What I Loved

its pulsating light provided by a small bulb hidden behind the painting. I couldn't see the man's face. His features were muted by shadows, but the woman's face, which she had turned toward her husband, resembled a tight, hard mask. The four characters had been drawn in black ink (etched in a style that reminded me a little of the Dick Tracy cartoon strip) and then set into the interior of the house, which had been painted in color.
    The three pieces that followed were paintings. Each canvas was framed in the heavy gilt style of museums, and each was a little larger than the one that came before it. The colors and style of the paintings reminded me at first of Friedrich, but then I realized that they bore a closer resemblance to Rider's romantic American landscapes. The first painting showed the children from a great distance, after they had awoken in the forest to find their parents gone. The tiny figures were clinging to each other under a high, eerie moon, its cool light shining on Hansel's pebbles. Bill followed that picture with another landscape of the forest floor. A long trail of bread crumbs glowed like pale tubers under a blue-black sky. The sleeping children were barely visible in this painting — mere shadows that lay beside each other on the ground. In the third canvas, Bill had painted the birds diving for bits of bread as a thin gold sun rose through the trees. Hansel and Gretel were nowhere to be seen.
    To depict the candy house, Bill abandoned framed canvases for a larger one that had been cut into the shape of a house. The children were separate cutouts attached to the roof. He had painted the house and children with broad, wild strokes, using colors far more brilliant than any that had preceded them. The two starved and abandoned children sprawled on the candy house and gorged themselves. Hansel's palm was pressed tightly against his mouth as he stuffed himself with chocolates. Gretel's eyes squinted with pleasure as she bit into a Tootsie Pop. Every sweet on the house was recognizable. Some were painted. Others were boxes and bags from real candies Bill had glued to the surface of the house — Chuckles and Hershey bars, Sweetarts, Jujyfruits, Kit Kats, and Almond Joys.
    The witch didn't appear until the sixth work, also a painting. Inside another house-shaped canvas, painted in colors more subdued than the one before it, an old woman stood over the sleeping boy and girl, who had the blissful, bloated look of sated gluttons. Near the three figures was a table covered with dirty dishes. Bill had painted bread crumbs and bits of hamburger, as well as the red streaks left on their plates from ketchup. The interior of that room was as banal and dreary as any in America, but it was painted with an energy that reminded me of Manet. Again Bill had included a television, and on the screen he had painted an ad for peanut butter. The witch was wearing a dirty brassiere and a pair of flesh-colored panty hose, through which you could see her flattened pubic hair and soft swollen belly. Her shriveled breasts under the bra and the two thin rolls of skin around her waist were unpleasant to look at, but her face was truly monstrous. Distorted by rage, her eyes bulged behind the lenses of her thick glasses. Her gaping mouth looked enormous as she bared her teeth to reveal rows of gleaming silver fillings. In Bill's witch, the fairy tale's literal horror came true. The woman was a cannibal.
    In the seventh piece, Bill changed the format again. Inside a real iron cage, he had placed a canvas cutout of Hansel. The flat painted boy was down on his hands and knees, and when I looked through the bars, I saw that he was much fatter than in his earlier incarnations. His old clothes no longer fit him, and his belly hung out over his unsnapped jeans. At the bottom of the cage lay a real wishbone from a chicken — clean and dry and white. The eighth piece showed Gretel standing in front of a stove. The girl was a thick paper cutout that resembled her earlier cartoon self but much chubbier. Bill had painted both sides of her, back and front, because she was meant to be viewed from both sides. The stove she faced was real, and its oven door hung wide open. But inside the oven there was no burned corpse. The back of the stove had been removed, and all that could be seen was the blank wall behind it.
    The last work showed two well-fed children stepping out of a doorway that had been cut out of a large rectangular canvas —