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

SARAH SHUN-LIEN BYNUM. The Erlking

IT IS JUST AS SHE HOPED. THE WORN PATH, THE BELLS TINKLING ON the gate. The huge fir trees dropping their needles one by one. A sweet mushroomy smell, gnomes stationed in the underbrush, the sound of a mandolin far up on the hill. We’re here, we’re here, Kate repeats to her child, who isn’t walking fast enough and needs to be pulled along by the hand. Through the gate they go, up the dappled path, beneath the giant firs, across the parking lot and past the kettle-corn stand, into the heart of the elves’ faire.

Her child is named Ondine but answers only to Ruthie. Ruthie’s hand rests damply in her own, and together they watch two scrappy fairies race by, the swifter one waving a long string of raffle tickets. Don’t you want to wear your wings? Kate asked that morning, but Ruthie wasn’t in the mood. Sometimes they are in cahoots, sometimes not. Now they circle the great shady lawn, studying the activities. There is candle making, beekeeping, the weaving of god’s eyes. A sign in purple calligraphy says that King Arthur will be appearing at noon. There’s a tea garden and a bluegrass band, a man with a thin sandy beard and a hundred acorns pinned with bright ribbons to the folds of his tunic, boys thumping one another with jousting sticks. The ground is scattered with pine needles and hay. The lemonade cups are compostable. Everything is exactly as it should be, every small elfish detail attended to, and as Kate’s heart fills with the pleasure of this, the pleasure of a world complete unto itself, she is also struck by the uneasy feeling that she could have but did not secure this for her child, and therein lies a misjudgment, a possibly grave mistake.

They had not even applied to a Waldorf school! Kate’s associations at the time were vague but nervous-making: devil sticks, recorder playing, occasional illiteracy. She thought she remembered hearing about a boy who could map the entire Mongol empire but at nine years old was still sucking his fingers. That couldn’t be good, could it? Everybody has to go into a 7-Eleven at some point in their lives, operate in the ordinary universe. So she hadn’t even signed up for a tour. But no one ever told her about the whole fairy component. And now look at what Ruthie is missing. Magic. Nature. Flower hair wreaths, floating playsilks, an unpolluted, media-free encountering of the world. The chance to spend her days binding books and acting out stories with wonderful wooden animals made in Germany.

Ruthie wants to take one home with her, a baby giraffe. Mysteriously they have ended up at the sole spot in the elves’ faire where commerce occurs and credit cards are accepted. Ruthie is not even looking at the baby giraffe; with some nonchalance she has it tucked under her arm as she touches all the other animals on the table.

“A macaw!” she cries softly to herself, reaching.

Kate finds a second baby giraffe caught between a buffalo and a penguin. Despite representing a wide range of the animal kingdom, the creatures all appear to belong to the same dear, blunt-nosed family. The little giraffe is light in her hand, and when she turns it over to read the tiny price tag stuck to the bottom of its feet, she puts it back down immediately. Seventeen dollars! Enough to feed an entire fairy family for a month. The Noah’s Ark looming in the middle of the table now looks somewhat sinister. Two by two, two by two. It adds up.

How do the Waldorf parents manage? How do any parents manage? Kate hands over her Visa.

She says to Ruthie, “This is a very special thing. Your one special thing from the elves’ faire, okay?”

“Okay,” Ruthie says, looking for the first time at the animal that is now hers. She knows her mother likes giraffes; at the zoo she stands for five or ten minutes at the edge of the giraffe area, talking about their beautiful large eyes and their long lovely eyelashes. She picked the baby giraffe for her mother because it is her favorite. Also because she knew her mother would say yes, and she does not always say yes, for instance when asked about My Little Pony. So Ruthie was being clever but also being kind. She was thinking of her mother while also thinking of herself. Besides, there are no My Little Ponys to be found at this faire; she’s looked. And a baby giraffe will need a mother to go with it. There was a bigger giraffe on the table, and maybe in five minutes Ruthie will ask if she can put it on her birthday list.

“Mommy,” Ruthie says, “is my birthday before Christmas or after?”

“Well, it depends what you mean by before,” Kate says unhelpfully.

