The Girl with the Mermaid Hair

by Delia Ephron

  Sukie loved the tennis club. There were precision-cut square hedges between courts and freshly mowed grass all around. When Sukie arrived for her private lesson at ten on Sunday morning, she always saw the mow marks. Sukie loved any way that anything could be made to look more orderly, including nature. She didn’t like the ocean, a poetic deficiency she would rather die than admit. A walk on the beach gave her a severe case of the jumps. Those tumbling waves rushing toward her, the endless water, God knows what underneath.

  If only the ocean could be mowed.

  While she zipped her racket into a canvas bag and pulled on a sweatshirt, Vince gave her a pep talk. Sukie suppressed the inclination she had at every lesson to recommend sunblock, SPF 60. It was late for that anyway. From playing in the sun for years—Sukie guessed he was ancient, practically sixty—Vince’s face was a leathery brown and creased in every direction. Even fine lines around his eyes and across his entire forehead crisscrossed, fascinating her. How did that happen?

  “Who are you playing next week?” Vince scratched his potbelly.

  “Copley Hills. They’re tough.”

  “Picture yourself winning. That’s the ticket. Visualize. Are you paying attention, missy? Look me in the eye.”

  Sukie focused.

  “Do you see your opponent crumbling as your shots whiz by? Are you walking around with your arms aloft holding a trophy? Is the crowd cheering? Tell me.”

  “I’m holding a trophy.” What an embarrassing thing to say.

  “Eh, what?” Vince cocked an ear forward.

  “I’m holding a trophy,” she declared more boldly, still feeling idiotic.

  He opened a cooler, handed her a water, and unscrewed one for himself. He took loud gulps. Sukie quenched her own sizable thirst silently, taking little sips, lots of them. She didn’t like it when her body made noise.

  Vince snapped the cap between his fingers. It flew through the air into the garbage can. “It won’t happen unless you believe it.”

  Sukie choked. Some water came out of her nose. “What?”

  “It won’t happen unless you believe it. Nothing ever does.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Ace true. Repeat that.”

  “Repeat what?” She pretended not to know because she didn’t want to say it.

  “Nothing happens unless you believe it.”

  “Nothing happens unless you believe it,” she said.

  “Like you mean it.”

  “Nothing happens unless you believe it.” She verbally committed but quaked inside. What a nightmare. Wasn’t that in conflict with “Nothing happens if you want it to,” the truth Sukie had unearthed, the one that provided psychic comfort or potentially could if only she had mastered the not wanting part? Could love and tennis be polar opposites? Did you have to want it to win a game, but not want it to win love? Her brain clouded up. She was getting mixed up about which was which. Nothing happens if you want it to. Nothing happens unless you believe it. Suddenly they sounded the same but they weren’t. How could she keep them straight? Should she do one and not the other? Which one?

  Getting confused, Sukie instinctively reached for her phone, her security blanket. She snapped a picture of Vince, then of herself. She’d found that if she took a photo of the person she was with, the person never found it odd that she’d snapped a selfie as well. “Are you keeping a photographic record of our classes?” asked Vince.

  “I may.”

  “Shoot, I left my hair at home.”

  Vince cracked that joke a lot. It must be hard to be bald, thought Sukie.

  As soon as he greeted his next client, she deleted the photo of Vince and checked her selfie. She zoomed in on her mouth. Beads of sweat are sexy, she decided, admiring herself. Sweat was sexy if it didn’t smell and was sprinkled as opposed to saturated (i.e. damp circles under the arms). Sukie never smelled because she was virtually laminated. Every morning and after every shower, she started in the middle of her arm, rolled the deodorant up to her armpit and then down her side halfway to her waist. In the sweat sense she was smell proof, but she was pleased to see delicate pearls of perspiration and a flattering pink in her cheeks.

  Shouldering her heavy bag, she headed over to her dad. His match was over. Sukie was sure he’d won, he usually did, and he was chatting at the net with Frank, the man he always played with. Frank, divorced, was dating the club bartender, Marie, who always gave Sukie and Mikey free Cokes and as many pretzel sticks as they wanted. She frequently leaned across the bar to kiss Frank, and everyone turned to look. It drove Frank crazy. “Cut it out,” he always said. “You’ll get me thrown out.”

