The Charmed Wife

In the Forest Clearing

The wood is just as I imagined it, just as I dreamed it. Leaves have not yet fallen but are already shot through with copper and bronze, and the trees stand tall, like columns in some mysterious autumnal cathedral carved out of gems, wrought out of precious metals, all rubies and amber and gold. Paths crisscross and disappear into the russet-colored dusk. I inhale the smell of ripeness, the smell of rain, the smell of wild things growing, dying, changing freely. It is neither day nor night under the trees, but a lingering in-between gloaming. The path I follow seems to have a will of its own, twisting, turning, always taking me deeper and deeper in. The farther I go, the more ancient the beeches, aspens, and elms, the more pungent the scents, the more solemn the world around me—and the less afraid I feel, as though with every step into the unknown, I am shedding a bit of my familiar past, losing a bit of my familiar self.

The wood is quiet with a profound, churchlike silence, but as I keep walking, I begin to sense stealthy presences all about me, traveling along invisible forest roads on hushed errands of their own. Enormous white moths that look like flowers—or else flowers that look like moths—glide slowly, weightily, from one pool of shadow into another. Glinting eyes stare at me from under misshapen roots, from inside hollowed trunks, yet when I draw nearer, they are quick to blink out of sight or turn into innocuous fireflies that zigzag across my path, winking in and out, before dissolving in the canopy above. The path soon takes me to the edge of a clearing, runs alongside it. I can hear water trickling somewhere nearby. It is dark on my left, light on my right: pale dawn has begun to glow between the giant oaks that line the clearing. I glance over, squinting after the dimness of the forest—and catch my breath.

A circle of slender sprites, translucent like leaves held up against the morning sun, are leading a swaying fleet-footed dance in the grassy glade. Without thinking, almost without knowing what I am doing, quite as if summoned, I abandon the path and rush out toward them.

Then I stand blinking in the brightness.

The clearing is empty, the grass undisturbed by footprints; only a breeze is moving long branches of willows back and forth, back and forth, above a shallow fast-running brook. Oddly, it seems that autumn has not touched this place at all: the grass is verdant here, the leaves vivid, the air full of midday summer warmth. There is a smell here, too, a sharp, clean smell that I cannot name, yet that reminds me of the wild, exhilarating way the night smelled when I walked out of the palace and ran to the crossroads, the now-empty velvet pouch at my hip still filled with my husband’s fingernails, with my mother’s flowers—was it only hours before?

It feels like another life—or else, a life of another.

A life of someone I did not like very much.

Something swoops over my head with an eerie cry, so low that the wind raised by its wings brushes my face. An owl chasing after the departing night, I tell myself—but when I swing around to follow its flight, I see a long-tailed creature wreathed in flickering fire. It trails sparks across the skies, then vanishes in the gloom of the forest. A firebird? Or even a small dragon? There are no dragons left in our orderly, civilized kingdom, of course, but I have gone so far into the woods that it no longer feels like any place I know, and I am suddenly sure that I would not find this hidden summer oasis drawn, bordered, and labeled on any of the maps my children pore over in their geography lessons.

My heart beating, I stand peering into the oaks that guard the clearing, but all is quiet again; only bumblebees hum, and the brook tinkles gently. All at once, I yearn for a refreshing sip of cold water. The brook is clear as crystal, and its bottom gleams with a pattern of bright pebbles. Too parched to care about grass stains on my dress, I kneel on the ground and scoop some water in my hand.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” a breezy voice says above me.

The water trickles out between my fingers as I meet the gaze of a girl who sits swinging her legs on the lowest branch of a nearby willow. She is stark naked, and her skin has a wet sheen. Perky pink nipples of an adolescent peek through the messy tousle of abundant curls the color of river weeds, and the eyes she has turned upon me are like two forest ponds, dark green and still; as I look closer, I can almost see tiny specks of water lilies floating inside them and tiny streaks of dragonflies darting through.

Looking into those eyes for long is a bit like drowning, and I glance away, dizzy.

“Unless, of course, you want to be a fish,” the girl continues blithely. “It’s not so bad, being a fish. Some may even prefer it. Not me, though. I enjoy having toes.” She wiggles them for emphasis; her toenails look just like the pebbles glistening in the brook’s merry current. “Also, I like eating the fish, myself. Girl fish are delicious.”

When she smiles, I notice that her teeth are sharp and crowded in her mouth.

Carefully, I rise and edge a few steps away.

“I’m searching for the royal woodsman’s cottage,” I tell her, then pause for a startled moment: I have not realized it myself until now. I feel a twinge of guilt as I add, “It may or may not look like a shoe. My sister lives there. Well, my stepsister, really. Do you know where I might find it?”

“Oooh, a quest, I love quests!” the girl cries, and dangles her legs faster. “But you must give me something first.” She stares at me with her disconcerting eyes. “I’ve got it! Tell me a secret. Only it has to be a real secret. Something that no one else knows. Just us girls.”

And because I am still filled with remorse over my treatment of Melissa, I remember something sneaky, something shameful, from my childhood, something I have never confessed to anyone before.

“When I was eleven or twelve,” I say quietly, “whenever I helped with the family dinners, I would… I would put things in my stepsisters’ food.”

“What kinds of things?” the girl asks with interest. “Shards of glass? Nails?”

She grins with anticipation. Her teeth are really quite sharp, filed to points.

“No, nothing like that, nothing to hurt them!” I protest with a shudder. “I just resented them because they were happy. Because they fit in. They didn’t have funny accents, and they did well at school. Of course, only Gloria got good grades, but Melissa was popular, she had so many friends. So I’d crush bugs into their soup. Or sprinkle dirt in their hot chocolate. Or do other, even worse things…”

I stop. She considers me, her head tilted.

“No,” she then says flatly.

“No?”

“No. That was child’s play. Give me something else. Something grown-up. And hurry, or I might bite you. Even if you aren’t a fish.”

She is laughing as she says it, but when I look again at her sharp, bared teeth, I am not at all certain that she is joking. Her features, her voice, her gestures are those of a very young girl, hardly older than I was when I spat in my sisters’ dinners, but her eyes, as she holds mine, are old and hungry and savage, filled with some dark, ancient knowledge, and I suddenly feel that it is the wood itself studying me out of the stagnant pools of her irises, weighing my worth, deciding whether to swallow me whole.

I take a deep breath.

“I used to fantasize about leaving my children. I imagined just walking away from them, from the palace, without glancing back. I dreamed of living a rough, bright life on the edge of the world. I’d ride stolen horses, dance with the winds, spend nights with sailors and gypsies, drink, swear—be free. And in those dreams, I never sent a single word home, just let them wonder what happened to me. And I did not miss them.”

She worries her lower lip between her teeth.

“Better,” she concedes at last. “You seem so nice and simple, but you aren’t all that nice and simple inside. Nice is boring. Still, I want something that cuts even deeper. Try again.”

And I say it before I even know what I am about to say.

“My husband only pretended to love me when he married me. In truth, he has never loved me. Not one day. Not one bit.”

In the fallen hush, the plaintive cry of the bird on fire rises from somewhere far, far away. Up in the willow tree, the naked girl claps and swings her legs.

“Ooh, yes, that will do, that is a juicy little tidbit,” she sings out happily. “That will feed me for a day or two.” She licks her lips, once, twice, her snakelike tongue darting out in quick, greedy stabs. “You are free to go now.”

For some reason, having said what I said, I can no longer meet her eyes.

“Aren’t you going to point me toward the royal woodsman’s cottage?” I whisper.

“The royal woodsman’s cottage? But I have no idea where it is. Not in these parts, that’s for sure. No royalty around here. Or don’t you know—it may have taken you only an hour or two to get here, but you are very, very far from home, lost little girl. This is my domain, and I eat handfuls of silly princesses like you for breakfast. You should be grateful I have chosen to let you go.”

And even though she may be only a thirteen-year-old willow sprite with a wicked sense of humor, some sinister thickening in her voice sends a deep chill through my blood, quite as if all my insides have gone goose-bumped. I walk toward the trees then, quickly, without protestations or questions, not raising my head. The unnatural summer, I see, ends abruptly at the clearing’s edge; back in the woods, autumn reigns once again, damp and brown. But just as I am about to reenter the cool dimness, I stop in confusion: where previously one single well-traveled path skirted the glade, there is now a fork in the road, one path going left, the other going right, both disappearing into the forest.

“You didn’t think it would be so easy, now, did you?” The girl laughs behind me. “This is still a fairy tale, you know. But you’ve been braver than I expected from the looks of you, and I am feeling benevolent. Let me see… Yes. If you take the path to the left, you will return to your old life, just like you’ve never left it, and no one the wiser. And if you take the one to the right, you will get an entirely new happy ending. A new, better prince and everything. What color eyes do you prefer?”

I look to the left. I already miss my children terribly.

I look to the right. I am tempted to start anew.

“What if I go straight?” I ask.

“Straight where?” Her laugh is just like the tinkle of the brook rushing over the pebbles. “There is no straight here, dummy. Only left or right.”

She speaks the truth, of course. The paths diverge, one veering back, one leading forward, but between them lies a perilous eruption of poisonous briars, a wilderness of weeds, a dark tangle of branches and roots so dense it is impossible to see through it.

I turn to ask another question. The girl is gone. Only the willow branch is trembling lightly, and the brook is still laughing with her young, cruel voice.

For a long while I stand unmoving on the edge of the quiet brown wood, not thinking about anything, just listening to the beating of my heart.

Then I gather my cloak around me and push straight into the briars.

At the Woodsman’s Cottage

My hands are soon bleeding, my clothes torn, my face scratched. This is a different kind of wood altogether—no longer the softly luminous, cathedral-like alleys of stately trees, but a snarling chaos of brambles, thistles, thorns, overgrown undergrowth. I cannot see three paces before me as I struggle through the wild brush, and my hearing is filled with the deafening crackle of branches snapping over my head and under my feet. Everything is untamed, everything is hard and sharp, everything is pushing against me. When I tumble into a ravine and find it filled waist-high with yellowing nettles, I almost weep with relief, so familiar does their gentle fire feel against my skin. Yet I pick myself up, clamber onto the other side, and plunge back into the murderous thicket. I do not stop, nor do I turn back—and in any case, I know that even were I to regret my decision and retrace my steps, I would not find the summery clearing with the laughing brook and the two paths diverging.

You are only ever given one shot at a choice in stories such as this.

Creatures in this part of the wood are curious rather than stealthy, almost as though they have never encountered a princess before. Birds and squirrels jump to lower branches to watch me closely as I fight my way past. For a while, a fawn walks gracefully through the brush alongside me, soundless next to my crashing and stomping, the white spots on its skin like round flashes of sunlight in the leaves. Then a wolf springs out of the bushes mere steps away, and the fawn vanishes just as suddenly as it appeared. The wolf stares at me with narrowed orange eyes, then follows me in turn, always keeping the same distance. I have no fear of it.

“Excuse me,” I say politely, “but have you seen a house built like a shoe?”

At the sound of my voice, the wolf tenses, twitches its ears, and swerves away, melting into the surrounding twilight. I notice that it has indeed grown darker all around me, as if the day, having only just begun, is already rushing toward evening. I stop to peek at the sky through the brambles, and it seems to me that I do see a star blinking far, far above. Something soft nudges my ankle, and I look down to discover what appears to be a family of plump brown mushrooms gathered at my feet. In the next moment they doff their wide-brimmed hats, and I am surrounded by lumpy, boulderlike creatures with twigs for their noses and moss for their hair.

I crouch before them. Their eyes are like birdseed, beady and excited.

“Pardon me,” I say to them, “but do you know where I can find a woodsman’s family that lives inside a shoe?”

They twitter and chatter in birdlike accents, then file off, giggling, one after another, into the weeds that reach to my shoulders. I wait a bit, but they do not return, so I press ahead. After another hour or two, it has grown completely dark, but the way has become easier little by little. Stars twinkle gently, their flickering light enough for me not to trip yet not enough to see anything clearly. Sometimes it feels as if I am walking in place, on the bottom of a sonorous well, with the night sky a perfect black circle above me. Now and then I enter colder pockets of drifting mists and guess at vague shapes swirling through them—pallid lilies, grimacing faces, beckoning hands with thin, ghostly fingers—but the fog clears swiftly, and I find myself walking on the bottom of the dark starlit well once again. Once, I am enveloped in a cloud of floral scents sweeter than a powder room crowded with perfumed court ladies, yet with the lightest tinge of rot at the very heart of the smell. It seems to me then that I am passing right next to a crumbling brick wall of some manor all entwined in blooming wild roses, yet I cannot be certain; and when I carefully put out one hand and feel about, I succeed only in pricking my finger on a thorn. Soon I start to feel drowsy, and drowsier still, until I am close to falling asleep on my feet. And perhaps I really do, for as I continue to stumble, to slumber, to stumble through the woods, I imagine a small log cabin striding past me on giant chicken legs, its one window fiercely ablaze, ruffled forest imps squawking and leaping out of its way by the dozen—and a sleek black cat on a golden chain who is singing a wordless song in a pleasant velvety baritone as it winds its way back and forth around an immensely thick oak tree in a blue woodland glade—and a glorious silver-haired maiden who is bathing in a silent forest pool, shining droplets of moonlit water running like pearls down her outstretched white wings—and other, stranger things that shimmer at the edges of my vision, beautiful and wild, yet melt into the dark whenever I turn to look at them directly. And as I walk, as I dream, through the obscure, glowing mysteries of the night, the ground evens out under my worn ballroom slippers, the unkempt brush slowly gives way to the magnificent trees of the morning, and the trees begin to part, and the path widens, and then I do trip, after all, but manage to catch myself, closing my eyes protectively for an instant—only to open them upon a sunny autumnal day, a clear pale sky over a meadow, and, across the meadow, a cheerful house painted bright yellow and shaped like a shoe.

I blink, half expecting the house not to be there when I look again—yet there it is still, just as solid, with its green roof, its red door, its blue weather vane fashioned like a rabbit. A dozen shirts of all colors, from prodigiously large to doll-sized tiny, flap and billow on a stretched clothesline in the small yard, and a cow is grazing outside the white wooden fence. As I stand there staring, a redheaded boy, barelegged and barefoot, no older than three, bursts out of the door, rushes into the yard, and, screaming with laughter, bends to pick up a handful of mud and flings it at the drying shirts. His aim is faulty: the clod of dirt arcs short of the clothesline and splatters the cow instead.

The cow looks up impassively, chewing all the while.

“Stop it this instant, you rampaging wildebeest!” cries the buxom woman who has just appeared in the doorway. “I should send you and your unruly brothers off to the woods. Not fit for civilized living, the lot of you!” Her apron is askew, her mouse-colored hair coming out of its bun in messy wisps, and there is a wailing baby propped on her hip. “Why can’t you be more like your sisters? Come here, you little monster!”

The boy ceases his laughter abruptly and edges sideways toward her, then turns around, a look of resignation on his reddened face, to receive a halfhearted slap on his behind; but her hand freezes in mid-motion when she glances up and sees me running across the meadow toward her.

“Your… Your Majesty?”

I throw myself, weeping and laughing, onto Melissa’s bosom. It is wobbly and warm, and smells of milk, mashed peas, and infant sleep, and for a few gasps I wish I were a child again, with a child’s simple sorrows and joys—and with a mother to right the world with one effortless flick of her wrist whenever the world would begin to tilt off center.

“Don’t call me that, don’t call me that!” I repeat between sobs and hiccups—and then become aware of the presence of the boy who is clinging to Melissa’s apron and the baby on Melissa’s hip, so close to me that our noses are almost touching, both children gazing at me in wide-eyed astonishment.

I inhale, straighten, and look down at the three of them. I am a full head taller than Melissa and, I am pained to notice, much thinner, while my gray silk dress, even stained and torn as it is, is infinitely finer than the coarse woolen sack she is wearing.

“I must inform you that I have left King Roland,” I tell her in an awkward, formal tone. “Could I impose upon you, please? It will be for a day or two only. Until I figure out what I should do.”

Her mouth gapes open, but before she can answer, the doorway behind her fills with a multitude of people, a veritable crowd, it seems to me, and they push and shout and shove until we are propelled into the yard, and there I find myself surrounded by children, children, children, little children, bigger children, children who are only a few years short of being adults, children pulling at the tassels of my velvet bag (“Ooh, Mama, look, look how fancy,” a pink blond girl purrs), children pressing their chins into my knees (“So soft!” sighs another girl as she rubs her cheek against the fabric), children touching my hair and my cloak, children looking me over with unabashed curiosity.

“Is this our other auntie?” asks a scrawny boy with scabs on both knees and one finger deep in his nostril.

“Yes,” Melissa replies, and her eyes are shining. “This is your auntie the queen. She will be staying with us for a while. For as long as she wants.”

And I try to thank her, but just then the yard erupts with noise, as they all offer me their names at the same time, calling out “Tom Junior!” and “Myrtle!” and “Mary!” and “Peter!”—but there are far too many of them, and I cannot keep track, I cannot even count them; every time I start my surreptitious count, six, seven, eight, the red and blond heads bobble, shuffle, dart, dip under my elbows and behind my back, and I must start anew, three, four, five… Melissa clucks and giggles and chides, like an immense mother hen in the midst of her brood, then gathers everyone and guides them back inside her house shaped like a shoe. And the house is astonishing—cramped, cozy, mad—filled with odd angles, slanting floors, sharp corners, dipping ceilings, round rooms, narrow rooms, rooms like shafts, rooms like honeycombs, rooms where you can only crawl on your hands and knees, rooms where you must squeeze yourself between the walls, rooms that become chimneys, and for a while, all is chaos, for there are fights breaking out, and three big dogs getting tangled in everyone’s feet, and two cats hissing, and I gift my velvet bag to the blond girl (Myrtle, I think), who is so overcome that she will not stop running around, squealing in delight, showing it off to everyone; and milk is spilled, and braids are pulled, and one pillow explodes, so there is goose down floating everywhere. Yet my stepsister, ever so lightly, holds the strings of this merry pandemonium in her capable hands, and eventually order is restored. The boys are sent off into the yard to feed the animals and tend to the turnips in the vegetable patch; the girls busy themselves with sweeping floors, washing dishes, and singing the baby to sleep. Melissa ushers me into a nook below a twisted staircase, sits me down on a chair fashioned out of a tree stump and painted with purple polka dots, underneath a garland of drying garlic that keeps bumping the top of my head, and asks me: “What happened? My dear, what happened?”

And I clam up. For what can I tell her? That I almost murdered my husband? That I left the palace without ever meaning to do so, and now I cannot go back?

“Oh, you poor thing, but you must be so tired,” she says when I do not reply, and pats my hand. “Why don’t I warm up some good mushroom soup and after you eat your fill, you can go straight to sleep. Things will be clearer once you rest.”

And all at once I realize how exhausted, how incredibly exhausted I am. How long has it been since I left the witch and the fairy godmother at the cauldron and started on the rutted road toward the wooded horizon? How long was I lost in the trees, talking to beasts, making bargains? It feels like days, if not months—sunshine and starlight, summer and fall. Is it morning or evening now, and what season?

I do not know, nor do I want to know—all I want is sleep, peace, oblivion.

Declining Melissa’s insistent offers of food, I follow her up the rickety staircase, pass through rooms upon rooms of slumbering, playing, gossiping boys and girls, navigate a maze of turns and twists to the end of a corridor, then climb the rungs of a ladder to a low-ceilinged loft where luminous dust clouds hang in shafts of light slanting through chinks between logs (it must still be daytime, then), and a bed of sorts is waiting for me—a pallet placed directly on the floorboards, draped in cowhides and wolf furs. Melissa keeps apologizing for the absence of a proper guest room, of a proper bed, of proper linens—“We hardly ever get any visitors here, but Tom will make a good, solid bed for you soon, he’s made all the things in the house, it’s no bother!”—but I hear her words only with great difficulty as I struggle out of my burr-studded cloak, my gaping satin slippers, my torn, soggy dress. I do not notice when she leaves. A thick woolen nightgown is draped over a three-legged stool painted with lopsided poppies. I put it on—it is several sizes too big and balloons about me like a small tent—and crawl under the hides.

I am asleep the moment my head touches my makeshift pillow.

Birds. That is the first thing I know upon reaching the surface after my long, dreamless dive into the dark. Birds, birds, birds, flapping their wings, shifting, pecking. I open my eyes. Broad beams of the sun are piercing the loft once again, striping it in light and shadow, but coming from the other side now, and numerous birds are cooing somewhere close. When I peek through a crack above my pallet, I see doves, tens of doves, taking off on short sun-dappled flights, landing, spreading their wings, preening, kissing, in a cote just on the other side of the wall. I watch their abbreviated attempts to fly until I am wide awake. My dress, I find, has been cleaned while I slept, and the rips in its sleeves and along its hem mended with confident needlework. I put it on and, humbled by gratitude, climb down the ladder.

Immediately I get lost. All the spaces are odd in this house, all the angles are bent, the windows shaped like teapots, birdhouses, tall hats, the doors hidden behind other doors or inside cupboards. It is like meandering through a wildly imaginative child’s drawing. I wander for some time, gaping in helpless astonishment, until I happen upon a round opening in the floor and, edging up to it so as not to crash through, look down into the family kitchen.

My sister is serving breakfast. The table is laden with jugs of cream, platters of forest berries, mugs of milk. The children are devouring stacks of pancakes. The redheaded man at the head of the table—this must be her husband, Tom the royal woodsman—is slathering a thick slice of bread with butter. His shoulders are broad, as are his teeth; he is not at all good-looking, his face seemingly carved with a few wide strokes of an ax, but he exudes solid sense—he exudes goodness. When Melissa passes behind him with another bowl of yogurt, I see her touch him on the back of his neck, see him place his hand over hers. Every time one of the children speaks, he stops eating, swivels toward the child, and listens, and when he offers a few words of his own, everyone pays attention. I am finally able to count their heads, some red like their father, others dark blond like their mother—two, four, seven, nine. Nine children, six boys, three girls—no, not nine, ten, for now I notice the still-hairless baby permanently attached to Melissa’s hip. They discuss the health of a lightning-struck linden in a nearby clearing, fish hatching in a stream behind their meadow, the vegetable garden. The children laugh easily.

Wholesome, I think as I look at them. Happy, I think.

They are talking in hushed voices—so as not to disturb me, I realize now—but I do not alert them to my presence. I watch them closely, avidly. At last the man stands, stretches, gathers Melissa to his green-clad chest in a bear hug, and plants a kiss squarely on her mouth, in front of everyone. My entire life, I have never had a kiss like that—solid, certain, open. When he leaves, the children, too, rise; the boys scamper out after their father, the girls start gathering dishes off the table, sweeping away crumbs. And I understand what I will do.

“Melissa,” I call.

She looks up.

“You’re awake!” she cries. “Come down, come down, I’ll make more pancakes.”

“Can I have something to write on first?” I ask. “And something to write with.”

And then I am seated on another tree-stump chair, before a tree-stump table, with a sheet of paper and a feather quill (“From our beloved goose Martha,” Myrtle tells me proudly as she hands it over). For a while I sit frowning. Writing has never been easy for me: there is something about imprisoning my thoughts in neat rows of words on a page that confounds me every time. But my stomach rumbles with hunger, and at last, I dip the quill into the inkwell (“Daddy made the ink out of blackberries,” Myrtle has informed me, “and I found most of the berries!”)—and start.

“Dear Roland.”

But he is not dear to me—certainly not now, and possibly not in years. I tear the narrow strip with the greeting off the top of the page, crumple it up, and try again.

