Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.
Bluebeard Illustration, “What She Sees There,” by Winslow Homer, 1868 “Sabrina,” says my husband’s first wife, “is married to my husband.” I hear this through The Grapevine, a multibranched root system resembling the hearts of my husbands’ two ex-wives planted in the same plot of deep, fertile soil. Vines like earthy veins, growing tough and twisty. A friend brings me cuttings. I hold them to my ear and listen. I tell my husband I am writing about Bluebeard. “Oh fuck,” he says. I look in the mirror. I have become uglier and stronger. I look out the window. A white shed glows in my yard. I live in “the unguessable country of marriage.” “Bluebeard” first appeared in Charles Perrault’s...