Mermaid in Chelsea Creek

by Michelle Tea

  Sophie wondered if something was wrong with her for not paying more attention to all the germs and bacteria out there, but she really couldn’t get herself to care about that. The world seemed fine, and evil bacteria, though she knew it existed, just wasn’t comprehendible. Doctors had cures for most everything, anyway. What she didn’t understand was how Ella could smoke cigarettes, but to Ella cigarettes were different. Having grown up in a house of smokers, cigarettes were the atmosphere. Though they created their own problems, they were in a different category from bacteria, germs, and filth. But most importantly, smoking made the wild tangle of fear inside her smoother. She didn’t know how it worked, but it did. And it made her feel fearless to do it—tough, invincible, immortal. A nice way to feel when you’re a girl convinced in her heart that she is bound to encounter an invisible pearl of E. coli, a splash of Ebola, a flea full of plague. Leaning against the back of a warehouse by the train tracks, a pilfered cigarette in her hand, Ella could relax into the notion that at the very least she looked hard, together, really Chelsea. Even if on the inside she was all bunched up with fear.

  “I’m going home,” Ella said, frantic, crouching low to examine her leg as if Sophie’s gentle touch had left a bruise, drawn blood. “You don’t even know what I am going to have to do to deal with this. You have no freaking idea.” Ella’s voice rang out angrily. “And snap out of it! You’re bugging me out. It’s like you’re more brain damaged than ever.”

  The insult stung Sophie, as it was intended to. Had her friend suggested she was newly brain damaged? Well, after sipping from the toxic creek, how could she be blamed? But more than ever? Had Ella always thought Sophie was brain damaged? She thought about the cruel way Ella could speak of others—fucking retarded—and imagined the words meant for her, felt tears spring to her eyes and plop down her face. She sucked the droplets into her mouth, grateful for the comfort of a salt that was safe, clean, her very own.

  * * *

  ELLA RAGED TOWARD the torn chain-link fence that did a poor job keeping the kids who lived in the nearby housing projects away from the water. The ripped-away metal was eaten through with rust; no one paid attention to this part of the city. It was possible no one paid attention to the city at all. It was that kind of place—far from the New England of sailboats and lobsters, checkered tablecloths on picnic tables, lighthouses, wooden toboggans to sled down a hill in winter, frozen, snow-dusted ponds for ice-skating. Chelsea was none of that. It was flocks of dirty pigeons and dented old cars; fish sticks with freezer burn and fast-food drive-throughs; scuffed, neglected parks, trash-strewn train tracks and a putrid creek. It made sense that Sophie and Ella enjoyed the pass-out game as much as they did; the world of the dream state was so much nicer, prettier, and more magical than the city they spent their days in.

  “You’re being a jerk!” Sophie shouted weakly at Ella’s back as she ducked gingerly through the fence, shrinking away from the gangrenous prongs of rusted metal, and was gone. When she got home, Ella would lock herself in the bathroom and scrub both legs with hot water, using every single cleansing product in the room. Shampoo, face wash, soaps, foot scrub. From underneath the bathroom sink she’d lift a bottle of tile cleaner, hands shaking and a pit in her stomach, absolutely compelled to use it in spite of knowing it was awful stuff, too much for her skin, too crazy to need it so badly. The grainy powder wore at her skin, creating a sickly pink froth. When she was done each leg would gape a raw, red wound in its center, slick and painful to observe, both radiating a patchy redness like a terrible sun. Her mother, looming nervously outside the bathroom the whole time, would try to catch Ella when she opened the door, but Ella would shake her mother off and bolt to her bedroom, to lie in her bed and cry, her sputtering fan aimed at her calves, which stung and emanated heat. Ella would know she’d made herself look ugly and wounded and she would be too full of secrecy and shame to wear shorts for a week. She’d weep with embarrassment; weep at a week of summer beach-time spent in a pair of jeans that would bring sweat down the back of her legs, stinging into her abraded skin. She’d weep with confusion, knowing that what she had done made no sense. But most of all she’d know in her heart that the scrubbing had made no difference, that the poison of the creek was still all over her, and at that, she’d weep and weep and weep.

