The Classic Fairy Tales (Second Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)

by Edited by Maria Tatar

  Outside the window Ed straightens up and wipes his earth-smeared hands down the sides of his pants. He begins to turn, and Sally moves back from the window so he won’t see that she’s watching. She doesn’t like it to be too obvious. She shifts her attention to the sauce: it’s in the second stage of a sauce suprême, which will make all the difference to the chicken. When Sally was learning this sauce, her cooking instructor quoted one of the great chefs, to the effect that the chicken was merely a canvas. He meant as in painting, but Sally, in an undertone to the woman next to her, turned it around. “Mine’s canvas anyway, sauce or no sauce,” or words to that effect.

  Gourmet cooking was the third night course Sally has taken. At the moment she’s on her fifth, which is called Forms of Narrative Fiction. It’s half reading and half writing assignments—the instructor doesn’t believe you can understand an art form without at least trying it yourself—and Sally purports to be enjoying it. She tells her friends she takes night courses to keep her brain from atrophying, and her friends find this amusing: whatever else may become of Sally’s brain, they say, they don’t see atrophying as an option. Sally knows better, but in any case there’s always room for improvement. She may have begun taking the courses in the belief that this would make her more interesting to Ed, but she soon gave up on that idea: she appears to be neither more nor less interesting to Ed now than she was before.

  Most of the food for tonight is already made. Sally tries to be well organized: the overflowing Jacuzzi was an aberration. The cold watercress soup with walnuts is chilling in the refrigerator, the chocolate mousse ditto. Ed, being Ed, prefers meatloaf to sweetbreads with pine nuts, butterscotch pudding made from a package to chestnut purée topped with whipped cream. (Sally burnt her fingers peeling the chestnuts. She couldn’t do it the easy way and buy it tinned.) Sally says Ed’s preference for this type of food comes from being pre-programmed by hospital cafeterias when he was younger: show him a burned sausage and a scoop of instant mashed potatoes and he salivates. So it’s only for company that she can unfurl her boeuf en daube and her salmon en papillote,6 spread them forth to be savoured and praised.

  What she likes best about these dinners though is setting the table, deciding who will sit where and, when she’s feeling mischievous, even what they are likely to say. Then she can sit and listen to them say it. Occasionally she prompts a little.

  Tonight will not be very challenging, since it’s only the heart men and their wives, and Marylynn, whom Sally hopes will dilute them. The heart men are forbidden to talk shop at Sally’s dinner table, but they do it anyway. “Not what you really want to listen to while you’re eating,” says Sally. “All those tubes and valves.” Privately she thinks they’re a conceited lot, all except Ed. She can’t resist needling them from time to time.

  “I mean,” she said to one of the leading surgeons, “basically it’s just an exalted form of dress-making, don’t you think?”

  “Come again?” said the surgeon, smiling. The heart men think Sally is one hell of a tease.

  “It’s really just cutting and sewing, isn’t it?” Sally murmured. The surgeon laughed.

  “There’s more to it than that,” Ed said, unexpectedly, solemnly.

  “What more, Ed?” said the surgeon. “You could say there’s a lot of embroidery, but that’s in the billing.” He chuckled at himself.

  Sally held her breath. She could hear Ed’s verbal thought processes lurching into gear. He was delectable.

  “Good judgement,” Ed said. His earnestness hit the table like a wet fish. The surgeon hastily downed his wine.

  Sally smiled. This was supposed to be a reprimand to her, she knew, for not taking things seriously enough. Oh, come on, Ed, she could say. But she knows also, most of the time, when to keep her trap shut. She should have a light-up JOKE sign on her forehead, so Ed would be able to tell the difference.

  The heart men do well. Most of them appear to be doing better than Ed, but that’s only because they have, on the whole, more expensive tastes and fewer wives. Sally can calculate these things and she figures Ed is about par.

  These days there’s much talk about advanced technologies, which Sally tries to keep up on, since they interest Ed. A few years ago the heart men got themselves a new facility. Ed was so revved up that he told Sally about it, which was unusual for him. A week later Sally said she would drop by the hospital at the end of the day and pick Ed up and take him out for dinner; she didn’t feel like cooking, she said. Really she wanted to check out the facility; she likes to check out anything that causes the line on Ed’s excitement chart to move above level.

