Swim to Me

by Betsy Carter

  “Okay doll, you can sit,” said Sommers. Delores held on to both sides and lowered herself into the water until only her head was visible over the rim. She knew right away it wasn’t working, that from the camera’s point of view she must have looked like a bobbing tennis ball.

  One of the cameramen called Sommers to come look through his lens. “You can’t even see her tits,” he whispered. “What the hell’s the point if you can’t see her tits?” Sommers bit down on his college ring. Then his quacky voice filled up the airtight studio. “This is not a barnyard, this is a local television station,” he shouted. “There will be no smart talk or foul language around Miss Taurus. She is a part of our team now, and you will treat her with respect. End of story. That’s all she wrote.”

  It was his last words that gave Delores the clue. Thelma.

  Sometimes when she least expected it, something like this would happen to remind Delores that she wasn’t as alone as she thought she was: a talk with Molly, a letter from Ellen, and now this assurance that Thelma had taken her side. She remembered how once, when she was a little girl, she’d fallen asleep while sitting on the couch between her parents watching TV. She became vaguely aware of her father’s rough hands stroking her hair out of her face and the warm, safe feeling that settled over her. That’s how this felt.

  Delores could have told Sommers how to resolve the bathtub dilemma, but she had no desire to make his job any easier. So she waited until he came up with the brilliant idea himself. “I’ve got it!” He shook his fist in the air as if he’d just won the heavyweight title. “She’ll sit on the side of the tub with her tail in the water. That’s it. Now all we need is the tail. I need a tail!” he hollered. The interns were called into the studio. Sommers explained the situation, then sank his teeth into his college ring. “We’re not in London. This is fucking Florida. Excuse my French, doll,” he glanced at Delores. “Find me a mermaid’s tail. Now! You have exactly sixty minutes, sixty minutos. We go on the air in two hours. Don’t stand there staring at me. I don’t even know how to swim.” He reached into his pocket for another of those fig cookies.

  No one paid attention to Delores, who was still sitting in the tub. The interns looked beleaguered; one had his shirt hanging out of the back of his pants. They reminded Delores of how put-upon she and Molly felt each time Thelma Foote sent them in to clean the tank. The water in the tub had turned cold. She got out and stood by the anchor desk, a curious sight in her black tights and green scaly halter, and with her big, wet feet. One of the interns turned to her. He had shoulder-length hair, skinny arms, and soft baby hands. “You must be freezing,” he said. She nodded, hugging herself and trying to conceal her trembling. “Here,” he said, taking off his blue blazer. “Put it around you.”

  “I’m soaked,” she said.

  “I’m Armando.” He smiled.

  She slipped the jacket around her. “Wait a minute,” she called after him. He turned around. “I can help you.” She gave him the number at Weeki Wachee and told him to ask for Molly Pouncey. “Make sure you tell her I said to call, and tell her the tail is for me.”

  WHENEVER SOMMERS TALKED about the mermaid weathergirl, he would include the story of the last-minute tail hunt. “It came to me out of the blue,” he would say. “Suddenly, I have a vision of our gorgeous girl sitting on the edge of the tub swishing her tail. Only problem, there is no tail. I go crazy. We have less than a half hour. There’s got to be a tail somewhere around here. We got ducks and mice in Orlando, for chrissake, someone in this crazy state has to have a tail. So I tell my people, I say, ‘I don’t care what you do or how much you have to spend, just get me a damn tail.’ Miraculously, we find one. I send one of the boys way the hell out to the other side of the state, practically, to get it. Ever try to get anywhere fast during rush hour? I radio our guy in the traffic helicopter to help navigate our boy through shortcuts. I’m like Westmoreland over here, radioing our helicopter, then calling our boy on his CB with directions. He finally gets here with the tail—a fine piece it is, nearly three feet long—and with three minutes to spare, the genius security guard says, ‘Wait a minute, what’s that? You can’t take that thing into the studio.’ They call me and I run downstairs like the place is on fire. ‘Just gimme that,’ I say, grabbing the tail from the kid’s hand. The security guy’s busting a gut. I tell him if he wants to hold on to his job, to move over and let the tail through. I make it back upstairs with less than a minute to go. And the rest is history.”