  Chapter 2

  Sophie pulled a key from a length of rawhide she wore around her neck, tucked into her t-shirt, and let herself into her home. She was surprised to find her mother in the kitchen, the light blue smock Andrea wore to her job at the clinic stuck to her body in the heat. Damp patches spread out from her arms, her fair neck was reddened from the walk home in the sun, and her hair was disheveled upon her head, bits of blondish-brownish-reddish hair bursting in a humid frizz of curls. Andrea held in her hand a chipped dish of iceberg lettuce, a hastily chopped tomato, and a pool of glistening dressing. She shoveled the food into her mouth in rushed, hungry gulps. The freckles sprinkled across Andrea’s cheeks always made Sophie imagine her mother as a girl, even though grown-ups had freckles, too. There was just something about it that made Sophie flash to faded photos from long before she was born, the colors in them suggesting the world itself had a slightly different palate, the yellows mustardier, the greens pinier, her mother’s pale skin deeper, as if perpetually tan. Photos of Andrea in skirts and dresses and bathing suits, four, ten, thirteen years old, a shy smile pulling her freckled cheeks up toward her eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” Sophie demanded, instantly regretting her tone. She sounded pissed, or challenging, or some other unfriendly way of sounding, and the tone would not be lost on her mother.

  “I live here,” Andrea snapped back. “I pay the rent here and buy the food here. I thought I would take some of the food I bought and eat it here in this kitchen I’m renting. If that’s all right with you?” She scooped dressing onto the last pulpy bit of tomato and forked it into her mouth, tossing the dish in the sink with a clatter. She turned to her daughter and regarded her with a squint. “Come here,” she ordered. Sophie stepped toward her. First her mother grabbed her hands and brought them to her nose for a sniff, her nose seeking the smell of smoke—cigarettes or worse. What she got was a burst of something ugly, like swill left in the August heat too long, with the tang of something metallic.

  “Ugh,” Andrea gasped, waving at the air with her hand. “You smell like something died! Why are you all wet?”

  Sophie twisted away from her mother. “I got hit with a water balloon. Some little brats on Tudor Street, I think they used dishwater or something.”

  The lie came easy, as they tended to. Sophie had ceased feeling bad about all the little fibs she fed Andrea. If her mother would just calm down, she thought, she’d be able to be honest. But her mother was perpetually tense, high-strung, and so suspicious of Sophie that she made Sophie suspicious of herself. And so she’d become used to giving her mother the least alarming story she could muster, regardless of it was true.

  “Were you with Ella today?” Andrea interrogated. Andrea always brought up Ella when she was unhappy with Sophie—with her appearance, her smell, her attitude.

  “Yes.”

  “Were you smoking with her?”

  “No! I hate smoking! I don’t smoke, I’ve never even tried it!” It was true. To Sophie, cigarettes smelled like acrid, burning hate. She couldn’t comprehend wanting to suck the stuff into your body. She hated being around Ella’s toxic clouds and was perpetually navigating their wind-borne procession while they were hanging out.

  “Were you smoking pot or doing other things? God forbid?”

  “No, Ma! And Ella doesn’t do drugs, either! She only smokes cigarettes.”

  Mother and daughter stared each other down. Sophie was at a disadvantage here. When Andrea had first asked her daughter if Ella smoked, Sophie had lied. But Andrea then brought a bag of trash out the clinic’s back door and spotted the shifty, lanky Ella sucking down a cigarette in the shoddy park across the way. Thusly proven a l
iar, Andrea reserved the right to never believe another word her daughter said.

  But another thing kept Sophie vulnerable to her mother’s suspicion—she felt guilty. She knew the pass-out game wasn’t pot or pills or any other drug—nothing that sat with a stink on her skin or gave her bloodshot eyes—but her mother wouldn’t like her doing it, and would maybe even lump it with pot and pills, vices worse than cigarettes, even. Sophie had never tried a drug, but she bet the pass-out game made her as high and hallucinatory as any of them. She cast her eyes down at the busted linoleum floor so that her mother wouldn’t read the conflict in her face, but she had.

