The snow is falling, white, surprising shimmering tears of sky - large fat tears, tears that stick to my cheek and refuse to melt. A quiet shuddering, a gust of wind, I twirl in front of my mirror: Daddy’s little princess, all decked out in white crinolines and lace. I look like the snow fairy from the Nutcracker suite. I am spinning in pirouettes of lace and scratchiness of fabric against raw skin; and here under the skirt you can see the place where the others touched me last, but only for a moment, because I’m spinning spinning spinning.
Like the turning wheel, I’m dizzily spinning, six years old and a little girl, all grown up and no longer a little girl, the scars are mostly healed but still I’m spinning; in my white dress, in the snow, snow is falling against the glass. There’s a draft under the window. I’m wearing the white dress because of the way you looked at me when I wore it the other night.
You looked at me as though I were Laertes’ ghost, and you Hamlet; as though I were Ophelia; as though I were your wife twenty years ago. You looked transfixed, you looked at me as though you had seen some beloved spirit; and I needed that look, I needed to be your beloved dead. So I twirled in my white silks, awkwardly, tippets catching on everything but it didn’t matter because you’d already looked away. You were helping a handicapped woman into her seat. I sat behind you, behind you and her and your wife, with your paramour’s companion dog, because I didn’t want to lose you. I was staying with the four of you that night.
It was snowing. I could see the flakes trying to get in through the windows of the sewing room, where I was sleeping under a pile of coats and bolts of wool. There was no heating register in the sewing room, which had once been a sun porch, I needed your leather jacket to keep warm, I curled up in it like an animal seeking shelter from the snow. I fell asleep watching my breath make fog in the air. I was fascinated. I remember you poking your head in there the next morning. Your trousers were missing. You looked lost, like a little boy. I needed that look but soon it was over, and you left and the snow started falling again.
That was a cold winter, so much cold and snow, taffeta flakes, whispering draughts of wind that always seemed to run up into the crevasses of one’s skirt. That woman in the wheelchair. Freezing, it was so hard to write letters back and forth, what with our frozen fingers. cold was the great equalizer, it froze me until my body was as stiff and immobile as hers. I could scarcely get into my dress.
It didn’t matter. When I went to sleep you woke her with a kiss and me with a shake. I don’t remember if I was wearing white anymore, the day after the Lughnasadh celebration, when you woke me up. I only remember that it was hot and that i felt wet, clammy, like a melted icicle in your arms. The wheel turns and Fortuna’s empress of us all, in the valley of the blind the one-eyed are kings, and now it’s winter and I’m twirling in a white dress before the full length mirror. You’re getting a new wife soon. She won’t wear white, she’s not into white princess weddings, and you’re not into little princesses anymore, not after that last fiasco you called a marriage. I’m still weaving in my tower, half sick of shadows.
I’m watching the patterns of snowflakes through a veil of white lace. I’m weaving a wedding present, a piece of myself really since you can’t have it all. Since I can’t be there to offer you and your new wife my lovemaking skills as dishwasher, dogwalker, general handmaid. Those little things I gave you when you no longer needed my body in place of your beloved’s - well, love has to go somewhere, doesn’t it? The snow is falling, but it melts when it hits the ground. I stop twirling. The woman in the mirror is not me. She’s a mannequin I built out of spare parts and snow and lace. She never got the finishing touch, just a few patches to cover the stains that the statue-fondlers left. She’s a work of ice and filigree, lace and opal, she’s an alabaster temple (a statue on an altar, clothed in lace, waits to be dusted off and worshipped by somebody). All these corridors, it’s cold in a marble cloister when there’s no fire.
It’s snowing and the wind is saying something that I can’t quite hear through my skin. Cold wind, I have to hold down my skirts, outside the castle where it’s cold, I have to protect myself from wind and snow. It’s snowing. I’m cold. I don’t know where I go. I think I’m lost, excuse me, can you please tell me where I am? I’m spinning in the cold.
(Copyright 1995 by Sarah Dorrance)
1 comment so far ↓
Maybe I am having a bad week (of that there is little doubt), but I read this and was crying by the third paragraph…and suicidal by the last line. Good job, GP.