Got it? she said.
Yes, I said.
I put the anger in the dress, the color of sky. I put it in there so much I could hardly stand it — that she was about to die, that she would die unrecognized, that none of us would ever live up to her and that we were the only witnesses. That we are all so small after all that. That everybody dies anyway. I put the anger in there so much that the blue of the sky was fiercely stark, an electric blue like the core of the fire, so much that it was hard to look at. It was much harder to look at than the sun dress; the sky dress was of a whole different order. Intensely, shockingly, bluely vivid. Let her go? This was the righteous anger she had asked for, yards of it, bolts of it, even though, paradoxically, it was anger I felt because soon she would be gone.
She died the following morning, in her sleep. Even at her funeral, all I could feel was the rage, pouring out of me, while we all stood around her coffin, crying, leaning on one another, sprinkling colors from the dye bins into her hands, the colors of heaven, we hoped, while the rest of the town went about its business. Her brother rolled in on a stretcher, weeping. I had gone over to see her that morning, and found her, dead, in her bed. So quiet. The morning sun, white and clear, through the windowpanes. I stroked her hair down for an hour, her silver hair, before I left to tell anyone. The dress request had already come in, the day before, as predicted.
At the studio, under deadline, Cheryl led a seminar on blue, and sky, and space, and atmosphere, and depth, and it was successful and mournful, especially during the week after the funeral. Blue. I attended but mostly I was nurturing the feeling in me, that rage. Tending to it like a little flame candle, cupped against the wind. I knew it was the right kind, I knew it. I didn’t think I’d do much better than this dress, ever; I would go on to do good things in my life, have other meaningful moments, share in the experience of being a human being in the world, but I knew this was my big moment, and I had to be equal to it. So I sat at the seminar with half a focus, just cupping that candle flame of rage, and I half-participated in the dying of the fabric and the discussion of the various shades, and then, when they had done all they could do, and the dress was hanging in the middle, a clear and beautiful blue, I sent everyone home. Are you sure? Cheryl asked, buttoning up her coat. Go, I said. Yes. It was night, and the blue sky was unlit, and it was a new moon, so it was up to me to find the blue sky in here, only. It was draped over us all, but hidden. I went to the bins, and listened for the chords, and felt her in me. I felt the ghost of her, passing through me, as I mixed and dyed, and I felt the rage in me, that she had to be a ghost: the softness of the ghost, right up next to and surrounding the sharp and burning core of my anger. Both guided my hands. I picked the right colors to mix with blue, a little of so many other colors and then so many different kinds of blue and gray and more blue and more. And in it all, the sense of shaking my fists, at the sky, shaking my fists high up to the sky because that is what we do, when someone dies too early, too beautiful, too undervalued by the world, or sometimes just at all, we shake our fists at the sky, the vast sky, the big blue beautiful indifferent sky, and the anger is righteous and strong and helpless and huge. I shook and I shook, and I put all of it into the dress.
When the sun rose, it was a clear morning, the early sky pale and wide. I had worked all night. I wasn’t tired yet but I could feel the pricklings of it, around me, peripheral. I made a pot of coffee and sat in the chill with a cup and the dress, which I had hung again from a hanger in the middle of the room. The rest of the tailors drifted over in the morning, one by one, and no one said anything. They entered the room and looked up, and then they surrounded it with me, and we held hands and they said I was the new Color Master, and I said okay, because it was obvious that that was true, even though I knew I would never reach her levels again, but at least, for this one dress, I did. They didn’t even praise me, they just looked at it and cried. We all cried.
Esther sent off the invoice pigeon, and with care, we placed the dress into its package, and when the carriage came by, we laid it carefully over the backseat, as usual. Manny came by right before the carriage left, and he looked at an edge of fabric to see the color as we were packing it up, and he held me close. We ate our hunk of gift chocolate. We cleaned up the area around the bins, and swept the floor of dust, and talked to a builder, a friend of Manny’s, about expanding one of the rooms into an official seminar studio. The carriage trotted off, with the dress in the backseat, led by two white horses.
