Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.

It is December in Georgia, and we are driving past twinkling lights, and wreaths, and mildly poisonous winterberries, and a wire reindeer whose red nose softly glows on and off, on and off. My six year old, Eli, looks out the window.

“Can we have a Christmas tree, Mama?”

“No.”

Silence.

“What if we paint it black?”

I consider this.

The holiday season does not bring out the best in me. I go sour and frantic. Mandatory cheer sinks my spirit. For my sons, I pile up presents for the eight days of Chanukah. The house grows small and dizzy as toys and more toys are torn from their boxes. The menorahs flicker and, yes, they’re beautiful, but if there is a miracle here, who could find it under all this pleasure? “It is possible I am doing everything wrong.” I say this to my husband three times a day, like I’m praying, until December is over. I’m awful at holidays, I know. Years ago, watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade in Manhattan, I was so nervous my whole family would fall off the roof that I was told to sit in the stairwell because I was ruining it for everybody. Where’s my December stairwell? I’ll go sit in it until everybody comes back down.

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1817 “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” opens with Marie and Fritz “huddled together in a corner of a little back room.” They hear a “distant hammering,” and shuffling and murmuring, and Fritz tells his sister a small, dark man has crept down the hallway with a big box under his arm. The small man is Drosselmeier. The children call him their godpapa. He wears a black eyepatch, and a wig made from strands of glass. He is as much toy as he is toymaker. “You’re just like my old Jumping Jack,” says Marie, “that I threw away last month.” “Dross” is waste, and “drossel” is to stir things up. And Drosselmeir is both. He is December. He is the month that makes waste inseparable from delight.

“Drossel” also means to choke. And it also means “a thrush,” a speckled songbird. The bird that sounds like a flute in the woods.  Over and over again, Drosselmeir is exactly what he isn’t.

Around the time I was trying to get pregnant, and my step-daughter was eight, my husband bought her two goldfish. Over the years the tank darkened, and smelled like old garlic, but the fish thrived. One of the fish (I don’t remember if she had a name) was always pregnant, or having babies, or eating her babies. This is how December makes me feel. Like I am the most un-pregnant person on earth watching a goldfish that is endlessly fertile eat her babies. “I am nothing,” writes Karl Marx, “but I must be everything.”

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Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.

Edmund DuLac, illustration for The Little Mermaid, 1911

I have a dream my mother is standing at my front door crying. Her hair is wet and tangled in seashells. She’s read a story I’ve written. “How could you,” she says. “Your own mother.” She opens her coat and out march my husband, his daughters, my brothers, my sons, my father. I try to run away but they catch me by the collar. “How could you, how could you, how could you?” they chant. “Your very own mother! Your very own us!” I’ll stop writing. I’m sorry. And I do. I stop forever, and instantly my lips and hands are dotted with mold. White threads spread across my face where mushrooms begin to swell. I grow wild with silence.

“Oh, for god’s sake,” says my mother. “Forget it. Enough with the drama.”

“But my silence is real,” writes Maurice Blanchot. “If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.”

Of all the silences in fairy tales, the most pronounced is the Little Mermaid’s. For a potion that will turn her into a human, she pays the sea witch with her tongue. In Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” the sea witch lives where no flowers or sea grass grow, where “all the trees and bushes were polyps, half animals and half plants.” It’s the sea witch’s silence, her exile, her house built from the bones of shipwrecked humans, the toad feeding out of her mouth, and the snakes sprawled like illegible cursive “about her great spongy bosom” that is the silence of poets. It’s Blanchot’s silence. It’s the silence of outsiders and mothers. Once kept it will run ahead, and wait for all of us to catch up. And as it waits, it will grow.

The Little Mermaid’s silence is the silence of children. But the sea witch’s silence is the silence of an old woman with a story no one will ever know. The first silence is soft and lovesick and melancholy like sea foam. The second silence surrounds you like water surrounds a drowning woman, transparent and cruel.

It’s been a difficult year. My stepdaughter moved in for seven months and then moved out. She left Mavis, her pet tarantula, behind. My husband and I argued more than ever. My grandmother died so I couldn’t call her up to ask her advice. In an act of grief I bought a yellow rotary telephone for my desk. It’s plugged into nothing. Sometimes I just hold the receiver up to my ear and listen. Sometimes I talk.

As the date of my stepdaughter’s departure grew closer, I practiced politely biting my tongue. There was so much to say, but I said nothing. I bit and I bit. “Peace,” I once wrote in a story about daughters, “is what pain looks like in public.”

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Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.

“I know you’re the tooth fairy.” Noah, my eight-year-old, looks me dead in the eye. We are out to dinner. A large television hangs from the wall. Without blinking, he looks back up at the screen. A small, dry wing falls from my back and lands on the floor like a candy wrapper. The thing about not existing is that sometimes it’s a lot like being a mother.

“Sorry, Mama,” says Eli, my six-year-old. He pats my hand and takes a bite of broccoli.

I think about all the elaborate notes in pink cursive, the one hundred shiny pennies in a cloth pouch, the blue stuffed cat, the five-dollar bill, the Superman, the glitter trails, the wooden hearts, the breath I held, the way I ever so gently lifted the pillow, the sparkle-stamped envelope with the tooth fairy’s address: 12345 Tooth Fairy Lane, Moutharctica, Earth. I kept myself secret. I tiptoed. I used my imagination, and now I’ve been caught. Noah looks at me again with a mix of sadness and pity and suspicion. I turn around to see what he’s watching.  It’s a cartoon about a sea sponge who lives with his meowing pet snail.

