To keep myself from watching the clock until Sally comes back, I go upstairs to do some more unpacking. I unpack the boxes marked SHEETS AND BLANKETS and make up my bed and Sally’s. Then I open a suitcase and put nightgowns and underwear in the cupboard drawers and hang up shirts and dresses in the closet. When I’m done I lift up the suitcase to put it on the top shelf of the closet, but I notice that it’s still heavy. Putting it back down I see that one of the outer zippered compartments is bulging. I unzip it. Inside I find Jude’s old Rolex watch, a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, and a handful of round, speckled stones.
I put the stones and the bottle on the night table and sit down on the bed, the heavy gold watch cradled in my hands. I looked for it off and on for the last ten months until I concluded Jude must have had it on when he was taken to the hospital and that someone stole it from him. It had seemed a final indignity—the thought of someone removing the expensive watch from his still-warm wrist—and I feel absurdly grateful knowing that’s not what happened. He’d used this suitcase for a trip he’d taken just a few weeks before he died and left the watch in the zippered compartment. It was a strange oversight, though, since he usually wore the watch. A sign, perhaps, that he was under stress.
I slip the gold band over my wrist where it dangles loose and surprisingly warm against my skin, as if it still held the warmth of his flesh. It’s still ticking. It’s kept time all these months, outlasting its owner’s heart.
The idea is so painful that I instinctively reach for the bourbon and take a long burning swallow. I pick up one of the stones and close my eyes, trying to imagine where Jude found it, what exotic beach or mountain stream, but all I feel is the cold, smooth empty weight of it in my hand. When I open my eyes I’m looking at the watch face. It reads 11:20.
Okay, I think, she’s a little late. No big deal. She was with polite, well-mannered Clyde Bollinger. I get up and look for a place to hide the bourbon. I stopped keeping alcoholic beverages in the house after some friends of Sally’s broke into the liquor cabinet last year and Lexy Roth-stein threw up all over her mother’s BMW. Sally might invite some of her new friends over and I don’t want a repeat of last year’s debacle, especially with kids who will also be my students. It’s going to be a little tricky having Sally socializing with my students. How will I deal with Clyde, for instance, when he finally gets here with Sally? Should I mention that they were late even if it’s only twenty—I look down at the watch—well, forty-three minutes late?
I go to the window, the bottle still in my hand, to look for them coming up the path, but I can’t see a thing. I turn off the bedroom light so I can see better—and so Sally won’t find me framed in the lit window when she comes home—but all I can see are those white birches swaying in the wind. I open the window to listen for Clyde and Sally’s voices and hear the wind instead.
I can’t remember the last time I heard wind like this—not in our Avenue B apartment where the city sounds of traffic and sirens drowned out every natural noise, and not in our hermetically sealed, climate-controlled Great Neck house. My new home, though, seems to be engaged in a duet with the wind. Gusts whoosh out of the pine forest and fling themselves onto the house, which sighs and moans as if it were being caressed and then, as the wind sweeps back into the forest, keens like an abandoned lover. The white birches thrash like women tossing their long hair over their shoulders.
I take another gulp of bourbon and imagine Sally out on this wild night, buffeted by the elements. Just when I think I can’t bear to sit another moment I catch a flash of light between the pines, hear a scrap of laughter, and then Sally and Clyde emerge from the woods. I look down at my watch. It’s midnight. A full hour late. I can’t let that go. Swallowing the last half-inch of bourbon, I head down the stairs. They’re coming in the front door just as I reach the bottom step and I see in the two sets of eyes that stare up at me how I must look: a deranged woman shaking her hand at them. Clyde flinches as if he thought I was going to slap him.
“I believe we agreed on eleven,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm.
Sally looks from me to Clyde and then, heaving a disgusted sigh, lifts her hand so I can see her wristwatch. “It is eleven, Mom.”
