Celestial Navigation

7. Spring and Summer, 1971: Mary

First it was like a picnic. I mean that I planned it with the same kind of bottled-up, excited energy. I lay awake all Thursday night making mental lists of what I would need for the children — just the essentials. We were finally getting down to the essentials again. I calculated the earliest time I could telephone Brian in the morning, and I decided on seven. Which was too early, as it turned out. I have forgotten the pattern of life without children. Brian answered sounding hoarse and sleepy, and he didn’t seem to be thinking well. I said, “Brian, do you still have that house by the river?”

“Who is this?” he asked.

“It’s Mary Pauling.”

“Do I what?”

“Do you still have that house by the river. Where your boat is moored.”

“Oh. Sure.”

“Would it be all right if the children and I went out there for a few days?”

“Out—?”

“I wouldn’t ask you this but you did say you never use it yourself. Didn’t you?”

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You want to take the children there?”

“That’s right.”

“You and the children but not Jeremy?”

“That’s right.”

“But this is not a vacation house.”

“No, I know that.”

“It doesn’t even have hot water. And it’s filthy.”

“Yes, we’ve been there once, remember?”

“Mary,” Brian said. “Are you — I mean, is this — you’re not leaving him or anything.”

“Oh,” I said, “you know Jeremy, he’s just so caught up in his work right now and I thought it would help if we got out of his hair for a while.”

Then Brian said, “I see. Well, of course. You can use it as long as you like.”

I could tell that he was still puzzled. But how else could I have explained it? “Actually, Jeremy forgot to marry me, Brian, and of course I could have reminded him but that would have been the third reminder on top of my proposing in the first place, and what kind of wedding is that?”

By then I was packed. I had done that at dawn, while waiting for it to be time to call Brian. I tiptoed into the children’s rooms as they slept and I felt for their things in the dark. All night I had been looking forward to it — I do like getting organized to go someplace — but it turned out not to be what I had expected. For one thing, the bare essentials for six children can fill a trunk in no time. You don’t get the same feeling of purity as when you run away with one small child and her favorite doll. Clothes, vitamins, toothbrushes, baby aspirin, diapers, Edward’s potty chair, Pippi’s antihistamine, seven pairs of plastic pants … Also, I felt so sad. Hadn’t I once sworn never to leave anyone ever again? Especially not Jeremy. Oh, never Jeremy.

I didn’t tell the children until Miss Vinton had had her breakfast and left for work. I knew they would have passed it on to her; they can’t keep secrets. Miss Vinton took an endless time buckling her mackintosh, smoothing the lapels down, checking on a little stain near the hem. I thought I was going to start screaming and shaking her, but instead I went on smiling. I looked steadily downward so she wouldn’t notice any difference in my face. “Have a good day, Miss Vinton,” I said. Then just as I was closing the front door after her I saw how straight she held her back, that rigid board of a spine marching off to deal with the world, those enormous Mary Janes flapping along, and I wished I had told her after all and given her a hug for goodbye.

Mr. Somerset sometimes slept till noon and Olivia even longer. She had a job now at a sort of leather shop. I never had figured out her hours, but I was fairly sure that she would sleep through our going. (The night before, making supper, setting out a tray for Jeremy, I started crying right in front of her. “Oh,” I said, “I just can’t go on with these everlasting trays of his,” so she took over. She gave him part of her casserole — something organic, I believe. Later I was so ashamed. Haven’t I been trying all this time to instill some sort of stability in her? This morning I didn’t want to say anything to her at all. I couldn’t face her. I wouldn’t know how to explain.) I stood at the foot of the stairs for a moment, listening for any sounds from her room or Mr. Somerset’s. Then I said, “Children?” They were still dawdling over breakfast. They thought they were going to school that day. I went out to the kitchen and leaned against the doorframe. “Guess what, children,” I said. “We’re taking a little trip.”

They wanted to know where — all but Darcy. Darcy just got very still. She was feeding Rachel her Pablum, and she stopped the spoon in mid-air and didn’t even notice when Rachel started shouting and grabbing for it.

“We’re going to spend a few days at Mr. O’Donnell’s cabin near the boatyard,” I said. “Remember last summer, when he took you all to see his boat? We’ll leave after breakfast; Mr. O’Donnell has kindly offered to drive us there.”

“Something’s gone wrong,” Darcy said.

“Of course not, honey.”

“But it’s a school day. I have a math test.”

“You can always make it up.”

“It’s going to count for half my grade.”

“You can make it up, Darcy.”

“Are we leaving Jeremy or something?”

Well, of course she would guess that. I suppose she remembers leaving Guy, although she has never said so or asked me a single thing about it. I said, “No, Darcy, don’t be silly. We’re giving him a little peace and quiet, is all.” Then I said, “Mr. O’Donnell is just providing the transportation.”

Which I might not have needed to add, but I couldn’t be sure. You never can tell what is going through that head of hers.

At nine o’clock Brian was supposed to be picking us up. (There was a city bus, but it didn’t go the entire way and I was just as glad we weren’t relying on it.) I gave each child a coat and a load to carry. “Hurry now,” I said, “out to the vestibule. Not outdoors, just in the vestibule.” I didn’t want Jeremy to see us leaving. I was afraid that one of the children would suddenly decide to run up and kiss him goodbye, but nobody thought of it. Then too he might come down on his own. Why hadn’t I taken him breakfast, so that he would have no reason to leave his studio? The fact is that if he did come, if he said a single word to keep me with him, I would gladly stay forever. I didn’t want to go. Yet I kept feeling this pressure to get out of the house before he discovered it. I kept saying, “Move, Edward, we’re in a hurry,” and when Hannah wanted to run upstairs for her bear I said, “No! Stay down!” I scared her. She went immediately to the vestibule and stood sucking her thumb and staring up at me. I was like a burglar trying to escape without a sign, leaving behind me those gleaming countertops washed clean of every fingerprint. I made them all whisper. “Olivia’s asleep, hush!” I said, and they stared. Hush for Olivia? She could sleep through nuclear warfare. We stood packed solid in that little cube of a vestibule, steaming up the front windows and keeping utterly silent. Yet if Jeremy would only come! If he would come and say, “What’s going on, Mary?” and blink at me and put out one of his warm, pale hands to touch mine! Then I would herd everyone back in and lock all the doors and draw all the curtains, and Brian could wait outside our house forever.

