The Merry Spinster

by Mallory Ortberg

  Then she looked down to see that she had been fully restored to herself, flexing joyfully in every direction, and found her body just as it had been, and she loved the prince and his bride better than she ever had before.

  “I’m coming, sisters,” she said, and she felt three voices humming all at once in her throat—her own, and the prince’s, and the prince’s bride (her prince, now, and her bride, too). And she had two souls inside her, and they both belonged to her, and she smiled, and she slipped back into the sea.

  TWO

  The Thankless Child

  After every meal came the Invocation to Combat Ungratefulness. All three girls had been catechized in the simple prayers that preceded the salt-ration years earlier but for a long time were without a godmother to chant the clarification. Meals were always taken outside, weather permitting, and only once the sun had gone down, with their godmother alone on one side of the low stone table in the garden. The girls sat on the other side, whomever had finished her work the soonest seated closest to the head.

  This had been the order of things: Paul, the eldest, had a dead mother who had been reduced to salt a decade since. The bones had been gathered in a square of fabric, bundled neatly, and buried at the northwest end of the family grounds; a false cypress, which was not by the strictest definition a tree but an overgrown shrub, grew over them, and dropped fat pale spiders from its branches. After an appropriate but not elaborately drawn-out mourning period, Paul’s father was taken husband again, and produced her sisters in quick succession. Gomer and Robin were equally black-eyed and charming, quick with both work and a smile, handsome of face and of person, less eager to please than universally pleasing.

  Gomer and Robin’s mother had no training in the motherly arts and confined herself to matters of business and household management. Their father knew the primary psalms, his place, and not much else. The godmother had appeared on the day of Gomer’s baptism and supplied the family with water she had conjured herself to mark the occasion. She joined the household as godmother and doctrinal master that same evening. Gomer, who had little native interest in religion but a placid desire to be generally approved of, took to her godmother at once. Robin took to her too, although with none of Gomer’s innate placidity; Robin created the unique impression of always seeming to be on the verge of spilling something on herself, despite not being in the least bit clumsy. Paul’s comparative reserve could not help but draw the godmother’s attention, and Paul was often the worse off for it.

  The godmother could read, and write a little when the situation called for it; she could walk in the noonday sun without fainting; commission deacons; haggle with the grocer; perform minor miracles; turn a dog into a man for upward of three hours; cast out territorial spirits; slaughter a chicken without spilling a drop of blood; initiate mysteries; and she could name over one thousand neurotoxins. She made all her own clothing, and the children’s too, and she was neither bent nor stooped with age. The garden, since she began to tend to it, produced both onions and cabbage and several other eatable things beside, and no birds ever landed in it.

  “Receive all things,” the godmother began. “Bless all things, mind all things; guard against ingratitude and the waste of water. Build your seat on a high place and watch for thieves; mind in what manner, when, whence, how many, and what kind come to break in and steal. When the watch grows weary, stand up and enter into the guard of the mind, then sit down again and attend to the task.” She turned her head to Paul. “What is it to be grateful, girl?”

  “To be grateful is to be wakeful and watchful,” Paul said. “To be grateful is to remember. To be grateful is to acknowledge one’s lawful debts and keep a balanced ledger.”

  “Attend, and affirm, the reasons you are grateful to me,” the godmother said. “Eldest first.”

  “For my life,” Gomer said. “For my going out and my lying down. For your right hand, which holds me fast. For my eyes, my ears, my limbs, and my senses. For the clothes on my back, the salt in my hand, the water-storage tanks in my home, the walls that keep out lawbreakers, for the rain when it comes, for the knowledge of the word you have given me.”

  “It is sufficient,” said the godmother. “Full salt and full rations for tomorrow.” Gomer’s flush broke through the dirt on her face, and she smiled broadly as she twisted her hands under the table, as if wringing out every last drop of the compliment.

