"What?"
"Gimli. Now listen closely: I'm going to tell you why they named the town Gimli. A long time ago, the Icelanders believed that in heaven was a beautiful palace with a gold roof. And the most beautiful room in the palace, where the very best people went after they died, was called Gimli. Gimli shone brighter than the sun. And so that was the name Our People chose when they arrived in their new land. And someday, I'll take you to Gimli. Would you like that?"
I wasn't sure. Which Gimli did my mother mean: the town in Canada or the palace for dead people? I fell asleep dreaming of black snow falling onto gold-roofed houses.
3
One Sunday afternoon each month Mama and I sat side by side on the orange plaid couch to telephone Our People in Canada. My job was to dial. As Mama called out the numbers I'd drag the dial with my index finger over to the small lick of metal that curled around the number one. Then I'd release it, savoring the clickety-clickety-click.
Mama let me speak to Amma Sigga first. The receiver felt big and black and heavy in my hand. I was always afraid Amma Sigga would ask if I'd run outside without my shirt or colored on the walls, but she never did.
"Hiya-amma-sigga!"
"Well hello, Freya rnin."
Freya mine. "Does that mean I'm your Freya?"
"It certainly does."
If Amma Sigga had sent me a present, for Christmas or Easter or my birthday, Mama would remind me to thank her. Usually Sigga sent things she'd knitted from Icelandic wool, slipper-socks and sweaters and scarves in white, gray, black, and brown.
"How did you like the mittens?" Sigga would ask.
"They're pretty," I'd answer politely, running my tongue over the small holes of the mouthpiece. "But they're too scratchy so I never wear them."
Mama frowned at such comments, but Sigga took them in stride. The conversations usually ended on a literary note. Sigga always wanted to know if I was reading yet, and once I'd started, what. "Icelanders love to read," she'd say. "It's in our blood."
I thought Sigga's is sounded funny.
"That's because she rolls them," my mother explained. "Icelanders like to roll their r's."
Whenever Amma Sigga said a word with an r in it, I imagined a pack of is somersaulting on her tongue.
While my mother spoke with Sigga I wandered the living room, sticking Lego pieces onto my fingertips, half-listening. It was a lot of talk about Our People with the funny names, all easy and pleasant, up until the moment when Mama asked Sigga to put Birdie on the line. No matter how happily the conversation with Birdie started out, it nearly always took a bad turn at the end. Mama would grow silent, and as she listened to Birdie she'd wrap the long coils of phone cord around and around her wrist into a massive black bracelet, then unwind it, then coil it up again. Usually, it was talk about why Mama hadn't brought me to Canada yet to meet my aroma and my aunt.
"I know you're looking forward to us coming."
"Of course I want to come!"
"But you know I'm afraid to fly-"
"I can't manage her on a train for three days-"
"Birdie, believe me, she doesn't know how to behave!"
"I can so behave!" I'd shout in the background. "I'll sit still on the train. Watch." I'd sit stiffly on my chair, knees pushed together, hands folded on my lap. "See?"
Then I got to speak to Birdie. It always surprised me when Birdie got on the line-even if Birdie and Mama had just been arguing, Birdie's voice would sound happy and excited. "Well, kiddo," she'd say. "How's life in in America.
I told her about the midget inside the traffic light at the end of the block who switched the light green-yellow-red.
"Clever little fellow!" Birdie laughed. She didn't ask if I had actually seen the midget or not. Another time I told her about a leaf I'd found that was exactly half green and half orange.
"Sounds like a case of split personality to me," Birdie pronounced. "Doesn't know if it's spring or fall!"
Once I confessed to Birdie that I wanted to learn to fly.
"You come to Gimli this summer, baby, I'll teach you how to fly!"
"You know how to fly?"
"Why do you think they call me Birdie?"
After the phone call was over Mama and I would sit at the kitchen table for an afternoon snack. If the call had taken a particularly bad turn, Mama wouldn't eat anything. I'd dip vanilla wafers one by one into my glass of milk.
"Well, Birdie's sick again."
