Mermaid Sisters by Robin Crane

 

    Mikayla knew that Diana tried to listen for actual words among the riotous din that drifted over from the elementary school whenever the kids were on the playground. More than once, she’d say something like, “I know they’re having conversations, but with all of them talking at once, it just sounds like they're all yelling at the top of their lungs at the same time.”

   Diana liked being able to faintly hear the morning announcements, but she didn’t like young children, and their playful noises sounded like seagulls aggressively squawking for the same pizza crust. Their family home growing up had been close to the beach, and they were currently sharing an apartment in a valley that was always hot and smoggy, with a sprawling building of U-Haul storage spaces, and the school of course, replacing the ocean as their view; hearing seabird noises out here felt like a taunt.

    No matter how many knots even a casual glance from Mom or Dad could put in her stomach, the temperate weather and constant cooling white noise, the vastness of the ocean and the infinitesimal grains of sand nearby - the fog that rolled in sometimes, causing the foghorn to blow like Dad’s loud honk when he blew his nose while angry - living near the beach had softened their family drama into something more like comedy.

    Mikayla, or Mickey, received disability checks because she’d developed idiopathic neuropathy, and Diana had moved in with her four months earlier. She worked from home online as a tutor with the same group of teenagers every week. That was an age group she liked, though she sometimes felt shy around them. They met up in a historical conference room at the local library after school four days a week for the whole semester, as punishment for getting bad grades or being disrespectful in the classroom. When this old conference room had been new ages ago, it’d been where the children’s books were, and a mural in the background showed a Humpty Dumpty with long eyelashes holding an upright Cheshire Cat’s big left paw and Dorothy Gale from Kansas holding the cat’s other paw. Diana didn’t always leave the apartment as much as she should, but she definitely wanted to go to the library to prove or disprove what her students said about the mural being extensive, including storybook characters they told her they weren’t familiar with that she wanted to see with her own eyes, like a dragon smoking a pipe and something that looked like the prototype for SpongeBob, but female and with a cowboy hat –  but Diana had asked one of them to move their laptop around the rest of the room so she could see more, and he and some others made the staticky noise of a malfunctioning walky-talky and said, “What’s that? I can’t hear you,” so the mural probably wasn’t as big or weird as they said.

    One thing she learned from them, due to her inability to curb their personal conversations, is that romantic love didn’t seem to be the ultimate goal for any of them, as it had been when she was their age, fifteen or years ago for most of them. The prettiest girl in the group called everyone “Bro.” One day, the handsomest guy in the group, who looked like he would be paired up with her if this was an 80’s movie, instead snapped at her, “Dude shut up. Stop calling everybody bro – not everybody likes it.” The young woman just laughed and said, “Kiss my balls.”

    Most of the students had an intense interest or goal, but no crushes. Madyson crocheted foxes for her friends and favorite teachers. Nathan was a big gamer. Milo, Lake and David were each wonderful artists. At their age, Diana had been embarrassed about her asexuality, as well as a little mournful about it, missing out on the playfulness of flirting and the readymade aspiration of someday getting married. The teenagers’ conversations inspired her and reassured her that she wasn’t the only one who never, or almost never, wanted or needed to be wanted.

    For the reason of having a job that didn't require relocation, and no mate, it had been easy to move in with Mickey when it became too dangerous for Mickey with her body falling apart to live on her own, even though Diana had several piles and boxes full of her various collections – the apartment had a roomy spare bedroom Diana used to sleep in when she’d visit at night and smoke too much weed to drive back to her little bungalow apartment in Pasadena.

    Mickey’s feet tingled and hurt so much sometimes she couldn’t walk that well, and sometimes lately she also got dizzy.  Every once in a while, she required a wheelchair. She hadn’t used it enough to build up the muscle tone in her upper arms needed to propel herself forward without pain yet, so when she needed to use it, Diana ended up pushing her. She referred to herself as “The Mermaid” when Diana pushed her in the wheelchair, maybe because mermaids can’t walk, but Diana didn’t quite see the resemblance, since Mickey still had two legs. Mickey always had an interest in mermaids, though. Mermaids and romantic love.

