Snow White, Rose Red

Abstract

99 KIM WELLIVER Snow White, Rose Red • After Anne Sexton No matter what life you lead1 the body is an engine that must be fed; caviar or beetroot, the inner furnace stoked. There are other hungers, and there is a cost. And so there were two girls, not yet eighteen, hair thick as hemp. One dark as a gallows bird. One pale as a turnip. Let us call them Snow White and Rose Red, They were good girls both, with bellies like empty cauldrons slung beneath their ribs, and families to feed: Mama, Papa, siblings galore. They loved one another like sisters. Two kings as well. The first big as a farmboy with cheeks like slabs of mutton. The second small as an afterthought, sharp as a straight-razor. They prospered like a younger son in Grimm. Perhaps there was spellwork involved. Something dark and chthonic. Perhaps not. Either way, with their complementary talents, 1. From Anne Sexton’s “Rumpelstiltskin” 100 their preference for goose liver, and truffles, they agreed to share a kingdom, draping themselves in fur and honey. Dear reader, this is a story of hungers. Our two maidens applied to work in the castle where, word on the street, (which always knows the way the wind is blowing) said hundreds of girls toiled toward their beds of roses, each as clean as an egg, sweet as a lamb. And so it was. Day and night these good girls plied scissors and needle, side by side. Beautiful clothes spilled from their hands. Seven days a week they toiled in coffin-shaped towers; fourteen hours a day. Sundays, rather than coin they were given a slice of pie; American as apple. Every day the kings’ servants, those frogmarchers, those bootlickers, winked at one another and promised the girls a gleaming future: bellies full as State Fairs, rags to riches, indoor plumbing. The castle teemed. Girls stitched like Singers, set sleeves, hems, cuffs. Pleated, ruched and cut. Rooms filled with frills and furbelows, lustre and ponge and silk. Soon the kings, pink as pigs in their velvet collars and monocles, began to worry. All those snips and scraps might be thieved. They believed everyone wore greed like a birthday suit. Those kings bridled at the thought of losing so much as a tail of thread, an inch of lace. 101 All day long the doors were bolt-shot tight as a coin purse. Eventide, every girl must be searched, all their nooks and crannies. Every pocket well-fingered. Somewhere inside the castle a man hungered for a cigarette, tobacco-fat to quiet his lean gut. And, as we all do, he gave in to the ache and gnaw: thumbed a match to flame, drew in the sweet heat. But the flame, like the engine of commerce, like the dumbbeast bellies, like the kings with their pampered skin, their porkpie hats, hungered. The uninvited guest refused to be put out, instead slid crackling fingers into heaps and stacks, furtive at first, then bolder. Ravenous it feasted: lapping paper patterns, cotton bolts, devouring, pushing everything it could into its hot raw mouth with fiery hands. It played hunger’s savage tune until the workers do-si-doed. Did the Lindy, O how they jigged and twisted to its hot licks. High in their counting rooms, where even the walls greased gold, the kings, told of the trollish trespasser, its gobbling, heathenish gluttony, fretted. They perspired, their moist mouths opening and closing like fish. Their servants came to gently mop their brows, to lovingly pat their hands, to tenderly lead them to safety. Below, girls were screaming. Smoke-choked. 102 Doors were still locked. Stairways blocked. Windows yawned ninety feet above the ground. Our heroines saw the flames. Saw their friends leap from windows, cartwheeling toward death. Skirts ballooning. Legs churning as though to find footing on air. Like Wyle E Coyote running off a cliff, almost cartoon humorous. Almost slapstick. Until they hit. Snow White and Rose Red clung to each other. Their cheeks, blistering. Their hair burnt away. They wore gowns of flame. They were almost beautiful in their immolation, bright as gold as they burned. Later, those who cleaned the...