by Mike Resnick
“Melora of the Purple Mist,” I say.
“Melora of the Purple Mist?” she repeats. “How can I fit all that on a wedding invitation?”
“Just use Melora,” I say.
“And what bowling alley or topless club do you meet Miss What’s-her-name of the Purple Mist at?” she asks.
“I met her at work, kind of,” I answer.
“I knew it!" she says, poking a pudgy forefinger into the air. “I knew I should never let you take that job with the sewage company!”
“It’s a salvage company,” I say.
“Sewage, salvage, what’s the difference?” she demands. “It’s that Gypsy who walks around half-naked with her deathless beauty sagging down to her pupik, right? I told you she had her sights set on you!”
“She’s not a Gypsy, and it’s not her. She’s just another diver.”
“So you’re marrying some other girl who lies around on deck with her tuchus soaking up the sun,” she says. “I should feel better about that?”
“She doesn’t lie around on deck,” I say uneasily.
“On deck, below deck, big difference,” she snaps.
“Bigger than you think,” I say. “The truth of it is, she spends most of her time about 50 feet below deck.”
“So she’s a diver,” she says.
“Not exactly,” I answer.
“What, then?”
“Try not to get real excited, Ma,” I say.
“I’m not excited, I have convulsions all the time,” she says. “Just tell me.”
“She’s a mermaid,” I say.
“As long as she’s not that Gypsy girl,” she says, fanning herself with the TV Guide. “Or that lady bartender from last summer. Or the bug woman.”
“The entomologist,” I correct her.
“Whatever,” she says. “So tell me about this Purple Mist person.”
“Like I said, she’s a mermaid.”
“Like what has a tail and spends her whole life in the water?” she asks.
“That’s right,” I say.
“Does she wear a bra?” she says suddenly.
“Ma!” I say, outraged.
“You heard me—does she wear a bra?”
“No,” I finally answer.
“Figures,” she says.
“What a thing to ask!” I say.
“What do you want me to ask?” she says. “My son comes home and tells me he’s marrying someone who’s covered with scales and spends all her time swimming in salt water, despite what it must do to her complexion. So can she at least get us a price on fresh fish?”
“It’s not something I’m real concerned with,” I say.
“Of course not,” she says. “You’re as impractical as your late father.” She sighs. “All right, so where did this female person go to school?”
“I don’t think she did,” I say.
“Ah!” she says with a knowing nod. “Rich family with a private tutor. What temple do they belong to?”
“Who?”
“Her family,” she says. “Try to pay attention, Martin.”
“Martin is your nephew who went broke manufacturing the folding waterbed,” I say. “I’m Milton, remember?”
“Don’t change the subject,” she says. “What temple do they go to?”
“They don’t,” I say.
“They’re Reformed?” she asks.
I take a deep breath and say, “They’re not Jewish at all,” and then I wait for the explosion.
It takes about three millionths of a second—a new record.
“You’re marrying a shiksa?” she bellows.
“I’m marrying a mermaid,” I say.
“Who cares about that?” she screams. “Call my doctor! I’m having a coronary!”
“Ma, try to understand—there aren’t any Jewish mermaids,” I say.
“It’s my fault?” she demands. “It’s bad enough that you want to give me grandsons with fins—and how in the world will the rabbi perform the bris?—but now you tell me that their mother’s a goy?”
“I knew I was gonna have trouble with you,” I say unhappily.
“Trouble?” she shrieks. “Why should there be trouble? Your Uncle Nate will come by with a knife and a cracker and say, ‘Is this a jar of Baluga caviar?’ and I’ll say ‘No, it’s 40,000 of my grandchildren.’”
“Will you at least meet her?” I ask.
“Some conversation we’ll have,” she replies. “She’ll say ‘Blub!’ I’ll say ‘Gurgle!’ and she’ll say ‘Glub!’ and I’ll say ‘I’m getting the folds’, and she’ll say—”
“That’s the bends, not the folds,” I explain.
“Bends, folds, what’s the difference?” she says. “I plan to be dead of a heart attack in two more minutes.”
“She speaks English,” I say, getting back to the subject.
“She does?”
“With a beautiful lilting accent.”
“I knew it!” she says. “You’re too young to remember, but they drove our people out of Lilting before the last war …”
“Lilting isn’t a place, Ma,” I say.
“It isn’t?” she says suspiciously. “Are you sure of that?”
“I’m sure,” I say. “She really wants to meet you.”
“I’ll just bet she does,” she says. “She probably wants to feed me to her pet lobster.”
“I don’t think lobsters eat people,” I say.
“Aha!” she says. “But you don’t know!”
“We’re getting off the subject,” I say.
“Right,” she agrees. “The subject was my imminent death.”
“The subject was Melora.”
“What does this fish person who doesn’t wear a bra want with you anyway?” she demands. “Why doesn’t she go elope with some nice halibut?”
“I met her while I was hunting for treasure,” I say. “It was love at first sight.”
“So what you’re saying is that you went down there looking for gold and what you came up with was a topless person of the Purple Mist?”
“You’re making this very difficult, Ma.”
