Bitter Bitch

by Maria Sveland

  But Dad does not budge and says he is too tired. Mum stands at the kitchen bench with her back to us and Dad lights a cigarette and leans back in his chair, and I cannot sit there any longer. I go out into the hall where I catch sight of myself in the mirror and I start crying because I see how uneven my bangs are, how ugly I am. My sister comes out and asks why I am crying and I yell that I am crying because we are all so damned ugly, every one of us.

  ‘Mum!’ Kajsa yells. ‘Mum! Sara said that I’m ugly!’

  She stands in front of the mirror next to me and starts crying when she sees herself.

  ‘Now you’d better calm down!’ Mum yells from the kitchen as she picks my little brother up from his high chair.

  ‘You can sit there and sulk,’ I hear her say to Dad, ‘but the rest of us are going to the photographer’s. And I’m taking the car!’

  Silence falls and Kajsa and I stop crying. The car is his, and Mum almost never gets to borrow it. He has said so many times, because women are terrible drivers and besides, he is the one who is paying for it. Mum could never afford a car with her puny wages. I know because Dad often says that Mum’s salary does not make a difference.

  We listen tensely after the outburst, but it is still quiet in the kitchen and Mum comes out and tells us to put on our shoes because we are leaving now. So we get in the car without Dad, and suddenly everything feels festive again. Mum puts on the radio which is playing Carola and we sing along to her ‘Foreigner’ all the way to the photographer’s.

  We have to stand against a dark blue background with our little brother between us. Mum does not want to be in the picture because Dad is not there so it becomes a photo of us siblings. Afterwards we each get a hotdog from the stand at the square. It is a warm summer day and we continue being happy and getting along the rest of the afternoon and evening, even though Dad is gone when we get home.

  The photos arrive a few days later and we really look horrible, all three of us. Dishevelled, with crooked hair and sad eyes. We are smiling stiffly, even our two-year-old brother’s smile looks fake. But Mum is really happy and frames the photos and hangs them on the wall. She wraps a few of them for Christmas, presents for Grandma and other relatives.

  It is August and there are a few weeks left of the summer holiday. The evenings are warm and Mum and our neighbour Gunilla sit outside on the tiny patio at the front of our terrace house a lot, smoking and drinking Rosita while we run past and grab a fistful of dill crisps from the bowl on the table. We are playing cops and robbers and I cannot run very fast, but I am good at throwing myself in the bushes and hiding while the others chasing me just run by without noticing me.

  This is the summer in which I discover that I cannot run around naked any more. We are at a swimming place and I am wearing the bottom part of my suit but not the top which covers my budding breasts. I am nine years old and no one says anything, but suddenly I know it. Maybe I can feel the stares?

  I stand in front of the mirror in the hall a lot and look at myself. I try and understand how someone can be as terribly ugly as I am. My hair is rat coloured and hangs in worn wisps that barely reach my shoulders. I pout my lips and open my eyes wide so that they will look bigger, try different expressions, but nothing helps. I know this already but I cannot keep from trying, in the hopes that something will have changed.

  One morning, as I am standing in front of the mirror, trying out my hair in a pony tail, Dad comes and stands next to me. I am embarrassed but I can see that he sees me. His eyes are a warm brownish-yellow just like mine. I have inherited his eye colour.

  ‘You look pretty with your hair up,’ he says, and continues to look at me.

  ‘Nah …’ I say hesitantly. It feels strange and unfamiliar.

  ‘You do. Now I can see your pretty face!’ he says, and walks into the kitchen to light his first cigarette of the morning.

  I remain standing there with my mouth gaping, amazed at what has just happened.

  My dad said I was pretty! I look at myself in the mirror and put my hair in a pony tail. I try to see if what he said is true, if I have a pretty face. Maybe it is just a little bit true? Maybe I am just a little bit less ugly with my hair up?

