She hurt so much sometimes on her daughter's behalf. Leonid had never understood that, had always discounted her experience. He had a way of finding articles on feminism and quoting them to her, leading up to an argument over its relevance. It was one reason she'd been so relieved to leave, that endless rehearsal, pressing on sore points that he'd learned, relying on sophistry and doubletalk to discount everything she believed in, everything she'd learned over decades of trying to exist as a female artist.
She said, "Sometimes I worry I'm too weak to be a good example."
"Don't be ridiculous. Eleanor Roosevelt said women are like teabags. It's not till we're in hot water that we learn how strong we can become."
"Did you pick that up on Pinterest?"
"Yup, with an infographic showing the rising number of women in the Senate." Peg's eyes danced.
But Petra didn't have the energy for banter. "I don't know what I'm going to do. I have enough laid aside for six months, but after that I need to be selling work. Ideally, I need to give a new gallery some time to plan a first show. But it's all such a pain in the ass. Nothing makes me feel more like a fraud than going into a gallery with my portfolio and trying to convince them they should give me wall space."
"ArtForum
called you one of the West Coast's most important new artists."
"After twenty years of work, I'm a new artist."
"The 'important' is what you should concentrate on. Get a new gallery and start building on that. I can't believe they'd let you go when your work brings in so much."
"I know. But I haven't delivered one in a year. Things were so up in the air. I only started working a few months ago. I've been trying to finish up the main piece. I guess I can relax on that deadline."
"What's it called?"
Petra licked jade frosting from a fingernail. "Welcome to My Life."
The mermaids had all hatched. Their differences fascinated her. Seaweed fronds grew along the green one's length, tangled in its black hair. The peacock purple one had scales shaded similarly but crimson hair and a delicate gold tiara floating in that hair. Petra had to squint to ascertain that it wasn't actually a separate artifact but rather the trick of a horny protrusion with deceptive coloration.
The marigold yellow mermaid had peach colored lips to match the flowers in the illusion of a lei around its neck. The black one was unexpectedly zebra striped, minute pearls around its neck glimmering coldly.
She watched them. Leonid had said flesh machines, but had all the patterns of be havior been programmed into them, then? She watched the green and marigold blowing kisses at each other.
Leonid picked up on the second ring. "You've called me more this week than you did all last year," he said without preamble.
She said, "They're blowing kisses and playing patty cake with each other, for god's sake. You can't tell me they're machines."
"But they are," he said. "Do you really think I'd make little thinking humanoids as toys? I know you think I'm an asshole, but really, Petra? Really?"
She said, "I guess you did a better job that you thought. They're fucked up."
His voice was a cold knife. "You're always ready to condemn. Particularly things that are meaningless. Jokes."
"Jokes are a form of hostility, Freud said."
"No one takes Freud seriously anymore."
"You deny there's hostility behind them sometimes?"
"Sure. Sure, sometimes. Not as many times as you think, though, Petra."
Her shoulders ached with tension, pain that spread its tendrils down her arms and caged her wrists. "All I want," Leonid said, "is for Kerry to be happy. I think she's happier if I'm part of her life. So I give her a present and here you are on the phone telling me it's fucked up. I'm just trying to reach out."
Guilt surged through her. Why was it so many people could evoke this helpless shame in her?
But Kerry deserved a father.
Kerry deserved so much.
Kerry deserved a happy life.
Kerry deserved to be more than a mermaid.
"Petra?"
She snapped out of the spiral fugue. "Sorry. I find them... I find them unsettling. Maybe that's good for you to know. Market research and all that. I can't think I'll be alone in the reaction."
"Sure," he said. "That's great, I appreciate it. Thank you for getting it set up for Kerry. You must be breeding them, if you're seeing the kiss behavior. That's a second level mermaid feature."
"Making them collaborate, you mean."
He laughed. "Yeah, marketing wanted to steer away from the idea of sex. We're thinking about a racier version, though. Who knows? They're convincing, you've got to admit that."