“King Roland.”

But queens do not address their spouses as kings, no matter how estranged they are from each other. I tear off another strip.

“To His Majesty from Her Majesty.” No. “To whom it may concern.” No. “To my husband.” No. “To the evil wretch who calls himself my husband.” Tempting, but no. As I rip off greeting after greeting, the page is getting shorter and shorter, until I am left with a mere stub, no more than a paragraph’s worth, which will never fit all the lofty sentiments about love, faithfulness, and decency that I have planned to include in my long, well-thought-out letter. Myrtle is playing with her velvet pouch in the corner, putting some shiny pebbles in, taking them out, putting them in again, humming softly. When I ask her for more paper, her little face falls.

“But this was the only sheet we had in the house,” she whispers.

And so, I consider the tortured, uneven fragment before me, then dip Martha’s feather into Tom’s blackberries, and write decisively: “Roland. I want a divorce. I want the children, who have never been of any interest to you. And I want half the kingdom.” But I do not want half the kingdom, for what would I do with it? I cross out “kingdom,” write “palace” above it; but I do not want half the palace, either, for I will never again live under the same roof with that man. I cross out the entire sentence—I trust he will know how to make proper arrangements—and finish simply: “I am staying at the woodsman’s cottage with my sister. Please send your reply there.” I study the period at the end of the sentence, listen to my heartbeat, and change the period to a comma, and add, my hand somewhat unsteady now: “by a courier.” Perhaps… But I do not wish to complete my unvoiced thought, not even in the privacy of my mind.

The note rolled up, I go looking for Melissa. I find her in the yard, clipping a new load of laundry to the clothesline.

“I need to get this to the king,” I say. “Urgently. I know the palace is far and the way to it treacherous, there are wolves and wicked spirits and—”

But she is already calling for Tom Junior. Another holler later, the boy pops up out of nowhere—a red cowlick, a smudge of mud across his freckled nose, dirt under his fingernails, a sleeve torn over a scraped elbow. She gives him the note and a smack (“You lot must think clothes grow on trees!”) and dispatches him promptly.

“But he is too young to go on such a long, perilous quest!” I exclaim as I watch him disappear into the trees at a run.

“Long? Perilous?” She laughs. “See the forest road that starts right over there? It’s broad and well maintained, carts travel it weekly. It will take him to the palace in two hours. Three, if he stops to chat with the miller’s daughter over at the village. And no wolves around here—Tom takes care to keep them away. And even if there were, Tom Junior could hold his own. A wild boy, like all my sons, not afraid of anything, always full of mischief. Don’t know where they get it.”

She sounds exasperated and proud at the same time.

As I give her a hand with the laundry, I wonder, silently, about the willow girl at the brook in the heart of the forest and the mysterious path through the brambles that brought me here—but already, much of my journey is fading from my memory, like a shimmering starlit dream. The autumnal air is crisp; the sky, luminous as stained glass, is filled with the flapping of starched white shirts; and all at once I feel hopeful. Perhaps, I think, King Roland will want to be rid of me himself.

Perhaps this will all be over quickly.

My hope, however, will diminish over the next two days, will fade completely by day four, will turn into sullen despair by the end of the week. I help with the chores around the house as much as I can, but I am conscious of Melissa always trying to take all the work upon herself, always giving me the best of everything, always fretting about my discomfort. Late one night, wandering lost about the house again, I happen to pass Tom and Melissa’s room and overhear them talking, in whispers, about how best to survive the coming winter on what little they have, what with the appetites of their six sons growing faster and faster, and, too, having to provide for their sister the queen. “But of course, she is welcome to live with us always, always,” Tom offers staunchly, and on the other side of their door, my heart breaks a little. I intend to speak to them the following morning, right after breakfast, when our meal is interrupted by a horn trumpeting in the meadow.

I must confess to my breath quickening—but the man who enters the house is in his middle years, with an expressionless face that resembles a door handle, and I quickly pretend to myself that I have not been holding out hope of anyone else darkening the threshold. The courier hands me a parchment with the royal seal (depicting a unicorn in a field of daisies), then doubles up in a series of ridiculous bows and flourishes, and steps aside to wait for my answer.

My hands tremble as I break the seal open.

“My beloved queen,” the letter starts. “You have tricked us, drugged us, left us without a word, but your attempt to humiliate us in front of our entire court has failed. We have announced that you will be visiting your ailing stepsister through the end of the year, as befits your charitable nature, and no one shall expect your return before the first snows. We feel that three months of an impoverished existence in a woodsman’s shack with no allowance will be enough for you to regain your sense of priorities. At the end of that period, we expect you to return chastened to the palace and resume your spousal duties. As you well know, they do not consist of much, but we require your presence by our side for propriety’s sake. In the event you choose to disregard our royal wishes and stay away, we will consider the divorce proceedings initiated, but we promise you that you will rue the day you turned your back on our marriage. You will lose the children and will be left homeless and penniless. The law, as you will be sure to discover, is on our side. Consider this a fair warning. Yours always, King Roland Ferdinand Boniface Frederick Reginald the Fifth.”

I read it again, then ask for a quill.

“I beg you, can I please, please, see the children?” I write at the bottom of the parchment. The messenger accepts it with renewed flourishes, pretending not to notice the tears that are streaming down my face, lifts his chin high in the air, and departs. A day, two days, three days pass, but there is no answer.

After another week, I know not to expect a reply.

At the Manor

“My dear, tell me what the bastard did to you,” Melissa asks again.

Her nine children have all been put to bed, and the two of us are sitting alone by the fire, warming our hands on mugs of hot milk.

I shake my head, then say, to change the subject: “I overheard you and Tom. Talking about the winter.”

She presses both hands to her ample breasts.

“Oh, my dear. You weren’t meant to hear that. We are happy to have you. What else is family for?”

I think of all the times I spat in Melissa’s food as a child, and flush dark with shame. “I know.” And I do know, which only deepens my guilt. “But I want to help with the household expenses.” For a moment I stare into the dancing fire. “I believe I would be good at shoeing horses. And—weaving straw bonnets?”

Melissa smiles, then stops smiling. “Oh. You’re serious. Alas, my dear. Those are commendable skills to have, even if I can’t think how you would have come by them—but the village smith already has three sons to help with the horses. And we don’t have much need for fancy hats around here.”

“I will not sit with my hands in my lap while you work your fingers to the bone, sister.” I frown at the leaping flames in the fireplace—so full of life now, yet in another hour or two, nothing but ash and cinders—and at once the perfect solution comes to me. My mouth twists at the thought, but not a small part of me revels in the bitter irony of its aptness. “Is there someone in these parts who needs a maid?”

Looking stricken, Melissa starts to say no, then hesitates.

“Please. I need to do something.” I do not add that, even more, I need to get out of this house where everyone is so welcoming, where everyone is so joyous, where I die a small death every day, every day.

“There might be a lady,” she concedes after meeting my eyes. “I hear she is rather odd. And her manor is badly neglected. But I will make inquiries. If you wish.”

“I do,” I say, “I do”—and she heeds the desperation in my voice, which is why, only two days later, I am walking the forest road with detailed directions scribbled on an oily piece of paper in which Tom brought fish for supper the night before. I soon take a less traveled path branching off the broad track, but the wood remains filled with light, transparent in the way of all autumnal woods, brown leaves fluttering down through the air. As I walk the rustling path, I let my thoughts float where they will. I wonder, not for the first time, about the mysterious life’s spark that the witch allowed me to keep at the crossroads. I try to imagine what my children are doing at this very moment. I recall, as I do now and then, the beekeeper with the honey-colored eyes and gentle lips. It suddenly occurs to me that, had I chosen differently at that forest clearing, had I gone right, to a fresh happy ending, he would have probably come back into my life, revealed, no less, as a long-lost son of some distant king, and a perfect new story would have started to unfold, from its enchanted beginning to who knows what (quite possibly grim) conclusion—and, just like that, I understand that I will not see him ever again, having chosen a thornier way. For a few minutes, the memory of our dream kiss lingers, warm and stirring; then I let go of it, and it dissipates in the morning chill, not to return.

I pull my cloak about me and walk faster.

After another half an hour, I detect an unexpected floral scent, rich and sweet, yet with the faintest trace of dampness, of rot, underneath. Presently, the trees lining the path give way to blooming rosebushes, and the lane opens onto the great expanse of an unkempt lawn crowned by a sprawling redbrick manor. Its darkened windows stare blankly through trailing ivy. Rust has corroded the wrought-iron arabesques of balcony grilles, and there is a deep layer of grime on the lion-shaped door handle, as if no hand has touched it in a hundred years.

The instructions I have been given direct me to enter without knocking.

Inside, all is oppressive silence, cobwebs, and obscurity; even the bright morning light invading the foyer has lost its cheer, become somber and dull, after straining through the gray and purple petals of the rosette window above the grand entrance. I move through the unfolding array of hushed rooms, and the echo of my footfalls gets lost, trapped in heavy gray draperies, muffled in thick purple rugs. Everything here, I notice, is gray and purple—the slate tints of veined marble floors, the striped light gray wallpaper, the faded violets of velvet sofas with tasseled lilac cushions, the flat grays of tarnished tea urns, trays, and sugar bowls arranged in fussy clusters on lavender tablecloths, the mauves of artificial orchids and chrysanthemums in prim purple vases, and, presiding over everything, the ubiquitous grays of dust, dust, dust.

This must be the house of a very old lady, I decide as I find my way downstairs and into the chilly, unused kitchen, where, as promised, a sad collection of pails and mops awaits my efficient handling.

I spend that day scrubbing the floors; the next, washing the windows; the third, dusting the knickknacks; the fourth, buffing the silver. The first two floors of the manor are deserted save for a dozen gray birds in rusty gray cages—and the birds, oddly, are always asleep, their heads tucked under ruffled wings. As soon as I arrive in the mornings, I pause by their perches to make sure that they have not died in the night; the scarcely discernible rise and fall of gray feathers never fails to reassure me, and yet I find the sight of these still, headless creatures so unnerving that I try to keep away from their cages as much as I can through the day. For the rest, I soon discover that the job suits me well, which is, in truth, unexpected; manual labor made me restless when I was a moody adolescent waiting for my life to begin. Now I move through the manor, singing softly, transforming the cluttered, dim spaces into gleaming geometries of order, and I think of how much satisfaction this simple work brings me. When I first took hold of the broom, after all those indolent years, I was surprised by the feeling of brisk self-sufficiency, almost of power, that surged from my fingers into my heart. I think, then, of how this might just be the answer—or, if not the answer, then at least an answer—to the question that used to bother me so during my empty days in the palace: What makes me different from any other starry-eyed maiden dreaming of her golden prince or her golden goose? Raised on the bland, mealy porridge of princess fantasies, I had imbibed the widely held belief that royal idleness was the only suitable reward for past misery and good behavior—but perhaps this one-size-fits-all approach could have never made me happy.

Perhaps I am, simply, someone who was never meant to be a princess. Perhaps I am someone who prefers the daily joy of using her hands.

And for the first time since escaping the palace, I am visited by a feeling that everything may still work out somehow—that everything will be fine.

On the fifth day, I gather my mops and pails and trudge up the carpeted stairs to the top floor. Darkening tapestries of purple parrots poised along silver branches line the long corridor, and when I touch them with my duster, soft clouds of oblivion bloom before me, making the insides of my nose itch. The rooms on both sides of the corridor are all sleeping chambers, the beds like elaborately garlanded four-poster tombs in their undisturbed brocade magnificence, each with an ornate chamber pot hiding coyly beneath the cascading frills of stiff coverlets. In the last room, the curtains are fully drawn, the windows shuttered, and my steps stir graying cobwebs that hang dense upon the air. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust in the swaying shadows—and then I stifle a cry.

A silver-haired woman in an antique bridal dress gone gray with age is lying stretched out on top of a mauve bedspread.

Once my heart slows down, I see the waxy pallor of her profile in the gloom, the hands folded on the motionless chest, the immense amethysts on the lifeless fingers. The rings are those of an old woman, yet the smooth, slender hands seem young somehow. I do not want to look closer, for fear that, unlike the birds, the woman is truly dead. My face averted, I make a few sweeps at the furriest cobwebs, then tiptoe to the door, forcing myself not to break into a run—and just as I reach the threshold and am about to exhale, I sneeze, and it is not a delicate, ladylike sneeze, either, but the most deafening, earsplitting sneeze of my life, which makes my broom crash onto the floor and my pail explode in a symphony of metallic clangs and rattles.

My blood freezes. I brace myself, steal a backward glance. Her eyes are still closed. Gingerly I pick up the broom and start once again for the freedom of the tapestried corridor—and it is then that the languid, coquettish purr intercepts me.

“My prince!”

Her body has not moved, but the yellowing layers of Flemish lace on her bodice are heaving theatrically, and her pale lavender lips are unmistakably puckered up for a kiss. I notice a gray glint behind the trembling lashes of her lowered eyelids.

“I am the new maid, milady,” I whisper.

The eyelids fly open.

“I know that, I’m not blind,” she says loudly, peevishly. “You could have humored me for a moment, of course. But sympathetic maids are hard to come by nowadays. Bring me a cup of tea, why don’t you. Plenty of milk, no sugar.”

Downstairs, all the birds are awake and chirping madly. When I return with the loaded tray, she is sitting up, propped against the pillows, shuffling a pack of Tarot cards with an intricate cobweb design on their backs. I set the tray down on the bed—a puff of dust rises to meet my face—then move to draw the curtains open.

“Leave it, leave it!” she snaps. “My eyes are too weak for the light.”

I bow and hasten toward the door.

“No, stay,” she orders. “Cool the tea for me. What year is it?”

“What… year?”

In the dimness, it is impossible to tell how old she is. Seen from across the chamber, she appeared young, so young, sixteen or seventeen, no older, and breathtakingly lovely, her silvery hair the palest shade of blond, like the delicate wing of a nighttime moth, her slight, birdlike gestures filled with an ethereal grace. Yet now, as I bend down to blow on the steaming cup, I catch a sour smell of dissolution or ill health masked by some ancient perfume, and her hair has lost its luminous sheen, become a dull gray of long years, while her brittleness resembles the frailty of age.

“Oh, never mind, it makes precious little difference.” Listlessly, she drops the pack of cards, scattering suns, moons, and winged angels all over the bedspread, and yawns. Her tongue is like a cat’s, neat and shockingly pink, trembling tensely in the dark, hot cave of her malodorous mouth. I shrink back. “Who can keep track? Things are different every time I wake up—sometimes only a little, but I can tell, I am quite sensitive, you know. Once, they replaced all the candles in the house with strange new lamps, gaslight, they called it. Another time, they had a man come who made new, magic kinds of portraits. He did one of me. He had a sinister apparatus on legs, and he covered his head with a black cloth, like this, and there was a bright white flash that blinded me. I cried out—I was quite frightened, I am delicate like that—but the likeness was better than any artist’s hand could have made it, only it had no color, it was all gray. I would show you, but my birds pecked it apart. Well, but they are always inventing new things, it’s the age, you know. And the maids change. Almost every time I wake up, it seems, there is someone new. Of course, that is to be expected. Sometimes I sleep for only a day or two, but other times it will be five or ten years at a stretch. On one occasion, it was thirty or forty, I myself was not sure how long. True, the same queen was still on the throne, but so much had moved past. You can take the tea away now, I want to go back to my dreams. You will find your wages in the purse with the beaded peacock, over there by the vanity.”

When I reach downstairs, the birds are asleep once again, heads hidden under their wings. But the next morning, they are jumping on and off their perches, chattering frenziedly, and in the bedroom the silver-haired woman in her rotting bridal gown is ensconced amidst the dusty pillows, counting out her faded cards, primly covering her yawns with the amethyst-studded hand.

“Are you a princess?” she asks without greeting me first, as though continuing our conversation of the previous day. “I thought so. Born or made? Ah. Well, we cannot all be born princesses. And really, being born to it is not as desirable as I once thought. There are just so many expectations, you know. The world expects things from you, that goes without saying, but you also expect things from the world. Sometimes, when I feel really blue, I even wonder if my expectations will ever be realized. Of course, I know they will be, because it was foretold, and every time I ask the cards, I always see the same lovely man in my future—but now and then, you know, all this waiting gets to be a trifle tedious. Now, don’t just stand there, bring me a cup of tea. Plenty of milk, no sugar, and add a spoonful of sherry while you’re at it—you will find the sherry in the drawing room cupboard, unless they’ve moved everything again. And say ‘Yes, Miss Rosa’ when I give you an order. And always curtsy.”

“Yes, Miss Rosa,” I say as I curtsy. But when I return with the tray, she is asleep again, her mouth hanging open, the Lovers card, a naked woman reaching out to a naked man, clutched in her mottled hand, the fusty lace on her shrunken chest stirring faintly with her exhalations—just as I will find her on most days when I tiptoe in to freshen up her stale-smelling chamber, which is entangled in new cobwebs every morning, fat gray spiders busy spinning and spinning and spinning their dreamlike threads above the slumbering woman’s face. When awake, Miss Rosa reads her fortune, exclaiming with a somewhat forced delight over the lovely groom invariably promised her in the brittle, graying constellations of the ancient cards, then requests cups of tea with increasingly generous splashes of sherry, and talks in breathless, fluttering monologues. Slowly I piece her story together.

A long-awaited daughter of a long-childless queen, she came into the world beloved and cherished, and her father the king arranged a grand feast to celebrate her birth. Unfortunately, the king cared more for the elaborate ritual of royal dining than for keeping his subjects happy, and thus, having thirteen fairies in the kingdom but only twelve place settings of solid gold, he chose not to invite the thirteenth fairy at all rather than sully his best damask tablecloth with mismatched cups and bowls of inferior silver and risk losing face before neighboring rulers whose offspring might, in due time, serve as suitable candidates for his precious daughter’s hand. (He was especially interested in the young son of King Roland the Second who would rule as Roland the Third, for their lands bordered his own.) The twelve lucky fairies marked the occasion by gifting the infant princess with all the customary accoutrements, such as porcelain skin, legible handwriting, and the knowledge of cutlery etiquette. Ten had already given their blessings when the uninvited thirteenth fairy—who, in truth, was more a witch than a fairy anyway and most likely did not belong at a decent gathering—appeared in the doorway, accompanied by bolts of lightning and black ravens tearing through the hall’s festive garlands, and called a booming curse upon the babe’s head. The girl, she cried, would grow up to be as perfect as a gilded doll—but she would never marry.

“She will die an old maid!” cackled the witch. “A fruitless virgin! A bitter, shriveled-up spinster!”

And she vanished in an explosion of frogs and vipers.

Immediately panic set in amidst the gathering. The king blamed the queen for not keeping a proper household supplied with a proper number of proper place settings, and the queen did the only proper thing in response and died of a broken heart on the spot. The eleventh fairy was then heard to step in and try to amend the curse. She had no powers to overturn it completely, she said with a sigh, but she could make it so the princess would marry, and marry for love, and marry happily, which was, after all, the thing that truly mattered—she would just not marry a prince. The king, having grown purple in the face, ordered the unfortunate fairy beheaded. The grooms then chased after the last, twelfth, fairy who was attempting to sneak away unnoticed through the servants’ entrance. They dragged her before the king. She was young and inexperienced; she had never given a baptismal gift or lifted a curse before.

“Fix it, or else!” the king barked, and the poor thing, trembling, whimpered that the princess would, the princess would, of course, marry a real prince. It might, however, take… a bit of time. A while, actually. So it would not be Roland the Third, but it might, just might, be one of his descendants. Or a different prince altogether, but equally royal, no doubt. The king, somewhat mollified, had her dewinged and imprisoned, in case any adjustments to the curse needed to be made at a later date, but at least he allowed her to keep her life.

Princess Rosa, now sadly motherless, was raised by a beribboned and bejeweled flock of court ladies who filled her flawlessly coiffured head with stories of proper royal matches. They told her about the purpose of a woman’s life, love at first sight, passionate declarations accompanied by massive engagement rings, dimpled flower girls, personalized stationery, and baptismal lace, then touched, more obliquely, on the interesting subject of conjugal duties. When Princess Rosa turned sixteen—the age of most proper royal marriages—she began spending her time sitting decorously in the window, peeking out from behind the curtains in an attempt to spot the royal suitor as he approached, eager to bid farewell to her girlhood; yet no suitor was forthcoming.

Days became weeks became months, and the princess grew bored and fell into a doze. She dreamed of a blood-red room full of spindles, powerful, turning, vibrating, thrumming. Fascinated, she reached for the largest one—and pricked her finger on its sharp, throbbing end. The pain made her cry out, and the cry woke her. When she opened her eyes, she was disoriented for a minute, for she was lying, dressed in a beautiful bridal gown, or was it a burial shroud, on her bed, her hands crossed ceremoniously on her chest, the room wreathed in mournful shadows, the court physician fussing about her pulse, an anxious crowd of courtiers holding a candlelit vigil around her. They rejoiced to see her awake, for they had nearly lost all hope. They told her she had been asleep for a full year, during which time the king had grown so displeased that he had beheaded the treasurer, the assistant gardener, and half the royal guard. (He had also sent to the dungeons to question the captive fairy, but when they unlocked the last of the rusty locks, they found the cell empty—or almost empty, for there was a small, frightened mouse cowering in one corner. The jailer swore that the fairy could not have fled and therefore the mouse must have been the fairy transformed, but in the ensuing commotion, while the enraged king spewed out spittle-punctuated decapitation orders, the mouse was somehow allowed to escape. Rumor had it, the creature found refuge in the kitchens of King Roland’s neighboring palace, where, in another century or two, a clumsy cook slipped and landed on it with her ample backside, putting an end to it, albeit not before it managed to pass its immortal fairy powers to one of its twin offspring, a girl mouseling conceived in mystery and born with the ease of a sneeze.)

Having heard the courtiers’ tale of woe and being sentimental by nature, Princess Rosa resolved to stay awake. She filled her bedroom with chirping birds to keep her company and had musicians play violins under her window as she continued to sit, day and night, awaiting her prince. Yet the tedium of her life was overwhelming, and she simply could not help it. The next time she fell asleep, she dreamed of the familiar blood-red room, this time crammed full of not only the whirring spindles but also oblong wine bottles, magnificent mushrooms with meaty white stems, and plump red umbrellas in tight sleeves of crimson satin. When she woke up, she discovered that five years had passed and the crowd around her bed had thinned considerably. Some had lost their heads and many others had fled, for the king was growing ever more irascible. By the time he himself passed away, another decade later, from choking on a fish bone in a fit of anger (Princess Rosa slept through both his death and his funeral), the palace was mostly deserted; only the birds, a handful of devoted old servants, and the court physician remained. When, emerging briefly from a dream of thick-handled walking sticks, buckets entering wells, and trains rushing into welcoming tunnels, she learned of her father’s demise, her deepening solitude, and the unceasing rotation of the world, she found that she did not mind all that much. By now, she much preferred sleep to being awake, as waiting for the prince was a thankless pastime and her dreams had become quite involved; nor were her hands necessarily folded over her chest every time she woke up—all alone now, as the last of her maids had died from respectable age, and the physician, borrowing the king’s golden inkstand, had departed for lands unknown—for on occasion they seemed to meander deep into her lacy maidenly lap, and pretending to be asleep for a little while longer, she kept them moving there before sighing the final sigh and refolding them anew on her subsiding bosom, just as she drifted off into another dream.

