THALIA SELZ
But that evening when he was again in the basement working,
I pricked and poked up my courage and went downstairs. He was
fitting a gate made out of green pipestems into a long, wooden
box-Vasiliki's.
."Why did you make it green?"
"Why not?" Then, afraid perhaps that he'd been too brusque
with his pet, he looked up and smiled with extraordinary sweetness.
It shredded to bits my puerile soul, and I could hardly bear the
thought of letting him down by telling him the truth.
"What are you going to do now?"
"I'm going to put
her-here."
He pointed with one hand to
a space behind the gate and with the other he picked up and
held aloft
my-my
little porcelain mermaid.
I gave an involuntary cry. "You can't!"
"Why not?"
There she was, darling and white and nude with little softly·
rounded, pink-tipped breasts. Once long long ago she had reo
clined, exquisitely languid, on the sandy sea-bottom of somebody's
goldfish bowl. Then oh bliss she had lost an arm (Madame Re–
camier undergoes surgery) and been given me for my dollhouse. I
never played with it anymore of course, but the notion of giving
her to Vasiliki-try to imagine this gnashing agony. The night.
brown walls of the basement turn a sickly mud-yellow with the
approaching hurricane. I could kill. In an instant. In the despotic
obliquity of youth I perceive that I, who merit all rewards
by
right,
am losing one of my possessions to a cook's spawn.
I almost spit. "She's mine!"
"Funny. I found her here on the table. Jason or your mother
must have ... Never mind; it doesn't matter. Here, sweetheart,
take her back. You're my best girl of all." Then he utters the
ultimate misfortune. "I'll find something better for her."
I was dumb with bitterness and shame. I stumbled back up–
stairs, clutching my one-armed mermaid, so long outgrown, so much
a part of my myriad inadequacies.
What happened during the next two days I have to recon·
struct from what my mother has told me.
During the night Joshua must have finished Vasiliki's
box.
What it looked like in its final form only Mother knew, for
she
