Then it was time to tend to the orchids.
She and Grandfather would move silently up and down the rows of flowers, waking them up, tickling their faces, watering them. Then the sun would rise over the greenhouse, revealing a sea of pale yellows and violent pinks, delicately veined greens and brooding blood-reds. Once this happy field was awake and watered and bathed in sunlight, Imogene would go to school.
Each day after school, Imogene took a wagon of orchids across the bay on the Staten Island Ferry and delivered them to fancy flower shops in Manhattan.
The ferry captain’s name was Edd Neck, or Big Edd. Big Edd steered the boat with one hand and told funny stories over the intercom. Badly drawn tattoos covered his arms, a moon-sized bald spot capped his head, and he kind of smelled like old cheese. Ladies sometimes coughed or wrinkled their noses when he walked by.
Imogene, on the other hand, adored him. In fact, he was her best friend. If you think it’s odd for a young girl to be best friends with a stinky boat captain, consider the facts: Imogene was an eleven-year-old girl living with her white-haired grandfather in an orchid greenhouse. While Imogene’s curious life intrigued her classmates, it made her shy too, and needless to say, she did not have a lot of friends her own age. As everyone knows, shyness and loneliness often come hand in hand, and companionship sometimes comes in unlikely forms.
One frigid Friday afternoon last December, when Imogene came on board with her orchid-filled wagon, Big Edd let one of his crewmen steer the boat and came over to admire the flowers.
“Those are nice,” he told her. “I wish I had a lady friend; I’d buy her that bright yellow one.”
“Why don’t you buy it for yourself?” Imogene asked. “For the steering room or something.” She couldn’t actually imagine Big Edd having a living room, or a house, for that matter. He seemed to live on the ferry.
“It’s not the same thing, Blossom,” sighed Big Edd. “Blossom” was Big Edd’s nickname for Imogene.
“I guess not,” said Imogene, feeling sad for Big Edd, who looked very woebegone at the moment. “Maybe someday you’ll get a girlfriend.”
“Ha, not me,” said Big Edd. “No woman in her right mind would want me for a husband. No one’s ever looked twice. And anyway, my standards are too high. A dame has to be pretty gorgeous to catch my eye. So the river and the sea are my ladies, and they always will be.”
Imogene got off the ferry in Manhattan and made her deliveries, her wagon bump-bump-bumping along the uneven sidewalks. It was cold and dark on the ride home, and she pulled her coat tightly around her as the nearly empty boat lurched away from the dock.
Halfway across the bay, the door to Big Edd’s steering room swung open and he stomped out.
“Larry—what is that?” he asked.
“What’s what, boss?” said Larry, who was one of Big Edd’s crewmen. He sat on a bench outside the cabin, eating a hoagie.
“That God-awful yowling noise,” said Big Edd. “Like a cat got caught in the engine or something.”
Larry stopped chewing. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “I hear it. But it’s coming from out there, not the engine room.”
The men marched out onto the deck and peered into the night. Imogene ran after them.
“Oh, man,” said Big Edd, wincing. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that was a dame with the world’s worst voice, trying to sing an opera.”
Imogene’s heart gave a leap. “It is a woman,” she said. “Look over there. She’s sitting on those rocks in the middle of the bay.”
“You got X-ray night vision or something?” said Big Edd. “Where?”
“Right there,” cried Imogene, pointing, and indeed there sat a woman on some rocks in the distance, waving at the boat. “She’s the one making that noise. It looks like she needs rescuing.” Imogene looked again and blushed and said, “Oh.”
“Whaddya mean, ‘oh’?” said Big Edd.
“Um, I think she’s naked,” said Imogene.
“All right,” yelled Larry. “Let’s go help her out!”
“Just a minute,” said Big Edd, squinting. “All I see is some sort of lumpy shape. Could be an animal or a big hunk of trash. Get back into the cabin, Larry, and call animal control or the coast guard or something. We’re staying right on course; we’ll all get fired if we don’t stick to the schedule.” Larry looked very disappointed but followed Big Edd’s order.
