The American Girl (54 page)

The shoes at the edge of the pool. I see, it was like that.

Your last message, Doris. Thanks for that.

But so: a not unimportant part of the short time she was living in the apartment in the city by the sea she spent deciphering and decoding all of the messages the surroundings gave her. Above all Kenny’s and Rita’s messages, since they were almost always close by.

Though Rita did not need to be decoded. She was unusually, shockingly direct. Sometimes, though, it was not unpleasant, it was a relief. You knew who she was (a bitch). You knew where you had her. You knew what you could expect from her (nothing, nothing, nothing).

But otherwise. If Kenny said yes, Sandra was convinced that she meant no. Little by little everything Kenny said had secondary meanings. Also, maybe particularly, when she was at her nicest.

“She’s hopeless,” Kenny sighed in Rita’s company on the other side of the wall. “There’s no life in her. She’s like a dead person.”

“She’s obsessed,” Rita stated, “with herself. With that little split-lip pathetic face that she can see in the mirror when she looks in it, which she is occupied with at all times of day.”

“What split lip?”

“A little harelipped girl. Haven’t you heard?”

“No, tell me.”

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

A: . . . the Marsh Queen and I: then we went out into the world in order to earn money. We stripped in Tokyo, in Yokohama and in Alaska. It was there, in Alaska, we started becoming a little desperate anyway. A pitch-black New Year’s Eve in a caravan, beyond everything. Would nothing ever become of our plans, our music? So we sat down and focused. And then made our New Year’s resolutions. I wrote in my notebook for the month of August that same new year: Wembley Arena. It didn’t come true. But almost.

A significant portion of the remaining months in the city by the sea, before Sandra disappeared, she devoted herself to wandering around in the city and selling herself. She was invited to many small, small rooms where young students of the male sex from the whole country lived. She met these boys at the disco in the basement of one of the biggest student boarding schools in the city center of the city by the sea. Only it cannot be called by its real name, the real one is too descriptive; the place was called Alibi.

Sex. She got herpes and scabies and an insight into a new shade of loneliness. She could not take it anymore. Either with
the boys or the loneliness. She could not take it anymore with the student hovels that smelled of loneliness and unwashed clothes, or just overgrown boys, uncertainty, and bad sex. Most of the boys had too much to drink and/or came from small hovels where sexuality was something shameful and vulgar in a way that Sandra did not understand even if she was the last to maintain that sex was something beautiful and natural—it was not at all, not at all. She used sex to evoke something in herself—and was it even sex, in that case?

She could not take it anymore, but that was, so to speak, the whole point. Maybe she met something of herself in those rooms. Something worse than shame and promiscuity.

And even if it was good—it was in any case NORMAL—then it was in no way comforting. She suddenly realized just that, without Doris-in-her she could not live. It was like cutting something vital off of herself (could she say that? “There isn’t any life in her,” of course, “she’s like a dead person”).

It was not possible. She had to live with Doris. There was no other way.

When she could not stand the students any longer she changed location. HUNTING GROUNDS, which some idiot would say (Pinky?). She started dressing more conspicuously, doing her makeup in such a way that for the initiated it left no room for misinterpretations of what she was after. She wanted to be “the initiated.” She was looking for “the initiated.”

It was a game in a way.

She visited hotel bars and certain cafés at strategically chosen times. There were many hotels, but particularly one whose name also cannot be given, it is so significant, it was called President. For example at lunchtime, which as a jet-setter had been called cocktail hour (she had no idea if it had been called that, but she noticed it amused certain men—and these were men, the real thing, not overgrown bullies and that she was grateful for—when she sat and said stupid things about Mom and Dad
and herself in Central European ski resorts in the interesting jet-setter lifestyle and how difficult it was to adjust to a normal day in a different place after that. After such a life).

Sometimes she accompanied them to hotel rooms, sometimes just to the restroom, sometimes to cars parked in garages under the city’s tall buildings, sometimes she said no right when it started burning. Sometimes she pretended to become morally indignant.

