The Blue Moon Review - Fiction

How To Breathe Underwater

by Irene Ziegler

"… if you are truly dedicated, and want to breathe underwater more than anything in the world, you will succeed and become a mermaid."

Here's what you do.

First, take a big gulp of air so you can stay under a long time. You have to learn slowly, so don't get discouraged if it takes several tries and several gulps of air.

Then, let the air out while you're underwater, until your lungs are empty and you sink to a sitting position on the lake bottom.

This next part is tricky. Count to three, then inhale through your nose--not enough to pull the water into your head--but just enough to feel it begin to travel up your nostrils. Don't let it come up too far! Then, breathe out.

Then try it again. One, one-thousand; two, one-thousand; three, one-thousand...breathe! You must keep the water where you want. You have to train the water. You have to be in control. You have to be the one to decide when you are ready to pull the water in, because if it gets in before you're ready, your lungs will fill up, and you'll drown. Remember, it is a slow process and learning takes time, but if you are truly dedicated, and want to breathe underwater more than anything in the world, you will succeed and become a mermaid.

My mother tells me this in my dreams. She knows all about it. Sometimes I'm convinced I see her when I'm awake, darting among the shadows beneath the lake. She hangs the way her ashes did--cloud-like--when my father poured them into the water from a squat jar. Then the current shifts and breaks her apart.

My mother also tells me this: many scientists believe humans once had a third eyelid, a transparent membrane that moved sideways across the eye from the corner nearest the nose. This third eyelid protected the eye underwater. We all still have a leftover, functionless reminder of it: the small, pink fold of tissue at the corner of our eyes nearest the nose, where pap and tears collect.

Mermaids have a third eyelid--if they're real mermaids. That's how you can identify impostors. When a real mermaid is underwater, that third eyelid closes over her eyes like a window shade pulled from the side of the sash. It has a murky transparency so the eyeball is still visible when the lid is engaged, but the eyeball appears foggy and blurred, like the eyes of a dead fish.

The mermaids at Weeki Wachee Springs are impostors. This I know on my own. I've watched them often. Their eyes stay open while they cavort about the spring, but I hardly have to observe them closely to know they are fakes. Anybody who needs a garden hose to breathe is not a real mermaid.

One Saturday, Pamela Hoke's mother brought me and Pamela to Weeki Wachee Springs. It was Pamela's birthday, and she chose me as the one friend she was allowed to bring along. Pamela was my age, but that was all we had in common. I suspected her mother made Pamela invite me because Mrs. Hoke liked my father. Pamela says she saw them kissing, but I know that is a lie. I agreed to go to Weeki Wachee Springs only because Pamela had a new Instamatic camera which she wore dangling from her wrist by its slender black strap.

"Hey, Pamela, can I see your camera?" I asked.

Pamela screwed up her fleshy, pink lips and considered me. "No, I don't think so."

"Why not?"

"I'm still using it."

"No you're not! It's hanging off your wrist, doing nothing."

"Well, that's where I want it right now."

"Can't I just see it for a minute?"

"Um, no."

"Ah, come on, Pamela--" I stopped myself. I wouldn't beg. If she didn't want me to look through her camera, then fine.

"I like Cypress Gardens better," Pamela huffed. "They have peacocks and you can pet them and once one of them followed me everywhere I went."

"Because you smell like its mother," I said, and Mrs. Hoke shot me a warning glance.

"And they have these ladies who wear these really big dresses like in the olden days with hoop skirts and ruffles, and my mother is going to buy me one."

"Uh huh," I said. Something was going on behind the glass. I turned my attention back to the mermaids.

"And I like DeLeon Springs, too, because you can swim there and the water is clean and blue, not like your smelly old lake."

Man, she was pushing it. I'd wanted to punch her for an hour now, but if I did that, she wouldn't let me look through her camera. "Uh huh," I said. The mermaid I noticed earlier broke from the underwater routine and was swimming around looking distracted. What was going on?

"And they have a concession stand there and my mother gives me five dollars and I can spend it on anything I want."

"Pamela, you're stingy, you lie like a rug, and I hate your guts," I said.

Pamela wrenched open her incredibly large mouth, as far as it would go, like a snake unhinging its jaws to swallow something larger than its own head, and the sound that came from her was otherworldly. It was an amazing tantrum. I was horrified. Mrs. Hoke pressed Pamela's face to her belly. I could barely hear myself over her shrieking sobs. People were staring.

"Okay, okay, Pamela, I'm sorry. I was just kidding, I didn't mean it, and I don't hate you, I don't." I didn't dare look at her mother.

