Swim to Me

by Betsy Carter

  Strange, this sudden intimacy. When there were fifteen hundred miles between them, her mother became a cartoon figure, someone she could parody in a few short sentences. But this close, it was more complicated. She saw things in her mother that reminded her of herself: how hard she kept trying even though the odds seemed stacked against her, how much alike they looked. They both had the same big, strong feet. She thought about her father and how he had ended up at the circus, while she was at a tourist attraction not even twenty miles away; about his affinity for the elephants and her own for the turtles and dolphins. She was connected to these people in the most primal ways, yet she knew so little about them.

  She patted her mother’s feet dry with a towel.

  “I can’t remember the last time I felt taken care of like this,” said her mother.

  Delores wondered if this was true.

  “Oh, Bert, you are too much.”

  As she shook up a bottle of Pinky Pink polish, she tried to sound casual as she asked: “Mom, who’s Bert?”

  “Oh, Bert.” Her mother raised her hand then dropped it again. Her eyes were still closed.

  Delores waited. “So who is he?”

  “Just a friend.”

  “What kind of friend?”

  “A friend friend!”

  “Is he a friend that Westie knows?”

  “What is this, What’s My Line? He’s a friend; that’s all you need to know.” Her mother sat up.

  “Don’t move, or you’ll smudge,” said Delores, grabbing her by the ankle. “Okay, forget about Bert for a moment. What about getting a sitter for Westie? What will you do when we leave?”

  “I’m trying to find help—what can I do? Maybe your friend Lester would like to stick around and babysit.”

  “Very funny.” Delores kept polishing.

  “Why not, he’s kind of cute.”

  “Seriously, Mom, you’re having a tough time, aren’t you?”

  “That is an understatement,” said her mother, her eyes welling up with tears. “Westie’s a sweet boy, but he’s a handful. And with no male authority around, I worry . . .”

  “Look here, you like the color?” asked Delores, blowing on her mother’s pink toenails.

  “Pretty. You do nice work, hon.”

  Delores opened a bottle of sealer. “Listen, Mom, I have this idea. Let me finish before you say anything. Seeing as I’m making pretty good money, and I work at a place that’s always filled with young people, well, I thought that maybe Westie could come down to Weeki Wachee and stay with me for a little while. Not long or anything, a few weeks maybe. Just think about it. He’d be outdoors every day; there’d be lots for him to do. He’d never be lonely, and there’d always be someone around to watch him.”

  “What are you saying, Delores?” Her mother’s voice was clotted with anger.

  “Just that you could use a break, and maybe Westie could come down and be with me for a little while.” The pungent smell of sealer filled the room.

  “What kind of a mother do you think I am?” She pulled her feet off her daughter’s lap and sat upright. “I know you’re a hotshot star down there, so maybe you’ve forgotten about your mom back home. Well let me refresh your memory. My mother left us when I was two years old. I was a teenager when I had you. My husband walked out on me. Then you up and go to Florida to do this mermaid thing, leaving me alone with your baby brother. And now you want to take him from me ‘for a little while’? Do you have any idea how that makes me feel? Where would that leave me in all this? Does anyone ever consider my feelings? Tissues. Where are the friggin’ tissues?” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “Here,” said Delores, giving her mother some of the cotton balls in her bag. “Now, can I say something?”

  “No, let me finish. I work pretty damn hard to keep my life going. To keep my dignity. I know you send me money every month, thank you very much. But frankly, I am sick of everything always being about you. I have a life, too.”

  “Yeah, well I see how your life is; I see exactly how it is.”

  “You see nothing, young lady. You see exactly what you want to see. If you are saying that I am a bad mother, then you have no idea what a bad mother is. I’m still here, aren’t I? I have sacrificed a helluva lot to make a home for that boy, which is more than I can say about you or your beloved father.”

  If she got derailed right now she might never find her way back, so Delores kept her anger inside. “You’re right,” she said. “Which is why I want to help out. This wouldn’t be forever. And it could be really good for you. You could quit the job at the supermarket. Maybe you could even do some more work for your friend at the magazine—Avon, or whatever her name is.”

