The American Girl (57 page)

And swish, like a suction in the water in the middle of the marsh, we were sucked down, how should I put it, but “figuratively” speaking, down, down into nothing.

Here we would be, by the muddy beaches—

“Welcome girls, to my lovely garden.”

“Welcome girls, to my lovely garden.”

Well. That would never happen.

And we certainly understood then finally how truly crazy Miss Andrews was—but it didn’t mean anything. We were convinced it was the last time we would see a trace of Miss Andrews and it was terrible. The door to the garden had been pulled shut right in front of our noses even, once and for all, and besides it was nobody else’s fault but our own.

“Look at what you’ve done now!” Solveig said to me, but weakly, where we stood alone by the marsh in our bathrobes because it was really so terribly cold this morning. And alone. Damned. Alone. Of course Solveig understood that she was just as much to blame. I had just been more precocious. With words. Like always. And we, we were two of course.

I said nothing.

The mosquitoes bit. Damn, actually. God, God damn.

But consequently there was no point in standing below the Glass House and looking up at the Winter Garden and imagining something marvelous would happen.

We didn’t talk about it, but maybe it became a watershed between us, me and Solveig, in some way, I don’t know.

Maybe Miss Andrews regretted it. I don’t know. Because she came back. Already two days later. Then she was extra nice, had presents for us. New bathing suits. One blue, one green.

And everything was delightful again. But still. Not at all. Solveig put on the new suit and jumped in extra-high spirits around on the beach and then she took Miss Andrews with her far out into the water and tried to get her to do the freestyle back to land. It was almost a disaster. Both of us had to work to save Miss Andrews again.

“You should receive a lifeguard medal, girls. There’s a strong current out there.”

“We’ve noticed that. It’s just a matter of being able to handle it. You have to have swimming experience. If you have that then you can manage. It’s not that hard,” said Solveig.

She said to me later that in the water with Miss Andrews then she had noticed Miss Andrews really was as good a swimmer as the next person, she had just been silly and pretended. Everything with the trade, it was a game.

Miss Andrews showed up one day and you could tell something had happened. She informed us grandly that she was going to travel, the location was so to speak implied . . . because when she came back she might have her own little niece with her. Next year. It was at the end of the summer, in other words, already then.

“I hope to see you again, girls,” said Miss Andrews. “I have namely become very attached to your company. Same place, same time. I mean in the morning, here at the marsh, next year again. Shall we agree on that?”

We answered yes, of course. She was so silly that you still couldn’t keep from liking her. In any case just a little. But something had changed after her rage. Consequently not just with our dreams, but between us, Solveig and me on the one hand, and Miss Andrews on the other. We didn’t really trust her anymore.

Not in the obvious way, anyway.

And besides, she had effectively gotten us to stop hoping for something new, something different, something amazing.

And then we also started thinking about that, think if Miss Andrews had known someone was spying in the bushes, and maybe that was why she was carrying on clowning about so, demonstrating her “eurythmic principles.” That maybe she didn’t have anything against standing there like that in his field of vision and in that case all of it was REALLY sick.

Miss Andrews jumping on one leg on the cliff. Just another fleshy tantadara instead of the Queen of the Winter Garden we had painted for ourselves. Miss Andrews, who taught us the world was large and open and that you could walk out in it.

“Seize the day, girls.”

•••

“Yes, girls,” Miss Andrews said at last. “It sounds like you will not be rid of me next year either. Don’t mention it.”

Miss Andrews bowed and curtsied on the beach.

“Don’t mention it. It’s fine with me. YOU are some of the funniest things I’ve experienced. In my life.”

And then it was the next year, that was the year Eddie came and Eddie died. Drowned, sucked up into the marsh. And now I’m going to tell you right away. Kenny. That we saw it. That it was us.

