by Vendela Vida
We all gather in the study—Svea, my parents, and I sit on the rug to make room for all the Bitchers. We turn the TV on five minutes before 7 because we don’t want to miss the establishing shot.
Someone asks me for water and I ignore them. Then the show starts and we get a quick glimpse of Joseph & Joseph’s exterior. Then the next scene shows the interior of the gallery. “What happened to the establishing shot?” I say.
“Shh,” say some of the Bitchers, loudly.
“I’m sure they’ll use that shot later,” my dad says.
But we watch the whole episode and toward the end of it, it becomes evident that Maria Fabiola, Julia, Faith, Svea, and I have been cut. I look at Svea and she shrugs. She doesn’t know how important it was to me to be in the show. She doesn’t know how I was counting on my friends seeing it, and things going back to normal.
The final credits roll and the Bitchers applaud. I excuse myself, claiming exhaustion, and say I have to study for a big test. I make a point of hugging Tall Mia. The hug is awkward, as she’s still seated, but the elliptical embrace allows me the chance to whisper in her ear: “Don’t take the bridge on the way home.”
“Why would I?” she says, not whispering. “I live in the other direction.”
Upstairs in my room, I can hear the women laughing and the occasional clattering of silverware—they’ve moved into the dining room for lutefisk. I hear collective gasps and wonder what story is being told and about whom.
I think of other TV shows and movies and how every movie star must be upset about a scene that was cut. I recently saw Out of Africa—my mom took me to the theater because she wanted to see the film and I had no plans. Since then I’ve thought a lot about the scene with Robert Redford washing Meryl Streep’s hair. Now that, I thought, is love. And Meryl Streep’s skin looked incredible.
I get up and check my complexion in the bathroom mirror. Four zits, not terrible. Not as bad as some of the girls in my class. Poor Angie. I reapply Clearasil and go back in my room and do twenty sit-ups. Then I lay in bed listening to the explosions of laughter, followed by the rearranging of chairs, the trickling of voices, and the closing of the front door. My room is directly above the kitchen and I hear my mother tidying up after the party. I picture her pulling on the gloves she uses when cleaning dishes. This is the same sink where she used to wash my hair. She’d place towels on the kitchen counter and I’d rest on top of them, with my head extending out to the faucet, and she’d shampoo my hair and talk about her day. Now I listen to her turn on the water—I find the sound comforting. I spread out my hair on the pillow like Medusa, like Meryl Streep, and imagine it’s my hair my mother’s washing in the sink, the way she did when I was young.
11
In Swedish culture December 13 is a holiday. A ritual. The oldest girl in the house acts out the part of Santa Lucia, dressed in white and wearing a crown of lighted candles, waking her family with singing and saffron buns.
My radio alarm clock goes off early, and after staying in bed to listen to the end of a Police song, I get up. I slip on the white, ironed nightgown that my mother has hung from the doorknob to my room. She’s done this—the ironing and the hanging—while I was sleeping.
Quietly, I walk downstairs to the kitchen and remove several saffron buns from a cookie tin and place them on a silver tray. I find matches in a drawer and contemplate the crown of candles. This is the hardest part—placing the crown of candles on my head and walking up the stairs. It requires balance, and when the wax drips down onto my scalp, it burns. I decide to carry everything up to the second floor. Then I light the candles and secure the crown on my head. I pick up the tray of saffron buns and walk into my parents’ room. Their door has conveniently been left wide open for this annual ritual. I start to sing the Santa Lucia song about how dark the night is, and my parents quickly sit up in bed. I can tell they’ve already been awake, waiting. I finish the first verse of the song and place the tray on a side table.
Sock-footed, I step into Svea’s room. She’s a heavy sleeper and hard to rouse. I’m singing loudly and the candle wax is starting to drip onto my head. Finally, I give up singing Swedish. “Wake up!” I yell. Svea sits up and I squat down, and she knows to help me blow out the candles. “Use your hands,” I say, and she cups each candle before she blows.
