The Seduction of Water by Carol Goodman

matriarchal bonding there is now a whiff—like the dead fish smell coming off the river tonight—of theft. Aren’t I just stealing my mother’s story? Even the title, “The Selkie’s Daughter”—which Phoebe admired and which I thought was an original variation on “The Selkie”—rings false to me, as if I’d heard it somewhere else. I even search Amazon.com for other books with that title but the closest match I find is
The Optimist’s Daughter
by Eudora Welty.
    The rainy weather lifts in the next weeks, but instead of lightening my gloom it just makes me too edgy to sit at my desk. I make no further progress writing about my mother and fall shamelessly behind on my grading. I feel bad because my students were truly excited by the fairy-tale assignment and each time I come to class empty-handed they look disappointed not to get their papers back. I decide, one Monday toward the end of April, that I simply have to finish grading the papers before that night’s class at Grace, but when I read Mrs. Rivera’s paper, which retells a Mexican version of “Rapunzel,” I suddenly have an overwhelming urge—like the pregnant mother in the story—for fresh greens. There’s no witch’s garden to steal from so instead I head across town to the Greenmarket in Union Square. I tell myself that I’ll just pick up some salad for lunch, but I know I’m also hoping to run into Jack.
    Instead I run into Gretchen Lu.
    She’s standing by a vegetable stall, taking two large plastic garbage bags from a young woman in overalls.
    “Professor Greenfeder,” she says, holding up her bags in two white-gloved hands. “Are you coming to the opening tonight?”
    I rack my brain for knowledge of an opening, but give up.
    “I’m sorry Gretchen, I don’t remember . . .”
    “The student show, Professor. My installation piece was inspired by your fairy-tale assignment.”
    Oh yes. Dead fish. “That’s right. You did ‘The Little Mermaid,’ right?”
    “Oh no. Too Disney. I changed my mind. Haven’t you read my paper?” I picture Gretchen Lu’s paper at the bottom of a stack on my desk, but she’s gone on, oblivious to the slothful practices of her English Comp teacher. “I wanted something more connected to my major—you know, textiles? So I reread Hans Christian Andersen and you can guess which fairy tale I came up with.”
    I can? I run though my list of Hans Christian Andersen stories in my head—“The Snow Queen”? “The Little Tin Soldier”? “The Ugly Duckling”?—but can’t come up with a textile motif. I’m distracted by the piles of fresh greens all around us, lying in damp bunches as if just picked in a dewy field somewhere in the country.
    “The Wild Swans!” Gretchen says. “You know, this little girl Elisa? Her eleven brothers are changed into swans? And she has to knit eleven shirts to change them back? And she can’t talk to anyone until she finishes knitting? And her mother-in-law makes it look like she’s killing her babies by smearing her mouth with blood? And she can’t defend herself because she can’t talk?”
    Although she ends every sentence with the upward lilt of a question, Gretchen doesn’t pause for answer, so I find myself nodding, spellbound, along with a small circle of farmers and shoppers here in the Greenmarket also drawn in by her story.
    “So she’s going to be burned as a witch? But she keeps on knitting and finally she’s finished all eleven shirts except for the sleeve on the last one and her brothers fly into the town square where she’s going to be burned and she throws the shirts over them and they change into boys again except for the youngest one? The one who gets the unfinished shirt? He has a broken wing instead of an arm.”
    Gretchen takes a deep breath and I notice that the little circle we’ve drawn also seems to take a breath and turn back to their purchases of herbs and goat cheeses and fresh-picked wildflowers. Are there really wildflowers like