Snow White Learns Witchcraft

by Theodora Goss

  I am a daughter of these mountains, and of the tales. Once, I wanted to be in the tales themselves. When I was young, I had my part in one—a small part, but important. When I grew older, I had my part in another kind of story. But now I want to become a teller of tales. So I will sit here, in your hut on goose legs, which sways a bit like a boat on the water. Tell me your stories, Grandmother. I am listening…

  The Gold-Spinner

  There was a little man, I told him.

  I gave the little man my rosary,

  I gave the little man my ring,

  my mother’s ring, which she had given me

  as she lay dying. A thin circlet of gold

  with a garnet, fit for a commoner.

  As I was a commoner, I reminded him.

  Nothing magical about me.

  Very well, he said. You may go

  back to your father’s mill. I have no use

  for a miller’s daughter without magic in her fingers.

  I’ll keep the three roomfuls of gold.

  I walked away from the palace, still barefoot,

  still dressed in rags, looking behind me

  surreptitiously, afraid he would change his mind.

  Afraid he would realize he’d been tricked.

  I mean, what kind of name

  is Rumpelstiltskin?

  But he would have kept me spinning

  in a succession of rooms, forever.

  I passed my father’s mill without entering,

  either to greet or berate. I wanted you to be queen,

  he had told me, after I said how could you

  betray me like this?

  You deserve that, you deserve better

  than your mother. What kind of life

  did I give her?

  No, I wasn’t going back there.

  By mid-afternoon I had left the town,

  I had forded the river, I had come

  to unfamiliar fields. I sat me down

  by a hedge on which a few late roses bloomed

  and from a thorn I plucked a tuft of wool

  left by a passing sheep. I spun,

  twisting it between my fingers

  as my mother had taught me.

  She, too, had the gift.

  I coiled the resulting thread

  of thin, soft gold

  around my wrist. Somewhere along the road

  it would buy me bread.

  Until then, there were crabapples

  and blackberries to share with the birds.

  And the road ahead of me,

  leading I knew not where, but somewhere different

  than the road behind.

  Rumpelstiltskin

  The little man

  tore himself in two.

  What did the two halves do

  after that?

  Fairy folk don’t die

  from such simple operations.

  And no, they didn’t hop about,

  each on a single leg.

  Each half was a complete

  facsimile of the original,

  except that one was reversed:

  a mirror image of the other.

  One was left-handed, the other right.

  The two halves stared at each other.

  Brother, said one,

  I shall go into the forest:

  I’m done with humanity.

  Let millers’ daughters ever after

  suffer the consequences of their own folly.

  I shall live alone, with only the birds and squirrels,

  the occasional deer, for company.

  I shall live off mushrooms, acorns, ferns,

  eggs fallen from the nest, rose hips

  and blackberries in summer: the forest’s bounty.

  Dress myself in moss, breathe slowly,

  become like the rocks.

  I shall call myself Rumpel,

  if you’ve no objection.

  None at all, said the other half.

  I, however, want to see the world,

  live as you have never dared to.

  Start as a thief, steal coins from the rich,

  food from the poor. Visit whorehouses.

  Build my fortune, gamble with it—

  win, lose, end up in debtor’s prison.

  Drink dirty water, and a year later

  fine Burgundy, when I have regained my fortune

  and more. I shall have estates

  in Germany, in France. My mills will spew black smoke

  over the countryside, manufacturing

  fabric for elegant ladies, so they can wear

  the latest fashions, my great looms

  clacking and whirring like mechanical spiders.

  That is the way to spin gold, brother.

  When I am richer than the king,

  he will offer me his daughter.

  By then, I shall be Lord Stiltskin.

  The two halves parted, with every sign

  of mutual respect. Neither

  chastised the other.

  There were no recriminations.

  In each of us

  there is a thief and a saint.

  The trouble of it is,

  we cannot part them.

  Goldilocks and the Bear

  They met when they were children.

  She was a thief,

  yellow-haired, small for her age,

  only twelve years old, already hardened

  by poverty, already a noted pickpocket,

  stealing into the bears’ house.

  He was a rube, a rustic,

  or so she said then. A mark

  is what she called him—

  to his face, no less.

  He was the one who found her in his bedroom,

  trying to climb out the window,

  and hid her in his closet

  while his father raged:

  who had stolen the carved wooden box

  filled with gold coins, the profits

  of their honey business?

  He would not let her keep the coins.

  He was not that much of a rube.

