The Charmed Wife

by Olga Grushin

  He tipped her off without ceremony, adjusted his clothes. His eyes came into focus and were absent. Hurriedly she dropped her skirts to the ground, to cover her shame—and, to her terror, dissolved into sobs.

  “Please,” he said, frowning. “I must work now. What is it?”

  “It’s nothing,” she said, and pulled herself together, then added in a small voice, “I love you, Roland.”

  “I love you, too.” There was a barely perceptible pause. “My dear.”

  He began sifting through papers on his desk.

  She fled the room.

  In later months, as she lay sleepless, stroking the dome of her belly where the baby was kicking, she found herself haunted by that anonymous endearment, by that pause in his words. And since she did not wish to give in to her unease, she began telling tales to the baby growing inside her, whispering familiar old stories into the mound of taut flesh. Yet now the comfort fare of the miller’s son, and the miller’s daughter, and the beggar girl all marrying their princesses and princes failed to soothe her, even if it still made her feel just as if she were settling down to knitting in her favorite armchair. And her unease grew, until one night, as she stood by the window, watching a pale moon rise above the black park, listening to the distant wail of a lonely siren, she realized that, quite simply, she no longer wanted to do any knitting in any armchairs.

  What she wanted was to leave on a journey through mysterious twilit woods full of uncanny creatures and unexpected encounters.

  And so, she began to invent.

  She invented a world unlike anything she had ever known, anything she had ever heard of. She was used to small villages and bustling market towns where everyone greeted everyone else by name, so she invented an improbable city—a city so immense that all the passersby were strangers to one another and every chance “Good morning” could become the beginning of an exhilarating adventure. She was used to frivolously ornamental palaces that looked like baroque wedding cakes overflowing with frills, curls, and lace, so she imagined the lines of her city to be sleek and simple, all glass and metal. She was used to rigid fairyland rules dictating every move and every outcome, so she made life in the outlandish world of her fancy fantastical and unpredictable, for in that world there existed true magic—the magic of choice.

  The ease of her invention took her by surprise: it was almost as if she were describing a place she had seen in some intense, vivid dream.

  “Once upon a time,” she would tell her belly, “there lived a man who had a wife and a daughter . . . But no, that’s not the right beginning, it’s not about the man at all. Let me start again. Once upon a time, there lived a little girl whose parents loved her, and she was happy until her mother got sick and died. Then she grew so sad that her father decided to take her somewhere far, far away from all the sadness. They climbed onto a magic silver bird, flew across the ocean, and came to a great city, and she soon knew it for the most magnificent city in the world. Astonishing things happened there day and night—and nights were as bright and full as days, for the city never slept and it never grew dark. Enchanted lights floated above pavements, palaces stretched a hundred blazing stories into the sky, the streets were full of shiny carriages that moved without horses. Thousands of wizards who knew the secrets of the universe and could turn paper into gold and dirt into diamonds jostled one another on the sidewalks, leopards and monkeys cavorted in a great menagerie in the city’s wooded heart, pictures of beautiful princesses flashed on and off above broad squares, and there were treasures to look at everywhere you turned—necklaces and shoes and toys and roses and oh, so many things, dogs, jugglers, pigeons, churches, bridges, balloons, guitar players, parks, guardsmen, marching bands, pretzels, stone lions, fortune-tellers, people laughing, people crying, people fighting, people kissing, people living.”

  The girl’s father found work doing handyman’s jobs in an elegant inn. The widow who ran the inn smiled at him whenever she met him in the hallways, and after a while he and the woman married. But he was not happy, for the glitter of the city was making him anxious, and one day his heart gave up and stopped beating, just like that.

  And so the little girl was left all alone in the world, with no one but her stepmother to take care of her. And the stepmother was bossy, and the stepsisters uncaring, and when she turned fourteen, they made her clean after the guests who stayed in the inn. Morning and evening, she carried her bucket and broom down long corridors, knocking on doors and calling “Maid service,” entering to change stained sheets, mop bathroom floors, wipe steamed-up mirrors. She did not mind the work, but she longed to go outside, into the streets, where the magic of life was sweeping through without cease. Sometimes she would press her nose to a window and, from the height of the third, sixth, tenth floor, spy on the world below. One spring, one of those enchanted pictures, larger than life, was always blinking on and off on a building across the way, and she watched it light up, over and over, in childlike wonder. It showed a lovely woman in a flowing white dress who stood in a half swoon, her back arched, her eyes half closed, her swanlike neck exposed, while a gorgeous man all in black was bending over her, swirling some mysterious potion from a glowing blue bottle into a glass he was holding up to her half-open lips. There was something about the expression on the woman’s face, the slackening of the woman’s mouth, that made the girl catch her breath every time the picture flashed up. The woman seemed to belong to some other world—a world out of reach for mere mortals, a hidden, thrilling world of beauty and happiness.

  One day, she promised herself, she, too, would live there.

