Spinning

Maybe she’d known some other Rumpelstiltskin. He’d never met anyone else with his name, but it was possible. Not probable, but still. Maybe she’d known a few other people with the name and just took a wild stab at it. She had three guesses, after all. It wasn’t like she got it right out of the gate, right? It was certainly possible.

Wasn’t it?

Regardless, he still knew how to spin gold from straw. He had that going for him at least. With those potential resources, how hard would it be to connect with a private adoption agency and, basically, buy a baby? Hell, he could buy out their whole inventory of orphans, every urchin in their catalog, if he felt like it. If he sat down and spun enough straw.

But the thing was, he shouldn’t have to do that. Not all over again. He’d already outlaid the time and expense, all that straw-to-gold spinning, and by rights, he should’ve been duly compensated. It wasn’t fair. It wouldn’t be tough to find a baby on his own, through an agency, of course, but why should he? It was the principle of the thing, because, sure, he’d gotten a little cocky, adding that side bet rather than keeping it a straight exchange—their initial deal, gold for baby, cut-and-dried—but she had so clearly cheated.

Chances were good, at least. He couldn’t prove it, but she’d likely cheated. Unless she was previously familiar with such a rare name and then just guessed, out of the blue . . .

Naw . . .

And an adoption-agency baby wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t be the offspring of potential royalty. He wouldn’t be able to tell his kid, down the line, “You know, your birth mother is now the queen, so . . .” Forget about having any sort of leg up when it came time to apply to colleges.

Having run out of schnapps, he dug up the last earthen jug of crab-apple cider he’d been fermenting in a hole in the ground in his cottage dooryard, and he spent the next twenty-four hours in and out of a stupor, glaring up at the sun and the moon and the sun, stunned at what had happened to him in the castle tower.

His friend Ernie stopped by to check on him and found him still outside with what was left of the cider. Rumpelstiltskin tried to be friendly. “I’d give you a swig, Ern, but there are potato bugs in it.” It was a lie. Or half a lie. There were potato bugs, floating in the dregs of it, but he planned on drinking it all anyway.

Ernie wasn’t being smug about it exactly, wasn’t saying I told you so or anything, but he didn’t seem surprised to hear what had happened with the baby deal. Ernie had warned him, back when he’d added that bet part, that it was unwise to attach an escape clause when he already had an oral contract in place, and besides, it wasn’t truly a fair bet—to her—which rendered the whole deal legally dubious. “The line on a bet like that, her guessing Rumpelstiltskin,” Ernie had claimed just the week before, “bookies would put that at maybe three million to one, something like that. Not much of a chance.”

“I didn’t have to give her any kind of chance,” Rumpelstiltskin insisted again, now that it was over. “It was a fair exchange of goods, to start with. A straight trade. The bet, that was just a little add-on, for fun.”

“Was it fun?” said Ernie now.

“To make me look like I had a heart, then. ’Cause she wanted to wiggle out of the agreement. To give her a chance.”

“Not much of a chance,” Ernie said. “Well, she guessed it, didn’t she?”

“I would’ve guessed Ernie,” said Ernie.

“Of course you would,” said Rumpelstiltskin.

“Because it’s an actual name,” said Ernie. “I mean, a regular name.”

“If I had your name,” said Rumpelstiltskin, who would’ve been ready to sock his friend if he could’ve gotten up, “I wouldn’t be so surprised she guessed it. Obviously. I wouldn’t be a sore loser. The odds on guessing someone is named Ernie can’t be three million to one.”

“Are you sure you didn’t tell her your name when you first appeared in her tower cell?”

“Positive.” He wasn’t positive, but he couldn’t accept that he’d been that dumb. He’d probably had a few drinks.

“It would be natural enough: ‘Hello. Don’t be startled!’ She goes, ‘Who are you? Oh, my gosh!’ and you introduce yourself, right?”

