My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

LYDIA MILLET. Snow White, Rose Red

I MET THE GIRLS AND INSTANTLY LIKED THE GIRLS. OF COURSE I LIKED the girls. A girl is better than a feast.

This was before the arrest, before the indictment and the media stories.

The girls were sisters, as you may know, and lived, during the summer, in one of those upstate mansions built by the robber barons who made their fortunes off railroads and steel and unfair business practices. It was in the Low Peaks of the Adirondacks — the southern part with glassy lakes and green slopes and white-spotted fawns. The girls, who were innocent in the glut of their wealth because they’d never known anything else, called their summer house “the cottage” to distinguish it from “the apartment,” which was a ten-thousand-square-foot penthouse on Fifth Avenue near Washington Square Park.

Their father was in real estate, but no one ever saw him. Correction: from time to time we caught sight of him briefly, the girls and I, getting in or out of a long gleaming car. Once, from the woods, I spotted him walking down to the dock in a pale-gray suit, his phone held to his ear.

He looked like a groom doll on a wedding cake. I wanted to tear his legs off.

At twilight, on the grounds of the massive yet log-cabin-style robber baron mansion, dozens of deer stood around, their graceful necks lowered, eating the grass. There’s an abundance of deer up there, due to the hunters who’ve killed off all the animals that were supposed to be preying on them. So the deer.

And the girls, equally graceful with their light, carrying laughter and long limbs, spun glow-in-the-dark hula hoops or played croquet with ancient peeling mallets as the purple dusk fell. The older one had honey-colored hair and blue eyes; the younger had brown hair and her eyes were a shade of amber. They hardly looked like sisters, but they were. The blonde was called Nieve, Spanish for snow, and the brunette was Rosa but she went by Rose. Their mother — a former ballerina from Madrid who was both anorexic and mentally slow — had named them but often she forgot their names.

We only met because I came out of the woods one night. I came out of the woods and walked right across the rolling lawn, scattering the Bambis. The sun was setting over the lake and a slight breeze rippled the water.

I admit the girls appeared frightened. What Rosa told me later was this: those first few seconds, they actually mistook me for a bear.

They’d never seen a homeless guy before — they were that sheltered, even though they lived in downtown Manhattan; trust me, it can be done — and though I wasn’t technically homeless I had that same dirty, hirsute aspect. I’m not a small man but tall and barrelchested, and that June evening I wore filthy clothes and a long beard and needed badly to bathe in the lake.

I had a home in the forest, or a temporary shelter, anyway; but to girls that pampered and young there’s no perceptible difference between an aging hippie and a transient.

So they were frightened at first, but I held up my hands as I walked up to the porch. The cottage had a wide wraparound porch, stone-floored, with swings, chairs, rugs, and potted plants. The girls retreated partway up the stairs and stood there uncertainly on the steps in their simple cotton frocks, clutching a Frisbee and a skipping rope. I held up my hands like a man who was surrendering.

I was lucky the help wasn’t around and the mother, as usual, had gone to bed early. If anyone else had been there — the cook, for one, who was a domineering type — they probably would have run me off.

I’d had too much to drink, of course. It was my pastime then — the summer before my divorce, a strange and isolated time. I was camped out in an old airplane hangar on one of the smaller lakes and now and then I hitchhiked into town, bought booze and groceries, and prayed not to run into my estranged wife. We’d had our own more modest summer place nearby.

What I’d done was, I’d disappeared. I didn’t want my wife to know where I had gone. It was the only trick I had left: hiding and vanishing. I got some meager satisfaction from an idea I had of her not knowing whether I lived or died — her wondering if maybe, defying all her expectations, I’d left my dull old self behind and flown off to a distant and unknown country.

Those girls were good. Plenty of rich girls aren’t, we all know that. But those two girls were innocent. I don’t know how they turned out that way, with the mother who wasn’t all there and the father who wasn’t there at all. That goodness came from them like milk from a rock.

Snow, as I came to call her because I couldn’t be bothered to pronounce her real name, mostly liked books, and sat in the shade of the porch on afternoons, reading. Her sister was more social and spent her time talking to everyone. She rode her bicycle to an old folks’ home most days and helped the people there.

As I stood on the lawn looking up at them, I noticed something I hadn’t seen from a distance: the girls’ skin glowed. Both of them had this luminous kind of skin.

That clear, young skin is part of what makes girls look so edible.

I asked them not to be afraid. I told them my name, and after a few moments they seemed to relax and told me theirs. They had a dog, an old Irish setter who lay around and barely raised his tail even for flies. I sat down on the steps and petted the dog, after a while.

