“What did they sing?” the stepmother asked, not because she was interested, but because she felt it would be polite.
“Tzzz, tzzz, tzzz,” her husband sang on the tips of his white teeth. The teeth that she insisted he bleach.
“That’s not a song,” she said.
“Oh, but it is,” he said, and he sang it again. “Tzzz, tzzz, tzzz.” He sang it gorgeously, lovingly, magnanimously. He sang it with a smile curving across those white, white teeth. He never sang that way for her.
As her belly grew, swelled, puffed, she bought a stethoscope, and listened for the sounds of her own child singing. She heard silence.
And the stepmother hated the girls.
And the stepmother hated Ronia Drake.
7.
As Ronia Drake ran, she did not miss her daughters. She knew she should feel guilty for this but she did not. When she was young, she was afraid of being alone and filled the empty spaces of her life with boyfriends and best friends and intimate acquaintances. But now. Now, it was different.
Ever since her husband learned how to bleach his teeth, how to artfully tousle his hair with pomade, and how to love the woman who would be her daughters’ stepmother, Ronia had her children on Wednesdays through Saturdays, and her husband had them on Sundays through Tuesdays. This arrangement worked for a long time while the stepmother did not conceive. But the stepmother wanted a baby. Of course she did. Pretty girl like that would want to pass it on. Ronia Drake, when she was young and slick with love, wanted a baby as well. She got two, and her body showed it. Then her husband left.
So it goes, she told people.
Finally, the waist of the stepmother swelled prettily. She bloomed, blossomed, was ripe and happy. At first. But after a while the growth was more rapid and uncontained. She doubled and tripled. She grew out of her maternity clothes and hired a woman to sew new shirts to cover her enormous middle.
You’re fine, the doctors said, you have a healthy boy—and just one, so don’t worry. But the stepmother worried and Ronia Drake could tell.
For two weeks, the stepmother had avoided allowing the girls into her home.
I’m so tired, she said.
My back hurts, my ass hurts, my belly hurts, my legs hurt, she said.
You understand, of course you do, she said.
Ronia Drake held her tongue. Lazy, she thought but smiled kindly instead. Of course she understood.
Ronia Drake loved her daughters. Loved them. She loved the mown grass scent of their matching scalps. She loved their reedy arms and matching pale lips, and how, no matter what color they wore, the mind’s eye dressed them in green. She loved the way they pressed their fingertips on her cheekbone when she pretended to sleep. They were her girls, and she loved them.
But when her husband—no, ex-husband—and sometimes her husband’s new wife, came to pick up the girls in the brand new Audi, Ronia Drake kissed their mown grass heads, and straightened their pink shirts and brown pants (though in her memory, they would only be wearing green), and told them to be good girls as she caressed their delicate faces, pressing her fingertips gently along their cheekbones. She stood on the curb and waved to them. They watched her through the window, their faces drawn and solemn. They waved back, the car rumbled then glided away, and her children disappeared.
Then, Ronia Drake did not miss her children. She painted. She worked. She ran—long runs along the river, or the creek, or from one end of the city to the other. Sometimes she ran for hours without tiring. She felt unfettered, faceless and unnamed. Lost, yes, but there was a freedom in being lost. There was a freedom in abandonment too, if you thought about it right.
She painted the walls in large, complicated murals that changed when she felt it was time for them to change. In the girls’ room, she painted a collage of important women, to inspire them. But when the girls found them boring, she covered up the severe suffragettes and resistance organizers, and painted bugs instead—delicate diplopods, luscious butterflies as they pleasured trembling flowers, and sure-footed arachnids pulling filament upon filament from their bellies. She painted figures that looked like girls if you looked at them in one way and bugs if you looked at them in another.
In the living room, she painted a girl sitting on a park bench with an old woman. The girl was unattractive, and would have been in an agreeable way, if it weren’t for the unpleasantness in her eyes and the slice of her mouth. The old woman was so old, the folds of her skin so complicated and fragile, as to render her shockingly beautiful.
People asked Ronia: “Does she glow in the dark? How did you get the old woman to shine like that?”
“I don’t know,” she said truthfully.
People asked, “Is it just me, or is that the ugliest looking ugly girl you’ve ever seen?” They saw the way the girl had just moistened her lips with her cracked tongue, the way the tip lingered under her sharp teeth. They noticed the way her knuckles were bent, ready, itching to strike.
“And look,” the people said. “The branches look like eyes.”
“And look,” the people said. “The grass looks like a mouth. A grassy mouth with hungry teeth and a large damp tongue.”
“Oh,” Ronia said. “I hadn’t noticed.”
8.
Once upon a time, a little girl sat next to a witch on a park bench as the sun set over the park. The witch was old and kind, with fragile skin that folded and creased upon itself like a complicated map. When people walked by, the witch would smile, and though they did not notice, they began to relax, soften, become unaccountably happy.
“You see,” the witch said to the girl. “It is neither good nor bad. It is itself, but can extend our goodness or badness, our foolishness or
