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

KAREN BRENNAN. The Snow Queen

I’D JUST MOVED BACK TO THE CITY, HAVING BEEN AWAY FOR A LONG time during which I’d accomplished quite a bit of work — I’m no judge of the quality — and was crashing at the apartment of a friend I’d run into at Borders bookstore after two weeks of hapless wandering. It had been snowing, but it always seemed to be snowing here those days; even when it wasn’t snowing one had the impression of snow about to or having just, and I was therefore cold. I was wearing only a flimsy red windbreaker, which is the same as saying I might as well have been wearing my bathing suit. I suppose it was pity when my friend asked where I was living or if I had a place to stay for the night. My general look of forlornness must have prompted him to say, I happen to have a free sofa, and he winked at me, which I considered very kind, very warm-hearted, of this friend who, as I recall, did not have a reputation for either warmth or kindness.

We were browsing the psychology section, he holding a book on the borderline personality and I holding a similar volume concerning narcissism. The maladies de jour, quipped my friend, if you don’t count drug addiction. Ah, yes, drug addiction, I said vaguely. I wasn’t sure I wanted to discuss drug addiction with this friend. I had known many drug addicts and they all were unbearably sad and I found it hard to be irreverent about them. One such was my own son, a pathetic person who wandered the streets homeless, perpetually checking himself into and out of detox units and trying to scam me into purchasing phony prescriptions. I wanted to forget about my son, to excise him from my mind, but the more I tried to do this, the more his presence asserted itself and I could see him, as if a movie were being played in front of my eyes, as a serious, overalled toddler and then as a tender, pudgy preteen with straight brown hair that hung over one eye.

Judge not and ye shall not be judged, warns the Bible, and actually I myself was homeless at the time, having just returned from a kind of vacation, really, during which I’d produced mountains of material (god knows how good any of it was). Still, I did not want to discuss my son.

My friend and I then repaired to the fiction section and explored the As — Jane Austen, all the Andersons, Agee, Alcott, and others, the usual great variety under A — and we each perused according to our tastes, slipping a book from the shelf, riffling through the pages, and replacing it, but not before chuckling over a title or author photo, the way you do.

I hadn’t slept for a week. I’d been away, and when I returned to this city I found everything changed. For example, a certain street I’d remembered as going one way toward the state capital now pointed in a different direction. Where this boulevard had been tree-lined, it was now flanked with tall soulless buildings. A store that used to sell small appliances had sprung up in the place of the junior college where I’d once taught freshman composition and all the cars had new-style garish license plates. I do not remember the state motto being ___________, but it’s possible I’d never really attended to the state motto. It was very cold, as I’ve said, snowing or about to — whereas before it had been temperate, tending toward sea breezes, balmy and blue. Now, no sea in sight (though I searched until I exhausted myself) and a strange odor permeated the air, a cold odor, not quite fresh, as of old snow, but so recent that it did not qualify as memory, but more like the fleeting space between nostalgia and dread, frozen into permanence.

My friend was blind in one eye, and though he assured me he’d always been blind in one eye — the result of a sleigh-riding accident when he was ten — I don’t remember him being blind in one eye. You must have hidden it well, I remarked. At this he bristled. It’s not something you can exactly hide, he retorted. He was holding a paperback edition of H. C. Andersen’s fairy tales — as far away from his face as his arms could stretch, because in addition to being blind in one eye he needed new reading glasses — and he insisted on sharing with me an excerpt from “The Snow Queen,” which is all about a terrifying being called the Snow Queen who kidnaps a boy called Kay. I didn’t want to be rude, but I’m not especially interested in fairy tales, no matter how capable and esteemed the author. In fact, “The Snow Queen” had a particularly perilous association for me, as she — the cold and beautiful woman — put me in mind of my mother, who had once read me that story. Therefore, while my friend read — it was a lady, tall and slender and brilliantly white.. — I let my mind wander.