  “Avalon,” said her mother pointing to the cotton balls. “I need more of those.” She wiped her nose and dabbed her eyes. “There is one thing. Avalon has said a couple of times that, if I could find the time, maybe the magazine would pay to send me to secretarial school to learn typing and shorthand. She says they need more trained clerical help. But that’s ridiculous. What am I talking about? Am I going to send a three-year-old to live with a bunch of mermaids, a bunch of freaks? No, no, that’s crazy. Westie stays with me and that’s that.”

  God, her mother was the most annoying person in the world. She really brought out the worst in her. Delores thought about Dave Hanratty and about what he might say in this situation. “If you had some time off from taking care of Westie, you could go to secretarial school and learn some real skills. You’d never have to take any stupid job just because it’s there. You’d earn good money. Don’t you see? You’d get to call the shots. This could change everything.”

  Her mother sniffled as she listened.

  When she finally did speak, her voice was nasally and girlish. “That part makes sense. The part about sending Westie with you, that part’s just nuts. Lemme sleep on it.”

  Her mother yawned. “It’s getting late. I need my beauty rest. Want to keep me company while I set my hair?”

  Delores sat on her mother’s bed, watching as she took little pieces of hair, twirled them around her finger, then clipped them with metal pin-curlers. When she finished, she wrapped a blue hairnet, babushka-style, around the construction site atop her head. “And you think I’m a freak?” Delores couldn’t contain herself.

  “Takes one to know one,” her mother said and laughed.

  Delores smiled weakly. “So you’ll think on it, on all the stuff we talked about.”

  “Yeah, we’ll talk tomorrow. Sleep well. And don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” she winked and nodded toward where Lester was sleeping. Delores rolled her eyes and went off to the pullout couch in the living room.

  When she got up the next morning, she found her mother already sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee in one hand and the Yellow Pages resting on her knees. She’d taken the hairnet off and the pin-curlers out but hadn’t yet combed out her hair. As she leaned over the phone book, hair pieces fell over her face like party streamers. “So lookee here,” she said, poking her finger at a little ad in the middle of the page: Jump Start Your Career Now, it read. Learn All the Clerical Skills You need to be a Professional. The Marcie Breitman Learning Center.

  “Grab a pencil, hon, and write down this number. This one seems to be close by.” Delores wrote down what her mother said, then asked: “Does this mean you’ve made up your mind?”

  “About what?”

  “You know, about Westie coming to Weeki Wachee, and all that,” she said impatiently.

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. I’ll call some of these places, and then let’s see where we’re at.”

  This was better than nothing, thought Delores.

  “What are you kids going to do today?” asked her mother, pushing a curl off her forehead.”

  “Mom, why is your hair like that? Why didn’t you just comb it out?”

  “You know, sometimes I’m glad you left home. I really don’t need a
critical seventeen-year-old watching me all the time. But if you must know, I don’t think it’s right for a man—even your cute young friend in there—to see a woman with her hair set. So I took out the pin-curlers in order to be presentable, but then wanted my coffee real bad, so I didn’t bother to do the rest. Is that all right with you?”

  “Yeah, it’s fine with me. Only you look a little like George Washington.”

  The conversation might have gone downhill fast had Westie not called from the bedroom. Delores tiptoed in to get him. Lester was still asleep on his side; he’d thrown off his covers and she could see his bare shoulder. It was tan and muscular and reminded her of the wing of one of those giant ospreys that flew over the Springs. She was still in her slippers and robe, and she paused as she was about to pick up Westie, who had the sour odor of a morning child. In the dappled light that seeped through the crevices of the Venetian blinds, it would have been the most cozy, natural thing in the world to run her finger lightly down Lester’s back, just as a way of saying how are you. Only the presence of her mother in the other room stopped her. Lord knows if her mother saw that, she’d never hear the end of it.

