Stranger Things Happen (18 page)

"That's nice," Jasper said.

Serena squirmed in her seat. "You look so familiar," she said to
Mr. Donner. "Have we met?"

"One meets so many people," Mr. Donner said. He took a sip of
wine. "We're expecting one more party. They're a little late."

"Is that why you keep the windows open?" Serena asked.

"We're hoping that they'll hear the band playing," Mr. Donner
said. "Music raises the spirits considerably, I find. We hope that
they'll find their way back down the trail without further
incident.

"You're talking about the lost hikers, right?" Serena said.

"There were twenty-three hikers," Jasper said. "They've only set
seven places."

Mr. Donner shrugged. "Do try your soup, Mr. Todd."

Jasper took a small sip of the soup. It was warm and salty and
as he swallowed, it burned. "I'm starving," Serena said. She showed
them her empty bowl. "Jasper's tooth broke, but he's afraid to go
see a dentist."

"It's fine," Jasper said. "I'll wait until we get back to
Auckland." He had a very clear picture of a dentist in Auckland,
who would be a kind man with a well-kept moustache. A gentle man
with small knowledgeable hands, who believed in using gas. Or maybe
the tooth would grow back.

The second course was a fatty cut of brown meat. There was a
little dish of green jelly and carrots cooked with brown sugar.
Steam rose up to Jasper's nose, thick and sweet. He diced up a
carrot and ate it with his spoon. "I'm not really that hungry," he
said.

"After dinner," Mr. Donner said, "we sit and tell stories in
front of the fire. I do hope you like stories."

"Ghost stories!" Serena said. "It's just like Girl Scout Camp. I
used to love the campfires."

Jasper's wineglass was full again. He didn't remember drinking
the last glass. 
The better to drink you, my
dear, 
his tooth said. He still had a sense of wrongness,
an instinct that the proper thing to do would be to leave or
perhaps just go up to bed. But that would mean the tunnel again, or
the small coffin-like room with its sad, sagging bed. He took
another sip of wine to fortify himself. The band was playing a new
song. The song sounded familiar. It might have been "Autumn
Leaves." It might have been a hymn.

"Have the two of you been traveling together long?" Mr. Donner
asked.

"Oh no," Serena said. "We met three days ago in a bar in
Queenstown. We're traveling around the world in opposite
directions. I fly to Hawaii next Tuesday and then I'm supposed to
go home again. This is just Jasper's second stop."

"Maybe I'll come back home with you," Jasper said.

"Don't be silly," she said, but under the table her foot moved
up his calf, nudged in between his legs in a friendly way. "I'm
trying to keep as far away from home as possible, for as long as
possible. Not that I have a home any longer. It burned down."

"How sad," Mr. Donner said, smiling.

"Not really," Serena said primly. "I'm the one who burned it
down, but I don't like to talk about that."

Jasper looked across the table at the girl he had met in a bar.
She didn't look like a girl who would burn down her house. He
wasn't really sure what girls who burned down houses looked like.
What was the name of the lipstick color? That had been the silly
thing, something like Berry Me, or Red Death, or maybe Red
Delicious. Maybe Firetruck.

"See?" Serena said. "Do you still want to go home with me?"
Under the table, her hand ran up and down his leg, pinching
lightly. "Jasper isn't the sort who travels purposefully," she said
to Mr. Donner. "He isn't the sort who's purposeful, or smart, or
careful about the kinds of women in bars he picks up in bars, for
that matter. You've got to be careful," she said, turning to Jasper
for a moment, "about picking up girls in bars, good grief, what if
I'd turned out to be weird, or something? But he isn't careful.
He's lucky instead. For example, he won his trip by filling out a
form in a travel agency."

"You are a fortunate young man," Mr. Donner said.

There was just a small smear of mint jelly on Serena's plate.
"When he told me in the bar how he'd won, I thought it was just a
great pick-up line," she said. "The tie-breaking question
was 
Why do you want to go around the world? 
And
he wrote, 
Because you can't go through it. 
Isn't
that ridiculous?"

"It's true," Jasper said. He was careful to enunciate. "Sad but
true."