  At first Ed said he was tired, that when the day came to an end he didn’t want to prolong it. But Sally wheedled and was respectful, and finally Ed took her to see his new gizmo. It was in a cramped, darkened room with an examining table in it. The thing itself looked like a television screen hooked up to some complicated hardware. Ed said that they could wire a patient up and bounce sound waves off the heart and pick up the echoes, and they would get a picture on the screen, an actual picture, of the heart in motion. It was a thousand times better than an electrocardiogram, he said: they could see the faults, the thickenings and cloggings, much more clearly.

  “Colour?” said Sally.

  “Black and white,” said Ed.

  Then Sally was possessed by a desire to see her own heart, in motion, in black and white, on the screen. At the dentist’s she always wants to see the X-rays of her teeth, too, solid and glittering in her cloudy head. “Do it,” she said, “I want to see how it works,” and though this was the kind of thing Ed would ordinarily evade or tell her she was being silly about, he didn’t need much persuading. He was fascinated by the thing himself, and he wanted to show it off.

  He checked to make sure there was nobody real booked for the room. Then he told Sally to slip out of her clothes, the top half, brassière and all. He gave her a paper gown and turned his back modestly while she slipped it on, as if he didn’t see her body every night of the week. He attached electrodes to her, the ankles and one wrist, and turned a switch and fiddled with the dials. Really a technician was supposed to do this, he told her, but he knew how to run the machine himself. He was good with small appliances.

  Sally lay prone on the table, feeling strangely naked. “What do I do?” she said.

  “Just lie there,” said Ed. He came over to her and tore a hole in the paper gown, above her left breast. Then he started running a probe over her skin. It was wet and slippery and cold, and felt like the roller on a roll-on deodorant.

  “There,” he said, and Sally turned her head. On the screen was a large grey object, like a giant fig, paler in the middle, a dark line running down the centre. The sides moved in and out; two wings fluttered in it, like an uncertain moth’s.

  “That’s it?” said Sally dubiously. Her heart looked so insubstantial, like a bag of gelatin, something that would melt, fade, disintegrate, if you squeezed it even a little.

  Ed moved the probe, and they looked at the heart from the bottom, then the top. Then he stopped the frame, then changed it from a positive to a negative image. Sally began to shiver.

  “That’s wonderful,” she said. He seemed so distant, absorbed in his machine, taking the measure of her heart, which was beating over there all by itself, detached from her, exposed and under his control.

  Ed unwired her and she put on her clothes again, neutrally, as if he were actually a doctor. Nevertheless this transaction, this whole room, was sexual in a way she didn’t quite understand; it was clearly a dangerous place. It was like a massage parlour, only for women. Put a batch of women in there with Ed and they would never want to come out. They’d want to stay in there while he ran his probe over their wet skins and pointed out to them the defects of their beating hearts.

  “Thank you,” said Sally.

  Sally hears the back door open and close. She feels Ed approaching, coming through the passages of the house towards her, like a small wind or
a ball of static electricity. The hair stands up on her arms. Sometimes he makes her so happy she thinks she’s about to burst; other times she thinks she’s about to burst anyway.

  He comes into the kitchen, and she pretends not to notice. He puts his arms around her from behind, kisses her on the neck. She leans back, pressing herself into him. What they should do now is go into the bedroom (or even the living room, even the den) and make love, but it wouldn’t occur to Ed to make love in the middle of the day. Sally often comes across articles in magazines about how to improve your sex life, which leave her feeling disappointed, or reminiscent: Ed is not Sally’s first and only man. But she knows she shouldn’t expect too much of Ed. If Ed were more experimental, more interested in variety, he would be a different kind of man altogether: slyer, more devious, more observant, harder to deal with.

  As it is, Ed makes love in the same way, time after time, each movement following the others in an exact order. But it seems to satisfy him. Of course it satisfies him: you can always tell when men are satisfied. It’s Sally who lies awake, afterwards, watching the pictures unroll across her closed eyes.

