Stranger Things Happen (13 page)

#

It is steamy and damp in the house, and you have to climb down
the chimney, past the roaring fire, to get inside. Bae leaps down
the chimney, hooves first, scattering coals everywhere. The Finmany
woman is smaller and rounder than the woman of Lapmark. She looks
to you like a lump of pudding with black currant eyes. She wears
only a greasy old slip, and an apron that has written on it, "If
you can't stand the heat, stay out of my kitchen."

She recognizes Bae even faster than his mother had, because, as
it turns out, she was the one who turned him into a reindeer for
teasing her about her weight. Bae apologizes, insincerely, you
think, but the Finmany woman says she will see what she can do
about turning him back again. She isn't entirely hopeful. It seems
that a kiss is the preferred method of transformation. You don't
offer to kiss him, because you know what that kind of thing leads
to.

The Finmany woman reads the piece of dried cod by the light of
her cooking fire, and then she throws the fish into her cooking
pot. Bae tells her about Kay and the Snow Queen, and about your
feet, because your lips have frozen together on the last leg of the
journey, and you can't speak a word.

"You're so clever and strong," the reindeer says to the Finmany
woman. You can almost hear him add 
and fat 
under
his breath. "You can tie up all the winds in the world with a bit
of thread. I've seen you hurling the lightning bolts down from the
hills as if they were feathers. Can't you give her the strength of
ten men, so that she can fight the Snow Queen and win Kay
back?"

"The strength of ten men?" the Finmany woman says. "A lot of
good that would do! And besides, he doesn't love her."

Bae smirks at you, as if to say, I told you so. If your lips
weren't frozen, you'd tell him that she isn't saying anything that
you don't already know. "Now!" the Finmany woman says, "take her up
on your back one last time, and put her down again by the bush with
the red berries. That marks the edge of the Snow Queen's garden;
don't stay there gossiping, but come straight back. You were a
handsome boy—I'll make you twice as good-looking as you were
before. We'll put up flyers, see if we can get someone to come and
kiss you."

"As for you, missy," she says. "Tell the Snow Queen now that we
have Bae back, that we'll be over at the Palace next Tuesday for
bridge. Just as soon as he has hands to hold the cards."

She puts you on Bae's back again, giving you such a warm kiss
that your lips unfreeze, and you can speak again. "The woman of
Lapmark is coming for tea tomorrow," you tell her. The Finmany
woman lifts Bae, and you upon his back, in her strong, fat arms,
giving you a gentle push up the chimney.

#

Good morning, ladies, it's nice to have you on the premiere Snow
Queen Tour. I hope that you all had a good night's sleep, because
today we're going to be traveling quite some distance. I hope that
everyone brought a comfortable pair of walking shoes. Let's have a
head count, make sure that everyone on the list is here, and then
we'll have introductions. My name is Gerda, and I'm looking forward
to getting to know all of you.

#

Here you are at last, standing before the Snow Queen's palace,
the palace of the woman who enchanted your lover and then stole him
away in her long white sleigh. You aren't quite sure what you are
going to say to her, or to him. When you check your pocket, you
discover that your list has disappeared. You have most of it
memorized, but you think maybe you will wait and see, before you
say anything. Part of you would like to turn around and leave
before the Snow Queen finds you, before Kay sees you. You are
afraid that you will burst out crying or even worse, that he will
know that you walked barefoot on broken glass across half the
continent, just to find out why he left you.

The front door is open, so you don't bother knocking, you just
walk right in. It isn't that large a palace, really. It is about
the size of your own house and even reminds you of your own house,
except that the furniture, Danish modern, is carved out of
blue-green ice—as are the walls and everything else. It's a
slippery place and you're glad that you are wearing the robber
girl's boots. You have to admit that the Snow Queen is a meticulous
housekeeper, much tidier than you ever were. You can't find the
Snow Queen and you can't find Kay, but in every room there are
white geese who, you are in equal parts relieved and surprised to
discover, don't utter a single word.

"Gerda!" Kay is sitting at a table, fitting the pieces of a
puzzle together. When he stands up, he knocks several pieces of the
puzzle off the table, and they fall to the floor and shatter into
even smaller fragments. You both kneel down, picking them up. The
table is blue, the puzzle pieces are blue, Kay is blue, which is
why you didn't see him when you first came into the room. The geese
brush up against you, soft and white as cats.

"What took you so long?" Kay says. "Where in the world did you
get those ridiculous boots?" You stare at him in disbelief.

"I walked barefoot on broken glass across half a continent to
get here," you say. But at least you don't burst into tears. "A
robber girl gave them to me."