  Sommers would tell the story with the self-aggrandizing bravado of a man in the midst of creating his own legend. He would relish saying that, had a tail not miraculously appeared at the last moment, he’d be back in Middletown, New York, selling light switches and ant traps in his father’s hardware store. In his telling, Armando, the intern who found the tail, went nameless. So did Molly and Helen, who were the ones who drove like the blazes to get the thing to the studio on time while Armando was sitting next to them, taking calls from Sommers on his CB and trying to sound as if he wasn’t going to throw up at any moment.

  People in the business who followed WGUP’s news ratings or read the trades would ultimately call Sommers a wizard. His detractors, offended by his sudden and public success, would snicker while calling him the Albert Einstein of local television. Although he would try to affect an air of modesty and self-deprecation by making himself the butt of the jokes when he told these stories, it was clear from his relish in telling them that he judged the enormous success of the show to be his alone.

  But anyone with a discerning eye who witnessed Delores’s debut that first night saw immediately that the girl had the kind of grace upon which infatuations are built and fortunes are made. The moment the camera turned on her, Delores swelled like a gorged bee. She stared out at the audience, her eyes wide and looking skyward, in a way that made it seem as if she had just emerged from the bottom of the sea. The short bangs gave a round innocence to her face, which she accentuated by modulating her voice to just above a whisper.

  Gripping the side of the tub with one hand, and holding the wooden pointer with the other, she extended her chest forward, cocked her head, and sent the right amount of quiver through her tail to make the water in the tub ripple just so. With her pointer, she made a swirling motion around the magnetic clouds hovering over Orlando to indicate the path of an oncoming cold front. She learned to write backward from the rear side of a Plexiglas map and talk about barometric pressure and wind currents with the ease of someone who had been speaking that language her entire life. Within weeks, Delores Taurus became a phenomenon in the Tampa area. Sommers decided to use only Delores as a weathergirl and not rotate her with the others. Women found her adorable; men thought she was sexy. Even little children sat through the first twenty minutes of the news, waiting for the mermaid lady to come on with the weather.

  Eleven

  The rain continued through March into early April, yet attendance was up at Weeki Wachee. At first, the other girls were excited by Delores’s success, thinking somehow it would rub off on them. But it quickly became clear that the increase in attendance was all about Delores. People would whistle and stomp their feet at the mere mention of her name, and when she was in one of the routines, all eyes were on her; the others might as well have been in the chorus. Even the marquee outside the park featured her name in big red letters: DELORES TAURUS LIVE! One afternoon, as she stood in front of the park waiting for the WGUP car to pick her up, Lester Pogoda came by. It wasn’t as if he’d casually wandered by; he’d been planning all day how he’d bump into her.

  “How you doing, Lester?” said Delores.

  “This weather, it’s killing my skin,” said Lester. “No sun for days, but I don’t have to tell you that, I guess.”

  People always talked to Delores about the weather now. She’d never understood how important it was in people’s lives. “Can’t you do something about this rain?” they’d ask her, as if by sticking a magnetic sun or thunderbolt on th
e screen, she could create a balmy day or swamp the place with thunder and rain. Was it her imagination, or was everyone at Weeki Wachee a little snippy to her right now because of the bad weather?

  “Yeah,” she said to Lester, “It’s starting to get me down, too. This weather job, I mean.”

  Lester looked surprised. “You’re not really having a hard time? I mean, with all this fame and everybody wanting to see you, you must feel like a million bucks.”

  “Oh, I feel okay. It’s just a lot, between working here and doing the news every night . . .”

  “Why don’t you rotate with some of the other girls here?” he asked.

  “Thelma. She won’t let me.”

  “I don’t want to add to your worries,” said Lester, choosing his words carefully. “But some of the girls are having a hard time with your fame. I can’t name names, but one of them is telling people that you’ve got something going on with that station-manager guy, Sommers or Winters or whatever.”