“Except lately,” she tells me after her second cup of sherry with a splash of tea, “something strange has been happening. I fall asleep but…” She lowers her voice to a dramatic whisper. “I hardly ever dream. It’s all just black before my eyes. Like nothing. Like death. And sometimes I wonder… I wonder if that nervous young fairy really knew how to lift curses. And if I shouldn’t have eloped with that nice musician who played under my window when I was sixteen. Oh, I suppose I am still sixteen, I know I look sixteen, I have been sixteen for the past hundred, or has it been two hundred, years. But I no longer feel it. Life has moved past, and I feel… spent, somehow. Empty. Old. But back when I still felt sixteen, back when I sat at the window waiting for my prince, I would often catch myself gazing into the ardent face of the first violin laboring with his impassioned bow under my window. He was in love with me, of course, they all were, but he was the one I liked best. Yet I did not let myself love him back, because he was not a prince and he was poor, so I thought he would never make me happy, his splendid mustache notwithstanding. But now I don’t know. I wonder if I haven’t wasted my entire life, waiting, just waiting. Perhaps I will fall asleep one day soon and simply fail to wake up, and everything will remain black and empty forever.”

“Don’t talk like that, Miss Rosa,” I say quietly, taking the cup of sherry from her unresisting hand. “Why don’t you get up and go for a walk in the garden? I will help you find some shoes, help you down the stairs. The air is so fresh and crisp out there. Winter is getting close. Shall we go, right now? Let me open the window at least.”

But she has already fallen asleep and is snoring softly, a bit of sherry-flavored saliva dribbling down her withered chin. I wipe it gently, wondering if she truly does not realize that she looks sixteen no longer, that, in fact, she looks like the very old, frail woman that she is. There are no mirrors in her dim lavender chamber to present her with the truth, and I myself would never tell her anything upsetting, for somehow, without noticing, I have come to feel sorry for Princess Rosa, I have come to care for her. When she spends a week without waking, I miss her tipsy chatter; and when I emerge from the woods a few mornings later to find the lawn hopelessly overgrown with brambles and her manor hidden by an overnight eruption of wild rosebushes, so dense that it is now impossible to reach the front door, I feel as though I have lost a friend—and a friend who has not paid me for the last fortnight of work, at that.

I touch my finger to the nearest bush, and instantly pull it away, and watch a drop of blood swell on my fingertip.

“Sweet dreams, Miss Rosa,” I say sadly, and turn back into the forest.

At the Log Cabin

The day lies empty before me. I do not want to return to Melissa’s house, not yet. They will be finishing their breakfast now; there will be the customary morning kiss from Tom as he rises from the table; their eight children will move in organized, smiling groups, helping with the chores. Seeing them all together makes me miss Angie and Ro so much I am sometimes unable to breathe. When I reach the broad forest road, on an impulse, I take a diverging path, away from the cottage.

Oaks and aspens are fully transparent now, leaves blanketing the ground, birds silent. Every step is a rustle. My solitude is a sadness, but it is also a gift. The woods are beginning to thin, and soon the path emerges from under the shade of the trees and winds along the top of a crest. Close by, I hear a rooster crow, then another. A panting dog bursts from the bushes and runs past me, head to the ground, chasing after some scent, and before I have time to wonder where it has come from, I see, in the ravine below, the slate-gray roofs of a village, spare rivulets of smoke rising from a few chimneys into the cold wintry skies. Mouthwatering smells of baked bread mix with the good, clean aromas of burning yew and birch, trailing after me even as the village falls behind, filling me with longing. I blow on my hands, chilled—and when I lift my head, I see before me, set back from the path, a neat little log cabin surrounded by spruce trees.

The shutters on the cabin’s solitary window are painted a cheerful orange, and a few chickens peck in the dust behind a low fence of the same bright shade. As I pause to watch, a stocky woman in late middle age, her gray hair cut as short as a man’s, strides briskly out of the door and scatters some seeds on the ground. I realize with a start that she is wearing a loose linen shirt tucked into a pair of britches, tucked, in turn, into weathered leather boots. “Here, chicky chicky,” she croons, then looks up abruptly, as though sensing my presence. Our eyes lock.

It is the witch.

“Well, here is a surprise,” she says, no surprise in her voice. “You are up early, Your Majesty. Come in, why don’t you, I’m about to have my coffee. Oh, and look, my hens have laid me a couple of gifts. How do you like your eggs?”

The inside of the cabin is light and pleasant, and somehow much roomier than the outside led me to imagine. Bunches of aromatic herbs hang around whitewashed walls; sturdy wooden chairs, stained sunshine yellow, circle a table piled high with books. A creature the size of a cat wobbles between the table legs, clicking its tough little claws against spotless floorboards. I stare at it. Its curling green snout is steaming around the narrowly slitted nostrils, and one of its leathery wings trails behind at an odd angle.

“Don’t mind Gilbert, he’s harmless,” the witch says over her shoulder as she busies herself with frying the eggs on a woodstove in the corner. “I’m just taking care of him temporarily for his mother. Once his wing is fully mended, he’ll be able to go back home.”

The eggs ready, she pushes the books aside, sets down plates and cups, gestures for me to sit. She is both like and unlike the witch of the crossroads: her movements are just as efficient, her tone just as matter-of-fact, and I recognize the compressed forcefulness of her manner—but I hardly recognize the woman herself, with her man’s hair, her man’s garb, her strong, calm face, her nose shaped more like a potato than a hook, and no traces of warts in existence. Only her eyes are the same, shrewd, piercing, all-knowing. She digs into her food with gusto. I take a cautious sip of whatever is in the cup before me; it is delicious.

“Fresh blueberry juice,” she says. “You can call me Gwendolyn.”

“But… I thought you lived in that cave.” I find my tongue at last. “And your hair is short. Also… these aren’t the right clothes for a woman.”

She glances at me sharply.

“The cave, the wig, and the rags are just for show, girl—a way of doing business. Resentful wives expect certain things. Drama, gloom, warts, and perdition. I prefer comfort and simplicity, myself. As for my clothes, conventions are for the weak.”

“And… and is Gilbert…”

“A baby dragon, yes. Eat your eggs, you are looking much too skinny. What brings you to my doorstep?”

“No, I… I was just taking a walk through the woods. I’ve been working for a lady in the manor down that way.”

“Ah, yes, Miss Rosa. A very silly woman. I tried to do her a favor once, when she was born, but it was misunderstood. Perhaps I shouldn’t have phrased it as a curse, but even I have to follow rules now and then. Still, I was hoping she’d see it as an opportunity.”

“The thirteenth fairy, that was you?” I ask in astonishment.

“Hardly a fairy,” she snorts, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. “So, then. Do you need help with the divorce?”

My breath stills. “Can you? Can you help?”

“Not for free, mind you. I’m not in the charity business here.”

“Oh.” I look down at my untouched plate. “I don’t have anything, just the dress on my back. I was earning a little, but my job with Miss Rosa is over now, I think.”

“I imagine so. Such a waste.” She shrugs. “Well, girl, you didn’t exactly get your money’s worth with the spell, I suppose, and I still have your trinkets. Why don’t we consider them a retainer for my future services, and we’ll go over the contract later.”

“I am grateful,” I start to say—and pause, reminded anew of the mystery that has lingered at the back of my mind for many weeks. I have resigned myself to not knowing, yet here is the witch, mopping up runny eggs with a chunk of bread across the table from me. I could just ask. If I were brave enough. “That night, at the crossroads—”

I hesitate.

“Yes?”

“You wanted my life’s spark in payment, but then—”

She winces.

“I’ve told you already, appearances are in the job description. I wouldn’t have taken it, though, I promise, not even if… But never mind about that.” She presses her lips together, and I know the matter is closed. When she speaks again, her voice is gruff, the momentary note of uncertainty banished. “Tell me what happened between you and your husband in your last months with him, why don’t you. The part I don’t already know.”

I open my mouth—and say nothing.

She studies me in the ensuing silence, not unkindly.

“I see,” she says at last. “Well. I know you think you had it bad. And I’m sure you did. But I will tell you a story now. Did you happen to pass a village on the way here? This is a story of a girl from that village.”

“Are you the girl?” I ask, suddenly shy. “Is this your story?”

The witch—Gwendolyn—does not reply. She rises to rinse out her cup, puts away her plate, then sits back down, stretches her boots out in front of her, and begins to fill a pipe with tobacco, not spilling a single crumb, deftly, briskly, as she does everything. The baby dragon clambers into her lap, and, once her pipe is lit and clenched squarely between her strong teeth, she rubs the scales on his back as she talks, making him purr and puff and send occasional clouds of fiery smoke into the air through the slits in his long nose. I watch him, mesmerized, for a minute or two, then forget all about him as the story unfolds.

Once upon a time, Gwendolyn starts—some fifty or sixty years ago, at the tipping point of the last century, the precise date is not important—a girl was born in the village. The girl was bright and bold, perhaps overly bold, but not overly pretty, a bit on the chubby side, if truth be told, with a nose rather resembling a potato, and with a meager dowry to boot; her father was the village chemist and his shop, on the main street, was respectable and stocked with many a rare herb, but the village inhabitants were a stolid, healthy, unimaginative folk in scant need of sleeping draughts or nerve-soothing potions. Still, the family managed to get by well enough. The girl, the oldest of four siblings, grew up reading her father’s medical journals, playing with ingredients, and dreaming of going away to a large town across the river, where she would study science at a university. She wanted to find out how nature worked—wanted to strip it naked, take it apart, wrest away its secrets, and touch its dark, pure heart with her steady hand, before choosing to put it back together again. Her father encouraged her, but when she was sixteen years old, disaster struck: the chemist perished in an explosion in the barn he used for mixing his more complex tinctures (there were those who whispered that it had not been an accident, that the man had turned rancid with bitterness from his own thwarted ambitions), and her mother informed her that, in their newly strained circumstances, they would not be able to afford her schooling. The family left their comfortable house for much smaller quarters, and two or three years after, the shop, too, had to be put up for sale, to pay off their rising debts. They placed announcements in all the local newspapers, but for months, no potential buyers came to inquire—until one spring day the bell above the shop door jingled and in strode a stranger.

The girl was minding the counter; she looked up in surprise. The stranger was like no one she had ever seen: around forty years of age, he was tall, handsome, and powerfully built, with a short black beard and gold-rimmed glasses, dressed from head to toe in black velvet. There was an air of subtle authority about him; he looked like someone important, someone used to being obeyed. He introduced himself as Dr. Merlin Stone, a science professor at the town university. He had heard that their shop stocked unusual powders and unguents that might be of value in his experiments, he told her. The girl’s heart beat violently as she showed him around, answering his questions about the inventory, her head only just reaching his soft velvet shoulder. And so knowledgeable did she prove in her explanations that, upon announcing that he would take their entire supply, Dr. Stone gave her a closer look and asked whether she would not like to come away with him and work as his assistant. He would provide her with room and board in his townhouse, and plenty of pocket money. She could even—if her interests happened to lie that way, of course—attend his lectures at the university, entirely for free, when he resumed teaching in the fall.

She stared at him, then at her feet, then back at him. His eyes, behind the golden rims of his glasses, were gray and intense, and his beard so glossy that, from certain angles, it seemed almost blue. He was waiting for her reply with a look of patience on his face, but his lips were pressed thin and his hands hung too still at his sides, and she saw that he was not a patient man by nature.

“Yes,” she cried, “yes, yes, yes!”

And as soon as the first “Yes” passed her lips, she knew that she loved him.

She stuttered from an uncharacteristic nervousness when she asked her mother for permission to go, but the exhausted widow, relieved to have one mouth less to feed, readily gave her blessing, and thus the girl left with the man for the town across the river. His house, she soon discovered, was the grandest in the square, and had she been given to delighting in the world’s finer things, she would have found much to admire therein, for the professor, it now transpired, was fabulously rich and in possession of highly discriminating tastes. Yet, having been thrust amidst hitherto unimaginable luxuries, the girl paid no heed to precious old Burgundy vintages in delicately chiseled Bohemian goblets, or poetry volumes bound in tooled Moroccan leather, or luminous Dutch still lifes with lemons unspooling thin golden skins next to yellowing skulls staring out of empty black sockets. Her great, thirsty, indomitable spirit was not fine-tuned enough to be receptive to the fragile beauty of such frivolous human pursuits and enjoyments.

What she sought, in this house of indulgence, was pure knowledge.

A week had not passed since her arrival when she and the professor became lovers. The girl had left the village at twenty, and she was no innocent. She had let the butcher’s taciturn younger son tumble her in a haystack behind the cornfield when she was barely fourteen, and since then had had her share of rushed, awkward, utilitarian couplings, had been hurriedly shoved against stove corners or groped on floors behind counters, and had shoved and groped back, taking whatever, whenever, she wanted—yet Dr. Stone was unlike any of the boys, any of the men, she had known. His touch was assured and deliberate, his ministrations thorough and profound, and in response, she discovered her own hidden fire slow to kindle but unquenchable for long, languorous, delightful hours to follow; and if, on occasion, his fingers pinched a bit too hard, his nails scratched a bit too deep, and his teeth tore into her skin with such brute savagery that they left behind jagged blue bruises, she only tingled all over, with a warm, secret flush, pleased that his desire for her was so unstoppable it could turn him into a beast—him, the most civilized, the most refined of all men.

She did, however, prefer him to return to his civilized self soon thereafter; for what she wanted most was to be invited into the hallowed sanctuary of his work.

She lived with him for two or three months, perhaps, when she started to feel troubled. She had not been made welcome by the townsfolk. Whenever she left on some brief errand, to purchase rosemary or sage in the market, to consult a new treatise on chemical reactions in the library, to order a shipment of mercury from the pharmacist, she would walk past the dressmaker’s shop, located directly across from the professor’s house, and always there would be a flock of women gathered on the sidewalk in the summer heat, women in tightly laced shoes, women with bejeweled little purses, women in ridiculous hats, peeking at her from under swaying ostrich feathers or clusters of silk roses, whispering with hot malice as she went by. She assumed that they were scandalized by her mere existence—a girl staying in an unmarried man’s dwelling with no chaperone present; but occasionally she overheard hints of a darker nature. There she goes, the women tittered, tottering in their impossible shoes, a fresh-faced new assistant—but what do you think happened to the other ones, the ones before? That little blond Gretchen, she had such a sweet tooth, the baker adored her? And the voluptuous redhead, what was her name, Elisa, she liked to come into the shop and try on white hats before the mirror, she had such lovely, shiny curls, she dreamed of having a perfect wedding? And oh, oh, do you remember Camille? And remembering Camille, they would smile knowingly at one another.

She brushed off the poisonous gossip, undisturbed by it, for just as she had not been a maiden, so the professor, of course, had had his past diversions. Something, however, had begun to bother her greatly: he no longer mentioned the possibility of her attending his lectures in the fall, and worse, he would not let her into the mystery of his experiments. His laboratory, behind the imposing metal door at the end of the basement corridor, remained off limits to her. She knew that he was working on something extraordinary, something momentous—he had told her as much—but every morning, rising from their passion-tossed bed, he would slap her, at times rather hard, on her naked rump, still reddened and smarting from the blows of the previous night, and say, as he buttoned his exquisitely tailored batiste shirt: “Off to work now, my sweet. Do have the cinnamon ground, and pick up arsenic in town for me, there’s a dear. Oh, and for dinner, let us have your delicious rabbit stew, yes?”—upon which he would saunter downstairs, humming a snippet from some opera into his black-blue beard, while she stayed sprawled in the moist (and, now and then, after a particularly vigorous flogging, bloodstained) sheets, staring sullenly at his retreating back, biting her fingernails to the quick, until she heard the great metal door clanging shut in the bowels of the house.

Then she would get up in turn, dress listlessly, and trudge off to the kitchen to grind the powders and cook the meals he required, feeling unhappy. For not only did she love him—she had begun to think of the two of them as partners, as equals. Surely, she mattered more to him than any of his other assistants could have mattered, all those flighty, featherbrained women who cared more for fashions and chocolates than scientific endeavors and who in the end, having grown bored or disenchanted, abandoned him in search of husbands or careers in glove-making? Surely, surely, she understood him better than any of them? Why, then, was there always the sense of an invisible arm outstretched, holding her at bay, whenever she questioned him about the nature of his research? Why did the door to his laboratory, the door at the end of the basement corridor, remain staunchly locked against her?

“All in good time,” he would say, smiling down at her over the rim of his glass filled with wine so dark it looked like blood. “I promise you, my sweet, you will find out soon enough.”

Another month passed, and the professor announced that he was departing on a short trip to obtain some supplies for his experiments. He would be gone three days. In his absence, he asked her to be a dear and take care of his house. He gave her the keys to all the rooms, an immense bunch whose unexpected weight made her meekly held-out hand dip. He told her she could have the run of the place, could open any door—any, that was, apart from the door to his laboratory, for she had not yet earned the right to learn its secrets.

“This one, right here,” he said, tenderly caressing a huge, jagged key of darkened iron. “A lesser man would hide it, but I trust you, my sweet.”

She accepted the keys with an obedient nod, smilingly suffered a playful farewell slap on her cheek, so harsh that her skin was branded with four round red marks of his fingers, then, the docile smile vanishing off her face the moment his back was turned, went to the window to watch him leave. She no longer loved him. When his chugging automobile, the first in town, disappeared around the corner, she spat at the window, took the jagged key off the ring, and ran down the stairs to the locked basement door.

The key turned with a surprising readiness, and the massive door opened smoothly, too smoothly, on well-oiled hinges, inviting, ushering her in, then swinging shut behind her. She found herself in chilly darkness, took a step, another. The cavernous echoes of her footfalls made her think of infinitely stretching dungeons, of cemeteries, of eternity. She felt for the nearest wall, happened upon a switch, flipped it. A single weak bulb blinked into faint blue life on the low ceiling.

She looked, her mouth grim.

Broad gleaming tables ran the length of the enormous stone-walled chamber, and on them, between intricate machines that bristled with saw blades, spiked wheels, thumbscrews, and guillotines, stood dozens of bottles and jars, the kind her mother used for pickling mushrooms and cucumbers. In their thick greenish liquid swam glowing, white, bloated pieces of the women who had come before her, their names neatly labeled next to each specimen in the professor’s beautiful hand. She saw the heart and the jaw of the chocolate-loving Gretchen—the red hair, once lustrous, now dull, and the breasts, their large nipples like spreading stains of mold, of the fashionable Elisa—the reproductive organs of Camille, who made the townspeople smile. And others, so many others. She read their names aloud as she walked along the tables, and the echoes returned each name manifold, like the last tribute, the final remaining memory tossed briefly between the dungeon walls, then fading, fading, fading, until it was gone in the descending hush.

“Violetta. Helena. Ariadne. Margarita. Isolde. Leonora…”

The door clanged. She swung around. Merlin Stone stood in the doorway, smiling with cruel delight into his glossy beard.

“Well, my sweet, this was too easy, I never even made it to the outskirts,” he said, his tone velvet. “The others, they were such good girls, tormented by their curiosity for days before they dared to disobey me—but you, you had to know about my work, didn’t you? Simply dying to know about it.”

He laughed an easy, leisurely laugh, took a step over the threshold.

“So be it. Now is when you get to find out. I am searching for a woman’s soul—no more, no less. You see, for centuries, serious people claimed that women had no souls, no souls at all. Men had souls, of course, no one debated that—but not women, they said, for women were more like beasts of burden, good for some things, rather useful, in fact, but not endowed with higher sensibilities. Nowadays, though, many argue otherwise, but nobody knows for sure, for nobody has ever found any definitive proof, one way or the other. A mystery, you see, just ready for a superior intellect such as mine to apply itself to the solution—and what a magnificent scientific discovery it would be, to prove the existence of the woman’s soul once and for all. And so many additional questions to ponder!” He picked up a pair of thin black gloves, began to snap them on with the same slow deliberation with which he used to disrobe her, to fondle her, to impale her during their nights of passion. “What physical form would a soul take—a butterfly, perhaps, as some of the ancients believed, or a ghostly reflection of the body, or an electric discharge of sorts, a beam of light? And would it be brought to the surface more easily by joy or by sorrow? Or, say, by terror?” Lightly, lovingly, he ran his gloved fingers over an array of shining instruments, as if over the keys of a piano, lifted one long, long blade, turned it over thoughtfully, set it down again. “And would the soul swell larger if it belonged to a young girl in the bloom of first love?” He met her eyes, smiled; obliviously, she knew, he had mistaken her for a timid virgin during their initial encounter and had thought himself an irresistible seducer, and she had never disabused him of the notion. “Well. I must say, I kept an open mind at the beginning, but now, I have cut up a dozen, two dozen women and have found nothing, nothing at all, so I’m almost inclined to believe that you have no souls after all. Still, a thoroughly dedicated scientist must persevere. Perhaps a soul is simply very small and tucked away, out of sight, hunkering down in some organ, for me to uncover. Now, you, let me see—” He looked her over with care. “Yes, I think I will take your brain. No offense, my sweet, but you just don’t have too many other parts to recommend you.” He strolled toward her, humming a line from La Traviata. “Are you not going to plead? The others did.”

She had expected something like this, of course, for, during their last few nights together, she had glimpsed undisguised murder in his eyes. She stayed silent and still, her eyelids lowered, lulling him with her immobility that he mistook for paralyzing fear, letting him come close, closer still. When he was so near that she could smell his tastefully understated sandalwood cologne, could see the wingtips of his immaculately polished leather shoes, she moved with all the speed and certainty of the countless generations of peasants whose blood flowed earth-bound and thick in her veins. With one heavily booted, perfectly aimed kick, she knocked him to his knees.

When she looked at him from above, as he writhed in agony, clutching at his groin, she thought of letting him go—but then she saw the cringing look in his eyes, and understood that she owed him the answer to the riddle that had so consumed him. Back in her village, she had watched the butcher’s boy, the one who had taken her unneeded maidenhood, slit the throat of many a pig. She was still holding the great iron key in her hand; now, swiftly, she bent down and dragged its sharp, jagged edge with all her considerable strength against his exposed throat. The blood that welled up from the ragged wound was blacker than the black of his surgical gloves, blacker than the black of his luxurious velvet, blacker than the black of his noble beard masking a weak, ignoble chin. And as he lay dying on the cold floor before her, his life leaking out yet no tangible soul making a scheduled appearance, she knew that, along with the relief of his death, she had given him a more precious gift still—had given him precisely what he needed. For, all along, unbeknownst to himself, he needed to find a woman like her. A woman bold enough to kill a cowardly man—a woman strong in spirit, rich in soul.

Gwendolyn falls silent. The eggs on my plate have congealed into a soggy yellow mess, and her pipe has gone out. The dragon is asleep, snoring cozily, in her lap.

“And… then?” I whisper, my throat dry.

“And then I went back to my village. I was quite cured of my desire to strip nature, to take her apart—I saw that there had to be a different, better, way of acquiring knowledge. I was twenty-one years old. I had helped myself to some of the professor’s most treasured possessions, and inspired by my new prosperity, the butcher’s son was quick to ask for my hand in marriage. They told me that I should say yes, that it was a proper thing to do, especially for a fallen girl like me. I laughed in their faces. With the money I had, I built this little cabin, rented the cave, and set up shop helping women who were not as bold as the girl in my story. Of course, this was all a long time ago, and it may or may not be entirely true. Well, the details may not be entirely true, but the essence is true enough. Most good stories are like that.” She starts to empty the pipe, her short-fingered, masculine hands steady, her motions methodical. “Do you want to talk about your divorce now?”

I am staring at her wide-eyed.

