And as Cinderella went off to complete her first marathon, Cinderella’s stepsisters stared at their bloody feet: the one missing her heel, the other with a single stump where just a few days before there had been toes.
“You know,” the elder said, turning to the younger, “I think we might have some seriously warped priorities.”
—FAIRY TALES FOR LITTLE FEMINISTS:
CINDERELLA, EVELYN HARPER KREIS
September 1995
Saskia was twelve. She and Lexi had been promoted to the middle of the bus: a relatively safe position. Far enough from the driver for coolness, far enough from the back to avoid the older kids’ taunts. But the middle had its own threats, and Saskia still knew enough to be wary when a girl’s face peeked up over the back of the seat in front of them.
“So, you’re, like, really good at the piano?” Becca Talbot’s voice was almost a bray. Saskia couldn’t fathom what it was that made her so popular. Could people not hear her?
She raised her eyebrows and pointed to her headphones, looked out the window.
But Becca Talbot was even louder than Rachmaninoff as she swiveled her head to Lexi.
“So, like, she actually does think she’s better than everyone else.”
But Lexi just looked away. Lexi was loyal to Saskia, but she would have liked to be Becca Talbot: with her swimming pool, her Nintendo, her two rich parents battling to win her love.
Saskia took her headphones off with exaggerated slowness and a sigh.
Becca’s face broke into a watermelon-smile of delight.
“So, how good are you?”
Better than you’ve ever been at anything. Better than you will ever be at anything. But she could feel Lex, still, tense as a cello string beside her.
“I’m good,” she said. Hating how defensive her attempt at humility sounded.
“I guess you’d have to be. You play, what, like a million hours a day?”
Faces were turning to them. The other kids liked to see Becca go in for the kill. But, more than that, they liked to see her play with her victims first.
Saskia was nobody’s victim.
“Six. More on the weekends.”
Fake bafflement.
“How do you have time for anything else? Have you ever even, like, kissed a boy?”
“Of course she has,” Lexi chirped indignantly. It was all Saskia could do to keep from gaping at her. Lexi had, this past summer at the Maine camp that her father insisted on sending her to. And she knew that the upper schoolers parked outside the armory to make out.
But Saskia?
This new requirement, the social demand for romance, had been like an itchy tag at the back of Saskia’s neck since seventh grade started a few weeks ago. She practiced the piano religiously, obsessively. She got decent grades. She even had a friend. She’d been doing everything right, or right enough, until this past year. Now, the requirement that boys find her attractive, on top of everything else, seemed very unfair. How could you even control what somebody else liked?
Becca gave a little snort. “Sure she has.” She turned back, but not before murmuring: “I bet you’re not even that good at piano.”
“She’s so good you wouldn’t be able to understand it,” a voice came from across the aisle. It was one of the boys from the other seventh-grade class. “She’s so good that it would go right over your head. You wouldn’t even know what you didn’t know.”
Even as Saskia’s face reddened, Becca had already flipped back around with a snort, thumping against the fake leather seat with an exaggerated push of her weight that made the seat back buckle out against Saskia’s knees. Saskia raised her leg sharply in return, resulting in a muffled yelp from the other side.
Saskia whipped around, wanting to show him, this guy—what was his name?—her gratitude, but after a second of staring at him meaningfully, she dropped her gaze.
She’d probably gotten it wrong. She must have gotten it wrong.
January 2020
Patrick returns her email quickly, confirming their meeting Friday afternoon. But Sas can’t dwell on that for too long. As it turns out, Evie wrote her own obituary; Saskia finds it on her mother’s desktop as she searches through the various calendars for Patrick appointments—spotting them, finally, dotted through Evie’s Google Calendar for June 2019. But as she’s forwarding the screenshots to Tara, another folder catches her eye: FOR AFTER. There’s only one document in there, and Saskia clicks it open with trepidation. But it’s brief.
It is with great regret that we announce the passing of Evelyn Harper Kreis of Milwaukee, on ______, at the age of _____ years.
The only child of Constance and Frederick, Evelyn leaves behind a husband, Michael, and a beloved daughter, Saskia.
Bestselling author of the Fairy Tales for Little Feminists series, Ms. Kreis was also a renowned photographer and illustrator. A tenured professor in the Art and Design Department at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, focusing on drawing, Ms. Kreis twice received the university’s award for outstanding teaching. Evelyn was a woman of many passions, including gardening, opera, and literature.
A memorial service will be held ______. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Foundation.
