“Be careful,” said Idun.
The woman in black reached up and plucked an apple, a beautiful one, shining in the twilight and the mist of the end of the world, white on one side and red on the other. None of the other apples were like that. She could barely hold it in both arms. But the apple got smaller as the ferry drifted back over the water, until it could fit in an old woman’s basket.
Years later, she came back. She was old. Her feet were covered in blisters. Idun shook her head and kissed them. Idun is like that.
Well, that was a long time ago. The tree punishes pride, it’s always had a bit of a thing about that. I can’t really walk anymore—some things don’t ever heal. I mostly sit by the wall in my old boat deck chair and watch the wind blow milkweed into the meridian. I watch them silently vanishing as the moon comes up. I knit, when my arthritis lets me. Frigg sends up a nice home-spun wool from New Hampshire at the end of each semester. Black, of course. When tourists come, I hand them headphones and an audio tour on cassette tape. On it, I tell them all the apple-stories I know. Except one. I used to do a live show, but the kids seemed so bored.
When winter comes to the end of the world, the sea freezes over, and we all have a little peace. The dock is clotted up with chunks of ice, and even the meridian freezes in places, huge circles of ice floating in the air like mirrors. It’s so quiet. That’s when I think about her the most, when I touch the great apples, hanging red and bright even in the cold, as they always will. I think about chances, statistics. What was the probability of choosing so badly? One in a hundred? A thousand? Less? Was there ever any chance that I might choose the right one, or did the tree choose, all along?
I dig my nails into the flesh of one, and the juice like blood runs over my wrinkled hand. I look up, helpless, palsied, childless, into the flat, frozen heavens, a sky like skin, skin as white as snow.
The Wedding
Last summer, my aunt married a rime giant.
The wedding was lavish; neither clan approved. My uncle-to-be stood dripping in the hallway of Grandmother’s great, sprawling house, miserable in a black suit that had already split twice at the shoulders.
Aunt Margaret always had a thing for foreign men. When they were kids, she and my mother tried to learn French from tapes so that they could grow up and marry Parisian dukes and dance in pink dresses with peonies on the shoulders. When they progressed past je vous rencontrerai au palais vendredi, Grandmother sat them both down and gave them ginger cookies and explained to them very gently about the revolution, the impracticality of flowers as personal decoration, and the difficulty of obtaining an EU visa. My mother shrugged and promptly threw over the French for mathematics. Margaret simmered and seethed in the kitchen.
“Ces paysans stupides ne peuvent pas m’arrêter,” she whispered, and took two more ginger cookies just to spite the guillotine-masters.
Her wedding dress was the palest possible pink, so pale you might be excused for thinking it white. Two enormous violet-rose peonies nodded from the shoulders, wilting lightly in the June heat. I told my cousin I thought it was cruel to our prospective uncle—couldn’t they have done all this in January? But my aunt has always had a perverse streak. At the reception, Volgnir put his wet blue hand to her cheek and whispered: I melt in thy service. They didn’t think I heard, but I did. I’m quiet; I sneak. Nobody really notices me, so I get to hear all kinds of things. Like when Grandmother took a lover from the local university—she had four of them come to the house and line up on the lawn like prize horses for her to choose. Grandfather sipped his limeade and gin and laughed at all of them, all discomfited and nervous, anxious to please.
I just sat and watched her examine their calf muscles. I took the three she didn’t want. Our family is like that—waste not, want not.
When Margaret came home from Norway, Grandmother pursed her lips and stared her up and down. I was washing dishes, careful not to clink the plates. Grandmother sniffed and picked at a dropped stitch in her knitting.
“I’ve always suspected our family has giant blood, you know,” Grandmother said at long last. “On account of the twins being so tall. Mind he wipes his feet—there’s ginger cookies in the jar.”
On the day before the wedding, we all gathered in the front room for iced tea and awkward conversation. We stood around, cubes gently melting. All of us younger girls wore light green and no stockings and delicate little bits of silver at our throats and ears. Volgnir’s people came in bronze and horsehair, burnished and I’m sure very fine, their braids greased to a high shine. We all avoided looking at each other, unsure of how we were meant to progress. Grandmother had dyed her hair blue in honor of the rime giants and clipped it back with diamond clasps that looked very like clusters of icicles. One of Volgnir’s sisters eyed them longingly, as the ice on her shield cracked and broke. Everyone ignored the sound. What could you say? Margaret seemed delighted at every moment; the more uncomfortable we all were, the wider she smiled. I could see, when she sat, that her ankles had little sheens of ice on either side, like anklets.
Finally, my brother Lucas suggested barbecuing, and we all thought this was grand. We took our shoes off to feel the dewy lawn between our toes; my cousin Rose made lemonade with fruit from our trees. We slapped marbly steaks on the grill, and sausages, a few chicken breasts and soy chops for the out-of-towners. Lucas felt at home, with a steel spatula like a spear in his hand, and slowly, we became ourselves, laughing and sharing the kinds of familial gossip weddings encourage. Little Shana’s off to college, majoring in biochemistry. Her boy’s run off with her—very romantic, but he can’t do the math, you know. Did you hear Eli’s insufferable wife is pregnant again? Modern science is a wonderful thing, I told them.
It came time to eat and we all sat in our accustomed yogic poses, balancing paper plates on one silk-clad knee with a glass of tea or lemonade crinkling and tinkling in one hand. The Hrimthursar—that’s what Margaret called them—we all took it to be rather an over-stuffed surname, but no more, we supposed, than the time Emily married her Hungarian secretary. At least there were a few vowels to spare this time. Anyway, the Hrimthursar just stood around the grill, their nostrils flared huge and dark, sniffing the last smoky wisps off of the meat, their eyes closed in ecstasy, their hands all joined together.
“Don’t you want to eat?” Lucas called in his friendly, bear-bellow voice.
“Don’t be ignorant,” snapped Margaret. “They are eating.”
When I was little, I wanted to be like Aunt Margaret. She wore flowers in her hair every day, and the flowers always matched her stockings, even when it was winter—then, she wore Japanese bittersweet in her brown curls, and flame-colored stockings that I thought were the height of elegance. She knew how to ride a horse, and make ice cream in a bucket, and could do algebra in her head. She knew about engines and crocheting and mountain climbing, and once in her twenties she wrote a potboiler novel about a murder in a French museum. She could do just anything, and I loved her. Once she went to Tibet and came back with purple prayer flags for my room. I sat in her lap—there were little whitish-green grape blossoms in her hair—and listened to her sing sherpa-songs and tell stories about the snow-maidens that lived on Mt. Everest, who would only love humans who could climb all the way to the top.