The Tricking of Freya

by Christina Sunley

  It's a good question, but I doubt we'll ever learn the answer: everyone involved in making that decision is either dead or senile. My theory is that Birdie wouldn't have stood for it. Your mother did not approve of mine. Then again, Birdie may not have had any choice in the matter. The hospital where you were born was no maternity ward but an insane asylum. Birdie was resident there throughout the pregnancy and birth.

  Whatever the reason, you were given away to a good home. That's all I've been told. And suddenly and more than anything else in my life I want to find you. You raison d'etre, you! In the month since I've returned from visiting Sigga in Gimli I've been busy busy busy. First, I hired a private detective in Winnipeg to look into the matter of your adoption. A limited search to match my limited funds. We'll see what if anything he unearths for the fee.

  And I've been writing to you, evenings when I get home from the Sub. I can't seem to stop. It's all I can do for you, Cousin, until I locate you. Just write.

  2

  Just write.

  Ha! Here you have it, the all and sum of this past month's work: zero zippity zilch. Those first weeks back from Gimli I was on a roll, hiring the detective, starting this letter. Now nothing but glacial stall.

  Judge me not, Cuz. I'm no talky Birdie, no teeming word-meadow. Not these days, anyway. And it's not for lack of effort. I take my scribal responsibilities seriously. Look around my apartment. No, not at the unmade futon on bare floor, the stacks of books leaning Pisa-like against the wall, the burial mound of unwashed clothes, the great dirty-dish shrine on the kitchen counter. Kindly avert your eyes from my slovenliness. I meant only to point out the crumpled balls of paper littering my desk (over there, that unpainted door straddling two file cabinets). A month's worth of false starts. Ho hum, the storyteller's perennial conundrum.

  Just start at the beginning, you say? And what beginning might that be? I've come to the conclusion all starts are false ones. Tap the fragile shell of any beginning and you'll find another nested inside.

  You want beginnings, I'll give you beginnings:

  Ginnungagap. This universe when it was nothing but a grinning gap, this earth when it was the big nowhere. No sand no sea no ground I tell you no sky. Grew nothing but nothing upon nothing. The Sun knew not when or where or how to shine, bewildering to her brother Moon the arts of waxing and of waning, and the planets those lost souls wandered the heavens dazed and orbitless. Then convened the Aesir-the High Gods, the rulers-and began to name. To Dawn and Dusk they gave names, and Morning and Night, and so learned Day to start and finish and start again. And so things originated, according to Voluspa, the ancient Norse poem that tells us how the world begins-and how it will end: Ragnarok, the End-Time, the doom of the gods, when the earth will sink into the sea, the sun turn black, stars plunge from the sky, everything afire.

  Not to worry. As foretold in Voluspa, life then begins all over again, the earth emerging from its scorched state fair and green, the gods cavorting in the golden heaven called Gimli.

  Cut the cosmic rigmarole? Sorry. Norse myths, Icelandic sagas, skaldic verses: your mother lived and breathed the stuff, ate it for breakfast, imbibed it at night. Dunked me in it too. And heady it was, for a suburban kid from Connecticut.

  Sure, I could attempt a proper biography of Ingibjorg Petursson. Start with your mother's birth in quaint little New Iceland and build a grand portrait of her talented and tragic mad-poet life. It would make a good storybut nothing more. When it comes down to it, what do I know, really, of Birdie's life? My childhood perceptions. Or to be more exact, memories of perceptions. Paltry, to be sure. You are welcome to try elsewhere, Cousin. Our grandmother Sigga for one. If she's still alive by the time I locate you, and if senility has not left her with cheese for brains, you can propose an interview about her star-crossed dead daughter. Or try Birdie's loyal suitor, our "uncle" Stefan of the Stiff Upper Lip. He lives in Gimli still. I haven't had much luck with either of them myself. But maybe to you, Birdie's prodigal child, they'll reveal all. In the meantime, you're stuck with me. If I were old and a man you could call me a curmudgeon: an ill-tempered person full of resentment and stubborn notions. Or in another era I'd be known as a spinster, nearly thirty, childless and unwed. Luckily, no one calls me anything. I keep to myself; attempts at intimacy only lead to disaster. Yes, I'm bitter. I won't deny it. I like to say-to myself of course, who else would listen? that Birdie wrecked my life. That if it weren't for Birdie I might have achieved some semblance of normalcy by now. But bitterness is a long time brewing. When I first knew your mother I was a mere child, and bitter-free. I'll do my best not to infect this account with anachronistic curmudgeonry.

