Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel Read online

  I’M GETTING AHEAD of myself, though, skipping ahead to honeymoons when Chip and I weren’t even married yet. Chip’s training for his race took up a few hours every day, at first just mornings and then evenings too; at times he’d come home bleeding from the earholes, with dirt leaking from his nose. He had one elbow in a sling, then fractured toes; his kneecaps were scab pancakes. He called it “necessary toughness” and told me men who finished the race often got the name of it tattooed on their biceps.

  We had the bachelor party issue decided, so the next thing was my side of the schedule. I’d never been a fan of bridal showers, or baby showers either, really. A shower of any kind seems like a place for brain deficiency—women squeal during those showers, squeal at the sight of trivial objects. A bridal shower features frilly underwear to make the new wife look more like a prostitute; a baby shower peddles frilly bonnets you drape around a newborn’s face to make it look less like a garden gnome. I skipped right over the shower option to its faux-raunchier counterpart the bachelorette party, whose most revolting facet is the name bachelorette. I’m as fun as the next California gal, or try to be at least, but what I don’t appreciate is the infantile aesthetic. Lacy frills, voluntary brain deficiency and words like bachelorette, what they add up to, let’s face it, is basically an infantile or possibly pedophile aspect.

  I’ve got no problem with the male-stripper custom. It’s a conundrum though, or maybe a complicated joke—sometimes I’ve thought the whole thing is 100 percent gay, style-wise, with all those middle-aged women smiling and clapping as though the gay male spectacle was just exactly what they came out for. Because let’s face it, in most cases the stripper dance moves are cruel and unusual punishment, for your typical straight woman. Other times I’ve thought maybe the moves aren’t gay at all, maybe they’re designed to be embarrassing. Maybe no one likes them. Maybe the point of them is male abasement, female pity/superiority. Could that be it?

  Thankfully, none of my friends insisted on the stripper theme. They were OK without strippers, also without a gigolo.

  Once I knew I was safely clear of the acrylic talons of the sex industry I handed the planning over to my maid of honor, Gina D. She wasn’t a maid of honor in the traditional sense, after all she’s a grown woman, as many of us are, nowadays, who choose to get married. There isn’t a maid around. The only one who called her a maid of honor was Chip’s mother, who I could write a book about. Chip’s mother also called me “the bride,” just every chance she got. As in “Well here’s the blushing bride!” when I walked in the front door in gym sweats with dark armpit stains, lugging five heavy bags of groceries and a case of beer. Or “Is the bride a little bit under the weather?” when she heard me in our bathroom during a bout of Thai-restaurant food poisoning. She said that through the bathroom door, where she hovered while I was in there making noises like a chimpanzee screaming.

  But she was my second in command, Gina D.—my best friend from way back and my wedding lieutenant. I call her Gina D. because when we met, in seventh grade, there was another kid named Gina, Gina B., and so we used their last initials. But they were oh so different, those two Ginas. Gina B. later became a successful quilter. Her quilts are everywhere, at least, if you’re the type that visits community centers, women’s art cooperatives and crafts conventions. If you’re a person who notices quilts, you’d certainly notice hers. Hard to miss them. The quilts have quotes, such as, for instance, I dream of giving birth to a child who will say to me: “Mommy, what was war?”

  Gina D., though, is starkly opposed to quilts—really to most things that are handmade. She openly despises pottery. I saw her laugh in a potter’s face. I was relieved she didn’t spit; to Gina D. the stink of earnestness is worse than rancid milk. Gina D. wants household items to be mass-produced, ideally of a polymer, and if they’re not she tries to throw them out. One time she walked through my kitchen and trashed three items in five minutes flat: a potholder decorated by another friend of mine’s kid, a floral apron sewn by a long-gone great-aunt and a glazed ceramic planter I really kind of liked.

  She’s funny, Gina D., with a carrying personality that makes you half forget she’s harshly obliterating your possessions. Everything’s performance art with her, she lives in a world of irony. If a gesture’s not ironic, why make it at all, is her philosophy. Gina’s a failed academic—at least, that’s what she calls it. Last time I checked she made a decent salary and had tenure in American Studies.

  Gina claims the term failed academic is redundant. That’s why she uses it.

