TITLE Page
Walking the Mermaid
By
Ann Medlock
HINTS Page
I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate.
I am and am not, I freeze and yet am burned,
Since from myself another self I turned.
—Elizabeth I
Teach me to hear mermaids singing.
—Donne
...the rude sea grew civil at her song
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid’s music.
—Shakespeare
Entry ONE--The story starts here.
Prelude
In the last faint glow of the long June day, in the house filled with sleeping-child silence, she pulled the drop cloths off the floor and the old slanttop desk, and flipped on the reading lamp.
Lights, camera, action. Let’s get on with this thing. Sign, don’t sign, go, no go. Tonight. The papers in the morning mail. Or not. And I stop thinking about it.
Crescents of dark earth tipped each paint-freckled finger as she spread the pages out to be read one last time.
In the early morning hours, before the sun drove her indoors, she had planted flats of impatiens, salmon and coral giggles along the curving brick walk. In the afternoon, as two fans blew droning kisses at her damp skin, she’d painted this small room just inside the front door a smiling, heartwarming gold. The first impression had to be excellent; there wouldn’t be much time to pull this off, if she went for it.
Prospects would come down the jaunty walk, taking in the old house, solid, plain, but wriggling its chocolate shingles at them, waving its peach shutters. They would be new department heads at the University or New York Achievers ready for the great move to this ubersuburb, taking their rightful places among the winners. Achievers and their proud wives, puzzled children in tow, would stand in the two-story foyer, would wonder at the ficus tree whose top leaves now reached the second-floor landing.
Now step this way if you will. This was, for the first half of the century, the office of the town’s most beloved family physician. Perfect for any at-home work you might want to do, or for seeing clients, patients. And what a lovely golden glow it had. How Norman Rockwell, they would think, not seeing the scenes played on this charming set that had been painted by Munch and Bacon, text not Saturday Evening Post but Journal of Abnormal Psychiatry.
She wiped her damp hands on the seat of her cutoff jeans, careful not to smudge the papers as she read, yet again, the ponderous terms and conditions, and the changes and deletions she had made in them. If she could be absolutely certain she had removed all the dangers, she might then date and sign two copies and mail them up to the city. When if they countersigned, she would put her copy on file so they could never get away with telling her she’d agreed to something that she hadn’t. She’d ferreted out every problem, she was fairly sure. And it was time to sign, or lose to another applicant.
She smoothed creases out of the tea towel that kept her from sticking to the wooden chair she’d carried in from the kitchen, and smiled at Joe’s elegant leather desk chair shoved into the corner, an occupantless, punished chair, facing the wall.
Joecooties. Sitting there could get them on me. The cooties would say, in that Joevoice, “Lee, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Well join the chorus, guys.
She cursed the New Jersey summer that insisted on invading beautiful Princeton, weighting and boiling the air as if this were Saigon or Leopoldville. It was dark now but she was still sweating and fighting to get some oxygen from the wet stuff that enveloped her. It couldn’t hold much more heat and water, would have to crack open into rain soon. There was thunder somewhere to the north and flashes of blue light.
She dipped her head into the weak, still-hot flow the attic draft fan was sucking through the window screen, and caught the clean new scent of the watered topsoil feeding the bright new flowers settling along the walk, maybe sending small white feelers out, startled, delighted to hit not a plastic wall but open soil, inviting, yielding, limitless.
There would be no more of that if she signed. They didn’t let you dig and plant in Central Park.
Pen in hand, she stared at the signature page of the almost-memorized lease. “No one reads that stuff,” the agent had said, It’s meaningless. Just boilerplate.” But Lee was not willing to be sliced and fried by New York. She had taken it away unsigned and parsed it word-for-word, pencil in hand, making notes.
Reviewing her edits, she felt solid, a responsible head-of-household, looking out for her family. The “boilerplate” only protected the owners of the apartment building; she had shaped it into reciprocity, protecting her and the boys as well. They couldn’t be evicted for having overnight guests, for hanging a picture or for painting the walls gold—as long as she returned the place to its original condition before they moved.
Which, she reminded herself, would happen. Signing wouldn’t commit her forever, only for two years. In her master plan, it looked like four. Four years to see if she could play jacks with the big kids. By then the Standish would surely go co-op and, as a tenant-of-record in the Republic of New York City, she would buy at the insider price, sell at market, and move on with a paper bag full of money, on to wherever they should be, a woman with an established career and one remaining nestling. It was possible that she could do these things. That she could soar and sing, that she had protectors, even though they could not be seen by those who thought she would not, could not do this.
The checkbook was in the top right drawer, along with the statements and records she’d made herself keep carefully for these last years. She’d have to send a check for the first and last months’ rent and a security deposit. It was more than it should be, but everything was, and this might actually be worth it. She tore out a check and put it next to the nine-by-twelve envelope that would go to the city certified mail return receipt requested. If she actually did this.
