Then I pulled down another book with the Cinderella story lavishly told and illustrated, and laughed with my head flung back when I saw the drawings of her, at how absurd it all was, at her yellow hair. It had been years since I'd really looked at how the story had been passed down. I wanted to take the artist aside, talk some sense into him: Cinderella's hair was like starlight, I would say, not yellow like corn. It was just like silk starlight, moon hair that swept down her back and actually glittered. I had been horrified, in the human world, when I'd first come upon the ridiculous fairy godmother so popular in the books and, later, the movies— her plump round body like a sack of apples, the hanging swinging double chin, the silly upturned smile that pushed out her cheeks like a chipmunk's. She even had gray hair swirled up in a bun.
Fairies were beautiful, I had wanted to explain. Fairies were perfect creatures who could move in and out of human form but who were naturally tiny, so small that a sensitive human would almost always see only a speck of light when we passed, if anything at all. Groups of fairies, gathered around a flower or a lake, would appear to the human eye like a cluster of lights, like the night sky strewn with stars. It was amazing that the girls in Veronica's fairy book had captured fairies the way they had, in photographs, but there was no doubt that the figures in the photos were my own kind. That they had chosen to show themselves to the human world. To me.
I knew I was in New York, in the Pierre Hotel, on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park. I knew where I was, who I was, what I had done, and how much time had passed. I always knew how much time had passed.
Even so, I could almost feel his hand slipping around my waist. I could hear the orchestra starting up, the marble floor sliding under my feet. I felt so full. Like I contained universes inside me. I closed my eyes, twirled around once, then again. I felt his breath on my neck and his palms on my waist.
“Theodore,” I whispered, and for a moment I was right there with him, the scent of gardenia wrapping around me. My heart breaking open. I let myself feel it, the pure beauty and pain of it, of giving myself over to him and leaving my own world behind.
When I opened my eyes, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror, just a glimpse as I whirled by. My hair like autumn leaves, like flame. The dress flowing down my body to the glass slippers that sparkled from my feet.
THE NEXT morning I got to the bookstore at eight. I spent a few minutes tiptoeing about, listening for any sound from upstairs. George had been busy the day before; I saw boxes of books piled by the register for me to deal with throughout the day.
I made coffee in back, smelling the earth scent of the beans as I measured them and poured them into the filter. I swept the floors quickly, gathering the dust at the front of each row, then scooping it up mound by mound into a dustpan. I lifted a stack of books onto the front desk to sort through, and all the while my heart pounded in my chest, my excitement and nervousness mixing together until I thought I would scream.
Having a purpose, something to look forward to. It made everything different. I felt like I was years younger. It was almost a shock to look down at my same wrinkled hands and arms. The other world was so close, just beyond my reach.
When I was sure it was safe, when I was sure I hadn't heard a sound from upstairs and there was still plenty of time before the store opened, I went into the back room and fired up the computer. I'd learned to use a computer a couple years before, when George started listing books online. I liked being online. It was the closest I could come to how I had felt once, when I could dip into any human dream or thought I wanted.
With trembling fingers I pulled Veronica's card out of my purse and typed in her website address. The page loaded, all pink and white and black with swirls along the edges. “Veronica Searle, Hairdos and Designs,” it said across the top, and underneath was a series of links. There was a photo of her, in black and white, her hair long and wild around her perfect pale face. Even posed and staring off into the distance, she had that fairy energy to her, and I could almost see her spreading wings and flitting over the water.
I clicked on the link that said “About.” Another photo of her came up, next to the same swirls and colors. Her hair platinum blond in this one, swept up to the side. She was wearing a floor length dress that flared at the bottom and holding a cigarette in a long holder. She looked aloof, glamorous, until you looked more closely and saw the small smile on her face. I felt like laughing, too, just looking at her.
“I have cut and dyed hair since I was a kid playing with Barbies,” said the words written in curling letters on the side of the page. “I used to paint their hair with watercolors and clip it with my mother's cuticle scissors. When I was eighteen, I packed my bags and came to New York, and I've been cutting hair professionally ever since. I worked at the Pink Sink for seven years before taking it over and making it mine all mine. I also design wigs, work on photo shoots, and sew and knit like a crazy woman. And I'm obsessed with old things. I love everything vintage. This may make my apartment smell like mothballs, but I can give you the best finger curls or beehive in the city.”
I was riveted. It was like reading a diary.
I clicked on the link titled “Cut and Color,” which took me to a page with a photo of her in a salon, next to an old-fashioned bonnet hair dryer. On the right were her hours and prices and a description of the hair color products she used. “I promise to make you gorgeous!” it said. I laughed. “Your hair is my canvas. I only use the amazing products I use on myself. And nothing but the best touches these tresses!” An array of photos swept by on the bottom of the page, in a mini filmstrip. Photos of Veronica and girls like her. Chameleons, girls who could be anything they wanted, without a fairy to help them.
I clicked on “Extensions” to see another page full of bright photos. Humans with hair shooting off their heads like geysers. I covered my mouth and laughed. They were so beautiful! I recognized Veronica on the lower right, her hair bright blue and twisted on the top of her head.
