Briar Rose (5 page)

going to find the castle and the prince and reclaim our herita These pictures and this ring and all this other stuff will help m promised Gemma."

"Obsessive-compulsive," Howie tried again.

This time they all ignored him.

Becca had a friend overnight for the flrst time and Gemma promised a story at bedtime.

"She'll tell Sleeping Beauty if we ask, " Baca said. "She tells it The part about the curse frightened them both.

'Vhen you are seventeen, " Gemma said the wicked fairy said, "m) will come true. You will lie down and a great mist will cover the cast, everyone will die. You, too, princess. " And then Gemma gave a laugh, high and horrible.

"Quick, Gemma, say the rest of it, " Becca begged, half hidden un, covers, her friend Shirley spooned around her.

"What about the spinning wheeM What about the need7e?"

whispered, her breath stirring Becca's hair and blowing hotly agail neck.

Becca elbowed her into silence.

"But one of the good fairies," Gemma said, "had saved a wis) everyone will die. A few will just sleep. You, princess, will be one.'

Shirley sat up in bed, furious. "That's not how it goes. You'v, wrong.

Gemma smiled.

"That's how it goes in this house, " Becca said. "'And if you dc it, you're not my best friend any more."

Briar Rose

39

I want to go home, " Shirley said. "I don't feel good. My tummy hurts and my throat wants to swallow up."

They took her home. She and Becca remained friends in school but she never stayed overnight again. Becca never invited her.

The house was silent when Becca got up, except for the tick the grandfather clock in the hall. She had not been able to sleel room had seemed too hot and she'd thrown off the covers ~

sweeping, almost imperial gesture. Not five minutes later, the was freezing and she had to scrabble around recovering both b and quilt. After two hours of successively sweating and shi~

she gave up and got up, checking the clock-radio on her b table. As she watched, the numbers ticked over from 1:59 tc

Sighing, she put her feet over the side of the bed, feeling arou her slippers. Then she went downstairs, belting her flannel r she went.

She got out a handful of chocolate chip cookies from th and-white cookie jar and padded into the living room. C

through the thirty-six cable stations, she found three soft-cor ies, one of which she'd already seen, some stale news, a:

weather channel promising rain in Texas and a heat wave ir nix. When she found herself staring at a test pattern for moi a few seconds, she clicked off the television with rathei vehemence than warranted, and went back into the kitchei

The cookie jar was empty except for three stale Fig Newto hated Fig Newtons, even when they weren't stale, but she at anyway.

Briar Rose 41

Wandering into the dining room, she turned on the light. The patchwork of papers still littered the table. She walked around the table slowly, trying to pretend the collection of old photos and mysterious forms and newspaper clippings were not worth a night's sleep.

"Gemma was just not there in the end," she whispered. "This means nothing." It didn't surprise her that the inflections were

Sylvia's and not her own.

She pulled out a chair and sat at the head of the table by the wooden box. After a minute, she put her hand on the boxtop and pressed down, hard enough so that the carving of briar and rose imprinted on her palm. When she looked at her hand she could see the outline clearly.

"It's no good," she whispered, meaning it was no good trying to convince herself the pieces of paper were unimportant. The fact that

Gemma had them tucked away in a box all these years, carrying the box with her to the nursing home, had to mean something. Gemma, ~g of Genevieve. Dawna. Gitl. Briar Rose. Whoever.

The All at once, as if the words were being spoken aloud, she heard

~th a her grandmother telling the story of Sleeping Beauty. The room was om suddenly filled with it:

et I

Ing,Once upon a time, which is all times and no times but not sidethe very best of times, there was a castleand the queen went

:00. to bed and gave birth to a baby girl with a crown of red hair.