“It’s not an animal—it’s a woman!” cried Imogene. “I swear.”
Big Edd looked at her queerly. “You feeling okay, Blossom? I’m worried about you. Maybe you oughta get your eyes checked out by the school nurse.”
He followed Larry back into the steering room. The Staten Island Ferry chugged along into the night.
Imogene stared out over the railing at the woman on the rocks. She had stopped singing and was watching the ferry intently. Suddenly she dove into the black water and there was a flash of a fat silver fish tail—and then she disappeared.
It seemed like a dream to Imogene the next morning. She woke up thinking about the glint of the woman’s skin in the pale moonlight. After breakfast, Imogene sat on a bag of soil in the greenhouse and thought some more about the woman and restlessly tore up dead orchid leaves. Her hands didn’t want to stop moving. Shred, shred, toss. Shred, shred, toss.
Blue pipe smoke curled up into the air from behind Grandfather’s Saturday-morning newspaper.
“Go for a walk,” he told Imogene.
“But it’s cold out,” Imogene protested.
“Yes, it is,” said Grandfather. “But you’re driving me bananas. Go outside until your hands are too numb to shred those leaves, and then you may come inside.”
Imogene scowled as she wound her scarf around her neck. She knew that Grandfather was only joking, but why did he have to be so weird all the time? Soon she was kicking seashells and rocks down on the beach. In the distance the ferry was making one of its early-morning trips to Manhattan; it glided over the water and vanished into the fog.
That’s when she heard it.
The yowl; that awful, hilarious, cat-in-a-ferry-engine yowl from the previous night. Except this time there was the yowl, followed by some piteous sobs, and then the yowl again. Then more sobs. The noises came from under the dock; Imogene ran out onto it and peered underneath.
There sat the naked woman from the night before, waist-deep in water, crying and singing to herself.
“I knew you were real,” Imogene said, forgetting to say hello or introduce herself. “I tried to get them to rescue you last night. Aren’t you freezing?”
The woman looked up at her with woeful yellow eyes. “I’m always cold,” she said, and slapped at the water.
“So why don’t you come out of the water, then?” Imogene frowned.
The woman slapped at the water again—a bit childishly, Imogene thought.
“I can’t—I mean, I don’t want to,” the woman said.
Imogene suddenly remembered the fish tail flashing in the moonlight the night before and things began to make more sense. She took a deep breath.
“Are you a mermaid?”
“Of course I am,” snapped the mermaid. “Why else would I be sitting in icy water on a day like this?” Her face rumpled up and there were tears again. “All I wanted was for him to notice me.”
“Who?” asked Imogene.
“The captain of that vessel,” whimpered the woman.
“You mean Big Edd?” Imogene was baffled. And after a perplexed minute, she asked: “Were you trying to sing to him?”
“Ye-e-e-e-s,” hiccuped the woman. “But it’s useless. Look at me! I can’t sing a note, all the algae has made my golden hair slimy and green, and I have a face that would stop a clock. People always mistake me for some sort of homely beast. One time a sailor threw up over the side of a boat when he saw me up close.”
Imogene looked more closely. Indeed, the mermaid was quite ugly.
“But why do you want Big Edd to notice y
ou so badly?” Imogene asked, still stumped. Big Edd himself had said that no woman in her right mind had ever looked twice at him.
“I just need him to,” said the mermaid mysteriously, and sobs shook her wretched blue body again.
Imogene sat upright on the dock and thought for a moment. It was turning out to be a very unusual morning. This mermaid appeared to be in love with Big Edd of all people.
If this was “love,” Imogene reasoned further, it certainly was a peculiar state of affairs. She wondered why everyone made such a big deal about love if it made people wail and yowl and sit waist-deep in ice-cold dirty bay water.
What Imogene did not know: this was not just any old mermaid; she was a Lorelei. Clearly a defective one—but a Lorelei all the same.
What Imogene did know: Big Edd was her best friend and he was lonely. And lo and behold, this woman seemed terribly interested in him. Wasn’t a homely mermaid better than nothing? Imogene peered down over the side of the dock again.
