I was ten the first time I saw the book. Small enough for a pocket and bound in green hardback, its cover embossed in gold. Beneath its strange title, my grandmother’s name, all in uppercase.
I was already the kind of girl who closed my eyes and thumped the backs of furniture looking for hidden doors, and wished on second stars to the right whenever the night was dark enough to see them. Finding a green-and-gold book with a fairy-tale name in the very bottom of an otherwise boring chest of drawers thrilled me. I’d been poking around the attic of a family we were staying with, a loaded couple with a two-year-old son who didn’t mind hiring a live-in nanny with a kid of her own. We’d stayed in their spare bedroom the whole first half of my fifth-grade year, miraculously without incident, until the husband’s increasing friendliness to Ella made her call it.
I’d sat cross-legged on the attic’s tacky rag rug and opened the book reverently, tracing my finger down the table of contents. Of course I knew my grandmother was an author, but I’d been pretty incurious about her up to that point. I was told almost nothing about her, and assumed she wrote dry grown-up stuff I wouldn’t have wanted to read anyway. But this was clearly a storybook, and it looked like the best kind, too: a book of fairy tales. There were twelve in all.
The Door That Wasn’t There
Hansa the Traveler
The Clockwork Bride
Jenny and the Night Women
The Skinned Maiden
Alice-Three-Times
The House Under the Stairwell
Ilsa Waits
The Sea Cellar
The Mother and the Dagger
Twice-Killed Katherine
Death and the Woodwife
Being named Alice, of course I’d flipped straight to “Alice-Three-Times.” The pages rippled like they’d once been wet, and smelled like the dusty violet candies my mother loved and I hated. I still remembered the story’s first line, which was all I had time to read before Ella came in, tipped off by mother-radar, and ripped the book from my hands.
When Alice was born, her eyes were black from end to end, and the midwife didn’t stay long enough to wash her.
It was so creepy it made my heart squeeze, and I was glad to see Ella. I didn’t understand why her eyes were so bright, why she was breathing so hard. “This book isn’t for children,” she said shrilly.
I wasn’t sure what to say. My mom never told me I was too young for anything. When I asked her where babies came from, she told me in Nature Channel–level detail. If her friends tried to change the topic of conversation when I walked into a room, Ella would wave away their concern. “She knows perfectly well what an overdose is,” she’d say. “Don’t insult her intelligence.” Then, more likely than not, she’d tap her glass and tip her head toward the kitchen, where I’d dutifully shake her up a perfect martini.
Hearing her pull the age card for the first time in memory made me horribly, burningly curious. I had to read that book. Had to. I never saw the copy from the attic again, but I remembered the title and bided my time. I looked for it at libraries and bookshops, and on the shelves of all the people we stayed with, but I never found it. It showed up on eBay once—I used to have a Google alert set for the title—but the bidding quickly climbed beyond my price range.
So I turned to finding out more about its author instead. That’s how my obsession with my grandmother, Althea Proserpine, began.
* * *
Lana left, and a guy named Norm came in to replace her. He spent the next three hours talking about a hangout he’d had with Lana that may or may not have been a date, not that he was worried about it, but what did I think and had Lana mentioned him?
I gave him noncommittal answers until finally I cracked. “Jesus Christ, Norm. This is the ‘move on with your life’ dance.” I did a dance like I was imitating a train. “There, did that work? Lana’s literally never said your name in my presence.”
The injured look on his face gave me a flush of dark satisfaction. “Damn, Alice, that’s cold.” He took off his hat, folded the brim to make it more pretentious, and re-perched it on his head.
His silent treatment for the rest of the night gave me time to think—time to replay what I’d seen, again and again. When my shift ended, I stepped out into the night feeling skinless. The light was gone, and the houses I passed on the way to the train looked closed and clannish, like that one house you skip on Halloween. I jerked back when a man brushed too close against me on the sidewalk. His skin smelled burnt and his eyes seemed too light in the dark.
He kept walking, barely acknowledging me. I was being paranoid. Everywhere I looked for the stocking cap, the blue eyes. Nothing.
There were a handful of people waiting for the Q. I stood close enough to a woman pushing a baby in a stroller that it might’ve seemed like we were together. She didn’t look at me, but I saw her shoulders tighten. When the train came, I got in and jumped out again at the last possible moment, like I’d seen in the movies.
But then the platform was even emptier. I put one earbud in and played the white noise app Ella put on my phone and made me listen to whenever I started acting like a loaded gun.
When the next train came, I practically leapt on. The scene from the café kept unfolding like a movie in my mind: the crack of the plate, the blue of his eyes, the way he’d vanished out the door with the book in his hands. But already the edges were rubbing off the memory’s freshness. I could feel it degrading in my hands.
