The Three Spinning Women

Elsa lived with her mother at the edge of the village, in a house with one good chair and a spinning wheel that had been in the family for three generations.

The wheel was the problem. Elsa hated it. She hated the whirr, the smell of the oil, the way the flax dust got into her nose. She hated the little knot of thread that always snapped just when she’d got going.

“Elsa,” said her mother, “the flax is piling up. You haven’t spun a single spindle this week.”

“I know,” said Elsa.

“Your aunt spun twelve spindles a day at your age.”

“Then let my aunt come and do it,” said Elsa, and she went outside and sat on the fence.

Her mother followed her out. “You’ll never get a husband,” she said, “and you’ll never get a home of your own, and you’ll never get anything at all, and it’s all because of that silly wheel.”

“Good,” said Elsa.

Her mother lost her temper then and gave her a smack on the back, and Elsa yelped, and that was exactly when the queen’s carriage came rolling past on the road.

The queen leaned out. “What’s all this noise?”

“My daughter,” said the mother, thinking fast, “won’t stop spinning. She spins morning, noon and night. I can’t make her stop. I can’t buy flax fast enough.”

Elsa opened her mouth. Her mother stepped on her foot.

The queen looked at Elsa the way you look at a strange, valuable bird. “Is that true?”

Elsa said nothing.

“Bring her to the palace,” said the queen. “I have a room full of flax. If she spins it all by the end of the month, she can marry my son.”

Elsa’s mother packed a bag before Elsa could say a word. The carriage had cushions. The cushions smelled of cedar. Elsa watched the village slide away and did not cry until the road turned and the house was gone.

***

The room in the palace was long and low, with windows down one side and a stone floor. Flax stood in bundles against the wall, taller than Elsa, more flax than she had ever seen in her life. The door closed behind her. The key turned.

Elsa sat on the stool. She looked at the wheel. The wheel looked back.

She tried. She really did. She threaded the flax and spun and it snapped. She threaded it again and the thread came out lumpy and wrong. By the third try her hands were shaking and by the fourth she was crying, big hot tears that fell on her knees and made dark spots on her skirt.

“I can’t,” she said out loud, to nobody. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

“Then don’t,” said a voice.

Elsa looked up. Three women stood by the window, and none of them had come in through the door.

The first woman was tall and leaned on the sill. Her foot was broad and flat, like a paddle, and she rested all her weight on it without any trouble at all.

“I’m Hilda,” she said. “I heard you through the wall. You’re making a terrible racket.”

The second woman was short and round, and her lower lip hung down past her chin like a little shelf. “I’m Marta,” she said. “We were passing. We pass a lot of places.”

The third woman was the smallest and she had a thumb like a doorknob, wide and flat and shiny. “Greta,” she said. “That wheel’s a wreck. No wonder you can’t work it.”

Elsa wiped her face with her sleeve. “Who are you?”

“Spinners,” said Hilda.

“Good ones,” said Marta.

“The best,” said Greta, and she grinned.

Greta picked up a handful of flax and let it fall through her fingers. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “That door’s going to open in the morning, and the queen will look at all this, and you’ll still have nothing but a broken wheel and a wet face.”

“I know,” said Elsa.

Hilda sat down on the floor, which took a while, because of the foot. “We could spin it,” she said. “All of it. Tonight.”

Elsa stared. “All of it?”

“All of it,” said Marta. “Every last straw. We’re quick.”

“We’re very quick,” said Greta.

“And what do you want?” Elsa asked. “For doing that?”

The three women looked at each other. Hilda nodded at Marta. Marta nodded at Greta. Greta put her broad thumb on the windowsill and leaned on it.

“When you get married,” said Hilda, “invite us.”

“To the wedding?”

“To the wedding,” said Marta. “And when people ask who we are, say we’re your aunts. Your mother’s sisters. Three of them.”

Elsa thought about her mother, who had one sister, who lived far away and had never once spun anything in her life. “That’s all?”

“That’s all,” said Greta.

“You don’t want gold?”

“We’ve got gold,” said Hilda. “We’ve got plenty of gold.”

Marta leaned in close, and her lip wobbled when she talked. “We don’t get invited places. That’s the trouble with us. We’re the kind of people who get looked at.”

“I get looked at too,” said Elsa.

“Yes,” said Greta. “We noticed.”

Elsa looked at the room. The flax sat in heaps, pale and endless, all the way to the far wall. She looked at the three women, who were strange and calm and not going anywhere.

“All right,” she said. “Come to my wedding. I’ll call you my aunts.”

“Good,” said Hilda, and she spat on her hands.

***

In the morning the queen opened the door and stopped still in the doorway.

Every heap was gone. The room was full of thread, fine as spider silk, wound on spools and stacked in neat towers that reached Elsa’s shoulder. The three women had gone before the sun. They had left the window open and a smell of cold air and woodsmoke.

“You did this?” said the queen.

Elsa, who had slept in a chair and had a crease on her cheek, said, “Yes.”

It was almost true. She had watched them until she fell asleep, and their hands had gone so fast she could not follow them, and their three heads had leaned together and muttered and laughed at things she couldn’t hear.

The queen walked around the room twice. She touched a spool. She held a length of thread up to the window and it did not break.

“I have never,” she said, “in all my years, seen work like this. My own grandmother could not spin like this.”

“Thank you,” said Elsa.

“You will stay,” said the queen. “You will stay here and spin for this house, and I will not hear another word about it.”

Elsa opened her mouth. She closed it again.