"She didn't sound sick." I swirled the cookie crumbs into the milk with my finger. "She didn't cough or sneeze or blow her nose."
"Well," Mama insisted. "She is sick."
"Will she be better by summertime?"
"I don't know, honey. Why?"
"She wants us to come visit her and Amma Sigga this summer." I often imagined it, me and Birdie soaring over the lake, swooping and twirling like trapeze artists, then diving off the edges of clouds into the sparkling water below. Mama and Amma Sigga watching from the beach, mouths open in awe.
"When you can behave, then we can go to Gimli for the summer."
But I did not behave, not well enough, not often enough. More summers passed, and as each approached I'd hear my mother arguing with Birdie on the phone. "I did not abandon you! I married an American. Really, Birdie. Everything doesn't have to do with you."
But it did. In the end it did.
In addition to the phone calls there was a steady stream of letters back and forth between Mama and her best friend, Vera. Vera had flown from Winnipeg to help my mother after my father died, but I was too young to remember her. The letters came in blue airmail envelopes, the kind where the letter and the envelope are one and the same piece of paper. Vera's neat slanting script would fill the page. Mama would read Vera's letters at least twice, and she always seemed sad after. "Homesick," she would say. "Vera makes me homesick." I decided I didn't like Vera very much, not if she made my mother sick.
It was not until I was seven and safely out of first grade that my mother announced we would spend the summer in Gimli. She bought me a suitcase for the trip, and each morning the week before departure I squirmed under the bed to slide it out for a look. The suitcase was a red so bright it made my cheeks tingle sour cherry, with brass hinges and irresistible brass locks: nudge the button with your thumb and snappity-snap the latch popped open with a crisp metal ping like a popcorn kernel exploding itself against the lid of a pot. Snappity-snap! Snappity-snap! Snappity-snap! Snappitysnap! Snappity-snap! Snappity
"You'll break it, Frey."
"I won't." But quit for fear of it. "Could a person travel inside a suitcase?"
"I don't suppose."
I imagined a shrunken version of myself settling onto a bed of dungarees, my mother latching me snugly in, my head resting on a pillow of socks while Foxy whispered me to sleep. In the morning my mother would carry Frey-in-the-suitcase to the train station, swinging me lightly in white-gloved hands until the train screeched its arrival and everyone climbed all aboard, all aboard.
The night before we left, Mama called Canada one last time. I was not allowed to talk. "You'll see them soon enough." The call was mostly arrangements: what time the train would arrive, who would meet us at the station. Then: "Is Birdie all right?"
"If she's not, we could always postpone."
"Of course we're coming. I never said we weren't. We'll wait for them at the station then."
"Not go?" I asked as soon as my mother hung up.
"We're going, we're going!" Mama untangled the black phone cord coiled tightly around her wrist. "Why does everyone think we're not going?"
Aside from an alarming episode when I got stuck between cars and had to be rescued by a conductor, I behaved on the train. While Mama stared out the window or knitted, I played endless games of solitaire. As we came within a few hours of Winnipeg she began dropping stitches left and right, sighing and ripping out whole sections of scarf. Every once in a while she would sound a warning. "Your amnia Sigga is a proper lady, Frey. You'
re going to have to be very well behaved."
"I will." Red seven on black eight. Black queen on red king. Red two on black three.
"Amma Sigga won't put up with any nonsense."
I imagined Sigga in her velvet Fjallkona cape, regal and strict as a queen. "What about Auntie Birdie? Will she put up with nonsense?" As far as I could tell from our phone conversations, Auntie Birdie seemed fond of nonsense.
"Auntie Birdie ..." Mama began, then stopped herself.
"Auntie Birdie what?"
"You'll see soon enough."
Out the window things became very flat. There were no trees. Just miles and miles of fields. Barley and wheat and alfalfa, Mama explained. Once when the train stopped she took me onto the platform for my first glimpse of prairie. All I could see was sky, blue in all directions. Except far to the west. In that one corner of the sky, dark black clouds. From their underside a gray streak connected sky to ground.
"Storm clouds," Mama said. "It's raining there."
