by Amelia Bird

This piece was originally published in The Southern Review, Spring 2009. You can find this issue here. Republished with permission from the author.

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1.

Strings in casings drew up the curtains. Bubbles spewed from the bases of the sills on the other side of the glass, creating an effervescence that obscured everything. A boy searched through the bubbles. He heard a tinkling sound, lower an octave, which became a sort of music accompanied by a swishy hiss. The bubbles slowed their pouring. Behind them: a mermaid, hovering in the space between the distant grotto walls of the deep blue spring. She swam toward the audience, her head up, smiling, pushing the water behind her with her fin, and scooping with her arms. Her golden tail flared at the tip. Long hair floated around her face in the raucous slow motion of underwater. She paused and angled her tail to one side. With a few fingers, she touched her mouth and blew a bubbly kiss, scattering the shiny bubbles with a sweep of her arm. They rose quaking, tiny feathers in opposite gravity.

The boy’s grandmother thought to nudge him playfully at the sight of that kiss, but when she looked down at him, she saw a spell she couldn’t bring herself to break. Eric sat completely still, leaning forward slightly. His feet hung limply and his eyes had grown wide. They glistened with the blue light of underwater. Something in him had shifted, a channel dug and the water diverted.

2.

Shortly after going to the mermaid show at Weeki Wachee Springs for the first time, five-year-old Eric Ducharme searched under his parents’ sink for garbage bags. He found a box, pulled out a handful, and took the bags to his room along with some scissors, masking tape, and a hot-glue gun. He sat on the floor, wrapped the garbage bags around his legs, and glued the bags together. The glue took too long to dry, so he grabbed the silver tape and wound it tightly around his legs. He taped the garbage bags over his feet and shredded the bottoms. The tatters swished as he scooted across the living room floor and the kitchen tile toward the screen door that opened to the pool.

A few weeks later, after two more trips to see the mermaid turn slow, arm­ propelled circles while holding an air hose between her teeth, Eric’s grandmother discovered him in her closet, tying one of her old, silky nightgowns around his ankles. She took him to Jo-Ann Fabrics.

The next day, yards of straight, satiny, bluish silver material covered the liv­ing room floor. Eric sat on it. He traced the shape of his legs onto the fabric. He estimated the space the fins would take, put them on, and sketched around their rubbery edges with chalk. He cut out the tail shape in double and asked his grandmother to sew it up for him. Inverted, it was his first mermaid tail. Nearly a thousand mermaid tails later, his parents and grandmother are proud of the name he has made for himself: Eric Ducharme, the Mertailor.

3.

How I fit into this has something to do with how it feels to be underwater in the rain. When I was a little girl and the lake level was high and the water clear—a combination of factors that didn’t always coincide—I swam as often as I could. Most of my time in the water was spent completely submerged. I’d settle into the sandy bottom and fan upward to keep my body down. The water felt warm compared to the air. All pressure slipped away, leaving only the slight sensation of hands pushing on my eardrums. Rain droplets on the lake surface made a frosted ceiling of light. The blurry, muffled underwater silence fizzed into a high, cottony hiss, a tssssss, a light twinkling of sound. The blub of exhales turning into bubbles rose to meet the diamonds mottling the water’s surface, now my ceiling.

I never learned to scuba dive, never swam competitively, never allowed my relationship with water to be anything more technical than held breath, the pills on the bottom of my hand-me-down swimsuit pressing into the sand, and the abso­lute quiet to be found there. The tails came when I was much older, in my twenties, but felt like an attempt to reconnect to that notion of escape—the simplicity of being an animal in a place, a feeling I swam to with a spiraling of knees and flipper.

I found Eric Ducharme when my first tail was under construction and I was tooling around the Internet looking at examples. In him, I saw another person working to extend that feeling of escape you find underwater—a person doing what I’d done as a child, but doing it on a much larger scale.

4.

Over the entrance of Weeki Wachee towers a statue: the pale white figures of two women performing an adagio. One woman balances the other in the air, a few fingers pressed to the small of her back. The woman on top arches her spine, one knee high in the sky, her arms extended, as if falling into a backbend. Her hair flows stiffly. All is perfectly poised, down to the flippers on the women’s feet. In the time before the performers wore tails, the mermaids used to adopt this pose deep in the cave of the spring, drift up with the boil toward the surface.

