Snow White by Donald Barthelme Page A

in the wrong time. There is somethingwrong with all those people standing there, gaping and gawking. And with all those
     who did not come and at least try to climb up. To fill the role. And with the very world itself, for not being able
     to supply a prince. For not being able to at least be civilized enough to supply the
     correct ending to the story.”

PART THREE

SNOW WHITE had another glass of healthy orange juice. “From now on I deny myself to them. These
     delights. I maintain an esthetic distance. No more do I trip girlishly to their bed
     in the night, or after lunch, or in the misty mid-morning. Not that I ever did. It
     was always my whim which governed those gregarious encounters summed up so well by
     Livy in the phrase, vae victis . I congratulate myself on that score at least. And no more will I chop their onions,
     boil their fettucini, or marinate their flank steak. No more will I trudge about the
     house pursuing stain. No more will I fold their lingerie in neat bundles and stuff
     it away in the highboy. I am not even going to speak to them, now, except through
     third parties, or if I have something special to announce—a new nuance of my mood,
     a new vagary, a new extravagant caprice. I don’t know what such a policy will win
     me. I am not even sure I wish to implement it. It seems small and mean-spirited. I
     have conflicting ideas. But the main theme that runs through my brain is that what
     is, is insufficient. Where did that sulky notion come from? From the rental library,
     doubtless. Perhaps the seven men should have left me in the forest. To perishthere, when all the roots and berries and rabbits and robins had been exhausted. If
     I had perished then, I would not be thinking now. It is true that there is a future
     in which I shall inevitably perish. There is that. Thinking terminates. One shall
     not always be leaning on one’s elbow in the bed at a quarter to four in the morning,
     wondering if the Japanese are happier than their piglike Western contemporaries. Another
     orange juice, with a little vodka in it this time.”
    “I HAVE killed this whole bottle of Chablis wine by myself,” Dan said. “And that other
     bottle of Chablis too—that one under the bed. And that other bottle of Chablis too—the
     one with the brown candle stuck in the mouth of it. And I am not afraid. Not of what
     may come, not of what has been. Now I will light that long cigar, that cigar that
     stretches from Mont St. Michel and Chartres, to under the volcano. What is merely
     fashionable will fade away, and what is merely new will fade away, but what will not
     fade away, is the way I feel: analogies break down, regimes break down, but the way
     I feel remains. I feel abandoned. After a hard day tending the vats, and washing the
     buildings, one wants to come home and find a leg of mutton on the table, in a rich
     gravy with little pearly onions studded in it, and perhaps a small pot of Irish potatoes
     somewhere about. Instead I come home to this nothingness. Now she sits in her room
     reading Dissent and admiring her figure in the mirror. She still loves us, in a way, but it isn’t
     enough. It is a failure of leadership, I feel. We have been left sucking the mop again.
     True leadership would make her love us fiercely and excitingly, as in the old days.
     True leadership would find a way out of this hairy imbroglio. I am tired of Bill’s
     halting explanations, promises. If he doesn’t want to lead, then let us vote. That
     is all I have to say, except onemore thing: when one has been bending over a hot vat all day, one doesn’t want to
     come home and hear a lot of hump from a cow-hearted leader whose leadership buttons
     have fallen off—some fellow who spends the dreamy days eating cabbage and watching
     ships, while you are at work. Work, with its charts, its lines of authority, its air
     of importance.”
    “THE refusal of emotion produces nervousness,” Bill said dipping into the barrel