    Diana was just sitting with her coffee and gazing out the big window from their second-floor kitchenette that morning when she heard a loud thump in the hallway that she assumed was the footless mannequin they kept balanced against the back wall falling over, which had happened before. Once she poked her head out into the hallway, though, she saw her sister sitting dazedly on the ground with a bruise already forming on her head and the mannequin just standing there ignoring it all.

    “That’s fine,” Diana answered her sister’s embarrassed and apologetic look, “just tell me what you need. You just surprised me is all. Like, should I call someone like last time? Or should we go to the ER, or at least Urgent Care?”

    “Oh God no. I’m supposed to be using my cane more than I do and they said they were going to start making me come in more and use the wheelchair all the time if I fell again. Can you just help me get to my chair?”

    Her chair was the light blue vinyl-covered, wooden legged one by the big window, on the other side of the little table from where Diana had just been sitting. Diana brought her some coffee and started another pot, and they sat in silence reading for a while.

    Mickey decided to rest on the couch at around 10:30 and set an alarm on her phone in case she ended up taking a little nap. The bruise on her head didn’t seem to have gotten any bigger since she’d put ice on it, fortunately. “My ankles just hurt, that's all.”

    While Diana didn’t share her interest in romantic love, she did share her interest in mermaids, just to a lesser degree. As a kid, she enjoyed playing with their collection of mermaid dolls in a self-aware way, predicting it to be a scene she’d someday look upon bittersweetly, while Mickey’s enjoyment was clearly unfiltered - you could tell she didn’t imagine an eye in the sky recording her life, the way Diana did.

    Of their collection of four small plastic mermaid dolls, only one of them had a natural hair color – the other sirens had bright colors like pink, purple and green with a white stripe, like the group of punk teenagers that used to hang out near their apartment building for a few months that they always kept their eyes peeled for. The best thing about these dolls was the black t-shirt drawn on each of them with a permanent black marker by Mom, meant to cover each doll’s immodestly bare shoulders and stomachs, only serving to make the small part of their arms left visible seem risqué.

    Mikayla slit her wrists in the bathtub when she was seventeen, and when Diana found her bobbing gently and unconsciously in her own pink blood in the tepid water  – well, though she has legs, of course, there was something of a mermaid look to her then.

    “I’ll have to tell her about that someday,” she noted to herself, if it’d ever seem amusing. Not yet though.

    “Hey, wouldn't it be nice to go to the beach today?”

    Diana had to agree that it did sound nice, but she wouldn’t know what to do if her sister fell down again, other than to call 911. If she had her hands full with Mickey though and had to yell for someone else to call 911, there was the possibility of being ignored. Still, they’d both agreed to adopt the “You only live once” mentality, and if a beach day sounded good, it wouldn’t do to ruin it by worrying about the what-if’s.

    “Sure, let’s do it. Let’s go to our old beach though.”

    “No! I want to have actual fun!”

    The beach they had grown up just a few blocks away from was close to a waste treatment plant and had more trash on its somewhat neglected sands than the popular beaches that had nearby piers or boardwalks for the tourists,  with souvenir and tattoo shops, video arcades, rides and buildings with bright murals painted on their sea-smelling sides. Their beach was still a beach though, with the same ocean, and it had the advantage of nearby free street parking often being found within a couple blocks.

    “Fuck it. Yeah, let’s go. Let’s bring your wheelchair though, just in case.”

    “Silver surfer.”

    “You know it.”

    The old, plum-colored Toyota sedan was ancient, but always clean, both inside and out, a lesson learned from their parents, who had the smallest apartment out of all the homes the girls had ever seen, just a one-bedroom for the girls with a pull-out bed in the living room for Mom and Dad, but it always looked so nice, with even a small table dedicated just to Mom’s two expensive orchids and her precious jade figurines, though when the girls first went to Chinatown they saw that most of the shops carried those figurines and some of them cost as little as $4.00.

