Funeral Dirge for a Fairytale

This is a companion piece to At the End of the Tour and is intended to be read after that story.

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The woman looking back at me from the mirror seems older than her years. Her face is overly made-up. She’s tired; too many sleepless nights and too many days spent hustling and rushing, trying to be ready for what was to come next. Her hair is stylish but impractical. It’s unlikely to last until nighttime, but the man she’s seeing this afternoon won’t care by then. The dress she’s wearing is tasteful, but beneath it she has on the sluttiest lingerie she owns. A night of torrid sex with a married man is in the cards in the next few hours, and she has no regrets about it at all.

How did I get here? How did I go from being the princess in a fairytale to this aged crone?

The story begins before the fairytale, of course. Or at least the part that people think of as “the fairytale.” Prince Charming riding in and rescuing Cinderella is what we’re told is “the fairytale,” not the part before where her father dies and leaves her to be tortured by her wicked stepmother and stepsisters.

Of course, in my case, I had no stepsisters; possibly half-sisters or half-brothers, since I have no idea who my biological father is, but any knowledge of them will likely only be obtained through an unfortunate surprise from a DNA test and a match in a database. As connected as the world is now, it’s just a matter of time before I find out if they’re out there, but there’s no reason to rush it.

I had no stepmother, either. The wicked maternal figure in my fairytale was definitely my birth mother. Gloria was as awful as any storybook malefactor, though. Maybe moreso. She had been pretty at one point, at least on the outside. I remembered her from that time– barely– before heroin, late nights in strangers’ beds, and her own evil rotted her from the inside out. In pictures of her from that time, I can see a glimmer of malevolence behind her eyes; or perhaps I only imagine it, knowing what I know now of her.

My father is not my father, at least from a biological perspective. Don, the man that I call "Dad" or, when in particularly vulnerable moments, "Daddy," raised me. He raised me even after finding out that Gloria had cuckolded him. He never treated me as anything less than his daughter, his real daughter. To him, I was his, lineage be damned. He was my model of a great man, the kind, unassuming protector. He provided for us, even putting his dreams aside to do it. Smart, witty, and clever, but never cruel. Charitable to a fault. Even to the people that deserved scorn, he tried to show compassion. In retrospect, I wish he hadn’t. But at the time, I thought he was the ideal.

Unlike in many fairytales, I had a best friend, a boy named Derek. I suppose, if one is being charitable, John Hughes oeuvre of movies can be thought of as modern fairytales; if so, “male best friend that doesn’t end up with the girl” is as much a stock character as “fairy godmother.” Derek did, of course, for a time. End up with me, that is. And then again later, in a way. But that’s going too far ahead. At the beginning of my fairytale, he was just the best friend, the reliable confidante. A secondary protector, when Daddy was too busy with his work or his church’s homeless outreach.

Derek and I bonded over geographical proximity and similarly rough childhoods. We walked to and from school together. Our houses were just close enough to the grounds that we couldn’t ride the bus, but far enough away that it made sense to always travel as a pair for safety. Plenty of time to talk on the way there and back: about our classes, our shared interests, our dreams.

Like many boys his age, Derek wanted to be a rock star; he never grew out of that. I wanted to be a wife and mother, a dying dream for girls of my generation. I was supposed to want a career, and even if I didn’t, the economy had long since become hostile to the traditional American dream of a nuclear family with separate breadwinner and homemaker. I never grew out of my dream, either. I was never sure which of ours was more of a fantasy.

Gloria wasn’t just a wicked maternal figure; she was more than that. She was my bogeyman. When I was young, in my barely remembered early grade school years, she still tried to give the pretense of being a doting mother. She raised me while Daddy worked; she didn’t work, of course, and only did a modicum of housework herself, assigning tasks to me that were far too advanced for my age.

She had been abused as a child. There were old circular scars littering her arms and back, telltale remnants of cigarette burns. If Gloria was wicked, then her parents had been truly monstrous. She was bounced from foster home to foster home, and each left an imprint on her. They taught her how to be cruel, but also how a caretaker can hide their cruelty from prying eyes. How to force a child to hide the results of cruelty as well.