“Your husband has many advantages over you, girl. You left the palace of your own volition, you know, so, technically, you are now a derelict mother who abandoned her children. You are unemployed, too, unable to provide a solid home for them, or so it would appear. We need to discuss strategy, but first things first—you must find another job. Since you seem to have a natural aptitude for cleaning, what do you think of starting your own cleaning company? Cinderella Maid Services, how does that sound? It just so happens that I have some clients who are looking for a domestic, I will jot down the information for you.”

She is writing names, dates, arranging for our next meeting, at which future steps will be discussed, but I am barely listening, the horrible story she told me weighing down upon my spirit. When, at last, she sees me outside, I am startled to discover that the woods have grown dim, that evening has fallen. The witch—Gwendolyn—has given me a lantern, and, swinging it before me, I quickly follow the path toward the village, toward the sounds of dogs barking and the smells of meats being grilled for the villagers’ suppers, all so familiar, all so reassuringly normal. I pause, just once, to glance back at the house in the trees. The cabin itself is almost lost to the darkness of the forest, but its solitary window is blazing bright, and in its cheerful yellow light it seems to me that the whole house is bouncing ever so slightly, dancing from chicken foot to chicken foot.

At the Seaside

In the rosy light of dawn, Melissa is taking down the laundry, stiff with morning frost; winter is nearly upon us. Four of her seven children are in school, two are playing with the dog in the yard, and the baby is napping inside. Pigeons are cooing on the thatched roof. How funny, I think, as I glance over at my sister’s cozy yellow house between the billowing white sheets—from some angles, it looks almost like a shoe, the way it juts out on one side and rises on the other.

I am about to point it out to her, then decide against it.

“Good luck,” she calls after me. “I hope they work out better than Miss Rosa.”

My new employers, I have been given to understand, are a group of twelve prosperous, unmarried, somewhat unconventional young women who are living in a large rented house by the water. To get there, I walk through a sparse birch grove to a rural station, take an hourlong train ride, then, along with a few other domestics of indeterminate ages, clad in sensible, ankle-length skirts and dark, shapeless blouses, board a trolley out to the shore, and traverse the remaining distance on foot, along the seaside promenade. All tints are pale here, bleached by the eternal labor of the waves and the wind, the white sky immense, the ocean rolling in with soothing murmurs, the air so bracing that each breath feels like a gulp of cold water. The house, when I reach it, turns out to be a rambling, airy, many-storied structure with balconies and verandas and a widow’s watch tower, its light gray colors perfectly suited to the broad, tranquil perspectives of the sea and the sand; when I climb to the door, the porch steps creak like the deck of a ship. I have a fleeting thought that I will be happy working here. Then, after several knocks that go unanswered, I step inside—and gasp.

Inside, all is chaos. Overturned glasses, overflowing ashtrays, tables sticky with pooling liquors, a cracked mirror, a few lamps on their sides, one bulky lampshade beached nearby like a belly-up whale. A woman’s solitary slipper is perched daintily atop cascading cushions, as though poised for flight; when I pick it up, I find its heel broken off and its satin-lined cavity filled to the brim with some sour-smelling liquid, so I drop it in terror and watch the pale yellow stain slowly eat into the filthy white rug. Crumpled papers—letters, photographs, shopping lists, invitations to parties—spill out of a bureau dragged into the middle of the living room and abandoned underneath the chandelier, where wilting heads of lilies stick out of the empty bulb sockets. The grand piano’s lid is sprung open, and I see, rotting amidst the springs, a brown bunch of bananas. All the doors between all the rooms are gaping wide, as are half the windows; wintry seaside light pours through the curtains splashed with many-colored splotches, making the devastation I witness all the more shocking. As I follow the trail of destruction through the house, my heart pounds and my knees quiver. I imagine armed robbers still lurking with their loot behind keeled-over armchairs, ready to spring at me, and I finish my inspection at a run, bursting into the upstairs loft as though being chased.

And here, I freeze. Scantily clad bodies of women are strewn at wild angles on beds, draped over settees, crumpled in chairs. I notice a dangling foot in a torn stocking, a nerveless arm tossed off loosely across a table, an apple of a breast fallen out of a soiled negligee, mangled shoes without mates littering the floor—and immediately I think of Gwendolyn’s story, of death, of murder.

I realize that my mouth is open, and only then hear myself screaming.

One of the bodies stirs, faintly, and a tousled head appears over the back of a sofa.

“Not very polite of you to shout like that,” the head says in a sulky voice, and squints at me through caked, furry eyelashes. “Who are you, anyway?”

The other bodies are now moving, too, shifting, stretching, moaning. I close my mouth with a snap, then open it again to reply. I feel rather shaken.

“Your new maid, miss. I believe you’ve been robbed.”

“Robbed?” Bleary dark eyes blink at me.

“The downstairs.” I gesture, weakly. “It’s all torn apart, pillows, papers—”

“Well, of course it is,” the head interrupts with an irritable yawn. “That’s why you are here, now, isn’t it? I’m going back to sleep. Wake me up when you’ve finished, and do be thorough, make sure the vomit is off the curtains, we have some fresh blood coming tonight.”

And with that, the head vanishes behind the sofa.

Unsettled, I descend the three flights of stairs and set about the slow, laborious, ungrateful business of straightening the living room, the dining room, the parlor, all equally in pieces. As I move scraping and scrubbing and washing well into the afternoon hours, the hush above my head continues complete, and I am just beginning to worry that I merely imagined the stirring limbs, the spoken reassurances, when a barefoot, barelegged young woman plods soundlessly through the door, a short and none-too-fresh yellow kimono thrown over her shoulders.

“Aren’t you an absolute peach,” she declares as she opens her arms wide and twirls about the parlor. I recognize the tousled hair, the once-bleary dark eyes, grown vivid and alert. “I fear we’ve lived in a bit of a pigsty, but young men nowadays, they are just so fast, you know, one needs to keep up, one simply has no time for domestic niceties. I’m Edna. Is there anything for breakfast around here?”

It is nearing four o’clock. Without comment, I go to the kitchen to fry the bananas I retrieved from the piano, make some toast, brew some coffee—the icebox is jammed with haphazardly piled provisions. Just as the smells of morning start to rise through the early-evening air, the kitchen begins to get crowded: more and more barefoot women in slatternly robes and camisoles with the oily shine of tired satin file inside, yawning, running their cocktail-ringed fingers through their messy bobbed hair, rubbing their mascara-smeared eyes.

Edna, who is now sitting on the bar, dangling her strikingly shapely, shockingly exposed legs and biting into her third piece of toast, rattles off introductions in a rapid staccato between zesty mouthfuls: “Greta. Clara. Ginevra. Zelda. Theda. Rita. Barbara, but she prefers Bebe, and rightly so. Anita. Gilda. And, last but not least, the other Barbara, but do call her Bean—we do.”

The names all sound like the same name, sharp and fresh, and the women all seem to be the same woman, short-haired, rosebud-mouthed, pretty, indecently young, scarcely into her twenties. I count, to protect myself from being overwhelmed.

“Eleven,” I say as I distribute more toast. “That’s eleven. But I thought there were twelve of you.”

The barefoot women, who have come alive with the imbibing of coffee and are chattering to one another like an exaltation of larks, fall into an uneasy silence, dart sideways glances at Edna.

“There is also Nora,” Edna admits with visible reluctance. She looks just like the rest of them, but from the oddly mature, hesitant note in her voice, I understand that she must be the oldest. “Nora is not here right now.”

“She might come by later, though,” pipes up one of the others, Ginevra or Zelda. “Hey, you know what, you should stay, too. We’re expecting some divine fellows tonight, aren’t we, girls? We’ll be doing Chinese lanterns, and the music is ever so swell—aren’t you just gone on jazz?”

“Yes, stay, stay!” all the others cry, perking up. “We will lend you a dress, and Bean is marvelous with a pair of scissors, she can get your hair looking like it belongs to this century in no time at all. You will have such fun!”

But something about their abruptly restored jauntiness, the artful geometry of their curls, the terrible youthfulness of their eagerly smiling lips, the restlessness in their naked eyes, frightens me. Mumbling excuses and apologies, I gather my cleaning supplies and slip away, just as the child-women start trooping up the stairs to get ready for the coming night, their shrill, excited voices carrying snippets of fashion advice mixed in with misplaced confidences and heartfelt confessions, their dulcet laughter chasing me out into the twilight. As I trudge down the promenade, I feel every single one of my three dozen years weighing on my shoulders, my back aches, and the trolley stop is so much farther away than it was in the morning.

When I arrive the next day, the house is in shambles once again, chairs lying with legs up in the air like so many expired rats, two or three vases smashed, scratched gramophone records hung in an undulating garland on nails freshly hammered all along the living room walls, something pink and sticky gumming up the piano keys, another silken shoe with a broken-off heel filled with sour champagne, the young women out of sight, clearly asleep, strewn all over the loft in exhausted abandon. Prepared this time, I attack the destruction with grim efficiency and manage to escape just as I hear the first creaking footsteps on the stairs above—a cowardly strategy I will follow without fail in the coming days, in the coming weeks, until one Monday in mid-December, at the uncommonly early hour of three in the afternoon, I am intercepted in the foyer by a droopy creature with spiky hair and vivid shadows under her swollen eyes, whom, after a stretch of impolite gaping, I recognize as Edna.

“Rough night,” she says with a shrug. “Well, you saw what happened to the potted plants. Shame, really. Tonight will be different, though, we will be meeting some absolutely lovely people. Do stay for the party, it’s so much merrier with an even dozen! Did you know they used to call us the Twelve Dancing Princesses? Oh, we were famous, we were! Only now Nora never comes, and it’s just not the same… Please? Pretty please?”

And whether because her dark, imploring eyes are beginning to glisten, or because, in the last week or two, my sister’s sunny bungalow has grown truly unbearable, her six happy children constant reminders of my own shortcomings and failures, I feel my resistance fading.

I hesitate, briefly, then exhale—and nod.

“Oh, will you, will you, really?” She claps, she jumps, she pirouettes; she looks all of twelve years old. “But that’s marvelous, marvelous! Come upstairs, we’ll get you fixed up right away. No, leave the broom, it doesn’t matter, really, it will only be trashed again in a couple of hours… Girls, guess who’s coming with us tonight! Bean, will you be a dear and grab the scissors, and you, Theda, bring the silver eye shadow, quick!” They crowd around me, talking all at once, peppering me with questions. “What size are you? Do you like pearls or onyx? Say, do you have a beau? But that’s perfect, we’ll match you up with an awfully nice sweetheart. Don’t be silly, now, everyone wants one, and it’s just for the night anyway, we always like to keep things moving, don’t we, girls?”

And just as I am starting to regret my moment of weakness, they push me into a chair before a three-legged vanity and fall upon me, twittering, giggling, fussing, like a flock of overexcited, maddened children—fall upon me with scissors, tweezers, curling irons, with brushes, perfumes, jars of pomade, with combs, lipsticks, powder puffs—and when, a full hour later, it seems, the frenzy is over and they draw back, spent, I look into the mirror before me and find someone else looking back.

The woman in the mirror is not the thirty-six-year-old mother pining for her children, distraught over her marriage, newly worn-out by the daily labors of scraping off anonymous vomit, her hair tucked away in a somber bun, her face blank like her future. The woman in the mirror is young and enigmatic, her metallic eyelids languid, her bob breathtakingly glamorous, her pink flower of a mouth made for deep moonlit kisses, her whole life in front of her still, one sweet, trembling, mysterious note of anticipation, just like the long, sensuous call of a trumpet that I now hear snaking through the house, emerging I know not from where. Neither do I know how I find myself wearing a cream beaded dress that cascades like shimmering water over my breasts, my hips, rustling and sparkling as I move, my knees defiantly bare; or where I got the high-heeled shoes that produce such delightfully assured tapping when Anita teaches me to dance the Charleston; or how I come to be perched on the piano lid, Greta on one side, Ginevra on the other, our arms linked through, flutes of champagne tipped against our lips, a thin ivory pipe with something dark and viscous inside its carved jade bowl being passed from mouth to mouth.

The smoke smells faintly of burnt flowers, distant lands, and lazy, languorous dreams in which everything unfolds in a warm, hazy, amber-hued harmony, and ever more drowsily, I watch as it curves into flowing shapes—transparent birds, dragons with coral wings, flying arches of medieval cathedrals. But when the soaring stone vaults threaten to rise all around me and my eyelids droop, the chirping children with bright eyes like bits of stained glass and taut mouths of ravenous sinners pull the glamorous young woman who was formerly me out of her reverie and take her up the stairs to the loft and up more stairs to the top of the widow’s tower and, somehow, up more stairs still, the steps luminously, inconceivably, rising through the air into the night skies above—and these skies are nothing like the measured, pale, sensible seaside skies of the world the former me left behind. This world is enchanting, and radiant, and full of whimsy; in this world, the air becomes floral scents become strands of celestial music become multiplying serpentine arabesques like the richest tapestries woven with gold threads become trees with entwined crystal branches become blue starlit clouds become infinities telescoping outward, merging with other infinities become boats that float toward us under light-suffused sails of sheer moonlight—and then I see that these truly are boats, drawing closer and closer.

And I count the boats, for numbers seem solid and sane, and I need to distract myself from the dawning terror of knowing that there is nothing but a void beneath my feet. One, two, four, seven, ten, twelve… Twelve boats—and I can already discern a beautiful youth standing at the heart of each, leaning on an upright oar like a statue posing to be admired, smiling at us, each smile so full of large, dazzling teeth.

“They are coming, they are coming for us!” the girls cry, and in their excitement they bob up and down on the blue heavenly shore, clicking and clacking their heels, all glittering and hard and jeweled like a plague of exotic, gorgeous insects.

“Oh, won’t we dance tonight!” one exclaims, and “Oh, look how hungry they are!” another exhales—and then, turning to the elegant young woman who was formerly me, they all press their hands against their scintillating chests, as if in prayer, and intone together: “Do stay, stay with us forever, we will have dances in the sky every night, it will be glorious, it will be splendid!”

“Please, do say yes,” Theda, the youngest, begs. “We will love you, you will take care of us, you will be like a mother to us!”

At this, I sway a little, then totter down one rung of the luminous ladder. Edna’s alarmed face is thrust close to me as she struggles to pull me back up.

“No, no, she means sister,” Edna whispers. “She means like a sister. A slightly older sister.”

But the words have been said, and as their meaning slowly sinks to the bottom of my soul, all the magic of the night seems to catch on their blunt, dull edge and slide sideways off the world. The boats waver, the intense blue of the stars starts to fade, and my desire to have mindless fun, to shrug off my past, to forget my future, if only for a few wild, careening hours—the desire to be young again leaks out of me, and I see myself through the multifaceted, glinting eyes of the insect girls, the girl-insects, I see myself as I really am, a lonely woman on the cusp of middle age, an anxious mother who has already made all her choices, all her mistakes. And now, once again, I remember my children, my own children, my flesh and blood, my daughter who used to love my bedtime stories, my son who used to spend hours conquering imaginary lands with his army of silver forks, my Angie, my Ro, deprived of my love, of my care, for so long, and the thought is like a sharp blade slicing cleanly through the fabric of this illusion, of all the illusions—and as the truth sinks in, so, too, heavily, inevitably, does my heart in my chest, and so do I, sinking, sinking back down through the air, the golden sky ladder disappearing above me rung by rung, the impassive insect faces of the eleven dancing princesses hanging over the edge of the cloud, staring after me, before vanishing out of sight, blinking out with the stars, with the magic.

The gray house meets me with the rickety floorboards of the balcony. I tear off the ridiculous high heels, then run down the widow’s watch tower, down past the loft, down past the second floor with its mutilated plant corpses. The first-floor parlor enfolds me in its dim, drafty silence. My head spinning, I hasten to find my old sensible shoes, to gather my bucket, my rags, when a woman’s voice sounds behind me.

“You,” the voice says, sadly, “are wearing my favorite dress.”

I drop the bucket just as a light flares up by the window, and there she sits, unmoving and prim, in the only hard-backed chair in the entire house, dressed all in brown, her hands set in resigned stillness on her squarely placed knees. The sight of her pierces my heart with the recognition of a kindred loneliness; but when I approach, I see that she is not like me, that she is still young, only a little older than the girls in the skies. Her face is heart-shaped and white, her eyes wise with grief. She reminds me of Angie, but something about her seems broken. I stop a few paces away, as my breath dies in my throat: a thin silver chain binds her wrists to the wall, and another chain binds her ankles.

“Are you…” But I cannot bring myself to ask what I want to ask, so I ask the question to which I know the answer already. “Are you Nora?”

“Nora, yes,” she says in some surprise, as though unused to the sound of her own name. Her voice is uncertain and pale, like the wind in the rushes, like old-age regret. “And who are you? I have never seen you here before. I return to this house every night in my dreams, you know, but it is always empty, my sisters are always away at their dances.” She sighs and, not waiting for me to answer, gestures for me to sit by her; when she raises her small white hand, the chain tinkles dejectedly. “I used to be just like them, once upon a time. Bright and reckless and fast. I made up poems—poems about music, about having wings, about boats in the sky—and many said I had a real gift, but I believed all gifts were meant to be tossed away freely, so I never wrote anything down. Every night, we climbed the stairs to the clouds and met with our lovers. Our lovers loved to watch us dance. We had such pretty feet, they said, and mine the prettiest. Every sunrise, in parting, we took off our beautiful shoes and threw them into the air, and our lovers caught them and drank champagne out of them, toasting our joy to come on the following night.

“But our fathers grew suspicious of all the shoes we kept buying, so they threatened to cut off our allowances, and when their threats had no effect, they sent men to spy on us. Men came, with butterfly nets, with magnifying glasses, with church hymnals, with thesauruses, with rulers, and tried to catch us, but we were clever and avoided them all, and some of them fell out of the skies and broke their necks. We watched them fall and cheered at their deaths, and perhaps that was wrong, and perhaps it was for our lighthearted cruelty that we were punished. For, after a while, there arrived a man with a perpetual frown and a white beard pointy as a knife, a man who hid his thoughts under a bowler hat. We heard rumors that he knew how to dissect dreams, knew why some women dreamed of balconies and kings, while others dreamed of wells and walking sticks, and that he would chase us through our dreams until he knew us and, knowing us, trapped us.

“We laughed at the rumors, and we laughed at him, at his arrogant folly, behind our hands, but in the end, he got the better of us. He followed us one night, dark as the night itself, up the golden ladder into the sky, and, once there, took copious notes of everything he saw—and as soon as he wrote something down, whatever it was vanished clean, just like it had never been. I cried for the moonbirds. I cried for the pearl lilies. I cried for the diamond-leafed trees. I knew it was only a matter of time before he spied the magnificent cloud boats with the splendid-toothed lovers. And so, to save my sisters’ happiness, I spoke to him, I promised to come down with him if only he would leave the rest alone. He was glad to have me, then, for I was like a bird in his hand. He took me home with him, and he put these on my wrists and my ankles, for, in spite of my promises, he did not trust me not to fly away. And every day now, I sit chained to his desk and recount my dreams for him, and he dips his dragon-claw pen into his golden inkstand and writes my words down in his thick notebooks, and he tears out the pages, and he swallows them after much mastication, and he grows ever fatter with fame. But I have my revenge on him, too, for every day I lie to him. I make up empty nonsense, fill his head and his belly with balconies and kings, wells and walking sticks, while in reality, what I dream of every night is this house, this dark, empty house of my former youth, with the vast blue skies above it and my young, beautiful sisters dancing free and joyous in the clouds. So, whoever you are,” and she points a see-through finger at me, jingling the chains lightly, “you are trespassing in my dream. And it is dangerous for you to be here, for the man in the bowler hat may begin to suspect the truth any day now and go back on the prowl through my soul. You’d better leave my dress behind, quick, and return to wherever you came from.”

And just like that, as though released from a nightmare, I am back in my own somber clothes, stumbling to the trolley stop through a pale pink morning, my bucket in my hand. On the trolley, on the train, my head is pounding, and it seems to me that all the other stern, darkly clad domestics are staring at me with disapproval. When I limp through the park toward my sister’s house, a short man, possibly wearing a bowler hat, darts out from behind a tree and flashes a camera in my eyes, and my insides grow heavy with ominous premonitions.

Melissa intercepts me by the front door, her forehead etched deep with insomnia.

“Where have you been, we’ve been worried sick about you, gone all night like that! Miss McKee is in the living room, waiting to speak with you. You should wash your face before you see her. And what in heaven’s name happened to your hair, who chopped it off like that?”

“Miss McKee?” I repeat, my temples splitting at the blazing trajectory that the sun is now drawing across the wintry sky. “Who is Miss McKee?”

Melissa gives me a withering look and strides off into the house, and I meekly follow her inside to discover Gwendolyn the witch sitting on my sister’s couch, tapping a pen against reams of paper spread out on the coffee table before her.

At the House in the Pines

“Perhaps I haven’t been sufficiently clear.” Her tone is stern, and yet again, she looks both like and unlike her previous incarnation, her gray hair cropped just as before but her face made colder, more impersonal, by a pair of glasses poised on the bridge of her nose, which seems to have shrunk even more in its dimensions, a far cry from the potato-shaped bulb of the chicken-legged hut and farther still from the hooked monstrosity of the crossroads. She is dressed quite formally, too, in a tailored pinstriped suit, which makes her look slimmer; or perhaps she has lost weight. “Your position is precarious as it is. Staying out all night, drinking, by the looks of you”—she gives me a chilly glance, the color and texture of steel, over her steel-rimmed glasses—“should not be permitted if you hope to reunite with your children. Now, when does your husband expect you to move back in with him?”

“Two weeks,” I whisper, chastised. “But I can’t. I won’t.”

“I should think not. In two weeks’ time, then, he will file for divorce, which will give him even more advantage over you. I recommend that we file ourselves before the time is up. We need to pick proper grounds for it, of course. Desertion is out, since you were the one who left him, and as for abuse, well, he was cruel and unpleasant, but he never did hit you, did he? Which leaves adultery, and here, I trust, we have ample—”

“No,” I interrupt. “I do not want to file anything.”

She clicks her tongue, impatiently. “As your lawyer—”

“No. Please. I do not want to do anything.” Panicked, I am pleading now, with her, with myself, with him, with the Powers That Be, in whose smooth, impartial workings I used to believe, used to not know not to believe, but which, I now fear, do not watch over me any longer—if ever they have. “Maybe he’ll see that parting is the best ending for both of us and agree to resolve everything peacefully?”

She drops her pen onto the table with much clatter to demonstrate the full extent of her exasperation. “The man is a classic bully in love with his own power. He will never agree to a peaceful resolution. Tell me what happened between you two in the last months of your marriage. There might be something there we could use.”

I stay stubbornly silent.

“This isn’t easy,” she says, relenting a little. “Why don’t you take a day or two to think it over, and in the meantime set up an appointment with Faye. Talking about things will clear your mind. Do call my office once you make your decision. We should aim to file by Monday. And look, I understand the desire to cut loose when a man hurts you, believe me, we’ve all been there, but you mustn’t forget that your entire future is at stake here. Last night was unwise. Let’s just hope there will be no repercussions.”

