A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories

The men bent half down in wonder.

Her face was white sand sculpture, with a few water drops shimmering on it like summer rain upon a cream-colored rose. Her face was that moon which when seen by day is pale and unbelievable in the blue sky. It was milk-marble veined with faint violet in the temples. The eyelids, closed down upon the eyes, were powdered with a faint water color, as if the eyes beneath gazed through the fragile tissue of the lids and saw them standing there above her, looking down and looking down. The mouth was a pale flushed sea-rose, full and closed upon itself. And her neck was slender and white and her breasts were small and white, now covered, uncovered, covered, uncovered in the flow of water, the ebb of water, the flow, the ebb, the flow. And the breasts were flushed at their tips, and her body was startlingly white, almost an illumination, a white-green lightning against the sand. And as the water shifted her, her skin glinted like the surface of a pearl.

The lower half of her body changed itself from white to very pale blue, from very pale blue to pale green, from pale green to emerald green, to moss and lime green, to scintillas and sequins all dark green, all flowing away in a fount, a curve, a rush of light and dark, to end in a lacy fan, a spread of foam and jewel on the sand. The two halves of this creature were so joined as to reveal no point of fusion where pearl woman, woman of a whiteness made of cream-water and clear sky merged with that half which belonged to the amphibious slide and rush of current that came up on the shore and shelved down the shore, tugging its half toward its proper home. The woman was the sea, and the sea was woman. There was no flaw or seam, no wrinkle or stitch; the illusion, if illusion it was, held perfectly together and the blood from one moved into and through and mingled with what must have been the ice waters of the other.

“I wanted to run get help.” The first boy seemed not to want to raise his voice. “But Skip said she was dead and there’s no help for that. Is she?”

“She was never alive,” said Chico. “Sure,” he went on, feeling their eyes on him suddenly. “It’s something left over from a movie studio. Liquid rubber skinned over a steel frame. A prop, a dummy.”

“Oh, no, it’s real!”

“We’ll find a label somewhere,” said Chico. “Here.”

“Don’t!” cried the first boy.

“Hell.” Chico touched the body to turn it, and stopped. He knelt there, his face changing.

“What’s the matter?” asked Tom.

Chico took his hand away and looked at it. “I was wrong.” His voice faded.

Tom took the woman’s wrist. “There’s a pulse.”

“You’re feeling your own heartbeat.”

“I just don’t know … maybe … maybe …”

The woman was there and her upper body was all moon pearl and tidal cream and her lower body all slithering ancient green-black coins that slid upon themselves in the shift of wind and water.

“There’s a trick somewhere!” cried Chico, suddenly.

“No. No!” Just as suddenly Tom burst out in laughter. “No trick! My God, my God, I feel great! I haven’t felt so great since I was a kid!”

They walked slowly around her. A wave touched her white hand so the fingers faintly softly waved. The gesture was that of someone asking for another and another wave to come in and lift the fingers and then the wrist and then the arm and then the head and finally the body and take all of them together back down out to sea.

“Tom.” Chico’s mouth opened and closed. “Why don’t you go get our truck?”

Tom didn’t move.

“You hear me?” said Chico.

“Yes, but—”

“But what? We could sell this somewhere, I don’t know—the university, that aquarium at Seal Beach or … well, hell, why couldn’t we just set up a place? Look.” He shook Tom’s arm. “Drive to the pier. Buy us three hundred pounds of chipped ice. When you take anything out of the water you need ice, don’t you?”

“I never thought.”

“Think about it! Get moving!”

“I don’t know, Chico.”

“What you mean? She’s real, isn’t she?” He turned to the boys. “You say she’s real, don’t you? Well, then, what are we waiting for?”

“Chico,” said Tom. “You better go get the ice yourself.”

“Someone’s got to stay and make sure she don’t go back out with the tide!”

“Chico,” said Tom. “I don’t know how to explain. I don’t want to get that ice for you.”