Mermaids on the Golf Course

by Patricia Highsmith

  Eleanor was half out of her chair, her slender body rigid.

  The thing didn’t move. But it was looking at her.

  Get it out of the house, she thought at once. Shoo it out the door. What was it? The face was vaguely human. Eyes looked at her from under hair that was combed forward over the forehead. Had the children put some horrid toy in the house to frighten her? The Reynoldses next door had four children, the oldest eight. Children’s toys these days—You never knew what to expect!

  Then the thing moved, advanced slowly into the living room, and Eleanor stepped quickly behind the armchair.

  “Get out! Get away!” she said in a voice shrill with panic.

  “Um-m,” came the reply, soft and deep.

  Had she really heard anything? Now it looked from the floor—where it had stared while entering the room—to her face. The look at her seemed direct, yet was somehow vague and unfocused. The creature went on, towards the electric bar heater, where it stopped and held out its hands casually to the warmth. It was masculine, Eleanor thought, its legs—if those stumpy things could be called legs—were in trousers. Again the creature took a sidelong look at her, a little shyly, yet as if defying her to get it out of the room.

  The cat, curled on a pillow in a chair, lifted her head and yawned, and the movement caught Eleanor’s eye. She waited for Bessie to see the thing, straight before her and only four feet away, but Bessie put her head down again in a position for sleeping. That was curious!

  Eleanor retreated quickly to the kitchen, opened the back door and went out, leaving the door open. She went round to the front door and opened that wide, too. Give the thing a chance to get out! Eleanor stayed on her front path, ready to run to the road if the creature emerged.

  The thing came to the front door and said in a deep voice, the words more a rumble than articulated, “I’m not going to harm you, so why don’t you come back in? It’s your house.” And there was the hint of a shrug in the chunky shoulders.

  “I’d like you to get out, please!” Eleanor said.

  “Um-m.” He turned away, back into the living room.

  Eleanor thought of going for Mr. Reynolds next door, a practical man who probably had a gun in the house, as he was a captain in the Air Force. Then she remembered the Reynoldses had gone off before lunch and that their house was empty. Eleanor gathered her courage and advanced towards the front door.

  Now she didn’t see him in the living room. She even looked behind the armchair. She went cautiously towards the side room. He was not in there, either. She looked quite thoroughly.

  She stood in the hall and called up the stairs, really called to all the house, “If you’re still in this house, I wish you would leave!”

  Behind her a voice said, “I’m still here.”

  Eleanor turned and saw him standing in the living room.

  “I won’t do you any harm. But I can disappear if you prefer. Like this.”

  She thought she saw a set of bared teeth, as if he were making an effort. As she stared, the creature became paler gray, more fuzzy at the edges. And after ten seconds, there was nothing. Nothing! Was she losing her mind? She must tell Dr. Campbell, she thought. First thing tomorrow morning, go to his office at 9 A.M. and tell him honestly.

  The rest of the day, and the evening, passed without incident. Mrs Burns came for her dress, and brought a coat to be shortened. Eleanor watched a television program, and went to bed at half past ten. She had thought she would be frightened, going to bed and turning all the lights out, but she wasn’t. And before she had time to worry about whether she could get to sleep or not, she had fallen asleep.

  But when she woke up, he was the second thing she saw, the first thing being her cat, who had slept on the foot of the bed for warmth. Bessie stretched, yawned and meowed simultaneously, demanding breakfast. And hardly two yards away, he stood, staring at her. Eleanor’s promise of immediate breakfast to Bessie was cut short by her seeing him.

  “I could use some breakfast myself.” Was there a faint smile on that square face? “Nothing much. A piece of bread.”

  Now Eleanor found her teeth tight together, found herself wordless. She got out of bed on the other side from him, quickly pulled on her old flannel robe, and went down the stairs. In the kitchen, she comforted herself with the usual routine: put the kettle on, feed Bessie while the kettle was heating, cut some bread. But she was waiting for the thing to appear in the kitchen doorway, and as she was slicing the bread, he did. Trembling, Eleanor held the piece of bread towards him.