My neck hurt from holding it tight, keeping it on a swivel. The constant vigilance became a beat behind my eyes. When a guy holding a saxophone case threw open the door between cars, panic made a hot, hard starburst in my chest.
What if there was an explanation for the man’s unlined face, the sense I had that he hadn’t aged a day? Botox, French moisturizer, a trick of the light. My own black hole of a brain, writing an image from the past over the present.
Even so, he would still be a man who had a book that was impossible to find. Who’d told me ten years ago he knew my grandmother and was taking me to see her. What if he really had been? What if Ella had been wrong about him being a stranger?
What if Ella had been lying?
Years after I thought I’d buried it, the old obsession stirred. When the train finally rose up from underground and onto the bridge, I pulled up an article about Althea on my phone. It was once my favorite, the longest piece I could find. I even had an original copy of the magazine it ran in, which I came upon by some miracle in a used bookstore in Salem. Vanity Fair, September 1987, featuring a six-page spread of my grandmother on her newly bought estate, the Hazel Wood. In the photos she’s as slender as the cigarette she’s smoking, wearing cropped pants and red lipstick and a look that could slice through glass. My mother is a black-haired blur by her knees, a wavering shadow under the glitter of the swimming pool.
It opens like this: “Althea Proserpine is raising her daughter on fairy tales.” It’s an odd opening, because my mom barely figures in the rest of the article, but I guess the journalist liked the double meaning. My mom was raised hearing fairy tales, like anyone else, and she was raised on the money that came from them. Althea’s estate, the Hazel Wood, was bought with fairy-tale money, too.
Before she wrote the strange, brief volume that made her name, my grandmother was a writer for women’s magazines, back when the job was less “20 Sexy Things to Do with an Ice Cube” and more “How to Get That Spot out of Your Husband’s White Shirt.”
Until she took a trip in 1966. She doesn’t name names, but she doesn’t stint on telling the reporter the good stuff: she was traveling with an older man, a married editor at a men’s monthly, lazing around the Continent with a group of other bored American tourists. After nine days spent drinking their liquor hot (couldn’t trust the ice cubes) and writing letters to their friends at home, things went sour between her and the married man. She took off on her own. And something happened.
She doesn’t say what, exactly. “I chased a new kind of story through a very old doorway,” she told the journalist. “It took me a long time to find my way back.” Not another word is said about what she did between 1966 and 1969, while her houseplants died and her job dried up and her New York life got mossed over and swept away.
When she returned to the States, the world had forgotten her. She felt, she said, “like a ghost moving through a museum of my old life.” (She talked like a woman who knew more books than people.) She found a friend to stay with, a former Barnard classmate with a spare room, where she sat down and tapped out twelve stories on a typewriter. They were collected into a book called Tales from the Hinterland, and published by a tiny independent press in Greenwich Village that focused on female-penned fiction nobody read.
But somehow, my grandmother’s was. Her lovely face on the back cover couldn’t have hurt: level eyes, blue in color but pale gray in black-and-white. Her eyebrow is quirked, her lips lined and slightly parted. She’s wearing a man’s white shirt, open one button too many, and a heavy onyx ring on her right first finger. She’s holding, of course, a cigarette.
The book got a few write-ups in smaller journals, and became a word-of-mouth sensation. Then a French director looking to make his first American picture optioned it for development.
The film shoot was infamous, plagued by high-profile affairs, professional squabbles, and the disappearance of two crew members in unrelated incidents. But the film itself was an art-house hit. It was rewritten as a psychological drama about a woman who wakes up in the woods with no memory of her former life; my grandmother’s stories play out as dream sequences, or flashbacks. According to the reviews I could find, it bore zero resemblance to its source material.
The movie’s success, partly fueled by infamy, led to several short-lived stage productions, a miniseries that never came to be, and Althea’s failed stint as a TV development consultant in Los Angeles. When she got back to New York she bought the Hazel Wood, going for a song after its last owner had died under seamy circumstances in a fire that damaged part of the estate.
She’d picked up a couple of husbands along the way, the first an actor she met on the set of the movie. He left his wife for Althea, and was killed by a junkie in their apartment in the Village when Althea was pregnant with Ella. She met her second husband, a displaced descendant of Greek royalty, in LA, and took him with her to the Hazel Wood.
So yes, you could say my mother was raised, in part, on fairy tales. But death played a part. And money. Dead-husband money, fairy-tale money, too. Enough of it must’ve ended up in my mother’s pockets to get us by despite her sketchy employment history and all the leases we’ve run from partway through. Staying in motion was as much a part of who we were as my mom’s sharp laugh, my angry streak. Our bad luck days that abated with every move, then slipped back in like red dirt on our shoes.
