The Gill Bride – Jan Stinchcomb

The Gill Bride

by Jan Stinchcomb

I think my brother’s big mistake was in assuming that he could just go out and get a wife. I’m not sure why it wasn’t enough for him to go to bars and get laid, like all the other men around here. He was good at that. But something inside of him, some misplaced sense of honor, made him want to go in a new, strange direction. All of sudden, he became a traditionalist who wanted an old-fashioned marriage with a virgin. Call me an optimist, but I do think you could find a virgin somewhere on land.

“But I want to marry someone who really needs me,” Kerry said as he sat at the kitchen table and flipped through the pages of the Ocean Brides catalogue. There were a lot of strange-looking girls in there, and all of them had gone under the knife.

“Marriage is not charity work,” my mother snapped. “This is not the Peace Corps.”

“I don’t want an American girl.” Kerry slapped his hand on the table. This announcement, I knew, was directed at me.

“You mean you can’t get an American girl to take you seriously–at least not one your own age,” I said.

He glared at me and then went back to his catalogue. Kerry’s okay-looking, blond, permanently sun-tanned. He used to be a surfer, and now he works in construction, which means that he’s often out of work. But I’m not judging him.

My mother says that he has a debilitating lack of self-esteem, which may be hereditary or else brought on by childhood realities: divorce, isolation, neglect. She says these things, bless her, as if she’s not responsible for the major events of our childhood. She was a working woman, a proud one, who always had time for political activism. My mother literally lay down to keep the bulldozer from breaking ground when they tried to put in the minimart down the road. The minimart won, but I’ll always remember how absolutely unafraid–comfortable, even–my mother looked as she lay there next to her hippie friends with cameras clicking all around them. They made the front page of the local liberal rag, The New Lighthouse.

When my parents first moved out here, back in the early days of their marriage, Vista Beach was considered so remote that everyone thought they were crazy. There wasn’t even a bus to take Kerry and me to school. It was always a bit of a drive to get away from here, but when we were home, we were happy. The beach was our backyard, our playground. We had a golden childhood out on the sand, never mind what was going on inside our house.

Perhaps that’s why he thought he should find a bride who came from the sea.

I can understand that. And the Ocean Brides catalogue made it seem like it was just a matter of some reconstructive surgery and an intensive language course, and the mermaid would be good to go. But those photographs are very disturbing. It’s not what has to be done to the tail, or the ever-delicate matter of the gills (should they stay or should they go?), it’s the lips and the eyes that bother me. The lips on all these girls have this strange, numb look, like they’ve had too much collagen. And the eyes, well, they’re all black. That’s very disconcerting. There is a tiny rim of white around the edge, but that’s it. There’s nothing like a fish eye to cut off communication. I never knew where to look, exactly, since that big black eye is like a closed door.

And, not to be catty, but I was expecting prettier hair. My sister-in-law’s was pure white, glossy, like you find on cheap plastic dolls. In the catalogue a lot of the girls have hair that’s orange or pink or purple, but it’s all dyed. I guess they haven’t received the best advice on how to appeal to the average American man.

Lucy was the name she went by. When I met her, I kept asking her what her real name was, and she kept repeating something that was a cross between a gurgle and a shriek. Needless to say, that first introduction did not go very well, what with my brother interpreting everything for Lucy, including her needs and desires, and my mother shouting like she does at city council meetings.

This is where I come in. I’m a social worker as well as a big sister. Everyone assumed that I would somehow help matters along. I’m not sure if I was much help, but I got busy as soon as I realized that Kerry was serious about his crazy plan.

I went out to the Ocean Brides website to try to find out more about the agency. It’s my belief that the entire wedding industry is a scam; the thought that love can be bought makes me cringe. The Ocean Brides website has a very mysterious, locked-down quality to it. They won’t give even serious customers any information until after that first check is cashed. I tried to talk Kerry out of it, but he was determined. In fact, the more I said against that place, the faster he wanted to act.

He did, however, ask me to help him choose a picture and get his wording right on what they call the Letter of Introduction. He kept wanting to make himself sound more serious or more successful than he actually is. Why won’t my brother believe me? All women want is a man who is kind and sincere. If he would only be himself… But no, and so he sent in an old photograph and made it sound like he was an independently wealthy beach bum.

“Do you really think that a mermaid wants a guy like that? I mean, why bother leaving the sea if you’re going to hang out at the beach all day? Why bother going through all that surgery–”

Kerry gave me a look of impatience. “Suzanne, you have to understand that I have a huge advantage as a person with beachfront property. They’ll put me at the top of the list.”