I am, in truth, not entirely certain what happened last night, but a stumble into the powder room revealed frightfully bloodshot eyes, lids painted in black and gray stripes, a glittering pink mouth slanted sideways, red blotches on my cheeks, and an unevenly chopped, bristly mop. After a single glance, I squeezed my eyes shut and would not look again, scrubbing blindly at my eyelids, at my lips, tugging a brush through the remains of my beautiful hair, too frightened to confirm that the dissipated reflection might have any connection to me, to my neat, respectable, hardworking self. And I now feel so distracted by wanting and, simultaneously, not wanting to recall what precisely led to my riding the trolley at six in the morning, carrying a badly burnt potted hydrangea in my cleaning bucket and bearing an uncanny resemblance to a not-altogether-sober lachrymose clown, that I let Gwendolyn gather her papers and depart the house before I think to ask her who Faye is.

Once the front door closes behind her, I sit by the window, massaging my aching temples, round and round and round, until I realize that the movements of my fingers have fallen in rhythm with the thin girlish voices I hear chanting some nonsensical rhyme outside, Melissa’s three daughters, Meg, Mary, and Myrtle, playing in the yard, choosing “it” for their game of tag. As I prod my temples, I listen absently to the winding words that reach me through the cracked window.

I straighten, listen more intently, my heart taking a sudden flight—and before the next girl is out, I leap to my feet and rush from the room, from the house, down the sidewalk that skirts the neighborhood park, shouting, “Wait, Gwendolyn, wait!” after the pinstriped figure in men’s brogues that is even now striding briskly toward a gray Packard automobile I see parked across the road.

She looks back at last, allows me to catch up, to recover from a stitch in my side, before asking whether I have made up my mind already.

“It’s not about that,” I pant—and stop.

It seems preposterous to bring up the stormy crossroads, the threats, the curse, when faced with this smartly dressed, businesslike person holding a briefcase of dyed alligator skin and considering me with poorly concealed impatience in the prosaic white light of a clear December day, and I feel a fleeting yet vertiginous doubt, almost as though I imagined that black-and-red night—dreamed it up wholesale to disguise the uncertainty, the terror, of my first divorce consultation with Miss Gwendolyn McKee, Esquire. I inhale and press on. “That time, at the crossroads, when… when you wanted to take what you called my life’s spark from me, you… well, you didn’t. And later, in your house, you said you wouldn’t have taken it, ‘not even if’—but you didn’t finish your sentence. What were you going to say?”

“Nothing of any practical use to you. And it might upset you.”

“Please. I’m not a little girl. Tell me. Please.”

I feel like a little girl standing empty-handed on the sidewalk, begging her for a crumb of some revelation. She sighs, probes me with an even gray gaze.

“I suppose you have the right to know,” she says at last. “I wouldn’t have taken your spark even if you had it. The thing is, you didn’t. You had no spark. No passion. No joy. There was nothing to take.”

I stare at her, stunned.

“A garden with no flowers,” I whisper.

“Yes, but you used to have it. I could feel the hollow in your chest where it had been once. Someone had taken it from you already. Scooped it clean out.”

“Some… someone?” My lips feel numb.

“Someone.” She shrugs. “Or something. Sometimes it is an act of malicious magic. Other times, it’s just—just life, you know. Joy leaks out when there are enough cracks.”

“But… can I never get it back now?”

Her face, bereft of the steel-rimmed eyeglasses, appears gentler.

“Few things are impossible. Still, let us focus on the pressing matter at hand.” She shakes her wrist out of her sleeve in an oddly familiar gesture, glances at her watch. “I have another client, I must run, but if you aren’t doing anything at present, why don’t you go see Faye. She is quite maudlin at times, but she should be able to help you process your emotions. Here, I’ll jot down the address for you if you don’t have it handy. Talk to her, organize your thoughts, then call me, yes? We should get the bastard before he gets us.”

And it is only after the rather long-nosed chauffeur in a green uniform with flames on the cuffs drives Miss McKee away in her gray Packard that I remember I have forgotten, again, to ask who Faye is. I look at the address on a slip of paper and, dully, walk to the other side of the park, through a neighborhood of neat little cottages rising bright and square and menacing like rows of well-cared-for teeth, until the street ends abruptly and I find myself beyond the town’s edge, in a thicket of evergreen trees, on a twisting path carpeted in dry fir needles and leading into a chilly emerald dusk. Some minutes later, I make out a small house through the pines. In another dozen steps, a smell envelops me—the light, sweet, delicious smell of a happy childhood. I have no time to think about it, though, because just then I come to an opening in the trees and, at last, see the house clearly—and it is like no other house.

Its walls are made entirely out of crumbling, sugar-sprinkled gingerbread, and its white roof glistens with frosting. Striped red-and-green candy canes frame the cheerful windows, chocolate hearts dot the door, and the weather vane is shaped like a pink lollipop. I stand gaping with wonder for a full minute, then, cautiously, approach the aromatic door and raise its licorice knocker. When I release it, the sound is the crunch of a cookie devoured by a greedy child, and a voice sweet as molasses calls out: “Just pull the bobbin, and the latch will go up.”

The door opens softly, soundlessly, as though on buttered hinges.

Inside, the air is stifling, and it is like Christmas, a confectionery shop, and a doll tea party, all rolled into one and suffused with a warm, rosy glow. Amazed, I stare at the profusion of potbellied teapots, cuckoo clocks, embroidered pillows, needlepoint rugs, porcelain statuettes, plump little lamps with tasseled shades, processions of jeweled eggs along flimsy shelves covered with lacy doilies, everything pink-hued, toy-sized, cozy, crammed—and absolutely suffocating. And I nearly give in to an impulse to dash back out into the woods, when the same saccharine voice exclaims: “Oh, my sweet child, what a surprise, how delighted I am to see you!”—and only then do I notice the round-shaped woman bundled in a multitude of strawberry-colored shawls, seated in a pink armchair under a pink pile of knitting, beaming at me over her rainbow-tinted butterfly-framed eyeglasses.

“Fairy… Fairy Godmother?”

“The same, the very same!” she confirms brightly. “But I prefer to go by ‘Faye’ now, it has a more modern ring, don’t you think? Sit down, sit down, have some chocolate with me.” Not rising, she stretches her hand to break off a chunk of the wall and, laughing, offers it to me; mechanically, I take it. The puffy pink ottoman I sink into is soft, too soft, and warm, as if someone was sitting there just moments before. “What brings you to my humble abode, my sweet child?”

For some reason, I do not want to mention the witch, or the night at the crossroads.

“I just stopped by to talk,” I say, uncertainly.

“Oh, yes, talk, I love talk!” she exclaims, muffled now, her mouth full of chocolate. “You don’t mind if I knit, do you, my dear? At this time of the year, with the holidays almost upon us, I am always so busy making socks for the poor town orphans… Tell me, and how are your own precious darlings? Doing well, I trust?”

My breath catches.

“Oh, Fairy Godmother! Do you not know? I haven’t seen… I haven’t been allowed to see…” And suddenly everything, everything, is too much—the hot, unmoving air inside the sweet pink house, the headache still beating at my temples like a trapped bird at the bars of a cage, the woman’s moist, egglike eyes turned upon me in smiling expectation, the chocolate treat I have forgotten I was still clutching beginning to melt, to run down my fingers, the exhaustion of keeping all my deeper emotions eternally locked away while I go about my hopeless task of fighting surface entropy with mops and dustcloths, the bitterness of the knowledge that, unlike all the other fairy tales in the world, mine has proved to be a sham—the old gnawing fear that I will never make sense of anything ever again, the new feeling of violation at having my life’s spark wrenched away from me by something, by someone—and more than anything else, the anguish of this never-ending separation from Angie and Ro, days turned to weeks turned to months, and who even knows what is happening to them, whether they are healthy, warmly dressed, properly fed, whether or not they go to bed every night crying for their mama—and now I am crying, too, tears freely streaming down my face, mixing with streaks of chocolate when I attempt to wipe them away with my sticky hands. “I may never be able to see… to hold… all I want… I love them so much… and that cruel, hard-hearted man…”

My words are turning into jerky sobs, become hiccups before trailing off into wet, incoherent shuddering.

“Oh, dear child! I simply had no idea, no idea!” the fairy godmother cries. She has flown out of her chair and is fluttering about me now, patting my cheeks with her fuzzy pink shawls, petting my back with her plump pink hands. “There, there, a nice long cry is good for you. Here, have a tissue… And now, take a deep breath and tell me what’s going on. Let’s start with what happened in the last months of your marriage, after the poor old dear… ahem… after King Roland died.”

I blow my nose, shake my head.

“Child, it’s not healthy to keep things bottled up inside like that.”

“You can’t possibly understand! How can you, when you yourself never had… had any… any…” Just as the sobs are encroaching again, I choke on a piece of dark chocolate I find wedged in my mouth. It starts sweet on my tongue, then turns so lip-numbingly bitter that I am shocked into silence as I work my teeth around it, laboring to rid myself of its sharp, binding taste.

The fairy godmother is back in her chair, knitting needles flashing in her hands.

“True, I never had any children of my own,” she says quietly. “But I know something about the heartbreak of motherhood. Why don’t you sit and breathe for a while, and I will tell you a little story. It’s a story of a fairy who was not always good.”

Surely, not you, Fairy Godmother? I want to ask, but my mouth is too full.

“Hush, child, do not interrupt. Just chew that chocolate, there’s my girl.”

And as I sputter around the sweet bitterness invading my mouth, she begins to talk, her needles clicking in rhythm with her words, the lamps glowing warm and pink around us. Once upon a time—the precise date is of no significance—in a nearby kingdom, there lived a fairy. In most respects, she was quite an ordinary fairy, preoccupied with small, benign workings of magic—infusing liquors with enhanced berry flavors, helping with firebird eggs, sewing dresses out of starlight, dabbling in royal matchmaking, and the like—save for the fact that, unlike most of her kind, she was raising two young children of her own. All fairies could have offspring, of course, but most chose not to, for, being obligated in the course of their professional engagements to spend much of their time at christenings and, subsequently, to watch over their godchildren as the spoiled little brats grew into proud princesses who refused to laugh or tyrannical princes who sent countless minions on missions of death in search of talking horses, mute brides, and pairs of comfortable slippers, they knew enough about the pitfalls and tragedies of motherhood to prefer vaulting right over the whole sorry mess on their humming iridescent wings. Not this fairy, though—this fairy had a sweet voice made for singing cribside lullabies and a generous heart made for unconditional love, and so she had produced two babies of her own to share her songs and her love with; and thus it was really quite sad when, finding herself the eleventh in line at a routine christening feast gone routinely wrong, she nobly intervened in a curse placed on some royal infant by a resentful old biddy and, after the infant’s father voiced a strongly worded objection to the manner of her intervention, lost her head, leaving behind a ten-year-old fairy boy and a five-year-old fairy girl.

The two children had a miserable time growing up. The hapless fairy’s friends took turns raising them, but, being flighty and callous by nature, they could not make up for the warmth that the siblings had lost when deprived of their own doting mother. In spite of the other fairies’ meager parenting skills, however, the brother and sister survived to young adulthood and, acquiring sufficient knowledge of their private history, swore revenge. They went about it in different ways. The brother, favoring a direct, blunt approach, as men often would, chose to wreak havoc within the family of their mother’s actual murderer. Insinuating himself into the palace under the guise of a celebrated physician, he proceeded to cast a sleeping charm upon the king’s sixteen-year-old daughter; then, having gorged himself on the king’s rage for so long that his gloating turned to boredom, he ensured the man’s death by conjuring a pointy fish bone in His Majesty’s throat. At that point, with the royal line essentially snuffed out, the brother took a parting stroll, in the same spirit of gloating, through the slumbering princess’s dreams and, unexpectedly, found himself so fascinated by what he discovered in her pure maidenly head that he declared the dreams of impressionable virgins to be the new object of his ambitions, and, bestowing a bristly kiss upon his sister’s dewy forehead, donned a bowler hat and left for greener pastures and darker nights.

The sister, on the other hand, possessed of a much subtler intellect and nurturing grander designs, set out to destroy the tranquility of each and every royal family in the vicinity, swearing to render each and every royal child a motherless orphan by the age of five—the age at which she herself had been deprived of maternal love. She worked at it tirelessly, relentlessly, for decades, initially getting the neighborhood queens to succumb to sickness and waste away in a plain, old-fashioned manner, but in time becoming more and more inventive at disposing of the royal consorts, turning some of them into frogs at the precise moment when they kissed their newborn babes for the first time, trapping others in magic mirrors, condemning them to report on the sordid doings of others in all perpetuity, making still others lose their hearts to donkeys or scarecrows or brooms and run off into the sunset with their tragically unsuitable seducers. There was a queen who, in a bout of uncharacteristic insanity, leaped into a well after a golden ball and lived out the rest of her life as a petulant herring. There was another who fled from her spouse and children to join a circus, first as a lion tamer and subsequently (after a local magician known as Arbadac the Bumbler caused an inadvertent accident during a coughing fit at a performance he attended) as the lion. The fairy celebrated each malicious accomplishment with chocolate bonbons and grew quite plump.

The final court she would ever visit appeared similar to all the others—a confection of a palace; a striking queen with eyebrows dark and glossy like strips of luxurious fur; an ineffectual king who dozed on his throne, entrusting the running of the kingdom to his ministers; a joyful five-year-old boy. Posing as a chaplain’s long-lost third cousin on a brief visit, the fairy learned the lay of the land, decided on a spell, prepared the groundwork. And then something happened: she found herself procrastinating at the king’s court, for a week, another week, a month. She lingered in the company of the queen, who sang sad, tender lullabies to her son, stirring up the long-buried memories of the fairy’s own childhood in her hitherto hardened breast; for thus had her own mother sung to her at each bedtime. Then, too, she had to confess to growing quite fond of the king, who was not in the least like other kings of her acquaintance, not irate or oblivious, but mild and courteous, often overwhelmed, and given to occasional bouts of existential despair, which she found worthy of sympathy and, if truth be told, rather romantic. And last, she was—much to her surprise, for she had never shown any affinity for children—drawn to the boy himself. He had the face of a stained-glass angel, a sunny disposition, and a generous spirit. One day, he brought her a present—a watercolor quite advanced for his age, for he had a marvelous aptitude for art. He had depicted a beaming boy standing between beaming parents; the three of them held hands, while a pretty, if slightly plump, young woman hovered above the group on immense butterfly wings.

“This is me with Mama and Papa.” He pointed. “And this is you. Because I can see that you aren’t just a girl, you are a fairy. A good, beautiful fairy, the kind that grants wishes. And now, will you please grant my wish?”

“And what is your wish?” the fairy asked, smiling, as she scooped him up into her lap and pinched his little chin between her finger and thumb, a trifle too hard. “A new hobbyhorse, maybe? Or ice cream for every dinner?”

The boy’s blue gaze was clear and serious.

“I wish for you to stay with us, always. I love you.”

And at that very instant her injured heart melted and mended, filling with love in return. But tragically, it was too late. For just as the fairy cried great tears of repentance and relief over the child’s radiant chestnut curls, over his drawing of the happy family, of which she suddenly believed herself a part, frantic servants ran through the palace calling for their queen, yet calling in vain, for the queen had vanished. The fairy realized, then, that her spell had been accidentally set into motion, that the harm had been done, that the queen must have somehow chanced upon the enchanted apple and bitten into it—and worse, deep within herself, she understood that she might have meant for it to happen, for had she not, in a supposed fit of absentmindedness, left the poisoned apple on the queen’s vanity table only the night before? Had she not, in truth, been hoping to get the sweet-voiced beauty with the sable eyebrows out of the way so she could have the king and the boy all to herself?

Horrified, newly heartbroken, she remained at the scene of her crime for a while after, striving to do what little she could to right the wrong. She failed. She watched the king fall into grief so gray and impenetrable that he became like another ghost haunting the royal cellars. She watched the light leak out of the boy. She fled their palace in shame, swearing to atone for her dark, terrible sins with everything she did forever after, determined to dedicate the rest of her immortal life to performing selfless deeds, dispensing miracles, making sweet little orphans happy. And she tried, and she tried, she tried so hard—but everything she did seemed to go awry, quite as if she were cursed. Her wards were not grateful to receive what gifts she gave, and babes wailed at her approach. She built a wondrous gingerbread house in a shady pine forest, hoping to create a peaceful haven for hungry lost children—yet the only ones who came her way were an ungrateful, boisterous, poorly raised mob of boys, five or six brothers, who treated her abominably, nibbled away half her house, and in the end escaped her tender attentions to return to the woods, where they now led wild, undisciplined lives, swinging from trees, playing barbaric games, transforming into ravens when the mood was upon them, making regular assaults on her sugar windowsills and candy-cane fences, and spreading malicious rumors that she was a wicked witch intent on cannibalism and other unnatural practices. And still, she has not given up—oh, no—she has been knitting socks for the local orphanages, has been turning up at every christening, whether invited or not—“so many godchildren I have, all sweet, motherless orphans…”

She trails off.

“But what…” My voice is a croak when I find it at last. “What happened to that queen? The queen with the loving boy? What did you do to her?”

The fairy godmother wrings her hands in anguish.

“She turned into a chess piece!” she wails. “Such an elegant spell it was, too, a proper, elaborate spell, came with a flash of lightning and everything, a pity there was no one nearby to appreciate… That is, of course, it was dreadful, just dreadful… The poor dear… I found her on the floor of her bedchamber, rolled under a dresser, and I dusted her off the best I could and put her on display with some other knickknacks they kept in the palace library. For all I know, she is still there, I never did have the heart to check when I came back. Because, you see, I did return some twenty years later, when I felt that I’d rehabilitated my character with enough good deeds to earn me a second chance with the king and his son. Neither of them recognized me—true, I had become a bit matronly with time—but perhaps it was just as well. The king was still depressed, so I counseled him, and… and I was kind to him in other ways, too, and it did cheer him up, if less than it might have. But the boy—the boy had grown into a man in my absence, and the man was not nearly as nice as he could have been. Cold. A bit shallow. Uncaring, some might have thought. So I decided the best thing I could do for him was find him a perfect bride, the kind who was meek and quiet and patient and would bring out the best in him after a while—and, well—”

She falls silent and, pressing her hands against her chest, stares at me with eyes made enormous by the butterfly frames. I stare back, speechless. I think of the small glass cabinet in the library of my own palace, with its unassuming display of dusty objects—the bleary mirror, the blood-encrusted key, the apple with a bite taken out of its shiny red side, the ivory chess queen, and, in the place of honor, the crystal slipper.

“Do you understand, child? I did it for both of you. I promise I meant well.”

And just like that, I understand—I understand everything. I look at the pink china cups, the pink glowing lamps, the pink porcelain cupids, and see all these trappings of goodness and decorum for the mere illusions they are. For the woman before me, the plump, anxious woman wrapped in pink fuzzy shawls, blinking at me through the pink butterfly glasses from the heart of the pink cozy room, is evil, pure evil, a fat, glistening pink spider caught in the center of the web of harm she has been busily spinning for years and years, trapping me and my prince in her sticky snares, all to avenge herself for some half-forgotten childhood slight.

She is no fairy—she is a witch.

An evil witch who ruined my husband’s nature, then robbed me of my joy.

Because it must have been her, who else could it have been, it was clearly her.

Wasn’t it?

“It was you,” I hiss, and as my voice strengthens, so does my certainty. “You were the one. The one who stole my passion. My life’s spark. You told me the dress, the glass slippers, the carriage were your gifts, because I was good, because I deserved it—but you lied, they weren’t gifts, your magic wasn’t free, you made me pay for everything, didn’t you? And the price was too high, and it ruined my life, it ruined my marriage, because I never felt completely right, I never felt completely there, I knew in my heart that something was always missing, something was always missing in my heart, and now I see what it was! Everything, everything is your fault, you knew just how it would play out, you arranged for all this to happen—”

Swiftly, irritably, she waves her hand about, as though dissipating some bothersome smell. A sudden silence stretches from one wall of her overheated room to the other. She continues to blink at me through her glasses, yet now she looks concerned, and all at once I feel a bit disoriented. To get my bearings, I glance at the framed diploma above her desk, at the box of tissues on the table next to her, at her plump middle-aged figure settled in her ample leather armchair, and the familiarity of my surroundings serves to quiet my agitation, as it always does.

“You are still doing it, I’m afraid,” she offers, gravely. “Still blaming outside circumstances for your own actions and shortcomings. Yet anger is a healthy emotion, even when misdirected, so I feel we’ve made progress today.” She sets down her pen, gently closes the notebook she holds in her lap, reaches for the tissues, and hands them to me just as her face begins to grow imprecise through the sheen of my tears. “Our hour is up, but we will pick this up next week. And in our next session, I want to work on your sense of self-worth, so let’s return to our discussion of your Cinderella complex. We talked about it back in the fall, remember, when you were first considering separation. Why did you think your husband was your benefactor when he married you? Did you believe that he was better than you in some way? Was it just his wealth and your inferior social status, as you perceived it, or were there other reasons, too? I want you to think about these things during the week, and we’ll talk about them next Tuesday at eleven. Here, let me write down the time for you, you’ve been forgetting our appointments lately. Of course, stress will make you forget a few things.”

She makes a pencil note on her business card, and I take it with a grateful nod, blow my nose, and stand up to put on my coat, and step outside. The cold suburban street stretches as far as the eye can see. I walk in the noonday glare, sliding my finger along the surface of the card, touching the raised letters of “Dr. Faye Wand, Licensed Therapist” embossed in its snowy white center. Just before I reach my sister’s home, plumb in the middle of the row of identical working-class houses, I slip the card into my pocket, feeling reassured.

Dr. Wand truly is a miracle worker. She always helps me see clearly.

In the Suburbs

The doorbell rings the following morning.

Melissa’s husband has already left for the lumberyard (he has just been promoted to supervisor), and her three eldest—Meg, Mary, and Myrtle—have gone to school; the baby is asleep in the crib upstairs. Melissa has made the children’s beds, brought down Myrtle’s latest creation to stick to the door of their new refrigerator (the first one on the block, she often mentions in a casual tone, her pride writ large on her face), and poured us each a mug of coffee, which we are now drinking at the kitchen table.

“She’s only seven, so who knows,” Melissa says. “But don’t you think so?”

“Sorry, what?”

“Myrtle. Don’t you think she has talent?” She motions to the drawing, sounding a bit reproachful, and I am reminded that I have been sleeping on her living room sofa for nearly three months, and should, if only out of gratitude, pay more attention to the accomplishments of her children—even if it pains me.

“It’s very… colorful,” I say quickly, to appease her, “colorful” being the first word that alights on my tongue—but then I look, really look, and am arrested by the picture’s imaginative vibrancy. In the bright green meadow, under the bright blue sky, stands a bright yellow house shaped like a shoe. Its door is red, its roof is green, with a blue weather vane fashioned like a rabbit; doves are flying overhead in a bright white flock, and smiling children, so many of them, lead a happy dance around a short laughing woman in an apron. Melissa, too, is looking at it, and there is an odd, dreamy expression in her eyes.

“It’s that Mother Goose rhyme, you know the one,” she says.

“The girls demand it every night before sleep. Of course, I change the words when I read it to them, I say, ‘She kissed them all gently and put them to bed.’ Because, you know, I would never. Although sometimes, God forgive me, I do so want to give them a good, sound smack. Some days are just overwhelming—there are only the four of them, and one still a baby, but I swear, sometimes it feels as if… as if I had a full ten.” She falters, sets the mug down, slides her worn wedding band up and down her finger. “Can I tell you something? I haven’t told anyone, not even Tom.”

“Of course. Is something wrong?”

“No, it’s just… it’s this anxious dream I keep having, the last couple of months. Since you’ve come to live with us, actually.”

