The Mermaids Singing Read online

  “She’s done fine without a father for twelve years,” Grace says. “She likes you, Stephen, but I think you’re underestimating her.”

  “Maybe,” Stephen says. What he means, she can tell by his tone, is: Maybe you are.

  When she closes her eyes, Grace can see her daughter clearly: three years old, sitting at the scarred wooden table in their first apartment in Brighton. She threw tea parties with the set Grace had bought for her at Woolworth’s. Plastic plates, saucers, cups, and a teapot with a rose pattern, which had begun to flake off from too much use. Gráinne prepared the pretend tea the way her grandmother did—scalding the pot, shaking in some oregano that represented the loose tea they’d drunk in Ireland. During tea parties, their kitchen would smell like a pizza parlor. Gráinne set places for her dolls, one for her kitten (who stayed because of the milk in her tiny saucer), and gave the least battered pieces to her mother. She always laid one extra place, reverently, opposite Grace, and left the chair empty.

  “Who’s that for, sweetie?” Grace asked once. “Is it for the pirate queen?”

  “Nope,” Gráinne said, pouring the flecked green water into the tiny cups. “Dada.”

  The smell of oregano and warm milk turned Grace’s stomach.

  “You still think Dada’s coming?” Grace whispered. Gráinne gave the empty seat a sugar cookie.

  “First he’s gotta escape from the mermaid pirates,” Gráinne said. “Will you take sugar?” she added, in her grandmother’s accent, holding a spoon out to her mother’s cup.

  Grace said nothing else the whole year during which Gráinne performed this ritual. Sometimes, watching the determination in the girl’s face as she laid the table for tea, Grace would shiver, and look toward the doorway, half-expecting their absent guest to appear. Gráinne never mentioned her father except at these tea parties, and Grace debated with herself about the best way to handle the subject. How do you explain something you don’t understand yourself to a three-year-old? A year later, when Gráinne lost interest in her tea parties—and, it seemed, her missing father—Grace was relieved.

  I should have talked to her then, Grace thinks now. Stephen has stopped rubbing her back, but he’s still here, waiting for something. She should have explained to Gráinne, or tried to, about why she left Ireland, about how one could feel trapped, captured, even where there were no pirates or mermaids. But she’d waited. And Gráinne had forgotten, never asked about her father except for an occasional, almost journalistic inquiry when she reached puberty—what color was his hair, that sort of thing. No more “Dada”—just a man about whom she was mildly curious.

  Now Grace’s pain is beginning again. Actually, it is always there—at different levels, from bearable to almost surreal—and at the moment it is escalating to a degree that will require the pills which keep her from thinking clearly. Soon, she knows, the doctor will give her a supply of morphine shots, which Stephen will have to administer. The pills no longer work the way they used to.

  Stephen knows from the sweat on her forehead, and from the way she begins to thrash against the sheets like a fish, that it is time to hand her the tablets. Time to help her sip the water which he leaves at room temperature, because cold liquids make her feel like her teeth are cracking.

  When the edges of the pain begin to smooth, she tries to think of Gráinne as a little girl again, to think of a time when she knew what she was doing as a mother, when she believed in the logic behind her lies. But it is herself as a girl she remembers instead, not as a whole being, but as a reflection in the scraps of what surrounded her. Herself next to a boy named Michael, whom for years she thought of as her brother, though she knew they weren’t related in any traditional sense. Michael had his own mother and father, but Grace’s mother was also his mother, in a way that no one had bothered to explain, other than to say she was his “nanny.” Which hadn’t made any sense to the young Grace.

  Grace’s own father was dead and had been dead, as her mother put it, for longer than Grace had been alive. Grace liked to imagine that they had spent time together in heaven, when she was just the soul of a baby waiting to be born. When she thought of her father, she pictured an angel. A winged man who looked like Jesus without the exposed, thorny heart. At least, that was how she imagined him before she found out her mother had been lying to her.