  And in time, the girl in these secret predawn stories did grow up and go to a dance and have a wedding, just like the girl in the oft-told romance Angie demanded now at every bedtime; but the sequence of these events was much less certain, the girl had decisions to make, and every tale was different in some small, subtle way that yet made her feel more alive in the telling. In none of these stories was there a fairy godmother who popped out of nowhere, nearly stabbed her in the eye with a wand, and trapped her in an insipid blue banality shaped like an upside-down cupcake. No, she had saved what modest wages she had received for helping out in the hotel—the stepmother was stern but fair—then went to a splendid shop that stretched over several lustrous floors and there found a beautiful dress all her own. In some versions, the dress was black, long, and elegant and clung to her hips just so, and in others, yellow, short, and sassy, shot through with sparkle. And when she tried it on in the bathroom she shared with her stepsisters (who were, incidentally, selfish as all teenage sisters were wont to be, but hardly the insensitive monsters of the familiar story), she loved the girl who looked back at her from the mirror, for the girl’s lips were those of a woman and the girl’s eyes shone with a great desire to live.

  The dance was an annual gala held in the hotel ballroom, and she sneaked in without an invitation, using her knowledge of service corridors. Unlike the other ball, this one had many princes, and she chose the one she liked best. She chose him before he chose her, and not because he was rich or desired by all but because she liked the boyish shyness of his golden-brown gaze, the soft cadence of his accent, the warmth of his hand when it found its way into the small of her back. But of course, the man she picked would change with each retelling, too, just like the dress. Sometimes he would be blue-eyed, suave, and dazzling, and other times mysterious, silent, and dark. In all the versions, though, she fell in love without a doubt, and her love was like the home she had always dreamed of having, warm and thrilling and filled with shared understanding—and reflected, just as deep and certain, in her beloved’s brown, or green, or cornflower-blue eyes.

  The girl in these stories, needless to say, did not go about losing her footwear like some silly strumpet, nor did she need to be recovered like some misplaced piece of luggage. They had a proper courtship that spanned days, weeks, months—not mere hours. They dined on spicy fare i
n the imaginary city’s ethnic restaurants. They went to the opera, where their souls soared in unison with the music. They took long drives through the countryside, and she laughed when falling leaves brushed her face. She knew the prince’s name. She met the prince’s family. She approved of the prince’s hobbies and forgave him his foibles, whatever they might have been. She was asked whether she wanted to be married, and she chose to say yes.

  These stories, in short, were nothing like the familiar story, and this girl was nothing like the familiar girl: this girl was special. The only thing, perhaps, that the two had in common was the presence of the two mouse friends, Brie and Nibbles—although in this new world the girl had purchased them, with her own money, at a neighborhood pet store.

  (There was, as it happened, great unrest among the mice during this time. Brie the Third and her companion, Nibbles the Fourth—formerly Captain Brunhilda—had adopted twin mouselings, a boy and a girl, who had been orphaned in the kitchen when the fattest of the cooks had slipped on a lemon rind and landed with her voluminous backside on top of their hapless mother. To the adopted children, in due course, passed the mantle of the Royal Companions and the titles of Brie the Fourth and Nibbles the Fifth. Young Nibbles settled into his new life of chocolate delights and musical pastimes with perfect ease, but young Brie soon began to chafe against the silky restraints of her role; having been raised by Brunhilda with a strong sense of civic duty, she bridled at having to dance polkas to the princess’s listless clapping and thought her passionately serious nature better suited to combatting poverty among the recently migrated field mice.

  She was not alone in considering herself unfit for her position. Among the direct descendants of the original Brie and Nibbles, there arose a mouse with an uncommonly long tail, by the name of Maximilian, who believed that the exalted life of mouse royalty belonged to him and his by sacred birthright. His great-great-great-grandparents, he told anyone who would listen, had been Chosen by the Higher Power and the distinction should never have been allowed to pass out of the family, first to a foreign upstart with unnatural proclivities and later to some kitchen riffraff whose genealogy could not even be traced beyond one threadbare generation. Having gathered a number of like-minded followers about him, he led an efficient nighttime raid, which became known in the Murine Historical Annals as the Five-Minute Mantelpiece Coup. Upon waking one morning and finding herself and her twin brother trussed up and surrounded by an agitated mob led by Maximilian, who wielded a thumbtack, Brie was frankly relieved, and promptly abdicated in order to devote the rest of her life to the pursuit of social justice among the underprivileged inhabitants of the palace sewers.

  Nibbles, however, had grown enamored of his goosedown pillows and breakfast sweets, and, too, at this sudden encounter with violence, the more militant lessons of his adoptive mother Brunhilda stirred in his breast. He determined to offer resistance. “Blood is a mere accident of birth,” he preached from inside the pumpkin in which he had been imprisoned. “It is merit alone that should be rewarded—and no one dances the mouse polka better than I!”