So we were friends. Of course, I wouldn’t have had a chance if the girls hadn’t been left on their own so much. Now and then a friend their own age came up from the city to visit and I didn’t intrude upon them then.

But those visits were rare. Often at dawn or dusk, when the deer and the girls were out, I was the only company they had. I kept a low profile and did not throw the Frisbee back and forth with them, in case someone could see us from the house. Usually we stood together and we talked, a little out of sight. Once or twice they sat on the end of the dock and trailed their feet through the water, and I swam, only my head above the darkening surface.

From the high bedroom windows of the cottage’s second floor, that wouldn’t have looked like anything.

The girls were kind to me. They let me use the canoes in the boathouse, even encouraged me, and some mornings I would row out into a hidden bay and sit and drift, trying idly to fish in the shade of a red pine. There were some old rods in the boathouse, and since I had none of my own I used to borrow them.

Snow would leave me sandwiches or sometimes bring a bowl of ice cream onto the porch. Rose offered small hotel bottles of shampoo and told me to use them.

These girls were both honest. Once Snow said to me, “You smell not too good. Did you know?”

I told her that I washed my clothes whenever I could, in the coin laundry in town or the lake. I also tried to swim and use soap on myself, but now and then I lost track and missed a day or two.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” said Snow wistfully.

My back hurt from sleeping on the cement floor of the hangar and I ended up asking the sisters for aspirin. For several days my back and neck had been sore, and the pills took the worst edge off the pain but that was all. Then Rose said I should sleep in the cottage, which had more bedrooms than could easily be counted. There was a certain servants’ part of the house, they said, which had its own entrance, and none of the help used it. I could sneak in at night and sleep in the comfortable bed, which had down pillows and high-thread-count sheets.

I protested at first; I had some fear I’d run into one of the other members of the household. But it was silent when I snuck in there at night, after the girls had gone to bed. It was so quiet that it almost seemed to me they lived there by themselves, and food and water were furnished to them by invisible hands.

The bed was a nice change from concrete floors, so nice I almost questioned my recent course in life — hunkering down in the hangar, unshaved and unwashed, hiding from my soon-to-be-ex-wife. But then I came full circle; the hiding couldn’t be so wrong for it had brought me here, to this great mansion with its soft sheets and gentle girls.

After that I often slipped in by the servants’ narrow stairs and slept in my private room, tucked up under the roof. I set my wristwatch alarm and crept out at the crack of dawn. The cottage doors were never locked during the summer months; the family was always there, the family or the staff. I watched them from the shadows whenever I could. The Mexican groundskeeper rode around on his lawn tractor uselessly, mowing nothing, happy to sit aloft. The live-in maid smoked cigarettes near the garden shed and sometimes slipped away to have sex with him in the bushes.

One day the mother had a brief flash of life and donned her sparkling tennis whites. She ran outside and hit a few balls feebly with Rose on the clay tennis court. Meanwhile Snow, on the sidelines, took snapshots for the family album.

It was a rare occasion, to see the mother outside in the sun, acting alive like that.

But only fifteen minutes passed before the mother went inside again, apparently angry or depressed. She threw her racket down and blurted something that I couldn’t quite make out. I saw the girls’ faces as they watched her go. Their faces were both sad and calm; the girls were resigned to this beautiful, semiretarded mother with her spidery limbs and odd tantrums.

Perhaps she was never a ballerina, I thought to myself. There aren’t too many retarded ballerinas in this world, is my perception of the thing, although there certainly are a few who, like the mother, starve themselves.

That evening, around dusk, the girls came swimming with me in the lake; Rose lathered my hair up with shampoo. It was one of the only times I felt the sisters’ touch. They weren’t too prone to physical contact. They hadn’t grown up with affection, and also, I was an older, often bad-smelling man, quite unattractive to them. No doubt they were afraid that any touching would be mistaken for an invitation.

But on this occasion, beyond the end of the dock, Rose ducked my head under, laughing, and when I came up spluttering and trying to catch my breath Snow pushed my head under again, and both of them were playfully drowning me.

We were happy.

Then Rose said, “What would he look like with no beard?”

Snow looked at me, too, considering, and then climbed up onto the dock, toweled off, and ran into the house. She came back in a minute with shaving equipment. She even had scissors — clearly no razor, by itself, would be up to the task — and an old hand mirror of heavy silver.

Snow cut off the part of the beard that hung. Then they watched while I sat in the shallows and, with Rose holding up the mirror, shaved off the stubble that was left.

“He’s not that bad,” she said, when I was done.

I dipped my face under and came up again, wiping the water away from my eyes, the flecks of girl-scented shaving foam floating.

