Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

by Gregory Maguire

  When the sun has moved to its proper place, the Master places Iris in a chair and composes her hands in her lap. He pulls the cap off her head. Tears start in her eyes. She is afraid he will undress her wholly. Her poor stick self isn’t fit for it.

  He misunderstands her concern. “The cap: filthy,” he says, “and I’m not looking at you anyway, but at the shape of your head.” He takes an hour making marks on the wall. She is supposed to focus on the marks, one after the other, while he keeps returning to his pad of paper and judging the cast of her eyes. By the time he’s ready, the light has shifted. He curses her for her stubbornness and throws some flowers at her, and she runs into the kitchen, hiding her eyes—it isn’t her fault!

  “Cry a little bit if you have to. It’s healthy to piss in the fire. But then back you go,” says Margarethe, raising a spoon like a truncheon.

  “He wants to draw a marble statue, not a person!” cries Iris.

  “Then be marble for him, you fool,” says Margarethe. “Be bronze if he wants it; be glass; be oak. Be what he wants, or we go hungry.”

  “He wants beauty,” says Iris, rubbing her nose. “He has a hound, and he wants beauty.”

  Margarethe’s expression is blank. At last she says, “Then be beauty. Make-believe it.”

  Iris gives a wordless cry of exasperation. If she had something to throw at her mother, she would throw it.

  “He hasn’t asked for—?” whispers Margarethe, making bosom-like drawings in the air with her left hand.

  Iris shakes her head. Now, oddly, she’s irritated. Clearly she’s not interesting enough to be insulted in this way.

  “I’m done drawing for the day, for the season, forever,” cries the Master from the other room. He is stamping back and forth. “I’m trying to decide how to end my life, and you two nattering on like that, it breaks my concentration!”

  “Begging your pardon,” says Margarethe in a wry, placating voice. “I wouldn’t want to interrupt some important thought.”

  He laughs. There is the sound of a piece of paper being torn. “We start earlier tomorrow, Iris,” he says. “You will not elude me, whatever shyness you pretend to. I will fix your face on board without fail. My livelihood depends on it, and so does yours. Dry your eyes and hush your whimpers or I’ll have to beat you.”

  Margarethe raises her eyebrows at Iris. Iris pouts. But by now they both know the Master is not one to beat children.

  The next morning he is at work again, and Iris sits for him. He draws her face and hands and her shoulders. “Let your head sink more, advance your chin.”

  “My neck will ache unless I hold it straight.”

  “Do as I say.”

  She sits like a traveler at a campfire, imagining something at her back. Something that should have been left behind in England?—or some new monster, like the lewd dwarf, the Donkey Woman, something darker, inching nearer?

  “What a complex wariness in your eyes!” he says.

  Later: “Now, without a word of protest, without moving your eyes, your hands, your neck, push out your lower lip. I don’t care how it makes you feel. Farther. That’s good.”

  If he catches me, thinks Iris, will he catch what is at my back? That thing that I can’t name? That thing I start from in my sleep?

  “Is there really a changeling child in Haarlem?” she asks.

  “I’m drawing your mouth. Close it!”

  It’s the worst torture anyone could have devised for her, to have to sit so still!

  But, day after day, she sits respectably, clothed. And glad for it now. “Let me see what you have done with me,” she says after the fifth afternoon. The lowering sun is pushing dusty golden light at the canvas, and she feels brave.

  “There’s no point,” he says. “I haven’t caught you. I’m not trying to catch you. I’m merely using you to suggest a shape to me. There is a shadow on the board; it is not Iris Fisher. It is a nameless girl, spiritless, while you are a spirited English-Dutch girl named Iris Fisher. It’s easy to assume you’re the same as the painting, but you’re not. I forbid you to look,” he says as she comes closer.

  In a warning tone, from the other room, Margarethe: “Iris.”

  She falls back. “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” she says.

  “You are my muse this month,” says the Master.

  “I don’t know what you mean. You speak in riddles to distract me.”

  “You’re a peasant girl from the marshes, a calf wandered up from the weedy bog; why should I spend my time educating you?” says the Master. “A muse is a spirit from the ancient Hellenic religion, a goddess who visits the man embarked upon the creative act and inspires him.”

