“The strength of ten men?” the Finmany woman says. “A lot of good that would do! And besides, he doesn’t love her.”
Bae smirks at you, as if to say, I told you so. If your lips weren’t frozen, you’d tell him that she isn’t saying anything that you don’t already know. “Now!” the Finmany woman says, “take her up on your back one last time, and put her down again by the bush with the red berries. That marks the edge of the Snow Queen’s garden; don’t stay there gossiping, but come straight back. You were a handsome boy—I’ll make you twice as good-looking as you were before. We’ll put up flyers, see if we can get someone to come and kiss you.”
“As for you, missy,” she says. “Tell the Snow Queen now that we have Bae back, that we’ll be over at the Palace next Tuesday for bridge. Just as soon as he has hands to hold the cards.”
She puts you on Bae’s back again, giving you such a warm kiss that your lips unfreeze, and you can speak again. “The woman of Lapmark is coming for tea tomorrow,” you tell her. The Finmany woman lifts Bae, and you upon his back, in her strong, fat arms, giving you a gentle push up the chimney.
Good morning, ladies, it’s nice to have you on the premiere Snow Queen Tour. I hope that you all had a good night’s sleep, because today we’re going to be traveling quite some distance. I hope that everyone brought a comfortable pair of walking shoes. Let’s have a head count, make sure that everyone on the list is here, and then we’ll have introductions. My name is Gerda, and I’m looking forward to getting to know all of you.
Here you are at last, standing before the Snow Queen’s palace, the palace of the woman who enchanted your lover and then stole him away in her long white sleigh. You aren’t quite sure what you are going to say to her, or to him. When you check your pocket, you discover that your list has disappeared. You have most of it memorized, but you think maybe you will wait and see, before you say anything. Part of you would like to turn around and leave before the Snow Queen finds you, before Kay sees you. You are afraid that you will burst out crying or even worse, that he will know that you walked barefoot on broken glass across half the continent, just to find out why he left you.
The front door is open, so you don’t bother knocking, you just walk right in. It isn’t that large a palace, really. It is about the size of your own house and even reminds you of your own house, except that the furniture, Danish modern, is carved out of blue-green ice—as are the walls and everything else. It’s a slippery place and you’re glad that you are wearing the robber girl’s boots. You have to admit that the Snow Queen is a meticulous housekeeper, much tidier than you ever were. You can’t find the Snow Queen and you can’t find Kay, but in every room there are white geese who you are in equal parts relieved and surprised to discover, don’t utter a single word.
“Gerda!” Kay is sitting at a table, fitting the pieces of a puzzle together. When he stands up, he knocks several pieces of the puzzle off the table, and they fall to the floor and shatter into even smaller fragments. You both kneel down, picking them up. The table is blue, the puzzle pieces are blue, Kay is blue, which is why you didn’t see him when you first came into the room. The geese brush up against you, soft and white as cats.
“What took you so long?” Kay says. “Where in the world did you get those ridiculous boots?” You stare at him in disbelief.
“I walked barefoot on broken glass across half a continent to get here,” you say. But at least you don’t burst into tears. “A robber girl gave them to me.”
Kay snorts. His blue nostrils flare. “Sweetie, they’re hideous.”
“Why are you blue?” you ask.
“I’m under an enchantment,” he says. “The Snow Queen kissed me. Besides, I thought blue was your favorite color.”
Your favorite color has always been yellow. You wonder if the Snow Queen kissed him all over, if he is blue all over. All the visible portions of his body are blue. “If you kiss me,” he says, “you break the spell and I can come home with you. If you break the spell, I’ll be in love with you again.”
You refrain from asking if he was in love with you when he kissed the Snow Queen. Pardon me, you think, when she kissed him. “What is that puzzle you’re working on?” you ask.
“Oh, that,” he says. “That’s the other way to break the spell. If I can put it together, but the other way is easier. Not to mention more fun. Don’t you want to kiss me?”
