“It’s nothing,” she said, and pulled herself together, then added in a small voice, “I love you, Roland.”
“I love you, too.” There was a barely perceptible pause. “My dear.”
He began sifting through papers on his desk.
She fled the room.
In later months, as she lay sleepless, stroking the dome of her belly where the baby was kicking, she found herself haunted by that anonymous endearment, by that pause in his words. And since she did not wish to give in to her unease, she began telling tales to the baby growing inside her, whispering familiar old stories into the mound of taut flesh. Yet now the comfort fare of the miller’s son, and the miller’s daughter, and the beggar girl all marrying their princesses and princes failed to soothe her, even if it still made her feel just as if she were settling down to knitting in her favorite armchair. And her unease grew, until one night, as she stood by the window, watching a pale moon rise above the black park, listening to the distant wail of a lonely siren, she realized that, quite simply, she no longer wanted to do any knitting in any armchairs.
What she wanted was to leave on a journey through mysterious twilit woods full of uncanny creatures and unexpected encounters.
And so, she began to invent.
She invented a world unlike anything she had ever known, anything she had ever heard of. She was used to small villages and bustling market towns where everyone greeted everyone else by name, so she invented an improbable city—a city so immense that all the passersby were strangers to one another and every chance “Good morning” could become the beginning of an exhilarating adventure. She was used to frivolously ornamental palaces that looked like baroque wedding cakes overflowing with frills, curls, and lace, so she imagined the lines of her city to be sleek and simple, all glass and metal. She was used to rigid fairyland rules dictating every move and every outcome, so she made life in the outlandish world of her fancy fantastical and unpredictable, for in that world there existed true magic—the magic of choice.
The ease of her invention took her by surprise: it was almost as if she were describing a place she had seen in some intense, vivid dream.
“Once upon a time,” she would tell her belly, “there lived a man who had a wife and a daughter . . . But no, that’s not the right beginning, it’s not about the man at all. Let me start again. Once upon a time, there lived a little girl whose parents loved her, and she was happy until her mother got sick and died. Then she grew so sad that her father decided to take her somewhere far, far away from all the sadness. They climbed onto a magic silver bird, flew across the ocean, and came to a great city, and she soon knew it for the most magnificent city in the world. Astonishing things happened there day and night—and nights were as bright and full as days, for the city never slept and it never grew dark. Enchanted lights floated above pavements, palaces stretched a hundred blazing stories into the sky, the streets were full of shiny carriages that moved without horses. Thousands of wizards who knew the secrets of the universe and could turn paper into gold and dirt into diamonds jostled one another on the sidewalks, leopards and monkeys cavorted in a great menagerie in the city’s wooded heart, pictures of beautiful princesses flashed on and off above broad squares, and there were treasures to look at everywhere you turned—necklaces and shoes and toys and roses and oh, so many things, dogs, jugglers, pigeons, churches, bridges, balloons, guitar players, parks, guardsmen, marching bands, pretzels, stone lions, fortune-tellers, people laughing, people crying, people fighting, people kissing, people living.”
The girl’s father found work doing handyman’s jobs in an elegant inn. The widow who ran the inn smiled at him whenever she met him in the hallways, and after a while he and the woman married. But he was not happy, for the glitter of the city was making him anxious, and one day his heart gave up and stopped beating, just like that.
And so the little girl was left all alone in the world, with no one but her stepmother to take care of her. And the stepmother was bossy, and the stepsisters uncaring, and when she turned fourteen, they made her clean after the guests who stayed in the inn. Morning and evening, she carried her bucket and broom down long corridors, knocking on doors and calling “Maid service,” entering to change stained sheets, mop bathroom floors, wipe steamed-up mirrors. She did not mind the work, but she longed to go outside, into the streets, where the magic of life was sweeping through without cease. Sometimes she would press her nose to a window and, from the height of the third, sixth, tenth floor, spy on the world below. One spring, one of those enchanted pictures, larger than life, was always blinking on and off on a building across the way, and she watched it light up, over and over, in childlike wonder. It showed a lovely woman in a flowing white dress who stood in a half swoon, her back arched, her eyes half closed, her swanlike neck exposed, while a gorgeous man all in black was bending over her, swirling some mysterious potion from a glowing blue bottle into a glass he was holding up to her half-open lips. There was something about the expression on the woman’s face, the slackening of the woman’s mouth, that made the girl catch her breath every time the picture flashed up. The woman seemed to belong to some other world—a world out of reach for mere mortals, a hidden, thrilling world of beauty and happiness.
One day, she promised herself, she, too, would live there.
And in time, the girl in these secret predawn stories did grow up and go to a dance and have a wedding, just like the girl in the oft-told romance Angie demanded now at every bedtime; but the sequence of these events was much less certain, the girl had decisions to make, and every tale was different in some small, subtle way that yet made her feel more alive in the telling. In none of these stories was there a fairy godmother who popped out of nowhere, nearly stabbed her in the eye with a wand, and trapped her in an insipid blue banality shaped like an upside-down cupcake. No, she had saved what modest wages she had received for helping out in the hotel—the stepmother was stern but fair—then went to a splendid shop that stretched over several lustrous floors and there found a beautiful dress all her own. In some versions, the dress was black, long, and elegant and clung to her hips just so, and in others, yellow, short, and sassy, shot through with sparkle. And when she tried it on in the bathroom she shared with her stepsisters (who were, incidentally, selfish as all teenage sisters were wont to be, but hardly the insensitive monsters of the familiar story), she loved the girl who looked back at her from the mirror, for the girl’s lips were those of a woman and the girl’s eyes shone with a great desire to live.
The dance was an annual gala held in the hotel ballroom, and she sneaked in without an invitation, using her knowledge of service corridors. Unlike the other ball, this one had many princes, and she chose the one she liked best. She chose him before he chose her, and not because he was rich or desired by all but because she liked the boyish shyness of his golden-brown gaze, the soft cadence of his accent, the warmth of his hand when it found its way into the small of her back. But of course, the man she picked would change with each retelling, too, just like the dress. Sometimes he would be blue-eyed, suave, and dazzling, and other times mysterious, silent, and dark. In all the versions, though, she fell in love without a doubt, and her love was like the home she had always dreamed of having, warm and thrilling and filled with shared understanding—and reflected, just as deep and certain, in her beloved’s brown, or green, or cornflower-blue eyes.