She stands up to splash more coffee into our mugs as she begins to talk. In her dream, she is herself, and still married to Tom, but Tom is a real woodsman, the kind who chops down trees, a green-clad giant of a man with an ax over his shoulder, and they live in a blooming woodland glade, on the edge of a great, ancient forest, with their great many children. For, in her dream, there are Meg, Mary, and Myrtle, just as in real life, and the baby is there, too; but there are also six boys, six loud, boisterous, tiring, exasperating, wonderful boys, the life and the curse of the house, the pride and the torment of the mother’s heart. But they are poor, there is not enough food to go around for everyone, and in a thoughtless moment of frustration, of which she has so many every day, whenever one of her unmanageable sons pulls Mary’s braids, or releases piglets inside the house, or flings mud at the cow, she screams that the boys are too much, that they are eating all of them into an early grave, that they would be better off spending their wild, freewheeling days as ravens feeding off the bounty of the land, living at the mercy of the forest. And just as her reckless, dangerous words fly into the wind, her six precious boys, the light of her life, transform into shaggy black birds and, cawing, take off for the woods, never to be seen again.

Or at least this is what happens in some dreams, and she spends the remainder of the nighttime hours pacing her kitchen, twisting her hands, willing her baby to grow up with magical promptness so she could venture out into the gloom of the silent trees and bring her brothers safely home, for the onus of any deed of salvation is ever on the youngest. In other dreams, though, there are no ravens. More heartbreaking still, she and her husband discuss, debate, deliberate, then choose their docile, helpful, artistically gifted, domestically inclined, soft-spoken girls over their savage, bright-spirited, impractical, ravenous, exuberant boys, and Tom, expressionless, stoic, takes the boys deep into the forest, by invisible paths known only to him, and there abandons them to their cruel fate. Occasionally, the slumber gods do take pity on her, and somehow she knows that her sons will not perish from hunger, thirst, and wild beasts but will stumble upon an enchanted oasis of milk, honey, and gingerbread at the heart of the woods, and will cavort in the trees forever after, joyful, free, fed on cookies and candy canes by some benevolent, maternal presence—and that, moreover, this new, unfettered life will suit them much better than their old, small life of chores and chastisement within the four walls of the family home and they will be eternally grateful to her, their mother, for having released them in her endless motherly wisdom.

On most nights, however, the dream gods are not as kindly disposed, and she wakes up just as her husband, his eyes blank, his hands running bloody with the monstrousness of filicide, returns home, and, suddenly aware of what they have wrought, she flies at him in an ecstasy of grief and fury, rakes his cheeks with her nails, screams their lost names into his face, each one torn from within her gut like a curse, like damnation: Peter! Richard! Henry! Arthur! William!—until she finds herself sitting upright in bed, the alarm clock ticking laboriously through the fourth hour of the morning, tears dripping off her chin, her husband snoring next to her in blissful oblivion, the name “Tom Junior” trembling still on her lips.

But it is not always thus—for, more often yet, there are no ravens, and no woods, and no gingerbread fairies in her dreams, nothing dark, nothing magic, nothing to console her with the inevitability of a tale unfolding from its tragic beginning to its fulfilling conclusion. She merely dreams of her life, her ordinary daily life in her ordinary suburban house, and the boys vanish slowly, one after another, each disappearing along with his scant possessions—filthy boots by the door, a small bag of treasured marbles, an infectious laugh, a handful of freckles—along with the room he has inhabited, along with all memory of him. And so their home keeps shrinking, and the rest of them go on as though nothing has changed, nothing has diminished, first mother and father with their ten children, then nine, then eight, until there are only the girls and the baby left in a small house with a white picket fence in a New Jersey suburb with the faintly fairy-tale name of Bloomfield, and Tom has no inkling of anything wrong, no recollection of there ever having been a delightful rambling cottage shaped like a shoe in a blooming field on the edge of a vast, ancient forest, no recollection of there ever having been anyone named Tom Junior, and she herself barely remembers what it is she is missing—she just knows that, on some mornings, she wakes up with a gaping sense of emptiness in her soul, where something else used to be.

She finishes the last of her coffee, worries the wedding band on her finger.

“Just dreams,” she says. “Just dreams, I know. To be honest, it’s probably all those miscarriages I had, before the girls. But sometimes I can’t help wondering—”

And it is then that the doorbell rings.

And since Melissa appears distraught, it is I who stand up to answer.

The short, unshaven man in a cheap brown suit who shifts from foot to foot on the threshold is a stranger, and yet, surprisingly, he offers me my name.

“Are you?” he asks.

“Yes,” I reply, a bit experimentally (am I?), and shrink from the swift mirthless smirk that twists his loose, rubbery lips.

“You are served,” he croons, thrusts a manila envelope into my hands, and disappears abruptly, as if he had never been there at all.

“Who was that?” Melissa asks from the kitchen table.

I extract a thick sheaf of papers from the envelope.

“Complaint for Absolute Divorce,” the black-on-white letters state at the top.

Dully, I leaf through the pages, and out of their stark whiteness words explode like a mob of angry crows startled out of a tree, flying into my face, scratching at my eyes. “Abandonment,” “child neglect,” “unemployed,” “erratic behavior,” “long-term abuse of prescription medications,” “history of mental instability,” “lived in a rodent-infested room,” “unsuited for taking care of,” “no residence of her own,” “is currently cohabitating with her brother-in-law, Thomas Woodley, in an adulterous arrangement,” “recent evidence of alcohol and drug use (see Exhibit A)”… A photograph flutters out. It is blurry, but I can make out myself, in crumpled clothes, with a crumpled face, stumbling raccoon-eyed and windblown through the neighborhood park at dawn, hugging a bucket with a burnt hydrangea to my chest.

The next page delivers the execution order: “… hereby request full custody of the minor children, Angelina and Roland the Sixth…”

Slowly I sink onto a chair, the pages falling from my loosened hands. My heart is like a plague bell tolling in my chest, and my chest is empty, my mind is empty. It’s over, I think, and maybe I say it aloud. Bustling, scowling, Melissa gathers the scattered pages, licks her index finger, begins to turn them, begins to exclaim, my supporting cast intoning the scripted lines of indignation.

“But this is outrageous,” she fumes. “These are all lies!”

Are they, though? I myself am not overly sure.

Some of it might be true.

“Call your lawyer,” she says, slamming the papers on the table, slamming her fist on the papers. “This makes me furious. I can’t even imagine how you feel.”

Furious, yes. But also—mainly—frightened: for this blow has split open a never fully healed scar, and out of the gaping wound has gushed my constant guilt over not being enough for my children in recent years, perhaps never having been enough, of failing as a mother in so many ways, of clearly, sickeningly, not being as perfect as fairy-tale princesses are expected to be. And as I sit there, frozen by horror, watching the lifeblood pouring out of my heart, all I can think is: Will I now pay for all my faults, my all-too-human weaknesses, by losing them forever, by forfeiting what I love most?

But already, somehow, the telephone is set before me, and Melissa is searching for the number, and I watch the round dial jerk forward and fall back, jerk forward and fall back. And next Gwendolyn’s efficient voice is in my ear, and then I am in Gwendolyn’s efficient office, and she is telling me we will fight him, king or no king, we will level our own accusations, will prove that I can take care of myself and my offspring, will establish my character, will end by making me a free woman, and a rich free woman at that, here is what I need to do, this, this, and now this—and so I read through this document, and sign here, and authorize that statement, and sign there, and then things speed up, everything slides by so quickly, my tearful farewell to Melissa, Tom, and their girls (“But we are only a short train ride away, we are here for you”), a tiny apartment I have found for rent in the city, my weekly sessions with Dr. Wand, which are beneficial as a matter of record, a string of new employment opportunities (following upon the termination of my contract with the young women of questionable values out on Long Island, who may have proved detrimental to my case), my work taking me out of the city and back to the suburbs, though more affluent than my sister’s by far, where I assist beautifully coiffed wives, their short ballooning skirts clenching their wasplike waists, with baking cakes, ironing sheets, and vacuuming wall-to-wall carpets.

I follow my lawyer’s strict injunctions not to fraternize with my employers this time, but I watch them closely, for doing so distracts me from dwelling on my own misery. The wives move as though under water, with their immaculately manicured pearly nails and their dainty kitten heels, and at midday their eyes assume a mild glassiness, a bit like the eyes of the fancy dolls in their daughters’ rooms. I never meet the husbands (in the city during the day, the wives inform me, at work in their advertising agencies or banks or investment firms), or the children, either (I am not told where the children are), though I am presented with the evidence of their existence in countless prominently displayed pictures. In the pictures, everyone is always smiling, seated over checkered tablecloths at picnics, posing in mid-jump with tennis rackets, lined up by lakes with fishing rods. The husbands’ smiles seem offhand and the wives’ faintly hysterical, yet the children look sincere, even eager. After a while, as weeks pass and I never see any of the children in the gleaming rooms of these gleaming homes, I fall to wondering whether the wives have not contrived to trap their darling boys and girls inside these framed displays of ideal childhoods and are thus keeping them safely out of the way while they themselves, ever so slightly sedated, navigate the troubled shoals of their marital havens.

Because I can recognize unhappy women when I see them, and these women are unhappy.

They long to talk to me. They act all frosty at first, for the instructional articles they favor in the Good Housekeeping magazine have advised them to keep their distance from their help; yet after a while—weeks in some cases, mere days in others—they feel reassured by the fact that I have not made any requests for monetary advances, nor have their precious candlesticks or silver spoons gone missing, so they begin to linger in doorways of dining rooms while I dust their displayed wedding china, and they chat about this and that, and then, at the end of my day, invite me to partake in cups of tea, relaxing pills, and confessions. I take no pills, share no confessions of my own in return, and offer little encouragement, but little is all that is needed, it seems, and I hear their stories. And perhaps the stories I hear are not precisely the stories they tell, but by now I know enough about love and princes to discern, behind the cheery inflections of their genteel fantasies, beneath the cherry veneer of their civilized mid-century dwellings, the dark, heady danger of primitive transformations, the rank odors of beasts prowling through the woods.

There are five of them, one for each day of my working week. The Monday princess, the oldest and most resigned of the lot, met her husband when she was out for a stroll in the park, gathering flowers for her parents’ mantelpiece arrangement, and he a stag pursued by a vicious hunt. He bounded over for help, pleaded with her to give him her heart, for only thus would the enchantment be broken, only thus would he resume his true, his human, form, and she felt sorry for him because of the frantic rolling of his golden eyes, the foaming of his blackened lips, and chose to believe him. And once her heart was firmly in his possession, he did make one fine-looking, graceful man; but these days, almost two decades later, she often finds her ceilings scuffed by antlers and her rugs imprinted by hooves, so she has begun to suspect that he lied to her, is lying to her still, that his true form has always been that of a stag and he gladly reverts to his prancing, doe-chasing ways whenever her back is turned, then pretends to misunderstand her tired questions in the mornings—and three or four times now, she has stumbled upon her heart, once his greatest treasure (he said), lying forgotten on windowsills or in kitchen drawers.

The Tuesday princess, by far the richest of them all, is elegant and sleek, slinking about her suburban mansion on feet soft as paws, lying sprawled on sofas in sophisticated silk dresses, grooming herself, her eyes evasive and smooth, stacks of golden bracelets jingling up and down her skinny arms. She takes the longest to speak to me, and even then, she purrs with half-truths and omissions. Still, I learn that in her youth, she was a beautiful white cat, a royal cat, no less, but she fell in love with a broad-shouldered, happy-go-lucky peasant youth entirely indifferent to her charms—he was a dog person—and the less he cared, the harder the thorn of love pinned down her soul. She invited him to live in her palace, gave him fine wines to drink, delicacies to eat, velvets and jewels to wear, and still he preferred his slobbery romps with street mutts to an hour of refinement in her discerning feline presence. At last, in despair, she begged him to cut off her head—and when he did, a lovely woman appeared in place of the cat, so, rendered dumb by the shock, the youth gave in and married her right on the spot. And, fifteen years later, they are married still, but now she often snaps, scratches, and spits at him, for she feels poisoned by the hateful recollection of the ease with which he granted her long-ago wish to behead her—a shrug and “Sure,” carelessly tossed off—and, too, she often catches her ever-gorgeous husband looking at her with amiable speculation, as though wondering what kind of delightful new being might emerge and grace him with her effervescent presence if he cut off the head of his tiresomely nagging, aging wife.

The Wednesday princess, the youngest, married a wolf. He terrorized her neighborhood for many a season, powerful muscles rolling under his shaggy pelt, devouring maidens and, on occasion, their mothers (though not grandmothers, rumors notwithstanding, for their meat was too dry for his liking), when she came dancing across his way one sunny day, a basket of homemade provisions in the crook of her elbow. He treated himself to her roast chicken and her rhubarb pie, thinking to eat her next—and then, somehow, found himself intrigued, for she wore bright colors, sang happy songs, had a mouth the color of burst berries, and was not a whit afraid of him. And so he brought her home instead, and she was ecstatic at first—she knew herself special for taming a savage creature of the dark forest—and she went around his house singing “Tra-la-la!” and cooking delicious suppers. Yet she soon noticed that if she happened to cease her singing for even a minute or burn even one piece of toast, his eyes would narrow and his tongue would take a few saliva-drenched lolls by his great yellow teeth. The more it happened, the more apprehensive she grew, until her apprehension turned to fear. Some months ago, she happened to meet a young hunter, she confided to me shyly. She is now weighing her options.

The Thursday wife was rescued by her prince from the top of a tree in the heart of the forest, where she sat naked and alone, for what reason she herself cannot recall—it seems like a different life. He had not asked whether she wanted to be rescued. Had she been asked, she is not sure what answer she would have given at the time, yet now—now she misses her tree. But it is the Friday princess, the most beautiful of the five, whose story bothers me most. When she first married her husband, he was a beast under a spell, yet she loved the sad, shriveled seed of a soul that she sensed fluttering beneath his fur and fangs. Devotedly, she followed every last bit of advice she mined from fashion magazines—she perfected her housekeeping skills, splurged on his creature comforts, did not complain about her own petty troubles when her beast came home from work, but listened with avid interest as he grouched for hours on end; nor did she ever forget to take a few minutes to refresh herself before his arrival, putting a touch of lipstick on her mouth and a ribbon in her hair. She arranged his pillows, took off his shoes, and treated him as the master of the house long after he had stopped roaring at her—and, in time, her tender ministrations made him soft and gentle in her hands, a new, caring, sensitive man. Now they should be happy together, but she is getting bored—and gradually, she is beginning to understand that what she loved was not the man himself, nor the beast, but her own near-magical power to effect the transformation from the one to the other. She does not tell me that, not in these exact words, but over a glass of sherry, she whispers that she has undercooked his steak on purpose once or twice, has forgotten to sew on an occasional button, has met him, with some regularity, with curlers in her hair—and even though he has appeared patient and understanding so far, she thinks she might have detected a growl in his voice now and then, and it has made a small flame of excitement flare up in her heart grown lardy on tedium. Who knows what he might turn into next, if only she keeps at it, she says, smiling dreamily into her second sherry of the afternoon. After her third glass, she grows giggly and brings over an instructional book she was given by her mother as a wedding present, Married Life and Happiness, penned by a New York physician some three decades ago, and, slurring slightly, recites a paragraph: “Remember that the old idea that a wife is the husband’s chattel to do with as he pleases is going out of fashion. The idea that woman has no soul and should be treated on a par with imbeciles and idiots is also becoming antiquated. Women are really beginning to find out that they are human beings, almost as good as we are”—upon which she dissolves into peals of inebriated laughter, and I hasten to excuse myself under a pretext of another cleaning engagement.

I recount these women’s stories to Dr. Wand at our next session.

“And how do they make you feel?”

“I would have felt hopeless a year ago. Now I just feel impatient. Because they are all more or less the same story, and they all end quite badly. Are there no happy endings for anyone anymore?”

She muses for a moment.

“In Shakespeare’s times, did you know,” she says at last, “any story that ended with marriage was considered a comedy. Doesn’t that strike our modern sensibilities as ironic? I’d say the ending would depend largely on the beginning, and none of these beginnings seems particularly promising to me. You can’t have the right answer to a wrong question, you know. And expectations play a vital part, as well. Are you ready to talk about what happened at the end of your own marriage?”

This question is our weekly rite of passage. I shake my head, so we discuss the approaching meeting with my children instead—now that my court date has been set for the summer, my tough no-nonsense lawyer has arranged for me to see Angie and Ro for an hour every Sunday, under the supervision of Dr. Wand, who, it turns out, is a trusted old friend of my husband’s family and, too, specializes in treating childhood traumas. She cautions me not to be clingy, not to reveal my anxieties, not to badmouth their father, and, however I feel, not to cry. When I see them at last—we meet for a walk in Central Park on a beautiful March evening, mere blocks from their home (I can no longer think of it as mine, if ever I did)—I am overjoyed by the sight, by the smell, by the feel of them, the sheer physicality of their presence, and stricken by how tall they have grown in the months we have spent apart from each other, and devastated by the slight formality with which they greet me, the detached stiffness of their first embrace, the awkwardness with which we struggle to find initial topics of conversation—but only for a few minutes, because Ro is already telling me about a puppy his daddy bought him (But I can’t compete with a puppy, I scream inside, then try to put the smile back on my face and listen to the sounds of my son’s cruel joy), and Angie reveals the gap in her gums where her last baby tooth has fallen out.

“But the tooth fairy forgot to come,” she says sadly, and even though she is plainly too old to believe in fairies, I clench my fists behind my back, stabbed by hatred for that self-engrossed, oblivious man.

They show me photos of their Christmas tree.

“But it wasn’t the same this year,” Ro says.

“Because I wasn’t there?” I ask, hopeful.

Dr. Wand shoots me a quick warning look, just as Ro replies, “No, because we had stupid white lights instead of the pretty rainbow ones, like we did before, and it was boring,” and then Angie kicks him in the shin and says, “But also because you weren’t there.” And they talk, and I talk, and we laugh, and we lick and rank one another’s ice creams, comparing flavors (Angie wins, as she always does), and somehow, for five full minutes, I truly manage to forget what things are, to stop stewing over their father, and I feel happy, and I feel whole—and then the hour is over, and suddenly I cannot breathe and am horrified to feel tears swelling into my eyes, but Dr. Wand puts a gentle hand on my shoulder, and I remember that in another week there will be another hour—and then a life, an entire life of puppies and ice creams and tooth fairies—and I can breathe again, at least a little.

In the City

This spring, the city is starting to change around me. Everything seems both familiar and endlessly new, as though my way of seeing has altered, my angle of vision has shifted. I look at the same throngs of people I have been passing on the sidewalks of Manhattan for most of my life, and I see stories, countless stories, behind the facades of their faces, just as I see interiors behind the facades of the buildings where I work—and sometimes the stories and the interiors are precisely what one would expect, sad clichés, trite romances with stale endings, princes and princesses leading dreary parallel existences past their happily ever after, vacuous rooms full of imposing furniture arranged in symmetrical flocks for the centerfold pages of design magazines, all in need of perennial dusting; but other times, more and more often as this strange spring draws closer to summer, the places surprise me, the stories unfold and intertwine in patterns that are delightfully startling, until I begin to believe, to hope, that there can be other plots, other joys, other ways of living—because life is changing, and so am I.

By April, the suburban Connecticut wives with their tight smiles, bouffant hairstyles, and handspan waists have faded into their well-mannered, color-coordinated misery, giving way to new city clients I have found, mostly through interventions of my older sister, Gloria, who travels the country as an art consultant to wealthy collectors and knows scores of musicians, sculptors, models, all those “on the fringes of genius,” as she likes to call them, half dismissively, half fondly. I clean airy lofts with virtually no possessions other than gleaming African masks or gigantic photographs of flat-chested nudes with sullen eyes. I clean houses with black-and-white zigzag floors and walls that slide open, letting in fresh, heady smells of balmy evenings, of city streets, of freedom. I sweep plastic wine cups and used condoms out of the darker corners of Soho galleries on mornings after openings. I meet people who love well, fully, with passion, but who do not live for love, or not for love alone—they live to create art, to quest after knowledge, to make friends, to walk the world. Not all of these people are happy, but there is an intensity, a vibrancy, an exuberance about them that seems to me better than happiness, or else an altogether different kind of happiness, that reminds me of some long-ago stories I used to hear, or perhaps fantasies I used to have. And though these people’s lives are not my life and I stand on the outside, peering in through the veil of my sadness, my worry, my exhaustion, now and then I feel that I, too, can break through, I, too, can will my life into some semblance of theirs, given time, given imagination, given desire, given work.

I meet a gorgeous fortysomething jewelry artist with a penchant for wearing loose, richly embroidered caftans, who, some years ago, was abandoned by her prominent politician husband for a sweet-faced girl with skin white as snow, lips red as blood, hair black as ebony, and the soul of a snake, young enough to be his daughter. Now the older woman lives in a loft with a terrace open to all the winds and seven muscular men for lovers, and they listen to dreamy music and paint flowers all over the walls and throw parties to which the entire city block comes to recite poetry and dance in the moonlight; and when her former husband, having tired of his new wife (who seemed to spend her days gorging herself on sugared fruit and sleeping), begged her to return to him, she smiled with pity and offered him a drag on her joint before her seven lovers escorted him out. I meet a prince whose father kept sending him portraits of suitable princesses and whose mother kept putting peas under the mattresses of overnight female guests, until the heir, fed up, escaped to remote lands (some said, by climbing a beanstalk), and there met a giant who refused to devour the passersby and, as a result, was ostracized by his traditional giant family; the two now share a penthouse apartment with a glass roof and work on making a mosaic map of the sky out of pebbles and crystals. I meet young, lovely witches. I meet old, wise imps. I meet tricky cobblers and homeless elves. I meet cooks who speak in foreign tongues and work magic in the kitchen, beautiful men who wear ball gowns better than any princesses ever could, trapeze performers who truly fly, taxi drivers who used to be kings and kings who used to be shoeshines, fatherless children who tame wild cats, dark-skinned pirates who write immortal verse, young girls who learn the secrets of the universe by peering into telescopes and kissing, then dissecting, frogs. The world is, all at once, so many worlds unfolding within worlds, and as I take Angie and Ro for our supervised weekly stroll, I start to see the three of us as three small spirits holding hands while we make our uncertain, brave, wondering way through the immense labyrinth of marvels and delights—and I want them to grow up to be a part of it, as I myself had not been.

In May, Gloria comes to New York to oversee an installation at a celebrated art gallery, and she insists on taking me out to lunch. I have not seen my older sister since the funeral. She looks much the same, though her edges are harder now, polished by her continued success in life, and most noticeably, her luxurious long hair, the pride of her adolescence, is gone, replaced by a severe rectangular cut that makes her look like a Modigliani portrait. The restaurant where we meet (she is ten minutes late, talking on her phone as she enters at a swishing, clicking stride) is much more expensive than anything I could now afford and much more fashionable than anything I ever cared to frequent; I am humbled by its black-and-white minimalism. Gloria, too, is dressed all in black and white, as though she chose the establishment solely to match her sense of style—and knowing my sister, I would guess that is just what she did. We sit at a tiny table, and shyly I pick at my three or four sprigs of some exotic herb crowned by flowers and arranged with flawless precision in the center of an enormous, barren plate, while Gloria talks of the early days of the feminist avant-garde movement, of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper reimagined with women as the apostles, of modern technology influencing art… And as I watch her red lips move, watch her black-and-white gestures multiplied by the mirrors, I catch myself puzzling over something. We have never been particularly close—even as a child, I found her formidable ways intimidating—but the lasting chill in our adult relationship, I realize now, has been mainly of my own making, caused by the offense I took at her behavior during my long-ago wedding. She wore a sour look throughout the ceremony, and later, when her turn came in the receiving line, she spoke to me out of the corner of her mouth and spoke to my groom not at all; she never even said “Congratulations.” For years, I believed her to have been envious of me, of my brilliant match.