“He looks like that actor,” said Snow, cocking her head. “You know, that big French one with the crooked nose.”

“You look like that actor,” concurred Rose, nodding.

“He’s sort of ugly,” said Snow. “And you have to like him.”

“Exactly,” said Rose. “Ugly, like you.”

“But also likable,” said her older sister.

“Girls,” I said ruefully, “you’re going to have to find a way to tell the truth a little less often.”

“Why?” asked Snow.

“Well, for one thing, it hurts people’s feelings.”

“We’re sorry,” said Rose. “We didn’t mean to.”

“I know,” I said. “I know. And B, if you get in this habit of telling men the truth, you’ll never find true love and get married.”

“I won’t get married anyway,” said Rose.

“I won’t either,” said Snow.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“It seems really stupid,” said Snow.

“Like cutting off your leg,” said Rose.

“Every marriage is different,” I said.

“Get out,” said Snow.

“Well, you’re supposed to be married,” said Rose. “But now your wife likes someone else better.”

“So soon you won’t be, anymore.”

“More or less accurate,” I conceded.

“Then why are you defending it?” asked Snow.

“Once you were practically normal,” added Rose. “But now you carry a roll of toilet paper around in a greasy disgusting backpack,” and she shuddered visibly.

“We’re just saying,” said Snow, almost apologetic.

It was then that we heard a rare sound — at least, rare to us in the tranquillity of those summer evenings: car tires crunching on gravel in front of the house.

“No way,” breathed Snow.

“Daddy,” said Rose.

“It’s the third time this whole summer,” said Snow.

“The first time lasted for an hour,” Rose told me.

“The second was on my birthday,” said Snow.

“He stayed fifteen minutes.”

“He brought me a gift certificate.”

I tensed up, worried I’d get caught with them. My clothes were heaped on the bank, except for the boxer shorts I wore. There was a clean line of sight if he came around the corner. But I had other clothes in the hangar so all I had to do was swim away — swim across to the part of the shore that was hidden from the house by trees, and from there retreat to my hangar.

“I should go,” I said.

“Don’t worry. We’ll totally distract him,” said Rose.

They climbed up onto the dock, legs dripping. Towels swirled up around their shoulders, feet left wet prints on the dry wood before they slipped into flip-flops. Then the girls were headed up the grassy slope — not running, not eager. Just dutiful.

I felt a rush of thankfulness that I’d never had children to disappoint. Though I wished the girls were my own daughters; even I would have shone in comparison with the gray doll.

I didn’t have his wealth. But still.

I sank down in the water and spied on them, the waterline beneath my nose. I kept my mouth clamped shut.

The suit was undertaker-black this time and I could just make out a silver-colored headset. He talked into the headset as the girls went up the hill to meet him. Rose stepped toward him awkwardly, as though she wanted to embrace, but he held up his hand and shook his head and kept talking, turning around as he paced.

She stepped back.

It occurred to me then that they would be better off if he died, but it was an academic, impersonal thought. It had nothing to do with me.

A second later, it also occurred to me that if someone tore the groom in half, the girls would still have his money but not his cold and persistent disregard.

It was painful, on the other hand, the loss of a father. Even a negligent father. And with the semiretarded mother on the brink of death surprisingly often — due to the repeated self-starving activities, which made her subject to sudden hospital visits — the poor girls might be farmed out to relatives. Separated.

So as quickly as I had it, I gave up the idea of murdering him. You know: murder goes through your head sometimes, and then goes out again. It’s normal, in my opinion.

Anyway, the thought had no bearing on subsequent events.

After a while the father stopped talking into his headset mouthpiece. By that time the girls had already given up and drifted into the house without, as far as I could tell, even a smile of greeting from him. Some fragments of his one-sided conversation floated down to me — a few words in the twilight, “value-added,” “deal structure,” and possibly “red herring.”

Then he, too, disappeared.

What happened later that night was simple, as I would testify.

Around one in the morning, as I lay trying to sleep on the hangar floor, my back started to hurt. It hurt a lot, mainly because there was nothing between me and the cracked cement but a threadbare sleeping bag I’d filched from a Goodwill bin in Albany. During the vanishing act I hadn’t wanted to reveal myself by using my joint-account ATM card. And I had no painkillers left from the prescription stash the girls had given me. So finally, driven by discomfort, I crept out onto the dirt road, pain shooting through my back, grasping my heavy, antique flashlight.

There was a dim glow in the ground-floor windows of the mansion where lamps had been left on, but through those windows I could see no one was reading by their light. The family was sleeping. So I went around behind the house and up the servants’ stairs, taking off my shoes and walking in my sock feet. I found my room as usual and went to sleep myself, so relieved by the comfort of the bed that I forgot my back.

