Bitter Bitch

by Maria Sveland

  On the way back to the hotel room I take the path next to her deck chair. I want to say goodbye, and maybe something else, something about my insights. I want to say that I understand why she has become an alcoholic bitter bitch. There are thousands of valid reasons for every woman on the planet to become an alcoholic as well as a bitter bitch.

  But that is the challenge, to keep fighting for dignity and for justice. The bitter bitch is just a consequent reaction against a sick system, a challenge never to satisfy ourselves with less than total equality.

  The woman in the cock-coloured outfit looks at me and I slow down. I try and make eye contact and smile my warmest smile. I have stopped now. I am standing in front of her and I feel my warm smile freezing. She gives me a friendly smile but her gaze is distant. She struggles to maintain her position, her back is just a little too straight.

  I am never going to despise grouchy women with tight lips again. I am never going to use the word witch, because behind every old hag there is a violated woman.

  ‘Auf Wiedersehen!’ I say.

  ‘Auf Wiedersehen!’ she replies kindly without having understood a thing; the look in her eyes is hazy.

  ‘Auf Wiedersehen then!’ I say again and quickly walk away. I turn around and see that she is sitting in exactly the same position, with her back a little too straight and her smile a little too stiff, a little too unaffected. Is it going to end like this? If so, it really would be unbearable.

  In the hotel room I weep a little, a melancholy cry about all of the unhappy alcoholic women, all the unhappy men swimming jerkily and playing tennis. I cry about love being so horribly petty. I cry because I do not know anything about my own ending. I cry because it is so damned hard to own your own life. I sit on the balcony and call Sigge and Johan. Today Sigge is happier and he wants to talk. He has just watched Bolibompa on TV and had ice cream with pears and whipped cream.

  ‘Can you sing a sad song for me Mummy?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes, which one?’ I say, even though I know which one he is going to choose.

  ‘The one about the herring,’ he says, and I sing into his beautiful little ear, a thousand miles away, but very close to my own mouth.

  Out in the deep of the Baltic Sea

  The little fish was swimming – he was so sick

  He had caught the flu under the ice

  He fought so bravely

  But he never came up

  ‘Hello! Sigge, are you there?’ He is quiet.

  ‘Why didn’t he ever come up?’ he asks, as usual.

  ‘He was so sick he couldn’t,’ I say, as I always do.

  ‘But what happened, when he didn’t come up?’

  ‘Nothing. He’s a herring, so he probably swam to his mum and dad.’

  ‘OK. See you tomorrow.’

  He gives me smacky kisses, right in my ear. I blow kisses back.

  ‘Yes, see you tomorrow night Sigge!’ I yell in a gruff voice, teary eyed as always when I talk to him. Johan comes back on the line.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I ask. ‘Are you angry, sad, indescribably tired or just a little happy?’

  ‘No, I’m not angry or sad, just concentrating on work. Honestly I think you leaving has been the best thing for us. Otherwise you would just have been angry with me,’ says Johan.

  I know what he is like at the end of a project, silent and distant, or in his words, focused. That is exactly what I recognize in the eyes of the older men here at La Quinta Park, and that is what annoys me so much.

  ‘I think we should do this every time I get close to the end of a rehearsal,’ Johan says.

  ‘What, I should go away?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, I’m serious. I think it’s great.’

  That is exactly the glimpse of generosity which makes me love him, the feeling that he wants the best for me.

  ‘But I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and there are things we need to talk about when you come home,’ Johan says.

  ‘I know. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking too,’ I reply, and think about the new life growing inside me and the change needed if we are going to have another child.

  We say goodbye, see you tomorrow. I miss you. Yes, me too. Kiss. Hugs. Goodbye.

  I sit on the balcony for the last time and try and memorize the sun, the ocean view and the sound of the retirees, creaking as they roll around the pool down there. I will carry all of this with me back to the everyday winter of Stockholm. I will even carry the woeful women and their silent men with me; a reminder of how love can change.