Serena smiled at him. "I shouldn't complain, though. It's great
traveling with Jasper. He gave me a plastic dinosaur. A
stegosaurus. Thanks, Jasper," she said.

"Don't mention it," said Jasper. He wanted to say something, to
explain that travel was important to him, that someday, he knew, if
he traveled long enough he would eventually come to a wonderful—a
magical—place. His toothache was almost gone, just the smallest
twinge very far away. Practically in another country. Some place
that he had been stuck in for a while. He looked past Serena, to
the French window. The torches were now at the base of the trail.
They swung back and forth, lighting up the great trunk of a kauri
tree, a growth of ferns on the lawn before the hotel.

"Look," said Mr. Donner, "here they come. Just in time for
dessert."

The whole room rose from their chairs, applauding. Five men and
two women came into the room. They stopped just past the threshold
as if uncertain of their welcome. They looked longingly at the
fireplaces, at the empty plates piled up on dirty tables, but they
did not move. Instead the crowd swept towards them.

"Excuse me," Serena said. She got up and went with the others.
Jasper watched her recede: the black hair fallen down around her
shoulders again, a tail tucked into her painted mouth, the long
legs in the purple tights. Waiters were going back and forth
between the tables extinguishing candles. Jasper watched as they
pinched the small flames between their fingers. Soon the only light
would be the red light of the fireplaces; the bulbs of the
chandeliers were faint as starlight, guttering to blackness.

At the opposite end of the room, near the windows, he could no
longer see Serena or the hikers. The crowd was clotted and
indistinct in the dim light. It moved slowly across the dance
floor, pouring through the window like the massy shadow of the
black mountain. Sitting by the dance floor was a single cellist. He
had put his instrument down, and was cramming balls of sheet music
into his mouth. He chewed them slowly, his hands pulling the white
pages out of the air around him as if they were alive. The wind
blew out the chandeliers, but Jasper could still see the musician,
his mouth and eyes wet and horrible. "Where are the other
hikers?"

Mr. Donner was biting savagely at his thumb, frowning down at
the table. "Sometimes people do unthinkable things, in order to
come home safely," he said. "Impossible things, wonderful things.
And afterwards, do you think they go home? No. You find it's much,
much better to keep on traveling. Hard to stop, really."

The French doors had shut—the hikers were cut off from the trail
and the mountain, should they wish to go back. The fire behind
Jasper was flickering low, casting out more shadow than warmth, and
yet the room seemed to grow hotter and hotter.

His tooth no longer hurt. The wine and the warmth were pleasant.
"I can tell you're a good man, Mr. Donner. Otherwise my tooth would
warn me. I've never had a toothache like this before. I've never
been to a place like this before. I've never been to a party like
this before. But your name, it's familiar. My tooth says your name
is familiar."

The crowd was moving back across the dance floor, towards them,
towards the table set with seven places, but he couldn't see
Serena. She had been completely swallowed up. The cellist had
finished his music, and like a magician, he lifted the bow of his
instrument, lowered it into his wide unhappy mouth.

"Perhaps you recognize it," said the bearded man. "But on the
other hand, what's a name, hmm? After a while names are just
souvenirs. Places you've been. Let me introduce you to some of my
friends." He waved towards the approaching crowd. "Mrs. Gomorrah
over there, Mr. Belly of the Whale, Ms. Titanic, Little Miss
Through the Looking-Glass, Mr. and Mrs. Really Bad Marriage, Mr.
Over The Falls in a Wooden Barrel."

Off in the distance Jasper could hear a wolf howling. Which was
strange. What had Serena said? It was all marsupials here. The
plaintive noise reverberated in his tooth.

The bearded man was practically gnashing his teeth, smiling
ferociously. "I have seen snow and I have been hungry, and I have
seen nothing in my travels that is so bad as not living. I propose
a toast, Mr. Todd."

They both raised their glasses. "To travel," one said.

"To life," said the other.

—
Some are leaving this fall for Texas, and more are going in
the spring to California and Oregon. For my part I have no desire
to go anywhere. I am far enough west now and do believe some people
might go west until they have been around the world and never find
a place to stop.
 
