My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (37 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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In desperation, I slipped into the premises of an antiquities dealer called Fiske. This was a small, sad establishment that reeked of bygone dust and spiderwebs. Fiske himself emerged from a back room with a fistful of white bread crusts in one hand, wearing a slight smile. How can I help you? he inquired politely. I explained that I was just taking temporary shelter, but I’d be happy to browse.
Indeed, Fiske’s Antiquities was a browser’s paradise and included stuffed owls and warthogs, troops of books with battered spines, an array of boxes—little ceramic boxes, cloisonné boxes, ivory boxes—perfume bottles with semiprecious jewels dotting their circumferences, a collection of ink pens, and nineteenth-century costumes, notably a chimney-sweep costume worn by a manneqin with no eyes.
Idly peering into a wooden box decorated with the burned-wood tool of mid-twentieth century—its lid contained an image of a buck-toothed beaver with the word TOOTHPICKS clumsily embossed beneath—I experienced a jolt of déjà vu so severe that I had to grab Fiske by the forearm in order to steady myself.
Even when I’d settled into the winged-back chair that Fiske was kind enough to provide, I still could not shake the déjà vu. There was an odd familiarity to everything in the shop—the boxes, the pens, the costume, and especially the books. I took in their battered spines absentmindedly as I sat, running my eyes over the titles of books I had never heard of. Even so, they were familiar to me in the way that a story is familiar when you enter in medias res and cannot shake the feeling that you’ve read it before . . .
It was hardly a surprise, therefore, when I spotted a copy of H. C. Andersen’s fairy tales, illustrated with the tortuous images of Kay Neilson. It was such a volume from which my mother read “The Snow Queen,” a story that terrified me as much as did the perfume of my mother.
In the penultimate scene (I recalled), the Snow Queen tells little Kay that if he can spell the word
ETERNITY
out of icicles she will give him his freedom. This Kay failed to do. Instead, Gerda appeared and melted his heart with the heat of her love.
Fiske said, I can give you a good deal on that book. But I didn’t know if I wanted to own it. I’d been away for a long time and I’d accomplished a great deal of work whose quality was difficult to determine. The bulk was housed miles from the city—only the residuals remained and at this point they no longer made sense to me. The memory of them, even now, locked in a suitcase, brought to mind a row of walls with vague, poorly executed scrawls.
Whereas the memory of my son brought to mind the sea . . .
When last seen, he was living in a black Camry, terribly thin, begging for food by sticking his hand out the window. His face, reported the crow, had hardened into a contemptuous mask, and when a passerby declined to drop a dollar into his outstretched palm, he spit at him. These depressing reports nullified all memories of the sea—though my son persisted at the back of my mind, despite my best efforts to banish him.
Oh beauty, oh sadness! I thought, apropos of nothing. Though perhaps it was the beautiful boy making sandcastles who flashed before my eyes. His knees scraped up.
It was still snowing. Possibly it would always snow. It is hard to know what to do under any circumstances, much less those circumstances that require us to fight against the prevailing weather. His knees were scraped because he had fallen from his bicycle.
I’d dabbed on peroxide and plastered a few Band-Aids. The world was shining and perfect, the sea left a mustache of white foam on the shore. In a while we’d go home, make sandwiches, tell stories. Did I read him the story of the Snow Queen? I think not. It would have frightened him.
Although my mother, who looked uncannily like the Snow Queen, read the story to me.
In those days I would have done anything to protect my son.
If I were to encounter him now—in an alley, say, covered with snow—I would not be able to melt his heart. My love, unlike Gerda’s, has gone cold. It appears that we are doomed to go our separate ways, to continue in the darkness of our own making, half-blind, and no longer who we once were.
That’s the way most stories end, I mused sadly. Not with roses blooming, not with the onset of summer, not hand-in-hand.
In moments, I would pay Fiske the required amount, tuck the book inside my jacket, and head into the fray.
What I’ve attempted in my version of “The Snow Queen” is to recycle some of the motifs in Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale—snow, talking birds, and flowers—as well as the concepts of disappearance and loss. My interest is not so much in retelling the tale (the sublime original needs no retelling!) but in creating an innovative fiction of my own.
Like Andersen, I’ve divided my story into seven sections, but there the literal similarity more or less ends. In my “Snow Queen,” I wanted to capture some of what has always enchanted me about the original—the eerie combination of danger and nostalgia and a chilled atmosphere that is mysterious and terrifying. One notable absence in my version is the Snow Queen herself, an absence which I intend as a kind of provocative lacuna at the heart of the tale—suggestive of her presence elsewhere, figured not only as the drugs which have “seduced” the narrator’s son but also as the more abstract seductions of nostalgia and love.
I’ve added motifs of my own that are subtly related to Andersen’s story. Chief among these is the notion of reading and its multiple functions: as interpretation, as social activity, as conduit for memory and its suppression. My version is necessarily fragmentary, unresolved . . .
Thus I do not tack on the happily-ever-after of Andersen’s tale—instead, as per our contemporary sensibilities, I’ve suggested that the narrator comes to accept her loss and sorrow as inevitable.
