Swim to Me

by Betsy Carter

  “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.

  Four

  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.

  Blonde Sheila, the third of the Sebring trio, had a bleached Farrah Fawcett hairdo and smoked nonstop. Whenever she’d talk about boys, she’d get loose and smirky and say things to try and shock the others. She called women she didn’t like “back-street whores.” She loved to bring up the subject of virginity, always guessing who had hers and who didn’t. She’d look down at her crotch and say, “Well, that cradle was robbed years ago,” then explode into a raw combination of laughter and smoker’s cough. Delores thought Blonde Sheila had a faded quality about her, as if she were already used up.

  There
weren’t many boys at Weeki Wachee. There was one guy who would show up twice a week to play the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz” show. His name was Lester Pogoda. He lived with his family nearby and worked in their pharmacy on the days he wasn’t swimming. Lester had red, lumpy skin that looked as if ants were crawling beneath it. He had the build of a swimmer, with a long slim waist and shoulders that fanned out like angels’ wings. Out behind the mermaid amphitheater, there was a big rock next to where the Weeki Wachee River flowed. Often, Delores would see Lester on that rock wearing a polo shirt and a pair of shorts. He’d lie on his back with his chin jutting out and his face angled so that it was directly under the sun. He’d stay there for as long as forty minutes until his face looked as if it might explode and his shorts and polo shirt were soaked in sweat. Once, while Delores was serving as an usher for one of the shows, she came outside for a break. It was a cloudless ninety-two-degree day, and everyone who could manage it had ducked inside to an air-conditioned part of the park, everyone except Lester and his fiery face.

  “Hey, Lester,” she said.

  “Oh, hey, Delores.” He was sitting up on the rock, dabbing the sweat off his face.

  “Pretty hot day for sunbathing.”

  “You’re not kidding.” He pulled his soaking-wet shirt away from his chest and waved it up and down like a fan.

  “Aren’t you sweltering?”

  “I really am,” he said, sounding anesthetized.

  “Why don’t you come in, out of the sun?” she asked.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I have a medical condition.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Delores, taken aback by this information.

  “It’s not life threatening or anything,” he said. “It’s just that I have this terrible acne. They say sun is the best cure for it. One time, a guest here, an older woman, saw me after the show. She told me that my face was unsightly. Can you imagine, she actually said the word ‘unsightly’?” Lester’s face got even redder. “She said the way to cure acne was to let the sun burn it away. She knew that because her son had had a bad case of it, and that’s the only thing that worked for him. She said that her son’s face got better and that he is now a famous linguist in Chapel Hill. I don’t know,” he said, running his fingers over his wet nubby skin, “maybe it’s getting a little clearer.”

  Delores wasn’t sure why Lester had told her all this. Maybe he would have told anyone who had come upon him at that moment. Seeing as she hadn’t had a whole lot of experience with boys, she wasn’t sure what to think. The only other boy she ever knew was Henry from the Y. Sometimes he had complimented her on her hair and told her how he liked it when she wore it up. One time, he was swimming in the lane next to her. She was doing the breast-stroke, he was doing the crawl. She could feel when he came near her by how the rhythm changed in the water. By accident, his hand brushed against her leg. She stopped swimming and merely floated. If she’d had to stand up at that moment, she couldn’t have.

  Later, when she’d gotten out of the pool, Henry had been waiting for her in the small corridor that led to the girl’s locker room. He didn’t say anything, just grabbed her close and kissed her. His tongue tasted like chlorine and she liked the way his nose bumped against hers. After that, they would kiss whenever they could find a private place. Neither of them ever spoke of it. Henry was the one who told her that she was good enough to become a professional swimmer, and Delores always wondered if he told her that so she would kiss him again.

  Lester seemed different—less sure of himself than Henry. She knew how he felt. She felt that way about her teeth, her feet, her breasts. If someone had told her she could make herself smaller and more attractive by sitting under the scorching sun for forty minutes at a time, she’d have done it without question.

  If she told Lester that she knew how alone and unattractive he felt, she would run the danger of cracking the facade of Delores Taurus. Instead, she tried to be encouraging. “You look good, Lester,” she lied. “I can see an improvement just in the time that I’ve been here.”

  “Really?” he asked, his voice suddenly filled with life.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Really. Just don’t go getting yourself a third-degree burn.”

  Delores got to know the shyest girl in the group, Adrienne, when they were both chosen to do a number with Molly and Scary Sheila in an upcoming show, “Carnival in Rio.” Adrienne was tall and reedy and looked like a piccolo. When she spoke, her little, airy voice made her sound like one, too. Early each morning, they’d practice in the tank, then walk back to the dorm together to get ready for the next show. Scary Sheila kept calling Adrienne “Sparky,” which seemed an aberrant gesture of affection coming from Sheila. Delores noticed how Adrienne flinched each time she heard the word Sparky, as if a bug had just flown in her eye. On one of those mornings, when Delores and Adrienne were huddling in the tube, the heated hidden platform where they warmed up between scenes, Delores asked about the nickname.

