The American Girl (44 page)

A few weeks later the picture came in a letter.

“. . . a last greeting from the werewolf. The seducer. The happy one.”

Rita had driven out on a small entrance road north of the town center. There she drank the wine from the bottle she had with
her. When she had enough of that she started the car and drove back on the long stretch of road where there were fields on both sides. She sped up and floored it and turned off and traveled out over the fields. Her firm intention had been to drive the car into a swamp, but the ground had been dry and hard, an all too good surface. Instead she had taken aim at the tree on the other side. Slowed the speed, just right, just right, then pushed down on the gas pedal again.
Vroom
. The car’s short little nose had been mashed against the tree.

When that was done she took her things out of the car, a plastic bag full, not more than that. Locked it and threw the keys away far, far into the field.

Then she walked back to the bus stop, a few miles. A little snow had fallen but it transformed into rain before it reached the ground. No bus had come, but a car. And she immediately recognized it, it was Anders Bäckström and Sabrita-Lill Lindholm in Anders Bäckström’s father’s BMW.

It was the middle of the night when Rita arrived at the Backmanssons’. A party was going on in the apartment. People were standing on the balcony facing the sea and the street when Rita came wandering up the sidewalk. The balcony doors were standing wide open, music and laughter and party noises could be heard from inside. Someone on the balcony caught site of Rita down on the street. They called and waved to her. Maybe they thought she was one of those lonely nightwalkers in the night who needed to be cheered up.

No one on the balcony was familiar to Rita, except Tina Backmansson, Jan Backmansson’s mother. She was also one of the ones who waved: obviously she did not recognize Rita in Solveig’s leather jacket and the dirty jeans, with plastic bag in hand and the makeup running down her face.

Rita stopped below the balcony, which was located on the third floor in a substantial stone house on one of the nicest streets in the city by the sea, and called hello. A moment of confusion
arose on the balcony but shortly thereafter Tina Backmansson had recovered from the surprise.

“Oh! Here we have you now!” she called down to the street. “Welcome! One moment!” She disappeared into the house and while she was gone the balcony emptied so that when she came back and threw down the bunch of keys she was alone. “Take this! It’s for the street door and the other entrance! You

know!”

And in the darkness of the stairwell on the third floor, in the door leading to the main entrance of the apartment, Tina Backmansson had already been waiting for her so that Rita did not need to use the keys. It was that entrance which was the “kitchen entrance” in the apartment and naturally Rita understood she would be smuggled in away from the party itself. But on the other hand, it was also the door leading to what in the Backmansson family’s vast apartment was called “the children’s corridor.” Jan Backmansson’s room and the guest room were located there, the room that had originally been Susanna Backmansson’s—Jan Backmansson’s sister who was studying dance in New York. And really, the party, it meant nothing. If she was a disgrace there or not, all of that was gone and not important now. Everything that belonged to the District, that way of thinking.

And Rita, she was the strongest and the weakest in the world in that moment when she thought like that.

Jan Backmansson was not at home. “He told you didn’t he? That he would be at camp?” Tina Backmansson asked in a voice that hinted that she understood maybe Jan Backmansson had not said anything at all to Rita. Not out of meanness or the desire to mislead Rita—Jan Backmansson was completely incapable of that sort of thing—rather, quite simply because it had started happening lately as expected, which the adults more than the children had known would happen. Step by step Rita and the District and the life with Rita, the girlfriend, had become increasingly out of date, due to the distance, due to all sorts of
things, you were young, you had your own interests, different interests, other things happened.

And no one, not anyone in the Backmansson family anyway, had thought about moving a finger to change it. All promises that had been made, for example the previous year, in the fall, for example after the fire on the First Cape when the family had to leave their house not to return—“It’s clear that you’ll come, later.” “You’re coming along, of course.” “To go to high school in a good school in the city is not a bad alternative”—yes, they had stopped mattering, they had been transformed into words, talk and a lot of water had flowed under the bridges since then. They were young people after all, Jan and Rita. Yes ALSO Rita. It happened of course, you could suspect, things in her life that made it so that what you planned one year appeared in another light already the following year, that of childishness, sudden eagerness. And Rita was a cute and intelligent girl. She certainly had so many other possibilities.

