Lady
Celebrating the 50th anniversary of one of my favorite movies, with one of my favorite characters! I did a similar piece on Elsa before ("Breaking", if you're interested), but this time I wanted to write an Elsa with a focus on her strength.
May also include some snark on that one line of the song Maria sings - "and you belong to him." It's rough watching old movies sometimes #feminist
Reviews much appreciated - let me know what you think!
Once when she was eight, she came home with bruised knees, a torn skirt, and a victorious smile. Her mother dropped her glass at the sight, and her father then turned at the sound. It would one day be her father's favorite story to tell over the dinner table with close friends, once she was a lady and such scandalous behavior was strictly forbidden. "Little Elsie," he would chortle, to her humiliation. "Always a fighter for what she wanted. The boys told her she would be no good at football, but she certainly proved them wrong!"
Her mother taught her such things did not deserve victorious smiles, and that - in fact - nothing really did deserve victorious smiles, as victorious smiles were unattractive on young ladies. "Nothing turns a man away like a boastful smile and a ruined dress," she scolded. An hour later, her horrified rant finally cooled into a mournful sob. "Oh, but it's our fault, isn't it?" her mother moaned. "We need to keep you in better company - you need to make a more glittering circle of friends - "
The spoils of her success - bruised knees, a torn skirt, and a victorious smile - were removed within the month, when her knees had healed and her dress had been burned and her smiles trained to be demure; but that night she sat in the bathtub watching the dirt flake away from her skin, wondering why it felt like she had lost.
At eleven, she laughed when one of the girls was given a storybook by an uncle, or a grandfather, or someone of some relation. "What's the matter, Elsa?" her friends asked. "Don't you think it's romantic?"
"Romantic?" Elsa echoed. "What's romantic about marrying a prince?"
There was a moment of silence before they all began fumbling for words, one over the other - how do you explain something so obvious? Elsa frowned and said, "But there's nothing so remarkable about Aschenputtel, besides cooking and cleaning and following orders. A prince has servants for that. What's so romantic about belonging to someone who doesn't really need you?"
"But he loves her," Jana insisted. "It was love at first sight."
"Maybe," Elsa allowed, "but she needs him more than he'll ever need her. She needs him desperately, to save her from stepsisters and chores. I don't ever want to belong to somebody like that. He'll have to need me just as much as I need him."
Hans - the baron's son - was passing by and he crowed. "Why would anyone need you?" he laughed, triggering sniggers from the other boys.
The girls gasped indignantly for her, but Elsa simply stood and said rather coolly, "Because I am a lady, and some men need ladies to teach them how to be gentlemen."
She held hands with a boy when she was fifteen, and it was terrible. Jana had been upset, because apparently she liked the boy (whose name Elsa could no longer quite remember, but the sweatiness of his palms was most assuredly something she'd never forget). He was a rather boring boy, if Elsa were to be completely honest, but there was an awe and worship in the way he looked at her that made something in the bottom of her stomach flutter a blush up to her cheeks.
To Jana's shock - and a cacophony of other emotions that Elsa had never fully deciphered - Elsa ended things with the boy before too long. "What?" Jana demanded. "Is he not good enough for you? Not romantic enough?"
Jana had been, perhaps, a little bitter and a little jealous at the time, considering also that Elsa - having once been the spearheaded Elsie that her father loved to talk about, and now the spearheading Elsa that her mother loved to talk about - was, only a few months prior, the first of their friends to throw a grand ball without the aid of her mother, and the party had been a fabulous success. "Your daughter has a natural talent for creating such splendor," Jana's mother had said to Elsa's mother, with enough of a touch of wistfulness in her tone to trouble Jana for quite a while afterward.
"He liked me because I know how to throw a ball, and I know how to dress elegantly and look the part. He liked me for my circle of friends, Jana, but he didn't need me." Elsa smiled modestly, the way her mother had taught her how to smile years ago. Even though she didn't think much of the boy, and even though she was a little hurt that someone could like her so much for her popularity and not for her, she looked at Jana's thin, tight lips and said, "Maybe who he needs is somebody else."
At nineteen, she had been styling her outfits with a black scarf for months, mourning her father who had passed away. Her friends had said little about it, except for Jana, who was quick to defend Elsa's fashion choices if anyone were to question it. Her mother had always been close to frowning whenever she saw Elsa's style for the day, but it was unladylike to frown, so the corners of her lips had always stayed thin and straight.
One day, her mother looked at the scarf Elsa had sculpted into a flower tied at her waist and sighed. "Oh, Elsa, must you carry that thing around with you always?"
"It hasn't even been a year, Mother," Elsa responded, hurt that her mother could so quickly forget her father.
"Oh, darling, I don't mean it like that," her mother said, gently pulling Elsa onto a loveseat with her. "But your father wouldn't have wanted you to mourn for him forever. He would want his little Elsie to carry on and grow, like she always has." When Elsa didn't respond, her mother took her hand. "Baron von Schraeder called in just yesterday, asking for permission to marry you. Maybe it's a sign to move on now."
In an instant, Elsa stood, stealing her hand back from her mother. "What did you tell him?" Elsa demanded. "You said no. Tell me, you declined."
"Elsa!" her mother reprimanded sharply. "That is no way for you to speak - especially to your own mother." Her mother stood with much more grace than Elsa had earlier demonstrated. "Marriage to the baron is most advantageous for you. Such prospects most girls could not even hope to dream for. I hope you show a little more decorum when you speak to the baron than what you showed me today."
"He is - "
"He is a baron, Elsa. He would treat you well, and you will live better than either your father or I could have hoped," her mother said. "Your father would have wanted this for you, Elsa."