  “Well, you’re up to something,” Andrea said finally. “Making out with boys?”

  “No!”

  “You’d better not be.” The way Andrea grouped making out with boys with cigarettes, pot, and pills confirmed to Sophie a suspicion of her own: that kissing boys was something fairly gross that nonetheless made you feel temporarily magical. If there were boys around worth kissing she might’ve braved it, but the boys of Chelsea were in much the same state of disrepair as the city itself.

  “Laurie LeClair came in today,” Andrea said abruptly, and Sophie was glad to feel her mother’s judgment move away from her and onto another.

  “Really?” she asked. “What for?”

  Laurie LeClair was a local legend. A few years ahead of Sophie at Our Lady of the Assumption, the girl had been unremarkable until she hit eighth grade. It was then that her transformation began, sudden and flamboyant. Her hair, formerly a mousy brown, was stripped to a nearly reflective platinum blonde. Her eyes, small and blue, became smaller and bluer as she circled them with an inch of muddy liner. The jewelry she layered onto her Catholic school uniform looked like it could double as weapons. Her face bloomed with streaks of harsh color, as did her throat, the skin there marked with what looked like bruises. Many girls had seen Sister Margaret, the principal, looming over Laurie in the ladies’ room, her hands planted on her polyester hips, the porcelain sink running with motley rivers of washed-away makeup as Laurie scrubbed her face with a handful of rough, brown paper towels. Laurie’s jewelry was confiscated, and if the nun could have confiscated the hair from Laurie’s head she would have. It sat there, fried flat to her skull, the darkness at the crown growing in faster than Laurie could bleach it away. A rumor went around that she even had tattoos—lousy homemade ones her boyfriend gave her with a needle and ink. The rumor said that he stabbed his name into her skin, or his initials, or their initials side by side, like a declaration of love carved in wet cement. A rumor said it was on her butt, or high, high up on the back of her thigh, or on the inside of her thigh, a place so tender Sophie winced at the thought. But before any of these rumors could be proven true or false, Laurie was gone. She’d gotten “in trouble.” Sophie wondered what such trouble could be. Did she cheat on a test, or steal something from the school? Did she write on the bathroom walls, or get caught shoplifting at the mall? Did she call Sister Margaret a bitch, or did she get in a fistfight with another student? No. “Trouble,” Sophie learned, was a word for “pregnant.”

  Removed from the school, Laurie LeClair’s legend swelled. Instead of ceasing, the rumors grew more lurid. Laurie had lots of boyfriends, and let them all tattoo their initials onto her; her legs a kaleidoscope alphabet, inky letters bleeding into each other beneath her skin. It was said that from far away she looked like she was wearing dark lace stockings. Laurie had a drug habit—it was cocaine, no, heroin, no, it was cocaine and heroin and she gave it to herself with needles, jabbing the crook of her elbow or scraping it along her arms or pricking the web of skin between her toes. Sophie felt degraded just hearing these tales. What had begun as a curiosity became something darker. The glee her classmates expressed in sharing the gossip brought up suspicion and scorn in Sophie—just why did everyone want so badly for Laurie LeClair to be such a mess?

  But some of the tales were true. Sophie knew this because her mother worked at the clinic. The private business of every body who walked through the sliding doors made its way to her, and Andrea was not a tight-lipped woman. Like her classmates, Sophie’s mother took a perverse delight in the teenager’s situation. She was there when Laurie waddled in, in the throes of childbirth, fluid trickling down her bare legs, angering the cabbie whose taxi had dumped her at the curb. Laurie came in alone and left with a baby girl.

  “Do you know what she named her?” Andrea sneered. “Alize!”

  “What does that mean?” Sophie asked.