  It was Michael who told her. Every night, he snuck into her bed and they pulled the sheets over themselves like a tent, lighting the inside with a flashlight they stole from the kitchen. If it was late and the grownups were in bed, Grace and Michael would take their pajamas off and trace their fingers over their identical upper bodies, giggling at the way their nipples puckered and shrunk like dried fruit. One night, when Michael had taken off his underwear too, and Grace saw the extra globes of flesh, she laughed so hard that Michael got mad at her.

  “Your father’s not in Heaven,” he had said. “He’s in Hell because he never married your mother.” When Grace stopped laughing and just looked at him, her pupils throbbing, he tried to take it back. But she punched him in the mouth anyway. There was a little blood, and he cried, which brought Grace’s mother, who smacked Grace for having no pajamas on as well as for being a bully.

  After that, Grace’s father was gone. She never pictured the angel again. And her mother, who had always been a stern but slightly unfocused presence in Grace’s life, became the expressionless face that Grace learned to mistrust, and, later, to hate.

  Grace loses the memory as Stephen pulls the sheets up over her back, smoothing the wrinkles she made in her pain. She wants him to pull them up farther, so she can make a tent, but she is too tired to explain why. Stephen requires more explanation from her than any other man she has ever loved.

  “Do you understand what I wrote down about the arrangements?” Grace says to him. She is afraid he hasn’t read her notes. He does not like to discuss the details of her dying.

  “I was Catholic once, too,” he says. “I know the routine. I just don’t understand why you want it.”

  “It’s not for me,” Grace says. Stephen closes his eyes, as he does a lot lately when she says something that seems to sting.

  “It’s not too late to talk to her,” he says. At first she thinks he means her mother, but then realizes he’s talking about Gráinne.

  “No,” Grace says, “it’s too early.”

  “What does that mean?” Stephen says, but she closes her eyes. He doesn’t understand. He was somebody’s child, but he has no children. He doesn’t know that things you swear you will never do become the things you must do, for reasons you never counted on. He doesn’t know that if she tells Gráinne the truth now, she will die in her daughter before she even dies in herself.

  CHAPTER 5

  Gráinne

  Stephen had lived with us for the longest of any of my mother’s boyfriends. He wasn’t the first of them that I’d had a crush on, but he was the first crush I’d dreamed about. Sexy dreams that left me blushing and frightened in the morning. Like once, I dreamt that he took off my shirt and lifted me up onto his piano, stood between my legs and kissed me wetly down my breasts and stomach and back up to my neck. I couldn’t look at him for days after that one.

  I hid my feelings well, I know, because my mother didn’t tease me. In the past she’d had fun with me when I started watching and thinking about her boyfriends. Never in front of them, so it was pretty harmless. She didn’t try to embarrass me, but instead acted like her lover was some boy at school and we were two girls talking about how cute he was. That’s the way my mother was with me—a best friend, a conspirator.

  “We’re both boy-crazy,” she’d say. She said I’d inherited her sex appeal, but I knew I could only wish to be as sexy as she was. She’d always had a man or two in love with her. I could remember most of her boyfriends, and we used to have arguments about our memories—she hated to admit that she had forgotten a man. I’d learned long ago not to ask her about my father, simply because he seemed so unimportant. I
t was as though he had never really existed for her: our life was the two of us in the center and men on the outside. Men she was never secretive or embarrassed about.

  Like one night when I was eight, I woke up to what sounded like a man being strangled—grunting, breathless noises coming from my mother’s bedroom. I got out of bed, went to her door, and knocked, calling for her. She came out, tying her robe, and took me back to my room. She told me she’d been having sex with Bob, the guy who had come for dinner. I already knew about sex. I wanted to know about the noises.

  “Bob was having an orgasm,” she said. Her voice was slightly musical, with that ever present hint of laughter underneath: it was the voice that told me everything. “He was pretty funny, wasn’t he?” Bob had been listening from the hallway, and when he heard her say that, he got really mad and yelled something about my mother being a sicko, then left our apartment, slamming the door.

