Mermaid in Chelsea Creek

by Michelle Tea

  “Let’s get you fixed up,” Andrea said. “If you are going to do this thing, I can’t stop you. But I can at least help you look presentable.”

  Andrea fetched a bottle of conditioner from the shower and sat her daughter between her legs, and with her nimble fingers unwove the balls of hair from themselves. She handed Sophie the feathers as she plucked them from her head, and Sophie clutched them, bundled in her hands like a bouquet. Andrea ran a comb through the locks, smoothing them, training them to lay flat. She plugged in the hair dryer and ran the warm air over Sophie’s head. Through all of it, Sophie melted. She luxuriated in the sensation of her mother’s hands working around her scalp, her hair raised in a delicious chill. Even the pulls, the inevitable stings, were okay, because they were followed by such soothing pets. Sophie felt sleepy, and loved. I feel loved, she thought. That doesn’t mean you are, came her next thought, and Sophie decided to stop thinking, just for a moment, and enjoy the feeling of it all, the feeling of there being so much time, this lazy, unhurried grooming, the tickle of her mother’s hands and the slow, glowing sensation of love. When Andrea was finished she pulled Sophie to a mirror and Sophie regarded herself, her hair in twin braids that fell across her shoulders, a light fringe of hair wisping across her brow.

  “Look,” Andrea said, “at how pretty you are.”

  It was not a word Sophie ever would have used for herself. It was a word she would have batted away as a well-intentioned lie, but seeing herself in the mirror she thought, Yes. Look how pretty.

  * * *

  ANDREA OPENED THE front door to a sidewalk full of pigeons. The pavement was alive with them, many shades and hues of gray, fat ones and malnourished ones, some standing solid on two good legs, many not, many standing stork-like, balanced on their one healthy claw, others shifting painfully on two twisted nubs, all of them silent, no coos or clucks. Many had traveled from distant cities to be there in Chelsea, at that moment, to escort Sophie to the creek. Andrea’s dulled heart spasmed at the sight. She could not resist her revulsion, but there was a begrudging acceptance, too. The pigeons loved her daughter, and had helped her as she, the girl’s own mother, had not been able to. What is wrong with me? She anguished inside, but she knew. She could feel her own mother sitting upon her heart, pecking away at it like a dark crow.

  “I can’t come with you,” Andrea said. She held her hand over the place her heart hammered. Was it the beating of her heart, or Kishka beating upon her heart? She felt it always, and never knew.

  “It’s okay, Ma.” Sophie stood on her tiptoes to whisper in her mother’s ear. “There’s a gold brick on the kitchen table, I brought it for you.”

  Andrea looked at her daughter, her face so raw; Sophie’s face was always so raw, her need sitting right on top of it. Her earnestness, this face of her daughter, it had been so hard for Andrea to look at it, to feel someone needing so much from her. She only needs love, Andrea thought. Surely it did not have to be so hard. She wrapped her arms around Sophie, kissed her head, which smelled so good, the fruity bright stink of it obscured the heavy, bed-scented sick smell of Andrea’s own hair.

  “Thank you so much, Sophie,” Andrea said. “I love you, baby.”

  She walked back into her house, her heart a thunder.

  Chapter 21

  Livia and Arthur stepped out from the mob of birds, holding in their beaks a ribbony garland, braided with tiny treasures—chestnuts, the green pods that fall from trees that Sophie played helicopter with as a kid, acorns, bottle caps, small dusty toys, twigs, strands of shredded plastic. All the things one might find brushed up against the curb on a Chelsea street. All of it braided together, strangely beautiful.

  “We all made this for you,” said Bix, as Livia’s mouth was full and she could not speak. “We braided it together, with our beaks and with our feet, those who have good ones.”

  Livia and Arthur rose into the air with the wreath firmly in their beaks. The light clatter of the trinkets shaking together was a pleasant clatter.

  “Could you bend, please,” Bix directed. “At the waist.”

  Sophie did as she was asked, and the birds swooped beneath her, landing on her back. She enjoyed the scramble of claws, their sweet weight upon her. Her eyes stung with missing the pigeons in advance. Would there be pigeons in Poland? It didn’t matter. Even if there were, there would not be Livia and Arthur and Giddy and Roy and Bix.

  Livia and Arthur worked their tiny beaks expertly, tying the garland into a messy knot on the back of her neck. They lifted off with a scraping push, and Sophie righted herself.

  “Ooooh,” the birds hushed.

