Variations on Coming of Age Fairy Tales

"What Her Mother Said" by Theodora Goss

Go, my child, through the forest
To your grandmother's house, in a glade
Where poppies with red mouths grow.

In this basket is an egg laid
Three days ago,
The three days our Lord lay sleeping,
Unspotted, from a white hen.
In this basket is also a skein,
Of wool, without stain,
Unspun. And a comb that the bees
Industriously filled
From the clover in the far pasture,
Unmown since the sun
Thawed it, last Spring.

If you can take it without breaking
Anything, I will give you
This ring.

Stay, child, and I'll give you this cap
To wear, so the forest creatures whose eyes
Blink from the undergrowth will be aware
That my love protects you. The creatures
Lurking beneath the trees,
Weasels and stoats and foxes, and worse
Than these.

And child, you must be wise
In the forest.

When the wolf finds you, remember:
Be courteous, but evasive. No answer
Is better than a foolish one.

If you stray from the path, know
That I strayed also. It is no great matter,
So long as you mark the signs:
Where moss grows on bark, where a robin
Builds her nest. The sun
Sailing west.

But do not stop to gather
The hawthorn flowers, nor yet
The red berries which so resemble
Coral beads. They are poisonous.
And do not stop to listen
To the reeds.

He must not be there first,
At your grandmother's house.

And when your grandmother serves you,
With a silver spoon, on a dish
Like a porcelain moon, Wolf Soup,
Remember to say your grace
Before you eat.

And know that I am pleased,
With you, my child.

But remember, when returning through the forest,
Kept warm against the night by a cloak
Of the wolf's pelt:
The hunter is also a wolf.


****************************************************

Persephone in Hades

by Theodora Goss

Poppies have never been my favorite flowers.
Here they bloom all year long, if one can say
a year in Hades, where no seasons pass,
where summer never fades. Ironic, that—
a land of death where nothing ever dies.

I have almost forgotten how it feels
when snowflakes fall and melt against my cheeks,
when frost spreads her white veil across the landscape,
covering the hills, decorating the leaves
that rattle on the trees with intricate lace.
I miss that time of year when autumn fires
bloom in the household hearths. Here, no fires burn.
Instead, among the wheat, the poppies sway:
an endless field to drug men into sleep,
relieve their pains or worries for a while,
here, in this silent land where all are welcome.

As silent as my husband, Hades himself,
who sits all day in his library reading scrolls
lost to the world above us. “Why did you bring me
to this stagnant country,” I ask him, “if not to talk?
To sit and brood in a chair made out of bones,
or stare out the window at the unchanging garden,
in which only yew trees grow, and never speak?
Why abduct the daughter of Demeter?
Why not some other girl?” He shakes his head
and sighs. He would be handsome, if not so lost
in his own dreams. Or if he would trim his beard.
“I saw your hair lift in the wind,” he says,
“and thought of it blowing back against my face,
but there is no wind down here. I saw your mouth
and thought perhaps it would kiss me, or whisper poems
into my ears. Perhaps then I’d wake up
from this endless sleep, this abyss of timelessness.
I thought you might love me in time, forgetting that love
cannot live in this land.” He looks at me, frowning.
“You’ll never love me, will you, Persephone?”
“Not,” I say, “as long as you keep me here,
while above us frost and snow blanket the earth—
away from death, among the endless dead.”
“Yet how can I let you go?” His eyes plead with me,
I suppose to be forgiven or understood,
but I turn away, unsympathetic. He should
know better: you cannot have love on such terms.
Even the gods, selfish as children, know that.

It is useless, here, to count the days, and yet
a day will come, a day without a dawn,
when I will feel that ache within my chest,
as though a string were tied around my heart,
and know, with crocuses and hyacinths,
it’s time to push my way through the dark soil
into the sunlight, into my mother’s arms.
It’s time to blossom like the olive trees,
be born again into mortality
for a little while, laugh and shake water drops
from my hair, dance across the sunlit meadows
sprinkled with daisies and cornflowers, forget the land
of death and poppies, at least for a little while.

