Nonfiction by Kathryn Nuernberger

In one of my great failures at the twin endeavors of “Nice” and “Pleasant,” I squabbled with my daughter’s teacher over her retelling of the tale, “The Fisherman’s Wife.” The teacher was really excited to tell me my daughter already knew this week’s circle time story and understood the moral perfectly. This is the one where a husband catches a magic fish and wishes for a nice house for his wife, but returns home to find she is not satisfied by the house or, later, a mansion, a castle, a cathedral, or anything less than what belongs to God himself. My child’s impressive analysis: It is about wishing too much.

“That’s all she said?” I asked. I thought it would be Nice and Pleasant to try a wry, over-the-kids’- heads joke with someone who seemed to love fairy tales with a degree of fervor similar to my own. “I told her the moral is that a woman’s ambition should never be thwarted.” It turns out this is neither a Nice nor a Pleasant thing to say to someone who has dedicated her life to the invention of an idyllic backyard forest for children where the fancypants Waldorf-inspired curriculum revolves around old stories.

Because I have dedicated my life, more and less, to the invention of what I imagine to be justice, the five-year-old and I had already talked at length about how messed up “The Fisherman’s Wife” is. With as much thoroughness as you can manage with a preschooler, we’d covered the meanness of always mocking women for wanting the same powers as men, not to mention how exasperating it is that so many morals involve the punishment of marginalized people who just want the same as others have.

I’m not alone out here. Jack Zipes, who practically invented the field of fairy tale studies, devoted an entire book to Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. To understand the politics of such a story, he says, you must first notice how, “Despite magical transformation, there is no mention of another world. Only one side of the characters and living conditions is described. Everything is confined to a realm without morals, where class and power determine power relations.” In general, if there is a moral at all, it is to reinforce the status quo of the existing ruling hegemonies.

I know my child is too young to understand what it means to extend a thesis by reading against the grain and further conclude, “The magic and miraculous serve to rupture the feudal confines and represent metaphorically the conscious and unconscious desires of the lower class to seize power.” And I’m too much the curmudgeonly English professor to forget that is small comfort, because, “In the process, power takes on a moral quality.” So I send her, in good enough conscience, to the rosy light and balsam wood of this kindergarten. But I roll my eyes at how carefully on guard they are against any signs of anxiousness in the children—being bossy, talking too much, always asking why. These are all behaviors interpreted as signs of anxiety. I am waylaid for earnest talks at pick-up because my child shows all these signs, as I did as a child and as I do now as an adult. They are qualities I used to think of as bad habits and tried with great discipline and a fair degree of self-induced misery to rectify. Now I am in these middle-aged years when I am astonished at the pleasure I often take in being asked to head up this or that capitalist endeavor. And also at my capacity to grow facial hair. I have become grateful that I never could smite out the sharp edges of my personality, which have proven to be the best and most useful of all my qualities.

I find excuses to avoid the parent-teacher meetings my husband so cheerfully attends, sending my apologies and regrets. It amuses him to tell innocuous and placating lies, while I know I would feel somehow compelled to admit, if asked, how I have taken a young child to marches and vigils and long sit-still-while-nothing-happens community meetings. How once I sat on a sidewalk and wiped her anxious tears while we watched her father put his body in front of a beat-up Camry threatening to run through an intersection full of people. As he pushed against the hood, his shoulders touched those of a woman as fearless as he is and even more righteously and resplendently pissed. Her curses at the driver, the horns wailing all around us, and the chants of “Shut it down” made it seem to a child that we were in the middle of an emergency. And of course, we are, but it is a very old emergency, much longer than an afternoon rally and more serious than people convinced they are going to be late to something.

I tell this nice teacher I am “impossibly busy” to keep myself from getting on my high horse about how nothing will ever change if we all stay home putting our children to bed on time. So I don’t ask, with that voice of frustration I never quite manage to fully temper, how many children in this world does she think have the privilege of growing up without fear? How many in our own city?

