The Mermaid of Brooklyn (14 page)

Her eyes were entirely black, which for some reason did not immediately strike me as being alarming. A cape of sea-dark hair the length of her body billowed behind her. She was naked from the waist up, her breasts buoyant in the water, her torso forties-starlet curvy, and from the waist down—I’m not kidding—she had a golden fishtail with which she muscled her way around. I know how it sounds. I
know
. But let me stress that at the time this seemed totally unsurprising. There was something soothing about her, nurturing in a slightly aloof, sex-kittenish way. She smiled as if we’d known each other our whole lives and swam close, somehow managing to swing her hips as she moved, winding her long, pointed fingertips into my hair. I closed my eyes and let her.

Obviously, I should have known better, but it is one of the defining characteristics of those moments when you should know better that you don’t. It was only on the way home, sitting on the over-air-conditioned A train and shivering into the extra-large “I Heart NYC” sweatshirt I’d bought from a street vendor to go over my besmirched sundress, that things started to come together. Only then did I remember what I had, in another life, written an entire master’s thesis on: that ghostly mermaid of Slavic folklore, the rusalka.

Nothing like the cheery princesses that obsessed Betty and the rest of the pre-preschool set, these were the restive spirits of abandoned wives and illegitimate mothers who threw themselves into bodies of water; the angry souls of women without a place in the world. They were as oversexed and lonely as housewives in cheesy romances, and accordingly, they swam around braiding each other’s hair and gossiping until sailors dropped into the drink.
Then they swam to the unfortunate men and seduced them, kissing them until they drowned, not understanding that the fellows wouldn’t be able to breathe once they joined them underwater. But who knew they could migrate all the way from the Baltic Sea! New York really
was
a melting pot. The thought made me laugh out loud there on the A train, garnering the suspicious stares generally reserved for shoeless people screaming into transistor radios. A discovery: Riding the subway after you’ve died is very much like it is when you’re alive.

Underwater, the rusalka seemed like a long-lost friend. When she held me, when our hair twisted together, when our skin touched, I was able to relax for the first time in a long time. Her thoughts entered my head, unbidden:
I am going to take care of you
.
You are not going to suffer anymore.
I believed her. It was impossible not to. I didn’t think that she might have unfinished business of her own, some ulterior motive for saving my life. Taking my life. Whatever it was. She was saying what I needed someone to say. She took my face in her hands and looked at me with those large black eyes and kissed me, sucking oxygen out of my lungs and blowing in her own aggressive essence.

And then I wasn’t Jenny Lipkin anymore. It’s difficult to explain how it happened, how I knew it was happening. I understood, I understand, that no one would ever believe me, that I had misunderstood what rusalkas did, what they could do. The physical creature before me had disappeared, but I felt her burning along my airways, bubbling through my veins. The old Jenny Lipkin stayed guttering in the tide like sloughed-off skin. I was one of them now, I knew it somehow, just as I’d known the thoughts the rusalka was projecting to me. I felt her there, in me, even when I kicked my way up to the surface, headed for the Brooklyn shore, a better swimmer than I’d ever been in my life, navigating the oily isles of floating trash,
greeting minnows as if they were friendly neighborhood eccentrics, the evening air sandpapery against my skin.

I know I should have been troubled to find that the mysterious being was living in my body like a bossy parasite. But it was clear to me that by taking over, she had allowed me to live, and it seemed like an okay deal at the time, particularly since I had decided I did in fact want to live. What kind of melodramatic ninny drowns herself? Anyway, I felt terrific all of a sudden. I felt
alive
.

I dragged myself onto the shore, skipped past the staring tourists and ferrymen. After her sodden decades of aquatic real estate, the rusalka was excited to be on land, and therefore so was I. The cacophony of sirens and car horns was jaunty as a Gilbert and Sullivan show tune; a rat skittering along the shore glinted with a dapper sheen. Who knew the world was so brilliant?

I tried to ask all the normal getting-to-know-your-new-spirit questions: where she had come from, how she had come to be, well, a mermaid. She had no patience for this. Bubeleh
, please, it’s “rusalka.” I don’t like “mermaid.” It sounds silly, like a unicorn or something. Anyway, thanks to you, I’m not even a rusalka anymore. I’m you, us, Jenny Lipkin, a lady with legs and lungs and all of it. Right? So,
nu,
let’s go. Show me where we live,
ordered the rusalka. I didn’t hear her voice so much as know it. “Okay!” I couldn’t wait to get there, overwhelmed as I was with gratitude, so happy to be alive and strolling toward the subway in my—how had she done it?—favorite shoes. In rescuing me, she had even remembered to save the slippers from their precarious perch on the bridge, had placed them beside my wallet and keys and phone in a little line on the shore. I loved her.

There are so many things I want to do here,
she told me, giddy as a child. I didn’t blame her. At her bidding, I felt drunk with glee. Even the grungy train, packed with humorless commuters,
seemed magical. I was gloriously tired, like after a day at the beach, my limbs loosened and full of sun. I couldn’t wait for her to meet Betty and Rose, even though I knew that wasn’t what she meant. She wanted to see the city in an upbeat montage. She wanted a romantic-comedy interlude. Enough with sorrow and longing. She wanted to go to the top of the Empire State Building and ride the French carousel in Midtown and wander through the Central Park Ramble; she wanted to stare down the white whale at the Natural History museum and get caught in the rain at the Cloisters and try on funny hats at a Times Square street vendor’s stand. She wanted to crash the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island and correct everyone. She wanted to drink cocktails at outdoor cafés and flirt with men. She wanted to do more than flirt, she wanted to fuck. She wanted to do all the things a long-dead person would want to do. And so, suddenly, did I.

