Mermaiding
By Faith Gardner
I’m a paid mermaid at the Mermaid Lounge, off Highway 5, have been for a year now, since I was legal. Once eleven rolls around I’ll dive in the wall-tall, dinge-blue aquarium and swim a little show. I wear a seashell bra and smile. I’ve got long dark hair that trails like a veil. I have a shimmery waterproof tail. I made it myself on my Singer.
Mermaiding’s my part-time gig, eleven to one each night. My boss Iris said she thinks it’s bad for the skin to stay in longer, and Iris is very concerned about everyone’s skin. So I bartend before and after, and when I keep my outfit on—hopping behind the counter, making everybody hoot and holler—I may spill Pabsts but I sure do make amazing tips.
Queenie doesn’t see it that way. She thinks everything in this town’s a dead end and spends all her time outside the nail salon planning her escape. She googles hostels and checks plane ticket prices to Mumbai, Panama, Cambodia. Less touristy, she says, smacking her gum. And cheaper. As if it would matter to Queenie, who’s never been outside the county. Even I’ve been to San Francisco and San Diego. But she’s like a sister, we’ve been roommates since we turned eighteen. Sometimes when she comes out from the shower with her towel wrapped around her like a minidress, steam pouring out the doorway, I imagine sucking the beads of water from her skin, then look away.
Some nights after work, Queenie comes to the ML for drinks. She orders manhattans and long island iced teas. She wishes she was in New York and writes in her Moleskin about it. I’ve peeked. She talks to men, her acrylic nails clawing the air for emphasis. She tells them she has a dream of becoming a pilot. That she wants to see the world at 600 miles per hour. When she brings men home, I hear everything, because we share a wall. And I know if Queenie’s faking it. Queenie always fakes it.
But I’m a mermaid. People love to watch me. And when Queenie drinks too many manhattans and long island iced teas and crawls into bed with me weeping about how badly she wants an African safari, I remind her that we have a life here. That I have a career I love. I rub lotion on my itching screaming skin. Queenie mumbles into my pillow that I’m crazy and there’s more to life than swimming around a bar’s fish tank and popping the lids off Olympias. I cuddle up next to her, hear her snore. I’m glad she’s too sauced to find her own bed, and I pull the sheet down and look at her back. I wonder if one day we’ll get boyfriends and all this will be stories.
I have a worsening skin problem. My arms are pink and stingy in their elbow-pits. Queenie says I’m allergic to this town. At work, Iris approaches me with a knitted bag filled with ointments and expresses her concern. She asks me if I need a break from the water and I tell her no. I open a Papst, pour a Bud, yell at people to not smoke inside. Queenie’s sitting at a table with a man she’s sat at the table with before. One she’s brought home. I burn and think of what she’s saying over there, some same old crap about how awful her life is, how she wants to leave but can’t.
A baby-faced guy in a black T-shirt’s got his elbows up on the bar. He’s telling me he comes here just to watch me swim. I smile. He asks me about my tail. Lots of men ask about my tail, but I like this one—his dimple, the scar above his lip. I like that as I smile at him, Queenie is there in the background at her table, tiny from the distance, and it’s almost as if she’s sitting on Babyface’s shoulder. Babyface’s name is Derek. As we talk, I realize I’ve seen him around. I’ve opened his bottles and taken his ones. I’ve swum and he’s watched, and I’ve been oblivious, as usual. Queenie leaves the bar stumbly with the man. I go home alone, with Derek’s number written on my hand, and I can hear the headboards hammer through the walls. I put in my earplugs and try to breathe normally.
What is wrong with me, I ask the bathroom mirror. The rash has spread along my arms. It is reaching for my wrists, it is headed for my shoulders. These past few weeks Queenie’s been with her guy, whose name is—as if he could get any more typical than he already is—Guy. She buys expensive pottery and researches the Peace Corps on her laptop. I call Derek, who whispers into his phone about his life in LA. The comics he draws. His ex-girlfriends and their various problems. Our conversations last hours, but I postpone hanging out after work because I want my rashes to go away first. He still watches me mermaid from eleven to one. Sometimes, through the murky glass, I watch him back and smile.
Queenie and Guy screw all night long, and I wear earplugs and turn my fan on high to block out her orgasms. They still sound fake. I have dreams we kiss and I wake up mad at her and then let it go by breakfast. She doesn’t talk about exotic places so much lately. Packages have been arriving every day from Overstock and Amazon. Last week she mentioned college. When I peek in her Moleskin all it says is Guy, Guy, Guy.
My rashes just get worse. I go see a dermatologist, who scratches his head and says eczema? I wear sleeves at work now outside the tank. I wear sleeves all through August. Derek and I talk over the bar. He’s leaving as soon as his aunt’s house sells. If I’m ever going to woo or be wooed, I need a cure for my arms. Queenie tells me I should quit the ML, that the water is dirty and making me sick. No, I say, throwing one of her New Yorkers across the room. I’m a fucking mermaid.
