Fish Folk

The other moms at the beach are skinny and sharp, all oiled angles and monochromatic bikinis. Mira and I don’t speak to them much.

“Beautiful day,” says the one under the striped umbrella. We cut close to her to reach the place where the sand turns wet and black.

“Yes, not bad,” I say in return. We exchange tight smiles.

Mira is twelve. Like me, she is round and white, her long blonde hair falling in leftover ringlets from yesterday’s poolside birthday party. Her suit is a contrast of pink and blue, and she wears her pearls–always, her pearls–roping double around her neck. She wanders ahead of me, laughing in the clear light, no cover for her legs. The angled women on beach towels hold their breath at her audacity. They worry for their sons.

She looks at the other children playing in the tide. “Am I supposed to talk to them?”

I squat on the damp beach and burrow into the smoothness with my hands and feet. “Honey, you are not supposed to do anything.”

This answer satisfies her, but she approaches them anyway. She tilts her head once at me and begins a crumbling path of footsteps toward the others. I worry for her. A boy with pale eyes and protruding ribs laughs at the sight of her. He pokes his friend in the shoulder and claps his hands like a seal. Arf arf arf.

Mira doesn’t understand, because that’s not how we would describe a seal in our household.

If I could command the ideas that linger in my brain, unable to be spoken in the language I once absorbed so easily, I would write my child a dissertation on the ocean. I would know the words to describe the darkness. I would tell her tales of salt-encrusted starfish, jewel-like seahorses among the underwater tangleweeds, katana-edged rock walls, sticky-moss shipwrecks, and monsters with eyes that glow brighter than the sun.

I would tell her that her grandmother’s grandmother was born of the cold that comes from deeper in the depths than land creatures could ever go. A holy sort of freeze. There’s no reason to be afraid of it. If you can freeze, you can do anything.

I cross my legs, half-buried in the sand. The sun is so bright that I can hardly make out the children. I should have sunglasses. A person would have sunglasses on a day like this.

Before Mira was born, my husband tried to walk me through the ordinary objects I should know. This is a dishwasher. This is a hat. This is a pushcart thing that spins razors and cuts the grass. These are shoes, some for walking and some for making it harder to walk. This is a car. This is a dog. This is a hairbrush.

Okay, we have that one.

After she was born, he decided that he didn’t like her. He was upset that she was so fat–aren’t all babies fat? I asked–and he didn’t like that she stared at him with great bulbous eyes. He swore that they were golden in the light, just like the giant blue mackerel he caught with his father when he was a boy.

Two little girls, both spaghetti-like and full of teeth, giggle and pinch the small bit of fat on their bare midsections, comparing their bellies to hers.

The first boy grabs a handful of her underarm. “Is that your blubber?” he asks. “Are you gonna swallow us like a whale would?”

“Ow,” says Mira. She takes her arm back and sighs, confused.

Another mom towers over me. Her silhouette blocks the light. I can see she has sunglasses, large and plate-shaped, like she is supposed to.

“Maybe you should find a less crowded part of the beach,” she tells me. She frowns at the way I am sitting. I know it must be unordinary, not like a person at all.

If I could find the words, or imprint the memories, I would tell my child that men cannot breathe underwater. It’s easy to forget, because men will act as if they can do anything. But one sharp inhale, and their fragile lungs fill up until they are fit to burst. Their blood-bruised veins rise to the surface in delicate paths along their skin, and they look at you with surprise before they die. This look will make you feel more beautiful and powerful than any other. You will see yourself, as if from the shallow surface of the water, an indestructible queen of alabaster and spun silk, with lips like poison flowers and breasts like impassable peaks. I’m so cool, you will tell yourself. I am so cool.

The boy has a seashell, pointy and white, and bigger than his hand. “It’s a present for you, Mira,” he says.

She reaches out to accept it, and he lunges for her palm. A cut to her Venus Mound starts to bleed, and the blood is too black. He stares at it in a kind of horror, but he laughs.

After a minute, he notices that his grip on the shell has caused his hand to bleed, too. He shows her the bright red streak between his fingers, and they snicker together.

Mira backs further into the waves. He follows, entranced, while the others look on. When the saltwater reaches their shoulders, I can hear one of the girls call out to him. His name is Tommy or maybe Brandon or Ian. All of their names sound the same to me.

My daughter’s blond ringlets float for a moment, then she disappears entirely. The boy follows. The moms start to scream, and I can see them running for the ocean, the lean meat of their legs pumping in the crashing water. One even dives into the foam. But Mira and the boy are gone.

I stay buried in the sand, like a beached orca, silently beaming with pride.