  Okay, I'll quit stalling. We'll start with my beginning, which is as good as any. Or rather, my birth. I do not suffer from that most American of delusions, that our lives begin at birth. Our People taught me well in that regard.

  I may have been named after the goddess Freya but mostly I got called Frey. Which made me sound less like a deity and more like a drunken brawl. Or some badly wrecked nerves. Or a thing that is always unraveling at the edges.

  A late-in-life child, I arrived long after my parents had given up the possibility of children. Barren, fruitless, sterile: these were the terms against which they'd had to contend. Eventually they accommodated themselves to their destiny and moved out of the baby-booming subdivision where they'd planned to raise a family-with its station wagons, baby carriages, tricycles, two-wheelers with training wheels, sleds, wagons, slides, and swings to an older neighborhood inhabited mostly by retirees. Not a tricycle in sight. The only commotion the occasional wailing of a she-cat in heat. My father worked as an accountant, my mother a part-time copy editor for the local paper. He tamed numbers, she tamed words: orderly work, orderly lives.

  I've seen a photograph from this pre-Freya era. My mother smiles gently into her wineglass, no trace of the scowl lines that my childhood would etch between her brows in the years to come. My father wears a starched white shirt and skinny black tie, looking thoughtful in his black-framed glasses. The living room has a museum-like air, and the dining table, which I would soon mar with Kool-Aid stains and crayon scribblings, gleams like an ice rink of pure mahogany. If my parents were unhappy with their childless life, the photo does not show it.

  And then along I came, a startling splash into the calm waters of my parents' middle age. Out of God's clear blue heaven, my mother would say.

  Our grandmother, Sigga, took the train down from Canada, arriving shortly before my birth, remaining three months after. I have a photograph of Sigga cradling the infant me, her hair coiled in a precise bun, eyes keen behind wire-rimmed librarian's glasses. So competent Sigga was, so in command, one arm cradling baby, the other expertly tilting the bottle to my lips. My mother stands to the side, peering over at me. Her expression looks tentative, perplexed. It was a look I would come to know well.

  I don't claim to remember Sigga from this postnatal visit, and it would be seven years until I would see her again, seven years before I would meet my Aunt Birdie, seven years before I would step onto the wide sandy beach of Gimli. Before I was born, my mother and father had visited Gimli every summer; once I arrived, my mother kept putting it off. Seven years my mother remained absent from her people. I don't think your mother ever forgave my mother those seven years.

  The first thing I remember is teaching myself to spin. Red-sneakered feet planted in the center of our green square lawn in Windsor, Connecticut. "Mama, look me!" My mother on the front porch, wicker mending basket in her lap. "I'm looking, Frey."

  I twisted at the knees, flung my arms wide as propeller blades, then spun myself once around, nearly tipping then spinning again without stopping, one spin spinning into the next-

  "Not so fast, Frey!"

  Brain whirling quicker than feet, quicker than the twirling trees and the blur of our brick house, I crashed to the ground and lay on my back clinging to handfuls of grass. The sky swirled around me like a blue tornado. Then
I lurched to my feet and began stagger-spinning diagonally across the yard, twirling again again again until to my amazement I crashed to my knees vomiting a creamy mound of vanilla wafers onto the grass.

  "See," I heard my mother say. With a hankie she wiped a splotch of vomit off the tip of my red sneaker. I examined the crisscross marks etched by the grass on my green-stained knees. "See what happens, Frey?"

  I saw. I stood up, I lifted my propeller arms, twisted at the knees. Look me again: inventor of spin.

  Every morning I woke with the urge to climb. My limbs ached for it. A quick slurp of milk and Cheerios, then I was scaling the maple that shadowed the house. My legs and arms were nimble monkeys fluent in the language of branches, my shins bled from scraping bark, but at the top of the tree I felt no pain. I gazed down at the roof of the house, at my tricycle tipped on its side in the yard, without fear.