Holding hands, they leave the elves’ marketplace and climb up the sloping lawn to the heavy old house at the top of the hill, with its low-pitched roof and stout columns and green-painted rafters sticking out from the eaves. Kate guesses that this whole place was once the fresh-air retreat of a tubercular rich person from long ago, but now it’s a center of child-initiated learning.

Ruthie’s own school is housed in a flat, prefab trailer-type structure tucked behind the large parking lot of a Korean church. It’s lovely in its own way, with a mass of morning glory vines softening things up a little, and, in lieu of actual trees, a mural of woodland scenes painted along the outside wall. And parking is never a problem, which is a plus, since that can be a real issue at drop-off and pick-up. At Wishing Well the parents take turns wearing reflective vests and walkie-talkies, just to manage the morning traffic inching through the school driveway! Or else there’s the grim Good-bye Door at the Jewish Montessori, beyond the threshold of which the dropping-off parent is forbidden to pass. For philosophical reasons, of course, but anyone who’s ever seen the line of cars double-parked outside the building on a weekday morning might suppose a more practical agenda. To think this was once the school Kate had set her heart on! She wouldn’t have survived that awful departure, the sound of her own weeping as she turned off her emergency blinkers and made her slow way down the street.

But she had been enchanted by the Jewish Montessori, helplessly enchanted, not even minding (truth be told) ghastly tales of the Door. Instantly she had loved the vaulted ceiling and skylights, the Frida Kahlo prints hanging on the walls, the dainty Shabbat candlesticks, and everywhere a feeling of coolness and order. On the day of her visit, she sat on a little canvas folding stool and watched in wonder as the children silently unfurled their small rugs around the room and then settled down into their private, absorbing, and intricate tasks. The classroom brimmed with beautiful, busy quiet. She felt her heart begin to slow, felt the relief of finally pressing the mute button on a chortling TV. How clearly she saw that she needn’t have been burdened for all these years with her own harried and inefficient self, that her thoughts could have been more elegant, her neural pathways less congested — if only her parents had chosen differently for her. If only they had given her this!

It came as a surprise, then, that the school did not make the least impression on Ondine. Every Saturday morning for ten weeks the two of them shuffled up the steps with more than twenty other potential applicants and underwent a lengthy, rigorous audition process disguised as a Mommy and Me class. Kate would break out into a soft sweat straightaway. Ondine would show only occasional interest in spooning lima beans from a small wooden bowl into a slightly larger one. “Remember, that’s his job,” Kate would whisper urgently as Ondine made a grab for some other kid’s eyedropper. The parents were supposed to preserve the integrity of each child’s work space, and all of these odd little projects — the beans, the soap shavings, the tongs, and the muffin tin — even the puzzles — were supposed to be referred to as jobs.

Ten weeks of curious labor, and then the rejection letter arrived on rainbow stationery. Kate was such an idiot, she sat right down and wrote a thank-you note to the school’s intimidating and faintly glamorous director in the hope of improving their chances for the following year. She had never been so crushed. “You’re not even Jewish,” said her mother, not a little uncharitably. Her friend Hilary, a Montessori Mommy and Me dropout, confessed to feeling kind of relieved on her behalf. “Didn’t it seem, you know, a little robotic? Or maybe Dickensian? Like children in a boot-blacking factory.” She reminded Kate about the director’s car, which they had seen parked one Saturday morning in its specially reserved spot. “Aren’t you glad you won’t be paying for the plum-colored Porsche?”

She wasn’t glad. And she did take it personally, despite everybody’s advice not to. Week after week, she and her child had submitted themselves to the director’s appraising, professional eye, and for all their earnest effort, they were still found wanting. What flawed or missing thing did she see in them that they couldn’t yet see in themselves? Even though she spoke about the experience in a jokey, self-mocking way, she could tell it made people uncomfortable to hear her ask this question, and she learned to do so silently, when she was driving around the city by herself or with Ondine asleep in the back of the car.

“Can I get the mommy giraffe for Christmas?” Ruthie asks at the end of what she estimates is five minutes. She stops at the bottom of the steps leading up to the big green house and waits for an answer. She wants an answer but she also wants to practice ballet dancing, so she takes many quick tiny steps back and forth, back and forth, like a Nutcracker snowflake in toe shoes.

“People are trying to come down the stairs,” says her mother. “Do you have to go potty? Let’s go find the potty.”