Kay snorts. His blue nostrils flare. "Sweetie, they're
hideous."

"Why are you blue?" you ask.

"I'm under an enchantment," he says. "The Snow Queen kissed me.
Besides, I thought blue was your favorite color."

Your favorite color has always been yellow. You wonder if the
Snow Queen kissed him all over, if he is blue all over. All the
visible portions of his body are blue. "If you kiss me," he says,
"you break the spell and I can come home with you. If you break the
spell, I'll be in love with you again."

You refrain from asking if he was in love with you when he
kissed the Snow Queen. Pardon me, you think,
when 
she 
kissed him. "What is that puzzle you're
working on?" you ask.

"Oh, that," he says. "That's the other way to break the spell.
If I can put it together, but the other way is easier. Not to
mention more fun. Don't you want to kiss me?"

You look at his blue lips, at his blue face. You try to remember
if you liked his kisses. "Do you remember the white cat?" you say.
"It didn't exactly run away. I took it to the woods and left it
there."

"We can get another one," he says.

"I took it to the woods because it was telling me things."

"We don't have to get a talking cat," Kay says. "Besides, why
did you walk barefoot across half a continent of broken glass if
you aren't going to kiss me and break the spell?" His blue face is
sulky.

"Maybe I just wanted to see the world," you tell him. "Meet
interesting people."

The geese are brushing up against your ankles. You stroke their
white feathers and the geese snap, but gently, at your fingers.
"You had better hurry up and decide if you want to kiss me or not,"
Kay says. "Because she's home."

When you turn around, there she is, smiling at you like you are
exactly the person that she was hoping to see.

The Snow Queen isn't how or what you'd expected. She's not as
tall as you— you thought she would be taller. Sure, she's
beautiful, you can see why Kay kissed her (although you are
beginning to wonder why she kissed him), but her eyes are black and
kind, which you didn't expect at all. She stands next to you, not
looking at Kay at all, but looking at you. "I wouldn't do it if I
were you," she says.

"Oh come on," Kay says. "Give me a break, lady. Sure it was
nice, but you don't want me hanging around this icebox forever, any
more than I want to be here. Let Gerda kiss me, we'll go home and
live happily ever after. There's supposed to be a happy
ending."

"I like your boots," the Snow Queen says.

"You're beautiful," you tell her.

"I don't believe this," Kay says. He thumps his blue fist on the
blue table, sending blue puzzle pieces flying through the air.
Pieces lie like nuggets of sky-colored glass on the white backs of
the geese. A piece of the table has splintered off, and you wonder
if he is going to have to put the table back together as well.

"Do you love him?"

You look at the Snow Queen when she says this and then you look
at Kay. "Sorry," you tell him. You hold out your hand in case he's
willing to shake it.

"Sorry!" he says. "You're sorry! What good does that do me?"

"So what happens now?" you ask the Snow Queen.

"Up to you," she says. "Maybe you're sick of traveling. Are
you?"

"I don't know," you say. "I think I'm finally beginning to get
the hang of it."

"In that case," says the Snow Queen, "I may have a business
proposal for you."

"Hey!" Kay says. "What about me? Isn't someone going to kiss
me?"

You help him collect a few puzzle pieces. "Will you at least do
this much for me?" he asks. "For old time's sake. Will you spread
the word, tell a few single princesses that I'm stuck up here? I'd
like to get out of here sometime in the next century. Thanks. I'd
really appreciate it. You know, we had a really nice time, I think
I remember that."

#

The robber girl's boots cover the scars on your feet. When you
look at these scars, you can see the outline of the journey you
made. Sometimes mirrors are maps, and sometimes maps are mirrors.
Sometimes scars tell a story, and maybe someday you will tell this
story to a lover. The soles of your feet are stories—hidden in the
black boots, they shine like mirrors. If you were to take your
boots off, you would see reflected in one foot-mirror the Princess
Briar Rose as she sets off on her honeymoon, in her enormous
four-poster bed, which now has wheels and is pulled by twenty white
horses.

It's nice to see women exploring alternative means of
travel.

In the other foot-mirror, almost close enough to touch, you
could see the robber girl whose boots you are wearing. She is
setting off to find Bae, to give him a kiss and bring him home
again. You wouldn't presume to give her any advice, but you do hope
that she has found another pair of good sturdy boots.

Someday, someone will probably make their way to the Snow
Queen's palace, and kiss Kay's cold blue lips. She might even
manage a happily ever after for a while.

