Mermaid in Chelsea Creek

by Michelle Tea

  As the doctor twisted her wrist to swing wide the door to her office, an ethereal whistling sound became audible; a high-pitched, mysterious ringing growing louder, fuller, melodious, and ending with a violent smack on the doctor’s curtained window. The glass shook with the impact, and everyone jumped.

  “Oh, dear,” murmured Dr. Chen. She moved swiftly toward the window and, pushing aside the yellow curtains that filled the room with lemony warmth, flung open the glass. Immediately there was a fluttering, and something feathered and gray filled the space—a pigeon, soot colored and stocky, with the strangest contraption affixed to its tail feathers. Perched on the windowsill, it tucked its wings tight to its plump side, and fixed an eager, orange eye on the doctor.

  “Oh, no,” Andrea grumbled. “They’ve got to net this building. These things are going to make sick people sicker.” Andrea switched into work mode and stepped toward the bird, making to shoo it away, but it only waddled sideways, ducking her flapping hand.

  “No, no.” Dr. Chen smiled. She laid out her fingers like an elegant invitation and the bird accepted, daintily wrapping its skinny feet around the doctor. Andrea gasped. It was as if Dr. Chen was brazenly picking her nose, or scratching her bum, or plugging her thumb into her ear and smearing fresh wax onto her desk. Surely, she had lost her mind. The doctor gazed at the animal with a sort of reluctant admiration, possibly pride. She brought her arm up so that the others could witness the bird’s full form, including the strange cluster of tubes fixed to its backside with threads of glinting copper wire.

  “This is Livia,” Dr. Chen introduced.

  “You know that pigeon?” Andrea asked.

  “This pigeon is a friend of mine. I guess you would call her my pet, though she’s a bit more independent than a dog or a cat. She lives in a dovecote on my roof.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” Sophie peered at the object stuck awkwardly to the tail feathers.

  “Nothing is wrong with her.” The doctor stroked the bird’s iridescent neck the way one would pet a docile cat. Andrea flinched as she watched the doctor’s sterile fingers rub the greasy feathers. “This is bamboo.” She touched the carved tubes lightly. “Bamboo whistles. When she flies, it makes the sweetest sound. Perhaps you heard it right before she smashed into the window. Silly bird,” she murmured, pecking the pigeon’s smooth gray head and leaving a bit of red lipstick on the feathers there. “You’re too smart to fly into a window! What was that about?” As if in answer, the pigeon shook itself all over, lifting from the doctor’s hand and taking to the air, there in the cramped office. Andrea cried out and backed away from the commotion of feathers, but Sophie remained still, even as the bird clumsily advanced and then settled on her head. She could feel the bird’s sharp claws tapping her scalp, sliding into her hair. She stayed very, very still.

  “Oh my god,” Sophie said, feeling like a strange statue in a park, a girl with an animal perched on her head. She thought briefly of Ella. If her friend could see her now, she very likely would end the friendship for good, judging Sophie contaminated beyond repair.

  “Dr. Chen!” Andrea scolded. “Please, get your bird off my daughter!” But Andrea made no move to brush the bird away. Its status as the doctor’s special pet had elevated it above the common pigeons trolling for scraps in dumpsters around the city. It wasn’t wild—it belonged to Dr. Chen. Andrea felt it would be rude to swat it. But what kind of pet was a pigeon? A grimy one, she imagined. Still out there flying around in the muck, tucking germs into its dingy feathers. “Please!” she snapped again.

  Sophie rather liked the bird settling on her head, though she feared its droppings. Its claws brought a roll of goose bumps down her neck, and her hair felt alive beneath its movements. The doctor shook her head at the scene and snapped her fingers at the pigeon. With a push off that stung Sophie, Livia jumped back into the air, flapping onto the doctor’s outstretched hand. Dr. Chen walked the animal to the window, stretching her fingers like a bridge for the bird to waddle across.

  “Go home,” she said firmly. And the pigeon did. With all the world before it, its take off was powerful and smooth. It glided into the sky, pulling air through the whistles on its tail, leaving a flute of sound in its wake. “Listen to that,” the doctor said, smiling, and Sophie rushed to the window to see her new friend disappear, straining her ears to hear the last of the music as it faded. Like the thin, fragile tone of a finger on a ring of glass. Like the subtle vibrations of something gently, artfully struck. Andrea followed her daughter to the window, inspecting the girl’s head for fleas and bird poop. She found nothing but kept digging. Sophie allowed it. Her mother’s scratchy fingernails reminded her of the bird, its comforting heaviness and skittering claws.