He remembered wanting to make an impression, really sell that he was powerful and mysterious and there to solve her problems, so he thought he’d cut out the mundane BS and just said, “I shall save you, fair maiden. I shall spin this straw into gold.” Went right for the sales pitch, kept it dramatic and less conversational. But then again, like Ernie was saying, introducing yourself is such a natural impulse, something you might do without even noticing. You almost have to. And he hadn’t had his guess-my-name addendum in mind at all at that point, so why wouldn’t it have maybe slipped out?

“I think you should look into this.” Ernie was standing over him now, too close, trying to hand him a pamphlet. There was a picture of some schlub holding his brow. On his back, in the shade of the crab-apple tree, Rumpelstiltskin could hardly make it out. He squinted at it and said he needed his cheaters. He thought it might be some law group or legal-aid society—that Ernie was suggesting he get some shysters to take up his case against this defrauding maiden in the tower.

“I know it’s hard to talk about,” Ernie said. “Embarrassing . . . ?”

And he saw finally that it was literature about local resources for alcoholics.

“You judgy little nothing,” he said and whipped the empty jug at him. From that low angle, with him still sprawled on the ground, it went high, just missing Ernie as he ducked but smashing against an overhead tree limb, showering his cringing friend with shards.

The embarrassing part that he couldn’t confess even to Ernie was the jig. How unprofessional was that? Sometime in the last twenty-four hours, he’d put it together that unless she had taken a wild guess, and assuming he hadn’t slipped up and said “How’s it going? I’m Rumpelstiltskin” at the get-go, then she had sent a footman or lady-in-waiting to poke around in the woods, or someone just happened to be walking past—again, that kind of rudderless serendipity strained the odds of probability—at exactly that moment on that night before he was to collect, when he’d gotten into the schnapps and gone outside—why the hell couldn’t he have kept it contained in his cottage?—and danced a jig in the moonlight here in his dooryard. A jig! And what on earth compelled him to spell it all out in a song? Ridiculous.

He almost had to wonder if the girl had cast a spell on him to make him behave irrationally. But if she were capable of spells, she probably could have worked out the gold-straw thing on her own, right? Or at least stymied the king with some sort of mind-clouder.

But that didn’t excuse his own sloppy behavior. That dance out in the yard—that was on him.

And now he’d chucked a jug at his only real friend, and a perfectly good jug too. Maybe Ernie was right. It probably was time he owned up to it: he had a drinking problem, and he was going to have to go to a meeting. Because wasn’t this the main sign of a problem—consequences for yourself or others?

When he sobered up, he knew what he had to do. He shaved and put on a clean shirt and ventured out from his cottage for the first time in days, planning to check out a meeting.

Mostly, it was to humor his friend, he told himself, halfway to the village. And as he entered the village square, he decided instead to stop by the office of a private adoption agency. Just to do a reality check first, see if he could maybe just get a kid on his own without a ton of scrounging, and so to heck with the stupid weeping maiden in the tower, screw her and her promises! Maybe this was just a minor setback, no reason for rash actions.

The receptionist tried to take down his name: “Rumpelstilt-stein?”

“Skin. Rumpelstiltskin.”

“Oh. Never heard that one. What’s the origin of that? Probably your family changed it at some point, right?”

Clearly, this snotty little nothing was anti-Semitic. Probably the whole system was, or this whole agency at least, and they’d mark him in their files as an undesirable.

“Any racial or religious preferences?” she asked.

“For me?” Now she was getting right at it, head on. Not even hiding her prejudice.

“For the child. The background of the parents, really.”

He hadn’t thought of this; hadn’t even imagined what the baby would look like, other than a small bundle of blanket. “No. Just—it would be better if they weren’t allergic to straw.”

“Well, we have no way of knowing that yet, sir. They’re mostly newborns. And there’s no box for that on the form, so . . .”

“So, no record of the parents’ allergies? Hay fever? Or maybe you could just roll the child around in a stable? Just briefly, to see?”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

He glanced at the big clock behind her. He could still get to that meeting.

Something about this receptionist—the look she was giving him—it wasn’t quite the mask of horror and revulsion the miller’s daughter had laid on him, but, man, it was close.