You are standing in your black laced boots, and the Snow Queen's
white geese mutter and stream and sidle up against you. You are
beginning to understand some of what they are saying. They grumble
about the weight of the sleigh, the weather, your hesitant jerks at
their reins. But they are good-natured grumbles. You tell the geese
that your feet are maps 
and 
your feet are
mirrors. But you tell them that you have to keep in mind that they
are also useful for walking around on. They are perfectly good
feet.

The three of them were sitting in a boat. When she closed
her eyes, she could almost picture it. A man and a woman and a
girl, in a green boat on the green water. Her mother had written
that the water was an impossible color; she imagined the mint color
of the Harmons' Tupperware. But what did the boat look like? Was it
green? How she wished her mother had described the boat!

The boat refused to settle upon the water. It was too
buoyant, sliding along the mint surface like a raindrop on a pane
of glass. It had no keel, no sail, no oars. And if they fell in, no
lifejackets (at least she knew of none). The man and the woman,
unaware, smiled at each other over the head of the girl. And the
girl was holding on to both sides of the boat for dear life,
holding it intact and upright on the tilting Tupperware-colored
water.

She realized that not only had the boat been left out of the
letter; after so long she could hardly trust her parents to
resemble her memories of them. That was the great tragedy, the
inconvenient unseaworthiness of memories and boats and letters,
that events never remained themselves long enough for you to insert
yourself into them… . The girl fell out of the boat into the green
water.

Was it cold? She didn't know.

#

Hildegard and Myron are spying on Hildy's cousin, Jenny Rose. It
is Thursday afternoon, October the fifth, 1970, and Jenny Rose is
lying on her bed in the room she shares with Hildy. She hasn't
moved once in the fifteen minutes that Hildy and Myron have been
watching her. Hildy can't explain why she watches Jenny Rose: Jenny
Rose never picks her nose or bursts into tears. She mostly lies on
her bed with her eyes closed, but not asleep. She's the same age as
Hildy—ten—and an utter freak.

Myron says, "I think she's dead," and Hildy snorts.

"I can see her breathing," she says, handing him the
binoculars.

"Is she asleep, then?"

"I don't think so," Hildy says, considering. "I think she just
turns herself off, like a TV or something."

They are sitting in the gazebo that Hildy's older brother James
made in woodworking the year before. The gazebo is homely and
ramshackle. The white paint has peeled away in strips, and bees
float in the warm air above their heads. With the aid of a borrowed
set of binoculars, Hildy and Myron can spy privately upon Jenny
Rose upon her bed. Hildy picks at the paint and keeps an eye out
for James as well, who considers the gazebo to be exclusively
his.

#

The three of them sat in the boat on the water. They weren't
necessarily people, and it wasn't necessarily a boat either. It
could be three knots tied in her shoelace; three tubes of lipstick
hidden in Hildy's dresser; three pieces of fruit, three oranges in
the blue bowl beside her bed.

What was important, what she yearned for, was the trinity,
the triangle completed and without lack. She lay on the bed,
imagining this: the three of them in the boat upon the water, oh!
sweet to taste.

#

Jenny Rose is the most monosyllabic, monochromatic person Hildy
has ever laid eyes on. She's no-colored, like a glass of skim milk,
or a piece of chewed string. Lank hair of indeterminate length,
skin neither pale nor sunny, and washed-out no-color eyes. She's
neither tall nor short, fat or skinny. She smells weird,
sad,
electric
, like rain on asphalt. Does she resemble her
parents? Hildy isn't sure, but Jenny Rose has nothing of Hildy's
family. Hildy's mother is tall and glamorous with red hair. Hildy's
mother is a Presbyterian minister. Her father teaches at the
university.

The Reverend Molly Harmon's brother and sister-in-law have been
missionaries in the Pacific since before Hildy and Jenny Rose were
born. When Hildy was little, the adventures of her cousin were like
an exotic and mysterious bedtime story. She used to wish she was
Jenny Rose.

During the 1965 coup in Indonesia, Hildy's aunt and uncle and
Jenny Rose spent a few months in hiding and then a short time in
prison, suspected of being Communist sympathizers. This is the way
the rumors went: they were dead; they were hidden in Ubud in the
house of a man named Nyoman; they were in prison in Jakarta; they
had been released, they were safely in Singapore. Hildy always knew
that Jenny Rose would be fine. Stories have happy endings. She
still believes this.

