My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (56 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me

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There once was a very old man with large gray eyes who collected all the fairy tales in the whole wide world. He put them in a large sack, and carried the sack from village to village. Some believed the sack to be filled with gold, others bones, but all were too afraid to ask. I know this because the very old man with large gray eyes is my great-great-grandfather. He left me this sack when he died. For many years I would not open it. I hung the sack from a tree in my yard. At first it swung drowsily, but the years turned the sack savage and soon it whipped around even when the air was still. Little yellow teeth began to poke through. It was not until my seventy-seventh birthday that I opened the sack. What was inside will not astonish you: glass coffins, the belly of the big bad wolf, ovens, forests, magic mirrors, men caught inside beasts, and frogs, and cats, hundreds of shoes, and a glittering sea. At the very bottom of the sack was a girl who had once, long, long ago in a land far away, become pregnant by swallowing a rose petal. I asked her who she was. “Before the sack?” she asked. “Yes,” I said, “before the sack.” She told me that before the sack she lived inside a fairy tale called “The Young Slave” by Giambattista Basile. I believed her because she was pretty and sad. “Do you want to know,” she asked, “what all the things inside the sack filled with fairy tales are like?” “Very much,” I said. She brought my hand to her belly. “They are like home.” “Home?” I asked. I felt confused. “Containers,” she said. “Either we are inside or we are outside.” “Who?” I asked. “Us,” she said. “The figures”—she blushed—“of fairy tales. Either we are inside . . .” She climbed inside the sack. “Or we are outside.” She climbed back out. “It is like in your story ‘My Brother Gary Made a Movie and This Is What Happened,’ how you are outside the heap.” “It’s not really me,” I said. “Exactly,” she said. “You are outside of you.” I looked at my story. “Gary’s head is inside the paper bag!” “Now you’re catching on,” she said. “Even the moobie is a container,” explained the girl. “Because Gary is trying to capture the Holocaust?” I asked. “Exactly,” said the girl, who was both pretty and sad. “Fairy tales are about questions of belonging, and Mouse does not belong.” “Me?” I asked. “Yes, Mouse,” said the girl, “you.” “Because I married a black man?” I asked. “This is not about you,” said the girl. “Oh, right,” I said. The girl handed me a rose petal. I put it in my mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Nine months later I gave birth to a very old man with large gray eyes.
—SOM

AIMEE BENDER

The Color Master

OUR STORE WAS EXPENSIVE, I MEAN EX-PEN-SIVE, AS ANYTHING would be if all its requests were clothing in the colors of natural elements. The Duke’s son wanted shoes the color of rock, so he could walk in the rock and not see his feet. He was vain that way, he did not like to see his feet. He wanted to appear, from a distance, as a floating pair of ankles. But rock, of course, is many colors. It’s subtle, but it is not just one plain gray, that I can promise, and in order to truly blend in, it would not do to give the Duke a regular pair of lovely pure gray-dyed shoes. So, we had to trek over as a group to his dukedom, a three-day trip, and take bagfuls of the rocks back with us, the rocks he would be walking on, and then use those, at the studio, as guides. I spent five hours, one afternoon, just staring at a rock, trying to see into its color scheme. Gray, my head kept saying. I see gray.

At the shop, in general, we built clothing and shoes, soles and heels, shirts and coats; we treated the leather, shaped and wove the cloth, and even when an item wasn’t ordered as a special request, one pair of shoes or one robe might cost as much as a pony or a month’s food from the market stalls. Most villagers did not have this kind of money so the bulk of our customers were royalty, or the occasional traveler riding through town who had heard rumors of our skills. For this pair, for the Duke, all of us tailors and shoemakers, who numbered about twelve, were working round the clock. One man had the idea to grind bits of rock into particles, and then he added those particles to the dye washing bin. This helped, a little. We attended visualization seminars, where we tried to imagine what it was like to be a rock, and then, quietly, after an hour of deep thought and breathing, returned to our desks and tried to insert that imagery into our choices about how long to leave the shoes in the dye bath. We felt the power of the mountain, in the rock, and let that play a subtle subtextual role. And then, once the dye had reached ultimate power, and once the shoes were a beautiful pure gray, a rocky gray, but still gray, we summoned the Color Master.

She lived about a half mile away. In a cottage, behind the scrubby oak grove. We summoned her by sending off a goat down the lane, because she did not like to be disturbed by people, and the goat would trot down the road and butt on the door as her cue. She’d set up our studio and shop, in the first place, years ago; she does the final work. But the Color Master has been looking unwell these days. For our last project, the Duchess’s handbag, which was supposed to look like a just-blooming rose, she wore herself out thinking about pink, and was in bed for weeks after, recovering, which had never happened before. Pink, she kept saying, as she tossed around, in her bed. Birth, sex, blushes, kisses. She had a very high fever, and lost too much weight. Dark circles ringed her eyes. Also her younger brother suffers from terrible back problems and cannot move or work and lives with her, on the sofa, all day long. Also she is growing older, and she is certainly the most talented in the kingdom and gets zero recognition. We, the tailors and shoemakers, we know of her gifts, but does the King? Do the townsfolk? She walks among them, like an ordinary being, shopping for tomatoes, and no one knows that the world she’s seeing is about a thousand times more detailed than the world anyone else is looking at. When you see a tomato, like me, you probably see a very nice red orb with a green stem, smelling fresh and delectable, with a gentle give to the touch. When she sees a tomato, she sees blues and browns and yellows and curves, and the vine it came on, and she can probably even guess how many seeds are in a given tomato based on how heavy it feels in her hand.