His car was a powder-blue Mercedes. Well, I suppose he is quite rich. He drew up soundlessly and peered toward the house, and I pushed the children out before he could honk and attract Jeremy’s attention. “Hurry, now,” I said. “Give me the baby, Darcy. Don’t forget that basket. Where’s my purse?” I was preceded by a parade of belongings, like some pampered movie star. Children, grocery bags, stuffed animals — I was padded with belongings. I felt I should apologize to Brian for having so many children, but during the first few minutes he was out loading things into the trunk and I was passing around Dramamine tablets. I had forgotten who was prone to car sickness; we so rarely drove. I gave Abbie a tablet by accident and then made her spit it out again. “Oh look,” I told her, “you ought to know if you get sick or not—” All of which helped me get over being embarrassed in front of Brian. I knew that he must be shocked at me. I have a very clear picture of how I appear to others: I am so big and slow and unexcitable, and women like that don’t act on impulse. They never leave people, certainly. Now when he was back in the car and maneuvering the rush hour traffic he kept throwing me sideways glances, maybe worrying that I would burst into tears or list all my grievances or spill some dark secret that he didn’t want to hear. I didn’t, of course. I kept the tears away by refusing to look behind me all the while that our house was in sight — that narrow, funny, lovable house with its potty bay window and the children’s old tattered construction paper Valentines glued to the upstairs panes and the dead Christmas tree on its side in front, dripping tinsel, waiting all these months to be collected — and who knows, maybe Jeremy drawing back a frayed lace curtain high on the third floor and peering out, dim and cloudlike, trying to understand what I had done to him.

What was my purpose, sailing away in this ridiculous baby-blue car?

We headed out through stretches of Baltimore that I had only seen once or twice before in my life, rowhouses layered over with ugly new formstone, dead-looking saplings scattered along a divided street so wide and gray that looking at it seemed to bleach my eyes. Meanwhile the children said nothing. I had never known them to keep so quiet for so long. They sat in a row in back, each of them framed by stuffed-in bits and pieces that couldn’t fit into the trunk. They gazed dreamily out the windows. Maybe they were in a state of shock, suffering through an experience I would never be able to erase. Maybe they were just admiring the view. Who knows? Children live in such a mist. I believe that most of what happens comes as a total surprise to them even when you think you’ve explained it. I said, “Abbie? Are you comfortable? Pippi?” They looked at me blankly, then looked away again. Hannah wet her finger and drew an H on the windowpane.

“In a week or so it will be spring,” Brian told me. “Then would be a good time for you to be out there.”

“It’s a good time now,” I said. “It’s spring now.”

“This morning I could see my breath.”

“We’re not made of glass, you know.”

“Mary, that cabin is no better than sleeping out. Maybe you’ve forgotten. There’s no heat, no—”

“I remember that,” I said, “but it’s the only place I know of to go.” Then I saw his face close over, braced for me to begin my story. I said, “And I certainly do thank you. Last time we were there the children loved it.”

The closed look didn’t fade. He said, “Tell me this, Mary. How long were you planning to stay?”

“Well, I hadn’t made any definite plans yet.” I mean—

“Probably not long,” I said. I felt I had to help him out.

“I hope you don’t mind my asking, but do you have enough money?”

“Oh yes,” I said.

“Because if you don’t, now—”

“Brian, you know better than anyone that Jeremy’s just sold four pieces,” I said.

Actually the little money Jeremy had made was still in the bank, and I had left the checkbook on his bureau, where he would be sure to find it. I wasn’t a genuine burglar. What I took was my household-hints money, my money-back-offer money, my coupon money, which I had been saving against trouble all these years as I once promised myself I would. It had mounted up. Fifty dollars for telling how I use old bottle crates to make spice racks, twenty-five for the third-best recipe based on sliced pasteurized processed cheese food and a dollar back for ten labels off canned beans. The money was in a plastic refrigerator container in my purse, and I reached in to touch it and felt strong and competent and too big for the car. Never mind, children; I might carry you away without ever saying why but at least I will be with you, and I will provide for you. I learned my lesson the first time around. Women should never leave any vacant spots for the men to fill; they should form an unbroken circle on their own and enclose each child within it.

We passed barren stretches now, where the fields had been peeled back and naked buildings sat on jagged slabs of concrete, looking as if they had recently been uprooted from some more crowded place. We passed long avenues of service stations and cut-rate tire dealers and machine shops, and then oil refineries and warehouses and strange mechanical monsters standing alone in tangles of dry grass — electrical objects on wiry, spraddled legs, tanks and cylinders, gigantic motors with bolts as big as grown men and twisted black pipes that could suck up a house, all silent and unused. The cars around us now were rusted and crumpled, fantastically finned, driven by gum-chewing men; we were close to the Bethlehem Steel Works. “Look!” said Pippi. “Country!” and she pointed to a matted gray line of tree branches far, far beyond an auto graveyard. “When we get to the river, can we swim?” she asked.

“Philippa Pauling! You’d get pneumonia.”

“Typhoid, more likely,” said Brian. “Bubonic plague.” He looked over at me. I thought he might be about to smile, although it was hard to tell beneath that beard of his. And the children were perking up too — pointing out sights on the road and quarreling over whose turn it was at the window. The junkyards gave way to houses, all tiny and papery-looking but with signs of real people in them, at least. Wooden donkeys pulled wooden carts across the front yards, and there were bird baths and flowered mailboxes and silvery balls on pedestals everywhere we looked. Some people had set up housekeeping in trailers with cement bases built in under them. Now, why would anyone want to do that? All those temporary objects resting on permanent foundations? Well, maybe it was just my mood that made me wonder. I felt like a solid stone house, myself, jacked up on little tiny wheels when I had no business going anywhere.

Now the space between neighbors grew larger and we passed through woods — scrubby and meager, but woods all the same. We turned off onto a gravel road lined with more houses, most of them smaller than the boats that sat in the driveways. Cabin cruisers — ugly things. I never could see why some people like boating so much. I’ve never cared for the water at all, not one way or the other.