“Wait a minute. You moved back in to the attic room of your mother’s house–that makes you the owner of beachfront property?”

“Well, this is where we’ll live. This is my reality. And I’ll get work soon. I always do.”

“What’s she supposed to do while you’re at work all day, by the way? How’s she supposed to feel, all alone, up in the attic by herself?”

“Mom will be here.”

“That’s exactly what I’m worried about.”

Somehow my brother barreled through the endless obstacles. Check after check. Form after form. Strange interviews conducted down by the docks, including one where I had to accompany him while shady Mediterranean types tried to judge his character. But none of this so-called preparation took into account the enormity of what he was about to do, all the cultural and emotional challenges. I seemed to be the only one involved in that part of the process. After all, I was the one who completed the recommended reading: Your Siren Bride: What You Should Know, Daughters of Charybdis: The Wave of the Future, and Your Inter-Species Marriage. I found even stranger things online, including a site not affiliated with the agency and which featured stories and photographs that weren’t always encouraging. I tried to warn my brother.

“I’m not worried,” he assured me.

“But shouldn’t you be? There are some things that might interest you. A guy in Florida has a very disturbing story to tell–”

“You shouldn’t believe everything you read online, Suzanne.”

“Let me ask you one thing: have you thought about children? Because I’m not sure if you can have them with her.”

My poor brother obviously hadn’t thought about this issue at all. I could tell from his face. “Look, Suzanne, I just want to get married. I want a nice girl who will take care of me. And I don’t want her to be all neurotic and critical like you and Mom. Is that too much to ask?”

From there we had a fight. I told him he needed to grow up. It’s my firm belief that my brother did too many drugs when he was young and that he still has the brain of a teenager. That’s why he likes to chase young girls. Oh, they’re perfectly legal, but that’s not the point. Why should a man in his forties chase after girls who are just out of college? Doesn’t he see the problem with that?

“Not everybody is as lucky as you and Roger, Suzanne.”

That was his parting shot. I’m not supposed to make any observations about love–or mention any topic related to coupling–because I have a good marriage. My relationship with Roger paradoxically invalidates everything I have to say. Kerry doesn’t want my advice, but he often wants my help. And after Lucy arrived, it was like I had another job, albeit part time, aiding him and his mermaid bride.

If you could call her a mermaid. Lucy was so stripped of her original identity that it was hard to imagine she was ever a carefree daughter of Neptune. When Kerry first brought her home to meet us, the mere sight of her made me sad. She was obviously not accustomed to her new legs, and her numb-lipped smile looked so forced. As if to honor her old self, her gills sparkled with iridescent powder. My mother did nothing to hide her disgust. Lucy was wearing what I took to be her wedding gown, which was white, with little shells stitched all over it. A mother-of-pearl comb held her fine hair on top of her head. She wore kelp sandals and carried anemones–the flowers, not the creatures.

Her black eyes, especially that very first time, freaked us out.

Kerry and Lucy sat holding hands on the loveseat in the living room while my mother and I took the matching armchairs. Nobody said anything after the initial introductions. I felt that a few gentle questions would be appropriate.

“So Lucy, why were you interested in a life on land?”

Silence. Perhaps I was being too hard on someone who had only recently learned English. I expected Kerry to scold me for asking that question, but then Lucy spoke up.

“The oceans are dying,” she said, with a very respectable accent that sounded vaguely Italian, or maybe Greek.

My mother and I nodded. Yes, the oceans are dying. That’s one of my mother’s favorite causes, in fact.

“My homeland,” Lucy went on, “it is awash in sadness.”

Now that sounded like a phrase she had memorized. I imagined her repeating such phrases in an undersea classroom filled with mermaids who had no idea what they were in for. Before I could ask anything else, Lucy whispered something in my brother’s ear. And then, without another word, they both went upstairs. I was worried that they were going to start consummating their marriage while my mother and I sat ignored in the armchairs, but then we heard the sound of a bath being filled.

Needless to say, this was the first of a thousand such baths.

“Now I’m glad I cleaned the tub,” my mother murmured.

We stared at the fresh fruit that we had put out in pretty little dishes on the coffee table. We had not known what to serve, and Kerry was no help. We had assumed that Lucy wouldn’t eat fish, but we were wrong. She loved fish, especially the canned stuff. The term cannibalism meant nothing to her.