  “I flashed him once,” she told Sukie and Mikey.

  “What’s that?” said Mikey.

  “My boob. I flashed my naked boob at him. It was Sunday morning and all these uptight people were drinking Bloody Marys, and none of them noticed.”

  Mikey had fallen in love right then and there.

  Whenever they came to the club, he snuck into the bar to see Marie, which wasn’t allowed unless you were with a parent. Sukie always found him perched on a bar stool, waiting to see that boob, praying that she would flash it once more. No one had any idea of the fantastic amount of time Mikey spent thinking about Marie’s boobs, or in what improbable context they figured. The other night he’d built his mashed potatoes in the shape of a boob, Marie’s, before he ate them.

  Sukie suspected Mikey was hanging with Marie right now.

  Her phone vibrated. She stopped. She had a text. Had she had it a minute ago and not even noticed? She tapped. It was from her mom. HOME BY THREE. DON’T BE SHOCKED. XOX MOM. Shocked? Why would she be shocked? Had her mom dropped a ton of weight at the spa? Did Dad know she was coming home today? “Hey, Dad!” Sukie clapped her hand over her mouth. What was she thinking? No one ever shouted near the courts. It could startle a player into missing a shot. She hurried instead while the phone vibrated again. She glanced down. Bobo.

  Sukie slowed as a sense of gratitude suffused her, gratitude to whom she didn’t know, but it was the most peaceful feeling. Probably the thanks were to herself for believing or not believing, or wanting or not wanting, or getting into whatever mind-set necessary to make this happen.

  She was in no rush to read what he’d texted. She knew it could set off fireworks of anxiety or confusion.

  Letting her duffel bag slide off her shoulder, she savored the moment, drinking in the letters identifying the texter, B-o-b-o.

  That was her state of mind, looking inward with joy, not outward. It was a glorious autumn day. The leaf colors, vibrant oranges and yellows, might have been selected by Sukie’s mom after studying swatches for months, the sky picked for its intense high-contrast cobalt blue. The outdoors mixed and matched, each element popped. “I could sell this day,” her dad sometimes remarked when it was especially nice out, and, no question, today he could sell fall. And that is why it was even more remarkable that Sukie looked straight ahead and saw nothing but the happiness in her heart, and certainly not the man in the red Windbreaker who walked onto her dad’s court. She didn’t notice him until he punched her dad in the stomach and, when her dad doubled over, slugged him in the face. Her dad toppled as if he weighed nothing at all, the way Mikey’s toy soldiers did when her brother once got into a rage and kicked them.

  Flopman

  “DADDY!”

  Sukie streaked down the path, jumped a hedge, shortcut across the grass and jumped another hedge, and when she landed again on the brick path next to his court, crashed into a stroller. A drum beat in her chest—Be all right, be all right, be all right. “Daddy!” While her first bellow had been from shock, this second was a wail of worry. Warren Jamieson still lay flat. His tennis partner hunched over him. “Daddy,” she called, “I’m coming, Daddy.” Fear sucked her energy away in a sudden whoosh, and her legs weakened. Slogging along, her legs now as soft and heavy as sandbags, she let out great honking breaths that would have embarrassed her to death had she b
een remotely aware of them. She rubbed her hand across her face, her eyes were blurred. The man in the red Windbreaker strode toward her quickly.

  Sukie shuddered backward, cowering, barely daring to blink. He passed, thank God, he passed. She had taken another heavy step forward when she felt her arm seized. Later she couldn’t remember his face, just a grimness, and when he spoke he barely unclenched his jaw. “Your dad’s slime. Never forget it.”

  Sukie yanked her arm free or thought she did. He might have released it. He kept going. Sukie swung around. Her dad was sitting up now.

  Flopman.

  He looked like Flopman, the stuffed body made from white sheets and string that their neighbors at their old house propped up on their porch each Halloween, next to a big pumpkin.

