Chlorine, p.17
Chlorine, page 17
“You can’t.”
“Yes, I can.”
My mother stared at me. I stared back at her misery-lined expression, and if I had been a weaker-willed being, I would have opened my mouth then and there to beg for her forgiveness, because she did not deserve both a husband and a daughter who abandoned her—
My father burst into the room, the door banging into the opposite wall, startling my mother and me. The door swung wildly forward, hitting his arm, yet he stood there, chest heaving, ignoring the heavy panel. His clothing was disheveled, his shirt skipping two buttons and his pants unzipped, and he did not carry luggage with him—I guessed he flew here from China immediately, hopping on the first flight available when he had heard of my transformation. His face was unshaven, and above the stringy black patches across his chin and upper lip, I saw mysterious tear tracks. I had never seen him cry, not even when we got the call years ago about nai nai’s death.
My mother ran to him, and they gripped hands, an intimacy that suddenly reminded me of my teammates, and of Cathy, the way we would high-five and handshake before and after races. I had never seen my parents hold hands, or even kiss on the cheek—we did not display affection in public. Had there been a seismic shift in how my parents showed face when I shifted body?
My dad stomped forward, as if to take charge, as if his presence were enough—often it was, because he was in a permanent state of absence, and his mere presence was surprising enough to make us pay attention. Who is this man? We never had time to take him or his directives for granted. Whenever he was around long enough that we could remind ourselves he was the father, and he was here, in America, to assert his dominance, he’d leave again for China. So now I, too, would leave, and it dawned on me then: the main similarity between humans and mermaids was that both are always leaving the ones they love.
He did not say hello. Did not hug me like my mother had. Did not ask me for my reasons. Instead: “Ren, ai ya, ting wo shuo de hua. Get rid of the stitches and then we can all go home, hui jia. Hao?” His voice thundered through the small room.
I chuckled, the tenderness I had felt upon seeing him dissolving at his aggression. “Dad, go home to where? What is a home? Whose home?” My voice came out sharper than I expected, no longer fuzzy from sleep, the mucus magically cleared away. My deadened senses had reanimated with the return of my father. Mermaids love their fathers but hold them to low standards they can still never jump high enough to fulfill.
“Ai ya, sha bao bei, what are you talking about?” My mother stood up and wrung her hands. “Why?” she asked once more. “Why, bao bei? Who are you? What are you doing to yourself?”
“I am Ren Yu,” I said. “Still your daughter. But a mermaid now. And if you had paid attention, a mermaid always.”
My mother flung her arm out against my father’s chest, stopping him from barreling to the side of my bed to slap me. She spoke. “Ren, we are your parents. Your ba ma. You must unsew your legs. You must accept the surgery.”
“No.”
“You are not a mermaid. Listen to us,” my mother begged, dropping to her knees with a crack. She began to bawl fountains of saltwater, the tears creating rivers in the canyons of her wrinkles. My father began to cry, too, fat tears misting his glasses that still slid down his nose—he had been too busy scheduling meetings and pitching ideas all these years to find glasses that fit correctly—collecting at the edge of lens and frame, then following his previously laid tear tracks, catching in the stringy hairs of his face. He opened his mouth and began to loudly wail, his screeching more haunting than any siren song documented from rocky coastlines.
I closed my eyes, the audio of my father crying terrible enough that the added visual would have cracked me open, would have been convincing enough to grab the nearest surgical knife and chop off my tail if it meant my parents’ agony would cease. I would’ve done anything to please them. But I had to remain strong, remain in my mermaid ways.
I hadn’t properly considered my parents’ emotions in the consequences of sewing my legs, too busy charging ahead without thought, but my bullish actions could be blamed on Jim—to be reckless was how he had taught me to live. To dive straight in without a plan, so by the time my muscles realized how icy cold the water was, it would be too late. I’d be moving already, swimming without stopping.
I spoke, my voice hoarse, barely audible over the din of my parents’ sadness. “I must go back to the water, to stay there for eternity. You cannot stop me.”