Tina Backmansson showed Rita into Susanna’s room and said she could sleep there that night. At a loss and suddenly powerless Rita had come to be standing in the middle of a rather empty room that she had always thought was so pretty (and it was) and that she had always dreamed about staying in . . . The kind of room where someone becomes different, not better or worse, just different.

And childish, yes, but it struck her in that moment, after everything that happened, though she was tired, confused, and dazed and actually void of all thoughts and feelings, how much she had longed for this room.

She would hold on to this with hands and teeth if needed. A strong thought, saucy. But as said, right now Rita was the weakest and the strongest in the whole world. And she looked at Tina Backmansson, who had offered her a place for the night, with all the confusion that existed in her, but also with all the will, strength, and determination.

“I’m here now,” she whined with an indescribable babyish voice. “I’ve come to stay.”

And then it was as if Tina Backmansson had taken in what she had in front of her. Not just the filth and the terrible things she tried to keep away, what was intruding, but the other, the heartwrenching. A wreck. Rita Rat—she had a hard time even taking that name in her mouth and it was difficult with Jan Backmansson because she honestly wanted to be a good and liberal parent—was a wreck who was falling apart in front of her eyes.

“My goodness, child. What have you done?”

And then a dam burst inside Rita. She started crying, tears sprayed out of her and continued and when it had once gotten started it just remained. She lost her balance and fell on the edge of the bed while the tears just gushed. Tina Backmansson, smelling like a party, sat down next to her and she took Rita’s hand. Neither Rita nor Tina was much for hugs. It would not have occurred to either of them to throw herself into the other’s arms. It was okay.

Rita cried. Tina Backmansson sat next to her and held her hand. It was a moment of devout nearness though they did not understand a thing about each other.

And Rita cried and cried, from exhaustion and joy over being in this room, over her embarrassment when she understood how intensely she had longed to come to the Backmanssonian apartment. But she also cried over everything else. Everything. Doris Flinkenberg, the cousin’s mama, Solveig—

And over herself. Her loneliness. Poor Rita.

And not immediately, but while she was crying, she also gradually understood that her tears had an effect on Tina Backmansson.

“Poor child,” Tina Backmansson whispered, “poor child.” Tina Backmansson who smelled the difference between them both—expensive perfume, expensive party clothes, expensive—all that is easy to disregard if you are the one who smells better. Which for Tina Backmansson was so self-evident she had never
reflected on it; the comfort of being able to live how you wanted, the security in having things.

But then Tina Backmansson got up and got some blankets, and when Rita had calmed down she fell asleep with her clothes on, on Susanna Backmansson’s bed in the wonderful room in the Backmanssonian apartment.

She slept for maybe twelve hours: when she woke up it was completely quiet in the apartment again and the middle of the day. She got up and went out into the apartment, through “the children’s corridor” through the kitchen to the living room and the library and the workrooms and through, quite simply, the vast rooms. No traces of the party anywhere. It was empty, completely cleaned, and if anything it smelled of disinfectant cleaning solutions.

She waited for Tina Backmansson in the middle of one of the large rooms. And she showed up, sure enough, in jeans and a shirt now, weekday clothes. Just as fresh and clean, no trace of the party left on her.

And they spoke to each other from a distance of about nine feet in the beautiful, white living room. Rita listened, paid attention, on her guard as always, Tina Backmansson just as abrasive and cold as always.

“Since you’re here now it’s best that we agree on the rules of the game,” said Tina Backmansson.

Whatever, Tina, thought Rita. I’m here now. Everything else is negotiable.

And they carried that conversation to its end; then Rita went to shower and washed herself really clean. She went to Jan Backmansson’s room and dressed in his shirts and pants, which she already had a habit of doing in the house on the First Cape, when they had had, and still had, almost the same size.