  “I’d like to know what he would have told you,” she said, snuggling under my covers. I can remember the tingly warmth of her hand on my arm, and the smell of her cigarettes and the sage oil she wore as perfume. There was another scent clinging to her, a strange combination of her sweat and a mustiness I thought must be left over from Bob, which I knew would be gone by morning.

  Stephen, from the beginning, was different than the others. He was the first man who ever belonged to us. The other few that had moved in, they were all right, but they came and they went and we never missed them much. My mother usually managed to stay friends with her men, so occasionally I’d see the nicest ones coming back for dinner or at one of her matchmaking parties. She liked to pass them off to her single girlfriends. I’d never worried about my mother losing some man, until Stephen came. And technically, I guess, she never did lose him.

  When my mother first found out she had breast cancer, she told Stephen to move out. She packed his duffel bag and called the piano movers and locked him out of our apartment. He sat on the stairs out front for hours, sent the truck away when they came for the piano. My mother had me checking out the window every hour to see if he had gone yet. By the time she let him back in it was late at night and Stephen was so cold his face had purple spots. She wrapped him in a blanket and laughed.

  “Are you trying to impress me?” she said.

  “I’m the stable, trustworthy type,” he said through chattering teeth.

  He was with her when she had her first, small operation and a session of chemo, and after that she got better. It was months before the next lump. When it came she said to him: “You can leave anytime.”

  She finished dying in a cottage on Singing Beach that Stephen had rented for the three of us. It was a long summer. At the very end she’d checked into the local hospital, and it was Stephen, not me, who went with her.

  That first morning after we moved to Singing Beach, I woke up and lay frightened for a minute until I recognized the little bedroom I was in. The walls were papered in a faded yellow rosebud print. The bed frame and the bureau were lime-green and lumpy, painted over many times. Nothing in the room was mine except my clothes, which were already in the closet. At home I had photographs clipped from magazines and my favorite poems written in blue marker on the wall next to my bed. I hadn’t wanted this place to be anything like home. That morning I wished I had brought something, anything, to anchor me.

  I looked for the bathroom—which I had forgotten was on the other side of the single-floor cottage, off the kitchen—then pushed open the gray-paneled door without knocking. My mother stood in front of the sink, her nightgown dropped to her waist, the gauze bandages on her chest pulled away from a deformed sunken welt of puckered skin and stitches. I hadn’t seen my mother naked since the operation, so I just stood there, shocked. She lowered her head and covered the screaming ugly spot with her upper arm.

  “Gráinne,” she scolded, and when I didn’t move she pushed the door closed with her foot, forcing me back into the kitchen. “I’ll be out in a minute, honey.” I didn’t wait but hurried back to my room.

  There was a wicker-framed mirror above my bureau, painted the same lumpy green as the furniture. I stood in front of it and unbuttoned my nightgown, dropping it down to my hips. I ran my palms across my breasts and watched my nipples pucker up, red and hard and deformed. I remembered the first time I had noticed them doing this, when I was eleven, how I had run crying to my mother. I had thought there was something wrong with my new, growing breasts, that I had cancer. She’d laughed and explained how it works—that my nipples would always respond to cold and to excitement. Later, if it happened when I was with a boy, I would concentrate, trying to figure out which I was—excited or cold.

  My mother no longer had a nipple.

  I covered my chest and stared hard at my image in the mirror. “My name is Gráinne,” I whispered, and repeated it over and over—a trick I’d learned when I was six. If I said it enough the sounds became meaningless and my face evil and unfamiliar, like some naked witch in a stranger’s mirror.

  When I woke again later, Stephen was practicing, and the thundering of his piano rattled the gray floorboards in my room. I put on a T-shirt and cutoffs before opening my door. The house was elevated above the high-tide mark on pillars, and one wall was glass doors that looked out onto the beach. From where I stood it looked like the waves were crashing right behind Stephen’s head.

  “Good morning, good morning!” he sang out when he saw me, playing a silly tune with single keys. The piano looked monstrous and out-of-place in the tiny room, luxurious mahogany next to a couch with a fisherman’s navigation map embroidered in blue on the fabric. The piano was the only thing in the cottage that reminded me of home.