With some effort I have managed each day at pick-up not to come completely unglued about rape culture vis a vis the little boy who has been antagonizing my daughter with his relentless kissing, on her forearm or shoulder or the tip of her ponytail, day after day, despite how she has asked him to stop and asked the teacher to make him stop. The child about whom the teacher says, “Oh, yes—he just has a little crush.” Instead, I trot out the Zipes, as if it were a joke: “Folk tales’ manner of portrayal is direct, clear, practical, and one-dimensional in its narrative perspective, and this narrative position reflects the limitations of feudal life.”

Maybe I should be more direct and less Pleasant, but it’s not always so easy to know who is right and who is wrong. Nor can I be sure of what meaning a child will make of the things that happen. Maybe punishing little boys for showing affection is worse in the long run, given how much they will soon be taught about showing an impenetrable cruelty. Or maybe this opportunity to tell my daughter she can take care of such problems herself, with force if necessary, is a gift, a chance to prepare her for the life ahead.

I hate “The Fisherman’s Wife,” not because I think any of us should aspire to be a king or emperor or pope but because I know for whom these relics from a long oral tradition were originally meant. I can hear how the men would have told this story to one another while wives fumed at the stove over an affront a husband would wave away with the breeze of his “shoo mosquito” hand. I hear how women would tell this story to one another with a self-deprecating smile at the absurdity of their impossible wanting.

I wish we could all see together how our longing is not really for wallpaper or jewelry, crowns or golden plates. The fisherman’s wife only wanted to be as fully human as the children all imagine her husband is. She wanted to be the kind of person a magic fish would choose to talk to, not just about. But no matter what crown she wore, she would never become that.

Maybe this has less to do with gender than I think, though. Certainly I know plenty of men who would do well to wish less. But I remember when I was a child reading alone in my room as far from the clamor downstairs as I could get. How it stays with me even now, that page where the wife crowns herself emperor while the scolding fish watches. The illustration was an homage to the famous painting of Lady Macbeth by John Singer Sargent, who lingered over the fire of her red hair. In my memory, her face is my mother’s, in much the same way my own face always seems to be my mother’s whenever I look very closely.

For my entire childhood I was afraid I would grow up to be as disappointed as so many of the women I saw around me. I thought abstaining from wishes was the way to achieve the kind of jolly cheer the fathers wore. The more frustrated a mother became—about the sink of dishes, the crying baby, the burning meat, the loneliness and boredom of their days—the more concentrated a husband’s unflappable demeanor. I thought this was because they were wise fishermen. I thought they were better because of this. I have since seen such perfect grace reflected in my own husband and the husbands of so many of my friends, and I know now, from living inside my own story, such a carefree disposition as its own sort of crown and its own sort of middle finger. I have felt in my own throat how insane and shrill it can make a woman sound to be so easily dismissed by a man, even a good and well-meaning one. Especially a good and well-meaning one.

My daughter’s teacher admonished me. “We think of this story as very spiritual. The children don’t take it literally.” Perhaps. So I try to tell it myself before bed. I make only a small change—the wife finds the fish, the husband makes tyrannical demands. “No, no, Mommy. You’re getting it all backward.” And also, “When is Daddy coming home? He’ll tell it the right way.”

Daddy will be here in the morning, dear. Tonight Mommy is telling the stories—you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. But I’ll try it one more time and see if I can make it right:

Once upon a time a fisherman caught a magic fish, and he asked the fish for a nice house for himself and his wife. When he came home his wife was happily waiting for him as she swayed on the new porch swing reading a cloth-bound edition of The Bloody Chamber that had just appeared by magic on a coffee table that had also just appeared by magic. But when he told her how it happened, she was disappointed. She understood he was only as human as she was, so she did not stomp her foot or raise her voice at his oversight. She just put on her cloak and set off for the sea. “I’m going to ask that fish to do the same for everybody in the village.” As she walked along the cliffs beneath the light of a full moon, she heard the mermaids singing each to each.

My girl is sleeping by then, so I do not bother to tell her what reply the fish gave, nor do I conclude that they all lived happily ever after.

But they did. On some nights, I can even believe it.