“The Swan Ride,” Oil on Canvas, 36″x48″
My painting, “The Swan Ride,” is a narrative depiction of something that happened to me as a young girl of four years old, expressed in a way that tells, in the form of a fairy tale illustration, of the frustration of a small child not being able to have what she wants and needs, and not finding the comfort and protection of adults.
In the Introduction to “The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales,” Maria Tatar, John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University writes, “Like David Copperfield, who comforted himself by reading fairy tales, some of us read ‘as if for life,’ using books not merely as consolation but as a way of navigating reality, of figuring out how to survive in a world ruled by adults.” She goes on to say, “In that world of imagination, we not only escape the drab realities of everyday life but also indulge in the cathartic pleasures of defeating those giants, stepmothers, ogres, monsters, and trolls known as the grown-ups.”
The Swan Ride
The small girl released the hand of her mother, bored with the conversation the adults were having. The sun glinted off a golden coin a few feet away. She walked over and bent to pick it up and saw that it was not a penny, but a type of coin she had never seen in this land so far from her home.
“I wonder if I could make a wish with this, like you can with a penny.”
She looked back at her mother to ask her, but she was listening to the other adults intently, slow to understand the language here. The girl shrugged and carefully placed the coin in the pocket of her red dirndl kleid apron. The summer sun was warm and a soft breeze caught the bright blue checked skirt of her dress. She wanted to see if spinning would make her lovely new dress billow out even more, so she did. Arms outstretched she spun and twirled and giggled until her body stopped against a girl-shaped wall.
“Was machst du, kleine Gans?” What are you doing, little goose?
“Nichts.” Well, nothing she wanted to tell this older girl. It was her cousin, whom she had met just that day. She wore a lemon-yellow mini dress and white go-go boots, marking her as almost a grown-up.
The cousin grinned, revealing protruding front teeth and a mischievous nature. Switching to school-girl English, she said, “I will show you how to have fun!” She grabbed the little girl’s hand and pulled her beneath the marquee of the bumper car ride. The sign showed people riding small brightly colored vehicles surrounded by a field of stars. They looked like they were riding in tiny spaceships among the real stars. She had heard that astronauts would fly to the moon very soon. She would love to fly like that, she thought.
The cousin gave a man two tickets and led her to a small red car. She climbed into the right-side seat. Her cousin climbed in and the car jolted to life. The younger girl took hold of the steering wheel. She sat forward, pressed the pedal beneath her foot and spun the wheel. They spun this way and that and she thrilled at the feeling of controlling the car herself. It was true, spinning in the car was more fun than spinning on her own two feet.
Just then another car bumped into them and a blue-eyed boy looked at the cousin and laughed. The cousin grinned and grabbed at the steering wheel. “Gibt es mir!” But the little girl was not ready to give up control of the wheel. The cousin yanked at the wheel once again, adding a shove with her shoulder against the much smaller girl. At the impact, the small girl’s hands released the wheel and her head reeled back against the electrically charged rod running from the car to the electric grid in the ceiling. Her small body toppled sideways like a rag doll, already unconscious from the electric jolt, falling heavily to the cement floor and hitting her head.
She awoke slowly and reluctantly to the sound of her mother’s voice calling her name. It felt impossible to open her heavily lidded eyes. Finally, she did, and found herself in a small dark room surrounded by the grownups. She was laying on a cot against the wall. She could see the bumper car ride through an open door. They were in the control room for the ride. Her mother sat on a chair nearby holding her baby sister. Her head throbbed so she reached for it to find out what was wrong.
“Don’t touch,” her mother said.
A sound caught her attention and she turned her head toward the raised voices of her grandmother and her grandmother’s sister.
“It is time for you to take Mama. I can not do it anymore!” The great aunt spit out.
“No,” the grandmother said, “I manage the apartment building and lead prayer services at the church. I’m too busy to have her live with me!”
“You selfish witch!”
The grandmother recoiled as if slapped, then struck out toward her sister, grabbing her forearm and yanking it up toward her face. She sank her teeth into her sister’s arm, triggering a fearsome scream from the aunt. All heads turned toward the commotion to see the grandmother release her mouth from the arm, spittle flecking her dress.
