Stepsisters

“Anastasia? Where are you?” I heard Drizella call out to me, but I sat on the bench in our garden, hoping she wouldn’t find me. I dabbed my eyes with my handkerchief and sniffed quietly so she wouldn’t hear me. The garden was winding, weaving through a path of tall fences and hedges. It was easy to get lost in the maze.

            “Anastasia? You can’t hide in here for forever, eventually you have to come inside” I remained silent. She was right, eventually I would have to go inside face my mother, face my future with her. It was a late autumn evening and all around me were dead leaves and dying bushes. The sun was setting and soon it would be almost too cold to bear, especially in the dress I was wearing.

            “Come on Anastasia, I’m not going inside alone and I’m cold” She yelled. She was getting closer to me.

            “I’d rather live out here in the cold than go talk to mother” I said. Drizella appeared beside me, also wearing a beautiful dress. She sat down on the bench.

            “You think I want to go?” she said. “She’ll probably make us practice Sing Sweet Nightingale all night, and I hate that song.”

            It was the evening after Cinderella and the prince’s wedding. Despite the fact she probably hated us, we’d been invited to the wedding and mother made us go. After it was over, I ran straight to the garden at home, and had been sitting on this bench ever since. It was a nice place to sit, surrounded almost entirely by a six foot tall fence covered in overgrown vines. Ever since we fired the gardener, the place had grown wildly and uncontrolled, but I liked it better this way. Even though it was uglier, to me it felt more welcoming.

            “She’ll be so disappointed we didn’t come home engaged.” I said.

            “Is that why you’re crying?” she asked me. I didn’t say anything again, hoping Drizella would let it go, but she didn’t. I shouldn’t have expected anything else from my overbearing sister. “No, that can’t be it. We got over disappointing mother years ago. What could it be? I’m the only friend you have and your sister, I should know this. Maybe you wish you and Cinderella were good friends so you could hang out at the castle all the time. Is that it? Are you upset we don’t get the benefits of Cinderella’s marriage because we were mean to her?”

            I blew my nose loudly into my handkerchief, hoping she would freak out and go away. She wasn’t persuaded.

            “No, that can’t be it either. We hate Cindy too much to even entertain the idea of friendship with her. Do you think their marriage will actually last? There hardly even know each other. Sure, Cindy’s pretty but I wonder if the prince knows she talks to mice. I bet in a month he’ll have her locked up for being crazy.” 

I tried to stop myself from smiling, but a little laughter escaped me. She was right; I think the years of never going out got to Cindy, but I could swear I heard the mice squeak back once or twice. I imagined the castle being overrun with different kinds of rodents, and I giggled some more.

“And now you’re laughing. Are you going to at least share the joke with me?” I told her about the image of mice running through the castle, the king chasing them around and Cinderella trying to stop him from killing them. We talked about it for so long, my sides started to hurt from laughter. It felt really good to poke fun at someone who seemed to be on the brink of a perfect life when ours were all but ruined.

“Do you think she’ll arrest us?”  I asked. It was a serious question. I wasn’t sure if it was legal or not, but I imagined Cindy could get the prince to do pretty much anything.

“Who? Cindy? For what?”

“I don’t know, being mean to her? Can a princess make arrests?”

“Probably not, and she invited us to her wedding. She’s way too nice to ever do something like arrest her family. If anything, she’ll just keep rubbing her perfect life in our noses.”

“That’s true. It would be a very diplomatic way for her to get revenge on us, while still seeming like a perfect person.”

“And anyway, she should be thanking us. If we hadn’t torn apart that first, pink and white dress she made herself, she probably would have never gotten the second one. We did her a favor.”

“Yes, I’m sure she sees it that way.”

“How do you think she did it?” I knew what she was asking, and I’d debated the question a thousand time. After we ripped apart Cindy’s first dress, she’d somehow got her hands on a one-of-kind dress and a pair of glass slippers, all before arriving only 20 minutes late to the ball. There was no humanly possible way for that to happen, so the answer was simple.

“Magic” I said. Drizella laughed at me, but I kept a straight face.

“Seriously?” she said, “I know we always were told stories about things like fairy godmothers when we were kids, but do think they actually exist?”

“They have to, otherwise there’s no explanation. Cinderella got her wish granted by her fairy godmother.”

“Whatever, we’ll go with that until Cindy reveals her secret to us.”

“Do you think she’ll ever tell us?”

“Oh, I think she’ll be telling this story forever. It’ll be her own little fairytale about how she overcame her wicked step mother and ugly stepsister, made it to the ball and married the prince. It writes itself, complete with her very own happily ever after.”

Happily ever after was a sad concept to me. The moment Cinderella’s foot slipped perfectly into that shoe, I suddenly realized she was about to get her own story book ending. A “And they lived happily ever after” scrolled across the last page of her story. But what about us? What would happen to Cinderella’s stepsisters? People already snickered behind our backs about our appearance. Even at the wedding, people would take their eyes off Cindy long enough to look over at us, nudge their companion, and share suppressed laughter. They thought we couldn’t hear or see it happing, but we are not blind. We knew everyone only saw us as Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters.  It took me a while, but I realized that Cindy wasn’t the villain in my story, I was the villain in hers.

