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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (15 page)

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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But children grow up, God bless them, they do and reach out and up and try things all on their own, things that even their own parents don’t always know about. And so I met your daughter, your little princess, on the Internet and have become her friend. What a place for people like us, you and I, the liars and braggarts and ghosts of this world. Such a nice place to hide and pretend and so I do, I am a lovely little teenage girl named “Samantha” with hair like hand-spun gold, and I live in Texas with my family of five with our dog named “Bubbles” and a boyfriend named “Cory”—yes, I used your husband’s name, I knew it would seal the deal when a squeal from your daughter was followed by “That’s my dad’s name, too! LOL!” Oh yes, she is mine for hours at a time now and we dream and talk and chatter on about a life together at college or beyond. It has been beautiful and filled with laughter and delight, not ugly like what you did to me, not wrong like how you used me. No. It has been so so beautiful and it needs to continue, must continue, and I know you have set restrictions on her recently because she gets online the second you leave the house and complains about you and so I know. But you will let her have this friend, won’t you? Yes, or everything will be revealed. Do you understand me? All of it and to the end. I will ruin you and your perfect little fairy-tale life if you stop her from “seeing” me. Obviously I can never meet her or tell her the truth, one day she will drift away from me and that will be that, as they say, I know this and accept it as fate. Kismet. Karma, not instant but destined and acceptable. But it is not for you to decide so stay away and so will I. That is the deal. That is the cost, my dear. She is yours, to be sure, but she is also mine now and mine she will stay. For as long as I can hold her she will be mine as well. Mine, mine, mine.
She’s beautiful out there, isn’t she? Dancing on the grass and running with her friends. I’ve had to send her photos of myself very carefully—using my little niece as a stand-in—but what I’ve seen of her has been no lie. She is perfect and golden and the one good thing to come out of the filthy ways you used me and soiled a part of my life. Don’t look away because you know it’s true. I hate women and their wily selves; I know men can suck and often do but you are a more treacherous creature overall, surely you recognize that as a truth. You ruined me and left me for dead. You built this burnished little life and happy little world on the shit and bones of my carcass without looking back—and now all I ask is that you continue to look away. Look off some other way when you see her sitting at the computer, giggling and talking with her “friends” on Facebook and Twitter and all the crap I’ve been reduced to just to be near her. My daughter. Look away, go into another room and leave us alone, and by doing so your own rotten, deceitful life can exist for yet another day. Do you agree, my dear? Oh, how I hope so. Here in my broken heart of hearts.
If you want me, need me, long for me as I do for you, my hated, hateful dear, you know where to find me. Lost in space. Out there, somewhere. [email protected].
I see you not looking at me. Head turned. Tears in your eyes. I so wish I knew what you were thinking, but then again, I never really did, did I, so why would it matter now? And it doesn’t. All that matters is you know the truth. Where we stand. And the truth of the matter is I’m here now. I am here and I’m not going away, no, I’m not. Not ever, my dear. Not for a very very very long time.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the Rumpelstiltskin story and its title character—he’s a nasty piece of work, but, for some reason, I feel for the little guy. After all, he does exactly what he promises to do and asks for only one thing in return; he keeps his promise when those around him break theirs and is publicly humiliated and sent shrieking off into the night (I suppose the fact that he’s asking for a baby as his prize does make some difference). Still, I love the “person who returns” in literature and “Rumpelstiltskin” is a perfect example of revenge as a motif in the fairy tale. It’s also just a lot of fun, the whole damn story—I mean, he spins gold out of straw, for God’s sake!
I always felt like the deck was so improbably stacked against Rumpelstiltskin and still he plunges forward with his offer of salvation—he’s a bit of a Shylock in this sense and anti-Semitic sentiment has even been heaped on his head throughout the ages. This guy can’t cut a break!
I’ve always worried that we’re too easy on the beautiful people in this world and so it’s little surprise that I find my overweight, average self drawn to this most romantic and fated of antiheroes. So it goes with writers—we can’t help but imagine new ways in and out of age-old troubles.
This is my attempt at giving the man his due, set in an updated world and filtered through a modern sensibility. I sincerely hope you enjoyed the ride.
—NL
SHELLEY JACKSON
The Swan Brothers
YOU ARE WALKING DOWN A FAMILIAR STREET AT DUSK. MEAT IS cooking. In the shadows down the block, you see a cardboard box, flaps open. The street is deserted; you will either be the first to look inside the box, or it has already been plundered; either way, there’s no reason to hurry, but you do. There is a limited variety of things left in boxes in your neighborhood: shoes gone the shape of feet, dusty videos, mugs with ceramic frogs amusingly glued inside them. You are hoping for books, and that’s what you find. Not many—others have preceded you—but you stoop anyway and poke through the pile, pushing aside
The Big Book of Birds
and
What to Expect When You’re Expecting.