My parents did not respond in coherent words.
I continued, more gently. “Ba, ma, I would rather return to the water with your blessing than leave without it. Can you grant me your permission, at least?”
My mother keened. Grasping my father’s hand, she pulled them both forward to embrace me. Their hug hurt my sensitive scales. They were both heavier than I remembered, as if their sadness had materialized into solid weights onto their shoulders, but it is true that what humans call intergenerational trauma has always been heavy, sinking to the gloomy abyss of repressed memory to be mined for so-called wisdom later. I was newly aware my parents were people who carried their burdens on their bodies rather than within themselves—this was my doomed inheritance.
I stroked their hair, my tears falling onto their black strands. The droplets glistened underneath the hospital room’s buzzing fluorescent lights. We sobbed together, loving each other, despite and because of everything that had happened, and would come.
In popular legends and retellings, mermaids do not treat their families well. Mermaids leave home to seek out new lovers, to have grand adventures impossible from the safe confines of their family homes. Mermaids do not regret leaving behind mourning parents.
But I must urge you to consider where these stories come from: Would a mermaid who stays at home, much-loved, with two beautiful parents and loving sisters who share everything, be worth memorializing?
No.
Humans and monsters both understand stories about magic and marvel and myth are made interesting by their stemming from trauma and violence and blood. How can one grow without pain?
Nüwa was surrounded by nature’s beauty but still devastated with loneliness before she decided to carve humans out of clay, cementing her legacy. Her loneliness was the catalyst for her mythology.
And the forever unfaithful Ariel ditched her sisters, disregarded her father’s advice, and threw herself under the curse of the evil witch, all for a man and for two legs, the most unworthy of trades in exchange for her magical being.
Remember, I am no Ariel. And I am no Nüwa.
I am my own mermaid, with my own tale. My own tail.
Understand I loved my human parents. Understand they loved me. Everything we did for, and to, each other was out of love. Even our farewells.
My tail-removal surgery was scheduled for two days after our family reunion. My father tried to push for sooner, but my mother insisted I needed some mental recuperation before something I so clearly valued was seized from me.
She always tried her best to keep me happy even when she tried to destroy me.
My parents did not come back to visit me in my room. I suspected they were too scared of another cathartic confrontation. Yet they still returned to the hospital to drop off what they hoped would make it feel more like what they perceived as a home: the blue fish vase from my bedroom, a bag of my favorite Chinese snacks—a reminder of when Cathy found me in the school library after my disqualification—and a stack of novels. These gifts were brought into my room by the nurse instead of them.
They never explicitly accepted my transformation, or me leaving humankind. But at the very least, through their actions, I sensed they forgave me. Forgiveness without acceptance. For me, from them, that was enough.
The nurse also brought in get well cards and clumps of balloons, leaving them within arm’s reach, as if the proximity of written prayers would infiltrate my mermaid dreams and force my body to heal itself. I shuffled through the cards from my teammates, grimacing at the note from Luke and his family, a simple “feel better!” in a near-indecipherable doctor scrawl above an illustrated frog with a thermometer in his mouth.
My tail pulsed with fury when I landed on Jim’s at the bottom of the pile. I didn’t want to read his note. Every pen stroke of his, whether it was crossing the t’s or dotting the i’s, slashed my heart with both ferocious anger and wretched, unwanted affection for the diabolical man who had controlled so much of my human fate. He was always doing questionable things; by now, in the hospital, I interpreted his actions as wrong and inappropriate, but it was too late to stop him, and back then when he might have listened, I had been too young—and too human—to understand the harm the man’s thousand small cuts would do long-term to girls like me. Instead, I had laughed, conceded, even enjoyed. Wasn’t this cordiality what all the men wanted? A genial concession to their advances, to keep the door open for the possibility of their future creeping? Jim had tried to be my father figure, and I had unwittingly allowed him, so much so that I bestowed unto him the position of being my father, and I his adopted swimmer daughter, because my real father was always absent and Jim was always there. No love existed as strongly as that of a coach for his athlete.
