Chamomile Flower
By Noelle Shoemate
At the edge of the bay, my toes welcome the gentle lapping of the water. I hold my gold strappy dancing shoes in one hand as my eyes land on the one clear, bright star that seems to belong to me alone. I have a wish that burns inside me, shorting out some important teenage circuits, making the party unbearable. If I were in a John Hughes movie, namely Sixteen Candles, I’d shout out into the night sky my desire. I shake my head at the impossibility of teleportation and turn back to the tent.
Two years ago, my grandmother leaned to whisper in my ear, “Someday soon, you’ll get the chance for a wish. Choose wisely.” Immediately, I asked her what she meant, as my grandmother, Elita, was prone to wild swings of both proclamations and temperaments, but she just smiled a little smile. I kept pushing her for answers, as her comment was too cryptic to decipher on my own. Instead, she asked me to reach into her nightstand and pull out one of the countless bottles of foot creams stored inside.
“Be a doll and massage my feet,” she said. My grandmother always complained that her feet hurt. In the mornings. In the afternoons. And especially in the evenings. The cream had chamomile flowers mixed with a black tar substance that smelled like seaweed. My hands glided over the arch of her foot, and my fingers massaged the areas of her feet that caused her the most physical discomfort, between each toe.
“Dig deeper,” she said, even though my small hands could offer a limited amount of force. I was not uncomfortable touching her feet, despite the fact that most girls my age thought feet were sweaty and dirty, better left to the care of a nail technician. While I continued kneading between each toe, I thought myself lucky that my grandmother trusted me to see her feet. She never let anyone see her feet up close; the story goes a former lover used to ask that she keep her socks on in bed. After I finished with the massage, she tapped me on the nose (something she would do when she wanted me to pay especially close attention) and said, “Don’t be wasteful of your one wish.” Then she fished a caramel out of her purse and worked it around and around her back teeth, rendering her mute.
Across the street from her house was a bay, which she spent hours jumping into, getting lost under its brackish color. Weather never affected her willingness to swim. Her only reservation was if other people were around. She was self-conscious. Ultimately, free diving claimed her at the age of eighty-two. My mother and I saw her jump off the embankment, never to return. After three days of watching rescue divers submerge under the water, and pop up again like seals, she was pronounced dead. I am still haunted by the susurrus of the police tape being tossed around by the wind.
I survey my surroundings: the fairy lights that litter the trees, the rhythmic thump thump of the bass. I almost want to be careless and waste my lone wish on knowing how to dance, but I’m afraid of using up my wish for when something comes along that is inevitably more important. Inside the tent, I test myself with guessing how many names I know, since this is a graduation party from Barrington Prep Academy, and my friend Amy and I are the only sophomores in attendance. The one hundred or so adults reach a level of glamour that the younger generation can’t pull off. Everyone is dressed in party finery, but the older women channel The Great Gatsby splendor with bright peacock blue and aubergine dresses that swirl in time to the beat. Yards of real diamonds encircle their wrists and necks. Men check their gold watches, while I have to remind myself that this is not 1922. Everyone younger than eighteen looks like they are going to a costume party. The girls keep pulling down their too-short dresses and adjust their overly padded bras. The boys have tried to match the exuberance of their dates and wear too much cologne, sport slicked-back hair, and have rolled up their dressy shirtsleeves that remind me of old-timey gangsters. I have managed to capture neither the glamour of the older women nor the slutty look of the other girls. My pink dress looks wrong. It hugs too loosely at the hips, further exaggerating my lack of curves, and the bodice all but announces I am an A cup at best.