  Frank, helping to position a towel on her father’s bloody face, tilted her dad’s head so his neck no longer appeared broken.

  She ran onto the court. “Dad?” She squatted next to him.

  He moved the towel so he could see her with half an eye. “Hey, kiddo.”

  She burst into uncontrollable tears, lost her balance, and plopped sideways.

  “Stop, honey, baby, Daddy’s okay.”

  Sukie, her ass on the asphalt, her legs splayed in front of her, let the tears fall.

  A few club members were venturing hesitantly onto the court. They bent forward in a curious way as if they were looking for something suspicious under a house. Closing in, they lobbed inquiries: Was he all right, what happened? “Heart attack?” someone whispered, and someone else shook his head vigorously no.

  “Call the police,” Sukie blurted loudly.

  The police. Bystanders spread that like gossip. A few produced phones.

  “No, no.” Her dad tried a laugh. “I think my daughter means I might need an ambulance, which I don’t.”

  Sukie hadn’t meant that at all. An ambulance? It hadn’t crossed her mind, although perhaps it should have. What about the grim man in the red Windbreaker?

  “Baby, get this damned headband off me.”

  Sukie scrambled up. She had a job with a grave responsibility. It was just like in those English movies on PBS where fashionable girls volunteered to become nurses, tending injured soldiers in World War II (or was it World War I, she was never sure), tenderly unwrapping bandages over hideous gaping wounds, their hair stylishly coiffed, their aprons stiff and spanking white with attractive red crosses on them. Now, with her dad able to speak, even summon his reassuring mellow confidence, she slipped into that familiar place where she wasn’t only in the world—the world was watching.

  She stood over her dad and, placing her hands on either side of his head, tugged gently. The band slipped up and off. She released the bloody side and held it gingerly by the clean side, pinching it between her fingers.

  “Get Mikey,” he instructed her. “Come on, Frank, help me up.”

  Frank locked his arm under her dad’s. “One, two…” On Frank’s “three,” her dad made it to standing, although bent at the waist. Sukie could see that each breath he took hurt. “You might have a cracked rib,” said Frank.

  Sukie remained mesmerized by her dad’s painful breathing.

  “Get your brother,” he told her. “Hurry up. Meet me at the car.”

  With all eyes on her, inflating the importance of her mission, Sukie flew to do her father’s bidding. She couldn’t help but notice as she ran swiftly that players on every court had stopped their games. At the net, on the baseline, wherever the last point had left them, they stayed. Alerted initially by Sukie’s shriek, they had halted their own dramas to make sense of her dad’s.

  Sukie tore into the clubhouse and stopped at the entrance to the bar. “Mikey.” She waved him toward her. When he casually spun on the bar stool, a row of pretzel sticks poking out of his mouth, she marched over and roughly yanked him. “Hurry up.”

  “Ow.” He jerked his arm away.

  “Someone hurt Dad. Just shut up and come.”

  Mikey, racing to keep up as they rushed to the car, kept asking what happened, and Sukie refused to tell him, partly to keep him agitated, he deserved it, though she wasn’t sure why, and partly because she was so anxious herself.

  Mom

  “I GOT into a fistfight,” her dad told Mikey, who fell silent at the sight of him and behaved, in Sukie’s opinion, in a way that no one should.

  “Stop staring.” She slapped Mikey on the back, although she was just as riveted as he was by the sight of her agile dad, bent and bloodied, moving across the gravel as if every step were an accomplishment.

  When the whole family had first visited their nearly finished, brand-new development home, it was sitting on a dirt lot on Lilac Drive, bare except for four birch trees. Their tall skinny trunks had twiggy branches lush with leaves. “Don’t love them, they’re history,” her dad told her mom. “They’re growing where the driveway’s going.” A man was already sawing one of them, and it was tilting, tilting, tilting. Then it fell, not with a crash but with a slow sigh. Sukie kept imagining that her dad would sigh over in the same way, but he didn’t. With Frank’s help, he wedged his body behind the wheel. Not easy. The strain and pain were biological proof of how everything is connected: His stomach hurt, and his muscles and ribs were bruised, which meant that to get his legs into the car, he had to lift each one up and into driving position. Every so often his lips tightened into a wince, causing his eyes to squint and then fly wide open when the squinting triggered pain in his cheek, where a red bruise spread from there down the left side of his face.