You look at his blue lips, at his blue face. You try to remember if you liked his kisses. “Do you remember the white cat?” you say. “It didn’t exactly run away. I took it to the woods and left it there.”
“We can get another one,” he says.
“I took it to the woods because it was telling me things.”
“We don’t have to get a talking cat,” Kay says. “Besides, why did you walk barefoot across half a continent of broken glass if you aren’t going to kiss me and break the spell?” His blue face is sulky.
“Maybe I just wanted to see the world,” you tell him. “Meet interesting people.”
The geese are brushing up against your ankles. You stroke their white feathers and the geese snap, but gently, at your fingers. “You had better hurry up and decide if you want to kiss me or not,” Kay says. “Because she’s home.”
When you turn around, there she is, smiling at you like you are exactly the person that she was hoping to see.
The Snow Queen isn’t how or what you’d expected. She’s not as tall as you—you thought she would be taller. Sure, she’s beautiful, you can see why Kay kissed her (although you are beginning to wonder why she kissed him), but her eyes are black and kind, which you didn’t expect at all. She stands next to you, not looking at Kay at all, but looking at you. “I wouldn’t do it if I were you,” she says.
“Oh come on,” Kay says. “Give me a break, lady. Sure it was nice, but you don’t want me hanging around this icebox forever, any more than I want to be here. Let Gerda kiss me, we’ll go home and live happily ever after. There’s supposed to be a happy ending.”
“I like your boots,” the Snow Queen says.
“You’re beautiful,” you tell her.
“I don’t believe this,” Kay says. He thumps his blue fist on the blue table, sending blue puzzle pieces flying through the air. Pieces lie like nuggets of sky-colored glass on the white backs of the geese. A piece of the table has splintered off, and you wonder if he is going to have to put the table back together as well.
“Do you love him?”
You look at the Snow Queen when she says this and then you look at Kay. “Sorry,” you tell him. You hold out your hand in case he’s willing to shake it.
“Sorry!” he says. “You’re sorry! What good does that do me?”
“So what happens now?” you ask the Snow Queen.
“Up to you,” she says. “Maybe you’re sick of traveling. Are you?”
“I don’t know,” you say. “I think I’m finally beginning to get the hang of it.”
“In that case,” says the Snow Queen, “I may have a business proposal for you.”
“Hey!” Kay says. “What about me? Isn’t someone going to kiss me?”
You help him collect a few puzzle pieces. “Will you at least do this much for me?” he asks. “For old time’s sake. Will you spread the word, tell a few single princesses that I’m stuck up here? I’d like to get out of here sometime in the next century. Thanks. I’d really appreciate it. You know, we had a really nice time, I think I remember that.”
The robber girl’s boots cover the scars on your feet. When you look at these scars, you can see the outline of the journey you made. Sometimes mirrors are maps, and sometimes maps are mirrors. Sometimes scars tell a story, and maybe someday you will tell this story to a lover. The soles of your feet are stories—hidden in the black boots, they shine like mirrors. If you were to take your boots off, you would see reflected in one
foot-mirror the Princess Briar Rose as she sets off on her honeymoon, in her enormous four-poster bed, which now has wheels and is pulled by twenty white horses.
It’s nice to see women exploring alternative means of travel.
In the other foot-mirror, almost close enough to touch, you could see the robber girl whose boots you are wearing. She is setting off to find Bae, to give him a kiss and bring him home again. You wouldn’t presume to give her any advice, but you do hope that she has found another pair of good sturdy boots.
Someday, someone will probably make their way to the Snow Queen’s palace, and kiss Kay’s cold blue lips. She might even manage a happily ever after for a while.
You are standing in your black laced boots, and the Snow Queen’s white geese mutter and stream and sidle up against you. You are beginning to understand some of what they are saying. They grumble about the weight of the sleigh, the weather, your hesitant jerks at their reins. But they are good-natured grumbles. You tell the geese that your feet are maps and your feet are mirrors. But you tell them that you have to keep in mind that they are also useful for walking around on. They are perfectly good feet.