To get to Brian’s house you go straight down to the river, through a cluster of bleak shacks and a store and a long shed where they do repair work in the wintertime. There were only a few boats tied up at the docks. The season had hardly begun. We went plummeting along a dirt road that ran alongside the water, and then Brian braked and we looked up to see his cabin: a gray weathered rectangle with a tin roof, and not a perfect right angle anywhere on it. Everything was sagging, leaning, buckling, splitting. The tops of both steps were missing; anyone entering would find himself stepping into wooden boxes, sinking down into cold black spidery caverns. I knew all that ahead of time, of course. I had meant what I told Brian. But still! There are some things you can’t actually summon up in your memory — smells, they say (although I always could) and then the exact atmosphere, the weight and texture and quality of air, that exists in certain places. I knew that Brian’s shack was dismal but I had forgotten how just standing next to it would make you feel dank and chilled, a despairing feeling, and how when you went in some heaviness would press down on your skin and cause your heart to sink. This is not just myself I am talking about. The minute we were inside Brian reached out and touched my arm, unnecessarily, as if the gesture had been startled out of him. “Mary!” he said. “You can’t stay here.”

The children climbed in one by one and fell silent, and stood in a huddle together shivering.

Part of it was the cold, of course. There is nothing so cold as air that has been trapped beneath tin all winter. Then there was the dirt. When Brian bought his ketch the shack came with it, automatically. The previous owner had stayed here whenever he was working on the boat or preparing for an early morning sail. Brian couldn’t have cared less about the shack itself. He let the grit form a film on the table and the mildew grow on the swaybacked couch and the rust trickle down from the faucets in the kitchen sink. Boys broke windows, birds flew in and died after battering themselves against the walls. Why, I could have shoveled the dirt out! I pictured myself with a great garden spade, laboring over the cracked beige linoleum. Then I saw how I would rip down those tatty plastic curtains and scour the sink white again and cover the couch with some nice bright throw, and all my muscles grew springy the way they had the night before when I was planning the packing, and I knew that we would stay.

“You’re not serious about this,” Brian told me.

“Could you bring in our things, do you suppose?”

I set Rachel on my hip and took a tour of the house. Not that there was much to tour. There was a living room with a couch and an armchair, and the kitchen merely took up one end of it — a sink and hotplate, a table and three chairs. The bedroom held a concave double bed and an army cot and a highboy with one drawer missing. In a little cubicle off the bedroom was a toilet with a split wooden seat, its tiny pool of water a coppery color, set squarely beneath the biggest window in the house. Something about that window — the fact that it was curtainless, or the white scum on its panes — made the light passing through it seem cold and eerie. I stood staring out of it for minutes on end, although I knew I should be helping Brian. I watched the children carry things from the car, all of them ghostly behind that cloudy glass. They tottered beneath blurred objects that I could not identify, and in their midst walked Brian, stepping precisely in his narrow Italian shoes, carrying the potty chair and something pink. When they entered the house, they seemed to have just that moment become real. Like people stepping off a television screen into your living room. I heard their voices, warm and high-pitched and louder than I had expected, and then Edward started crying over a scraped shin and I went out to comfort him. I was very glad to see their faces. Their noses were pink from the fresh air and they were sniffing and puffing. “Where shall I put this?” they kept asking. “What do you want me to do with this? Where will we sleep? What will we eat?” I bent to roll Edward’s jean leg up, tilting Rachel on my hip, but Rachel was used to that and she just took a clutch of my blouse and went on smiling in her sideways position, as adaptable as any of them.

When I went out to say goodbye to Brian I could tell that he was still worried. “Well, so long!” I said. “And thanks again, Brian”—singing it out, hoping to cheer him up. But he didn’t seem to hear. “Mary. Look,” he said.

“We’re enjoying this, Brian.”

“Look. Why don’t you tell me the whole story?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” I said.

He sighed and climbed into the car. He rolled down the window to give me last-minute instructions—“There’s a phone up at the store … you can turn on the water out back beside the … call me if you …”—and I nodded and waved and smiled.

Then his car disappeared down the road, and I turned back to see my children watching me anxiously from the doorway. They were clustered at all heights, smudged from the things they had been carrying, framed by rotting wood with a great hollow blackness behind them. I have seen happier pictures in those ads appealing for aid to underprivileged children. I never thought that any children belonging to me would look that way.

From the little store up at the boatyard we bought cleaning supplies and groceries, and we all cleaned until dark but it hardly showed. Lunch was sandwiches and supper was canned spaghetti, and after supper we fell into bed. Bed: that was a problem. I put the three older ones in the double bed and Edward and Hannah at opposite ends of the couch. Rachel and I used the army cot. We didn’t even have sheets — just the blankets I had brought and one musty old quilt we found in the highboy. The children were tired enough to sleep anywhere, but I lay awake for a long time wondering what I thought I was doing. I tried to call up a picture of Jeremy. Had he missed us yet? I imagined him sitting in front of the TV in the darkened dining room, keeping silent company with the boarders. Whenever he had something to think over he would stare at the television for hours on end. Maybe he was weighing us in his mind that very minute, stacking us up, listing our faults and our virtues. Or mine, at least. Surely he didn’t need to think twice about the children. They might get on his nerves sometimes but at least they were mostly his own flesh and blood. I was the interrupter, the overwhelmer; nobody has to tell me that. I saw how he had to tear his eyes from his work when I climbed the stairs to ask him could he babysit while I went to a kindergarten conference? Would he feed Hannah while I took Edward to the doctor? did he happen to have change for the diaper man? I knew those things weren’t as important as his sculptures, but what did he expect me to do? This is what comes with having children. You don’t just tie off their little navel cords and toss them on their way like balloons. You have to start thinking about adenoids and zinc ointment and the proper schooling, you worry about nutrition and germs, money begins to matter suddenly. Oh, hear how shrill my voice gets. Imagine what it would be like to be interrupted by such a voice just as you were conceiving your finest statue. As for my overwhelming him! Did he think I didn’t know? I never spoke to him without a sense of holding myself in check, trying to keep the reins in. I didn’t want to dominate. When I talked to him with big, wide gestures, with power and energy flooding out of me, I saw how he quailed and then made himself stand firm. He was wishing that I would shrink a little. He never guessed that I already had shrunk, that this was as small as I could get.

I sent him messages through the dark: Come and get us. Call Brian, call the boatyard. Make up some excuse for missing your wedding, anything at all, I’ll believe it: you suffered a stroke or amnesia, you were mugged in the studio, you would never have simply decided that you didn’t want to marry me. I thought up ways that he might get in touch with us. I pictured the storekeeper banging on our door—“Lady? Man up there on the telephone, says it’s urgent, life or death.” Or he might come in person. No. Never. But couldn’t he, just this once? He wouldn’t bang. His knock would be so soft I would wonder if I had imagined it. I would open the door and find him waiting, hidden in the dark, recognizable only by the dear, sad hopefulness in his stance and that hesitant breath he always took before moving toward me. For that moment I would give up anything, half the years of my life even, anything but the children. I made a hundred silent promises, but the night just went trailing on and on and the only sound I heard was the murmuring of the baby in the crook of my arm.

