I walked through the house fast, and out the front door, and even though I lost one of my shoes on the steps, I didn’t look back. I felt like I was breathing for the first time in my life, and I felt like I was floating. I remembered just exactly where the lady had said to go, and I heard later that I had a big smile on my face. I felt like I was some kind of queen. I felt like I was going to the ball.
“Reading a husky poem by Anne Sexton, and seeing a tough and tender drawing by Terri Windling, both about Cinderella, got me going on a grand consensus of the different versions of the tale that I had written over the years. I’m pretty sure Cinderella wasn’t a fool.”
You, Little Match-girl
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most prolific and respected writers in the United States. She has written fiction in almost every genre and medium. Her keen interest in the Gothic and psychological horror has spurred her to write dark suspense novels under the name Rosamond Smith, with enough stories in the genre to have published four collections of dark fiction, the most recent being The Collector of Hearts, and to edit American Gothic Tales. Oates’s short novel Zombie won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in the Novel, and she has been honored with a Life Achievement Award given by the Horror Writers Association. Oates’s short fiction has often been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her most recent novel is My Heart Laid Bare.
She was a lonely girl but her loneliness was hidden by her pride in her accomplishments, as a gnarled thicket can hide even the blazing sun. So she became a young woman without comprehending the depth of her aloneness. At crucial times she warned herself in a calm, reasonable voice, If I love no one I am free. So long as I love no one, I can travel where I wish. I can become anyone I wish.
And so it was, and so it came to be.
Already as a bright, secretive child thinking her own thoughts as her parents smiled at her, kissed and hugged her, took pride in her (for even as a very small child she was obviously intelligent, sharp-eyed, talented), as her grandmother cuddled and sang to her, she understood that she could become anyone she wished. You have only to shut your eyes, hurry down a shadowy corridor to a doorway shimmering with light — and cross the threshold. It was Grandma who sang Mother Goose songs to her, “The Fairy Ship,” “Jack and Jill,” “Three Blind Mice,” “Humpty Dumpty”—she laughed at the comical illustration of the bland, bald, egg-faced Humpty Dumpty teetering on his wall — and, when she was very sleepy, and couldn’t keep her eyes open (though trying! she’d been eager to emulate grown-ups from the cradle onward) “Rock-a-Bye Baby.” It was Grandma who read to her from her favorite book, tales beginning Once upon a time … which excited and enthralled her, the stories of “Snow White,” “The Frog Prince,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Little Match-Girl,” “Cinderella.” One day she would learn that the tales in this book were not the original, harsh tales but tales with happy endings: Once upon a time would lead eventually, reassuringly, to And they lived happily ever after. The illustrations were vividly colored and fascinating, her favorites were Little Red Riding Hood with bouncy chestnut curls and bright red cloak, and the brave woodsman with his red shirt, bristly black beard, and upraised ax hurrying to kill the wolf and save Little Red Riding Hood; and Cinderella in her dazzling white gown, the fairest of all the land, a glittering glass slipper on her upraised foot; and the Twelve Dancing Princesses who were so secretive and obstinate, even their father the King couldn’t tell them what to do. She did not like the Frog Prince, who too much resembled a comic-strip frog with bulging eyes, nor did she like the Little Match-Girl, who was so ragged, hunched over, sad. You can make yourself anyone you wish, why then make yourself sad? Shut your eyes, run down the secret corridor, step over the threshold and you can be a princess, a queen, Puss-in-Boots, Jack climbing the beanstalk, Goldilocks who dares to enter the house of the Three Bears but wins their love and admiration anyway. You can imagine yourself anywhere, in any remote kingdom by the sea or in the mountains. Many centuries ago, or centuries into the future dwelling among a race of beings like angels. My choice! Mine.
Then abruptly, overnight it seemed to her family, she lost all interest in fairy tales and childish things. She began school, she discovered school books and the excitement of pleasing her teachers, no longer her parents, or Grandma. Of course she loved her parents, and she loved Grandma, who was so nice to her, but it was her teachers she admired, respected, wished to emulate. And how she succeeded! — it was like a fairy tale, how she became a “star”—and the other children, even the prettier girls, even the boys, were made to envy her. And so, one day, when she was in sixth grade, in a burst of energy she cleared out her shelves of her oldest books, most of them gifts from Grandma she hadn’t glanced into in years — out went battered Mother Goose, out went Favorite Fairy Tales with the stained, warped cover that had once slipped into the bath, out went Tales of Hans Christian Andersen—out! Grandma was surprised and hurt, but she decided not to care. For she was on her way to growing up. Becoming who I really am.
Even before her twentieth birthday she’d begun to travel, to England, to Europe, to Northern Africa, to Turkey. By the age of thirty she’d traveled to the Far East, including Tibet and Afghanistan. Sometimes she traveled with companions, students like herself, but more often she went alone; or, starting out in the company of others, splitting off on her own. She was a photojournalist: her province was what was real. She had no patience for fantasy, for wishful thinking in any guise — political, religious, literary. She was an attractive woman, but an air of impatience and something vaguely sneering in her manner rebuffed men, and discouraged women from befriending her. If I love no one, I am free. So long as I love no one. Looking back upon her childhood, she felt a stab of embarrassment, and scorn. No one in her family had been educated beyond high school; not one of her relatives, including her cousins, had ventured much beyond the territory (rural Maine, west of Skowhegan) of their childhoods. She recalled the old fairy tales her grandmother had read to her, tales of people so strangely fated. Yet, in real life, only fools are fated.
By the age of thirty-five she’d realized her dream of establishing an international reputation as a photojournalist of the highest integrity and professional skill, and she liked it very much, though she was never boastful, that her work commanded the highest fees as well. She was known for her remarkable reliability: alone among her competitors, whose personal lives were often stormy, she seemed never to allow personal problems (if she had any, these were kept secret even from friends) to interfere with her work. She’d been out of contact with relatives, photographing Tibetan monks, when her grandmother had died; when her father died unexpectedly, she’d been traveling in Lebanon, and hadn’t even known of his death until twelve days later; but when her mother became gravely ill, she was in Berlin as a fellow of the Berlin Institute, and easily accessible, so when she received a telegram from one of her mother’s sisters she had no choice but to fly home. What a time for this to happen. What bad luck. Her emotions were confused — anger, fear, even a touch of panic. As if she were a high-flying bird enthralled by her natural element the sky, oblivious of Earth, caught suddenly in a net and hauled back to the ground. Her German colleagues believed that Maine must be a romantic place, like America of the nineteenth century, and she told them flatly that it was not romantic at all—“Except at a distance of thousands of miles.” Yet when she arrived at the Skowhegan airport with its single runway, and was met by relatives she hadn’t seen in years, and taken to the hospital to see her mother, whom she hadn’t seen in years, she was astonished at the rawness of her emotion. Her mother so aged, so frail, so exhausted by her long ordeal of surgery — it was as if her heart were wrenched from her. “Mother! — Mommy.” She burst into childlike tears and had to be consoled by her relatives, and even by her mother.