  Delores took Westie into the kitchen and cuddled him in her lap as they sat at the table, across from her mother with her bizarre George Washington–do, still skimming the Yellow Pages. How long had it been since there were this many Walkers in the apartment? In the Walker home?

  Home was a funny word, thought Delores, warm and empty at the same time. When she thought of home, she thought of towels on the bathroom floor, toast crumbs spilled on the kitchen counter from the morning’s breakfast, half-finished sentences shouted from room to room. A dull ache filled Delores’s stomach. It was that same sensation that had gnawed at her on those cold Sundays when she’d lock herself in the bathroom to drown out the sound of her parents’ fighting. Only this time, the feeling that was snaking up inside her wasn’t hers. She felt it for her mother, imagining what it would be like for her to sit in this home by herself, so quiet and alone.

  Her mother looked up from the phone book abruptly, as if nudged on the shoulder by her daughter’s thoughts. “Well hon, I’d love to chat. But I don’t have all day. Some of us work for a living.”

  “I know, Mom, but there’s one more thing I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

  Her mother stiffened, as if awaiting a blow.

  “You know the back of your closet, where you keep your old fox stole and stuff?” Delores continued. “Go look behind that, there’s something there for you.”

  “Now?” asked her mother.

  “Yeah, now’s a good time,” said Delores.

  Her mother went to the closet and came back holding the Crown Royal bag half filled with coins. “Where did this come from?” she asked, holding the bag away from her.

  “Dad collected them. Didn’t you know that?”

  Her mother shook her head, as if trying to rid it of an old memory. “No, not really,” she said.

  “Well, they’re for you.”

  Her mother seemed embarrassed and clearly wanted to move off of the subject. “So, what are your plans for today?” she asked.

  Delores’s old friend, Ellen Frailey, had said she would pick up her and Westie and Lester and take them to Orchard Beach for the day. So Delores was only half lying when she said, “Oh, Ellen’s going to drive over.”

  Her mother scraped back her kitchen chair. “It beats me how that friendship has survived. She probably has all these fancy Riverdale friends by now. Well, you are a novelty, I will say that.”

  And just like that, all of the sympathy Delores had been accruing for her mother that morning went out the window and down the sewer right in front of their apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.

  AS THEY RODE toward Orchard Beach in Ellen’s Toyota, Delores and Lester savored the briny fish smell of the water. They’d been on land for four days now. To them, that was akin to drowning, and although the soupy water of Orchard Beach was not comparable to the crystalline Springs, just the sight of it felt restorative. They spread their blanket on the beach, anchoring each corner with a shoe. Ellen had greeted Delores with a big hug when they first saw each other. “You are more gorgeous than I remembered,” she’d said when she walked into the apartment. She’d picked up Westie and told him what a big boy he was, then thrown her arms around Lester and told him how happy she was to meet him. Delores was relieved that Ellen hadn’t changed all that much, even if she did have a lot of fancy new friends.

  When they got to the beach, they settled on the blanket for about two minutes before Delores shot Lester a look that said, “Let’s go in.” She asked Westie to dig the biggest hole that anyone had ever dug and said she was sure Ellen would help. Then she and Lester ran down to the beach, dove in, and swam for a while. Lester came up beside Delores. “Wanna put on a show?” he asked. “Here?” she answered. “Why not?” he said. “I’ll bet none of these people have ever seen live mermaids before.” She glanced toward the shore where ladies were going into the water only waist deep so as not to mess their hair. Couples with kids were sitting on blankets eating sandwiches and potato chips. Two older couples were playing cards. “Bet you’re right,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