You are drawn to the shape, the color, the design of the book before you have made out the title. It is a durable old Dover paperback, its thick cover leathery with use and still bright red, except for a pink band along the top where a shorter neighboring book allowed sunlight to hit it. It is a small, fat, leather-bound book with marbled edges, its morocco binding glove-soft and chipped at the spine. It is a vintage pocket paperback with a keyhole on the spine, a map on the back, and a still life on the front: a quill pen, a bottle of ink, and a spindle.
When you flip through the book, more to feel the thick pages ruffle smoothly across your thumb, like an old deck of cards, than to check the contents, you find, pressed between two pages, a feather. It is white, it is black with an iridescent sheen, it is pigeon-gray, in any case you pin it to the left-hand page with your thumb as you begin reading, walking on. You like to start books in the middle. Maybe you like the challenge of trying to figure out what’s going on. Maybe you just like doing things differently. In any case, you are soon engrossed, though the page waxes and wanes as you pass under the streetlights, and it is sometimes hard to make out the words.
It’s a good thing you read so much when you were a child, or you wouldn’t know what to think—you read—when you turn the corner on the greasy little street—a pigeon startles up, leaving a lone feather stuck to the asphalt—and see the dusty storefront into which the woman, her hands, wrists, and forearms so swollen that she appears to be wearing down opera gloves, is dragging a stuffed, heavy-duty lawn-and-leaf bag with numerous rents out of which what must be nettles are protruding. But since you have read every single one of Andrew Lang’s color-coded Fairy Books, even the ugly olive-green one, you recognize at once that she is a daughter and, more important, a sister, who is involved in the long, difficult, and not always rewarding work of saving her brothers from—you duck reflexively at a whirring vortex in the air: that pigeon again.
The woman, who has held the door open with her rump while she edged the bag inside, turns into the brightly lit interior and lets the door slam shut. It doesn’t matter, you can watch through the big shop window, despite the posters pasted all over it. Because you’ve read a lot of stories, you’re not surprised when she seats herself at a spinning wheel, behind which a row of brown, bristly little shirts hang from hooks screwed into the wall.
Because you’ve also lived—you’ve been living and reading for years, sometimes both at once—you are not surprised that people often repeat their most unpleasant experiences. It’s probably for the same reason we tell the same stories over and over, with minor variations—“The Seven Ravens,” “The Seven Doves,” “The Twelve Ducks,” “The Six Swans.” It is cozy to have one’s expectations met, though there is also, always, the possibility—is this is a happy thought or a sad one?—that things will turn out differently, this time.
THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST REMEMBERS
A young woman, who must be rather good at the domestic arts, to spin thread out of nettles, to weave cloth from that thread, to sew shirts from that cloth—or who will certainly, in six years, become good at them—is sitting in a room made of stone, her tongue a stone. She has been silent for two years, three months, four days. The sun is slanting through an unglazed hole in the thick wall, warming her knee, lighting up one leg of the spinning wheel and the rim of the basket of nettles. A bug buzzes up from them and whacks the rim of the basket, crawls along it, crawls all the way around it.
She has wicked thoughts. For instance:
Is self-sacrifice always a virtue?
If their positions were reversed, would her brothers do the same for her?
Would she want them to?
What is it
like
to fly?
Here’s how she imagines it: in a room just like this one, a basket of nettles at her knee, she is spinning. The stool knocks on the uneven floor as she foots the treadle. The thread is passing through her fingers, burning. Her skin prickles, comes out in bumps, more blisters no doubt, but on her chest, her ass, her back, her shoulders—that at least is new. Then she goes hot all over with tiny bursting pains, as if the blisters have broken all at once. Every pore is the head of a needle through which a thread is passing, or cloth through which a needle is passing; she is like a sun in an old painting, sending zips of light in every direction. Only it’s quills now crowding through her skin. They are pinkish gray, tightly curled and wet from her insides, but in the air they unfurl and dry to white until she is thatched all over with feathers, and at the same time her legs are tightening, hardening, shrinking. She walks out of the neck of her suddenly gigantic gown. A great force is pulling on her fingers, stretching them; feathers as strong as fingers shoot out of her wrists and the backs of her hands. She presses her lips together to keep herself from crying out and her whole face pouts and tightens. And then she cries out after all and, amazed by the sound she makes, spreads her wings and hurls herself through the window into the rushing sky.
She spins faster, to punish herself for her thoughts. The wheel thumps. The spindle twirls. Nettles race through her fingers. The pain is extraordinary. Her hands are no longer hands, but flames, or stars, or voices singing.
THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST DREAMS
The performance artist has two kinds of dreams about flying. In one, she is swimming in air, doing a strenuous frog kick just to stay a few feet out of reach of the murderer who is calmly waiting for her to tire. In the other, after a running start, she simply lifts her feet and swoops up and away. She rises effortlessly, the sky is hers; suddenly, though, she is frightened, it seems that she is not flying but falling upward, she has gone too far, she may never return to earth, or to the murderer far below, who is now the only one who remembers her, but who has already stopped looking up at the shrinking speck in the sky, and is trudging home with the spade over her shoulder, thinking about dinner.
BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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