How could it be raining in one part of the sky and blue in another? The dark clouds brightened for a second. Lightning. The storm raced our train to Winnipeg and won; when I stepped onto the platform raindrops fell so hard they pinpricked the skin of my arms and the back of my neck. Mama didn't seem to notice. Her gaze was fixed on the large group of people waiting under a tin awning. Suddenly a pair of arms shot up above the crowd. The arms were long and pale and slender, crisscrossing dramatically through the air like those of a person stranded on a desert island signaling to rescuers. The arms moved through the crowd until they reached the front edge of it, then connected to a person, a woman in a lilac dress, who began running toward us in the rain. Still waving grandly.
"That's Birdie," Mama said, raising her own hand in a modest gesture of acknowledgment.
"I know that!" I started running to meet Birdie but my mother gripped my hand and we walked instead.
First Birdie threw her arms around Mama, then she stepped back and took Mama's two hands in hers. "Anna," she said. "Anna Anna Anna!" Her voice was like a song. Then she knelt onto the platform and looked me in the eye. "Little Freya."
"I'm not little. I'm the tallest girl in first grade."
"Frey," my mother admonished. "It's not nice to boast."
Birdie didn't seem to mind. "Of course you are," she said apologetically. "We'll call you Freya the Tall." Then she pulled me to her.
"Birdie," Mama said, after a few moments. "That's enough. You'll ruin your stockings on the pavement."
Birdie did not let go. My chin rested on Birdie's shoulder, my nose against Birdie's long soft neck. "You smell purple."
"Good nose, kiddo." Birdie sounded pleased. "That's Lavender Dawn. I'll dab some on you when we get home."
I took my mother's hand, then reached up for Birdie's. Every few steps I swung in the air between them, a feat I'd often watched other kids-ones with two parents perform with envy. By the time we reached the parking lot, a very tall man in a dark suit was putting my red suitcase into the back of his car.
"Stop, thief!" I shrieked. Foxy was in that suitcase.
Birdie laughed. And laughed and laughed. There seemed no end to her laughing. "That's no thief," she managed to get out, gasping for breath. "That's your uncle Stefan."
"It can't be. I have one aunt no uncles."
Stefan stood awkwardly at the side of the car.
"Stefan's not a blood uncle," Birdie explained. "He's the kind that chooses you. Even better."
"Does that mean he's like your brother?"
"Exactly!" Birdie seemed pleased. Stefan blushed.
Stefan's car was old-fashioned and shiny. A Rambler, he called it. I sat up front between Stefan and Birdie. Mama sat in the back. "I can't see anything," I complained. So Birdie pulled me onto her lap.
"Take us through Winnipeg, Stefan," Birdie commanded. As if Stefan was a chauffeur. "Let's give Freya a tour of the old West End."
"Oh no," Mama protested. "That's out of the way. No need for that. Stefan's nice enough to come all the way from Gimli to fetch us."
"It's no trouble," Stefan said.
"I won't hear of it," Mama insisted. "Anyway, Frey and I have had a long trip. We're exhausted."
"I'm not exhausted!" I protested.
"Just a quick tour," Birdie pleaded. "Freya's never seen where we grew up.
"I thought you grew up on a farm."
"We did at first," Mama explained. "In Arborg. And then after our father died we moved to Winnipeg. The Gudmundssons were kind enough to take us in until your amnia Sigga found work in Gimli. I don't know what we would have done without the Gudmundssons."
"The Grand Gudmundssons," Birdie said mockingly. "The Great Doctor Gudmundsson."
"Why was he great?" I wanted to know.
"He was the first Icelandic doctor in Canada," Mama began. "And his daughter Vera was my age, and treated us like her very own sisters."
"Are you kidding, Anna? She treated us like country bumpkins fresh off the farm. She made fun of our accents. You were her special charity project, she only wanted to My- Fair- Lady-ize you."
"Vera was good to us," my mother insisted. "Dear Vera!"
"Dear Vera," Birdie echoed. But she didn't say it fondly, the way Mama did. Her voice had what Mama called that tone. Don't use that tone with me, Birdie. That tone had a name, sarcasm, that made me think of an unhealed scar. But all that would come later.