“But why are you sitting here then?”

“I’m waiting for Dad,” she whined.

Sometimes she said something long and incomprehensible in French.

She put the money she earned in an envelope she kept in the lining of her backpack (the only real one, which she still carried with her). Just about the most obvious hiding place there is, and sure enough, when one day just before she left the big apartment in the city by the sea the money was gone she was not at all surprised.

At first she saved the money in other words.

Not for anything in particular. Just saved it.

She had everything you could have.

And she had also started classes at the university. She enrolled in a degree program in a department that had been easy to get into. She had participated in the admissions interview but had not needed to do much more than answer a few questions competently and in detail. Competently, in that way, it was not an art form. It was just a matter of reading—or making up.

Inget Herrman might have wrung her hands in despair if she had known how poorly Sandra’s studies were going. It happened that Sandra remembered: Inget Herrman at the edge of the pool in the house in the darker part, those days when the Islander was gone and no one really knew what he was doing. But soon they would find out. He would come home. Newly married.

With Inget Herrman’s sister, Kenny.

“I can’t be your mother,” Inget Herrman had said. “But look at me like a kind of a godmother. Your guardian angel.”

Inget who lectured to her about the importance of planning and purposefulness, the importance of having thoughts concentrated on the task at hand and nothing else, the importance of having goals, intermediate goals as well as big ones, overarching, neatly written down on a piece of paper or in a notebook.

“Time doesn’t wait for you,” Inget Herrman had continued, later, in her workroom in the city, at the beginning of the fall. She had lit a cigarette and raised her glass with the sparkling earth-red wine inside. “Cheers, Sandra. That’s the way it is. There are small and decisive moments. Before you know it you’ve experienced them. They’re gone before you know it. If you don’t hold on to them. That’s the way it is, Sandra. Before you know it . . . You shouldn’t waste your time.”

And Inget Herrman had passed out on her bed, a mattress in a corner of the room in the small apartment which lay on the outskirts of the city. Though by then it was quite late in the fall.

Women in a state of emergency
. It had started so differently. Early in the fall, she had sought out Inget Herrman in her workroom and Inget Herrman offered her a job, she had been filled with determination, plans, and energy. (“Otherwise I’m training for a marathon. It’s a difficult and intensive program.”)

“I’m going to write my thesis,” Inget Herrman had informed her at the end of the summer already when it had become clear that Sandra and Kenny would move, and the Islander also, but Inget Herrman had not exactly wrinkled her nose when it came to light just as quickly that the Islander would be heading out on the seven seas again.

Inget Herrman thought it was good Sandra was going to move to the city by the sea where she had her combined living quarters and work den because then Sandra would be close at hand.

“I’m offering you a job in other words. Before I deal with my doctoral thesis I have to write my licentiate thesis but above all I
have to finish my master’s thesis. I have a lot of material. I need help sorting it.

“I’m giving you an offer that won’t take your breath away.

“But what I can offer in return,” Inget Herrman continued generously, “is good company.”

Inget Herrman’s material
. That was a lot of paper. You had no reason to be disappointed on that point.

Everything from neatly written archive cards, big and small, small notes with more or less legible handwriting that Sandra learned to recognize and even decipher, notes on napkins, on advertisements, on the backs of envelopes. “You can get an idea wherever and whenever,” Inget Herrman explained.

It was decided that Sandra would work at Inget Herrman’s three days a week in the morning, when Inget Herrman had “the day’s first shift” at the library.

This first shift lasted from nine thirty when the library opened until twelve thirty, whereafter Inget Herrman had a short break for lunch before it was time for the second shift of the day.

Inget Herrman often came home at the beginning of the second shift or at the end or even in the middle of the first shift. In any case, while Sandra was still there, and she often had one or more bottles of heavy red wine with her, which they chugged while they talked. And talked.