And why hadn’t the little fool shown that face when he first floated the proposal? Why had she waited to look stricken till the potential for taking her still-only-theoretical baby became more real, once he started producing the free gold she claimed was so important? And what did she think he was going to do with the thing—eat it? No. He didn’t want it for any nefarious reason. It was just going to be a conversation piece. Something novel to have around the house. Prestige. Look, I got a baby. How about them apples?

Outside the adoption agency, the sun hurt his head. He had to go back in there and just explain. Pushing back into the lobby, he told the receptionist, “Listen, does it help if I tell you I already was owed a baby—that by rights, I already—I should be in line—”

Another woman, in serious glasses that may or may not have been real, stepped out into the hall, listening, as if something public were happening, like a bank robbery or other emergency, a low-pressure weather system from which everyone must seek shelter.

“I mean, I had a baby all lined up, but they weaseled out of the deal, so . . .”

Too late, he saw his own sweat land on the shiny desk with a clear fat drip. As he turned again to leave, he heard the second woman direct the receptionist, in low tones, to contact security.

The back of the custom twill work shirt was embroidered with Rumpelstiltskin’s Gold-Spinning Service, and he was wearing it with pride . . .

The dream was awful and absurd, and it woke him, crestfallen and certain he’d been wearing that shirt when he first visited the miller’s daughter. In a moment of listless recollection, it left him feeling, as most dreams did, utterly childish.

Hopping up, he went to the closet to check for his uniform shirt, which, he realized, had been at the dry cleaners for weeks now. He had not, in fact, been wearing it when he first presented himself to her.

Still, he could easily have been wearing it, he saw: he was just that out of control. Basic common sense seemed out of his grasp lately. Possibly, deep down, it was that he somehow wanted to fail. How else could he explain it? Self-sabotage, the pamphlet called it. He did it all the time, if he really got down to it. Like that fix-up he’d had, maybe a year before, with some friend of Ernie’s cousin. They’d gone on a date, and it was going so well that she initiated going for a walk after dinner, since the night air was so pleasant. And they were walking along the lakeshore, and he ruined it: he said, “You know, if we go to bed, it probably won’t mean anything. It won’t be anything serious. I just want to be up-front with you . . .” Why did he say that?

Even that terrible date, and his rash announcement, his big stab at honesty, cards on the table, made a little more sense than how he’d handled things with the miller’s daughter, dancing around in front of his cottage, shouting, “Rumpelstiltskin is my name!” There was no earthly reason for doing that. He was clearly trying to scuttle the whole deal.

But why? Did he feel that he was incapable of being a parent? Or that he was unworthy of the love of a child?

He could have lied. Why not? She could have guessed Rumpelstiltskin, and he could have just denied it. Just made that buzzer sound—“Wrong! Sorry! Name’s Jerry! Soooo close! So, if you have some sort of travel carrier for the tyke when I come back, that’s great, or I can maybe bring along a gunnysack . . . whatever works. Just let me know. Ta-ta for now!”

Anyone else would have.

Reluctantly, mostly out of guilt, unable to shake that look on Ernie’s face when he’d smashed the cider jug, he relented and finally made it to a meeting.

This one was held in the basement of a half-eaten gingerbread house. The leader of the meeting was a centaur with long flowing hair. Very charismatic. A bit of a poser, the way he’d twist his bare torso, his showy mane spilling around his shoulders, and rest his coffee mug on his own withers. Flick his tail to emphasize a point or underscore a lame joke—that kind of guy.

There was no way he was going up there to speak. It was hard enough just sitting there watching these fools talk. And unsettling, really, how easily these strangers were tossing their names around. No way to play that Guess-my-name-in-three-tries game with these losers.

It said in the pamphlet that no one was going to make him talk. Certainly his first time, since he might not come back anyway, he could just listen.

So he did. He kept his mouth shut and scurried out before the coffee time—didn’t even stay long enough to put the folding chairs away. But he did think about the kind of things he might have spilled, if he had stayed and if he’d been the sort of jerk to spill such crybaby junk.