  “We don’t hold with goddesses from other religions,” calls Margarethe tartly.

  “I’m not asking you for opinions, you cook,” he replies, as tartly. “Iris, the love of those old pagan stories has swept up every patron and painter alike. The Florentines are as likely to show us Io being turned into a cow, Daphne into a laurel tree, Zeus disguised as a bull out to rape Europa as they are to show us Madonna and Christ, Saint John and Saint Nicholas.”

  “I do not approve,” calls Margarethe—she can’t help herself.

  But the Master only says, “No more do I, but commerce is commerce. If the rich will buy Venus, then we paint the Mother of God and call her Venus.”

  “For shame!” says Margarethe.

  “We eat,” says the Master.

  “I’d rather go hungry.” The moral superiority of the well fed.

  “Go hungry, then. The more for me.”

  Iris hasn’t followed much of this, but she’s interested that it bothers her mother. A spiritual awakening in that old iron contraption of a heart? Too hard to fathom. Iris moves on, and says, “I bet you’re not portraying me as Venus or another ancient spirit from another land.”

  He moves away from the board, squints at it with one eye. He frowns. “No,” he says. “No, Iris, you’re right about that.”

  “I want to see.”

  “Go get your sister from the meadow. It’s late. Where are my flowers today?”

  “Let me see.”

  “Get out of here!” he cries, angry now. Iris leaves, though not fleeing. She leaves with dignity, carefully knocking over a pot of ground powder onto the stone floor. He curses her clumsiness. She doesn’t reply.

  She is still sulking when she arrives in the meadow. Something is happening here that she doesn’t like. The Master is a kind man in some ways, but he makes her angry. He is framing her on his board, but he is framing her in the room too, keeping her in a box, away from him. She might not be beautiful, but he is keeping her small.

  Margarethe can’t help much. As far as the Master’s concerned, Margarethe is little more than annoyance; even Iris, who loves her, can see that. Margarethe is one of the irritants of the world, a black fly at the behind of the cow. No, it’s up to Iris to be patient and behave, or the family will be back on the street again. And now that Iris has seen the legless dwarf, heard about the Girl-Boy of Rotterdam, who knows what bizarre villains lurk farther inland? It might not be an enchanted castle and a sugar-voice godmother. It might be major imps and minor demons, huge bumblebees with claws. Or even some fierce god disguised as a bull, to kidnap poor girls and do what bulls are well known to do.

  “We’ll give him his monstrosity,” says Iris suddenly. Ruth looks up from the late daisy heads she is shredding. “He wants to catalogue all the quirks of the world? We’ll queerlimb for him, Ruth!” Ruth likes this sound of bravery, which hasn’t been heard much since leaving England. Iris wheels about the meadow, laughing, thinking. She lunges at the old apple tree and brings down a dead branch, and snaps the brittle limbs just so. “Antlers,” says Iris, “for the Girl-Stag of the Meadow!”

  They link hands and run home. Margarethe is out at the well or the market square, away somewhere. The Master is busy in the second studio—the gallery of God’s mistakes—so it’s easy for Iris to slip in and fin
ger some dun-colored paint from the long board that serves as a palette.

  In the shed at the end of the kitchen yard, she coats Ruth’s face. “You’re a beautiful Girl-Stag,” she croons, to keep Ruth from scraping the muck off with her hand. “Can you sound like a beast?” She knows the answer to this already. Ruth obliges with a passionate moo. “Close enough, says Iris.

  Ruth on her hammy hands and strong knees. Iris finds a long cord in the kitchen and ties the rack of apple bough antlers on Ruth’s head. Iris drapes a length of brown, foul-smelling sacking over Ruth’s back. The pelt. Then Iris kneels behind her sister, right up against her, like that bull Zeus pressing against a cow. She ties the ends of the sacking around her own waist to show that they are one two-headed creature, covered by the same hide. “Now, Ruth,” says Iris, “we’ll amble to the studio and have our portrait drawn. We’ll make the Master laugh, and he’ll forgive me for how I bother him!”

