The Charmed Wife

by Olga Grushin

  “It’s . . . hard to explain.”

  “Do try, my dear. Verbalizing your feelings helps with tension reduction.”

  “Oh.” She crumbled a scone into dust on her plate. “Well, sometimes I wonder if this story hasn’t . . . hasn’t gone wrong somehow. Because sometimes I almost feel like I don’t belong in it. Like maybe I’d be happier in some other story—even in some other world, a really different world, if only I could figure out how to get to it . . .”

  Her anxious voice trailed off.

  The fairy godmother sighed.

  “My dear child. There is no other world. There is just this world. And in this world, I assure you, stories never go wrong. All of us get exactly what we deserve. Villains have their punishments, heroes win their princesses, and if your story has a happy ending, then it is simply your matrimonial duty to be happy.” She paused to ponder. “Still, you know, stories don’t always run in a straight line. There could be something you’re overlooking, some twist to the plot. Of course, all twists are properly catalogued in the royal library. I’m afraid our hour is up now, but I want you to read up on fairy tales this week, and we’ll continue at our next session. As always, Tuesday at eleven. Let me jot it down for you, you’ve been a bit forgetful lately.”

  “Yes, Fairy Godmother,” she said meekly as she accepted the appointment card.

  That very afternoon, she walked to the palace library.

  The library was a light-filled room with cream-colored armchairs, cream-colored curtains, and four slim white bookcases, one along each wall, with carved daisies on the sides and books neatly arranged behind glass; it was most often used for mid-morning tea parties. Professor Dagobert, the scholarly dwarf librarian, grumbled, as he showed her in, about the lack of dark wood paneling, blackened fireplaces, illegible manuscripts, and overall air of arcane knowledge and insomnia. He found the gilded compendium she required, explained how to use the index, and left her perched on an ottoman next to a small display cabinet whose shelves contained a modest collection of magical treasures, with a tiny crystal shoe in the place of honor.

  Resolutely not looking at the shoe, she moved her finger down the columns of words, whispering under her breath: “Apples, as emblems of patriarchy. Apples, golden delicious. Apples, as weapons of destruction. Beasts, as allegories. Beasts, as bridegrooms (see under ‘Frogs,’ ‘Stags,’ ‘Swans,’ ‘Swine, abusive,’ ‘Swine, adulterous,’ ‘Swine, alcoholic,’ ‘Swine, lying,’ ‘Swine, not pulling their weight around the house,’ ‘Swine, unemployed,’ ‘Wolves’). Children, desired (see also ‘Children, unwanted,’ ‘Motherhood, ambiguous,’ ‘Stew recipes’). Children, grown up into monsters (see under ‘Parenting, poor’). Children, royal, as ciphers with no distinguishing characteristics, used to further the plot . . .”

  For a while, it was quite slow going; but when she came to “Spells, false brides,” she read, with growing excitement, the entry on lawful wives being deprived of—or rather, this still being the land of deserved conclusions, temporarily diverted from—their happy endings mid-story, by scheming, envious women who plotted to marry the husbands after plunging the wives into slumber, rendering them mute, turning them into fowls or fawns, and otherwise befuddling and bewitching them in such a way that their normally faithful princes became blind to their charms and virtues. She was not by nature mistrustful, but something about this malevolent notion sent shivers of potential revelations through her mind, and she went to bed that night harboring a grave suspicion.

  Was it possible that she was under some sort of spell? Could that be the reason for her feeling of wrongness—and for the deepening chill between her and the prince?

  When, after much tossing and turning, she fell asleep at last, she was trapped in her old recurring dream of dim, scented places where she wandered as before, lost and naked, only this time, a giant green bird with eyes of burning amber flew after her, shrieking, “You fool, you fool, you fool!” It was barely light when she bolted upright in bed, wide awake, reeling. She thought back to that afternoon in the reception chamber of the Duchess von Lieber: the ticking clock, the muttering butler, the tray tremulous in his gloved hands as he had pressed a cup of tea upon her. She had drunk the sweet, watery offering to its last drop, courteous guest that she had been. She remembered, too, her deepening sense of confusion as she had dashed through the low-ceilinged maze filled with luscious fruit, ruby-colored potions, and slinking cats fit to be some wicked witch’s familiars—and at the end of the maze, Prince Roland looking at her with cold eyes, the eyes of a stranger.