My complaints to Dad were taken seriously, but he was too forgiving to follow through. He was unable to believe that the woman he married was as awful as I claimed. It wasn’t until a blood test showed him to be a cuckold and I the egg that the scales fell away from his eyes. I was eight years old. They say that a child’s personality is set by five.

He kicked her out but never divorced her. Gloria threatened to assert maternal rights and take me away if he did. They reached a détente; she wouldn’t come home unless it was the last possible choice, she was never allowed to be alone with me, and he would give her as much maintenance as he could afford. It was a devil’s deal, but it was the only one he felt that he could make to keep me safe. Safer, at least.

The last time I saw Gloria, I was twelve years old. Her outer beauty was gone. She resembled nothing more than the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal then, withered and twitching. Her frail, birdlike limbs were pocked with track marks, a grotesque complement to the old cigarette scars. The abuse forced on her body at the beginning of her life sat alongside the abuse she heaped on it herself at the end.

My mother had let herself in while I was at school, as she sometimes did. Her observance of the treaty had fallen apart in recent months. She was, as with her last few visits, looking for something to steal in order to finance her habit. She had been a prostitute for some years as her addiction deepened, but she’d finally reached the point where only the cheapest johns were willing to stomach the sight of her. I had taken to hiding anything of value when I left the house. Dad had changed the locks for the third time, but he was never very imaginative about hiding the spare key.

As she ransacked my father’s house, I followed her, yelling at her to get out. She just laughed. “Fuck off, Ellie. Don knows what’ll happen if he tries to get rid of me.”

“God, Gloria, why are you such a cruel bitch to him?” That earned me a slap across the face. I knew better than to mouth off to her, but I couldn’t take it anymore.

There was a brief look in her eyes then, something I hadn’t seen in years. Just for a moment, I thought I saw regret. Then she shook her head, and it was gone. She continued her looting. “‘Gloria.’ That’s rich. I gave birth to you and I’m ‘Gloria.’ He’s not even a sperm donor, and you still call him ‘Dad.’” She held up a trinket, then decided it was worthless and tossed it aside. “As to why I’m so ‘cruel?’ I’m not. He’s just weak.”

“He’s a good man!” I huffed quietly, “A better person than you’ll ever be.”

She was too focused on her midday theft to smack me again. “Hah!” That awful cackle. “‘A good man.’ Boo fuckin’ hoo.” She turned her face to me. “I’m going to tell you something, daughter o’ mine. There are no good men. The only things men are good for are their wallets and their dicks. And you can use the one to get to the other.” This was a new Gloria-ism, the last I’d hear from her. They were her legacy to me, a sort of Poisoned Chicken Soup for the Soul. Other gems included, “No one’s ever going to care about you but yourself,” and “People are either marks or grifters, and nothing in between.”

Her back cracked as she stood from a crouch; her appearance wasn’t the only thing that was prematurely aged by her lifestyle. Deciding she had found enough to buy her next fix or two, Gloria stepped up to me. I flinched, but she just gave me a kiss on the top of my head and then patted my cheek, the same one she’d just struck. There was a surprisingly sad smile on her face. The bogeyman opened her mouth to speak, thought a moment, then simply said, “See y’around, Ellie Belly.” She hadn’t called me that in years.

I never saw her alive again. A week later, she was found dead in a tenement building. It was an overdose; even now, I don’t know if it was accidental or planned. Gloria was a rarity: an old junkie. The law of averages eventually got to all of them if they didn’t get clean, but Gloria had survived that long. I still wonder to this day if she wasn’t saying goodbye in her own awful way that last time I saw her.

If Dad ever hated a person, it was Gloria. Still, he made sure she had a modest funeral; nothing expensive, but no pauper’s grave either. He had tried to save her from herself and failed, but he could still see her off with dignity. There were only a handful of us at her interment: me, him, a few friends and family– some of whom I’m sure were just there to make sure she didn’t climb out of the grave– and Derek. He was there for me.