“Seriously though, why were you crying earlier?” Drizella asked again. I wanted to ignore the question, but she kept insisting.

“The day of the ball, while we were waiting to meet the prince I had this thought, this little ray of hope that he might choose me. I thought he might actually be able to look into my eyes after we bowed to each other and see past everything everyone else saw. I thought he might be the first person to not grimace and call me ugly behind my back.”

“Well that was dumb, we don’t even know the prince. He’s the prince, he gets to choose the prettiest girl in the whole kingdom, and you had to know we had no chance.

“I know, I was stupid. I built him up in my head and for some reason I thought he might be the one. I thought if he just looked into my eyes, he would fall in love with me, I would fall in love with him and I would get my own happily ever after. But after I bowed to him, I looked up into his eyes and he wasn’t even looking at me. He was looking at Cinderella because she’s beautiful and I’m ugly. I thought I was in love with the prince, but I’m not. I’m in love with the idea of someone who might think I was beautiful. After seeing Cindy’s wedding and how happy she was, I just couldn’t get over the idea that I’ll never have that. I’ll never get to have my wish granted by my fairy godmother. I’ll never meet and marry a handsome prince because Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters never get their happily ever after.”

Drizella was quiet for the first time all day. I knew she had probably been having some of the same thoughts, but she was different than me. She talked and made jokes when she was upset. That’s one of the things other people didn’t like about her. She couldn’t keep her mouth shut during a serious moment, but she never had anything useful to say. She was inappropriate and loud, but I loved her for it. It took me many years of crying at her badly timed jokes to realize she was actually trying to help.

I, on the other hand couldn’t keep the tears from flowing when something bad happened. People compared me to a child I cried so much. Some pair my sister I made at funerals. Her, cracking jokes at every possible opportunity and me, stealing other people’s handkerchiefs because mine was already soaking.

It was no mystery why people didn’t like us, but we’d been this way our whole lives. Whenever Cindy’s father was still alive, he would take us all into town occasionally to look around at the market. People would see Cinderella first, and congratulate her father on a beautiful daughter. Then they would see me and Drizella, and I could see them try to connect us, wondering what went wrong. Other kids constantly ignored me to talk to Cindy, and before we all learned what manners were, sometimes the kids would tell me to go away because I was gross.  

After the death of Cindy’s father, my mother tried to continue the tradition of taking us to the market. The first and only time she took all of us, she watched people grimace behind our backs and whisper to each other that the one was destined for happiness, and the other two would probably never marry. Mother knew they were right, but she wanted to change our fate. She tried to make us into elegant ladies with persistent music, manors, and etiquette lessons, but they didn’t help. Drizella still always said the wrong thing, and I still always tripped over my own, oversized feet.

Our misfortune was the reason we hated Cinderella so much. She was so effortlessly perfect, so we did everything we could to ruin her. We made her work for us, we ripped apart her clothes, and we locked her in tower so she wouldn’t be able to try on the glass slipper. Despite our efforts, in the end we still wound up alone and Cinderella got her happily ever after. It felt like the world was working against us, like some force kept beautiful people succeeding and ugly people from living happily ever after. It started when we realized we would always be ugly and awkward, and we blamed anyone we could think of. It wasn’t fair, and both of us knew it. Both of us knew that all we were destined for was a lonely life at home with our demanding and impatient mother.

Maybe if mother hadn’t continued with the lesson and let us just grow up, we would have been fine. If we weren’t taught to live in a selfish way. If she hadn’t encouraged our anger against Cindy. If she’d taught us to have Cindy’s kind of spirit, we would be different and happier. Instead, I know how to tie a perfect bow, play the flute out of rhythm, and complain.

            In silence, Drizella and I pondered our doom and wondered what we could have done, or what we could do to change it. Separately we came to the same conclusion: there was nothing to be done. So instead, Drizella cracked another joke and I shed some more tears.

            “What if the prince is crazy too? That’s the only explanation if they stay married. Maybe the whole royal family is crazy. That’s why he ran around making every girl try on a shoe to try and find his princess. He couldn’t even remember what she looked like. I think that’s it. Everyone is insane, Anastasia. Everyone, except for us, has completely lost their minds. I think we actually narrowly missed a tragic life. Can you imagine being surrounded by people who think it’s okay to marry someone you just met and couldn’t even remember? Crazy, all of them.” Drizella said, turning her pointer finger around in circles by her ear to indicate insanity.

            “You’re right Drizella, we’re the only sane people left in this entire kingdom.”

            We were silent for a while, letting the cold wind chill our bones and make us shiver. A moment later, a shrill voice broke the silence. “Drizella? Anastasia? It’s time for your music lesson!” It was our mother, calling out from the house. I winced, but Drizella grabbed my hand and made me stand up.

            “Come on Anastasia, if we don’t practice our music again, we, Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters, will never have our happily ever after.” She looped her arm through mine and we walked back through the garden, our voice ringing out loudly and off key as we sang Sing Sweet Nightingale all the way home.