  The saltwater stung their eyes, but they hardly noticed. They thrust themselves into swanlike forward leaps, keeping their arms, legs, and heads back as they swam forward; they spun pinwheels, turning somersaults with their back legs bent toward their heads and their front legs bent; they flew into a Weeki Wachee maneuver, the knee-back dolphin, doing back flips with one leg straight and one leg bent. From the shore, they looked like a pair of sharks who’d suddenly slipped into town, their swift motions cutting sharp angles in the surf. By and by, a crowd gathered. Delores spotted Ellen and Westie. Ellen waved and gave her the thumbs-up. She picked up Westie and he waved, too. Lester went through his dance sequence from “The Merfather.” Some of the ladies waded in up to their shoulders so they could get a closer look. Delores and Lester moved smoothly and quickly in every direction, making startling turns, melting into the ripples, and seemingly never coming up for air. Nearly half an hour went by before they finished. When they finally stood up and walked toward shore, the crowd applauded. Delores overheard one woman say to another, “He’s a real hunk, isn’t he?” She was pointing at Lester.

  Later in the afternoon, Delores took Westie for a ride on her back, just as she had done a few months earlier in the Springs. “Hang on, buddy,” she yelled, as she rode the waves out to where the water was calmer. This time, there were no turtles, just clumps of seaweed and an old beer can. As she dried him off, she asked him if he liked the water. He stuck out his tummy and nodded his head. “Yes,” he said. “I like it a lot.”

  She rubbed his hair dry and said, “Westie, can you keep a secret?” Again he nodded.

  “Mommy doesn’t know we came here today. This is just between us, so let’s not tell her, okay?”

  Sensing that this was part of some great adventure, he nodded solemnly, then pulled her by the hand. “Swim,” he said. “I want to swim.”

  “Would you like to come back to Florida with me? You could swim every day. You could see the turtles.”

  Westie considered her offer for only a moment. “Okay, I’ll come.”

  “Are you sure? You’d have to leave Mommy for a while. But I would be with you every day. Maybe you could also meet an elephant.”

  Westie nodded again. “Yes, I can see the turtles and elephants.”

  Delores hugged him. “Okay then. This is another secret, just between us. Promise?”

  “I promise,” he said.

  Twenty-three

  The first night Westie spent in the dorm, he cried himself to sleep. In between sobs, he’d say, “Mommy, I want my mommy.” The more the girls tried to comfort him, or sing to him, the louder he cried. He calmed down only after Delores promised to take him to the elephants the next day, but by then he was also exhausted.

  The follow
ing morning, Delores and Westie walked down to the Springs, where they found her father waist-deep in the water next to Nehru. He was murmuring to Nehru, who appeared to be bending down so she could hear him. Delores watched for a while before hollering: “Hello. Umm, hello.” He turned toward her and she pointed down at Westie. “Look who’s here.”

  Westie stared at the man in the water who, though he looked remarkably similar to him—short and round, like a hatbox—was a complete stranger. Roy stared back, all the while stroking Nehru’s trunk. At one time or another, most children with siblings wonder if, should they all be drowning, whom their father would save first. Most probably wouldn’t answer: the elephant. She thought back to their conversation of the week before, and how he’d said: “I like working with the animals, and for the most part, people leave me alone.” He looked at peace there, in the water with Nehru. She’d never thought about peace, and what it was. But if he felt about Nehru the way she felt every time she swam in the Springs, then that was peace. That was home.

  Her father whispered something to the elephant, then climbed out of the water. He crouched down on his knees and stared into Westie’s face. “Well, well,” he said. Had he noticed the gap between Westie’s two front teeth? Just like his gap. “Well, well,” he said again, a grin creeping over his face. Westie squinted and moved a step closer to Delores.

  “Westie, do you know who this is?” she asked. “This is your father. Your daddy,” she said, knowing full well that just because you call someone your daddy, doesn’t mean you feel it. “Daddy,” she said again. Even saying the word made her feel peculiar, though for all Westie cared, she might as well have said: This is the man in the moon.

  Roy scanned the boy with his eyes. “So, young man, how do you like it here so far?” His voice, too loud and too singsong, betrayed his discomfort with children.

  “We just got in last night,” said Delores. “He bunked with me in the dorm and was a big hit with the girls, weren’t you, Westie? We’re going swimming later. Westie likes to swim.”