by Betsy Carter
“Well, I have a little French in me,” said Delores. “From my mother.” It wasn’t a lie exactly. She had, after all, grown up on liver.
Delores studied Molly’s profile: a thin, white scar ran down the side of her neck. She wanted to ask Molly if she’d been stabbed and also how she got the money to come from Philadelphia, but she didn’t think it was appropriate to ask those kinds of questions so soon after meeting her. Molly, it appeared, did not have the same problem. “How does a girl from New York City make her way down to this part of Florida?” she asked in her gluggy accent. “Did you run away from home?” “Oh no,” answered Delores. “My parents—they’re in the entertainment business—have always encouraged me to do my own thing.”
“Are they famous?”
“Is who famous?”
“You know, your parents. Are they famous?”
“Well they travel a lot,” said Delores, startled at how easily the words were leaving her lips. “They play the guitar. They sing. You’ve probably seen them around.”
Molly fell quiet, realizing that she might be in the presence of greatness, or at least someone related to greatness. She took in Delores’s outfit—a red-plaid miniskirt, a short-sleeved black knit sweater, and white vinyl boots. High fashion for 1972. There was a sudden shift as if, by Delores introducing the possibility of famous parents and glamour, Molly was the one who would now have to try to please Delores. Delores let the silence linger before asking a question of her own.
“Is that scar a stab wound?”
Molly put her fingers to her neck. “Oh that,” she laughed a little falsely. “I forget that it’s there half the time.” Then, in a hurry to change the subject, she said: “What’s your sign?”
Delores checked herself up and down. “What sign?”
“Your birth sign, you know, your sign of the zodiac.”
It was as if Molly was speaking Swedish.
“I don’t know if I have one.”
“Of course you do—everyone does. When’s your birthday?”
“May fourth.”
“Taurus. Your sign is Taurus. People born under the sign of Taurus are determined and stubborn. They can also be lazy and greedy.” She made a sad clown face. “Are you stubborn and lazy?” She quickly brightened. “My birthday’s in June, so I’m a Gemini. We’re very sociable and good communicators. People like to have us around.” She made a happy face.
Delores had assiduously avoided the horoscope section of Teen Girl. With its weird drawings of animals and planets, she had assumed it was some column about religious stuff. So Molly spent the rest of the trip explaining astrology to Delores. By the time they arrived at Weeki Wachee, Delores’s head was filled with images of bulls and twins and rising moons and waning tides. Westie, she’d learned, was a Sagittarius (cheerful but restless). Her dad had bought Otto at the circus in mid-September, she remembered, which made Otto a Virgo (shy and fussy).
Molly led Delores to the dormitory where the mermaids slept at night. The room was sparsely furnished and overheated. Eight girls, wearing identical white terry-cloth robes and with towels tied like turbans around their heads, sat on a modular couch in front of a fireplace.
“Everyone,” shouted Molly, clapping her hands. “There’s someone new I want you to meet. She’s from New York City.” She put her arm around her new friend’s shoulder. “Say hello to Delores Taurus.”
Two
The name stuck. Since all of the recruits except for Molly came from the area, Delores Taurus was the only name on the list for tryouts the following morning. That night, she stayed across the street at the Best Western—the same motel where she had stayed with her parents two and a half years earlier.
Molly walked her to her room. All afternoon, she’d been giving her tips for her tryout: smile while you lip synch; if you get water in your nose, just blow it out; play to the audience, not just one person; and, most importantly, don’t panic if you get disoriented.
“Get a good night’s sleep,” she said now, tentatively patting the suede fringe jacket draped over Delores’s arm. “Tomorrow is your big day.”
Alone behind the closed door, Delores noticed that the room was the color of overcooked peas. It was small, with a low ceiling and a stained bedspread that had a poinsettia print. The smell of Lysol cut through the old cigarette air. Next door, a bunch of men were laughing in that deep, hollow way that men do when they drink. What she felt dug deeper than any Sunday night loneliness in the Bronx. Delores propped Otto up on the peeling chest of drawers; his head fell against the mirror. Even he looked sallow in the low-wattage light overhead. She waited to hear his quacky, reassuring voice, but he had nothing to say. She put her return ticket next to her on the nightstand.