Tonight, they’re eating their dinner of memorial leftovers in the den. Her father’s skin looks paper-thin in the firelight; she can see all sorts of purple-blue veins, arteries, beneath the surface. She takes a deep breath. Into the ring, Sas.
“I, uh, I’m going to see Patrick on Friday.”
And his eyes pause on her, uncannily still over his soggy sandwich.
“Are you sure I shouldn’t be there?” Not the same as: Do you want me to come?
Does it seem strange, to him, that she wants to see Patrick alone? Or is she finally coming off as responsible, the kind of daughter who follows through on things, who can be trusted? She presses her lips together, shakes her head, forces confidence and lightness into her voice. “I can do it. It’s better coming from me, he’ll see me as more of a … mediator.” She’s lying, can’t he tell she’s lying? She barrels ahead. “Also, I found—this—” She can’t think of a suitable introduction, so she just passes her phone over with the obituary pulled up.
Her father reads it, face a mask.
“Did you write this?” he asks, handing the phone back to her.
“No. I found it on Mom’s computer,” she says again.
He nods.
“Do you want to add anything?” she asks.
He shakes his head so slightly she almost misses it.
“Can you send it to the Journal Sentinel, kiddo? And maybe the Times?”
“Sure,” she says, starting her search for email addresses. As she sends them, he turns on the news. This was never what the Kreises did, eating in front of the television, and in no world was it a Harper habit, but it’s better than chilled silence. She wishes she knew how to read her father’s moods better. The truth was, she’d never had to—that was her mother’s domain. When it came to raising Saskia, her father had always been the capable and calm adult in the room, never the parent whose feelings she had to manage. At least, never before.
Saskia shovels the rest of her sandwich into her mouth. Mess here, not sure when I’ll be back, she texts to James. It’s after eight in New York, which means she’s texting beyond their agreed-upon hours, and she’s not bothering to use any of their coded language, but fuck it. That’s his problem.
Then, Georgia. When institutions failed you, when you ran up against walls, what did you do? You turned to other women. The princesses have taught her that much. She taps out: Let’s grab lunch, just the two of us? Within seconds, her godmother shoots back a series of emojis. Saskia interprets them as hungry, hug, yum, fire. Georgia has always had what Saskia thinks of (very uncoolly, she’s sure) as a way with the youths. She’s the only one of her parents’ friends she’s ever been able to stand. None of the endless What do you want to be when you grow up? that she got from everyone else. What did she want to be? She was already being it. Who the fuck were they, now that they were grown up?
Saskia sets her phone down. For a moment, the plaid couches, the threadbare velvet cushions, the snoring dog curled tight at her feet—she feels wrapped up in the warm embrace of the Elf House, as the fire casts flickering light onto the paneled walls.
Five generations of Harpers. All of the women—Emilia, Rosemary, Constance, Evelyn, Saskia—marrying into the name or inheriting it, but they are all, somehow, still here.
When she dies, she thinks, she wants to come back as a ghost that haunts the fireplaces, twisting flames into clues about who she was. Saskia Kreis. Prodigy. Heiress. And then, perhaps, she could finally say the third thing that had made her special, whispering it into eternity.
Beloved of Patrick.
In the meantime, their names beat on in the background like a drum.
Emilia, Rosemary, Constance, Evelyn, Saskia.
This is their house. Theirs. Always has been, always will be.
When Saskia was growing up, Bartolotta’s Lake Park Bistro had been one of a small handful of Milwaukee restaurants where you could spend more than $100 on lunch. That hasn’t been the case for a decade or more, prices rising ever higher around the city, but Georgia suggested it and Saskia’s too proud to refuse. It’s a restaurant full of memories for her: after-concert dinners, celebrations, her first sip of champagne. And nothing, not a single linen tablecloth, has changed, she thinks as she weaves under the hanging chandeliers, following the waiter to her godmother. Only she has. Saskia, and the cost of a Cobb salad.
Georgia has picked a table looking out over the water, and Saskia feels her blood whooshing in time with the waves. For a second, she resents it, resents it all: the expensive restaurant, the inescapable lake, the Elf House weighing like physical bricks on her shoulders.
She kisses her godmother’s cheeks with a smile.
“Aunt Georgie,” she starts once they’ve ordered.
“Yeah, kid.” Georgia has this showbiz cadence to her speech, even though she’s never left Wisconsin, which used to drive Saskia nuts. It seems more endearing, now.
