Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

Getting bored, are you? I bet. All right well, I’m nearly done. I’ll pick up the pace a little, if that will help.

Fast-forward two years; the girl is now sixteen. Sweet sixteen, and her mother is still there, in front of that mirror. Do you know how awful puberty is when you have to go through it alone? At sixteen the girl, now a young woman really, was in the throes of it. All sorts of stuff was going on in her body and in her mind. All sorts. She’s trying to achieve some kind of independence, to be her own person, that kind of thing, and here she’s got this monster in the closet, right, this dirty secret that she can’t share with anyone. Because how, really, do you tell someone that your mother has been standing in front of a mirror for years on end? It’s ridiculous. No one would believe you anyway even if you did tell. They’d think you were making it up.

That’s what you’d become to me by then. A monster. A horrible dragon clutching its treasure in a dark room. I had to do something.

Anything, I thought, would be better than this.

But what? I didn’t know. I didn’t know until one day, who knows why, Mr. Jonet—he was the English teacher that year—started talking about apples. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, apples. He went through every story that ever had an apple in it, he went on and on about the health properties of apples, the symbolism of apples, all of this stuff about apples. It drove the class nuts. Rumor had it that he’d fallen in love with Miss Hayton, the biology teacher. We made jokes about him bringing her an apple, like some pet schoolboy. We got sick of hearing about apples.

Then he told a story about a woman named Eve. She was apparently the first woman, ever, on earth. She was good, pure good, no evil in her at all. Kind of like you used to be, before the mirror came. Or at least how I remember you to be. Rose-colored glasses and all that. So anyway, this Eve lady was brought low by an apple. The fruit of evil, it was, and she took a bite and then she wasn’t so good any more. Cast out of the garden, I think it was a garden, by a serpent or something.

But basically, Mr. Jonet said, what had happened was that Eve’s eyes had been opened to everything that was around her, to all of the ? 329 ?

? The Mirror Tells All ?

nuances of life, to all of the little details that she couldn’t have seen before, because pure good can’t see anything but good, and that’s unhealthy. That, he said, is what leads us to a fall. When we can’t see and appreciate the bad in something as well as the good, we’re in trouble. Rumor had it Miss Hayton had turned him down.

And the girl thought, maybe if I take my mother an apple, her eyes will open, too, and she’ll look at something other than that mirror.

It couldn’t be just any apple, though, could it? It had to be the best apple, the ripest apple, the reddest apple, because for her mother, only the best would do. The girl didn’t really know anything about apples, which were good for what, which were sweet, which were sour, none of that. She’d just eaten whatever apples were offered her. But she learned, and that autumn she went into town again and brought home the best apples she could find.

Oh, right. I said I’d speed it up. You do look a little uncomfortable.

You can probably guess what happens next.

The girl takes her mother the apple, and the woman doesn’t