An hour has gone by, and I am ready to go home. I think what a mistake this was—agreeing to come to a party when today is my birthday, and I would rather be dulling my senses with sugar and fat. My birthday used to be my favorite day of the year. Ever since I was old enough to talk, my grandmother would bake a cake of my choosing. She should have gone to pastry school because she could emulate many cakes from either magazines or television shows. I spent the remaining 364 days of the year trying to find the perfect inspiration for my cake. When I was six years old, I asked for a zoo theme; she fashioned the entire three-tier cake herself and then molded twenty animals out of fondant icing. When it came time to cut the cake, I stood in front of it and refused to have the knife destroy any of the creatures. I worried that my grandmother would be annoyed after spending so much time designing zebras, bears, and an owl. Instead, she said, “It’s your cake, and you can do with it what you like.” After the party ended, she wrapped the cake up and placed it in her chef-style, walk-in freezer so I could visit the sugary zoo whenever I liked. If my grandmother were still alive, I might ask her to design a ballerina who is standing on pointe. The ballet shoes would be the emphasis of the design, dyed extra bright pink.
I search for my friend Amy, who insisted on dragging me since her cousin Matthew is hosting the party. She asks me to stand on the side of the tent so that she might flirt with the bartender for an exchange of two whiskey and cokes. I press my body away from the dance floor, shoulders rolled inward, in hopes that if I take up less space no one will see me, but realistically I know people always see me since I am a gawky six feet. I hope that no one asks me to dance. And yet, the contradiction delights me because I know how embarrassing it will be if no one asks me. Matthew, with his boy-band lips, asks me to dance. I watch and notice he has no awkward moves—his arm effortlessly grabs mine as the heat of his palm presses into my lower back, raising all of the baby hairs on my forearms. I look into his eyes and wonder why he would bother with me, as there are far prettier girls showcasing more flesh and almost certainly knowing how to dance.
I try to remember the way Amy taught me how to dance last week. She stood me in front of her bedroom mirror and said, “It’s all in the hips, babe.” Every beat I missed caused her to playfully swat my hips. “Do it this way,” she said, manually gyrating my hips. No luck. Every time I heard the pull of the bass, my hips would try to grab purchase and swivel off course.
“It’s my feet,” I insisted, as she blew a large cinnamon-flavored bubble. I wondered what it would be like if the tacky contours of the bubble could entrap us, and I could be cocooned in the sugary confines for good. Floating would work much better for me. No wondering at correct foot placement, no occasional numbness on my heels.
With Amy’s cousin, I think this will be different, but as soon as he half-spins me around, the sensation of late, thousands of knives, pierces each part of my foot, especially my toes. He twirls me around, and much to my horror, I step on his foot with my stiletto heel. Hard. While he bends down to massage his foot, my cheeks bloom with shame. Not wanting to make a further scene, I mouth, “I’ll be right back.”
The ladies’ room around the corner from the bar should have said, “Alexa” as I always find a restroom—it stands in as my sanctuary when I need a place to collect my thoughts. I try and lock the bathroom door, but the lock spins around listlessly, the cold stinging my palm. Somehow, the restroom understands me: the antiseptic smell of the pine cleaner, which is the perfect concealer for the parts of me that I want hidden, and the loud buzz of the automatic hand dryer that disrupts any of my repetitive thoughts. The mirror reflects the panic in my wild eyes. I give myself a fair look: the same cerulean blue eyes as my grandmother, and her forehead with the pronounced widow’s peak, which she said would make my face look interesting when I got older. The one thing we shared that embarrassed me was our webbed feet. I pull my foot out of my gold shoe and hold it up under the light. Remarkable really, as where the pinkie and the fourth toe were always fused—tiny webbings holding them together—there is a beginning of new intricate webbings surrounding my middle toe, traversing toward my second toe. Doctors have always diagnosed my webbings as an overgrowth of skin. I disagree. To me, they seem like an overgrowth of grief. When my grandmother was pronounced dead, I too noticed the beginning of the webbings. Supposedly, this skin condition skips generations.