  Truth struck her like a thunderbolt.

  The tea—the tea had not been tea.

  She had been most cruelly poisoned.

  Minutes later, she tossed on some clothes and was pelting down hallways, alarming teapots on their brisk breakfast errands, causing havoc among a clump of gossiping maids who squealed and scattered at her passage. “Your Highness, your slippers don’t match!” one of them cried, and the babble of scandalized voices followed her all the way to the fairy godmother’s door, upon which she proceeded to bang in the most unladylike manner.

  “Fairy Godmother! Fairy Godmother, I must speak to you!”

  There was a moment of startled silence on the other side, before a muffled reply reached her: “Not now, my child, I have a visitor.”

  “But I need you, I need you now, I’m under a spell, you have to fix me, he won’t love me if you don’t!” she wailed, and, in a move even less ladylike, flung the door open. She heard an abrupt squawk, saw the edge of a robe (or, possibly, a mantle edged with ermine) and the heel of a shoe (or, perhaps, a mouse-eared slipper) disappearing into the wall through some secret passageway, and found herself face-to-face with the fairy godmother, who looked highly indignant, and not a little disheveled.

  “Dear child, this isn’t proper, there are appointment books,” the fairy began, hurriedly doing up a butterfly-shaped button of her salmon-colored blouse—but she had already thrown herself onto the soft matronly bosom and wept, and the fairy godmother abandoned her scolding and started clucking.

  An hour later, she walked back to her room, her pockets bulging with multicolored vials. “A pink spoonful at breakfast, for mood improvement,” she whispered to herself. “A green sip before bedtime, for insomnia. A blue drop every other day, for . . . for . . . No, the blue one at breakfast, for anxiety, and the pink one . . .”

  The fairy godmother had promised that the potions would work as antidotes to the perfidious spell, setting her right in a matter of weeks—months at the most. Having a list of concrete steps to follow made her feel newly hopeful. Her love for the prince became an earnest resolve to cure herself of the evil malaise until she was, once again, the wife he deserved. She obeyed her godmother’s instructions with steadfast adherence, and, for a while, things did get better. Her days, true, grew a bit muffled, as though swaddled in cotton; but her nights were dream free at last, as if someone had stretched a peaceful black cloth over the nocturnal agitation of her mind. She spent her waking hours playing complacently with her children (though she now left all storytelling to Nanny Nanny, who favored simple tales of the animal kind, with foxes being cunning, chickens naive, and wolves malicious; love did not enter into them in any guise, only the most basic needs to eat and not be eaten). And whenever she saw Prince Roland at state functions, she smiled a slightly loopy smile in his direction, patiently waiting for him to notice the positive change in her nature and rekindle their romance.

  Yet seasons passed, and still the prince came no closer. Her patience wavered. To speed up her cure, she began to down the potions two or three at a time, grouping them by color, or on a whim. Her days grew wobbly then and ill defined, now stretching until prolapsed, now shrinking to taut compression. Sometimes she woke up, after not being asleep, and was thrust into the midst of foggy conversations with the frowning Nanny Nanny or the Marquise de Fatouffle, who gaped at her rudely
over a teacup. On one occasion, she discovered old King Roland hovering above her, in hushed consultation with the court physician, and thought she could make out, amidst their whispers, an oft-repeated phrase: “Nervous breakdown, nervous breakdown . . .” She was unbothered by it, for she had started to sense a kind of gap between herself and everything around her, not unlike the jolting sensation one got when one failed to notice stairs coming to an end and attempted to place a foot on yet another step, only to have it hit the floor with shocking abruptness—and in that gap, she would glimpse, at times, disjointed fragments of that other, imaginary, world, streets thronging with multitudes, roads honking with hurtling monsters, gilded musical boxes sliding up and down the metal spines of needle-like buildings, everything loud and bright and sharp-edged, and somehow so much more present than her actual life in the palace. Her feeling of dissociation grew, and grew, until she did not feel at all herself. One day, she drank three pink potions in rapid succession, then sat before her mirror, watching a pasty-faced, overweight woman who glared at her with hostile eyes, when it occurred to her that, quite possibly, she was not herself—could not be herself—for her true self, her lovely, lovable, thin, happy self, must have been spirited away by the wicked enchantress, hidden, perhaps, in some dream-spire of steel and glass—and the unlikable woman in her mirror was none other than the evil impostor in person.