  Robin came next, reciting in a high, practiced voice: “For consolation, for comfort, for the discernment between what can be eaten and what not ought to be eaten, for the power to keep the dead in the ground, for your commandments, for your wonder-working, for the knowledge of poisons and of proofs, for the safety of your garden in a wicked world.”

  “It is sufficient,” said the godmother. “Full salt and three-quarters rations, for failing to mention the watch-fires I have set around this house that burn both day and night.”

  Paul said nothing, and the godmother did not ask her to speak. She sat on the lowest stool at the end of the table, for her work had taken her to the farthest ends of the property, and she had been late in presenting herself to the house. She had broad shoulders and reddish-brown hair, which she wore very short. She sat at the end of the table six nights out of seven.

  “Attend, and account how you love me,” the godmother said. “Youngest first.”

  “More than eyes,” Robin said. “More than life, more than health, more than salt-rations and true water, more than breath, more than honor; you are speech and liberty to me.”

  “More than milk,” Gomer said. “More than eggs, more than a portable generator, more than bread and lamps, more than my living parents and my own sweet bed; you are air and light to me.”

  “Paul, I will not ask how you love me,” said the godmother, “as I know that you do not.” Gomer twisted her hands under the table again, but said nothing. Robin looked at Paul out of the corner of her eyes and pulled her mouth to one side, but said nothing. Paul stacked her sister’s dishes under her own and swept the crumbs off the table onto the ground.

  “Sly,” said the godmother to Paul’s sisters. “Sly and secret and workful, and gives her loyalty to a dead woman even as she neglects the living woman who stands before her. She wastes water and salt weeping over those who neither notice nor profit from them. Look, she has been crying today; her eyes betray her.”

  Paul still said nothing, having long since learned better than to offer a defense. Soon enough the godmother gathered up her cup and book and, rising from her seat, led them all in the final salt-prayer.

  “Blessed be salt. Blessed be the solution, from water and from rock, intervener in the blood.

  “Blessed be the anti-caking agent, the de-iced highway. Guard against the seizure and the fluid of the lungs.

  “Blessed be the Trace Elements. You iodize all things, preserve all things, desiccate the living and the dead, the Great Solubizer.

  “Blessed be Potassium, salt’s glorious spouse, guardian of the concentration gradient, protector of resting potential.

  “Let my flesh be a safeguard of the reserves: let my body preserve the salt for those who will come after. Bless the rations. Bless the Alberger process. Keep us from the daily minimum, the saltless fits. May she who wastes salt, lose salt; may she who finds salt, keep salt.

  “Salt within me, salt before me, salt behind me, salt beneath me, salt to my left and to my right, salt when I lie down, salt when I sit down, salt when I arise, salt in the heart of all who think of me, salt in the mouth of all who speak of me, salt in every eye that sees, salt in every ear that hears.”

  With that the meal was over, and they went inside.

  * * *

  Gomer and Robin attended to their own rooms, their own laundry, and their own labor. Their mother managed the house’s income and expenditures; their held-in-common father handled all responsibilities municipal and civic. Paul was responsible for the kitchen, the guardroom, the chapel, the compost heap that fed the garden, t
he neatening of the family pathways, the tithe, and the several public rooms of the house, because, as the godmother had pointed out, “Paul has a dead mother, who does no work, and so her daughter must work for both.”

  What had happened, what had always happened, was this: Paul’s work took her often to the false cypress that flourished over her mother’s bones at the end of the field. There were no other trees nearby (although it was not a tree, precisely, but a shrub, no more than six feet in height and perhaps eight feet around), which meant it provided the only shade to be found for half a mile during the worst heat of the day. It was not for emotional but logistical reasons that Paul preferred it. Had there been another option, she would gladly have availed herself of it, for the shade the false cypress provided was patchy and thin, and she had to thrust herself underneath its branches in order to hide herself from the sun, and cover her face with her hands, as bloated yellow spiders rained softly down on her. If she cried sometimes as she lay underneath, that was an expected physiological reaction. If her mother’s tree sometimes responded sympathetically, that was to be expected, too. Her mother had been in possession of not-insignificant sympathetic powers, and if every so often a spare bundle of nails or scrap of ash-soap or loaf of bread dropped down with the spiders, Paul did not waste them.

