Mermaids (1990)

and the Girl Who Wanted to Stay

A comedy about a mother who moves every time a relationship ends, and the fifteen-year-old who becomes the calm in the house. What it teaches about a home run on crisis, a girl nobody told about her own body, a grown man the film lets off, and the conversation that finally lets a family stay.

Mermaids (1990). Directed by Richard Benjamin, screenplay by June Roberts from Patty Dann’s 1986 novel. Cher as Rachel Flax, Winona Ryder as Charlotte, Christina Ricci as Kate, Bob Hoskins as Lou Landsky and Michael Schoeffling as Joe Peretti.

“It feels like there isn’t a single adult left on the entire planet.”

Charlotte, fifteen, in 1963.

A note before you read. This page discusses a film in which a 26-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl begin to have sex, a nine-year-old nearly drowns, and a mother slaps her daughter. Nothing is described in detail. If an adult did something like this with you when you were young, whatever you called it at the time, RAINN is there any hour at 1-800-656-4673. If you are a child or teenager and something is happening now, or you are worried about one, the National Child Abuse Hotline is 1-800-422-4453. Every current number is on the Resources page.

This page belongs to Plot Twist. It is the third film in the series about a mother and a daughter, after Postcards from the Edge and Mommie Dearest, and the first about a household that runs on leaving. It is funny, warm, and loved, and it has a story inside it that the film tells as a girl’s first romance and this page will not.

Like every entry on the Plot Twist page, it reads a story for the pattern it teaches, and makes no claim about anyone’s diagnosis. Rachel is not a villain. She loves her daughters, she makes them laugh, and at the end she listens. The pattern the film holds up is a common one: a home where the crisis never stops, and the child who grows up trying to be the calm in it.

The Story

It is 1963. Rachel Flax is 31, a single mother with a carefree style that looks more like friendship than mothering. Every time a relationship ends, she packs up her two daughters, Charlotte, 15, and Kate, 9, and moves. Charlotte is anxious and embarrassed by her flamboyant mother. The family is Jewish, and Charlotte is obsessed with Catholicism, which her mother finds exasperating.

After an affair with her married boss ends, Rachel moves them to Eastport, Massachusetts. Charlotte is thrilled: the new house is next to a convent. She becomes infatuated with Joe Peretti, 26, who drives her school bus and looks after the convent. Rachel starts seeing Lou Landsky, who owns the shoe shop.

The day President Kennedy is shot, Charlotte finds Joe ringing the convent bell and comforts him, and they kiss. She runs, sure she has sinned, and starts fasting until she faints from hunger. No one has taught her about sex. She becomes convinced that God will punish her with a pregnancy, takes her mother’s car, and drives all night, until she runs out of gas and a young family takes her in for breakfast. Lou comes to fetch her. A doctor, a few days later, tells her she can’t be pregnant.

At a New Year’s Eve party, Lou asks Rachel to marry him. She says no: he is still legally married. Joe gives Rachel a ride home, and she kisses him. Charlotte sees it.

On New Year’s Day, with Rachel out with Lou, Charlotte stays home with Kate. She dresses in her mother’s clothes and makeup, drinks some wine, and offers some to Kate, who drinks far more than Charlotte realizes. At the convent, Charlotte leaves Kate by the river collecting rocks and climbs the bell tower, where Joe is. The two of them begin to have sex. Kate falls into the river and nearly drowns. The nuns pull her out.

At the hospital, Rachel, frantic, threatens to move them all again, and slaps Charlotte across the face. Then the two of them talk, calmly, for the first time. Rachel tells her she is just a year younger than Rachel was when she had her. Charlotte understands that her father is never coming back. She asks to stay in Eastport, and her mother agrees to stay at least another year.

Joe moves to California. Kate recovers and swims again, though her hearing is sometimes “fuzzy” now. The film ends with the three of them dancing as they set the table for a family dinner, something they have never done before.

The Story Before the Story

Mermaids began as Patty Dann’s novel. Two directors left the project before Richard Benjamin made it, and one of its producers said both had imagined a darker film. The one that was released is a comedy about a mother and daughter, with a crisis at its center. Winona Ryder was nominated for a Golden Globe for playing Charlotte, and Christina Ricci, in her first film, won a Young Artist Award for Kate. The film’s tagline was: “This is our mother. Pray for us.”

What It Gets Right

A great deal. It takes a teenage girl’s inner life seriously, and lets her narrate it, with all its terror and comedy. It shows a mother and daughter who love each other and can’t hear each other, until they do. It gives the last word to the daughter’s request, and has the mother say yes. And it ends not with a wedding or a rescue, but with a family laying a table together.

What It Gets Wrong

It lets Joe off. A 26-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl in the bell tower is not a romance, and it isn’t a coming of age. It is an adult doing something no adult should do with a child, and it is his responsibility, not hers, however she felt about him. The film half-knows this and half doesn’t. Afterward, Joe and Charlotte trade postcards from California, and she has a new reputation at school, and both are played lightly.