In the tank, zebra stripes and a peacock blur circled, lemniscate.
"They are that," she said and hung up without saying goodbye, a petty blow she regretted immediately.
She spent the rest of the evening studying the mermaids. She got out a notebook and put a color atop each page, recording the combinations she'd tried so far. She assembled the rest of the tanks in the bottom of the box and cleared the nook's bookcase in order to stack them in it. She ordered it with what Leonid had called the second level mermaids on the top shelf, and what were presumably the first level, the ones hatched from the kit's seeds, on the middle shelf. She set the rest of the seeds to hatch, another half dozen colors.
She made notes of the behaviors and characteristics of each, transcribing the few lines the pamphlet provided for each onto the appropriate page.
Once or twice, she thought, "I should go work." But the mermaids riveted her. She tried to analyze their actions.
Put more than four in a tank and you had trouble. They'd all just hang there limply, floating in the water as though dead.
Some interactions were mermaid specific. If you had two with the lei growths, they'd swap them from time to time. How had Leonid managed to make those detachable?
When she finally lay down, sleep wouldn't come, no matter how hard she tried to relax. The mermaids flitted behind her eyelids, spasmed in the water as they fucked. Because no matter how you tried to disguise it with prettier words, that was what they did. Leonid had said things about the song releasing the collaboration protocol in the mermaids.
How many times could one sing, she wondered. How many mermaids could one end up with, a marine version of a crazy old cat lady, a madwoman in the attic, tending mermaids and breeding them into increasingly crazy combinations? What had led Leonid to think of mermaids? They were certainly unthreatening to a girl child, the half where sex occurred removed, a neuter fishtail substituted. Wasn't that what was at the heart of the Little Mermaid, the mermaid taking on legs and the ability to fuck, and look what disasters came of all that.
But he'd reinserted sex with the Song Chamber.
She didn't think about feminism that often. But something about the tanks of mermaids kept bringing it up over and over again.
She'd minored in women's studies at a particularly oppressively religious Midwestern university. It had been the classes that got her through the years there. That and the other women. Not just the teachers, but the other students.
And at the same time, she'd hated those classes because of what they showed her, the rage that rose in her every time she saw an injustice. She remembered seething then, full of hot anger. It lurked under every thought sometimes. Had informed every piece of art she'd made during those years.
She rolled over and laid her cheek against a cooler section of the pillow. These days her temperature fluctuated in the night. She'd wake sauna-hot, throw off the covers and freeze. Lather, rinse, repeat till seven A.M.
Her younger self would have hated the mermaids.
Cartoons of traditional roles. Distorted mirrors held up to little girls to start them down the path of always looking at themselves, judging themselves against anorexic mermaids, wasp-waisted French maids, sex kittens, and iron-jawed Amazons.
They were pretty, the mermaids. Mean girl prettiness. Female prettiness, the kind that masked their own inner rage.
Was that anger still inside her, lurking under her placid surface like a coral reef? Unseen but shaping every thought current?
Maybe she was going crazy again.
Maybe Leonid was trying to drive her crazy.
Maybe some facet of herself was trying to drag her down with it.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
Some combinations didn't work when you put them together to sing. Again the mermaids showed their displeasure not by fighting but by sulking, hanging limply in the water and refusing to move. She recorded the dislikes in her notebook but could make no sense of the pattern.
More worrisome, the Song Chamber had produced a grey globe that refused to hatch. It bobbed loosely as she lowered her hand into the blood-warm water and tested it with her fingers. Through the rubbery substance of the globe's outer layer, she could feel something solid inside, but it didn't twitch at her touch.
She did what she had promised herself she wouldn't do anymore. She called Leonid.
He was over faster than she would have thought, there at her door within a quarter hour.
He fished out the globe to examine it, "I thought we'd eliminated this problem.
Sometimes they just don't spark. No one knows why."
