"Emily," he says, "why don't you put on this dress?"
When he was a little boy it was always one of two things. He was petted and pampered and made much of, or he was ignored and left to his own devices. When he was alone what he liked best was to sit under things. He liked to hide in plain sight, to be in the middle of all the people. He sat under the piano in the music room. At banquets he slid down his enormous chair and sat under the table with his father's dogs. They licked at his face and arms with long thoughtful tongues. He hid in the fireplaces in the great hall, behind the wrought iron screens. In the summer there were sparrows up in the chimneys, also lizards, spiderwebs, broken sooty bits of shell, feathers and bones caught in the grates. The ladies-in-waiting stood dozing in the thin dusty sunlight of his mother's rooms, and he crept under their heavy skirts and sat at their spangled feet, quiet as a mouse.
He helps Emily Apple slide the beautiful pink dress over her head. He buttons the row of buttons up her narrow back. He lifts her hair up, heaps it up and sticks pins all through the sticky teased mass. She sits perfectly still on the bed, the glass eyes of the tiger looking out at her from the folds of her skirt. He brings water in a basin and washes her face. He powders her face. He finds a locket in a heap of bangles and safety pins. Inside is a photograph of a young girl, maybe Emily Apple, or maybe not. The little girl stares at him. What kind of a girl do you think I am?He fastens the locket around Emily Apple's long neck. Her face is very naked, very beautiful. Her freckles stand out like spatters of soot on a white sheet. She looks as if she is going to a funeral or to a wedding. They find a pair of gloves and pull them up over her freckled arms. Her fingers stick out where mice have eaten the tips of the gloves, but the dress comes all the way down to the floor. They both feel more comfortable now.
Sometimes it surprises him, all these runaway girls – all these women – with their sad faces and their tiny feet. How long has this house been here? When he was looking for that girl, he went to a lot of houses. He knocked on the front doors. He announced who he was. These were eligible girls from good homes. They had maids. He asked the maids if they would try on the shoes, too. At night he dreamed about women's feet. But this house, he never came here.
He has been married for nine years. Perhaps this is the sort of house that only married men can find.
That girl, where did she go? He's still looking for her. He doesn't expect to find her, but he finds other girls. He loves his wife, but her feet are too big. It wasn't what he expected – his life, it isn't at all what he expected. His wife isn't the one that he was looking for. She was a surprise – he burst out laughing, the glass slipper hanging off her toes. She laughed and soot fell out of her hair. He loves her and she loves him, but that girl, he only danced with her one time before the clock struck midnight, and then she left her shoe behind. He was supposed to find it. He was supposed to find her. He never found her, but these girls – this girl, Emily Apple – the other girls in their tiny rooms: the woman downstairs knew exactly the sort of girl he was looking for. In one of these closets, he thinks, maybe there is (perhaps there is) a glass slipper, the match for the one in his pocket.
Some nights when he comes home, he's carrying the orphaned shoe in his coat pocket. It fits just fine. That's how small, how impossibly small it is. His wife smiles at him. She never asks where he's been. She sits in the kitchen beside the fire, with her feet tucked up under her, and he lays his head down in her lap. If only her feet weren't so big. When he was first looking for that girl, he got to lift up a lot of skirts. Only just so high. Really, not high enough. He knelt down and he tried the shoe on every single foot. But it never fit right and he always went away again with the shoe in his pocket.
His wife wasn't one of the eligible girls. She was a kitchen maid. When he saw her, she had her head stuck up the kitchen chimney. She was beating the broom up the chimney, shaking out the soot. Head to foot, she was covered in soot, black as a beetle. When she sneezed, the soot rose up in a cloud. She tried to curtsey when she saw him, and soot fell off her like a black cloak.
Everyone had crowded into the kitchen behind him: his footmen, the lady of the house, her daughters, the other maids. One of the footmen read the proclamation, and the sooty girl sneezed again. The eligible young ladies looked sulky and the maids looked haughty, as if they knew what was going to happen. They didn't like it one bit, but they weren't one bit surprised. The kitchen girl dusted off a kitchen stool and she sat her sooty self down on it, sooty arms akimbo. The long prehensile toes of her bare black feet gripped the stone floor as he knelt down beside her. Her foot was warm and gritty in his hand and her long toes wriggled as if he was tickling her. He hung the glass slipper off her toes. Soot came off on his fingers. There was soot in the long folds of her skirt. He stayed there for a minute, kneeling in the warm ashes at her feet.
"What size shoe do you wear?" he said. Her feet were so big.
"What kind of girl do you think I am?" she said. She sounded as if she were scolding him. When he looked up her face was so beautiful.
This girl sits perfectly still on the bed. There is just room enough for him to kneel down beside the bed. He lifts up her skirt, just high enough. He cups her tiny foot in his hand. How could anyone's foot be so small? It fits into the palm of his hand like a kitten or an egg. He wishes he were that small, like a shoe. He wishes he were a small, perfect shoe, that he could be matched to her foot and hidden under her skirt forever. He takes out the slipper and he slides it onto her foot. They both look down at her foot, beautiful in the glass slipper, and the girl sighs. "It fits just fine," she says. When he doesn't say anything, she says, "What do we do now?"
"What kind of girl do you think I am?" that sooty girl (his wife) said.
He says to the girl on the bed, "Take the shoe off. So we can put it on again."
2. Miss Kansas on Judgment Day.
We are sitting on our honeymoon bed in the honeymoon suite. We are in a state of honeymoon, in our honey month. These words are so sweet: honey, moon. This bed is so big, we could live on it. We have been happily marooned – honey marooned – on this bed for days. I have a pair of socks on and you've put your underwear on backwards. I mean, it's my underwear, which you've put on backwards. This is perfectly natural. Everything I have is yours now. My underwear is your underwear. We have made vows to this effect. Our underwear looks so cute on you.
I lean towards you. Marriage has affected the laws of gravity. We will now revolve around each other. You will exert gravity on me, and I will exert gravity on you. We are one another's moons. You are holding onto my feet with both hands, as if otherwise you might fall right off the bed. I think I might float up and hit the ceiling, splat, if you let go. Please don't let go.
How did we meet? When did we marry? Where are we, and how did we get here? One day, we think, we will have children. They will ask us these questions. We will make things up. We will tell them about this hotel. Our room overlooks the ocean. We have a balcony, although we have not made it that far, so far.
Where are we and how did we get here? We are so far away from home. This bed might as well be a foreign country. We are both a little bit homesick, although we have not confessed this to each other. We remember cutting the cake. We poured punch for each other, we linked our arms and drank out of each others' glasses. What was in that punch?
We are the only honeymooners in this hotel. Everyone else is a beauty pageant contestant or a beauty pageant contestant's chaperone. We have seen the chaperones in the halls, women armed with cans of hairspray and little eggs containing emergency pantyhose, looking harassed but utterly competent. Through the walls, we have heard the beauty pageant contestants talking in their sleep. We have held water glasses up to the walls in order to hear what they were saying.