Growing up, dinners at Clara’s home had been different. Her father at the table’s head, delivering grace before anyone was permitted to eat, and her mother not relaxing until he’d started eating and declared the meal to his liking, and even when it was, their conversation usually wasn’t. Clara’s sisters had moved out, married with families of their own, by the time Clara was old enough to have opinions, which meant it was just Clara and her opinions at the table with her parents. Three weeks after her sixteenth birthday, cracking under the weight of their disapproval, Clara fled to the home of her boyfriend-at-the-time, whose understanding family sheltered her in their spare room for six months, even after the relationship had ended. Clara then rented a room in a house with a shared kitchen, where nobody paid proper attention to the stove and the smoke alarm was pretty much a constant, her fellow tenants burning the bottoms off pot after pot. With the help of some very good teachers, she’d finished high school while working part-time at a health food store, which is where she’d met Alex, and by the time her classmates were framing their grad portraits, Clara was far away with him, embarking on a round-the-world adventure. Properly outfitted kitchens, for a long time, were few and far between.
Who knew Clara would turn out to have such a weakness for basil on the windowsill, a green thing to gaze upon as she washed her dishes? Clara had thought she made arespectable nomad during all those years, but it turned out she could also stay put, and not merely to defy her father either, who’d always maintained Clara was too flighty, unable to follow through with anything because, after all, she’d fled his house. But now here she was, most of the way through her university degree, and she’d managed to make a cozy home in this place with Jess, in their kitchen with all that incredible light.
Clara’s room was upstairs, tucked under the eaves, the walls so poorly insulated that the wind blew in. The solution, Clara learned their first winter there, was layers of rugs on the floor and quilts and blankets on the bed, which made the climate bearable, and she could remind herself that at least the rent was cheap.
Jess’s room downstairs was warmer, but smaller. Decorated with a frog motif, a preoccupation that started with a weird batik bedspread and a poster fromThe Frog Prince, and grew from there. She collected frog figurines, and then people started giving them to her, ceramic ones and a few carved from wood, and one with ridges on its back that you ran up and down with a small stick, producing a croaking sound. Which Jess would do intermittently, startling Clara, who would hear the sound in the attic and start wondering about wild creatures in the walls.
Wild creatures in addition to the family of squirrels who’d built their nest in that narrow space between the ceiling and the roof above Clara’s bed, a roof that was barely there in places and not only welcomed the wind but let in the rain sometimes. Clara caught the rain in a bucket, falling into sleep those nights lulled by the drip and the pounding on the roof outside, which sometimes drowned out the skittering of paws overhead.
One night late in the autumn, the skittering turned to scratching and the squirrels broke through. Clara was getting ready for bed when it happened, the scuffling, the crackle, and then a cloud of dust. Rats, she thought at first when she saw the beady eyes, recoiling further as she took in the entire creature. She was so much bigger than the squirrel, but it didn’t matter. That squirrel wasn’t afraid of her, or maybe it was afraid of everything, mad, literally bouncing off the walls, and joined by three companions, each one’s emergence making the hole in the ceiling even bigger. Before the fourth had made it all the way through, Clara was out on the stairs with the door slammed shut, the squirrels slapping, thumping and hissing on the other side.
Clara realized she’d been screaming like a woman in a horror movie, useless and distressed, her screeches summoning Jess and Clayton, who thundered up the stairs. All of them peered around the door at the black shapes tearing the air like bats, Clara screaming still, only stopping when Jess clamped a hand over her mouth. Clayton ran back downstairs, returning with a broom. Then he charged inside, kicking the door shut behind him in a beautiful choreography, as if a whole life spent watching action movies had been preparation for this.
Jess and Clara stood in the dark listening to Clayton swearing and the thumps continued, but there were more of them now, presumably from the broom. They heard the strain of the window being wrenched up, and Jess let go of Clara’s mouth.
“Oh my god,” Clara said, when she could find the breath to talk, and she even laughed as she heard Clayton exclaim, “Fuck YOU!” from behind the door and then a triumphantcrash. Another bang, the window slammed, and Clayton opened the door, letting the light into the stairway.
“Clayton, you’re a hero!” Jess exploded, enfolding him in her arms.
But he shook her off. “There’s squirrel piss everywhere.” And there was, all over Clara’s desk and her bed and the floor, and the ceiling had been ripped to pieces, along with the Bob Dylan poster Clara had taped up there, the one of him walking down the street with his hands in his pockets, a girl in a green coat clutching his arm, all gone to confetti.
“A knight in shining armour,” said Clara, watching Clayton and considering the way he’d wielded his broomstick. “Who’d have thought we still needed one?”
“Or that he’d have to fight a squirrel,” said Jess.
“Maybe all the dragons have been slain.” Clayton didn’t have a shirt on. They’d been in bed, Clara realized. “I’m so sorry, guys.”
“We’re going to have to call Ferber,” said Jess. Ferber was their landlord’s nephew, a dubious handyman at best who’d show up to repair a leaky faucet and end up drinking all their beer, which was why they put up with things like leaks in the roof for as long as they did.
“We could patch the wall with duct tape,” said Clayton. Living in that place, they had a lot of the stuff on hand. The seal on the fridge door had gone; tape was how they kept it closed, and it also held up the shower head.
Jess went downstairs and came back with some tape, as well as a dustpan and paper towels. They piled up Clara’s rugs and blankets for the laundromat tomorrow, along with Clayton’s track pants. Jess taped the hole in the ceiling, although they could already hear the squirrels back skittering about, while Clara swept up the mess on the floor and got onthe phone to Ferber, who said he’d be over in the morning. And when all that was finished it was after eleven and they tramped downstairs exhausted.
“You’ll have to bunk with us,” said Jess, because it was either that or sleep in the kitchen. Their apartment came so cheap because it lacked other common space, and linoleum would make for a terrible place to slumber.
So that was how Clara ended up on Jess’s floor, uncomfortable on the foam mattress they kept rolled up for guests, listening to Jess and Clayton’s respiratory harmony and surrounded by the frogs.
—
The frogs had started a couple of years ago, when Jess was taking a course in myths and fairy tales and became preoccupied with the frog in “Sleeping Beauty.” “What the frog foretold came true” was the line that haunted her. No one ever remembered the frog.
Clara was sure there hadn’t been a frog.
“You don’t know the frog because it was the easiest part of the story to cut,” said Jess. “The frog is incongruous, discomfiting. Without the frog, it’s simple—relatively speaking, as fairy tales go.”
The fairy tales we know, Jess loved to explain—emphatically, and this was what Clara loved about Jess, how her obsessions ran away with her, and everybody got to come along and learn about “Sleeping Beauty,” “Snow White and Rose Red,” “Hans My Hedgehog,” “Iron Heinrich”—have been watered down, sanitized. Disney and Little Golden Books have made us think that we know these tales, that they’re stories we can hold in our hands. Stories meant to be told tochildren, no less.
“The frog in ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ” she said, “was in the mother’s bathtub.”
“A frog in a tub?” She and Clara were sitting in the kitchen talking about this and everything. They could never get to bed at a reasonable hour. “And what was the mother doing in the tub?” Clara asked.
“Contemplating her fertility,” said Jess. “A man and a wife who waited for a child, and they waited and the seasons changed and they began to grow old, and then…”
“And then?”
“The frog,” said Jess. “ ‘And what the frog foretold came true.’ ”
“Which was what?”
