The conversation I’d planned to have with Nan about how I was fine with Isaac sleeping over probably didn’t need to happen. I got home from work the next night to a note that said, Bowling with Bitsie. Staying at Isaac’s. XO Nan.
Luca hadn’t called. Not hearing from him meant I could honestly say I didn’t know how to get equipment and we’d have to take photos on solid ground. But I was disappointed anyway. I wanted more of him. I wanted him to want more of me. I made a concerted effort to stay away from Facebook. The risk of sending him a dopey late-night message was too high.
Nan and Bitsie wanted to start shooting for the calendar in a few weeks. At the theatre in Rochester, costumes were my only job. Now I was committed to working at Isaac’s full-time and helping Mo two nights a week, and I felt a little frantic about all there was to do. I decided to take full advantage of the night alone.
“Okay, Bark,” I said. “What music should we listen to?”
Bark got excited, like maybe he knew the word music. I didn’t want him to think we were going to dance in the living room and not make it happen, so we started my brainstorming session with a good jump around to “Barracuda.” If Bitsie loved that song, maybe there was something in it that would send me in the right direction.
I flailed around the room, Bark following in a goofy gallop.
Rock and Roll Mermaids? Sharp barracuda teeth? Long hair like Ann and Nancy Wilson? Should these mermaids have long hair? Nan and Bitsie looked great with their spiky pixie cuts, and I didn’t want to shove them into the image of youth normally attached to mermaids. I’d never seen a depiction of an old mermaid. Were they were supposed to be eternally young like vampires? Did they have a short life span? Whatever the standing myth was, it had to change. These mermaids were about wisdom, not youth.
When the song was over, I scribbled Wisdom! in my notebook and underlined it. But wisdom brought to mind flowing gray Earth Mother hair, muted pinks and purples. It wasn’t the right word. I crossed it out and wrote Vitality! Strength! Joy! and something clicked in my head. I always felt self-conscious doing artsy-fartsy, free-thought stuff, but I never got anywhere without it. If I failed to do the inspiration work, I usually got stuck later in the process. The design started to feel false, and moving forward would get harder and harder, like I had to drag along the weight of all the wrong choices that snowballed from the first one. It was more productive to do the amorphous creative thought work first, even if it felt silly.
I sat on the couch with Nan’s mermaid photo album, flipping through the pages. There was a picture of the ladies in dresses and high heels. Hannah’s A-line dress had bold circles along the hem, like bubbles. Woo Woo had a string of oversized fake pearls. Nan’s hair was in an actual beehive, and Bitsie wore a checkered trapeze dress that showed off her skinny legs.
The picture made me think of the B-52s video for “Love Shack.” My dad had a bunch of their cassette tapes in his car. I thought the deadpan way Fred Schneider spoke lyrics was hysterical, so sometimes my dad spoke the words to other songs to make me laugh.
I remembered being in his old station wagon while he cranked up the Rolling Stones, chasing Mick Jagger singing “Wild Horses” with Fred Schneider–style Sprechgesang. We were driving home from mini golf. I had a chocolate soft serve cone dripping down my arm faster than I could finish it. I laughed so hard it hurt. I’m not sure how old I was, but I remember in that moment, it occurred to me that my father was having fun beyond trying to keep me entertained. He enjoyed my amusement, liked being the source of it. It was the first time I saw him as a person, not just my dad.
I smiled, and felt warmth in my chest. It was one of the rare times I’d been stuck in a good memory of my father. I mostly thought of the last one. But maybe, if I tried, I could get comfortable remembering him. I closed my eyes and worked to picture everything I could about what it felt like to be in that car with him. The sting when I crinkled my sunburned nose. Sticky hands. Sparkly purple flip-flops on my dirty feet. The sun was low in the sky, cotton candy clouds turning pink as it set.
I remembered the click and whir when I put Cosmic Thing in the tape deck. We sang along to “Love Shack” with the windows down, my hair whipping into my ice cream. There’s no way I had any idea what the words meant, but I understood the joy.
I remembered my dad’s deep voice. Faded red t-shirt. Tan arms. Scratched Wayfarers. He popped the rest of his ice cream cone in his mouth and handed me his napkin. “You’re a mess,” he said, grinning, like I was a great masterpiece of summer. I think he took the long way home. I think he didn’t want the moment to end either.
I played the video for “Love Shack” on my phone and got goose bumps. I was on the right path. The video set was a mishmash of diner details and thrift store finds, shabby and loud. Because of the eclectic feel, there was no expectation of time-period accuracy. I watched Kate Pierson jump and shimmy in an orange-fringed onesie and decided she would be my muse. Bitsie needed fringe, not shells. Nan needed shimmering splendor. They would not be demure. These were not mermaids sitting on a rock waiting for a sailor to come by. They were basking in their own strength.
I looked up the B-52s and found a current picture of Kate Pierson in a shiny purple bodysuit, her hair Raggedy Ann red. I pinned it to my mermaid board on Pinterest. Maybe, if I kept the budget tight, I could get my hands on some photogenic wigs.
* * *
I stayed up into the morning hours, colored pencils strewn across the coffee table, bowl of popcorn eaten down to the kernels on the floor next to me. Bark lay on my feet, snoring. It didn’t seem worth it to wake him for bed, so I slept on the couch.
