There is a brief flare.
One long tongue of flame licks out of the oven, touching Gretel’s apron. Gretel beats it out with a wet rag. She hears a loud crackle and a heated snap, and that is all there is of the witch. No slow roast. No dripping juices. No intoxicating smell. Within minutes, the witch is reduced to ash and bone.
And Hansel and Gretel are returned to their father, who is free of his wife. She has mysteriously died, apparently consumed in the same fire as the witch. How has this happened? The father wonders about this. He is glad the woman is gone, but her departure is strange. Finally he asks his children. And maybe it is Gretel who answers him—girls are quicker than boys at that age—and she will say, “Why, father, don’t waste your time thinking about it. People vanish every day.”
8
My childhood was a quiet place, my home so silent that books seemed to be the only place to find words. I slunk about the house with my black hair braided to my waist, Mary Janes scuffing on the floor, book in hand. There were many places I could read. The house offered small chance of interruption. The living room had comfortable chairs and natural light, but I preferred my father’s study with its broad wooden beams hewn by pilgrims, the shelves of scented wood, the oriental rug whose weft and pile made me think of generations of Chinese women, one after the other, losing their sight, although in retrospect the rug was Persian. I, in deference to my family’s code, was silent to the point of being invisible. I’d watch my father balancing the massive checkbook, scratching missives back and forth from his company (Park, Shea and Dunn) to other investment corporations that spun money out of paper. He pounded stamps and from this ink and rubber came gold. Sometimes I’d watch him for close to an hour before he noticed me sitting in the chair. I sat with my book, wide eyes focused on him, silent and stiff as a rag doll.
For my sixth birthday my father brought home the usual elegantly wrapped children’s book. The bow was cloth, wire-edged, deep red with gold trim. The paper was heavy and printed in matte flowers with whorls of silver and gilt-edged leaves. When I tore the package open, the rip made the low, shredding noise that is made only by paper of the highest quality. The book was Hansel and Gretel.
If I hadn’t been sure that my father’s gift had actually been purchased by my father’s secretary, I might have thought he was sending me a message by giving me this tale of thwarted infanticide. I know that I disturbed him. I looked like a miniature of my mother, the same dark beauty, but where she fluttered around like the daintiest of moths, I crouched in the corners like a spider. The translation that turned my mother’s fragile beauty into my gloom was exactly equal to my father’s failure. His inability to make her happy and his complete disregard for anything to do with me—perhaps out of his love for her and knowledge of her slow withdrawal from health—had created this discrepancy between the females in his life.
Hansel and Gretel looked like a promising read. I knew I had heard the story before, but couldn’t remember the exact sequence of events. The witch was frightening, the gingerbread cottage delicious. Hansel and Gretel stared out innocently, but I recalled some variety of wiliness that saved them in the end. I gave them both a grudging respect, even Gretel whose blond pigtails and apple cheeks reminded me of my first grade nemesis, Penelope Cornwall. I nodded a solemn thank-you to my father. He gruffly acknowledged this and left for his office.
My mother had bought me close to thirty gifts, all brightly colored and expensive. There was a china tea set with twenty place settings, in case I had planned a banquet for the variety of stuffed animals and dolls she had also purchased. She made me open all the packages while she watched, and with each tear of cardboard and split of plastic I managed a small “oh” of wonder, which I knew pleased her. I even played with the things, sitting “Teddy” and “Dolly” up against the furniture, as my mother instructed me. I offered them invisible cake and tea, which they consumed without chewing and, although this gesture meal was an ordeal for me, I could see that my mother was pleased. She wiped little happy tears and hugged me close to her, finally sobbing at the tremendous accomplishment of having made it to yet another of my birthdays.
All the while I was longing to escape. I had dug up our recently departed tabby, Claude, and had been spending evenings with him in the backyard behind the compost heap, where I thought his compelling odor might not be noticed. I don’t know why I did this. It didn’t give me any comfort. I think I was trying to prepare for (or anesthetize myself against) death—mine, my mother’s, anyone’s—and although Claude presented a fearful sight, with the worms and grimace and leathery sides, I got used to him soon enough. Claude, who had little to say in life and less in death, was soon discovered by Mr. Jones, who disposed of him with the other garden trash. Mr. Jones, forgivably, had assumed that the carcass (almost a skeleton at this point) was not Claude but some other unfortunate cat whose ninth life had finally quit on our property.
After Claude was gone, I began reading Hansel and Gretel over and over. I don’t know why. Soon I had committed the entire text to memory, but still found myself drawn to the pictures and the rich smell of the paper, which somehow lingered despite my constant reading. I thought of what might happen should my mother finally succumb. Would my father take up with another woman? Would my father kill me with an ax in order to make her happy? This seemed unlikely, as my father was unconcerned with anyone’s happiness, even his own.
I’d like to think that the reason I loved the story—although love is a strange word choice, strange in nearly all its applications—was because of the triumph of good in the end. But in retrospect I think it was probably the child-eating witch that kept tempting me back to its pages.
I woke up on the couch. It took me a minute to figure out where I was, that the screaming outside was the crows. I remembered that Arthur had been there, but he wasn’t in sight. I got up and went to the door. His van was still parked in the drive. I pushed open the door. The clouds were all gone, the sky an even blue. I walked out in my bare feet and knocked on the back of his van.
“Come in,” said Arthur. I could tell from his voice that I’d woken him up.
I swung open the door. He was lying on a platform of boxes in a sleeping bag. I climbed inside and sat on a speaker.
“When did I fall asleep?”
“Not long after the power came back on. The first fifteen minutes of Silence of the Lambs.”
I picked up a framed photo that was at the top of a box—a man in squatting in catcher’s gear, poised as in a baseball card. “Who’s this?”
“My father.”
I put the picture back in the box. “I’m starving.”
“Me too.”
“There’s no food in the house,” I said. Boris would have had food, fried eggs, sausage, cheese.
“Let’s go into town. What do you feel like eating?”
“Grease,” I said. “And look, how convenient, we’re both dressed.” It was true.
Arthur took me to a diner right on one of the wharves, a place that actually did cater to fishermen. The tables were full, so we sat side by side at the counter on swiveling stools. I ordered steak and eggs and Arthur ordered something of his own concocting, which involved hash, eggs over easy, an English muffin, and melted cheese. While we were waiting for the food, I drank my coffee and Arthur went to find the paper. The fisherman beside me hunched grimly over his eggs and toast. A slick deposit of egg yolk rimmed his beard and moustache. His face was wrinkled like an elephant’s backside. Lobster traps were stacked outside the door and gulls scuffled on the boards. I sipped my coffee, which was somehow better burned than it would have been otherwise.