The last time she had been in this motel was right after she and her parents had seen “Mermaids Go to the Moon.” She remembered how, when the show was over, the men in the audience had been the first to jump to their feet and cheer while the women and children sat in their seats and clapped. Someone whistled. The mermaids took mock curtsies and blew kisses. They were so beautiful and teasing, safe behind their Plexiglas wall.
Delores longed for the time when the Walkers were a whole family, for the safe feeling of having her parents on the other side of this motel wall. The sulfurous taste of fear caught in her throat. She unpacked only her pajamas and toothbrush, since she had no intention of spending another night in this place. Then she pulled back the poinsettia spread and got into bed. “So this is how it is,” she said to no one in particular. Grateful to be sprawled out on a mattress instead of scrunched up in her seat on the bus, she pictured Westie lying in his crib and how she would wiggle her fingers across the fat of his belly like some creepy crawly thing, and how he would try to swat her away with his spongy fist. She tossed and turned and knocked the poinsettia bedspread to the floor. Exhausted, she finally fell asleep hugging her pillow.
Sunlight jutted through the window shades the next morning. Delores jolted awake as if one of them had rapped her on the head. Where was she? Why was her heart flip-flopping so? In daylight, the room seemed even smaller than it had the night before. Best to get up and out of here as soon as possible. She took a quick shower and dropped the tiny bar of Camay soap a half-dozen times. Remembering the laughter of the men from the night before, she wrapped herself in her towel as she rummaged through her suitcase for the bathing suit that her mother had brought home from her cleaning job at the office of a fashion magazine. It was a bright, iguana green, nylon Speedo, cut high on the thigh and low in the back. Her mother said it must have been the latest thing. She’d found it in a bag marked “Photo shoot” that was way in the back of a closet. “No one will want it now,” she had reasoned. “It’s already been used.” Delores put on the suit and spun around in front of the small mirror in the bathroom.
“Kiddo, you look stunning . . .”—Otto was back—“. . . like the princess of the sand castle. You’re going to be the most popular girl in the place.” Delores slipped on a pair of cutoffs and a men’s white T-shirt (also from the “Photo shoot” bag) over her suit. She stepped into a pair of platform shoes and clopped off to the reception area, where she ate a complimentary corn muffin and drank a glass of orange juice. Then she crossed the highway to Weeki Wachee. At the ticket counter, she told the woman with a nest of teased platinum hair that she was there for her tryout. “Oh, you must be the New York girl, Delores Taurus,” the woman said, pulling a pencil from some cranny inside her hair. “Thelma is expecting you.”
Delores walked behind the parking lot to a wooden bungalow that was the administration building. Thelma Foote, she thought, would be beautiful, like Pocahontas or Marlo Thomas. But the woman sitting at the desk in Thelma Foote’s office was well into her fifties. Her skin wobbled like marshmallows, and she had short, mannish helmet-hair. She wore thick, black-framed eyeglasses, which made her eyes seem to protrude more than they already did, a white windbreaker, baggy khaki pants, and a pair of spotless white Keds. Sh
e looked to Delores like one of the old women who lugged their shopping carts behind them on the Grand Concourse; nothing like Marlo Thomas. This had to be Thelma Foote’s secretary. The woman rose from her desk and extended her freckled unadorned hand. “Hey, sugar, I’ve already heard so much about you.” She scrutinized Delores up and down. “You are a tall drink of water, aren’t you? So far, I’d say the reports have not been exaggerated. How do you do? I’m Thelma Foote.”
Delores shook her hand firmly. “So nice to meet you,” she said. “I’m Delores.”
Thelma Foote offered Delores a chair across from her desk. “So,” she said, “tell me everything about yourself.”