Derek was always there for me. I was always there for him. When his dad beat him, before the vicious old bastard finally went down for armed robbery, he’d hide at my house. The one time Gloria burned me with a cigarette, other than the couple of “accidental” ones when I was younger, he held me while I cried. Held me until I fell asleep behind the school on a Saturday. My best friend woke me as dusk started to fall, having watched over me the whole time. We walked home together, and he made sure she was gone before he left. He made dinner for me; cold bologna and cheese sandwiches, the reliable staple of the latchkey kid.

When hormones started to hit and we began the slow, painful steps to adulthood, he was my first kiss. First boyfriend. First love. We gave each other our virginities; at least, I assume he gave me his. He was handsome even then, and the other girls noticed. I was cute, but I was like a clone of Gloria with sandy blonde hair instead of her mousy brown; I wouldn’t come into my looks until nearly senior year. I was jealous of our classmates, a jealousy that would later turn out to be well-founded, but I’d like to believe that he was loyal to me then, at least.

He was… I loved him, but he was weak. “A weak boy,” Dad called him. He wasn’t wrong. He started to perform with his fledgling garage band in high school, and they were good. He was good. High school bands don’t have groupies. He did, and he availed himself of them.

You need to understand, Derek was literally the only solid ground in my life a lot of the time. He had been for years. Dad tried, but between his work and his need to make up for his failures with my mother, he wasn’t around as often as he should have been. I knew he loved me, but in the triage of life, his daughter had a friend she could rely on, and homeless junkies didn’t. In trying to assuage his guilt for failing Gloria, he failed me, too. I was left vulnerable to someone I thought was worthy of my trust, because he had been worthy of it when we were children.

I caught Derek cheating, of course. He was not the smartest boy; he barely finished high school. But he was cunning and silver-tongued. He’d always taken care of me when we were kids, and I hadn’t realized yet that something had changed in him as he went physically from boy to man. He convinced me, an eighteen year old girl, that him doing this was best for us. That he could treat me as his princess because he treated these other girls like whores. Not exactly in those terms, of course; as I said, he was silver-tongued.

Who accepts that kind of idea? Well, someone like me. Someone who was terrified of being alone. Someone who trusted a man she shouldn’t, because he had been a boy that she could. I had exactly two people in my life that I could count on, and one of them was on the cusp of leaving me if we couldn’t get past his wandering eye.

I was desperate and afraid, but he eased me through my fears; or, rather, I allowed myself to be eased through them. By the time we were done talking that evening, I tentatively agreed that he could continue with them, as long as I saw no hint of his goings on. As long as he kept them and me separate. As long as I was THE girl in his life.

He was as good as his word where that was concerned. When I came to his shows, I was the center of his attention. He’d pull me up on stage and introduce me as his girlfriend. His muse. That was the first time he called me that.

He was selling me short with that title. I was a voracious reader and loved to write. The written word, both creating and consuming it, had always been my refuge from the world. Throughout my school years, I’d won numerous poetry competitions. I was, on most of Derek’s songs, an uncredited co-lyricist. He’d always make a tiny tweak so that they were “his” songs, but we both knew it was a partnership.

As I entered college and his band started to take off on a local and then regional level, the occasions I could attend his shows were fewer and farther between. I knew he was indulging himself while he was away, but it didn’t affect me directly; he promised that he’d practice safe sex, and his bedroom skills grew by leaps and bounds.

That may sound shallow; honestly, it is. But the way he treated me when we were together, how happy we both were with our arrangement, the way our lovemaking technically improved, all of it together convinced me that this was manageable. He had told me we’d both get something out of it, and we were. More importantly, it convinced me that it was a way we could be happy together.

And I was happy. I was doing well in college. Unlike a lot of gifted and talented kids, my transition to college life was smooth. I had no real direction, but I liked writing poetry and lyrics, so I decided on English for a major. I knew that it wasn’t exactly a huge earner, but I wasn’t concerned with that. My boyfriend was going to be a bigtime rock star, so college was just a backup plan anyways.

Until it wasn’t. Derek’s band were the regional openers for an upper tier indie act, and the two bands had gelled. The lead singer, Sabrina, was a gorgeous post-post-emo type, all black eyeliner and daddy issues sex appeal. She and Derek hooked up the first time he opened for them, and they stayed hooked up for that leg of the tour. I had been busy with my finals at the time, so I hadn’t noticed, and he had kept to his promise of keeping his two lives separate. I didn’t find out about it until much, much later. But afterwards, after that mini-tour, he was different. He was still affectionate, but he wasn’t really with me anymore, not in his heart.