  Adrienne’s voice got even flimsier. “It’s a horrible story. Everyone else seems to know, so I might as well tell you. I’m from Zephyr-hills, and I was the star majorette of the Zephyrhills High School marching band. Last year, for homecoming, I was chosen to do this trick where I light both balls of my baton on fire, throw the baton in the air, and catch it again. I’d done it perfectly millions of times in practice; it was no big deal.”

  Between deep breaths and long sighs, her story unfolded. On this particular evening, as Adrienne hurled the flaming baton into the air, she became distracted by some guy in the stands who was mooning the Zephyrhills Bulldogs as they were about to make their second-half entrance. The baton landed on the forty-yard line, igniting half the grass on the field. The Bulldogs were forced to forfeit the game, which they were winning by three touchdowns. After that, Adrienne was known around Zephyrhills High School as Sparky. “Even my teachers called me Sparky,” she said. “It was so awful. Every time I hear that name, I think of that night and how humiliating it was. Finally, I got so depressed I dropped out of school and came here. Someone sent one of the Sheilas the story from the Zephyrhills High Times and she was quick to spread it around. I don’t care, though. I’m still determined to become a majorette someday.” She told Delores how since her arrival, nearly seven months earlier, she’d been attempting, without any success, to insinuate baton routines into the mermaid shows.

  Twirling a baton underwater, thought Delores. It can’t be done.

  THE SEBRING TRIO figured Delores, with her fancy clothes and famous parents, for a snob, so they rejected her before she could them. During her second week there, Delores landed the role of one of the Lost Boys in “Peter Pan.” Helen was playing Wendy. One afternoon, Helen got confused and couldn’t find the air hose. Delores saw her panic. Without stepping out of her role, she swam over to her, took her hand, and pulled her over to the nearest hose as if she were introducing Wendy to some magic hideaway in Never Never Land.

  After the show, she stood next to Helen under the hot shower. “Thank you for helping me out down there,” Helen said in almost a whisper.

  “No big deal,” said Delores.

  “I suppose not,” said Helen.

  They didn’t speak again for another three weeks. During that time, Delores got slightly larger roles, first as a fan dancer in “Carnival in Rio,” and then as one of the von Trapp children in “The Sound of Music.” Her skin had turned the color of chestnuts, and the sun was starting to bleach her hair. But her real beauty flourished in the Springs. There were no boundaries between Delores and the water. She embraced its swells and tempo and moved through it with airy grace. Even the girls who wished her the least well were charmed by her natural affinity with it. On the Friday night after Delores received a standing ovation for her solo performance of “Climb Every Mountain,” Blonde Sheila came up to Delores as they were leaving the amphitheater.

  “I like whiskers on kittens, too,” she said in a strangely provocative manner.

  “Uh, tha
nks,” said Delores.

  “So listen: me, Sheila, and Helen are hitchhiking into Port Richey tonight. There’s this place, Hot Chick. You cannot believe how incredible their fried chicken is. We were thinking that maybe you’d want to come with us. What do you say?”

  Molly, who was standing next to Delores, placed her hand over the scar on her neck, as if by hiding it, she might be chosen this time. She shot her a look that said, If you go with them and leave me behind, I will put a knife through my heart. So Delores told Blonde Sheila that she was expecting a phone call from her parents, who were on the road.

  “You don’t want to be hanging out with them,” said Molly later. “Bad news, bad reputations. You know what I mean.” So while the others went off to Hot Chick that night, she and Molly stayed behind with Adrienne and her best friend, sad Sharlene from Homestead. They listened to a Bee Gees album, and another one by Chicago. Sharlene had long, thick blonde hair that she seemed to haul around. Since she never looked up, except when Adrienne spoke, the hair served as a shroud. She allowed as how, sometimes underwater, her hair would drape her face and she would get momentarily disoriented. “Why don’t you try wearing a headband?” asked Delores. Sharlene and Adrienne exchanged startled looks. “That’s a great idea,” said Adrienne. Sharlene nodded. It was only eight thirty. Molly suggested that maybe they go watch some TV. Adrienne smiled and said, “I have a better idea. Let’s twirl.” Sharlene jumped up to retrieve the baton that Adrienne had given her. Adrienne ran to get hers. Delores whispered to Molly, “How much longer do we have to do this?”

  When Delores landed the lead role of one of two sirens in “Song of the Sea,” Scary Sheila rationalized it to the other two: “She’s new meat. Thelma likes new meat.” Still, the three of them decided to invite her to one of their “try-on” sessions. That’s when they’d try on each other’s clothes then borrow something from the others in order to make it look as if they had bigger wardrobes. Molly said it was because they wanted to wear all of Delores’s fancy clothes that they’d invited her. Delores didn’t care; she was pleased to be asked. But out of loyalty to Molly, she laughed and said: “I’m way bigger than you guys. Nothing will fit.” By now, she and Molly were definitely best friends. In the dormitory, their beds were side by side. They even tried to work the same shifts.