At times, the only thing that kept Bennie from hating her mother was a memory, probably unreal, of watching her stand on the diving board of her aunt’s backyard pool and unzip her skin. It wasn’t the lurid cherry of her flesh that moved her because later when she saw her mother’s blood, she was filled only with revulsion, even annoyance. It was what became of her mother when her skin came off that moved her. The memory was old, but she witnessed the weight of it, the immensity, and worked to burn that precise image into her mind. Decades later, she’d remember the darkening lime of the water, the blue-black of floating eucalyptus leaves, and the singing teal of the sky.
Playing mermaids in the pool, Bennie felt she was the first to discover it all: the water, the curves of the white concrete floor, the beetle blue of the side tiles, and the monstrous wasps drowning their way across the cupped oceanic wilderness. She loved how imagination games made her mind feel gently pressed by a divine and eerie gauze. Sometimes, she preferred to play alone, as this heightened the veiled and anointed feeling. It was forbidden, though, to play in the pool alone, and usually her mother would come out in her floppy hat and aviator sunglasses to sit in the poolside chair and pretend to read.
Bennie knew her mother wasn’t beautiful. She knew this because her mother wouldn’t swim. Bennie was with her when her mother purchased her bathing suit. She told Bennie to turn around in the dressing room, but there were mirrors on either side. Bennie watched the reflection of her mother’s reflection as she pinched the straps above her shoulder to pull tight where the fabric gaped at her breasts. A built-in skirt lay over her belly but did not disguise it. The cellulite of her thighs looked the way water does when the wind whips it into ripples.
Bennie liked to wait until her mother took a shower or a nap to sneak into the pool. Once, a while passed before her mother slid aside the back door and sat in a blue plastic chair. Bennie, startled from privacy, noticed her mother’s bathing suit straps peering from beneath her thin gray sweater. She wore a denim skirt to accommodate the skirt of the bathing suit beneath it. After a few seconds, her mother stood again. Water left a dark shadow on the back of her denim skirt—Bennie had been sitting there herself a few minutes before. Her mother made her hoist herself up onto the edge of the pool while she went back inside. Water slid off her skin and puddled onto the stone. She wondered what it would mean for her mother to get in the pool and what kind of games she would want to play. But when her mother returned, she was in jeans and a T-shirt, the bathing suit gone.
By then, Bennie was cold. A large black beetle wound its legs disturbingly through the water beneath her feet. Bennie was filled with the knowledge that she could save the beetle’s life if only she could endure the feeling of its hard, greasy, clamoring weight in her hand. She began to crawl away toward the towels.
“What are you doing?”
Bennie froze. Her mother wasn’t reading her open book.
“So the second I get out here, you’re done?” Her mother’s fingers were more beautiful than the rest of her. She pointed one at the pool. “Back in.”
Bennie walked around the pool to get as far away from the beetle as possible. The side of the pool scraped her butt as she slipped in. She picked out a wedgie. Here, her toes barely touched the pool floor.
“Keep playing. Pretend I’m not here.”
Bennie moved the water listlessly. The beetle had stopped moving.
“Dammit, Bennie. Play.”
Her mother was on the verge of tears. Bennie gravely pretended even harder to play. Her mother wasn’t prepared to hear the details of her real games. She wished her cousins were there so they could dissolve an hour arguing over who got which color combination of hair and tail and seashell bra. In the game Bennie had been playing, she’d worn no seashell bra, just her long violet hair with turquoise highlights that sometimes wound against her to provide modesty and sometimes did not. She’d been collecting oysters, sucking out the meat, not aware that the mermaid king’s daughters, all nine of them, watched her from behind a giant sea anemone. They found her wild, terrifying, and very beautiful.
She never asked her mother about the skin-unzipping, even in the days immediately following, when she still believed it had happened. For weeks, it changed how Bennie saw her mother to a state of awe and fear. She started clinging to her mother’s side. “Stop pinching me,” her mother would say, pushing her away.
It was in this period of belief—Bennie still waiting with her back pressed against the bathroom door every time her mother locked herself in—when the boyfriend returned, and they moved out of her aunt’s house. Her mother was only with her boyfriend for two years, but it felt much longer at the time. Later, she couldn’t remember very well what he looked like. Brown hair. A beard, or maybe not. Yellow teeth—she knew that for sure. He had the same personality of every loud and insecure man she’d ever known or would know, but his interests were idiosyncratic. He brewed his own kombucha and drank it by the gallon. He bought old shoes from the charity shop downtown, repaired them, oiled them until they gleamed, and then lined them up on the shelves that squared his bedroom. Each morning, he’d agonize over which pair to put on, though most were off-limits even to himself. He repaired a pair of brown leather little boy shoes, sized them to Bennie’s feet, and let her wear them, though only indoors. Bennie did so with great reverence.