We finished shoveling the dirt out. We scrubbed the floor and dusted the furniture, we replaced the broken steps with cinder-blocks that Abbie found down by the water. Darcy washed the kitchen cupboards and the mismatched dishes she found stacked in them, and scoured the sink. The little ones polished the windows, their favorite job. I taped cardboard patches over the broken panes. We tore down the curtains and the great meshy spiderwebs, we ripped the tacked-on oilcloth off the table and the draggled calico skirt off the sink. From the boatyard store we bought brighter lightbulbs, a bucket of disinfectant, a flashlight for walks in that deep, country dark that is so startling after a life in the city, and finally — three days later, when I stopped thinking we might be leaving at any minute — aluminum cots for the children to sleep on and more blankets to cover them with. The store had no pillows except the life-preserving kind. My children have always slept on pillows. “Never mind,” I told them, “this way is good for the spine. You’ll be healthier.” Not that health seemed to be any problem. They worked hard every day fixing up the house, as if it were a game; they ate enormous meals and slept like rocks every night — pillowless and sheetless, crackling about on the red vinyl pads that came with the cots. I wondered what I would do with them if we had to stay here so long it stopped being a novelty. Should I put them in the local school? But it was so close to the end of the year by now — nearly May. The weather was getting warmer. We peeled off some of the layers of clothing we’d been wearing day and night. And as we slacked up work on the house the children simply took to the outdoors. They lugged Rachel with them through the tall grass and pestered the boatmen and hung around the docks. They weren’t allowed to touch the water, even — it was foul and filmed with grease. “What about summer?” Pippi asked me. “Won’t we get to go swimming?” I said, “Of course not. I’ll get you a wading pool, if it’s hot.”

Summer! Would we still be here when summer came?

Brian stopped by almost every day. I told him not to but he said he had to come anyway — he had his boat moored out on the river, a little blue ketch bobbing in front of our house. “How are things in the city?” I asked him. “What’s happening in Baltimore? Is the show going well? Do you have many buyers?” All except what I wanted to ask most: Why doesn’t Jeremy miss us?

The only time he mentioned Jeremy was once during the first week, when it was still cold. I remember the cold because he asked me to step outside with him a minute, away from the children, just as he was leaving. I came in my sweater, with my arms folded across my chest for warmth, and he said, “Not like that, get a coat. I’ll wait.” Then out beside his car he said, “Mary, I feel I’m in an awkward position here.”

“Do you want me to leave?” I asked.

What would I have done if he’d said yes?

But what he said was, “No, of course not, but I’d like to know what you expect of me. Am I supposed to be keeping your whereabouts a secret? Because if I am, now—”

“Oh no,” I said. “Jeremy knows where I am.”

“I wasn’t sure that he did.”

“He knows. I told him, I wrote him a note.”

Then I thought, Suppose he never saw the note. Is that why I haven’t heard from him? I said, “Did he say he doesn’t know my whereabouts? Have you seen him? Did he ask you?”

“I saw him, yes. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even seem to want to mention your going.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, you can tell him, Brian.”

“Of course I wouldn’t bring the subject up myself. But if he asked, you see, I felt that I was in an awkward—”

“Bring it up, I don’t mind. Tell him, It isn’t as if this were a fight or anything.”

“What is it, then?”

I pulled my coat tighter against a breeze.

“I don’t want to pry,” Brian said, “but is this something permanent you are doing?”

I didn’t answer. I had questions of my own. I wanted to know how Jeremy had looked and whether he was getting enough rest and eating right. (He was always so fond of sweets and he didn’t like meat.) But I knew those were housewifely questions that would make Brian smile, and anyway he wouldn’t have been able to tell me. Oh, sometimes I think of other artists’ wives, people that Brian must run into all the time. I picture them fragile and blond and hollow-cheeked, the kind that model in the nude and lead unscheduled lives in garrets and never, never complicate things with children and plumbers. When I used to come clumping into the gallery every month, wearing my nursing bra and my best black dress with the spit-up milk down one shoulder, I imagined that Brian looked stunned. He would stare at me, and if he happened to be talking with other women they would hush and stare too. I suspected that they were feeling sorry for Jeremy. “An artist — married to her?” Then I would pull my stomach in and stuff the straggles of hair back behind my ears, and when I was looking at paintings I spent longer before each one than I wanted to, just showing I could appreciate art. I wouldn’t have been caught dead mentioning anything domestic. And now all I allowed myself to say was, “I hope he’s making out all right.”

“Oh, you know Jeremy,” Brian said. I had no idea what that was supposed to mean. He smiled down at me and said, “Don’t worry, Mary. I’m sorry I brought it up. Go back inside now before you catch a cold.”

The next time he came he didn’t mention Jeremy at all, and I was afraid to ask.

Now more and more boats were tethered at the docks and bobbing on moorings. Weekdays, when not many people sailed, I could look out over a stretch of black water prickling with masts, and I liked to pretend that I was some fisherman’s wife living in a hut at the edge of the ocean. The river did have the feeling of an ocean. There was no opposite shore in sight; from this boatyard you sailed due east into the Chesapeake Bay, which looked like white veils at the limits of our vision. Late Friday afternoon the city people would begin to arrive from Baltimore and Washington — couples dressed for yachting, carrying ice buckets and windbreakers and Hudson Bay blankets. My children would crowd along the dock to stare at them. We saw their sails scudding away all Saturday, converging on us again all Sunday evening like birds flocking home. While we ate our supper doors would be slamming in the parking lot, motors revving, voices calling goodbyes. By Monday morning all that remained were their tire tracks in the gravel and those naked masts lined up again beside the docks. A few people drove in during the week to sail on their own or make minor repairs, but they were quieter and the only time I was aware of them was when I ran into them at the store. Then their solid, confident city voices startled me, and I would stand gawking like any country woman as they read off their long extravagant lists. Ice, they wanted, and a Phillips screwdriver and a can of rust remover and a sack of potato chips. Luxuries, every one. We took our food unchilled, or bought it from the store refrigerator just before time to eat; our tools we borrowed from neighbors or made ourselves from scraps; we stripped that everlasting salt-air rust off them with the Coca-Cola left in discarded cans. As for potato chips! I made the children eat protein foods instead. I have never liked being stingy with food but what else could I do? I fed them lots of eggs and cottage cheese and powdered milk. I gave the baby bits from my plate. Gerber’s was too expensive. Even doing the laundry was expensive. Once a week I carried the dirtiest things to the store washing machine and dropped my quarter in the slot and sprinkled on the detergent, rationing every grain. I lugged the clothes home wet and hung them up to save fifty cents, even if it was rainy and I had to drape the living room with them and bat my way between damp blue jeans for a day and a half till they dried. Then here came this city man with his list so long that it filled two separate pages of his memo pad, not to mention what he idly tossed in from the counter displays as he wandered about the store whistling through his teeth. I doubt if he noticed me. If he did he probably thought I came from one of those shacks beside the store, where the boat mechanic lived or the carpenter or the old retired steelworker and his daughter. Poor white trash with dusty paper flowers before the madonnas on their windowsills and cotton balls on their screen doors to keep the flies away. That was what I had become. My children ran in and out between counters with their faces dirty and their dresses unironed, their feet bare and callused even before the summer had set in.