“I’m going to help you,” she said to the mermaid.
“How?”
“I’m going to get Big Edd to fall in love with you,” Imogene said. She didn’t know quite how she was going to accomplish this, but there had to be a way.
“Really?” The woman swept a gummy green tendril of hair from her eyes and gave Imogene an ingratiating smile, her teeth a decaying keyboard with some of the keys missing. This would clearly not be an easy challenge. “How?”
“I’m going to think up a plan,” Imogene told her. “Meet me here tomorrow at the same time.”
“Wonderful,” said the mermaid. “I’ll start practicing a new song.”
“Let’s try something different,” Imogene said tactfully. “I’ll come up with something good.”
She ran home to begin her research.
That night after dinner, Grandfather’s pipe smoke rose again from behind his favorite evening reading: a beleaguered old movie magazine from 1953. Imogene stood tentatively in front of him.
“Grandfather,” she said.
“Yes?”
“What makes a woman pretty?”
“Hmmm?”
“What makes a man notice a woman?”
Grandfather put down his magazine and looked wistfully into space. “A fine set of chops, I’d say.”
Imogene paused, not quite knowing what to do with this information. “What else?” she asked.
There was a long silence, and then: “A fine set of gams, I’d say.”
“Chops” and “gams”—what was he talking about? Imogene gave up. She poked impatiently at Grandfather’s magazine. “Why do you read this same old fifty-year-old magazine all the time?” she demanded.
“Someone put a lot of work into making it all those years ago,” Grandfather said contentedly. “The least I can do is give it some attention. And look at Marilyn Monroe there on the front cover. How could a man ever weary of her?”
And he put the magazine up in front of his face again. Imogene stared at the woman on the cover. Marilyn Monroe, movie star, had bouncy blond curls. The picture gave Imogene an idea.
She counted her saved allowance money and then went to sleep.
Mondays usually come too quickly; in this case, it meandered and dawdled and took its sweet time in arriving. After school on Monday afternoon, Imogene ran with her wagon to the ferry, clumsily bouncing some of the orchids out onto the ground and leaving a trail of petals, moss, and leaves in her wake. As the ferry pulled away from the dock, she tied the wagon to some chairs and looked for Big Edd.
He was in his steerage cabin, laughing with some of his crewmen. The cabin windows were steamed up with breath and body heat. Imogene wondered how they could see the river at all and grew anxious as the boat made its way into the middle of the bay. If Big Edd stayed in that bog of a room, he would miss the surprise she had cooked up for him.
She knocked on one of the windows.
“Hey, Blossom,” said Big Edd, opening his door. “How’s my best girl?”
“Can you come out for a minute?” Imogene said. “I want to show you something.”
“Like what, another naked lady on the rocks?” asked Larry. “The coast guard was real excited to get out to those rocks the other night and find nothing there.”
“Aw, shut your trap, Larry,” said Big Edd. “She’s just a kid.”
“Just come with me,” Imogene begged Big Edd, pulling on his sleeve. The boat was getting close to the mermaid’s rocks.
“Uh-uh,” said Big Edd. “It’s freezing out there. I’m staying in here where it’s nice and cozy. You should come in too, Blossom, unless you wanna turn into a Popsicle.”
The rocks came into view, and once again, the Lorelei lounged on top of them.
“Oh!” cried Imogene, running out onto the deck. “You’re going to miss it! Hurry up!”
“Forget it,” said Big Edd. “Knock on the door once you’re done running ’round in the cold,” and he closed the steamy door just as they passed the rocks.
The mermaid’s head had been stuffed into a perky wig of corkscrew blond curls, removed from a thrift-store dummy and purchased by Imogene the day before. Imogene saw with dismay that the woman had put the wig on backward, for heaven’s sake. It really was quite a dreadful effect.
By the time the boat went back in the other direction, the mermaid—and the wig—was long gone.
