The Girl with the Mermaid Hair

by Delia Ephron

  “Sukie.” Isabella tapped her shoulder.

  “Issy.” Sukie spun and threw her arms around her. Frannie and Jenna could see Issy’s surprise, the knitted brow, the awkward way she patted Sukie on the back. “I’m sorry,” said Sukie, letting go, stepping back, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I didn’t expect…It was seeing you and Sinatra.” She lowered her voice to a whisper, “My parents might be getting a divorce.” The tears squeezed out again.

  “Oh. Oh, dear.” Issy’s delicate hands danced up and she clapped them together. Sukie could see she was at a loss. “Look, you guys, take this table, no one will notice.” She scooted them to a booth in the back. “So here.” She distributed menus.

  “Have you seen him?” asked Sukie.

  “Seen him?”

  “Has my dad been here?”

  “Yes, two days ago. Was it two days ago? Yes, two days ago.”

  “Alone?” asked Sukie.

  Issy fussed with her hair, which was now a palomino blond, stabbing it with a clip. “He sat at the bar and watched the game.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “About what?”

  “You know, the situation.”

  “No. Not a thing. What do you guys want to drink?”

  “Diet Cokes,” they all said at once. “With double lemon,” said Sukie. “It’s great that way,” she told Frannie and Jenna.

  “Okay, I’ll get the waitress. You’re probably starved,” said Issy.

  “How’s Richie?”

  “Long gone. I’ve got to get back to work. Three Diet Cokes, six lemon slices.”

  Sukie examined the rolls in the bread basket, wondering where her dad was staying and if he was with the black-haired lady.

  “What are you having?” asked Frannie.

  “What?” said Sukie.

  “Pizza or pasta?”

  “Pizza.”

  “I think I’ll have a salad,” said Jenna.

  “Salad. Boo,” said Frannie.

  “Dancers can’t pig out,” Jenna protested. “Oh, okay, I’ll have plain pizza. A good old margherita.”

  While wolfing pizza, they discussed how great it would be to study in New York City next summer. Frannie at the Art Institute, Jenna at City Ballet, and Sukie…Sukie was stumped. “I have no idea what I want to be,” said Sukie. “I used to think CEO, but I never knew of what. What could I do there?” Frannie and Jenna threw out all sorts of suggestions—interning at a law firm or online for a website, modeling, maybe they need assistants at the big tennis tournament, the US Open. They discussed what was sexy in a guy, and Frannie announced that she’d once been fixated on the frayed cuff of Simon’s shirt. “There is nothing sexier than a shirt disintegrating,” she said. Sukie confided about going to Bobo’s game and getting stuck in the mud and the giant hawk mascot nearly suffocating her, and everyone was groaning and laughing. “Mister le Bobo,” Frannie nicknamed him.

  While they were sharing a hot-fudge sundae and Jenna swore, while she licked her spoon, that if she took even one more mouthful she’d be a dancing cow, Sukie laid down the scrap of paper. They tried to decide again.

  “Spin a fork,” said Frannie. “If it points toward you, you call. Anywhere else, no.”

  Sukie spun the fork. It flew off the table.

  “That doesn’t count,” said Frannie, retrieving it. “Spin the knife.”

  Around it went twice and slid into Sukie’s lap.

  “Oh, no.”

  “You’ve got to do it,” said Frannie.

  Sukie toyed with her cell, letting her fingers play over the numbers. “It’s probably a bank. Probably just related to some business deal he was making, right?”

  “Right,” said Jenna.

  She dialed and pressed the phone against her ear. She could barely hear the ring. She pressed her fingers against her other ear to blot out the noise.

  She clicked off, sat down, and dropped her cell on the table as if it were radioactive.

  “What happened?” said Jenna.

  “A bank or a woman?” said Frannie.

  “A woman. She said, ‘Hello.’”

  “Uh-oh,” said Jenna.

  “That’s it for me.” Sukie dug into the sundae. Her cell vibrated. She glanced over. “Oh my God, it’s the number. The bitch is calling back.”

