Kathryne David Gargano

A Mermaid HaS No Tears

Someday, you will be given a choice, the jellyfish says, when you are old enough to understand what a choice is. It doesn’t say, you will choose between what is right and what is easy. It doesn’t say, I will never see you again. Instead, the jellyfish coils and releases, and drifts up to the top of the tank. Another takes its place and says, Don’t mind him, love. He only speaks in riddles these days. It’s the captivity, you see. It does things to us. 

Mayim stares at the wall of shampoos and conditioners. Vanilla, lavender, honeysuckle, rose, orange. One proclaims a “fresh scent,” another “almond oil blend.” Some detangle, some volumize, some make shine, some strengthen. Mayim’s hair, a riot of curls, needs patience, needs the specialized products her mother keeps in their shower. The army, Mayim knows, doesn’t care about her hair. Knows she’ll be lucky to have the time to bathe at all, and yet she is expected to be clean and well-groomed and presentable at all times. Her friend had told her this over coffee shortly after Mayim received her draft letter. “Black hair ties only,” her friend had said. “And don’t forget flip flops.”

Mayim’s cart is already full: baby wipes, sports bras, a toiletry bag, a waterproof digital watch, a few small locks. She has army-approved underwear at home, an extra phone charger, pajamas, and bedsheets. She still needs batteries. A lighter. Sanitary gloves and cotton swabs.

Or drops a package of disposable toilet seat covers into her cart. “Found them.” 

Mayim smiles. “Took you long enough.”

Arching an eyebrow, Or makes a show of glancing at her watch, then the array of hair products, then at Mayim, who shrugs. Or nudges her shoulder and reaches for a pre-packaged set of shampoo and conditioner and drops it into Mayim’s cart. “Can’t go wrong with a sea breeze,” she says.

Mayim’s mother is not from Israel but moved to Kiryat Yam when she was 22, and shortly after met her would-be husband, Mayim’s father. He was an easygoing man, Mayim’s mother tells her, but prone to wandering—from place to place, job to job, lover to lover. One day he wandered too far, Mayim’s mother says, and never returned. But I keep him close, she says, and points at the painting of a spotted eagle ray over the mantle.

As a child, Mayim found it embarrassing every time her mother said to guests, That’s a portrait of my late husband. Isn’t he handsome? The next-door neighbors and the electricians and plumbers and cable company employees never seemed to be perturbed, and Mayim used to watch them nod and smile and lift their cans of soda in recognition of something she still doesn’t quite understand. The first time Or saw the painting, when she was eleven years old, she said it felt like the eyes were following her around the room. Mayim’s mother had laughed—Oh, don’t worry, he does that to everyone.

While Mayim prepares for the army, Or prepares for her first art show. She looks up from her sprawl on the floor of her bedroom and grins—her cheeks swell and she pushes her hair back from her forehead—and pats the mange-looking carpet next to her. Mayim settles cross-legged, leaves her socks on despite the heat, positioning herself in front of the grumbling fan Or keeps in the window year-round, a green string attached to its neck writhing furiously.

“Take a look,” Or says, rubbing her thumb into the arch of Mayim’s foot. Mayim looks at the cutouts spread across a plastic placemat—words, like “daughter” and “farrow” and “obsolescence;” images, like a wooden spoon, a horse-drawn carriage, a couple about to kiss. Mayim picks up the couple, carefully razored out of a photograph, and stares at the hidden face of the woman, the hands of the man on her veil, lifting it back, forever suspended in half a smile, betraying nothing.

Mayim thinks of the horror of that moment—not the veil, or what lies beyond it, but the fear of never seeing, of waiting on tip-toe like Tantalus, feet wet and tongue lolling. She tosses the image back on the pile. Or pulls a half-finished collage out from under the placemat.

“They go here,” she says, tapping her index finger in the corner, her nails bitten down but freshly painted peach. Mayim lifts Or’s finger and kisses her knuckle. Or moves the couple to the corner, where they half-cover a line in Hebrew, tell me in a high sweet voice.

“I don’t know how you cut up books.”

