The American Girl (52 page)

And added, after a well-considered and extremely sober pause:

“If I were a man I would definitely fall head over heels for her too. The only thing that surprises me,” she had ended with a less
sober dyke laugh, in which all of her wounded pride finally appeared, “is what in the whole wide world does she see in you?”

And, by way of conclusion, she hissed:

“And now Sandra is going to hang up immediately!”

The first time Kenny came to the house in the darker part of the woods and carried out an inspection she said “pretty” and “special” about almost everything she saw around her and even though you knew she could not possibly mean it, it sounded like she meant it. She did not dwell fatefully on her words like Lorelei Lindberg had done when she had walked around and stated “interesting” and “fascinating,” did not wander restlessly from room to room with a wineglass and a burning cigarette, constantly searching for a place where she could settle in with her books and her papers, the material from her thesis that could benefit from being collected into a meaningful whole, like Inget Herrman.

Kenny was none of that. She was honest and untroubled. Which in and of itself could have depended on the fact that the house in the darker part meant nothing to her, it had nothing to do with her dreams and expectations as it had for Lorelei Lindberg
(“I was going to show you what your dream looked like”)
, nor was it a place that she in some way needed to try and conquer from the Islander as it had been for Inget Herrman, which the Islander had always explained because he could not imagine living together with her in the house in the darker part of the woods. The Islander and Kenny were already married of course: that Kenny was going to live there, that it was also her territory now, that was a matter of course.

“Nice, pleasant,” Kenny said and it sounded in other words as if she thought so. Maybe she would continue to think so, in the same cool way. Maybe that was how the house should be treated because it was a very calm and in some ways harmonic time, the time that Kenny lived there with the Islander and Sandra Wärn.

After a while they would move to an apartment in the city by the sea anyway. Not give up the house in the darker part of the woods, but certainly leave it, for the winter—which would turn out to be for good, but for different reasons for all three of them. But that would also happen imperceptibly, without any fuss. It would, quite simply, happen. And would have nothing to do with the house in the darker part.

Moreover Kenny was not someone who had a habit of expressing discontent, she was not like that, quite simply. She was truly an agreeable person to be around, Sandra could state that over and over again. Just like her sister, the one Inget Herrman rejected by the Islander, had said.

“If it wasn’t Kenny. Then maybe I would . . . I don’t know. Claw his eyes out?” She had laughed as if the thought were so absurd, so ridiculous. “No. Never in my life. Kenny is worth all of it. She hasn’t had it easy.”

It was deserving and generous.

But. But what were you supposed to do with such a bright and uncomplicated person around you?

“I’m going to live here,” Kenny said the first time she came into the narrow hallway. “I hope I’m going to enjoy it here.”

“I’m not the decorating type,” she would also say, a bit apologetically, but not very, that was also not her style. She did not create problems where there were none, in that way she and the Islander were alike—time passed and it was the way it was in the house in the darker part of the woods, with the exception of the basement. “But I like plants. And that pool is horrible.”

The Islander looked at Sandra, suddenly exposed, in order to get some support. He was not interested in any revolutions.

Sandra looked away. Suddenly she refused to have any sympathy for him. Any at all. She was so tired of everything, so tired. HE was the one who had gotten them into this, he was the one who had brought Kenny to the house in the darker part of the woods.

• • •

“They buried her in the pool.”

Damn overaged sex addict
. She stood there on the other side of the pool’s edge over the water where paper, cigarette butts, and other such disgusting items were floating around and thought about the Islander with Doris’s words inside her. Suddenly so invisibly upset (not angry, especially not at Kenny, it was not actually Kenny’s fault) that she forgot the hickeys on her own throat, forgot altogether to conceal herself.

“What a mud puddle.” Kenny laughed happily and turned to Sandra. “Do you grow water lilies?”

