Turn the Page

In our first grade we were—at different times—almost every creature imaginable, learning of them and how they fitted into the world and how they touched onto our segment of the world, until we saw fellow creatures wherever we looked. We were birds! We fluttered and sang and flitted from chair to chair all around the room. We prinked and preened and smoothed our heads along the brightness of feathers and learned in those moments the fierce throbbing restlessness of birds, the feathery hushing quietness of sleeping wings. And Mary beat endlessly at the closed windows, scattering feathers, shaking the glass, straining for the open sky. But Zach set himself against the lessons and ground his heel viciously down on the iridescence of a green June-bug that blundered into our room one afternoon. The rest of us looked at our teacher, hoping in our horror for some sort of cosmic blast from her. Her eyes were big and knowing—and a little sad. We turned back to our work, tasting for the first time a little of the sorrow for those who stubbornly shut their eyes against the sun and still curse the darkness.

And soon the stories started. Other children heard about Red Riding Hood and the Wolf and maybe played the parts, but we took turns at being Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. Individually we tasted the terror of the pursued—the sometimes delightfully delicious terror of the pursued—and we knew the blood lust and endless drive of the pursuer—the hot pulses leaping in our veins, the irresistible compulsion of hunger-never-satiated that pulled us along the shadowy forest trails.

And when we were Red Riding Hood, we knew under our terror and despair that help would come—had to come when we turned the page, because it was written that way. If we were the Wolf, we knew that death waited at the end of our hunger; we leaped as compulsively to that death as we did to our feeding. As the mother and grandmother, we knew the sorrow of letting our children go, and the helpless waiting for them to find the dangers and die of them or live through them, but always, always, whether we were the pursuer or the pursued, the waiter or the active one, we knew we had only to turn the page and discover who lived happily ever after, because it was written that way! And we found out that after you have once been the pursuer, the pursued, and the watcher, you can never again be only the pursuer or the pursued or the watcher. Ever after you are a little of each of them.

As Cinderella, we labored in the ashes of the fireplace and of lonely isolation and of labor without love. We wept tears of hopeless longing as we watched the semblance of joy and happiness leave us behind, weeping for it even though we knew too well the ugliness straining under it —the sharp bones of hatefulness jabbing at scarlet satin and misty tulle. Cinderella's miracle came to us and we made our loveliness from commonplace things, and learned that happiness often has a midnight chiming, so that it won't leak bleakly into a watery dawn; and finally, that no matter how fast we run, we must leave a part of us behind, and by that part of us, joy comes when we turn the page and finally live happily ever after, because it is written that way.

With Chicken Little, we cowered under the falling of our sky. We believed implicitly in our own little eye and our own little ear and the aching of our own little tail where the sky had bruised us. Not content with panicking ourselves with the small falling, we told the whole world repeatedly and at great length that the sky was falling for everyone because it fell for us. And because the Fox promised help and hope and strength, we followed him and let our bones be splintered in the noisome darkness of fear and ignorance. And, as the Fox, we crunched with unholy glee the bones of little fools who shut themselves in their own tiny prisons and followed fear into death rather than take a larger look at the sky. And we found them delicious and insidious.

And Jackie started having nightmares—he just wouldn't come out of the Fox's den even after his bones were scrunched to powder. He was afraid of a wide sky and always would be. So the next day we all went into the darkness of caves and were little blind fish. We were bats that used their ears for eyes. We were small shining things that seemed to have no life, but which grew into beauty, and had the wisdom to stop when they reached the angles of perfection. So Jackie chose to be one of those and didn't learn with us any more, but grew to limited perfection in his darkness.

And Steve longed to follow the Fox forever. Every day his eyes would hesitate on our teacher's face, but every day the quietness of her mouth told him that the Fox should not come back into our learning. And his eyes would drop and his fingers would pluck anxiously at one another.

The school year went on and we were princesses leaning from towers drawing love to us on shining extensions of ourselves, feeling the weight and pain of love along with its shiningness as the prince climbed Rapunzel's golden hair. We, as Rapunzel, betrayed ourselves to evil. We were cast into the wilderness, and we bought our way back into happiness by our tears of mingled joy and sorrow. And—as the witch—we were evil, hoarding treasures to ourselves, trying to hold unchanged things that had to change. We were the one who destroyed loveliness when it had to be shared, who blinded maliciously, only to find that all loveliness, all delight, went with the sight we destroyed.