Elvira Power Hynes, March 1852

1. The glass slipper.

He never found the girl, but he still goes out, looking for her.
His wife—the woman he married—she has the most beautiful smile. But
her feet are too big.

This girl looks at him, but she doesn't smile. She's wearing too
much makeup. Blue eyeliner put on like house paint, lipstick,
mascara, sexy glitter dusted all over her face and bare shoulders.
If he touched her, it would come off on his fingers, fine and
gritty and sad. He doesn't touch her. The other women in the house,
they've probably told her things. Maybe she recognizes him. These
women are paid to be discreet, but once, afterwards, a woman asked
him for his autograph. He tried to think of something appropriate
to write. She didn't have a piece of paper, so instead he wrote on
the back of a takeout menu. He wrote, 
I am a happy man. I
love my wife very much
. He underlined 
happy
.

They stand awkwardly in this girl's tiny room. The room is too
small and the bed is too big. They stand as far from the bed as
possible, crowded up against the wall. On the wall are posters of
celebrities, pictures that this girl has cut out from newspapers
and fashion magazines. The people in these pictures are glossy like
horses. They look expensive. He sees his wife with her beautiful
smile, looking down at them from the wall. If he were to look
carefully he would probably find himself on the wall as well,
looking comfortable and already too much at home here. He doesn't
look at the wall. He looks at this girl's feet.

#

He was never a very good dancer. What he loved were the women in
their long wide skirts. When they danced, the heavy taffeta and
silk hitched up and belled out and then you saw their petticoats.
More silk, more taffeta—as if underneath that's all they were, silk
and taffeta. Their shoes left thin gritty smears along the marble
floor.

He never saw what kind of shoes they were wearing. Only hers.
Perhaps they were all wearing slippers made of glass. Perhaps glass
slippers were fashionable at the time. Her feet must have been so
small. And she was a tall girl, too. She leaned against his arms,
and he hovered over her for a minute. He could smell her hair. It
was stacked up on top of her head, all pinned up in some sort of
wavy knot, just there beneath his nose. It tickled his nose. It
smelled warm. He was so happy. He must have had the silliest smile
on his face. Her dress went all the way down to the floor. There
were diamonds on the hem, which was silk. The dress made a silky
slithery scratchy noise against the floor, like tiny tails and
claws. It sounded like mice.

So these are the two things he still wonders about. What's under
those skirts? Those other people dancing—were they as happy as he
was?

In the garden, the clock struck twelve and she went—when she
went, where did she go? He never found that girl. He finds other
girls.

(These girls) this girl (they don't wear) she isn't wearing
enough clothes. Tangerine-colored see-through shirt; short skirt
ripped all the way up the thigh; flesh—fat breasts squashed
together in a black brassiere, goose-pimpled arms, long stalky legs
balanced on these two tiny feet—he finds the body extremely
distracting. "First of all," he says to her, "let's have a look in
your closet."

In these closets there is always the right sort of dress. This
dress is not the sort of dress one expects to find in a closet in
this sort of house. It is prom dress-y—flouncy, lacy, long and
demure. It's pink. This girl, he thinks, ran away from home on her
tiny feet, with a backpack on her back, with these things in it:
posters of her favorite rock stars, her prom dress. And the stuffed
tiger with real glass eyes that he sees now, on top of the red
velveteen bedspread. "What's your name?"

The girl folds her arms across her breasts defensively. She has
realized that they are not the point after all. Her arms are
freckled and also, he sees, bruised, as if someone has been holding
her but not carefully enough. "Emily," she says. "Emily Apple."

"Emily," he says, "why don't you put on this dress?"

When he was a little boy it was always one of two things. He was
petted and pampered and made much of, or he was ignored and left to
his own devices. When he was alone what he liked best was to sit
under things. He liked to hide in plain sight, to be in the middle
of all the people. He sat under the piano in the music room. At
banquets he slid down his enormous chair and sat under the table
with his father's dogs. They licked at his face and arms with long
thoughtful tongues. He hid in the fireplaces in the great hall,
behind the wrought iron screens. In the summer there were sparrows
up in the chimneys, also lizards, spiderwebs, broken sooty bits of
shell, feathers and bones caught in the grates. The
ladies-in-waiting stood dozing in the thin dusty sunlight of his
mother's rooms, and he crept under their heavy skirts and sat at
their spangled feet, quiet as a mouse.