  Normally, Delores would have guessed that it was Blonde Sheila who was spreading that rumor, but ever since Blonde Sheila started dating the preacher at the Spring Hill Church, she’d been going to Bible school and finding religion. Blonde Sheila, who saw sex in everything and could cuss as well as any man, was trying awfully hard to become righteous in the hands of God and not half as much fun. “Who’s saying that?” she asked Lester.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said, shaking his head and closing his eyes. “The point is, it’s probably just jealousy, but they’re gossiping about you, and I thought you should know.”

  “And you? Are you gossiping about me, too?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, not meeting her stare. “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Just wondered.”

  That night, when Delores came back from the station, she noticed that someone had rearranged the letters on the marquee: DELORES TAURUS LIVE! now read DIVE U LOSER SLUT!

  The rain bonnets had become an ongoing joke, with the girls showing up to practice with them on their heads. Thelma even wore hers in the director’s booth one afternoon, that’s how buoyed her spirits were. One night, shortly after her conversation with Lester, Delores had a brainstorm of her own. After the camera was already on her, and the anchorman had introduced the weather segment, she whipped out a plastic bonnet that she had tucked into her halter. She tied it around her head and began her segment by saying, “Is it ever going to stop raining in the Tampa Bay area?” Later that night, she found herself seated next to Sharlene at dinner. Sharlene stared at her food as she talked, her face obliterated by a veil of hair. “That was a funny thing you did tonight on the news,” she said. “Thanks,” said Delores. “I didn’t know that anyone here was watching.”

  “Yeah, we all watch. We thought you were real cool tonight. For what it’s worth, Adrienne and I don’t believe what they’re saying about you and that TV producer.”

  “What’re they saying about me and that TV producer?” asked Delores.

  “Oh, nothing,” said Sharlene, lowering her veil of hair around her.

  Every night, after the lights went out, the conversation would inevitably take a turn toward sex. On this particular night, Blonde Sheila was talking about guys whose ding-dongs were so small you couldn’t even tell if they were inside you or not. Then Helen turned to Delores and said, “Speaking of small, what’s with you and that little TV guy? Is he going to make you a star, or is he just going to make you?”

  “There’s nothing going on between me and him,” said Delores. “He’s a real pig.”

  “Well, with you half-naked in that bathtub every night, the guy must have the worst case of blue balls in the state of Florida,” said Helen. In the darkness, she could hear the girls choking on their laughter. The next morning, Delores asked Molly whether blue balls were some kind of flower, and why was that so funny?

  Molly told her she thought it was a thing that guys got before they had sex, but the way she said it made Delores think that Molly had as little idea what they were as she did.

  After that night when she called Sommers a pig, it seemed as if the girls were less chilly toward her.

  A few evenings later, Delores confided to Otto, “I think things are going pretty well for me.” Although she didn’t say it directly, there was a slight flip in her tone that implied she felt hope for the future. Little Otto, who’d been stuck in an airless suitcase for way too long, was not feeling as sanguine as she was. For one thing, his white skirt was starting to yellow with age. In the past, Delores had hand-washed him, making sure to keep him pristine. Now he was relegated to under the bed, a secret too mortifying to be shared with anyone except Molly. Ordinarily, his voice was shrill. But lately, it had taken on a piteous tone of hurt and indignation. She’d barely gotten him situated on her hand before he started in: “Why are you letting them use you like this?” he demanded. “You’re a television star. How much money are you making? Not enough. Who’s getting all the credit? Mr. Brillo Head. Do you think they like you for your good personality and brains? Think again, doll. That’s what he calls you, isn’t it? Doll. But then I guess I’m not one to talk.”

