Her mother died just before her 3rd birthday, after a 2½-year struggle with leukemia. In many ways, fairy tales - dark and ruthless, often structured by loss - were the stories that most resembled Lily’s life. That’s her fuel, and her festering heart.
She just doesn’t act the way a mother is supposed to. She is an artist of cunning and malice, but still - an artist. When I asked Lily why Cinderella’s stepmother was her favorite character, she leaned close to me and whispered, like a secret, “I think she looks good.”įor all her cruelty, the evil stepmother is often the fairy-tale character most defined by imagination and determination, rebelling against the patriarchy with whatever meager tools have been left to her: her magic mirror, her vanity, her pride. Maybe she just liked a virtuous reason to dump water on the floor. Maybe it was thrilling to stage her own mistreatment, to take power over the situation of powerlessness she had imagined. She and a friend liked to drink something they called pepper water, which was ordinary tap water they pretended their cruel orphan-handlers had made undrinkable. During play dates, Lily often liked to play orphan, writing down long lists of chores: dichs (dishes) moping (mopping) feeding (the fish).
When she was 6, my stepdaughter, Lily, told me that her favorite character in “Cinderella” was the evil stepmother.