  Horrified, she cast about for ways to rid herself of the hateful creature. She stopped leaving her room altogether in an effort to keep the false wife away from the prince, hoping that the villainess would see the futility of her designs and go back whence she had come; yet the wretched woman did not budge. Next, she thought to scare her away with violence, and went about smashing teacups and pressing china shards into the tender skin of her arms and thighs; but invariably she found the pretender wife unperturbed and herself howling with pain. Desisting, she decided to starve the impostor instead, and tried to stop eating; yet always she broke down and accepted a cracker or a cluster of grapes that Brie and Nibbles pressed upon her, then felt ashamed of her weakness.

  (As it happened, the descendants of Maximilian the Long-Tailed were no longer in power. The dynasty had developed an extravagant taste for luxury along with an imperious sense of entitlement. Not content with styling themselves mere Royal Companions, they had demanded to be addressed as Their Majesties and claimed an ever-growing number of prerogatives, from taxing all cheese consumption to exercising the droit du seigneur. King Nibbles pinched the backside of every passing mouse, whether nubile or old, simply to remind them all of his authority, while Queen Brie expected everyone she encountered on the daily inspections of her domains to prostrate themselves before her, and was always preceded by two pages, one of whom heralded her approach by blowing into a peapod, while the other walked backward unrolling a ribbon of crimson silk under her paws. And tyranny and oppression only worsened with time, even though rulers themselves changed rather frequently: numerous members of Maximilian’s family, seduced by the heady prospects of impunity and overindulgence, vied for the throne and deposed one another with clockwork regularity, by means of varied brutality that ranged from plying siblings with poisoned truffles to pushing grandmothers off staircases, and not excluding an occasional bout of surreptitious infant strangling or a more elaborate ploy involving a dozen young cousins who were invited to a birthday party only to find themselves in a locked room with a famished cat. There had, in fact, been so many assassinations and coups that no one paid attention to the regnal numbers anymore.

  Still, as long as the royal contenders kept all the murder in the family, the masses grumbled quietly; but when one of the pages tripped while unrolling the ribbon before one of the queens and stepped on her toe and she had him beheaded, the grumbling grew louder. Sewer rats were the first to voice their discontent openly, and the working kitchen mice joined them shortly. In the end, the entire indigent population rose up, led by the intrepid Provolone the One-Eyed, overthrew the tyrants, and liberated their fabled stores of chocolate.

  A general democratic election to the positions of Brie and Nibbles was then held in the kitchens. Victory was carried by a landslide by a team of two brothers, Snufflebit and Snifflebit, who were young and carefree, and had won the favor of the electorate by running a hilariously improvised campaign, complete with stand-up comedy, blueberry juggling, and riding along pantry shelves on bottle caps. Grandmothers’ tales had led the brothers to believe that the job would entail hours upon hours of board games, musical diversions, and much merriment, and they were eager to test their dancing skills. Soon after moving to the royal mantelpiece, however, the Mice Elect discovered, much to their dismay, that no dancing was required and that, far from being an enviable boon, the role of the Royal Companions was a grueling charity. It appeared, quite simply, that the princess was not overly intelligent and needed someone sensible to take care of her, day and night, or she might forget to eat, neglect to sleep, and have unfortunate accidents with assorted sharp objects. Less than a month into their one-year term, Snufflebit and Snifflebit grew so wan and thin that their family, alarmed, called an emergency meeting in the broom closet. The brothers were absolved of their duties, and a weekly rotation was set up among volunteers—a week, it seemed, was all it took before even the most stalwart mouse felt utterly worn-out.

