Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience Read Online Free Page A

forearm, which she yanked away. I stumbled and grabbed one of the little horse heads on the back of the chair to regain my balance.
    Mom had chosen this kitchen set at the suggestion of the father in another Irish Catholic, larg ish (only six kids) family, the Keatings. While our parents clucked their tongues at our neighbors’ Lincoln Continentals and chauffeured limousine, Mom carefully studied Mrs. Keating’s clothes. After Mass Mom would say, “She didn’t buy that dress here. Not even at Giddings. I’ll bet Mary Elaine bought that dress in New York. Heck! I’ll bet she went to Paris .” This would have been after the eleven o’clock, a Mass we always attended because of what some in our town called “The Mary Elaine Keating Show.” When Mom was really impressed she’d put Rosa or Liz up to spying: Get the lowdown. Were the Keatings in Paris?
    “Why? Are we going to Paris?” Rosa would say.
    And I’d be thinking, “Why do the Keatings live here ? Why haven’t they joined the ‘filthy-rich’ families in Indian Hill?”
    Mom waved it off when the nouveaux riches bought planes or toured Europe. We were above all of that. And yet it was hard not to see that Mom was fixated on Mrs. Keating. I suppose this obsession dated back to when they were girls.
    They were ten-year-olds at Fort Scott Camp when my mother first took note of Mary Elaine. Mom would have been at the camp on money that her mother had squeezed from a meager “budget.” Mom would also have been trying to hide her first period, which she believed was the result of riding too roughly on a horse. She hadn’t had the birds and bees talk yet. Mary Elaine would have stepped onto the porch of the opposing cabin wearing spanking-white shorts with a matching sailor top. Mom even guessed at the amount of starch in that collar, for she respected a stiff collar.
    As for this kitchen set, it was one of at least three suggestions made by Charlie Keating to my mother. The first was his teenage daughters’ swim camp, which took place in the Olympic-size pool in their backyard. Mom enrolled Ted and me in the camp. I learned to swim there, but not until after another girl toppled my raft and climbed onto it, trapping me underneath. The second suggestion was this table and chairs with little horse heads shaped like knights on a chessboard. Charlie explained that his kitchen table’s ends could be extended and more horse-head chairs could be added as the family grew. This was the smartest thing Charlie Keating ever said, according to Mom, and she rushed out to buy a kitchen table just like theirs. I wouldn’t learn about the third suggestion until years later; it concerned a class action lawsuit over a drug called thalidomide. Mom dismissed it because she said she’d never taken thalidomide.
    Now steady on my knees, I peered past Rosa’s elbow to the sepia-tinted photos. “Can I see, too?”
    “These are for Mom,” said Rosa, curling her shoulder to block my view. “Now, squiddle on.” To make her point she poked me hard in the ribs, but I was tenacious and caught glimpses of some of the photos while she riffled through the stack.
    Rosa’s hands were one clue to her nascent beauty. She had clean nails on tanned, shapely fingers. Often, at my urging, she manipulated her hands into silhouettes of darting serpent heads using a flashlight in a darkened room, and—because the serpents lunged to an ever-approaching hissing noise she made—I always begged her to stop. From there her hands became shackles around my wrists to go with her favorite made-up song: You can fight; you can pinch; you can do anything, but you’ll never, you’ll never be free ...
    Now she might just squeeze out the full story of Mom’s past.
    Except for some stock lines about growing up in the Depression, Mom had only told us that her mother could barely feed the six kids crammed into their tiny house. Yet, here were photos of a mansion with stained-glass windows, chandeliers, and