{"id":133287,"date":"2019-02-04T09:00:41","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T14:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=133287"},"modified":"2019-02-04T17:16:01","modified_gmt":"2019-02-04T22:16:01","slug":"the-post-menopausal-fairy-tale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/02\/04\/the-post-menopausal-fairy-tale\/","title":{"rendered":"The Postmenopausal Fairy Tale"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sabrina Orah Mark\u2019s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m dying,\u201d says my grandmother.<\/p>\n

\u201cDying where?\u201d I ask. \u201cI\u2019m coming. Don\u2019t go anywhere before I get there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI have to go,\u201d says my grandmother.<\/p>\n

On December 26, 2018, my grandmother, Gertrude Mark, died somewhere.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

If this were a fairy tale, I\u2019d go look for her.<\/p>\n

My hair has been going slowly white since I turned eighteen. I color it brown, but a few months ago I decided to grow out one strand. Like snow. Like the cold, bright path I would take to look for my grandmother if this were a fairy tale. But it\u2019s not. This is America, and my grandmother is dead.<\/p>\n

When my mother sees the strand she begins to cry. \u201cI hate it,\u201d she says. \u201cI just hate it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Italo Calvino\u2019s retelling of the 1883 Italian fairy tale \u201cThe False Grandmother,\u201d \u201ca mother had to sift flour, and told her little girl to go to her grandmother\u2019s to borrow the sifter.\u201d In other versions of \u201cLittle Red Riding Hood,\u201d the mother sends her daughter to grandmother\u2019s with a loaf of hot bread and a bottle of milk. Or cake and a bottle of wine, because grandmother is ill. Whatever the version, there are always woods between mother and grandmother, and the woods are thick with wolves. There is undergrowth, a rising moon, and the unsolvable riddle of choosing a path of pins over a path of needles. Like a house that gets smaller and smaller behind you, the mother vanishes from the tale once the story opens into the woods. And Little Red Riding Hood, like a streak of blood, is the trail that connects a gobbled-up grandmother to the barest trace of mother. I don\u2019t read \u201cLittle Red Riding Hood\u201d as a cautionary tale of what can happen to a little girl who strays from the path. The path to grandmother (like any good story) is by its nature a stray, it\u2019s rooted in stray-ness. And even Little Red Riding Hood, her name alone, is marked by gerund: a verb disguised as a noun, a riding, a going away. I read the story instead as a tale about the wild space between grandmothers and mothers, and the child that grows there. In the Brothers Grimm version, \u201cLittle Red Cap opened her eyes wide and saw how the sunbeams were dancing this way and that through the trees and how there were beautiful flowers all about.\u201d The space between mother and grandmother is where the light comes in. It\u2019s where Red glows reddest.<\/p>\n

My mother laughs at me in my grandmother\u2019s living room for pretending to feed a baby doll my grandmother has just given me. I am five. It\u2019s my first memory of anger and shame. \u201cYou ruin everything,\u201d I say to my mother.<\/p>\n

In Kellie Wells\u2019s \u201cThe Girl, the Wolf, the Crone,\u201d the mother (\u201ca soon-to-be-old woman\u201d), who has a \u201cloaf of bread always sitting in her hands,\u201d tells her daughter (Little Miss Red Cheeks) that she knows a \u201csickly wolf who would like nothing better than to receive stale bread from her.\u201d It\u2019s a genius twist. The mother tells her daughter to be careful because the woods are full of old women who miss the feel of bread in their hands. The girl is barely on her way when she sees \u201ca crusty old woman with a face like a fallen cake\u201d who is after the wolf and the bread and Red because Red\u2019s mother once \u201cpinched the loaf\u201d from her and \u201cthe embezzlement of fertility necessarily exacts a stiff tariff.\u201d The old woman (who speaks a mix of feral and ancient, and, as it turns out, is the girl\u2019s grandmother) eats the wolf, who \u201cunzips his coat and drags his body dutifully into her mouth.\u201d Then she waits for Red and her bread, and then dear grandmother eats the girl and the loaf, too. If menopause comes after menstruation, then what comes after menopause? In Wells\u2019s retelling it is something wild and primordial and hairy and ravenous.<\/p>\n

\u201cA pagina,\u201d says my five-year-old son to my seven-year-old son, \u201cis a cave covered in fur.\u201d Good enough, I think.<\/p>\n