It was true my swimming performance was inevitably intertwined with Jim—my victories were his, and my disappointments were his too. Reliance was a feature of any close relationship, as were desires. A proper education, a predictable curse, a classic trait of girlhood: to be forever confusing your desires with that of an older man’s. And the folklore book had shown me even most mermaids were not free of this—I would never forget those Chinese mermaids, stranded on sand or stolen for marriage, dependent on the goodwill whims of men.
I swore to myself, as I ripped Jim’s card into shreds, that I would break the curse and write my own legend.
There were no cards from Cathy. I double and triple checked each envelope and signature to confirm. I missed her. We spent so much time together at meets, practices, school, and all the times in between. I had adjusted to a life with her consistent presence, and to spend so many hours lying immobile without her was a malicious act against my nature. I had trouble focusing on the television, or on the book I was holding, because my brain was too busy conjuring sepia-toned fantasies of Cathy lying in the hospital bed with me, or of cuddling Cathy in a musty hotel room during an away meet. Whenever Dr. Smyth came into my room, wielding an evil leer, my parents’ permission to saw me apart, and the reminder that he was going to destroy me, change me back to human, and force my legs to reemerge, scale-free, I would force my mind somewhere very far away, where Cathy and I would intertwine our bodies at the edge of the ocean and sand, making crowns out of seaweed and drinking aloe water from conch shells. The need to disappear when medical professionals came was so profound, I disassociated, imagining Cathy’s weight on me as the doctor bustled around, conducting whatever tests he wanted to do. When he finally left my room, I would awaken back to the cold hospital room, touching the scratchy blanket covering my mermaid tail, reorienting myself.
I could not let Dr. Smyth succeed. The brief euphoria of becoming a magical creature would never be enough to sustain me through a life reduced to woman. I had to get to the water. The fresh water. But how?
Eighteen
A knock on the door.
A rare evening golden sun was streaming through my window, casting my room in a warm light. I had just woken up, blinking blearily in the tentative space between afternoon and dark’s falling—I had been unable to sleep that night, fretting over how to escape the hospital before the operation, whether fresh water would not be as easy to swim through as chlorinated water, and if my eyeballs would acclimate underwater without goggles, until dawn hit and I finally succumbed out of sheer exhaustion.
“Come in!” I said, thinking the knocker was a nurse. My voice was guttural, low-pitched, still clouded with the grogginess of slumber.
The door creaked open, and instead of a bustling nurse came a girl with red curls, freckles, a warm smile, round cheeks.
“Hi, Ren. It’s me, Cathy!”
My mouth dropped open, then I closed it immediately, my jaw snapping shut.
“Of course it’s you. Who else would it be?”
Cathy grinned. She wore uncharacteristically high wedges, a denim skirt, and a tight black shirt underscoring her flaming hair, as if she had decided to dress up for our visit, a first date after a long separation. I had never seen her so dressed up, as she usually resorted to sneakers and sweatpants—leggings if feeling fancy—with some sort of swimming team gear or team spirit clothes on top. I scanned her up and down, nodding with surprised approval. She blushed at my silent assessment and leaned against the doorframe, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
“Wow, it feels like so long since I’ve seen you!” I exclaimed.
“Yeah, well, a lot has happened in that short time,” she replied, frowning.
I raised my eyebrows, the excitement upon seeing her leaking out of me. Cathy’s expression made it seem like those happenings had been nothing but negative. “Took you long enough to stop by. I thought you would’ve come yesterday, straight from the pool. Honestly, I thought you didn’t want to visit or something.”
Cathy shook her head. “No, I’ve wanted to come ever since the ambulance took you away. But there are specific visiting hours, and I had to wait for Jim to leave.”
“Jim was here? At the hospital?”
“Yeah. I walked in, saw him, and quickly ran out back to my car before he could see me. He was demanding the front desk reveal your room number. Throwing a tantrum like a toddler. I felt bad for the receptionist. I think your mom might have listed his name as prohibited or something.”
