MERMAID
In a Bottle
“Have you seen the hair conditioner?”
No one answered me. “Never mind. I found it.”
I couldn’t tell if everyone had left our motel room, or if I was finally on the receiving end of a well-deserved silent treatment. I was a bore and a bitch and all I did was lose things.
“I’ll be in the shower for the next hour, trying to get these dreads out.”
They left, I guess. I didn’t blame them. I would talk to myself in the bathroom, until I got those knots out, one by one.
I stepped into the stand-up motel shower and fiddled with the broken hot and cold knobs for a minute. Half the water came squirting out of a broken pipe in the corner, the rest through the shower head.
The big bottle of conditioner said it was “Gardenia” but I hoped it was slimy and filled with silicon goo as slick as a new rain puddle. I poured a full cup of it into my hands and massaged it into my fried blond thatch. Press, press, squish, squish.
The gardenia scent went right up my nose. Sweet. I closed my eyes. You don’t have to open your eyes to get tangles out; you can sit in the dark with a wide-tooth comb for an hour.
My fingertips were so tender, separating each snarl, that it occurred to me I’d never touched my head this gently.
That’s because it wasn’t me. I opened my eyes and found myself eyeball to belly with the most beautiful figure. A genie, like an “I Dream of Jeannie” genie, was standing above me, cradling my cheek to her tiny waist. She lifted a single lock from my head, as if it were a golden thread.
“Pobresita de Margarita,” she said. She said my name! Her eyelashes were so long that when she blinked, it was like a curtain of petals opening. Petals with sapphires inside.
“Who are you?” I tried to wipe the streaming water out of my eyes.
“I am the Genie-I of the lamp, my love.”
“There is no lamp. There’s only a bottle of Trader Joe’s Gardenia conditioner!”
The beautiful imp shrugged her shoulders. “Ça m’est égale.”
“And you’re a polyglot, too?”
“You’re funny, little one. Be still while I finish your hair.”
“I thought you were supposed to ask me to command you, to do my bidding. That’s what Scheherazade says.”
“It’s perfectly obvious what you want. I am going to take care of you, without you having to say a word.”
“I don’t think that’s possible. I’m always saying a million words, a million ways, to everyone who loves me, and none of them ever get it.”
“They don’t understand you the way I do.” Jeannie pulled the last of my strands through her abalone shell comb.
My entire head of hair was perfectly smooth, it was long, and it curled at the ends, like I’d always wanted. It was silky and shiny and as thick as buttermilk.
I wanted to say, “What happens now?” I wanted to make the walls disappear. I wanted to crawl into her blue eyes but maybe she already had that covered.
She lifted me and laid me out, in one seamless motion, onto fresh linen sheets on the bed. She anointed me with rose water and lavender oil and rose geranium. She braided my hair with coconut oil and tied the pigtail ends with satin ribbons. Blue satin ribbons.
“Are you laying me out to rest?” I asked.
Her laugh was like silver bells. “Yes, I think I am,” she said. “I think you want to rest for a long time, and when you are rested, I will know what to do next.”
“But you don’t know, now?”
“Pas encore, my darling,” Jeannie said, smoothing my brow with her hands. —With her touch like silk, so soft, my whole life untangled before me. “Not yet.”
“Mermaid” is from my first collection of short stories: There’s No Hope But I May Be Wrong.
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