Beneath this statue, Eric ran to the ticketing booth holding the silvery blue sack he’d sewn. He was going to swim in his homemade tail at the place where he had first seen a mermaid.

Buccaneer Bay — the water park portion of Weeki Wachee — looked then pretty much like it does today. A dock was anchored in the spring run that flowed past a wide beach of trucked-in sand dotted by umbrellas. Bright yellow water-slide chutes dumped kids with wedgies right into the spring water, water that’s seventy-four degrees year round.

While little boys Eric’s age dunked each other in the pale blue shallows and older boys stood on the dock or did cannonballs near the lifeguard, Eric sat on the sand of the swim area, his mermaid tail at his feet, and began inching the fabric up his legs. He had to lie back on the sand and lift his pelvis to wiggle the tail’s material up and over his swim trunks. As he smoothed it over his legs and started a fin-first, caterpillar crawl toward the water, a few of the boys in the shallows doubtlessly looked over at him. They might have giggled, but Eric didn’t notice. He was thinking the flippers could be more tightly bound by the tail’s material. Lowering himself into the water, he noted that he could see the shapes of his kneecaps through the wet fabric. Not good enough, he thought, having barely swum at all; I’ll have to make another one.

5.

Today, Eric Ducharme is one of the top mermaid-tail makers in the country, maybe the world. It’s a small industry, accessible by Google search and mail order. There are a few tail-makers who are well known. They all have opinions about each other’s work. Eric’s one of the big ones. And he is only seventeen.

His quiet state is louder than most people’s. He ticks every now and then, looks around, appears anxious. His deep and close-set blue eyes are sharp but skittish. He always needs to be doing something with his hands. Now and then, he sniffs compulsively.

I asked him, over lunch at a seafood restaurant, if he dreams about being un­derwater. He considered the question a long time before answering. “Probably,” he finally said. “Yeah.” He turned his attention back to his picked-over chicken fingers. He doesn’t eat seafood.

“I’m living my dream at such a young age,” he had told me earlier over the phone. “I have just always been really, really creative and driven.” He continued, “Just so you know, I’m not working for Weeki anymore.”

Eric had been doing what he’d waited his whole life to do: perform for Weeki Wachee, the place that had started his obsession, his business, his identity. He swam in the shows as Prince Eric, tailless, though the mermaids wore his tails. I asked how long he’d worked for Weeki.

“About six months,” he replied. “But I quit last week because … well, it’s like I told them all the time: how can you have mermaids without mermen? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

6.

Weeki Wachee is a tourist trap; Weeki Wachee is a treasure trove. Weeki Wachee: tossed up or washed up or still going strong, kitschy before anyone thought to aim for kitsch. Best known by reporters and postcard collectors, Yankees and lovers of roadside curiosities, tourists and teenaged girls. Weeki Wachee, the underwater mountainscape. Weekiwachee—one word—in Muskogee, coming from “wekiwa” and “chee.” “Little Spring” or “Winding River” as named by the Seminole Indians. To the mermaids, just Weeki.

A large-magnitude spring, one hundred and twenty feet deep, Weeki Wachee pulls forth a flow strong enough to knock the mask off a snorkler, spilling the cool contents of the Floridan aquifer system into the sand hills of west peninsular Florida. The water is always warm. On cold mornings, stretch marks of fog tease the glassy surface. The spring pool is miraculously blue. In the 1930s, freshwater-spring enthusiasts claimed it to be the clearest water in the state, so clear you could drop a coin in, watch it sink a hundred feet, and witness a puff of smoke as it struck the white sand bottom. Underwater slopes harbored rare, aquatic plants with leaves that tinted red, purple, and green when they waved in the current, reverberating through the blue.

In 1947, Newt Perry, a barrel-chested man known as “The Human Fish” dove into the water to scout for a location for his dream. Looking down the blue, cavernous hole through his mask, Perry had to remind himself that one couldn’t gasp underwater. After the Gulf Coast Highway was put in and a crane had hauled the old box springs and automobiles from the spring’s bottom, Perry built an underwater theater the size of a boxcar, tied weights to it, and sunk it. A sign was erected, a few girls from down the road taught to breathe pressurized air and eat bananas underwater, and Weeki Wachee became one of Florida’s few roadside attractions—the only thing going on for miles.