"I'm sorry, Pamela really, I am," I said. "I'll play Cinderella with you. I'll even be the prince, and I'll play as long as you want."

"I want to go home," Pamela sniveled into her mother's stomach, shoulders heaving spasmodically.

"Yes, I think we should," said her mother.

"No! Wait! I apologized! Please, Mrs. Hoke, I want to watch the mermaids! We just got here!" But she had already moved toward the exit with Pamela leeched to her middle, and I knew I could yell and holler all I wanted, but it wouldn't do any good. "Pleeeease!" I cried, but they were gone. "Hell damn fart!" I said, and somebody's father glared at me. I turned back to face the glass.

The mermaid I'd noticed earlier was engaged in some sort of solo performance, a kind of mime show, but with ballet-like movements of her arms and sudden, powerful lashes of her mermaid tail which propelled her gracefully around the spring. Though I couldn't see them perfectly, her eyes were wide open, and there was about them a foggy quality I hadn't noticed before. I watched her, mesmerized, as she tried to communicate with hand gestures and mouth movements, and although I had no idea what the specifics of her message were, I thought I knew what she was saying. She was saying, Save me. She was saying, Get me out of here, and she was talking directly to me.

"Annie!"

There was Pamela, standing at the entrance, one hand on her hip, the other still dangling that camera like a carrot. She bent forward slightly at her waist in an attitude that made me want to punch her again.

"My mother says come on or we're leaving you here and I get to sit in the front."

"I'm coming." I struggled to keep my voice civil. "Go ahead, I'm coming." She whipped herself around and flounced away.

The dancing mermaid was pressed against the glass, staring at me. Her arms were above her head and her fingertips touched the glass, like the tree frogs that suctioned themselves to our sliding glass door. Her long black hair fanned around her head as if it were alive. Where was her air hose?

I stepped up to her. "Momma?" I whispered.

A family of four surrounded me suddenly and pushed me from my place. Flashcubes popped. I got squeezed behind a tall man and almost fell down. I groped and clutched and elbowed until I could see her again, and just before someone shouldered his way in front of me, the mermaid blinked. Her eyelids moved sideways and open, then sideways and shut, and I let go of the railing.

You are made of water. It courses through you and draws you like a magnet to your primordial beginnings. Humans can live much longer without food than without water because your core is liquid, and what is life but the ebb and flow of blood which carries with it both your history and your future. The first gestating months of your life were spent in water. You breathed it then. If you try, you can breathe it now.

When I told my father and sister about my mermaid encounter, they were predictably skeptical.

"You've flipped, Annie," said Leigh, at the supper table. "There's no such thing as mermaids." She bit a piece of her fingernail and spat it off the tip of her tongue. "You probably saw what you saw because you wanted to see it."

"No, I saw it. I really did."

"Mermaids don't exist," my father said. "Eat your dinner."

"I bet Mom would have believed me," I said.

He looked at me again, and his eyes softened. "It's not that I don't believe you, Annie. It's just...well, sometimes the eye can fool the brain, that's all. You look at something and you think you see it, but it might not really be what you think at all."

Leigh looked up. "That's what I just said."

"But what about the hose? She didn't have an air hose."

My father nodded. "She probably topped off when you weren't looking."

"But it was a long time!"

"The world record for breath-holding is six minutes and 29.8 seconds," my father said.

Leigh's eyes shot over to him. "How do you know that?"

"I know." Then to me, "So did she--"

"But how do you know?" Leigh persisted.

"I know, that's all. So, Annie, did she go six minutes without air?"

"I'm not sure," I admitted. "Could have been. I don't know."

My father opened his hands in a gesture that said, you see?

"Six minutes and 29.8 seconds, Dad?" Leigh said again. "Sure it's not, say, six minutes and 29.6 seconds?"

"No, it's six minutes and 29.8 seconds."

"You're sure?"

My father gave Leigh a searching stare, then asked, "What's your point, Leigh?"

"Well, I'm just so impressed that you would know that, that's all. I mean, that's so specific. Like, maybe you made it up."

Her tone put me on guard. "Skip it, Leigh," I said. "I wasn't--"

"You think I made that up, Leigh?" my father said. His voice was too controlled.

"I didn't say that."

"Well, do you?"

"Dad, there's something else about the mermaid," I said.

"You think I'm lying just to impress you, is that it, Leigh?"

"I didn't say you were lying."

"What did you say?"