These obsessions of his were the only thing that endeared him to her. Generally, she was wary of him. But she loved an adult with hobbies. Her aunt with the pool also had hobbies. Breeding long-haired show gerbils, for instance. Her house always smelled of their pine bedding and vaguely, almost pleasantly, of piss. Bennie’s mother did not allow her to touch the gerbils. Another hobby: watercolor painting. And French films. Bennie’s mother wouldn’t let her near these either, though once, while her mother took a long bath, her aunt allowed her to cradle her prized gerbil on her lap while together they cuddled on her huge pink couch to watch The Green Ray.
Even her mother’s only friend, Wanda—a strange and unpleasant woman—ran a blog reviewing varieties of tinned fish. Her breath smelled of sardines or tuna, but she meticulously straightened her thin shoulder-length hair and kept a spare hair iron in both purses. Best of all, she collected magazine photographs of Daryl Hannah, hundreds of them that she kept not in a scrapbook but filed away in a leather briefcase.
But what, besides Bennie’s one false memory, could be said of her mother’s eccentricities or obsessions? She had none. None but Bennie herself, whom she didn’t smother with affection, which might have been bearable, but instead with anxiety. She was observed obsessively but at arm’s length. Every night, her mother would creep in and stare at her. Bennie pretended to sleep, but inside, she burned with the desire to leap from the window and run away. But then, later in the night, she’d enter her mother’s bedroom and beg to sleep in her bed. At best, she’d be allowed to sleep on the floor and hold her mother’s pointer finger slung over the bed, dripping into Bennie not only a soothing mother-narcotic but annoyance and exhaustion.
Once, she spent a morning on the floor by the bed, where her mother sat up stiffly and stared at her phone. Forgetting that Bennie lay nearby, she began murmuring to herself. It took a few minutes for Bennie to realize what she was saying, round and round, like a chant: you’re stupid, an idiot, and a fool. Some instinct in Bennie told her that her mother was speaking to herself. She rose and touched her mother’s knee through the blanket. Her mother froze in horror, then threw the blankets from her body, ran to the bathroom, and slammed the door. After that, she stopped allowing Bennie to enter her room.
Once, Bennie saw two cats mating. The way they circled each other, wary, spiky, yowling, only to be drawn together by ancient, violent instinct, reminded her, perversely, of her mother and herself, the intensity that lay between them, and the way they couldn’t seem to domesticate that feeling into a comfortable or trusting love.
As a child, Bennie had known her great aunt was beautiful because she would slide out of the back door in a huge fuchsia summer dress, then whisk it over her shoulders to reveal her vastness: big belly, big hair, big thighs. When she sank into the pool, her long breasts spread out like a pair of stingrays. When the cousins scattered in, she refereed games of Marco Polo and Dead Man Sink. She plastered her curls beneath a swim cap when the pool was empty and mermaided herself across. The pool rocked to and fro to accommodate her.
To play Dead Man Sink, the cousins took turns balling their bodies into the fetal position—the cannonball—and sank to the deepest bottom of the pool. They’d wait in airless suspense. Hope would seem lost. Then their aunt would split the waters like dough, belly the pool’s bottom, scoop them up, and cradle them to the surface. It was an exhilarating, deeply romantic game to be so tragically dead, pressed down by the water’s force in perfect solitude. Sound muffled, everything warped and dappled, even color itself, and above them, the indifferent skinny legs of the cousins. Then, the rescue. The deific safety of their aunt’s arms. Bennie would lay in them like a newborn long after she’d been brought to air, and her aunt, sensing the treasured fragility of this moment of play, would kick to the pool’s edge and lay her gently down on dry land.
Her mother’s boyfriend had a big black truck with a narrow middle seat. This was Bennie’s seat. She did not like to sit between them but did so out of a solemn duty, as if she were the membrane that held their relationship in place. This membrane felt taut and fragile in the days after he returned and stole them from her aunt’s house. Bennie worked hard to make it seem like she was sleepy and well-behaved. Bennie was walking behind them in the 7-Eleven, holding her bag of goldfish crackers, when he did it: shoved her mother with the side of his body into the door frame. There was a moment before she bled, when her shoulder was simply flayed open when they all stared at each other and knew what had happened and who had done it. Then the blood fell, and her mother’s boyfriend said, “Jesus, Bev, why are you so fucking clumsy?”
Bennie knew then that the unzipping on the diving board wasn’t about to happen again and had probably never happened at all. She turned away, nauseated, while the cashier brought bandages. On the ride back, her mother swallowed ibuprofen without water and then slept with her head against the window. Bennie sat still and upright between them while the AC blew freezing air at her knees.