~ for Becca touched her own springy red hair and smiled. She and e as Gemma, the family roses, Daddy called them. Like most redheads, ~lue- Becca hadn't had a full head of hair until she was nearly two. But dng in fairy tales anything was possible. She looked around guiltily, in lov- case anyone had seen her gesture. But no one else was up.

the So the king said it was time for a party with cake and ice loe- cream and golden plates. And not to mention invitations sent to

~an all the good fairies in the kingdom, But not the bad fairy. Not re the one in black with big black boots and silver

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~Ohe "Eagles," Becca said aloud. She wondered, and not for the first time, M if her own ability to tell a story, to invent details, came from

I

Gernma. Inventing details was not a gift a journalist should cultivate.

42

Jane Yolen

"I curse you and your father the king and your mother the queen and all your uncles and cousins and aunts.... And all the people who bear your name. . .

Becca shuddered. It was only a story after all; she had hear hundred hundred times. But suddenly it occurred to her that, il

Gemma had had no one else who bore her name. No mothi father, no ... husband. Only a daughter who had three daug

Maybe that was why she had been so obsessed with the sti Briar Rose. Just a fairy tale, she whispered to herself, a ki comfort. But in this house of death it was no comfort at al]

The good fairy had promised not death, but sleep. And af what was so bad about sleeping? She and Shana and Sylv talked about it over and over.

And then, all at once, Becca's childhood question was ans

"It's not the sleeper who minds. It's the ones left behind, a~

Gemma's story never ended happily ever after except I

princess Briar Rose and her own little girl. There had alwa) something decidedly odd about the whole telling. Only nc Becca able to admit it. In Gemma's story everyone-other d prince who wakes the princess with a kiss and Briar Rc afterwards their child-everyone else sleeps on. But what abi and Gemma's voice came back, the dark words tumbling acj dining room: Everyone slept: lords and ladies, teachers and tummle dogs and doves, rabbits and rabbitzen and all kinds ofcitizens -

Becca took a deep breath and the sounds of Gemma's words to fade. In the storybooks she'd read in school, everyon, wake up at the prince's kiss. But in Gemma's version, the tion was that they all still slept under the wicked fairy's ser death. Death by sleep. No wonder Shirley what's-her-na had lived down the block never wanted to come back and s.'

at the house again. Death by sleep.

"Gemma, what can you have been thinking of!" B(

fiercely. Then she yawned and picked up the photograr woman and child. "And did you live happily ever after?" , it. The woman stared straight out at the camera, her b.

Briar Rosc

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,er all, a had

Page 26

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43

gazing past Becca. No matter how Becca moved the photo, the woman's eyes stared over her shoulder. The child, a finger in her mouth like a stopper, lay with closed eyes, head on her mother's breast.

By the time the others were straggling down to breakfast, Becca had organized the contents of the box, falling asleep at the table, her head resting between two of four piles. One pile was photographs, the second clippings, the third documents, and the fourth what she called "others": That included the ring, an envelope with two curls of hair, one gold and one red, a brass button, possibly from a uniform, and the torn half of an Italian train ticket.

The clippings she had arranged in chronological order, the first from August 30, 1944, the last from June 3, 1956.

The photographs were impossible to date. Only one had any kind of identification at all, though the same young woman appeared in each. She was clearly pregnant in all the photographs except the one in which she was holding the child. In all but that picture she was wearing the same dress, a shapeless dark dress with white piping at the collar and sleeves. They showed her standing a little apart from other people in front of a row of barracks, a bit of a lake or ocean appearing in the background, behind the buildings. In each shot she held her right hand protectively over her belly and looked warily to the side of the photographer.

It was the documents that Becca puzzled over the longest, seven in all. One was the entry form into America with the same date as the oldest newspaper clipping. Another was a white paper, 81/2 by

14, with Gitl Mandlestein's signature in careful penmanship at the bottom. It looked like a kind of visa. There was a birth certificate for

Eve Stein, a certificate of citizenship with a photo of a solemn and still young Dawna Stein dated July 6, 1946, a rental agreement for an apartment on Twelfth Street and Avenue A in New York City, and an Immunization Register. Finally, bound in pale blue, there was a mortgage document for the house on School Street where

Becca and her sisters had grown up. Gemma had bought it in 1958

for $8,500. Thirty-eight years ago.

