Snow White Learns Witchcraft

by Theodora Goss

  When I was in high school, Nana Anna finally succumbed to lung cancer from the small brown cigarettes she was incessantly smoking, hand-rolled from a tobacco flavored with vanilla. After school—I had been admitted to Boston Latin Academy, one of the prestigious public schools that require an examination—I would go to her small apartment in Alston, and eventually her hospital room in Massachusetts General Hospital, to sit with her for hours, doing my homework. One day in the hospital, she motioned me to approach her bed. Closer, closer, she motioned, impatiently. With her small, frail, claw-like hand, she pulled me down by the lapel of my school jacket and whispered, in a voice that was almost gone, the ghost of a voice, “Versika, when it is time, you must go back.”

  I did not know what she meant, and did not want to distress her by asking. Anyway, I was American now—the previous year, my mother and I had become citizens. I had no desire to go back to Winter. I did not think of it as my native country anymore—did not even remember what it looked like, except in dreams that were probably based on my mother’s stories of frost giants and streets paved with ice and quince trees grown in glass houses. I spoke my native language adequately but not well, and rarely practiced it anymore now that Nana Anna was so sick. Somewhere along the way, I had decided to become as American as possible. I wore blue jeans and had a tattoo of falling snowflakes on my left wrist that scandalized my mother, because well-behaved girls did not get tattoos. I read Sylvia Plath.

  My mother wanted me to study library science, “Because you like books so much, Vera,” she said, “and it’s a practical profession.” But I told her I wanted to study literature.

  “Well, perhaps you can become a teacher,” she replied.

  * * *

  There were only a few people at Nana Anna’s funeral—three old men and one young woman who said she was a distant relative. One of the old men came up to my mother and bowed, then spoke with her too rapidly for me to understand what he was saying. But among the words, I recognized one that meant “princess”—literally, “king’s daughter.” When I asked my mother about it, she said, “Anna was a member of the royal court, a descendant of one of the two families that have, for time out of mind, fought over Winter’s throne. In our country, she was lady-in-waiting to the queen. It was her hereditary right.”

  How strange that this old woman who had taken care of me had been a member of the royal family! Remembering her one-bedroom apartment with its tiny kitchen, I felt sorry for her. She had been meant for palaces made of white stone with veins of quartz.

  But I had the SAT to study for. I could not spent too much time thinking about the history of Winter—about which, anyway, I knew only the fragments Nana Anna had told me.

  There were boyfriends here and there, in those years—a couple of casual ones in high school and a steady one in college, at Amherst, where I had gotten a full ride—half scholarships, half grants. I even thought we might become engaged, until the day he told me he was in love with a girl I thought was my best friend. Several months later, when he broke up with her and told me that I was the one, had always been the one—that he had just needed to make sure—I had already been admitted to a graduate program. Sorry, I told him. I really don’t have time for a relationship right now.

  I was right—the M.A. program took all the time and energy I had, that and being an R.A. in an undergraduate dorm. At least it gave me a place to live so I didn’t have to stay at home with my mother. I could never have afforded my own apartment in Boston. I settled down to write my semester papers, determined to do as well as I could. That would be my life, I figured—classes during the day, evenings doing research in Mugar Library.

  And then I met Kay.

  * * *

  I have always preferred winter, probably because I was born in Winter, in February, when my mother tells me the capital city was encased in ice and the doctor had to come by electric sleigh through a snowstorm. I love to see the first leaves change, love to feel the cold breath of autumn coming. Seasonal allergies have something to do with it. June and July, I live on Claritin. The pollen from all the blossoming trees gives me a terrible headache. But after September comes, it seems as though the air regains a crystalline quality. It feels like clear water, like something hard and soft at the same time—feathers that can cut. Then the leaves turn and fall, like a splendid sunset lying on the sidewalks, and the first snows come, white and fresh, as though the earth is putting on her wedding gown.

