My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (80 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

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This activity transfixed me for hours upon hours and days upon days.
In time, my companion and I so well established ourselves in the cottage that soon we felt that we had lived there our entire lives. I presume we had
not
lived there our entire lives; yet of the event that drove us into the forest to the cottage I cannot speak, and not only because I cannot recall it. But I can tell you that we had so well established ourselves in this cottage that I was shocked one morning to discover, under my feather pillow, a miniature book that had not been there before. It proposed to criticize and describe the whitework on the walls.
Bound in black velvet, with a pink ribbon as a placeholder, the volume fit precisely in the palm of my hand, just as if it had been bound for me to hold there. Long—long I read, and devoutly, devotedly I gazed. Rapidly and gloriously the hours flew by and then the deep midnight came. (Not that I knew the day from night with the curtains so tightly drawn.) The bluebird was guttering—just a puddle of blue now, with yellow claws fashioned from pipe cleaners protruding from the edges of the blue puddle. I reached my hand out to try to build the wax once more into the form of a bird, but I achieved merely a shapeless mass of color. Regardless, the candlelight flamed up and shone more brightly than ever upon the black velvet book with onionskin pages.
In my zeal to illumine the onionskin, the better to learn about
Ma Marraine
and so on, I had, with the candle’s light, also illumined the corners of the room, where sat the mousetraps. Yes, this turret had corners—quite a remarkable thing, as the room was a circle. If I failed to perceive the corners before, I cannot explain . . . truly this architectural marvel of corners was a marvel inside a marvel, since even the turret itself was not visible from outside.
With the corners of the room thus illumined, I now saw very clearly in one corner, behind a mousetrap, a very small portrait of a young girl just ripening into womanhood. I don’t know how that phrase comes to me—“ripening into womanhood”—for I would prefer simply to describe the portrait as a very small portrait of a young lady. But, to continue, I could not look at the painting for long. I found I had to close my eyes as soon as I saw the portrait—why, I have no idea, but it seems to be that my injury, rather than being limited to my crippled legs, had crept inward to my mind, which had become more . . . impulsive or secretive, perhaps. I forced my eyes back on the portrait again.
It was nothing remarkable, more a vignette than an exposition. The girl was depicted from top to bottom, smudged here and there, fading into the background, reminiscent somehow of the
Kinder- und Hausmärchen
yes, you could describe her portrait as an illustration. She was a plain girl, not unlike me. Her eyes were sullen, her hair lank and unwashed, and even in the face and shoulders you could see she was undernourished—also not unlike me. (It is not my intention to plead my case to you or to anyone else, now or in the future; I merely
note
the resemblance.)
Something about the girl’s portrait startled me back to life. I had not even realized what a stupor I’d lain in, there in the turret, but looking into her sullen eyes, I awoke. My awakening had nothing to do with the girl herself, I believe, but rather with the bizarre execution of this portrait, this tiny portrait—no bigger than that of a mouse, yet life-size. And it was painted entirely white upon white, just like the embroidery on the walls.
Though I felt more awake and alive than ever before, I found that I was also suddenly overcome with sadness. I don’t know why, but I do know that when my companion brought me my nightly black coffee, I sent him away for a pitcher of blueberry wine. I asked for him also to bring me a pink-flowered teacup. My needs felt at once more urgent and delicate, and thankfully he was able to find articles in the cupboards that satisfied them.
For quite some time, drinking the wine, I gazed at the portrait of the sullen girl staring out of miniature eyes. At length, wholly unsatisfied with my inability to decipher the true secret of the portrait’s effect (and apparently unaware that I very nearly was standing), I fell into the trundle. I turned my frustrated attentions back to the small book I had found under the pillow. Greedily, I turned its onionskin pages to the girl’s portrait. “Flat, unadorned,” the page read. The rest of the description was missing—everything except a peculiar exclamation for an encyclopedia to contain:
SHE WAS DEAD!
“And I died.” Those are the words that came to my head. But I did not die then, nor did I many days and nights later, there in the forest, where I lived with my companion quite happily—not as husband and wife, yet neither as siblings: I cannot quite place the relation.
Soon, of course, I thought of nothing else but the girl in the painting. Nightly my companion brought me a teacup of blueberry wine, and nightly I drank it, asked for another, and wondered:
Who was she
?
Who am I?
I expected no answer—nay, nay, I did not wish for one either. For in my
wonder
I possessed complete satisfaction.
It was of no surprise to me, so accustomed to confusions, that one morning I awoke to find the painting vanished—and not only the painting but all the little priests with the little birds from the walls. No whitework, no turret, no companion. No blueberry wine. I found myself in a different small and dark room, again on a bed (not a trundle). An old woman and a doctor sat by my side.
“Poor dear,” the old woman murmured. She added that I would do well to take courage. As you may imagine, the old woman and doctor were at once subjected to the greatest of my suspicions; and as I subjected them privately, I also protested publicly, for I knew I had done nothing to lose all I had learned to love there in that mysterious prison or home. No: I should have been very happy to be lame and blurred, to have my companion bring me teacups of wine at night, and in the morning my coffee and rolls. I never minded that the rolls were so tough to the bite that my teeth had become quite loose in their sockets, as loose as my brain or the bluebirds in the forest when their nests are looted by ravens.
Cheerfully, the doctor spoke over my protests. He said that my prognosis relied on one thing, and one thing alone: to eliminate every gloomy idea. He pointed toward a room I had not noticed before. “You have the key to the Library,” he said. “Only be careful what you read.”
I wrote this story in the public library in a small town in Massachusetts, in the summertime. It was fishing season at the time. Outside, children in yellow slickers slung lines over the bridge as I drove to the library, buckets of still-living fish by their feet. But it was always fishing season in the library, with its dioramas of schooners and nets with starfish on the knotty pine walls. I sat at a table across from an old man doing crossword puzzles. He really looked like he belonged in
The Old Man and the Sea
. I had been reading Poe, and some scholarship on these instances in seventeenth-century novels of fairy-tale scenes. Somehow, the proximity of all that saltwater, combined with the Poe and the seventeenth-century German, transported me into this story. It is for me a most architectural story, a Joseph Cornell box or diorama, and by writing it I got, for a brief time, to live in the impossible cottage of my dreams. Certainly, it could be said to be a story about the anxiety of influence, or, perhaps more aptly, the influence of anxiety—it contains the code to my work with fairy tales as a writer, I think. But the code is submerged, just as secrets should be.
—KB
Sources
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Oval Portrait” (1848 version).
 