The Islander left the two of them alone. She did not know what she was going to say. She just continued to be embarrassed and blush and finally she had to leave rather abruptly because there really was nothing else to say. The Islander was taking a long time. On purpose of course. He was an expert at disappearing during precarious situations and he rationalized this in the style that the young women, of almost the same age, needed to work things out once and for all. From the beginning. But maybe Kenny had even suggested it to the Islander before they arrived at the house just in time to see Inget Herrman standing in the rain among her bags, waiting for a taxi that she had naturally ordered a long time ago but that, of course, was taking so long that the humiliation became complete for her and all three of them had to stand there in the rain and talk to each other.

She was a “man’s woman.”

Kenny swept past Sandra on the stairs and said softly to her so that the Islander would not hear:

“And what have you been up to? Kissing disease. Here. Take this.”

And she had taken off her scarf and held it out to Sandra who had not taken it but had taken the hint well.

The band of dark hickeys on her throat. She had forgotten about it then. Even on the morning before the Islander and Kenny arrived the sight of the marks alone had evoked a sensual pull in her stomach.

Nymphomaniac
.

And it did not exactly get any better because of it either. That she thought Kenny was okay. So damned okay.

“Thanks,” she replied. “For the reminder.”

“Don’t play with fire, Sandra,” Inget Herrman had said about the same marks on Sandra’s neck, the evening before, the last evening with Inget Herrman in the house in the darker part. “I ALSO mean to clarify it, that I would like to encourage you not to start acting like a psychopathological case study. You’re playing with things you don’t believe in, which aren’t you. But suddenly they are you.”

“Don’t get any of it,” Sandra replied nonchalantly.

Inget Herrman had impatiently thrown one of her countless half-smoked cigarettes into the pool and taken a deep gulp from her champagne glass and then tried to fix Sandra in a stare with a spine-chilling look. This, she had actually, despite the fact that she already had quite a bit to drink, partly succeeded in.

“Don’t forget that if you do something long enough then you become it. Your hickeys and bruises—small fetishes that evoke feeling in you. Something that is reminiscent of lust. You want to feel alive. Life. Certainly there are a lot of people who would be tickled at being able to have a closer look at your so-called double life. It’s something one would gladly like to write about. Read about. Preferably make a movie about. Without many drawn-out naked scenes out of that other life.”

The girl in the blouse with lace and the pleated skirt and briefcase who is completely naked underneath. “My God.” Inget Herrman sighed and lit a new cigarette. “You ARE a walking and
standing dime-a-dozen sexual fantasy. You don’t need to pretend at that at all.”

“But the question is,” Inget Herrman had finally said, “if it has anything at all to do with that which burns. The question is if everything isn’t . . . the entire arrangement isn’t just a camouflage in order to conceal something else.”

And then they swam in the pool, she and Inget Herrman, together for the last time in the house in the darker part of the woods.

In the water that was also slowly, slowly trickling out in cracks, down in the earth beneath. Or was it a dream? Swimming among the cigarette butts. Rather disgusting, is it not?

“He shot her. By mistake. She died. In the pool. They buried her there. Under the tiles.”

Sandra. She had liked the marks on her body. These marks on her neck had actually evoked a feeling in her stomach. Up until now. Kenny’s eyes on them got her, more than Inget Herrman’s words ever could, to understand that they were silly, childish, and laughable.

Kissing disease. Kenny’s wide smile.

“A way of being with yourself.”

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

In the pool now.

And Kenny, “Do you grow water lilies?”

“If you think I’m going to clean up after you then you’re wrong,” Inget Herrman had said the morning before she left. “I’m not planning on cleaning up after you.

“Then we’ll have to warm the sauna and wash off the old life,” she had suggested the night before when it was clear that the Islander and Kenny would be coming home as newlyweds, together. It had been the last time with Inget Herrman in the house in the darker part of the woods.

“And discharge me,” Inget Herrman had added, and then they had opened a bunch of champagne bottles and cheers, cheers.

The sauna had become warm and they had bathed. Washed themselves, dipped in the pool, drunk some more. Inget Herrman had sat on the edge of the pool and held expositions, which she had a very special predilection of devoting herself to when she was drunk.

About the weight of purposefulness and planning. Not just as a student, but otherwise. In life. “In life, perceived as a whole,” she was always saying.