According to Lucy, the sea is a cutthroat world, full of rage and murder. She assured us that our little beach town was a much nicer place to live.

#

The agency provided Lucy with a work permit, and it was up to me to help her find a job. Swim instructor seemed like a natural choice, and she was very quick to complete her training. But her strange way with children was unanticipated.

I got a call at work on Lucy’s first day. A panicked voice at the other end of the line asked me to come and collect my sister-in-law.

“Is there some kind of problem?” I asked. Of course I knew there was a problem. I had known there was a problem for some time. But I wanted to ascertain the level of damage that Lucy had managed in one morning.

“She’s throwing the children into the water face-first. The mothers have asked her to be removed. They’re threatening to sue. Could you please come and get her right away?”

Of course. I came right away with my professional smile and tried, hopelessly, to smooth things over. I took her home. Lucy had to be driven everywhere because she couldn’t walk very far without great pain. What’s more, she had a horrible sense of direction, at least on land. On the way back to my mother’s house, I asked her what had happened. My work has taught me that the offending party rarely sees things the way her accusers do.

“Those children must swim to learn,” Lucy said in her singsong voice. She did not seem at all concerned.

I tried to explain to her what she had done wrong: “Lucy, those children can’t breathe underwater. They don’t have gills. It’s a big deal, a very big step, for a human child to learn how to swim. To navigate water. To simply be in water.”

“All the mothers here, they are so… smothering. It is surprise to me that the children thrive. Soon your race will die itself out.” Her black eyes blocked the possibility of any real understanding.

I pulled up in my mother’s driveway. My brother, who had been making himself scarce all morning, came running out, and Lucy jumped up to meet him. I grabbed her arm before she could get away. “Lucy, you could have killed someone this morning. Those children could have drowned. This is serious. Very serious. It’s going to be hard to find you another job. You have to learn to understand our race better.”

I don’t know if she heard anything I said. She ran to my brother, who twirled her in the air and asked how his girl had done.

I got out of the car and slammed the door. “Fired.”

But my brother merely raised an eyebrow before giving way to laughter. Lucy followed suit with her spooky mermaid’s laugh, but I don’t think she understood the joke.

I know I didn’t. I wanted to slap the both of them.

#

When Lucy wasn’t drowning other people’s children, she was busy making eggs of her own. Apparently my brother had been right to object to my Internet findings: she had no problem with procreation. If you like a lot of fish.

The story I had read about a man in Florida whose mermaid bride had died a gruesome death in childbirth must have been a hoax. Let’s hope so, at least. What came out of Lucy was a steady supply of eggs about the size of baseballs, and these had to be stored in heated, saltwater tanks. (It was around this time that my mother asked me if she could move in with me and Roger.) Fortunately, Lucy and Kerry didn’t feel any special connection to these little fish. After they hatched, Lucy was more than glad to release them to the sea. Or to let someone with strong human legs walk them down to the shore for her.

My mother and I had a little discussion, aided by a good bottle of wine, one evening while Kerry and Lucy were out at their favorite sushi restaurant.

“I don’t even think Kerry is the father,” she told me.

I groaned. The majority of my case files have to do with paternity issues, and I didn’t need to hear more.

“Think about it,” my mother went on in her loud voice. “How’s that supposed to work? How could Kerry possibly fertilize her eggs?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she’s like a chicken. You know, you can keep hens, but you don’t necessarily need a rooster. Unless…” I was too tipsy to complete the analogy.

“Oh, but listen to what you’re saying, Suzanne. This is the problem: Lucy’s eggs are turning into little fish. They’re not staying roe. Someone fertilized them. I think she’s having an affair.”

“Who with? She can barely make it down to the beach.”

“That’s what you think. I see her limping down there when Kerry’s gone. I see a lot more than you do.”

I considered this for a second. “I thought you were all for free love, mother.”

“I am. But I’m not for free rent. Or free fish.” She made a sweeping gesture that took in the aquariums lining the walls of her little house. Upstairs, the bathtub would be full of water, too. It always was.

And now we were using words like roe.

I decided to treat my family more like the families I work with. It was time to talk about setting real boundaries. “Mother, I think that maybe Kerry and Lucy should move out.”

“How? Where?”

And I had to admit that I didn’t know. I certainly didn’t want them to move in with me and Roger.