It was almost always Inget Herrman who was talking.

But it was different from that other talk, the tittle-tattle in the apartment, the big, bright one, the voices from outside and inside your head that threatened to slit open your lip so that it could be seen, it was not a game—if the world was a divide then the world was a divide but you could not be in that divide if you did not want to be obliterated and die.

And Sandra did not want to be obliterated and die.

Doris-in-her, who should have been a friend and an ally, just laughed and asked strange things.

•••

Inget Herrman’s talk, a talk you could find yourself in. The afternoons in Inget Herrman’s research lair. A bright memory. Inget Herrman who raised her red-wine glass so that all of the afternoon’s clear sunrays that seeped in through the window gathered in the glass and reflected in glitter, glitter.

Cheers. Endurance.

And what they talked about. All sorts. Nothing. About Kenny and the Islander and their crumbling marriage. Not much, but a little.

And Inget Herrman’s life, which in the beginning sounded so exciting and eventful, with the marathon training and the thesis and the film criticism and the essay book and all the rest.

They talked about “old times.” And the Women and the house on the First Cape.

“What are they doing now?” Sandra asked and thought about the women in the house on the First Cape,
Eldrid’s Spiritual Sojourn
.

“Planning the first menstruation rituals. For their daughters.

“Well, joking aside. Managing to get along somehow. Trying to finish their studies.

“And well,” said Inget Herrman because it really was not true. “There are those who are DOING something.” Laura B-H, who recently finished and had success with her big romance novel that was set over four centuries and on sixteen continents. Or Anneka Munveg, who could still be seen on television. That is to say if you had the energy to turn it on.

Have the energy to turn it on.

But Inget Herrman, she did not have a television. “There are far too many good books to read,” she also had a habit of saying. But all the more hesitating.

“I don’t know,” Inget Herrman said and just looked more tired and the book fell out of her hand and it was as if Inget Herrman, during a brief moment, actually saw her own narcissistic pettiness
in contrast to the big worlds, ideas, and perspectives. All of the real. Everything that had been.

Eldrid’s Spiritual Sojourn
.

The travels, revolutionary in the world and the senses, not necessarily geographical, but in space and time.

Because that was what it was about, in the end: not about how you did or did not want to march in line, rather how you wanted to believe in a change.

“I don’t know,” said Inget Herrman.

During this time Inget Herrman was still a “highly attractive woman,” as the Islander also had a habit of characterizing her, next to “lovely” and all of that.

Sometimes she pretended to stop drinking. Put on her outdoor clothes at the same time as Sandra and said she needed to take a walk in the fresh air before she started the evening shift. Any idiot could see on her that she was on her way to the bar. And sometimes she did not even bother trying to hide it.

“And in certain states I drink. I DRINK.”

They also talked, in the vaguest terms, about Sandra’s future. Inget Herrman continued to give Sandra good advice. In her usual, general terms.
And there wasn’t anything wrong with that advice, Inget, there was something wrong with me
.

Purposeful, according to plan.

But that was before Sandra, among Inget’s things when Inget was not there, made the discovery of a certain letter. Doris’s last letter.

Which Inget had not even opened. It was just lying there, forgotten, among yet another bag of collected material for Inget Herrman’s thesis.

She, Inget, had not even opened it. It was Sandra who did, in the end. Alone in Inget Herrman’s work den. And then she fled.

But when she regretted it a few weeks later and tried to get in touch with Inget Herrman again, find her, in order to tell her everything, it was too late.

Inget Herrman was not in her work den. In the beginning Inget Herrman could not be found at all.

So later when Sandra, one of the very last days before she took her belongings and got on the ferry to Germany, would look for Inget Herrman in her apartment there was a person who opened the door whom she had never seen before. One of those boys, a youth, whom she recognized anyway, in some way. He was one of those boys she had a habit of, as it was called, picking up at the disco she sometimes visited, it was underground and was called, in real life, Alibi.