I’m awake before sunrise watching a wedding on TV. Not just any wedding. The wedding, three thousand miles away, in a church that looks like a castle. Thousands of people line the streets of London, cheering and waving, hoping for a glimpse of the bride or the queen or another member of the royal family wearing a fancy hat and heirloom jewels.
I’m seven years old and not much for weddings. The one wedding I was in, I picked wild strawberries in the churchyard with my white satin gloves. My mother, furious at the sight of my crimson fingertips, smacked the berries out of my hands and dragged me into the sanctuary, where I walked the aisle as flower girl for my uncle and his wife, who also happened to be named Diana.
What I love are princesses. Willowy, blonde, with petal-pink lips and buttercream gowns, tiny shoes on their itty bitty feet. I draw princesses for hours, over and over, with magic markers and whittled-down crayons. Sometimes I tape several pieces of paper together and draw them bigger, grander, with wider skirts and fuller hair. With big blue eyes and eager, outstretched arms.
On television, the real Lady Diana emerges from her glass coach like Cinderella, spurring me to sit up straight on my Aunt Marilyn’s sofa. She’s babysitting me, as she does every weekday while my parents are off working in separate shoe factories. They deliver me to her doorstep before sunrise and pick me up again in the late afternoon, both of them smelling like sweat and rubber cement. They are far from my mind, though, as Diana appears – her ivory train cascading like frosting on a cake. A tulle veil covers her eyes. A jeweled tiara encircles her head. She looks like one of my drawings. Like the princess I want to be.
When I was three years old, I insisted everyone call me Cinderella. I turned bath towels into dresses, tied a blue ribbon in my hair. I pretended the mice in Marilyn’s vegetable garden were my friends and the birds were singing my name. My dad called me princess until I was five years old, when my little brother was born on my birthday. After that, he just called me Wendy.
As Diana walks the red carpet, my skin begins to tingle. I feel lightheaded, teary and hot. Maybe it’s the scene in front of me. Maybe it’s the dream we are all having, of happily-ever-afters and fairytales coming true. Or it could be allergies. Outside, summer ragweed blooms through the hills of western Maine. The paper mill pumps out sulfur, leaving us with stuffy noses and scratchy throats. I reach for a tissue, then lay back on the sofa and pull Marilyn’s crocheted afghan over my legs, stretching it long like another fancy gown. I point my toes, imagining glass slippers. Imagining a ball to go to and a horse-drawn carriage to take me there.
Diana is a commoner, they say on TV. The daughter of a nobleman. Her father served in Parliament, while her mother went to church and performed charity work. I am the daughter of factory workers. My people punch timeclocks when the sky is still the color of motor oil. They carry ham sandwiches in their lunch pails and get paid according to the number of shoes they can stitch together in a day. They go home eight hours later with cramps in their fingers and aches in their backs.
We don’t have royalty in this country, but if we did, I imagine they’d live someplace beyond my neighborhood. Beyond the stinky paper mills, the mobile home parks and the bottle redemption centers that smell like stale beer. They’d prefer someplace clean and lush, where a girl could grow up to be more than what her parents were before her, where the things she drew on paper might someday turn real.
I swallow the tickle in my throat as Diana makes her way into the cathedral and down the aisle toward the altar. Toward a man with big ears and a military uniform. She looks young and scared, her pale face barely visible beneath that thick fabric veil. For a moment, she doesn’t look like a princess at all. She looks more like a ghost.
I am only seven, but already I know some things are not meant to last. A lightning bug kept in a jar for one too many nights. A ladybug cradled too tightly in the palm of your hand. The sweetness of wild strawberries. The thrill of being a princess.
Back on the TV, Diana emerges from the church. The veil is off now. Her smile, gone. Bells ring through the streets of London as the royal couple climbs into a different horse-drawn carriage and rides away. I squeeze my eyes shut and roll to the side, pulling the blanket up to my chest, clutching another tissue, waiting to see if Aunt Marilyn will make me get up and have breakfast or if she’ll let me sleep just a little bit longer.
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Wendy Fontaine’s work has appeared in dozens of literary journals and magazines including Hippocampus Magazine, Jet Fuel Review, Short Reads, Sweet Lit, Sunlight Press and Under The Sun. She has received nonfiction prizes from Identity Theory, Hunger Mountain and Tiferet Journal, as well as nominations to the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthologies. A native New Englander, she currently resides in southern California and holds a master’s degree in creative writing.
© 2024, Wendy Fontaine
Halfway Down the Stairs 