The Force of Such Beauty

With a mother around, daughters are safe, but without one, they are prey for princes, witches, and beasts alike. They are killed for their insolence, sacrificed for their male counterparts, imprisoned for their desires. Mothers cannot appear in fairy tales because there is no room in the stories for both women.

ALL FAIRY TALES serve the same purpose. One woman’s story, told to warn the others. Here is how I lost my feet; here is how I lost my voice; here is how I lost my children. Here is the moment I was given from my father to my husband. Here is where the danger lies: the man with the blue beard, the ogre in the forest, the tricky gentleman, the lying merchant, the prince in the tower. Fairy tales are not about sparkling shoes or white cats. They are about the ribbons that adorn, then sever, your neck.

Then I came home and cried with shame until they took my children away. But that

For all my devotion to equality

I learned that the world was made from men—for men—that men controlled the world, and further—that their desire for my attention was the only leverage I possessed. I could have learned other things, I suppose, but that would have required an education.

I know now that I must have glowed for them. I was a flower in a greenhouse, unsullied by the air that everyone else was forced to choke on. Worldliness has its price - cynicism - which I lacked, almost wholly.

That's what men do in this world to fertile things: put fences around them and make them procreate at any cost.

Running was the only sport that could not be segregated by the government, could not be kept down by oppression, could not be bought out from under the feet of my peers. They could not, you see - they could not segregate the roads. Not during the day, anyway.

It isn't until you feel safe that you realize how difficult it was before, when you were constantly afraid, as though you have been hearing a noise in the background for so long that you cannot pick it out until someone turns it off. And when you hear the sound of silence, it's sweeter than you knew anything could be.

Monarchies are sales pitches for a political tale as old as time: that women can feel secure if, and only if, we’re able to make ourselves valuable to a valuable man.

I know why you wanted to live in a palace. But every time we tell ourselves that it’s better to make change from the inside instead of tearing down the building . . . it feels like such a profound failure of imagination.

I’d erased my greatest power: the ability to coexist with discomfort. In seeking security at the price of liberty, I lost both. The power of authority is freely given. I gave my body away. I allowed it to be turned into a national resource. I stopped running through the fields and I became one myself.

Long ago I’d told Finn, “One of the most important lessons that I learned from running was to expect pain. I expected it. If you try to get rid of it, you’ll lose your mind. When it happens, like it’s happening now, you have to coexist with it.

For all my devotion to equality, I wanted equality as a backdrop so that I could prove without a doubt that I was an exception. My belief that I was special made me believe Finn was special, that his life, our life, could be extraordinary. I believed that we could be extraordinarily good. But the truth was that people in power, people like us, almost certainly only become extraordinarily bad.

I’ve tried not to be dramatic about the pain, but pain can break you. In the scope of things, women are vulnerable, people in pain are vulnerable, and mothers who cannot leave their children are the weakest of all. I know that not everyone will agree with this. Nobody wants to admit that they can be rendered weak by the things they want. But I was.

Enfolded in the living, breathing human cost of our greed, I chose not to intervene. I said nothing, I did nothing. Wealth had made me into someone who prioritized most her own comfort, her own wants and needs, above all other things.

The past five years had utterly distilled us. Finn was the same person that he’d been when we met and when we married. But I’d grown six people, one after the other; I divided and subdivided into pieces, as his understanding of me, his empathy for my experiences, subdivided, too. I felt often that it came down to one problem: Finn remained an individual while I became a group. He no longer understood me, and in turn, I resented his independence.

his word was always the final word. He was my home, the father to my children, the son of this country; I didn’t stand a chance. I was an adjunct to power. I was not its source. I was merely its reproductive resource.

Marcella’s card, however, was uniquely thoughtful: It does not matter what you do, as long as you do it with confidence. The best mother is simply one who can be counted on.

The original Beauty, she of La Belle et La Bête, trades herself to the Beast to grant her father his freedom. Like so many, she goes from her father’s clutches to her husband’s.

That’s what men do in this world to fertile things: put fences around them and make them procreate at any cost.

Then he erupted into a gale of laughter. A tear squeezed out of one eye, like it had back at Scoria Vale, but for different reasons. I reached up and brushed it away. “Tears always at the ready,” I said, licking the drop from my finger. “Emotional. I like that.” “I’m never emotional,” he said, serious now, watching me, blooming, that lily smell mixing with the cedar of his sweat. We were inches apart, glued to each other, our bodies composed in mirrored poses. And me thinking I was the lion, while he played the lamb.

Look. Ask yourself. Who does income tax affect? It doesn’t affect the rich. They get around paying it no matter what,” he said, tapping my fingernails, one by one, as I scowled, incredulous. “But regular people can’t do that. Most people can’t lose thirty percent of their paycheck. We get it back from the rich in property fees. The balance is the same. Income tax is a regressive tax,” he insisted. The tapping stopped and he rested his fingers over mine.

No one, not even my parents, had ever told me that they thought my mind and body were equal. A smart runner, yes. A creative runner. An economical runner, but not a smart person. I tucked the compliment into a pocket of my heart, where it stayed forever.

I was a twenty-four-year-old, handicapped, thus-far-unemployable former athlete with a grade-nine education on an extended faux gap year who gave the occasional motivational speech. My biggest hobby was walking. But—I was beautiful.

I didn’t let myself touch him, not just then, because I was trying to be what I thought of as strategic. Christian had been an influential lesson. Men—rich men, handsome men, powerful men; poor men, hideous men, weak men—men do not want women they can simply have. Men are socialized to chase and dominate, to win, to esteem combativeness. History as it is written is the history of men conquering, men pillaging, men owning, men commanding. Everything around us, from the faces on our money to the statues in the streets, reiterates that we value men who conquer—men who take something from others. And women are property. We have been property forever. It is so rare for a woman to belong to herself. Even now, as I write these words, grasping for order and truth, I wonder if I am yet possessed of myself.

Would there ever be a woman who would be his equal? I scowled. Equal? From where? As an athlete I wasn’t allowed to compete against men. We accelerated—but so did they. The performance gap between the sexes stood in most sports. The wage gap stood in every industry. The gaps were everywhere. Why did everyone insist on pretending, all the time, that anything was fair? Fairness only existed if you started in the same place, with the same tools and the same resources.