To forget, for a little while, the silent husband
who waits implacably at summer’s end.

*************************************************

Snow, Blood, Fur

by Theodora Goss

She looks at herself in the full-length mirror of the bridal salon. She resembles a winter landscape, hills and hollows covered with snow, white and sparkling. She is the essence of purity, as though all that has ever blown through her is a chill wind. The veil falls and falls to her feet. She shivers.

"Are you cold, Rosie?" her mother asks.

She shakes her head, but she is cold, or rather she is Cold, a Snow Queen. If she breathed on the mirror, it would frost.

"Well, you look beautiful. Just beautiful. Nana would have been so proud."

When she gets home, she goes up to her bedroom and opens the closet door. In one corner, in a wooden toy box she has kept from her childhood, is the wolf skin. She puts it on, draping it around her shoulders, then steps into the closet, pulls the door closed behind her, and sits down beside a parade of high-heeled shoes.

It is dark, as dark as she imagines it must have been in the belly of the wolf.

Sometimes she still has nightmares.

She is walking through the forest. Pine needles and oak leaves crunch under her boots. Once in a while, blackberry bushes pull at her dress so she has to stop and untangle the canes. She is wearing the red cloak her grandmother knit and felted. In it, she looks like a Swiss girl, demure, flaxen-haired: a Christmas angel. Her grandmother gave it to her for her sixteenth birthday.

Suddenly, on the path ahead of her is the wolf. Dark fur, slavering red mouth. Sharp, pricked ears, yellow eyes as wild as undiscovered countries. Or it is a young man, a hunter by his clothing. He has a tweed cap on his head with a feather in it, and is carrying a rifle. When he sees her, he bows, although she cannot tell if he is serious or mocking.

"Aren't you afraid of the wolf, Mistress Rose? He has been seen in this forest. Perhaps I should escort you, wherever you might be going."

In her basket is a bottle of blackberry cordial, a small cake with currants. She is taking them to her grandmother, who has rheumatism. She has been told to beware wolves... and young men.

****************************************************

Her Mother's Ghosts

— by Theodora Goss —

Her name is Ilona. The other children at school call her Smellona. She is not me, but I have been her. Here are the things I remember most clearly:

---

She lives in a townhouse in Washington D.C. with her mother and younger brother, whose bangs are always cut crooked. It is the seventies. She and her brother wear clothes they will later call hideous in photographs, but now, today, they are not hideous, because brown is still a respectable color. They are playing under the cherry trees. The blossoms are everywhere, lying on the asphalt in heaps like pink snow.
In the kitchen drawer are silver spoons, smuggled in socks, the sleeves of pajamas. They are heavy, dulled with use. They are older than her mother, her grandmother. One is much worse for having slipped into the garbage disposal. In the kitchen cabinet are margarine tubs, more than ten, perhaps more than twenty, washed clean, ready in case the world runs out of margarine tubs. Don't laugh. It could happen.

---

Since Ilona turned seven, she has been haunted by her mother's ghosts. Once, late at night, she saw a train conductor coming out of the bathroom.
"Do you have your visa?" he asked her.
She shook her head. She was in a pink nightgown, and her feet were bare. The floor was cold.
"Then you can't cross the border," he said, looking down at her sternly. "You'll have to get out here, and speak to the station master."
She nodded. She really needed to go to the bathroom, but she was afraid that if she tried to slip past him, he would grab her. Then she would scream, and her mother would wake up. She would have to explain that she had had a nightmare. She could never tell her mother that she had seen her ghosts.
Once, when she was sitting at the kitchen table doing her homework, a man in a green plaid suit said to her, "You can't go to medical school. You're not qualified."
She stared at his tie, which had a pattern of wheat sheaves and small tractors. His neck turned red. Above his mustache, his cheeks and nose also turned red.
"Why haven't you joined the Party?" he asked with barely suppressed rage. She had not known that a question could sound so angry. She was afraid he was going to slap her.
After he disappeared, she could not think about her homework. Instead, she went out to the back garden and sat on the bricks, staring at the ivy that grew up the sides of the house. Sometimes sparrows built nests there, among the leaves, and in the mornings, especially, the ivy cheeped and stirred. Last spring, one of the stray cats had brought a baby sparrow in to breakfast and laid it down on the linoleum, like a gift.