  Sometimes small miracles occur, like Dad coming with us to the pool one Sunday. Usually it is Mum who comes with us. She swims laps while we play in the children’s pool nearby. I love the pool and sitting in the hot sauna afterwards with all of the naked women who are chatting and sweating.

  This Sunday when Dad comes with us he plays with us in the children’s pool. He is a crocodile swimming under the water and chasing us. We scream with delight and exultation. It is so amazing that he is playing with us and that it is finally happening, now, just once.

  A constant longing, a constant frustration spreads and infects, making me and my sister fight a lot. I have scratch marks high up on my arms and a teacher points at my scratches and asks if we have a cat. Another time when we are fighting I grab Kajsa’s fingers so hard they break and she has to go to the hospital and they are set in a plaster cast. Then I am genuinely ashamed but I cannot make myself apologize.

  It is a constant disdain in a downward spiral, which begins with Dad making fun of Mum.

  ‘It’s “accept” not “assept”! Learn to speak properly for once!’ he says with an evil grin on his face, and Mum, who never sticks up for herself, falls silent as she always does.

  His disdain is infectious and for a long, long time I believe Dad when he says that Mum is stupid. Even Mum seems to think so. Every now and then he pops out of the cloud of smoke that constantly encircles him.

  ‘Dad, please don’t smoke when we’re watching TV!’ Kajsa and I ask with our noses buried in our shirts in order to escape the rank, sticky smell.

  ‘Listen up! I’m the one who pays for everything. This is my house and I’ll smoke as much as I damn well please!’ he replies angrily, and continues taking long drags on his White Prince.

  He is our almighty father, feared and admired. Someone to long for your entire life.

  Always poor posture, always something that is itching, and I do not change until I have turned eleven and that is when Cecilia joins our class. Cissi has long, red hair and nostrils that flare when she laughs. For some reason, which I never understand, Cissi wants to be my friend. She laughs at all of my jokes and thinks I am the funniest person in the class. She waits for me after school so we can walk home together. From that point on she is my best friend for life.

  With Cissi at my side I finally build up the courage to be myself. We sit in my room and fantasize about Don Johnson and Sylvester Stallone, about a life in Hollywood where we are loved and admired. Sometimes we switch and fantasize about Jesper and Adam in our class, on whom all of the girls have crushes. With Cissi anything can happen and it does, too. One day, when we are fantasizing about Jesper and Adam ringing the doorbell, we suddenly hear the doorbell ring, then the sound of quick steps and my door is opened by Jesper and Adam. Happily we go out into the magic summer evening and on to the jungle gym in the playground, where we kiss our princes.

  That summer we discover the paper mill which is close to our neighbourhood. It is surrounded by a high fence with barbed wire on top, but some of the boys show us a hole we can sneak through. There are huge piles of newspaper in there which we climb on and the mill is filled with older boys who watch us, wide-eyed. We find magazines in the paper piles. It is just a matter of taking what we want. There are tons of porn magazines, too, which the boys collect and put in their plastic bags.

  It is against the law to be in there and sometimes someone yells that the security guards are coming. Everyone runs and the boys show us secret holes among the paper bales where you can hide until the guards have disappeared. We sit there close to each other, close to the boys, and we hear the dogs barking below us. We are almost grown up and everything is dangerous and exciting, just like Hollywood.

  Late in the evening, when it is almost dark, some of the boys want us to look at th
eir porn magazines. It is the first time I see what female genitalia looks like from below. In one of the pictures there is a woman with her legs spread apart and there, inside her body, a vacuum cleaner hose has been stuck. I look at her eyes to see if it is painful, but her eyelids are half closed, as if she is falling asleep.

  In another picture there is a woman using her fingernails to pull open her labia, revealing small gold rings, three on each one. Cissi and I sit quietly and look. The boys have also become quiet and it is dark and I want to go home. Why does everything have to be so disgusting? We walk silently past the terrace houses where we live. Thick mucus in my throat makes it hard to breathe and I have to stop and spit every few feet. Cissi clears her throat and spits too, out of sympathy, but we still cannot talk to each other. At home Dad is sitting watching The Macahans on TV. As usual Mum is busy in the kitchen with her restless movements.