Near the end of my second year of college, he told me that our lives were going in two different directions. That he couldn’t give me the home and family that I wanted. I argued with him, said he could, tried to convince him I was content with what we had. He, I think, was trying to protect me in his own way. He knew that this new life was going to be unsustainable. Ever the fauxmantic, he convinced me that he would always love me, and that he couldn’t do this to me. That he’d never be a good father, never be a good husband. Maybe not even a good provider. That I needed to find someone else to give me my fairytale, because it couldn’t be him.

I was devastated. Dad tried to console me, but I knew he was secretly pleased; he had never believed Derek would grow up. He was right, but no girl that age wants to admit that to her father. Both of my protectors had failed me. One failed to protect me from the other. The other failed to protect me from himself. I knew I couldn’t count on a man to protect me anymore; I’d have to do it myself.

I fell in with a number of feminist groups during my post-Derek renaissance. Some of them were reasonable, all for egalitarianism and equality, improving the lives of men and women by addressing social inequities. Others were not, full of second wave throwback radfems that espoused a variety of ideologies that ranged from transphobia to the the impossibility of equal partnerships in heterosexual relations. I dipped my toes into each of them, but rejected the most reactionary stuff. Consciously, anyways.

I wrote a lot, poetry and short stories, novellas and prose. Most of it was absolute dross. I don’t know if it was the loss of my writing partner or the loss of my self-confidence, but none of it was as good as the work I’d done with Derek. I hated that. I had loved that I was his muse. After his abandonment, I couldn’t stand the notion that maybe he was mine, too.

My grades didn’t suffer, but my spirits did. Despite everything that had happened in my life, I used to have a pretty sunny disposition. But that changed. I got nicknamed “the mopey hippie” by an acquaintance, and it stuck. I went around everywhere under a cloud; I was always spoiling for an argument or a fight. The woman I’d become was absolutely miserable to be around.

And then I met Tim. I wasn’t paying attention and slammed into him while we were both walking on campus. He wasn’t looking up either, so maybe we were both partly to blame, but I was doing my stridently angry walk, the one that said I had somewhere I needed to be and no one had better get in my way. Usually my body language cleared a path for me, to the point where I usually didn’t bother to look where I was going. I was reading on my phone, confident that people would get the fuck out of my way like they always did. But Tim wasn’t looking up. He was nursing a hangover instead.

It was like slamming into a wall. I fell flat on my ass, and my books, phone, and laptop sailed out of my hands. He apologized for me running into him, and I yelled at him. Then, for no reason other than that he is who he is, he pulled me up, gathered my stuff and, after I yelled at him yet again because my laptop was broken, he fixed it. He didn’t need to; there was no reason for him to do it. I’d been a flat out bitch to him. I was cute, sure, but Tim was already so focused on fixing the problem that he was sure that he’d caused that I doubt he’d even noticed. Within ten minutes, he had me calmed down, my laptop fixed, and my number in his phone.

I wasn’t looking for anyone; certainly not someone like Tim. He was a tall, gangly goth kid with a perpetual smile on his face. Imagine the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz if he got really into Siouxsie and the Banshees back in high school. But he was sweet and funny and kind. He made me laugh. He was cute, in his own goofy way. There were no smoldering good looks or intense stares; he wasn’t Derek, and that was a good thing.

He was a truly decent person; the best man in the world, I’d call him later. He was kind to everyone, whether they could help him or not. It wasn’t my Dad’s kindness; as much as I loved him, Dad had a real martyr thing going on. Tim didn’t. His was just a thoroughgoing decency that made me feel safe around him. Really safe, not protected. There’s a difference, and it’s the difference between a girl’s love for a boy and a woman’s love for a man.

In time, I loved him in a way I’d never loved anyone before. Derek had been my first love, but I knew Tim was the man I was meant to be with. He wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows; he had an acerbic wit that could be a bit cutting, but never cruel. I loved that he was a good, straightforward person, but that there was also a depth to him that could come out and surprise me at times.