The city spun, at nor north east, in front of her and slightly to the right, pulling insistently like some huge centripetal force field, though she was alone in feeling it. The boys eyed her strangely, friends were sure she was mad.
“Do what? Leave Princeton to live in the city with your kids?” That wasn’t the way the tide flowed. People achieved Princeton, upgrading to it after paying their dues in New York. Exactly. There was the rub. She hadn’t achieved her way here, had just landed on Park Place as baggage, a camp follower. Year after year, the wonderfully honest property tax bill from the state of New Jersey was addressed “Joseph W. Montagna, et ux” She had come here et uxorem, Joe’s property.
Her mother, on the line from Carolina, was filled with the economic and safety reasons to stay put, mystified yet again by her peculiar daughter, sure she could not affect this wayward offspring’s decision, finally saying only, “But sugah, you’d be so lonely.”
Lee had quieted her with numbers and lies—surely if she were ever to find a good man the odds were better in the largest possible population. She couldn’t say her truth to a kind, puzzled woman who had been a fulltime wife and mother for more than forty years.
Staying means resigning myself to a life of benign inconsequence. What if I can do more, be more, do some work that matters? How will I ever know if I don’t go?
The questions could only be answered if she pulled herself out of this calm nook and stepped into the arena of possibilities, possibilities both glorious and horrendous.
Here there would always be professors’ books to edit. Steady work, solid. There would always be a grad student in the attic studio, to help with chores, and the “east wing” to rent for extra cash. Someday she might find a friend to fill the space Claudia and Marina had made when they walked out of the world. Gabe would start and finish school; and he and Tobias would always have this safe, strong place standing behind them. Home. Her home, theirs.
All her life she had passed by big old houses on shady streets and wished she could live in such a place. Now, she had lived that dream for seven years, the time it took to renew every cell in a body, making her a different being than the one that had moved into the derelict house on Rebellion Road as Joseph Montagna’s uxore.
Her sons had something she had yearned for as a child and she could hold this ground for them, saving the place they would bring their children for Easter egg hunts and Christmas caroling.
She could grow old in this house, sustained by solid plaster walls and quartered-oak floors, hearing for the rest of her life the mourning doves whose cooing now filled the night. Nothing untoward would happen, nothing frightening. Ever.
The unthinkable alternative was to turn and walk through the crack in time that had opened, so briefly, and into the dangerous, uncertain action that was being played out just minutes away from this silent, sycamore-roofed street. There was the dangled possibility of being fully alive—but also of being sliced and fried, of living the rest of her life not with a respectably wistful, unfulfilled dream, but with the sure knowledge that she was second rate.
She’d set the bar as high as possible against that lethal discovery. She’d go back to New York if there was a place for Gabe in the kindergarten at Steiner, and everyone knew the city’s private schools had waiting lists pages long. She’d go back if Tobias made the final cut at Hunter, and the competition for that freshman class was intense. She’d go back if there was also an apartment with dawn windows across the park from Steiner, one that she could afford—an impossibility.
It all had to be in place or she could pull back from the brink and rest easy, here in her downy, cooing life, where nothing would ever disturb the tranquility of mourned dreams.
Tobias had aced the entrance exams, despite his don’t-care grades at Princeton High. Gabe had so charmed Steiner’s interviewers that they accepted him on the spot. A little unnerved, she had taken his hand and walked from the old school on East 79th, across the Park on the transverse, toward the West Side. They emerged to see a large sign on a Central Park West building— ”Over 400 apartments Available September 1.”
The Standish Hotel, a grande dame of the 20’s, was being renovated, mustiness removed, kitchens installed, long-term tenants recruited. Standing in the still shabby little two-bedroom suite on the southeast corner of the eighth floor, she imagined herself watching as the sun rose, a ribbon at a time, from behind the Metropolitan Museum and said crossly, “All right, all right. I’ll take it.”
It was the windows that had captured her, more than the eerie fulfillment of her unreasonable requirements. The old many-paned wood windows were cracked and peeling, and were to be replaced with steel-rimmed expanses of glass, but even through the old panes, the content of the windows astonished. In the living room and in what would become her bedroom, it was all sky and clouds at the tops, all green trees at the bottoms, with the Manhattan skyline dividing the two, a magnificent array, from the 90’s on Fifth to the Essex House on Central Park South. The Plaza, the Chrysler Building, Citicorp, the Sherry-Netherland—it was Oz on parade.
A person living in that apartment would not be burrowed down in some airshaft, looking out at brick walls, able to hide from the city. A person living there would know she was “on.” There was no way Lee could awaken in apartment 801 of the Standish and not know where she was, and what was expected of her in the day ahead
.
Exposure. She would be exposed, the city looking back at her, calling her forth to try her hand.
She only had to write her name on pieces of paper and mail them into the realm of possibilities. She put the pen down and stared out at the moonlit, blossom-lined path, the path that led to her home, and away from it.