A little light goes out inside me. But I can’t locate exactly what it ever lit up.

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Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.

Bluebeard Illustration, “What She Sees There,” by Winslow Homer, 1868

“Sabrina,” says my husband’s first wife, “is married to my husband.” I hear this through The Grapevine, a multibranched root system resembling the hearts of my husbands’ two ex-wives planted in the same plot of deep, fertile soil. Vines like earthy veins, growing tough and twisty. A friend brings me cuttings. I hold them to my ear and listen.

I tell my husband I am writing about Bluebeard. “Oh fuck,” he says.

I look in the mirror. I have become uglier and stronger. I look out the window. A white shed glows in my yard. I live in “the unguessable country of marriage.”

“Bluebeard” first appeared in Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century Tales of Mother Goose. A man with a blue beard, several missing wives, and extraordinary wealth gives his newest wife all the keys to all the doors of his very fine house. “Open anything you want,” he says. “Go anywhere you wish.” Except for the “little room,” he says.

I ask my husband to clean out the garage, but instead, while I am gone for the summer with our sons, he builds in our backyard—dead center—a white shed. As the walls go up, his second wife drops their daughter off to live with us, possibly forever. She also drops off many boxes. Contents unknown. The garage is half empty now. The shed is half full. I call my mother. “Now there’s a shed in my yard,” I say. “Of course there’s a shed,” says my mother. “Better check it for wives.”

There are doors no third wife should ever open.

My husband, possibly the gentlest man on earth, came to me in a coat of old vows. I married him knowing he arrived with wives. Maybe I married him a little bit because the vows had somehow deepened the lines on his face. Like handwriting I wanted to read, but never could. I married him knowing, but I didn’t know the wives would keep growing in a locked room in my heart. Sometimes they move around, angrily. Sadly. Wives, like peeling wallpaper. Curling wives. Wives like skin. Wives who tell their daughters things that their daughters, my husband’s daughters, don’t tell me. That silence breathes inside me. “What did she say?” I am always asking. “What did who say?” my husband answers.

“Perhaps,” writes Angela Carter, “in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.”

I am not an incredibly jealous person, but it hurts to think of my husband saying, “I do. I do. I do.”

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Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.

One day in nursery school, when I was five I think, I cried. My teacher, in her floral apron with gigantic pockets, handed me a paper cup. She handed me a paper cup, and told me to collect my tears as they slid down my face and drink them. “And when you drink your tears,” she said, “think about your ancestors who were slaves in Egypt.” It must’ve been close to Passover. She didn’t intend to be cruel. Her face was covered with freckles the same rust color as the flowers on her apron. The other kids wanted to taste the tears, too. The teacher told me to pass the cup around. And I did. And from the little paper cup the children drank.

I wish I could remember what I was crying over.

In 2014, a story appeared about a Yemeni woman who cries stones. She produces as many as a hundred stones a day, and she cries most of the stones in the afternoon and evening. She is one of twenty children, and she does not cry stones while she is sleeping. None of her sisters or brothers cry stones. Her name is Sadia, which means “happy” in Arabic. The tears look like tiny pebbles, and they collect under her lower eyelids. It is not impossible that the girl’s tears are the same pebbles Hansel and Gretel use to make a path home. Local doctors cannot offer a scientific explanation, but some villagers agree she is under a magic spell.

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Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.

“I hope you’re not afraid of mice,” my friend Amy says. I am in her car. She clicks open the glove box and a soft shock of fur and paper and string is gently exhaled. A mouse nest. “Hello there,” says Amy. The nest is mouse-less for now, but the mice will return to it when it gets cold. Eventually the mice will eat the guts of the car, a mechanic told her. But Amy won’t disturb the nest. “It’s their home,” she says, shutting the glove box back up, not before petting the little nest that seems so alive I swear it might be breathing.

For years I have kept René Magritte’s The Healer over my writing desk. The bronze man with an open birdcage for a chest. A cane in one hand, and a suitcase in the other. Limp and flee, limp and flee, limp and flee. He is faceless, and his cloak is open. There’s a hat on his nowhere head, and in place of his heart is a nook for doves to rest. Amy’s car moves me the way The Healer moves me. Both tell a story of kindness and protection and ruin. Both will give up their guts to keep the vulnerable ones safe. Months later, I am again in Amy’s car. The nest has doubled in size. The car, for now, still runs perfectly.

Fairy tales are crowded with saviors: the prince on his horse, fairies, gnomes, godmothers, and witches. They appear out of nowhere. They are hidden, like the subterranean and the aristocratic, and then out of a clearing they arrive to save, or erase, or enchant the day. They are not angels or saints. And they are not without flaws. In German, Rumpelstiltskin (or Rumpelstilzchen) means “little rattle ghost.” And it is Rumpelstiltskin who can, unlike the miller’s daughter, spin straw into gold. He saves her, and even adds an escape clause to their contract because he a compassionate gnome: if she guesses his name in three days she can keep her child. He spins like the storyteller spins. And as he spins I wonder whether the miller’s daughter ever hears the whir, whir, whir in his empty chest. For his work, he wants what is missing. He wants something alive. No, the miller’s daughter cannot hear the whir. She has cried herself soundly to sleep.

“I prefer a living creature,” says Rumpelstiltskin, “to all the treasures in the world.”

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