How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales (5 page)

The older I grew the harsher she got—I don't think she liked the way my growing stretched her so thin. When I became a woman, I grew leagues not only in height but also in ethics. I thought of others before I thought of myself. Soon after that, the shadow girl began to trouble me badly. Her face held a constant and hideous smile. In the past, she had hardly broken even a tentative grin—just like me, whom my mother has always accused of having a grim demeanor.

Things got rough for a while, but we've worked everything out now, me and my shadow, me and that little dark curse of a being.

In the early days, it wasn't that bad.

The first day of preschool, in the red barn of Happy Acres, I was settling for a nap, ready to enter a spaced-out blissful condition on a sky-blue terrycloth mat to tinkling music beside a blonde girl wearing a pink-and-purple striped top with a zipper down its center and matching shorts. I thought she was the prettiest creature I ever had seen. So, like a monkey, I stretched out my lips and showed her my teeth; I'd learned to smile, of course! But the response I received was quite unexpected. The blonde girl in the purple-and-pink outfit made a horrid face when she saw me, and turned away. When I told my mother she said, “Don't be silly, it had nothing to do with you!” But that wasn't true. She saw my shadow, I'm sure.

The first day of kindergarten, we were asked to sit in a circle, to sing. I sat down next to Janie O'Malley. Her freckled face went white under her orange hair. She turned to me with her eyes burning bright, reached out, and pinched my hand. Her face was a white globe of meanness. I don't know if it was her face or her pinch that hurt me so much, but I do know I cried. “Go away,” she hissed. “Why?” I asked. No answer.

We had to make rhymes later that year with our names. We'd just learned to read and to write. Oh, I was proud of my clever idea! Words, especially rhyming words, had quickly become my very good friends. “Cathy needs a bathy,” I wrote very carefully, in crayon. I drew a claw-foot tub, white and gleaming. How I loved my nightly baths, a special time alone with my mother and with No More Tears. But everything went bad from there. Janie chased me home from school yelling, “Cathy needs a bathy! Cathy needs a bathy!”

That evening, when I looked in the mirror as I brushed my teeth before bed, my face simply burned and I could see it burning. I perched on the footstool into which my name was etched in red and blue and yellow letters—C A T H Y—and the happy, colorful letters became black and loomed in front of my eyes. Not like shadows, but like headstones.

And later that night, the shadow girl came to my room. She had been with me forever, since that very first day, but for the first time since then she told me her name. I woke up in the middle of the night, just as always. The moon shone into the room. I looked over to my sister's bed where she slept deeply. Meg-Anne's brown curls framed her face on the pillow. Even fast asleep she looked like the perfect creature she was; when awake she often played on her toy plastic guitar and sang over and over, “I am Meg-Anne!” Above her head, Wonder Woman curtains flapped in the wind; Wonder Woman was pointing her finger straight at me, a gleam in her eye. I noticed a movement on the ceiling; a shape on a string, dropping down.

Soon, on my night table, next to the music box with the twirling dancer inside, sat my shadow, my friend, glowing as the moon glows and as a star sparkles. With her legs crossed and in a puny green dress, just like my own green velvet dress, the one I had gotten at Grover Cronin's, she looked terribly sad. She cupped her hands over her mouth and whispered, “I'm Cathy.” Then, she disappeared. I felt my heart beat hard, harder than ever before. She had levitated, hovered over my face. She flew not like a butterfly but more like a crow. And I noticed for the very first time that there were no wings on her back—only her shadow.

I told my best friend Lizzie about my shadow when we played the next afternoon. (Yes, I did have a friend for a time, but nothing lasts forever.) “Oooh!” she said. “Let's play that!” So with our two dolls, who were also best friends, we enacted the scene. It became our favorite game for several years to come. My doll played me and Lizzie's played Lizzie. We set the dolls up in their tiny toy beds. I'd put my hands over my mouth and whisper, “Cathy,” and then I'd flap my hands together like they were a bird. Lizzie would sit the two dolls up in their beds and with her mouth make a big giant O! of surprise and fear.

Come to think of it, that's how Lizzie always looked at me: with surprise and fear.

