Chlorine

by Jade Song

Forget what you know about mermaids. For too long you’ve been inundated by G-rated fairy tales, the blood and dirt in their original drafts scrubbed clean by salarymen in suits. They sold you false love disguised in pastels. Thanks to them, and the cubicle corporations they work for, you think mermaids wear bikini tops made of shells, swim in saltwater, and have flowy red hair. You think mermaids desire either to copulate with two-legged male sailors or lure them to their watery deaths—always or, never and. You think mermaids hate their bodies and their tails, though these are the parts of them that hold their power. You think mermaids have no power. You are wrong.

Mermaids are not born. We are made. I burst into being when I was seventeen years old. I became a mermaid not as a pearl in a clamshell, but as a girl in a locker room shower stall at the University of Pittsburgh pool during my junior year of high school. I alone saw myself as a rightful mermaid, finally free of my short and pitiful life as a human girl.

I cannot describe Mr. Osborne’s face or his classroom. The tiny details comprising insignificant men like him have long since been discarded from my memory. But I can easily recall the shapes of his greasy fingerprints on my book’s laminated cover. He gave me my first experience in attempting to prove myself to a man, with no avail.

We couldn’t afford a pool in our backyard, so I begged my mother to let me join a swim team. She refused for an entire year, thinking piano was the right path for me, until she read a viral article online about the best extracurricular activities to teach kids time management. Armed with the listicle advice, she capitulated to my begging and pulled back on car repair to save money for team dues, in the event I did manage to qualify for the team with no prior experience. It was more important for me to learn control than it was for her to drive safely.

We were tougher than the football players and the tennis players and the track athletes combined, even tougher than the boys’ swim team. Our high school swim team was a small world, but it was ours—we ruled with a dihydrogen monoxide fist.

Like many other stories, mine begins with a wretched man. His name was Jim. He was my swim coach, and I his vessel for his secondhand glory. The glory he gave me hung off my neck in medals of gleaming gold. The more he gave, the more I wanted, and the more I took. With each swim meet I gained laurels, yet my craving was never satiated. Jim offered me the training to secure these victories, so I bestowed unto him my love in return. I loved Jim because there was no greater intimacy than that found between athletes and their coaches.

Jim, who had already noticed me during tryout week, paid me close attention as the weeks went on. He noticed my beauty at the same time he noticed my swimming talent, because Jim had two great skills: swim coaching and predicting who would be hot. The two skills went hand in hand. The pretty ones were always fast. Did skill beget beauty, or did beauty beget skill?

As a human girl, I adored winning. To win was euphoria, and euphoria was a blackout—black holes, stars, and galaxies forming at the edge of your goggles, an entire outer space dedicated to the Big Orgasmic Banging of first place. Euphoria was the feeling of ascension, a path I recognized when I later shed my human self for mermaid. Euphoria was reaching the edge of fatigue, near fainting, until adrenaline slapped you awake. Euphoria was muscles on fire. Euphoria was to slap the wall first, fist pumping the water, then to bask in the crowd’s uproar, hollering your name. Euphoria was to dip your head in an act of humbleness for the gold medal to be placed around your neck.

On the day of my first period, I was more dead doe than human woman. Was womanhood always so violent, raw?

My period continued, an inevitable cycle, yet every month I was somehow surprised by the violent pain. It was as if I refused to believe my body, something I’d trusted for years, would repeatedly betray me. My stomach ate itself from the inside, a revelry I had been dragged to, a feast I was forced to join though I was not hungry. The meal lasted four to six days, gorging on cramps, the spilled crumbs falling out of me stained with raspberry jam. My stomach was never a clean eater, gnawing on my uterus and fallopian tubes, leaving bite marks.

died and regenerated every month. How else could I define the experience? The reasonable explanation was death. I decided when my body was wheeled into the morgue, the coroner would declare I died of being a woman. Which was far better than dying of being a man.

Every day I contemplated how mermaids do not menstruate. There was no mention of cramps in my mermaid book. I was jealous of them. I wished to be freed of my uterus’s commands.

But the swim meet did bring me something beautiful. I finally had a friend. Cathy and I were acquaintances until she jerked me off with a soggy tampon. I pulled her inside the bathroom stall because she had been there at the right time, but also because she seemed the friendliest out of all my teammates, and though we had not been teammates for long, I could already tell she wasn’t the type brave enough to say no. I may have initiated with her out of desperation, but we became close friends after the meet because it was impossible to stick a hand up a bloody vagina and not fall in love with its owner.

Humans are the downfall to myths. Whether the human razed the home, broke the heart, or betrayed the trust, the mythical is always in a worse state after the introduction. I read countless stories of mermaids dragged forcibly from their oceans, mermaids condemned to marriages with men, mermaids stricken with voiceless throats. My ancestors’ lessons forewarned me to close my heart to human advances. But I was so lonely.

