Snow White Learns Witchcraft

by Theodora Goss

  “One more thing. No, two.” Thea found the Seeing Ball where she—the shadow—no, she as the shadow—had left it, behind Volume VII of The Collected Poems of Sappho. It was confusing, having two sets of memories. Going to school at Miss Lavender’s—being in a box for twelve years, like a long, dreamless sleep—attending her grandmother’s funeral—finding herself free in Mother Night’s Castle—-sitting in her Boston apartment, watching anime on YouTube and eating takeout sushi, afraid of everything, college and what the future held for her—capering around the gardens with Oryx, hiding behind the giant chess pieces, teasing the fish. Which were her memories? All of them, she supposed. She felt around the floor next to the satyr—there, the invisibility cloak, with its scratchy wool. She put it over her arm so that her hand looked as though it were floating in the air. Then she hoisted the soft, sleepy cat to her shoulder. Carrying cat and cloak and mask, she walked to the library door.

  “Morning has come, and morning’s star has risen:

  her chamber awaits its radiant messenger.

  Take me there.”

  She stepped through the library door into Morgan’s tower.

  The Morningstar was, in fact, not there. Putting Cordelia on the bed, where she promptly curled up and fell asleep, Thea changed into her own clothes. Thank goodness she had brought extra. And Mother Night had said something about chocolate…yes, there it was, half a bar in the front pocket of her backpack. She broke off a square and put it into her mouth, chewing it quickly, automatically. But it was the best chocolate she had ever tasted—honestly, ever. Dark, sweet, bitter, creamy…had she never actually tasted chocolate before? Oh, for goodness’ sake, she was starting to cry again, and her nose was starting to run. Hastily folding the green dress before she could get tears or snot on it, she put it on the bed with the peacock mask on top and the invisibility cloak beside it. Then she took the notebook out of her backpack, tore out a sheet of paper, and left a note, with the Seeing Ball on top to weigh it down:

  Thank you so much for everything! I got my shadow and sewed it back on—very Peter Pan! Invisibility cloak is to the left <———— If you’re on Facebook friend me!!! <3 Thea

  She slung her backpack over one shoulder and draped Cordelia over the other—drat the cat, why couldn’t she wake up and walk? She had to keep sniffing so her nose wouldn’t drip. Somewhere in her backpack she might have a tissue, but she couldn’t search for one while holding Cordelia and trying to come up with a poem. It didn’t have to be long, right? Just effective.

  “The greatest magic

  brings you home.”

  She stepped through the tower door into the kitchen of the headmistress’s house.

  Mrs. Moth was in an apron making breakfast. “Good morning, Thea,” she said. “When we didn’t see you yesterday, we figured you’d found your way to the Other Country. Why, look at you!” She said it in the tone of an aunt who has not seen you in a while and remarks on how much you’ve grown. “Emily, Lavinia,” she called. “Thea’s back! All of her, thank goodness.” Then she held out a paper towel for Thea’s dripping nose.

  * * *

  “Well, how do you feel?” asked Miss Gray. Thea had taken a shower and brushed her teeth, examining herself curiously in the mirror. She looked tired, and her eyes were red, and there was a shadow following her around, everywhere she went. She kept seeing it out of the corner of her eye and flinching. She could not get used to it.

  “I don’t know.” She ate the last spoonful of her oatmeal. “Confused. Sad about my parents. Angry about being put in a box. Glad to be here. Any minute now I’m probably going to burst into tears again. Sometimes I feel like kicking things, and sometimes I feel like dancing around the room. Although I haven’t actually done either of those things yet.”

  “Oh, but you will, my dear,” said Miss Lavender. “It’s very confusing, being all of yourself. You’ll find it quite uncomfortable for a while. But you’ll get used to it. We all do.”

  “Coffee, anyone?” asked Mrs. Moth.

  “Not for me,” said Thea. “I think I’ll go to Booktopia for a latte. There was a book on writing I wanted to get—John Gardner.” Maybe even the Anne Lamott.

  “Good for you,” said Miss Gray. “I always liked your pieces in The Broomstick, especially that article on Hans Christian Andersen. He really was a charming man, although terribly insecure.”

  “And Sam’s quite attractive,” said Mrs. Moth. “Though very young.”

  “This is about literature, not romance,” said Miss Gray. “Anyway, you think anyone under a century is young. Have a good time, Thea.”

  “I’ll try,” said Thea. Miss Gray had read something of hers and actually liked it! Maybe she could write some poems, or an article. That shouldn’t be too hard, right? The novels could come later…She smiled at herself, then sniffed again and wiped her nose with the balled-up paper towel.

  On the way out, she scratched Cordelia behind the ears. The cat curled up more tightly on the parlor sofa, purring in her sleep. Thea put on her jacket and scarf, then stepped into the cold New England morning, her shadow accompanying her up the path and into the town, toward the bookstore and anywhere else she might want to go.