Now, I am not so sure.

“Gloria, what did you have against my marriage?” I blurt out when she pauses to take a sip of her martini.

She raises one elegant eyebrow. There is something of a bird of prey in the spare grace of her movements.

“Let’s just say, I did not think you two were a suitable match.” She waves her hand, and I follow the bright red trajectory of her glittering nails. A baby-faced waitress materializes by our table. “Another martini, my dear,” Gloria says, lightly touching her finger to the waitress’s bare arm, then shifts her gaze back to me. “You were too young. Too young to know yourself properly. Too young to know your fiancé properly. When I was that age, I didn’t even know what I liked.”

“What you liked?”

The waitress sails back across the black-and-white room with the new martini, swinging her hips, and a dozen more waitresses float through the mirrors on all sides of us, their eyes obliquely meeting the eyes of Gloria’s manifold reflections.

“Shortly after your wedding,” Gloria says, raising her fresh drink to her lips, “I met someone. A prince much like yours. Handsome, rich, all the right parts in all the right places. He wanted to marry me. But something felt wrong, so I just kept saying, ‘Perhaps,’ and ‘Let’s talk about it next month,’ and ‘Maybe after I’m done with my studies next year,’ and ‘Let me just settle into my job first.’ Eventually he got angry, tricked me into a tower, and, once I was inside, walled the door shut. For weeks, I sat by the only window, high off the ground, and his servants used pulleys to deliver my food so I wouldn’t starve, but I was allowed to talk to no one, to see no one—and every Sunday, right as clockwork, he would come to my window and shout: ‘Will you marry me now?’ And then I was angry, too, so there were no more ‘Maybe’ and ‘Later.’ I would just scream ‘No!’ down at him, and he would stride away in a huff.”

She pats her dramatic red mouth with a napkin, and immediately the waitress appears by her elbow. “I’ll bring you a fresh one,” a dozen waitresses promise breathlessly in a dozen mirrors. We wait for her to deposit another white paper square on the table, wait for her to walk away.

“Gloria, I had no idea… But you didn’t marry him, did you?”

“Of course not. The very thought!”

“How, then, did you get out?”

“Well. Since you ask. One of the prince’s servants and I fell in love. We figured out a way to see each other. Remember when my hair was really long? If I let it down from the tower window, it would touch the ground, and she could climb up to me. In time, she managed to smuggle in a rope ladder, and I escaped. We escaped together.”

“Sorry.” It has taken a few moments to filter through. “She?”

Gloria smiles at me, indulgently.

“All part of growing up, baby girl,” she says, enunciating as though speaking to a child. “Figuring out what you like. What you are. Which—in spite of being almost forty years old, you know—is something you still need to do, in my opinion.”

“Oh.” I feel as though I have accidentally walked in on my sister naked, so I hasten to skip over her comment. “And then… then you lived happily ever after?”

She drinks the last of the martini, calls out, “Check, please!” and turns her level gaze back upon me. “Sometimes, I just don’t know about you. This isn’t some fucking fairy tale. Oh, I suppose we had a few good years. Eventually she left me for another woman. An artist I myself had discovered, as it happened, which wasn’t pretty. That’s when I cut off my hair. In the end, though, I like it better this way.”

I do not know whether she means her hairstyle or her life, and I am feeling too embarrassed to ask, so, to say something, anything, I tell her: “I guess all this happened after your mother’s funeral? Your hair was still long then.”

And now she is looking at me funny, and all at once uncomfortable, I lower my eyes, which is when I see the napkin the waitress brought her still lying on the table, and it is not a fresh napkin at all: the paper square is visibly smudged with the red imprint of Gloria’s kiss.

“Hey, she gave you back your own used napkin,” I mumble.

“Indeed?” Gloria turns it over. A telephone number is scrawled in one corner. “Yes, I rather thought so.” A look of mild yet unmistakable interest flickers through her eyes. “Listen, it was good seeing you. I’ll go settle the bill now.”

She stands up, tall, elegant, collected, and looks down at me.

“Everything will be all right, little sister. Or maybe it won’t be, in which case it will be something else, something new, which may turn out even better once the dust settles. Mel and I are here for you.” She touches my cheek, briefly. “But you really need to stop with those Freudian slips. She was your mother, too.”

I watch her moving away, as though in slow motion, into the black-and-white geometry of the room, the assured clicking of her heels slicing cleanly through the clanking of silverware, through the muttering of other diners’ conversations. There is a sound, a nagging, repetitive sound, like the buzzing of a very loud, angry bee. People at the neighboring tables turn their heads to glare at me, and snapping out of my reverie, I reach for my purse and fish out my cell phone.

It is my lawyer.

“Are you anywhere near my office?” she says. “We need to talk.”

What Happened at the End

And so, half an hour later, still reeling, I sit in a glass-walled office high above Manhattan, across the desk from my lawyer, who is telling me that her private investigator has turned up nothing, nothing at all, for my husband is clever and careful, if not actually clean, whereas the evidence against me is solid. There is the family doctor’s testimony on the subjects of my depression and my propensity for self-medication and self-harm, there is the recent photograph of me inebriated in the park, there are maids willing to confirm the abundance of mouse droppings and ill-smelling weeds all over my former quarters, and to corroborate my erratic habits and odd behavior, such as my staring into a handheld mirror for hours on end or not speaking for months at a time—and, given the facts, the custody hearing is not likely to go my way. Financially, too, everything my husband owns is either part of his inheritance, to which I have no right, or else squirreled away in offshore accounts and shell companies, equally out of reach, and I have next to no claim on absolutely anything, which she has been trying to get through to me for days, for weeks, but do I listen?

And at last, I am beginning to listen.

“There is the Fifth Avenue apartment, though,” I say. “Half of it should be mine. I don’t want to live there, but we can sell it and split the proceeds. It would be more than enough to buy a modest place for me and the kids.”

She snaps my file closed and sits back, exasperated.

“I’ve explained. Over and over again. It belonged to your father-in-law. Roland got it through his inheritance. It’s nonmarital property.”

On the streets below, cars honk, people walk, vendors hawk pretzels and newspapers—life as usual, life as I have always known it.

As Gwen’s words sink in, I force myself to breathe.

“But the house on Martha’s Vineyard?”

“The same.”

“And the furnishings? The artwork? The royal treasury?”

A lonely siren cries somewhere far away. I am starting to panic.

“The same.”

“But surely, half of my husband’s income—”

“Half of it would be yours, yes. If your husband had any income. As it happens, though, he draws no actual salary, he just runs his late father’s company.” I open my mouth. “Which is his inheritance, and thus nonmarital property.” I close my mouth. “On the other hand, Roland’s lawyers have just informed me that your own income since your separation—all the money you’ve earned from your cleaning business, which appears to be doing quite well—is subject to the marital division, so they are now demanding half of everything you’ve made in the past six months.”

“But… but it’s all gone!” My heart is pounding now. “I gave some to Melissa, and I’ve been paying rent, and there are Jasmine and Alice—I hired them to help out last month, I told you—and then I bought some presents for the kids, and… and it was so little, anyway, nothing compared to his millions upon millions… They can’t do that!” I cry, and in a smaller voice: “Can they?”

“Oh, they can,” she says. “In fact, they have.”

A second siren has joined the first, and another, and yet another, until half the city seems to be screaming with doom and disaster.

“But what do they want? What does he want?”

“He wants full custody of the kids. And to keep all his money. And come trial next month, he may well get both. Of course, I will do my best. But.”

“But he can’t do this to me! I’m better at taking care of Ro and Angie than he’ll ever be. He won’t even bother himself, they’ll just have a staff of nannies round the clock… Wait—what about Nanny Nanny? She’ll tell the court I’m a good mother, she knows, she was there, all the nights I spent by their beds, all the stories I told them—”

“Sadly, Nanny Nanny no longer works for your husband. She hasn’t been seen since before Christmas. And I’ve heard rumors…” Gwen lowers her voice. “The family cook served roast leg of lamb at the holiday feast, and—”

“And what? Please tell me.”

“And my sources inform me, it tasted more like goat. Like tough, old goat.”

For a minute we are silent.

“So, then, what can we do?” I ask, defeated.

She faces me squarely.

“Nothing. There is nothing to do. Unless you are finally willing to tell me what happened between you and your husband at the end.”

I look through the window at the city of glass and steel before me, and I think of the last months of my marriage, not so remote in time, and yet belonging to the fabric of some entirely different life, ruled by other laws, held together by other truths, an out-of-time fairy tale with a rosy beginning that promised happiness never-ending, stretching all the way from that snapshot of the blue spring skies protectively enclosing a white-veiled bride as she ran down the grand staircase hand in hand with her beloved, both smiling radiant smiles, to the two of them, thirteen years hence, standing side by side in the dimmed ballroom of their silenced home, clothed in the somber black of grief, jointly experienced and yet unshared, their faces blank, their stiff hands not touching.

After the last courtiers had departed muttering condolences, the fairy-tale princess, about to become the fairy-tale queen, slunk away to her own bedchamber without another look at the man who was not her true husband, who was left all alone, hunched over, in the dark. She was feeling faint and not sure of anything, her reality a mere step away from a dream. Her head ached as though she had not slept the night before, and perhaps she had not. Her feet were sore as though she had recently walked a long distance, and perhaps she had. Her lips bore a faintly tingling impression of other lips pressing against them, and this she could not bear to think about at all, for the kiss, whether real or imagined, had been warm, exhilarating, overwhelming, alive, nothing like any of the stilted, close-mouthed, obligatory kisses dimly remembered from the first year of her marriage (there were no later kisses to remember), and the lingering thrill of it, while making her heart beat faster, only served to add to her confusion and misery.

In her room, she sank onto her bed, raised her eyes—and saw two mice, one fat, the other skinny, with whiskers wrapped in golden foil, sitting side by side on her mantelpiece, bracketed by the dusty porcelain poodles.

She gasped.

“Nibbles? Brie? Are you really back? Is that really you?”

The mice nodded, their beady eyes brimming with sympathy.

“We know you are sad,” they offered in unison, “and we are here to help you.”

(This time, astonishingly, unnaturally, the mice were telling the truth: they were indeed the original Brie and Nibbles of her youth. Their long-dead spirits, snatched from a tranquil afterlife by their dear princess’s acute distress, had taken to haunting the dwellings of mice, squealing and moaning, spooking the old out of their slumbers, making the young choke on their cheese, until the venerable Sister Charity, currently known as She with the Immortal Fairy Blood Flowing Through Her Veins, grew annoyed at the hubbub of constant complaints and appeals, and consented to grant the two temporary visibility on the plane of physical manifestations, to “sort out the princess mess,” as she told them sternly, turning her piercing blind eyes in the direction of their flickering shapes, “so you can at last rest in eternal peace and I can be left in peace for at least two minutes to complete my important work. Go now.”

As it happened, the fairy mouse had recently discovered that there was another world only a breath away from theirs—a much richer, thrilling world full of glorious sewer systems to populate, millions of mice and rats to rule over, and whole alleyways of trash cans positively overflowing with magnificent food—and was currently devising some way to merge the two worlds once and for all. For reasons not altogether clear even to herself, she felt the unhappy woman to be a loose end that needed to be tied up in order for her plan to succeed, but she did not explain her secret purpose to the spirits of Brie and Nibbles, and even if she had done so, her grand future vision would have gone right over their furry little heads.

Dismissed, they found themselves materializing on the familiar mantelpiece and there awaited their friend. They felt rather anxious about their status as ghosts—it seemed best not to disclose the fact of their long-ago demise to the princess for fear of upsetting her, yet wouldn’t she be bound to notice that they were ever so slightly transparent? But when she saw them, she did not look beyond what she expected to find, for she was still only a human princess of limited understanding, and grateful as she was for their return, kindhearted and mindful of others as she strove to be in general, she naturally attributed much more significance to her own life than to the lives of simple mice, and would have been genuinely astonished had anyone told her that her one-note, romance-obsessed, cliché-ridden story might not be immensely more important or endlessly more fascinating than the multigenerational, multidimensional, magical, militant, philosophical, and culturally diverse saga of the dynasty of Nibbles and Brie.)

And so, overcome by relief at having someone to talk to at last, the princess broke down and told her friends everything—told them about the cruel curse imprisoning the prince since the early years of their marriage, and how she had been trying and trying to get her true beloved back, and how the world had conspired against her, and how… how… And just as she choked on her sobs, Brie and Nibbles exchanged a dark look, and Brie cleared her throat.

“Pardon us,” she said in a tiny voice. “We are terribly sorry to tell you, dear princess, but you are mistaken. There isn’t any curse. There never was. We’ve been watching your prince from the very beginning, and sadly, he is the same prince. The very same prince you married.”

She shook her head with such vigor that a headache drummed at her temples.

“No, no, that’s not true!” she cried. “It can’t be true. Because you don’t know. You don’t know what terrible things he’s done since the curse—”

She blushed, fell silent.

“Believe us, we know.” Brie spoke with care. “We mice are small, we can go wherever we please and no one pays heed to us. We’ve seen… things. Many things. Many… eek… different things. Starting just days after your wedding. A young kitchen maid got lost in the hallways delivering breakfast to the Marquise de Fatouffle’s bed, and, well… Then, the following week, the marquise herself… And others after that… Oh, we grew so concerned about you—”

“We argued all the time,” Nibbles interrupted. “I thought we should tell you, that you needed to know. Give the rogue the old heave-ho and good riddance, I said.”

“I disagreed.” Brie’s golden whiskers drooped. “Because who were we to destroy your happily ever after? You didn’t notice anything amiss, and you did seem happy. At first, anyway. Was I wrong? Please, dear princess, was I?”

Her chest filled with a fluttering, as of many birds she could not bear to release, not yet, not yet. She looked at the mice with unseeing eyes, and rose, and walked out of the room. As she slowly went through the palace, she had few coherent thoughts, concentrating merely on putting one foot in front of the other; but she knew, without thinking, that if she happened to interrupt her husband in the midst of yet another copulation, she would not be responsible for what occurred next. But when she threw open the door to the prince’s—now the king’s—study, she found him alone, sitting at his desk, his head buried in his hands, the painted prince, as before, gracing her with his radiant smile from the portrait above.

The prince—now the king—lifted his head at her entrance, and his eyes were lost, swimming. Then a look dawned on his face, a look she could not place, a look she did not want to decipher. She stood before his desk, straight-backed, still, in her regal ermine-trimmed robe the color of sorrow, her hands folded protectively across her chest as though shielding her heart from any further harm he might try to inflict upon it.

“Roland.” Her tone was flat. “Did you ever love me?”

And just like that, the odd look was gone from his face, and in the moment before it vanished, she knew it for a look of hope.

“Now? You want to talk about this now? My father has just died. Or have you been too preoccupied with your own precious little emotions to notice?”

She chose to disregard the ominous rising of his voice.

“I’ll take it as a no. You never loved me. And this portrait. Who painted it?”

“You’re unbelievable, you know that?”

He glared at her, and in his glare, she read a threat of looming violence.

She wrapped her arms tighter over her heart.

“Answer me. Who painted it?”

“Who painted it? I did!” he shouted. She forced herself not to shrink back. “I painted it! Imagine that, a prince of royal blood, able to do anything other than sign orders and chop off heads! Imagine me having ideas, having interests, having a life other than the life in which you have me pegged in your own pathetic little world of poodles and teatimes! But did you ever, even for just a second—” He made a visible effort, and his face, his voice, turned cold, turned dead; but his hands were clenched, his knuckles white, as if he was exerting an immense effort to contain something enormous, something monstrous, to prevent it from erupting and subsuming them both. “Did you know that I loved drawing as a child, that I wanted to be an artist, but they told me, when I was only six or seven years old, that I had to follow in my father’s footsteps, had to shoulder the burden of responsibility? No, you didn’t know, and why? Because you never asked. Never asked anything about me. So, let me tell you. I cried for a full week, longer than when my mother had left us, a small, lonely child with no one to talk to. And then I dried my tears and I grew up. I learned to do what was asked of me. Learned to rule my kingdom. Learned when harshness was needed and when to be lenient. Kept my hobbies in check. Married when it was required of me. Produced heirs when it was required of me. You’re right, I never loved you—and why would I? I thought, in the beginning, that you had spirit, that you had understanding, that you could be a worthy partner to me, and that, with time, something real might grow between us. Then I saw what you were really like, what you were really after. All you wanted were balls and roses. Being a sweet little princess. You knew nothing about hard work. You knew nothing about companionship. I should have never chosen you. I should have chosen someone with substance, not someone as vain, empty-headed, and unforgiving as you.”

Every word was a slap.

She felt the blood mounting higher and higher in her cheeks.

“But none of this is true!” she cried at last, hardly knowing what she was doing as she took a step, leaned on his desk, thrust her flaming face forward. “I wasn’t like that at all! I was young, and I was in love, and I tried to make you happy, I tried so hard, I did my best, I wanted to be a good wife to you, it was you—you—you who…”

“Who what?”

“Who fucked anything that moved, that’s what, from the day we got married!”

He appeared momentarily stunned, his mouth flapping loose. Then he was shouting again, their faces so close now she could feel his spittle on her skin.

“Oh yeah? And what would you have me do? And why would you even care? From the day we got married, you made it painfully clear that you wanted nothing to do with me, that I repulsed you! You felt no passion for me, it was like I married a paper doll. Have you ever, ever in your life, enjoyed a single kiss? I was twenty-four—and my beautiful young wife was so frigid she couldn’t even be bothered to part her lips for me, much less her thighs!”

She recoiled, pressed her hand to her mouth, her lips suddenly, treacherously, burning with an unbidden memory of another man’s fiery kiss. A shocked silence rolled over the room, tolling with vast, terrible things that could not be unsaid. Across the ringing stillness, they measured each other, two people wearing the black of mourning, two people who had just lost someone they loved. She knew that, in that moment, he hated her every bit as much as she hated him.

He pushed his chair back, away from her, spoke through his teeth, in control once again. “But here we are, and this is how it is, how it will be, from now till the end, and I will have my little diversions to which you will kindly close your eyes, and you will have your porcelain knickknacks, or whatever else catches your feebleminded fancy, and I will pay for it. I will tolerate this intolerable situation because I need to protect the public face of my company and because you happen to be the mother of my children. I just hope to God they will grow up to be like me, not like you. Now get out. I am mourning my father.”

The last thing she saw, before turning and leaving the study, was the brilliantly painted man smiling his beautiful, loving, mocking smile into her eyes.

That night, she did not sleep. Transparent Brie and Nibbles hovered above the mantelpiece, trading anxious whispers, but she ignored them. After torching the nettle shirt in the fireplace and stomping the two pearl buttons into dust with her heel, she lay in her starched white bed, staring at the cupid-infested ceiling, her thoughts a feverish jumble of disjointed, whirling images, fears, losses all running together—her children growing up with that man for a father, the beekeeper’s kiss, the kind old king’s death, the deceitful portrait, the magic mirror, the green-eyed duchess, the duchess’s hapless cuckold of a husband and his sorry end… It would have been better had you, too, fallen off your horse long ago, it flashed into her mind out of nowhere—but immediately, horrified by her own savagery, she disowned the unworthy thought. Yet once unleashed, it would creep back again and again, as she lay tormented, night after night after night, for weeks on end. For time passed, of course, as was its wont. Her husband was crowned king, and she became queen; they saw each other at official functions, but avoided each other’s eyes and exchanged not a word. Her heart broke every time she looked at her son, at her daughter. At night, she would go back to her room, to her bed, and lie there, not heeding the timid consolations of the mice, glaring at the cupids on the ceiling, the same thoughts churning round and round in her head: Oh, if only he had fallen off his horse early on in their marriage—after she’d become heavy with Ro, but before she had time to look into that poisonous mirror and learn the truth about the conception. She was still blind to the man’s true nature then, small lapses in their life had not yet joined together into one impassable gulf, and she would have been able to smooth over the more inconvenient incidents in her mind, would have been able to cherish the memory of their love for each other. And instead of wanting to scream “Your father is a monster, a monster!” into her children’s sweet, innocent faces, she would be telling her daughter how proud he’d been of her and asking her son to find the bright star that his father had become in the skies, then crying herself to sleep every night with soft, affectionate tears. Her life would be sad yet full of warmth, solid at its heart, good. Now it felt hot, not warm, but the heat was hollow, hollow and angry, and she was forever seized with fear for Angie and Ro.

For how, how would they grow up, with that man in their lives?

Spring turned into summer. One especially stifling morning, worn-out by the constant weight of her unhappiness, she gathered her courage and sent a servant over to the beekeeper’s cottage with a carefully worded note requesting a jar of honey for her breakfast table (to be delivered by the beekeeper in person). The servant returned alone, to inform her that the beekeeper’s place had been abandoned for weeks, his bees dispersed, and he himself gone, no one knew when or where. She tried to hide her disappointment, her apprehension, from herself, tried to forget the taste of cider on the man’s warm lips, tried not to worry about her husband’s ubiquitous spies, or think about exiles and executions that he meted out with such ready ruthlessness—but all through that day, she felt increasingly aggrieved by what she had come to regard as her one chance at her own small, private joy being wrenched away from her, so unjustly, so cruelly; and that night, all her suppressed emotions bubbled over in one great explosion of scalding fury, and she screamed a silent scream.

I wish he would fall off his horse!

Or get eaten by a dragon. An occupational hazard of being a ruler; though not his kind of ruler—not the kind who wields a quill instead of a sword—and there are no dragons left in our land, in any case. So instead he might choke on a fish bone during one of his fancy state dinners with the servant wenches pouring wine into his glass while he pinches them under the table. He would bite into his fish, and cough, and it would be a small, delicate cough at first, but then his perfect, gorgeous face would turn red, first red and then purple, and suddenly there he would be, those cornflower-blue eyes bugging out, not so pretty now, is he, mouth gaping, gasping for air, and before anyone even knows what is happening—dead, dead, dead!

Or maybe a heart attack. Of course, he is but thirty-eight, but they happen at any age, do they not, and more so if one’s lifestyle is so vice-ridden. Or a freak accident, there are always those—a lightning strike, a flash flood, a chance tile falling off a roof just when my husband is passing below, his expensive suede shoes stepping ever so confidently along the sidewalk… But no, I do not wish him ill, I’m not a vindictive person, I’m kind and good, all I want is justice, only justice, I want him to pay for depriving me of any chance at my own happiness, for marrying me when he knew he didn’t love me, for cheating on me with impunity from the very beginning, as if there were nothing at all wrong with it, as if I—I!—forced him into it myself, but of course I did not, I was so very young and I loved him, I loved that man, once upon a time I loved him, I did my best to love him—but not dead, of course I do not wish him dead.

Although—if he were dead—all the memories of my miserable years as his wife, all my humiliations and mistakes, all my poor choices, would die with him, and that would be just, that would be well deserved, being granted a clean slate like that, having a future again, unburdened, unmarred, haven’t I earned it after everything he’s put me through? Because I hate what our marriage has made me, a small, mute, unloved thing. If he were dead, she, too, would die with him. So, perhaps, I do want him dead.

I want him dead because I hate the woman I am when I am with him.