Elsa stared at her mother until she felt something hot begin to rise up within her, and then she turned away and walked slowly back to her room - slowly, head raised, like a lady, but always angling her face so that the tears that leaked couldn't be seen.
At twenty, she walked down the aisle in a gown of white with black feathers braided into her hair. She stared at the man she was about to marry - a man with coarse gray hair, a man who leaned too much on his left side when he walked, a man who couldn't sit through dinner without having to use the bathroom - and his son beside him, his son Hans who was a year older than she, his son Hans who had been so cruel to her and her friends as a child.
She wondered how she could be a dutiful wife to this man she didn't care for. She wondered how her mother could see her through this. She wondered how her father could have wanted this for her.
She walked down the aisle toward a man who didn't need her - only a pretty face, only pretty company - as a girl who needed everything from him - his money, his title, his house - and wondered if this was what Aschenputtel felt like at all when she married her prince.
It wasn't until she was thirty, and Hans - her step-son - was thirty-one, when the baron passed away. Ten years of being the lady she didn't want to be, ten years she could have had with her father but were instead given to a man who wanted a slim figure to warm his bed and delicate fingers to cling to his arm at parties.
Sometimes, she had been thankful for Hans' existence, which meant she was never pressured to give the baron a son.
But now she cashed in on her reward of ten years belonging to a man who didn't belonging to her. For she had always been a proper lady to him, his will was generous towards her, and Hans begrudged her for it though he had plenty for himself.
For the week following his funeral, Elsa dressed in gowns of black, but following that week she put away all her black scarves she accumulated through the years and wore only color.
She fell in love a few years later, when she was thirty-three.
He was a man from Vienna, a decorated naval hero, just as lost in the world as she. She had heard stories from her friends about this man, Georg, and how romantic his devotion to his late wife had been. He was a man who loved, and Elsa desperately, desperately wanted to know what it was like to be loved.
So she had smiled prettily at him, and after a party or two he had finally smiled back - and she had wanted to smile at him like she used to smile when she was eight, but instead she had masked her face and invited him to dance with her.
"Shouldn't that be my role?" Georg had asked, surprised that she would be so forward.
Elsa had laughed, and how freeing that had felt! "You hadn't danced at the last several parties," she had said, taking his hand as he led her to the dance floor. "I wasn't sure you knew how to ask at all."
And then one day, he would invite her to his home in Vienna.
"You brought some meaning back into my life," he said, and her throat was suddenly dry because this - this was all she had ever wanted.
The governess that Georg kept was vibrant, more vibrant than the colors that Elsa kept in her wardrobe these days. The governess was kind, pretty, and warm, but nothing at all like a lady. No sense of propriety, no discipline. She was certainly a girl who would never last in a ten year marriage to the now-deceased baron. Elsa briefly wondered what her mother would say if she met a problem like Fraulein Maria.
And yet Elsa couldn't deny that Georg's eyes were flitting over towards the girl in the blue dress, and it felt a bit like walking down the stairs and missing a step.
She watched them dance, she watched red flood the girl's cheeks, felt that same red course through her blood.
But Elsa was no Aschenputtel, who would cry to a tree asking for fine jewels and fine dresses to win a man. Nor was Georg a prince who could be won simply by a fair face and glittering shoes. He was much more than that, which was why she was in love with him; and she was much more than Aschenputtel, which was why he was in love with her.
And after all she had endured, did she not deserve love? Would she give up her chance for love so that a whimsical woman who wished to be a nun could pick it up?
Elsa could endure a little longer.
She stared at Max, and his insensitivity to her hurt. That he could recognize who was the one who could whisper into Georg's mind and that it wasn't her. That he would have the gall to ask her to recruit Fraulein Maria to his silly singing scheme.
"Perhaps," she said, and it was ten years of practice that had taught her how to maintain such an airy, casual tone no matter what she truly felt, "the person you should be asking is me."
Please, no more talk of Maria. Tonight was to be her celebration, and she would celebrate.
It didn't take him too long after to propose to her. She had known all along that he would remember that they were in love. That she would always be there to find him, when he's lost in an Austria he once loved, when he's in a world that is disappearing. She would always bring him back from far away.
She brought some meaning back to his life, but Maria brought back to him his children. And Elsa, she would have done the same if she knew how, but she was thirty-four years old and never bore a child. Her only child was her step-son Hans, who was now thirty-five, who had laughed at her acne when she was twelve, who had stepped on her toes on purpose during dance lessons.
She didn't know how to manage children. Especially not when they're mourning for Maria, Maria, Maria, Maria who had been there first.
"I get a fiendish delight thinking of you as the mother of seven," Max chortled, having watched her miserable attempt at lifting their spirits.
She gingerly sat herself down at the patio table, exhausted but determined to not let it show. She tried to imagine herself as the mother of seven, but she came up with nothing.
"Darling," so she said instead, "haven't you ever heard of a delightful little thing called boarding school?"
She felt like she was eight again, sitting in a bathtub wondering why victory felt so broken.
"It's no use. I'm only cheating you."
"Where are you going?"
She looks at Max, and her gaze drops slightly to his lips. Why not him, she thinks. She needs the laughter he provides, and he needs her money.
But her heart hurts too much right now, and what hurts even more are the whispers in her head: You're not made for love. You don't deserve love. No one needs you, not the way you need them.
She thinks about bruised knees, fairy tales, sweaty palms, black scarves, a wedding, a funeral, and love she would never have.
She pushes those thoughts aside. "I don't know," she admits. "Maybe I'll go to a monastery to look for a man who will never be a monk." She smiles - not victoriously, because she doesn't remember what victory feels like, and she's not sure if she's ever known. "Auf Wiedersehen, darling."
She turns away, head raised like a lady, but always angling her face so that the tears that leaked couldn't be seen.