    Mickey closed her eyes and fell asleep almost as soon as they got on the freeway. The stuffy warmth felt good, so Diana kept the windows up. She’d recently hung a small heart-shaped crystal prism pendant from her rearview mirror, unaware of how dangerous it was to other drivers looking her way when the sun hit the crystal just so and caused too bright a refraction; she was now innocently enjoying the tiny rainbow spots on her hands and her sister’s face. It was a bit troubling to see how low in the sky the sun already sat, though; it was already a little after noon and this time of the year, Fall, a beach day should start as early as possible, because once the sun even thought about setting, all the vendors packed up their art that they tried to sell to tourists and had spread out on woven blankets on the sandy walkway, folded in the walls of their sunglasses or bong kiosks, or rolled down and locked the metal shutters over their shop windows. The pretty and handsome skaters and surfers packed up too, the second the sun started lowering, and it got colder but most beach-goers only brought clothes for the heat, and now had to make do with damp, sandy towels worn as sarongs or shawls to keep them warm. Diane knew that their beach day would end up in some state of shambles, because as she sat in traffic, it hit her that she’d been preoccupied with something else and had left their bag of beach supplies on the couch. Sometimes a day can be a shambles but also a good time though, so that’s what she hoped for.

    One thing that’d been better about her last neighborhood was the quality of the traffic jams on the main freeway there – much of the way was so tree-lined, a friend’s young child who was often on that route with her family assumed the word was “treeway” instead of “freeway.” For much of her old commute to her sister’s place, the freeway ran just a stone’s throw away from a charming neighborhood of mostly one-story family homes; you could see inside their rooms sometimes, inside their dining rooms for family meals and inside their kitchens for someone washing the dishes while staring out at the freeway.

    This highway, on the other hand, had more cargo trucks on it than any other in Los Angeles, connecting the Ports of Los Angeles to the warehouses in their town and further east, as well as running through major citrus-growing territories that surprisingly hadn’t been razed, transporting their acidic fruits by the ton into the city. For the most part, as she looked around her, all Diana saw were trucks and, no surprise, a bunch of limes rolling towards her car. There was always some truck here stacked dangerously high with its fruit.

    She noticed more limes rolling towards them now, and as she watched them roll past, she suddenly felt a jolt, heard a noise, and realized she’d rear-ended the black hatchback with the Uber sticker in its window in front of them, the only other non-truck she could see.

    Mikayla woke up with a start and said, “Are we alright? Oh no, we’re not, huh?”

    “Oh no,” returned Diana, “and you already got hurt once today.”

    The person who emerged from the driver’s side of the Uber had clearly been born a woman but through their willful intention, effective because of how attractive and confident they were, Diana not just tacitly agreed in her mind to accept as a man, but to feel it with her whole body. The driver had a mop of loosely curly brown hair that fell onto his blue eyes, perfect teeth, a white tank top, small firm breasts like pectoral muscles, tattoos of pin-up girls on his muscular arms and dark blue jeans intentionally frayed and ripped along the upper legs. He had a light mustache and, Diana quickly found out, a deep though slightly prepubescent-sounding voice.  He looked subtly from side to side as he walked back towards their car, not as though he was gingerly watching for traffic to start moving, but as though he was on guard for paparazzi.

    “Yo! What happened?” he said.

    “I’m so sorry! I saw the limes and –”

    “Yeah, I saw them too, but why did you do that? You’ve got to pay attention! My ride is my job.”

    He seemed about ready to really go off on them, but then he looked them over and changed his mind. Neither sister was pretty – they were each glaringly unattractive in their own way, as far as the golden ratio – but both of them dressed boldly, which was popular among people like his friends at the moment - it reflected well on a person in L.A. when they were ugly but dressed for attention. Also, he’d just finished reading a self-help book his life coach recommended that suggested “sometimes an odd sign ends up leading us to our ultimate success in ways we never dreamed, so always keep an open mind.”

    “Look,” he said, “Let’s get off the freeway and exchange info at the Mobil station right over there.”

    Diana and Mickey followed the black hatchback as it cut through traffic, honking its horn, and they finally exited the freeway, which took almost ten minutes.

    “Mikayla, I have to tell you something. I didn’t like my car insurance - long story - so I cancelled it a couple months ago and I don’t drive very much, you know? I just never got new insurance. We’re fucked, and the person we hit is so intimidating. I think I’m going to have an anxiety attack before we get there.”

    She didn’t want to add to the anxiety, but it felt a little to Mickey like the driver side tire was flat, and also like the other driver was looking in their rearview mirror and was able to read Diana’s lips or at least her aura of panic, which Mickey could observe freely only because she was wearing sunglasses.