But wait a minute, I’m going to finish telling the story. How it was. Well so. Summer and Miss Andrews again. She came early that year, already in June, and she had that girl with her. The “niece,” in other words, whom she had talked so much about but you could see right away that everything was wrong. If we had been cheated out of our dreams then it was nothing compared to what Miss Andrews had been cheated out of. It really wasn’t a “bright” girl from, one more of Miss Andrews’s favorite sayings, “the great outdoors.”

Eddie de Wire. The American girl. This was one of those real teenage girls, of the worst kind. She didn’t come down to the beach either, just sat extremely reluctantly—you could see that at a distance also—there on Lore Cliff across from the bay with the small clump of reeds where we were swimming. And watched us. Listlessly, in other words. Swatted at mosquitoes and lit a match. When she did that Miss Andrews called to her, her face was unusually sweaty and she couldn’t concentrate on the swimming at all, glancing up all the time, with anger and irritation, but it was also, we understood later, that she was scared—well in any case when Eddie on the cliff lit that match Miss Andrews called to her, saying that the first thing she did in the morning didn’t need to be smoking a cigarette.

Then the girl called back that it was a match she lit, not a cigarette, because of the damned mosquitoes, fire was a way of
getting rid of them, they were everywhere of course. The girl didn’t look at us at all.

And when she spoke the very first times, she certainly spoke Swedish, but she had a funny accent. She would lose the accent pretty quickly, surprisingly quickly, later, with Björn. And Bengt. They were together of course, the three of them. Well that’s a pretty ménage à trois or whatever it’s called, she could have said that, Miss Andrews, before, but it was as though she wasn’t inclined to hold that kind of exposition any longer.

Miss Andrews just snorted at Eddie and put on her swimsuit and now we swam a little, but nothing really became of that either because it was rather difficult to concentrate. She sat there on the cliff and lit matches, which she threw in the water, lit and threw. And suddenly we were freezing. We almost never froze but now we did and suddenly all the energy and desire had left all three of us, and then we just sat on the beach for a while and felt like we were being watched. It was time for a little English. But with the girl there, it was too idiotic.

And Miss damned Andrews quoted for us from her favorite quotations. Pico della Mirandola.

“This, girls,” she said, “is Pico della Mirandola: ‘I have placed you in the center of creation so that you will be able to plainly see and judge all that exists in the world. You are neither of heaven or earth, neither immortal nor mortal, but are your own sculptor, freely and nobly fashioning yourself as you would like to be.’

“What is he saying, girls?

“He says,” Miss Andrews continued absentmindedly “that it is possible to make up your own life.

“But note carefully, girls, he says famously, ‘One must live one’s life with style.’ And that is what so many people misunderstand. One thinks that style is how things look, or something that exclusively has to do with aesthetics. One can separate . . .”

And point point point. Because then Miss Andrews got going. The girl on the cliff across from them. Suddenly she was gone.

“I must go. She cannot be left alone . . .”

And we sat there alone, Solveig and I, at the marsh. It could have been rather comical, but it wasn’t at all, not in light of what happened later.

Consequently Miss Andrews didn’t come to the marsh very often that summer and when she showed up nothing was like before. There was rarely any swimming, mostly talking. Sometimes she didn’t even get undressed. I mean, the bathrobe. She had entirely stopped swimming in the nude. All of that, the eurythmic principles, belonged to another time.

And one thing and the other was said, but nothing memorable. She didn’t have the peace to concentrate on the English. Sometimes she just came to be sitting there on a rock while the words flooded out of her.

I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. Later came to understand that it was what it was: a person in dire need. Eddie was in the process of taking the spirit out of her.

“That girl is such a disappointment to me,” she said once, but to the cousin’s mama, not to us. That was during the very last time when she suddenly showed up at the cousin’s house because she wanted to “warn” the cousin’s mama about Eddie, “the American girl,” she used that nickname willingly too, which she hadn’t done earlier. Then Björn and Eddie were already in full swing of course. And Bengt and Eddie.

And maybe we also would have thought then, Solveig and I, when she came to the cousin’s house, that we felt for her, but she didn’t tell us who she really was this time either. As the one she was, with us. Miss Andrews, in other words.