For two weeks, I’d been looking for the sea, sleeping where I could under whatever canopy or ledge I could find — bridges, which had been abundant in the old days, had vanished without a trace, and so I was reduced to buttresses — the new gargoyles, snow-laden and hideous, the tiny balconies that used to be so fragrant and flower-laden, where people now smoked cigarettes, pitching the still-smoldering rockets below, almost burning me to death on several occasions.

I did not like to ask my friend — or anyone for that matter — about the sea because it is entirely possible that I am misremembering my old home. While he read Andersen’s “Snow Queen” in that excited way people have when they desperately want you to share their enthusiasm, their voices ratcheting up dramatically, my mind wandered the streets in the same manner that my body, for the past month, had wandered the streets. Still no sea.

My friend did not have the reputation for warmth or kindness, nevertheless he invited me to his apartment where he said there was an empty sofa with my name on it. He must have known I was extremely tired, yawning constantly and twirling and untwirling a strand of my hair around a forefinger, a habit when fatigued.

My friend said: All I ask is that you remember to put the shower curtain inside the tub. Otherwise the water will drip into the downstairs apartment and that bitch will have a fit.

That’s easy enough, I said. We hadn’t even arrived at his apartment when he gave me this rule about the water and shower. I wondered if there were other rules that would be more difficult to follow because, like anyone, I worry about unconscious behaviors, those which I cannot control, and then I worry that I am too old to change.

I don’t see well, said the friend apropos of nothing. We were walking down some avenue or other — I should say sliding down some avenue or other, because it had of course recently snowed and the road held the tracks of sleds and skis as well as snow tires and chains — but there was really nothing to see, I wanted to point out to my friend, everything was white, the sky, the street, and all the things that might have been visible on a day without snow were now covered with snow — rows of automobiles to the point that I wasn’t sure they were automobiles. For all I knew, they might have been great hulking sea monsters who had lost the sea like the rest of us.

Nevertheless, I gave my friend my arm, and he clutched my red windbreaker, which probably did the opposite of keeping me warm, it was of such a weird, cold material, and in this manner we eventually arrived at his apartment.

I was perfectly comfortable in my new surroundings; they beat the hell out of wandering the icy streets homeless, running into bands of thieves and drug addicts, my son not among those I’d encountered, thank god. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d seen my pathetic son. My heart no longer bleeds for him, though there was a time when my heart was smashed to smithereens. Enough said. Every time I try to banish him from memory here he comes again with his tilted gray eyes, even in the guise of who I did not see in the past month, as he who was conspicuously absent from my wanderings.

Being homeless is no picnic and, unlike my son, I did it drug-free, with only my thoughts for comfort, my belief (mistaken) that the sea lurked somewhere, waiting to restore me to my bearings.

My friend had a sofa, a TV, a lamp, a rug, a stove, a fridge, a double bed, a closet full of shoes, and a cat. I hadn’t realized he was such an austere fellow. He didn’t have a reputation for warmth or kindness, but inviting me to his apartment suggested that this reputation was not entirely warranted.

I slept on the sofa, as instructed. It was foamy, not lumpy, and its velvet material a cocoon of sorts. We all like to feel swathed, I think. Also, my friend gave me a blanket — a nice blue blanket which I wrapped around myself multiple times — and a pillow that used to belong to the cat. In fact, the cat shared the pillow with me at night, which I didn’t mind, the paddling and purring of the cat next to my ear as I slept, though I believe it colored my dreams.

The cat was cream-colored with large irregular splotches on its back, giving it the appearance of a small cow.

As cats go, it was medium-sized.

I dreamed of cows, therefore, and human infants who were pitched into dark holes and drug addicts sleeping on sofas belonging to other drug addicts.

The last time I saw my son he informed me that he was living in a “squat.” I told him that that fact struck me as kind of ignominious.

I remember the ocean as being a deep gray color laden, on good days, with streaks of white, which gave it its characteristic shimmer. The sky on such days was lit with what looked to be rags hanging from a celestial clothesline. Very beautiful, but spooky.

My friend was christened Frederick von Schlegel, after the German philosopher of the same name, but everyone called him Hans. My name was G, just the initial deprived of the clothing, I liked to say. The cat’s name was Fur and I won’t tell you my son the drug addict’s name.