#

The saddest thing was that my brother actually fell in love with Lucy. I had never seen him act this way with a woman before. Before Lucy, Kerry had been largely controlled by the Madonna/Whore complex, and now he was deep in a rescue fantasy with his little gill bride. He took care of her like she was a child, carrying her around and speaking for her. Her diminutive size and irretrievably foreign ways served only to encourage him.

I found her a job singing in the choir at a local church, but that only lasted a few weeks, after which they concluded that she was completely amoral. “Your sister-in-law, Mrs. Jenkins, says the strangest things. She told us that her father is also the father of all her children. And she didn’t seem to have any problem with this.”

I had to raise this issue with Kerry.

It was not news to him. “I know, Suzanne. It’s one of the reasons why she had to leave home. It wasn’t her fault.”

“But it doesn’t seem to bother her.”

“I know. Still, it wasn’t a healthy situation. She’s better off here.”

I tried to imagine Lucy’s undersea life. It was very hard to chase fairy tale images and those old advertisements for Sea Monkeys out of my mind. Was Lucy anything like Andersen’s self-sacrificing heroine? Could Disney’s upbeat version of undersea life be remotely possible? Was the sea just like our world, where parents destroy their own children, often without meaning to? When I talked to Lucy directly, I got yet more baffling information.

“In this world, you all make such big deals of everything. Eggs are good. I don’t see what is your problem with me?”

“In this world, a father would never impregnate a daughter. It’s illegal. Unhealthy.”

Lucy pointed to all the bubbling aquariums as if they proved good health. I didn’t bother asking exactly what she and her father had done together. I preferred to think of him, whoever he was, whatever he was, swimming along and tossing his seed like fertilizer into the ocean current. I did want to know, however, what it would take to make another little mermaid. Or merman.

“Oh, for that I would need true love. Passion.”

Ah-ha. “And you don’t have this with Kerry?”

Lucy picked up a comb and began smoothing her hair. She often did not respond to stupid questions; her big black eyes came in handy at times like these.

I briefly considered getting her a job at one of those programs where they teach babies how to swim, but I came to my senses before filling out the application. Then I asked a friend from high school to do me a favor and give her a job at the pool he managed. By this time most of the town knew Lucy was unreliable at best, so he offered her a position washing towels and scrubbing down the changing areas. Instead, she spent every afternoon luxuriating in the deep end until her shift was over. It was clear that Lucy was going to be a stay-at-home mom of sorts, except that she paid no attention at all to her many children.

“Where are your eggs, Suzanne?” she asked one day when we were trying to work on her English.

I had to admit, that was an excellent question. Roger and I had everything except a child. We both liked our work. He was a lawyer, which made up for my low salary, and because he had inherited his mother’s house, we were way ahead of the game financially. For years we were all set to have a kid, but it never happened for me. For us, I mean. I was too frightened to venture very far into invasive fertility treatments, but I was open to adoption. Roger, however, was not. He didn’t come right out and say that he had any objection to adopting a child from Russia or India or China, but it never seemed to happen. Everything got in the way, whether it was a global crisis like 9/11, or a domestic issue like our leaky roof. Then Roger was suddenly worried that our old Victorian had lead paint. I began to suspect that there was something more substantial behind all his resistance.

“We’ve gone too long without having a baby,” he admitted one foggy Sunday. “We’re getting older and older, Suzanne. I’m not sure if I want to give up all our freedom, our time together. We barely see each other as it is.”

I was jealous of the zeal with which Kerry had pursued his ocean bride. He was willing to welcome someone from another world, a place so foreign to us that it made Russia and China seem like neighboring states. My brother was fearless. My husband and I could never demonstrate that same degree of courage–or willful blindness.

“Look, you don’t even know if you would have liked motherhood, Suzanne,” Roger finally concluded. “And we don’t know what our kid would have been like. What if it was sick? You know all the things that can go wrong with a fetus, Suzanne. You see these problems in your work all the time.”

I knew what he meant, but that didn’t make it any easier for me to explain what had happened to my eggs.

#

Apparently Lucy needed something more than a perpetual soak in the bathtub. She started to hang out at the same bars that Kerry had frequented when he was younger. She was especially popular with sailors. She got a reputation.

That was why my mother invited me over one afternoon to hang out with Lucy while she took Kerry for a walk on the beach. She was sure that if he knew about Lucy’s infidelities, he would make her go back home. When I arrived, Lucy was upstairs in her bath. Kerry was standing around with his hands in his pockets, looking so morose that I wondered if my mother’s plan was even necessary. Perhaps he was already starting to let go. Still, he offered to pick up sushi for everyone later, as if we were still some kind of family.

