by Olga Grushin
“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.
“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,
She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do;
She gave them some broth without any bread,
Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.
“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 bri
ng 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 lik
e 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.