When I was ten or eleven, I had plans to poison her.
These were not theoretical. My brother had just introduced me to the internet, and one of the first things I did with it was compile a list of poisonous plants common to our area of the Midwest. I’d been raised on a steady diet of Disneyfied fairy tales, augmented by the older, deliciously gruesome originals that I sought out. I loved the stories that featured meat pies made with children, harps made with young girls’ bones. I knew that there was a version of “Cinderella” in which she killed her stepmother and a version of “Snow White” in which she invited hers to the royal wedding, then forced the woman to wear iron hot shoes and dance until she dropped dead. I didn’t know of any fairy tale in which both stepmother and stepdaughter survived intact.
At that point, what I knew about Jo Ann consisted of the following: she wore a fur coat and diamond earrings. She kept her hair cropped in a black bob and painted her nails a lacquered red. She worked at the same company as my father, and in a misunderstanding that took decades to correct, I believed her to be his secretary. She once gave him a mahogany clock the size of a small cantaloupe that he placed on his office desk in plain view.
I had never spoken to her. Three years earlier, before the divorce, my mother had made me promise to never say a word to a woman named Jo Ann K—.
I invited my best friend Jennifer to join in my botanic research. Jennifer had recently acquired a stepfather, which I figured was almost as bad as a stepmother, especially since he wore a ponytail and held strict religious convictions. Together, we added to the list until we had collected nearly twenty different options. But then Jennifer started spinning around in the desk chair to make herself dizzy. “This is boring,” she informed me.
Soldiering on alone, driven by the combined weight of my own hatred and my mother’s, I determined that the most promising option was lily of the valley, since it grew in my mother’s garden. I unearthed the poisonous roots that lurked beneath the tiny white bell flowers, tied bunches with lengths of embroidery floss, and hung them to dry in my closet. It took me years to realize that the plants I gathered were not lethal, that “poisonous” did not mean “deadly.” Had I gathered the courage and malice to slip something into her soup, Jo Ann would probably have just suffered a stomachache or nasty case of diarrhea.
Later, I also realized that in early versions of many fairy tales— those unsoftened by the pens of the Grimm brothers or Charles Perrault—it is often a blood mother, not a stepmother, who asks the huntsman to cut out her daughter’s heart, drives her children barefoot into the woods, beheads her son by slamming a trunk lid on the slender stem of his neck.