  Christmas has always been my favorite holiday. In my country, gifts are not brought by Santa Claus. The Lady in the Moon herself comes down from the sky in her silver sleigh, drawn by snow geese that have put on their white plumage for winter. Next to her sits the white fox who eats the moon each month before the Lady renews it again. With the help of all the stars, who look like elves in sparkling tights and dresses, she distributes gifts to children throughout the land. Although my mother had given up many of our native customs, each year she decorated the tree with a moon on top, papier-mâché stars hanging from the branches, felt reindeer, and gingerbread men. We would leave out elderberry wine for the Lady in the Moon and a plate of oat cakes with a wedge of cheese for the geese and fox. The next morning, the oat cakes always had small bites taken out of it, and the cheese was eaten into a crescent shape.

  I met Kay during the first snowfall. He bumped into me as I was walking to class, thinking about my paper on the rhetoric of mourning in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. I slipped and fell on the icy sidewalk. “Undskyld!” he said, then switched to English. “I’m sorry, how stupid of me—I should have watched where I was going. Let me help you.” He took off his right glove and reached down a pale, firm hand. I recognized him from my class on the Transcendentalists, which was a 500-level course for both upper-class undergrads and M.A. students. He was the one who always did the reading and talked about the Transcendentalists as though their ideas mattered for more than the final exam. I had noticed him—he was, after all, tall and blond and very good-looking. He was hard not to notice. But I had thought of him as simply another undergrad.

  What made him so much more exciting than other boys I had dated? Well, he was European—more sophisticated, more intellectual. He could talk about postmodern literary theory, although after several beers his utterances became as convoluted as Lacan’s. His area was modern European literature. He had been taking courses in the American Studies department simply for a distribution requirement. But he could also be moody, go silent for days at a time, sitting on his dorm room window seat and looking out at the snow. I asked him once if all that theory was good for him.

  Still, there was something in me that was attracted to him. His family came from a small village in Denmark beside a glacier, where the primary industry was the ski season. Sometimes he seemed like a breath of cold mountain air. We had been dating for several months and our relationship was going well—he was going to stay in Boston for Christmas, and I had already told him that he could come celebrate with me and my mother—when Gerda showed up.

  It was after Thanksgiving Break. We were sitting in our Transcendentalism class, waiting for Professor Feldman (Bob to those of us who were graduate students, but only in office hours and at departmental cocktail parties) to show up when in walked a girl—well, a woman, but she was not much older than me. She was wearing a pair of red boots that came up over her knees, and her black hair was cut in a Louise Brooks bob. She stood in front of the class and said, “Hi everyone. I have some bad news—Professor Feldman had a heart attack over the break. We don’t know yet when he’ll be able to come back to class. I was his TA last semester, so I’m going to fill in for him. I’m a grad student, so don’t bother calling me professor. You can just call me Gerda. All right, let’s see who did the reading. Pop quiz!”

  She was in my department, but I hadn’t met her—she had passed her oral exam over the summer and was already working on her dissertation. After the class I introduced myself. “Oh, right, Vera,” she said. “You and the other M.
A. students don’t need to take the final exam. Just turn in a 20-page paper on the last day of class. Have you written a prospectus already? No? Well, how about turning it in next Friday?”

  Later, Kay told me that she had “Robber Girl” tattooed across her shoulder blades, right where you could see it if she wore a low-cut dress, or maybe a bathing suit. It was the name of her rock band. Yes, she had a rock band with a couple of students from the Berklee College of Music—she was the lead singer and played guitar. They toured during the summer months, doing covers of the Eurythmics and other 80s groups. I wondered how he knew—when had he seen her bare back? But it was the sort of information Gerda volunteered freely. Perhaps she had simply told him during office hours.