  Andrea snorted at her daughter’s innocence, not quite sure if it was feigned or genuine. “It’s a beverage. An alcoholic one. Very cheap, like a wine cooler.”

  “Well,” Sophie considered, “people name their babies Brandy. That’s alcohol, right?”

  “Yes, and people name their babies Rose, and Lily, but you wouldn’t want to be named Crabgrass, would you? You’re just being difficult.” And Sophie was. She didn’t know why the urge to defend Laurie LeClair had risen up so strongly, but it had, coexisting with a baser interest in what had happened to the girl now.

  There was the time Laurie had come in with her face smashed in the places her boyfriend’s fist had landed. A doctor’s examination had uncovered more bruises, and as usual the girl’s neck was all marked up with hickies. When Andrea told her about it, Sophie had gasped in concern, but Andrea had only shaken her head coldly.

  “Some girls like that,” she said with a simple shrug, a comment that Sophie puzzled over for weeks. Some girls liked to be beaten up? That couldn’t be true. And even if it was, it had to mean that likes and hates had gotten so tangled up inside them that it became a sort of sickness, not a true like, not the way Sophie liked reading books or sleeping late into the morning or feeling the pastel dreamscapes of the pass-out game. Sophie felt a worry for Laurie LeClair but, having no place to go with it, shelved it where all her other useless worries were stored. Occasionally Andrea would return with more stories of the girl’s sad life—a stomach pumping for alcohol poisoning, a cockroach trapped in the cave of her baby’s ear. Sophie’s stomach lurched as the horrible stories took her on their ride. Who knew a chilly cockroach would seek out warmth in the nook of a baby’s ear? Sophie wished she didn’t.

  It was sometimes hard not to share these horrid tales with her classmates, knowing the rush of instant friendliness and importance it would grant her, but she told only Ella, whose promise not to tell was solid. Scornful, cranky Ella looked down upon almost everyone in that school but Sophie, keeping her distance from the swarm of chattering students and their ill intentions. She couldn’t afford to get too close: if they ever found out about her germ thing, and her germ-related food thing, it would be her they’d gossip about when rumors of Laurie ran dry. She trusted only Sophie, whose unwillingness to betray Laurie LeClair, a girl neither of them actually knew, confirmed that her trust was sound.

  * * *

  “SHE ALMOST KILLED her baby.” Andrea was rustling for her keys as she said this, patting her smock pockets and glancing around, as if the news she had delivered was banal, and perhaps to Andrea it was. Life at the Chelsea Clinic brought with it a constant stream of tragedy—gunshots and stabbings, malevolent infections, illness spiraled out of control. Sometimes Sophie wondered if her mother’s hardness was how she coped with having to witness so much sadness all day long.

  “What do you mean?” Sophie gasped. “What happened, what did she do?”

  “Hypernatremia. Salt poisoning.”

  “She poisoned her baby’s salt?”

  “She poisoned her baby with salt. You can’t give a baby salt. They can’t handle it—it makes their kidneys stop.”

  “Well, well, was it a mistake? Did the baby get into the salt?”

  Andrea gave her daughter a look that expressed disappointment with her mental faculties. “A baby isn’t going to eat salt. Salt tastes terrible.”

  “I love salt,” Sophie protested. Andrea’s look turned steely, and she turned away.
/>   “Normal babies don’t think salt tastes good. Babies—”

  “I did. I loved salt. I remember eating it right from the shaker, that same Tupperware shaker—”

  “No you didn’t, and if you were stupid enough to try I would have slapped it out of your hand. Salt can kill small children, infants and toddlers especially. It’s a great way for a mother to kill her kid and then act like it was a big accident, like the kid just ‘got into’ too much salt. It happens all the time, especially here.” Andrea stopped and watched her daughter, waiting for her inevitable questions to come.

  “What do you mean, here?”

  “I mean in Chelsea. We have a lot of hypernatremia. A lot of babies die from salt. Every so often there’s a rash of salt killings.” She paused. “You’ve never heard about this?”