When Brian came he almost always offered to take us sailing, unless he had brought a girl along or a group of his friends. I was afraid he felt he had to offer. “Brian’s here! Brian’s here!” the children shouted when they saw his car, and I would say, “Stop, now! Hush. I want you to stay in here with me.” They couldn’t understand that. They always crowded around the windows and cheered when he knocked. To make up for them I kept my back to the door and was slow answering and pretended to be surprised when I saw him. “Just stopped by to see what you were doing,” he would say, and usually hand me something — a little patterned rug he had been keeping in storage, towels he said were cluttering up his apartment, most often a sack of some kind of candy for the children. “How about it, kids?” he would say. “Feel like a sail?” He said he needed the help on deck. I didn’t believe him. I was afraid he felt responsible for us in some way. I didn’t want to say no to the children — what other treats did they have? — but usually I stayed home myself and kept the baby. I only went sailing twice all spring. The first time was the first sail I had had in all my life, and I didn’t think much of it. I don’t like to be floated to places, willy-nilly. But I stood on the deck with Rachel on one hip, pretending to enjoy myself, and he didn’t keep us out too long. The second time was unplanned. It was in July, after several days of rain. He came late one afternoon when the little ones were off playing somewhere. “I wanted to see if you’d do me a favor,” he told me. “Oh, anything!” I said. I was so glad to have him asking me for something.

“After rainy spells, if I don’t have a chance to get down here myself, would you row out to the boat and dry my sails for me?”

“Do what?”

“Come out; I’ll show you.”

So we left the baby with Darcy and pulled the dinghy out of the weeds in front of the house, and he showed me how to row. Well, that much I more or less knew already, having been to Girl Scout camp on a muddy pond the summer I was ten. But then we reached the ketch and I felt so clumsy. I hated that clambering up the side, wondering if I might kick the dinghy out from under me or tip Brian into the water when he offered me his hand. Up on deck I shook myself out and smoothed my skirt down and gave a little laugh. “Well!” I said. “Now tell me what to do.” He taught me how to unfurl the sails and run them up. It didn’t look hard. “Let them stay awhile, an afternoon or so,” he said. “Bring the kids if you want.” Then he said, “Let’s take her out, shall we?”

“You mean right now?”

“Why not?”

“But it’s — now it’s almost evening,” I said.

“We won’t be long.”

“All right,” I said. I was getting nervous. I felt fairly sure that he wanted to talk about Jeremy. Why else take me away from the children, and suggest a sail in that artificial voice that meant it wasn’t so spur-of-the-moment after all? I wondered if Jeremy had fallen ill, or died, or found somebody else. I felt my hands growing cold, but I didn’t tell Brian to break the news because I was too scared. I just sat there freezing to death on a warm summer afternoon, and Brian started the motor and steered us slowly out past the other moored boats.

When we reached open water he cut the engine. The quiet rolled down over us like a bolt of silk. I could hear water lapping, ropes creaking, Brian doing something complicated to tighten the sails. Oh, everything was so unfamiliar! I felt that this entire scene was foreign and bizarre, some trumped-up substitute for the world where Jeremy lived. Every move that Brian made, even the tone of his voice and the way his beard ruffled and parted in the wind, was makeshift; nothing like Jeremy at all. When he came to sit down beside me the sheen in the unknown fabric of his shirt made me want to go home. He laid an arm across my back and his hand rested on my shoulder — a big, wiry hand, as unlike Jeremy’s as a hand can get. Now, I thought, is when he will say it. They shield you and brace you before they tell you, as if the blow they are about to deal is a physical one. I knew all about it. (Don’t ask me how.) I swallowed and waited, and hoped that he wouldn’t feel me shudder when he started talking.

Only he didn’t. He didn’t talk at all. First I thought he was waiting for me to prepare myself, and then I thought he was having trouble finding the words. And then, when the silence had gone on for several minutes, I gave him a sidelong glance and saw him sitting perfectly relaxed in the orange light, one hand loose on the tiller and his eyes on the mainsail. He wasn’t looking for words at all.

Well! I was too surprised to be angry. Where were all those thin blondes that came visiting at the gallery or sauntering down to his dinghy in their crisp white bellbottoms? Or was he, perhaps, just laying an arm around me out of bachelor’s habit? I am not the type to jump to conclusions. I moved away, rising to peer off the stern of the boat as if I had seen something interesting. “Come here and sit with me, Mary,” Brian said. I was afraid I might laugh. He seemed so sure of himself, giving directions that way — it was a tone I wasn’t used to. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. I stayed where I was, staring at the streamers of the sunset in the water and fighting back the laughter and the tears that were swelling in my eyes. “Well,” said Brian finally. “Shall we head back?”

Going home, he used the motor all the way. Then when he had tied the boat to the mooring again he furled and bound the sails in silence. I wondered if he were angry. The only friend I had nowadays. And with all that I owed him! There suddenly seemed to be so many complications to life, so many tangles and knots and unexpected traps, that I felt too tired to hold my head up. I dropped like a stone into his dinghy, pretending not to notice the hand he held out to me. I sat slumped over with my elbows on my knees while he rowed us ashore. Then as we touched land, as I was stepping past him while he steadied the dinghy, he said, “Mary.”

