The American Girl (46 page)

I can’t dance for you, Doris. My shoes are too small. My feet have grown. And my toes, they’ve become so long and so chubby. Quite simply supersuperhuge.

And legs like jelly too after so many years in bed. And trembling, like Bambi’s thin legs. Trembles that at a distance might have looked like movements but they felt like ordinary cramps . . . there in the sunshine she understood, quite simply, accordingly that she could not dance, she would just topple over again. So she had to hurry this up and she turned toward where the eye was and shouted, “But come on then. What are you waiting for?”

In other words she was the one who started the game, she was the one who made herself known. Shortly thereafter, not more than half an hour later, they found themselves in Bencku’s barn.

Longing. Skin. Body. Longing. Skin. Body. What was it other than words that poorly rendered the experience that followed in the moment when, after fumbling to get each other’s clothes off, they could finally be united as man and woman. Fumblingly,

yes—

Now I’m definitely kissed black and blue, Sandra would think in front of the mirror in Bencku’s small bathroom. Still in the middle of that bright day and she would be fascinated by her pale face and the almost blue, swollen lips and she would almost be happy.

But first: she was carried away by his hands everywhere, all of her body’s cavities were trembling inside and butterflies whirled
in her stomach. She wanted this, it had not been like this before. Not with him, not with Doris. Because it was new now, she had decided that; it would be new and wonderful.

He came inside her, he lifted her pelvis toward him, her legs spread wide were ridiculous when they sprawled out in the air, but she wrapped them around his legs and it went very quickly and very slowly.

Now it’s happening, now it’s happening, it pounded inside Sandra.

And he bent his back like a spring, his chest thrust forward naked and exposed like on Saint Sebastian with the arrows, he breathed heavily and the wave of warmth welled over her too.

Back to the room.

Seemed foreign. Words. Most things were foreign to her after Doris’s death. Most of the words that described different kinds of feelings. How were these words applicable to the feelings and the mental state that they bore reference to? Was there any connection at all? It was not clear.

“I accept everything, Doris. I’m an anomaly.” She had lain there in the bed in her room and spoken to Doris, that had been her lifeline. But a Doris who was not the Doris who had been there alive not such a long time ago, but another, halfimagined and constructed by her. A Doris-construction that did not exist any more than Doris’s flesh and blood existed in life, but that was needed so she would not fall apart completely. A Doris to talk to. So that was what she did in bed when she did not masturbate or sleep. Spoke with a Doris whom she knew did not exist, whom she knew she had made up.

The masturbation was less sexual than a means of creating a room for herself away from what was outside. Away from the world and the unpleasant facts in it. Among others the fact that Doris Flinkenberg was dead.

It was like sleep. It carried her away.

But gave a kind of awareness of her body.

“I’m probably a bad dyke,” she had said with regret in the bed where she was lying alone in the room behind closed curtains without knowing whether it was day or night. “You’ll have to forgive me.”

But does it matter
, Doris Flinkenberg replied very clearly, and she could not answer that, so her fingers found their way down over her body to between her legs and so on.

“Sexuality is communication and creativity,” it said in red letters in a brochure that had been handed out in school once. She remembered that right when she got her threehundredmillion-fourth self-inflicted orgasm there in the marital bed in the dark little room in the darker part of the woods, and could not resist smiling.

Communication and creativity.

“My God,” she said to Doris Flinkenberg inside her and Doris laughed. Pulled her spit-filled mouth into a smile, showed her gleaming teeth. “You’re supposed to learn all kinds of shit and then find out later that it isn’t even true.”