  “Did you do that?” Sophie marveled. “Give it that whistle?”

  The doctor nodded. “I learned from my father. It is a very old art, mostly forgotten. Once, long ago, whole flocks of pigeons were whistled. They would fly together and it would be an orchestra in the air, like heaven was announcing itself to the world. Imagine! A sky full of such sound!” The doctor sighed wistfully, blowing her own light whistle through her lipsticked mouth. “But not all pigeons like the whistles. Some find it terrible.” She scrunched her face. “Would you want a tuba rigged up to your butt? I would not!”

  Sophie considered it. She wouldn’t want to have to lug something around on her body, but she would like to leave a trail of invisible beauty behind her as she moved through the world. She would like to stir the air and feel her passing change it. “I don’t know…” she said thoughtfully.

  “Livia likes it very much. She’s proud to have the whistle. I watch her swoop off from the roof—she finds new ways to tumble and soar that bring different sounds to her tail. She is a true artist.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You know.” The doctor nodded. “Do you have a pet?”

  “A cat.”

  “And you know what your cat likes, and what she does not like?”

  Sophie thought. “She likes being petted, and then she hates it, and bites. But I know right when she starts to hate it. I can just tell.”

  “Cats are the meanest.” Dr. Chen shuddered, as if Sophie had revealed that her pet was a dragon. “When they are done with your affections they slice you up!”

  Andrea, finished with her inspection, smoothed her daughter’s hair down, and addressed the doctor with a grim look. “Dr. Chen, I’m going to have to report this. It is so unsanitary! I can’t believe you allow pigeons in here, in a hospital. On my daughter! I don’t care if they’re your pets.”

  “Okay, Andrea,” the doctor said amicably. “Do what you must. I promise you that Livia is a clean bird, though, and that Sophie is fine.”

  And with that Dr. Chen cracked her office door, swinging it wide on its hinges. In rushed the cacophony of the rooms beyond: the dinging elevators, the braying of a mother trying to control her kids, the steady typing of the intake workers, the whooshing of the glass doors sliding open and closed, open and closed. The television communicated its bad news to a slumped audience too consumed with their own bad news to pay attention. Wheelchairs spun by, beefy orderlies wheeling gurneys, a nurse pushing a med cart. Their motion spawned a breeze that fluttered the posters on the doctor’s wall, graphic posters in blood red and liver purple, illustrating the body’s many systems. The yellow curtains hung still before the now-closed window. Dr. Chen waited patiently for Sophie and Andrea to exit. They seemed stunned by the hectic activity beyond the room. “I know.” She nodded. “It’s a lot to return to. If I had my way, I’d spend all my time on my roof with the birds.”

  “You have more?” Sophie asked, intrigued. Dr. Chen nodded.

  “A whole bunch.” She smiled. And she took the first step, out of the office and into the clinic, breaking a certain spell.

  * * *

  “YOU’RE STILL PUNISHED.” Andrea’s mouth was a grim line on her face; her face was a resolution on her body.

  “T
hat’s not fair,” Sophie declared, remembering her mother’s guilty grimace when the doctor suggested that she, too, had played the pass-out game once upon a time. “That’s hypocritical.”

  “Don’t think you’re so smart just because you learned a new word,” Andrea snapped. “You’re still punished.”

  Sophie was insulted. “Hypocritical is not a new word,” she said. “I’ve known hypocritical for, like, a long time.” She folded her arms and leaned back against the plasticky car seat. It was so warm from being parked in the sun of the clinic parking lot that it felt like hot melting taffy beneath her thighs. She pulled the visor down to knock the sun away. She’d thought summer was going to be so great because there’d be no school, no nuns. She’d forgotten it just meant more and more Mom.

  “Maybe I did it once,” Andrea relented. “Maybe twice. But I wasn’t doing it all the time, and I didn’t give myself a seizure.”

  “Dr. Chen said it didn’t hurt me!”