  I sit down on the sofa next to Dad and see Zeb Macahan shoot an injured horse with his revolver. The horse looks frightened and does not understand why Zeb has hurt him. The eyelids are half closed and Zeb is stroking the horse on its head and talking soothingly. Finally the horse stops fighting and his body becomes completely still. I look at the dead horse and suddenly I am sobbing loudly. My body is shaking and I cannot stop the tears which are pouring down my cheeks and throat.

  Dad looks at me in surprise and puts his arm around my shoulders. It feels unfamiliar, he has not touched me in so long. I cannot remember the last time he hugged me.

  ‘There there, sweetheart. The horse was injured, it would have died eventually anyway,’ he says, and I hear how his voice sounds thick and tearful too, and then I cry even more.

  And I never want to stop crying. I just want to sit there in his arms and be comforted for ever.

  FAMILY JOY

  The woman with the cock-coloured outfit ate breakfast alone again today. She looked sad – until now she has looked a bit more drunk and detached. After a while her German husband came and sat down. Then she brightened and quickly got up to get a cup of German herbal tea for him. I saw how she carefully picked through the tea blends. I heard a short Danke, and then they continued eating in silence.

  I cannot stop. My observations just become darker and darker. I try and look away, read my book, take off my sunglasses and think about something else but it does not help. Besides, after a few days I have started feeling like I know some of the couples here. It is a feeling that makes me stare even more openly.

  Another group of Germans has sat down at the table next to mine. One of the women came before her husband and set a cup of coffee at one seat, and said hello to two friends who had already started eating. Then she went to get the rest of her breakfast. While she was gone her husband came, with his plate piled high with bread and toppings. Without hesitating he sat down at the place where she had put her coffee, let out a small mm … and took a gulp, as if the coffee had been put there for him. Why not? Of course the coffee was for him.

  When the wife came back with her food she did not let on that he had made a mistake. She did not smile indulgently or point it out. She turned around quietly and got a new cup for herself.

  Some of the couples look reasonably happy. Some of them are actually enjoying their parallel loneliness, while others have merely accepted the lack of contact and their parallel lives. When I interviewed one of my great idols, Suzanne Brøgger, I remember how infinitely disappointed I was by her speech about ‘gratitude’, which she claimed she had experienced in her later years.

  ‘Should we just settle then?’ I asked, frustrated.

  ‘Yes, why not?’ she said. She was the one who had written several wonderfully brave, self-revelatory books about not settling, the one who has always studied how to live one’s life in the most interesting and least unhappy way. It was she who had written the most beautiful and sad thing I had ever read about the difficulties of coupling: that coupling is an organized form of an unlived life. A string of non-meetings. But here at the hotel in Tenerife, I am prepared to believe that maybe that is how it is with contentedness, or gratitude; that it comes with age. You are quite simply content with less.

  I can go along with ‘gratitude’, in the sense of having the peace to stop and rest and look at what you have, to see that wealth is within your reach. When you have imagined that the grass is greener on the other side, you have usually discovered that this is not the case. A certain talent is required in order to realize what you have.

  Though I am not really sure that is what Suzanne Brøgger meant.

  It can be risky to meet your idol in the flesh, especially if her name is Suzanne Brøgger and she has written books depicting the nuclear family’s hell with such feeling that she may have inspired hundreds of women to take action and actually get divorced. And if I am going to be honest, I also wanted a lot of personal answers from this wise woman. Answers to questions about my own little marital hell in which I was then living.