When I was a child I was told by a teacher that if you put a piece of challah bread under your pillow, go to sleep, and then wake up at midnight and look in the mirror, you will see yourself as a very, very old woman. And I did. And I saw my very old face, though I\u2019m not sure whether I actually saw it or whether I only remember seeing it. What I am certain of is that the very old face sees things. I wish to look out through that face. Even if it isn\u2019t yet mine.<\/p>\n

In fairy tales, you can open up a wolf and find an old woman. Or you can find an old woman deep in the woods in a hut that dances and twirls on chicken legs. Or sweeping with a broom made from the hair of the dead. Or living in a house made of bread with sugar windows and a roof made of cake. Or deep in the sea where no flowers grow, with her great, spongy breasts covered in fat water snakes. When you find an old woman in a fairy tale often she is tucked deep inside the folds of an underworld. Somewhere the psyche grows intuition like wild mushrooms.<\/p>\n

For most of my life, my favorite activity was to talk to my grandmother. She and I would verbally line up every member of our family and go at them one by one. Subjecting each, without their knowledge, to deep analysis and Freudian cures. Looping and unlooping. Around and around we\u2019d go. When my grandmother got to the heart of one of our relatives, she\u2019d squint her left eye as though she were looking through a crack in the air. I wanted her soft wrinkles. I wanted her furrowed brow. When I was a child I wanted to be old.<\/p>\n

At the end of Angela Carter\u2019s \u201cIn the Company of Wolves,\u201d grandmother\u2019s old bones clatter under the bed like a haunted wedding bell. The girl lays the wolf\u2019s \u201cfearful head in her lap,\u201d picks the lice from his fur, and imagines eating them \u201cas he will bid her.\u201d It\u2019s a reception in a deathbed: half funeral, half wedding. It\u2019s a grave of love. \u201cSince her fear did no good,\u201d writes Carter, \u201cshe ceased to be afraid.\u201d<\/p>\n

In my grandmother\u2019s final hour, her room was crowded with people even though it was only my stepmother and my father who were actually there. \u201cShe was moving people around,\u201d says my father. \u201cPushing some out of the way, and pulling some closer.\u201d My father is a doctor. \u201cI could give you a medical explanation \u2026\u201d His voice trails off, taking science with it. In this moment he is more a man with no mother than he is a doctor. And now that the world has run out of his mother, he wants to believe another more beautiful world has run in.<\/p>\n

My father doesn\u2019t say, \u201cGrandma died.\u201d Instead he says, \u201cCome home.\u201d I feel dizzy and fortified and fragile all at once. It is as though I am giving birth in reverse. As though I now have a new, thick lining of grandmother inside me, a hard soft thing. \u201cWhy is grief,\u201d writes Gertrude Stein. \u201cGrief is strange black. Sugar is melting. We will swim.\u201d Grief is the rat-a-tat-tat of a hungry wolf.<\/p>\n

I dream I am flat on my back on an examining table. The doctor rubs a clear, cold jelly on my belly and glides a small rectangular box across me. Look, says the doctor. The waves of the sonogram echo as they hit a dense object, such as organ or bone. Such as my dead grandmother who smiles in a small wooden boat. She is the size of an almond. Instead of a heartbeat, I hear a gentle splash. Her oars dip into my grief, which is now a lake inside me. The lake looks sweet and thick and dark. \u00a0\u201cThis Water Water,\u201d says my grandmother, \u201chas the strength of one thousand old Women Women.\u201d I look at the doctor who is now my five-year-old son. He wants to know why I named him Eli. Around his neck is a bright pink stethoscope.<\/p>\n

After the wolf in \u201cThe Story of the Grandmother\u201d kills grandmother, he puts her flesh in the pantry and a bottle of her blood on the shelf. \u201cYou\u2019re a slut,\u201d says a cat, \u201cif you eat your grandmother.\u201d The cat never speaks again, and rather than reply, Little Red Riding Hood takes off her apron, bodice, dress, skirt, and stockings, throws them in the fire, and climbs into bed with the wolf. She outsmarts him by untying the wool rope the wolf tied to her leg and tying it to a plum tree. She outsmarts the wolf because she now has grandmother inside her. But in Perrault\u2019s \u201cLittle Red Riding Hood,\u201d the wolf not only devours grandmother, he gobbles up Red, too. Instead of a huntsman, a moral follows: Be careful whom you listen to. Tame wolves are the most dangerous of all.<\/p>\n

At the funeral, the rabbi hands me a pamphlet: How to Explain Death to Children<\/em>. He loved my grandmother, and he smells like old rain, and he is missing teeth. Every Friday night he called her before sundown to let her know the exact time to light the Shabbat candles. I look through the death pamphlet. Item no. 7 is this:<\/p>\n