“You bring home a cod for dinner, and instead of cooking it I have to give it my son, and I’m making this difficult?” she says, just a bit hysterically.
I figure it’s time to play my ace in the hole, so I say, “She’s willing to convert, Ma.”
“Into what—a woman with two or more legs?”
“To Judaism,” I say. “I told her how important it was to you.”
“How can she convert?” she says. “Do we know any rabbis who can hold services 50 feet under the water?”
“She can come to the surface,” I say. “How else would we talk?”
“When did you ever talk to a girl?” she says. “You’re just like your departed father.”
“We talk all the time,” I say.
She considers this and finally nods her head. “I suppose there’s not a lot else you can do.”
“Don’t get personal, Ma,” I say.
She raises her eyes to the heavens—which are just beyond the light bulb in the middle of the ceiling—and has another of her hourly chats with God. “He wants me to welcome a lady fish into my family and he tells me not to get personal.”
“A lady Jewish fish,” I point out.
“So okay, she won’t be just a fish girl, she’ll be a gefilte fish girl, big deal. What do I feed her? If I give her lox, will she accuse me of cooking her relatives?”
“She eats fish all the time, Ma.”
“And when we leave the table to go watch Oprah, do I carry her or does she slither on her belly?”
“Actually, she doesn’t watch Oprah,” I say.
“She doesn’t watch Oprah?” she says, and I can tell this shocks her more than the fact that Melora is a mermaid. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s never seen a television,” I say. “They don’t have them in her kingdom.”
“What are they, some kind of C
ommunists?” she demands.
“They don’t have any electricity,” I explain.
“You mean she doesn’t even have a food processor?”
“That’s right,” I say.
“That poor girl!” she says. “And no disposal unit in her sink?”
“None,” I say, and I can see that suddenly she’s working up a head of sympathy.
“How can anybody live like that?” she says.
“She manages just fine.”
“Nonsense!” she says. “Nobody can live without a trash masher. My son’s wife may be a fish, but she isn’t going to slave 30 hours a day just because I had to!”
“That’s very thoughtful, Ma,” I say. “But—”
“Don’t interrupt!” she snaps. “You bring her by this afternoon. I’ll have some knishes ready, and some blintzes, and maybe a little chopped liver, and we’ll watch Oprah and I’ll show her my kitchen and …” Suddenly she stops and re-thinks her schedule. “Bring her earlier and we can watch Dr. Phil, too. And tonight they’re re-running that old series with Lloyd Bridges. It should make her feel right at home.”
“You’ll like her, Ma,” I promise.
“Like, shmike,” she says. “If I have to go through life without ever being able to point to my son the doctor, at least I can point to my almost-daughter the gefilte fish girl. Mrs. Noodleman down the block will be so jealous!” She pauses. “We’ll have to put a little meat on her bones.”
“You haven’t even seen her,” I say.
“That’s all right,” she says. “I know your taste in women. Cheap and skinny.”
“Ma, you think any woman under 200 pounds is skinny.”
“And you think any woman who doesn’t ask for ice cubes and a straw with her wine is sophisticated.” She gets up, and I can see she’s getting set for a couple of hours of serious puttering. “Now, you go get her and bring her back, while I prepare something for the poor undernourished thing to eat. And I think I’ll invite Rabbi Bernstein, since we need someone to work with her, and he’s always fishing when he should be at Temple, and …”
As I leave, she is trying to remember which company sells the pens that write under water so she can send out wedding invitations to the bride’s family.
***
I actually wrote a version of this story, under a female pseudonym, back in the mid-1960s for the only issue of an “all-women’s tabloid.” I never kept a copy, so this isn’t an exact duplicate, and I’d like to think I’m half a century better, so when an anthology where the theme fit opened up, I took another shot at it.
The Revealed Truth
Her first name was Helen. No one knew her last name.
She wasn’t a local resident, that much was certain, since everyone in town knew everyone else. She had been passing through, on her way from somewhere to somewhere, probably driving a little too fast, especially on the fatal turn, and a tire had blown out while she was heading south on River Road. Her car plunged right into the river.
It was only eight or nine feet deep, but her door was locked and her window open. She banged her head pretty hard on the dashboard, and before a pair of startled fisherman could drag her out of the car she’d drowned. They carted her off to the hospital, dead on—well, before—arrival.
Her purse had the name “Helen” embroidered on it. It didn’t seem likely that her wallet and registration had floated away, but they weren’t in her purse or her car, and a whole troop of Boy Scouts volunteered to look for them, or some other ID, in the water and along the shore.
Turned out they only spent about four hours searching. No, they didn’t find it, but word reached them that she’d been miraculously revived, and they concluded that she could probably tell the authorities her name.
I heard about it while I was working on my next Sunday sermon, something about gluttony being a worse sin than most people thought, and I was hunting up government figures on our increased national obesity problem when word of the miracle came through.