  “Get in back, hurry up, dope.” She pushed Mikey in.

  “Who’d you fight with?” Mikey asked as they drove home.

  “An idiot.”

  “Why?”

  “Business. It’s just business.”

  “What business?”

  “Leave Dad alone. He’s hurt,” said Sukie.

  “A building,” said her dad. “He wants it, I got it. He’s a sore loser.”

  “Are you in the mob?” asked Mikey.

  “Nothing as interesting as that.”

  “Mom’s coming home today,” Sukie piped up, realizing as she said it how happy and relieved she was. “She said she’d be home by three. She texted me—” Sukie did not fully get the word “me” out of her mouth. It died on her lips, dealt a knockout blow by the word “texted,” which she said, and then heard, and then remembered.

  Her breath caught in her chest. With sharp, shrieking intakes she fought for air.

  “What the hell?” Her dad braked quickly.

  Her elbows winged up, a spasm. Was she going to flap like her mom? Am I a flapper? Is it genetic? Strange thoughts can flit through your head even when you’re struggling to do something as essential as breathing. Perhaps if she’d leaped off a skyscraper, she might think, My hair’s dirty, or I wish I had a cat, before she hit the sidewalk. Or, as a noose tightened around her neck, which was exactly how Sukie felt this second, she might be struck with one last burst of self-knowledge: I’m a flapper too.

  “Get air,” her dad barked.

  She hit the button to lower the window.

  “Put your head down,” he said, and unsnapped her seat belt.

  She bent forward and let her head drop between her knees. “My cell,” she choked out.

  “Yourself?”

  “My cell. My cell phone. It’s gone!” Her wail broke the jam—she could breathe again.

  “Are you kidding?”

  She sat up. “No.”

  “You mean this fit is about your phone? Your silly phone?”

  “I must have dropped it. When I was running. When I saw you. My racket, too.” Her bottom lip trembled.

  “Christ.” Her dad smacked the steering wheel. “Are you going to cry?”

  Sukie shook her head.

  He shot Mikey a look in the rearview mirror. “What about you?”

  Mikey shrank back in his seat.

  Her dad reached to open the glove compartment but gave up with
a grimace. “Christ,” he said again, and there was blame in his voice. Sukie could hear it. It was her fault for making him forget his injuries and do something as stupid as reach. “My phone’s in the glove compartment. Call a friend at the club and ask her to find it.”

  “Can we go back?”

  “No.”

  “My whole life is in that phone,” said Sukie. But what she was thinking was, My heart is in that phone. Maybe my future. Bobo’s text. She’d never get to read it.

  “I’m not going back to the club.” Her dad pulled into traffic.

  He’s never going back to the club. How did she know that? Why did she know that?

  “Don’t you have a friend at the club?”

  “No,” said Sukie.

  “No one?” He threw her a curious look.

  “No.” She kept her eyes low.

  “Then call Mrs. Merenda and ask her to look for your stuff. I’m sure someone found it.”

  Sukie took her dad’s phone out of the glove compartment. She punched in her own number. Answer, someone please answer, she prayed, and then reversed herself, Don’t answer, please don’t answer. Was it better if someone had her precious cell phone with Bobo’s text message in it, or was it better if the phone was lying on the grass somewhere waiting to be found? After a bunch of rings she heard her own voice, “Hi, this is Sukie, I really appreciate your call. Leave a message please.” Oh, man, could my voice-mail message be any more lame? Sukie clicked off with dismay and dialed the club.

  “Hi, Mrs. Merenda,” Sukie chirped so adorably, so innocently, so helplessly that she might be a baby chick who had broken its shell and was announcing its arrival to the world. She laid her catastrophe on Mrs. Merenda in an endless run-on sentence, the words tumbling after one another, some um’s and uh’s sprinkled in to generate maximum sympathy.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Merenda. “Someone was talking to me, could you repeat that?”