Mayim reaches over Or’s back to the bed and pulls the dissected book off the edge, flips carefully through the pages, some whole, some erased, some missing, some chopped up. She stops on a dog-eared page and reads what’s left of the poem. Her father used to read her poetry, her mother tells her, when she was in the womb. Mostly Amichai, sometimes Kovner, sometimes bits and pieces of the Torah. He liked the sections he disagreed with most, and read them all in translation, despite decades living in Tel Aviv, and then Arad, and then Netanya, before finally landing a job in Haifa and meeting Mayim’s mother at an industry conference. They sat next to one another by accident in three panels, though her mother tells her it wasn’t really an accident, that she saw his strong jaw and love handles and immediately fell for him—But don’t you dare tell him that.

“With scissors,” Or replies.

They make love on the floor, the kissing couple crinkled under Or’s shoulder blade and the placemat slipping and sliding, causing Or’s hair to static. They make love in the shower, Mayim on her knees, breathing through the water and steam and sweat, and after, they lie naked on Or’s bed, the fan with its green ribbon blowing steadily, Or’s high sweet voice as she reads new poems from the cut and blacked out book, saying softly, You do / everything / inside me.

Mayim’s mother often tells her daughter the story of her birth—how she was born on a cruise ship off the port city of Valletta. How she was born so slippery she slid right out of her, through the waiting hands of Mayim’s father and across the deck and into the Mediterranean. Every year on Mayim’s birthday, Mayim’s mother writes a letter to the Israeli woman who leapt into the water and rescued Mayim from drowning. Not, she insists, that Mayim would have drowned. That is why you were born with gills, metukah, her mother says, tracing three red lines on her daughter’s wrists. It is why Mayim, according to her mother, is allergic to salt water. It is deadly to you, her mother says, over and over, until Mayim can parrot: “I am allergic to salt water. It is deadly to me.”

They dress in a slice of sunlight, swimsuits under their clothes, and Mayim bundles her hair off her neck. Outside, the handlebars on her bike are hot. She rides with her hands on her knees, Or behind her with her arms wrapped around her waist, through the park and past the synagogues, swerving the roundabout at Tsahal. Teenagers crowd the surf shop and the swings, spotting the sand and edges of the waves; old, shirtless men occupy the covered benches, circles of half-smoked cigarettes at their feet. Kites arc the sky, children chew their toes in the sand, and Mayim leans her bike against a streetlamp, stripping off her t-shirt.

“Are you sure you should show that much skin?” Or says, and always says, and Mayim tosses her t-shirt at Or’s face.

“We’re far enough from the water,” Mayim assures. “Don’t fuss.”

They meander the boardwalk, stop at the Balanga Beach Cafe for burgers, and sit under the canopy in the shade. In exactly one week, Mayim will leave for basic training, and Or will stay behind, under Profile 24, temporarily unfit for military service due to physical or mental health problems. Most of their friends are eager and nervous, celebrating the rite of passage with family, but Mayim hasn’t gone to any celebrations, or thought much about it beyond what it would mean to leave Or behind. She knows she should. Her mother had encouraged her to leave Or for just one night, to go out with friends, to see someone other than her girlfriend for just a little while, metukah. Mayim’s mother had cupped her cheek and traced the circles under her eyes with her thumb. She’ll be alright. Mayim had nodded, and said she would consider it, but then Or had called and they’d spent the night in Mayim’s bedroom, eating Bisli and watching old sitcoms. Mayim had asked if Or’s father was speaking to her yet, but he wasn’t then, and still isn’t now, as far as Mayim knows. Or’s father is a lieutenant colonel, her mother ka’ab, a defense lawyer in the MAG Corps. Mayim remembers when Or received her letter: her father’s blistering anger, her mother’s stony disappointment. She remembers Or in her hospital bed; she never saw her father visit. She’d been asleep, then, when he’d stood over her like a tombstone. Mayim had been there, silent in the chair, her hand in Or’s.

He’d said nothing, and she’d been too angry, then, to follow him when he turned and left. She never told Or he came, and Or never asked. Mayim supposes it’s better that way—her mother, at least, had come once each of the three days she was there, managed a joke or two, left quickly, like she didn’t know what to do with the strange girl in the bed who was her daughter, who was almost not her daughter anymore. Every time she left, Or stared down at the IV in her hand, as if it were a punishment. Mayim hadn’t known what to do with that, still doesn’t, when Or gets that far-away look in her eyes sometimes, or when they pass a cemetery.