It was during the breakdown, or just after it. But the breakdown itself, this was how it started. It was six weeks after Doris’s death, the last week before Christmas, a Saturday evening at the Blumenthals’ where Sandra had been visiting. A completely ordinary Saturday evening when the parents were home. Mom and Dad Blumenthal were at that moment in the sauna on the floor below the cozy living room where Sandra and the daughter Birgitta were sitting and watching television while they discreetly and unbeknownst to the parents were nipping at the bottles in the well-filled bar that the Blumenthal parents used only for show. He was a pediatrician, she a nurse—but was sitting on the city council—they were complete teetotalers. The breakdown started in the just aforementioned living room, while the
Blumenthal parents were getting changed in the dressing room after bathing. A
bonk
could be heard, a great thud, when Sandra tumbled to the ground in a half-conscious state. Mrs. Blumenthal who, having time to think “the war is coming,” had traumatic childhood memories from the bombings of the city by the sea where she had lived, she screamed, an open, childish scream. But the second thereafter she knew enough to get herself together and run upstairs to the girls. And when she saw the girl on the floor, not their own daughter, thank goodness, she rolled up her sleeves to provide first aid—but of course it was not needed, said her husband, the pediatrician, who had already made it to the patient’s side. It was not that life threatening. Sandra Wärn had quite simply passed out, it was probably a result of overexertion and certainly understandable after everything that had happened. He did not bother about what her guilty friend, their own daughter, tipsy and excusing herself, had to say right then. He was a doctor after all and understood immediately that this had nothing to do with alcohol regardless of how Birgitta Blumenthal, in a half-hysterical and drunken state, was standing and clinging to him with her childish confession. “We were just tasting.”

So that is how the breakdown started, and it did not come unexpectedly though it looked that way. Sandra had actually gone and waited, though it sounds a bit bizarre to say that. But it was also just as bizarre to carry on like nothing had happened. Which she had done to begin with. She understood the whole time that it was not the way it was supposed to be, that it was not normal either. But normal, what was that now anyway? When Doris was gone the words paled as well, the worlds they hid, all the nuances and associations, their own meanings. Normal was normal again, in a normal sense. Of course it facilitated communication with the outside world and the possibility of establishing an understanding, but it also took something away, something essential, a taste.

And the big question that should have been answered was quite simply the one that had been pushed forward the whole time before the breakdown: was it possible to exist at all without this taste? If you said yes right away then you were lying just as much as if you said no and took action accordingly—found new friends, for example, just as if it had been a question about having a friend. This is the dilemma Sandra found herself in after Doris’s death. She did not want to die, but she did not understand how she would go on living.

It was real as real could be. And if she started thinking about it, no that was it, it could not be thought, for entirely logical reasons. There was only one solution, death die, but in other words she did not want to so it was a matter of pushing the thoughts aside as best she could and, what, NOW Doris spoke in her, “trot along?”

Right after Doris’s death, when Sandra, recently recovered from the last disease of childhood, which was the mumps, had returned from Åland and was stubborn about immediately returning to school, she had the feeling that everyone was watching her. First because of what had happened. A bunch of students she barely knew had been polite, even held open doors for her, at the same time as they had been careful about maintaining a proper distance. Later, especially, when the days passed and you still could not see anything noteworthy about her, not a trace of unusual emotion for example, there were those she thought looked at her crookedly, and whispered things about her and whispered behind her back.

Then there were of course those, both teachers and students, who came up and gave their condolences. The grief. “The grief,” said the adults. It sounded strange and big and heavy and Sandra became even more depressed by hearing it.

“She didn’t have an easy time of it, that girl,” said Tobias Forsström, who taught English and history and came from the
District, in the same way Doris’s biological relatives had. “All odds against her,” Tobias Forsström stated with a tone of voice as if he was holding a lesson even though it was during a break and it was centuries since Tobias Forsström had been her teacher in any subject at all. “There are many here who come from such poor circumstances, almost destitution, that others, outsiders, have a hard time imagining. Therefore you think it’s truly unnecessary when things turn out like this for a girl who had been given every opportunity to get out. Break the cycle so to speak.” And then he smiled resolutely and patted Sandra on the shoulder. Sandra had certainly taken the resoluteness and the somewhat forced pat on the shoulder to interpret to her own disadvantage. She certainly understood. There were those in the District who looked down on residents like the Islander and herself.

