pat willard

In our house, we think of the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade as an official summer holiday. It follows Memorial Day, precedes the Fourth of July–and has its own hard-and-fast rituals. We get off the subway at Coney Island by Noon, watch the parade, have a couple of hot dogs and too many cheese fries, attend a couple rounds of the Side Show, get our fortunes read, scream a lot on the Cyclone, then wander back home, spent in all possible ways, but smiling because summer is officially here. So, when my thirty-sixth birthday began to peek over the horizon, it seemed natural to think that the best way to greet it would to become a mermaid and march down Surf Avenue in a black Wonderbra and a fish tail.

Or rather, ride. I wanted a float, something foamy. I also wanted a school of mermaids with me. I am no beauty queen; despite the Wonderbra (which seemed necessary for flat-chested mermaids) and a very skinny tail, I am somewhat shy. I was also hoping for a couple of mermen but here’s what happened: the first two women I asked immediately–and enthuastically–shouted yes; all the men, from fairly out-there artist types to a usually game brother, acted as if I was absurd–and that was their most charitable assessment of my idea. For the record, I didn’t even approach my husband. He was supportive, even in the face of some ill-disguised shock on the part of a few friends who wondered aloud why he was even letting me do this, an action he never even considered undertaking (which is why I love him after all these years). He’s just not the merman type. Instead, he designated himself the float’s photographer. My brother-in-law, who was in the Coast Guard at the time, was the only one who didn’t laugh at me. He generously lent me his small jeep to build the float on and said he’d drive it, so long as we came up with a disguise for him.

I sent in my mermaid float application, then began to build with a single-minded fervor that eventually usurped almost every thing else in my life. Most of my workdays were consumed with the preparations; I spent perhaps 2 hours on proper office work, and the rest of the day on mermaid affairs. Bolts of iridescent, scaley-printed stretch material and sea-green tulle festooned my office. I tapped colleagues for their building and design expertises or pretended I was going out to meetings but, instead, headed for Canal or Bridge Street to find wavey foam sheets and multi-colored sequences.

I was obsessed, I admit that. But it all seemed necessary, having a little to do with aging. Okay, aging had a lot to do with becoming a mermaid. It was important to me to go bravely into this time of life when most women start to feel a bit marginal. I didn’t look much at the wrinkles beginning to shoot up around my eyes; gray hair was nothing new, but I did know I was not as desirable a package as I was in my twenties and thirties. It bothered me a little–and I was bothered that it bothered me at all. A bunch of slightly blowsy mermaids, wagging their tails at the notion of being over the hill, seemed to me to be the best way to deal with my frankly ambiguous response to this upcoming birthday.

The flip side, of course, was knowing that, like the men I had asked to be mermen, there was no way I would have even considered being in the parade at an earlier age. My innate shyness had only a little to do with it. Mostly it was my strong, youthful, need to be taken seriously. Come to think of it, I don’t think it was the approaching birth date that changed my outlook as much as it was the accumulation of years–of babies and bosses and finally finding a route that navigates marriage. At some point I said to myself, “Who cares,” then went out in search of wire fins.

And in the end, I got exactly what I wanted. A week before the parade, we had dinner at a newly married friend’s house. When we told the couple about the parade, the wife immediately pleaded to join us; after finishing another bottle of wine her husband, a philosophy professor at New York University, agreed to be our merman. The week proceeded in a fury of preparations. My brother-in-law fixed a platform onto the back of his jeep. We stabled on chicken wire, foam and netting in swirling waves. The last of the mermaid tails were sewn and a tiny little matching brief was constructed for the professor. He gasped, tried to squirm out of his commitment but was too much enamored of his wife. We told him we’d fix it up so no one would recognized him.

We painted him and my brother-in-law a Mediterranean blue. In the field at Steeplechase Park, we wiggled into our tails and adjusted our Wonderbras. All around us other floats were being prepared–cave-mermaids, rubber octopuses, a burly Neptune in a feathered head-dress. Gawkers took our photographs while Al, my youngest son, his face painted blue, too, squirted the crowd with a very full water bazooka. The signal went out for the floats to get in line. We hopped into the waves; the professor stood behind us with a surf board, wearing his little iridescent bikini brief and a gold crown, all the while worrying about students seeing him and never being able to teach again. We gave him a beer and told him to get a grip. Then we were off, bumping down Surf Avenue with my husband snapping pictures of us blowing kisses, throwing glitter, laughing our heads off in the bright hot sun of a glorious summer day.