Karoline von Wolgozen,
Agnes von Lilien
(1798), as translated in Jeannine Blackwell’s essay “German Fairy Tales: A User’s Manual. Translation of Six Frames and Fragments by Romantic Women.” In Haase, Donald, ed.
Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches
. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004.
The End
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK HAS BEEN MANY YEARS IN THE MAKING. CONVERSATIONS with Maria Tatar about the perils and beauty of fairy-tale editorship provided inspiration and godmotherly guidance, as has her entire body of work. I would not have found John Siciliano at Penguin had Jack Zipes, a kind and most generous thinker, not pointed me toward him, and he is simply a national treasure. When invited to write a foreword to this collection, Gregory Maguire didn’t hesitate for a moment: what a gem! Kristen Scharold at Penguin was a dream to work with throughout the entire editorial process: meticulous, enthusiastic, and kind, she deserves all gratitude. And the book would not exist had Carmen Giménez Smith and I not met after a fairy-tale reading at AWP and discussed our shared vision that a book like this would someday exist. In compiling this volume, odd research needs were fulfilled, often at the very last minute: so thank you, Amanda Phillips, Morgan Fahey, and Hanne Winarsky and Christopher Chung at Princeton University Press. To all the contributors to this volume—you must know that our correspondence over the years of this book’s evolution has been illuminating, moving, and deeply satisfying to me. This book also owes so much to many writers, known and anonymous, past and present, who are the spirit of the tradition, and it belongs, too, to the children who are hearing fairy tales for the first time. From my graduate and undergraduate fairy-tale workshop students at the University of Alabama, I had the privilege of talking to a new generation of avid fairy-tale readers and future authors. To my parents, siblings, in-laws, and their children, your support is invaluable. The University of Nebraska Press, current publisher of
Fairy Tale Review
, and The University of Alabama Press, its former publisher, are rare and wonderful havens for fairy tales. I would also like to extend my deepest gratitude and admiration to Maria Massie and John Siciliano, who have honored my fairy-tale habit with care. Finally, Brent and Xia, you are my fairy-tale family, full of bliss.
—KB
 
Thank you to Kate Bernheimer. Kate’s exquisite vision of the book’s possibility and her ability to orchestrate such an ambitious endeavor is awe-inspiring. I’d also like to thank Evan Lavender-Smith, who helped me a great deal on this project, and Sofia and Jackson for giving their mother space when she needed to work. I’d like to thank Dylan Retzinger for his eleventh-hour help, and, finally, the writers, past and present, who bring us such joy in their work.
—CGS
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

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