I had been away for an indeterminate amount of time during which I completed a great deal of work. I kept residuals in a suitcase which, until I met Hans in Borders bookstore, I lugged around with me through the city. The bulk was housed elsewhere. I had no idea if any of it was successful. In more optimistic moments, I liked to think so; but eventually something would happen — the tiniest alteration in the atmosphere, such as the time when the crow who frequented the fire-escape railing growled at me through the window — and then I would be in despair over my accomplishments. At such times I felt I understood the impulses of those who scourged themselves with cato’-nine-tails and slept on beds of nails. I, too, craved punishment for the unworthiness of my effort, indeed the unworthiness of my being.

Other than the sofa, Hans’s apartment was replete with artificial flowers of every denomination. In the mornings, he would tend to these thousands with a translucent spray bottle, which would take a full hour. I could not shake the feeling that these flowers were about to speak, that there was more to them than twists of colored plastic or, in some cases, starched fabric. The cluster of pink ranunculus that sat stiffly on the coffee table in front of the sofa on which I slept seemed always about to discourse about psychology. The narcissist, they always seemed about to say, is generally a happier person than the comparatively hysterical borderline personality. Here they seemed to nod pointedly toward the daffodils, and I of course was reminded of my encounter with my friend at Borders bookstore when we each held those books on personality disorders only to abandon them (thankfully) for fiction. The tulips, I thought, seemed about to agree with me that the idea of personality disorders was kind of creepy and attractive at the same time, the notion that something surprising lurks under the surface of a person always a thrill, but perhaps, at times, an unwelcome thrill. On and on, the flowers seemed about to yak, and I admired their stamina. The fact that they all persisted in a season of profound winter was, I suppose, cause for celebration of some sort — or perhaps they were merely stir crazy, as was I.

Even so, I rarely left the apartment, but settled myself by the window where I indulged in an on-and-off sprightly communication with the crow. The crow would bring me news of my son, not welcome news, and much as I tried to dissuade him (or her) from these reports, she seemed to insist upon delivering them. You never know about the sensibilities of other species that are possibly impervious to that which we hold dear as humans. In this case, I was holding dear the absence of my son from my life. I cherished this absence as some might cherish inhabiting the premises of one who collected artificial flowers of every denomination and harbored a spotted cat.

The cat was not a communicator and, aside from our sleep time, kept its distance. There were times when I felt it was “giving me a look,” but many feel this way about cats on account of the shapes of their eyes and the fact that they rarely blink. Perhaps, though, they have the capacity to stare into the soul; if this one had been able to gaze into mine, I doubt it would have insisted on sleeping with me. It would have discovered a clotted mess of conflicting desires and repugnancies, all of which I hid behind my usual sangfroid.

Hans and I spoke rarely, and when we did our conversation tended to get caught up in snarls of misunderstanding. He was, as I’ve said, blind in one eye, and this was the central fact of his life, to hear him talk about it. Once I tried to tell him that being blind in one eye was not all that disabling and he nearly bit my head off. You have no idea, do you? he said incredulously, and we went on from there, back and forth, like a Ping-Pong tournament I remember participating in (and losing) as a ten-year-old. Nerve-wracking to see that little white ball — innocuous as it may have been — barreling toward you, as if it might cripple you for life, which is the spirit in which we fought, Hans and I. You are the most self-indulgent person I’ve ever met, he shouted, and I shouted, At least I’m not deluded, and he shouted, You could at least tidy up a little around here, and I shouted, I can’t hear myself think around here!

This last was a mean-spirited reference to Hans’s incessant theremin playing, the spooky sounds reminiscent of bad sci-fi or a copulating cat or, less frequently, a flock of warbling mourning doves. Hans had not yet mastered the instrument, which was a difficult instrument to master, though if you asked me, anyone with a decent soprano could mime the sounds pretty accurately by intoning ooooo and eeeee to the tune of something plaintive.