We were the greedy woman. We wanted a house, a castle, a palace—power beyond power, beyond power, until we wanted to meddle with the workings of the universe. And then we had to huddle back on the dilapidated steps of the old shack with nothing again, nothing in our lax hands, because we reached for too much. But then we were her husband, too, who gave in and gave in against his better judgment, against his desires, but always backing away from a no until he sat there, too, with empty hands, staring at the nothing he must share. And he had never had anything at all because he had never asked for it. It was a strange, hard lesson and we studied it again and again until Benny was stranded in greed and Dorcas in apathy.

But childhood can't last. That was our final, and my hardest, bitterest, lesson. One day our teacher wasn't there. She'd gone away, they said. She wouldn't be back. I remember how my heart tightened and burned coldly inside me when I heard. And day followed day and I watched, terrified, the memory of her dying out of the other kids' eyes.



Oh, I know that no one believes in fairy tales any more. They're for children. Well, who better to teach than children the fact that good must ultimately triumph? Fairy tale ending—they lived happily ever after! But when it is written that way! The marriage of bravery and beauty—tasks accomplished, peril surmounted, evil put down, captives freed, enchantments broken, humanity rejecting the pleasures of beasts, giants slain, wrongs righted, joy coming in the morning after the night of weeping. The lessons are all there. They're told over and over and over, but we let them slip, and we sigh for our childhood days, not seeing that we shed the truth as we shed our deciduous teeth.

I never saw our teacher again, but I saw my first grade again, those who survived to our twenty-fifth anniversary. At first I thought I wouldn't go, but most sorrow can be set aside for an evening, even the sorrow attendant on finding how easily happiness is lost when it depends on a single factor. I looked around at those who had come, but I saw in them only the tattered remnants of our teachings.

Here was the girl who so delighted in the terror of being pursued that she still fled along dark paths, though no danger followed. Here was our winged one still beating her wings against the invisible glass. Here was our pursuer, the blood lust in his eyes altered to a lust for power that was just as compulsive, just as inevitably fatal as the old pursuing evil. Here was our terror-stricken Chicken Little, his drawn face, his restless, bitten nails, betraying his eternal running away from the terror he sowed behind himself, looking for the Fox, any Fox, with glib, comforting promises. I looked for Jackie. I asked for Jackie. He was hidden away in some protected place, eternally being his dark shining things, afraid—too afraid—of even shallowness ever to walk in the light again.

There were speeches. There was laughter. There was clowning. But always the underlying strain, the rebellion, the silent crying out, the fear and mistrust. They asked me to speak. I stood, leaning against the teacher's desk, and looked down into the carefully empty faces.

"If you have forgotten," I said, "it's a long time ago. If you remember, it was only yesterday. But even if you have forgotten, I can see that you haven't forgotten the lessons. Only you have remembered the wrong part. You only half-learned the lessons. You've eaten the husks and thrown the grain away. She tried to tell you. She tried to teach you. But you've all forgotten. Not a one of you remembers that if you turn the page you can happily ever after, because it was written that way. You're all stranded in the introduction to the story. You work yourselves all up to the climax of terror or fear or imminent disaster, but you never turn the page. You go back and live it again and again and again.

"Turn the page! Believe again! You have forgotten how to believe in anything beyond your chosen treadmill. You have grown out of the fairy tale age, you say. But what have you grown into? Do you like it?" I leaned forward and tried to catch evasive eyes. "With your hopeless, scalding tears at night and your dry-eyed misery when you waken. Do you like it?

"What would you give to be able to walk once more into a morning that is tiptoe with expectancy, magical with possibilities, bright with a sure delight? Our teacher taught us how. She gave us the promise and hope. She taught us that we can all finally live happily ever after because it is written that way. All we have to do is believe and turn the page. Why don't you?"

—Zenna Henderson, Turn the Page, abridged.