This chick shows up to work one Saturday with seashells on her tits. She’s wearing jeans. I’m cleaning up puke with a mop and bucket. What the hell, I say to Iris. Iris pulls me into her office and says, let’s talk. But really she just talks. She writes down homeopathic remedies on a post-it like some kind of doctor and tells me to go take it easy until my skin gets better. Peppermint oil, milk baths, fuck you, Iris, I say. Iris doesn’t care if people say fuck to her. She asks if Sheila can borrow my tail. Absolutely not, I say, and go home.
Queenie’s painting her toenails on the leather sofa and I tell her she shouldn’t bring her work home with her. It’s supposed to be a joke but neither of us laugh. She has the TV on mute, some reality show about brides. I tell her I’m temporarily on leave from the ML and she gets up and hugs me like this is good news. She follows me into my room, crawls on my bed, blows on her toenails. She snuggles up to me and we lay in silence and I can hear my heart. It’s so loud I can’t believe it’s only a tiny muscle there inside of me. She kisses my neck and I don’t move and she asks, is that okay? When she kisses my lips, I taste the whiskey. Queenie, I say, what are you doing?
She pulls up my sleeves. She puts her face against my arms and her cheeks cool the itch. That place, she says, has made you sick.
The next morning Queenie is grumpy. My nails look awful, she says, squinting at her toes. She leaves my bed and says nothing. She brushes her teeth and I can hear her sigh. She comes into the doorway and drapes an arm there and says, I’m moving out, okay? That was what I meant to say. We don’t talk about it. The apartment door slams and I hear her car vroom and then nothing.
Desperate, I go to the grocery store and buy gallons of milk. I take a milk bath. I try to squeeze out tears but for some reason, I barely care that Queenie says she’s going and anyway I think I shouldn’t believe her. As soon as I get rid of these rashes, I’m going to be a mermaid again. Just watch me.
I go back to bartending at the ML, but the rashes are improving too slowly to let me back in the water. I watch Sheila with contempt, the pathetic green tail she obviously made, and botched, herself. Her blah-blond hair, medium-length, nothing like a real mermaid. She’s bone-skinny, no-tits. And yet she draws a crowd of yokels there to see her every night. Nobody but Derek seems to miss mermaid-me. Queenie doesn’t even come to the ML anymore, she’s into the late night BBQ place a few miles down the road. Derek is leaving soon. I invite him over for a good-bye dinner. He’s been a fun flirtation, a distraction, and at night, in hushed voices on our phones, we’ve become intimate friends.
It’s fall, and it’s not just the colors of the grass and the leaves that spin from the trees and die in the streets. It’s not just that, it’s the pace—the slowing, the emptiness of the apartment. Queenie has cleared boxes and crates of her clothes and shoes and travel books out. I still don’t believe it’s real. I still think Queenie will realize she’s made a mistake and will come crawling back. She’s never loved a man more than a month. Derek comes over for his goodbye dinner. I cook salmon in tin foil, vegetables, uncork a bottle of wine. I pretend I’ve done this kind of thing before, but really I’ve only listened through the door while Queenie’s done it.
A bottle of wine later, I tell Derek about how I much I love mermaids. How as a kid my favorite movie was Splash. How I used to tie my feet together and swim all summer long, hold my breath for minutes at a time in the bathtub. He puts his hand on my knee and shakes his head. A shame, he says, it’s a damned shame. I take off my sweater and show him my rash, thinking, this is it. He doesn’t flinch. Put on your mermaid costume, he says, and come sit on my lap.
He fondles my seashells, runs a hand along my waist, caresses the plastic material of my tail. I try to draw the string to loosen the seashells but he says don’t. I stand up to take off my tail but he says keep it on. He says, I like you just like this. I sit back down. I like me like this, too. We relax. This is fine with me, just sitting here, a dry mermaid on a man’s lap. I can feel his erection through my mermaid tail and I’m glad I don’t have to feel responsible for it.
We stay sitting like that for a long time, until I hear him snoring. I’m thinking about Queenie and hoping she’s having a terrible night. I’m hoping she calls and comes stumbling drunk back to me again. I’m hoping my rashes clear up and back into the tank I go.
Derek takes me to breakfast in the morning. He orders tofu instead of eggs and the waitress shudders as she pens it on her pad. He tells me to come visit him in LA. At first I hesitate, but then he reminds me about movies and TV and all the mermaid parts. If the ML doesn’t work out, he says, you can come down there and try to make it as a mermaid in a bigger pond. I wonder if he’s joking as I wave goodbye. But the first thing I do when I get home that night after bartending and blond mermaid-ignoring is google apartments and auditions in LA. I find Disneyland, where a Little Mermaid delights little girls all year long. Her hair is so very vermilion. I start drafting emails to potential jobs, citing my extensive mermaid experience. I kiss my elbow-pits where my rashes are healing. I put on Splash for the first time in years and say all the lines with Madison. But then I stop and shut down my computer and forget about everything, because Queenie is home, and crying, and calling for me.
About the Author:
Faith Gardner is the author of The Second Life of Ava Rivers and Perdita. Her short fiction has been published in places like ZYZZYVA, PANK and McSweeney's online. She lives in the Bay Area. Visit Faith online at www.faithgardner.com and follow her on twitter @iamfaithgardner.
About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQIA+ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as "queer," while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream. Submissions are open from June 1 to July 1. Poetry, prose, visual art, reviews and interviews will all be considered. Visit Submittable for more details.