by Teresa Milbrodt.
I spent four summers with the mermaids, seven of them with gray curls and glistening green tails who sat at the city pool and played in the shallow end with little kids, yelling at them not to run too fast along the pool’s edge, applauding them when they did underwater handstands, and making the littlest ones keep their water wings on because someones they wanted to slip them off and pretend to be taller than they were.
It started when my aunt and her friends formed their mermaid club, an idea she got from her cousin in Arizona who knew a gaggle of older ladies with not much to do but hang out poolside, so they made mermaid tails and shiny green bathing suit tops and became honorary lifeguards. My aunt wanted to do the same thing, and I’d flat-out refused a summer babysitting job for two little brats, so I took up mermaid-sitting instead, bringing the middle-aged merladies bottles of water and popsicles when they took breaks, because it was hard to hop around in those green tails, but I liked watching them in the pool, approachable meraunts with soft, slightly sunburned arms, ones who you could imagine made cookies shaped like starfish and shells.
I didn’t go into the water because I hated pools, or pools hated me, or really they hated my hair and turned it into a snarled green mess not unlike seaweed, but as chief mermaid assistant I got blue raspberry slushies, more than I could drink. When the merladies asked me to get something for them from the snack bar they gave me extra money to buy a treat for myself—Get an ice cream bar, honey, you’re thin as a twig—but I liked the slushies because they turned my tongue blue as lagoon water.
The ladies kept their summer mermaid stint for years until they moved down to Florida and relocated the club, so our city pool is still waiting for replacements, more women with green gossamer tails, but who’s to say other mermaids don’t exist? My philosopher boyfriend says there are a lot of sea creatures that seem like they should be mythical—seahorses and octopi and color-changing cuttlefish–all too fantastic to be real, so when people go to aquariums the first time, he’s surprised they don’t pass out from amazement.
Sailors on Spanish and English and Portuguese galleons saw mermaids for years, and though most of those turned out to be manatees there probably were a few authentic merpeople among them, arms crossed as they evaluated humanity and decided further study was needed, but after all those centuries of observation they probably decided it was best to go the way of the Loch Ness Monster and stay hidden, and sometimes I think this is not a bad idea, but there must be merpeople out there conducting ongoing surveys, taking copious notes, writing research papers on the development and decline of the human species, and perhaps monitoring the activities of middle-aged ladies in city pools who happen to have tails and play with children, obviously the most sensible creatures around.