But no matter how bad it got, the Hazel Wood was always at our backs. It was always the place Ella would never return to. She took care of me, and I took care of her, in a symbiotic sisterly relationship that looked cute on TV but felt fucking exhausting when you’re moving for the third time in a year and don’t even have a bedroom door to slam.
As I pored over the article about Althea for the nth time, it didn’t read to me the way it used to. I once pictured Althea as a distant but benevolent star, a fairy godmother who watched me from far away. My fevered kid brain cooked together fairy tales and my missing grandmother and the mystery of the man who took me into a superstition I never voiced aloud. When I looked into mirrors, I secretly believed Althea could see me. When a man watched me too long through a car window or at the grocery store, I didn’t see a perv, or the first harbinger of the bad luck coming: he was one of Althea’s messengers. She watched me, and she loved me, and one day she would show herself to me.
But now I was reading her story with fresh eyes. She wasn’t a fascinating fairy queen, she was an arrogant fantasist. Who hadn’t once, from my babyhood to her death, tried to contact Ella. Ella, who had me at nineteen and hasn’t had anyone but me to hold on to since.
Because that’s what the article doesn’t get to. Just months after it ran, Althea’s second husband killed himself in the Hazel Wood. After his death, Althea closed its borders. She and Ella were shut up in there alone, living on fairy tales and god knew what else, with only each other for company. This is the part Ella really won’t talk about, the fourteen years she spent rattling around in a place cut off from the world. She didn’t even go to school. Who my dad is, and how she met him, is a secret so buried I’ve stopped asking.
My head was buzzing when I reached the apartment.
Wait. Apartment doesn’t put the right image into your head. The … estate? Not quite, but closer.
Harold’s place smelled like discreet cleaning products, my stepsister’s perfume, and whatever takeout Ella ordered that night. I think Harold had some idea she would be cooking dinner for him, maybe from the dented tin box of recipes that lived in the kitchen, inherited from his mother. But he was disappointed there: Ella and I could live for weeks on cereal and popcorn and boiled edamame.
I heard the high murmur of raised voices down the hall and followed it to their closed bedroom door.
“You didn’t embarrass me tonight, you embarrassed yourself.”
Harold’s voice ended in a hiss. I used the sounds behind the door to place them: Harold to my left, a soft shift that was Ella on the bed.
I pressed my back against the wall outside their bedroom door. If he moves any closer.
“You can look like trash on your own time, but tonight was about being my wife.” Wife burned even worse than trash, but I stayed still, biting back the cold metal taste of rage. Ella asked me again and again to trust her. That she could handle Harold. That she loved him. That this grab at stability wasn’t just for me.
Her silence was louder than Harold’s voice. It’s her greatest power, though she never used it on me. She’ll stare at you as you try to pull your thoughts together, to say something that’ll reach her, but she’ll never reach back. I’ve watched her pull things out of people—secrets, confessions, promises to let us stay an extra month—with her silence alone. She wields it like a weapon.
“Ella.” Harold’s voice was suddenly desperate. I was lanced by a pity I didn’t want to feel. “Ella, say something, goddammit!” I heard the rush of his clothing as he moved across the room, toward my mother on the bed.
I waited a beat and a breath, and tried to wrench open the door.
Locked.
“Mom! What’s going on?”
“Jesus Christ, is that your daughter again?”
“Mom.” I pounded the heel of my hand against the door. “Let me in.”
Quiet, a creak, then Ella’s voice was close. “I’m okay, baby. Go to bed.”
“Open the door.”
“Alice. I’m fine. We’re just talking. You can help me by going to bed.”
Rage was running through my blood. “He called you trash. Open the door!”
Harold threw it open, and I startled back. He was rumpled, partly undressed. His shaved head looked shadowy and his eyes were bloodshot. Harold had Captain Hook eyes—mournful and cornflower blue, with a phantom glaze of red when he was angry.
Next to him, in a dark strapless sheath and shock of wild hair, Ella looked like a black poppy. Her dress seemed designed to call attention to the tattoo climbing up her arm and almost to her throat: a psychedelic flower on a spiny stem that could’ve been a botanical illustration of a blossom found on Mars. I had its twin tattooed on me in mirror image—a misguided Mother’s Day gift Ella had blindsided me by hating.
In the half-light of the hallway, she looked like a predator, and Harold looked like prey. The anger ebbed away.
“I didn’t call her trash. I just said…” He ran a hand over his drooping head. “These dinners are important. They’re full of potential clients, they determine the course of— Oh, for Christ’s sake, why am I trying to talk to you?”
Ella leaned against the doorframe, watching him coolly. “I was wearing this the night you met me. Remember?”
“Yeah, when you were a cocktail waitress. Forget it, I’m not going to stand here defending myself to both of you.” Harold glared at me. “I’m not a monster, Alice. Why are you always looking at me like I’m some goddamned monster?” He turned heel and retreated to the master bathroom.