“Life perceived as a whole,” Inget Herrman stated, “is rather short. It’s wise to live consciously, as Thoreau says, and with concrete goals in front of you. How did that poem by Nils Ferlin go? ‘Think now—before we push you away / You barefoot child in life.’ ” Inget Herrman lit a cigarette and continued. “The essence of that poem as I see it is that you’re given a certain amount of opportunities and chances, but not an infinite amount. If you don’t take care of your opportunities then there isn’t anyone who comes and gives out new ones. And furthermore. Finally all of us are alone. There isn’t anyone who gives us anything. We need to be prepared for that. To become an adult is to understand this. A cursed damned enormous loneliness.”

And, after a pause, with an entirely different voice, a tormented one, like a small animal’s:

“I don’t know if I’ve grown up. I don’t know anything.”

And Inget Herrman had burst into tears. She sobbed, with her mouth open, without covering her face with her hands, for a minute maybe and it had been unpleasant to see, but at the same time, a wave of tenderness had welled up inside Sandra and she cursed the Islander and his awkwardness, to exchange this for . . . yes, for a sister besides. “Kenny is a man’s woman,” Inget had said. “It’s not her fault, and she deserves all the happiness in the world, she hasn’t had it easy. Someone he could go around and introduce, virile in the prime of life himself, as ‘my young, beautiful wife.’ ”

And for a moment, exactly then—or had it just been the intoxication that had made Sandra think like that? She did not know, but one thing was certain: she would never be closer to complete surrender, to telling everything, as in just this moment, which was so tormented but yet suddenly so open, filled with possibility—the fantastic had traveled through her. What if . . . what if she were to tell Inget Herrman everything? From beginning to end? Without leaving anything out. Everything, honest, direct, and without detours.

Like a confession.

“Guilt is an action,” the lover had said. He had bitten her neck blue during the second—and last—intercourse a few days ago. “It cannot be evaded. But sometimes there is . . . mercy.”

It had been a colossal feeling, a relief, freedom, conviction. But a second that was gone just as quickly as it had come. Inget Herrman had stopped crying. Stopped just like that. Laughed, lit a new cigarette, filled her glass, and acted like nothing. Nothing nothing.

And later, very quickly, she drifted off into further thoughts, into her endless monologues. Farther into words into words into words.

Her name was Lassie (Marsh-Lassie)
. A strange scene. There, at the pool’s edge, in a wet bathing suit. She, wrapped in a terry cloth towel, with the dog Lassie on it.

An entirely different dog from the silk dog, the one who had existed earlier.

Later, in the final part of Sandra’s life inside these borders, this doggishness would render her one last humiliating nickname.

Wrong kind of dog.

But still. Inget Herrman on her back in a wet bathing suit with a cigarette, the eternal cigarette, like a dead person, so drunk, so
gone. Furthermore it was rather cold in the pool section and you could, for example, easily get cystitis if you did not take off your wet bathing suit after swimming, Inget Herrman did not seem to even be thinking about that.

The moment was over.

Inget Herrman had fallen asleep.

But she had been on her feet again the next morning.

And it was Sandra of course, not Inget Herrman, who caught a cold again and was forced to see the doctor and was prescribed a sulfur treatment against acute cystitis.

“Finally,” Inget Herrman had said, “we’re quite helpless.”

And they never swam in the pool again.

The pool filled with slime, until Kenny had it emptied and furnished her subtropical winter garden in it.

Sandra was sleeping in the marital bed. She was sleeping alone, under the sky, the white, tulle-covered one (a mosquito net, newly obtained), between the light red sheets. Kenny did not want the bed. Kenny had laughed when she saw it.

In front of Kenny’s eyes.

“Sandra!” Kenny called. “Time to wake up. Are you still sleeping?”

Not reproachful exactly, but still. Sandra pressed her nose deeper, deeper into the soft cushion. She was frozen, quiet, pretending to sleep even though she was awake.

“A dreamer in an alert state,” “the aunt” on Åland had said. “That’s what you are. Just like the other islanders.”