“I’m just dancing!” Ruthie says. “You’re hurting my feelings.”

“You have to go potty,” her mother says, “I can tell.” But Ruthie sees that she is not really concentrating, she is looking at the big map of the elves’ faire and finding something interesting, and Ruthie will hold the jiggly snowflake feeling inside her body for as long as she wants. This means she wins, because when she doesn’t go potty regular things like walking or standing are more exciting. She’s having an adventure.

“It says there’s a doll room. Does that sound fun? A special room filled with fairy dolls.” Her mother leans closer to the map and then looks around at the real place, trying to make them match. “I think it’s down there.” She points with the hand that is not holding Ruthie’s.

Ruthie wants to see what her mother is pointing at, but instead she sees a man. He is standing at the bottom of the lawn and looking up at her. He is not the acorn man, and he does not have a golden crown like the kind a king wears, or the pointy hat of a wizard. She has seen Father Christmas, by the raffle booth, and this is not him. This is not a father or a teacher or a neighbor. He does not smile like the brown man who sells Popsicles from a cart. This man is tall, thin, with a cape around his neck that is not black, not blue, but a color in between, a middle-of-the-night color, and he pushes back the hood on his head and looks at her like he knows her.

“Do you see where I’m pointing?” Kate asks, and suddenly squats down and peers into Ruthie’s face. Sometimes there’s a bit of a lag, she’s noticed, a disturbing and faraway look. It could be lack of sleep: the consistent early bedtime that Dr. Weissbluth strongly recommends just hasn’t happened for them yet. A simple enough thing when you read about it, but the reality! Every evening the clock is ticking — throughout dinner, dessert, bath, books, the last unwilling whiz of the day — and with all of the various diversions and spills and skirmishes, Kate wonders if it would be that much easier to disarm a bomb in the time allotted. And so Ruthie is often tired. Which could very well explain the slowness to respond; the intractability; the scary, humiliating fits. Maybe even the intensified thumb sucking? It’s equally possible that Kate is just fooling herself into thinking this, and something is actually wrong.

Tonight she’ll do a little research on the Internet.

Slowly Kate stands up and tugs at Ruthie’s hand. They are heading back down the hill in search of the doll room. They are having a special day, just the two of them. They both like the feeling of being attached by the hand but with their thoughts branching off in different directions. It is similar to the feeling of falling asleep side by side, which they do sometimes in defiance of Dr. Weissbluth’s guidelines, their bodies touching and their dreams going someplace separate but connected. They both like the feeling of not knowing who is leading, whether it’s the grown-up or the child.

But Ruthie knows that neither of them is the leader right now. The man wearing the cape is the leader, and he wants them to come to the bottom of the hill. She can tell by the way he’s looking at her — kind, but also like he could get a little angry. They have to come quickly. Spit spot! No getting distracted. These are the rules. They walk down the big lawn, past the face-painting table and some jugglers and the honeybees dancing behind glass, and Ruthie sees that her mother doesn’t really have to come at all. Just her.

She has a sneaky feeling that the man, under his cape, is holding a present. It’s supposed to be a surprise. A surprise that is small and very delicate like a music box but when you open it keeps going down like a rabbit hole, and inside there is everything, everything she’s wanted: stickers, jewels, books, dolls, high heels, pets, ribbons, purses, toe shoes, makeup. Part of the present is that you don’t have to sort it out. So many special and beautiful things, and she wants all of them, she will have all of them, and gone is the crazy feeling she gets when she’s in Target and needs the Barbie Island Princess Styling Head so badly she thinks she’s going to throw up. That’s the sort of surprise it is. The man is holding a present for her and when she opens it she will be the kindest, luckiest person in the world. Also the prettiest. Not for pretend, for real life. She’s serious. The man is a friend of her parents, and he has brought a present for her the way her parents’ friends from New York or Canada sometimes do. She wants him to be like that, she wants him to be someone who looks familiar. She asks, “Mommy, do we know that man or not?” and her mother says, “The man with the guitar on his back?” but she’s wrong, she’s ruined it: he doesn’t even have a guitar.

Ruthie doesn’t see who her mother is talking about, or why her voice has gotten very quiet. “Oh, wow,” her mother whispers. “That’s John C. Reilly. How funny. His kids must go here.” Then she sighs and says, “I bet they do.” She looks at Ruthie strangely. “You know who John C. Reilly is?”