Though I have always found her beautiful, human teenage popularity standards were unyielding, especially for athletes. Cathy couldn’t rise to their expectations. Cathy was the kind of blue-eyed white girl reminding me of the Blue Eyes White Dragon YuGiOh card I coveted when I was younger. And like blue eyes and whiteness, eventually I learned the Blue Eyes White Dragon was simply a construct too. A piece of flimsy card stock, its value ascribed by a mysterious higher power.

My mother and I considered Faye the most beautiful woman in the world. Neither of us had ever seen anyone else carry such an ethereal face, either in China or in America. Faye was the epitome of cool. I didn’t care about Abercrombie logo T-shirts or milkshakes or Tamagotchis. When I wasn’t thinking about mermaids or swimming, I was thinking about Faye. My mother played her CDs to and from practice, Faye’s crooning accompanying our journey. When I recall the lactic acid cooldown of post-practice drives, I hear Faye’s slow yearning beats of nostalgia.

Journey, Bon Jovi, Eminem. M&M. Is there anything more American than a musical artist named after candy? Anything more American than living on a prayer and nothing else?

My body had long since entered a state of burning numbness. I had no sensations left. To survive I stared ahead. You were in front of me. We were best friends. It was freshman year already. By now, you could rap every word to “Lose Yourself” by Eminem, even though we both agreed your pronunciation was in poor form. On your head was your usual swim cap and goggles: tight purple straps, smooth latex. On your body was your new swimsuit. Do you remember which one I’m talking about? You had told me as we changed in the locker room before practice that your mother agreed to buy the suit if you finished five SAT prep practice tests with perfect scores, and of course you succeeded, in part because of your own brilliance, but mostly because the answers were available online.

My head broke during sophomore year of high school, during the winter. Pittsburgh was a dull, gray, human city full of bridges, prone to hiding the sun behind stormy clouds and bisecting family neighborhoods with four-lane highways, and as a human girl I was both annoyed and enamored with the city. The home was a hard place to love, perhaps because it was the home, and you therefore expected so much more from it, and felt its failures more acutely. Twelve inches of snow couldn’t faze even the feeblest of Pittsburgh residents, and so life went on in the winter without reasonable inconveniences like event cancellations or road blockages.

We strode across the driveway to our cars. We were sixteen years old, finally achieving suburban vehicular freedom, and whenever we had to go somewhere after practice, whether for a team dinner or meeting, Cathy and I would drive together but separately: me first, leading the way in my beat-up hand-me-down old car with thousands of miles clocked on the odometer, bestowed from my mother, who, after careful calculations, realized she would, over time, save money and office reputation by giving me the family car and buying another used car for herself so she could stay longer at work instead of leaving early to drive me; Cathy following in her own sparkling new sixteenth-birthday-present car because her mom didn’t think twice about it.

Chlorine. How I loved thee! In chemistry class I’d peer at the periodic table and narrow in on the Cl block; I was acquainted with Cl better than I was with Au or Fe. And I preferred chlorine over fresh H2O—drinking and showering second and third to swimming first. My body shook with cold-turkey shakes, the chlorine withdrawal terrible and profound. I read in health class during the Tobacco Prevention component of the syllabus that experts would often recommend the cold turkey method to quit certain addictions. Even as a mere young high schooler, with chlorine as my unstudied and uncharted addiction, I had perceived this phrasing ridiculous. As if the way you quit could be a choice. Not a necessity. Not an action imposed onto you.

We could tell by the way he sat on his ass in his chair rather than pace around the pool deck stalking us as we swam. When Jim felt lazy, and if we had done well at the previous weekend’s meet, he’d allow us to play Sharks and Minnows for the last hour of practice. The game was not for relaxation. It was coach-sanctioned violence. We played aggressive, mean, and belligerent, the way you’d imagine hormonal teenagers with athletic bodies would play games involving grabbing a half-naked body in tight spandex.

Wasn’t it ridiculous how we expected our mothers to cook for and host the girls’ team, every week? I guess Jim thought it would be more equitable to make each mother host once per season, with all mothers responsible for bringing food. Spreading the burden, he claimed. How kind of him. I thought it hilarious how your mother never cooked homemade food—she always brought microwavable egg rolls from Costco’s freezer section. The other mothers spent hours prepping layers of cheesy creamy dip, while your mother simply hopped in the car for ten minutes to the store, with two extra minutes for the microwave at home. It could’ve been so brilliantly simple for everybody, but yours was the only mother brave enough to try. The best part was your mother’s Costco egg rolls were delicious. As good as, and frankly even better than, the homemade food.

We exited the bathroom. The slumped clerk didn’t see us leave, too busy tapping at a game on his phone. We headed back to her car, treading across the parking lot in large bounds, more leaps than steps—we were buoyant from the negative result and the gorgeous sunset, the sky unveiling its long strands of pink and purple. I breathed in. I breathed out. The cold winter air puffed out, visible. I whooped with glee and turned to Cathy, who was grinning, her face lit up by the parking lot lights, beautiful under such glorious evening skies.