  Sally steps away from Ed, smiles at him. “How did you make out with the women today?” she says.

  “What women?” says Ed absently, going towards the sink. He knows what women.

  “The ones out there, hiding in the forsythia,” says Sally. “I counted at least ten. They were just waiting for a chance.”

  She teases him frequently about these troops of women, which follow him around everywhere, which are invisible to Ed but which she can see as plain as day.

  “I bet they hang around outside the front door of the hospital,” she will say, “just waiting till you come out. I bet they hide in the linen closets and jump out at you from behind, and then pretend to be lost so you’ll take them by the short cut. It’s the white coat that does it. None of those women can resist the white coats. They’ve been conditioned by Young Doctor Kildare.”7

  “Don’t be silly,” says Ed today, with equanimity. Is he blushing, is he embarrassed? Sally examines his face closely, like a geologist with an aerial photograph, looking for telltale signs of mineral treasure: markings, bumps, hollows. Everything about Ed means something, though it’s difficult at times to say what.

  Now he’s washing his hands at the sink, to get the earth off. In a minute he’ll wipe them on the dishtowel instead of using the hand towel the way he’s supposed to. Is that complacency, in the back turned to her? Maybe there really are these hordes of women, even though she’s made them up. Maybe they really do behave that way. His shoulders are slightly drawn up: is he shutting her out?

  “I know what they want,” she goes on. “They want to get into that little dark room of yours and climb up onto your table. They think you’re delicious. They’ll gobble you up. They’ll chew you into tiny pieces. There won’t be anything left of you at all, only a stethoscope and a couple of shoelaces.”

  Once Ed would have laughed at this, but today he doesn’t. Maybe she’s said it, or something like it, a few times too often. He smiles though, wipes his hands on the dishtowel, peers into the fridge. He likes to snack.

  “There’s some cold roast beef,” Sally says, baffled.

  Sally takes the sauce off the stove and sets it aside for later: she’ll do the last steps just before serving. It’s only two-thirty. Ed has disappeared into the cellar, where Sally knows he will be safe for a while. She goes into her study, which used to be one of the kids’ bedrooms, and sits down at her desk. The room has never been completely redecorated: there’s still a bed in it, and a dressing table with a blue flowered flounce Sally helped pick out, long before the kids went off to university: “flew the coop,” as Ed puts it.

  Sally doesn’t comment on the expression, though she would like to say that it wasn’t the first coop they flew. Her house isn’t even the real coop, since neither of the kids is hers. She’d hoped for a baby of her own when she married Ed, but she didn’t want to force the issue. Ed didn’t object to the idea, exactly, but he was neutral about it, and Sally got the feeling he’d had enough babies already. Anyway, the other two wives had babies, and look what happened to them. Since their actual fates have always been vague to Sally, she’s free to imagine all kinds of things, from drug addiction to madness. Whatever it was resulted in Sally having to bring up their kids, at least from puberty onwards. The way it was presented by the first wife was that it was Ed’s turn now. The second wife was more oblique: she said that the child wanted to spend some time with her father. Sally was left out of both these equations, as if the house wasn’t a place she lived in, not really, so she couldn’t be expected to have any opinion.

  Considering everything, she hasn’t done badly. She likes the kids and tries to be a friend to them, since she can hardly pretend to be a mother. She describes the three of them as having an easy relationship. Ed wasn’t around much for the kids, but it’s him they want approval from, not Sally; it’s him they respect. Sally is more like a confederate, helping them get what they want from Ed.

  When the kids were younger, Sally used to play Monopoly with them, up at the summer place in Muskoka Ed owned then but has since sold. Ed would play too, on his vacations and on the weekends when he could make it up. These games would all proceed along the same lines. Sally would have an initial run of luck and would buy up everything she had a chance at. She didn’t care whether it was classy real estate, like Boardwalk or Park Place, or those dingy little houses on the other side of the tracks; she would even buy train stations, which the kids would pass over, preferring to save their cash reserves for better investments. Ed, on the other hand, would plod along, getting a little here, a little there. Then, when Sally was feeling flush, she would blow her money on next-to-useless luxuries such as the electric light company; and when the kids started to lose, as they invariably did, Sally would lend them money at cheap rates or trade them things of her own, at a loss. Why not? She could afford it.