“Have you done something different with your hair?” Sylvia
greeted me, the new me, us. A pause. The longest heartbeat. She knew. It was real. I was caught. I was crazy—“unfit” was how they said it if you were a parent, and it was true, I just didn’t
fit
—and they were going to take my children away, and here it came, thundering close, the end of everything.

Then, mumbling within like the dulled voice of a snowstorm:
You might as well stop with the guilt and the suffering and the wah-wah-wah. Nobody knows anything because there’s nothing to know. We look good is all. That’s all she’s saying. I mean you. You look good! You look, what is it . . . refreshed. Relax, why don’t you?
I’m sure it doesn’t say anything good about my mental state that I found it reassuring to hear this voice in my head. But hey, it’s not easy to go on as if nothing has happened when you’ve contemplated suicide, died, been possessed by a spirit, and brought back to life, only to be home by dinnertime. I appreciated the help. How was it that Sylvia couldn’t tell? How was it that nobody noticed? Even the dog only snuffled at my hand, none the wiser. Did this kind of thing happen all the time to all sorts of people without anyone knowing?

Listen, Jenny, hello: I give you permission to be happy. You may cease all the depressive moping and enjoy life. Starting . . . now.
So I laughed, gathering Rose in my arms, leaning over to accept a passionate leg hug from Betty—my girls, my girls, what a joy it was to squeeze those little monsters!—then straightened up to survey the tidy kitchen, the neat living room. For the first time I looked at Sylvia’s cleaning job and felt not shame that I hadn’t been able to keep things this clean myself but vague amusement at what manifested itself to me as Sylvia’s OCD.
What’s with this woman, anyway? Doesn’t she have anything better to do than persecute dust bunnies?
“You missed a spot,” I said, trying to sound breezy and, you know, normal.

Sylvia frowned. “Where?”

“I’m kidding. Thank you so much, Sylvia. I’m sure you have a lot of work to do at the office.” I didn’t even sound like myself, not just what I was saying but my actual voice, which seemed lower, richer, with a brassy pitch like a bell. I was sure I wore the whole story on my skin like a corny tattoo: bridge; mermaid. I couldn’t help feeling nervous. But the rusalka whispered, an encouraging hiss beneath my skull,
Don’t you know,
bubeleh
? That’s how it is with secrets. A surprise party, an affair. You think the world has changed and that everything is so obvious. But believe me, no one knows. No one even suspects.

I came to enjoy hearing the rusalka’s abrasive interruptions, like the friendly thumps of a pregnancy, but like that other sort of inhabitation, it took some getting used to. I knew it was impossible, that what had happened to me couldn’t have happened to me. And yet.

Sylvia started to say, “Oh, I can stay for din—” And the rusalka hissed,
Oh no, please, this woman. She tires me. Enough!
I turned to Betty, who was whirling around in circles and watching her skirt
billow, energized by some private engine of joy, or perhaps smuggled-in Ever So Freshness, and said, “Say, ‘Bye-bye, Grandma!’ ” I felt jumpy and exhilarated, caffeinated by near-death. “Bye-bye, Grandma!” Betty hollered.
Bye-bye!
We smiled as we waved. Sylvia gave me a funny look, but she gathered her things and left to the notes of our antic “Bye-bye” chorus.

I stood in the hallway, Rose perched lightly on one hip—I actually felt physically stronger than I had that morning—and surveyed the apartment. I was embarrassed for the rusalka, for my new self, to see it, embarrassed that she either knew or would soon know about Harry, about how I was a woman to be pitied, about how I wasn’t someone with an imperfect marriage so much as someone who was married to imperfection. I didn’t want her to get the impression that the girls didn’t have a father, that he had abandoned us, that this was where and how we lived. And yet here we were. Here was our temporary situation that had somehow become permanent. It was as if I’d been distracted for months, maybe years, as if I hadn’t gotten to the real part yet but believed I would someday.

“Dinner, Mommy?” crooned Betty.

Ordinarily, I would plop Rose in the bouncy seat and prepare some sort of pseudo-healthy convenience food—tofu pups, Amy’s frozen mac and cheese—conjured up out of a mix of laziness and guilt. But tonight I didn’t feel like it. The rusalka nagged in my brain:
Honey, I’m starving. You know how long I’ve been a watery specter? You know what the food is like down there? I want to try human food. I want to taste something delicious. What’s good around here? Just no kelp, please.
“We’re ordering a pizza,” I said. So there. Betty bugged her eyes out and then shrieked, “YAYYY!” galloping around the apartment. I never ordered in. It was a favorite indulgence of Harry’s but one I always felt bad about, what with the expense and
the ease and the inevitable waste, so we ended up ordering Harry’s favorites and never mine. Forget it. I let the guilty tightness go, like the unwanted thoughts I was never able to release when commanded to in yoga.
Whooosh.
“With spinach and garlic,” I added, “because that’s how I like it.” Betty wrinkled her nose, but when it came, she wolfed down her slice happily.

And that was the first act of my new life. Ordering pizza.

Hey, you have to start somewhere.

I introduced the rusalka to the kids, the dog. After bedtime, she ran us a bath.
I need a little hydrating. Old habits die hard, isn’t that what they say?
I didn’t know how to talk to her. I whispered, there in the echo chamber of tile and mildew, which felt goofy, but I wasn’t sure whether she could hear me unless I said the words out loud. “That’s what they say,” I whispered. “They do. Someone does.” We lay there, I lay there, my hair seaweedy in the lukewarm water. The water felt better to me than water ever had. I wiggled my toes around, or maybe she did. It was disconcerting, the sense that my body had the capability to move without me.
So? What are we doing here?