ABC bought the attraction in the 1960s and replaced the tiny, old theater with a million-dollar one that could seat five hundred people. The spring was walled in on all sides, glass tucked inside the walls to create a space for viewing, the view­ing space drained, trenches dug, pipes and lines buried, and cement poured for a parking lot. Today, the spring is developed on every side, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of homes and golf courses and the neighboring Disney World, which draws a crowd the size of a major university’s population every single day — com­petition so fierce the attraction in the spring water can barely stay afloat.

But the vision! The undiscovered world of performance in zero gravity! The can­vas of the spring water filled with water nymphs who can fly! The tails didn’t really get established until the 1970s, but it was always Weeki Wachee, home of the Aqua Belles, the Undines, the Aqua Maids, the Loreleis and their underwater boys, and the occasional sea turtle. Weeki Wachee, “The Only City of Live Mermaids,” the mermaid center of the free world, just a few blocks from Eric’s grandparents’ house.

7.

The first show Eric saw performed at Weeki Wachee is the only show to be performed in the underwater theater for the last fifteen years: The Little Mermaid. He’d already seen the Disney cartoon so many times that he had it memorized. Then he saw Splash, and it became his favorite because he prefers “realistic-looking tails.” All these pro­ductions share the root of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale. The show at Weeki Wachee, Disney’s cartoon, and Splash all have happy endings, but in Hans Christian Andersen’s telling of The Little Mermaid, the lovely, nubile mermaid doesn’t win the prince during her time on land with legs, and the prince cannot, in the end, breathe underwater and return with her to the underwater kingdom. Instead, the mermaid spends her last days on earth absolutely miserable. She weeps all the time. Every turn of foot feels like she’s stepped on a knife. Her last action on land is to perform mute, somber, I’m-about-to-die-and-turn-into-sea-foam dances for the prince and his new bride. She bleeds through her shoes. In the end, instead of simply dying, the little mermaid turns into a spirit of the air—part of neither world she has known and loved.

But all contemporary mermaid tales end happily. Ariel wins Prince Eric and a wedding is the finale. The same goes for Splash and the shows at Weeki Wachee. These stories seem to say that if you try for something purely and in earnest, it will all work out just as you wish.

8.

Eric took so quickly to Splash because the fish tail that Madison wore, the mermaid character played by Daryl Hannah, was so perfectly crafted. The tip of her wide, caudal fin shone with a ribbed transparency that eased into the vivid orange of Japanese koi. The back midline bristled with a fringy dorsal fin. Two quaint pectoral fins, like fish hands, came out from where her quadriceps were hidden. The orange scales melded into her belly skin.

During the making of the movie in the early 1980s, Thom Shouse, the foreman of the film’s tail-making crew, commonly known as the “Tail Man,” constructed the tail out of Plexiglas and Skinflex, a urethane compound that was new on the market and had been used primarily to make prosthetic limbs. That tail carried the screenplay and made visual the aquatic dreams of many people, not the least of whom was Hannah. The actress refused the option of a swimming double. She swam so fast in the tail that the underwater makeup artist and the three divers toting her scuba tanks had trouble keeping up with her.

Eric’s initial reaction to Splash was similar to many people’s reactions. Sort of a, How did they do that? The difference between Eric and most people is that his next thought was, How can I do that? He spent the next twelve years figuring it out.

9.

“I always have to have things match,” he told me. “I don’t know why; I just do.”

In his father’s garage, he squatted over a seaweed bra he had just painted the same color as his brand new, realistic tail—a tail to rival Shouse’s. We were about to drive to Rainbow Springs to try out the tail with Mermaid Abby, a friend of Eric’s from Weeki Wachee, but he had to heat-set the paint on the bra first. A scalding hair-dryer contraption purred in his hand.

Eric drives a blue Mustang with a chrome mermaid lounging near the taillights. When the bra was dry, we put the flippers and masks and everything in bags, and he lined the trunk of his car with thick plastic so it wouldn’t get wet from the tails.

10.

Eric’s grandmother gave her Kenmore sewing machine to him when he was eight years old, because, after making five tails for him, she figured it was high time he learned to sew the seams himself. Eric discovered that the zigzag stitch isn’t the only option for a strong and forgiving seam. Experience with stretch fabrics taught him how to predict how many centimeters a fabric will give. He learned the hard way that materials with sequins, tiny plastic mirrors, glued-on spangles, or lines of glitter make the sewing machine shudder and the thread break. He also saw how spangles and mirrors flake off in the water—bad for the design, bad for the fish.

