Mermaids in Paradise by Lydia Millet (debian ebook reader .txt) 📕

“But back at the table there, you let your twinkle toes do the talking.”

For a second I thought the barkeep would get to clean my sick up after all.

“Twinkle . . . ?”

“I like them,” he said, in a fruity voice.

I glanced down at the offending digits as we walked, needing somewhere to rest my eyes. They still sported their wedding pedicure; the nails were salmon-pink. Seen from a Heartland viewpoint, I guessed, they could be deemed trashy.

“I’m a toe man,” he said, dropping the volume. “And yours are top-notch. Grade A. So hot.”

“You’re kidding me,” I said. “Is this something—is there a hidden camera?”

“A lot of people feel it’s not cheating if it’s the toes,” he went on, fruitier and juicier by the second.

“So did Chip mention we just got married?” I rushed. “This is a great place for a honeymoon, I think. Don’t you? Really perfect.”

“Many people say if it’s just the toes, anything goes. There’s an increasingly—call it liberal approach, since you’re from California, ha ha—to when it’s just the toes.”

“Just the toes that what?” I said, and then regretted it.

“That share intimacy,” he said. “Toe-genital intimacy.”

“Oh my God,” I burst out, and practically stampeded over the Bay Areans in my haste to get next to Chip.

As soon as he and I split off from the others to make our way along the lighted footpaths to our cabin, I gave him the lowdown. He seemed not to completely believe me, before I reprimanded him. Chip tries pretty hard to see the best in folks. But he came around when I supplied a few details, and he promised me we’d try to eat alone—at least in the evenings, when darkness was all around.

“I’m not hanging out with that guy again,” I said. “I’m not sharing another meal with him. No meals of any kind. And no day trips either, Chip, because I know how you like to invite strangers along. Not him. He made me feel like my toes were prostitutes. Like my toes, Chip, were dolled up in Frederick’s of Hollywood. That’s not right.”

“Your lips say no, but your toes say yes,” said Chip.

I hit him for deadpanning, but it was weak. Still, the words of the toe man haunted me as I tried to fall asleep. I thought to myself: Are my toes sluts? Were my toes asking for it? It kept me up after Chip had fallen asleep, even, because I worry about these questions. In the broadest sense, of course, no woman should have to worry about whether her toes are asking for it—in the most lofty, the most righteous sense. But on the other hand, in the more narrow, specific context of personal choice, was I responsible for debasing my own toes? Were the toes, in essence, fashion victims, like those newborns with lacy headbands strapped around their craniums, fluffy rosettes affixed, to broadcast femaleness? To function as blaring signs that read: I am a female baby, what so many call a “girl”; moreover, it is absolutely vital to my parents that even perfectly indifferent passersby should know this instantly. For that reason, and that reason alone, I have been tagged with this most hideous adornment.

Had I visited that kind of sad, pimpish outrage on ten innocent dactyls?

It wasn’t till the next morning, when I woke up to the sound of steadily plashing waves, and then the sight of Chip bringing me my morning coffee with his shirt off, that I felt completely nausea-free again. I sat propped up on the pillow, drinking my coffee, watching the fan whir overhead, and I reassured myself. The toenails were pink. That was the whole story.

We set off for the Baths not long after, where we spent the morning walking between gray, wet boulders, on top of boulders, and beneath boulders. There were narrow crevices to walk through, sand beneath our feet; there were ropes to hang onto as we climbed; there were wooden ladders. It was a group of boulders, with the ocean washing in and washing out again. That was the situation there.

We sat on top of a boulder, just the two of us, and looked out to sea one time; after that Chip kissed me on the sand, an inch or two of tide lapping at our legs. I had sand on my calves, sand on my knees, and I thought how much I enjoyed the sight and texture of sand on skin, how satisfying it could be to roll the grains beneath my fingertips, two sleek expanses of my skin with sand between them. One day, I ruminated, that skin would be wrinkly. That skin would be baggy as a pachyderm’s, and possibly gray, too. The sand wouldn’t be as satisfying then.

“You think we’ll still like sex when we’re old, Chip?” I asked romantically, while one more time we boulder-sat.

“I’ll take me some Viagra,” said Chip. “I don’t care. I’ll pop it like vitamins, if need be.”

“I’ll be all wrinkled, like an elephant.”

“Me too.”

“Wrinkles get a bad rap. Don’t they,” I said.

“If you think about it, what’s a wrinkle or two,” agreed Chip.

“I think it’s probably an evolution, reproduction-of-the-fittest type thing. I mean we probably want to mate with wrinkle-free people so they’re still fertile, for one thing.”

“Good point,” said Chip, nodding.

I was contented, sitting there with him. And yet I had a sense that nothing was happening—that nothing, possibly, would ever happen to me again.

Curiously it was then, sitting on our boulder, looking out to sea and thinking of being elderlies together, that we caught sight of a small powerboat churning into the harbor from the direction of the reefs. In that boat was a newly familiar figure: the parrotfish expert. She wore a black wetsuit and stood looking off the bow, a kind of rigid tension in her posture; when the boat passed close enough that we could see each other better she jumped up and down, waving wildly. She was yelling, but I