They dated for four more months, and then her mother’s boyfriend died from botulism. He wasn’t poisoned by his kombucha, like her mother sometimes said would happen, but from soup a coworker brought to a work function. Bennie didn’t cry, but she stood in the doorway of her mother’s room and watched her long, creased form shudder beneath her deep blue sheets. When her mother finally emerged, she began leaving the television on twenty-four hours a day. She didn’t watch it; she just left it on. For months, they let his kombucha scoby increase in its vat in the back of the fridge. Finally, they buried it like a transparent, yellowish placenta in the yard.
“You don’t have a father,” Bennie’s mother always said, but in her freshman year of college, he contacted her, and she met up with him. He was slight, bald, a bank teller, anxious. When they shook hands, his palms left her own palms cold and wet. It was only in seeing him that Bennie realized she had always assumed her father’s absence hid a beautiful tragedy, a brewing redemption. What if, for instance, he was a handsome, lonely sailor who slept with her mother once but could never find her again? What if, as he stood at the helm, eyes full of salt, he was roped with the feeling that somewhere, he might have a daughter who might fill the emptiness that hollowed him if he could only know her? What if, passing a family of manatees, he mistook them not for mermaids but for the women he’d left behind? That father she may have grown fond of. This one repulsed her with his mundanity and his naked desperation. He bought her terrible Chinese food, and they sat over it in great tubs of awkward silence. Three times she tried to wrap up the conversation, only to have him forge on, panicked, pinching at his collar, ordering her another soggy spring roll. In the end, he insisted she take the leftovers home to her dorm.
“I remember how hungry I was in college,” he said. She threw it all away in the garbage outside and didn’t answer his follow-up email, which he signed “Regards, Jeremy Atkinson,” with his name hovering above the bank logo.
That was two decades ago. She was a bank teller now, like he’d been, and knew she’d been unfair. Still, even now, she couldn’t bring herself to reconnect. Who would that sweaty, frightened man be in old age? The year she’d met him, her mother had moved to an apartment in her college town. “Because it’s cheaper here,” her mother said. They’d both known this was untrue. Her mother called her every day with urgent opinions on everything: what classes she took (gen ed), what friends she had (none), the state of her grades (dire), and the food in her fridge (hot dogs and mustard, nothing else). Bennie took refuge in the school’s indoor pool until one day, bursting from the water, eyes baked in chlorine, white lights dazzling above her, she saw her mother by the bleachers. She wore a caramel cardigan and the same denim skirt from years before, tight at her hips and down her calves, her lower body sausaged into what looked like one fat continuous leg.
“I just wanted to check the place out,” her mother said. “I didn’t know you’d be in here.” Bennie, seething, wrapped the towel tight around her ribs. It didn’t occur to her that her mother might be telling the truth. She looked down at her legs, prickly. She should have shaved. She waited for her mother to comment on them.
“Are you wearing a bathing suit?” Bennie asked to embarrass her. “Under your clothes?”
Her mother flinched. “You know I don’t swim.”
The light twitched above them. The pool house floor was slick and wormed with hairs.
“Where is your shame?” her mother said, pointing at her legs. “Shave.”
“We could be roommates,” her mother said two years ago after she asked again if Bennie was seeing anyone, and Bennie once again said no. This was in the aftermath of Bennie’s longest relationship: a professional rock climber named Suzette. She’d liked Suzette when she was away at rock climbing competitions but not when she came home and wanted to discuss their childhoods or when she got angry at Bennie’s silence and chipped the granite countertop by slamming a wine bottle onto its surface. Worst of all was when, at night—they slept separately—she’d enter Bennie’s bedroom, dragging a blanket behind her like a child, and climb inside her bed. She’d suckle her limbs around Bennie’s back like a starfish, making her want to climb out of her skin. She tried that once, climbing out of her skin, the winter after she saw (not real) her mother do it. She took a butter knife into the bathtub and pressed the round tip into the hollow at the base of her neck. But she didn’t have the nerve to pierce the skin, and what if it turned out she wasn’t like her mother after all? What if all she did was bleed?
In every way, it would be a relief to find out she wasn’t like her mother: every way but that.
Bennie struggled to make rent without Suzette there, but she still told her mother no. Instead, her mother moved twenty minutes away into a cottage behind Wanda and her husband’s house. Bennie made herself visit once a month and found the cottage dark, mildewy, and eerily bare of belongings.
“What do you do in here, Mom? What do you get up to?” Her mother moved a pillow off and then back onto the futon. She shrugged and changed the subject back to Bennie. Had she told her landlord about the cracks in the ceiling yet?
Bennie looked out the filthy front window. Wanda stood outside beneath a light, phlegmy rain. She held a plastic tray of sushi and pushed each piece methodically into her mouth. “I’ve told you reporting the cracks would be a waste of time.” She turned. “Mom. Do you need money?”
