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By Sabr ina Orah Mark

May 7, 2020

H A P P I L Y

Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily , focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.

H Ä N S E L A N D G R E T E L , B Y D A R S T E L L U N G V O N A L E X A N D E R Z I C K

In February, as a plague enters America, I am a finalist for a job I am not offered.

I am brought to campus for a three -day intervi ew. I am shown the library I’ll never have access

to, and introduced to students I’ll never teach. I shake hands with faculty I’ll never see again. I describe

in great detail the course on fairy tales I’ll never offer. I stand up straight in a simple black -and -white

dress. “Don’t say anything strange,” says my mother. “Don’t blather,” she says. “You have a tendency to

blather.” I meet with a dean who rubs his face until it reddens, then asks me whether writers even

belong in universities. I meet with anothe r dean who asks me the same thing. There are so many deans. I

cannot tell the deans apart. Another dean asks me who the babies in my first collection of poems, The

Babies , actually are. “We only have a few minutes left,” he adds. “They don’t exist,” I thin k I say. I am

hurrying. “I was writing about voices we’ll never hear,” I think I say. He stands up and shakes my hand. I

shake so many hands. I can’t tell if everything is at stake, or nothing is at stake. All I know is that I am

being tested, and whether or not I am offered this job will depend on the appetite and mood of

strangers. “Your final task,” I imagine the dean saying, “is to make a rope out of these ashes. Do it and

the job is yours.” On the third day of the interview, the head of the creative de partment asks me if the courses I

would be expected to teach should even exist. “No,” I wish I had said as I made my body gently vanish.

“They shouldn’t exist at all.” Instead I say yes, and pull a beautiful, made -up reason from the air and

offer it to him as a gift. Gold for your dust, sir. Pearls for your pigs. “Who is watching your sons right

now?” he asks. “Their father,” I answer.

What does it mean to be worth something? Or worth enough? Or worthless? What does it mean

to earn a living? What does it me an to be hired? What does it mean to be let go?

It’s May now. More than thirty million Americans have lost their jobs. What mattered in February

hardly seems to matter now. My sons, my husband, and I are lucky. We have stayed healthy, and we have

enough mo ney and enough food to eat. In between teaching my sons the difference between a scalene

triangle and an isosceles, and moving my writing workshops from my garage to pixelated classrooms, and

cleaning my house, and going nowhere, and being scared, and look ing for bread flour and yeast, I can

barely remember what it felt like to plead my case for three straight days. It feels good to barely

remember.

“You write a lot about motherhood,” says the sixteenth or seventeenth dean.

In the Brothers Grimm’s “Cherry,” an old king with three sons cannot decide who of the three

should inherit the kingdom, and so he gives his sons three trials: the first, that they should seek “cloth

so fine” the king can draw it through his golden ring. The second, that they find a dog s mall enough to fit

inside a walnut shell. And the third, to bring home the “fairest lady” in all the land. In the Grimms’ “The

Six Servants” a prince will win his princess if he brings back a ring the old queen has dropped into the

red sea, devour three hu ndred oxen (“skin and bones, hair and horns”), drink three hundred barrels of

wine, and keep his arms around the princess all night without falling asleep. And in “Rumpelstiltskin,” if

the poor miller’s daughter spins larger and larger rooms full of straw into gold she will become queen. If

not, she will die. Fairy tales are riddled with tasks like these. Some contenders cheat, and some were

never worthy, and some take the dreary, barren road, and some take the smooth, shady one, and some

are helped by bird s, and some are helped by giants, and some by witches, and some by luck.

I call my mother. “I can’t find bread flour or yeast anywhere.” “ F**k the bread,” says my mother.

“The bread is over.”

In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into

gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop

out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don’t inherit the kingdom is vanishment.

What happens when your skills are no longer needed for the sake of the fairy tale? A great gust comes

and carries you away.

In fairy tales, the king is the king. If he dethrones, his bones clatter into a heap and vanish.

Loosen the seams of the stepmother, and reach in. Nothing but stepmother inside. Even when the

princess is cinders and ash, she is still entirely princess.

I send my sons on a scavenger hunt because it’s day fifty -eight of homeschooling, and I’m all out

of ideas. I give them a checklist: a rock, soil, a berry, something soft, a red leaf, a brown leaf, something

alive, something dead, an example of erosion, something that looks happy, a dead branch on a living tree.

They come back with two canvas totes filled with nature. I can’t pinpoint what this lesson is exactly.

Something about identification and possession. Something about buying time. As I empty the bags and

touch the moss, and the leaves, and th e twigs, and the berries, and a robin -blue eggshell, I consider how

much we depend on useless, arbitrary tasks to prove ourselves. I consider how much we depend on these

tasks so we can say, at the very end, we succeeded.

Tomorrow, on day fifty -nine, I wil l ask my sons to “find me an acre of land / Between the salt

water and the sea -strand, / Plough it with a lamb’s horn, / Sow it all over with one peppercorn, / Reap it

with a sickle of leather, / And gather it up with a rope made of heather.” I will tell t hem if they perform

each one of these tasks perfectly, they will be rewarded with more tasks. And if they perform each of

those tasks perfectly, they will be rewarded with more. Until, at last, they will not be able to tell the

difference between their han ds and another boy’s hands.

Over the years I have applied for hundreds of professorships, and even received some interviews.

I’ve wanted a job like this for so long, I barely even know why I want it anymore. I look at my hands. I

can’t tell if they’re mine.

“Of course you can tell if your hands are yours,” says my mother. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I have no real job,” I say. “Of course you have a real job,” she says. “I have no flour,” I say.

“F**k the bread,” says my mother again. “The bread is over.”

And maybe the bread, as I’ve alway s understood it, really is over. The new world order is

rearranging itself on the planet and settling in. Our touchstone is changing color. Our criteria for earning

a life, a living, are mutating like a virus that wants badly to stay alive. I text a friend , “I can’t find bread

flour.” She lives in Iowa. “I can see the wheat,” she says, “growing in the field from outside my window.”

I watch a video on how to harvest wheat. I can’t believe I have no machete. I can’t believe I spent so many hours begging unive rsities to hire me, I forgot to learn how to separate the chaff from the wheat

and gently grind.

If I had a machete I would use it to cut the mice, and the princess, and the king, and the

stepmother, and the castle, and the wolf, and the mother, and the so ns, free from their function so they

could disappear into their own form.

But also I wanted an office with a number. I wanted a university ID. I wanted access to a fancy

library and benefits and students and colleagues and travel money. I wanted the whole stupid kingdom.

“And then what?” says my mother. “And then nothing,” I say as I jump off the very top of a fairy tale

that has no place for me. “You’re better off,” says my mother. I look around. I’ve landed where I am.

I like it here. I feel like I’m in G ertrude Stein territory, where the buttons are so tender they’ve come

undone. The whole kingdom is spilling out of itself. There are holes everywhere. To the east, a pile of

impossible tasks of my own making. To the west, a mountain of broken crowns I will melt and recast into

a machete. “This is so nice,” writes Gertrude Stein, “and sweet and yet there comes the change, there

comes the time to press more air. This does not mean the same as disappearance.” It’s day sixty of

homeschooling. Eli asks me to rem ind him how to make an aleph . I take a pencil, and draw it for him very

carefully. “It’s like a branch,” I say, “with two little twigs attached.” “You know what, Mama?” he says.

“You’d make a really good teacher.” “Thank you,” I say. And then I show him h ow to draw a bet .