My grandmother never lied to me, which was why I never doubted her truthfulness regarding the wish. When I was thirteen years old, I stayed over at her house for a week while my parents went on vacation. For my birthday present, she promised that I could get my ears pierced at the cheap jewelry store, Claire’s. I had to pinkie swear that I wouldn’t tell my mother, as she didn’t approve. While the ear piercer was numbing my earlobe with an ice cube, I leaned over to my grandmother and asked if it would hurt. “You bet, but worth it,” she said, while squeezing my shoulder. She lifted up her mounds of hair and showed me her small, gold earrings—I am ashamed to say that I never noticed her ears were pierced.
While I am earnestly trying to refasten my shoe, I get a text from Amy: Where r u? with a sad emoji face. When Amy and I were seven years old, we had spelling hour every Thursday with Mrs. Clarkson. One day, the class was told that the following day, a final spelling test would be administered in order to determine our spelling ranking—the highest performers would be invited to join the spelling bee, which would meet after school. I was a bad speller; Amy was not. It was predicted that Amy would be one of the highest spellers. When we received our scores, it showed Amy’s matched mine. When I asked her what happened, she said, “Spelling bee club wouldn’t be fun without you.”
I place the phone back in my sparkly purse and focus on refastening my shoe, but it burns the newer webbings, stunning me with pain.
“Chamomile flower will help with that.” Startled that another person has possibly witnessed my deformed foot, I bolt upright. “Jumpy,” she says, but with a voice like someone who has been gargling with mouthwash and forgot to spit some of it out. I turn around and am greeted by a woman with the same piercing eyes as my own, except she smells like low tide. “Here you go, dearie,” she says, handing over my shoe, and when our hands brush together, I notice how hers feels strangely wet, even though she had no chance to wash them since she arrived in the ladies’ room.
I stare and watch her eyes track my face as if she is hunting me. It is clear she is very old, and yet there are no lines on her face. There is the sense that time both stops and accelerates. I try and push my way past her, but her wet hands press gently on to my shoulders. I am both surprised and unnerved by her strength, with her age being at least five times greater than my sixteen years. I motion with my finger to the door that I am leaving, but her words stop me: “Alexa, I know your grandmother.”
My head snaps back, as she clearly used the present word know instead of the word knew.
“If you really knew my grandmother, then you might recall her death,” I say, staring closer at her, noticing her saline smell intensifying.
She ignores my comment, so I ask her how she really knew my grandmother, my hand poised on the door, which now refuses to open. “Cooking partners,” she says, smiling with very pointy teeth. I don’t believe her, and yet the fact she knew my name, knew that my grandmother loved cooking, endears me toward her. She unzips her crocodile purse and offers me a baggie filled with dried seaweed. I refuse. “Suit yourself,” she says, “but you’ll need your strength where I am taking you. And my name is Illyrian,” she says.
As if I am under a period of enchantment, I follow this woman, the woman with the oddest of names, who pivots her heel every time her toes make contact with the earth. Like mine. She wraps her arm around my back, and I notice again that her saline smell intensifies, swirling around me. “You’ll get used to the smell, dearie,” she says as if able to access my thoughts. My mind. I stifle a laugh as I imagine the picture we make: one young, one old, but twinning nevertheless as each step on the ground pierces our feet like glass. And so we hobble along like trolls. She leads me down the embankment, away from the party. “Put this on. We’re going swimming in the bay,” she says. She makes a big show of snapping her purse shut, and then she hands me an orange snorkel and its accompanying mask. Before I realize, a laugh has made my way past my diaphragm and is threatening to pour from my lips. I don’t intend to be rude, but I laugh like I have never laughed before, including all spaces in me so that the laugh almost hurts. She tells me that the bay is less unpredictable than the ocean, and therefore is perfect for my introduction.
“Introduction?”
“Laugh all you want,” says Illyrian, “but I will be in so much trouble if you refuse to wear it.” I snap on my mask, somehow immune to the madness of my evening, and bite the rubber snorkel bit between my teeth. I don’t stop to ask why she doesn’t need a mask, a snorkel. It never crosses my mind. She motions for me to sit and lovingly unbuckles the clasp of my shoe.