“I’m from New York City,” she began. “My parents are entertainers, though my mother keeps her hand in the fashion business. They travel quite a bit. My mother is part French. We came here two years ago. I saw the mermaids and knew that, someday, I wanted to be one of them. We always take our vacations at the seashore; I practice my mermaid routines there. One time, the recreation director at the hotel we were staying at saw me. He asked me if I would be in a show they were putting on at the pool. I said yes, and every day for a week, I swam for the guests. At the end of the week he offered me a job for a lot of money. My parents said I should finish high school. High school was such a gas, you know, with all the parties and stuff.” Delores giggled. “And I have a little brother. His name is West, but I call him Westie.”
Delores could feel her face flush as the words poured out of her. This was the person she would have been had those two people in the bus been her parents: pretty, popular, well-dressed, slightly stuck-up Delores Taurus. She thought about the blonde woman on the bus, and how snuggly her bell-bottoms had fit her. That’s how well the name Delores Taurus suited her. She wondered if Thelma Foote believed what she was saying. The whole time Delores was talking, Thelma Foote was running the zipper of her windbreaker up and down. One of the teeth was broken, and the zipper was jammed. She glowered at the impaired zipper as she gave it one final tug. Nothing happened. “Goddam piece of crap,” she muttered under her breath. Then she looked up at Delores with a taut smile. “Well, sweetie cakes, you certainly have quite a story. Let’s take a walk over to the bell, shall we?”
Thelma had been doing this job for enough years that she’d heard it all before. She could recognize the fakes, the liars, the girls who came from nowhere and would end up in the same place. It was something about the timbre in their voices, or how they never looked directly at her. She could winnow out the ones who wouldn’t have the staying power to make it, and the ones who didn’t take being a mermaid seriously. This one was nervy, thought Thelma, had the cut of determination. If she came from such a fancy family though, why hadn’t they done anything about her teeth? Never mind. Even if her story was made up and she’d come from nowhere, somewhere would definitely be her next stop.
Thelma and Delores headed across the lawn toward the girls’ dormitory. Thelma was short, and whatever else she was, was hidden behind the lopsided jacket and baggy pants. Delores was tall, close to six feet in the platforms. When Thelma put her arm around her, she practically had to leap in the air to do so.
“Did you ever dance ballet?” she asked Delores.
“Of course I’ve taken lessons,” Delores lied. She remembered a story she once read in Teen Girl about Karen Carpenter, or someone like that. Karen had such a natural singing voice, the article said, that her parents worried how formal training might ruin its uniqueness. “But my parents always felt that I was a natural and that lessons would only mess up my personal style.” She turned toward Thelma to see if she was buying it.
“We shall soon see if you look as good in the water as you do out of it.” Thelma nodded, as if she were agreeing with herself. “Ah, here’s the famous bell, where dreams are made and hearts are broken.”
They stopped before a metal capsule that was indeed in the shape of a bell. It was open at the top and filled with water, and it had windows all around it. The bell stood about twelve feet tall and nine feet wide—just big enough for one swimmer. Thelma told Delores that the water temperature was 74.5 degrees, the same as it was in the springs. Most pools are heated to between 80 and 83 degrees. This would be cold—“plenty cold”—she said.
Delores stripped down to her electric green suit. She shook her long brown hair so it fell around her shoulders. “So what do you want me to do?” she asked.
“I want you to get into that tank and show me what you’ve got. Convince me you’re a mermaid.”
Delores arched her back and moved her head from side to side, loosening her neck muscles.
She stepped into the bell. At first, she just swam in circles. Then she did a couple of twirls and pinwheels and basic ballet movements. She smiled and pretended to lip synch to a song, like the girls in the show. Molly had told her that the mermaids swam sixteen feet beneath the surface and that sometimes they needed to stand totally still. The way they controlled their buoyancy was by taking air in or letting it out at the right times. Delores was able to hold her breath for a little over a minute. Keeping her eyes open in the clear spring water was hard. Mermaids never wore masks, and the water made everything blurry. Everywhere she looked, all she could see were the thick, black frames of Thelma Foote’s glasses pressed up against the glass windows. After about ten minutes, she hoisted herself half out of the water. She waited for Thelma to speak.