  She promised me no male strippers, ironic or otherwise. Gina’s the type who, left to her own devices, would have to raise the stakes on male stripping—regular male strippers would never be enough for her, she’d shake her head in boredom at that idea, instantly dismissing it. Gina would have to get some paraplegic ones or maybe amputees. And she’d probably end up making out with at least one of them in a broom closet. Gina’s got game.

  She and I brainstormed awhile, with her arguing at first for a pilgrimage to the theme park Dolly Parton owns. She said the infantile or pedophile aspect of weddings made Dollywood the perfect place to go—a whole family amusement park, with millions of visitors a year, based on the image of a woman known for abnormally huge breasts. The whole thing doesn’t fit together unless you factor in its standard deviation, what Gina calls SD. SD is the perversity of everyone, Gina says, which everyone totally ignores. “We’ll fly on the wings of an eagle,” she quoted (Gina loves to quote). “Dollywood, sweet promised land of giant breasts,” she rhapsodized, “the land of friendly, singing breasts. Land where the large breasts sing.”

  Gina is fond of perversion, although, since her fondness is ironic, you can’t pin her down for being an actual pervert. Quite probably, you’ll never know. That’s the hard part with irony. But I said no to Dollywood; we’re keeping it local, Gina, I said. Chip would be heartbroken if I went without him to not only an amusement park but also Middle America. Tennessee has to count as that; the name of the town is Pigeon Forge. Meanwhile Chip would be clambering over spirals of razor wire. He’d feel left out, and I couldn’t do that to him.

  “I’ll take a rain check,” said Gina D. briskly. “Oh, I know—we’ll go when Chip’s busy doing his midlife thing. There’ll be a free week in there, maybe a few, while you’re deciding if you should go the couples therapy or divorce route.” She flicked on her phone, opened the calendar. “Hmm, seven years. I’m putting a reminder in. Back to the party, then. You sure about the travel ban? Because Precious Moments™ has its own chapel in Missouri.”

  WHILE GINA WAS planning my party, my almost-mother-in-law was also making plans: Chip had asked me to let her help. Chip’s an only child, and his mother had retired the previous year from what was, as far as I could tell, a Nurse Ratched-type position. She worked at an old folks’ home where, before she left her job, we used to drop in on her sometimes; I saw some elderlies who quaked at the sound of her footfall. Around the time of our engagement and wedding her main hobby was going to hear motivational speakers, and after each one of them she’d bear some pearls of self-help wisdom home to share with Chip and me. Chip’s mother brings motivation to the table, that’s for sure. She buckled down to setting up our reception, and if she wasn’t bringing me a swatch of this it’d be a forkful of something else.

  I told her that I didn’t want certain so-called traditional aspects of wedding receptions, that is, the aspects that are repulsive. No feeding each other wedding cake, for instance, then mashing it around the oral region like giant babies. Strict pedophile/infantile thematic. Also no disturbing miniature bride and groom dolls perched upon the cake with glassy smiles, a serial killer’s dream of love.

  Chip’s mother wasn’t happy about this, of course, she feared the opinions of the other relatives, some of whom would be hailing from Middle America or Orange County. I shouldn’t say she feared, on second thought, since Chip’s mother has never been one to frighten easily; more like she s
hared their views and stoutly wished us to conform to them. People don’t even perceive the standard deviant quality of wedding receptions—to them it’s cute, the cake-on-face smearing, the frozen serial killer dolls with tiny startled eyes and pink slashes where the mouths should be. Not for one second is your wedding-going public bothered by things’ actual meanings—and by public I mean those women who pass amongst each other all the information about what weddings and receptions should be, spattered across the generations like so much female deodorizing spray across the shelf at a Walgreens. These women are the clear standard-bearers of the nuptial industry a.k.a. basic wedding perversion.

  To them a wedding theme is “starry night,” “angel” or “antique vanilla.” Yes, they firmly believe vanilla is a theme, along with warm yellow, mauve and tangerine. To them the sight of a full-grown man and woman mashing white-frosted cake into each other’s nostrils and chin pores is traditional plus heartwarming. If it were tradition to eat human intestines at wedding receptions they’d garnish the plates with curls of spleen. When these ladies happen to glance at the food-ravaged faceholes during the cake-on-face smearing and feel a shiver of revulsion, they simply disregard that shiver and smile as though, somewhere within the floral centerpieces, iddle fairies are giggling.