Still, I find myself picking wax out of my hair on the way to school.
I have stopped walking by Julia’s and Faith’s houses—instead I take a different route, with Svea and her dour friend, who is dourer today because we are late. The Santa Lucia ritual has set us back several minutes. We walk past the castle, past the house that once belonged to Carter the Great, past the pink house that belongs to the woman who went to Palm Springs for the weekend and impulsively got a tummy tuck. “Who gets a tummy tuck on a whim?” I’ve heard other women comment, as though it was the last-minute nature of her procedure that was most shocking. In the distance, foghorns sound, and near us, leaf blowers make their loud leaf-blowing sound. The streets are empty as usual. But at the entrance to the school, there’s a commotion, and causing the commotion are three police cars.
The headmaster’s secretary is standing stiffly outside the front office. She never stands outside the office. When she sees me approaching, her body relaxes, and then tightens again. She asks if she can speak to me for a minute.
I go inside the office. She waits for the door to close. “Maria Fabiola is missing,” she tells me. “She disappeared yesterday when walking home from school. The detectives want to talk to you.”
12
The meeting with Mr. Makepeace and the detectives takes place in a conference room at the back of the office. Probably because there’s more room. There are three detectives waiting to talk with me—a man with tight pants, a man with loose pants, and—surprise!—a woman. She has dyed blond hair pulled severely into a ponytail, and very thin lips. Her eyes are upon me the moment I pass through the conference room door.
“I’m Detective Anderson,” she says. “And you’re Eulabee.”
I agree that that is my name.
“That’s a beautiful name,” she says. “Where is it from?”
It’s evident they’ve decided that she’s going to be kind to me, that she’s going to sweet-talk me so I will give her answers.
“It’s from a painting,” I say. “My dad liked a painting of a woman named Eulabee Dix.”
“Interesting,” she says, showing no interest. She is already looking down at her clipboard, thinking of her next question. “Do you know why we called you in here today?” she asks.
I look at Mr. Makepeace, who nods at me. His blue bow tie bounces up and down.
“Because he told you to call me in,” I say, nodding back at the headmaster.
“And why do you think he did that?” Detective Anderson says.
“Because I used to be best friends with Maria Fabiola.”
“Used to be?” she says. Now she does seem genuinely interested. She puts her pen down, to show that we are about to have a serious conversation. “Why used to? What happened, my dear?”
The dear sounds so forced coming out of her mouth that I want to laugh.
“We had a falling out.”
“About what?”
I don’t say anything.
“Was it about a boy?” she says in a tone that’s meant to convey we can all relate to that.
“No,” I say.
“Oh,” she says, clearly disappointed that she has not tapped in to the root problem with her first guess. She looks at the other detectives.
“You were friends a couple months ago.”
“Things change,” I tell her.
“Don’t I know it,” she says. “Six months ago I was married!” She lets out a laugh that I think is supposed to sound jovial but instead sounds more like a scream.
Mr. Makepeace looks at me, as though he, too, is curious about my falling out with Maria Fabiola. Or maybe he’s just upset because he wants a cigar and this conference room has
a “No Smoking” sign that was posted specifically to target him. No one else in the administration smokes.
“You used to walk to school together, didn’t you?” the detective with the tight pants asks.
“Yes, but then we had a . . . difference of opinion about what happened that morning.” I’ve never used the phrase “difference of opinion” before and I like how it sounds.
“What was the difference?” the detective with the loose pants asks.
“She said there was an incident on the way to school, and I maintained that the incident was a fabrication,” I say. Everyone is looking at me as though wondering where I got my vocabulary from. Then they look at Mr. Makepeace, who shrugs, unsurprised, as if to suggest, What else did you expect from the girls at our fine institution?
“So you didn’t walk home with Maria Fabiola yesterday,” Detective Anderson says.
“No,” I say.