“Who’s John C. Reilly?” Ruthie asks, but only a small part of her is talking with her mother, the rest of her is thinking about the surprise. The man has turned his head away, and she can see only the nighttime color of his cape. She is worried that he might not give it to her anymore. She is sure that her mother has ruined it.

“Just a person who’s in movies. Grown-up movies.” Kate’s favorite is the one where he plays the tall, sad policeman: he was so lovable in that. Talking to himself, driving around all day in the rain. You just wanted to hand him a towel and give him a hug. And though something about that movie was off — the black woman handcuffed, obese, and screaming, and how the boy had to offer up a solemn little rap — John C. Reilly was not himself at fault. He was just doing his job. Playing the part. Even those squirmy scenes were shot through with his goodness. His homely radiance! The bumpy overhang of his brow. His big head packed full of good thoughts and goofy jokes. Imagine sitting next to him on a parent committee, or at Back-to-School Night! She’d missed her chance. Now he and his guitar are disappearing into the fir trees beyond the parking lot.

Kate sighs. “Daddy and I respect him a lot. He makes really interesting choices.”

“Mommy!” Ruthie cries. “Stop talking. Stop talking!” She pulls her hand away and crosses her arms over her chest. “I’m so mad at you right now.”

Because another girl, not her, is going to get the surprise. The man isn’t even looking at her anymore. Her mother didn’t see him, she saw only who she wanted to see, and now everything is so damaged and ruined. It’s not going to work. “You’re making me really angry,” Ruthie tells her. “You did it on purpose! I’m going to kick you.” She shows her teeth.

“What did I do now?” her mother asks. “What just happened?” She is asking an imaginary friend who’s a grown-up standing next to her, and not Ruthie. She has nothing to say to Ruthie: she grabs her wrist and marches fast down the rest of the hill, trying to get them away from something, from Ruthie’s bad mood probably, and Ruthie is about to cry because she is not having a good day, her wrist is stinging very badly, nothing is going her way, but just as her mother is dragging her through the door of a small barn she sees again the man with the surprise, he has turned back to look at her, so much closer now, and when he reaches out to touch her she sees that he has long, yellowish fingernails and under his cape he’s made out of straw. He nods at her slowly. It’s going to be okay.

Inside the barn, Kate takes a breath. It actually worked. Nothing like a little force and velocity! Ruthie has been yanked out from under whatever dark cloud she conjured up. Kate will have to try that again. The doll room, strung with Christmas lights, twinkles around her merrily. Bits of tulle and fuzzy yarn hang mistily from the rafters. As her eyes get used to the dim barn and its glimmering light she sees that there are dolls everywhere, of all possible sizes, perched on nests of leaves and swinging from birch branches and asleep in polished walnut-shell cradles. Like the wooden animals, they seem to be descended from the same bland and adorable ancestor, a wide-eyed, thin-lipped soul with barely any nose and a mane of bouclé hair. Despite being nearly featureless, they are all darling, irresistible: she wants to squeeze every last one of them and stroke the neat felt shoes on their feet. Little cardboard tags dangle from their hands or ankles, bearing the names of their makers, the names of faithful and nimble-fingered Waldorf mothers who can also, it’s rumored, spin wool! On real wooden spinning wheels. What a magical, soothing, practical skill. Could that be what she’s missing — a spinning wheel? Kate is still searching for the proper tools in the hope that maybe they will make her more equipped. But no sooner has the idea alighted than with perfect, disheartening clarity she sees the lovely spinning wheel languishing alongside the white-noise machine and the child-sized yoga mat and the big expensive bag of organic compost intended for the theoretical vegetable garden, a collection of great hopes now gathering deadly spiders in the back of the garage. She glances down at Ruthie — is she charmed? Happy? — And then looks anxiously around the room at its sweet assortment of milky faces peeking out from under tiny elf caps or heaps of luxuriant hair. Please let there be some brown dolls! she thinks. And please let them be cute. Wearing gauzy, sparkly fairy outfits like the others, and not overalls or bonnets, or dresses made of calico. A brown mermaid would be nice for once. A brown Ondine. She squeezes her daughter’s hand in helpless apology: for even at the elves’ faire, where all is enchanting and mindful and biodegradable, she is exposing her again to something toxic.

