“First, I tell him fairy tales – the very oldest ones, with the pain and death and forced marriages pared away like dead foliage… As he grows, though, he asks too many questions. Why would they not eat the pig, hungry as they were as wicked as he had been? Why was the witch permitted to go free after her terrible deeds? And the sensation of fins to feet being anything less than agonizing he rejects outright after cutting his hand with a pair of scissors… So then I tell him stories closer to true…” – “The Husband Stitch,” Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado.
I read this and I thought to myself that I knew this feeling exactly: the reading of stories and the incessant questions, an unwillingness to believe in the world the writer has set up in the story. (Why do I feel personally offended when children ask me questions about stories that aren’t even mine?) While I don’t have a child of my own, I was a reading child, I am a reading woman, and a writer, and, finally, a teacher. In school, we read a lot of Latin. We read it, but my students don’t often have questions about it. My students are often just willing to accept the stories as they are. The kings of Rome rape and capture women because they don’t have wives, and they don’t find that worthy of questions.
As a reader myself, I am not always questioning. I don’t always ask questions about stories, or question the story. I am not indignant, unless the book is bad. The questions are what get me here, in this passage. Me – I can listen to stories, I am willing to follow what the writer intended, I want to fall into some other world, or at least someone else’s version of reality. This is one of the reasons why I read. Of course fairy tales don’t happen in real life. In fact, the stories often end with a message, something we are supposed to take away from the story, the story that happened long ago and far away, in a world ruled by kings and queens, a universe where mermaids do exist. Those stories are trying to tell us something, but they are not, necessarily, trying to tell us that the things that happen in them are real and true reality. They are trying to give us meaning.
Every year, I teach the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe. This story is basically Romeo and Juliet and also A Midsummer Night’s Dream. My students dislike this story. The boy and girl are forbidden to ever see each other, but are hopelessly in love. They communicate through a wall, a small crack that has grown there, to aid the two young lovers in speaking with whispers and nods. (Here, I am met with skepticism. Is this just Romeo and Juliet?) Pyramus and Thisbe decide to meet at last, decide on a place, and, of course, Thisbe arrives there first. Thisbe sees a lion and is terrified, so she runs away into a cave. Pyramus comes, finds Thisbe’s abandoned shawl, torn and covered in blood from the lion, thinks the worst, and kills himself. (But she’s not dead! Followed by eyerolls, they know this story.) When Thisbe comes out of hiding, she finds Pyramus taking his last breaths, and in response to the love that she lost, she also commits suicide. The questions I get: why can’t they just walk around the wall? why don’t they try to talk through the crack in the wall instead of nodding? this is stupid (not a question, but an unwillingness to suspend disbelief). why would he kill himself? doesn’t he know she’s just in the cave? why would she kill herself? this is stupid. why does he tell this whole story just to tell us about the mulberry tree?
And that’s it. As they die, their blood, gushing from their wounds, stains the roots of a mulberry tree. The fruits, once white, become purple. If you now look up a picture of a mulberry tree, you will see that this story is true. The story is not about star-crossed lovers, the story is about the mulberry tree. How the mulberry tree came to be. At some point, we become skeptical. We have these expectations, because we think we know the story of Romeo and Juliet. I want to teach my students to trust the author, in this case Ovid. Trust that he has a message, he’s creating this world for a reason, telling this story for a reason. Only this story (the story of a double-suicide, anyway) has, seemingly, little to do with the final message, the color of the mulberry tree and its fruits, except for the blood. This makes me wonder about children and reading. Have we spent too much time telling children what to read, how to read, giving them answers to everything, always having something that is neatly packaged? Always a yes or no answer, always a black or white message.
I am hopelessly spacey, always have been. Some of my friends’ parents once said that it was good that I had such grounded friends because if I didn’t I would just float away. This was when I was in high school. I wanted those other worlds, I wanted to live in the other worlds, away from reality. Not because I had a bad homelife or because I was treated poorly. More because I didn’t like my city, and I wanted out, out of the social and political conservatism, out of church, out of the heat, out of a place that didn’t always accept differences. When I read, I don’t ask questions. I listen, I consume the world and want never to let go of it or be taken away from it. I want to discover how the writer created the story and for what reason. I trust this reality, this un-reality.
Alexandra Sladky 