. . . Maybe how his mother went through an entire kitchen drawer of wooden spoons, eventually breaking each one, in her attempt to communicate with him—to train him proper, was how she put it; how she seemed to find the name she’d given him repulsive or not worth the effort, referring to him only as “little nothing,” “nudnik,” “pisher,” “dross,” or, in lighter moments, “sparrow crap,” “gnat crap,” “piffle.” Or he could tell how he’d have to hide under the floorboards when she’d tie one on, and how she made him turn the only thing that ever gave him any attention, a cute stray puppy he named Jangles, into a gold ingot. Or maybe about school, socializing—how he stopped even trying to be picked for kickball when his mother, not bothering to embroider his whole name across the back of his gym jersey, just sewed a big zero on it instead, so he’d spent recess and gym stealing away to sip the elderberry-wine stash he discovered in the janitor’s mop closet; how that led to his mastery of slipping in and out of dark lonely places, being unseen, not mattering.

That sort of crap.

Rumpelstiltskin woke at an incline, in the bright morning sun, to the murmur of children. A burly man loomed, a badge flickering on his lapel.

He’d passed out on a slide in a nursery-school playground. He remembered, vaguely, taking a dump over in the little sandbox in the shape of a big turtle, covering it up with the turtle-shell cover.

“Buddy. Pal.” The burly man squatted low on the balls of his feet, like he was addressing one of the preschoolers. “You live around here?”

“I think . . .”

“What’s your name?”

He wasn’t that out of it. “Ernie?” he said instead.

“Okay, Ernie, so this is not a tragedy, okay? But you are upsetting the kids. So we got two options here. You tell me which way you want this to go, okay? So. We can take you in front of the magistrate on a drunk and disorderly, maybe trespassing, or you can get yourself to a meeting.”

“I’ve been. It’s okay. I have. I’ve been to a meeting.”

“Not today you haven’t. You got a sponsor, Ernie?”

“I’ll go straight away, sir,” and he was up with a groan, clearing out of there on stiff legs. A yelp had just gone up over by the sandbox. Some kid had peeked under the turtle shell.

“Rumpelstiltskin is my—” That wasn’t right. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Hi. I’m Rumpelstiltskin, and I’m an alcoholic.”

He was stunned at how easily it came out. He hadn’t planned to say that much, certainly not that, brand his own ass with the A-word, first time up in front of these losers. But now it all tumbled out, and he spilled it all, in a long messy rush—the deal for the baby, how he’d saved the miller’s daughter from execution and got bupkes for his trouble.

And then, to his surprise, he went on, talking about himself, his life in general, going back to the wooden spoons and Jangles, whose love was lost forever when his mom’s loser boyfriend traded that gold ingot for a pontoon boat. How he started drinking at a young age because he felt so insecure. And how drinking became entwined with his work, to the point where he worried that without the crutch of a good buzz, he wouldn’t be able to do it. And how those skills were his only true value. He heard himself saying, “I guess I never feel like anyone would ever like me, you know, for me. Just for myself. It’s usually, Oh, hey, maybe you could make some gold for me . . .? Like I’m made of straw or something.”

He could tell from the restless stirring and facial expressions that a lot of people at the meeting had some thoughts about his “share,” but there was a rule against what they called “cross talk,” so they waited, he found out, till the coffee time to really get into it with him.

He started to help with the folding chairs, but a wizard, opening a new carton of nondairy creamer, told him, “You don’t need to do that. The dwarves like to put away the chairs.” And he could see now that it was mostly the little bearded men, that they had some sort of a system.

“I liked your share,” said a very crooked old man, offering his very crooked hand to shake, welcoming him. “This is a great group,” he said, more quietly. “With this bunch? No one gives a fig how you make your gold here. We got all sorts of trades here—a real hodgepodge, very accepting . . .” He pointed out, hanging around the cookie table, a professional leech gatherer, an organic honey producer, a gloomy-looking linen weaver named Silas, a masked highwayman. “We’ve got someone in stump removal and someone in stump renovation. We even get bridge trolls.”