  "Frey, come down!"

  Frey, come down, Frey slow down, Frey stop Frey now-even when spoken from two feet away I heard such commands only dimly. From my treetop perch my mother's words floated lighter than birdsong, and she appeared to me doll-like as the toys scattered in the yard.

  My middle-aged mother could not keep up. I frayed her ragged, pun intended.

  Where was my father in all this? Dead of a heart attack before I turned two. I have no memories of him, except the ones my mother tried to give me. She recounted these so often it seemed I almost remembered him myself. How I would beg my father to carry me on his shoulders, crying Up Up Up! How he taught me peekaboo and tickled me until I squealed. When I learned to add and subtract, Mama told me, "Your father would be so proud to see you now. He was a genius with num ers.

  It made me sad not to have a father, but I felt my mother's grief more than my own. I often came upon her holding the photograph of him that took center place on our mantel. "He's still with us," she would say, reassuring herself. It was to marry my father that she'd left Canada in the first place-they met while he was at an accountants' convention in Winnipeg and without him she found herself stranded with a frenzied toddler in a bland Connecticut suburb. My mother wasn't good at suburbia. The women of Windsor played tennis in the afternoons, or bridge; my mother was embarrassingly poor at both. And although she'd been born in Canada, not Iceland, my mother radiated foreignness, as if she'd come not only from another country but from another era altogether. Modern America frightened her; her decision not to own a television was as much to protect herself from the world the Vietnam War, with its body bags and massacres, the hippies with their LSD and free love-as to protect me.

  It was an isolated life during those years before I began school. There were no children in the neighborhood for me to play with, no relatives to join us on holidays. My father had been an only child whose parents died before I was born, and my mother's family all lived in a place called Canada. Their photographs were arranged shrine-like on the mantel in the living room. Keeping an eye on things. Mama's father, my grandfather Olafur the poet, holding a pipe. I wasn't sure what a poet was but I liked the sound of it, the long oh, the clip of the t. Amma Sigga in her Fjallkona costume: a tall white headdress with a floor-length veil and a green velvet cape trimmed in white fur. Each year in Gimli, my mother explained, one woman was chosen to represent the motherland, and there was a big celebration, Islendingadagurinn. I understood perfectly: Sigga was some kind of queen.

  There was also a black-and-white photo of my mother as a child leading your mother, a toddling Birdie, through the shallows of Lake Winnipeg. Both in funny one-piece black swimsuits that fell halfway to their knees. Another photo of Birdie grown up, her hair in layers of soft blond curls down to her shoulders, her cheeks high and round as apples.

  "Birdie is the beauty," my mother would say matter-of-factly.

  "No, Mama, you're the beauty," I insisted. But secretly, shamefully, I agreed. It was hard to say why Birdie seemed more beautiful than Mama when they looked so much alike. Both were tall, both were blond, and yet Birdie's face was somehow radiant and Mama's somehow plain. It made my love for Mama even more fierce.

  There were other photos too: Mama's dear friend Vera and Vera's father, the Great Dr. Gudmundsson, and other names that giggled my ears, like the Finnbogason Boys and Old Gisli. Collectively, these friends and relatives were known as Our People. Mama spoke of Our People as if they lived around the corner, as if she'd seen them just yesterday.

  "You and Old Gisli, always joking." As if Old Gisli and I had been swapping jokes that very afternoon.

  "You're as devilish as those Finnbogason Boys." Who were by then grown men in their fifties.

  Birdie and Sigga ruled our home in absentia. Sigga was our household's moral guardian, invoked by my mother to bolster her authority. What would Amnia Sigga think? Amma Sigga does not tolerate lies. Amma Sigga does not allow girls to play outside with their shirts off. Amma Sigga expects children to color only in coloring books and never on walls. Amma Sigga, Queen Sigga, expected so much of me. I tried not to look at Sigga's photo on the mantel when I raced bare-chested through the living room and out the back door.

  Birdie taught by negation. According to my mother, Birdie forgot to look both ways and almost got hit by a car on Victor Street. Punched Tommi Finnbogason and gave him a black eye, which brought shame upon the family. Got locked in a trunk in the attic and nearly suffocated to death. Threw her shoes down the sewer because she wanted a new pair and this was during the Great Depression.