  That evening, Paul was using her mother’s soap to scrub the dishes in her sink and was up to her elbows in foam when the godmother appeared in the doorway. Paul briefly dropped one knee in the lightest possible genuflection without releasing the dish in her hand.

  “When you need something next,” the godmother said, “you do not go to her. You will come to me.”

  Paul shrugged. “It is no concern of yours, I think,” she said. “I have rejected nothing from you, nor sought any of her favors. What I am given, I use, and give thanks for it, as you have taught me.”

  For a moment the only sound in the kitchen was the light splashing of Paul’s hands in the sink. Then the godmother was at her elbow, spilling a low and steady stream of words in her ear.

  “You cannot continue to take from the dead without incurring a debt you cannot possibly pay. My yoke is easy, and my burden is light; the yoke of the dead is not so easily thrown off. What you need, I will provide. No one else.”

  “You do provide for me,” Paul said. “I seek nothing from her but shade at noon, and yet I cannot turn away a gift given unasked.”

  “Then you do not love me,” the godmother cried. “You do not love me, and I have loved you with my whole and living heart from the first day I mothered you, and I will perish for the want of you.”

  The godmother plunged her hand into the sink and groped blindly until she found Paul’s fingers, and clutched at them. “You will kill me,” she said again. “Have I not given you more than your sisters, although you love me less? Have you not the privilege of sharing my own bed? Do I not appoint you in the best clothes, the first pair of new shoes, the best tools, the first choice of food, when you have earned food? Who else’s hand would I clasp against my own? Who else have I offered my heart to but you? Yet you spurn it, and offer me stares, and dawdle in the fields rather than sit at my honored side at table. If I thought it would bring a smile to your face, I would let myself slip underground like your first mother, to have you willingly climb under my branches, to know you love me.”

  Paul let her hands go slack under the water. “I love you,” she said, and the godmother clasped her all the harder, stroking between each knuckle with her long fingers.

  “How do you love me?” the godmother said. “How can one be so young, so lovely, and so unfeeling?”

  “I will come to you,” Paul said. “I will come to you for everything.”

  The godmother smiled in great triumph, and her fingers encircled Paul’s wrists tightly. “And you will bring me the gifts she gives you? Not hoard them to yourself? Not drive me off, as some stranger unfit to share your joy?”

  “I will bring you everything.”

  “Not to come to me,” the godmother said, “suggests you are not prepared to be grateful to me. It smacks of ingratitude. Am I not your proper godmother? Is not my power sufficient? There is nothing I would not give you, if you would only acknowledge my right to grant you favors. What is it that I ask of you, that you find so impossible? What have I only ever asked of you?”

  “To be good,” Paul said. “To be a good girl, a good daughter, and to return your love honorably.” The godmother looked at her with a long and searching look, and nodded, and broke her hold, and shook her hands dry over the soaking-water.

  The godmother handed her a dish from the drying rack. “This is dirty. Clean it again.” Paul thrust it back into the sink and scrubbed again, then handed it back for inspection. The godmother swiped it with the dishcloth that hung from her belt and stacked it neatly with the others.

  “Everything you need, I will provide,” the godmother said again. “All I ask of you is to love me and to be good. Are you prepared to meet those terms?”

  “I am prepared,” Paul said, and allowed herself to lean a little against the edge of the sink.

  “You need salt,” the godmother said—it was not a question—and flashed something small and white in her hand. Paul shook her head and pressed her lips together.

  “You have been crying,” the godmother said in her most businesslike tone, “and have been at half rations for nine days. Your head aches, and you cannot eat, and you are clutching at the sink to stay upright.”

