Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience Read Online Free

take those,” she said.
    I slumped down in my seat while Aunt Gert considered Rosa’s offer. She kept the photos in her right hand, folded her arms, and said, “I’ll just wait for your mom.” Then she settled against the copper-and-gold-flecked Formica countertop to wait.
    There were about five of us eating cereal at the table, many in the swimsuits we lived in from June through August. Mine was faded pink and worn at the bottom. I had liked it better two years before when it belonged to Liz. Everything looked better on Liz, who shared Mom’s looks and tastes. On that day Liz was wearing the swim team’s red-white-and-blue-striped tank suit. The suit itself was a reminder of what I could never possess—membership on the swim team.
    Since Frankie was often playing baseball in the summer while others were at swim practice, this left me in the company, and care, of Rosa. The third child of eight siblings, Rosa had to compete with Bridget and Michael for authority. The two eldest siblings viewed themselves as the residents in this town that we knew as family, and they tolerated us younger children as townies might accept that their economic power came from tourists, even if the tourists did clog Main Street and gum up the village green with taffy. Rosa craved Michael and Bridget’s “townie” status, and for us middle children she ran the show. She even wrote and directed plays, which we performed for the Jesuits and Girl Scouts.
    Later she would direct a play in which I provided the “commercial break” by squiddling onstage to eat a bowl of Corn Flakes before exiting stage right. Kevin, behind the curtain, lifted me into my wooden legs before I re-entered stage left and said, “Tall up with Kellogg’s Corn Flakes!” This was among the better roles Rosa assigned to me. Typically I played the naïve hausfrau to Liz’s cosmopolitan woman. My lines always fell flat while the audience roared with every impatient roll of Liz’s eyes. Afterward I would chide myself for agreeing to play these roles, while Rosa was handed flowers at the curtain call.
    Now, at the counter, Rosa and Aunt Gert exchanged notes on their favorite soap opera. During the school year Mom and I were to be found in front of the television set, where she chain-smoked, bouncing a baby on her knee or folding laundry, while we watched the soaps. This was crucial bonding time. Mom’s eyebrows were always screwed into a knot of puzzlement, and she would stop bouncing to ask me, “Now, why would Erica say such a thing to her mother?”
    And I would think to myself, “Because she’s Erica Kane, of course!”
    “Erica is the devil!” she’d say. “I just love Erica.”
    When summer came, Rosa and Bridget horned in on our routine and talked as if only they understood Erica’s evil charms. Now, as Rosa and Aunt Gert chatted, I wanted to join in so I jumped up again. Rosa shot me a look that said, “What do you want?”
    I wanted to talk, but if I did, Rosa would smirk at Aunt Gert, and they would both go silent. “Nothing,” I said, skidding down again—time to mind my own business, or try to mind it, but then I caught Rosa’s eyes flickering to the envelope and back.
    Everyone finished breakfast. The crowd thinned as kids rushed off to swim practice or a friend’s house. I stuck around. So did Rosa. Aunt Gert saw the clock on the oven and said, “Uh oh.” She grabbed her cigarettes. “My court time’s in ten minutes.”
    She started for the door, stopped, and gave Rosa a measured look. “These are for your mom,” she said, handing Rosa the envelope.
    “I’ll make sure she gets them,” said Rosa, sober-faced under a bubble perm, adolescent thighs fighting the seams of her cutoffs.
    As soon as Aunt Gert’s Keds hit the back porch, Rosa ripped into the envelope and shrieked, “What!” I scrambled over to the chair at the head of the table, stood up crookedly, and, because of the differing lengths of my legs, leaned into Rosa’s