  But while his father was talking to the constable,

  a comical fellow straight out of Shakespeare,

  he returned the box, saying he had found it

  by the kitchen door, where the thief must have dropped it

  on his way out. They should look in the forest—

  he could be a mile away by now.

  That night, he told her the coast was clear

  and let her out the window.

  At the last moment, before she made her escape,

  she kissed him on the cheek

  and laughed. That’s the way she was

  back then, fearless.

  He got on with his life,

  finishing school, then going into the business,

  learning how to care for the bees,

  how to keep them healthy,

  taking extension classes on bee diseases:

  mites and spores that endanger bees directly,

  hive beetles that infect their homes,

  wax moths that feed on honeycombs,

  damaging the larvae.

  He learned what to plant in the fields,

  how to prune the trees in the orchard:

  to produce lavender honey, and clover,

  and linden-flower.

  He learned how to mold the wax sculptures

  sold in the gift shop.

  His mother was particularly good at those.

  Meanwhile, she worked with a gang

  of child thieves out of a Dickens novel:

  ragged clothes, solidarity pacts,

  the possibility of incarceration.

  She ended up in jail once, was broken out,

  continued to steal until she was fifteen

  and their leader suggested prostitution.

  It was, he said, an honorable profession,

  as old as thieving. And she such a pretty girl,

  with that yellow h
air: she was sure to do well.

  He would, of course, take a small percentage.

  The suggestion was punctuated

  by his fist on the table, and a grin

  she did not like the look of.

  That night she climbed up to the bear’s window—

  she had not forgotten the location—

  and knocked on the pane.

  “Help me,” she said when he opened it.

  “I need help, and you’re the only one

  who’s helped me before.”

  He listened patiently, then angrily:

  three years’ worth of exploits

  and exploitation. She showed him her wrist

  where the gang leader had once broken it.

  She was still small and pale from malnutrition.

  They dyed her hair brown with walnuts.

  He got her a job in the honey business,

  first in the gift shop, then because she showed interest,

  taking care of the bees.

  She had never seen anything so fascinating:

  like a city of soft, furry bodies

  moving in a mass, then in individual flight,

  seemingly wild, erratic, but purposeful.

  She loved to watch them among the lavender,

  the dusting of yellow pollen on their fur.

  There was something purely joyful about them,

  and they were always making, making—

  thieves, like her, taking the nectar,

  but making wax catacombs, the golden honey

  more precious, she thought, than coins.

  He showed her how to work among the bees,

  wearing thick cotton and a hat veiled with muslin,

  which he did not need, protected by his pelt.

  Eventually, he asked her to dinner

  with his parents.

  His mother said she was charming.

  His father had a serious talk

  with him: you can’t trust humans, he said.

  They’re not like bears. Think of that thief, long ago,

  who tried to take our gold.

  They don’t even sleep in winter,

  which is unnatural, unbearlike.

  If you have to fall for someone, can’t it be

  another bear from a good family,

  like ours?

  The bear explained that love

  doesn’t work like that.

  When he asked her to marry him

  beneath the linden branches,

  she said, aren’t you afraid

  I might still be that girl?

  That I might become a thief again?

  You are, and you might, he said.

  But I’m not my father. I’ve always been willing

  to take risks, like letting you go that day

  or trying new honey flavors. Look how well

  the rhubarb honey turned out.

  I’m not rhubarb honey, she said, laughing.

  Close enough, he said, and kissed her.

  Goldilocks and the bear lived to a grand old age

  together. Their children could turn

  into bears at will. One married a princess,

  one joined the circus,

  one took over the honey business.

  They have five grandchildren.

  Her hair is silver now.

  Look how well her thievery turned out.

  She got the gold, she got the bear,

  she got the fields of clover,

  the flowering orchard, the house filled with sunlight

  and sweetness, like a jar of honey. The life

  of a happy woman.

  Sleeping With Bears

  I. The Invitation

  Dr. and Mrs. Elwood Barlow

  request the honor of your presence

  at the marriage of their daughter Rosalie

  to Mr. T. C. Ursus

  on Saturday the thirteenth of June

  at one o’clock

  at the First Methodist Church

  Reception to follow in the Church Hall

  II. The Bride

  They are wealthy, these bears. Their friends come to the wedding in fur coats.

  Rosie is wearing Mom’s dress, let out at the waist. When Mom married, she was Miss Buckingham County. She shows us the tape measure. “That’s what I was, twenty-two inches around the waist: can you imagine?” My sister, after years of jazzercize and Jane Fonda, is considerably thicker. When, I wonder, were women’s waists replaced by abdominals? When cheerleaders started competing for state championships, I guess. Rosie was a cheerleader. Her senior year, our squad was fourth in state. That year she wore the class ring of the student council president, who was also the captain of the football team. She was in the homecoming court. She was furious when Lisa Callahan was elected queen.