Oh, and my children, my children would be so much better off without him. Because, of course, I would be doing it for my children, not for myself. Not that—not that I would actually do anything, ever! Although hasn’t the magic mirror mentioned a witch who helps unhappy wives with their marital problems? There would be no harm, perhaps, in going to see her. Just to talk, nothing more—I wouldn’t have to follow through with anything. In truth, I couldn’t, for isn’t a lock of hair always required for such spells to work, and how would I get a lock of his hair, I’m never close enough to him, I would have to pretend to a reconciliation, force myself to sit down to a private dinner with him, distract him enough to slip a sleeping draught into his wine, then, worse, feign passion, trick him into my bed… But I would never do any of that, would never go that far, that would be so base, so treacherous, so shameful, I would never, and even if I would, he wouldn’t go along with it in any case, he wouldn’t be interested, would he, not after all those hateful things he said to me, none of them true, because I loved him once upon a time, I did love him, of course I did, so I couldn’t, I would never.

So, then, just a consultation. One brief little consultation with the woman. Just to hear what she has to say, just to explore my options, just—

My lawyer’s voice, kinder than usual, reaches me as if from another place.

“Tell me what happened at the end,” she says.

And I meet her eyes and, at last, tell her the truth.

“Nothing. Nothing happened. I understood some things, that’s all. Hard things. Ugly things. Things I haven’t felt ready to admit to anyone.”

“Such as?” She is gently insistent.

“My marriage was not as I thought. And Roland may not have been the only one to blame for things ending. And also…”

“Yes?”

“Nothing,” I say, firmly. “Can we talk about the trial now, please?”

And also, I was far from the innocent fairy-tale princess I had believed myself once.

The Fairy-Tale Ending

“Divorce is not unlike temporary insanity,” my therapist observes. “You can’t judge yourself too harshly. You can’t judge him too harshly, either. Believe me, life will go back to normal by and by.”

This is our last session before the trial, which is set to start on Friday.

“But he is doing all these awful things!” I cry. “He wants to take the children away from me, he wants to give me nothing and rob me of what little I have… And I—I did nothing wrong, you know. I tried to be a good wife. Never lied to him. Always did my best to help him. Put my marriage first.”

Dr. Wand jots something down in her notebook, ponders briefly, and crosses it out. “You feel betrayed, and that’s understandable. Consider his point of view, though. He gave you everything he thought you wanted, he took care of you and the kids, surrounded you with luxury—and you ran away from it all and would now rather be cleaning other people’s toilets than go back to him. And to be frank, you never seemed that involved in his life while you were together, either. Do you even know what precisely he does for a living?”

“Whose side is she on, anyway?” Melissa says loyally when I repeat the conversation to my sisters the following night, as we sit in Melissa’s living room drinking Gloria’s expensive Bordeaux.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Gloria muses. “Everyone has his truth. Roland may see things differently.”

Melissa turns on her.

“Whose side are you on, then?” she says fiercely.

“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like the asshole, never did.” Gloria shrugs. “All I’m saying is, I bet he’s not the villain in his mind. Everyone is a hero of his own story.”

Everything seems so ordinary, so peaceful—Melissa’s cheerful living room with its striped couches, floral pillows, polka-dotted curtains, and her daughters’ framed drawings on the walls, the company of my sisters, so easy to slip into, even after all these years, like some old, stretched cardigan—and yet I know that everything is about to change. The trial is only two days away now, and my anxiety is such that I cannot sleep, I cannot eat, I can barely think straight. I notice Melissa glancing at me with concern. When she notices me noticing, she smiles, a bit too brightly, and says, in a clear ploy to distract me: “Speaking of stories, remember that book of fairy tales we used to love, the one in the red leather binding? I found it in the attic the other day, and now the girls don’t want anything else before bed.”

“I never liked it,” Gloria announces.

“You did, too!”

“No. I never did. The women in these stories are all wimps and ciphers. No feelings, no thoughts of their own. No balls. All they want is to get rescued and to get married. Artifacts of masculine oppression, the whole bunch.”

“Not true,” Melissa says. “Most fairy tales are subversive. Feminist, even. No, don’t snort, listen. These are stories women told to other women, old wives’ tales, spinners’ yarns, right? And who are their heroes? Women again. Snow White, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood. Girls who run away from home, choose husbands, escape wolves. They have names, they have characters, they have adventures. But the men? Just nameless blanks, the lot of them, and some are downright evil. Did you know, there is a version of Sleeping Beauty in which a married king comes across her, rapes her in her sleep, then goes back to his wife. She gives birth, still in her sleep, and it’s actually her baby who wakes her up trying to suckle her. And I’m sure the storytellers knew exactly what they were saying. And the Cinderella prince, what a dolt! First he takes one ugly stepsister to the palace, then the other, and he can’t tell they aren’t his true love until someone else points out their feet are bleeding? Not exactly the romance of the century! But Cinderella, she knew what she was doing marrying the guy. It never says she was in love. She just wanted to be a queen, and it sure beats washing dishes… Hold on, let me tiptoe upstairs, I’ll get the book from Myrtle’s nightstand.”

She brings it down, and the three of us sit on the couch and look through it together, Melissa in the middle, turning pages, and Gloria, unconvinced by Melissa’s rhetoric, making dismissive noises as each new wide-eyed princess floats into view. Inwardly, I find myself inclining to Gloria’s opinion. The illustrations, though, are beautiful and unexpected, with the familiar tales of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm set by the artist in Victorian manors filled with glowing gas lamps and grandfather clocks, in Jazz Age mansions full of bobbed flappers, in oppressive suburban mid-century homes, all beige-tinted bourgeois comforts. My memories of the book are vague at best—as the youngest, I did not always share in my sisters’ pastimes—and yet, as the next picture comes into view, I seem to recall seeing it before, and am studying it with mild interest when Gloria takes the book out of Melissa’s hands.

“French Baroque is appalling.” Only she is capable of infusing so few words with so much disdain. “Methinks we’ve had enough of regressing.” She shuts the book firmly. “Shall we now do something more age-appropriate and open the third bottle? By the way, remember how, when you were four or five, you went about talking with some ridiculous made-up accent, sniffing some precious bouquet you unearthed somewhere, drinking milk with your pinkie stuck out, and pretending you were an adopted child of some foreign grandee and we your evil stepsisters?”

“I did not!”

“You most certainly did.”

“You did, you know,” Melissa chimes in, smiling.

“No, did I, really?” I had honestly forgotten all about it. “I must have been a horrible sister,” I say, half laughing, half repentant. “But it was hard growing up as a follow-up act to you two.”

“Nonsense, you were always the prettiest,” Melissa says.

“Maybe so, but it didn’t count for much with our mother, did it? I mean, Gloria, you were tough, you had brains and ambitions, and you, you were so outgoing, and you had that laugh, everyone liked you. But what did I have, apart from my silly blond curls? I wasn’t good at anything, Mom said so all the time. Not good at anything other than mopping dirty bathroom floors, that’s what she told me, over and over, until I really couldn’t stand working in that hotel. You two were always her favorites. Even the name she gave me, I always hated it, the most boring name of the lot… Well, I guess I just needed to get away from home so badly, I had to marry the first suitable man who asked. And Roland was certainly suitable. Of course, we all ran as far and as fast as we could, though in very different directions, no?”

“What a load of horseshit.” Gloria pours more wine into her glass, then, after a moment’s hesitation, mine. “Mother never played favorites. Hers was tough love with all of us, you don’t know half the stuff she said to me and Mel. Every time I brought home a less-than-perfect grade, she told me I’d die drunk in a gutter. ‘Just like your father.’ That’s what she said to me. Every single time. There were days I was sure I would always hate her. Well, what did I know then, I was fifteen. So, fine, she wasn’t easy to live with, but she worked herself sick for us and she raised us the best she knew how… And there is absolutely nothing wrong with your name. It was our great-grandmother’s name. It’s beautiful. And it suits you perfectly.”

Melissa is frowning at me.

“But you loved him, right?” she asks. “When you got married? Didn’t you?”

And just like that—whether because of all the wine I have drunk, or the relief of speaking to my sisters after the decade and a half of near-estrangement, or the coziness of Melissa’s home, her girls’ happy drawings on the walls, her good, stolid husband asleep upstairs, or Gloria’s matter-of-fact, plainspoken vulgarity—something in me breaks loose, something vast and cold slides away, and from below, released, the emotions swell, and the truths, their dark, warm, salty flow much like the sea tide, much like weeping, and I see what I have been afraid to see, what I have hidden from myself for so long behind the story of an innocent lovesick wife put upon by a heartless man who tricked her into a marriage without a spark.

I did not love my husband when I married him.

I never loved him—and deep inside, I must have always known it.

Oh, of course, I was infatuated once—more, I was smitten, for he was handsome, he was brilliant, he was worldly, he was rich, he was ambitious, he was generous, he was absolutely everything a sad young girl with clouds and dreams for feelings could have wished for. And yet I did not love him, not in the deep, true sense, not in the way Melissa loves Tom, not in the way I love my children, not in the way our stern, no-nonsense, widowed mother loved the three of us. But as a child, I had often found her love heavy, demanding, disapproving, damaging even, so I had come to long for a different kind of love to find refuge in, to escape to—an easy love, a pretty love, a fairy-tale love. There is no easy love, of course, but at twenty-one, at twenty-two, I could not have possibly known it, and when something much like it came dazzling into my life, all my future selves, all my unrealized chances, all my untold stories seemed but a paltry price to pay for it—and a price I paid gladly. No one had robbed me of anything—I myself made the choice to give away my freedom, to give away my fire. And it never even occurred to me that I could say no, because how can you say no when fate singles you out, raises you out of the common muck as someone special, someone deserving of an ideal life, a life in which everything is easy, everything soft, everything gentle, and no one ever barks a harsh word, and no one ever slaps you, and no hard-drinking fathers die of heart attacks at the age of thirty-eight, and no hardworking mothers, old and gray before their time, cry nightly at the kitchen table before growing grim and estranged. But in this ideal life, everyone glides with the oily predictability of porcelain figurines in a decorative music box, one-two-three, one-two-three, and your days are like a never-ending teatime, everything polite and elegant and gilded just like some picture of a smiling princess in a powdered cake of a palace in a fairy-tale book. And maybe this life has no depth, and maybe it has no spark, that may be true, everything may well be somewhat flat, everything slightly dulled, even kisses may well taste of dust and ice, because proper fairy tales do not need any depth and you yourself tossed passion away when you married a seemingly flawless man whom you never loved, whom you were not in love with, whom, in truth, you never even wanted to take to your bed, for there had always been something in him, something too slick, too cold, too perfect, something that you disliked, something that held you off. And yet, at the time, it all made such sense, and you were like a young hopeful fly carried away by a luminous drop of sweet nectar, intoxicated, blinded by the luster, not knowing that the fresh-smelling sap would soon calcify into hard amber and you would be trapped in all that suffocating golden light, you would be trapped, trapped, trapped—

“It will be all right, everything will be all right,” Melissa is repeating, holding my shoulders as I weep, speaking to me in that soothing tone I have heard her use with her daughters.

Gloria sets down her glass, abruptly.

“I wasn’t going to tell you,” she announces, “but I’m a tad inebriated now, and you’re bawling anyway, so what the hell. The cad hit on me when I met him. Put his hand under my skirt. The last time I ever wore a skirt, I believe. Remember that gallery opening I invited you to? You’d only just gotten engaged. I didn’t tell anyone because I thought you loved him. I should have, maybe. Probably. But I was young. We were all so fucking young. Look, I’m sorry, all right?”

“Oh my God. He hit on me, too. At the rehearsal party, the night before you got married.” Melissa releases my shoulders. “He followed me into the ladies’ room and tried to kiss me. I was mortified. That’s why I acted a bit funny at the wedding. And why I never liked visiting you in later years. I felt horrible. Just horrible.”

“Oh, me too,” Gloria says. “Me too.”

The three of us look at one another across the widening hush.

“Would it help in any way,” Melissa begins, tentatively, “if Gloria and I testify at your trial? I mean, it may not be much, but all the same…”

And then everything speeds up again, the way things tend to in my life when something momentous is happening, and I am too overwhelmed to focus on any one instant for long, so everything runs together, in a stream of blurring snapshots, from the late-night, somewhat slurred, telephone call to my lawyer, to her conversations with my sisters, to the rushed meeting arranged for the very next morning, only one day before the trial is scheduled to start, where I find myself, bleary-eyed, with an incipient headache and my heart in my throat, sitting at a blond-wood conference table across from a sleek-suited man representing my husband, his cuffs crisp like abstract sculptures, his golden cuff links blinding, and my own lawyer, dumpy in comparison yet formidable and calm, is issuing demands, and the man is fuming and bustling and whispering into his phone and then subsiding, retreating, until, hours later, yet somehow all at once, numbers are thrown about, and days of the week are bandied back and forth, the talk of summer vacations, college payments, and suddenly there it is, a stack of papers crisp before me, still warm from the printer, the divorce agreement. I sign, here, and here, and here, and the sleek man disappears with the stack as I sit at the table, gasping a little, stunned by the magical speed of the events unfolding—and when the man returns, his cuffs seem less crisp, dampened with sweat, and my husband’s many-angled, spiky signatures darken all the pages underneath my own tremulous scrawls.

And just like that, we are done.

And oh, of course, there are details and clauses to pore over, weekends when the kids will stay with him, modest financial concessions granted to me—all of which I will process later, later. This is the bare substance, this is what I know right now: There will be no trial. He will keep all his money. I will have Angie and Ro.

I walk through the evening city happier than I have been in my entire life. I feel light as a feather. I feel like singing. I feel as though my feet are not touching the ground. All clichés, and all perfectly true. I am going home, to prepare for the children, who will be returned to me tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow… And so what if my neighborhood is far removed from the cool, rarefied heights of Fifth Avenue, so what if my apartment is small, my building shabby, my furniture secondhand—none of this is important, and all the important things I have in abundance. I fly home through the darkening streets, and am already fumbling with the keys at the front door, so happy, so happy, when a voice hits me in the back.

“Jane.”

I freeze, the keys clutched in my hand.

“Jane.”

I inhale, turn slowly.

Roland.

My former prince.

He stands on the sidewalk, hands shoved into his pockets, slightly out of breath, as though he has been running after me for some blocks. His haircut is expensive, his suit immaculate, his shoes shine like mirrors, and yet he seems disarrayed, he seems nervous, his figure not nearly as imposing, his face not nearly as handsome as I remember it. I have not seen him in months, but it feels like years. In fact, it feels almost as if I am now seeing him for the first time ever—seeing him in real life, outside my memories, outside my fantasies.

And he is not as I imagined him.

“What do you want?” I ask. “Are we not done?”

He begins to talk, his mouth sneering, his voice harsh. Everything, he tells me, has worked out just as he willed it, because I am a fool and he had me where he wanted me from the very beginning. He never intended to have full custody of the children, he has no time for it, he has a business to attend to, demanding it was just a trick to make me give up all my financial claims. I could have walked away with millions, but instead I left everything, everything, on the table, so easily manipulated, so naive, did I not realize that he would have signed away so much to avoid the publicity of the trial, there was never going to be any trial anyway, I played right into his hands… And he talks, and he talks, and I can tell that he wants me to grow angry, wants to stomp out the happiness he must see in my face—but oddly, whatever words he says, they seem to have no effect, for I hear, am surprised to hear, other words moving just beneath them, words of uncertainty, words of hurt.

Why did you make me believe, right at the end, that there might be some hope for us, after all? That night, the night you left, why did you kiss me? Why were you not there for me when my father died?

Why did you marry me if you felt no passion for me?

And as I look at him, standing crumpled and angry on the sidewalk, his mouth working around barbed words, his eyes pained, I realize that I, too, will have to face the wrongs I have committed. With time, I may even be ready to acknowledge the truth behind his cardboard cutout in the shape of a storybook villain. Perhaps my ever-so-sage therapist will tell me that his clumsy passes at my sisters before our wedding were his own cries for help, his own attempts to escape the fairy-tale marriage that fate was driving him into yet which he felt wrong in his bones—and someday, perhaps, I will even listen to her. Someday, but not today, for it is still too early to be magnanimous.

I want this night for myself.

In the middle of his tirade, I move to the door, turn the key in the lock.

“Jane, wait!”

Someday, but not yet.

Without looking back, I step inside, and the door creeps closed behind me.

The foyer is stuffy and dim—no liveried concierges, no visitor log books, no flower arrangements, no mirrored expanses here. As I stride across to the mailboxes, I glimpse something scuttling across the floor. A cockroach, I think at first—I have seen a fair share—but no, it is much too big to be a roach. I stop to look. A rat, or maybe an unusually large mouse, hobbles toward me across the lobby. My first impulse is to scream and run, as incoherent exclamations flash through my mind—my poor children, they aren’t used to this kind of thing, this place is worse than I thought, but of course it’s only temporary, I will work hard, I will work so hard to get us out of here—and then I am arrested by the sight of the creature’s white, staring eyes.

The poor thing is blind.

And in that instant, while I hesitate, the mouse, or perhaps the rat, rises to its full height, slowly, laboriously, twitches its whiskers, squeaks at me, and lifts its right paw, looking for all the world as though it is giving me a solemn benediction, a benevolent blessing—or else thanking me for something. I gape at it, openmouthed, about to burst into a jittery laugh (“history of mental instability,” the divorce papers said), when a small secret door unlocks somewhere deep, deep within me, swinging open just a crack, just for a moment—but a moment and a crack are all it takes.

It floods back, it all floods back—the fairy godmother, the glass slipper, the blue-and-white palace, the chatty teapots, my friends the mice, the vile potions, the treacherous mirror, the nettle shirts, the witch, the curse. And as I stand in the middle of the dim foyer of a rent-controlled building in the lower reaches of Manhattan, I hold the immensity of both realities in my mind, and I say to myself: Perhaps all of this is the same story, only seen from two different angles, like one of those trick paintings—birds if you look from one side, horses if from the other, both if you move far enough away to take everything in at once.

Because maybe, maybe, I simply could not face the darker facts of my marriage—my discomfort at being a rich man’s idle wife, my constant guilt over not doing enough for my children, my postpartum depression, my brief addiction to pornography, my longer addiction to prescription pills, my unacknowledged attraction to one of Roland’s underlings, my obsessive spying on my husband along with my pathetic attempts to explain away his philandering, to shift the blame from him at all costs, to myself, to his women, to anyone and anything, my growing desperation to forget the bitter truths of so many awful, shameful moments—oh, such layers of self-deception I practiced, possibly out of some nebulous notion of ideal love, but just as possibly, only so I might go on living with my own cowardly choices… And all the years I spent sifting through, shaping, reshaping the past, trying to pinpoint the exact moment at which our marital happiness dimmed, embroidering upon the myth of our perfect romantic beginnings—until the kind old Roland Senior died and I found his papers and learned of the clause stipulating that Roland Junior needed to marry before the age of twenty-five in order to come into the ownership of his trust. Then, at long last, our screaming confrontation, and my therapist trying to dissuade me from drastic measures, and my subsequent visit to a lawyer who frightened me so, a shrill, man-hating witch—or so she first appeared to my eyes—droning at me, “Law is not strictly a science, it’s more of an art,” her professionally suppressed yet palpable excitement at the realization that my ex-husband-to-be was the wealthy heir of a windowsill empire, the first mention of the word “divorce” striking me with the force of a lightning bolt blazing out of the dark stormy sky… They say, do they not, that divorce is akin to insanity, so perhaps all these other truths I now remember are only stories I once told myself to keep sane, to mask the crude ugliness of things ending, to transform the chaos of pain into some semblance of order, of higher sense. And maybe that is what all fairy tales are, at their heart: generations of unhappy women throughout history who lost their mothers to disease, fathers to violence, daughters to labor, sons to hunger, who were beaten, abandoned, exploited, orphaned, collectively trying to dream themselves into a life that made sense, spinning tales of man-eating ogres, crystal shoes, poisonous apples, and true love—thinly veiled metaphors of everything gone wrong and everything hoped for on lonely winter nights.

And then again, just as likely, it might be the other way around. Maybe, once upon a time, I was indeed an ordinary fairy-tale princess, like many other such princesses, a princess with her cardboard love for a cardboard husband, living a cardboard life in a cardboard palace, stuck within the confines of a predetermined tale, going through predetermined motions, a fate akin to death, a fate worse than death, yet all the while, in my gilded porcelain teacup, in my beautifully curled blond head, dreaming of another life, of another place—a place full of surprises, full of choices, a place I could sense, glimpse, almost touch now and then, in my rare moments of non-cardboard, transcendent emotion, whether genuine joy or genuine pain. Perhaps, then, when my heart was kindled once and for all by a real love for a real child, for two real children, I managed to do something truly magical—to break through the theatrical decorations, to will myself out of my one-dimensional prison and into the three-dimensional world, this world around me, this life, this city, this moment.

And whatever the truth—whether once upon a time I was a wretched housewife distracting myself with fantasies to while away my empty days or a depressed princess battling the tedium of stale fairy-tale coupledom—I have never felt more clearheaded, more awake, more present, more ready to jump into the thick of life, than I do now, and no other place has ever seemed more thrilling, more unpredictable, more crackling with possibilities—with real magic—than this dim lobby with an old cranky elevator and a blind mouse, before which I stand amazed, overwhelmed, holding both lives superimposed in my mind, one balancing the other.

The elevator thuds as it arrives, and its door shudders and creaks. My next-door neighbor, an ancient lady wrapped in bundles of gray and brown shawls, makes her unsteady way out into the lobby, and sees me, and stops.

“Are you all right, dearie?”

“I… yes, I… I thought I saw something run into that corner.”

Together we peer into the shadows.

“Ack,” she says. “Must be rat.” Her strong accent has a whiff of the Old World about it, strange places, dark stories. “Shameful, state of this hovel. Someone should call exterminator. Good day to you, dearie.”

She sounds like a fairy-tale witch, I think, amused; looks like one, too, with her hooked nose and the warts on her chin. Mesmerized, I follow her precarious progress toward the front door, then, shaking myself awake, press the elevator button. As I step inside the poorly lit box, I am touched by a fleeting feeling that I was thinking something important, maybe even something vital, a mere moment ago, but the thought remains uncaptured. I may remember it later, I tell myself. For now, there is so much to do: the children are coming tomorrow, tomorrow, there is no time to waste.

My place is small, but I spend hours cleaning it until it shines, cleaning late into the night, cleaning as I have never cleaned anything in my long life of cleaning. When every last doorknob is gleaming, every last dust bunny banned, I sit down by an open window and look at my city, the magical city that never sleeps. I look at the wide night sky with a scattering of pallid, urban stars, and the shining rivers of headlights streaming below, and lamps coming on and blinking out in other windows, illuminating or concealing other lives, other stories—and only a stone’s throw away, there are dogs, and sirens, and boys, and flowers, and women young and old, and lovers, and beggars, and poets, and pretzel carts, and wine bars, and bookshops, and laughter, and sadness, and triumphs, and losses, and kisses, and fights, and miracles, and quests, and discoveries, and heartbreak, and life, life, life.

That night, when I go to bed, I dream of being a witch. I dream of being a sleeping beauty. I dream of being a gingerbread house. I dream of being a prince. I dream of being a falling star, a rushing wind, a rustling forest. When I wake up in the morning, the sun is pouring through my window, and everything looks unexpected. Perhaps, I think, I have finally dreamed myself into a new story, a story with no commonplaces—an entirely different, as yet unknown story that will be a new beginning after the familiar end.