Do Not<\/em> give stories and fairytales as an explanation for the mystery of death. Never cover up with a fiction or a confusing interpretation that you will someday repudiate. For example, to say that \u201cyour mother has gone on a long journey\u201d is to give the impression that she may someday return.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We light Shabbat candles. My son Eli looks into the flame. \u201cI see Grandma Gert in the brown part,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnhealthy explanations,\u201d according to the pamphlet, \u201ccan create fear, doubt, and guilt, and encourage flights of fancy that are far more bizarre than reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGrandma Gert is dead, isn\u2019t she?\u201d says my seven-year-old, Noah. A week earlier, he had given me clear instructions: \u201cIf she dies, never tell me.\u201d \u201cShe is dead,\u201d I say. I am empty of poetry. She\u2019s just dead, I think. I am the most boring mother on earth. I scan my imagination, and the only thing I can find is the part where Noah never knows for certain whether my grandmother is dead or not. Like a white spot on his consciousness. And I begin to think about what might grow in this spot. A cold, empty, nameless thing. He should not have this spot. So I say it. \u201cShe is dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

I comb many fairy tales for mourning rituals, but there are few. Death is often a spell to be broken, so to mourn as though death can\u2019t thin back into life isn\u2019t\u2014in a fairy tale\u2014realistic. Also characters in fairy tales are never quite conscious. It\u2019s our consciousness that wakes them up, which is why the stories are so susceptible to retellings. Even in the Brothers Grimm\u2019s \u201cSnow White,\u201d after the dead princess is unlaced and combed and washed with water and wine, the weeping dwarves cannot bear to \u201clower her into the dark ground.\u201d Instead they put her in a glass coffin, carry it up the top of the mountain, and watch her body through the glass not decay. Snow White\u2019s glass coffin is the magic mirror her wicked stepmother has really been after: a magic coffin, a coffin of youth. When the prince shows up, it\u2019s not Snow White he asks for, but the coffin. \u201cLet me have the coffin. I will give you whatever you want for it.\u201d The prince doesn\u2019t want Snow White or to solve the mystery of death. He wants the undying body.<\/p>\n

My father covers all the mirrors with bedsheets to prepare to sit shivah. In the bathroom, I pull a small corner back expecting to see my grandmother\u2019s reflection, but instead I just see my own.<\/p>\n

After the funeral, we return to my grandmother\u2019s house, where she lived for sixty-seven years. She is nowhere to be found. It\u2019s barely been one day, and already the living room is windy and stale. \u201cWhere the hell did she go?\u201d asks my brother.<\/p>\n

For $6.99, a pattern for a three-headed Little Red Riding Hood Topsy-Turvy doll is available on Etsy. Flip Little Red Riding Hood over, and she becomes Grandmother. Reverse Grandmother\u2019s bonnet, and now she\u2019s the wolf. I can\u2019t sew. Nor can I successfully follow a pattern without, well, straying. But as I imagine turning this doll upside down, then right side up, then inside out, I begin to realize that Little Red Riding Hood is a shared wolf song sung by a girl, an old lady, and a beast, about straying, and hunger, and dying.<\/p>\n

At the funeral, the rabbi rips my father\u2019s shirt. It is a long tear down the left, over the heart. A frayed arrow pointing at my father\u2019s nipple because my father\u2019s mother is dead. I have never wanted to not die as much as I have since my sons were born. In the last photograph I have of my grandmother, she is sitting between my sons like twilight smiling in the middle of two dawns.<\/p>\n

My sons don\u2019t ask me where my grandmother is now. Instead, I ask them. \u201cShe\u2019s right there,\u201d says Eli. He points behind me at a bookcase where I keep all my old journals and the books my husband has published. I turn around. \u201cThere?\u201d I ask. \u201cYes,\u201d he says, impatiently, \u201cright there.\u201d He checks for himself. He feels sorry for my inability to see, and then he puts his little hand on my shoulder. \u201cAnd also,\u201d he says, now soft with charity, \u201ceverywhere.\u201d I\u2019m thinking maybe he should rewrite the death pamphlet.\u00a0No. 7.<\/em>\u00a0Close your eyes. No. 8. Now open them<\/em>. No. 9<\/em>\u00a0Now look inside.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Sabrina Orah Mark\u2019s monthly column, Happily, here.<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections\u00a0<\/em>The Babies\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Tsim Tsum.\u00a0<\/em>Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, is recently out from Dorothy, a publishing project.\u00a0 She lives, writes, and teaches in Athens, Georgia.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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