But distracting Or is easy, something Mayim is good at. She did it often in the hospital, sitting at the end of her bed with a card game, affecting voices for the muted television, games of twenty questions, all absurd: If you were a camel who’s the first person you’d spit on? and Would you rather give Bibi head once or never have sex again?

Or had laughed, her throat still scratchy from the recently removed tubes. “Am I still with you?” she’d asked, “During all this?”

Mayim nodded.

“Then I’ll take one for the team,” she’d said, had fallen asleep shortly after, and Mayim remembers crying in the corner of the room until her eyes were bloodshot and her head ached, remembers covering her mouth with her hand to keep as quiet as possible. She remembers the moment she remembered that crying stains her, her cheeks streaked blue and gold. She remembers pretending to be asleep as the nurse changed Or’s saline bag; she’d kept her head down on the edge of the bed, slumped over in the uncomfortable chair, her hand on top of Or’s. The nurse hadn’t noticed her still-blue face.

Mayim sat up the moment she was gone, went to the window and stared at her reflection and felt abruptly furious—at the blue stain, at the nurse, at the doctors, at Or’s mother, at her own mother, for taking Mayim to the beach every week but never letting her in the water, at the water itself for changing her in ways she doesn’t fully understand.

She remembers riding home, streetlights haloing.

When Mayim is six years old, she follows a stray dog from school to the beach, watches from a safe distance on the shore as it plunges into the water, biting at the waves, tail wagging. It glances over its shoulder often, but Mayim has never been able to hear land creatures, not the way she hears her next-door neighbor’s angelfish, always complaining of a stomachache, or the jellyfish in the Corfu Aquarium she visited with her mother when she was three. The dog barks, but she isn’t sure if it’s a warning or an invitation, and heeds her mother’s words, staying at a safe distance away from the water.

She watches the dog play, watches other children play with the dog. She watches the dog run out of the water toward her. It stops at her feet and shakes its coat, and Mayim feels the splashes on her skin like warm rain. On those spots, her skin turns blue. Only for an hour, and then they fade, but they last long enough for her mother to find her: sitting in the sand, petting the wet dog, her palm stained the color of berries.

Mayim visits the community center pool nearly every day, and has done since her first year of high school, her muscles tense and body antsy when she doesn’t. She lowers herself into the deep end of her lane and ducks beneath the surface. The water seems clear; shafts of sunlight through the window cast an inhuman sparkle. Mayim pulls herself forward, keeps her head under but her arms arcing out, her feet kicking without breaching the surface.

Underwater is a different kind of loud. Underwater, she cannot hear the children in the shallow corner, diving for colorful rings; she cannot hear the lifeguards yelling across the width of the pool about their days. And yet, the drain at the bottom of the pool bubbles. Water slices in and out of the skimmer; water barrels through the pipes; water boils in the heater. Even the water jostled by the movement of Mayim’s legs makes a sound, a sort of tuneless humming. She likes the sounds no one else can hear and focuses on the hissing of the vacuum port. She kicks faster, turns, pushes off the wall, turns, pushes off the wall.

She wishes she were in open water. Wishes she could swim out and out and out and there would be no wall to stop her. She wishes she could have gone with her senior class on their trip to the Dead Sea or that she could gargle saltwater when she’s sick. Or cried when she woke up, and Mayim climbed onto the bed and held her head in the crook of her shoulder and felt the tears seep through her thin t-shirt. It tickled but didn’t hurt, and it hadn’t been until much later, after Or fell asleep, that Mayim crept off to the restroom and pulled the neck of her shirt to the side. Her skin was bright blue and translucent where the tears had gathered, like stained glass, and scaly to the touch when Mayim ran her fingers over the patch. She remembers staring into the mirror, blue all she could see: the blue of her skin, the blue of the water, the blue of Or’s parted lips.

Mayim is three when she first hears the sea speak. At the Corfu Aquarium, her mother holds tight to her hand and keeps her away from the open tanks. Mayim doesn’t understand what the jellyfish are on about, nor does she understand why all the marine life in Greece are speaking Hebrew.

