A Wild Swan Read Free

ecstatic transport you’d visit upon them, and, more touching still, for the mornings they’d wake with faces buried in your breasts, abashed, embarrassed, eager to depart, in which endeavor you’d encourage them (you’d cultivate no hint of desperation, never urge them to stay). During the brief interludes before they jumped up to search for their socks and underwear, you’d assure them that they were marvels, they were warriors; gifts in the making for some girl who’d be thankful forever for what you’d taught them in a single night.
    The boys would grin with nervous self-admiration as they stumbled back into their clothes. They’d know the truth when they heard it. They’d understand: You were seeding your town with suitable husbands. You were a goddess (a minor goddess, but still) of carnal knowingness; you were seeing to it that the youth of the region knew not only where the clitoris is, but what to do with it. You were cultivating, in absentia, a cohort of girls (might a few of them learn about it, might they pay you an occasional visit?) whose nights in bed with their husbands would feel like proper compensation for their days of washing and ironing.
    That future, that particular old age, however, refused to occur.
    It had to do, most likely, with the accident (the backfiring car, the horse) that left you with that gimp leg. It had to do with the tiny apartment over the laundry (who expected rents to go up the way they did?), where the smell of mouse pellets and dry-cleaning chemicals seemed only to be made worse by the veils of perfume you sprayed around. What boy would want to come there?
    It had to do as well with the surprising timidity of youth; the endangered-species status (or so it seemed) of the fearless princelings you remembered from your own early days—the boys (old men now, the ones who were still alive at all) who’d been drunk on confidence, touching in their unpracticed attempts at swagger. They’d been replaced by this generation of alarmingly well-behaved man-children, who seemed content to learn about women at the hands of girls who knew almost as little about their own bodies as the boys who fumbled with them.
    Eventually, by the time you’d come to think of seventy as still young, you bought yourself a bit of real estate. It lay a considerable distance from town—who could afford even the outskirts, anymore? Once the deal had been struck you stood (aided by the cane you still couldn’t quite believe you carried) on your modest patch of bare ground surrounded by forest, and decided that your house would be made of candy.
    You did the research. It was, in fact, possible to construct bricks—out of sugar, glycerin, cornstarch, and a few unmentionable toxins—that would stand up to the rain. Gingerbread, if fortified with sufficient cement dust, would do as a roof.
    The rest, of course, would require ongoing maintenance. The windows of spun sugar were good for a single winter, if that; the piped-on lintels and windowsills would need to be remade every spring, even when the icing was reinforced with Elmer’s glue. The tiles made of lollipops, the specially ordered shafts of candy cane that served as banisters and railings, held up, but faded in the summer heat and had to be replaced. What could be more depressing than elderly-looking candy?
    The house, however, was charming, in its insane and lavishly reckless way, all the more so because it put out its lurid colors, emanated its smells of sugar and ginger, in a tree-shadowed glade far from even the most rudimentary of roads.
    And then you waited.
    You had—it was probably a miscalculation—expected a more exploratory spirit among the local youngsters, whatever their general devotion to decent behavior. Where were the sweet little picnickers; where were the boy gangs looking for hideouts where they could (with your approval) imbibe the whiskey they needed in order to fully