  As summer days cooled into fall evenings, it became harder and harder to find volunteers. Then someone remembered that in the rat-infested sewers deep below the palace, there was rumored to live an incredibly ancient seer by the name of Sister Charity, so beloved and wise that even the most murderous rat bandits grew as gentle as hairless mouselings in her saintly presence. Many argued that it was only a legend and no such mouse existed, but eventually a rat was found willing to show them the way to Sister Charity’s abode in exchange for a ration of sausages, and a small, nervous delegation with Snufflebit and Snifflebit at the helm was sent down below to ask the venerable seer for guidance.

  They found her seated in the darkest underground chamber, telling a quiet story to a circle of mesmerized baby rats at her feet. She looked older than the very stone foundations around them, and in the unsteady halo of light cast by the candle stub in Snufflebit’s shaking paw, they saw that her eyes were milky and blank, for she had gone blind in her great age. Yet when she turned to face them, they felt that she was looking directly at them—looking directly into their souls.

  “I know why you’ve come, o mice from above the ground,” she said in a voice like a rustle of leaves, like a creaking of trees. “I see the pleading in your hearts, and your hearts are pure. So be it. For your sakes, I declare the old debt paid, and I release her. Let all her mistakes be her own from now on. You will be free of your toils at the advent of winter.”)

  At the advent of winter, a messenger came to the palace with a letter from Melissa, the princess’s younger stepsister, informing her that her stepmother had died. She felt distraught at the prospect of leaving her room. On the day of the funeral, she stood in the front row of mourners, her face buried in the fur of her collar, her eyes hidden behind oversized sunglasses; she had drunk three or four potions to calm down, and now her features felt as if they were both numb and melting. Melissa, on her right, was crying openly, but Gloria held herself with her usual haughty self-possession. It was Gloria who, her mouth hard, her back ramrod straight, tossed the first handful of earth onto their mother’s coffin. Afterward, Melissa and Gloria walked off together, Gloria’s arm wrapped protectively around Melissa’s heaving shoulders, but she herself had slipped the tightening noose of sisterly embrace and trailed a few steps behind. As she stumbled through the frozen cemetery, headstones beckoned to her, angels leered suggestively through marble tears, and at last the path buckled beneath her feet, which she was now surprised to find liberated of shoes.

  A hand grasped her arm, and there was Melissa helping her to a bench, saying, “Here, sit down for a moment. Are you feeling all right?”

&nb
sp; “I’m fine,” she replied, or tried to reply; her words had grown larger than her mouth and would not quite fit there. The world was swimming, and everything felt hot, and her stepsister was peering at her with eyes that had gone wide and solicitous.

  “You don’t seem well,” she kept repeating. “And why are you barefoot?”

  She straightened, tried to focus. They had not seen each other in almost a decade, not since the royal wedding, in fact, though she presently recalled that Melissa, who had ended up marrying the king’s woodsman, had persisted in sending her holiday cards, dutifully answered by Prince Roland’s scribes, as well as stork-bordered birth announcements for her numerous children, five or six by now, she was not certain exactly how many, but however many they were, she decided in a burst of resentment, Melissa had grown far too dumpy and her life was far too pathetic for her to have the right to offer any kind of sympathy, to visit any kind of judgment, to be looking at her betters with such condescending concern while living, it wouldn’t surprise her, in a shoe in some backwoods with her badly washed brood, eating porridge morning, noon, and night, telling time by the crowing of a rooster, and now Melissa’s eyes were once again brimming over, almost as if she were voicing all these awful yet indisputable thoughts aloud, which of course she was not, which she was almost sure she was not, until Gloria took her under both elbows with unwomanly strength and, lifting her bodily from the bench, passed her to a slack-jawed footman and ordered, rather grimly: “Her Highness needs to go back at once. She is upset. And speaking of shoes, do find hers.”

  The last things she remembered were her younger stepsister’s glistening cheeks as she sobbed, over and over, “I forgive you, you aren’t yourself, you aren’t yourself right now!”—and her own dignified reply, while she was being manhandled into the carriage: “Well, of course I’m not myself, the evil sorceress sent me away a long time ago!”—and the hush falling among the mourners. Then everything turned black and still until, without any transition, there she was, sitting on a sofa in her reception room, possibly on a different morning, her hands cradled in the gentle warmth of Melissa’s grasp.