  The Sensitive Woman

  There are days on which I am a thunderstorm,

  and days on which I am an eggshell. Today,

  I am so fragile that if you breathed on me,

  I would break apart. The pieces of me would lie

  on the kitchen floor, over the hard gray tiles,

  my torso in fragments, my heart like a shattered cup,

  one eye near the sink, one near the refrigerator,

  staring upward, blinking.

  There is a story about a woman so sensitive

  that she could be bruised by the brush of a swallow’s wing,

  that the cold light of the moon would burn her cheek.

  There is a story about a woman who wept at the fall

  of a rose petal, at the sight of a spider’s web,

  at a line from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”

  There is a story about a woman who could not be

  consoled when she heard a single measure of Brahms,

  or watched the sun setting over Budapest.

  Her tears flowed into the Danube.

  There are days on which I am all these women.

  I would like to write a poem comparing myself

  to a thunderstorm raging down the valleys,

  battering the rocks, flattening the willow trees.

  But today a raindrop could drown me. Today, a breeze

  could tear me apart, send ragged bits of me flying

  like white tufts of milkweed from the pod.

  Hush. Don’t breathe, don’t speak, handle me gently.

  Today, a word of yours, no matter how kind,

  would be too hard to bear.

  The Bear’s Wife

  I went to the bear’s house

  reluctantly: my father would have a pension

  for his old age, my mother a pantry filled

  with food for winter. My brothers would go to school,

  my little sister—all she wanted, she said,

  was a dolly of her very own. I went

  dutifully. Like a good daughter.

  In the bear’s house there were carpets with dim, rich colors

  from Isfahan, and mahogany furniture,

  and brocade curtains. More bedrooms than I could count,

  a ballroom in which I was the only dancer,

  a library filled with books. And electric lights!

  But I chose a candle to see him by—the bear,

  my husband. The wax dripped.

  He woke, reproaching me, and it was gone—

  house, carpets, furniture, curtains, books,

  even the emptiness of empty rooms.

  I was alone in the forest.

  If I returned to my father’s house, they would greet me

  with cakes and wine. My mother would
draw me aside.

  This is what comes of marrying a bear, she would say,

  but now it’s over. You can live a normal life,

  marry again, have children that are not bears,

  become a respectable woman.

  There was the path back to my father’s house.

  Instead I turned toward the pathless forest,

  knowing already what the choice entailed:

  walking up glass mountains in iron shoes,

  riding winds to the corners of the earth,

  answering ogres’ riddles. And at the end

  the bear, my husband, whom I barely knew.

  And yet, I walked into the dangerous trees,

  knowing it was my life, knowing I chose it

  over safety, maybe over sanity. Because it was mine,

  because it was life.

  The Bear’s Daughter

  She dreams of the south. Wandering through the silent castle,

  where snow has covered the parapets and the windows

  are covered with frost, like panes of isinglass,

  she dreams of pomegranates and olive trees.

  But to be the bear’s daughter is to be a daughter, as well,

  of the north. To have forgotten a time before

  the tips of her fingers were blue, before her veins

  were blue like rivers flowing through fields of ice.

  To have forgotten a time before her boots

  were elk-leather lined with ermine.

  Somewhere in the silent castle, her mother is sleeping

  in the bear’s embrace, and breathing pomegranates

  into his fur. She is a daughter of the south,

  with hair like honey and skin like orange-flowers.

  She is a nightingale’s song in the olive groves.

  And her daughter, wandering through the empty garden,

  where the branches of yew trees rubbing against each other

  sound like broken violins,

  dreams of the south while a cold wind sways the privet,

  takes off her gloves, which are lined with ermine, and places

  her hands on the rim of the fountain, in which the sun

  has scattered its colors, like roses trapped in ice.

  A Country Called Winter

  In winter, the snow comes down as softly as feathers. I have always loved to watch it. It’s different, of course, once it’s fallen: thick, heavy, difficult to walk through. In Boston, the snow plows come out almost as soon as the first flakes land on the sidewalk. They make narrow paths, and the snow piles up on either side, so when you walk to class, it’s between two mountain ridges, like a miniature Switzerland.

  That’s how Kay described it to me one morning, while we were sitting in my dorm room, drinking Swiss Miss hot chocolate that I had heated up in the microwave I wasn’t supposed to have. He had the most charming accent that sounded, to my ear, sort of German and sort of French, and that look foreign students have. They are generally better groomed, their clothes are better proportioned, and they have the latest electronics. They listen to avant garde music and talk about art. Of course that’s partly because they are the children of diplomats and businessmen—the ones who can make the choice to come to an expensive American university. Kay was the son of the Danish ambassador, but he had lived in so many countries that when I asked him where he was from, he simply said, “I am European.” Once, he even took me to the art museum on a date. Catch an American student doing that!