I climbed the stairs and pushed open the bathroom door, where I was greeted by a wave of moist warmth and one of Lucy’s eerie mermaid songs. I felt sad, just like my brother. This girl had grown on me precisely because she was so determined to be herself. After Lucy’s bath she put on a swimsuit and asked me if I wanted to go down to the beach with her. I knew she was leaving us because she also asked me to take care of her eggs. “Make sure they all go back to the sea,” she said. “Just toss them in water. They survive.”

As we walked to the sea, we held hands. The curious looks Lucy always got had ceased to bother me. She told me that no matter what, I had been a sister to her. She said that siblings are unknown in her world because there are so many children constantly being born and going off in several different directions at once.

“Still, I am so glad to leave here. You have one very painful world,” she said.

I regretted not putting on my suit. I would have liked to watch her swim away one last time. I asked her if she knew where she was going. I asked her if she would be in danger without her tail. I found myself projecting onto her all the love and protectiveness that I had wanted so badly to feel for somebody else. I realized that this was as close as I would ever get to sending a child off into the world.

“If a sailor called Mark asks for me, please to tell him I went back to the sea.”

“Mark?”

“I think that is his name. Mark. Or maybe Sam.”

And with that she tossed off her swimsuit and disappeared into the waves. I was left completely empty, desolate. When I went back to the house, my brother and mother were sitting on the loveseat and saying nothing. A plate of sushi sat untouched on the coffee table.

I didn’t even need to tell them that Lucy was gone. Suddenly my mother rose and began pulling the plugs on the aquarium system. “I want all this out of here. Today!”

“Don’t do that,” I begged her. “Please calm down. Help me get some buckets together, and we’ll take these down to the water.”

My brother jumped up, glad to have a project. He insisted that they were his eggs, too, and that he wanted to do right by them. We had to make three trips, and my arms were aching by the end of the afternoon.

“Don’t you think we should save just one?” he asked me as we stood at the end of the pier. “To have something to remember her by?”

I was about to say, sure, go ahead, when I noticed something special in the bucket in my hands. One of the eggs was different: there was a tiny girl inside of it, a girl with a visible tail and hair that was already long. So Lucy really had shared something with that sailor. I showed the egg to my brother, and I explained that a little mermaid could only result from true love. My brother took the bucket from my hands and gazed into it as a smile spread across his face.

I didn’t tell my brother about the sailor. What for? He’d probably already left town, and every girl around here knows that sailors don’t come back to check on one-night stands. Carrying the bucket between us, my brother and I turned to cross the sand and go back to the house. The other beachgoers gave us knowing smiles as if we were fishermen who finally had a bit of luck. I knew that what we were really carrying between us was my brother’s ability to take a risk, and I was glad to help him out. And to see what would develop.

#

I became Aunt Suzanne.

When she was little, Lorelei would hide in the depths of the bathtub and wait for me to come find her. Then she would wink at me before breaking the surface with her tail. Like her mother, she’s happy in the tub, even though she can swim like it’s nobody’s business. We’ve tried to let her be herself. Sometimes I remember the scar that ran from crotch to ankle on each of Lucy’s legs, and I shudder to think of the violence of her assimilation.

Lorelei doesn’t ask about her mother. Like Lucy she is amazingly nonchalant when it comes to her kin.

Mermaids grow up fast. Lorelei has the same selfish streak that Lucy had, and it has stood her in good stead in a foreign world. My brother still thinks that he can make all the decisions about her, but I know he’s wrong. Like any daughter she is going to go off on her own, and soon. I’ve learned a thing or two as I’ve tried to guide this girl with a tail. I’m not as surprised by her as I was by Lucy. She can’t shock me so easily; I’ve become used to the aquatic impulse. And I’ve even learned how to read those deep black eyes, which have just enough of her father in them to make her give herself away.

---

Jan Stinchcomb was born in San Francisco just weeks before the Summer of Love began. Her work has appeared in the other room, PANK online, Notes Magazine, Words and Images, Singularities: Writing from the Center of the Edge, and in Tartts Two and Four: Incisive Fiction from Emerging Writers. A former foreign language teacher, she lives in a purple house in Austin with her husband, daughters and rehabilitated feral cat. Visit her at http://www.janstinchcomb.com.

© 2011 All rights reserved Jan Stinchcomb.

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