From what I heard, soon after the Princess got the third dress, she left town. The rest I do not know.
The rest of the story — known, I’m told, as “Donkeyskin”—is hers.
I read “Donkeyskin” many times as a kid, and what I loved most were those dresses. Inside an unsettling, provocative story — the king marrying his daughter? — was the universe revealed in fabric. What would it look like, a dress the color of the moon? It seemed this princess, in having dresses that seemed to go way beyond anything one might wear to a regular ball, was dabbling in something bigger, or had a connection to something truly magical in the kingdom. Who were these tailors and seamstresses? I didn’t think about any of this directly, but the pull to read and reread the story often had to do with the breathlessness I felt, imagining a dress the color of the sky. Which sky? Blue-sky day, or cloudy day? A cumulus cloud boa or a nimbus collar?
I feel the same when watching movies of deep-sea fish. Their unusual shapes and colors, which often do seem to resurface in fashion — ruffles that look like a kind of coral, or capes that seem to be taken straight from the black sweep of a manta ray. Clothing that reflects nature. It was great fun to spend time thinking about how those colors happened because it had to be difficult. No way that dress was just an ordinary blue.
MARJORIE SANDOR. The White Cat
IN THE STORIES YOU LIKED BEST AS A CHILD, MY LOVE, THERE WAS always a terrible repetition of tests. The hero, in order to win a wife and make his fortune, set out full of confidence to retrieve some object not even precious to himself. He was driven by the father-king who, facing the wobbling end of his reign, was in an unusually selfish, wheedling mood. And, let’s face it, this father had never been a noble fellow: forever trying to steal a kingdom, or defend his own against imagined enemies.
Three times the hero plunges back into the unknown world he has by dream or accident discovered, where the treasure — coveted by the king, whose hungers are unconscious and therefore impossible to sate — lies surrounded by obstacle, tedium, dragon. Three times he plunges in, three times risks his life to get the prize: first it’s the golden apple; second, the magical linen woven of thread so fine the whole cloth can pass through the smallest needle; and at last, the tiniest dog in the world, who can be heard barking inside a corn kernel, itself enclosed in a walnut shell.
The trouble is, in that other world, there appears someone more alluring than the object of the quest, for instance a beautiful white cat who begs the hero to stay — without words, of course. Please stay. Take the treasure back to the king, but come back. I need you here. I am forbidden to say why.
The mystery of the white cat’s need, not to mention her startlingly human beauty and intelligence, is far more deep and fulfilling and morally necessary than the foolish king’s demand for a golden something-or-other. It in fact turns the quest trivial, wrong, and inconsequential.
With each successive journey it gets harder and harder to cross the border back to the king, the real world. The reward — wife and land and future fortune — goes dim, the whole thing revealed for what it is, a repetitive, pointless exercise, an exchange of commodities: golden apple for king’s kingdom, princess-bride, etc. The taste of ashes in his mouth, the hero travels into middle age. Meanwhile, deep in the woods of his awakened imagination, the cat-queen, who can offer no material reward or even a logical reason why he should give up the world for her, waits helplessly by the midnight gates of her kingdom, bound by an ancient curse of silence, forbidden to ask favors or tell her story. Who is she? You don’t know, but the prince’s third and final return to his father’s castle, with apple, linen, dog at last acceptable to the king, and the earthly reward achieved, always left you feeling hollow, incomplete.
By now the lost domain, with its caverns and balustrades, its pointed gates and absolute danger, had gotten hold of you.
Meanwhile, back in the king’s palace, the elusive world is dismissed with shocking ease by courtiers and peasants alike. The prince himself is now bound by silence, too, his story trapped behind walls and briars and the hills in the distance, until, like the blurry cluster of the Pleiades, it is only visible when you gaze to the side.