I start to object, but then, looking down at Jude’s watch, I understand. The last time he wore the watch was in Japan where, no doubt, it is now twelve o’clock in the afternoon. I consider making a joke about how late she would be if we were in Japan, but she’s already stomping up the stairs, leaving me with an embarrassed Clyde.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s my late husband’s watch so it’s set to a different time.” Only when Clyde’s gone do I realize that what I’ve said sounds like the dead are on a different time zone.
Sally is still angry in the morning. I bring her orange juice—the only thing she’ll ingest before noon—as a peace offering, but she tells me she promised to meet Clyde and Chloe for breakfast in the cafeteria at—she holds up her watch—“eight o’clock standard sane person’s time.”
“I said I was sorry, Sally. You don’t have to be mean—”
“You were mean to embarrass me in front of Clyde,” she snaps. “If you don’t want me to make any new friends here we might as well have stayed in Great Neck.”
“Of course I want you to make new friends—”
“Good. Then I’d better go unless you don’t think I’m capable of walking to campus by myself.”
I concede that she can find her own way to campus.
And truly, in the light of day finding the spot where the trail splits—left to the campus and right to the ridge and Witte Clove—couldn’t be clearer or more straightforward. Once on the trail to campus, I deliberately slow my steps so that I have time to calm down from the scene with Sally and to think over how I want to open the class.
I had planned to simply go over the course outline, which will take us from primitive animal bride tales to Greek myth to the seventeenth century French salons to Marvel and DC superheroes. But now? I don’t want to start with chronologies and bibliographies; I want to start with the raw panic I felt in the woods last night. I want my students to hear the trees moving behind them, to see the fleeing peasant girl in the shadows of the pines—to hear her heart beating as she races from the witch’s house to reclaim her stolen life. I want them to experience the fairy tale as a living, breathing organism, not some quaint story in an illustrated children’s book.
As I enter Beech Hall and walk to my classroom, it strikes me that this was Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhardt’s achievement. They created a life here at Arcadia Falls crafted out of their dreams and visions—a fairytale kingdom where artists could come and paint and draw and write and compose amidst the beauty of nature, free from society’s demands and the stress of commerce and industry. They were changelings, I think as I enter the classroom, who refashioned themselves into the heroines of their own stories. They had come here to reinvent themselves. Perhaps that was part of the reason I’d applied for the job here. I remembered my mother once saying that if she’d come here to school her life would have been different. She would have been a different person. I think that I’d hoped that Sally and I might be able to become different people here.
I stand in front of the class, looking out at the young faces that last night had glowed in the light of the bonfire. I recognize Chloe and Clyde but am disappointed not to see Isabel. I recall what she said last night: let’s be the best that we can and leave regrets behind us.
“What if,” I say now, “you could start completely fresh as someone new?”
“As anyone?” The question comes from a slight girl in the back row. I noticed her when I first came in because she’s striking in an unusual way. She has the oval face, high forehead, and almond-shaped eyes of a Botticelli madonna. She’s wearing an embroidered peasant dress and purple tights. “Absolutely anyone,” I answer.
“Any personality would be an improvement for you, Hannah,” a girl in the front row says.
I q
uickly look down at my roster and find the name Hannah Weiss. Then I look up at the girl who’s just spoken. She’s wearing faded jeans that hug the curves of her hips and accentuate the length of her legs. From the stitching on the pocket I recognize the brand as one coveted by Great Neck teenagers. A backless sheepskin slipper dangles from her right foot; she taps it against her heel. “And who would you trade places with?” I ask her.
“Oh, I’m perfectly happy with who I am,” she says, flipping her waist-length, perfectly straight brown hair over her shoulder, “unless … well, I wouldn’t mind trading places with Angelina Jolie if it meant I could be Mrs. Brad Pitt.”
A few of the girls giggle, but Clyde Bollinger straightens up in his chair and pushes the hair out of his eyes. “Why would you pick a mindless celebrity, Tori, when you could change places with someone truly extraordinary. Like Stan Lee, or the Coen brothers, or Stephen Hawking.”