  They clump and thump across the yard, Ruth mooing the announcement of their arrival. Silence in the studio as they cross the threshold. When the Girl-Stag crawls around the corner made by a painting propped against a stool, they see the Master has returned from the second studio. He’s sitting there with an open mouth. He stares at them. He’s not alone.

  The visitor is a younger man, with a tender beard beginning on his chin, and none of the stoutness that proves the success of greater men. He perches on a stool, mopping a hunk of bread in a broth of milk and onions. “Oh, a household pet!” he cries, and jumps up, knocking over the stool, spilling his broth, bumping into the knees of the Master.

  “I was expecting the brilliant daughters of my housekeeper,” says the Master. “Instead, let me introduce you to some beast of the forest.”

  Ruth moos, delighted, unable to hear condescension in the Master’s voice. Iris is mortified but gamely keeps on. “We’re the Girl-Stag of the Meadow,” says Iris. “Are we ugly enough now to suit you?”

  “The disguise is impeccable,” says the Master dryly. “I’d never have known you but for your dulcet tone.” Despite himself, he starts to laugh. “Iris, you have some cleverness about you. But you’re late, daughters, and you worried your mother; she went to look for you. You worried me too. There is supper in the kitchen. Now look, this is our Caspar, feckless Caspar, returned from the Hague. Silly Caspar, unable to solicit a single commission on this trip, though he carried letters of testimony from patrons in all the courts of Europe.”

  “I wrote the letters myself,” says Caspar boastfully. “Which is Iris and which Ruth?”

  “This is Ruth, the elder,” says Iris, untying the pelt, feeling foolish, “and I am Iris, the younger.”

  Ruth won’t stay to be observed by a new member of the household. She half gallops, antlers tilting, and disappears into the kitchen, scolding herself with moos.

  “Ruth is shy, like me,” says Caspar. “Such an appealing trait. But you, you’re a rare one, Iris; did you invent that costume? What fun to have a companion here!”

  “I’m not running a salon for the practice of conversation,” says the Master. “Remember that. Caspar is here to learn the trade of drafting, but he’s a hopeless fool, though attractive enough in a pony-like way. He will canter into a low lintel one day and brain himself, and we will all be relieved. He is bereft of any real talent, or Hals or van Schooten or my current rival, Bollongier, would have taken him in. Caspar is almost as useless as you girls. This should make you feel in good company. I hope you’re pleased.”

  Iris studies the new arrival briefly, warily. Caspar has a winning smile. He seems used to the gloomy Master. Caspar doesn’t take offense at these ironic remarks. He bites the corner of his mouth. His lip is glossy with new blond hairs. Despite herself, Iris has a sudden yen to stroke the early mustache with her finger, the way she likes to stroke the ears of the kitchen cat when it sits in the sunlight of the doorway.

  “Speak,” says Caspar, twisting his hand upward in a courtly, welcoming manner.

  “Silence,” says the Master.

  “Porridge,” says Margarethe from the kitchen, returned from her search. “Now,” she adds.

  Didn’t the Master say that the Fishers could stay until his apprentice returned? But now the Master makes no suggestion they should pack up and leave. He has grown used to them. Fair enough.

  Iris turns to go. Is Caspar here merely for a visit? If so, will it be a long one? Iris believes she’s pleased at the notion of his arrival, but in this, as in so much else, she’s not sure.

  “The Girl-Stag of the Meadow,” says Caspar as she passes him into the kitchen. “Which part are you? Girl or Stag?” But from him the remark is not an insult; it makes her chortle, and she doesn’t answer.

  Girl

  with

  Wildflowers

  With the arrival of Schoonmaker’s apprentice, Iris becomes, if not happier, at least less self-conscious, because Caspar doesn’t seem to notice her sorry looks. To be sure, Iris knows that she’s not the insult to the human form that huge Ruth, with her withered arm and spilling spit, can seem; but Iris also knows that she’s not a proof of a divine presence in a corrupt world.

  The best she has been able to wish for, most of her days, is to be unnoticeable.

  Every morning the Master draws Iris, and then he begins to paint her, quick studies that he won’t allow her to see. He incorporates any meadow flowers that Ruth brings. “What does the form or the color matter,” he mumbles, “when what is required is the freshness of the blossom?”