The sun had set by now. In the twilight his voice seemed closer than it was, a little furry behind the beard. Whatever he was planning to say, I didn’t want to hear it. I spun around and smiled, giving him a good brisk handshake. “I certainly do thank you for the boat ride!” I said. “And I’ll be sure to tend to those sails, Brian, if we happen to have a rainy spell.”

But he held onto my hand and looked straight into my eyes, not smiling back. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to rush you,” he said. And after a minute: “Good night, Mary.”

That’s what they say in soap operas: Don’t worry, I’m not going to rush you. The romantic, masterful hero with the steady gaze. People don’t say it for real. There are no heroes in real life.

I went back into the house and found the children grouped around Rachel, who was standing. Not unsupported, of course — she had two fistfuls of the couch cover — but it was the first time she had managed it and they were all excited. “Come watch,” they told me. “Sit, Rachel. Sit down. Show Mom how you do it.” They uncurled each of her fingers and tried to fold her up, but she wouldn’t bend. She stiffened her legs, refusing to return to her old floor-level existence. I had forgotten how desperately babies struggle to be vertical. Always up, away, out of laps and arms and playpens. Why, in no time she was going to wean herself! All my children lost interest in nursing once they could walk. They took off out the door one day to join the others, leaving me babyless, and for a few months I would feel a little lost until I found out I was pregnant again. Only now, it wasn’t going to be that way. I hadn’t considered that before. I stood staring at Rachel, my very last baby, while she fought off all those grubby little hands that were trying to reseat her. “Look, Rachel,” they said, “we just want you to show Mom. Sit a minute, Rachel.”

For the first time, then, I knew that Jeremy was not going to ask us back.

Now it was deep summer, and the air under the tin roof was so hot that we spent most of our time outside. I bought the younger children an inflatable wading pool. They stayed entire days in it, splashing around in their underpants, but Darcy was too old for that kind of thing and she had trouble amusing herself. I would find her sitting in the scrubby brown grass, under the glaring sun, frowning at the river. She was so serious. “Why don’t you take a walk, honey?” I said. “Pick us some flowers for the dinner table.” Then she would look straight at me, narrowly, as if she were trying to figure something out. I thought probably she wanted to ask what we were doing here. She was old enough, after all, to see how strange it was. She had been yanked out of a school she loved; she had been separated from Jeremy without even telling him goodbye, and in some ways she was closer to Jeremy than any of the others were. But it was the others who asked the questions — when would they see him, and what was he doing that kept him so busy, and could they bring him back a present of some kind? Darcy kept quiet. “Why don’t you head over to the boatyard and see what’s going on?” I asked her. But if she did she took Rachel with her, as if she couldn’t imagine doing anything purely for her own enjoyment. She set the baby on her little sharp hip and walked off tilted, with her head lowered, plodding along on dusty bare feet. The knobs on the back of her neck showed and her legs were all polka-dotted with mosquito bite scabs.

Coming here was the most selfish thing I have ever done.

In the evenings I heated kettles of water on the hot plate and sponged off the little ones. Then I dressed them in fresh underwear — I hadn’t brought anything so inessential as pajamas — and sent them to bed. Darcy sat up reading movie magazines borrowed from the steelworker’s daughter. The whole house had the sharp smell of insect spray. Moths were pattering against the sagging screens and I felt as if I were coated with a thin layer of plastic, I was so salty and sweaty. It was the hardest time of day for me. “I believe I might go for a walk,” I would tell Darcy. “Will you keep an ear out for the baby?” Then I would step into the dark and go down to the water’s edge, and slip the dinghy from its tangle of weeds. All alone I would row out to the ketch — me! so landbound! It was the only place I could get free of the cramped feeling, those masses of hot little bodies tossing in a tiny cube of space, sticking to the red vinyl mats. To escape from that I was even willing to cross the black water and make the climb from the dinghy to the deck, trusting my weight to this mysterious object that somehow managed to keep itself upright fifteen feet above solid earth.

Now there were fat little orange life vests heaped all over the deck — six of them. Brian had brought them out one Saturday, laying them before me one by one like an Indian warrior laying skins before his maiden’s tent. Five would have been bad enough, but six! That implied we would be here until Rachel was old enough to sail too. “Oh, Brian,” I said. “Well, I — that’s very nice of you but I really think the regular life preservers were fine, it’s not as if they go with you all that—” You would never have guessed how often I pictured five of my children drowning simultaneously. At the moment all that worried me was Brian, his brown eyes so gentle and amused above the beard — so confident.

Jeremy’s eyes were blue. Brown eyes didn’t seem right any more.

In the Gothic novels Guy used to buy me the heroine was always marrying for convenience or money or safety from some danger, and when she was proposed to she took pains to make that clear. “I must be honest, Sir Brent, I do not love you.”

“Oh, I understand that perfectly, my dear.” Then later, of course, she did begin loving him, and everything ended happily. I wish I had been honest. I accepted Jeremy because it was all I could think of to do at the time, and although I believe he knew that we never discussed it in so many words. I was trying to be so delicate with him. My first mistake. One day he said, “Mary, do you love me?” He said, “I need to know, do you?” And I said, “Yes, Jeremy. Of course I do.” Well, I did have a sort of fond feeling. When he brought me that first bouquet of chicory and poison ivy my heart went right out to him, but not in that way. Then after we had been together a while it seemed as if something crept up on me without noticing, and one morning I watched him stooping to fumble with Darcy’s broken shoelace and the love just came pouring over me. Only by then, of course, there was no way to tell him. He thought I had been loving him for months already. Was that why things went wrong?

For we never got it straightened out. When I tried to show how I felt it seemed I flooded him, washed him several feet distant from me, left him bewildered and dismayed. Sometimes I wondered, could it be that he was happier when I didn’t love him back? It seemed all I could do was give him things and do him favors, and make him see how much he needed me. The more he depended on me the easier I felt. In fact I depended on his dependency, we were two dominoes leaning against each other, but did Jeremy ever realize that?

Once he made a piece showing a white cottage with a picket fence and roses on trellises, set on a green hill. At first you might think it was a calendar picture. The hill was so green, the cottage so white. “Oh!” I said when I saw it. “Well, it’s very — it’s not exactly like you, Jeremy, is it?” Then I came closer, and something disturbed me. I mean, it was too green and white, and the sky was too blue. The hill was too perfect a semicircle, and the pickets of the fence marched across the paper like gradations on a ruler. I felt that he had twisted something, and yet I couldn’t say what. I felt that in some way he was insulting me, or protesting against me. Yet I don’t think he knew that he was. “Jeremy—” I said, and turned to look at him, but I found him punching red paper circles to make perfect flowers, and I could tell from his frown that that was all he was thinking about.

