sukie could see their clasped hands, because every so often they made an appearance, popping up, untangling and tangling again. The woman leaned into the man—there was something about this, the way her body melted into his, that wasn’t only sensual but also easy and free. How confident she was that the man was welcoming, and that more than anything else told Sukie that the couple were lovers. The sight filled her with sadness. The disappointment of Bobo, all the unfulfilled
yearning, and the loneliness of having not one friend to tell her troubles to finally sank in.

The woman had short wavy black hair, locks were visible as she nestled against his shoulder. Playfully the man mussed her hair, which made Sukie smile even as her loneliness deepened. The man pulled away. “Sure that’s all you want, a glass of tap?” he asked, and it was at that moment that Sukie realized she was looking at her dad.

Her phone slipped from her grasp and hit the floor with a clack. She swung back to the counter, yanked her hood up over her head and down over her forehead, then seized the neck strings to jerk the sweatshirt up. It didn’t reach as high as she hoped and she ended up with the strings bisecting her mouth, top lip visible, lower lip not. The hood winged out on the sides like the hood of a monk’s cloak, shutting off all side vision, mercifully blocking her dad from seeing her and leaving only a swath of face visible head-on—mainly her nose with two panic-stricken eyes above.

“Whipped cream?” asked the counter girl.

Sukie’s head bobbled slightly in reply as her dad passed so closely behind her that she felt a stirring
of the air. She squatted, felt the floor for her phone, snagged it, and rose up again slowly as she heard his request. “I’d love two glasses of tap.”

She assumed her dad was standing not more than two feet to her left, and this was true. She assumed he’d flashed his winning smile, it always produced quick service. She was right about that too. Being so tall, he reached for the water right over the giant jar of chocolate espresso beans. Sukie calculated that as well. A dreadful curiosity, a compulsion to look over and confirm the horror of what she already knew—to torture herself with a second thousand-volt shock—battled with an even greater terror of being seen.

The counter girl capped her drink and set it down.

“Thanks. Thanks a bunch,” she heard her dad say.

Sukie made no move for her drink, and the coffee girl, noticing this, stopped dancing and observed. How odd the way Sukie stood there without a twitch, concealed except for her nose poking through the hood like a bird at a feeder and her eyes radiating anxiety. Anxiety can infect an atmosphere so powerfully that it’s practically weather. Sukie was producing a storm.

Not certain of her dad’s whereabouts, Sukie waited for a sign that he had passed and returned to his table…to the woman—that fact she could barely admit. Don’t let him notice me, she prayed. God, please, I’m begging you. And he didn’t, and later she wondered how he could not have noticed her. How could he not have noticed his own daughter? Soon she discerned his voice, softer now, mingling with the low drone of conversation in the café. “Here you go,” he said.

Sukie turned and used every ounce of willpower to stroll out casually when what she wanted to do was run as fast as she could to the other end of the world.