That afternoon the queen’s son came home from wherever he had been, which was a place with horses and weather. He found Elsa in the long room, holding a spool like it might bite her.

“Are you the one who spun all this?” he said.

“I’m the one who’s here,” said Elsa.

He laughed. He had a good laugh, low and quick, and he did not look at her like she was a job. “I’m told you hate spinning,” he said.

“Who told you that?”

“Everyone,” he said. “The whole palace. They say you cried for a day and then produced a miracle.”

Elsa wound a thread around her finger. “It wasn’t a miracle,” she said. “It was help.”

“From who?”

“My aunts,” said Elsa, and she was surprised how easy the lie felt, sitting in her mouth like a stone she could carry.

The prince sat down on the floor, which princes hardly ever do. “I have three aunts,” he said. “They’re awful. They pinch my cheeks.”

“Mine are worse,” said Elsa.

“Will they come to the wedding?”

Elsa looked at him. “What wedding?”

“Ours,” he said, “if you like. There’s no hurry. But I’d like to meet the aunts.”

The wedding was small. Elsa had asked for that. Candles in the hall, a fiddler, a long table with bread and honey and a bowl of late plums. The prince stood by the door greeting people. Elsa stood by the window, watching the road.

“They’ll come,” said the prince.

“You don’t know that,” said Elsa.

“I know you invited them.” He squeezed her hand. “And I know you’ve been watching that road for an hour.”

Then the road moved. Three shapes came up it, walking slowly, and even from the window Elsa could tell they were not like other guests. The first one walked flat, like a boat coming ashore. The second one’s face arrived before the rest of her. The third one waved with a thumb the size of a small pear.

“Aunts!” Elsa shouted, and ran out.

The hall went quiet when they came in. The fiddler stopped. The queen put down her cup. The three women stood in a row and smiled, and the smiles were not the sort you see on a wedding invitation.

“You came,” said Elsa.

“We said we would,” said the woman with the broad flat foot. “We don’t say things we don’t mean.”

“You’re the aunts,” said the prince, coming over. He looked at each of them, one after the other, the way you look at a puzzle you’re pleased to have. “I’ve heard about you.”

“Everyone has,” said the one with the huge lower lip. “We’re hard to miss.”

“Now then,” said the prince, “I hope you don’t mind me asking. Why is your foot so flat, aunt?”

The woman with the broad flat foot shifted her weight. “Spinning,” she said. “Treadling. Day in, day out. You press and press and the foot gives up and spreads out like a pancake. It’s the only foot I’ve got, so I keep it.”

The prince turned to the second. “And your lip, aunt?”

“Licking,” she said. “Wetting the thread so it holds. It’s a job for a lip, and my lip has done a lot of it. I’ve licked enough thread to reach the moon and back, and the moon can keep its distance.”

The prince looked at the third woman. “And your thumb?”

She held it up. It was broad and flat and brown, like a little bread roll. “Twisting,” she said. “Rolling the thread. My thumb’s done more miles than your horse, and it never once complained. Well. It complained a bit.”

Elsa laughed. She couldn’t help it. The hall laughed with her, and the fiddler started up again.

***

The prince did not laugh. He stood with his hands behind his back and his head tilted, thinking.

“So,” he said at last. “Spinning did this.”

“All three of us,” said the flat-footed woman. “And we’re the best spinners in the country. That’s the trade-off.”

“You’re welcome to it,” said the prince.

He turned to Elsa, who was standing between them with flour on her sleeve from the bread and a plum in her hand.

“Elsa,” he said. “You never liked spinning.”

“I hated it,” she said. “I hate it now. I’ll hate it tomorrow.”

“Then you’ll never spin again,” said the prince.

Elsa blinked. “What?”

“Not a thread. Not a spindle. Not a wheel. If anyone hands you flax, you hand it straight back.” He looked at the three women. “Is that all right with you?”

“It’s better than all right,” said the woman with the broad thumb. “It’s the first sensible thing anyone’s said all night.”

“But the queen,” said Elsa. “The flax. The room.”

“The room is finished,” said the prince. “That was the whole bargain. My mother wanted the flax spun. It’s spun. Nobody said the spinning had to come from you.”

The queen, across the hall, said nothing. She was looking at the three women, and then at her son, and then she picked up her cup again and drank.

“So I’m free,” said Elsa.

“You’re free,” said the prince. “You can do anything you like. Except spin.”

Elsa thought about it. She thought about the little room with the window, and the wheel, and the flax stacked up like a punishment. She thought about all the mornings she had sat there and cried.

Then she looked at the three women, who were already edging toward the door, because a wedding is a fine thing but it isn’t a spinning room, and there was nothing left to do.

“Wait,” said Elsa.

They turned.

“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know how to say it bigger than that.”

“You don’t have to,” said the woman with the huge lower lip. “You kept your side. You called us aunts.”

“We’ll come again,” said the flat-footed one. “In the summer. We’ll bring plums.”

“You brought plums,” said Elsa.

“Then we’ll bring more.”

The three of them went out into the dark, and the door closed, and the fiddler played something quick. Elsa stood by the window and watched them go down the road, three shapes, one flat, one lippy, one thumbed, and she waved, and they waved back, all three at once, like a little crowd of their own.

She turned back to the room. The candles were low. The prince was cutting bread. The queen was asleep in her chair with her cup on her knee. And Elsa stood there with her hands empty and her whole life ahead of her, and for the first time in a long time she did not wish she were somewhere else. She was exactly where she wanted to be.