But Saskia has to hold firm if she’s going to get the information she needs. She looks into the older woman’s eyes.
“You knew,” she says, and it’s not a question.
Georgia blinks away, startled, looking out over the frozen lake.
“About the disease?” she says finally, weakly. “Sure. I knew.” But before Saskia can say anything, she’s turned fierce and garrulous, mouth running fast as she twists back to the table. “I couldn’t not know. We talked every day of our lives from the time we could talk. You think I’d miss something like that? But, honey”—and she grabs Saskia’s hands with her own, which are cold and bony—“if you think I didn’t want to tell you, you’re dead wrong. The fights we had over it! You’re long since grown up, after all, and I kept saying to her, ‘What if you misjudge that final window, to say goodbye?’”
Saskia starts as Georgia pauses. So, her mother had planned to tell her. Eventually. But she had failed to realize how quickly things were deteriorating. The same failure that had allowed her to renegotiate a ninety-day extension on her manuscript submission in mid-December, when she wouldn’t survive January.
“If it’s any comfort,” Georgia says, her voice turning slower, rougher, as she blinks away again, “I would give anything not to have had to see her the way she was, in those last days. Not telling you— Don’t you see, Sas, that it’s the best thing she could have done? It was a gift.”
Before Saskia can reply, the waiter cuts her off, trotting over with Georgia’s rare steak, Saskia’s Cobb salad. They pull their hands apart.
And Saskia, for one, is grateful. She feels like she’s just been doused with a bucket of water.
“Thank you,” she murmurs, smoothing the already smooth napkin over her lap. “But, Aunt Georgie, I’ve been wondering. Was she being funny about anything, last year?” She rolls her eyes at her own vagueness. “The house. Did she talk to you about selling it, about giving it away?”
Georgia’s plucked, arched brows draw together. “Oh, kid. I mean, we never talked about it, not exactly, but it’s one of those things you just know. It was unsustainable, keeping it. But I think it broke her heart, a little. The idea of selling. All that history.” She picks out a french fry and swallows it. “I’m glad she didn’t have to be the one to decide to let it go.”
Saskia tries to make her voice light, but it just comes out strangled. So when it came to the will, Georgia knew nothing. So even other women couldn’t save you, sometimes. “No?” she says.
Georgia shakes her helmet of a bob, starts sawing her meat into tiny bits. “When we were little—we were like you and Lex, you know, two only daughters—we used to talk about how we’d rule the East Side, grand dames in our side-by-side mansions. Christ, she was obsessed with that place.” She pops a cube of the rare steak into her mouth. “But, I mean, if your house is anything like mine, you must be paying a fortune in upkeep. We did chat about that.” She shrugs. “Are you asking whether she would have been okay with you selling? Is that it? Are you thinking of putting it on the market?”
Saskia opens her mouth but can’t bring herself to speak.
She could tell the truth, of course. But there’s something about the situation that she knows doesn’t reflect well on her as a daughter. Evelyn left the house to some acquaintance? Or, best-case scenario: Her mother donated the house to the university? And Saskia didn’t know any of this? Well, why not, Saskia?
“What would you do if you needed a ton of cash for your house?” Saskia asks instead. Might as well answer Georgia’s question with a question; her godmother does it enough herself. And Georgia doesn’t mind, her eyes dancing to the ceiling.
“Oh, Christ. What haven’t we done. Reverse mortgage, home equity line of credit … there’s plenty of money to borrow if you have assets, darling. And of course, we do have the assets. It’s not about that, it’s about whether you want to pay the cost.” The cost. Georgia’s reveling in the mystery, of the vague dramatic utterings, and Saskia doesn’t begrudge her the theatrics. But she does make up her mind to go straight to the bank afterward.
And then that hand, again. Reaching out from across the table, grabbing at her. She lets it happen.
“You know, I was so envious of your mother growing up—next to the Elf House, ours is just … well.” Saskia keeps her face studiously blank. Georgia’s house doesn’t have a name; it was built sometime in the 1920s, a good fifty years after the Elf House, though on Harper property that they’d sold off around the time the brewery folded. And while the Elf House is all stately gray stone, Georgia’s is an Italianate palace with fountains, with orange terra-cotta roof tiles. It looks perfectly ridiculous when it snows. “We used to play the best games of hide-and-seek in there. Did you know that one time, Evie had to hide one of her boyfriends in the dumbwaiter?” Saskia shakes her head. “Well! She heard Mr. Harper coming home. And her father was scary. And this is before the sexual revolution went mainstream, of course—oh, he would have murdered her if he’d found out about her Pill!” Georgia blinks at her a little absently.