---

At first she thought the stray cats were ghosts. They came in the evenings and sat on the bricks in the back garden. She would take them up to her bedroom. After they had stayed in her bedroom for three days, living on milk and chicken left over from the paprikás, they were allowed to stay.
Sometimes they disappeared as mysteriously as they had come. These, she decided, where ghost cats from the streets of Budapest. But others stayed, and during her childhood there were more and more cats, sitting on the sofa, scratching the legs of the dining room table, curling beside her when she slept at night, one on her feet, one at her side, one with his chin on her shoulder, purring into her ear. In the middle of the night, he liked to pull her hair with his claws. She would wake up, and that was when, more often than not, she would see the ghosts.

---

At first, she thought the voice on the telephone was a ghost. "Traitor!" it said. "We're coming to take your children. Why did you leave your parents? They miss you, your husband misses you. We'll put you in prison, with rats, and sewer water seeping over the floor!"
Soon after, they moved to the country. Her brother began a series of collections: stones from the streambed, insects, a selection of rusted nails. He kept them in shoe boxes, in his closet. The insects crawled out. Spiders began to spin webs in the corners of his room. Sometimes they would eat dinner with fireflies crawling over the ceiling. The stray cats kept leaving half-eaten caterpillars on the stairs.

---

More than once, Ilona saw her grandmother, an old woman with short gray hair and delicate wrists. As a girl, she had studied art. Later, she had been forbidden to sell her paintings. They arrived at holidays wrapped around boxes of chocolates. Her mother hung them in every room of the house, even the bathroom. If you stood close, you could still see creases where her mother had ironed the folds.
She always appeared as a thin wash, like one of her watercolors of the light over Lake Balaton. Through her, Ilona could see the banister, the dining room table, the swing hanging from an oak tree in the garden.
Once, she thought she saw her father standing by the oak tree. He was wearing a uniform, like the train conductor but with a red star on his cap. She thought he looked handsome, but he vanished quickly.

---

There is something I have forgotten to tell you. When she was twelve and still living in Washington D.C., day after day for a period of three months she saw tanks driving down the streets. On her way to school, on her way to the dentist. During these months, she could not sleep. She threw up everything but a slice of birthday cake at a party for a girl from school. She lost weight and developed dark circles under her eyes. Her mother took her to the doctor. She began to believe she was turning into a ghost.

---

You are angry with me. You say, this is not a story. It is merely a series of scenes, and of manufactured scenes at that. Your name is not Ilona. You never saw your mother's ghosts.
And of course you are right. When Ilona was seventeen, her mother died of breast cancer. After that, she never saw ghosts. Her brother grew up to be a famous entomologist. He is now a professor at Harvard. She grew up to be a writer, but not of stories. She writes about art, and sometimes architecture. She would never write this story, so I am writing it for her.
My mother did not die. Last year, she finished law school. My brother, a computer programmer, went to her graduation. They live by the ocean in California, where it is always sunny.
I rarely see them. I am haunted by ghosts, invisible, impalpable: the ghosts of silver spoons and margarine tubs, the smell of paprikás cooking on Sunday afternoons. The ghost of a country.
Sometimes, in my Boston apartment, I see her: the ghost of my mother, walking along the hallway, running her fingers over the piano. I see her from the back, wearing a dress with light blue and white checks. She made us both dresses out of that fabric, in Brussels. Once, a policeman stopped to ask me, with a wink, if I liked taking walks with my older sister.
When I see her, she is always walking away from me. And her back tells me, some things you can't understand, even by writing about them.