He helps Emily Apple slide the beautiful pink dress over her
head. He buttons the row of buttons up her narrow back. He lifts
her hair up, heaps it up and sticks pins all through the sticky
teased mass. She sits perfectly still on the bed, the glass eyes of
the tiger looking out at her from the folds of her skirt. He brings
water in a basin and washes her face. He powders her face. He finds
a locket in a heap of bangles and safety pins. Inside is a
photograph of a young girl, maybe Emily Apple, or maybe not. The
little girl stares at him. 
What kind of a girl do you
think I am?
He fastens the locket around Emily Apple's long
neck. Her face is very naked, very beautiful. Her freckles stand
out like spatters of soot on a white sheet. She looks as if she is
going to a funeral or to a wedding. They find a pair of gloves and
pull them up over her freckled arms. Her fingers stick out where
mice have eaten the tips of the gloves, but the dress comes all the
way down to the floor. They both feel more comfortable now.

Sometimes it surprises him, all these runaway girls—all these
women—with their sad faces and their tiny feet. How long has this
house been here? When he was looking for that girl, he went to a
lot of houses. He knocked on the front doors. He announced who he
was. These were eligible girls from good homes. They had maids. He
asked the maids if they would try on the shoes, too. At night he
dreamed about women's feet. But this house, he never came here.

He has been married for nine years. Perhaps this is the sort of
house that only married men can find.

That girl, where did she go? He's still looking for her. He
doesn't expect to find her, but he finds other girls. He loves his
wife, but her feet are too big. It wasn't what he expected—his
life, it isn't at all what he expected. His wife isn't the one that
he was looking for. She was a surprise—he burst out laughing, the
glass slipper hanging off her toes. She laughed and soot fell out
of her hair. He loves her and she loves him, but that girl, he only
danced with her one time before the clock struck midnight, and then
she left her shoe behind. He was supposed to find it. He was
supposed to find her. He never found her, but these girls—this
girl, Emily Apple—the other girls in their tiny rooms: the woman
downstairs knew exactly the sort of girl he was looking for. In one
of these closets, he thinks, maybe there is (perhaps there is) a
glass slipper, the match for the one in his pocket.

#

Some nights when he comes home, he's carrying the orphaned shoe
in his coat pocket. It fits just fine. That's how small, how
impossibly small it is. His wife smiles at him. She never asks
where he's been. She sits in the kitchen beside the fire, with her
feet tucked up under her, and he lays his head down in her lap. If
only her feet weren't so big. When he was first looking for that
girl, he got to lift up a lot of skirts. Only just so high. Really,
not high enough. He knelt down and he tried the shoe on every
single foot. But it never fit right and he always went away again
with the shoe in his pocket.

His wife wasn't one of the eligible girls. She was a kitchen
maid. When he saw her, she had her head stuck up the kitchen
chimney. She was beating the broom up the chimney, shaking out the
soot. Head to foot, she was covered in soot, black as a beetle.
When she sneezed, the soot rose up in a cloud. She tried to curtsey
when she saw him, and soot fell off her like a black cloak.

Everyone had crowded into the kitchen behind him: his footmen,
the lady of the house, her daughters, the other maids. One of the
footmen read the proclamation, and the sooty girl sneezed again.
The eligible young ladies looked sulky and the maids looked
haughty, as if they knew what was going to happen. They didn't like
it one bit, but they weren't one bit surprised. The kitchen girl
dusted off a kitchen stool and she sat her sooty self down on it,
sooty arms akimbo. The long prehensile toes of her bare black feet
gripped the stone floor as he knelt down beside her. Her foot was
warm and gritty in his hand and her long toes wriggled as if he was
tickling her. He hung the glass slipper off her toes. Soot came off
on his fingers. There was soot in the long folds of her skirt. He
stayed there for a minute, kneeling in the warm ashes at her
feet.

"What size shoe do you wear?" he said. Her feet were so big.