“I will push your head under the water; don’t be alarmed. Otherwise, you might be afraid to go under with the snorkel!” I shrug my shoulders, knowing already how to swim. What I always remember about water is that it calms the pain in my feet.
Like someone daring, I allow the water to tongue at my toes and weigh down the sequins on my dress.
“Don’t be nervous, service,” I hear as my shoulders and neck have been pushed under, not exactly forcefully, but with a certain amount of unexpected alacrity and authority for someone of her age. I try to speak, but the rubber snorkel bit proves an impossibility. Instead, I allow Illyrian to clasp my hand in hers and guide me to an area in the bay that abruptly drops down another ten feet. I know that I should be afraid, but instead am profoundly aware of the impossibility that I am breathing with the guidance of the snorkel, as water has already flooded the cavity.
“Wait here,” she says, knowing I wouldn’t dare move around alone.
Before I can do reality-based testing, I see the shadow of another, moving behind Illyrian, who gently clasps a phosphorescent fish in her hand, so it acts as a natural night-light. The shadows play across both women, who appear to be the same age. Both of them have giant widow’s peaks and those piercing blue eyes. One of them is my grandmother.
“Grandma?” I say to the other one; even though the water has blurred her features, there is no mistaking the fact that this creature of sorts is really my grandmother.
“I see you’ve met my friend Illyrian, my dearest friend. First, though, we feast then talk,” she says to me. In unison, they both raise their giant widow-peaked foreheads and smash them down on crabs. In that moment, I am not sure if I am more shocked at the prospect of my supposedly dead grandmother chatting with me under the water or the fact that she always espoused perfect decorum, particularly table manners.
While Illyrian tears into the crab, sucking up cartilage and marrow, getting flecks of crab stuck to her lips, my grandmother pulls me into her with a hug. There is the same saline smell as with Illyrian.
“I’ve missed you,” she says.
My grandmother always loved to feed me, fatten me up with whatever she was cooking for Sunday lunch, so I agree to take a few bites of their raw crab first before pestering her for explanations. Tears pour from my eyes, but in an unsatisfying way, as the current whisks them away. I ask her what she is, how this is possible.
“Mermaid?” I say after tearing off a few bites.
She responds with a tsk, which sounds more like she is blowing bubbles.
“Why does everything need a label? Do you see a fin? Where’s my clamshells?” she asks.
I look at her with even closer attention and see her deep, grooved lines near her mouth, her ravaged skin.
“So, this is like a collective?” I say.
“Grimm brothers ruined everything,” my grandmother says. “Sometimes, things are just the way they are. I fit in here. Illyrian fits in here. And so do the rest who are too shy to say hello. End of the story.”
Illyrian swims over from the side of the kelp forest and entwines her arm with my grandmother’s. My grandmother gently pulls back Illyrian’s hair and shows me the same pierced gold balls as my grandmother’s. Both smile at each other, presumably at the memory they share.
“You aren’t the only one to have a treasured best friend,” says my grandmother. My grandmother leans closer to me and says, “You may recall that I got my ears pierced with a friend, but I never told you with who or the reason why. Well, it was Illyrian. Both of us were new to town our junior year of high school and very quickly became friends—we never made friends with anyone else in school. Illyrian convinced me that we needed to seal our status as outsiders by getting our ears pierced. Neither of our parents consented, so we did it the old-fashioned way: two ice cubes, a needle, and a few sips of vodka. We promised that we would never take the gold balls out ever, even if a handsome man tempted us with finer gold. Or diamonds.”
I notice how beautiful my grandmother’s feet look in the water, the webbing stretching against the currents, her happiness. As if my grandmother can read my mind, she says, “Pain-free tootsies,” while wiggling her toes. I look down at my feet and notice for the first time that I can bend and articulate my feet, without the unnecessary worry of pain flooding my heels, my toes.
