Catwoman Ponders the Intangibles
While Drinking a Whiskey Sour
at McDevitt’s Ale House
in Gotham City

by Beth Sherman

What if Batman didn’t need a girl like me to bring out his dark side?

What if I was Selina Kyle fulltime – a prim librarian type with tortoise shell glasses and a lisp?

What if each day at the library I wandered the stacks, inhaling the scent of old books and new ideas?

What if I developed a taste for Jane Austen novels and started wearing full-length gowns and white ruffled caps?

What if I went to Grad School?

What if I wrote my dissertation on animalism in the works of Edgar Allen Poe?

What if while I was at Grad School, I met a millionaire named Bruce Wayne and we married and went to live in a mansion with three daughters and a ferret?

What if Bruce didn’t mind that pregnancy made my stomach pouchy and each year the lines around my eyes deepened?

What if I was the girls’ Scout Leader and taught them how to survive in the woods, taught them how to sell cookies outside the supermarket, taught them to be kind, resourceful, independent.

What if I never met anyone at Grad School and went on to get my PhD?

What if I found a job teaching literature at a small liberal arts college where I was everyone’s favorite professor and students liked to hang out in my office drinking warm milk?

What if I bought a dog?

What if I stayed home nights instead of leaping from one rooftop to the next in uncomfortable thigh-high black boots?

What if I carried a knapsack instead of a bag of loot?

What if I really was as pretty as Halle Berry or Anne Hathaway or Michelle Pffeiffer before she got old?

What if I could afford a breast reduction and ate as many cupcakes as I wanted for the rest of my life?

What if I left Gotham and traveled around Europe: lounging in a gondola down Venetian canals, strolling through the galleries of the Louvre, riding a horse through Kensington Park?

What if birds ate from my hand instead of being afraid of me?

What if when I was six I hadn’t walked into my mother’s bedroom to find her tied to the wrong end of a rope, hanging from the ceiling fan, her face a mottled shade of blue?

What if my father hadn’t crawled into a bottle only emerging to paw my bottom when I walked too near the couch and bellow, “Come here, baby. Help a lonely fella out.”

What if I didn’t have a taste for diamonds, their hard pearly edges, their perpetual shine?

What if I’d never heard the word heist, never been to jail, never clawed and scratched to get by?

What if Batman and I went dancing at a dive bar in Queens and when we finally kissed, hung-over and bleary eyed at two in the morning, we both knew we were wrong for each other?

What if instead of a hideout I had a small rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn with a view of the river and washer/dryers in the basement?

What if I took a bunch of comic books and cut out the pictures and decoupaged them onto vases and trays that I sold at flea markets for an obscene amount of money?

What if I started my own band called Kitty Litter? What if my eyes were the same topaz color as the eyes of an American Shorthair?

What if the Penguin and the Joker were my friends, not fellow villains, but real friends who called each other when we were depressed and met once a week to trade crime tips over a game of darts?

What if I wrote and directed a film about my life and Batman and Robin were minor characters?

What if my spangly catsuit made you think of a trained dancer instead of a dominatrix?

What if I allowed myself to go gray?

What if I was an elderly lady with 14 cats, feeding them kibble out of cracked, mismatched saucers and the neighborhood kids said stay away from that crazy Catwoman? Would that be better or just different?

What if I jumped from a four-story building and landed on my feet?

What if the men at DC Comics had made me a heroine instead?

What if I only had one life to live – one glorious, messy, hectic, human life – instead of nine?

What if I never had to wear a mask?