She doesn’t understand why her father hasn’t been home for weeks, or why he isn’t with them on the vacation they’ve been planning for months. When she asks her mother, the answer is always the same: Don’t worry about him. He’ll be fine.

When she tugs her mother’s sleeve and tells her what she can hear, her mother merely smiles.

Or’s first gallery showing is at a small cafe just off Eshkol Square. Students gather there in clusters, chatting between cookies and cups of frothy sahlab topped with pistachios and cinnamon. There isn’t much room on the walls, between books and plants and framed sketches, but they’ve cleared one area for Or to hang her collages, each with a small placard in Hebrew. Mayim has seen all the collages individually, but not together, not framed, and she stands before the first one she can see at eye level.

Dynamite Coral, mixed media, erasure (2019) 

Or Ohayon

Sources: “Why Don’t You Reach Orgasm?” in LaIsha (Shlomit Ski, 2011), National Geographic (1988), Ansel Adams (1971), Gal Gadot for Modern Weekly (2012), Curious George Goes to the Hospital (1966), “Beyond This” by Rivka Miriam (2000)

It’s a whirlwind of color and shapes, tiny cutouts stacked on words stacked on cutouts, painstakingly Exacto-knifed from the original context. There are plants, a black and white tree, a woman’s body with the head of a monkey. Words cut from a book scatter the page:

I

cross death and 

howl

Laid on top in different fonts and sizes: ORGASM! repeated over 20 times. Mayim glances at the man who is standing next to her, frowning at the image. Beside him are a few young boys, pointing and snickering at a large collage of breasts.

The cafe had poorly publicized a short “meet and greet with the artist” for the evening, but no one seems to be there for that. Most people are getting coffee or tea, reading books, studying, chatting with friends. An old couple in the corner are ignoring each other in favor of their phones. A young couple near the front are doing the same. Or stands off to the side, smoothing down imaginary wrinkles in her dress. Mayim thinks about walking over to her, taking her hand, kissing her cheek. She thinks about whispering comforting words in her ear. About making her laugh. But sometimes in the middle of the night she wakes up and hears sirens; sometimes she dreams of a funeral; sometimes when she sleepwalks, the spotted eagle ray on the mantel says, You did everything you could, little one. There are plenty of other fish in the sea.

Mayim stares at Or, fingers tangled and trying to smile, and she feels the way she did when she was twelve and swallowed saltwater. She slips around a couple reading the placards and presses her hand to the small of Or’s back.

“Hey.”

Or turns, eyes bright with relief. “Hey,” she whispers, then clears her throat, and nods toward the man Mayim noticed earlier, now outright glowering at a collage of US Marines and Haredim spliced together, their lips painted red and eyes shadowed blue, lines from Yona Wallach’s Tefillin woven over the top. “I think I’m about to lose them a customer.”

“If your art isn’t pissing off a middle-aged man, you’re doing it wrong.” 

Or frowns. “Who said that?”

“You did.”

“You actually listen when I talk?” 

“Every once in a while.”

Or smiles, cheeks round and pink. “Did you see the new work?” 

Mayim frowns and glances back at the wall. “You added something?”

Or grips her hand and tugs her over to the image closest to the door, shadowed slightly by a hanging plant. The background is a deep blue, a mosaic of lighter blues in the shape of an anatomically correct heart. When Mayim squints, she can make out shapes in the blues: the fin of a dolphin, a streak of sky, a storm, a wave, a skirt, a photo of Mayim’s duvet. Each piece is small, no more than a few centimeters, but from a distance, the heart has shadows and curves. At the bottom, in tiny script: for Mayim.

“I tried adding words, but I wasn’t sure what to say that wouldn’t sound . . . schmaltzy.”

Mayim laughs, delighted. “You are schmaltzy,” she says, but her eyes stay on the mosaic, the delicateness of it, the tiny piece near the fourth chamber, a slice of her own blue skin.

They’re thirteen the first time Or sees Mayim’s condition, on the beach with friends. One has a bucket. He fills it with ocean and runs back, throws it at Or with a laugh. The splash stains Mayim’s cheek and she turns, runs back up to the boardwalk with a hand over her face. The night hides the worst of it, but she can feel her skin start to brine.

