Own Eyes
The moon came on in the mirror.
This time I did not run off. The mirror was an animal, like Thompson or the crocodile. You have to show it you’re not gonna hurt it, maybe feed it a little, before it stops thinking you’re prey or predator or both. I fed the mirror my face and the moon came on inside it like a huge white eye. I had already seen this trick. But I did not know how to make it do anything else. I just kept looking into it, counting craters, and I guess the mirror got fed up because the moon started creaking and spinning and before the dark side came around to the light it had turned into Mrs. H on her knees scrubbing a marble floor with pink veins forking through it.
Mrs. H was young. You could tell she wasn’t Mrs. H yet. Her whiskey-colored hair was braided up tight and I could see dirt under her fingernails. She scrubbed and scrubbed and my hands tingled where I had rubbed them raw scrubbing just that morning. Young Mrs. H looked up at a fine lady in a primrose dress and I heard her say something real quiet like the mirror was a muzzle.
Why do I have to work on my knees? We have more maids than books in the library. Mrs. H held out her hands. Lye burns slicked them like shiny snail-tracks.
The woman in the primrose dress answered: this is what it means to be a woman in the world. Work until you die and work again after. Your only choice is whether you scrub the vaults of hell or the halls of heaven. Anyone who tells you different is a huckster with his hand in your pocket.
The brush in Mrs. H’s hand blinked out and with a quickness she was bent over in the hearth in a yellow apron, picking out hard little peas. Her face was full of ash like a Catholic in spring. The same fine lady wore a cornflower dress.
Why do I have to comb the grate? We have charwomen and sculleries as plentiful as water. Mrs. H held out her hands. Ash turned them dead and grey.
The woman in the cornflower dress answered: this is what it means to be a woman in the world. Obey until a man gives you permission to die and keep on obeying after. The tasks you’re handed make less sense than a rooster in a Sunday hat, but if God wanted us to have a say he’d have made us men.
The hearth hissed away like steam and young Mrs. H stood in a forest blacker and older than any white pine I’d shot a squirrel out of. She was crying. Up until then I had never seen anyone cry but me, and suspected I was the only one who could do it. I was the only body weak enough. Everyone else had a strong thing inside them where I had tears, and that strong thing protected them against sadness. But young Mrs. H was crying and no mistaking. She unbuttoned her dress and pulled out her laces and stepped naked out of her skirt into the night. The same terrible eyeball of a moon that lived in the mirror shone down and turned her blue. I had never seen a naked woman before. I could not breathe right and my heart ricocheted all over the inside of me like a misfired bullet. Mrs. H looked like a person come to visit from another planet. Her breasts and her belly glowed aquamarine, her muscled legs moved like I imagined that striped, antlered unicorn in the painting moved, graceful as a star coming up in evening. That hair like a long, stiff drink covered her hind parts which made me sorry. I wanted to look at her forever.
Mrs. H dropped to the ground and hit that forest with both fists. She cried and she screamed and she grabbed at the mud, smearing it all over her and scratching herself bloody. Get me out, she said into the earth. Get me out.
Well, I guess in New England there’s things living under the world that answer when you holler at them like that. Two arms bigger than stovepipes came up out of the loam and the grime, and the arms were loam and grime and leaves and roots, and they wrapped around Mrs. H like the tenderest husband ever born. A stony hand stroked her hair I heard a quiet voice like it was a long way off, but so close it whispered right in my ear:
This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness, which is not strength but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am a huckster with a hand in your pocket. I am freedom and I will eat your heart.
The loamy arms gathered Mrs. H close in. A still pool opened up under her body like a bloodstain. The water shone clear and perfect as a mirror. For a second she floated on top of the pool, then it flowed around her, up over her skin and into her mouth, filling up all the empty places in her body and pulling her down into the starry slick of it. Under the surface, her face looked so happy. But that’s not what I mean. I mean her face was happiness. Like her perfume was an emerald. Every time I seen a body take on joy in my life, it’s only been a shiver of that blue face in the dark wood, a little piece of her smile or her tears. When the water let Mrs. H go, she came up dry as a prairie, wearing a dress the color of dirt. Green jewels like moss crowded the silk, silver jewels like rivers ran through it, red gems like poison berries wound around her hips and Mrs. H was wearing the forest. She didn’t have a speck of mud on her. She had a ring on her finger with a chunk of rough green stone fixed into it.
A distant music picked up and my stepmother moved toward it, starting to dance in time to the mandolins, the lights of some grand ball waltzing already on her skin.
Now, I have had a long time to cogitate on this. I guess I know something about magic after everything that’s happened, enough to know you don’t go talking about it when it’s not around. But I think back east they have Puritan magic and out west we have animal magic and I’ll tell you the truth for nothing, those goodies and goodwives and poppets and dark woods scare me worse than any crow with the sun in her mouth.
Snow White
Wears Her Insides
on Her Outside
Mrs. H bathed me in milk on Sundays. She poured ice into that milk like sugar and the cream got so cold it burned me like
fire. I lay in there trying not to quake or shiver none as Mrs. H called that a weakness. My toes got so you could stick pins in them and I’d never know it. The bathtub was black, from Hungary which is a place I only know the name of. White milk and black stone and me in the middle of it like a cork.
Mrs. H said it would turn my skin white. She said it would wash out my dark parts and better than any soap. Milk had power in the formulation of Mrs. H’s mind. Milk comes from creatures that eat only grass and drink only water and do not pollute their bodies with death. Milk comes from mothers. You can see from this that she did teach me things. When she started on this kind of talk my heart toppled over. If she was in a teaching mood she wasn’t in a hitting mood. Like sneezing and keeping your eyes open, Mrs. H couldn’t do both at once.
Came a night she put me in the milk bath and I thought I’d die of the cold. The hairs on my arms tried to stand up and run off. She dunked me in and shoved my head under the cream and kept it there. I thrashed a good bit but Mrs. H was strong. I couldn’t see nothing but white. Shhhh. Mrs. H could sound so soft when she wanted. Shhhh. Let it happen. Take it in. It’s inside you, that’s the trouble. You don’t speak Crow, you don’t paint your face. For Heaven’s sake, I know more about your mother than you do. It’s inside you. Drink it in. What’s inside you needs cleaning. Swallow it down and you’ll come out pure.
I choked. I drank it. It went up my nose and I stopped breathing. I hit her across the breast and the chin trying to dig up from that milk that stunk like perfume. The white in my eyes started to go dark and she let me up all the sudden like my skin burned her.
After I squinted real close at the mirror but I didn’t look no different.
Snow White
Covers Her Tracks
With Her Tail
You may not know it but the keeping of a large house by one girl is the hardest work going on earth. I heard there’s fire in hell but I’ll bet the Devil just hands you a bucket and tells you to get moving, this place ain’t gonna clean itself.
Snow White’s Stepmother