My story, finally, is an exploration, a rummaging around in another text, a diving into the inchoate, fragmentary nature of experience, a hybridish piecing of this and that.
—KB
LUCY CORIN
Eyes of Dogs
A
soldier came walking down the road, raw from encounters with the enemy, high on release, walking down the road with no money. The road was lined with trees, and every so often a hovel hunched right there at its edge, droopy and mean, with a dirt yard like a pale sack at its feet. The soldier thought he was walking home, but at the end of the road no one was there anyway. He passed a hovel with a little dog outside, barking on a rope. The dog’s dish was just beyond the reach of the rope, and he watched the dog run, barking, to reach it, catch itself by the neck at the end of the rope, bounce back yelping, and then do this repeatedly, his white ruff following the jerk of his head. The soldier could see that there was nothing in the bowl.
As he walked along, the trees grew broader, filling in space, the canopy more complete and farther above. He passed a little girl on the stoop in front of a blackened hovel door, breaking branches into pieces for tinder, wearing a fancy dress gone ragged. He could see, through the tattered ribbons and limp lace bows, that the fabric of the dress had once been bright, rainbow colored, and shiny. The girl’s eyes looked very big because of the circles under them, but her skin, smudged as it was with ash, seemed to pulse dimly, just as the shine of the dress did.
At the next hovel, an old woman was stirring a large iron pot set up on coals in the dirt yard. For an instant, the soldier thought that this was his mother, and he took his hands from his coat pockets to wave to her, but then he could see that it was not his mother; it was a witch. The resemblance, however, remained, and part of him thought that with all he’d done and seen he might have made his mother into this. Another part of him, though he could see she was a witch, still felt the kind of trust and longing you can feel toward a mother, even if she has become a witch after all these years.
The witch called out to him, her face rusty and sweating or beaded with steam, holding a crooked spoon in a hand concealed by her cloak: “Soldier! I see you looking at me with your weird eyes. I can see right through you, and I know what you want.”
The soldier said: “What’s in the pot?”
He thought,
I bet you think I want to be a better man.
The witch said: “I know what you want. It’s money, and I know where you can get it, and there’s nothing to it, you just go and get it, and I know where.”
She was right. That’s what he wanted. He even forgot to ask her how it could be that she lived in a hovel and knew where there was money, but then there she was, and she was right, he wanted it, so the soldier forgot to ask about that, and about why the witch’s hovel sagged to the side and why she wore a witch’s rags, and if she had any sons who’d gone off to war, and he forgot about the pot, about what might be stewing and steaming in it, something awful, something good to eat or know. His mind cleared of everything except the idea of money.
“Tie this rope around your waist,” said the witch. “Hop down this black hole into this deep hollow tree. You’ll be tethered to me. Don’t be frightened of what you’ll see. Ha! You’ve seen worse than this. You’ll see some dogs. Wink at the first dog, blink at the next dog, and for the third, squeeze your eyes shut, and wait to see. You will find a little leather purse in the earth down there, and all I ask is you bring it to me. If you don’t, I won’t pull you up, and then you’ll have something to be frightened of.”
A Tinderbox is a little box that sparks to make fire. Like for lighting things.
So he wound the rope around his waist and the witch took the loose end. Then he hopped down into the hollow tree and fell deep into it and also underground. Smack! his feet hit the earth, and everything around him was so dark that he couldn’t see anything. In the dark, he thought of the little dog, so stupid for lurching at the end of his leash. He thought of the little girl, and recognized the terrible whirl of ideas that had surged across his mind when he saw her: to hack her to pieces, to feed her soup and rock her to sleep, to gobble her up for himself, to dress her properly. He put his hands to the rope around his waist because he was having trouble breathing and felt like it was choking him from the gut up, but soon his eyes adjusted to the light. He could see the twisty shadows of the inner wood of the tree, all tunneled with wormholes and mud wasps making convex mazes all around him in the walls, but he couldn’t tell a groove from a bulge. It wasn’t only his eyes adjusting, though; the light was changing, too, and he stepped toward where it pushed at him through the darkness. The light expanded its reach, the space expanded with it, and soon he could see a whole inner chamber lit with a hundred burning lights.
This reminded him of something, this chamber, with passages leading off. Then he remembered: he remembered tearing open a man’s belly with his sword in battle, and then seeing himself as if within the man’s stomach, looking from that chamber down the man’s bright bowels, which simultaneously lay beating on the ground before them both. And as if brought on by this thought, an enormous blue dog appeared, guarding a golden chest filled with money.
The dog had eyes as big as snow globes, sparkling and swimming with watery light, but the witch was right, the soldier had been through a lot, and very little fazed him. He didn’t even need to think about her instructions; it was as if she were there with him, as if he could feel her through the rope.
You need to cut those apron strings and find your way in the world!
That’s what people had said to him when they passed him chopping wood for his mother’s hovel, that was one thing he’d thought when he enlisted, and that was what was on his mind, not the witch, when he winked at the enormous dog, and the dog lay down and tilted his head to the side and let the snow settle, an Eiffel Tower reflected in one eye, a Golden Pyramid glowing from the depths of the other, and let the soldier open the chest and fill his pockets with promissory notes.

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