In fourth grade, one of the last times we played the Shadow Game, we used my Polaroid to record it. “The camera is broken,” Lizzie said dully, waiting for the photo to develop. The frame was filled with white light, nothing more. No sign of the dolls. Nothing but light, white and gleaming.

In fifth grade, the year I lost Lizzie's friendship, my class put on
Mary Poppins.
For the tea party scene, Mrs. O'Neill had rigged up a table and chairs to hang from the ceiling on ropes. All the girls wore party dresses in pink, blue, and green. Boys wore black suits with jackets and ties. We sang about candies and cakes. The table and chairs wobbled and danced. In the middle of the nonsense song about delicious foods, everything went black all of a sudden. When I opened my eyes I saw my shadow, dangling in a sparkling party dress from the ceiling. Like my dress, hers had ladybugs printed on it, and a clear plastic purse in the shape of a ladybug hung over her shoulder—dark circles under her eyes.

My shadow's shadow was a little bit broken.

Then everything went bright and I was arm in arm with Lizzie and Barbara, singing that song. Over my head, I saw the shadow girl, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lizzie also look up. She turned to me with terror . . . the dancing went on . . . and then I felt a sharp pinch on my behind. “I hate you, Cathy,” Barbara said in my ear. She looked over my head at Lizzie. Lizzie glanced my way, then up at the ceiling (my shadow was gone). “I hate you too,” Lizzie whispered. “I hate you, Cathy.” Then there was a flash, my mother snapping her camera.

When my mother got the photo developed, in between Lizzie and Barbara, where I ought to be, is no one. A bright light, white and gleaming. “Damn it! I left you outside the frame,” my mother said, when she saw it. For my mother those were very strong words. I believe now she was angry because she would have no proof later to show me how happy I was at one time. (“But you loved being in
Mary Poppins
with Lizzie!” she tells me sometimes.) Eventually, junior high came and things got much worse.

Still, sometimes, even after what I came to think of as the Poppins Episode, Lizzie would call me at home. Her voice was always very low on the phone, as if she was afraid someone would overhear her. But who? Her mother had always been so kind to me; she could hardly mind if Lizzie called. “How are you?” Lizzie would ask with concern. “I'm fine,” I would answer, pretending not to be crying. I was always so happy she called! “Remember the Shadow Game?” I soon would ask, overcome with emotion, and things would go quiet on the other end of the line. “I have to go,” she'd say then. Click went the phone. The day after, she would never say hi to me in school. She wouldn't look in my direction. I could not believe my good fortune when high school finally ended.

I stayed home, just as I always had wanted. Daily I walked to the library—I planned to work my way alphabetically through its circular rooms. But I especially wanted to read the books locked up in the cupboards in the Adult Room: those rainbow fairytale books! I always checked out as many as I could carry and then walked home through the woods. There, in the backyard, at a rotting picnic table, I would read. Around noon, I would go inside and make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and wrap it in a blue bandana; I'd pour some water and drop some ice into an empty jelly jar. I'd carry the picnic out to the yard like a girl I'd read about in a children's book. For the very first time in my life since before the pink-and-purple shorts-suited girl at Happy Acres scowled at me, I experienced bliss.

At night, my shadow visited me. She'd drop from the ceiling in her tank top and undies—what I slept in too—and hover just over my pillow, her face close to mine. Into her ear, I'd whisper tales I had read. I told her about science, how the earth was heating up slowly. About novels, like the one about the girl whose half brother named Ram, “overtaken with lust,” had impregnated her. Picture books—a baby chicken who lost its mother. “Are you my mother?” it asked a log.

Meg-Anne had already gone to college two years before, so my shadow and I had the bedroom all to ourselves. I'd fall asleep reading in bed—I'd covered Meg-Anne's bed with books, and sometimes I'd fall asleep lying on top of volumes and volumes—and then with a whoosh she'd appear. She was as big as I was then—five foot four—and had grown her hair long, just as I had. We both had hair past our shoulders: glorious shades of blonde, brown, and pink. We wore matching white undershirts, underwear embroidered with the days of the week, and both of us had the same necklace on: I had found two teeny dead frogs in the yard, and shellacked them, tying them onto a string. She could not believe I'd made her a present—her face lit up the room with a smile. She'd never smiled before, and the light that came from it was like sunrise, or sunset. I had begun to smoke cigarettes, a kind that came over the ocean in a pale blue box, with their name all in squiggles. They made me sick to my stomach, but I liked it. My girl smoked cigarettes too, as she dangled from the ceiling. We really had flowered!