Rikki Ducornet (1943– ) is a writer and painter who was born to a Russian-Jewish mother and Cuban father in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where her father was a professor at Bard College. From an early age, she wanted to be an artist, and then while living in France and raising a bilingual son, the power of language captured her imagination. She describes her work as “animated by an interest in nature, Eros, Abusive Authority, subversion and the transcendent capacities of the Creative Imagination.” She is often described as a surrealist, which is perhaps as accurate as any label for her, but like most labels, it is inadequate to the range and depth of her oeuvre. Since her first novel, The Stain (1984), she has written eight others, including Brightfellow (2016), Netsuke (2011), and The Jade Cabinet (1993), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her story collections include The Complete Butcher’s Tales (1994), The Word “Desire” (1997), and The One Marvelous Thing (2008); she has also published numerous collections of poetry and essays, created illustrations for many books, and exhibited her paintings internationally. She is also known as the Rikki from Steely Dan’s song “Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number.” “The Neurosis of Containment” was first published in the literary journal Conjunctions (published by Bard College) in 1996 and reprinted in The Word “Desire.”
THE NEUROSIS OF CONTAINMENT
Rikki Ducornet
For Dorothy Wallace
WHAT I AM ABOUT TO RELATE took place in the late summer of 1930 when, a woman of middle age, I was a guest at the house of Ms. Livesday in Barrytown-on-Hudson. The house was destroyed the following year in a freak storm that lasted under an hour and yet devastated the village and woodland. No one was harmed, and Mrs. Livesday, her vigor untrammeled, simply took up housekeeping in her summer home on Block Island—not a small feat for a woman in her eighties.
A self-taught student of botany, I had spent the previous summer in Mrs. Livesday’s company on the island, hunting down rare specimens and pressing them between prepared papers. I also collected seeds—upon Mrs. Livesday’s encouragement: of field poppy, chickweed, nigella, et cetera; and pinecones, the samara of the maple and elm. Some seeds are smooth and others rough and wrinkled; the seed of the field poppy is honeycombed with alveolate depressions. I set the seeds in cotton from the pharmacy.
Although a Christian and a woman of common sense, Mrs. Livesday had been reading the Jew, Freud. Certain arcane words and phrases—cabalistic, very pagan—peppered her conversation—always lively—so that speaking with her was now more than ever like eating borscht. That summer on Block Island I heard for the first time psychical unpleasure and obsessional neurotic. And although these terms were addressed to me—“There goes Gertrude Hubble once again indulging in psychical unpleasure!” or, “May I introduce you to my friend Gertrude Hubble, one of my favorite obsessional neurotics?”—they were always said with an affectionate tone. In other words, I did not take Mrs. Livesday’s latest enthusiasm seriously. (I believe it is a mistake to take Jewish ideas seriously.) When I came down to dinner with my boxes of seeds neatly sown in sterile cotton in impeccable rows, Mrs. Livesday turned to Cobb—who at that moment had brought a large tureen of veal-bone broth to the table—and said: “Cobb, look at these latest efforts of Gertrude’s and tell me: might they be said to illustrate a neurosis of containment?”
Despite the fact that I, too, am Christian, that Mrs. Livesday was both a great deal older than myself and my hostess, my dander was up.
“These little collections,” I said, “lovingly arranged are nay more than seeds, Mrs. Livesday. I fear your gracious mind has been addled by Semitic tomfoolery!”
“No! No!” she replied with such earnest good nature that I was at once reduced to shame. “They are charming, dear—there is no doubt about that. Very prettily executed. You do everything with skill, Gertrude, and these collections are no exception to that rule. But, you see, Cobb and I were talking in the kitchen about pathological phenomena” (inwardly I rolled my eyes, my temper fraying anew) “and how anxiety is often revealed by attempts to order and to contain the world. Anxiety is the product of chaos—or, rather, of the fear of chaos—and what could be more chaotic than the natural world? So we attempt to order it: just look at Cobb’s spice rack! Yes! Yes! I know I’m being silly. But, for example, think of the way you lay out your combs and brushes as though they were schoolchildren or dead matter: bones, fossil fish on exhibit in a museum! One, two, three—run up to your dresser, Gertrude, and there they will be! Lined up: big brush, little brush, comb next—lined up as if for execution! Don’t look at me like that. So are your shoes!”