Or chases after her. Tugs on her arm and sees in the dim light from the streetlamp that inhuman blue.

“Is that what happens?” she asks, “With your allergy?” Mayim nods.

“It’s pretty. Can I touch it?”

Nodding again, Mayim lets Or brush her fingers across her cheek. “Is your dad really a stingray?”

“I don’t know,” Mayim answers. “Maybe.”

Or drops her hand back to her side, her hair wet against her shoulders. “Cool,” she says. “Will it go back to normal?”

“In a bit.”

Or takes a seat on a nearby bench. “We can wait.”

“What do you want to do before you leave?” Or asks, pillowing her head on Mayim’s chest. “Pretend it’s your last day on Earth.”

Mayim flinches, and Or takes Mayim’s hand and holds it so tight she can feel her bones knead together.

“Sorry. It was just—” 

“Yeah. I know.”

The silence pulls taught.

“Are you angry with me?” Or asks finally, and Mayim looks down at her, sees only the top of her head.

“Sometimes,” she answers after a moment, and Or’s breath stutters against her skin. Mayim tightens her arm around her waist. “I’m just scared,” Mayim admits. “I don’t want to go.”

“I’ll be okay.”

Mayim tugs on Or’s hair, just enough to tilt her face up. “Will you?” 

Or nods. “Besides, you’ll visit.”

“I will,” she promises, and Or cups Mayim’s cheek in her palm.

She doesn’t remember the ride home from the hospital. She doesn’t remember abandoning her bike two blocks down. She doesn’t remember banging on her mother’s bedroom door and gesturing to her face, demanding, tell me, tell me, tell me.

She only remembers her mother, sat next to her on the sofa, her gentle voice: It is time I tell you the truth, her mother had said, about your father. He had an affair with a sea witch. When he refused to leave me, she cursed him into the thing he feared most, a ray, after he was stung as a small boy. I knew it was him by the pink swell near his ankle—now fin—that never quite healed. As he returned to the water, so will you. It is in your blood, metukah, she’d said, brushing her fingers over the fading scales on Mayim’s cheeks. And I will have to surrender you.

They take an early bus to Jerusalem. The sky is overcast and dull. Mayim stares out the window as they pass through the Ashdot Yagur Reserve, though it doesn’t look like a reserve—not the kind she’s seen on documentaries about the United States, national parks blooming with evergreens and snow. The land here is dry, all its life hidden in the valley on the other side of a low hill.

Or falls asleep on her shoulder, mouth open, her hand on Mayim’s knee, and Mayim thinks of Moses and the Red Sea and all those horses. She wonders if their bones are still there, at the bottom of the water; if sharks swim between their rib cages and fish nibble on their femurs.

The sun rises and blinds her. She cannot look out the window any longer.

Some nights, Mayim will sleepwalk and follow a voice out of her bedroom, down the hall and through the kitchen, into the living room, where she’ll stand before the painted ray above the mantel and listen to its musings. It never says anything particularly profound: Your mother makes a brilliant shakshuka, eh? or it’s beginning to smell like dog in here again, eh? She knows the painting cannot actually speak, not like the horseshoe crab her friend kept in a tank, or the cow-print clownfish in the pet store window who lived less than a week. She knows this is her flight of fancy, her own delusion of the real in the image.

Mayim waits until Or is home from the hospital to tell her about the sea witch. Mayim sits on the floor, leans against the head of Or’s bed and fiddles with the zipper on Or’s pillowcase. “Apparently I’m cursed.”

Or stares down at her, chin propped in her hand. “It’s a lovely curse,” she offers. Mayim tries to laugh but it hitches in her throat, guttural and lonely. 

Or wraps her fingers around Mayim’s wrist. “It’s okay,” she says, “It’s all okay.” 

“I don’t know what I am.”

Or smiles, and cups the back of Mayim’s head, pressing their foreheads together. “You’re Mayim.”

At the aquarium, everything is so loud. The anemones in the tank next to her are arguing about socialism and the starfish are singing “Im Nin’alu.” Behind them there’s a wall of small tanks, each with one creature: an axolotl is hungry and a zebra fish is bemoaning his stripes. A baitfish is pressed against the glass saying Let me out, let me out and a cassiopeia won’t stop humming “Hatikvah.”