When he played O mio bambino cara, though, in spite of myself, I was moved. There he would stand, at the helm of his peculiar instrument, a lumpen figure of a man with a large square head, his mouth pressed in a grim line, his hands like big roast beefs paddling the air — and the tender spectacle of this sad, blind-in-one-eye man, along with the Puccini — all the more poignant for being a little off-key — would unfailingly bring tears to my eyes.

I was settling in like a cat settles in, surrendering myself to unfamiliar surroundings, marking my own tiny territory, as it were, which consisted of the sofa and a plastic chair I had moved to the window for the purpose of looking outside. It was always snowing or about to snow and it fascinated me to watch the snowflakes, which resembled swarms of large white bees.

I began to dread the crow’s visits, however, the news of my son always discouraging — he was caught scoring heroin and the police had broken his nose; he was contemplating injecting bleach into his arm, so despondent was he; he had checked himself into detox units, rehab programs, hospital psych wards; he was cohabiting with a Mormon bishop, a blond meth freak, a black cat who subsequently died in an alley. I had to cover my ears.

There came the day, as I knew it would, when I neglected to tuck the shower curtain inside the bathtub while taking my shower. Hans had gone for the afternoon — god knows where he went for hours at a time (I used to speculate that he had a woman stashed somewhere, a person who tended to his physical needs and complimented him on his taste in reading, his formidable intellect, and his sense of humor) — and when I had finished with my ablutions, I heard the angry pounding on the apartment door. Wearing only a towel, I peered through the little eyehole and perceived a tiny, misshapen woman with a large nose looking back at me.

You have some nerve, she said when I opened the door. My entire apartment is flooded, thanks to you. She was not as tiny as I’d thought, nor as misshapen. She was actually quite attractive in a cheerleaderish way — a certain type of big girl with crisp incisors renowned for a lack of irony. Permit me to help you clean up the mess, I said. Which is how I came to know Rita and her various boyfriends, one of whom was perched on top of a ladder reading a book on that first visit, where, for the rest of this tale, we will leave him.

Rita was a hairdresser with her own business, which had been recently revamped by a TV personality who went around revamping hairdresser salons. She was immensely grateful to this personage, claiming that her sales went up exponentially and her employees were far more respectful than before. All this was divulged after I’d done a fair job of sopping up the small lake in Rita’s bedroom with two bath towels. When I’d wrung the last of my shower effluent from the towel into a large bucket, Rita was frowning over me. Your hair needs attention, she said.

This is how I happened to become a regular patron of Rita’s Hair Salon. I’d been cooped up in Hans’s small rooms for so long, I’d forgotten the sheer gleam of the outside world — its rivets and whorls, its dizzying frontal assault when, on my first time out, the snow bees attacked me. Bigger and bigger they grew until they transformed to giant chickens in front of my eyes, squawking and revving up their wings like jet engines, but silent (paradoxically), perfectly silent, so that the squawks and the revving were only in imagination (nevertheless loud).

And this is a curiosity — how the mind creates its own disturbances and how there is almost a kind of synesthesia involved when it comes to the workings of the imagination, a kind of leakage among compartments. Indeed, in imagination everything connects and overlaps — a disturbing vision is capable of hurting the ear and vice versa, and what was past returns uncannily to infect our present moments. Not only memories but stories, even the stories we held most dear as children, and the thought of who we were as children reading those stories, or listening to them, our mothers’ warm breath on our necks.

Which is why I tried to banish all thoughts of my son.

Thankfully, Rita’s salon did not entail much of a trek. It was a pleasant enough place with purple walls and elderly women sitting under hair driers with pink curlers and Rita running around snapping her precision scissors, which she ultimately employed on my own coif, cutting, shaping, and spraying to such an extent that I did not recognize the severe and helmeted visage — like a Roman foot soldier! — that looked back at me from her mirror.

An old woman to whom Rita applied her energetic ministrations, from I believe Finland or Lapland, engaged me in conversation; she talked about her children and her abilities as a fortune-teller, a little diminished, she admitted, with her great age. Her children and her children’s children and even their children were getting on, she said, and the whole business made her feel very ancient, which in fact she was, displaying the ropy veins on her old hands with pride. Fabulous, no? she said. I am lucky to have made it so far as the world is endlessly — here she searched for the right word, then shook her head. The world is endlessly, she repeated, then laughed. Rita was teasing her hair into two towers, then situating tiny plastic windows in each. I like to do my part, said the old woman.

