“Chip,” I said, to cover the sound of her phone patter over our supposedly relaxing dessert coffee, “what did they look like, the ones that you saw? I know it was fast. But can you tell me some details?”
Chip nodded, swallowed some pie. “The one that was the closest to me was the only one whose face I saw at all. And I have to say, she didn’t look like you might expect. Not exactly.”
“Yellow hair, bare breasts,” I said. “Right?”
“Yeah, no,” said Chip. “That’s true. But she kind of had bad teeth. No dentists in the sea, I guess. No underwater dentistry. The teeth were brownish or yellowish. Like an Englishman.”
“No fluoride,” I guessed.
“And in the background I saw one that seemed to be a guy. He had big shoulders, you know, a general guy shape? Except for the tail. The tail, I have to be honest, on him it looked a bit girly.”
“Maybe it was a butch mermaid.”
“Deb. Are you taking this seriously?”
“I am—really. A butch mermaid isn’t a joke, Chip.”
My husband squinted at me over his fork, sizing me up. Attitudinally. I made my eyes wide. Because I had meant it, about the butch mermaid—it wasn’t a diss. I’ve got nothing against a certain butch quality. Plus if there were really mermaids, I hoped they didn’t look like Ariel. Honestly, if they turned out to be Disney-style mermaids, I wouldn’t like them one little bit. That big-eyed cartoon shit would get on my last nerve.
So I narrowed my own eyes again and lifted the cup containing my decaf, looking past him with what I hoped was a meditative aspect—I was hoping to resemble a person with important, largely abstract concerns. After swallowing my delicate sip, I made my mouth prim. I hoped he got the message.
“Early to bed!” cried the biologist abruptly, snapping her nearly vintage clamshell. She stood up, grabbing a last slice of focaccia from the basket and stuffing it into her mouth, and spoke while chewing. “Got to get up at five to make history! Meet me in the lobby at five-thirty!”
Chip actually whistled as the two of us strode up the Tiki-lit path to the cabin. He held my hand and swung it widely while he whistled a patriotic tune—maybe “La Marseillaise.” Possibly “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Chip, too, believed we might be making history.
I was agnostic where that prospect was concerned, but open to it, certainly; if we made history, then good. A job well done, I guessed.
I WAS DISPLEASED, the next morning, to find the toe man in our party. People milled in the lobby, when we appeared there blearily at that indecent predawn hour, and he was among them. Adding insult to injury, his wife was not among them—I imagined she hadn’t been seduced by the prospect of sighting some goliath groupers. And possibly, unlike him, she was also indifferent to the prospect of ogling other divers as they padded naked-footed around the boat or struggled to pull on fins. A person needed tube socks, I felt, with the man from the Heartland free-roaming.
Or fishermen’s waders.
I wondered if Chip had invited him and prepared to snap at my newly minted husband for the infraction, but before I could open my mouth he assured me Nancy had issued the invite with no input from him.
I didn’t know any of the others, beyond the Bay Areans, though I’d talked to some on the phone; I busied myself carrying a cooler of sandwiches down to the dock, where the dive boat was waiting. I talked to my personal dive pro, Jamie, and then occupied myself with mundane tasks while Chip chatted excitedly with the various divers and fishermen he’d signed on, substituting the word groupers into his enthusiastic narrative of the mermaid sighting.
“Them jewfish are real easy to spear,” I heard a man drawl. At first the phrase startled me. It turned out, Chip told me later, that groupers used to bear that name before some kind of fish-naming council censored it. “Yeah. Easy pickins. Jewfish will swim right up to you. Fish in a barrel, ha ha. As innocent as babies. I use a Stinger.”
“Of course there’s no fishing today,” said Nancy to the spearfisherman, who was sun-wrinkled and had a diamond stud in one ear. “The ban on grouper harvest is respected here.”
We all trooped down to the boat—a motley crew loaded with gear and backpacks, some still sucking at their cups of coffee, others munching on remnants of Danish or muffins from their continental breakfasts. The fisherman ambled beside Chip and me. “The jewfish,” he said to Chip, “now they’re a hermaphrodite, as you may know. Those suckers are born with lady parts.”
I sensed a certain degree of puzzlement, among the recruits, at the suppressed excitement evinced by Chip and Nancy. I got the feeling they thought: Sure, groupers are good, but are groupers as good as all this? At least one of the party was chalking the vibe up to our vacationer status—“Crazy tourists,” I heard him mutter. Someone else nodded sagely.
Nancy focused on the videographer—an Australian, he sounded like—seeking repeated assurances that he would film constantly, without missing a second, as soon as he hit the water. He shrugged, he seemed confused, but at the same time he was willing. Jamie got stuck in a conversation with the toe man before the boat even weighed anchor. I hadn’t asked him to steer clear, of course; I didn’t have the stones for that. I only hoped the two of them wouldn’t still be fraternizing when I had to approach Jamie physically to get ready for my dive.
Meanwhile Chip was deep in a discussion of unusual wildlife with the retired Navy SEAL, a barrel-chested man who sported a full white