"What kind of girl do you think I am?" she said. She sounded as
if she were scolding him. When he looked up her face was so
beautiful.

#

This girl sits perfectly still on the bed. There is just room
enough for him to kneel down beside the bed. He lifts up her skirt,
just high enough. He cups her tiny foot in his hand. How could
anyone's foot be so small? It fits into the palm of his hand like a
kitten or an egg. He wishes he were that small, like a shoe. He
wishes he were a small, perfect shoe, that he could be matched to
her foot and hidden under her skirt forever. He takes out the
slipper and he slides it onto her foot. They both look down at her
foot, beautiful in the glass slipper, and the girl sighs. "It fits
just fine," she says. When he doesn't say anything, she says, "What
do we do now?"

"What kind of girl do you think I am?" that sooty girl (his
wife) said.

He says to the girl on the bed, "Take the shoe off. So we can
put it on again."

2. Miss Kansas on Judgment Day.

We are sitting on our honeymoon bed in the honeymoon suite. We
are in a state of honeymoon, in our honey month. These words are so
sweet: 
honey
, 
moon
. This bed is so big,
we could live on it. We have been happily marooned—honey
marooned—on this bed for days. I have a pair of socks on and you've
put your underwear on backwards. I mean, it's my underwear, which
you've put on backwards. This is perfectly natural. Everything I
have is yours now. My underwear is your underwear. We have made
vows to this effect. Our underwear looks so cute on you.

I lean towards you. Marriage has affected the laws of gravity.
We will now revolve around each other. You will exert gravity on
me, and I will exert gravity on you. We are one another's moons.
You are holding onto my feet with both hands, as if otherwise you
might fall right off the bed. I think I might float up and hit the
ceiling, splat, if you let go. Please don't let go.

How did we meet? When did we marry? Where are we, and how did we
get here? One day, we think, we will have children. They will ask
us these questions. We will make things up. We will tell them about
this hotel. Our room overlooks the ocean. We have a balcony,
although we have not made it that far, so far.

Where are we and how did we get here? We are so far away from
home. This bed might as well be a foreign country. We are both a
little bit homesick, although we have not confessed this to each
other. We remember cutting the cake. We poured punch for each
other, we linked our arms and drank out of each others' glasses.
What was in that punch?

We are the only honeymooners in this hotel. Everyone else is a
beauty pageant contestant or a beauty pageant contestant's
chaperone. We have seen the chaperones in the halls, women armed
with cans of hairspray and little eggs containing emergency
pantyhose, looking harassed but utterly competent. Through the
walls, we have heard the beauty pageant contestants talking in
their sleep. We have held water glasses up to the walls in order to
hear what they were saying.

As honeymooners, we are good luck tokens. As if our happiness,
our good fortune, might rub off, contestants ask us for a light:
they brush up against us in the halls, pull strands of hair off our
clothing. Whenever we leave our bed, our room—not often—two or
three are sure to be lurking just outside our door. But
today—tonight—we have the hotel to ourselves.

The television is on, or maybe we are dreaming. Now that we are
married, we will have the same dreams. We are watching (dreaming)
the beauty pageant.

On television, Miss Florida is walking across the stage. She's
blond and we know from eavesdropping in the hotel bar that this
will count against her. Brunettes win more often. Three brunettes,
Miss Hawaii, Miss Arkansas, Miss Pennsylvania, trail after her.
They take big slow steps and roll their hips expertly. The colored
stage lights bounce off their shiny sweetheart dresses. In
television interviews, we learned that Miss Arkansas is dyslexic,
or maybe it was Miss Arizona. We have hopes of Miss Arkansas, who
has long straight brown hair that falls all the way down her
back.

You say that if we hadn't just gotten married, you would want to
marry Miss Arkansas. Even if she can't spell. She can sit on her
hair. A lover could climb that hair like a gym rope. It's
fairy-tale hair, Rapunzel hair. We saw her practicing for the
pageant in the hotel ballroom with two wild pigs, her hair braided
into two lassoes. We heard her say in her interview that she hasn't
cut her hair since she was twelve years old. We can tell that she's
an old-fashioned girl. Please don't let go of my feet.