    Finally, they parked at the gas station right off the exit, the only Mobil they knew of that still had a red Pegasus on its sign – both girls had commented on wanting to ride it. They both got out of the car this time to talk to the driver.

    Once he got a full look at Mickey, he saw that in addition to the physical shortcomings of her extreme overbite, almost concave chest and the bump on her head, she also walked using a cane. She was skinny like a stick bug but compensated for it with the many bright cloth flowers she’d worked into her long, black braid and the vivacity of her bright purple dress. Diana was short, chubby, had bad posture and was covered in dark brown downy body hair, but she had bright purple hair that somewhat matched the other woman’s dress, and wore a true red lipstick on her full lips under her visible mustache. They were assessing their car’s damage along with apologizing, noticing both cracked headlights and, yes, a flat tire, which it would have been strange to come from just the fender bender, or the limes either, and which Diana would later chalk up to cruel fate.

    “Well, it looks like it’s going to be one of those crazy days,” the driver said, with his hands in his back pockets, surmising the cars’ damage like the sisters were, not bothering to ask Diana for her car insurance information.

    “My name’s Atlantis.”

    Mikayla had only been giving her attention first to their car and then to their plans being ruined (“I’m sorry,” Her sister said,” your wheelchair might be top of the line but it’s not going to get us both to the beach before sunset”), but now she looked over quickly at their semi-adversary.

    “Wow, that’s really cool! Is that your birth name?”

    He chuckled. “Nah. I was watching an old mobster movie with a friend of my stepmom’s and there was this one scene with a gnarly bar fight but meanwhile the song in the background was really chill and beautiful, and it caught my attention. Her friend said it was by a singer named Donovan and that it was called Atlantis, like the underwater kingdom of riches and all this technology that was before its time that they’re still looking for.”

    “Wow,” said Diana, “I love that movie, and one of Mickey’s favorite books as a kid takes place in Atlantis.”

    “Oh really? That’s so funny, because when I saw your dress, it made me think of the ocean. People usually think of blue as a water color, but that purple color really gives off oceanic vibes.”

    “Oh my gosh, thank you, that’s actually why I wore it. I woke up wanting to go to the beach more than anything and I thought if I wore this dress it would, like, put subliminal messages in my sister’s brain to want to go too, even though the drive is such a monster. I fell pretty hard earlier and thought we wouldn’t be able to go, but –”

    “You look fine to me.”

    She blushed in response.

    “I’m sorry, Mickey, we have to take care of the car now though, but we’ll go soon. I’m going to see if they can change a tire here, and, um, why don’t you just sit back down for now. Atlantis and I will talk about the serious stuff over by their car, if that’s okay? Maybe instead of going through insurance, I can just pay you directly, whatever you think it’ll cost to get that ding out.”

    But Atlantis was still looking at Mickey, strategically leaving the more sensible sister out.

    He said, “This is like fate, or kismet I’ve heard it called. I wanted to stop working for the day and head to the beach. Which one were you heading out to?”

    “Venice.”

    “Are you kidding me? That’s my favorite! Man, I have so many good memories there and some friends that live nearby! Did I hear you have a wheelchair with you?”

    “Oh yes,” Diana pitched in, “We call it Silver Surfer because the place we got it from explained that it’s made from sterling silver.”

    She didn’t feel so bad bringing him in on this private joke without his knowledge, because she was irritated that he’d tried to make her seem less fun than Mickey. They’d gotten the chair from a small, stuffy medical supply shop that smelled like feces inside, as though it specialized in the body’s most vulnerable smells as well as its more tangible shortcomings, or like maybe they sold used bedpans they didn’t wash out all the way first.

    “This is going to be the chair you want,” the salesman with crumbs in his mustache had said,” and then he lied more than either could bear without having to mouth their disbelief to each other behind his back. He said that its steel structure was sterling silver, and that the vinyl seat and back were in fact Corinthian leather. He said it was new. Since it still cost the amount Diana had been prepared to pay, for a chair her sister was hardly planning to use, there was no reason not to buy it.