So, we sent over the goat, and when she came into the studio, with the goat, we’d just finished the fourth dying of the rock shoes. They were drying on a mat, and they looked pretty good. I told Cheryl that her visualization of the mountain had definitely helped, because it was a deeper, stronger gray than I’d expected. Cheryl blushed. She’s one of the nicer ones. I said, too, that Edwin’s addition of the rocks to the dye had added a useful kind of rough texture. He kicked a stool leg, pleased. I hadn’t done much; I’m not the most skilled, but I like to commend good work when I see it. But the thing is, even with all our hard work, with all our deepening, they still looked like really beautiful gray shoes. The kind any normal person would love, if they didn’t have this curious vanity about vanishing feet.

The Color Master walked in, wearing a linen sheath woven with blue threadings. Her face hinting at gaunt. She greeted us all by nodding, and stood at the counter where the shoes were drip-drying.

Very nice work, she said. Esther, who had fronted the dying process, curtsied.

We sprinkled rocks into the dye, she said.

A fine choice, said the Color Master.

Edwin did a little dance in place, over at his table.

The goat settled on a pillow in the corner, and began to eat the stuffing.

The Color Master rolled her shoulders a few times, and when the shoes were dry, she laid her hands upon them. She lifted them up, to the sunlight. She picked up a rock, next to the shoe, and looked at the rock, in the light, next to the shoe. She circled both, inside different light rays. Then she went to the palette area and took out a handful of blue dust. We have about 150 metal bins of this dust, in a range of colors. The bins stand side by side, running the perimeter of the studio. They are narrow, so we can fit a whole lot of colors, and if someone brings in a new color, we hammer down a new bin and slide it into the spectrum, wherever it fits. One tailor found an amazing deep burgundy off in the driest part of the forest, on a series of leaves; I located, once, a type of dirt that was a deeper brown than sand but not like rich mud, over by the reddish iron deposits near the lake. Someone else found a new blue, in a dried-out pansy flower, and another in the feathers of a dead bird. We have instructions to hunt for color everywhere, at all times. The Color Master toured the room, and then took that handful of blue dust (and always, when I watch, I am thrilled—blue? How does she know, blue? It was a darkish blue, too, seemingly far too dark for shoes this light, unless he wanted wet rock shoes) and she rubbed the dust into the shoe. Back to the bins and then she got a black, a dusty black, and then some sage green. All rubbed into the gray shoe. While she worked everyone stood around, quiet. We dropped our usual drudgery and chit-chat.

The Color Master worked swiftly, but she added, usually, something on the level of forty colors, so the process, even quickly, took more than two hours. She added a color here, a color there, sometimes at the size of salt particles, and the gray in the shoe shifted and shaded under her hands. She would reach a level and ask for sealant and Esther would step forward and the CM would coat the shoe to seal in the colors and then return to the sunlight, holding a shoe up, with the rock in her other hand. This went on for about four rounds. I swear, I could start to feel the original mountain’s presence, in the room, the great heavy lumbering voice of it.

When she was done, the pair was so gray, so rock-like, you could hardly believe they were made of leather at all. They looked as if they had been sheared straight from the craggy mountainside.

Done, she said.

We circled her, bowing our heads.

Beautiful, I said.

Another triumph, murmured Sandy, next to me, who cannot color-mix to save her life.

The Color Master swept her gaze around the room, and her eyes rested on each of us, searching, slowly, until they finally settled on me. Me?

Will you walk me home? she said, in a deep voice, while Esther tied an invoice to the foot of a pigeon and then threw it out the window in the direction of the dukedom.

I would be honored, I said. I took her arm. The goat, full of pillow, tripped along behind us.

I am a quiet sort, except for the paying of compliments, and I didn’t know if I should ask her anything on the walk. As far as I knew, she didn’t usually ask for an escort home at all. Mainly I just looked at all the stones and rocks on the path, and for the first time saw that blue hint, and the blackness, and the shades of green, and that faint edge of purple if the light hit just so. She seemed relieved that I wasn’t asking questions, so much so that it occurred to me that that was probably why she’d asked me to walk her home in the first place.

At her door, she fixed her eyes on me: gray, steady, aging at the corners. She was almost twice my age, but had always had a sexiness I’d admired. A way of holding her body that let you know there was a body there, but that it was private, that stuff happened on it, in it, to it, but it was stuff I would never see. It made me sad, seeing that, while also knowing about her husband who had gone off to the war years ago, and had never returned, and how it was difficult for her to have people over because of her brother with the bad back, and how long ago she had fled her own town for a reason she never spoke of, plus she had a thick cough and her own money issues, which seemed so unfair when she should’ve been living in the palace, as far as I was concerned.

Listen, she said. She held me in her gaze.

Yes?

There’s a big request coming in, she said. I’ve heard rumors. Big. Huge.

What is it? I said.

I don’t know yet. But start preparing. You’ll have to take over. I will die soon, she said.

Excuse me?

Soon, she said. I can feel it, brewing. Death. It’s not dark, nor is it white. It’s almost a blue-purple, she said. Her eyes went past me, to the sky.

I will do my best, she said. I will do a fair bit of prep. But start preparing your color skills, Missy.

She lowered her brow, and her look was stern.

My name is Patty, I said.

She laughed.

How do you know? I said. Do you mean it? Are you ill?

No, she said. Yes. I mean it. I’m asking for your help, she said. And when I die, it will be your job to finish.