  “Oh it’s very pretty,” Giddy cooed. Sophie rather liked the bustle of it, the unexpected sight of a plastic cowboy translucent from a decade in the sun, or a fragment of a rusted can looking fragile and lacy.

  “This is really cool,” Sophie said. “I can’t believe you all made this for me.”

  “It was our pleasure,” Arthur said. His melodic pigeon voice was taut with the swell of emotion butting up against his bluster. “We really love you, Sophie. We think of you as one of us, ours. Oh, crap—” Arthur’s voice cracked, the sound of a violin trill slightly off key. “I said I wasn’t going to do this.” He pushed his face into Livia’s feathers.

  “Arthur hasn’t cried since Roy hatched,” Livia said.

  “Well, I’m going to cry!” Sophie said to her audience of birds. Had her mother told her she loved her? Was it the first time Andrea had ever said such a thing? Sophie remembered hearing it as a little girl, but it had been a long time since Andrea had uttered that phrase. “I love you guys,” she said to the birds, grateful to feel such an easy love inside her heart, uncontaminated by doubt or fear, no hurt there, nothing worn away by time’s passage, just a sweet and easy love for the birds. “I really love you.”

  Together they walked toward the creek. Sophie wished she could carry her closest friends upon her body, all of them, but she was too small for so many birds, so she let petite Giddy perch on one shoulder and still-growing Roy, eager and proud, on the other. Livia and Arthur led the dark cloud of pigeons in the sky above them, such a mass they blotted out the setting sun. Sophie watched people leave their houses to point up at the incredible swarm of them. Closer, hovering above Sophie, was Bix.

  “ ‘How do I love thee?’ ” He said sadly. “ ‘Let me count the ways.’ ”

  “Bix is in love with you,” Giddy said, giggling.

  “Giddy!” Roy chastised. “You weren’t supposed to tell!”

  “You weren’t supposed to tell,” Giddy corrected. “You made an oath. I was just eavesdropping.”

  Bix went on, quoting love poetry. “ ‘How will I be awake and aware / If the light of the beloved is absent?’ ” He asked mournfully. “The Muslim poet Rumi.”

  “Uh-oh,” Sophie said.

  “He wants to mate for life with you,” Giddy said.

  “I’m not a bird,” Sophie said.

  “I’ve told him that,” Roy said. “I’m trying to get him to come to his senses.”

  * * *

  THE SUNSET ON the creek almost made it look pretty. Hot reds and orange and neon pink, it looked like a stream of fire winding through the weedy earth. Sophie was delighted to see Angel and Dr. Chen standing side by side, watching Sophie pick carefully through the ripped chain-link. She wished she could run to them, but the weight of Giddy and Roy on her shoulders plus her massive garland of flora and trash forced her to walk slowly, with purpose. With dignity, even.

  “Hi you guys,” she said shyly. “I didn’t know I would see you.”

  “I wouldn’t miss this, are you kidding?” Angel said. “Hey, bird-brains.” She held up her palm to Giddy and Roy, and they smacked their tiny claws upon it. “High five.”

  “Dr. Chen,” Sophie said.

  “The birds were so excited,” the doctor said. “They had been making this necklace for you at the dovecote, and sending messages to other flocks. It has been quite an exciting
time at our place.” She paused. “And we all know about the tragedy, also. The birds from a flock in Lynn that your grandmother ate.”

  Sophie’s hand flew to her face in sadness, causing Giddy and Roy to lift off in alarm.

  “Oh, Dr. Chen! They will have—a burial? A service?” Sophie did not know the pigeon custom for such things.

  “The flock will have their mourning. And their revenge.” A wave of energy rippled through Dr. Chen, as if she were shaking something off her. Her perfect, shining bob tossed, glossy with the day’s dying light. She put her hands on Sophie, gripping her by the arms and pulling her in for a tiny peck of a kiss on the top of her head. “What an adventure is before you. Try to enjoy yourself, okay? So many girls would kill to run away with a mermaid!”

  “Well, you haven’t seen this mermaid,” Sophie said uneasily.

  As if on cue, the oil-slicked waters rippled, and Syrena’s gnarly head broke the surface. She pulled herself to the bank, stretching her arms onto the trash-strewn earth.

  “Really,” she spoke. “I look and look for some thing of worth in this creek, I find nothing. Terrible place. I not believe I trapped here so long. We go now, finally, yes?” She wiped at the water streaming down the sides of her face, leaving dark streaks of grime smeared across her skin, like war paint. “Hello, you people.”

  “Hello!” Dr. Chen said crisply, her excitement making the word sparkle.