You know how people are always asking “Where were you when …?” When JFK died, when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Well, to tell you the truth, I was two years old when Oswald killed Kennedy, and I was still in single digits when Armstrong walked on the moon, but I will always remember sitting at my desk in the alcove just to the left of the main altar when news of the Miracle at Miller’s Landing came to me. Initially I was thrilled, as we all were, and I praised God for His power and His compassion.
Oh, I suppose we’d all read and heard about such things happening, but never in or even near our Miller’s Landing. Helen had been officially dead for two hours and seventeen minutes. Usually, when someone’s revived after that long, their brain is gone because it’s been starved of oxygen, but every now and then they come back just fine, more often from freezing or drowning than any other kind of fatal (or should I say temporarily fatal?) accident.
Since no one knew anything about Helen, we didn’t know what religion she belonged to, but everyone seemed sure she’d want to thank God for reviving her, and maybe get some counseling from a member of her church, so the word went out to me—I’m the local Baptist minister—as well as to Father Patrick McNamara and Rabbi Milt Weiss, my friendly rivals for our citizens’ souls. I couldn’t find any record of her, not only in Miller’s Landing, but any nearby communities. I wondered if Patrick or Milt were having any better luck.
I remember that I was having lunch over at Irma’s, like I always do on Tuesdays, when she serves up that wonderful tomato soup, and in came Patrick McNamara. He spotted me and walked over.
“Hi, Pete,” he said. “Mind if I sit down?”
“It’s a free country. Until Irma brings the check, anyway.”
He chuckled at that. “We missed you on the links yesterday morning.”
“Wedding arrangements. Billy Forrest and Lois O’Grady.”
“Hey,” he said with a smile. “That’s half mine.”
“You’re too late,” I said, returning his smile. “She’s converting.”
“Okay, you win this one,” he said. “But I’ll get mine back.” And I knew he meant next month’s Cain-Connors wedding. “By the way, have you heard about this drowned woman, this Helen someone-or-other?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I thought I’d stop by after lunch and see if I could do anything for her.”
“Oh. She’s a Baptist?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea what she is, but I thought at least I’d make myself available to her.”
“I was thinking the same thing. And just in case she is a Catholic, I’ll make arrangements to take her confession right there.”
“It’s got to be more meaningful when you’re mostly dead than when you’re mostly not.”
He chuckled. “Precisely.”
I looked out the window. “I wonder where Milt is?”
“Are you supposed to be having lunch with him?”
“No, we usually meet over at Herbie’s fish place on Thursdays,” I answered. “But he’s got a smaller congregation than you or me, so I figured he’d be Johnny-on-the-Spot to pick up another member.”
Patrick laughed. “He won’t find one here. If Lois O’Grady changes her mind, she’s mine.”
“No,” I agreed. “I meant that if he’s off to see Helen Somebody, he’s got to walk right past Irma’s front window to get to the hospital.”
I finished my pie and coffee, treated Patrick to a coffee as well, and after I had paid Irma we got up, walked out into the sunlight, and strolled the two blocks to the hospital.
“Well, son of a gun!” said Patrick. “Look who’s here. What a surprise!”
“I love you, too, Patrick,” laughed Milt Weiss, who stood at the registration desk. “Hi, Pete.”
“I didn’t see you walk past Irma’s,” I said.
“I drove. And since I have a direct line to God, let me state, rather than guess, that you’re here to see the remarkable, resurrected Helen.”
“Of course,” I said.
“She’s in Room 314,” announced Milt. “Shall we proceed? No sense doing this in relays.”
We joined him and entered the elevator, which let us out a few seconds later. We walked down the white, antiseptic corridor to 314 and went into the room.
“Good afternoon,” said the nurse. “I’ll go check on some of the other patients while you’re here.”
“How is she?” I asked. “Will she live?”
The nurse nodded.
“Must be in serious condition,” said Patrick.
“Not really, not for what she’s been through.”
“But you look so grim.”
The nurse shuffled uneasily. “She’s not what you expect.”
“What do you mean?” asked Milt.
“You’ll see,” the nurse said, and then she was gone.
We walked over to the bed, Milt on the right side of it, Patrick on the left, me at the foot, and stared down at the women. She seemed fiftyish, but her horrible experience and her weakened condition could have aged her ten or twelve years. Her hair was a dirty gray, her skin wrinkled, and though the blanket covered her loosely, she looked to be about fifteen or twenty pounds overweight.
She opened her eyes.
“Good afternoon, Helen,” said Patrick, taking her hand and holding it gently.
She stared at each of us in turn. I looked for softness, or perhaps gratitude, if not for our presence, then for the simple fact of being alive, but all I saw … well, I couldn’t be sure if it was annoyance or contempt.
“How are you feeling, Helen?” asked Milt.
“I just died. How do you think I feel?”
“Grateful, perhaps?” I suggested. “A merciful God has allowed you to live again.”
“What do you know about God?” she said.
The question took me by surprise.
“I am a minister,” I said. “If there’s any way I can help …”
“And I am a rabbi,” said Milt, “and this gentleman across from me is a priest. No one knows your religion, so we came together to see if any or all of us could bring you spiritual comfort.”
“I don’t need it as much as two of you do,” she said and gave a nasty smile.