If you watched this at twelve and took it as the story of a girl’s first love, you weren’t wrong about what the film showed you. You were a child, reading what the grown-ups had made. Looking at it again now is allowed.

What It Teaches

1. The house that ran on leaving

Rachel’s philosophy fits in one line: “Death is dwelling on the past or staying in one place too long!” It sounds like freedom. For her daughters, it means a new town, a new school and a new set of faces every time one of her relationships ends.

The Decoder’s Card 5, Chaos as Camouflage, is “Constant crisis and disorder.” The card is usually written about a partner, but the pattern is the same in a family: when there is always something moving, no one has to stop and look at what’s underneath. And the person the card describes as getting hooked, the one who “manages, cleans, fixes, soothes,” is very often the eldest child. Charlotte is fifteen, and she is the most anxious person in the house, because someone has to be.

2. “There isn’t a single adult left”

Charlotte says it on the day President Kennedy dies, and the whole country feels it. But she has felt it for a long time. Her mother is fun, and bold, and more like a friend than a parent. That can look like freedom from the outside. From inside, it can feel like having no one holding the rails.

Children in houses like this often reach for structure wherever they can find it. Charlotte reaches for the convent next door, and a faith with rules for everything. The film plays her Catholicism as a joke, and it is funny. It is also a fifteen-year-old building the order she doesn’t have at home.

3. What nobody told her

After one kiss, Charlotte starves herself, runs away, and gives a doctor a false name, sure she is pregnant. The doctor asks, “Has your mother ever talked to you about sex?” And Charlotte, loyal to the end, answers, “Yeah, all the time.”

She is covering for her mother, and she is terrified. A girl who doesn’t know how her own body works is a girl who can’t tell when an adult is taking advantage of it. What she needed was information, and the chance to ask for it without shame.

4. He was 26. She was 15.

This is the part the film gets wrong, and it is worth saying slowly.

Charlotte’s feelings for Joe are real. Many girls of fifteen have had a crush on an older man. That is not the problem. The problem is what a grown man does with a girl’s crush. An adult who is safe for a child to be around keeps his distance, however she feels. Joe doesn’t.

The film never names this. Afterward it gives Charlotte a new reputation and a stack of postcards, and moves on. If something like this happened to you, whatever you called it at the time, and whatever the grown-ups around you called it, it was his responsibility. RAINN, at 1-800-656-4673, talks with people about things that happened years ago, too.

5. Who was watching Kate?

On the day Kate nearly drowns, the only person looking after her is her fifteen-year-old sister, who is dressed in her mother’s clothes, has had some wine, and has given Kate some too. Charlotte gets the blame at the hospital, and the slap.

Charlotte made real mistakes that day, and she knows it. But notice the shape of the house: a mother out for the day, a teenager left in charge, and a grown man in the bell tower. The blame that falls on the child in a house like this is often a weight that belonged to the adults. And a slap is never the way to put it down.

6. “I want to stay!”

What turns the film is not the crisis. It’s the conversation afterward. Rachel stops, and talks with her daughter, and tells her the truth: that she was only a year older than Charlotte when she had her. Charlotte stops waiting for her father. And then she asks for the one thing she has wanted all along: “I want to stay!”

Her mother says yes. For a year, at least, they stay. The last scene is the three of them dancing as they set a table they have never set before.

It is a small ending, and a true one. Chaos doesn’t end with a lecture. It ends when someone agrees to stay in one place long enough for the children to unpack.

Mothers and Daughters, Side by Side

	Mommie Dearest (1981)	Postcards from the Edge (1990)	Mermaids (1990)
What the house ran on	Warmth and punishment, from the same hand	Her mother’s spotlight	Leaving, every time
What the daughter did	Watched the weather in every room	Did her mother’s makeup after the crash	Became the calm one
How it ends	She tells the story	She sings her own song	Her mother agrees to stay

Three films about mothers and daughters. Only one ends with the two of them at the same table, and it is the one where the daughter asked, and the mother heard her.

If You Grew Up on This

Many of us watched this at a sleepover, and loved Cher, and wanted to be Charlotte. Nothing on this page asks you to stop loving it. The useful thing is to look at it clearly from where you stand now.

Some questions to sit with:

Was there always something moving in your house, a new town, a new crisis, a new man?
Were you the calm one? Who taught you to be?
Did anyone tell you how your body worked, before you needed to know?
Was there an adult, when you were young, who didn’t keep the distance he should have? Whatever you called it then, what would you call it now?
What would it have meant to you to hear someone say, “All right, we’ll stay”?

Charlotte was fifteen, and she was the one keeping the house steady. At the end, for once, her mother stood still long enough to hear her.

You’re the audience now. You’re allowed to stay.