"Signposts," Becca had whispered, turning each one over. But why had Gemma kept them
Page 27

secret? And what had any of them to do with the story of Briar Rose?

Jane Men

"Gemma, I'm trying," she had whispered to the silent r(

before falling asleep at the table, head on her hands.

it was her mother who found her and woke her gently. "Becc~

on to bed. You'll just make yourself sick this way. And I can't with you being sick right now."

She blinked owlishly up at her mother, then sighed. "Only F

ise you won't move anything? I have it all arranged. Promise 3

keep them out of the piles." By them she meant her sisters.

"But what about breakfast?"

"Eat in the kitchen, like always. Never mind what they Sylvia had complained once about how unsophisticated it was at the kitchen table, but that was after she had married Mik they had a live-in nanny for Benjamin. Sylvia had taken I cooking lessons; she ate with candies. "Promise?"

"I promise, dear."

Only then did Becca grudgingly go up to bed, but her slee fitful, disturbed by the screams of the three children as they up and down the stairs and through the halls.

"Why do you tell Sleeping Beauty all the time, GemmaV' Becca asked on the day she graduated from kindergarten. They were seated at a Friendly's in Northampton and Becca's stomach was tight with the strawberry fribble.

Some of it had dribbled down her dress front. She was glad Shana and Sylvia were still in school, otherwise they would have teased her.

"Fribble dtibble!" they would have chanted all the way home.

"Don't you like Sleeping BeautyV' Gemma asked.

"I like it. But why do you say it all the timeV' Becca had persisted.

"Because I like it, too, " Gemma said.

She had told it in the car on the way home. And when she got to the part where the king said:

"Sing and dance, my people. Sing and dance. Keep all thoughts of the mist away. I forbid you to think about it, " Becca said it with her.

"And do you know the next part?" Gemma asked.

"I do, I do!" Becca said.

'Well, as it is your graduation from kindergarten, and next year you will be in hard school . .

.'~-hard school was what Shana and Sylvia called it because they had homework- "you will probably not want to hear my little story ever again. "

Becca had leaned over, putting her hand on her grandmother's arm, "'I will want to hear it always, Gemma, Because it is your story

"From your lips to God's ears, " Gemma said.

Jane Yolen

"That's not from this part of the story, silly Gemma, " Becca said. And as her grandmother
Page 28

smiled, Becca spoke the nw part of the tale.

'V`hen princess Briar Rose was seven teen-that's ten-levens more than me, Gemma.

"That's twelve more than you.

"When princess Briar Rose was seventeen, one day and without furthe warning ... What's a warning?"

"Telling you to watch out. "

"Oh! Without further warning, a mist covered the entire kingdol?

What's a mist?"

"A fog. An exhaust."

"A mist. A great mist. It covered the entire kingdom. And everyone it-the good people and the not-so-good, the young people and the not-,, young and even Briar Rose's mother and father fell asleep. Everyone slej lords and ladies, teachers and tummlers, dogs and doves, rabbits a rabbitzen and all kinds of citizens. So fast asleep they were, they were i able to wake up for a hundred years. Are you a hundred years, GemM4

"Not yet."

, I 'M six,"

"Not yet."

"Is a hundred a lot?"

"A hundred years is forever.

By the time Becca got up it was noon. Sun streamed in through the slats of the blinds, making familiar and comfortable patterns on the floor. She knew she had dreamed lots of short dreams all through the night, a veritable anthology of them, but she couldn't recall any.

Stretching, she got up and did a quick ten floor touches and ten deep-knee bends, then went to the bathroom to brush her teeth.

The bathroom door was shut and she could hear Howie hum-

ming to himself inside. A light tap on the door brought no response, so she shrugged and went downstairs. She supposed coffee could disguise the bad taste in her mouth as well as toothpaste.