Thelma yanked her zipper one more time. “Crap,” she whispered, looking momentarily distracted. Then she turned her attention to Delores. “Lord knows, you’re photogenic enough, and you’ve got enough damn grace to make Esther Williams look like a frog. I want you to do one more thing. I want you to swim on your back, forward, underwater.”
Molly had warned her about this part. If you swam forward on your back underwater, there was no way water wouldn’t go up your nose. “If you’re going to lose it, that’s when it happens,” she’d said. “Just keep your eyes straight ahead and don’t panic.” Delores plunged back into the tank. She arched her back and did the scissor-kick to get herself underwater. The water burned as it went up her nose. The urge to come to the surface was so strong that she felt tears come to her eyes. She tried to concentrate on the water before her, just as Molly had said she should. She noticed that the sun reflected on it in such a way that all of the bubbles looked like tiny diamonds. She thought about what it must be like to be able to swim in this clear water every day and see the diamonds and the turtles and the manatees that would float by. She pretended that she was swimming in the real springs and that the audience inside the amphitheater was applauding and whispering to one another: “Do you think she’s a real mermaid?” It gave her the courage to do a back flip and keep her legs perfectly straight. She came out of the flip and swam to the window where Thelma Foote was peering in on her. She put her face right up against the glass so that she and Thelma were nose to nose, but for the thin piece of Plexiglas between them. The move startled Thelma. Delores smiled a mysterious smile and swam away.
In all her life, Delores had never been as sure of herself as she was at that moment. She’d passed the tryout and would become a mermaid; that was for sure. It wasn’t until she climbed out of the bell that she realized how cold she was. She was shivering and blue-lipped, like a kid who’s stayed in the pool too long. Thelma Foote wrapped a thick white towel around her. “Way to go, doll face, you just earned yourself a tail. You are officially a mermaid. What do you think of that?”
“How much will I get paid?” asked Delores, cocking her head to the side so she could get the water out of her ear.
“You’ll live here with the other girls.” Thelma pointed at the A-frame dormitory behind them. “You’ll flip burgers, you’ll clean the pool area, you’ll take tickets. And you’ll get to swim in the show. You’ll make fifty dollars a week plus whatever you pick up in tips. I’d say that was payment enough.”
Delores turned her head upside down and shook her wet hair. Drops of water fell o
n Thelma Foote’s Keds. Delores stood up and flipped her hair backward. “I’ll talk to my parents,” she said, still affecting her new coolness.
“You do that,” said Thelma. “That is, if you can reach them while they’re traveling.”
BACK AT THE MOTEL, Delores took a hot bath. Bath was a fancy word for it, as the tub was so small her knees were practically touching her chin. She sat with her back to the faucet and let the hot water run over her. She’d never had good news before. It was the first time someone had ever chosen her for anything. Thelma Foote said she was photogenic, said she had earned her tail. It was odd, this feeling. Delores knew how to deal with disappointment. She was as used to that as milk in her cereal. But praise, and getting what you wished for? She wanted to cry for how happy she felt.
She thought about her friend Ellen, and how perfect Ellen’s life had always seemed to her. In the light of what had just happened to her, Ellen’s life now seemed ordinary, nothing to envy anymore. She thought about her mom and wondered what place she would have in her new life. And she thought about Westie, and the talcumy smell of the top of his head.
Delores got out of the tub and put on a pair of jeans and one of the slinky Halston jersey tops her mother had rescued from the magazine. She sat outside in the plastic chair in front of her room and let the sun fill her until the chill inside her was gone. Now was a good time to write to Westie. On a postcard that pictured the pink hotel with its orange tiled roof, she wrote:
DEAR WESTIE, THIS is where I am staying now. Today I passed my tryouts to become a mermaid. Every day I’ll get to swim in the beautiful clear springs. It’s a dream come true. I will send you a mermaid doll so you can see what I look like. I miss you. Love, Delores