“Mom.”
Ella cocked her head at my tone, looked for a moment like she’d ask. Instead she sighed, long and heavy. “Go to bed, Alice. We’ll talk in the morning, okay?”
She touched her forehead to mine, gently, then closed the door between us.
A dense quiet settled around my ears. It was the sound of living in a place sealed off from the rest of the city, in a vacuum of wealth.
I walked into the kitchen feeling like a thief, and foraged through cabinets in the dark.
“Is that a squirrel I hear, rummaging for nuts?”
I looked at the bag of pecans in my hand and eased it back onto the shelf. Audrey kept tabs and a running commentary on what people ate, her voice hard-edged if it was less than what she did. She sat in the unlit living room, her spume of dark hair in a topknot just visible over the back of the couch. She didn’t turn as I walked closer, but she tensed.
My stepsister was a sexy, zaftig motormouth who made me feel like an awkward breadstick. She was sprawled out in cutoff sweats and a tank top, always a little under-covered even at home. I watched over her shoulder as she clicked, restlessly, on a long feed of women wearing expensive clothes, ordering things she’d barely recognize when they arrived. It made me think of someone sitting at a casino machine.
“You playing superhero again?” she asked, her voice too bright. “Did you save your mom from my evil dad?”
I dropped onto the armchair across from her. “Harold’s not interesting enough to be evil. He’s just not good enough.”
That made her look up, eyes washed to blankness by white computer light. “You think my dad’s not good enough for your mom?” She made the last two words sound like profanity. “You’d still be living out of your car if it wasn’t for him. Wearing Walmart jeans.”
I was impressed she’d heard of Walmart, and pissed at myself for telling her something true. “Hey, sometimes we lived in shacks,” I said. “Or trailers. Once a garage.”
She considered me. “Once I waited so long for my truffle burger it was cold when it got there,” she said. “So I totally get it.”
“Once our car window got broken out, and Ella replaced it with duct tape and a sled.”
Audrey smiled faintly, her hand going still on her laptop. “Once my dad bought a boat and named it The Audrey, but he forgot to put a ballroom in so I sunk it.”
“Once…” The image that came to me then was jagged and fast, a three-frame cut of the bad luck that chased us out of Chicago. I closed my eyes against it, then stood abruptly. “You win.”
Her expression slid shut, and she smirked down at her computer. “Good night, sis,” she muttered as I passed her.
“Good night, Audrey,” I replied, too quiet for her to hear.
Ella and Harold’s room was silent as I passed. I tried to read the silence, but it was hard through a carved oak door. I continued on to the guest room Harold had barely converted for me.
Every morning I left my eyeliner out on the sink of the bathroom attached to my room. I left books open on the bed, socks under the sheets, jeans accordion-scrunched on the floor. Every night they were gone, tucked back into the cabinet, the hamper, the bookshelf. Waking up at Harold’s felt like living in Groundhog Day. No matter what I did, I couldn’t make a mark.
I avoided my eyes while brushing my teeth, then climbed into bed with a copy of The Blind Assassin, because if you’re not with the book you want, you might as well want the book you’re with. But I couldn’t focus on the words, and after a while I got up to retrieve the feather, the comb, and the bone from my dirty apron. I held them on my palm a moment before tipping them into a velvet pouch that used to hold Scrabble tiles and tucking it into my backpack.
I lay back down certain I wouldn’t drift off for hours but found myself waking from a sound sleep while it was still dark. Before my eyes were fully open, I sensed my mother’s presence in the room. She climbed noiselessly into bed beside me, and I loosened my grip on the covers so she could grab her share. I stayed still as she dropped a kiss on my cheek, dry-lipped and smelling of amber.
Her sigh was silvery; it tickled my ear. I held my breath till I couldn’t stand it, then rolled over to face her.
“Why him?”
She went tight, like she was tensing for a blow. I hadn’t hit her since I was ten, but seeing her brace made me press my hands between my knees. I expected her to beg off, to roll over, to tell me to wait till it was light and ask again. Not that she’d answer.
But she turned toward me, her eyes a faint, familiar shine. “I thought I was in love with him,” she whispered. “I promise I did.”
“And now?”
She settled onto her back, long fingers plucking at the comforter. “It feels good to rest. Doesn’t it? It feels so good to just rest.”
The roar in me, of everything that had happened—the man at the coffee shop, his book, the feather, the comb, the bone—turned down like a volume knob. Because Ella deserved this, didn’t she? Peace in a city so dense and bright its lights ate bad luck like they ate darkness.
Unspoken things bloomed at the back of my throat, then went cold. And I decided: I’d give her one more day. One more stretch of rest before telling her the same old curse had found us, in a form I didn’t fully understand.
We lay quiet in the dark a while longer, and fell asleep at the same time.