    “Look,” Atlantis leaned in, his tan body smelling of sandalwood, “I’m forming an idea I think is good for everyone. My car is only a little dinged up. You leave your car parked here. We pack that silver surfer up in my car, where I sometimes keep my surfboard, myself being somewhat of a silver surfer, you pay me for the ride there, we separate at the beach and do our own things for a while, then meet back up at a set time and I drive you two back over here. With you paying for the return trip too, that’s more than enough for me to forget about trading insurance info, and who knows, it might even lead to a nice time.”

    Diana had to disguise her extreme relief, even excitement, just in case Atlantis used the same playbook as their parents, who increased their punishments whenever the girls didn’t look upset enough by the initial decree, and conversely, often cut back on a reward if the girls seemed too pleased.

    “That sounds fair,” she said.

    And forty-five minutes later, the three of them were seated at a coveted table on the patio of a Mexican restaurant situated along the festive but dangerous Venice boardwalk. There were only three sit-down restaurants along this mile-long scenic stretch, and this was the only one that, while still sort of expensive, wasn’t so fancy you needed to dress well to get in. It was painted vibrantly, serving strong, sweet and colorful cocktails or blended drinks, making it a popular place with a frequent line, in the daytime, of people waiting for patio seating. When the three of them pushed through a crowd of others up to the hostess’s podium, Diana expected to hear that the wait for a table was too long, but instead, when it was their turn to talk to the hostess, Atlantis told her winningly, “Me and my girls would like that table there that’s just getting cleaned,” and the young pale worker with long blonde hair and a short, bright green skirt, looked at Mickey on her cane, then the cool Atlantis, then said, “Sure, right this way,” grabbing three menus before extending a many-braceleted arm to guide them towards their seats.

    Diana watched as a few children of greatly different ages played together in the ocean, falling down in the tide and laughing each time a strong wave rolled on to the beach. They were wearing full outfits. She watched a menacing flock of gulls swarm an unseen scrap or open bag of food next to one of two young, heavily tattooed women laying out near a red umbrella – they were both heartily laughing. Honestly, happiness looked a little exhausting, but this was a false judgment that preceded her next thought about how lonely she felt.

    “Do you get stressed out a lot?” Atlantis’s voice broke her musing. She looked at him confusedly and he explained, “You’re rubbing your neck.”

    “Oh, yeah. I guess I might’ve hurt myself a little. I guess from our little accident.”

    “Oh, that,” he smiled and winked. “Well, some drinks will fix that. Maybe I can give you a shoulder rub later. I’ve been waiting for my friend to text me back to see if she’d meet me here, but I heard back, and she’s actually in Joshua Tree.”

    This wasn’t, of course, the day Diana had envisioned. It wasn’t the day she resolved to give her frail sister when she saw her try to recover that morning from a fall and deny her body’s premature failings. It’d reminded her of this cat they had for a while who always tried to jump up to places it couldn’t make it up to because it was too heavy, and when it fell back to the ground clumsily, pretending it’d never happened, the sisters pretended they hadn’t seen it.

    They hadn’t had a chance to speak alone since the turn of events set off by the crash, but each could see the others’ flirtatious behavior with their new companion, so the day pushed on in this direction with both sisters hoping the other once was happy.

    They ordered strawberry margaritas, guacamole and chips.

    “I love your mermaid tattoo,” Mickey said. “I mean, they’re all cool tattoos, but she’s my favorite.”

    “Yeah, mermaids are her favorite. Since we’re kids. Oh my god, one time we bought this novel that didn’t even have anything to do with mermaids but just mentioned them in the title, and it was such a big risk to buy the book because it didn’t glorify God!”

    Mickey read about it in the alternative teenage girl magazine, Sassy, that was so important to her in establishing her identity. The book was On Mermaid Avenue, by Binnie Kirschenbaum, and the two sisters made a covert public bus trip to the mall to buy it, weighing the risk versus reward of getting in trouble with Dad for reading something that doesn’t glorify God, if their mom were to find the book and tell on them. And yes, the reward of being cool enough to read a book they could get in trouble for, with even a cover that had a near-naked woman’s back and almost-naked legs on it, was worth it.

    “Oh yeah, it was even riskier because the writer’s name sounded so Jewish.”

    “My stepdad is Jewish. He loves me more than my mom does.”

    They’d slurped their first drinks quickly and already ordered seconds.