  When I read her book Deliver Us from Love for the first time, I immediately adopted her as my universal dream mother. The one who, in contrast to my biological mother, would never bake a single cursed bread roll, but to whom you could talk. My copy of her book is filled with underlining and exclamation marks, and I know some sections by heart. So when the opportunity to interview Suzanne Brøgger presented itself I grabbed it. I wanted to know what she was thinking some thirty years after writing Deliver Us from Love, what she thought about the children of the 1970s who had got married while she and several other women from her generation had paved the way for an entirely different way of life. Why the traditional church wedding was more popular now than ever among my generation.

  I knew that even Brøgger had gotten married and had children. So as I rang the doorbell of her flat I expected to encounter a duality similar to my own; that the ideas she had then would not really be the same today, even if I might hope that they were.

  She opened the door and I registered that what I had heard about her beauty was true, as well as her predilection for leopard-print clothing and red lipstick. And I thought that the best thing might be to have several different kinds of mothers, the bread baking, fish-stick smelling, and the eccentric, intellectual, sexual, because a combination of the two is not imaginable.

  She smiled and gave me a pair of golden ballet slippers, no joke. I smiled back stupidly and wished I was just as magnificent as she was. She served tea in beautiful cups with gold edges and I turned on the tape recorder and began.

  ‘Why do you think so little has happened in the thirty years since you wrote Deliver Us from Love? Why do you think my generation has run off and got married?’

  Suzanne took a sip of tea and thought for a few seconds. ‘Well, maybe because these waves go up and down and forwards and backwards and every generation rebels against the previous one,’ she replied.

  ‘So us having gone and got married should be seen only as a reaction against you?’ I asked, and stared hard at her mouth as if the answer that would soon appear was of decisive importance, which it was in a way.

  ‘I mean that if you have children, you will always have the problem of the triangle father-mother-child, and so I think that each individual must adapt, and external factors do not mean that much. But when you’re young you think that maybe a certain lifestyle is vital to the success of your life. On the other hand, things are not as secure as they once were, both in the cities and in the country. This can be viewed as an expression of fear: in an insecure world with terrorism and lack of control, you focus on the nuclear family.’

  I tested my theories, that love has been exploited so that women give and men take, that married women have more mental health issues than their unmarried counterparts, and so on. Suzanne nodded a little but did not say anything. I asked why there are so few stories, almost none, about happy women who have chosen solitude over marriage. Suzanne sighed but looked at me kindly and said that free love is just as big a problem as love in a steady relationship. That was not the an
swer I wanted and I tapped my golden-slippered feet, looked at the gold on the teacup and thought that somehow gold was standing in the way.

  Suzanne Brøgger, on the other hand, was probably used to people feeling disappointed in her, and I feel embarrassed when I think back to how she must have been smiling inside at the sight of poor desperate me.

  ‘How do you want to live, then?’ Suzanne countered, and I realized that she was growing tired of this interview and the interviewer in particular.

  ‘How?’ I asked, in order to win some time.

  ‘Yes …?’ said Suzanne.

  ‘I don’t know, I’m thinking about it,’ I replied, pitifully.

  ‘Well, you have all the freedom to do that,’ Suzanne replied, and smiled. And in that moment she became a bit like the wise mum I hoped she would be, but now I felt awkward and exposed and tears started to form in my eyes.

  I did not want to sit there and cry at her kitchen table, so instead I quickly returned to the safe role of interviewer.

  ‘Do you think patriarchy has a need for marriage?’ I asked.

  This was one of my biggest theories and pet projects, that patriarchy could be likened to a super ideology, a kind of religion which has affected us down to the tiniest element, and as part of this ideology, we were persuaded to marry as a means of smothering all struggle and rebellion. As a result, most stories – movies, television, books – are about longing for romantic love, which is made whole through marriage. A false image, which never includes the dark side, abuse, rape and unpaid, disgusting, boring household chores.

  But Suzanne did not agree. ‘I actually don’t think the inherent patriarchy in our culture is that strong today. We certainly carry some traces within ourselves, but not compared to the power men in Muslim families have over their women. Then you can talk about patriarchy!’