“I knew it wouldn’t work,” wailed the mermaid the next day. She took off the drenched, sorry wig and threw it into the oily water under the dock.
“That’s because you had it on the wrong way,” Imogene told her. “If you’d worn it right, you would have looked like Marilyn Monroe.”
“Who is Marilyn Monroe?” sniffed the mermaid.
“An olden-days movie star,” Imogene said. “My grandfather’s been looking at a picture of her practically every day for fifty years, so she must have been doing something right. If we make you look like her, I bet that Big Edd will fall in love with you. So put it back on, and try this.” She handed the woman a tube.
“What is it?” said the mermaid, sniffing the tube.
“Lipstick,” Imogene told her impatiently.
The mermaid opened it and gave it a little lick. “What do you do with it?”
“You put it on your lips,” explained Imogene. “It’s red, just like Marilyn Monroe used to wear. Now sit out there on the rocks this afternoon, and I’ll make sure that Big Edd sees you.”
The plan was, of course, an abject failure.
When the ferry glided past the mermaid’s rocks again, the wig was on sideways this time; the lipstick was a disaster beyond explaining; once again, Big Edd refused to leave that steam bath of a steering room.
The final insult: a passenger threw a beer can in the Lorelei’s direction, beaning her right between the eyes.
Imogene was at her wit’s end. This project was turning out to be an awful lot of work. But Big Edd is worth it, she reminded herself, thinking about how forlorn he’d looked when talking about wanting a “lady friend.”
Having no one else to ask for advice, she returned to Grandfather.
There he sat in the shack next to the greenhouse, drinking coffee and still reading the morning newspaper. A record spun lazily on an old windup phonograph on the dirt floor, making comforting pops and murmurs.
“Grandfather,” Imogene said, sitting down in her usual spot on top of a soil sack.
“Yes, child,” he said absentmindedly.
“What do you think is the prettiest thing about Marilyn Monroe?”
“Hmmm?”
“Is it her puffy hair?” Imogene pressed. “Or her red lips? How did she get men to look at her?”
Grandfather put down his paper and thought for a moment. “No, it wasn’t about those things, although they were nice,” he said, a little smile on his lips. “It was her voice.”
“Her voice?”
“Yes,” said Grandfather. “Listen to this,” he added, getting up and shuffling across
the room. He pulled an old record off a shelf and placed it on the phonograph player. “This is one of Miss Monroe’s most famous songs, called ‘The River of No Return.’ ”
Imogene listened for a while.
“She just sounds out of breath to me,” she said crossly. “I don’t see what’s so great about her.”
“A million chaps would disagree with you there,” said Grandfather, listening happily. “That voice could lure you across the globe and back.”
This statement intrigued Imogene. She looked down at the phonograph player.
“Can I borrow that tomorrow after school?” she asked.
The phonograph player was heavier than it looked, and the logistics, of course, were nearly impossible. Getting it wet would be a disaster. Imogene wheeled it out onto the dock in her wagon with her orchids.
“Listen,” she told the mermaid, who sat shivering under the dock, and she wound up the player and played the breathy lullaby.
There is a river called the River of No Return
Sometimes it’s peaceful and sometimes wild and free
Love is a trav’ler on the River of No Return
Swept on forever to be lost in the stormy sea.
The mermaid listened intently; she was still and quiet. She looked almost pretty in her quietness, the way that old broken china dolls are pretty. When the song was over, she wanted to hear it again, and when it was over for the second time, she asked:
“What is it?”
“It’s your new voice,” Imogene told her solemnly.
The phonograph player was suddenly light; the mermaid balanced it on her head easily as she swam toward her rocky perch in the bay, skimming the water’s surface like a petal in the current.
As the mermaid disappeared into the silver winter fog, Imogene felt a pang of melancholy. Would Big Edd forget all about her when he fell in love with the mermaid? Would she lose her best friend? She knew that you weren’t supposed to be selfish about sharing your friends; you were supposed to want what was best for them, which is why she wanted to help him find a “lady friend” in the first place. But the idea of losing him still bothered her.
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