  Sukie pushed the phone away, into the center of the table. Every time it vibrated, it moved.

  “It’s alive,” said Frannie.

  Sukie snatched it and pressed the green button, “Yes,” she said.

  “Did you just try to call me? I didn’t recognize the number.” The squeaky, scratchy voice was unmistakable.

  Sukie twisted in the booth. At the back computer, Issy had her cell to her ear.

  “Issy?” said Frannie.

  “That’s impossible,” said Jenna. “Isn’t that impossible?”

  Sukie’s scalp prickled. She was on fire.

  With a shrug of her shoulders, Issy slid the phone into her back pocket and went into the kitchen.

  “She’s like three years older than you,” said Jenna.

  “More like eight,” said Frannie, “but still.”

  Sukie sprang up, dodged a waiter, split a family of six making their stuffed way to the front, and barged past Dominick and into the kitchen, where Issy was popping a chef hat off a cook.

  “My dad,” said Sukie.

  Issy gave the chef back his hat. “What about him?”

  “Did you see The Other Boleyn Girl?”

  Issy walked past the giant refrigerators, the boxes of sodas and cans of tomatoes. She smacked the steel door, opening it. Sukie stormed after her into the parking lot, with Frannie and Jenna in her wake. “Was your hair black? Did you dye your hair black?”

  “Why?”

  “You did.”

  “Maybe. So? It wasn’t anything.” She kept walking.

  Sukie slapped her arm to stop her. “What wasn’t anything?”

  “Maybe it meant something to your dad. It was nice for a while, he’s still into me, but I told him, hey, I’m like in between, I’m not ending up here. I’m considering my options. You’re like sixty.”

  “My dad’s not sixty,” Sukie shouted.

  “Okay, forty, whatever, calm down. What’s the difference?” She bent to primp in a side mirror. She fluffed her hair, ran her tongue over her teeth, applied some gloss. “Men like me,” she said with a shrug.

  “Issy, we were friends.”

  “Who?”

  “You and I.”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really! I can’t believe you’re saying that.”

  “You’re a customer.”

  “A customer? I confided in you,” said Sukie. “You invited me shopping. You said if you had a sister you’d want her to be me.”

  “When did I say that?”

  “I was in the bathroom and—” Sukie stopped.

  “The bathroom?” Issy eyed her curiously, truly baffled.

  Frannie and Jenna, whose heads had been whipping back and forth as they followed the arguments, instinctively closed in behind Sukie, correctly intuiting from her strange expression, the slight swaying, and an uncontrollable blink that she was in danger of toppling. She might need catching.

  “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” said Issy.

  “It’s really freezing out. I’m freezing,” said Sukie. She started forward, backed up, turned. Frannie and Jenna, flanking her, steered her back into Clementi’s.

  Nobody spoke on the way home. In the backseat Sukie was lost in thought. Issy wasn’t her friend. She was her friend in the mirror. Sukie had invented her and, judging from everything she’d seen and learned tonight, she hadn’t invented even a reasonable facsimile.

  “Do you think you can cause something to happen just from wanting it so much?” she asked.

  “I don’t get what you mean. Does this have to do with your dad?” asked Frannie.

  “Not really. I’m talking about
loneliness.”

  Frannie turned around and considered her answer. For a while she seemed to be in a wilderness of her own. “Do you mean that you imagined that Issy was your friend?”

  “Yes, so completely that it was real.”

  “Oh that can happen. I believe that totally. Loneliness is powerful.”

  Mirror Confessions

  LONG into the night they discussed the mirror. They were snuggled in bed—Frannie in her own, Sukie and Jenna in sleeping bags on air mattresses. The lights were out, and they each had a pile of goodies scrounged from the kitchen cupboards—chocolate-covered mints, chips, raisins (for Jenna), and red licorice vines from Halloween, stale and tough but still tasty. Aside from their whispers, the only other sounds were crunching, chewing, the crinkle of paper, or the slurp of a tongue sucking a mint until it dissolved. The privacy of darkness made it easier to confide. Sukie told them how much fun she’d had in the mirror, about the dreamy encounters with Bobo, the soothing visits with Issy.