Then she took my hand in both of hers and read my palm. Ah, but you, she said. You have just been away on a, shall we say, sojourn, during which you completed a great deal of work. It is difficult, almost impossible, to judge this work — I’m not sure why. Then you wandered, looking for that which no longer exists. Then you happened upon a friend, not noted for his warmth and kindness, who took you in. Listen to the crow, she said. Follow the snow bees. Your son awaits you. At this the old woman began to weep so profusely that Rita gently escorted her to the restroom and I made my departure.

“The Snow Queen,” written by an unattractive, socially inept Dane, said Hans, is a sort of coming-of-age story. There are two children, a boy and a girl, who through a twist of fate become separated. The twist of fate is the Snow Queen herself, an enigmatic personage, beautiful and dangerous—“slender and dazzling”—who entrances the boy, invites him to ride on her sled, wraps him in her fur—“creep into my fur,” she entreats seductively — and takes him to her ice palace. We know she is dangerous because on the way to the ice palace, the Snow Queen says, “And now you will have no more kisses. or else I shall kiss you to death!”

But the best part of the story, said Hans, is that before any of the above occurred, the devils dropped a special mirror which smashed into millions of pieces and became lodged in people’s eyes and hearts, causing distorted views of the world. For some reason, don’t ask me why, I love the idea of that mirror. You love contradictions, I pointed out, and calamities. No, said Hans, I love the idea of lost souls.

The story is a ludicrously obvious tale of sexual seduction, piped up the iris. The beautiful queen, the “fur” that “envelopes” the boy, the sleigh ride to “another land,” even the palace with its postlapsarian, postcoital chill. who among us wants to surrender his penchant for enchantment?

We are all lost souls, Hans went on mournfully, and then he went mournfully to his theremin to play a version of “Over the Rainbow,” which sounded like a duck quacking. But I was still thinking about the Snow Queen, who had always reminded me of my mother, who also was given to furs and a cold house and, for years in my young life, inhabited a place of mystery. And this made me think of my son, which I did not want to do, so I changed the course of my thinking and instead thought of the power of the imagination.

So though we cannot exactly envision the matter of “beyond our wildest dreams” (I reflected) since it has not yet been revealed, we can nonetheless attach to this imaginary empty place an ecstatic feeling; it can occupy all our thoughts and direct our smallest actions.

As if reading my mind, a chorus of violets seemed about to chant obsessive compulsive disorder a few times until interrupted by a single rose who seemed about to discourse on that personality disorder, claiming that Gerda demonstrated all the signs of OCD in her persistent quest, her inability to banish little Kay (who was no longer little) from her mind. In a way, the roses seemed about to say, Gerda was obsessed with the irrecoverable past, with childhood in all its one-dimensionality. One could say, the roses seemed about to continue, that she was unable to deal with the complexities of adulthood, especially her own impending adulthood.

Just then the crow appeared at the window, surrounded by its customary band of snow bees, looking a little worn out, as if it had been through an even fiercer blizzard than usual. You are both wrong, said the crow, the SQ is a gothic story, if you will, wherein a girl has an adventure — becomes, for the moment, the agent of her fate — and in the end discovers the prize wasn’t worth it. Ha, added the crow cynically, as if this were the case with pursuits of any kind.

Or, said the cat, who for the first time in our acquaintance seemed to have an opinion, it is the story of incest. That story reminds me of the film Psycho, only it has a different outcome. The boy escapes the suffocating clutches of the girl and the grandmother and returns to this vale of tears, inevitably resigned. The Freudian drama to a T.

Lost souls! interjected Hans, after which we all fell silent.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized that Hans’s love of lost souls might have explained his kindness to me.