  He shifts onto larger canvases. When he has a form he admires, he begins to work more slowly, thinning his colors with oil so as to keep them wet and malleable days at a time. Every afternoon when the light changes, though—he can sense it to the instant, by some canniness that Iris can’t fathom—he throws down his brushes and sends Iris from the room.

  Sometimes Caspar hangs about in the shadows of the studio. From him Iris picks up the habit of watching how the Master works. How he pets a surface with the softest of splayed-bristled brushes. “A blush to emphasize the reflected light,” he murmurs.

  Iris can’t see—she’s not allowed to look at the image—but Caspar sucks in his breath and says, “That shrill yellow jagged line—a bold inaccuracy, but so revealing!” The Master grimaces, but Iris can tell he is pleased.

  Though it embarrasses Iris to think about it, from a corner Caspar occasionally attempts drawings of her too. He hides his work from Iris and the Master. One morning the Master has had enough of this coyness. “How am I to teach you if I can’t see your errors?” the Master grouses.

  Caspar replies, “You teach me through your own errors.”

  “And what errors might they be?” The tone is so ominous that Iris breaks her pose to lean and see the Master’s scowl.

  “In this studio you’ve painted God and His companions,” says Caspar, “and in the next room you’ve portrayed the degenerate. Your two obsessions. So what you hope to accomplish by—this once—painting in the middle of the moral spectrum—?” He nods at Iris and at the canvas Iris can’t look at. “I admire your self-denial, your sacrifice, to forsake your grand subjects for the mundane—”

  He’s needling the Master, though Iris hasn’t the wit to work out how. The Master says, “God preserve me! The abuses I put up with, from those who gobble at my own table and warm their backsides at my own hearth!” He snatches a stout cloak from a peg. “I’m locked here with curs and idiots,” he says, “while the babble of children and a foolish housewife poisons the air. Get out of my way.” He leaves the house for the first time since the Fishers have arrived. Margarethe, hearing some of this from the kitchen, goes to the door and watches him stride down the lane.

  He isn’t an old man. He walks briskly and with purpose, striking his blackthorn staff against the cobbles. Dogs retreat, children stand still, and the women of the lane mutely nod greetings, showing pious disapproval.

  “Oh, Caspar,” says Margarethe, “we will all be thrown out on our heads, and
then what?”

  “Nonsense,” says Caspar cheerily. “He doesn’t walk enough. He gets bad-humored. He’ll be better when he gets back. This is part of my job, don’t you see? I have to annoy him enough to keep him involved with the world. Otherwise he would latch the shutters and hide inside his paintings and never emerge. It’s a steady trial for him, this habit of black spirits and black bile, and retreating from the world because of it.

  “Does he request this of you?” says Margarethe.

  “What he requests and what he needs are often separate things,” says Caspar.

  “Who assigned you to decide the difference?”

  “Love assigned me,” says Caspar, surprised at the question. “You are a mother, you know what love requires on behalf of your family.”

  Margarethe says, pompously, “Obedience and silence.”

  Caspar says, “Charity, and a cudgel about the shoulders from time to time.”

  The Master being gone, Margarethe allows herself to sit in the sun on the stoop next to Iris. Iris is given a bowl of late summer peas to shell. Margarethe rinses lentils. Ruth brings her toy. She squats in the ungainly position taken by small children at play or by folks relieving their bowels in a ditch.

  Caspar says to Iris, “Well, he won’t be back for hours. He’s gone off to see his betters, his cronies.”

  “He has no friends but us, I thought,” says Iris.

  “He could have a wide circle of friends if he paid them as much attention as he pays his paintings,” says Caspar knowingly. He likes to publish his opinions. “Schoonmaker is thought of fondly by the best artists of the city. But he keeps apart, ashamed that his work is less well regarded than theirs.”

  “Tell me,” says Iris, brave to approach a subject now that the Master is away, “tell me: Is there a changeling child in Haarlem?”

  “Gossip is stronger than gospel sometimes,” says Caspar. “They say there is: Clara, the daughter of the man who has commissioned the Master’s current work.”

  “Clara!” says Iris. “That’s the name of the child who gave Ruth the small windmill. She’s no changeling.”