Just beyond the splintered skyline of Empire Island, the sprawling outer burghs of Kings and Crookbridge, there lies another place, a land of twisted oaks and wild rabbits and haunted sounds in the rafters. Wonland County. The Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg, now betrothed to the heir to the Ripple fortune, spent her girlhood here, lying on her shingled roof, blowing the fluffy seeds off dandelions that had grown in the gutters, and snagging her petticoats on nails. Her roof was a ship in a green ocean of treetops. There were no other houses for miles. Sometimes she sat on the chimney and watched the dragons through her spyglass. Their leathery wings, their roiling claws, spoke to her of city lights, glamour, and communion with like souls.
“They’re flying low today, Cyril,” she would intone, warming an imaginary snifter of brandy in one hand. “Love me while you can.” She’d never seen another child.
In those days, Swanny lived with her mother in a house of thirty rooms. In wintertime, they warmed the space in phases, followed the rattle of the radiators from parlor to hall. Some rooms stayed locked for insulation. They had two hireds, the dentist and the maid. The dentist was for Swanny, mostly. His job largely consisted of tying long threads to certain of her teeth and then attaching those threads to the manor’s various doors, which he gleefully slammed. Over the years, as her tooth roots gripped deeper, he moved on to pliers. For the longest time, Swanny saw nothing odd about this.
The maid, Corona, was a sad-eyed muttering woman who called Swanny’s mother “La Diabla” and skinned rabbits in the kitchen. She carried a rolling pin at all times. Swanny had, on more than one occasion, seen her unscrew the handle of this rolling pin and take a hearty swig, but she said nothing to her mother about it. When Swanny took ill, Corona always came to her room to sew and read stories and sometimes to cry about her son, whose incinerated remains she kept in a ceramic cookie jar in her little room under the eaves.
“The sickness devoured his body, but his eyes—his eyes were still alive. Esos ojos, esos ojos…It is a mother’s duty to remember, a duty and a curse,” she would whisper to Swanny, furtively wiping her mouth as she lowered the rolling pin. “Our sins are visited upon our children. Your mother knows this. This is why she turns away.”
“Corona, get me a fresh Carbon8.” Swanny would tap her glass with a swizzle stick. “This one’s gone flat.”
It was true that Pippi Dahlberg, Swanny’s mother, never even came upstairs when Swanny was sick. She said she could not bear it. To Swanny, this was understandable. Swanny could still vaguely remember the days when her father was dying: the dim, furry light that crept past the velvet curtains in the master bedroom, the bags of fluid, red and yellow and yellow-green, that seeped into his body and then seeped back out. “Your father is not himself,” Pippi had told her, as the twisted figure amid those pillows contorted itself unnaturally, like a hand shaping shadows. Pippi had tended him through his sickness, and now she had no nursing left for Swanny. Besides, they were together the rest of the time.
The first time Swanny saw her mother without makeup, she did not recognize her. Pippi was a petite woman, trim and active but not slender, with the grasping look of someone who has always strained against the natural tides of metabolism and hair color. Her fingers tapered to lacquered talons; a stenciled mole marked a spot just above her upper lip. Her skin pressed too tightly against the bones of her cheeks, as if her inner self longed to break through the thin barrier of flesh and at last breathe air. Her shoulders, always padded beneath her rainbow of suits, were square and hunched forward slightly. She seemed as though she might pounce.
Pippi was an Old Mom and an active member of the Old Mom Movement. When Swanny was small, Pippi chaired the local chapter of the organization. The Gray Ladies of Wonland County, as the members called themselves, met each month in the house’s ballroom, around a massive mahogany table still battered and gouged from the days of the Siege. The other Gray Ladies, like Pippi, were anything but gray. Their hair came in shades of Burnt Umber, Sienna, Hayseed, Ebony, Dusty Rose, even Robin’s Egg—Swanny named the colors from the fan deck of paint samples in her Junior Decorator’s Kit. The Gray Ladies wore ostrich plumes and leopard print, patterned tights and fractal hats. Their high heels rang against the ballroom tiles. Though they were Old Moms, not one of them would tell Swanny her age.
According to Pippi, Old Moms were the target of discrimination by prejudiced individuals who believed women should not bear children after menopause. Corona was one of those prejudiced individuals, though she tenderized meat for their luncheons just the same. Swanny didn’t know what the dentist thought of them; sometimes she noticed him leering through the ballroom French doors, or leaving his business cards on the table for them to find.
Little Swanny found their meetings dull. She sat beneath the mahogany table, staring at the pointy toes of lizard-skin shoes, and snacked on pinwheels of rabbit prosciutto and cream cheese that Corona had assembled. The other Old Moms did not bring their children. They spoke about the perils of inbreeding (though “Who could blame a person for wanting to keep good genetics in the family?”), thieving servants, seepage, and the declining condition of their various estates, where vines choked hand-quarried stone, and copper monuments crumbled to green dust. Sometimes in their excitement they dropped pamphlets to the floor, with titles like “A Childless Life, Then a Childish Life: Priorities, Motherhood, and the Federal Constitution” or “You Can Have It All, Just Not All at the Same Time.” Sometimes their faces were bandaged; soft neck wattles vanished, noses changed.