What they saw next was momentarily confusing. There was something pink, no, flesh colored, in a plastic doll-flesh sort of way, stuck to the top of the great aunt’s forearm. The grandmother’s face registered shock and her jaw fell open. Her upper lip was unusually sunken in. She clapped her hand to her mouth then grabbed the object from her sister’s arm with her other hand and brought it to her mouth. When she removed her hand, her upper lip was back to its normal shape. The two sisters locked eyes and began laughing and hiccupping and gasping for breath, tears of dissolving tension running down their faces. The girl let her eyes drift shut, wishing she could shut her ears.
“We have to take her to the hospital,” someone said.
“Nein,” the mother said. “I don’t trust the hospitals here,” the mother said to the father.
The worried look on the mother’s face told of past experiences that made her nervous and afraid. The day before she had taken her two young daughters for a haircut with her mother-in-law. Unable to speak the language she could not stop the hairdresser before she cut the length off the older girl’s hair, once reaching the middle of her back, afterwards skimming the tops of her shell-pink ears in a pixie cut. The mother fumed with impotent anger. That was only a haircut. So many more things could go wrong in a foreign hospital.
“It’ll be fine,” she said to the father.
He glared and turned away. “Let’s go,” he said, secretly happy to not have to go to the hospital.
And so, the mother, holding the baby, and the father holding the hand of the little girl, they left the dark room and set out walking. Along they went, the girl stumbling and dragging her feet, shielding her eyes against the too-bright July sunshine.
“Daddy, carry me,” she pled, “I’m so tired, I can’t walk.”
“No,” came the tart reply.
The girl felt the storm cloud of tension between her parents floating above her head ready to erupt once they were away from prying eyes and ears. It was obvious they each blamed the other for not watching over her.
“I wish they would all stop arguing,” the girl thought.
She looked to her left and saw the Swan Ride. A large white swan floated along a slow-moving river into a cool dark tunnel. “Oh,” the girl thought, “I just want to lay down in one of the swans and take a nap.”
She closed her eyes and imagined just that as she slipped her small hand into the pocket of her apron, closing her fingers around the smooth coin. All her frustration over not being able to rest, her father not carrying her, the adults arguing, the cousin grabbing the steering wheel away, all of it welled up inside her and she wished with all her heart that she could float away on the back of a beautiful swan.
A loud honk startled her into opening her eyes. There before her was a swan. This was not a stiff plastic swan like the ones in the ride, but a majestic living and breathing and flapping bird circling around the family. She looked at her parents to see what they thought of the swan, but they were no longer there. Or, should we say, they were no longer as they were. To her left stood a towering brown bear in a ruff collar and a pointed hat with a red pom-pom, standing on hind legs. To his right was a cream-colored horse like the one she rode earlier in the carousel.
She knew her mother would say she was imagining all of it. But who is to say what is real and what is not? At that moment, no one in the girl’s world was able to say anything at all, and that suited her well. The bear growled, the horse neighed, and what was that? A brown squirrel with a large yellow bow around its neck high in an oak tree chittered away. “Well,” thought the girl, “she can’t shove me now.”
With that the girl turned toward the swan and climbed upon the proffered back. The girl felt the gathering tension in the muscles of the swan’s body and a release as it rose into the air with a powerful flap of its broad wings. Up into the sky they went. The girl looked down, now seeing two circus dogs in clown ruffs and caps growling and frolicking, one with a bright red bite mark on its foreleg.
The horse reared on its hind legs as if to call the girl down from the sky. The girl reached toward her mother, the horse. “I’ll be back. When I’m ready.”
She settled into the plush nest of feathers, as wonderfully comforting as she knew it would be. Her eyes began to close, but a sudden thought startled her. Where was her baby sister? She looked down and scanned the clearing. There she was, in the shade of the enormous oak tree, away from the unruly animals in a basinet strewn with fine silky fabric, dressed like an infant princess.
But that is another story, for another day.