“Fancy a spin?” she asks as she threads her arm through mine and guides me around, taking me to deeper layers of the bay. Lower and lower, we descend. When we get to a spot where I think my lungs will explode, she makes a cross with her hands so that we stop.
She asks if she can braid my hair, something I was always too impatient to let her do when I had the chance. Since I believe I have all the time in the world, I happily let her twine a piece of seaweed through the ends.
“Penny for your thoughts?” she asks.
“How did you find me?”
“Didn’t think I would miss your sixteenth birthday, did you?”
“I think my wish should be to stay here with you.”
“Don’t be foolish,” she says, clasping my hair around her finger. “Now is for the above-water living.”
I explain how my feet hurt all the time, and maybe she would be less lonely at her age with me here. And yet she dismisses my complaints with a snort and references the before-mentioned benefits of chamomile tea.
“I never really fit in above anyway,” I say.
She tells me no one really does, that understanding the existential angst is the real secret to living. I ask her the inevitable question of why she is living here then. I challenge her to present me with a fair answer and ask her if she would consider coming back up with me.
“No. Eighty-two years I gave to the earth. Now it’s your turn,” she says. Then she tells me she can’t leave Illyrian—they made a pact to be together when things were no longer fun up above.
I shake my head no, but she tells me that I am not welcome to come and join her until I have promised her two things.
“Anything,” I say.
She tells me that I have to learn how to dance, even if I’m understandably terrible, and fall in love. If I can succeed in both of these, and still find the prospect of land dwelling a burden, then yes, I am free to join both my grandmother and Illyrian.
“Maybe I could meet someone here?”
She then tells me the only choice for my age group would be clam-faced Allen, which she doesn’t recommend. Plus, she asks how I could give up my mother or my friend Amy.
“Selfish,” she says.
She presses her saline-stink lips on my forehead and pushes me up up up, this time without the use of the snorkel either. I try to pull her wrist—I am not ready to say goodbye—but she is stronger than I. All I succeed in doing is leaving her with a few unfortunate scratches. Illyrian gently untangles my grandmother and me, wedging herself between us, arms out like a sentry.
I twist my head as far as it will go and burn my grandmother’s face into my retina. I hear the imaginary click of a camera as I capture her giant forehead, her pointy-toothed smile, and the wildness of her beauty.
The ascent upward lodges water down my throat so when I crest through the surface of the bay, I am already coughing. I pray no one is there, preferring to make my entrance unnoticed, despite the fact that I will be drenched and that there are crab bits stuck in my teeth. As I crawl out of the water, wondering how to characterize my experience, I hear, “Night swim, amazing.”
I look up into Amy’s cousin’s face and think for the first time: Maybe this wish can wait just a little longer. He offers me his hand, and I am delighted about how natural it feels, almost as if the architecture of our palms’ heart line, which is indicative of one’s romantic future, are aligned. Last year for Amy’s and my fifteenth birthdays (we are born two days apart), we decided to visit a fortune-teller. While neither of us put much faith in the nonsense of a turban-wearing woman with a crystal ball, we hoped that we might get lucky and meet a genuine psychic, someone who could offer us ways to maneuver around life’s obstacles. When it was my turn, I rotated my palm upward, and the fortune-teller traced over the heart line again and again. She kept repeating the word interesting and pretended she didn’t understand my question about what was so interesting. After we left the fortune-teller’s storefront, Amy said, sotto voce, “Lots of lovers!”
“My little mermaid,” he says jokingly, forcing my thoughts to the here and now, even though they tend to get stuck in the past. Despite the fact that the water has clumped my hair into Medusa snakes, and my dress is leaving trails of water, I feel almost beautiful, in a baptismal way. He leads me to the party with a gentle touch, suggesting that I might break, leading me to forget we are the same height.
“Alexa!” I turn as I hear my name being called and see Amy standing with her palms turned up. She stands still, and then mouths the word interesting.
THE END