Do You Want Me To Come With You?

I finally saw Pan’s Labyrinth the other night, after having heard a lot about it from various people and waiting for it to come to New Zealand. It was frightening and unusual and awful and fantastic and I found myself gasping aloud and having to hide my face several times. At one point I thought, during a particularly graphic and violent scene involving the Captain, “Oh, can we PLEASE go back to the horrific flappy fairy-eating eye-hand monster!” I have been thinking about the story ever since.

Several aspects of the movie really moved me: Mercedes’ low dark bun and her cheekbones, the way she calls Ofelia “mi amor” (which I used to hear all the time as a kid in Miami and now never do), the brave mud-smeared girl in the roots of the fig tree and her carefully, futilely hung up dress, the way she stares with so much fear and rage at the Captain when he throws her back in her room and holds her cheek where he’s slapped her.

The way, especially, she speaks to the fairy-insect when it comes clicking and crawling over her bedspread: “Do you want me to come with you?” Yes, it chitters, pointing the way out across the cold stone floor, and she puts on her slippers and goes. She goes down into the forest, the labyrinth, into the hole in the dark, knowing absolutely that it’s the right thing (the only thing) to do, accepting and understanding that she’s a lost princess and that she will have to prove herself because that’s how these things work and she has always known that she was different.

I looked for Narnia in every closet and left my window open for Peter Pan every night in our semi-tropical suburban house when I was little, waiting and waiting for it to be my turn to be discovered by adventure. It was so obvious to me: I would have flown out in my nightgown without a backward look, I would have followed the Yellow Brick Road, I would have gone down the rabbit hole without ever worrying about getting home for tea. When I was about twelve I told a friend’s mother, very sincerely, “Well, I’ve always been special,” and I could understand neither why she thought I’d said something funny and self-obsessed nor why the evidence of my extraordinariness seemed so easily ignored by everyone else.

The past twenty years have done nothing if not assure me of my own bog-standardness and convince me of my utter plainness. I know now that I wouldn’t be the princess, that I wouldn’t even be the ugly stepsister. I would fall asleep for a hundred years on my way back from the bathroom because I’d spilled something on my shirt and when the prince came and kissed his beauty and saved us all I’d wake up with a snort and a start, remembering that I really had to get home and get my laundry off the line because it’s about to rain any minute, and oh, man, what am I going to make for dinner tonight, did I pick up tomato sauce at the store like I was supposed to and what’s the deal with this crick in my neck, did I sleep weird or something? My life has turned out just about as quotidian as you’d expect and I think, now, that if there’s going to be any adventure in my life it’s going to be mostly of my own making, and that if I ever do find it, it will be a lot messier and more complicated than all the stories make it out to be, and I will still have to do laundry and make dinner and go to the store.

(Still. I would still follow the articulated arthropodal fairy, I would still find the key, I would still open the book and do as it told me. Twenty years have not been enough to convince me completely that if I keep checking the closets one day the door will open and the lamppost will shine out through the winter, and that I will put on the fur coat and go out unhesitating into the wide new world).

(I bet you would, too).

(Maybe I will see you there).