  “Everything was so much nicer in the mirror,” she said.

  “Nicer than what?” said Jenna.

  “Than my life. Except sometimes.”

  She told them about the freaky wicked turns—her butt as big as an island, her ramp a four-lane highway.

  “What ramp?” said Frannie.

  “The ramp down my nose. The one my mother got rid of.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Frannie. “I’d kill for your nose.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with your nose?” Jenna asked Frannie.

  “The bump.”

  “But it’s elegant.”

  “A bump isn’t elegant.”

  “It is, it’s positively regal. My nose is so little and perky,” said Jenna. “Who wants perky?”

  It turned out no one liked her own nose. Sukie, brushing potato chip crumbs off her pillow, wondered if spending all that time relating to her reflection, rather than, say, another person, might possibly have blown her anxieties out of proportion.

  “I trust only one mirror,” said Frannie. “The one in the downstairs bathroom. If I’m going out, that’s the one I look in.”

  “Why is that?” asked Jenna.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s the light, maybe it’s the mirror, maybe it’s me.”

  “My grandmother’s mirror is especially flattering,” said Sukie. “Except when it isn’t.”

  “Sometimes,” said Jenna, “when I’m in dance class, I go nearly mad looking in the mirror. I see my thighs, only my thighs, nothing else, and they look simply huge, especially compared to Cecelia’s thighs. She dances next to me. If you watch yourself in the mirror, you can’t dance. I mean, you can but not really because you’re supposed to let go, to feel the music and the movement, and yet how in the world am I expected to do that with all those mirrors?”

  “Your thighs are perfect,” said Sukie. “I’d love to have your graceful ballet legs.”

  “Remember when Mom forced me to play soccer?” said Frannie.

  “You hated it,” said Jenna.

  “I was on that team,” said Sukie.

  “Right, you were. You were good, but the coach, Coach Randall McCord, I remember his whole name, it’s burned in my brain because he was really mean to me. I’d be daydreaming in the middle of practice and the ball would go right by or hit me on the head, and he would scream. He called me Flake.”

  “I vaguely remember that,” said Sukie.

  “‘Hey, Flake, wake up.’ ‘Hey everyone, look at Flake.’ ‘Hey Flake, run around the track ten times.’ I’d come home, lock myself in the bathroom, and tell him off in the mirror. I would call him much worse names than Flake.” Frannie giggled. “Then I would say, ‘You are arrested for extreme mental and physical cruelty and are going straight to jail.’ It really helped, it did, it helped.”

  “Who used to sing in the mirror, raise her hand?” said Jenna.

  They all raised their hands.

  “What about with a hairbrush for a microphone?”

  They all kept their hands up.

  Sukie sat up and pulled the sleeping bag around her shoulders to keep warm. “I have to tell you something strange. My mirror cracked. I feel as if I caused it because it didn’t just crack, it kind of cracked up. But that’s impossible. I researched it. Telekinesis has no basis in science. That a person can cause an object to move or change…that energy, grief, or I guess joy or anxiety or even fierce determination could cause something to happen…people claim to have done it, but there’s no proof at all.”

  “Just because you can’t prove something scientifically,” said Frannie, “doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Things happened to me—”

  “Things?”

  “After my dad died,” said Frannie.

  She left it at that, and the silence that followed was deep, like the quiet of deep sleep. Sukie knew not to pry further.

  “You lived in that mirror more than you lived in the real world,” said Frannie.

  “It’s true,” said Sukie.

  “So.”

  Dad

  THE next morning when Sukie was eating French toast in the most delicious way, with sour cream and blueberry jam, and Frannie’s mother was fretting about how many more poinsettia plants to order for the Christmas season, the doorbell rang.

  “Your dad’s here, Sukie,” Mel called.

  “You don’t have to see him,” said Frannie, “does she, Mom?”