Her mother waved her hand dismissively. “Maybe,” she said, “you could try dating men again.”
Bennie turned back to the window to hide the look on her face. Wanda, finished with the sushi, was running her finger along the tray, then sucking off the juice.
It was always like that, visiting her mother. Eventually, she stopped. Her mother began riding the bus to her apartment—two connections stretched the trip to an hour and a half each way. Bennie endured the visits with a swollen throat and a need to shake her leg up and down. She silently listened to her mother’s comments on the state of her apartment while picking the crackled plastic off the cheap dining room table. Her mother had nothing to say about her own life, rarely had, and thinking of this stoked a great hot fury within Bennie. Her mother opened her fridge and made a delighted, girlish sound. She pulled out a bottle of coconut milk and turned, her eyes lit with an unusual softness, and placed her hand on Bennie’s shoulder. Her mother hadn’t touched Bennie in years, and her flesh was cold and uncanny, like being touched by a wraith.
“Remember when I used to buy this for us? I didn’t think you liked it very much.”
“I need to lie down now,” Bennie interrupted, leaving her mother sitting in the living room with the TV streaming on autoplay.
When an apartment opened two doors down, she made the switch and didn’t tell her mother. These were her darkest moments; she knew it. Four times, she heard her mother’s footsteps —the sound so familiar, written into her very DNA—approach what was no longer her door. Four times, she sat with her back against her door, fist in her teeth. Four times, she did not undo what she had done. Her mother would knock and wait. Knock again and wait. Bennie’s phone would light up. She’d shut her eyes against it. Then, her mother would leave to wait outside at the bus stop.
Eventually, the people who took over Bennie’s old place were there to open the door and send her mother away for good.
That was how they stopped talking altogether. Bennie felt guilty about the great relief this brought her. She started swimming again. She drove two towns away after work to the pool and swam laps until it closed at 9 p.m. She swam and swam, but the swimming did not make her beautiful. When she injured her shoulder, she began sitting in the shallow pool with the parents and their tiny, terrified children, who pinched, squabbled, and refused to put their heads underwater. To escape them, she sat at the bottom of the pool, the top of her head barely submerged. She wore goggles so her eyes wouldn’t dissolve in the chlorine. The legs of the children and their parents warped and wavered. After a couple of nights of this, a young, zitty lifeguard took her aside and informed her in a peppy voice that she was making the parents and the children uncomfortable. After that, she could only drive to the reservoir, stand on the sharp gravel beach, and watch the still, deep waters quiver until mosquitoes ate her back to her car.
It was Wanda who called her in the end. Bennie could almost smell tinned fish through the phone. “We bought a boat,” she said. “We’re starting at the Farne Islands. Northumberland. I thought you should know.”
Bennie held the phone a few inches away. “You’re going to live on a boat?”
“That’s the idea.”
An image assaulted her: Wanda and her mother together at the wheel of a motorboat, like a nautical Thelma and Louise, Wanda clutching a hair iron in each hand. Did they even have sushi in Northumberland? That had to be at least a thousand miles away.
She was pierced then with an unbearable feeling of loneliness. It cored her and brought tears to her eyes. She bent at the waist, her head at her knees, and twisted the collar of her shirt in her fist.
“Can I come?” Asking was humiliating, but she bore it; she had to bear it.
There was a long pause, a fumbling sound. Bennie felt like she was sinking deep into the rocks beneath the earth’s crust. Wanda’s voice warped back as if she’d been holding the phone away.
“She says no.” Bennie’s heart lurched.
“Can I talk to her?” Another excruciating pause.
“She says no, hon.”
In the wake of the phone call, Bennie turned her TV on and let a show begin playing. She was filled with the urge to call her aunt, but her aunt had died years before. What happened to her house when she died? She remembered. Her cousins had sold it. She couldn’t ever return. She unblocked her mother on her phone and called, but it went straight to voicemail. She stared at the TV without watching and remembered her aunt’s pool. Its kidney bean shape, its fresh chemical smell, the way the lights at the bottom turned on at dusk and made it glow. Her mother on the diving board with her slender hand at the hollow at the base of her throat. The way she undid her skin like it was made of cake fondant.
The clouds had wrestled in the greenish dusk, shadowing and unshadowing her mother’s skin as it split open between her breasts and down her belly and then crumpled over the diving board. The inside of her skin gleamed an urgent magenta and leaked a clear fluid but did not bleed.
A seal dropped into the pool: silver and dappled, with black, sympathetic eyes. It swam tight loops back and forth in the dimming light. It was not a graceful animal. Its breathing was labored. Water splashed up onto the stone ground. It swam the anguished, neurotic laps of an animal in a cage.
***
Illustrations by Beatriz Camaleão