  “If I give you this, would you go away?” she asked.

  The monstrous hand reached out and up, and took the bread. “Not necessarily,” rumbled the bass voice. “I don’t need to eat, you know. I thought I’d keep you company, that’s all.”

  Eleanor was not sure, really not sure now if she had heard it. She was imagining telling Dr. Campbell all this, imagining the point at which Dr. Campbell would cut her short (politely, of course, because he was a nice man) and prescribe some kind of sedative.

  Bessie, her breakfast finished, walked so close by the creature, her fur must have brushed his leg, but the cat showed no sign of seeing anything. That was proof enough that he didn’t exist, Eleanor thought.

  A strange rumbling. “Um-hm-hm,” came from him. He was laughing! “Not everyone—or everything—can see me,” he said to Eleanor. “Very few people can see me, in fact.” He had eaten the bread, apparently.

  Eleanor steeled herself to carry on with her breakfast. She cut another piece of bread, got out the butter and jam, scalded the teapot. It was ten to eight. By nine she’d be at Dr. Campbell’s.

  “Maybe there’s something I can do for you today,” he said. He had not moved from where he stood. “Odd jobs. I’m strong.” The last word was like a nasal burr, like the horn of a large and distant ship.

  At once, Eleanor thought of the rusty old lawn roller in her barn. She’d rung up Field’s, the secondhand dealers, to come and take it away, but they were late as usual, two weeks late. “I have a roller out in the barn. After breakfast, you can take it to the edge of the road, if you will.” That would be further proof, Eleanor thought, proof he wasn’t real. The roller must weigh two or three hundred pounds.

  He walked, in a slow, rolling gait, out of the kitchen and into the sitting room. He made no sound.

  Eleanor ate her breakfast at the scrubbed wooden table in the kitchen, where she often preferred to eat instead of in the dining room. She propped a booklet on sewing tips before her, and after a few moments, she was able to concentrate on it.

  At 8:30, dressed now, Eleanor went out to the barn behind her house. She had not looked for him in the house, didn’t know where he was now, in fact, but somehow it did not surprise her to find him beside her when she reached the barn door.

  “It’s in the back corner. I’ll show you.” She removed the padlock which had not been fully closed.

  He understood at once, rubbed his big yellowish hands together, and took a grip on the wooden stick of the roller. He pulled the thing towards him with apparently the greatest ease, then began to push it from behind, rolling it. But the stick was easier, so he took the stick again, and in less than five minutes, the roller was at the edge of the road, where Eleanor pointed.

  Jane, the girl who delivered morning papers, was cycling along the road just then.

  Eleanor tensed, thinking Jane would cry out at the sight of him, but Jane only said shyly (she was a very shy girl), “ ’Morning, Mrs. Heathcote,” and pedaled on.

  “Good morning to you, Jane,” Eleanor answered.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “I can’t think of anything, thank you,” Eleanor replied rather breathlessly.

  “It won’t do you any good to speak to your doctor about me,” he said.

  They were both w
alking back towards the house, up the carelessly flagged path that divided Eleanor’s front garden.

  “He won’t be able to see me, and he’ll just give you useless pills,” he continued.

  What made you think I was going to a doctor? Eleanor wanted to ask. But she knew. He could read her mind. Is he some part of myself? she asked herself, with a flash of intuition which went no further than the question. If no one else can see him—

  “I am myself,” he said, smiling at her over one shoulder. He was leading the way into the house. “Just me.” And he laughed.

  Eleanor did not go to Dr. Campbell. She decided to try to ignore him, and to go about her usual affairs. Her affairs that morning consisted of walking a quarter of a mile to the butcher’s for some liver for Bessie and a half-chicken for herself, and of buying several things at Mr. White’s, the grocer. But Eleanor was thinking of telling all this to Vance—Mrs. Florence Vansittart—who was her best friend in the town. Vance and she had tea together, at one or the other’s house, at least once a week, usually once every five days, in fact, and Eleanor rang up Vance as soon as she got home.