I woke to the sound of the front door opening, and covered my face with a throw pillow so Nan would leave me to sleep. Bark ran to the door, howling. I thought as soon as he figured out that it was Nan he’d settle down, but his howls grew in intensity.
“Bark!” I yelled. “Here!” But he didn’t come back. He growled. “Geez,” I shouted, getting up from the couch. The light hurt my eyes. I hadn’t even been drinking. It was the lack of sleep. Not enough water. I’d forgotten to eat anything besides popcorn.
“Get off me!” someone said, only it sounded more like “Geddowffme!”
“Ruth?” I rubbed my eyes, stumbling into the foyer. Ruth had her back pressed to the front door like she was about to be attacked.
Bark was six or seven feet away from her, and just as scared as she was.
“He’s not on you.” I grabbed Bark’s collar anyway.
“How did you get in?”
She held up her key chain.
“Nan’s not here,” I said, unsure if it was okay to say she was at Isaac’s.
“Well, I’m meeting her here,” Ruth said, crossing her arms like I might attempt to forcibly remove her from the house. “We’re going to the farmers’ market.”
“Cool,” I said. “I’m sure she’ll be back soon, then.” I wondered if I could sneak off to bed.
“Is there coffee?” she asked.
I wanted to say, “If you make it,” but I went into the kitchen to set up the percolator. She followed, opening the door to the patio without asking. I knew it wasn’t fair to be grumpy about it. She wouldn’t have asked Nan either. Nan wouldn’t have expected her to.
Ruth was brusque with everyone, but I felt it acutely. She had boys. Five of them. Her husband had been an army sergeant. She didn’t have time for my soft spots.
Once, when Nan bought me a frilly new comforter set, she told Ruth I woke up saying, “I feel like a princess.”
Ruth said, “She is a princess,” in a tone that made me sure it was an insult, even though Nan took it as a compliment.
Bark stayed by my side, staring Ruth down while I scooped coffee into the percolator.
Ruth claimed her usual seat at the patio table. I grabbed a soy yogurt from the fridge and sat with her while I waited. I hated sitting on the patio, but I didn’t want to be rude. And I didn’t want to hear a monologue about how her youngest son, Joey, used to have antisocial behavior, but her husband wouldn’t stand for it, so Joey got over it. She was always going on about Joey, and how he was better than everyone else. I wasn’t sure if I should feel sorry for her other boys, or if it was better because she was too busy fussing over Joey to bother them.
Bark rested his head on the table to stare at Ruth.
“That dog is strange,” she said.
I gave her a half smile and went back to my gross yogurt. The good thing about Ruth was that it didn’t matter if I answered when she talked.
“My son Joey has a Mastiff,” she said. “Best-behaved dog I’ve ever seen. But, you know, Joey put the work in.”
I held my tongue. I ate my yogurt. The words I wanted to say bubbled in my veins.
“You can’t just let a dog do whatever they want,” she said. “You have to take them to obedience class. And you have to get a good one to begin with. From a breeder. Not a junkyard dog.”
I was about to hit my boiling point when I heard the front door open.
Bark ran to the door, but didn’t howl, happy to see Nan.
“Yes! Really!” Nan said into her phone. “Bitsie lives right down the street—Well, you should—You should move here too—” She waved at Ruth. Covering the speaker on her phone, she grinned at me and said, “You’re such a stinker!”
I sniffed my armpit. Nan laughed, but I wasn’t sure if it was at me or the person on the line. She walked away, phone to her ear.
Thankfully, Ruth had moved on from the Mastiff. “Joey’s got a watch that hooks up to his phone,” she said. “Like Dick Tracy.” She held her wrist to chin level. “Just like Dick Tracy!”
From the other room, I heard Nan’s cocktail party laugh, rich and arching like church bells.
“You know,” Ruth said, pointing at me, “I like your hair that length. It’s good on you.”
“Thank you,” I said, thrown. That was the thing about Ruth, she wasn’t always mean, and when she was nice, I felt like a jerk for writing her off.
Ruth beamed like she’d bestowed magic upon me; an awkward smile that showed all her teeth. It occurred to me that I didn’t actually like her. She was loud and rude, and despite all her bluster, she bruised easily if someone disagreed with her. I’d never felt like I was allowed to pass that kind of judgment on an adult. Adults were fixed entities, and it had been my job to keep up, fit in, be quiet and good and nice enough for them to want me around. But now I was an adult, and Ruth made me uncomfortable. She wasn’t my friend, she was Nan’s, and I’d never made any kind of choice about spending time with her. I didn’t hate her, but I didn’t like her, and maybe that meant I could stop caring about whether she liked me.
Nan joined us, done with her call. “That was my old friend Hannah.” She squeezed my shoulder again. “And I think this one here had something to do with that.”
I worried maybe I’d done the wrong thing, but she sat next to me, smiling, and said, “Oh, Kay, thank you. It was lovely to hear her voice again.” To Ruth, she said, “She’s a senator’s wife! Patrick Novak from Maryland.”
“Fancy!” Ruth said, fanning herself. “Must be nice.”
I thought I saw a hint of irritation flash on Nan’s face.