Eric began searching out Lycra-spandex blends. He got really into faux velvet. He ordered bathing-suit liner in bulk. He trimmed the edges of the tails’ tips with scarving. He cut scuba fins to make the flippers resemble a dolphin’s. He pushed his Moto-Tool drill bit through lion’s-paw shells. He made casings for tubing to add structural support to the fins, creating a tail design he called “the triggerfish.” He aimed his industrial heat gun at thin, vinyl strips to make them curl like kelp in a current and painted them a shimmering green, pioneering what came to be known as “the seaweed bra.” He made tails that matched bra tops that matched jewelry. He began experimenting with neoprene.

11.

When he wasn’t at his machine or in elementary school, Eric was at Weeki Wachee. After months of begging, he convinced his parents to let him attend “Adventures Under the Spring,” Weeki Wachee’s mermaid summer camp. He was the only boy.

There, he met Barbara, a former mermaid. Barbara noticed Eric’s interest in the performances and got to know him because he was always at the park. As soon as he was scuba certified she offered to teach him how to breathe out of an air hose. He slept over at Barbara’s house—everyone calls it “Mermaid Mansion”—on the weekends. Between shows, he and Barbara swam together. She taught him tricks in a tail. She told him, “Eric, you can be a merman if you want to,” and he believed her.

The first tail Eric sold was Barbara’s doing. A fashion designer, Sara Dionne, who would later coauthor a book on Weeki Wachee, had been shooting interviews for a documentary on the park’s history. Sara wanted to know where she could get a few tails for a fundraiser for the film, so Barbara called Eric at his mother’s house. Soon, Sara was giving the measurements of her calf’s widths and inseams to nine-year-old Eric, who was trying to act professional.

Eric finished the tails with help in a little under a week. Twins Holly and Dolly, who had once worked at Weeki Wachee, wore the tails in the Coral Room, a bar in New York complete with a nine-thousand-gallon saltwater fish tank.

Eric’s business was launched. He made mermaid tails for Halloween. One black with a bone design, one blood red. He made tails for the Fourth of July with fireworks on them and red and green ones for Christmas. He made tails of different sizes to keep at the pool behind Barbara’s mermaid mansion. He wore a tail he made to his grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. He filled two bulk orders for Weeki Wachee Springs, making fabric tails for mermaids and former mermaids, altering many because the girls had lied about their waist sizes.

He made tails with zippers and tails with dorsal fins. He received an order for a tail made of long, shaggy fur.

“I don’t work with fur,” he replied.

He received orders for erotic tails—tails with holes in certain places, tails that covered a person’s head and shoulders—but he didn’t fill those orders. He received an order for a pink tail from the principal of a high school who had lost a bet with his students over the grades they would make on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. He made a tail for a star on American Idol. He made tails that were worn once for Glamour Shots, tails that never got wet. He made tails for little girls who had to be supervised when they swam near the deep end. He made tails for sexy ScubaRadio women to wear in a shark cage off the coast of Guadeloupe.

By the time he was fifteen years old, the website Eric had created and maintained—www.themertailor.com—came up first in a Yahoo search for “mermaid.” By the time he turned sixteen, he had sold more than six hundred tails.

12.

At the finale of The Little Mermaid show, the mermaids surface at the opening of the mermaid hole, which is the end of a sixty-foot-long submerged tube that connects the show’s dressing room with the spring’s cave. Eric, on the other hand, would exit the water and climb a stepladder onto the theater roof. After experi­encing the silence of being underwater for nearly an hour, he would suddenly be bombarded by the sound of squawking tropical birds from the bird show, screech­ing kids on the water slides, and yelling parents, and by the smell of pretzels and pizza and steaming pavement. He’d pick up a white, gauze shirt and button it as he walked across the roof toward the doors for the part of the day when he carried a mermaid to the photo-op area.

He would stand to the side of the low, wooden bench next to the mermaid while the crowd poured from the theater. His job was to smile and keep out of the photo­graphs—the same kinds of mermaid photographs he collected when he was a kid.

13.

When Eric was allowed to wear a tail at Weeki Wachee—that is, when the theater was empty—the tail he wore was a more ornate model than those the mermaids used at the time. It was deep blue velvet with silvery trails meandering along it like creeks. Diaphanous cloth hung at many angles from the tail fin, and as he moved to the beat, it followed a half step behind. The underwater speakers emitted a tinny version of the music. The treble trickled through the water to his ears.