“Well, at least if you were Stephen Hawking you’d finally score a set of wheels, Clyde.” This remark comes from a red-haired boy sitting next to Tori—Victoria Pratt, I guess from the roster—who wears identical jeans and a polo shirt with its collar popped up. He’s the boy that Isabel joked with last night, Justin Clay. He and Tori exchange a high five as Clyde turns pink and slouches back down in his seat.
“Hey,” Hannah chirps, “if Clyde did trade places with Stephen Hawking, would that mean that Stephen Hawking would have to take Clyde’s place? I mean, that would probably be cool for him because he could walk around and be in a regular body—” Hannah begins to blush as she realizes she’s trapped herself into discussing her classmate’s body. I notice that Clyde seems to be breaking out in hives. I decide to jump in before he goes into anaphylactic shock.
“Exactly. In fact, it would be interesting to see if Stephen Hawking would want to ever go back. He might find life at the Arcadia School too appealing.”
This sets off a round of speculation on how the British physicist would take to life at Arcadia: how he’d like the food, whom he might date, what sports he’d go out for, and whether anyone would notice that he was inhabiting the body of Clyde Bollinger. Just when they’ve exhausted all the scenarios they can envision, Hannah Weiss pipes up with another identity.
“J. K. Rowling,” she says. “I’d like to be J. K. Rowling for a month.”
“So you can live in a British castle?” Clyde asks.
“No! Well, not just for that. I’d like to see what it feels like to have that kind of imagination. And to look at all her notes to see what she plans to write next.”
A number of students second Hannah’s choice and I’m grateful to see that the teasing has abated. Instead of Hollywood celebrities the names of famous writers are bandied about. In addition to J. K. Rowling, Stephen King and Dan Brown lead the list, but also included are the graphic novelist Alan Moore and “that guy who wrote Fight Club.” Internet tycoons follow—Steve Jobs, of course, but also Mark Zuckerberg who, I learn when I admit my ignorance, made so much money from inventing Facebook that he dropped out of Harvard. The final celebrity candidate is Bono, the lead singer of U2, both for his musical talent and humanitarian work. I’m about to move on when Chloe, whose full name on the roster appears as Chloe Lotus Dawson, raises her hand. She’s been unusually quiet all period. I assume she’s tired from last night’s revelries. She looks pale and her light blue eyes are rimmed with red. “Yes, Chloe?”
“Does it have to be a celebrity?”
“Not at all,” I answer, grateful for the question.
“Could it be …” Chloe’s voice trails off and she looks out the window toward the giant copper beech tree. Just visible beside it are the smoldering remains of last night’s bonfire. “Could it be yourself, only yourself yesterday? Like a past version of yourself?”
Chloe’s question strikes me dumb, and the entire class as well. I’ve been studying the changeling story in fairy tale and folklore for a couple of years now and I’ve never come across a version in which the changeling trades places with another version of itself. But as I think about it I realize that there is an element in some of the stories that the changeling itself was a child deprived of a normal childhood and that by stealing another child’s place it gets to reexperience its own childhood minus its flaws and heartbreaks.
“You mean so that you could relive your past … more perfectly?”
“Like a do-over,” Clyde says, looking toward Chloe. Chloe glances at Clyde and blanches. Then she looks away from him and meets my look.
“Yeah, like a do-over.”
“I don’t see why not. After all, this is your fairy tale and fairy tales are nothing if not flexible. Look at what Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhardt, the founders of this school, did with them. They took the old changeling story and rewrote it to tell the story of the young women who came here to Arcadia in the thirties and forties and were able to reinvent themselves. How many of you have read it?”
I’m expecting at least a few raised hands—after all, the story was written by the school’s founders—but no one responds. Then I realize that it’s not in the collection that Vera published after Lily died—Tales of Arcadia. It was only printed in a limited edition.
“Huh,” I say, trying to think how I can continue with the assignment I planned to give the class—the assignment that all of this talk is supposed to have led up to. To buy myself a few minutes I rummage through my book bag and retrieve my old, worn copy of The Changeling Girl. It’s the copy I first found at my grandmother’s house in Brooklyn and which I’d read over and over again sitting on the linoleum floor beneath her kitchen table. As soon as I take it out, I feel the eyes of my students lock onto the cover. The illustration chosen for the cover is one of the most striking in the whole book. It shows the peasant girl kneeling beneath the bloodred copper beech at sunset, cradling the root she’s just dug up in her arms as if it were a baby.