He dug deeper, bringing a sharp pain, and I prepared myself for the afterlife, as I was sure I had just died a brutal, violent death, convinced he had broken through my cervix, my stomach, my skin, and the copper IUD was sticking out of my belly button like an impaled sword, but instead the doctor shouted in triumph and patted the lower half of my stomach in a misguided attempt at comfort.

The UTI wasn’t from the locker room, but I did pick up toe warts from its concrete crusty floor. The podiatrist I went to told me Asian female feet were his favorite kind of feet because he could see the lingering effects of foot binding in the later generations. He had stuck his fingers between my toes and wiggled them like worms.

But I was too late—Mrs. Johnson let Cathy go to attack me instead. I was crushed against her rock-hard boobs, each breast crafted by a reputable local plastic surgeon and covered in sweat-wicking, breathable, four-way stretch spandex. One square inch of the fabric cost more than my entire outfit, one implant cost more than my car.

I was unbalanced from alcohol and the heady sense of hormonal youth at unsupervised parties. Though I abstained from alcohol during the swim season, I did enjoy drinking, the way it cleared my head of pain and made me stop thinking about the copper rod in my body, the mermaids, my mother alone in our house without a father to keep her company while I partied and swam. My body was flushed with Asian glow, causing Cathy to call me her siren. The nickname made me blush harder, adding to the redness of my skin. Cathy meant a siren like those on top of police cars, but I secretly nourished the idea that when she called me a siren, she referred to the Sirens in Greek mythology, who lured sailors to their rocky, watery deaths with their haunting songs.

I never said yes, but I never said no, and the indefinite limbo of maybe is where regret and doubt and confusion reside as neighbors, forever reduced to the monotony of a clouded memory, the mind traveling in never-ending cul-de-sac circles. I stayed quiet that night and the days after. I never pushed him off, and I never accused him of anything.

We were sitting on the edge of the pool, the water up to our calves. Late-summer evening air in Pittsburgh embraced fragrances of mown grass tinged with sunscreen, soundtracks of unseen birds chirping in the gentle breeze. Tiny bugs danced around our heads, unbothered. A broken branch drifted past our legs. We were too lazy to do our job and use the butterfly net to clear the pool of nature’s debris each night.

The doctor came closest to my bed. I avoided his gaze and looked up to the ceiling tiles. There was a stain the color of milky coffee in the corner of one of the rectangles, a shade similar to Jim’s teeth. The doctor cleared his throat, indicating I should look at him, but I refused. Like all the other doctors I’d known, his competence was fake, his knowledge unimaginative, and, as a mermaid, I now had the wisdom to ignore what he would soon impose onto me, a power I had lacked as a girl.

I was grateful for her delay. But I lacked the explanations she wanted. So I did not respond. How could I have woven my many-years-long tale for her, there in the hospital? I did not have that much time. We did not have that much time. No mother-daughter ever did.

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?

There were differences in what it meant to miss someone. I had grown up knowing this difference. I missed many people. My dad, my mom, my self I hadn’t yet met. And I missed them all differently. Missing someone out of love, missing someone out of loss—both an I miss you, I missed you too, but with disparate connotations. And like the unspoken implications in our friendship, Cathy and I had always carried our connotations differently.

I turned to face the building wall and fell backward, my arms outstretched, closing my eyes, faithful the wind, the hedge, and Cathy would catch me. A trust fall, like the ones Jim had forced us to do as team bonding at the beginning of each season, where we stood on the cafeteria tables and fell back like limp rag dolls, and though I hated the activity, Cathy never let me hit the ground. I didn’t rely on any other teammate for those icebreakers, especially not Ally nor Brad nor Luke. Whenever I landed onto the soft net of human flesh, the one pair of arms I recognized cradling me were Cathy’s.

The landscape zoomed past, a blur of various shades of green atop brown, budding trees regrowing their leaves. I realized with a jolt that today would perhaps be the last time I’d witness the coming of a Pennsylvania spring. How much had changed on this land, and how much hadn’t, since I entered the hospital? How much would change, and how much would not, after I left it? I pinched the inside of my wrist to distract myself from the poisonous line of thinking. Mermaids refused regret.

I waved back. Strange loneliness coursed through me. I planned to swim in the opposite direction of Cathy and embark on my mermaid journey alone. The water was vast, the world endless, the heavens infinite. I had much to see, much to travel, much to find. Yet despite my desire to ditch humankind, the left side of my sternum pounded in pain. My heart was breaking before I even left. I wasn’t sure what our picnic meant to Cathy. A farewell? Closure? An innocent trip out to nature? How could I interpret our kiss? Part of the healing process perhaps, though I was unclear whether the healing was for me or for Cathy.