The Very Best of F & SF v1 by Gordon Van Gelder (ed) Page A

la—I mean, woman, girl like you hear about, living the
life and bathing in the altogether. And I turned my back on her to show her
what I thought of that kind of goings-on, but looking over my shoulder to see
if she got the message, and I thought then I’d made it all up, because there
was nothing there but her suds where she splashed, and they disappeared before
I really saw them.
    “About then my
knee gave another twinge and I looked down and saw it wasn’t just bumped, it
was cut too and bleeding all down my leg, and only when I heard her laughing
louder than I was cussing did I realize what I was saying. She swam round and
round me, laughing, but you know? There’s a way of laughing at and a way
of laughing with, and there was no bad feeling in what she was doing.
    “So I forgot my
knee altogether and began to swim, and I think she liked that; she stopped
laughing and began to sing, and it was...” Smith was quiet for a time, and Jane
Dow had nothing to say. It was as if she were listening for that singing, or to
it.
    “She can sing
with anything that moves, if it’s alive, or even if it isn’t alive, if it’s big
enough, like a storm wind or neaptide rollers. The way she sang, it was to my
arms stroking the water and my hands cutting it, and me in it, and being scared
and wondering, the way I was... and the water on me, and the blood from my
knee, it was all what she was singing, and before I knew it it was all the
other way round, and I was swimming to what she sang. I think I never swam in
my life the way I did then, and may never again, I don’t know; because there’s
a way of moving where every twitch and wiggle is exactly right, and does twice
what it could do before; there isn’t a thing in you fighting anything else of
yours...” His voice trailed off.
    Jane Dow sighed.
    He said, “She
went for the rocks like a torpedo and just where she had to bash her brains
out, she churned up a fountain of white-water and shot out of the top of it and
up on the rocks—right where she wanted to be and not breathing hard at all. She
reached her hand into a crack without stretching and took out a big old comb
and began running it through her hair, still humming that music and smiling at
me like—well, just the way you said he did, waiting, not ready to run. I swam to the rocks and climbed up
and sat down near her, the way she wanted.”
    Jane Dow spoke
after a time, shyly, but quite obviously from a conviction that in his silence
Smith had spent quite enough time on these remembered rocks. “What... did she
want, Mr. Smith?”
    Smith laughed.
    “Oh,” she said. “I
do beg your pardon. I shouldn’t have asked.”
    “Oh please,” he
said quickly, “it’s all right. What I was laughing about was that she should
pick on me—me of all people in the world—” He stopped again, and shook his head
invisibly. No, I’m not going to tell her about that, he decided. Whatever she
thinks about me is bad enough. Sitting on a rock half the night with a mermaid,
teaching her to cuss... He said, “They have a way of getting you to do what
they want.”
    It is possible,
Smith found, even while surf whispers virtually underfoot, to detect the
cessation of someone’s breathing; to be curious, wondering, alarmed, then
relieved as it begins again, all without hearing it or seeing anything. What’d I say? he thought,
perplexed; but he could not recall exactly, except to be sure he had begun to
describe the scene with the mermaid on the rocks, and had then decided against
it and said something or other else instead. Oh. Pleasing the mermaid. “When
you come right down to it,” he said, “they’re not hard to please. Once you
understand what they want.”
    “Oh yes,” she
said in a controlled tone. “I found that out.”
    “You did?”
    Enough silence
for a nod from her.
    He wondered what
pleased a merman. He knew nothing about them— nothing. His mermaid liked to
sing and to be listened to, to be watched, to