But Ruthie isn’t even looking at the dolls because now she has to go pee very badly. Also she can’t find her giraffe. It isn’t there under her arm where she left it. Her baby giraffe! It must have slipped out somewhere. But where? There are many, many places it could be. Ruthie looks down at the floor of the barn, covered in bits of straw. Not here. She feels her stomach begin to hurt. It was her one special thing from the elves’ faire. A present from her mother. Maybe her last present from her mother, who might say, “If you can’t take care of your special things, then I won’t be able to get you special things anymore.” But she won’t need special things anymore! She is going to get a surprise, one that gets bigger and bigger the more she thinks about it, because she has a feeling the man is able to do things her mother is not able to do, like let her live in a castle that is also a farm, where she can live in a beautiful tower and have a little kitten and build it a house and give it toys. Also she’s going to have five, no, she means ten, pet butterflies.

The man is standing outside the barn, waiting for her, and maybe if she doesn’t come out soon enough he’ll walk right in and get her. Ruthie wants to run and scream, she can’t tell if she’s just happy or the most scared she’s ever been. Noooooooo! She shrieks when her father holds her upside down and tickles her, but as soon as he stops she cries, Again, again! She always wants more of this, and her father and mother, they always stop too soon.

The man in the cape won’t stop. The dolls in this room are children, children he has turned into dolls. Ruthie can help him, she’ll be on his team. She’ll say, “I’m going to put you in jail. Lock, lock! You’re in jail. And I have the key. You can never get out until I tell you.” Her friends from school, her ballet teacher, Miss Sara, her best friends, Lark and Chloe, her gymnastics coach, Tanya, her mommy and daddy, her favorite, specialest people, all sitting with their legs straight out and their eyes wide open and no one else can see them but her. She will be on the stage copying Dorothy, and they will be watching, she will do the whole Wizard of Oz for them from the beginning, and the man will paint her skin so it’s bright not brown and make her hair so it’s smooth and in braids and she looks like the real Dorothy. It will be the big surprise of their life!

Kate knows there must be a brown doll somewhere in this barn, and that it’s possibly perfect. If anyone can make the doll she’s been looking for, these Waldorf mothers can: something touchable and dreamy, something she could give her child to cherish and that her child would love and prefer instead of settle for. Considering that she’s been searching for this doll since the moment Ondine was born, $130 is not so much to spend. For every doll in this barn can be purchased, she’s just discovered; on the back of each little cardboard tag is a penciled number, and it’s become interesting to compare the numbers and wonder why this redheaded doll in a polka-dot dress is twenty-five dollars more than the one wearing a cherry-print apron. She wanders farther into the barn, glancing at the names and numbers, idly doing arithmetic in her head: how much this day has cost so far (seventeen for the giraffe, eight for the smoothies, two for raffle tickets) and how much it might end up costing in the future. Because if she does find the doll she’s looking for, it’d be wonderful to get that white shelf she’s been thinking about, a white shelf she could buy at IKEA for much less than the similar version at Pottery Barn Kids and nearly as nice, a shelf she could hang in a cheerful spot in Ondine’s yellow room from which the doll would then gaze down at her daughter with its benign embroidered eyes and cast its spell of protection. All told, with the doll and the giraffe and the smoothies and the shelf, this day could come in at close to $200, but who would blink at that? You’re thinking about your child.

Ladies and gentleman! Ruthie will say, Welcome to the show! And the man with the cape will pull back the curtains and everybody will be so surprised by what they see, they will put their hands over their mouths and scream. But Ruthie’s own surprise is already turning into something else, not a beautiful secret anymore but just a thing that she knows will happen, whether she wants it to or not, just like she knows she will have an accident in the barn and her giraffe will be lost and her mother will keep looking at the tags hanging from the dolls’ feet, looking closely like she’s reading an important announcement, looking closely and not seeing the puddle getting bigger on the floor. When it happens her mother will be holding her hand, she is always holding and pulling and squeezing her hand, which is impossible actually because Ruthie, clever girl, kind girl, ballet dancer, thumb sucker, brave and bright Dorothy, is already gone.