  “That woman needs her head examined.” Andrea shook her head. “She barely looked at you, and then she lets some germy pigeon run all over you! I am so reporting her. I don’t care if her bedside manner is great. There’s something wrong with her.” She flicked her eyes up and down her daughter, searching for remnants of the earlier strange behavior. “What was it then, huh?” She shook her head. “You’re grounded. I want you where I can keep an eye on you.”

  “You’re not home, Ma,” Sophie said, with duh in her voice. “You won’t be keeping an eye on me. You won’t even be there.”

  Andrea chewed her lip. It was true. She glanced sideways at her daughter. This was how it happened. The mothers were away at work because the fathers were away god knows where and before you knew it the girls turned wild and you had a Laurie LeClair on your hands, all shot up and smacked up and knocked up. Andrea herself had paid the price of her own young wildness—was still paying the price, arguing with her daughter on a hot summer’s day. She wasn’t going to let history repeat itself. She had to get her daughter under control.

  “I’ll send you to be with your grandmother,” she threatened.

  “No way,” Sophie cackled. “You hate Nana more than you hate me.”

  Andrea’s gasp nearly flung her hands from the wheel. “Is that what you think? That I hate you?”

  “Well, you don’t act like you like me,” Sophie said in a voice that started out sounding tough but weakened as the heaviness of what she was saying hit her. Did her mother really not like her? Were mothers even allowed to not like their daughters? Was there a special agency Sophie could file a report about this? What would happen? Were there orphanages and foster homes for the children of perfectly capable, functional mothers who just took a strong dislike to their offspring? Sophie felt her eyes fill with a painful mist, like she’d been gassed with something toxic. Don’t let her see you cry, she ordered herself.

  “Sophie, you don’t understand how tough this world is. You think you do, I know you really think you do, but you just don’t. You think you can rattle off some smart-ass remarks and that’ll get you whatever you want? You think some fancy school is going to give you some big-shot life?” She shook her head. “That’s just what I’m going to do. That is just what you need. A summer at your grandmother’s. I don’t feel… great about it, but you’ve really left me no choice.” Andrea paused and chewed her lip. She shook her head again and sighed. “There’s really no place else for you to go.”

  Sophie’s blood chilled as she realized her bluff was up. Why did she have to run her mouth like that? Why could she never resist picking a fight with her mom? A simple grounding issued by a working single mom would have been a cinch to sneak out on. She could have been running around the city and been back home sulking on the couch by the time Andrea returned from the clinic. She could have smuggled Ella inside to watch television, releasing her between programs to smoke her cigarettes in the alley next door, stashing her in a closet when her mother came home for lunch, freeing her when the coast was clear. The subterfuge could have even been fun. No fun now, not with Nana, Sophie thought, the grief settling in. Sophie was about to spend the remainder of the long, hot summer hanging out at the town dump.

  Chapter 4

  “Well, I guess that’s, like, the end of our friendship, then,” Ella said coldly. Her voice tunneled through the telephone wires, entered Sophie’s ear, and bore into her heart.

  “Ella, come on. I’ll shower, for god’s sake. I’m not going to be rolling around in trash! I’ll probably just be, like, sitting in the trailer with my nana. Watching soaps, eating cookies. You could come, too. You’d love my nana. She just likes to hang out talking shit and chain smoking those grody, long-ass cigarettes.” Sophie paused, searching for a way to bribe her friend into joining her. “I bet she’d even give you cigarettes. She has really bad judgment.”

  “And why is your mom making you stay with her?”

  “To punish me for playing pass-out.”

  “I can’t believe you cracked so easily,” Ella said. “I’m disappointed in you, Swankowski. I thought you were stronger.”

  “Sophiiiiiiiiieeeeeeee!” Andrea hollered from the front door. “I said noon, it’s past noon! Don’t make me late!”

  “I gotta go,” Sophie spoke into the phone. “You’re crazy if you think I want to be hanging out at the town dump. It’s going to be the most boring summer of my life.”

  “Well, I’ll remember you while I’m tanning on the wall at Revere Beach,” Ella said breezily. “Until your memory fades, of course. And then I’ll forget all about you.”

