“I think we need to talk,” Snow White said, plucking the apple from her stepmother’s hands. “I know it is you in that costume, Stepmother. And I want you to think about the ways patriarchy has pitted us against each other. Beauty is not a zero-sum game!”
—FAIRY TALES FOR LITTLE FEMINISTS:
SNOW WHITE, EVELYN HARPER KREIS
February 2000
Saskia was seventeen, and by that winter, the magic of skipping class was gone. Not only did she have her own driver’s license now, as well as her own car, but junior year was harder than sophomore year, just like the adults had threatened. Every missed class meant an extra hour of staring in bafflement at her textbooks late into the night. Every extra hour was an hour she spent alone, an hour without Patrick, an hour in which his texts rained down, gratifying yet increasingly annoying: I miss you. I’m thinking about you. Are you almost done? Every extra hour was an hour she spent away from the piano, an hour in which she could feel the muscles of her hands tightening, weakening. Atrophying.
But after putting Lexi off for days, Saskia finally agreed to meet during a morning free period. She should have been in the library, working on an English paper due at the end of the week. But instead, Saskia sat across from Lexi in the diner booth, two mugs of black coffee, the cheapest thing on the menu, between them.
“How are things with Josh P.?” Lexi asked, lighting a cigarette.
Saskia gave a weak smile. “Good. Fine. You know.”
Lexi stared at her, the hard look in her eyes making something in Saskia shrink back. It was so foreign, so adult.
“Give it up, Sas,” Lexi said. “I know there’s no Josh P.”
The air in the diner was vibrating, twitching against her skin. There was no Josh P. What else did Lexi know?
Saskia lifted the mug to her mouth. The coffee was too hot, thin and scalding.
She tried one of her mother’s phrases. “Why do you say that?”
Lexi’s eyes rolled. “Because. I talked to Becca the other day, and she said the only Joshes are the ones I already knew. There’s no Josh P.”
Saskia’s mouth went dry, despite the coffee. Dry and burned.
“Okay,” Lexi said with a sigh. “But there’s obviously someone. So, who is it? Why did you lie to me? Is it a teacher? Is it, like, really bad?”
Outside, a snow plow garbled its way down the street, pushing the new snow over the grayed and dingy remnants of the old.
Saskia took a deep breath. “It’s—”
But she couldn’t bring herself to say it.
Three years now. Three years, it had been him and her. Nobody else. The only two people who knew about the golden cords of energy between them. About what they meant to each other. About the future they’d imagined, the present they owned, about his hand on the side of her cheek, caressing—
“It’s nobody,” she said, and closed her eyes. “I made him up to seem cool.”
“Bullshit.” The flint of Lexi’s words made Saskia jump. “Bullshit!” Lexi said again, bending forward. “Nobody lies about a boyfriend to seem cool to their parents. Unless, I mean—are you gay?”
Saskia toyed with the idea of this new lie for a moment. But she knew Lexi would never keep that from her mother. And it would trickle up and over, and within a day, two max, her parents would be purchasing books about helping their child come out of the closet.
But she hated keeping this secret from Lexi. She hadn’t known it before, but she knew it then, in that moment: when she’d chosen Patrick, she’d chosen not to have a lot of other things. Maybe a million other things.
It was worth it. Wasn’t it?
“No,” she said. “I just don’t want to talk about it.”
Lexi thrust herself back in the booth, wrapping her arms over her chest. “Who even are you anymore? You’re, like—I mean it, I don’t even know who you are anymore, Sas. You’re, like, not even a teenager. You’re like a grown-up.”
Lexi meant the words as an insult, Saskia could hear the barely contained rage in the flat tones of her voice. And yet they lit something inside her. She wasn’t a teenager, not like the others. She wasn’t listening to Jessica Simpson or the Backstreet Boys, she was listening to Bach and Mozart. She wasn’t dating some kid named Josh, she was dating a grown man, a man with passion and purpose. Each realization pinging down into the pit of her stomach, filling it with a trickling pride.
She raised her eyebrows.
“I know,” she said. “I’m not a teenager. I’m a real person.”
And everything seemed to drain out of Lexi as she looked back.
“But I’m a real person, too,” she said.
The next time Lexi texted, Saskia didn’t answer. And eventually, Lexi went away.
February 2020
Josh is very much the type to arrive early for a date. Saskia already knows this, but she’s so busy trying on her mother’s earrings that when the doorbell rings that Monday, Mike gets to it before she does.
