Inside the Wolf

Abstract

82 M. B. SMITH Inside the Wolf • eople at parties always want to hear the story. “How did you two meet?” they ask, giving the words an innocent lilt as if they don’t already know what happened. She doesn’t blame them. It is a good story, and her husband has turned out to be a natural storyteller. He begins at the beginning—the cloak, the basket, the mother’s warning—although of course he himself was not there until the end. He begins at the beginning and ends with the first time he saw her lovely face. And so the moral is no longer keep to the straight path but we were meant for each other. The way her husband tells it, he fell in love with her the very moment he pulled her out of the wolf. He does not mention that it was in fact the grandmother he pulled out first, or that she had soiled herself. Both she and the girl. And only when people specifically ask does he give even the most cursory account of the thing they all did after to the wolf, which at the time was still very much alive. They did it at her grandmother’s insistence. No one is proud. And never does the girl’s husband try to approximate the sound the creature made when it woke up. The girl still has the original red cloak. People kept asking about it, and at some point she took to wearing it again. It fits the same as it ever did, and the effect is simply terrific when she shows up to a party with the hood tugged low, a basket on one arm and her husband on the other, the famous hatchet dangling from his belt. When people see the pair of them they lose their minds. The girl and her husband are always happy to pose for photographs. Only on occasion does somebody ask the question that makes the girl wish she and her husband had some other story to tell. A simple, awful question. Most nights it does not come up. Still, she often senses that somewhere, in some corner of the party, somebody is slowly working up the nerve to ask it. There are nights she finds herself out on the lawn, watching through the lighted windows as within her husband entertains drunk p 83 strangers with the story of the worst day of her life. She can always tell by his gesticulations which part he has reached. By now it is a finely tuned routine, and its beats are quite consistent from performance to performance . On some of these nights she has a feeling that, ever since the wolf, her whole existence has been nothing but a chain of parties with no breaks in between for ordinary life. One night she gets so drunk she becomes convinced that there’s really just one single never-ending party from which somehow she cannot return. Feeling ill, she lies down on the cool grass. Above her the sky wobbles. Someone shouts, and the girl sits up. Through the trees she catches a pale, irregular movement. As she watches, the thing leaves the woods and flickers into the moonlight. It is an old woman. She is shouting, but the girl cannot make out the words. The old woman is stooped and scrawny, and she moves with alarming speed, juddering across the dark grass in the girl’s direction like a pull-toy on a string. The girl hauls herself to her feet. The old woman’s voice is shrill. The girl cannot tell what she is saying. “Is the music too loud?” the girl asks. She swings an arm out broadly toward the gleaming house, nearly throwing herself to the ground. She is drunker than she thought. Breathing heavily, hands resting on her knees, she tries to appease the old woman, who has not stopped shouting. “I don’t live here. I’m sorry. Hi, hello.” The girl takes note of each word as it comes out of her mouth, faintly aware that the sentences do not follow one another. All at once the old woman is upon...