  “Should we have a lesson this morning?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. He shrugged and went back to playing. I grabbed a nectarine and went out on the beach.

  Stephen had been teaching me piano on and off since he’d moved in with us. I used to love our lessons, mostly because I got to sit so close to him on that smooth bench, and because he touched me a lot, showing me how to move my fingers and wrists. He slid the tip of each of my fingers gently along the ivory keys before pressing down. I had imagined kissing him and thought that his mouth would feel like those keys, cool, soft, and tense, hovering just above something powerful. I’d stopped the lessons awhile back, to prepare myself for when he decided to leave us. My mother had given him permission, what she called her “get-out-of-jail-free card” he didn’t even need an explanation to take off. Each day I half expected him to be gone before breakfast, leaving my mother bleary-eyed but affectionate; she’d say things like “It’s so nice to have my freedom” and “There are plenty more where he came from” while pouring my cereal. It had also occurred to me that if Stephen left, my mother might not say the usual things, might not start dating someone else right away, or not get out of bed to pour my cereal at all. Either way I didn’t want to torture myself with any more sensuous piano lessons. I didn’t want to have more to miss when he was gone.

  When I’d finished the nectarine and buried the pit in the sand, I went back up the porch steps. I stopped and peered in the sliding door. Stephen wasn’t at the piano, he was helping my mother sit down in a chair by the dining table. She was wearing her purple scarf, and some red bangs, fluffed up to look thicker, poked out over her forehead. She turned her face up to Stephen and smiled weakly. He touched her, his fingers resting on the side of her neck, his thumb grazing her earlobe. I decided not to go in and went back down to the beach. I walked along the edge of the waves—not looking ahead where I was going, but down at the seaweed, shells, and foaming water at my feet, thinking eventually they’d lead me somewhere.

  I sat on the cement wall that lined the public beach strip, watching the swarms of tired, sweaty families carrying coolers and umbrellas and L.L. Bean canvas bags. I kept an eye out for the teenagers, strutting in tight groups back and forth from the general store, some of the boys playing volleyball with a fierce energy. I
saw one boy, tall and spare, with tan shoulders, and hair in a thick ponytail like Stephen’s. He played volleyball well but nonchalantly; he had a cigarette propped in the sand by his feet and in between serves he picked it out and dragged on it. He looked older than me, maybe seventeen, and confident—the type that would look straight into your eyes for a while before he kissed you. I lit a cigarette and watched him play.

  “Man-hunting,” my mother would have called this if she’d been there. Flirting was something she liked and knew she was good at. But this thing I’d been doing since my body had gone berserk with strange longing felt like something else entirely.

  It had started with dreams. Not dreams about being with boys or anything specifically sexy; those dreams didn’t come until Stephen moved in. In these earlier dreams I’d be alone, usually sitting on a park bench, and between my thighs this bubble would begin to grow, a swollen, living thing that was frightening even though it felt so good, because I was not sure if the bubble was a part of me growing outward or something dangerous trying to get in. Eventually, even the fear didn’t matter and I would press my thighs together, trying to keep the bubble from escaping, willing it to move harder against me. I’d always be struggling to keep a straight face because people would be walking by with their dogs. Occasionally, some man or boy would sit down and try to talk to me and I would close my eyes and wish him away so that I could finish alone. Often I would wake with echoes in my stomach and thighs, my underwear slippery.

  I knew what it was. I’d read Our Bodies, Ourselves; I’d had many explicit conversations with my blunt mother. I wanted to find that feeling when I was awake. I tried touching myself, late at night with my covers pulled up over my head like a tent, my underwear down at my ankles, wetting my fingers in my mouth and probing around. And sometimes I’d manage a minor explosion, a muscle spasm, that was so unlike what I’d dreamt that I’d end up crying, feeling stupid and disgusting. I’d fall asleep smelling myself on my fingers.