  Gina maintains the standard deviance is Freudian. To her, breastfeeding is non-ironic, earnest and the child-raising equivalent of making macramé wall hangings; also to her, all children wish to nurse at their mothers’ breasts until the age of at least six, and not being able to do so makes standard deviants out of them. Gina’s not bothered by her own conflicts of opinion, though: another benefit of the irony position. You can be a walking pastiche of opinions, if you’re deeply committed to irony. If Gina is drunk she’ll get even more into it, telling all those who care to listen—and many who would prefer not to—how our free nation is a carnival of stunted mental growth. “Arrested adolescence? We wish,” she’ll slur loudly, Gina, my wedding helpmeet, when she’s in her cups. “We never made it out of elementary school, buddy.”

  It’s not always clear what Gina’s referring to.

  Chip’s mother kept trying to shoehorn items into the reception, slip in repulsive elements without me noticing. For instance, party favors such as star-shaped fairy wands with a label on them inviting guests to WISH UPON A STAR. When I said no to that one she left me five messages, each one more indignant. Then she wanted bottles of bubble bath with swans on top, their necks disturbingly entwined; then a white-silk flower with CONSIDER THE LILIES stamped on the stem in gold.

  I told her no favors, since Chip and I had passed beyond that phase. We were adults, I told her calmly but firmly: when we attended a party we didn’t expect to go home with sparkle-filled bouncy balls or a handful of Tootsie Pops. We were no longer impressed, like so many gentle natives on the wrong end of a cargo-cult trade, by the magical wonder of the monogram. Black and silver matchbooks, floaty pens, even high-priced cake knives or serving spoons engraved with Jon & Minky or Dick & Billy left us completely unmoved. My personal impulse, upon receiving such items as a guest, was to hurl them into the nearest trash can as soon as I exited the function.

  No, we were perfectly pleased to leave a party empty-handed, our blood alcohol content somewhere above .08.

  BY THE TIME the various events fell into place, my party was slated for the day after Chip’s race. He’d need some time to recover before the ceremony, with morphine derivatives for pain. Then the rehearsal dinner and then, on a Saturday in late July, our small ceremony and reception.

  It wasn’t going to be easy to spectate, at the mud marathon, but I drove with him anyway; the course had been set up at a ski resort in the San Bernardinos. Once we were up there in the pines, checked into our hotel room, I took a shower while Chip listened to rabble-rousing music with his earbuds in. Then we went outside and I watched as runners milled around at the starting line for what seemed like an eternity, stretching, high-fiving, chugging sports drinks and eating astronaut food.

  The weather wasn’t sunny, in fact a thunderstorm was threatening, which seemed to please those extreme sportsmen and sportswomen: they sought every encumbrance possible. Many would happily have run the distance on hot coals. A number sported rubber bands around the thick parts of their arms or rings from multiple piercings—rings that, I imagined, could easily get snagged on the barbed-or razor-wire entrapments and rip off a lobe or a nipple. Several participants bore large ink designs from previous years’ events, one on the top of his shaven head; I saw two others comparing mud-race burns and scars, one on the neck, the other across the ribs.

  “Chip,” I said—as Chip, standing on one leg like a stork, pointed and flexed the airborne foot repeatedly, writing the alphabet upon thin air with his toes to loosen his ankle—“are you completely sure? I’ve got a great idea. How ’bout you just don’t do this race, and we can tell everyone you did?”

  “I’m not going to wuss out,” protested Chip. “Babe. Babe! Are you kidding?”

  “It wouldn’t be wussing,” I said. I hated the thought of Chip with a tattoo on his head. Till death do us part, and all, but with the head tattoo I wasn’t sure. It didn’t appeal to me. “Not in the least. This would be more like, you doing me a solid.”

  “Now honey,” said Chip, de-storking his muscular legs and coming over to put his arms around my waist, “I know you support me taking this on. It’s going to rock. It’ll totally rock, OK? You’ll see.”

