by Olga Grushin
As she worked on the shirt, she thought about buttons and happiness. She decided on her wedding dress for her prince’s liberation: it seemed the appropriate choice. The confectionlike gown, once her most cherished possession, hung in a cloud of white tulle in her dressing room. Sewing scissors at the ready, she stood before it one morning, looked at the pearl-encrusted buttons running down its lacy back, and recalled trumpets blaring, horses prancing, crowds tossing rice into the warm spring air, her stepsisters acting huffy and displeased, and the prince lifting her veil, bending down to kiss her. When their lips had touched, she had believed that she would float in this tranquil warmth of love and comfort, shielded from all unhappiness, from all change, forever after. Now she trailed her fingers over the buttons’ cool iridescence and wondered how many to snip off. Precisely when had Prince Roland stopped being the attentive, generous man who had made her feel content and secure and been replaced by the soulless, hard-eyed automaton who wielded his sharp porcupine quill and his virile member with an equal self-obsessed, callous ruthlessness?
For she knew everything now. She had long since retrieved the magic mirror from the wastepaper basket, brushed off the cherry pits stuck to the glass, and made sheepish apologies. The mirror, which had seen it all and took everything in stride, had accepted her contrition, and she now spent an hour in the morning and another in the afternoon, as well as an occasional hour or two in the evening, watching the prince’s antics; for it seemed only prudent to keep track of his doings. She found out a great number of things, all confirming (had she needed any further confirmation) that this man was not the man she had married. This man ruled the kingdom with an iron hand, crushing every disagreement, no matter how minor, punishing every criticism, no matter how trivial, signing death warrants and exile orders with no trace of misgivings. In his leisure moments, he worked his way through the female inhabitants of the palace—and here, once her furious blushing had given way to a horrified fascination at the thoroughness of the curse, his exertions proved rather instructive to watch. The study was the place of choice for his assignations, and he plowed into scullery girls with angular hips and middle-aged countesses plumped up on bonbons, all strewn with egalitarian abandon and in varied combinations on his floral rug; he also not infrequently contrived to couple paperwork with assorted diversions, as a flock of women serviced him under his desk while he perused his reports. The latter revelation shed nauseating new light on that afternoon when she had surprised Esmeralda the Singing Maid in the act of searching for a thumbtack at the prince’s feet and had then, so trustingly, alighted in his lap. It made her study her son with fearful apprehension—would the shame of his life’s quickening find reflection in his nature? It also confirmed that, by the sixth year of marriage—conveniently, she could calculate the precise date based on Ro’s subsequent entrance into the world—Prince Roland had no longer been himself, which brought her back to the pressing question: Exactly when had her beloved prince stopped being her prince?
The radiance of their early years together shone undimmed in her mind: the first year, brimming over with dances, roses, and ardent (if properly restrained) affections; the second, when she had bathed in the prince’s doting attentions through her long confinement; and the third, when she had learned the ways of the palace, indulged in the innocent joys of poems and tapestries, and basked in her overall sense of belonging.
Without the slightest hesitation, she sheared three buttons from the dress’s back.
Then, her scissors yawning in her hand, she stopped and thought.
The fourth year, now—what was she to make of the fourth year, the year she had paid her surprise visit to the von Liebers’ palace? The prince had not been entirely kind to her at the time, but he had offered oranges and explanations later. And the following stretch, before the unequivocal afternoon in the man’s lap, had not been one of relentless misery, either, filled as it had been with the ups and downs of a regular, albeit not altogether fairy-tale, existence. Was her husband not entitled to some intermittent infelicities, moments of impatience or irritability, and sour moods before she would brand him an accursed monster? At what point would the weight of her cumulative unhappiness signal the innate change in his personality rather than an occasional bad day on his part?
After nearly a year of work, the shirt was finished at last, three buttons provisionally dotting its collar, the day for breaking the curse—their eleventh anniversary, as it happened—fast approaching, and she was still unable to make up her mind. There were only two weeks left now—and then a week—and then, somehow, she rose one windy spring morning to find that their anniversary was on the morrow and yet she felt no closer to deciding. On the verge of panic, she resolved to pay a visit to the von Liebers themselves, to uncover what she could about Prince Roland’s long-ago sojourn. The prospect was unpleasant, but she was learning to pursue her aims with a force of will no less steely for her seeming meekness and patient acquiescence, and her poor prince’s rescue lay at stake.
And so, she had her grooms ready a carriage and rode over to the ducal palace.
* * *
• • •
“It pains me to say it, but women are such self-deluding imbeciles,” the witch announces. She does not, however, sound particularly pained, and adds after some thought, “Not that I should complain, it’s what keeps me in business.”
“Well, but hold on a minute,” the fairy godmother interrupts. “That year of wandering—was it all just a dream, or wasn’t it? And if it wasn’t, am I correct in surmising that she went and allowed herself to be groped by some gypsy vermin?”
“Don’t get your panties in a twist,” the witch says, her tone dismissive. “Of course it was a dream. The girl had clearly developed a bit of an imagination while moping around her palace. A sound survival tactic, too, in my opinion.”