  Sukie looked pleadingly at Frannie’s mom as her dad came into the kitchen. He didn’t put out his arms as he normally would and expect her to fly into them. All he said was “Hi, kiddo.” He didn’t mosey around to investigate his surroundings and lay on the compliments or probe Mel about his work or Frannie’s mom about the flower business. He pulled out a chair at the breakfast table and sat down next to his daughter. “How about some tennis?”

  “It’s twelve degrees out,” said Sukie.

  “Not quite. More like forty. I brought your racket and sweats. It will be fun.”

  In the car Sukie kept her eyes directed out the side window. She counted out-of-state license plates, a game she and Mikey used to play, but the thing about riding in cars is that eventually you talk. There is too much history, going for ice cream, being picked up from school or taken to the movies. Or, as her dad was doing right now, driving to the club. Sukie and her dad had ridden together too many times and shared too many confidences on those car trips not to end up talking now.

  After a few blocks of quiet, her dad jumped to the heart of the matter.

  “Look,” he said, “I’d like to tell you that I’m a good guy, that your mom and I are back on track, and that your life is going to be easy, but I think what I have to be with you is honest. I don’t know what’s in store.”

  “Are you and mom getting divorced?”

  “We don’t know. Your mom and I lost our way. You know, she’s difficult and—”

  “Stop,” said Sukie. “Stop right there, Dad. Don’t criticize Mom to me. I don’t want you to do that anymore even though…well, I just don’t.”

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  “That guy called you slime.”

  “What guy?”

  “The one who punched you.”

  “Richie?”

  “That was Richie?” said Sukie. “That was Issy’s boyfriend?”

  “He’s a hothead.” Her dad pulled over and let the car idle. He drummed his thumb on the steering wheel. “I’m sorry that happened. I’m sorry you went through that, and all of this.”

  “Is he right? Are you slime?”

  “What do you think?”

  Sukie shook her head. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Your mom wants to see you.”

  “No way,” said Sukie.

  “I know she booted you out, but she went a little crazy when she found out…” Sukie could see that it took great effort but he forced himself not to hedge. “…when she found out about me and Isabella.”
r />   “I’ll never forgive her.”

  “I hope you do,” said her dad. “I hope you’ll forgive us both.”

  “Are you living at the house now?”

  “No, but nothing is settled.” He started up the car again and pulled into traffic. “God, I miss tennis, don’t you? I can’t wait to see that killer forehand of yours.”

  “Do you know if Mom happened to notice Grandma’s mirror?” asked Sukie.

  “She didn’t say anything. Why?”

  “It cracked. It cracked a million ways from Sunday.”

  “How?”

  “Stress,” said Sukie.

  Back

  MIKEY tore down the stairs and threw himself at Sukie. When she half carried, half dragged her brother back upstairs because he simply would not let go, Señor came to greet her at the top. He brushed against Sukie’s legs, circling around and around, rubbing against her.

  “Hi, my darling beast.” She knelt and hugged him, pressing her face into his fur, inhaling the musty scent of a dog seriously in need of a bath.

  She tapped the door to her room and let it swing slowly and soundlessly open. After the comforting mess of Frannie’s bedroom, with its collage of personal expression on the walls, display of bizarre objects, rumpled spread with an ink stain, her own neat and pretty environment seemed the room of a stranger. She sat on the edge of the bed and bounced gently, reacquainting herself with it.

  Her mother bustled in, setting down a vase with some pink baby roses in it. “A homecoming,” she said. “I picked up some tacos for lunch, the ones with chicken, your favorite.”

  She fussed with the buds, pulling the roses this way and that. Her hair, normally exquisitely coiffed, appeared egg-beaten in the back. She’d obviously brushed the front that morning and, either from loss of focus or despair, had forgotten to do the rest of it. When she finally turned, she couldn’t quite meet Sukie’s eye. Her face, bright thanks to an application of full makeup, still had shadows of sleeplessness. Her blush was too bright and sharply drawn. She hadn’t blended. Since her mom was big on blending and had held forth on the subject on many occasions, Sukie knew that her mom was a wreck.