There was a room filled exclusively with statues of nymphs in Marie’s house. Her father had gone through a period where he was quite consumed with possessing them.
Marie walked by the room one spring evening and looked in the door. The nymphs were all in their various odd positions. The moonlight gave them the effect of looking very much alive. They were in states of ecstasy. They reminded her of being young. She was so wild at one age. Was that state of being unobtainable to her now? Was each nymph expressing a mood Marie would never experience again?
They were so unselfconscious. They reminded her of the ways she used to feel when she spent time with Sadie. The hysterical affection and admiration she had for her. But what made all those states glorious was they were unaware of the rest of the world. They existed in the state purely. The nymphs were all contorted in miraculous positions. It made them look as though they were flames that had escaped the fire for a moment. It was right before the moment where oxygen snuffed them out.
* * *
Marie recollected how she once loved when Sadie would read poetry to her. As she sat in the grass one afternoon while listening to a poem, a tiger strolled silently around her. All the air grew tense when a tiger was nearby. Marie had struggled against the urge to stand up and run.
Another time she found herself sitting on a rock in the middle of the ocean while listening to a Tennyson poem read by Sadie. The waves were coming up close to her. She held up her knees and feet and pulled up her dress so she wouldn’t get her shoes and skirt wet. When she felt safe from the water, she turned her head around. She let out a cry. There was a mermaid with a huge tail sitting next to her. She was beautiful and her blond hair was in thick strands down her face like seaweed. But the tail was terrifying.
Then she learned that an actual mermaid had come to town. There were advertisements for its arrival in the dime museum pamphlets. Mermaids lived alone, unmarried and wild. Marie thought if she were to see someone else in her position, it would cure her of her profound solitude.
Marie paid admission to enter into the dime museum where the mermaid would perform. She moved through the rooms of the museum, taking in the other specimens on display. There was a bell jar with a small mummified demon. It looked like a baby monkey with bat wings. There was a stillborn baby who had apparently been found in an ostrich-egg shell. How in the world an ostrich had become impregnated with a human was a mystery of science. Miracles defied science and happened all the time.
She had to force her way through to get a seat at the front of the small theater at the rear of the museum. She heard the sound of the train of her dress tearing as someone stepped on it and she tried to move forward at the same time. But she didn’t care. There was a slight degree of humility you had to sacrifice along with the ticket price in order to see something magical. You had to admit that human reason and progress were in some ways lacking. You had been a fool.
You believed in what you needed to believe in these places. She needed to believe in the mermaid. Mermaids had no role other than to be themselves. They were not mothers or sisters or daughters.
* * *
Marie sat with the audience in a dark theater around a stage on which a group of blue curtains hung around a square frame. The lights went on. The curtains were pulled apart. There was a tank of water in which a woman with an enormous blue fish tail was swimming.
Marie’s heart fell. She wanted to fall to her knees and pray. It was as though you had pulled back a shower curtain to see the Virgin Mary standing there, a halo of light around her head as the sunlight reflects through the shower’s downfall.
The mermaid swam in circles, as though her tail were a paintbrush an artist was trying to rinse the color from. She looked confined. She was in captivity. But that made her all the more appealing to the audience. They were looking at somebody who didn’t want to be looked at.
She put the palms of her hands against the glass. They clung to it like starfish. She pushed her face up against the glass. She looked at the audience. It seemed as though it was so much harder for her to see the audience than it was for them to see her.
She pretended to be in need of mercy. But if she were in the ocean, she would be grabbing onto the feet of swimming children and pulling them to the bottom of the sea and would let them go as soon as they were dead. They would float back to the surface with their mouths open and their arms spread, as though they had just seen God.
The crowd was informed the mermaid’s tongue had been removed. She was prevented from singing. If she sang, she would cause members of the audience to run onstage and crawl into her tank, where she would proceed to strangle them.
How many deaths was she responsible for? She would stick her head out of the water and sing to sailors and fishermen on boats. The fishermen would slit their own throats and toss their bodies in the water.
The mermaid swirled her body around, regaining her grace. She lifted her arms and body over the side of the tank. Her hair was limp on her face like seaweed. It looked so much better underwater. She ceased to seem like a watercolor painting being created right before your eyes.
The mermaid opened her mouth and a silence came out that was so lonely and powerless and sad, the curtains immediately dropped. And you did not want to see more or ask any questions about the mermaid for days.
* * *
Marie rode home in her carriage lost in deep reflection about what she had seen. The mermaid was stuck inside a tank. She had a tiny world in which to exist. But that wasn’t only because she was in captivity but also because she was unique. She would not be able to breathe outside of it. She had nothing in common with those who lived outside the tank. And what was the point of conversation other than to find points of communality? The mermaid was on display for everyone to stare at in amazement. And wasn’t that somehow the role Marie played in society as well?
Like Marie, because of her peculiar gifts and powers, the mermaid could not mingle with outsiders. So be it. Marie’s social world was limited. It was a necessary result of being powerful. To be a woman in her position was as unusual and unheard-of as a mermaid. She wanted to exist in a world that allowed her to be herself uniquely. The mermaid, like her, too, had no mate. She was doomed to a life of celibacy. But that chaste fate was also a gift. It ensured she would never see herself in relationship to another person. In this way she would only ever be herself.