  “Hiiiiiiiiiii,” Angel said, her greeting more of a dazed sigh. Her eyes upon the mermaid were wide. Sophie thought about Ella’s declaration that all girls who looked like boys were lesbians. Angel was mesmerized by the creature.

  “What they say here—What’s matter, got staring problem?” Syrena shot Angel a dirty look, pulling the wild snarl of her hair around her shoulders. “No time for—big party, meet mermaid, oh, so magical, blah blah blah.” With her strong, gnarled fingers she tied her impossible hair on the top of her head in a big knot. Fish sprung from it into the creek below, diving for their lives. “I been here for days, all alone, no one bring me party, no one see if I need anything.” Syrena pouted. “Too late now. Time to go. Sophie, get in.”

  Sophie looked at the skanky creek. This was her grand exit, the climax to her braid of pigeon treasure, her skyfull of birds, her mother’s gesture of love? She was going to climb into the lousy creek, Dr. Chen and Angel watching. She looked at the adults. Dr. Chen nodded encouragingly. “It’s okay, Sophia.”

  Angel’s eyes were still glued to the mermaid, in spite of her spiteful pronouncement. “If I had known you had needed for anything,” she said, “I would have brought it for you.”

  “Get better magic, why don’t you. I would have liked a fish to eat without, you know, the chemicals all inside. Maybe a crab, some oysters.” She sighed. “Is fine. I am being, what you call, a snob. The chemicals, they are interesting in their way. Get me drunk, I think.” Syrena smiled. Sophie’s heart took on a new beat at the sight. She hadn’t seen the mermaid smile, ever, and it was a beautiful thing, like shoots of sunlight cutting through water, illuminating beams. The mermaid’s smile changed everything.

  Sophie ran to Angel and clutched her hard in a wordless good-bye. “Look inside,” Angel said, and Sophie drew herself into Angel, no wall to keep her out, and she felt the depth of Angel’s love and concern, her hope and belief in her. She felt its purity and its strength. “Remember that, okay?

  “Okay.” Sophie nodded. She walked to the edge of the creek. She would have liked it to be deep enough to just jump in. She was so scared, scared and thrilled: to just hurl herself into the waters would have felt right, but the creek was thin, shallow. She crouched to the dirt awkwardly and looked at Syrena. To see the mermaid in person, not beneath the waters, not in a dream. Her eyes were wide and circular as coins, and they flashed with a sort of silver human eyes didn’t have. Her face was smooth and rough at once, she had many wrinkles in her face yet she was beautiful, somehow young. Something about her made it seem like you weren’t fully seeing her, and so you kept staring, searching her face.

  “What is the wait?” she asked Sophie.

  “My sneakers,” Sophie said. “Do I keep my sneakers on?”

  “For creek, yah. Later, no. Come on, I tell you all you need to know.”

  “So, I can breathe under there?” Sophie checked.

  “Come, come! Now not time to be ascared!” The mermaid’s giant tail poked through the creekwater and slapped its surface. There was a gasp of awe from the crowd of birds and humans. Dirty water spattered Sophie’s face. “Come now or I pull you in like Boginki.”

  Sophie stepped down into the creek. The water was warm, but creepily so. Stagnant water being baked by the sun, cooking the trash into a nasty stew. Syrena offered Sophie her hand, the chips of pearly seashell rings glinting in the last, orange light of the sky. “Come with me.”

  The mermaid dunked beneath the surface so that all Sophie saw of her was stray clumps of hair floating like seaweed. With her free hand Sophie waved goodbye, and disappeared beneath the creek.

  * * *

  SOPHIE WAS STILL trying to orient herself when Kishka broke through the water. Syrena had led her slowly down the narrow creek, warning her to dodge the various debris she had become intimate with during her stay. A car door, dismembered, wedged on its side in the sludge. A shopping cart, the weave of its metal dark with rust. There were hunks of car battery and chunks of random concrete, there was a refrigerator to maneuver around. Sophie picked her way around it all carefully, mimicking the ginger movements of the mermaid, whose hand she clutched. Syrena’s hand, Sophie noted, was not wrinkled with her eternity in the water, the way Sophie’s fingertips pruned when she stayed in the bathtub too long. The mermaid’s hand was poreless and smooth, and the slick feel of it oddly familiar. What was it? Dolphins! Sophie’s class had had a field trip to the aquarium in Boston, and Sophie had gotten to touch one of the smiling creatures. The feel of them was like a toy, just the way Syrena’s hand felt inside her clutch, like it could slip away, some kind of rubber or plastic, something unalive yet alive, like the dolphins. Sophie’s head swam with questions, and as if Syrena could feel them, a current in the water, she turned to her charge.

