“I didn’t have a closet in our old house,” I say. Our Massachusetts house didn’t have many closets at all. Mom said she liked that about it. She liked buying wardrobes and dressers. Antique ones with delicate knobs and engraved wood.
Which is especially funny considering how obsessed she is with wandering into the closets here in the New Hampshire house.
Dad nods again, his same thoughtful, serious face, and lets out a long, rumbling hmmmm.
“You know ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’?” he says after a moment.
“Isn’t it some fairy tale?” I say. I take a seat in the rocking chair. It squeaks with every rock.
When Dad talks about fairy tales, especially princes and princesses, he gets this look on his face that reminds me of the look LilyLee’s parents get on their faces when they talk about things like their wedding or their first date or what they did when they were our age. He’s going to go off on one of his lectures.
“A princess fairy tale. A good one. Don’t tell your mom, she’d be mad,” Dad says. It’s true. Mom won’t read any books with princesses, won’t buy us princess toys, or let us be princesses for Halloween. It’s funny, considering how much Dad loves fairy tales, that he ended up with someone who hates them. A lot of things about Mom and Dad are funny, I guess.
“I don’t tell her anything,” I say. It slips out, accidental and huge. Dad pretends not to notice.
“These princesses, in the story, are exhausted every morning, so the king surmises that they must be doing something scandalous every evening. Oh, and they have shoes. Their shoes are all ripped up and worn out every morning. They keep needing new shoes.”
Dad is actually terrible at telling stories. His voice is nice and he sounds all excited, and you can tell he really, really wants you to enjoy yourself, but in terms of actually making sense, he fails every time. I wonder if he’s this way when he’s teaching classes too, or if he’s only bad at telling stories to his daughters.
“So he takes their shoes and gives them to this prince, and tells the prince to, I guess, find out what’s wrong with the shoes? So the prince follows the girls into their closet, and inside is this magical world where they dance with other princes, or maybe not even princes, just really handsome boys, and the prince tells the king that’s what the girls are doing every night. Dancing in this magical world they get to through the closet.”
“Then he marries one of them?” I say. I don’t mind the story, actually. Even the way Dad’s telling it. I like the big group of sisters, and I like their secret magical world, but I hate that in the end all that really happens is a wedding. That’s how fairy tales always are.
“Then he marries one of them. He gets to choose which one to marry, since he solved the mystery.”
“And the girls stop going dancing?” I rock more quickly. I like talking about the closets with Dad, even if he doesn’t know that’s what we’re doing.
“I don’t remember,” he says. “I’ll look it up and get back to you.” Dad has these big books of stories from different cultures. Sometimes the same story shows up five different ways, told with a slightly different focus depending on the time and place and storyteller. I like that the same story can end so many different ways.
Eleanor and Astrid and Marla come downstairs a few minutes later and join us on the porch. Eleanor wrinkles her nose at the smell still haunting the air of French toast gone wrong.
They each have a piece of fruit and a bowl of cereal, and none of them asks what happened in the kitchen earlier. They know the answer.
“The Dancing Princesses have emerged,” Dad says, winking in my direction.
“Mom hates princesses,” Marla says, showing off for Mom even now, even when Mom is sleeping or doing whatever she’s doing upstairs.
Dad picks his paper up again, the rustling of the pages signifying the end of the conversation, and we sit on the porch in silence, the mention of Mom heavy and hard enough to quiet us all.
Ten
I’m going to sneak an egg up to my room. It won’t be hard to do. I’m practically invisible right now. Dad’s going for a post-paper run. Eleanor is texting her secret boyfriend, and when she’s doing that, she doesn’t notice anything else. Marla’s baking something, and Astrid’s working on a diorama at the kitchen counter, filling a black shoe box with flowers made from Dad’s newspaper and lining the bottom with carpet samples Mom’s left on the counter for weeks. It’s easy to take things like that without Mom noticing.
LilyLee was always jealous of me wearing my mother’s things. I’d come to school with a necklace with a tiny diamond hanging off it, or a yellow silk scarf that looked like it was stitched from Rumpelstiltskin’s gold, and LilyLee would tell me how lucky I was that my mom didn’t care about things like that.