“Do you know what route she would have taken?”
“I can guess,” I say. “We used to walk home together. She probably walked toward the ocean and then followed El Camino del Mar to her house.”
“Do you think she took a detour? That she walked by the cliffs?” the third detective asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I wasn’t with her.”
“Does she have a boyfriend?” Detective Anderson asks. It must have been established ahead of time that she would be asking me all the questions that had to do with boys or relationships.
“I don’t know,” I say again.
Detective Anderson looks down and balances her forehead on the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, as though she’s tired. Her ponytail flops to the side the way a horse’s tail moves when the horse is about to urinate. When she straightens up her head, her eyes are full of fire and desperation. “You realize that your best friend has gone missing, don’t you?”
I want to remind her that Maria Fabiola is no longer my best friend, but I sense this correction will further enrage the detective.
“Yes,” I say.
“And you’re not concerned?”
“I am concerned,” I say. What I don’t say is that I’m more concerned about how easily I seem to upset people recently—first Mr. London, now her. My capacity to ignite fury seems to know no gender boundaries.
“Can I ask a question?” the detective with tight pants says.
“Didn’t you just do that by asking?” Detective Anderson retorts.
The detective clears his throat. They are tired of each other already. Either that, I think, or they’re going to go fuck after this. I have many different and somewhat contradictory ideas of how adult seduction works.
“Do you know of any reason why Maria Fabiola might have . . . run away? You mentioned you had a falling out. Has she been . . . left out of things in the last months? Has she had friends?”
“She’s had plenty of friends,” I say. “I’m the one who’s been ostracized.”
The three officers stare at me. Then all at once, they turn to their notebooks and scribble. The officer with the loose pants peers over at Detective Anderson’s notebook. “It’s T-R-A-C-I-Z,” she says. Then she turns to me.
“Has anyone ever approached you and Maria Fabiola in a way that you thought was . . . inappropriate?” Detective Anderson says.
I think of the flashers in the park, of the man in line at Walgreens who saw me with a Kinks album under my arm. I was coming from a record store in the Haight and he offered to take me to coffee and talk about the Kinks. “I don’t drink coffee yet,” I told the man at Walgreens.
“I don’t really know what you mean by that,” I say to the detective.
“Have they ever made you feel uncomfortable?”
“Everyone makes me feel uncomfortable,” I say. “I feel uncomfortable right now.”
The men in the room roll back on the wheels of their chairs, retreating. Detective Anderson is now going to be the only one asking questions.
“Your friend is missing,” she says. “Her family is, well, her family is freaking out. They are crying and screaming. Can you imagine how your family would feel if you were missing?”
I nod, unable to picture it. My mother doesn’t cry.
“And Maria Fabiola is probably scared to death, too, wherever she is. You might be able to help us, to help her. I understand you two aren’t close anymore, but in the scheme of things, having a falling out for a couple months isn’t a big deal. It might feel like that now, but honey, when you’re older those three months will feel like a quick blip.” She snaps when she says the word “blip.”
I stare at her.
“Is there any information you have about any men, or anybody in general that you think might have had an interest that went beyond normal in Maria Fabiola?”
“An interest beyond normal,” I repeat.
“Yes, anyone who wanted her to himself, for example.” She pauses and adds: “Or herself.”
I think of Faith’s father. I think of the boys of Sea View Terrace. I think of myself. Everyone always wants more of Maria Fabiola to themselves. There is something about how she focuses on you with those ethereal eyes. Even when you aren’t looking directly at her—especially when you aren’t looking directly at her—you can see that she’s staring at you, her eyes unblinking.
A minute goes by, maybe two. I can’t mention the boys of Sea Cliff, that wouldn’t be fair. If anything, we have more of an interest in the boys of Sea Cliff than they have in us. But I do feel the pressure to provide an answer.
“Is there anyone you encounter on your walks to and from school on a regular basis?” Detective Tight Pants asks.