“Shit shit shit,” she mutters to herself as she runs down the stairs, shoving her phone into an old black clutch, stumbling in Evie’s heels. There’s her father, squaring off in front of the door like John Wayne in some old western. Boomer dads—they love that shit.
“Josh!” she cries, too loudly and too excitedly, too much, just enough to break off whatever conversation they’ve been having. “Hi!”
And then it’s the three of them at the door. Both men are looking at her expectantly, and she leans over to kiss Josh’s cheek, then swoops over to the closet.
“Okay!” she calls, shrugging her mother’s camel coat on too quickly, getting tangled. “Back soon.”
“Curfew’s at ten,” her father says, and Josh chuckles politely. Saskia rolls her eyes. She never had a curfew.
Heels crunching against the gravel, she can’t help casting a glance over her shoulder as they leave the house. It’s just hit her: What if Patrick thinks things through and tries the door? The floor’s soundproofed, sure. Maybe even the stairs, she’s not positive. If he starts pounding the door, though—
“You look great,” Josh says as she opens the passenger door.
“Do I?” she says, genuinely caught by surprise.
“You do. Just like you did back at school.”
She shakes her head. “I wasn’t big on makeup or jewelry back then.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s something…” He stops. “Something else.”
They pull onto Lake Drive and fall into easy, simple conversation about the weather. All of these backs and forths, heat waves and blizzards … and they say climate change isn’t real! It’s a rote, routine sort of conversation, and she doesn’t have to pay too much attention. In the meantime, at the back of her brain: Patrick. She’s leaving Patrick alone in the house with her father.
But it’s okay, she tells herself. She’s ensured that he’s too far gone to try messing with the door.
For their dinner, Josh has chosen Beans & Barley. Not a vegan restaurant, not even a vegetarian restaurant, but a Milwaukee institutional holdover from the 1970s: a health food restaurant. The ceiling arches high above, thirty feet at least, the wall behind Josh’s back sheer glass. Yet it’s a paper-napkin kind of place: a relief. Josh, with a quick glance to check in with her, orders a bottle of pinot grigio. When it arrives, he tastes it dutifully, nods. Is he a wine guy? She’s never dated a wine guy. One sip and it’s like she can hear a Klaxon sounding: Maybe this guy isn’t for you.
But her radar is fucked up, she’s known that for a long time. It sucks to not be able to trust your own instincts. His quiet earnestness, she reminds herself. His intelligence. His deep, hidden intensity. Those are qualities she likes, that she could like.
There’s a reason she’s here.
Although she can’t think of anything to say. The one thing that brought them back together, her mother’s will, is the one thing they’re not allowed to discuss. The one thing she wants to talk about, Patrick, is the one thing she’s not allowed to disclose to anyone.
“So. University School, huh? You seem to have fonder memories of it than I do,” she says, and it’s someone else’s voice coming out of her. Fond?
But as soon as it’s out there, she realizes that she really is interested in knowing what it was like for Josh—and, okay, she’s interested in seeing herself through his eyes.
Josh’s earnestness serves him well. “I’m not sure. It felt like hell at the time. Looking back, though—the stakes were lower, you know? Or, if not lower … I don’t know, things were spelled out. The path was clear. I guess I do miss that.”
“Things were spelled out?”
The waitress is hovering next to them, and she skims the menu quickly as Josh orders salmon. With a smile, she orders the grilled chicken platter. Look at her. So healthy, after days of leftover sandwiches and frozen pizzas. She feels like she’s glowing with the virtue of it.
“I don’t know,” he says, returning his gaze to her, palms up and helpless. “I don’t—I was just talking, that didn’t actually mean anything.”
He grins, and they’re back where they started: the conversational void.
She opens her mouth. Closes it.
Reconsiders.
Well, why the hell not? She’s on a real live date with a man, which is something she never thought she’d do. She trapped another one in the tower. Maybe her instincts are getting better.
“So,” she says, twirling the stem of her wineglass. “I mean, I know there’s only so much you can tell me,” looking up at him. “But—I can’t stop wondering.”
He has a shy smile, a guarded smile. “What’s that?”
“How on earth did you become Mom’s executor?”
“Ah.” His face is still pleasant, but it’s professional now, too. “Pretty simple, really. Your mother came by the office last summer to see Paul, and she recognized me. We grabbed a coffee. After that, she had the will … she had the will revised.”
Saskia laughs. “Back when we were in high school—you remember—?” She can’t make herself say pretending to be my boyfriend, but he doesn’t make her, just nods with a grin. “Well, she loved you. She asked me about you for years afterward.”