“But even so,” the fairy godmother persists. “A lady should be better capable of controlling what she imagines. Imagination can be highly dangerous, you know. Deadly, even. And all that mirror business, my dear child, really!”
I am grateful for the sudden disappearance of the moon behind new clouds: the conveniently timed darkness hides my reddening face.
“Ah, come now, I’m sure it did her good to stay abreast of her husband’s athletic pursuits. She may have even learned a novel move or two to try under the covers in the event her true love found his way back to her bed.” The witch pauses, then goes on slyly, “Or if he happened to be otherwise engaged, a nice young beekeeper, perhaps?”
Her insinuation, unfair as it is, comes out of nowhere, and I am winded. And then, because I must not let any chance feelings of guilt interfere with my sense of being fully in the right, I speak, sharply—too sharply.
“We need to finish this. Now.”
The witch, I see, is regarding me with new interest.
The Middle’s End
She found the ducal palace in a state of neglect. The gates to the grounds were unguarded, the paths overgrown. The windows, in spite of the twilight hour, gaped black, with only the faintest flickering of candlelight here and there. No one came to greet her carriage, and she stood before the front doors, knocking until her knuckles hurt. At last the butler of the once-stately gait let her in; he was old now, and wheezed as he walked. The Duke von Lieber, he informed her, his speech interspersed with bouts of coughing, had fallen off his horse, regrettably with fatal results, two summers ago now, and the duchess, aggrieved by her childless widowhood, discouraged visitors.
Stunned, she stared at the man. Surely, this was wrong. Fairy tales allowed for deaths, without a doubt—but not undeserved or inconsequential deaths, or, hardly ever, deaths from accidents—to say nothing of deaths without issue.
“So you’d best be going now, Your Highness, if it’s all the same to you,” the butler prompted, not unkindly. “I’d offer you some tea, but our last teapot quit.”
She wanted t
o plead her case, but of course, she could not speak, and her elegant visiting card, proffered at her arrival, had failed to convey the urgency behind her visit. In desperation, she grabbed the card out of his grimy gloved fingers—there was the remembered O of his mouth—scribbled a few words on its rich creamy surface, and, underlining “To your mistress,” handed it back. The old man sniffed, blinked, coughed, mumbled in a desultory fashion, and, at last, limped away with a shrug.
She waited. The clock ticked in the corner. The butler, his approach heralded from afar by scraping footfalls, reappeared in the doorway and, the look of surprise now perpetually rounding his mouth, invited her to follow. A step behind him, she walked through rooms that were darker, smaller, shabbier than the dangerous, jewel-bright, velvet-soft places that had haunted her onetime nightmares. At the end of a chilly corridor, he pushed open a door, made a creaking bow on the threshold, and departed with a shuffle.
After some hesitation, she stepped inside.
It took a moment for her eyes to grow used to the dimness. Then she saw the darkened bulk of an enormous bed, and her heart quailed at the recognition. The bed was unmade, as it had been all those years before, but now the rumpled mess of sheets and pillows bore a sad look of squalor rather than the luxurious languor of abandon.
“The maid has run off,” snapped a petulant voice behind her. “Bitch.”
She spun around. A woman sat at a vanity by the far wall, her back to the room. A single candle burned before her, and in its guttering a multitude of bottles, jars, and vials gleamed dully. The woman’s feeble yellow curls, fat shoulders straining against a robe the unbecoming color of persimmon, hands so puffy that a ring could be seen cutting deep into the flesh of one finger, all seemed unfamiliar—but just then, in the mirror, she caught the woman’s gaze and felt a jolt. The woman’s eyes, that unforgettable shade of poisonous green, stared out of the ruin of her face with frightful intensity.
“I need to talk to you about Prince Roland? Spare me!” the woman hissed with startling violence. “Come to gloat, have you?” She swung around in her chair and, snatching the candle off the vanity, thrust it close to her face. “Go ahead, take a good look, why don’t you? This is what happens to us. What happens to beauty. This will be you someday—just give it a few more years.”
She stared, horrified. Darting light threw into grotesque relief the thinning lips drawn in lurid red, the flaccid eyelids oily with peacock-green paint, the artificial beauty marks glued to three wobbling chins.
The duchess was—suddenly, shockingly—middle-aged.
Middle-aged, and repulsive, and alone.
But surely this, too, was wrong. Those who were middle-aged had always been middle-aged, whether cozily so, like plump cooks and stolid gardeners existing on the margins of every tale, or maliciously so, like cruel stepmothers with striking architectural cheekbones. A charming young woman living at the happy heart of her love story would remain charming, young, and in love regardless of the passage of time—or so she had always assumed, in spite of her own diminished expectations; for were her troubles not unique, caused by a spectacularly evil spell?
“Cat got your tongue, little princess? Too good to address the likes of me?”
The duchess’s voice, too, had changed: sharp, rusty springs poked through the threadbare upholstery of the silken, flirtatious tone she remembered. She shook her head, helpless—but even if she could speak, what would she have said? Forever mindful of her manners, she could have never allowed the frantic questions she so wanted to ask to escape into the air that smelled, sourly, sickeningly, of encroaching old age and failed beauty magic: Is this your true face, madam? Do you deserve it? Is this your punishment for something, something awful, you’ve done? Or—are you telling the truth and is this just something that happens?