“You want me to play the track again?” came a woman’s voice over the speakers. Since the installation of an underwater sound system in the 1970s, there had been no male announcers because their voices were too low to carry through the water.

Eric looked toward the blurry wall of windows and nodded.

In a tail, there are limits to what moves you can do. No arabesques, they taught him, no side leaps, no Shinkos. Pinwheels are out and so are marlins, and defi­nitely no adagios, and don’t even think about making anything up. In tails, rou­tines consist of back-kneed dolphins, swan dives, backflips. Straight legs in these moves, not much undulation for the family show; an arc of the spine and the arms push circles to rotate the whole body forward or back.

Eric had choreographed two routines—one set to One Republic’s ”Apologize” and another to Fergie’s “Glamorous”—even though he only needed to show one to the mermaid manager, Marcy, to finalize his rise in the Weeki Wachee performer stratum. He’d moved from trainee to novice early on, passing the tests easily. He swam the thirty-odd feet down to the stage, took off his mask, put it back on, filled it with air by exhaling. He swam across the theater windows twice in one breath, practicing.

Eric performed in two shows a day, five days a week during the summer, and two shows a day over the weekends when school was in session. He wore a prince costume, shorts with contrived shipwreck edges cut jagged above the knees. When he wasn’t doing the falling-in-love-dance with the Little Mermaid or fighting the sea witch, he got no action. He could have been ready to perform his routine for Marcy at any time, but whenever he brought it up, she insisted that he hadn’t worked there long enough to make the leap from novice to merman. So instead, he tweaked his dance between shows.

During the planning of the yearly mermaid calendar, one of the mermaids sug­gested that Eric appear “in one of his fantastic tails.” Robin, the general manager, nixed the idea. “People expect girls,” she said.

“But how do you get mermaids without mermen?” Eric joked.

Eric quit before he got a chance to perform his routine for Marcy. But even if he’d been promoted to merman, he would have spent all but two days out of the year being a prince. Only one show at Weeki Wachee involves a man in a tail. In the Christmas show, the starring mermaid’s father, the sea king, swims up, waves regally to the crowd, lip-synchs a few words of the recorded scene, and then dis­appears again into the air lock in the castle.

14.

I stayed up all night making my first mermaid tail. I riveted flippers together and sewed crooked seams. It was a fluid movement in the water I wanted, the feeling of being a different kind of creature, and some abstract notion of embodied and shareable magic. It wasn’t until I tried out the tail in front of other people that I realized how naïve I had been.

I brought it to Silver Glen Springs in central Florida with some friends. There were other visitors in the spring there, too. People snorkeled or waded in the clear shallows or looked at the water from picnic tables. As soon as I wiggled into the tail on the submerged stairs and stood up to jump in, everyone in the water and on the banks looked at me. Little girls pointed. Adults looked confused, tried to look away, stared back at me again. Self-consciousness overwhelmed me. I slumped into the water and started to swim. I wanted to feel myself moving with the water, and began to, but then noticed all the masks pointing at me. All the sudden, the flippers and bathing-suit material stretched over my calves and thighs had ceased being a personal experience. I had turned myself into a spectacle.

Putting on a mermaid tail inevitably implies performance. And yet there is an inconsistency here: performance, even if inevitable, is antithetical to the point of donning the tail—to be something outside yourself and magical and in tune with spring water.

15.

I asked Eric if he went swimming with other mermaids and mermen, if they took field trips to springs together, by themselves and just for fun. He answered, “We do photo shoots with models when I finish new tail designs. They all have to be tried out.”

“Do people stare at you?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “A lot of people don’t understand why we’d want to do some­thing like this. They act kinda confused.” He went on, distantly, “I smile at people and try and be friendly and most of the time everyone’s positive and excited and I’ll take pictures with them and send it to them if they want. But every now and then I get weird comments when I have a tail on. People aren’t used to seeing a man in a tail. But I’ve learned just not to care what people think. They’re just jeal­ous. If they’ve got a problem, it’s really a problem with themselves.”

Eric is cautious about revealing his sexuality, but the subtext is strong when he says something like that. His e-mails sometimes contain lines like, “My dad’s friends just don’t understand my world.”