  The creature was not in sight at that time.

  Vance agreed to come over at four o’clock. “How are you, dear?” Vance asked as she always did.

  “All right, thanks!” Eleanor replied, more heartily than usual. “And you? . . . I’ll make some blueberry muffins if I get my work done in time . . .”

  That afternoon, though he had kept out of sight since the morning, he lumbered silently into the room just as Eleanor and Vance were starting on their second cups of tea, and just as Eleanor was drawing breath for the first statement, the first introductory statement, of her strange story. She had been thinking, the roller at the edge of the road (she must ring Field’s again first thing in the morning) would be proof that what she said was not a dream.

  “What’s the matter, Eleanor?” asked Vance, sitting up a little. She was a woman of Eleanor’s age, about fifty-five, one of the many widows in the town, though unlike Eleanor, Vance had never worked at anything, and had been left a little more money. And Vance looked to her right, at the side room’s door, where Eleanor had been looking. Now Eleanor took her eyes away from the creature who stood four feet within the room.

  “Nothing,” Eleanor said. Vance didn’t see him, she thought. Vance can’t see him.

  “She can’t see me,” the creature rumbled to Eleanor.

  “Swallow something the wrong way?” Vance asked, chuckling, helping herself to another blueberry muffin.

  The creature was staring at the muffins, but came no closer.

  “You know, Eleanor—” Vance chewed, “—if you’re still charging only a dollar for putting a hem up, I think you need your head examined. People around here, all of them could afford to give you two dollars. It’s criminal the way you cheat yourself.”

  Vance meant, Eleanor thought, that it was high time she had her house painted, or re-covered the armchair, which she could do herself if she had the time. “It’s not easy to mention raising prices, and the people who come to me are used to mine by now.”

  “Other people manage to mention price-raising pretty easily,” Vance said as Eleanor had known she would. “I hear of a new one every day!”

  The creature took a muffin. For a few seconds, the muffin must have been visible in midair to Vance, even if she didn’t see him. But suddenly the muffin was gone, being chewed by the massive, wooden-looking jaw.

  “You look a bit absent today, my dear,” Vance said. “Something worrying you?” Vance looked at her attentively, waiting for a confidence—such as another tooth extraction that Eleanor felt doomed to, or news that her brother George in Canada, who had never made a go of anything, was once more failing in business. Eleanor braced herself and said, “I’ve had a visitor for the last two days. He’s standing right here by the table.” She nodded her head in his direction.

  The creature was looking at Eleanor.

  Vance looked where Eleanor had nodded. “What do you mean?”

  “You can’t see him?—He’s quite friendly,” Eleanor added. “It’s a creature two feet high. He’s right there. He just took a muffin! I know you don’t believe me,” she rushed on, “but he moved the roller this morning from the barn to the edge of the road. You saw it at the edge of the road, didn’t you? You said something about it.”

  Vance tipped her head to one side, and looked in a puzzled way at Eleanor. “You mean a handyman. Old Gufford?”

  “No, he’s—” But at this moment, he was walking out of the room, so Vance couldn’t possibly have seen him, and before he disappeared into the side room, he gave Eleanor a look and pushed his great hands flat downward in the air, as if to say, “Give it up,” or “Don’t talk.” “I mean what I said,” Eleanor pursued, determined to share her experience, determined also to get some sympathy, even protection. “I am not joking, Vance. It’s a little—creature two feet high, and he talks to me.” Her voice had sunk to a whisper. She glanced at the side room doorway, which was empty. “You think I’m seeing things, but I’m not, I swear it.”

  Vance still looked puzzled, but quite in control of herself, and she even assumed a superior attitude. “How long have you—been seeing him, my dear?” she asked, and chuckled again.