Holding the globe over the Chamber's water, he used a pocketknife to slice it open and let it drain. When he peeled away the gray shreds of the globe, the lump inside was not the perfect little body she'd feared. Rather it was a misshapen mass of colors, green and blue and yellow like a rotting Rubik's cube.
"Do you have something I can put it in?" Leonid said. "I want to take it to the scientists. If you have another, just stick the whole thing in a container and put it in the fridge for me."
As she crouched by the sink to find the box of baggies, she said, "Why mermaids?"
"What do you mean?"
"You could have picked some other form for your toy. You could have made all sorts of fish, for example."
He laughed nervously. "Well, believe it or not, it's my tribute to you."
She blinked as she handed him the baggie. Color mounted on his cheekbones. "They always seemed to me like women artists.
Out there singing."
"Singing to lure men to them."
His headshake was immediate. "No. I can see where that's coming from. But I always imagine them out there on the rocks, singing into the wind."
"Where no one can hear them."
"I know it's difficult. Everything they say about women having to work harder, I've seen it. And having a daughter... well, I think about it more because of her. So I made mermaids for her."
Something occurred to her. "Why don't they get along?"
He laughed. "Well, come on. We had to complicate things a little. And you've seen it as well as I have. Sometimes women just take an instant dislike to each other."
"I think that's true of either sex."
He shrugged. "Mermaids only come in one flavor though."
By now it had become ritual to sit watching the mermaids in the evening, to scribble down notes, moving them from tank to tank, trying new song combinations, recording the behaviors. The Mariposa mermaids did funny little flips while blowing bubbles, which seemed unique to them so far. The Amazonias had not just natural armor but tiny tridents that seemed to be outgrowths of their hands. It gave them a wobble when swimming.
She laid her pen down. Odd to think that Leonid had given time to musing about women artists. And that he'd constructed an image like that, uncharacteristically romantic, the mermaids singing into the wind.
That wasn't how she thought of them. To her, artists overall were the canaries in the coal mine, the eyes that could see outside the structures containing everyone and voice a warning when there was something poisonous, something dangerous.
Something that needed to be exposed.
A self-important view, to be sure.
She could have gone down that rabbit hole of thought, but she wrenched herself away from it.
Both sexes—all sexes, if you wanted to be encompassing—saw how it worked. Did women artists have a vantage point that gave them some insight no one else could access? Again, overly self-important. Artists saw from every viewpoint, they splin tered their consciousness, reflected and refracted reality in their minds before they turned it into art.
Maybe they were more sensitive to those poisons, like the canaries, who warned of danger by dying.
Perhaps that was why they went crazy so easily.
An Operetta mermaid swam around the tank in long slow loops. She had to admit there was a great deal of inventive detail to the mermaids. Leonid had confided that they were the work of three comic book artists that he'd commissioned. A talented gene splicer used a three-D rendering of the artists' concepts. The gene tech was incredible. The Starbright mermaid actually twinkled. If you turned out the light it looked like a shifting constellation hanging in the dark water.
Around and around. Her thoughts did that sometimes. Often. Though the medication helped.
Around and around. Around and around.
After an hour, she pulled herself to bed.
Around and around.
Pomegranate Bistro was on a side of town she didn't usually opt for, one she thought of as just a little snobby, just a little too consciously upscale.
Saffron was fifteen minutes late. The precision of the timing made Petra wonder if it wasn't calculated, if Saffron hadn't waited in the car, expressing her disdain for Petra with the interval.
That was paranoid and unworthy of her. She fixed a smile on her face as Saffron came through the tables.
The first thing you noticed about Saffron was always her costume. Not costume perhaps, but an outfit clearly assembled for its Bohemian effect, vintage items mixed with upscale shoe designers, a necklace that proclaimed eclecticism with every mismatched link. She sat down with a jingle of bracelets, picking up a menu to study it.
"I hope you didn't have any trouble finding the restaurant," she said from behind the paper. "I know it's not your sort of place, but it's one of my favorites."