But presently I was woken up. There was a loud, terrible noise. Bleary, I didn’t recognize it at first. I thought it was a cat, in pain or trying to mate. Then I understood it was human — human and female. I sat right up, jolted with fear for those sweet girls. I had to do something, so I grabbed my flashlight and ran out into the corridor.

I didn’t know the house at all, only the route to my secret cubby. So I was stumbling down narrow halls like I was in a maze, basically running blind, this way and that, trying to follow the screaming. It stopped for a short time and I faltered — partly in confusion, partly out of a growing conviction that the sound wasn’t coming from either of the girls. It was too feral and too hoarse. But then it started up again and I ran, tearing up and down halls in a panic, because I couldn’t be sure.

Eventually I came out into a wider hall where lights were ablaze; a long carpet down the middle, and there was the mother. She wore nothing at all and was so emaciated that her jutting ribs resembled zebra stripes. I couldn’t help but notice she was shaved completely bare beneath. And there was the father, in seersucker pajamas, who seemed to be choking or suffocating her. They were thrashing around, and she must have been the one screaming, though now his fingers were over her mouth. He had the upper hand, clearly, being a man and not mentally or physically impaired. A fear seized me — though behind that fear I was relieved that Snow and Rose were not the targets of this violent assault — and without thinking I threw myself into the fray.

The flashlight was the only weapon I had, and as I said, it was heavy.

Before I knew it the groom doll lay upon the ground, the left side of his head stove in.

Once we understood the gravity of the situation, we threw ourselves into reviving him. I knelt beside him and performed CPR, which I’d learned as a lifeguard in the seventies; Rose, in her frilly teddy-bear nightgown, ran to the telephone and called 911; Snow sat, her face solemn, and held one of her father’s limp white hands, which I noticed was almost effeminate in the perfection of its manicure. Only the starving mother, still naked, hung back, sitting with her knobby knees raised to her chin against the far wall’s wainscoting, beneath the pompous portrait of a wattled ancestor.

As you may already be aware, if you’re the type to follow crime-beat or society news stories, the father did not die. In fact — and this is little known — he came out of the hospital substantially improved. It was as though he’d had a personality alteration, the sort that might follow a frontal lobotomy, for instance. He was more pleasant, after he recovered. He had more time for his wife and his children.

I even heard from my lawyer that he sought professional help for the mother. Not for the retardation, I don’t think — there isn’t much they do for that — but for the eating disorder.

And me, I never heard from the girls again. Not personally. But they must be better off now, too.

Because the father, who’d already made enough money to keep the family in fine linens and silverware for life, was no longer interested in business. That part of his character had simply been removed, either by the impact of the flashlight or the subsequent brain bleed. It wasn’t that, as my lawyer assures me, his cognitive capacity was reduced, per se. He still performed adequately in standard aptitude tests.

No, it seemed to be more a matter of a changed disposition.

Myself, I didn’t fare so well. It adds up against you when you’re indigent at the time of felony commission, abusing alcohol, etc., even if the crime was committed in defense of a vulnerable party. And there was the trespass issue — although the girls, I have to say, did not desert me in my hour of need. They told the police I’d had their full permission to sleep in the house that night. Sadly, due to their ages — eleven and twelve — that testimony did not go far to clear me of the trespass charge.

I sometimes dwell on my last moments with those girls. It’s true we sat upon an old carpet, discolored by the father’s spreading blood, between dark-painted walls adorned with grim, even judgmental-looking paintings of the girls’ dead relatives. It’s true our clothing was splattered and gruesome, and the unconscious father was stretched out between us, casting a pall.

But I gazed up and around, when I’d done all the CPR I could — it was a kind of coma, I guess, though it wouldn’t last long once they got him to the emergency room — and saw the semiretarded mother. Even a ballerina, I remember thinking, did not deserve to be asphyxiated, and I was still glad I’d come to her aid. Now she was staring at me with eyes as big as saucers, murmuring something in her native tongue. She spoke the dialect of Spanish where everyone has a lisp. I saw Snow, whose lovely face, lit from within, bore the light, drying tracks of tears, and the vibrant Rose, nervous and biting her nails beside a Tiffany table lamp effulgent with orange-pink roses.

And I was overcome with a curious feeling of belonging and satisfaction, as though I’d eaten a full meal and was preparing now for a long winter sleep. With the father lying inert between us in his blue-and-white seersucker, I felt we were all where we were meant to be, all posed in a tableau whose composition had been perfectly chosen a very long time ago. Whatever came afterward, I recall thinking, this was a warm cave full of soft, harmless things.