  “You’re being a bad best friend,” said Sophie, and hung up the phone. The thought of Ella holding a dead line in her nicotine-stinky fingers was satisfying for a minute, until it was replaced by the image of Ella lounging on the wide expanse of concrete that lurched above the ocean at Revere Beach. Wearing a risqué bikini, the mirrored lenses of her sunglasses reflecting sunshine and blue sky, smoking and looking way older and more worldly than her thirteen years. Adventures would come her way—new, cooler friends; boys in cars. Ella would speed through New England eating neon Italian ices and prancing in the scuffed pumps she had found for a dollar at the Salvation Army. Sophie was hot with jealousy, like a sunburn on her heart. Who would be there to help Ella when a splash of the polluted ocean splattered her coconut-oiled skin? When a dirty seabird as big as a dog came waddling her way, a mess of filthy feathers? Ella needed her, Sophie assured herself. No one but Sophie really knew how sick her friend was. It was a dark sort of comfort, but since she needed Ella just as fiercely, she let herself have it.

  * * *

  THROUGH THE CAR window Sophie watched Chelsea smear by. Clusters of kids, boys mostly, radiating agitation, leaning against buildings, on stoops, kicking debris through lots. Old ladies from other lands made their way gingerly down cracked sidewalks, picking their way with canes, shuffling in their rubbery shoes. Women too young to have bruise-colored pillows beneath their eyes pushed baby strollers. The green of trees blurred the sky. Sophie loved passing over the train tracks, the snake of wood and metal undulating toward Boston. Andrea drove quietly, steering the car toward the outskirts of Chelsea, past the giant, tarp-covered pile of rock salt heaped by the rusty bridge that crossed into East Boston. Past the water where scrappy boats bobbed in the muck. Past the warehouses where produce was hauled in, loaded onto trucks, and shipped back into the world. So many parts of the city were mysteries to Sophie. Her routes were simple: to and from school, Ella’s, the creek and the mall. The store Andrea sent her to for groceries was blocks and blocks away, taking her past gangs of awful, harassing boys, and so she went instead to Hennie’s, the ancient, dusty Polish grocer Andrea hated. Her mother had claimed to see mice and other vermin scurry into the darkest corners when the door creaked open, leaking sunlight into the dim, wooden store. Hennie’s accent was thick as the dust that lay on the shelves, on the foods from other eras, things no one would ever come looking for—surely the people who ate
such strange pickled meats and potted fish had passed on, and their offspring were shopping at the other, fluorescently lit grocer, its aisles stuffed with Doritos and bright cartons of sweetened juice and cereals with cartoon characters waving from the boxes.

  But Hennie sold the basics, too: milk, Pepsi, cigarettes, meat, and Andrea never suspected that the ground beef she fried up for Hamburger Helper came from Hennie’s shadowed deli case. Hennie herself was large and hunched, with a babushka knotted beneath her chin—a scarf that held back her gray hair, just a curl or two scrambling out onto her broad, wrinkled forehead. The most striking thing about Hennie was her eyes, a blue so pale they seemed to flash silver in the poorly lit shop. Cataracts, Sophie had thought, but no, they were simply the old woman’s eyes, lit from within like a lamp. In spite of the fact that Hennie’s shop brought to mind a Grimm’s Fairy Tale crime scene, despite Hennie resembling the sort of elderly witch that snuffed out small children, pickling their limbs in great jars of brine and then selling them from her dusty shelves, Sophie wasn’t scared of her. And she wasn’t grossed out, even when a faint scuttling noise seemed to confirm her mom’s accusation of pests and vermin. Sophie was vaguely fascinated, as if stepping into Hennie’s grocery was akin to entering the great hushed hall of an art museum, or a scientific laboratory from another time. It was truly like no place she had ever seen, with bins of candies from other worlds and centuries, shelves of colored glass bottles holding liquids, and a flicker in the faint lighting that suggested lanterns or candles.

  “Hello? Hello? Hello?” Andrea’s harpy tone cut through Sophie’s reverie, and she snapped to attention as her mother pulled the car awkwardly up a long gravel drive. Sophie became aware of a smell in the air, like rot and dust, something earthy and chalky at once. The dump spread out before them, splayed wide to either side and clambering up a hill, where some of the more fanciful garbage—plastic deer, pink flamingos, a giant ceramic dog’s head—had been whimsically arranged, creating a cartoony sculpture garden.