  That was after the semester was over, of course—after we had picked up our final papers from her box in the department mail room. I was relieved to have gotten an A on the paper and for the semester. Gerda was much too smart to mess around with the university’s sexual harassment policy. No, she just stood in front of the class in her high red boots, wearing skinny jeans or a short denim skirt and a black turtleneck, talking about feminism and sexuality in Emily Dickinson’s poems, which was the topic of her doctoral dissertation. “If Dickinson could have fucked death, she would have,” Gerda said once, clearly not caring what anyone said on her course evaluations.

  She was a good teacher, I’ll give her that. She found meanings in Dickinson’s poems that I had not seen. I had admired them for their artistic and intellectual engagement. Gerda revealed their incandescence. Kay always paid particular attention in that class, but then he had paid attention to Professor Feldman as well. It was only later that I realized there was more to it than caring about Dickinson’s subtext.

  Just before Christmas, he told me that we should take a break, that he had to focus on exams and didn’t have time for a relationship. There was no celebration with my mother after all—he insisted that he had to study. By the time I came back to campus in January, he and Gerda were dating.

  When I found out from my friend Stephanie, who was a work-study receptionist in the main office and knew all the departmental gossip, I spent a week crying myself to sleep at night, sobbing into my pillow. But Kay didn’t know that. I didn’t bother asking him for an explanation, and recriminations have never been my style. I have always prided myself on my ability to let things go. After all, I’ve had plenty of practice. When I was a little girl, I let go of an entire country.

  One day, we ran into each other at the new café that had opened at the edge of campus, on Commonwealth Avenue. Blue Moon, it was called—organic, fair trade, locally sourced. There were scones with chia seeds in them, scones with açai berries. Smoothies that combined mango and kale.

  “Vera,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to text you—”

  “I already know,” I said. “About you and Gerda.”

  “I really like you,” he said, as though it were an apology. “Like, really like. But Gerda, I don’t know. We’re just on the same wavelength.”

  But Gerda. I suppose at some level, I had known from the moment she walked in with her high red boots. I had simply not wanted to see that he was drifting away from me like snow. Even when she was standing at the front of the class and he was the undergrad challenging her phallic interpretation of Emily Dickinson’s “A narrow fellow in the grass”—“Sometimes a snake is just a snake,” he would say—there was something between them, a solidarity. You could tell that despite their differences, they lived in the same intellectual and emotional time zone. They synched.

  “I hope you’re happy with her,” I said. “I’m sure she’ll be happy with you.” Why wouldn’t she be? Any disagreements would be smoothed over by his blue Danish eyes, the perfection of his cheekbones.

  * * *

  Christmas was strange that year. Men and women I did not know came to the apartment and talked to my mother in the walk-in closet she used as a sewing room. They spoke in the language of Winter, but so low and rapidly that I could not hear them through the keyhole, although I tried. I particularly wondered about one woman dressed in a long white coat with silver embroidery all over it, wearing a white fur hat.

  “Who was that?” I asked my mother.

  “That was the Matriarch of the Orthodox Church,” she replied. “Her Holiness is the highest religious authority in our country.”

  “What is she doing here?” I asked. I had heard of the Holy Mother, but only in Nana Anna’s stories. Somehow, she had not seemed real to me, any more than the palace made of white stone or the glass houses with their orchards of flowering trees. But this priestess of the Lady Moon was real the way dreams are real—improbable, and yet indisputably sitting in our small living room, drinking my mother’s espresso.

  “Paying her respects,” said my mother. “Vera, I smell something burning. Did you seal the jam pockets properly?”

  Of course not. I never sealed the jam pockets properly. My mother always sealed their edges so the jam did not run out into the pan, but somehow I never managed to. The jam always ran out, overflowed the sides of the pan, and dripped down onto the electric burners. My baking was always accompanied by the smell of burnt sugar.

  Winter is a cold country. Most of our deserts incorporate jam, dried fruit, or candied nuts—ingredients that can be stored almost indefinitely during the long, cold months. They are made of hearty grains—barley, oats, rye. Into them we mix cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger.