I thought about my plan, the one that would bring two lovers together and redeem myself for what I'd done. Their fates, entwined. If I squinted, I could see George there next to her, adoring, a thick book in his hand. They will balance each other, I thought. He will calm her. She will bring him to life. I knew that I was meant to be her fairy godmother, that somehow she had been sent to me, and to George, and that it was my task to ensure that both of them met the destinies I could see so clearly. I knew this. I knew it with a certainty I hadn't felt for years.
The room was dark, the early morning haze just starting to seep in to the back of the store. I felt as if I was in her mind and thoughts.
On a whim, I opened my e-mail program and typed in the e-mail address listed on the website. I typed: “I am your fairy godmother. I am here to send you to the ball.” I smiled, imagined her bending over a screen the way I was, her face immersed in the pale light. Reading the words the way Cinderella had heard my voice in her ear. My finger hovered over the mouse, ready to press “send.” I'd only opened this account to buy some items online, shortly after George had shown me how to use the computer, and I loved the idea that I could sit alone in this hushed room and send a message into space, to her. What would Veronica think, receiving such a message from lillian99? Could I make a new account for your_fairy_godmother? I laughed and deleted the e-mail.
There was another link, I realized, at the bottom of the page. “Journal.” When I clicked it, a new page opened. It took a second for it to fill with a number of diary entries about her life. I scrolled down the page, saw that the entries dated to a month back and that there was a link on the bottom of the page to see entries from before. A few years’ worth of archives were listed on the right. How could such a young woman have so much to say, I wondered.
I glanced down at the first one, dated the day before, 10:16 A.M.
So last night on the subway I saw the coolest old man: he had a full-on pompadour that stood, I swear, like a mile high, and swirled a
round like the top of a soft-serve ice cream cone. His hair was taller than his body, which was AT MOST three feet tall. And when I walked by him he called me “mami.” Which was not undisturbing and has, more than ever, put me off having chillen of my own. But that hair! I so wanted to lick it.
I laughed and scrolled through the next few entries, reading about a German movie she'd loved, her obsessions with Coney Island and rhinestone jewelry and abandoned buildings, a party she'd been to a few nights before, and how, this summer, the air was so thick she felt it was molesting her. I read about a Pomeranian named Diva that she'd fallen madly in love with when it showed up at her door, and how her heart had broken when the owner came to collect it. Diva, I repeated out loud. I could see the dog panting up at her with its bulging eyes. She wrote about a T-shirt she'd bought—“Prufrock is my Homeboy”—and included a photo of herself “glamorously draped over a park bench,” modeling it. In one entry she wrote about staying with a friend's Indian family in California and her fervent desire to become Indian as well, due to the luscious food and colorful garments that really “complement my skin tone.” I reached the bottom of the page and realized I was smiling at the screen, utterly charmed.
I shifted in my chair. The light in the back of the store was dim, but the computer screen shone out. I was enjoying this. I took a drink of coffee and clicked on a month from the year before, then looked down at the first entry.
I am so sad lately. I'm not sure why. Yesterday I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge at four in the morning. I just wanted to be alone and think. I love feeling that free, suspended over water, leaving this insane city behind. I'd spent the evening with Kara and Melody at the Slipper Room, watching the burlesque show Val's doing, and I think that put me in a weird mood … made me depressed, even though we had a great time and Val was hilarious, as usual. But it just felt like we're always trying to imitate these amazing lives that other people had, back when everything was different. Better. We play these old wartime songs and dress in these fabulous old clothes because our own time is so empty. Or something. Sometimes my life starts feeling so small, and I want it to be the opposite of small. I want it to be everything. I think of all the other lives I could have-traveling the world, making art, falling madly in love, playing instruments, taking photographs, living on the water. No matter where I am, there's a part of me that wants to be somewhere else. I don't know sometimes how people choose, make a choice and decide this is what I will be and do, and then they think that it's just natural, that they're just doing what they were meant to do all along.
I scrolled down to an entry from a few weeks before that.
I've been doing a ton of sewing to clear my head. I finished the curtains and started a new sundress, and now I'm thinking about doing a baby quilt for Maureen. I just feel like holing up and getting a ton of stuff done right now I think I sort of need the rest. I had a dream last night about Ryan. It's been a while since I've had one; I thought they'd stopped for good. In the dream we were driving around through the swamps, like we did that time we went to New Orleans and rented a car for the day. Just driving around in the late afternoon, taking all these little roads. He kept looking over at me and laughing in that way he did. In the dream I felt really calm, like in a way I never do in real life. I mean, completely at peace with the world, like we could just drive around forever that way, with the sun going down and the car filling with shadows. I woke up elated, and then it all came crashing down. I cried for hours. I miss him so much. I keep thinking I'm “getting better” or “getting over it,” but it just comes at you sometimes, and you realize it will never be any better. But I'm sort of glad he came back. I can remember every inch of his face again. I was starting to forget.