“The dumbwaiter…” Saskia prompts.
“Oh! And she has Bob…” Georgia laughs. “She has Bob up in her room. And she’s absolutely frantic. She tells him to hide in the dumbwaiter and goes downstairs to greet her father. But Bob—cute boy, Bob, not the brightest. Bob climbs down the laundry chute instead! Escaped through the basement.”
Saskia laughs. “To be fair—”
“Oh, I know, they’re right next to each other. And that house, with everything so dark and windy … it’s amazing he didn’t get trapped between walls or something. Or in a secret passageway. We looked so hard for a secret passageway when we were young, but I’ll tell you what—” She holds up a finger. “If anyone could find one and get trapped in there, it would be Bob Robinson!”
“Wait, Mom dated someone called Robert Robinson?”
Georgia rolls her eyes. “Well. That’s why he went by Bob, you see?”
As Georgia prattles on, Saskia realizes how far they’ve gotten from what she needs. You can’t dance around things with Georgia. She’ll answer any question you ask, but her monologues will never contain the information you need, because she’s not really listening.
You just have to fucking say it.
“Aunt Georgie,” she says, “what do you know about Mom’s will?”
“Nothing, babe.” Her godmother pops a french fry into her mouth, red brown with the juices from her rare steak. “Why? Did she leave me something?”
“I … No.”
Georgia scans her with those round eyes. “I always did like that silver Queen Anne tea set,” she says.
The responses rise quick and thick in Saskia’s throat. She takes a deep breath and forces herself to go on. “She left … she left kind of a weird bequest to Patrick Kintner.”
“Who’s Patrick Kinder?” Georgia says.
How to answer that question? “Kintner. A colleague from the university.”
Georgia scrunches up her face, shakes her head. “Oh, wait. Is he the Fox?”
In another context, Saskia might have laughed at the antiquated compliment.
“I always thought he looked more like a lion,” she says.
Georgia laughs with a little snort. “No, I mean—Christ, the man’s sexy, if it’s the guy I’m thinking of. Dark hair, about six feet?” Saskia nods. “Yeah, Jake and I used to call him the Fox. Because he has this weird way of kind of … slinking around. Looking right at you like he’s thinking about how to get through you.” She gives an exaggerated shiver. “Honestly, sexy or not, he’s always given me the fucking creeps.”
Saskia has to look away, at the waves beating against the shore.
“What did Evie leave him?” Georgia asks, bending forward.
“Oh. It’s nothing. Anyway, come by the house sometime this weekend,” Saskia says, clearing her throat. “I’ll make sure you get that tea set.”
After lunch, Saskia drives to the bank, where she waits for an hour before the Kreises’ banker, Jeffrey, is free to talk with her. It takes him another hour to finally convince her that a mortgage for the kind of money she needs would cost about $7,000 a month. And even with the Little Feminists money, even if she pretended she was going to keep her current job, Saskia won’t pull in anything like the $250,000 a year the bank would need to see for that kind of loan.
She offers an alternate solution. With her father’s salary, though, if he were to cosign—
Is Jeffrey blushing? Surely bankers don’t blush.
“It’s our policy not to give out a mortgage to anyone who will be over the age of seventy-five when the term ends. And your father—”
She holds up her hand. She doesn’t need it said: the reminder that one day, one day maybe not that long from now, he, too, will die.
Jeffrey does offer her a boon, a single boon: a mortgage for the expenses, the foundation, the cliffs. It comes out to $500,000 for thirty years, in her name, at $2,500 a month. Given that the lien is part of it, it’s incredibly generous. All the same, she has him recalculate at $600,000. They’d need to win the probate case for that to work, and Tara doesn’t come cheap. And, as Tara warned them, the whole thing could take months, if not years.
For $600,000: $2,900 a month. She could afford it, and she’s approved. A zing of hope like a laser beam cutting through her.
But she has to say no, for the moment. Has to tell the banker that her hands are tied until the court decides the house is theirs.
As she leaves, her phone pings with a message from Tara: the probate hearing’s scheduled for February 20, a month out. She’ll have to change her ticket, have to stay longer. The heaviness of the Elf House is descending back upon her before she’s even pulled out of the bank’s parking lot.
And it’s all she can think of as she drives. What good is it, to have everything in the world tossed in your lap, if it doesn’t allow you to keep the one thing that you want?