Jenny Rose was in Singapore for the next four and a half years.
When her parents went back to Indonesia, it was proposed that Jenny
Rose would come to stay with the Harmons, in order to receive a
secondary school education. Hildy helped her mother prepare for the
arrival of her cousin. She went to the library and found a book on
Indonesia. She went shopping with her mother for a second bed and a
second desk, extra clothes, hangers, and sheets. The day before her
cousin arrived, Hildy used a ruler, divided her own room into two
equal halves.

Hildy hugged Jenny Rose at the airport, breathed her in, that
strange hot and cold smell. She hauled Jenny Rose's luggage to the
car single-handedly. "What is Indonesia like?" she asked her
cousin. "Hot," Jenny Rose said. She closed her eyes, leaned her
head against the back of the car, and for the next three weeks said
nothing that required more than one syllable. So far, the most
meaningful words her cousin has spoken to Hildy are these: "I think
I wet the bed."

"Give her time," Hildy's mother advised, putting the sheets into
the washer. "She's homesick."

"How can she be homesick?" Hildy said. "She's never lived in a
single place for longer than a year."

"You know what I mean," said the Reverend Molly Harmon. "She
misses her parents. She's never been away from them before. How
would you like it if I sent you to live on the other side of the
world?"

"It wouldn't turn me into a mute, stunted turnip-person," Hildy
said. But she thinks she understands. She read the library book.
Who wouldn't prefer the emerald jungles of Bali to the suburbs of
Houston, the intricate glide and shadow jerk of 
wayang
kulit 
puppets on a horn screen to the dollar
matinee, 
nasi goreng 
to a McDonald's
hamburger?

Hildy and Myron come inside to make hot chocolate and play
Ping-Pong. They go to Hildy and Jenny Rose's room first, and Myron
stands over Jenny Rose on her bed, trying to make conversation.
"Hey, Sleeping Beauty, whatcha doing?" he says.

"Nothing."

He tries again. "Would you like to play Ping-Pong with us?"

"No." Her eyes don't even open as she speaks.

There is a bowl of oranges on the night table. Myron picks one
up and begins to peel it with his thumbnail.

Jenny Rose's eyelids open, and she jackknifes into a sitting
position. "Those are my oranges," she says, louder than Hildy has
ever heard her speak.

"Hey!" Myron says, backing up and cradling the orange in his
palm. He is afraid of Jenny Rose, Hildy realizes. "It's just an
orange.

I'm hungry, I didn't mean anything."

Hildy intervenes. "There are more in the refrigerator," she says
diplomatically. "You can replace that one—if it's such a big
deal."

"I wanted that one," Jenny Rose says, more softly.

"What's so special about that orange?" Myron says. Jenny Rose
doesn't say anything. Hildy stares at her, and Jenny Rose stares,
without expression, at the orange in Myron's hand. The front door
bangs open, and James, the Reverend Harmon, and Dr. Orzibal are
home.

Myron's mother, Mercy Orzibal, is a professor of English and a
close friend of the Harmons. She is divorced, and teaches night
classes. Myron spends a lot of time at the Harmons under the
harried attention of Hildy's mother, known as the Reverend
Mother.

This afternoon was a wedding, and the Reverend Mother is still
in the white robes of a divine: the R.M. and Mercy Orzibal, in her
sleeveless white dress, look like geese, or angels.

James is wearing black. James is almost seventeen years old and
he hates his family. Which is all right. Hildy doesn't care much
for him. His face is sullen, but this is his usual expression. His
hair is getting long. His hair is red like his mother's hair. How
Hildy wishes that she had red hair.

A cigarette dangles from the lips of the Reverend Mother. She's
reached an agreement with Hildy: two cigarettes on weekdays, four
on Saturday, and none on Sunday. Hildy hates the smell, but loves
the way that the afternoon light falters and falls thickly through
the smoke around her mother's beautiful face.

"Do we have any more oranges?" Hildy asks her mother. "Myron ate
Jenny Rose's." There are several in the refrigerator, when Hildy
looks. She picks out the one that is the most shriveled and puny.
She tells herself that she feels sorry for this orange. Jenny Rose
will take good care of it. The good oranges are for eating. Jenny
Rose has followed Myron and Hildy, she stands just inside the
doorway.

"Oh, Jenny!" says the Reverend Mother, as if surprised to find
her niece here, in her kitchen. "How was your day, sweetheart?"

Jenny Rose says something inaudible as she takes the orange from
Hildy. The R.M. has turned away already and is tapping her ash into
the kitchen sink.

Hildy retrieves three more oranges out of the refrigerator. She
juggles them, smacking them in her palms, tossing them up again.
"Hey, look at me!" James rolls his eyes, the mothers and Myron
applaud dutifully—Hildy looks, but Jenny Rose has left the
room.