"I just said that it sounds like maybe you made it up. I didn't say you did make it up." She was backing off now, but I saw my father's eyes narrow as he watched her, and I knew he wasn't through, wouldn't be through until he'd finished it his way, the way it always got finished--with a fight.

"Look, Dad, I put potatoes in my napkin again," I said, and I showed him, but I was in his blind spot.

"So, Leigh, you think I'm so stupid I have to make things up?"

"No, Dad. I didn't say that."

"I'll tell you what stupid is, Leigh. Stupid is the kind of trash you hang out with at that Blue Springs. Stupid is wasting your time in school while you fill your head with daydreaming and nastiness. You're stupid, Leigh." He pointed at her. "You."

"I am not stupid."

"Come here," my father said, and rose from his chair. My heartbeat quickened.

"What for?" asked Leigh.

"Come here, goddammit. Come with me."

"Where?" She still hadn't moved.

"I told you to come here, and I mean it. Get up and come here."

"I already said I was sorry."

"I just want to make a little point." His volume crept upward. "Are you going to come here or do I have to pull you from that chair by your hair?" Then, in a calmer, quieter voice, "I just want to show you something. Come with me."

"But Daddy, I don't want to," whispered Leigh, who was nervous now, and twisting her hair around her fingers.

My father loped purposefully toward her. Leigh sprang from her chair and backed herself against the wall. "All right, all right." She held her hands up. "I'm coming."

"We'll be right back," my father said to me as he grabbed the keys to his truck off the TV."

"But where are you going?"

He gave Leigh a little push to get her going. As the two of them headed for the door, Leigh looked back at me with a fearful expression. My father pushed her again, and said, "The library."

They were back 20 minutes later. He had been right, of course. It was right there, in the book of world records—underwater breath-holding: six minutes and 29.8 seconds. I guess he rubbed her nose in it because Leigh came in the house red-eyed, arms folded across her chest as she ran sniveling to her room. My father didn't come inside. I saw him through the sliding glass door. He was down at the lake, standing on the retaining wall, looking for...what? The reflection of the moon? A mermaid of his own? My mother? What would he say if I told him she wasn't there anymore, that she swam with the fake mermaids at Weeki Wachee Springs, and was trying to come back to us? My father sat down then, and rested his face in his hands. I caught my breath and held it, silently ticking off the seconds as I watched his shoulders heave.

You are made of water. When you hold a conch shell to an ear and listen to the ocean trapped for all eternity within it, you are stirred beyond the simplicity of the experience because you recognize, on a level as basic as instinct, that the sound you hear is your own heart roaring within you. Breathe in, breathe out. It is all you need to know.

I slipped from the house. No one heard me; I was sure they were still asleep. The moon hung on even as dawn broke, and it lit my path to the lake. Armed with my mother's instructions, I'd never felt so confident.

I half expected the water to be cold, but it was as warm as my bath. I thought I might dissolve in it, as easily as a sugar cube disappears with a stir. I floated on my back for awhile, watching the sky go from pink to blue. When I was ready, I curled myself into a ball, rolled face down in the water, and blew the air from my lungs.

I sank to a sitting position on the lake bottom. I counted. One, one-thousand; two, one-thousand; three, one-thousand...

I drew water into my lungs.

I did it slowly, and intentionally, and with my eyes wide open.

My months of practice prepared me for the clogging sensation which occurred as the water traveled up my nasal passages, but the pressure behind my eyes was a surprise. My body convulsed, but my brain was steady.

Where was the bottom of the lake? I wanted the bottom.

My eyes stopped perceiving light, even though they were open, and in the involuntary physical panic that consumed me, I thought of Pamela's camera.

My eyes are out of film, I thought, as my head hit hard on the lawn.

I felt pressure on my chest, heard the faint swell of a voice. Hands on my face.

Another convulsion. My eyes flew open, or maybe they were already open and resumed functioning. I vomited. Someone worked me as if I were a rag doll.

Momma?

I let him.

Sounds came from me I never heard before. The horizon lay back down and a shadow came between me and the sky. I sought out eyes, and found green.

"I'm out of film," I said, but my father didn't answer. He lifted me in his arms, and I wondered if I was flying.

Irene Ziegler was a Henry Hoyns fellow in creative writing at the University of Virginia, and a recipient of an individual artist fellowship in fiction from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Her short stories have been published in several literary magazines. Irene is the author of a one-woman play, RULES OF THE LAKE, which won the Mary Roberts Rinehart award for drama. She makes her living in Richmond, VA as a writer and actor, and plays mostly evil people on stage, TV, and film. She is a mom and an excellent parallel parker.