I kept clicking to go back and back through the months and years, to the journal's first entry. I sank deeper and deeper into her life, reading about her travels—to Mexico and San Francisco and Berlin—and nights out at clubs or shows. I read about the art she loved: Joseph Cornell, photos by Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Diane Arbus and Brassaï. Her soaring passions for misfit men and the sudden crashes after they'd revealed themselves to be cracked and flawed. Her continued grief at the death of her first love, in a car accident several years before. I riffled through her heart, her thoughts.
I couldn't believe that it was all right there, for anyone to see. In the old days, no one spoke what they felt, and what we tapped into was buried deep. Now here was a modern girl, with all the secret desires right up there on the screen. It was the modern way. She had been able to walk into the bookstore and flirt with a young man and talk with an old woman, tell me about her breakup and her life, with no self-consciousness at all. For a moment I imagined what it would be like to be as fearless as that, as open.
What I read confirmed everything I'd intuited about her. That she was, like Cinderella, longing for something extraordinary. That she had been sent to me for a reason.
Chapter Six
INEVER SHOULD HAVE SEEN THE PRINCE UP CLOSE, never even come within eyeshot of him, really. My instructions had been specific, startlingly simple: Help Cinderella get to the ball. It didn't matter why, or that she was to go to the ball to fall in love with the prince as the fairy elders had decreed. Of course I'd seen the prince—we saw everything back then, in all the world—but I hadn't seen him the way another human would have. The way I saw her.
But I had finally convinced Maybeth to come with me. The lure for her of poking around the royal palace was too strong to resist.
“We'll only take a quick look,” I had said. “Just to see up close what all the human girls are so crazy about.”
“I'm sure he's as revolting as the rest of them,” Maybeth said. “I'm going to pull that hair of his and turn it into hay. And then I'll turn him into a cow so he can eat it!”
“May!” I laughed. “You'll do no such thing!”
We flitted about the royal palace and laughed and squealed, thrilled with our daring. Until I realized— suddenly, shockingly—that the servants were running into place, bugles were blowing, and carpet was being unfurled across the floor. Just underneath us, Prince Theodore was entering the grand hall.
We should never have been in that palace; I never should have let it get that far. It wasn't officially prohibited, I had argued. It would be fun just to pretend. To flirt with taboos, the other world. And now here he was, the prince himself. My previous encounters with the royal family had been official, regulated by the fairy elders, recorded in the fairy book. This, here and now, was all wrong.
I looked down and saw the spark of his hair. I laughed nervously. He glanced up then, right at me, as if he could see me. But he couldn't. No humans could. Could they?
I was aware of Maybeth tittering and laughing at me, but I just stared down into his blue eyes. It was as if vision had taken on a whole new significance. I had never looked at someone like that, never had someone look like that at me. I forgot everything else.
“Can you see me?” I whispered, just as he turned away.
“Lil, that's not funny!” Maybeth said.
I looked over at her. “He saw me,” I said.
We were still hovering against the ceiling of the grand dining room. The room underneath us shone with marble and gold. I could feel him moving through the palace, down the great hallway, through to the suites where he slept.
“That's impossible,” Maybeth said. “You know that's impossible.”
“Sometimes they can see us,” I said, turning to her, challenging her.
She looked down, then back up at me, no longer laughing. “Lil, you shouldn't be talking like that. And we're late. Come on.”
But I had to be sure. “I'm taking another look,” I said. “One more, just to see.”
“Lil, he's promised. He's the prince! Her prince!” May-beth swooped over to me then and grabbed my dress with her tiny hand. Her fingers pinched into me.
“Let go!” I said. I could feel him in his chambers, sitting on his velvet chair with a man
uscript open in his lap. All my senses homed in on him, and I could feel his dreams of the hunt the next day, the flush that swept through him. “He saw me. I can feel it!”
“So what if he did?” she asked, exasperated. “We have to get back. We shouldn't have come here at all.” Maybeth, my sister, the prettiest, wildest fairy girl, was practically wringing her hands with worry. I almost laughed out loud at the sight.
“Go ahead, then. I'll meet you there!” I said. I was tired of listening to her and her annoying, high-pitched squeal, and with that I tucked in my head and just went. As fast as I could. So that even Maybeth saw only a blur of light, felt a whoosh against her pale skin before I was gone.
I laughed and whooped, my heart racing with the thrill of it. This was my one chance, I thought. I was doing everything wrong, and, for once in my life, I didn't care. I didn't slow down or even think about where I was going, I just darted through the great hall and the gigantic gilded doors and the various ornate chambers until all at once there he was. He looked up from the pages and right into me.
I stopped dead. He was so beautiful.
I was shocked. We fairies were interested in humans; we helped and loved and tormented them. But I had never felt anything like this before. I felt stupid suddenly, and scared. I was used to being invisible and having free rein over the human world. Being able to flit along the curve of a child's ear, playing my harp and tickling the skin with my notes. Sliding myself into a rain gutter. Perching on the tine of a fork. Whispering and singing until the humans dreamed of our world, and longed for it. But I had never been pinned down the way he was pinning me now.