  When I learned to read, shortly after my fourth birthday, my mother said, "You're going to be as clever as Birdie. God help me."

  And of course the photo of my father, in the center of it all, gazing out from behind his black-framed rectangular glasses. "He's still with us," my mother had said, and so I would often stop in front of his portrait. "Two plus two is four," I would whisper, hoping to impress him.

  My tiny family of two supplemented by a cast of invisible relatives looming from the mantel place: it was all I knew. Yet Mama was the only one who was real. If I got overexcited she would pull me onto her lap and stroke my hair while I squirmed to get away. And then, magically, I too would become calm. When I looked up into her soft green eyes it was like entering a pine forest. If I put my ear to her chest I could feel the gentle steady pulse of her heart.

  Night was when I loved my mother best. It was a lengthy process, unwinding my brain for sleep, requiring a continuous stream of story and song. After pulling the crisp sheet up to my chin, Mama would take her seat in the rocking chair at the side of the bed. Sometimes she sang, dreary songs she called Lutheran hymns, but I always begged for a story and she usually gave in. Reading aloud required holding the book and turning its pages, and Mama preferred to keep her hands free for knitting, crocheting, and embroidering. So mostly she talked story from memory as she stitched tiny flowers to border our pillowcases and nighties. While Mama talked and sewed I listened and stroked Foxy. Foxy was a stole sent as a gift by our distant cousin Helgi, a mink farmer in British Columbia. Mama refused to wear the stole, with its head, feet, and tail intact. Who on earth would want such a disgusting animal around her neck?

  I would. Thumb in mouth I'd lay my cheek against Foxy's auburn fur, waking in the morning to find his pelt stiff with drool.

  "A long time ago, when your grandfather Olafur the poet was a little boy, he lived on an island near the top of the world, below the North Pole, in a house with a sod roof."

  "A sad roof?"

  "Sod is grass."

  "His roof was made out of grass? It was green?"

  "It was green in the summer, but in the winter the house was so buried in snow the only way out was a set of stairs cut into the snowdrifts. Above where Olafur slept was a window as small as my hand. One morning when Olafur woke up, he looked out the window as small as my hand and saw that the sky was dark instead of light. It was so dark it looked like night. He lit a candle and climbed down from the sleeping loft. He could hear the sheep in the next room."

  "Sheep in the hou
se?"

  "So they wouldn't freeze. And the sheep were crying, baaaaa, baaaaa, as if they knew something bad had happened. Olafur scrambled up the icy steps leading out of the house. And you know what he saw? Black snow falling from the sky."

  "There's no such thing as black snow!"

  "It turned out to be ashes, a blizzard of ashes blocking out the sun. For three days Olafur's family lived in darkness. Mount Askja had erupted, and its lava spread in a thousand rivers of hot burning mud. But worse than the lava was the ash. It killed cows and horses and sheep and buried people's houses."

  "Was Olafur's house buried?"

  "Not completely. But nothing would grow on their land anymore, and all their sheep died because there was no grass for them to eat. Olafur's father and mother decided to leave Iceland and find a new place to live. Just think of it: their people had lived on that island for a thousand years! But they had no choice. On a summer evening, Olafur and his brothers and mother and father packed up their things and climbed onto their shaggy horses. They rode away from their farm, which was called Brekka, and they never saw it again. Olafur kept falling asleep in the saddle. They rode into midnight but it was bright as day, because in summer the sun shines at night in Iceland."

  "The sun can't shine at night!"

  "It can in Iceland. And in the winter, the sun never shines. But this was summer, and they rode all night until they reached Seydisfjordur, where they boarded a boat crowded with hundreds of other Icelanders who were starting a new life in a place called Canada. The waters were rough, and Olafur was seasick the whole way to Scotland. From Scotland they got on another boat, and this boat took them all the way to Canada. In Canada they boarded a train. Olafur had never seen a train before, none of them had. He thought little men were pushing it from behind. Finally they traveled by boat to a big lake, Lake Winnipeg. This was going to be their new home. And do you know what they named their new town?"