“Sometimes,” said a milkmaid, butting in, offering a meaty hand to shake. “Not a lot. I mean, they’re trolls.”

“But life coaches and personal organizers, for sure,” said a pixie. “Personal shoppers, owls . . .”

“Goblins . . .” the old man offered. “Candlestick makers, piemen, Pilates instructors . . . All kinds.”

Rumpelstiltskin thought he recognized the mayor, a wealthy local grain merchant. He must have been staring, because the old man said, “Yeah, Michael’s been sober for—I don’t know, longer than all of us. He’s great, too. Just one of the gang.”

“Good share, by the way,” said the milkmaid, shaking her head like it was a lot. “That stuff that went on way back, that scarred you as a kid, a lot of times, it’s easy to dismiss that as old news, say Oh, that’s kid stuff, but it’s good you’re looking at that. It’s great.”

Now a bear was stepping closer, joining them, making a jabbing motion at him with a Hydrox. “Not only that, friend, but seriously—this stuff you’re telling us, vis-à-vis what just went down over at the castle?” He seemed to have several more cookies already in his mouth. “This is pure chaos, man. What kind of a plan was this, anyway? No judgment, dude—really: zero—but you’re popping into fancy ladies’ private chambers in the middle of the night—”

“I was hammered. Absolutely.”

“That’s the kind of situation can go sideways fast, am I right? And then you enter into this fucked-up project with her, no contract really, work your ass off, and she’s full of histrionics about how she’s going to get killed if she doesn’t pony up some gold, pronto. Big red flags should be going off. Classic sob story she’s handing you, one we’ve all heard, I’m sure”—the others, the woodsmen especially, murmured assent—“and every single one of us was loaded at the time, am I right? ‘Oh, it’s a fair maiden in distress! I have to help her out!’”

“You were looking for chaos. And boy, you found it,” said a chipmunk with neck tattoos, who seemed pretty sure of himself for a chipmunk.

“Frankly, I’m hearing a lot of blame,” said a small ogre. “The ol’blame game. And not a lot of honesty.”

“You were trying to screw up,” said one of the hags. “You were.”

“I was,” Rumpelstiltskin said. “I was trying to screw up.”

“You wanted a reason to say it wasn’t fair, right?”

A laugh spilled out of him. “I don’t honestly know what to do with a baby, man. I’m a fuckup.”

“That right there, friend?” said the bear. “That’s the start of not being a fuckup. Saying ‘I am a fuckup.’ Hug?”

They hugged. And the others shifted around from foot to foot awkwardly, but they wanted in on it too. Most of them smelled of turnips, which was nice. He was picking up a little whiff of schnapps, but it was probably his own shirt.

Afterward, out in the parking lot, he talked for a long while to a gnome he thought he might ask to be his sponsor. The gnome said one thing he really liked: “Dude. There’ll be other babies. When you’re ready. Right now, you’ve got to love yourself before you can handle any of that . . . or something. But what the hell do I know? Anybody tells you they know absolutely what the deal is with someone else—they’ve got their number, figured them out—they’re wrong. They don’t.”

Sometime later, with his gold-plated six-months-sobriety chip snug in his front pocket, he hiked to the edge of the woods and watched the miller’s daughter, now the queen, walking with her handmaidens, picking dandelions to tickle her baby. He was glad she looked happy. Maybe she was just happy not to be killed by the king, but that was her journey and not his. And the baby would probably have a wonderful life with her, even if the father sounded like a bit of a maniac.

He lingered there, in the shadow of a juniper tree, trying not to be a creepy lurker but also hoping he wasn’t spotted. If she drew near, he might say hello or simply wave. He wasn’t quite there yet, but eventually, he knew, he did owe her an amends. For now, he told himself, it was enough to be up to step four, just doing his best to be honest with himself about who he was and who he wasn’t.

Rumpelstiltskin is my name, he said to himself, feeling no urge this time to do a jig.

Read more from Issue 19.1.