  I rushed into the kitchen to rescue the jam pockets, and by the time I came out again, the Matriarch was gone.

  But it was more than a matter of strange visitors coming at all hours. My mother seemed agitated, distracted. When I asked her what was wrong, she said only, “I’m getting old,” which was patently untrue. Her black hair was touched with gray, and she had lines of laughter and worry around her eyes, but she was as beautiful as ever—still the woman in the only photograph I had of her with my father, at their wedding. She was wearing an elaborate wedding gown, he was in his military uniform.

  “What was his rank?” I asked her when I was in high school. I was curious about this man with the fierce mustache, who had died when I was only a child.

  “I do not remember,” she had answered. It was more likely that she did not want to remember. All I knew was that he had died in one of our innumerable revolutions, defending the king—Nana Anna had told me that.

  To be honest, I was glad when Christmas break was over and I could go back to school. At least I could replace worrying about my mother with working on my papers and avoiding Kay. I transferred out of Elegance and Anxiety: The Age of Wharton and James when Stephanie told me he was registered for the course.

  * * *

  And then spring failed to come. In April, the snow did not melt. The forecasters shrugged as though to say, sometimes that happens in Massachusetts. But in May it did not melt either. The temperature did not get above thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. When June came and the temperature still hovered around freezing, the Weather Channel started talking about freak cold snaps, global cooling, a new ice age.

  By that time, I assumed Kay had gone back to Denmark for the summer break. Of course I was still on campus, studying for my oral exam and R.A.ing for the high school juniors and seniors taking summer courses, trying out college for the first time. Anyway, I lived in Boston—I had nowhere else to go.

  But one day, I got a text on my cell phone: V need to talk to you please K.

  Why? I texted back.

  To talk about us.

  Well, that wasn’t exactly an answer, was it?

  What about?

  Please??? I’ll buy coffee. Blue Moon @ 2?

  Fine. What was I going to do, refuse to see him altogether? That would just prove to him that I cared, and I didn’t. Well, I did, but I didn’t want him to know that. Anyway, it was uncivilized. Only high school girls who had watched too much reality TV behaved like that.

  He was waiting for me at a table near the front of the café, with a s
mall cappuccino topped with cinnamon, my favorite. He still had perfect cheekbones, but just above his right cheekbone, at the corner of his eye, was a rectangular bandaid. Had he cut himself shaving? No, it was too high for a shaving cut. Well, I would not ask him about it. I was no longer his girlfriend, after all. Let Gerda do that.

  “All right, what is it?” I asked, sitting down. He slid the cappuccino over to me.

  “I know I messed up,” he said. “I should have told you about Gerda. I’m really sorry—really really sorry. Is there any way we can start over?”

  I looked at him, astonished. “Start over like…what? Like it never happened? What about Gerda, anyway? Where is she? And what are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in Denmark?”

  “That’s over,” he said. “I broke it off with her. She was—well, she was kind of nuts, and also kind of cruel. It’s as though she kept sticking this knife into me—metaphorically, I mean. With the things she would say, telling me loved me, and then that she didn’t want to see me anymore, then calling me the next day and telling me to come over. It’s like she wanted to punish me for caring about her. And she was so negative—she would laugh at me for things like my mom sending me cookies from home—I mean the embassy, not home home. She called me sentimental. I don’t know where she is now—she said she was going on tour with Robber Girl, and then she just left. The last I heard from her, she was in Austin, Texas. She hasn’t texted me since. But honestly, I don’t care where she is. Come on, I know I messed up, but I care about you more than I’ve ever cared about anyone. Please, can we start over?”

  I sipped my cappuccino. I didn’t know what to say. On the one hand, he had behaved like a complete asshole. On the other hand, he had very blue eyes, with long lashes. He looked at me pleadingly. That bandaid was incongruous on his perfect face.

  “I have to think about it,” I finally said, putting my coffee cup down and pushing back my chair. I tried to be nonchalant, but I almost tipped it over as I stood up.