He has no sense of humor but I never understood why that should be important. He has always been either too much removed from us (shut away in body and in spirit, cutting burlap) or too much with us (smack underfoot from dawn to dark, when other men are busy in some office). And I won’t try to convince anyone that he is handsome. Nor that he has what they call “personality”—watch some visiting neighbor woman stammer when he fixes her with his worktime gaze, as if he were wondering why she doesn’t leave when in fact he is not even aware that she is there. On top of that we are separated by years and years, although with Jeremy that never mattered as much as it might have with someone else. He is not really a product of his time. When I was a toddler, for instance, other men his age were fighting World War II, but Jeremy wasn’t. I don’t have any proof he even knew about the war — not that one, or the one we are going through now. Nothing outside touches him. Sometimes he seems younger than I am, as if events are what age people. I remember when his sisters came to meet me. We were having tea in the parlor and they were discussing dead friends and relatives. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were so old! They had that reverence for the past — forever returning to skate back around its edges, peering down, fascinated by its cold and pallid face beneath two feet of water. Repeating all they said in that doddery, old-lady way. (Jeremy did that too but I had never noticed before.) I looked from one to another. I felt like a very small girl at a tea party with three ancient relatives. I began to be shy and tongue-tied. What was I doing here? How could I have anything to do with this elderly man? But when they left he stood hugging himself at the door with his face all forlorn and I felt he was a two-year-old in need of comfort. “There now,” I told him, “won’t you come back in? Have another cup of tea.” And I laid my hand on his soft limp home-clipped hair and pressed my cheek against his, and felt far older than he would ever be.

When I first came here, I would have laughed aloud at the thought of loving him. Yet it is only now that I think to be surprised at myself. While it was coming about I hardly noticed. We have such an ability to adjust to change! We are like amoebas, encompassing and ingesting and adapting and moving on, until enormous events become barely perceptible jogs in our life histories. All I know is that bit by bit my world began to center on him, so that my first thought in the morning and my last at night was concern about his welfare. “Are you all right?” I used to wake and ask him out of nowhere. “Are you — is there anything you need?” I would move to his side of the bed and feel him seep away from me somehow, backing off from my everlasting questions and my face too close to his and my perfume, which — even if it was only the hand lotion I had put on after finishing the dishes — suddenly seemed too rich and full now that I was next to him. “Oh, I’m sorry!” I wanted to say. “I never meant to — I don’t want to overpower you in any way, believe me!” But then he would only have backed off further; saying that would have been overpowering in itself. There was no way I could win. Or I could win only by losing — by leaving bed, reluctantly, to sit up with a sick child or a colicky baby, and then he would come stumbling through the dark house calling my name. “Mary? Where’d you go, Mary? I can’t find you.”

He changed. I changed. He gathered some kind of stubborn, hidden strength while I became more easily touched by anything small and vulnerable — changes that each of us caused in the other, but they were exactly the ones that have separated us and that will keep us separate. If he calls me back he will be admitting a weakness. If I return unasked I will be bearing down upon him and plowing him under. If I weren’t crying I would laugh.

One day in August Rachel started fussing at breakfast time, and she kept it up without a single pause. She wouldn’t eat or sleep. She was flushed and her breath had an ether smell that my children usually get with fever, but no one in the boatyard owned a thermometer and I was too hot myself to be able to gauge the temperature of her skin. By afternoon I had decided I would have to find a doctor. I was going to ask for a ride from Zack — the boat mechanic, a slimy man who whistled whenever he saw me, but still he did have a pickup truck — and then I saw Brian’s car pulling up in our backyard and out he stepped, looking very steady and reliable in his old jeans and a fresh-ironed shirt. “Brian!” I said. “Will you drive me to the doctor? Rachel’s sick.”

“Of course,” he said, and turned on one heel without a second’s pause and went back to the car. I felt better already. I grabbed up Rachel and my purse, called out instructions to Darcy, and slid into the front seat. “Her doctor is on St. Paul,” I said, “just a few blocks away from us. Away from Jeremy.”

“What’s the matter with her?” Brian asked.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

Rachel was quieter now, maybe from the shock of being in a car, but she still whimpered a little. Brian said, “Could be a tooth.”

“Oh, no, she wouldn’t make this much fuss.”

“Are you sure? It’s my understanding that—”

“Will you please just drive?” I said.

He stopped talking. We sped down the gravel road I had nearly forgotten, between rows of neat little flower-decked houses and trailers. After a minute I said, “Sorry, Brian.”

“That’s all right.”

“It’s just that I’m afraid he’ll close his office soon, you see, and then I wouldn’t know how to—”

“Sure, sure, I understand.”

We turned onto the main highway. It seemed to me that Brian was driving faster than I had ever gone before. Fields and factories and junkyards skimmed past, and then came the first gray buildings of the city and the long unbroken walls of rowhouses. Brian dodged in and out between slower cars, honking like an ambulance, scarcely ever putting on his brakes. I felt that I was in good hands.

In front of the doctor’s office, he double-parked and got out of the car. “Oh, don’t come with me,” I said. “You’ll get a ticket, Brian.” I was expecting him just to drop me off and then pick me up later. But he had already opened the door on my side and reached for the baby, and I let him take her. Freed of her weight, I felt light and cool. I floated behind him across the sidewalk, which seemed very crowded, through the revolving door of a surprisingly tall dark building. In the lobby I was hit by the cold smell of marble, which I had forgotten about. I had also forgotten the doctor’s office number. Imagine, after ten years of school checkups! It was as if I had been away for decades. My eyes had trouble focusing on the tiny white letters in the showcase. Even my hand, skimming a straight line between his name and his number, looked like a stranger’s hand, brown and chapped, bigger-boned. “Four thirteen,” I told Brian.

“We won’t wait for the elevator.”

I followed him up the stairs. Rachel peered at me over his shoulder; all this speed had startled her into silence.

In the waiting room Brian told the nurse, “We don’t have an appointment, but it’s an emergency. This baby is very ill.”

The nurse looked at Rachel. Rachel grinned.