  He was an undergraduate, and I had just started my M.A. I was a little uncomfortable about that. He was only two years younger than me, but at the university, the undergraduate/graduate divide seemed almost unsurmountable. And anyway, I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend. I wanted to finish my M.A. year with a high enough grade point average to go directly into the Ph.D. program. All I was planning to think about that year were my classes in American literature: The Poetry of Emily Dickinson, Emerson and the Transcendentalists, The Novel from World War I to Postmodernism, and The Immigrant Experience, which I was not particularly excited about. I’d lived my own immigrant experience, and didn’t want to read about anyone else’s.

  When I was a little girl, I asked my mother why she had come to the United States, with one suitcase and an infant daughter, leaving behind her parents, her language, everything she had ever known.

  “We come from a cold country,” she had told me. “Do you know, Vera, in that country the king lives in a palace built of white stone with veins of quartz that resembles ice. The streets are made of ice between snow banks, and there are no automobiles—only sleighs. They used to be pulled by reindeer, but nowadays they are electronic.”

  Vera was not my real name, but my English name, which she had given me when we landed at Logan airport. It sounded like part of my name in our native language, which I will transliterate Veriska, although Americans have difficulty pronouncing it properly. In our language, it means Snow Flower.

  I would write it here in our alphabet, but the letters aren’t on my computer. My Apple Mackintosh does not yet speak the language of snow.

  * * *

  I was six years old, just about to start first grade, when we came to America. I was put in an English immersion program. The school administration had no choice, really. There was no one in the school, or even the school district, who spoke our language. We come from a small country, with a difficult language—agglutinative, and not related to any Indo-European tongue. The alphabet resembles a series of curlicues, like frost on a windowpane. If you’re not familiar with it, you won’t know where one letter begins and another ends. Some of the letters are not letters at all, but ideas, or more properly, modes of thinking. There is a letter, for example, that stands for memory. If you put it at the beginning of a word, it means something has been remembered. Or, if you add the letter for negation, that something has been forgotten.

  Even the name of our country is difficult to pronounce for English speakers. Instead of spelling it out phonetically, we refer to it by its name in translation: Winter.

  There was a small community of my countrymen and women in Boston, all my mother’s age or older. Many of them had fled after the most recent revolution. The history of my country in the twentieth century is a series of revolutions and conquests. I asked my mother who would want to conquer the country she described to me: a series of valleys between high mountains, where in summer the snow might melt for several months in the lower valleys, to be replaced by small white flowers that resembled snow, and winter seemed to last forever. Even in June the blossoming fruit trees might be covered with a layer of ice. The cold made our small, hard apples sweeter, tastier, than they were anywhere else. Cabbages and turnips were staples. Most crops were grown in large greenhouses that protected tender plants from the cold.

  Countries in the lower valleys, my mother answered. Before the Second World War, in warmer regions, our primary export had been a valued commodity. In the days before electric refrigeration, everyone wanted ice. Now, of course, there was tourism: skiers and snowboarders valued our steep slopes, and mountain climbers came to conquer the high peaks of our mountains.

  Because I could not speak English that first year, I could not make friends. It was a lonely year for me.

  Eventually I learned English, but I never quite learned how to be an American child. Perhaps I had come here too late. Or perhaps it was something in me that caused me to turn inward rather than toward other children, and I would have been the same even in my native Winter, never quite fitting in there either. I found my refuge in books, particularly books about this new country I could barely understand. Little House on the Prairie seemed to me the most wonderful fairy tale about the great wide west. Jo, Beth, Meg, and Amy March were four princesses growing up in a magical place called Concord, Massachusetts—just close enough to be real and yet far enough away to seem like a land lost in mists. I was in love with Tom Sawyer, and bitterly jealous of Becky Thatcher, for whom he walked on top of a fenc
e. No one had walked on top of a fence for me. I liked those stories better than the stories in the old book from our country that my mother read to me, in which women married white bears and then had to travel to the ends of the earth, climbing mountains of ice in iron shoes, to rescue their bear husbands from frost giants. Why marry a bear in the first place? I wondered. Why not go to a one-room schoolhouse, form settlements, write for magazines as Jo was doing? Tom Sawyer was a trickster, like the fox in our fairy tales, whose pelt was as white as snow. He would sneak into your house and steal your fire, like a ghost. Huck Finn was like one of the ice trolls—uncivilized and uncouth, but somehow fascinating.

  Although my mother read me these fairy tales, she did not like to discuss the history of our country. “We have left all that behind,” she said. But the woman she hired to stay with me after school while she worked at Boston University as a research librarian told me about the two princes who had founded our country, climbing high in the mountains to establish their territory above the Roman legions who were harrying them below. They had married the daughters of the king of the ice trolls—tall, beautiful women whose eyes were the color of rocks. Their descendants had battled each other a thousand years for the throne. She had taken the American name Anna, and I called her Nana Anna. It was she who helped me retain my native tongue, for my mother rarely spoke in our language. “Why should I?” she said. “We are never going back, and it makes me sad.”