I’d used Bitsie’s address for the neoprene order, but I forgot to tell her.
“Uh, kiddo?” she asked when I got to her house to work on the tail prototype. “Did you order this giant box of baby poop colored scuba fabric?”
“Nope,” I said, working my poker face.
“Smart-ass.”
“I’m going to paint it. I swear.”
“Good. Because it is ug-ly.”
Before we got down to business, I showed Bitsie my Pinterest board of mermaid inspiration.
“Oh my gosh,” she said, pointing to a picture I’d pinned of a cherub-faced porcelain mermaid holding a shell full of flowers. “My mother had that vase.” She put her hand over her mouth and stared at the screen, haunted. “So strange to see it.”
“Not good strange, huh?” I said.
“My father broke it.” Bitsie flashed a sad smile, and I could tell the vase wasn’t broken by accident. “But it used to be on the table in the kitchen, and she’d fill it with carnations. I thought it was so beautiful.” She stroked her wedding ring with her thumb absentmindedly, like she was checking it was still in place. “I wonder if that’s what started my love of mermaids.”
“I like the color palette,” I said awkwardly, not knowing what else to say.
“I’d forgotten all about that vase,” Bitsie said. “What a riot.” Her eyes were still sad.
“You okay?”
“I read somewhere that memories don’t adjust for perspective. The visceral ones—that hit like a flash—they trick you. I don’t feel like a seventy-five-year-old woman looking at that vase. I feel like a six-year-old.”
I squeezed her arm. When the memories of the day my father died flashed in my brain, it was like video recorded in that moment. Nothing faded. Nothing changed.
“It’s all in there.” Bitsie pointed to her head. “We can’t always get it out or keep it in when we want to.”
“I’m sorry, for triggering—”
“Oh, no, no, no!” Bitsie said, messing up my hair. “I think it’s good sometimes to stir up the muck in an old noggin. It reminds me how long I’ve been here to see things.”
“What color carnations?”
“Huh?”
“What color carnations did your mom like to put in that vase?”
“Red,” she said, smiling. “Always red.”
“That’s the palette I was thinking about. That turquoise, like her tail, and then a bright red with bluish tones. And the rest of the colors to fit that scheme.”
“My mother had excellent taste,” Bitsie said, nodding. “She liked things to be beautiful.”
I remembered what she’d said about her mother telling her she’d never be pretty. “I’m going to turn you into the most gorgeous mermaid,” I said.
Bitsie put her arm around my shoulder and squeezed. “Thanks, kiddo.” She looked at the picture of the mermaid vase again. “My mother didn’t have a lot of say in her life.” She nodded, like she was trying to coax forward the right perspective. “Not like I did either. That was our narrative then. We waited to be chosen, hoping we’d like the life we got. My mother got a shitty consolation prize. Mine was better, but not quite right until I had more say.”
“I sort of felt like that.” When Eric asked me to marry him, it was like I’d passed a test. I’d pretended to be normal skillfully enough to go on to the next level. “The thing I liked best about Eric was that he wanted me.” I sighed. “And then, he didn’t.”
“But you had a say. Even if you didn’t exercise it.” Bitsie smiled at me kindly. “When I was your age, if I didn’t have my father or husband cosign, I couldn’t get a bank account.”
“Wait! Really?” It sounded like an ancient rule that might have been true for Bitsie’s grandmother, not something that could have been so recent.
“We’ve come a long way, baby,” Bitsie said dryly. “We used to need men to exist in the world.”
“I sort of understood the oppression, but I always thought of that time period as pretty dresses and making canapés for dinner parties, and fun Donna Reed stuff.” It hit me that my understanding of Nan and Bitsie’s lives came from movies I watched on AMC.
“Sure,” Bitsie said. “The fun kind of oppression. Ha!” Her laugh was one loud staccato bark.
“So this isn’t right.” I pointed to the screen. “When you see this stuff, it makes you kind of claustrophobic, huh?” I took a deep breath. Work over ego. Work over ego. It was my mantra in college to fight the frantic feeling that fuels the urge to throw good work after bad. These costumes were supposed to make Nan and Bitsie happy. They weren’t worth anything if they didn’t. But no one likes being wrong, and it takes time for feelings to adjust. That’s why an artist needs an honor code. Work over ego.
Bitsie paused for a moment, then said, “I think there’s joy in honoring where we came from. But I want to celebrate who we are now.”
“What does that look like?” It was a question my favorite design teacher in college always asked.
“I don’t know. But I think you’ll get there,” Bitsie said, smiling. “Do you have to know to start the tail? I mean, a tail is a tail is a tail, right?”
“True.” No matter what we did, the mermaids were going to have tails. We had engineering work to figure out. “You ready to help?”
“Bunny always got annoyed with me when I tried to help her. I’m not good at straight lines.”
I laughed.
“That’s not a gay joke,” Bitsie said, grinning.
“I was remembering when you tried to teach me how to play hopscotch. Nan saw the board you drew on the driveway and thought I did it and wanted the school to do extra testing on me.”
“Holy crap!” Bitsie said, laughing. “I forgot about that.”
“I’ll do all the cutting,” I told her. “You be my model.”
Bitsie put one hand behind her head and jutted out her hip. “Dah-ling, I’d be delighted,” she said in a funny husky voice.
I traced her figure in the living room so she wouldn’t have to lie on the floor in Bunny’s room. I told her there wasn’t enough space in there.
“It’s too quiet in here,” she said when we’d finished making Bitsie-shaped markings on the neoprene. “I can’t listen to Bunny’s records and I don’t even remember what I liked that wasn’t hers, so it’s always too quiet.”
I handed her my phone, and she looked through my music while I pinned fabric.
“Oh! I love this song!” she yelped, and turned up the sound.
“Barracuda” by Heart blared at us, tinny on the phone speaker. I laughed. “Good choice.”
“I think we should do a number to this,” she said, shaking her hips.
I watched Bitsie dance and tried to figure out what a mermaid dancing to “Barracuda” should wear.
Eventually, she settled in to help me pin the fabric together. When we’d placed the last pins, I tried to pick up the tail, and we discovered she’d pinned her side to the carpet.
I laughed, but her face fell. “See? This is why Bunny never let me help.”
“You have helped me. I needed the moral support.”
“You’ve always been a sweet one, Kay,” Bitsie said, patting my cheek.
I repinned her section as fast as I could so it wouldn’t look like much of a setback.
Three hours later, with minimal trial and error, we had a rough approximation of a tail. Bitsie tried it on over her black and white polka dot tankini, her legs threaded through the slit I’d made in the back so she could still walk once she put the costume on. In the water, legs in place, the neoprene would overlap and stay closed.
“You look like a million bucks,” I said.
“Only a million?” Bitsie asked, holding one hand up, the other out to the side, like a game show hostess. “This tail alone knocks it up to at least two point five. If we ignore the color.”
I laughed. “You’re right. You look like three million bucks. Four, once I paint it.”
“Let’s try it out!” Bitsie said.
Panic hit like lightning, sharp and low in my belly.
“I can’t,” I told her, collecting my stuff. “I have to feed Bark.”
She could see the terror in my eyes. I knew she could.
“Oh, honey, wait!” she said. “Let’s have a cup of tea.”
“No, no. I know you want to try it out. I’ll send Nan over. Don’t test it without her, okay?”
“Why don’t we go out and get a milkshake?”
“I’m sorry, Bits,” I said, willing myself to make eye contact. “I need to go home.”
“Yeah. Yeah. I get it.”
“Promise me you won’t get in the pool with that tail until Nan gets here?”
Bitsie shrugged. “I’ll wait.” But I wasn’t sure if that was a false promise.