Mermaid crouches down by the desk drawer that she pulled out. There’s a pile of junk in there, and mixed in it there’s some really valuable stuff. Very little. Her textbooks and notes are in there too, along with the daily journal from two years back, taped over so that it’s impossible to read without tearing it apart, certificates of achievement, and several bells rejected by Rat, the ones she refused to hang over her mattress. Mermaid sends her fingers to the back of the wooden cigar box (so old that the label is completely gone), and they find what she was looking for—a crocheted gym bag for the flats she wore at physical-therapy sessions. She pushes away the cat sniffing at her hands and spreads the bag on the floor. It’s not exactly the way she remembered it. Grubbier, more mundane. There’s a moth-eaten hole right in the middle. She imagined it to be much more attractive. She doesn’t have to look closely at the pattern to remember how she knitted it. Row after row of tiny brown men, holding hands in a sort of silly dance. Each with its leg in the air at a different height, so they could all be different from each other. She loved them all, her ugly bubble-headed brown creatures. She was eight. She’d made a wish, and for it to come true she needed to do something extraordinary. Something that was hard. To knit a bag, for example, when everyone else was quite content with scarves. “Why would you want to take on something you don’t have any idea how to do?” Hecuba had asked her then. Mermaid didn’t answer. When the bag was done, and even Hecuba pronounced it “cute,” but the miracle still wouldn’t happen, that’s when she thought of the little men. It is not easy to just abandon a dream. Much easier to complicate the road to it than to accept that it could never be achieved. Twelve little men. They took more time than the rest of the bag. The figure in the center was unlike the others. It looked a bit like a mop. That was Mermaid herself, wearing a fluffy crown made from her real hair. “Look at that,” Hecuba said. “That’s really good . . . You’re going to knit amazing sweaters for your guy, mark my words.” Mermaid did mark them, and weaved them into her enchantment—they sounded wonderful. She remembers as she runs her fingers over the little men. All of her wishes have come true. Except one. That last one. Her guy is not wearing her sweaters yet. In fact, he doesn’t even know he’s hers.
Mermaid folds the bag and secretes it under her shirt.
“What’s that?” Catwoman asks from the mattress where she has been watching Mermaid. “Overcome by the childhood memories?”
“I guess you could say that,” Mermaid says.
“I see,” Catwoman sighs. “So the next thing would be Ginger digging up her favorite sling. Or Rat bringing in that baggie of arsenic, half of which she dumped into her dear grandpa’s soup when she was four. I just can’t wait. So sudden, so exciting!”
“That was mean,” Mermaid says levelly, preoccupied with her own thoughts. “Want me to feed the cats?”
“No. Taken care of. You’re all so courteous, so attentive. Catering to my every whim. Except you hightail it out of here when I so much as look away. But who am I to complain? I don’t need much and I can spend a whole day here alone. It’s not like I’m good company or anything. Of course, there are more interesting things in life than talking to a stump.”
“Shhh,” Mermaid says, closes her eyes, and puts a finger to her lips. “That’s enough. Please.”
She slips out of the room without giving Catwoman an opportunity to counter her words.
Lately, being with Catwoman has grown into something like torture. Incessant blackmail and their feeble attempts at countering it. Ginger is better equipped for it. Rat simply doesn’t much care about anything. Mermaid envies them both.