“It looks just like our copper beech,” Hannah says.
“I’m sure Vera and Lily used the tree as a model. Would you like to hear the story?”
I’m not expecting an enthusiastic response. The teenagers who a few minutes ago debated the relative merits of Angelina Jolie and Natalie Portman surely don’t want to hear a bedtime story. But I’m wrong. The tapping of laptop keys and shuffling of bodies stills. Even Tori Pratt stops slapping her bedroom slipper against her bare heel and sits up a little straighter.
Leaning against the edge of a desk, I cradle the book in my left arm so that the class can see the pictures. Luckily, I remember the story so well I hardly need to see the words. “There once was a girl who liked to pretend she was lost,” I begin. When I get to the part in the story where the peasant girl is running through the forest at night, the trees closing in around her and her lamp running out of oil, I feel the hairs at the back of my neck stand on end and, looking out at the class I meet Chloe Dawson’s wide, bloodshot eyes. She looks as if I’ve just described her worst nightmare. I consider stopping—it’s well past the hour we’ve been allotted—but when I start to close the book for just a second Hannah Weiss squeaks.
“You can’t stop now. Does she make it out of the forest alive?”
“Yes, but just barely. This last part, though, is a little … squicky,” I say, using one of Sally’s favorite words. Nobody objects to squicky. They only lean in closer.
“When she saw that the light in her lamp was failing, the peasant girl took her knife out of her belt and, cutting a deep gash in her arm, added more of her own blood to the remaining oil. The light flared up again, only now it was as red as the cooper beech leaves at sunset, as red as the heart of a hearthfire, as red as heart’s blood. The pine trees stomped and thrashed behind her, their resiny breath hot on the back of her neck, their boughs lashing her face. Her legs felt heavy and wooden and when she held up her arms she saw that her skin had roughened to bark. A lock of hair brushed against her face with the feathery touch of pine needles. And when a single tear rolled down her face it was sticky as tree
sap. She was becoming a tree. The wind that moved through the forest chanted an invocation: ‘Stay with us. Live through the centuries with us.’ When she picked up her feet, roots clung to them. She felt so tired. Would it be so bad to become a tree?
“But then she caught a glimpse of light at the end of the path. The sun was rising in the fields beyond the forest. She could hear birds singing on the fence posts and smell the smoke of the farmhouse’s cookstove. She smelled bread and coffee and the heather that grew in the fields around her old home … and then she heard her mother’s voice calling her name. She ran, tearing the roots that clung to her feet and leaving bloody footsteps behind her. She ran for the gap between the trees that had shrunk to a mere slit, and leapt through it, the bark flaying her skin into peeling strips. But she didn’t care. She could see her childhood home, her mother standing on the stoop, her arms held open … and then she saw her. The changeling girl. Like herself, only grown taller and more beautiful. The changeling stepped into her mother’s embrace—her mother’s!—and bent her golden head down to kiss the old woman’s weathered cheek, and her mother lifted her face to the changeling as if she were lifting her face toward the sun.
“The girl saw then that in the year that had lapsed her mother had gone blind. She saw, too, that the humble farmhouse she left behind had become a stately manse. Her sisters, who came out from the barn carrying pails of milk and baskets of eggs, were dressed in fine clothing. Everything the witch promised had come true. In exchange for her year in the witch’s cottage, her family had been granted wealth and prosperity. Nowhere did she see any sign that she had been missed. Her sisters greeted the changeling with kisses and embraces far more fervent than any sign of affection she ever received from them. They preferred the changeling to her, she realized as she got to her feet. She looked down at her own torn clothing, her scratched arms and bleeding feet. But it was her hands that looked different. Her hands that had learned to paint and carve, mold clay and weave yarn. They weren’t the hands of a milkmaid anymore. Did she really want to spend her days milking the cows and gathering eggs?