  Two of the mice set to guard him were swayed by his eloquence, helped him escape, and became his Right-Paw and Left-Paw Captains in the eventual civil war of the Mouse House against the usurpers Nibbles the Sixth, formerly Maximilian, and Brie the Fifth, formerly Lady Bruschetta, Maximilian’s sister and concubine. In the end, the Blood Faction prevailed, albeit after many violent battles and regrettable casualties. Unluckily, Maximilian himself perished of his wounds in the final skirmish, and it was his son who assumed the title of Nibbles the Seventh to rule with his mother (and aunt) by his side. Maddened by their loss, the victors showed no mercy to the defeated and had the headless body of their enemy, the unfortunate Nibbles the Fifth, flung into the sewers. A hushed crowd of sorrowful rats brought it before their beloved Sister Charity, formerly Brie the Fourth. Heads bowed, they stood around her in the underground dimness, as she cradled what was left of her twin brother and lamented the senselessness and cruelty of the world.

  “Oh, my dear heart,” she cried, her fur matted with blood and tears, “do you see where your foolishness has gotten you? And all for what—the love of chocolates and a few absentminded pats from a frivolous, moody princess who can’t tell any of us apart and treats us like wind-up toys, just because we are little? I do not blame Maximilian—like my poor brother, he, too, was a misguided fool, and he paid for his own mistakes dearly. No, I blame her, I blame her!”

  She moved her eyes along the wall of silent mourners, her piercing gaze burning into them with unmouselike fire. When she spoke again, her tears had dried and her voice was a low, fierce chant: “My brother’s blood is on her hands. All of our blood is on her hands. And I curse her, I curse her, I curse her. As long as she walks the places turned red with the spilling of our lives, she will never know a day of peace but will be gnawed by discontent, fear, and sadness, just as we gnaw our daily bread. I bind her to her misery by the truth in our blood.”)

  The princess hoped that her unborn child would be a girl who might benefit from being thus imbued, while still in the womb, with brave examples of free and unconstrained living. Yet when the child was born, it was a boy. They named him Roland, after his father the prince. Since the old king, too, was Roland, as the king’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been before him, it made her son Roland the Sixth. She felt secretly disappointed, even a little betrayed, as if all her marvelous inventions had been wasted—more, as if she had made some vast, courageous effort to do something different and it had been in vain.

  And seemingly out of nowhere, despair descended upon her.

  * * *

  • • •

  “‘An insipid blue cupcake,’” the fairy godmother quotes, her voice frosty. She has seated herself in an ample leather armchair she has summoned out of thin air and is brushing invisible specks off her cloak. “I never took you for an ungrateful kind.”

  “As much as I hate to admit it, I agree with the busybody here,” the witch says as she stirs the potion. “Also, I must tell you, it’s not very reasonable, expecting the prince to remain eternally enticed by you no matter what. Because, let’s face it, you did not exactly overwhelm him with personal accomplishments or depths. Preserves and polkas, did you say?”

  “But.” My eyes are stung with unexpected tears. I blink them back, quickly. “But that is what princesses are supposed to do!”

  “Is that so? Well, I don’t claim to be an authority on princesses. All the same, it might have done you some good to develop a real interest or two along the way. You could have studied astronomy. Just for instance.”

  “Or practiced watercolors,” the fairy godmother chimes in suddenly.

  “Or become a rock climber,” says the witch after a beat.

  “Or founded a charity that rescued homeless dogs,” adds the fairy with a sniff.

  “Or learned another language.”

  “Or discovered a new species of butterfly.”

  “Or played in a band.”

  The witch is ticking off the items on her fingers now, and they are nodding at each other.

  “Or opened a bakery.”

  “Or gone to law school.”

  “Or taken piano lessons.”

  “Or gotten involved in local politics.”

  “Or volunteered at a school.”

  “Or—”

  “Stop!” I cry. “Stop! I—”

  And then I, too, fall silent. The realization that neither of them seems to like me all that much is surprisingly painful, and I want to justify myself somehow—but I do not know what to say. When I try to catch their eyes, neither woman will look at me. Everything is very still around me. The winds have long since abandoned the crossroads. The grasses are not moving in the fields, the flames under the cauldron have become coals. The world seems perfectly flat and gray, all dust and weeds.

 
“Well, like I say, you get out what you put in,” the witch concludes dryly. “Let’s move along, then, shall we.”

  “By all means,” the fairy godmother says. “None of us are getting any younger, and some of us have real things to get back to. Like clients who appreciate what we do.”

  Feeling deeply ashamed, I return my gaze to the cauldron, in whose turmoil another stretch of time has already passed.

  The End of the Middle’s Middle

  One morning, as she lay on the sofa in her godmother’s visiting chamber, her tea grown cold, she drew a breath and made a shocking confession.

  “I’m not very happy, Fairy Godmother.”

  The matronly woman looked up from her knitting, her bulging eyes amplified even more by the rainbow-colored butterfly-framed glasses.

  “Don’t be silly, my dear. ‘And they lived happily ever after,’ remember? The story is very clear on that point. Another cup of tea?”

  She shook her head. “I know I should be happy. I’ve done everything required, I’ve followed all the rules. Only I’m often sad, and the prince never seems to be there, and sometimes . . . sometimes I even wonder . . .”

  “Yes?” The fairy godmother stared without blinking, one knitting needle poised like a pen in her rosy hand.