Will it happen to me?
All at once, she felt she understood very little about life.
The duchess was speaking, in hot, angry hisses.
“You think you’ve won, little princess, and maybe you have, maybe good, boring girls do come out ahead in the end. But you know something? When you’re old and your precious little children are all grown up and gone and your eyes are too weak for embroidery, you will have nothing, nothing to think about, nothing to remember, because good as you are, you haven’t lived, haven’t dared, you’ve just slumbered your years away in your precious little palace. You want to talk about Prince Roland, do you? Let me tell you about your prince. Your prince was never yours. I knew right away when I saw him at that reception, knew the kind of man he was, the kind of woman he needed. His mouth was hungry, so hungry—and there you were at his side, empty as a canary, stupid daisies in your hair, chirping to my buffoon of a husband about the weather. Oh, I remember it all like it was yesterday. Our eyes met, and he smiled, such a slow, dirty, delicious smile, I bet he’s never given you a smile like that, and I knew without a doubt, I knew just what would happen when he offered to show me some funny old tapestry.”
The duchess was talking, she understood with a recoiling of her entire being, of that long-ago visit—the visit in the third, unblemished year of her marriage. She wanted to protest—more, she wanted to scream—yet she said nothing, could say nothing, and the horrid woman with the vulgar beauty marks atremble on her chins went on hissing spitefully.
“We both knew neither of us gave a hoot about sightseeing, even if the tapestry really was delightful, some faun having his way with a nymph, quite outrageously, too, his red cock smack in the middle of the daft thing! But wouldn’t you know, there was a secret room behind the tapestry, and there we spent some delectable hours together. Such a lover he was, so strong, so inventive, with an arsenal of moves that took even me by surprise, tricks he’d picked up from an earlier mistress in some exotic southern land. Of course, then you had to spoil all the fun with your pathetic little suspicions. We never did go behind the tapestry again, and the floor in his study wasn’t nearly as comfortable. Oh, but a year later he paid me a visit here, and what a visit that was. Because you know what, little princess? I may be all alone now, youth gone, beauty gone, and that fool of a duke went and got himself dead and left nothing but gambling debts behind—but there was a time when I was alive, and your prince and I, we were alive together. The games we played in this very bed, let me just tell you—”
But she was already running, her hands over her mouth.
Somehow, she did not know how, she found her way outside, and into her carriage, and, after a blank ride through the deserts of non-time, was back in her own palace, her own chambers, her own dressing room. There she threw a handful of gowns into a pile on the floor, to reveal a hidden shelf at the back of the closet and, folded on it with great care, the shirt made of nettles. She dragged the shirt into the light, looked at the three pearly buttons along its collar for one full, demented heartbeat, then viciously ripped the third button off.
The nettles, all along the seams, split and gaped.
Her legs gave way. She slid down to the floor, sat frozen for some minutes, her soul near to bursting. Then, all at once hectic, she jumped up, grabbed her sewing kit, tried to repair the damage—to patch up the holes, pull the edges together, close up the wound now gaping where the prince’s heart would be—but her hands shook, the needle kept slipping, and the leaves grew brittle and crumbled at her touch.
After an hour of her mutely hysterical efforts, the shirt was ruined.
She stared at it with stark, bereft eyes. There was no time to fix it now. It was not a Monday, there was no full moon, the kitchen was fresh out of nettles. The next day would come and go, and the spell would remain unbroken. A year of her life. A year of blistering, burning fingers, a year of silence, a year of hopes—all gone. Her mouth taut, she swept away the nettle dust, crawled into bed, and slept the heavy sleep of the defeated—slept, as it happened, all through her eleventh wedding anniversary and straight into the twelfth year of
her marriage.
* * *
• • •
When she awoke, everything looked simple once again. Her love for the prince was a bit dimmer, perhaps, but he needed her help, and help him she would. She would spend another year in silence, she would weave another shirt. And this time, there would be just two buttons attached to its collar; but of those two, she was absolutely, resoundingly, certain—as, in truth, she had never been of the third.
For, once she calmed down, she mulled over the duchess’s story, and understood that it was not all that unexpected. Indeed, if she were to be unflinchingly honest with herself, the third year of her marriage had not been one of cloudless contentment. She recalled the emptiness she had felt when Nanny Nanny had taken over Angie’s care and she had found herself, quite simply, with nothing to do. There had been so many hazy, flat, lonely days—the hours spent listening to that ranting ghost of the minstrel whose bellicose epics she had detested, the battalions of pickles and preserves she had labored over in a swoon of sticky-fingered boredom, the afternoons she had stood before that faded tapestry, obsessively guessing at the meaning of the red spot in its center, willing everything to make sense. She remembered gazing at the prince across banquet tables and ballroom floors, wishing he would stop being so considerate and, her need of rest notwithstanding, start spending nights in their bedroom again. And of course, she remembered hearing the woman’s low laughter and the man’s soft voice in that tapestried hallway—but she remembered something else, too, something she had forgotten, had made herself forget, until now.