Who built impossible houses for a fortune, and settled there, otherwise lacking all ties to the District. It was easier to relate to the summer guests: they did not claim to belong in the same way, and furthermore they were, in any case when seen from a certain perspective, a bit moving in their goal of separating, in their eyes the “genuine” (sea-) and the “false” (upstarts like the Islander who thought they could buy everything with money); so careful about always being on the right side.

“Now we’ve gotten a proper young lady in our class,” Tobias Forsström said with a crooked smile a long time ago already when Sandra had started in the school in the town center. “A proper young lady from the French School in a completely ordinary English class, then we’ll have to see how this is going to go.” The class on the other hand had not laughed, at her or at Tobias Forsström’s attempt at light humor. Tobias Forrström was not a well-liked teacher. The aggression that oozed around him under the oily smile and the so-called ambiguous jokes with which he tried to entertain a highly uninterested world around him were repulsive in and of themselves, you pulled away out of
instinct. And furthermore, on the other hand, who wants to be reminded that you belong here and nowhere else, once and for all and no matter what happens, whatever you undertake in the world? When you were still young, a child and looking ahead at the big picture? On the surface the world was also filled with lots of messages from here and from there saying it was open to everyone to become and to do anything.

Sandra had not bothered about Tobias Forsström, either then or later.

“But was a fantastic young person.” He was actually the one who had said that too.

Him. Tobias Forsström, of all people.

And yes. You could agree with that. Her way of talking, being. DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW UNTHINKABLE IT IS TO LIVE WITHOUT HER? Sandra had the desire to shout in Tobias Forsström’s face, but of course she had not, she had just walked off, politely and kindly, just like a “young lady from the French School,” where she would incidentally return and quite soon, would be expected to do.

Pain was a mild expression for what it was like even to brush against the memory of the first time in the house in the darker part of the woods, the first period, then before everything became complicated.

Doris who had come to you like a gift. So wonderful, so unexpected—had changed everything.

No one like Doris. No one who talked like her.

I didn’t abandon her
. Sandra Wärn said solemnly, as if she were in a church and was going to confess her sins out loud. This happened at school again, suddenly and without reason, and the one who happened to be standing in front of her turned around. It was yet another schoolteacher: Ann Notlund, the music teacher, who took a step closer because she certainly also wanted to hug Sandra.

“Sometimes you wish you could get the young to understand that there is a life after this one,” said Ann Notlund. “I mean,” she corrected herself when she heard how it sounded, “in life. There is something other than a large and fateful NOW.”

Then, sure enough, she opened her arms and came closer so that Sandra ended up right in between them.

Sandra stood there stiff as a stick and thought, still a bit unaware of everything around her, out loud:

“It wasn’t me. Wasn’t wasn’t me.”

“But dear child, what are you saying?” Ann Notlund said devoutly but absentmindedly as if she still was not really listening.

Maybe, thought Sandra while she slowly returned to reality, Ann Notlund was quite simply no woman of words. Had a hard time hearing, speaking, and understanding.

Maybe, thought Sandra, the only weapon she had in that case was just this hug.

The only weapon she had was her hug
.

“What a funny saying, Sandra,” Doris said to Sandra a bit later and in the middle of the school day. Loud and clear, but so that no one other than Sandra heard it.

Hugs. How Sandra hated hugs, especially in school right after Doris’s death when she appeared to be the only one who seemed to be careful about carrying on as if nothing had happened. Well aware that it was an impossibility and that out of necessity the breakdown must be lurking just around the corner if she continued (which she did, there were no alternatives) living in something so unreal.

“But how are you, really?”

“How are you doing?”

The talkative ones who carried on like that.

But my God, what are you supposed to say? Isn’t it obvious? Not so great. And what are you going to do about it? How are you going to make it go away? Should we hug?