Swim to Me

a novel by

BETSY CARTER

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

For Miriam Brumer

S
HE WAS TWO YEARS OLD
when her mother dropped her into the shallow end of a lake. Her mother insisted that instinct would prevail and that instead of sinking, she would paddle like any dog in over its head. Delores Walker always claimed she had a vivid memory of this incident. She remembered the cold and how she suspended her breath, and how she waved her hands and kicked her feet. Things got calmer when she realized that the water was carrying her. She stopped being scared. Her body moved with the flow of it, the most natural thing in the world. From then on, the water was where Delores felt most at home.

Twelve years later, over the Christmas break of 1970, Delores and her parents drove from their apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx to Winter Haven, Florida, where they went to see the famous water ski show at Cypress Gardens. Delores watched with gape-mouthed attention as the skiers in their great plumed tiaras climbed on each other's shoulders to form pyramids, twirled in the air, and danced on one leg, all the while skittering above the water like flies. That night, her mind filled with all she'd seen, Delores lay awake in the room she shared with her parents at the Slipaway Motel. At one in the morning she was still fidgeting in her canvas cot when her mother sat up. “You having trouble sleeping, hon?” Her pin-curlers twinkled in the moon-filled room.

“Those skiers were the most beautiful thing I've ever seen,” said Delores. “Can you imagine wearing those costumes every day? I swear I could do that for the rest of my life.”

Her mother switched on the reading lamp and lit a cigarette. Next to her, Roy Walker was sleeping, making sounds like a little animal that's just been stepped on. “It was pretty enough. But as they say in the movies . . .” and her mother talked through the side of her mouth, affecting a gangster accent, “you ain't seen nothin' yet. Tomorrow we're going to Weeki Wachee.”

The next morning, they got into the old Pontiac and followed a curlicue highway eighty miles northwest to the tiny town of Weeki Wachee Springs. They drove on tar roads made soft by the sun. On either side of them were swamps. Now and then, a gator would rear its head—not ready for a showdown, just checking the weather. Hot fish air filled the car. Roy had on the kind of wraparound sunglasses that Elvis wore, and a Hawaiian shirt that he'd bought for the trip. He held the wheel with one hand, and took off his Yankees baseball cap to wipe away the sweat. “What a stinkhole,” he said. Delores and her mother ignored him. They were too busy passing a vanilla Bonomo's Turkish Taffy bar between them, biting off large hunks of the candy. “That one,” said Gail Walker, pointing to a yawning gator and dangling the candy wrapper out the window. “Look at the brown hide on him. He would make me a nice handbag and pair of shoes.” She let the wrapper fly.

They pulled into a gas station, where there was a big old Florida bear caged up next to the cans of car wax and Texaco Motor Oil. Behind the station was a hand-painted sign that said:
LIVE ALLIGATOR WRESTLING
. For three dollars, they watched a Seminole Indian wrestle a worn-out gator until the animal rolled over on its back. Then the wrestler rubbed a spot on its scaly stomach, and the gator went out like a light. It looked easy enough, but the guy who took
their money said that only the Seminoles knew where that sleep-inducing spot was. Just before they got to Weeki Wachee Springs, they drove past an orange grove, where the air was sticky and the smell was as sweet as if it had rained honey.

This was Delores's first time away from New York City. She'd never seen an animal in the wild, if you didn't count pigeons. The white egrets with their long ballerina necks filled her with wonder. The limber palm trees, the gnarled mangrove swamps, even the way the heat forced itself on her was new. And then there was the water: the blue Gulf, brown swamps, green lakes. And somewhere, the ocean. Delores swam in the turquoise pool at the Slipaway Motel, a dingy little square whose bottom was slimy with algae. Still, it was water, and she had the whole thing to herself.

They drove into the nearly filled parking lot at Weeki Wachee Springs and followed the other families to the park's entrance. In front of the gates to the park was an obelisk in the center of a fountain. On top of the obelisk was a statue of two mermaids who appeared to be spinning underwater. One held the other over her head, with one hand holding the heel of her foot and the other resting under her arched back. There was a seat shaped like a clamshell in front of the obelisk, and people, mostly women, lined up to sit on it. The women would twist and turn in the clamshell seat, then strike pinup girl glamour poses as their husbands took their photographs. Roy grabbed Delores by the arm and pulled her into the line. “Let's show ‘em what a real mermaid looks like, eh?”

Roy Walker was a chunky man, five feet eight inches and 190 pounds. He worked at a wholesale grocery store, and his arms were thick and ropy from hauling cartons of canned beans and lard out of the trucks and onto the shelves. “Watch this,” he said, heaving Delores over his head, one hand under her back, the other holding her foot, just like the statue above them.

“Dad, quit it,” she shouted. “Put me down.” Her father shouted back. “Go on, Delores, show ‘em what a real mermaid looks like.” Instinctively, she threw back her head, arched her back and splayed her arms. She could almost feel the water around her as she forgot her embarrassment and floated in the air above her father's head. Word rippled through the crowd, so that even the people at the ticket booth turned to see the man who had, for the moment, turned his daughter into a mermaid. Her mother stared at the two of them, her mouth slack with disbelief. She appeared to be the only person in the crowd without a camera. “That's my daughter and my crazy husband,” she began telling the people around her. There was an elderly couple beside her. The husband kept nudging the wife with his elbow and saying, “Get a load of this,” as he shot frame after frame. The woman turned to Delores's mother: “Don't you have a camera of your own, dear?”