  Ed meanwhile would be hedging his bets, building up blocks of property, sticking houses and hotels on them. He preferred the middle range, respectable streets but not flashy. Sally would land on his spaces and have to shell out hard cash. Ed never offered deals, and never accepted them. He played a lone game, and won more often than not. Then Sally would feel thwarted. She would say she guessed she lacked the killer instinct; or she would say that for herself she didn’t care, because after all it was only a game, but he ought to allow the kids to win, once in a while. Ed couldn’t grasp the concept of allowing other people to win. He said it would be condescending towards the children, and anyway you couldn’t arrange to have a dice game turn out the way you wanted it to, since it was partly a matter of chance. If it was chance, Sally would think, why were the games so similar to one another? At the end, there would be Ed, counting up his paper cash, sorting it out into piles of bills of varying denominations, and Sally, her vast holdings dwindled to a few shoddy blocks on Baltic Avenue, doomed to foreclosure: extravagant, generous, bankrupt.

  On these nights, after the kids were asleep, Sally would have two or three more rye-and-gingers than were good for her. Ed would go to bed early—winning made him satisfied and drowsy—and Sally would ramble about the house or read the endings of murder mysteries she had already read once before, and finally she would slip into bed and wake Ed up and stroke him into arousal, seeking comfort.

  Sally has almost forgotten these games. Right now the kids are receding, fading like old ink; Ed on the contrary looms larger and larger, the outlines around him darkening. He’s constantly developing, like a Polaroid print, new colours emerging, but the result remains the same: Ed is a surface, one she has trouble getting beneath.

  “Explore your inner world,” said Sally’s instructor in Forms of Narrative Fiction, a middle-aged woman of scant fame who goes in for astrology and the Tarot pack and writes short stories, which are not published in any of the magazines Sally reads. “Then there’s your outer one,” Sally said
afterwards, to her friends. “For instance, she should really get something done about her hair.” She made this trivial and mean remark because she’s fed up with her inner world; she doesn’t need to explore it. In her inner world is Ed, like a doll within a Russian wooden doll, and in Ed is Ed’s inner world, which she can’t get at.

  She takes a crack at it anyway: Ed’s inner world is a forest, which looks something like the bottom part of their ravine lot, but without the fence. He wanders around in there, among the trees, not heading in any special direction. Every once in a while he comes upon a strange-looking plant, a sickly plant choked with weeds and briars. Ed kneels, clears a space around it, does some pruning, a little skillful snipping and cutting, props it up. The plant revives, flushes with health, sends out a grateful red blossom. Ed continues on his way. Or it may be a conked-out squirrel, which he restores with a drop from his flask of magic elixir. At set intervals an angel appears, bringing him food. It’s always meatloaf. That’s fine with Ed, who hardly notices what he eats, but the angel is getting tired of being an angel. Now Sally begins thinking about the angel: why are its wings frayed and dingy grey around the edges, why is it looking so withered and frantic? This is where all Sally’s attempts to explore Ed’s inner world end up.

  She knows she thinks about Ed too much. She knows she should stop. She knows she shouldn’t ask, “Do you still love me?” in the plaintive tone that sets even her own teeth on edge. All it achieves is that Ed shakes his head, as if not understanding why she would ask this, and pats her hand. “Sally, Sally,” he says, and everything proceeds as usual; except for the dread that seeps into things, the most ordinary things, such as rearranging the chairs and changing the burnt-out light-bulbs. But what is it she’s afraid of? She has what they call everything: Ed, their wonderful house on a ravine lot, something she’s always wanted. (But the hill is jungly, and the house is made of ice. It’s held together only by Sally, who sits in the middle of it, working on a puzzle.8 The puzzle is Ed. If she should ever solve it, if she should ever fit the last cold splinter into place, the house will melt and flow away down the hill, and then …) It’s a bad habit, fooling around with her head this way. It does no good. She knows that if she could quit she’d be happier. She ought to be able to: she’s given up smoking.