Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

“Lary brought his girlfriend over,” I say. “Knitting Needle.”

“Really,” Noble says. “How interesting.”

Lies. He's not interested at all.

Sphinx sighs.

“Noble. Next time could you please not lean so close to the fire?” he says. “Fire really is a dangerous element.”

“Oh god,” Smoker moans. “I am so tired of you all.”

I have a strange dream that night. A dead lake, grayish, calm as a mirror. Withered white stalks peeking out of the water. I sit by the edge and wait for some horrific creature that lives at the bottom to come out. There's a rusted sword on the sand next to me. The mist is drawing in, enveloping everything. Suddenly I'm in the water... and here I wake up.

The night is not too dark, even though the moon isn't visible. Noble is awake. He's sitting on the bed looking at me, absentmindedly gnawing at the collar of his pajamas. And petting Mona, the striped rug draped over his knees.

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.

She navigates the hallway strewn with mattresses and walks into the first classroom door she finds. Sits down on the freshly scrubbed floor, takes the backpack off her shoulder, and turns it out, emptying its contents. Then slowly and deliberately puts most of it back. What's left is a small pile of things that don't belong to her. Mermaid lies down, propping her chin on her hands, and looks at them: a suede pipe bag; a necklace, nutshells on a string; a coin with a hole through the middle; candied lemon peel; a shirt button; a crumpled diaper bearing traces of egg yolk; leather headband; guitar pick. Some of them she stole herself, others were brought in by Catwoman's sneaky children. For the necklace and the coin she traded fairly. Mermaid considers her hoard, bringing some of the items closer together, pushing them apart. Then she sits up and takes out the gym bag from under her shirt. She puts the items in it one by one, warming them up in her hands, breathing on them, whispering mutely, until all that's left on the floor is the crud that's been accumulating on the bottom of the backpack since time immemorial: hair, crumbs, twine. She blows on them, scattering them away. Then she stands up and walks to the window. There, with her back to the door, she takes out the most important piece—a small sewn-up bag on a string, a suede pouch decorated with beads. She stole it from a desk drawer in the Fourth. It is definitely the most magical object she's ever held in her hands. Out of the vest pocket she produces nail scissors and uses them to rip the seam. The pouch is now open, but Mermaid does not peek inside. From another pocket she takes a handkerchief and unfolds it, exposing a lock of her own hair. She twists the lock into a figure eight, binds it with twine, and lowers it into the pouch. Then slowly and carefully sews it back, still not having taken a look in it. The pouch goes back in her pocket, everything else in the gym bag. Mermaid cinches it and then stands there with her eyes shut tightly. She feels very tired. That might be a good sign. A confirmation that she has accomplished a really difficult task. She has to hold on to that thought if she wants to avoid crying.

The empty classroom shines. No one hauls mattresses in here, or dumps their clothes, or saunters in to rummage through the bookshelves. They warned that if the classrooms were to start filling up with junk they would start locking them, so the girls, with unexpected fastidiousness, stopped going in altogether. The hallway and the dorms are quite enough. The classrooms are for dusting, watering the plants, and airing out from time to time. Now that Mermaid is finished with the task she came here to do, she wants to leave as soon as she can. She slings the gym bag over her shoulder. It will now accompany her wherever she goes. She's not sure if it’ll help anything, but it's safer this way. No one would be able to find it and look inside. And she still needs to put the amulet back.

She walks out of the classroom weighing in her head if she should return to Catwoman, but even as she's still thinking about it, her legs are already carrying her in the opposite direction. Catwoman is bitter. She needs to dump the long list of perceived slights and hurts on someone, and Mermaid tries to put off that moment. Until right before going to sleep. Or even until tomorrow.