  After she graduated from Sweet Briar and began working as a legal secretary, she met a lawyer who was making sixty thousand a year. They started talking about having children, buying a Mercedes.

  So I don’t understand why she decided to marry a bear.

  III. The Groom

  Of course he comes from old money. Ursus Americanus has been in Virginia since before John Smith founded the Jamestown Colony. The family has gone down in the social scale. It doesn’t own as much land as it used to, and what it does own is in the mountains, no good for livestock, no good for tobacco. No good for anything but timber. But there sure is a lot of timber.

  Anyway, that’s how Southern families are. Look at the Carters or Randolphs. If you haven’t degenerated, you’re not really old. If you want to join the First Families of Richmond, you’d better be able to produce an insane uncle, an aunt who lives on whiskey, to prove you’re qualified.

  We don’t come from that kind of family. Mom is the daughter of a Baptist preacher from Arvonia. There was no whiskey in her house. She didn’t even see a movie until she was seventeen. Dad was a step up, the son of the town’s doctor. Grandpa Barlow didn’t believe in evolution. I don’t think he ever got over learning, in medical school, that men don’t have a missing rib. Mom and Dad met in third grade. They went to the sock hop and held hands in church while sharing a hymnal. You can see their pictures in the Arvonia High School yearbook. Dad lists his future career as astronaut, Mom as homemaker. They were voted Most Likely to Get Married. They look clean, as though they just stepped out of a television show from the 1950s.

  So maybe that’s it, maybe Rosie’s still mad that we didn’t belong to the Richmond Country Club, that Dad didn’t send her to Saint Gertrude’s, where the daughters of the First Families learn geometry and which fork to use with the fish. That he didn’t think of giving her a debutante ball. Mom’s friends would have looked at her and said, with raised eyebrows, “My, isn’t Rosie the society lady?”

  And when I see them, the bears sitting on the groom’s side of the church, I have to admit that they are aristocratic, like the Bear Kings of Norway, who sat on thrones carved from ice and ruled the Arctic tundra. (Nevertheless, they look perfectly comfortable in the heat, even in their fur coats.)

  IV. The Procession

  “What do you call him in private?” I ask Rosie. I’ve never dared call him anything other than Mr. Ursus. When a man—or bear—is six feet tall and over two hundred pounds, he commands respect.

  “Catcher,” she says. “That’s his middle name, or maybe part of his first name. Trout Catcher. That’s what his family calls him.”

  “How much do you really know about bears?” I ask. “Like, do you know what to cook him for dinner?”

  “For goodness’ sake, Blanche,” she says. “Put the brush down, you’re tangling my hair. Some of his relatives eat garbage, all right? I’ll figure it out as I go along.”

  I wonder. In the library, I found a book about bears. Ursus Americanus eats acorns, melons, honey (including the bees), and gut piles left by hunters. I don’t know what Rosie’s going to do with gut piles.

  I help her with the veil, which comes down to
her fingernails, manicured yesterday and painted bubble gum pink. I wonder if bears like bubble gum? I hold her train as she walks along the gravel path from the minister’s house, where she’s been applying a final coat of mascara, to the church. I’m careful not to let her skirt trail on the gravel.

  Mom’s and Dad’s friends are standing, the women in dresses from Lord and Taylor, the men in linen suits. The bears are standing, black and brown and the toffee color called gold. “Black bear” is a misnomer, really. They look like a forest of tree trunks, without leaves.

  The organist plays the wedding march. This is Rosie’s choice. She has no originality. Which again makes me wonder: why is she marrying a bear?

  V. The Ceremony

  Or perhaps I should ask, why is he marrying her?

  When she first brought him home, Mom hid in the bathroom. Dad had to tell her repeatedly that bears don’t eat people. That they’re really quite gentle, except when their cubs are threatened. That they’re probably more afraid of you than you are of them.

  Still, Mom sat at the edge of her chair, moving the roast beef around on her plate, not reassured to see Catcher eating only peas and carrots, mashed potatoes.

  “What do you do, Mr. Ursus?” asked Dad.

  He managed the family property. Conservation land, most of it, in trust for future generations. You could call him a sort of glorified forest ranger. He laughed, or perhaps growled, showing incisors of a startling whiteness.