One time, in the morning by the beach, Miss Andrews lit a cigarette. A cigarette, it was now seven o’clock in the morning, before it had been unthinkable. Though she put it out immediately.

“And now, out in the water with all of us,” she carried on, Miss Andrews, but while she said that she was standing in the shadows hugging herself. “Out in the water, everyone, come come come.”

But just sat there.

“Seize the day,” she said. “That is what it’s all about.” And then she stopped again.

“That is one of my most important principles.” She came to be staring in front of her at a loss when Solveig kindly asked what that meant—we had stopped with English a long time ago, it was actually completely quirky what we sat there and talked about in the mornings, the swimmers and their crazy godmother Miss Andrews.

The swimmers and their crazy godmother. You could also see it that way.

Well, this much was certain. The American girl had come into Miss Andrews’s life and everything had changed.

She never spoke to us about her, never even mentioned her. And of course we didn’t ask. We had learned not to ask too many questions and furthermore, that “niece,” that was still a sensitive thing for us.

So we didn’t know what Eddie was doing or what she was up to.

Not directly.

“You cannot trust her,” she said to the cousin’s mama. And you could have thought then, who was it who said that Miss Andrews’s version was the right one. It certainly was not easy to come and stay with a Miss Andrews with all her dreams about who you are and then be expected to be that and act accordingly with it so to speak.

But we saw how unhappy she was. For real, in need. And scared.

Later for example I understood that Eddie was stealing. Money and things. Big and small things. There was so to speak no logic in her.

And she had started picking up strangers in the city by the sea and bringing them to the baroness’s house. Not just for parties,
but otherwise also. People who came and went. Sometimes you couldn’t get rid of them.

Above all you couldn’t get rid of her, Eddie.

And maybe in some way the baroness still had some hope that Eddie would become different. She was so young also, nineteen. That she would come to her senses, grow up.

It probably felt quite insecure. The baroness was alone. She had no husband, no children—she had for the most part one friend, and that was a boarder. In other words one of those male students who had once lived as a boarder with her. The Black Sheep. It was just a type.

But still, he certainly helped her. She had a habit of calling him and asking him to come and empty the apartment of people, that sort of unpleasant thing. She also tried to get him to talk some sense into Eddie, but it didn’t work at all, and so on.

It was him she called in desperation that last night, from the Glass House. When Eddie was still alive. She had locked Eddie in a room. Without clothes. So that she wouldn’t run away. Now she was going to leave. And the baroness called the Black Sheep in a scattered state and he, yes, he came.

So she asked him to come and take her away. She never wanted to see Eddie again.

For alleged reasons. I happened to know a bit about it since my brother Bengt was extremely involved. It was together with him that she, Eddie, was going to leave. Together Bencku and Eddie had cooked up the world’s intrigue; they were going to run away together and so on.

It actually could have been a little comical too. In some way. If now for . . . As said, Eddie was together with Bengt. Little Bengt in other words, and he was head over heels in love with her. But that was so to speak more unofficial than the fact that she was also together with Björn. She and Björn were the number-one turtledoves of the District for a while, where they hung out in the opening of the barn and made out and smoked and were going to get engaged and everything.

We weren’t terribly interested in that, Solveig and I, but nevertheless what was a bit interesting was how different Eddie was with the two of them. With Björn she was one way, with Bencku another. Though he saw what Bencku and Eddie did when it was just the two of them. Björn that is.

Eddie, soft as a cat and purring. It was, when she was standing there in the opening of the barn, as if she were standing on a stage and playing her part as Eddie the lovely, so good.

It was like another side of her, one Miss Andrews never saw, but maybe it was the same thing.

Well, they were in other words going to go away, that night. Bengt and Eddie. Sat and swore immortal things to each other in the boathouse, while they were intimately entwined, and then comes Björn. He doesn’t understand anything. Bengt. Bengt is five years younger, to start with.

Well, he understood later because he went and hanged himself.