  “We get to deeper water, we talk, yes? I tell you all. For now, you just stay close and walk careful. Soon you will learn to swim like mermaid. You learn to eat mermaid food, you understand water. Now, you are like human baby. You just follow me.” Syrena paused and plucked a small dark fish from creek bed. She popped it in her mouth.

  “My last chance to eat these!” she spoke around the fish as she chewed, then pulled the bones out intact, and stuck it into her hair like a comb. “Jewelry now, a snack later!” The mermaid hiccupped, and her eyes flashed silver beneath the dark water. “I maybe a little funny from the fish.” Sophie couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like Syrena was smiling. “Very bad for you, but I begin to like feeling.” She giggled a little, giggles that rose toward the surface in little air bubbles. “Very glad we go now! Back to the sea! Back to my home, my river! Oh Neptune, let us get out of here!” She turned to Sophie, and yes, Sophie was sure of it, the mermaid was smiling! “So many people waiting to meet you, Sophia. My sisters, the Ogresses, so many animals! Let us begin.”

  Sophie felt calmed, momentarily by the mermaid’s authority and sudden cheer.

  And then her grandmother arrived.

  Kishka’s presence exploded the waters like a bomb. A wave rose above her. Like a bad magnet Kishka drew the waters toward her, and the waters, as if conscious, responded, came to do her bidding.

  “Oh no.” Syrena looked back at Sophie, her authority cut with fear, her cheer dead gone. Still disoriented by the little toxic fish but no longer giddy. For a terrible moment Syrena looked her age—ancient, withered, exhausted. In that glance Sophie knew that the mermaid had witnessed many, many things, bad things, and that those things had left some part of her sunken and resigned.

  The wave rose like a tornado taking to the sky, c
arrying within it heaps of mud, layers of sediment embedded with decades of poisons. Toxins dumped and long settled were now stirred into this giant wet cloud arcing above them. Sophie thought of her friends on the creek bank, watching this liquid monster grow. The birds, at least the birds could fly. What about Angel, and Dr. Chen? Kishka’s arms were stretched above her, her hands breaking the surface of the creek, and her face was contorted with her awesome power as she summoned the wave. Sophie looked to the mermaid, who shook her head in a sort of stuck panic.

  “This will be bad, this will be very bad. She is making rogue.” Her silver eyes flashed at Sophie, like the rhythmic flash of a lighthouse in the darkness. “Sophie, this is going to hurt.”

  But the hurt came before the rogue wave crashed upon them. It came when Kishka’s hands plunged beneath the surface of the creek, clutching in their bony grip a drowning flutter of pigeon. Its wings churned the water, the struggle creating a tiny whirlpool. Fighting to free itself, all the bird could do was wrap the water around itself like a horrible cloak of drowning. Beneath the dark waters, the orange flash of a bird eye, tiny and desperate.

  Sophie lurched toward the animal, the water both catching and stalling her, like in a slow-motion nightmare when you try to run away but you’re stuck in molasses. Sophie’s arms sunk thickly in the grimy creek bed as she pushed herself to where the bird lay thrashing in Kishka’s hands. Too shocked to put up her shield, Sophie felt her grandmother enter her heart, a sickening swirl, like the poison of the dirty creek had slid right into her veins. Sophie realized that this was Kishka’s terrain, too; this creek was part of her rotten heart, all the parts of the earth that had been ruined or killed were part of the vast, dark heart of her grandmother.

  The rogue was descending. Sophie could feel it as a pressure change inside the water. Her ears did strange things, clogging and snapping; she grew dizzy. She made one last lunge toward the bird but it was too late. The creature was limp in Kishka’s hands, which had taken on glamours and become goat hooves, chunky and cloven. Stilled by drowning waters, Sophie could finally see the pigeon—the thin stick of bamboo, the artfully carved whistle. The shine of the wire that held it to Livia’s tailfeathers. Livia. Her tiny head turned to the side, her lovely eyes, that orange color, how nicely her eyes had matched the coral of her legs, Sophie realized, how beautiful Livia had been, how much like necklaces were the marking of her throat feathers. Livia was beautiful because Livia was beautiful, Sophie thought dumbly, realizing beauty to be a thing deeper than she had ever understood. In a sob she reached out to catch the bird as Kishka left the waters, grabbing for the precious body this thing called Livia had brought alive, this precious thing now empty of Livia but special for having held her.