    “As a matter of fact, it’s like fate that you’d bring that up right now, when we're here breaking bread together on this beautiful Friday, as the sun is setting soon. That’s when the Jews celebrate shabbat dinner. It’s when God comes down and rests with them, like visits with everybody, and the dinner has a bunch of different courses and friends come over to share. Have you guys heard of that?”

    “Yes, of course! We were raised Christian but not Amish! There were Jewish kids at school!” Diana teased him, noticing his feelings seemed hurt. Mikayla knocked her leg against Diana’s under the table in rebuke and followed up, “Yeah, but we’ve never been to a Shabbat dinner before. What’s it like?”

    “Aw man,” Atlantis leaned back and stretched his arms, “it was really nice. I mean it was fun as a kid because we could drink. They drink a lot of red wine, which people still think is good for your heart, but all alcohol is carcinogenic. My nutritionist would flip if he saw me here drinking this. Anyway, my stepbrother would sing that song that’s so important at a Bar Mitzvah, like–” he closed his eyes and put his hands over them as he sang, his voice sounding more like a teen boy than a man’s, maybe in imitation of his stepbrother’s. His pronunciation was slurred from drinking, but he only knew the words phonetically anyway, “Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu, Melech Ha'Olam –” Atlantis opened his eyes and came back around to the world, “and that’s all I remember.” It sounded beautiful.

    “Oh wow, so cool! And I totally know what you mean, in movies and shows when they show a Bar Mitzvah, they show the boy character at the pulpit reciting something, and it’s just the ‘Baruch Atah’ part.”

    “Yes!” said Atlantis, “That’s what I always thought of, and how I remembered that part.”

    “They showed Krusty the Clown singing it on a Simpsons episode, when he had his Bar Mitzvah.”

    “Bart Mitzvah,” Mickey chimed in, and the girls giggled about the pun.

    Atlantis continued, “I remember this part I always thought was nice, you say, ‘Shalom Aleichem’ to the angels and the other people at the table.” He took Mickey’s hands in his and looked at her and told her, “Shalom Aleichem.” Then he let go of her hands and did the same with Diana. “Shalom aleichem, Diana.”

    “Thank you, Atlantis,” she replied, “Shalom aleichem to you.”

    “Oh, I’m no angel,” he said. Then, “Actually, I need to use the little devil’s room. Be back in a second, angels.”

    He scooted out from behind the table, coming around to their side of the table, kissing each one on the forehead and then going indoors.

    A few quiet minutes later, Diana excused herself to the bathroom as well, and when she came back she had a serious look on her face, shaking her head no.

    “He must have believed us that the wheelchair was expensive and taken off with it. No wonder he was trying to talk us into leaving it in the trunk!”

    Now she sat across from Mickey, where Atlantis had been, and took in the sweet woman’s bruised forehead and resigned expression.

    “It made me feel cool walking around with her,” Diana said, though she knew it wasn’t the time for that.    

    Mickayla announced that she was going to be sick – she stood and fumbled with her cane but ended up hastily throwing it aside and just throwing herself forward limpingly through the restaurant to the bathroom. On her way back through the pink and green restaurant interior, Diana watched her use the table edges and empty bar stools for balance. One of her ankles was all purple and swollen now.

    Nobody rushed them to finish up at their table, because the fun-goers and vendors were all going home now, and the young women sat drinking ice water in bumpy red plastic cups and splitting a burrito that Diana, whose head was throbbing, paid for, because Mikayla had left her small, sequined gold purse in Atlantis’s car.

    “Should we tell the police? There’s a squad car right over there – they’re talking to those street guys.”

    “No! I don’t want to tell anyone else about this, or at least not the cops. It’ll just seem crazy of us for how long we went along with everything. Like the TV thing with Mom.”

    When Micky was released from the hospital after her suicide attempt, the psychiatrist from the ER was assigned to follow up with her. Diana remembered him talking alone with their parents and then returning to her sister in bed saying, “Good news! Your parents have signed this contract here, agreeing not to be so strict, and to be less aggressive about their religious beliefs.”      He smiled reassuringly. “We’ll talk again in two weeks and you tell me how they did!”

The girls looked at each other like they couldn’t believe he wasn’t getting in trouble for presuming to tell their parents what to do!