I was reminded again of how my mother had always tried her best to keep me happy.
Cathy was watching me. “Did you want him to come? I can call him.”
I wavered. I could, with Cathy’s assistance, invite Jim to my hospital room under the guise of wanting him, needing him, craving him and his coaching. And then I could enact my revenge. Haven’t mermaids have always possessed the ability to tempt men to their deaths with the power of their voice? If I wanted to, I could open my mouth and sing so beautifully that Jim would be convinced to smash his head against the wall, the way a man’s ship would crash against the rocks. His skull would crumble like the ship’s planks of wood, and his brain would ooze down the side of the wall like the ship’s soggy flag. I could curse him so he would choke on his next cigarette, the way men did when they tried to breathe underwater. I could rewrite his destiny so he would fall into the pool and drown at his next swim practice, the way men did when they crawled into the ocean to meet the mermaids. Or I could suddenly beg his forgiveness and claim my previous words were simply jokes, and let Jim come close to hug me, the way he always came too close, and in the seconds before he kissed me on the cheek, I would bite his jugular with my shark-sharp teeth, and he’d suffer on my hospital blanket while I cackled at the poor mortal man’s hubris. He would bleed out and die before the nurses could save him. But the taste of his skin, his neck, would be disgusting—likely Mountain Dew and preservatives and whatever cheap cologne he decided to splash on—and I had to remain clean, or else the water might reject me. Everything was pure down there and I could not blemish myself or my system with Jim’s death. He did not deserve my debasement. He did not deserve to see my ethereal mermaid abilities used on him.
“No,” I said. “I’d rather not.”
“Okay.”
Cathy stood at the entrance awkwardly, as if waiting for a proper greeting, for me to pull up a chair. She carried a pothos plant in her arms, which I recognized because my mother cultivated a copious number of these easy-to-grow plants in our own home. The pothos would soak up the rare glimpses of Pittsburgh sunlight streaming through our house windows. Pittsburgh could crush any Pacific Northwest woods in a battle of average annual precipitation and gray skies, but my mother still insisted on trying her best despite the lack of sunshine. She had gotten my own pothos for me from the hardware store months ago, thinking I could learn a green thumb out of the blue waters of the pool. I had ignored the plant, but it refused to die. Impressed with its hardy will to live, I grudgingly conceded with watering, and so its leaves and stems stretched themselves down the wall, across the carpet, and onto my bed. Some nights, I had nightmares where a mermaid with snakes as hair would pull at my feet, trying to drown me in teeming, stormy whirlpools. I’d fight the mermaid, screaming that I was a mermaid, too, simply unformed. Then I’d jolt awake, kicking my feet up, the covers floating upward like a ghost, the pothos shaking in annoyance, and I’d realize that it was the pothos touching me, not a mermaid who did not recognize me as one of their own.
The plants were narcissistic and greedy, dunking themselves in excess sun and water, but I suspected Cathy’s would serve a purpose: an offering, an apology, a hello. Its leaves were thick, round, and juicy, and the tendrils snaked out of her arms to brush against my skin, a tentative greeting.
“Well, are you going to just stand there?” I asked teasingly.
Cathy smiled, as if she had been waiting for my permission. Limping, like her feet had already formed blisters, unused to the rare heel, she headed to the windowsill and placed the pothos in the middle of the afternoon sun, where it settled with a thud, the leaves shaking and already snaking closer to the window glass, where it could reach the sunlight.
Then she toddled toward my bed—toward me—and placed her arms around my body in a hug, her hair tickling the bottom of my nose. Her weight was tentative, as if trying not to crush me. I fought the urge to throw her off. She was my first close contact since transcendence who was neither a medical professional nor a wailing parent but what I could call a friend—although there had always been other connotations between us I was too tired to define—and yet because she was human, I was nervous at how my tail might react to her proximity. I remained tense, my arms stiff at my sides, curling the blanket between my fists, willing my top half to relax so Cathy would not pry into how I was feeling.