We were shown into a cubicle at the front of the building. Above the examining table was an enormous, sooty window overlooking the street. I could peer down and see cars threading their mysterious paths below us, stopping and starting magically. I felt I was observing them from another planet. “You can undress her now, I’ll send the doctor in immediately,” the nurse said. But all Rachel wore was a diaper, a damp one. I left it on her. I stayed at the window, remembering other, happier times when I had come here with three or four children for their shots. Then my only worries had been how to keep them out of the cotton swabs, and how to calm the one who was scared of tongue depressors, and what to fix Jeremy for supper that night.

The doctor came in with his white coattails billowing — a young man, dark-skinned. “Now! Mrs. Pauling,” he said. “What seems to be the problem here?”

“I think Rachel’s sick,” I said, “but I can’t tell what’s bothering her.”

He gave Brian a short nod and stretched the baby out on the table. She frowned at him. He prodded her stomach, felt her neck, looked into her nose and mouth and ears and listened to her chest. I held my breath. The skin on my scalp ached from waiting. Then, “Ear infection,” he said. “Both sides.”

“Oh! Are you sure that’s all?”

“It’s all I see. She been pulling at her ears lately?”

“No, she hasn’t.”

“Usually that’s a sign.”

“Well, I know that,” I said. Relief made me snappish. I felt he was accusing me of something. Did he think that after six children I wouldn’t notice a thing like ear-pulling? All my children have been susceptible to earaches. I wondered if he disapproved of Rachel’s single, grayish diaper. I became aware suddenly of what I must look like in my dirndl skirt and rubber flip-flops, one shoulder strap slipping out from the sleeveless blouse that I had fastened shut with a safety pin. My purse was patched with a flesh-colored Band-Aid. I turned it to its good side while he was bending to write out a prescription.

When we were back in the car, loaded down now with penicillin and decongestants and a brand-new thermometer, Brian turned east although it would have been simpler to continue due south. I suppose he thought it would disturb me to pass near my old neighborhood. “Wait,” I almost said. “Let’s go back, can’t we?” What I wanted to do was just confirm that the house existed; it wasn’t that I planned to walk inside or anything. But Brian looked straight ahead and chewed on his pipe, pretending that this route was a natural one, and I didn’t say anything after all.

His car was air-conditioned — something I hadn’t noticed when I was so upset. For the first time in weeks I could stop fighting the heat, and Rachel actually went to sleep in my lap. “Must be fast-acting medicine,” Brian said. (We had given her the first dose back in the drugstore.) When I told him I thought it was the coolness he frowned. He said, “Now will you believe that shack is no place for children?”

“Well, I don’t see how the shack comes into this,” I said. “We’re perfectly comfortable there. The children get earaches any old place; it’s something to do with the twists in their ear tubes.”

“In summer, even?”

“Any time.”

“I don’t believe it,” Brian said. “And if they’re sick in summer, what will winter be like? The place is not insulated, you know. There’s no heat, and you will have to turn the water off every night, and I won’t always show up just in the nick of time this way.”

“No, I know that,” I said. Actually I had thought about winter several times lately, but then I put it out of my mind again. I said, “We’ll work it out when the times comes. I’m sure that everything will—”

“It’s August, Mary.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Could you tell me what’s going on with you and Jeremy?”

“Well, I don’t know exactly,” I said.

“Do you still love him?”

“Oh yes,” I said. Which was easier than describing the exact combination of love and hurt and anger that I had been feeling about Jeremy lately.

Brian looked over at me for a second, and then back at the road. “I don’t want to step on Jeremy’s toes,” he said, “but I wish that if you’ve really left him you would make it final and get a divorce. Are you considering that?”

I don’t know why my life always seems more confusing than other people’s. First Jeremy proposed marriage when I wasn’t divorced and now Brian was proposing a divorce when I wasn’t married. I said, “I’m sorry, I really don’t want to think about anything right now.”

“All right, then. I’m just letting you know that I’m here, Mary, and sooner or later you’re going to want someone to turn to.”

Did he suppose I hadn’t thought of that?

My poor, pathetic store of money, which once had seemed the answer to everything, had almost disappeared. I lay awake nights trying to think of people who might help. On the trip home now I dreamed up ludicrous solutions: I could take up with the slimy boat mechanic, I could suddenly reappear at Guy Tell’s front door. I pictured the string of children trailing me like ducklings, Guy’s startled face, his new wife peering out behind him. “I’ve come back to you, Guy!” “Uh, who are all these people with you, Mary?” I nearly laughed, but then I grew serious. I began to see how every move I had made in my life had required some man to provide my support — first Guy when I left my parents, then John Harris when I left Guy, and Jeremy when John Harris left. Now I couldn’t imagine any other way to do it. I had come here on my own, certainly, but it began to look as if I couldn’t keep it up. Underneath, Jeremy and I were more alike than anyone knew. Eventually I would give in and find someone, Brian or someone else, it all came to the same thing. I could see it ahead of me as clearly as if it had already happened. I couldn’t think of any way out. I felt drained and weak suddenly, as if I had shriveled.

I looked over at Brian, but he had dropped the subject when I told him to and now he was just driving along puffing quietly on his pipe.

In the evenings I tell fairytales, the same old fairytales over and over. The children curl against me, clean and warm in their fresh white underwear, smelling of milk. I close my eyes and take a deep breath of them. I could tell these stories in my sleep. “Another, now another,” the children say. Don’t they ever get tired?

I see myself on a sagging couch beneath a warped tin roof, braced on each side by my children for lack of firmer support. I understand that from outside I seem to have been leading a fairly dramatic life, involving elopements and love children and men stretching in a nearly unbroken series behind me, but the fact is that when you proceed through these experiences day by day they are not really so earth-shaking. All events, except childbirth, can be reduced to a heap of trivia in the end. When I die I expect I will be noticing a water ring someone left on the coffee table, or a spiral of steam rising from a whistling teapot. I will be sure to miss the moment of my passing.

Rapunzel. The Princess and the Pea. Rumpelstiltskin. My voice grows croaky. My mind runs ahead of the words. I play silent games with the tired old plots, I like to ponder the endings beyond the endings. How about Rapunzel, are we sure she was really happy ever after? Maybe the prince stopped loving her now that her hair was short. Maybe the Genuine Princess was a great disappointment to her husband, being so quick to find the faults and so forthright about pointing them out. And after Rumpelstiltskin was defeated the miller’s daughter lived in sorrow forever, for the king kept nagging her to spin more gold and she could never, never manage it again.