  He started to laugh, making a loony, billowing sound. Molly was standing guard and, as promised, whispered their code word when the others were coming. “Lollapalooza,” she said. Then again, more urgently, “Lollapalooza!” Otto was shaking with laughter now and Delores worried his rhinestones might come loose. What was she to do but to put him back in the suitcase? Besides, she really didn’t want to hear what he was saying. Otto used to be an escape for Delores and the bleakness she felt about her life. With him came a world where there was quiet and order and beauty, and all of the things that she desired. When she played with him, that world became present to her. If anyone had seen them together, they’d have been charmed by the young girl inventing skits for her morose-looking puppet. It was her secret that, while she was acting them out, the skits were her life and the puppet her alchemist. Now Thelma Foote and Alan Sommers were the puppet masters, and she was in their hands. Otto was becoming irrelevant.

  She stared down at the sad little figure with his yellowing cotton skirt and made a mental note to wash him as soon as she could. She folded him carefully and placed him back in the suitcase. After she snapped the latch, she turned around to make sure that no one was coming. Then she patted the top of the suitcase as if it were the head of a bunny. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m really sorry.”

  HAD SHE GIVEN it a second thought, Delores might have remembered that the middle of April held meaning for her. But the way things were, she barely had time to attend to her own schedule. Since his success, Sommers had become feverish with ideas: he added goldfish to the bathtub and backup music appropriate to the day’s forecast (“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” during most of March, then “Here Comes the Sun” when the skies finally cleared), and he devised a rating scale for the weather ranging from one to five tails (really bad weather, one mermaid tail; perfect weather, five).

  All of these additions were a headache for the crew, but had little consequence for Delores—until Sommers had his latest epiphany. The viewers would phone in the details of their upcoming special occasions, and Delores would work them into her forecast. So every night, instead of just talking about scattered clouds and north-east winds, she’d have to recite all kinds of names and numbers: “Bartow’s Enid and Larry Swigert can expect isolated showers and eighty-nine percent humidity for their twenty-fifth anniversary bar-beque tomorrow night. But the skies will brighten early Saturday morning, when the thermometer will hit sixty-eight degrees with light humidity, just in time for Ronnie Frankel’s bar mitzvah at Beth David Synagogue.”

  “Scriptwriting isn’t in our contract,” Thelma announced to Sommers. “We need to renegotiate our fees.”

  “You don’t understand, do you? We are making television history,” he shot back. “We are reaching out to our audience. We’re saying, ‘Hey you out
there in the butt-hole of nowhere, you are just as important as we are. Your lives are our lives and we are one big, happy family.’ They hear Delores Taurus mention their names on television, or maybe their friends’ names or their first cousins’. Then they tune in again the next night to see if she names someone else they know. It’s personal. Personal, that’s the name of the game! They all feel as if she knows them.” He nipped at his college ring. “It’s genius. Pure genius, if I do say so myself. So tell me, Miss F., do you have a big birthday or special anniversary coming up? I could get your name on the air. I have some pull, you know.” He closed his eyes, shrugged his shoulders, and gave a little laugh, as if once again his keen wit had snuck up on him.

  Thelma put her hands on her sacrum and stuck out her stomach the way women who are late in their pregnancy do. “Let me make myself clear,” she said. “I honestly don’t care if you’re reaching out to the moon. A deal is a deal, and our deal didn’t call for my girl to have to memorize half the Tampa phone book. And yes, I do have a special day coming up. Tomorrow marks the three-month anniversary of the first time I shook your bony little hand and found myself knee-high in all your horse manure. You play your cards wrong, Mr. S., and tomorrow could also be the day we celebrate the last time Delores Taurus sits her pretty little fanny down in your precious little studio.”

  Thelma waited for Sommers to go back at her. In truth, she loved sparring with him. It was the closest she’d ever come to opening up to a man. Her jousts with him felt physical: a jab, a punch in the gut, a split lip. Often when they were finished, she felt spent and faintly satisfied. Mostly, men didn’t interest her one way or the other. All that strutting and preening and cock-a-doodle-dooing didn’t amount to a hill of beans when it came down to it. She’d never understood what all the fuss was about. But this shouting at a man, saying the crudest, meanest things she could think of, this had heat and fire and juice and all those semidisgusting words that women used when they talked about men.