When I am watched underwater it is for different reasons than when people stare at him. Girls are allowed to be mermaids, objects of fantasy. When Eric puts on a tail, people assume flamboyance or that he’s cross-dressing, which is not nec­essarily the case. Eric’s “mer-world” is not an attempt to escape from his gender. Underwater may be more real to him, may allow him to be more authentic than he feels out of the water, but it is a world that still abides by rules and norms that are beyond his control.

16.

On the dock at Rainbow Springs, Eric was too cold to not look vulnerable. His jaw was penciled with a thin line of hair along his chin, and his teeth chattered cartoonishly. He clutched his chest with his arms. Goose bumps covered his shoulders. They shook.

“You don’t really have much flubber to keep you warm, do you?” I said.

“I know, right? Thanks for noticing.”

He was chubby as a child, but now he has the body of a well-toned swimmer. His figure is important to him: since quitting his job at Weeki, he has been trying to promote himself as a merman model. He introduces himself as “Eric Duc­harme, Mertailor and Merman Model.” It is the tagline on the bottom of all his e-mails. Really, I now know, it’s a way for him to stay submerged.

Rainbow Springs is the headwaters of a clear, wide river. About thirty miles from Weeki Wachee, it is another west coast, blue green jewel embedded in Flor­ida’s sand hills. One dollar each got us in to swim in the designated area with a metal dock with metal ladders. A line of buoys denied us access to the larger spring boils around the bend. Eric said he’d probably swim past the buoys and out to the main springs “because what are they gonna do?” but we stayed in the swim area the whole time, probably because he was so cold.

Abby, an ex-Weeki employee and friend of Eric’s, hauled herself out of the water and onto the dock. She flung up her flipper and then stood, carefully, keeping her balance with Eric’s help. Tails, out of the water, utterly restrict the wearer. Eric shivered his way over to inspect part of the tail at her waist. A mystery substance textured the surface of the neoprene and gave it a scaly relief, a sleekly aquamarine glow, and the appearance of being perpetually wet.

“You know what? That’s gonna look awesome. That’s not even really peeling off in the water. But with another clear coat … I’m there! It swims like one of Thom’s tails!”

“It swims better, actually,” Abby corrected.

“Really?” Eric said, peering closely at the surface of the tail.

Abby had worn two of Thom Shouse’s tails for a photo shoot. She said of the tails that they were really hard to get on and off because the material stuck to­gether if the surface folded in on itself, which is somewhat inevitable.

“Yeah, because I can bend my legs,” Abby said. Eric looked down at the monofin flipper he had cut and adhered to the coated neoprene. With his toe, he pushed on an area that seemed to have caught a bubble of air.

“It’s slightly buoyant,” Abby continued. “It’s kind of hard to tell since it’s so shal­low. But I could really pick up some speed.”

Eric had also met Shouse when he came to Weeki Wachee with one of his fa­mous tails, a model, and a photographer. He took Eric seriously after Eric asked him questions about his tail design for Splash and his more recent designs, tech­nical questions regarding construction and material. The two formed a business friendship, communicating for months until Thom’s replies dropped off.

17.

Over the phone a few weeks after our visit to Rainbow Springs, Eric was willing to talk about his decision to quit working at Weeki Wachee. In the fall he had been sick for a few days with a sinus infection—an illness prevalent among merfolk because of the water pressure—and the manager had insisted he attend practice anyway. He was to play the male part, tailless, of course, in the Halloween show.

I asked him what the days were like right after he quit.

”A sense of relief, definitely, because I could dedicate my time to my mermaid dream. A lot of times I would cry and be very upset emotionally, but more doors started to open.” Calls came in from ScubaRadio. A diving convention in Orlando gave him a place to display his tails. He received tail orders from an underwater artist, sched­uled an interview with a Japanese documentary film crew. He was going to start making mermaid calendars and greeting cards, trying to promote himself as a merman model.

Eric has lived his entire life in Citrus County. Often Abby suggests that when he’s old enough to do such things, he ought to open up a shop in Miami or Holly­ wood or West Palm, someplace in Florida with a younger tourist population, somewhere more important and urban than the Gulf Coast. He shrugs politely as a reply to suggestions like this, says, “I know it’s small, but I like it here.”

