Read Online Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea - Free Book Online Page B

to maneuver around them. To see this tender, wounded streak exposed paralyzed her, filled her with a strange mixture of love and fear, and the urge to hug her mother and run quickly away. Clearly her mother had loved her father. That Kishka had loved him too was harder to see, as the man’s name brought out of her grandmother abitter rage that made her cigarette smoke hotter, that made the muscles in her skinny neck tense so that she’d loosen the breezy scarf kept knotted there, sometimes taking it off and wrapping it around her hand, like a boxer taping his fingers together before a fight.
    Well, he was a man after all , Kishka would say, and Sophie couldn’t tell if this was Kishka’s understanding, her dark acceptance—it is a man’s prerogative, after all, to leave as he wishes—or, if it was the old woman’s regret at a mistake—she’d believed Carl was special but it turned out he was a man after all, a thing that leaves. Either way it made Sophie shift with discomfort, and so she didn’t mention her grandfather, whom she’d met many times but so long ago she had no memory of him, only photos pasted into yellowy photo albums, baby Sophie sitting on the lap of a faceless man. Faceless because someone—Kishka in her rage or Andrea in her grief—had cut out the offending image, leaving a perfect, round hole, a gap where the gluey page of the album striped through. Sophie found them creepy, and imagined an envelope somewhere containing a confetti of her grandfather’s tiny heads. He’ddisappeared, and then they had disappeared him. Sophie hated all of it. She hated that anyone could disappear. She wondered what it meant, but never did she imagine boarding a bus, running away, hopping a train. She thought of a slow shimmer that vanished her.

    Kishka’s apartment was frozen in the era of Carl’s vanishing. Nothing new had entered, nothing old was discarded. The place held the stillness of a museum. Andrea doubted her mother evenslept there anymore, choosing instead to sleep inside the cluttered Airstream trailer that tilted on the side of a hill at the dump. Sophie had glimpsed the Airstream’s interior during the Fourth of July barbecues Kishka threw for her workers; the tight space was a havoc. A giant television sucked a bounty of channels from a satellite dish perched in a nearby tree. Great glass ashtrays overflowed with lipsticked cigarette butts. Mess scattered the capsule, including a couch so heaped with sheets and pillows it gave the impression of a bed. A desk held piles of papers, and more paper poked from the slammed drawers of file cabinets, as if trying to crawl from their habitats. Air conditioning chugged from a hulking machine jammed into a window. Sophie wasn’t permitted more than the briefest peek inside.
    â€œSee?” Her grandmother would flap open the door, then shut it before Sophie’s eyes had the chance to adjust to the dimness. “Just a hangout for an old lady. Nothing fun in there for a little girl.”
    Sophie always hated the cookouts at the dump, but as it was a holiday, Sophie and Andrea’s presence was insisted upon. The glare of the sun was unrelenting and carcinogenic; the stink of charcoal and lighter fluid barely masked the putrid stink of the summertime trash. Her grandmother’s employees were self-conscious and obligated, the occasional city official dropped by, beaming their fake personalities onto everyone. If she had been allowed to roam the grounds perhaps it would have been interesting, but the dump was off-limits to little Sophie. Again and again she would stray toward the heaps of fascinating junk-stuck muck, only to be called back by Andrea, hermother’s voice raw with annoyance and repetition. Well, not today. Now that Sophie wanted nothing to do with the putrid piles, it would almost certainly be required of her to touch it. Why was life so mean?
    As she approached the