Hildy plays Ping-Pong in the basement every night with her
father, uncrowned Ping-Pong champion of the world. He tells silly
jokes as he serves, to make Hildy miss her return. "What's brown
and sticky?" he says. "A stick."

When Hildy groans, he winks at her. "You can't disguise it," he
says. "I know you think I'm the handsomest man in the world, the
funniest man in the world, the smartest man in the whole
world."

"Yeah, right," Hildy tells him. The sight of his white teeth
across the table, floating in the mild, round pink expanse of his
face, makes her sad for a moment, as if she is traveling a great
distance away, leaving her father pinned down under the great
weight of that distance. "You're silly." She spins the ball fast
across the net.

"That's what all the ladies tell me," he says. "The silliest man
in the world, that's me."

The basement is Hildy's favorite room in the whole house, now
that Jenny Rose has taken over her bedroom. The walls are a
cheerful yellow, and fat stripey plants in macrame hangers dangle
from the ceiling like green and white snakes. Hildy lobs a
Ping-Pong ball into the macram? holders—it takes more effort to
retrieve these balls than it does to place them, and at night when
Hildy watches television in the basement, the Ping-Pong balls glow
with reflected TV light like tiny moons and satellites.

She lets her father beat her in the next game, and when he goes
back upstairs, she ducks under the table. This is where Hildy sits
whenever she needs to think. This is where she and Myron do their
homework, cross-legged on the linoleum floor of their own personal
cave. Myron is better at social studies, but Hildy is better at
math. Hildy is better at spying on Jenny Rose. She shifts on the
cold linoleum floor. She is better at hiding than her cousin. No
one can spy on her under the table, although she can see anyone who
comes into the basement.

She has learned to identify people from the waist down: brown
corduroy would be her father; James and Myron wear blue jeans. Her
mother's feet are very small. The R.M. never wears shoes in the
house, and her toenails are always red, like ten cherries in a row.
Hildy doesn't need to remember Jenny Rose's legs or toes—she would
know her cousin by the absolute stillness. Jenny Rose's legs would
suddenly appear above two noiseless feet, pale and otherworldly as
two ghost trees. Hildy imagines jumping out from under the table,
yelling "Boo!" Jenny Rose would have to see her then, but would she
see Jenny Rose?

Last night at dinner, the R.M. set four places at the table, the
blue plate for James, red for Hildy, orange for her husband, purple
for herself. The R.M. likes routine, and her family accommodates.
No one would ever eat off the wrong-colored plate—surely the food
would not taste the same.

Hildy set a fifth place, yellow for Jenny Rose, while her mother
was in the kitchen, and retrieved the fifth chair with the wobbly
leg from her mother's study. She did these things without saying
anything: it seemed unthinkable to say anything to the R.M., who in
any case, neither noticed her error nor saw that it had been
corrected. At dinner, Jenny Rose did not speak—she hardly ate. No
one spoke to her and it seemed to Hildy that no one even noticed
her cousin.

She was as invisible as Hildy is now, under the green roof of
the Ping-Pong table. She almost feels sorry for Jenny Rose.

Jenny Rose's parents write her every week. Hildy knows this
because Jenny Rose donates the stamps to Mr. Harmon's stamp
collection. Her father currently has eighteen stamps, neatly cut
out of the airmail envelopes, lying on his desk in the
basement.

As for the letters themselves, they are limp and wrinkled, like
old pairs of cotillion gloves. They are skinny as feathers, and
light, and Jenny Rose receives them indifferently. They disappear,
and when the R.M. or Mr. Harmon asks, "How are your parents doing?"
Jenny Rose says, "They're fine," and that's that.

#

October 10th, 1970

Darling Jenny,

We have been staying in Ubud for three weeks now, visiting
Nyoman's church. Every night as we fall asleep the lizards tick off
the minutes like pocket watches, and every morning Nyoman brings us
pancakes with honey. Do you remember Nyoman? Do you remember the
lizards, the length of your pinky? They are green and never blink,
watching us watching them.

Nyoman asks how you are doing, so far away. He and his wife
are having their second baby. They have asked us to be their
child's godparents, and to pick the baptismal name. Would you like
the baby to have your name, Rose, if it is a girl?

It is sticky here, and we go for walks in the Monkey Forest,
where the old woman sits with her bunches of bananas and her broom,
swatting the monkeys away. Do you remember how they scream and fly
up into the trees?

Aunt Molly wrote that you are quiet as a mouse, and I don't
blame you, in that noisy family!

Love you,

Mom and Dad