Yet even though I had started to feel free—I mean not really free, but somewhat free, or at least left alone—my shadow seemed more severe as days went on. While I felt happier as summer progressed, she began to emit an intensity that I couldn't stand. Her eyes went mean . . . and she smoked more and more. She dropped from the ceiling fast, blowing smoke into my face. Still, somehow, her evening appearances remained a real comfort.

From time to time the shadow girl would tire of my tales, and read me stories out of books that she favored, but I'd shudder and ask her to stop. The stories she read me were from strange, tattered paperback novels and had titles like
Flower Children in Danger
and
Evil Horse-Loving Girls.
That I disliked the novels aggrieved her—I preferred happy stories of rainbows, flowers, and girls, and was particularly fond of a series of books about pegacorns, a rare species that is a cross between a unicorn and a Pegasus. I complained, because though I was shy, and self-hating, I was not timid on the subject of stories. Her flying went haywire when I complained.

All the while I continued to enjoy my trips to the library, and my new outfits and hair. I began to wear my grandmother's old clothes. I wore her fur stole, and petticoats. I read fairy book after fairy book. School ending for good was the best thing that ever had happened to me. Then, one night in August, my shadow appeared, and without a word dropped a box at my feet on the bed. I could tell my shadow was angry. I didn't touch the box, and she said nothing about it to me.

By the end of the summer, when I had wound my way around the library to Juvenile, having devoured Adult and Reference and the locked-up fairy-tale books, I started to take the long way home, not just through the small woods but into the forest. I walked down the path of pine needles.

One day, a boy I knew called down to me, from up in a tree. “I like your outfit,” Plute said. Plute Peters, just a boy from Meg-Anne's class who worked at the gas station at Four Corners, about a mile away from the library and near the entrance to the woods. Plute. Plute! What a name. Who would name a kid something like that? I don't even know if it's short for anything. I was named Cathy, and that's usually short for Catherine, but it was all that I had been given.
C-A-T-H-Y. P-L-U-T-E.
Spelled aloud they sounded nice together, I thought. I had on a long white petticoat, under a ratty fur coat of my nana's. The coat had come with her all the way from Russia, on a boat, and it smelled like the sea, and like honey and roses. “Thank you,” I answered, and began to walk faster. Books fell from my arms. Plute leaped down onto the ground, and then touched my shoulder. “What are you so scared of, Weinberg?” he said. “Nothing,” I answered. And it was true.

“So sit down,” he suggested, gesturing to a tree trunk. I sat on the tree trunk and folded my arms. I crossed my legs too, for good measure. I knew what happened to girls in the woods when they encountered man-strangers. Plute stood in front of me. “Excuse me,” he said, with a blush. He always was strange, as much of a social reject at school as I had been. He disappeared behind the oak. Silence, and then I heard him peeing.

Then there was a giant shadow—something flapping in the air—a horrific sound. I leaped up and ran home. I looked over my shoulder, and saw Plute rushing out from behind the tree, zipping his fly. “Weinberg!” I heard him cry.

The next day, Plute was waiting for me on the tree trunk. In one hand, he held a bunch of fading hydrangea, and in the other, a little black leather notebook. He thrust both toward me. “These are for you, Weinberg,” he said. I thanked him, took the flowers and notebook, and continued walking. I know this all sounds very mysterious and strange, but it wasn't. He was just a guy, and I was a girl. It was a nice sort of friendship, for rejects.

We met daily at the tree trunk after that, him on his break from the gas station and me on my way home to read. I'd smoke my foreign cigarettes and he'd compliment my outfits. He'd ask what I was reading and I'd show him my myth and fairy-tale books. He even liked me to read them to him. Seems he loved to be read to, just like a child. I didn't even notice that my shadow was gone. She'd been my only friend for so long; thinking back to those days in the woods, I can't quite wrap my brain around how I didn't notice her absence. And believe me, this is nothing symbolic—she just wasn't there. But he was. And after the first time we did it, there was a sound sort of like wind.