Later, in Jan Backmansson’s room, she became tired again and crawled down under the quilt on Jan Backmansson’s bed.
And fell asleep. And later on Sunday evening when Jan Backmansson returned from camp or the trip or wherever he had been she was lying there under the quilt ready and waiting for him like a present.

Jan Backmansson became happy over seeing her and immediately crawled down to her.

“You stay here now,” he whispered. “It was good that you came. I’ve waited . . .” Jan Backmansson burrowed his face into Rita’s neck, Rita’s hair.

Rita had come to the wonderful room. She would stay there.

And what she left behind in the District was: a few photographs (above all that of Rita Rat, the last evening,
time of the werewolf
), the taste of decomposing leaves and damp earth and bitter wine the night before you crash a Mini Cooper against a tree, the smell there in the woods, the smell at Lore Cliff. The smell there in the woods, the smell of gunpowder, the smell of baked coffee, blood, the smell of Doris Flinkenberg’s blood. And it could not be changed. All of that which could not be changed.

And the smell of fire . . . but suddenly another symbol, a contrasting picture, the sea urchins, here they came walking, the white, white in the strange night when everyone was moving around, was it the night after the American girl had been found?

But no, it was only one. Kenny. Kenny with a glowing cigarette in her hand, Kenny who looked completely wild and came toward her—then it started burning in the woods. Kenny in white, white clothes.

And she left the fire the blaze behind her, a corridor of fire in the woods. It was a strange dream that was no dream, she was standing at one end of the corridor, her sister Solveig at the other. Solveig in the corridor of fire.

“You did it. You set fire to the woods.”

“You did it. You burned it up. Are you cra—”

• • •

And that last evening, after Doris Flinkenberg’s funeral, before Rita went into the shower, Rita had said to her:

“Apparently there’s nothing you aren’t capable of Solveig.”

Then she had left everything, fled. Gotten into Solveig’s car and driven off.

Let me tell you something dear, blessed child. That the mercy God has measured out for just you, it is so great that not a single human being can grasp it with their intellect
.

—LIZ
MAALAMAA

F
ROM THE RETURN OF THE MARSH QUEEN, CHAPTER I. WHERE
did the music start?

The Marsh Queen:
I don’t know about music, if what I mean with music, is music.

From The Return of the Marsh Queen, Chapter 1. Where did the music start?

Richard had a T-shirt he tore up and made holes in
. He took an ink pen and wrote “Kill me” in big letters on the stomach. Malcolm aka “the Worm” McLaren saw the T-shirt and thought: awesome. I’ll take it with me to my trendsetting boutique Sex in London. Then I’ll pick up the boys who hang around the boutique and dress them alike and it’s a band and we’ll call them the Sex Pistols.

From The Return of the Marsh Queen, Chapter 1. Where did the music start?

The American West should have been conquered
with red body-hugging rubber overalls and platform shoes and the Soviet flag in 1974. Money was scant and times were hard. You—that was Malcolm aka “the Worm” McLaren and “the boys”: Arthur “Killer” Kane, Johnny “Thunderstorm” Thunders, Sylvain “Clothing Monster” Sylvain, David “Hot Lips” Johansen, and Jerry Nolan—lived in a trailer park outside Los Angeles for what felt like several weeks. At Jerry Nolan’s
mother’s
. They ate her sticky spaghetti night after night. After night. Malcolm aka the Worm encouraged “the boys” to think about the big picture in
order to deal with the present. It was doomed. In fact, the very hardest was to score. Downright a near impossibility. And for someone who has to score but cannot, every hour, every minute, every second is as long as an entire lifetime, an eternity.

There are, in other words, those who maintain that if there had been access to heroin in the American West at this point in time and in this place in history then
punk music
would never have been born. Because the following is history. It was just that night, at the dinner table at Mama Nolan’s, that the legendary glitter rock band the New York Dolls broke up.

A few segments from the dinner table discussion that followed (and that deteriorated):