“Not altogether romantic of you, now, is it,” the witch says mildly as she stirs the brew, “suggesting that poor put-upon wives ignore their spouses’ transgressions with such vigor, all in the name of pragmatism and material comfort?”
“In the name of peace and love,” the fairy godmother says firmly.
“Is it, though? Is it, really?” The witch shrugs. “Well, you are the resident expert on love around here, I just clean up the mess afterward. Still, from where I stand, it seems much more pleasant to be eating éclairs amidst silk cushions in some lovely little palace than to be getting soaked at a crossroads. It pays to be oblivious, wouldn’t you agree, for as long as you can take it—or should I say, fake it?”
“I don’t see what you’re implying here,” the fairy godmother blusters.
I do, though, and my breath hitches with a sudden sense of unease.
“Please.” My voice breaks a little. “Please. Can we just get on with this?”
The surface of the potion has continued to flicker all the while.
When we look down, it is already spring in another year.
The Middle of the Middle
In her twenty-ninth year, she began to have unsettling dreams, of herself drifting lost—and, shockingly, naked—through dark, scented places where no walls ran straight, no angles were right, but everything curved and wavered and candles quivered and peaches dripped and cats streaked softly past her bare calves. When she awoke, her rib cage heaved as if something untamed were beating against it from the inside, and there was a hot heaviness somewhere at her core, at the bottom of her stomach, perhaps, that she did not understand and did not like. On such mornings, she threw on her dress, ran to the nursery, and, relieving Nanny Nanny (who was shedding just then and welcomed rest), drew princesses and built cardboard castles with Angie, then, after putting her down for a nap, sat by her bed and told her about the ball, about the slipper, hurrying just ahead of the child’s questions in her scramble to reach the happy ending, again and again.
“And they danced together all night,” she would say in a rush, “until the clock began to strike midnight. Then she fled as fast as she could, and in her haste lost one glass slipper on the stairs. And the prince declared that he would marry the girl whom it fit. And all the girls in the kingdom tried it on, but it fit no one, until the courier came with it to our house. My ugly stepsisters did their best to squeeze their big, ugly feet into it, but they failed. And then the courier got down on one knee and put the slipper on my foot, and of course it fit perfectly. They took me to the palace, and dressed me in beautiful clothes, and held the royal wedding, and then the prince and I lived happily ever after, while the stepsisters got just what they deserved. Gloria, the older one, never married at all and became a bitter spinster, while Melissa married someone so poor she now spends all her time scrubbing floors and washing dishes!”
But as she told the story over and over, it grew leached of inner meaning, as a word might when one repeated it too often, and she started to find it oddly lacking. What if the slipper had fit someone else—would the prince have married the other girl instead, would he have even known the difference? Was she, in fact, all that different from every other maiden with a sweet singing voice and a patient disposition? What exactly had he liked about her at the ball—the way she waltzed, the cut of her bodice, the childlike size of her feet? Why hadn’t they asked each other’s names, or, failing that, favorite colors at least, or favorite ice cream flavors? Also, and most disconcertingly, why did the recollection of the young courier kneeling before her—the brief pressure of his hand upon her bare instep as he had helped guide it inside the slipper, the golden brown of his gaze that had lingered one moment too long on her lips, the soft burr of his accent (like her, he had come from a distant land as a child)—why did it make her feel so profoundly unsettled?
It was at this point in her ruminations that she rose and, blushing, went to see her husband. They had not been alone in quite some time. The guard at Prince Roland’s door muttered apologies while trying to bar her way into the study, but she distracted him with her most radiant smile, ducked under his elbow, and pushed the door open. The prince sat behind his massive oak desk, his elegant fingers steepled, his eyes closed, a thoughtful look on his face, while one of the Singing Maids—they only ever employed singing maids in the palace—appeared to be crawling in search of something underneath the desk, her ample uniformed rump protruding beyond the desk’s carved phoenixes and vines, undulating in some hurried rhythm.
At the slamming of the door, Prince Roland’s eyes flew open, his eyebrows flew up, and he said, his usually smooth voice rather husky: “Esmeralda, you may stop looking for that thumbtack now, my wife is here.”
She heard a choked exclamation, a rustling of clothes, and presently Esmeralda emerged from under the desk, a bit rumpled and red-cheeked, her mouth slack, her small black eyes running about her face like startled beetles. She gave the maid a polite nod, then, once the door closed behind the woman, went and sat in Prince Roland’s lap, entwining her arms about his neck.
“I love you,” she said. “Do you love me?”
Without replying, he pulled her closer with a jerk. She gasped. His gaze seemed both intent and unfocused, and before she quite knew what was happening, his lips were devouring her neck. And then that persistent warm, heavy feeling somewhere at her core flared up, and everything grew urgent and new and vastly surprising, and she was lost in the fumbling tangle of skirts, the helpless, eager need to undo his britches (which had somehow proved already undone—but no matter), the awkward struggle to accommodate their arms, their legs, their rocking to the confines of the chair, to the shamelessness of the afternoon light flooding the windows, all of it so rushed, so vital, so unlike the few (so very few) nighttime, chaste, brief, sweet, embarrassed, blanketed, invisible, horizontal couplings of their first year of marriage (and none at all since she had found herself with Angie—which she had always assumed to be the proper way of these things—so why now, why this?—but no matter, no matter) . . . A button popped, the chair groaned, he groaned, she felt something unexpected rising in her, something overwhelming, akin to a powerful command to close her eyes and fall backward, trusting some great new sensation to break her fall—a sensation so unfamiliar, so freeing, so imperative as to be almost frightening. But just as it had started without warning, so now, without warning, it was over, everything was over, and, still poised on the brink of that fall into the unknown that she had not taken, that she sensed she would never take now, she felt something inside her shifting, tilting, growing unhinged and unmoored.
He tipped her off without ceremony, adjusted his clothes. His eyes came into focus and were absent. Hurriedly she dropped her skirts to the ground, to cover her shame—and, to her terror, dissolved into sobs.
“Please,” he said, frowning. “I must work now. What is it?”