I was on my way to Rita’s Hair Salon in an even worse blizzard than usual. I could not see one foot in front of me as I walked; I proceeded, therefore, in blind faith, hoping not to fall into an open manhole or walk in front of a truck. The wind howled and buffeted and finally tore my umbrella from my hands and tossed it god-knows-where. I was quite cold and I was enacting that trick where you allow the cold into your body in order to nullify it.

In desperation, I slipped into the premises of an antiquities dealer called Fiske. This was a small, sad establishment that reeked of bygone dust and spiderwebs. Fiske himself emerged from a back room with a fistful of white bread crusts in one hand, wearing a slight smile. How can I help you? he inquired politely. I explained that I was just taking temporary shelter, but I’d be happy to browse.

Indeed, Fiske’s Antiquities was a browser’s paradise and included stuffed owls and warthogs, troops of books with battered spines, an array of boxes — little ceramic boxes, cloisonné boxes, ivory boxes — perfume bottles with semiprecious jewels dotting their circumferences, a collection of ink pens, and nineteenth-century costumes, notably a chimney-sweep costume worn by a manneqin with no eyes.

Idly peering into a wooden box decorated with the burned-wood tool of mid-twentieth century — its lid contained an image of a buck-toothed beaver with the word TOOTHPICKS clumsily embossed beneath — I experienced a jolt of déjà vu so severe that I had to grab Fiske by the forearm in order to steady myself.

Even when I’d settled into the winged-back chair that Fiske was kind enough to provide, I still could not shake the déjà vu. There was an odd familiarity to everything in the shop — the boxes, the pens, the costume, and especially the books. I took in their battered spines absentmindedly as I sat, running my eyes over the titles of books I had never heard of. Even so, they were familiar to me in the way that a story is familiar when you enter in medias res and cannot shake the feeling that you’ve read it before.

It was hardly a surprise, therefore, when I spotted a copy of H. C. Andersen’s fairy tales, illustrated with the tortuous images of Kay Neilson. It was such a volume from which my mother read “The Snow Queen,” a story that terrified me as much as did the perfume of my mother.

In the penultimate scene (I recalled), the Snow Queen tells little Kay that if he can spell the word ETERNITY out of icicles she will give him his freedom. This Kay failed to do. Instead, Gerda appeared and melted his heart with the heat of her love.

Fiske said, I can give you a good deal on that book. But I didn’t know if I wanted to own it. I’d been away for a long time and I’d accomplished a great deal of work whose quality was difficult to determine. The bulk was housed miles from the city — only the residuals remained and at this point they no longer made sense to me. The memory of them, even now, locked in a suitcase, brought to mind a row of walls with vague, poorly executed scrawls.

Whereas the memory of my son brought to mind the sea.

When last seen, he was living in a black Camry, terribly thin, begging for food by sticking his hand out the window. His face, reported the crow, had hardened into a contemptuous mask, and when a passerby declined to drop a dollar into his outstretched palm, he spit at him. These depressing reports nullified all memories of the sea — though my son persisted at the back of my mind, despite my best efforts to banish him.

Oh beauty, oh sadness! I thought, apropos of nothing. Though perhaps it was the beautiful boy making sandcastles who flashed before my eyes. His knees scraped up.

It was still snowing. Possibly it would always snow. It is hard to know what to do under any circumstances, much less those circumstances that require us to fight against the prevailing weather. His knees were scraped because he had fallen from his bicycle.

I’d dabbed on peroxide and plastered a few Band-Aids. The world was shining and perfect, the sea left a mustache of white foam on the shore. In a while we’d go home, make sandwiches, tell stories. Did I read him the story of the Snow Queen? I think not. It would have frightened him.

Although my mother, who looked uncannily like the Snow Queen, read the story to me.

In those days I would have done anything to protect my son.

If I were to encounter him now — in an alley, say, covered with snow — I would not be able to melt his heart. My love, unlike Gerda’s, has gone cold. It appears that we are doomed to go our separate ways, to continue in the darkness of our own making, half-blind, and no longer who we once were.

That’s the way most stories end, I mused sadly. Not with roses blooming, not with the onset of summer, not hand-in-hand.

In moments, I would pay Fiske the required amount, tuck the book inside my jacket, and head into the fray.