“No,” she said. “There was nothing much to photograph, until now.” The woman asked her where she lived, pulling a pen and an envelope from her purse. Gail told her they were from the Bronx.

“We're from Baltimore. That's not too far from New York City. If you write down your name and address, I'll be sure to send you a print. What a nice family,” she said, smiling at Roy, whose arms were beginning to shake by now.

Finally, he lowered Delores to the ground and back to earth. “How'd you like them apples?” he asked her.

“Dad, I know I will never forget this,” she answered gravely.

Even as they walked to the amphitheater, little kids pointed and grown-ups smiled at them. One man with a wooly beard winked at Delores and said, “You looked like the real thing up there.” By the time they took their seats in the bleachers, Delores's heart was tap dancing in her chest. Then the lights went down and the music started to play. It was “Moon River,” the jelly-sweet theme from the
movie
Breakfast at Tiffany's.
As the music oozed into the amphitheater, the black velvet curtain rose slowly. There was a collective intake of breath from the audience as one of the mermaids, already in the limpid blue water, swam to the edge of the aquarium. She had long blonde hair that floated like a nimbus around her, and wore a pink halter-top and pink Lycra fin that flapped to the rhythm of the current. She carried a sign that read:
MERMAIDS GO TO THE MOON.

A year earlier, the Apollo 11 space mission had brought the first men to the moon. As they touched down, Neil Armstrong and his crew had played Frank Sinatra's brisk version of “Fly Me to the Moon.” In Weeki Wachee's homage to this historic event, the show began with a rocket blasting into space. A mermaid with long red hair and a silver lamé tail hung on to the wing as the tape recorder sputtered a scratchy rendition of a takeoff. Then came Frank and his jazzy anthem. The lady in lamé lip synched without appearing to swallow any water, while behind her, another mermaid, also in silver, played backup, snapping her fingers and thrusting her shoulders in time to the music. Two mermaids in cobalt blue tails and white helmets did somersaults and pirouettes around some Mylar stars and planets. A tortoise floated by.

Delores could feel what it would be like to be underwater with them: the weight was gone from her arms, her body felt buoyant. She felt herself lulled by the soft, rolling rhythm. Time slowed down, as it does in that moment between waking and dreaming. Every second was filled with different colors, depending on where the sun hit the water. Things happened: one mermaid drank from a bottle of RC Cola, another blew wet bubbly kisses to the audience. When one of the mermaids peeled a banana and then ate it, her father whispered something to her mother, who then giggled. Her father could be so funny at times. Her mother had rolled her eyes
and whispered back: “Roy, you old turd, get your mind out of the gutter.” But maybe because the words of the lady from Baltimore were still fresh in her mind—“nice family”—she'd also squeezed his arm and held on to it.

The images melded with the harmony of colors; mermaids and water became one. Delores saw the mermaids occasionally suck air from the air hoses that were hidden behind the scenery. Even so, she was dizzy with the illusion that what she was seeing was real.

For their grand finale, all the mermaids gathered around a moon rock. One pulled an American flag from beneath her fin and planted it in the ground. A tinny version of “God Bless America” rose up through the amphitheater as the mermaids stood on their tails and saluted the flag.

Delores hoped nobody noticed the tears sliding down her cheeks. She stayed fixed in her seat, worried that if she stood up, she might break into pieces. There was no name for what she was feeling, only this certainty: whatever she had to do, wherever she had to go, one day Delores Walker would become one of those mermaids.

After the show, they checked into the Best Western motel across the street. Her father seemed so strong and robust that night and her mother was more flirtatious than she'd ever seen her. They decided that, this being their last night in Florida, Delores would stay in a separate room next door. There was a bolted door between them. “Just knock if you get scared, hon,” her mother had said. But by the way her father raised his eyebrows, and her mother turned away with a smirk, Delores knew that unless someone broke into her room and put a rope around her neck, she was to stay as far away from that door as possible.

That was a happy time.

It turned out her parents would never forget that magical day either, partly because on that magical night, another Walker was
conceived. Nine months after their trip to Weeki Wachee, Delores's brother West was born. Named after the motel in which he was conceived, West Walker was thick and stubby, just like his dad. He slept in Delores's room, and at night, she would sing to him or talk to him as though he understood what she was saying. He never complained, even when she dressed him up in old doll clothes and wheeled him around in a toy baby carriage that she'd kept from childhood. She started calling him Westie.

For a while, the Walkers seemed like any other happy family. Her father would toss West in the air and say things like, “How's my buddy boy?” He'd tuck him under his arm like a football and run across the room shouting, “It's the great halfback from the Grand Concourse,
WEST WALKER
.” As fast as he could, West would wriggle away from him until Delores's father would give up and pass him off to her mother. Eventually, her father stopped treating him as a football. “He's a real mama's boy,” he'd say to Delores. “Too bad it didn't turn out the other way. You shoulda been a boy, he shoulda been a girl.”

On winter afternoons, particularly on Sundays, Delores would get a hollow feeling inside her. It was a gnawing ache, as if her in-sides were concave. She knew it best by its absence, the times when she did not feel like the loneliest person in the world.