Eric knows about every mermaid venue there is. Trying to find more outlets for sales led to a larger search for places mermaids performed, other underwater communities, so to speak. He discovered a number, but none were as grand as Weeki Wachee. The resort in the Bahamas put mermaids on inflated doughnuts in their chlorinated pool. At Aquarena, an old attraction in Texas, the underwater girls wearing ballet shoes and skirts got laid off when the theater facility closed in the 1960s. There was a place in Japan—he knew about it because an underwater performance artist named Shinko had emigrated to Weeki Wachee from there­ but it was basically a giant fish tank, similar to the Coral Room in New York. As for the shows in Vegas, they were scandalous, used only female performers, and took place in constructed environments replete with fake coral and types of fish that normally wouldn’t hang out in the same hemisphere. Weeki Wachee is still the only place Eric knows of that uses water that isn’t chlorinated or pumped through a filter, the only place where, when turtles swim by, they do so by choice.

Weeki Wachee suffered quiet beginnings. It arrived long before jet skis, pre­ceded the hullabaloo about manatees. The Springs came into existence before there was a need for such a title as “The Nature Coast.” Back in those days, in the first years the park was open and before Newt Perry had to sell it because he was unable to turn a profit, Perry would tell his mermaids to stand near the road to flag down passing cars. The girls, clad in the modest one-pieces of the time, convinced those they could that there was something back there in that spring, a phenomenon they would regret missing even though they had never dreamed such magic existed.

The spring water changed before Eric was born. In 1976, the Weeki became cloudy when a nearby conduit collapsed, spilling silt into the river that feeds into the spring. The mermaids tried performing a Sherlock Holmes show to make the most of what looked like dense London fog, but they couldn’t see to do even that. For the first time since the 1940s, there were no mermaid shows for nine months. As the spring began to clear again, it filled with brown algae, dreary piles of it, and all the colorful, aquatic plants died. By the time Eric went to the mermaid show, the water wasn’t drinkable anymore, wasn’t as invisible as oxygen.

But tainted or not, the mystique persists: the water has never stopped offering itself in cupped hands toward the sky. How was Eric to see the springs’ limitations before they held him back? Weeki Wachee was what he had, what began who he now is, and, however limited the ways of its waters and the policies of its mermaid shows might be, they haven’t yet released him. Listening to Eric talk about his business successes, one would think they made up for the loss of Weeki Wachee. “I hope the management there will change,” he told me. “If I could go back tomor­row I would be there.”

18.

That day at Rainbow Springs, Eric scooted off the dock with a mask and his digital camera and followed Abby to deeper water. Their heads rose together above the sur­face. They took a synchronized breath and then descended. A minute or two passed with bubbles on the surface, then their heads rose for another breath. After taking some forty pictures of Abby in the tail and coordinated seaweed bra for the Web site, Eric returned to the dock to drop off the camera and pick up a tail for himself. By this time, a few people were walking near the dock. Eric stood and zipped the tail up the back to his waist—for this one was a zippered, pro tail—sat on the edge of the dock, then pushed off into the water. A boy ran to the edge of the  dock in time to catch a glimpse of the tail underwater, waving as it moved away from him. The boy and I watched Eric join Abby in deeper water, gazed at the boil of their bubbles on the surface, their mercurial shapes.

“Pretty cool, huh?” I said to him.

He looked at me, folded in on himself with shyness, and returned to his father.

When Eric and Abby got back to the dock, out of breath, people were there waiting for them.

“Hey! Do y’all swim at, um … Wika Wachee?” a woman called from the side­ walk above the swim dock.

“No,” Abby called to her as she struggled to stand up in the tail. “We used to.”

“When did you last go to Weeki?”

“Last February.”

“I was there then,” Abby said.

“I wasn’t yet,” Eric said. “You saw my tails, but—”

“We really enjoyed it,” the woman said. “That place is totally wild!” A few minutes later an older couple joined us on the dock.

“Are you from Weeki Wachee Springs?”

Eric replied robotically, “No. We used to work there.”

“He designs the tails,” Abby said. “He’s made them for Weeki but he works on his own now.”

Eric recited prices for children’s tails to the people around when they asked. He described the difference between his fabric tails and his newer, realistic tails.

“What’s this stuff on the surface here?” someone asked, touching the slick, scaly surface.

“That’s my secret. Neoprene mostly. And other things.”

At some point as we chatted with people on the dock, the little boy alongside me who’d been watching the mermaid and merman tugged at his father’s shirt and asked if he could have a merman tail. His father laughed and said, “I don’t think so, hon.” Eric, busy answering someone else’s questions, didn’t notice this interac­tion.