  “I saw him first two nights ago,” Eleanor said, still in a whisper. “Then yesterday quite plainly, in broad daylight. He has a deep voice.”

  “If he just took a muffin, where is he now?” Vance asked, getting up. “Why can’t I see him?”

  “He went into the side room. All right, come along.” Eleanor was suddenly aware that she didn’t know his name, didn’t know how to address him. She and Vance looked into an apparently empty room, empty of anything alive except some plants on the windowsill. Eleanor looked behind the sofa end. “Well—he has the faculty of disappearing.”

  Vance smiled, again superiorly. “Eleanor, your eyes are getting worse. Are you using your glasses? That sewing—”

  “I don’t need them for sewing. Only for distances. Matter of fact I did put them on when I looked at him yesterday across the room.” She was wearing her glasses now. She was nearsighted.

  Vance frowned slightly. “My dear, are you afraid of him?—It looks like it. Stay with me tonight. Come home with me now, if you like. I can come back with Hester and look the house over thoroughly.” Hester was her cleaning woman.

  “Oh, I’m sure you wouldn’t see him. And I’m not afraid. He’s rather friendly. But I did want you to believe me.”

  “How can I believe you, if I don’t see him?”

  “I don’t know.” Eleanor thought of describing him more accurately. But would this convince Vance, or anybody? “I think I could take a photograph of him. I don’t think he’d mind,” Eleanor said.

  “A good idea! You’ve got a camera?”

  “No. Well, I have, an old one of John’s, but—”

  “I’ll bring mine. This afternoon.—I’m going to finish my tea.”

  Vance brought the camera just before six. “Good luck, Eleanor. This should be interesting!” Vance said as she departed.

  Eleanor could tell that Vance had not believed a word of what she had told her. The camera said “4” on its indicator. There were eight more pictures on the roll, Vance had said. Eleanor thought two would be enough.

  “I don’t photograph, I’m sure,” his deep voice said on her left, and Eleanor saw him standing in the doorway of the side room. “But I’ll pose for you. Um-hm-hm.” It was the deep laugh.

  Eleanor felt only a mild start of surprise, or of fear. The sun was still shining. “Would you sit in a chair in the garden?”

  “Certainly,” the creature said, and he was clearly amused.

  Eleanor picked up the straight chair which she usually sat on when she worked, but he took it from her and went o
ut the front door with it. He set the chair in the garden, careful not to tread on flowers. Then with a little boost, he got himself on to the seat and folded his short arms.

  The sunlight fell full on his face. Vance had showed Eleanor how to work the camera. It was a simple one compared to John’s. She took the picture at the prescribed six-foot distance. Then she saw old Gufford, the town handyman, going by in his little truck, staring at her. They did not usually greet each other, and they did not now, but Eleanor could imagine how odd he must think she was to be taking a picture of an ordinary chair in the garden. But she had seen him clearly in the finder. There was no doubt at all about that.

  “Could I take one more of you standing by the chair?” she asked.

  “Um-m.” That was not a laugh, but a sound of assent. He slid off the chair and stood beside it, one hand resting on the chair’s back.

  This was splendid, Eleanor thought, because it showed his height in proportion to the chair.

  Click!

  “Thank you.”

  “They won’t turn out, as they say,” he replied, and took the chair back into the house.

  “If you’d like another muffin,” Eleanor said, wanting to be polite and thinking also he might have resented her asking him to be photographed, “they’re in the kitchen.”

  “I know. I don’t need to eat. I just took one to see if your friend would notice. She didn’t. She’s not very observant.”

  Eleanor thought again of the muffin in midair for a few seconds—it must have been—but she said nothing. “I—I don’t know what to call you. Have you got a name?”

  A fuzzy, rather general expression of amusement came over his square face. “Lots of names. No one particular name. No one speaks to me, so there’s no need of a name.”