I was scandalized. How did she know about my shoes? I was outraged. Cobb offered to serve me a slice of chicken pie and despite its fragrancy I shook my head, frowning for all I was worth.
“You are wanting pleasure, Gertrude.” Mrs. Livesday prodded her butler on. “Do serve our guest some pie. It is too easy to ruffle your feathers, my dear,” she said kindly. “And so that you won’t think otherwise, I didn’t go up to your room to spy. Call it intuition!”
“I was brought up to be an orderly person,” I said next. “Nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Yes! Yes!” She tore into her bread with such ferocity I was startled. “But suppose it all means something.” I was dumbfounded, my temples throbbing. “Suppose those shoes and those brushes in their rigorous rows, and the perfectly folded linens in the upper-left-hand drawer were the key to your inviolable soul, Gertrude. Saying more about you than anything you could possibly say about yourself?”
The rest of that week I roamed the crags of Block Island collecting pebbles and wondering about Mrs. Livesday. Had she gone mad? What had hairbrushes to do with spirit? Clearly hairbrushes, linens, and shoes were worldly artifacts. Once I attempted to squelch her for good by saying in my most imperious tone: “There are no linens, hairbrushes, or combs in Heaven!”
“Poor creature,” had been her response, before retracting into a silence unlike her. “No. I suppose not.” Before we separated for the night she addled me one last time: “Gertrude,” she said, “why were you never a flapper? Had I been your age…” She trailed off and then: “Oh! Imagine! To have been a flapper!”
* * *
—
The key to my room in Barrytown was very small—like the key to a child’s music box—and when I opened the door and saw Mrs. Livesday’s collection of family dolls nested down in ancient perambulators, I thought the key’s size most appropriate. One of the dolls was black—a rarity in any collection. Black people were a rarity in those days, too, at least within the circle in which I moved. Missionary friends in Africa saw them in droves, of course, and once Mrs. Livesday had thrown an eccentric garden party for the Episcopal clergy and friends of the mission work to which—to my astonishm
ent and discomfiture—a number of Negroes came. As I had previously offered to pour, I found myself in the preposterous position of pouring tea for potential cannibals.
Mrs. Livesday’s black poppet was a pretty thing, idealized, its expression sweet and its clothes—if faded with age—trim. As with her tea guests, not one button was missing from the little shirt and trousers; the doll even wore shoes. I am a spinster, and it occurred to me that putting me up in this particular room demonstrated a certain insensitivity on Mrs. Livesday’s part.
In a recent letter, my dear friend Deacon Hill, who was living among the Kaffirs in Kaffirland, described the marriage customs of that country and included a little sketch of Oz, the chief of the Zulus, in ordinary dress—or, dare I say it, undress—for as far as I could tell, Mr. Oz wore little else than a feather duster. I recall being not a little surprised when I opened Deacon Hill’s envelope and the sketch fell out. The sketch proved Deacon Hill’s imperfect judgment—the result, I suppose, of living among savages for longer than any civilized person should. I was outraged. But his letter proved fascinating and I read it despite myself. The Deacon described domestic polity in Kaffirland and I learned that Oz, who perambulated in nothing but a handful of turkey feathers, had an illimitable number of wives! The Deacon had enclosed a photograph: a gaggle of wives all sitting on their heels in rows, bowls of porridge incongruously set before them—perhaps to illustrate a racial propensity for overindulgence. Standing among several dozen dolls, all white and female but for one little black fellow trussed up in striped trousers, I could not help but think I had been spirited away to a Kaffir harem—a conceit I imagined would surely amuse Deacon Hill as I was a spinster of forty-two with no intention of marrying, not ever. In his letter the Deacon instructed me that in Kaffirland each wife has her own hut.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 117