"Stefan," Birdie commanded. "Pull over!" Stefan parked the Rambler in front of a two-story brick building with bright blue shutters and a pair of white columns out front.
"Jonsson Funeral Home," I read the sign out loud. "Is someone dead?"
"Plenty of people are dead," Birdie said. "People die all the time. But that's not why we're here. Tell her, Stefan."
"My family runs this business," Stefan said. "I grew up here."
"In a dead people's house?"
"Indeed. All the old Icelanders came here, some young ones too. My father sent them on their way."
I studied Stefan closely. His glasses looked like the kind my own father had worn, black and rectangular. "Do dead people wear glasses?" It was something I had wondered about for a long time, and Stefan seemed like a good person to ask, given that his family were experts in the ways of the dead. He thought it over for a moment.
"I doubt there's a need for eyeglasses in heaven," he replied. "But proba bly no rule against it, either." He pulled away from the curb and a few blocks later said, "We're in the old neighborhood now. The West End."
"Home of the Goolies!" Birdie said it like a radio announcer.
"Who are the Goolies?" I asked.
"Who are the Goolies?" Birdie repeated. "Who are the Goolies?" As if it were impossible for anybody not to know. Then she laughed. "I'm a Goolie, Stefan 's a Goo lie, Anna s a Goo lie. You"re a Goo lie too.
"I'm not a ghost!"
"A Goolie's not a ghost. A Goolie's an Icelander. It's what the Anglos used to call us, when we first came to Canada. It comes from the word gull, which means yellow. For our blond hair." She ruffled mine. "And right there" she pointed to a beige cement building on a comer, plain and square, with a sign that read GOOD TEMPLARS-"that's the Coolie Hall. Center of it all. And now we're turning onto ... Victor Street! Home of the First Lutheran Church, where all good Goolies go on Sundays."
"And home of the Gudmundssons," Mama added from the backseat.
"Oh yes, the grand home of the Gudmundssons-pull over, Stefan."
Most of the houses on Victor Street were small and wood-framed, but the Gudmundsson house was brick and imposing, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and framed by rosebushes. "Can we go inside?" I asked.
"Yes, let's," Mama said. "Maybe Vera's home."
"No time for visits now," Birdie decided. "Sigga's making dinner for us back in Gimli. The tour must go on! Besides, you'll see Vera tomorrow. We're having a little coffee party in honor of your homecoming."
I turned around and looked at my mother over the backseat.
To my surprise, Mama was wiping tears from her face with one of her embroidered hankies.
"Why are you crying?"
Mama didn't answer.
"Seven years is a long time, Anna," Birdie said. She didn't sound worried about Mama, just ... satisfied.
"It couldn't be helped, Birdie. You know that."
"All I know is we missed her first seven years." Birdie locked her arms around my middle. "We missed you." Birdie was starting to sound mad. Suddenly I didn't like her anymore-she'd made my mother cry! and I tried to squirm out of her grasp, but she held tight.
"Well we're here now," Mama said cheerily. "Isn't that what matters?"
"That's right," Birdie answered, cheery-mean. "Sweep everything under the rug like you always do! Sweep sweep sweep-"
Stefan put a hand on Birdie's arm. "That's enough, Ingibjorg."
"How come you call Birdie Ingibjorg?" I asked Stefan.
"Because that's her name," he answered.
"Because Stefan is ever so proper," added Birdie.
"Next stop, Gimli!" Stefan called it out like a conductor. Ever so proper.
By the time we were out of Winnipeg and heading north to Gimli the rain had stopped and Birdie rolled down her window. It was still very flat outside but there were trees and shrubs the new light green of early summer. I stuck my head out like a dog.
"Frey!" Mama called from the backseat. "You know you're not allowed. Something could get in your eye."
I pulled my head back in, but later I stuck it out again because Mama was sleeping in the backseat. Except she was only pretending. Normally she slept with her mouth a bit open. Now her lips were closed tight, hands folded in her lap. I wondered if Birdie would make me stick my head back inside, but she didn't.
The Tricking of Freya Page 3