“What did you say?” he asks.
“Oh, I had a whole life made up for you,” she says as the waitress sets their food down on the table. “Funny, I haven’t thought of any of this for years. Um, let’s see. I think you became an architect. And you got married a few years ago.” She’d told her mother it was to a man just to get her off of her fucking back—but no need to tell Josh that now.
He’s thinking, fuzzy eyebrows drawn slightly together.
“Were you invited to the wedding?” he says finally, and the two of them laugh.
“I was,” she says, tipping her glass to him, “but I declined to go. Out of respect, you know, for your new partner.”
“How kind of you.”
Silence again, but not uncomfortable now. Strange how telling someone something personal, intimate, could make things easier between you. That’s never happened to her before.
Over the tiny votive candle, she sees his eyes fixed gently, darkly, on her.
“Josh?” she says. “I’m— So, I talked it over with my father, and I’ve been making some arrangements, and—”
He is watching, patiently waiting.
“I’m going to stay in Milwaukee,” she says.
“Are you?” The delight as he leans forward in the booth. “I didn’t want to ask, I figured you’d be here through probate, at least, but—Sas. That’s great fucking news!”
“Is it?” she says, though she can’t keep the smile off of her own face. And holds in a gasp as he brushes his fingers over her palm, so lightly it’s as though it’s not happening at all.
“It is,” he says softly. “Because I think we might really have something here.”
She stares at him, but he just stares back. There is a world where men say these kinds of things to women. It exists. And, somehow, she’s ended up in it.
After they split a piece of carrot cake, they walk briskly into the wedge-shaped parking lot. The night is chilled charcoal and streetlight yellow. The renovated library, slick polished gray nothing, is lit up across the street; old-timey Milwaukee taverns crowd up around it with their brick façades and neon signs. She pulls out her phone; two hours, passed in a heartbeat. Her own pounds through her as she slides it back into her pocket.
“Thanks for dinner,” she says, the rest of her chicken boxed up and swinging in a bag from her wrist, ready for Wolfie to scarf down. “You really didn’t have to pay.”
“It was fun,” Josh says. And as he leans toward her, she’s wondering how his lips will feel, if she’ll be able to taste the wine that must still be on his tongue.
His mouth brushes against hers and she almost cries out.
The soft lips. The light touch.
The ghost of Patrick will live on forever. In each first kiss, in every caress.
He marked her. He owns her.
Saskia pulls away first, and Josh squeezes her shoulder with a surprisingly strong hand.
They’re quiet on the way back to the house. And it’s not until Josh’s Prius rounds the drive, as she hears the familiar barking greeting her at the door, when she watches his taillights flicker back on, recede into the distance, that she realizes. Patrick may own her in one sense, yes.
But in a much realer one, she owns him.
In the aquarium-blue dark, Saskia opens the door. Wolfie’s yapping his head off, but he immediately quiets as she sets the box before him, as he attacks the chicken with gusto.
It’s ten, and her father will be in bed, if not asleep. And Patrick?
Surely he must be ready to talk by now. She lugs a six-pack of Poland Spring from the kitchen up the stairs with her, Wolfie circling her heels. As she puts the key in the lock, she turns to him.
“Wolfie, stay,” she hisses, and the dog gives her an annoyed glance but sits just outside the door. After kicking the water inside the stairwell, she locks the door behind her and slides the key carefully back in her pocket. Four hours since his last Xanax, it’s unlikely Patrick’s at full strength; still, why risk it?
But though the bulb is lit, though she can hear its buzz from the bottom of the stairs, he’s fast asleep. She drops the water bottles on the ground, just lets them fall, but it doesn’t make a difference: he’s out. He always slept through the night like this, like a machine that had been flipped off.
Well. She can come back in the morning. She’ll have to.
Saskia turns to go, her hand on the light switch, when he turns with a groan and she catches a glimpse of his sleeping face.
For the first time in twenty years: his sleeping face.
The night has erased his wrinkles. If she doesn’t look at the silvery hair, it could be the Patrick she’d known all those years ago. Sleeping Patrick still has an angelic look to him. The dark sweep of his lashes sweet against his cheeks, which have been given a new roundness by his slack, relaxed jaw.
She reaches down and pinches one, like Grandmother Harper always used to do to her. He doesn’t respond, and she lets her fingers draw closer until his skin, his flesh, is caught between the fingernails of her thumb and index finger.
He grumbles, and she draws back. In the flickering light, she takes a minute to admire her handiwork: the perfect crescent moons.