Mayim stares through the water in front of her, clear, a sign posted that reads 25 degrees Celsius, reads thrives in tropical environments, reads driftwood has been added to soften the water. There are four of them, gliding in circles around the enclosure, leaning this way and that to avoid the wood, a rock, an eager hand. The sand is white. The rays are spotted. Beside her, Or is distracted by a starfish. The sign reads do not pick up. Mayim watches as Or slides her hand through the water, touches one finger to the ridges and smiles.

A child squeezes in between them. He plunges a hand in the water and waggles it around, splashing the sides of the tank. The rays lilt, their fins breaching the surface of the water like a shark’s before slipping back under, flattening, scattering. The boy sticks two fingers in the center of an anemone, its mouth, and its tentacles close around him, sucking him in. He yelps and pulls his hand out of the water, droplets everywhere, and Mayim leans away, glad she’d worn long sleeves. Or smirks over the boy’s head, the smirk she always gives when she’s thinking the same thing Mayim is thinking, but is more inclined to say it out loud. Mayim shakes her head and watches the boy glare at the anemone before sticking both fingers in his mouth, as if to suck the blood from a wound.

Or laughs, loud and bright, and the boy startles, looking up at her with the same wonder and slight distaste as he had the sea creature. “Like this,” Or says, and gently brushes a finger over the tentacles so they ripple and hug her finger. “Softly.”

The boy turns away. Back down the short steps, he disappears into the crowd, and Or shrugs.

The attendant reminds a man to take off his watch before reaching in.

When Mayim is four her mother tells her, finally, after almost a year, that her father has gone out to sea. She doesn’t say, He will be back tomorrow. She doesn’t say, He’s waiting for us in another land. Instead, she looks away, tears lilting down her cheek. Mayim has never seen her mother cry. She doesn’t understand.

“Blue?” she asks and prods her mother’s skin with her finger.

Mayim’s mother shakes her head. “Not for me, metukah,” she says, “I’m not special.”

Mayim doesn’t understand this either, because her mother is the one who fights the monsters underneath her bed and heals her cuts with kisses and sings lullabies when it thunderstorms. These, as far as Mayim knows, are all special things.

“I bought you something,” Or says after they arrive home. After dinner with Mayim’s mother, coffee and dessert, and a walk to the beach. The sand is cooling beneath their feet as the sun dips lower, and Mayim thinks perhaps it will be a trinket from their afternoon in the Old City, or a card from the bookstore they’d had lunch in, one of the ones that had made Mayim laugh. Instead, it’s a necklace, a blue seashell on a silver chain. She hooks it around Mayim’s neck and presses her fingers to where it falls, flat against her breastbone. “So you’ll always be close to the sea,” she says.

“And you.”

Or smiles. “And me.”

Mayim looks out at the ocean, teal darkening to navy, the bright white foam licking the shore. She thinks about taking a step forward, and then another, and another, until the water can bruise her ankles blue. Until she wades far enough in that her body will do what she sometimes thinks it’s always been meant to do. She thinks about swimming out, as far out as she can, about breathing underwater for hours and miles. She wonders how far she could make it. If she would know which way to turn. If she could find her way home.

At the aquarium, she’d stopped in front of the jellyfish tank and listened to them repeat bits of political news they’d heard from passersby: Netanyahu’s corruption scandals, flaming kites from Gaza, the location of the US embassy, once again up for debate. They hadn’t paid her any attention. Bickering amongst themselves, they floated and pushed, circled and weaved. What choice? she’d wanted to ask them, though they weren’t the same jellyfish from her childhood. What choice will I make?

Or tugs her down into the sand. The sun disappears. The water, black and mawing, calls to her.

Kathryne David Gargano (she/her) hails from the Pacific Northwest, but isn’t very good at climbing trees. She received her MFA from the University of Nevada—Las Vegas, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee. Her work has been published in Pithead Chapel, Salt Hill, Phoebe, the minnesota review, Tahoma Literary Review, and others. She can be found on Twitter @doubtfulljoy.