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The child Victoria pressed her forehead to the smoking floor and wrapped her arms around her belly, weeping as if her only child had been born dead and still.
Tabitha wrinkled her nose as she bustled the children in from the frosted twilight. Their clothes smelled faintly of smoke, their faces were smudged and exhausted and hollow-looking, which was not right at all for four young folk who had been playing in the sun all day! What they had been about they would not say, nor how they had been gone so long, nor how they had found their way home in the dark. In fact, all four were silent as monks. But they were not four—little Anne was missing. She sent the girls and Branwell to scrub their cheeks and dress for supper and perhaps play with their wooden soldiers a bit if being away from them for an afternoon had soured them so. The fish would not be ready for a three quarters of an hour—an eternity for minds like theirs. Tabitha drew on her woolen shawl and went out into the gloam to find the violet-eyed little wastrel that lagged behind, probably to watch some silver worm chew the earth or skip a rhythm on the cobblestones.
It would be spring soon, green snapped in the air though the yews in the churchyard gave no hint of bud. Tabitha spied a golden head—and no bonnet, the lamb!—among the monuments and went to the half-frozen child, who had gone where love bade her, to the sisters lost before she’d ever known them. Anne stood before three headstones on the slope next the moor, the middle one, Elizabeth’s, grey, and half buried in the heath; the children’s poor mother’s only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot, Maria’s still bare.
Tabitha and Anne lingered around them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass.
“How anyone can ever imagine unquiet slumber for our dear sleepers in that quiet earth I shall never know,” Tabitha said finally, and drew Anne in to the great candlelit house.
The Red Girl
A few years ago I fell in love with Red Riding Hood. I know it sounds silly but you can’t help who you love. You see a girl in a cafe with a bowl of soup and a coat drawn up around her face and there’s something savage about her hands, something long and hooked, and while you’re wondering about her it just happens inside you, like cancer.
She didn’t really wear red all the time. It was more like purple or brown. A lurid, bruised color. When I asked her about it, she would wave her hand as if trying to clear smoke from the air.
“Oh, Catherine,” she breathed. Whenever she said my name she spelled it wrong, “it’s just, you know…transcription errors.”
She never liked that I was a writer. She didn’t trust writers—she said they just wanted to swallow her up. I said I didn’t, but it wasn’t true and she knew it. I lay there the first night with her, my head on her breast, her dark, hard nipple near my mouth, and I said I wasn’t like the others, I would keep her secrets, I wouldn’t try to tell her story the way everyone else did, the way I’d done with Snow White and Rapunzel and all those other girls. She was better than the other girls, and I was kinder than the other writers. She brushed my hair over my ear and drew up her battered old hood around her perfect face, as if putting on an old war helmet.
Sleeping with someone famous is strange. It’s like sleeping with a person, and also sleeping with a mirror showing that person as everyone else sees them. We’d go out and the flashbulbs would pop. Not so many these days, but someone always recognized her.
Here are some facts about Red Riding Hood:
She doesn’t speak German.
She is left-handed.
She prefers pan au chocolat in the mornings, with milk and tea.
Sometimes she wakes up blind and screaming, and she thinks she is inside the wolf, still.
I learned Icelandic so that I could calm her when this happens. In the dark, it’s the only language she knows.
She does no
t eat meat. “You never know who that’s been,” she says.
She liked me because I am Italian. She told me that she had lived in Italy when she was young. She was vague about the dates.
She is vague about a lot of things.
She is afraid of enclosed spaces. You must keep everything clean and bright or she will howl and cry.
Her cries are worse than anyone’s.
She has a mole on her thigh, and another on her earlobe.
Her hair is the same color as her hood.
Once I asked her if she wanted to bring the wolf to bed with us. I don’t mind, I said. It wouldn’t change anything between us. And she looked at me like she might say yes, like it might have been what she was waiting for, someone to pull back the coverlet and allow both her and her creature in, to love them both and not ask her to choose. She looked at me like she was afraid I would take it back, like it wasn’t possible that she could ever end the constant circle she ran, around and around, her and the wolf and the forest, her human mouth and her ferocious teeth. She looked at me like I’d offered her everything.
And then she said no. It doesn’t work that way, she said. It would change everything. You would vanish between the two of us, like a grandmother, like an ax. I love you but there are things older and murkier than love. Things that live not in the heart but the entrails.I don’t want you to see me with the wolf. I don’t want you to see what he does to me. I don’t want you to see what I do to him.
I wouldn’t love you any less, I told her.
But I would love you less, she said. I’m sorry. It’s in my nature. I like writers and Italian girls and red kisses just fine, but the wolf is a singularity, a collapsed, black thing that I can’t get around, I can only fall into.
I was so young. I didn’t know anything. I said: I could be a wolf for you. I could put my teeth on your throat. I could growl. I could eat you whole. I could wait for you in the dark. I could howl against your hair.