  When I first met Chip, on a speed-dating lark that Gina dragged me to as an ironic gesture after I’d gone through a bad breakup, I had the impression he was a handsome guy but seemingly indifferent. It turned out he wasn’t indifferent at all; when Chip gets a far-off look in his eyes it’s not coldness, it’s more like an echoing. He forgets what’s in front of him sometimes, does Chip—goes to a dreaming place, a dreaming environment. In that land flags are flying over tall-grass meadows; men are Vikings, women like ornaments on the prows of ancient ships, their hair long and wavy. Chip’s a dreamer and if he could, he’d make the world a place where questing videogames became reality, where he could wear breastplates and a deep battle horn would sound over the white-peaked mountains and lush green valleys. Stags leaping in the woods; fording of streams by warriors and their warhorses, decked out in glorious regalia; possibly mythological creatures.

  But if you can’t make the world into a videogame, and if you’re not a full-on geek but fifty-percent jock too, I guess the next best thing is a mud marathon.

  “I do support you, Chip,” I sighed. “Just—would you do something for me? Don’t get a head tattoo. Look at that guy. With the name of the race beneath that stubble on his scalp? He looks like he’s here to kill minorities. Chip, I don’t favor a man with head tattoos.”

  “You’ve got my word on it, sweetcheeks,” said Chip. He disentangled himself from my embrace and returned to his warmup/stretching routine.

  “Chip,” I went on, as he storked on his second leg and peeled back the wrapper on an energy bar that looked like something dark nestled in cat litter, “you know, while we’re on the advisability subject, I sometimes have a thought. My thought is that, with the planet at seven billion people and counting, hundreds of millions in abject poverty, my concern is that extreme sports are maybe a red herring. If people want to put so much effort into testing their toughness, if they want to prove they’re not afraid of hardship, why not travel as Good Samaritans to famine-ridden or war-torn countries? Or for the rebel, punk-rock types, maybe bomb missile factories? You know—do something productive?”

  “Huh,” said Chip, looking surprised and a little worried as he chewed the protein bar with his mouth open. “Man, Deb. Should I not have booked the honeymoon package for Virgin Gorda?”

  “Honey, my point is—”

  But the pre-starter sounded then, a five-minute warning. Chip gulped down his soy protein, kissed me, took off his ultra-featherweight jacket, adjusted the tube on his backpack hydration kit (giving it a
practice suck or two) and the angle on his headlamp, and made for the starting line. I raised my phone and called out to him as he went, snapping a picture when he turned to smile at me. He looked like a combination football player/spelunker/Green Beret, his broad grin a Cheerful Chip special.

  Chip’s a positive guy, one of the things I value about him. Events don’t tend to get him down for long. He cries a lone man-tear now and then, when he sees a commercial with starving babies or remembers watching the planes hit the buildings—Chip doesn’t have a problem showing emotion—but he snaps out of it before he reaches a level that’s maudlin. Chip snaps right out of it and switches into basketball, World of Warcraft or having-sex mode. He’s quite accomplished at all three.

  The hotel had screens set up where spectators could watch the feed from various cameras positioned along the route; I wasn’t sure, though, how to pick Chip out of the rest of the crowd. He’d tied a bright bandanna loosely around his neck, colored a putrid yellow-green, but it would soon be brown as Chip got mud-covered and then it would cease to distinguish him. I bought myself a drink at the ski resort bar and sat down to watch the proceedings.

  The first obstacle was ropes over a pond; the runners had to walk along thin ropes strung slightly above the surface of the water, one rope per runner, like a tightrope, plus a second rope to hold on to above their heads. Several of them splashed down in rapid succession. They were falling readily from those ropes, dropping like flies. Meanwhile I slowly drank my margarita, there in the ski resort bar. There was abundant salt on the rim of the glass, and I liked that; I liked the margarita quite a bit, I realized pleasantly, as the extreme athletes balanced, then wavered wildly, as they splashed into the pond and struggled to climb out again, covered in scum.

  Yes, I nodded to myself, the margarita was tasty.

  Between leisurely sips I tried to make out Chip on the large screen, Chip balancing on a narrow rope or toppling into the chilly, brackish water, but I really couldn’t see him, and in the end it wasn’t worth the effort. There were so many men on those ropes, so many strong, tough men out there exemplifying toughness—surely these men were heavy as iron, with that muscle mass on them, and yet to me it almost seemed as though their bodies were puffy, as though they might suddenly rise into the air, borne heavenward like so many man-shaped muscle balloons … a few woman balloons, here and there, but mostly it would be men.