  Paul nodded, and in an instant the godmother’s hands flew to Paul’s face, one at her throat and one on her lips. Paul felt the familiar prickle on the back of her tongue, and tried to swallow. The hand at her throat stroked gently downward as she gulped and heaved over the sink. “I can’t,” she said, gasping, and then there was a glass of water at her lips and a hand in her hair, and she accepted both gratefully. Finally she swallowed, and felt the prickle blossom into a hot, hysterical pool in her stomach.

  “Are you going to be sick?” the godmother asked, brushing the back of her hand over Paul’s forehead. “Shall I fetch a bucket?”

  “No,” Paul said, and shook her head tightly. She straightened up and kept her hands close at her side. “No, I’m not going to be sick.”

  “Are you quite all right now?” the godmother said, and her voice was gentle.

  “Yes,” Paul said. “I’m sorry. I’m all right now.”

  * * *

  It did not happen that the members of the parish gathered together often; there were monsters on the earth in those days. But the priest’s son was in need of a wedding, and the neighborhood offered up their children for his selection.

  The girls’ father had called it a public concern, reminded them the family had never balked at civic participation, and left it at that. Gomer and Robin’s mother had calculated their bridewealth in both directions the day they were baptized and determined that whether they went as grooms or as maids, the budget would abide. So they were all right to go, if they liked, and both decided they would like.

  “Gomer might bathe, for a change,” Paul said over the washtub to her sisters the afternoon they had been granted ordinary leave. “There’s plenty of room with the laundry; jump in and take a bath, if you think you can stand the shock.”

  “And resign my wife to a lifetime of disappointed hopes, dreaming always of the day I take another?” Gomer said. “Thanks just the same, but he’ll have to be clean enough for both.”

  “You’d wife him, then?” Paul said.

  “What, catch me volunteering for anything more than husband’s work?” Gomer said. “He’s a priest’s son, he can already read, and anyhow I’m too old to train in anything new. No, I’ll go unwashed and husband both, or I won’t go at all.”

  Robin looked more shocked than usual, which took some doing. “It would be presumptuous,” she said, “to assume yourself husband, when you do not know their household’s need—when our own mother has set a perfectly good example of finding a role that
suits her talents, rather than making demands of—”

  “I rather wonder, Robin,” Paul said, “at your eagerness to follow her good example, as it is no secret that you’d scrape up the dust with your heels and crow like the Devil if our godmother told you it held the key to mastering the mothering arts.”

  There was silence for a minute, then Paul spoke again. “What an interesting game you’ve found, Robin, alternating your mouth between open and closed so quickly. I wonder what it’s called, and if anyone can play?”

  “Spoken like a true wife,” Gomer said, laughing, and after a minute Robin found it in herself to laugh, too.

  The seat by the fire had been empty, and then it was not; the godmother did not fuss about making her appearances now that the girls had grown and ceased to be overcome with delight by the many secret ways she knew to enter a room.

  “How much joy you find in thinking which of you will leave me first,” she said, writing something unintelligible with her finger in the ashes on the hearth, “which of you will take your strength and add it to another family, and diminish the power of mine. I wonder if you have ever thought of bringing someone to me, of joining their strength with ours? Perhaps not. You will notice, of course, that your father has granted you leave, and your mother has granted you leave, but I have granted you nothing, nor indeed has my leave been sought.”

  Gomer was the first to her feet, genuflecting so earnestly she quite lost her balance and had to reestablish herself against the table. Robin followed suit, a little less desperately, and remained frozen mid-droop until the godmother nodded her acknowledgment. Paul kept at the washtub.

  “See how Paul doesn’t greet me,” the godmother said sadly to the ashes on the hearth. “Paul, Paul, you are careful and troubled about many things, yet only one thing is needful. Your sisters have chosen that good part, and it will not be taken away from them.”