“There are a couple gardeners who harass us,” I say.
“Who?” the detectives ask in unison. They all lean in, like an a cappella group singing a high note.
“Well, there are a few. I don’t know their names. They have trucks and they all wear white undershirts as their T-shirts. They usually comment on our appearance.”
“What do they say about your appearance?” Detective Anderson asks with slow deliberate words. She’s trying so hard to be calm.
“They noticed when we started wearing bras. These white blouses don’t help.”
I sense that everyone in the room is sitting up taller. It’s like a fishing line going suddenly taut.
“What do you mean they noticed? How did they notice?”
“They comment. They chase after us.”
What I don’t say is that they chase us away sometimes when we’re bothering them. Sometimes when we’re bored on the streets of Sea Cliff, when the neighborhood boys seem to be gone, in some place in the city we can’t find or get to, we approach the gardeners and try to talk with them. That’s when they chase us away.
The detectives seem happy with my response.
“Well, we have a lead,” Tight Pants says. Detective Anderson slides me her business card. “Call me if anything else occurs to you.” I take the card and don’t know what to do with it. I don’t think I’ve ever held a business card before. I lift up my skirt and the male detectives look away. They don’t know we wear gym shorts under our uniforms. I place the card in a pocket of my shorts.
I enter science midway through class. There’s a drawing of a penis being projected onto the screen, its parts labeled.
At recess, rumors swirl. We see the vans of news stations surrounding our campus. We’re ushered back inside the classrooms, which makes us more stir-crazy. When the air-raid siren goes off at noon we all scream. It’s hard to distinguish between the siren and our screams, but we keep going even after the siren has ceased. We know it’s a practice drill but things are tense. Even the teachers seem at a loss about what do without Maria Fabiola at school. The desks she normally occupies in each classroom seem extraordinarily shiny.
By the time school lets out, all the students are acting frenzied. The news trucks are still surrounding our school. There are more of them now. NBC. ABC. KPIX. Well-coiffed anchorwomen in suits and pearl
s stand beyond the school gates, their backs to us, commenting. I’m sure they’re using the words “private,” “elite,” “wealthy” as often as they can. Every parent has been called and asked to pick up their daughter after school. None of the mothers work except for my mom, so I call her at the hospital. I know her work phone number by heart because it’s the punch line of a story. My mother entertained our guests at a dinner party one night by telling them about the looks she gets when she’s at work and leaves a message on a fellow Swede’s answering machine. She’ll ask them to call her back and then give them the phone number—666–7777—which in Swedish sounds like Sex! Sex! Sex! Who? Who? Who? Who?
I dial the number now.
“She’s in the OR,” Mrs. Markson says. Mrs. Markson is my mother’s supervisor and Petra’s mom. She asks if she can take a message. “No,” I tell her. She congratulates me on winning third place in the hospital contest for kids. I designed a new nurses’ locker room. Svea won the contest and received $400. I got a subscription to a teen magazine I don’t read.
After school, the parents line up in the horseshoe-shaped driveway by the field. The pick-up process is slow and made slower by the fact that every mother gets out of the car to talk to other mothers about Maria Fabiola’s disappearance. The caravan looks like an ad for Volvo. I see the dour friend’s mom picking up her daughter and my sister. The mom now waves as though she’s just returned from a cruise. Hello! I missed you! I have presents!
I sneak out the back gate while the parents line up at the front one. I start walking. I don’t go into my house, but instead grab my bike from the garage and pedal quickly to where I suspect Maria Fabiola is hiding.
13
I stop my bike across the street from the Olenska School of Ballet, in front of the comic-book store. The studio’s floor-to-ceiling curtains are closed. I move my gaze up to the apartment above the studio, where Madame Sonya lives. She often complains of hot flashes that didn’t cease even after she completed menopause, so she likes to keep the windows cracked. But now the windows are shut—a good indicator she isn’t home.