    Her dad worked all day but Mom was usually home. Mickey had to stay home until the infections on one of her wrists got better or at least until the first meeting with the psychiatrist. She stayed in her room all day, mostly drawing and reading young adult fantasy novels until her sister got home. The apartment was quiet the first two days Diana got home from school, but the third day, she came home to Mom with a religious TV show turned up so loud she’d heard the praying from outside when the front door was still closed. The two ignored each other as she came inside, but Diana got a surreptitious peek at the screen as she walked to the bedroom and saw there were mostly black people praying on a stage, and her mom was pretty racist against black people –  it was hard not to conclude that their mom wasn’t watching or enjoying the prayers, just playing them loud to be doing something mean.

    As retaliation, it became a ritual for Diana to throw her backpack on the bed as soon as she got home and immediately switch on the local channel that played two hours of The Simpsons on syndication, that they were forbidden to watch, loud enough to compete with the religious programs their Mom took to watching every day. It didn’t start up until this one prayer show at 3:30. Diana got home at around 4:00 pm – it seemed like this ritual needed the guidelines of a start and end time. Dad came home from work at around 6 every night to a quiet apartment, except for a week and a half into Mickey’s convalescence, when he came home early, and nobody in his family heard him because of the televisions both going so loud.

    “What on earth is going on in here? Sera, is this something the psychiatrist is going to be mad about if she tells him about it? I’m not going to have a daughter taken by CPS.”

    “We were just watching TV, daddy – we didn’t know it was so loud.”

    “Yeah, we’re sorry.”

    With their apologies, their mom didn’t have to explain herself.

    In bed later, Diana asked Mickey if she was going to tell the psychiatrist about their mom’s bizarre psychological warfare.

    “No way! It’s too sad that we were a part of it. Like, there’s no explanation for it. It’s embarrassing.”

    Diana saw how being ripped off and abandoned by Atlantis after practically being on a date with the stranger, their Uber driver, would be something Mickey wanted to keep quiet, as well. Diana didn’t care one way or another. She was physically exhausted and so sad.

    “Want to head down to the water? I’ll help you. I can sort of carry you a bit once we get to the sand, and you can hang the cane from the crook of your arm.”

    “That sounds nice.”

    Strangers watching the sisters could see they both looked tired and a little drunk. The one in the purple dress was shivering and the other one held on to her with a strong side hug and they walked that clumsy way until they got to a little island that separated some basketball courts from the rest of the beach. There they sat and leaned against a palm tree facing the ocean and the sunset while Diana tried to catch her breath for a few moments; it was tiring bearing so much of her sister’s weight, though it was nice and cozy to hug her so close.

    “The cane is probably going to be pretty useless on the sand, right?” she asked.

    “The cane!” Mickey said, then looked back at the spot in front of the restaurant where she’d leaned the cane while straightening her dress – since her sister was letting her lean on her, she’d forgotten to take it with them. For a second she was mad at her sister for the help. Diana looked back at the restaurant too.    

    “It’s gone,” she said, shrugging and smiling like c’est la vie.

    “Well, come on, let’s get closer to the water. Stand up for a minute and I’ll carry you.”

    She carried her in both arms in the way a fireman carries an unconscious old lady, and fairly easily. She was not particularly strong, but Mickey was small.

    “You know I sort of feel like a mermaid being carried to my home,” she said.

    “I was waiting for you to say that.”

    “Are you going to throw me in and be done with it?”

    “Ha ha, no. I’m so tired though. Can I just put you down here and just rest for a minute? I know it’s getting dark, but I’m just so tired, I just need to put you down for a second and let’s both just sit on the sand.”

    Mickey stretched out on the sand next to her, first keeping propped up on her elbows, then just letting herself lay fully back, releasing all the tension she felt, everywhere.

    “I'm almost happy we forgot the blanket,” she said. Her head was throbbing as were her ankles, and her mouth was dry and sour from having thrown up.

    “I’m just going to rest my eyes for a second Mickey. I’m okay, I just feel dizzy and it feels so good in the sand, like yeah, I’m almost happy we forgot the blanket too. The beach was a good idea.”

    They moved closer together for warmth and both seemed to relinquish all hope on the same exhalation.