  The next morning at the airport I see Fear of Flying Girl with her boyfriend.

  She sees me too and comes over. ‘You’re missing home, aren’t you?’ she says happily.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ I say, and discover that her question does not bother me. I really miss home, both Sigge and Johan.

  ‘Have you had a nice time?’ I ask, because today I am in a great mood. I am satisfied and proud that I have survived going away and thinking all of my long thoughts.

  ‘Yes, but now my hell is starting. The flight, you know.’

  She smiles secretively at me. ‘I gulped down four whiskys at breakfast, hope that helps.’

  I smile back at her. Then her boyfriend comes over. His face is sunburned, particularly his nose. He is fiddling with the gold ring in his left ear.

  ‘Yes, my God, she’s wasted and the plane hasn’t even taken off yet,’ he says and laughs.

  I do not laugh with him. After a week at La Quinta Park I am tired of all of the distant men who hide behind their beer glasses and mocking irony. I am tired of men who are ashamed of their wives. I look at Fear of Flying Girl but she is looking at the floor. She is ashamed too, not of her nasty boyfriend, but of herself. The boyfriend is angered by my not laughing along with him. His smile stiffens.

  ‘What the hell are you supposed to do when she’s so fucking scared all the time?’ he asks, without actually wanting an answer.

  Fear of Flying Girl is still staring at the floor. Maybe she is used to her boyfriend talking about her with strangers in an airport?

  ‘Maybe you should try comforting her instead of being so damned rude,’ I say and walk away.

  I feel my cheeks burn and I am sweating. Good God, what a reaction. I find a café far in a corner and before I sit down I make sure Fear of Flying Girl and her boyfriend haven’t followed me. I order some coffee and a croissant and sigh with pleasure when the hot, strong coffee fills my mouth and burns my tongue.

  On the flight home I can barely sit still. My legs are jumpy and the six hours creep by. My stomach is in knots with a longing that is endless. I try and read about Isadora, I just have a few pages left now, but my thoughts are many and they are all fighting for my attention.

  It must be possible to love someone and still be their equal. It must be possible to liberate your life from the prison of patriarchal shit. Love has to be the greatest of all things. It has to be what makes change possible, what makes people want to do good. I am going to believe that. I want to believe that.

  But then I catch sight of Joyce Carol Oates’ words, a quote I have written in my notebook, which I often look at. Truth is desire; we want to believe; what we want to believe we call truth. And when love enters the picture we lose the truth.

  I think about that. I think about the woman in the cock-coloured outfit, about Fear of Flying Girl, about Mum, about myself. I think that being quiet hurts just as much as fighting. I think about the fact that I really do not know what the truth is and what I want to believe.

  My head is spinning and my stomach is filled with butterflies as the plane lands. A mild feeling of nausea spreads through my body and I chew frantically on my gum. Then we are there.

  Sigge is sitting in his blue buggy with a half-eaten bread roll in his hand. Johan is crouching next to him. I had forgotten how beautiful they are in real life. I lift up Sigge and hug him hard and feel the tears start to come. I breathe in his smell, kiss his ear, his cheeks, his hair. I hold hi
m a little away from me so I can see him properly.

  ‘Hello my gorgeous little sweet pea!’ I say.

  ‘Hey!’ he says simply. ‘Why are you sad Mummy?’

  ‘Because I’m so happy to see you again!’ I reply.

  ‘You can hug Daddy too!’ he orders.

  Our wise, sensitive child who constantly surprises me with how much he already knows about the frailty of love. I put Sigge in the buggy and turn to Johan. He gives me a questioning look and I raise my eyebrows and give him a questioning look back. We both seem to have a hard time deciding what mood should prevail – will it be the frosty sulkiness, the oh so familiar, which slowly but surely hollows out my guts? Or have we downright missed each other? My smile is a searching one. Johan responds with a slightly bigger smile. I feel myself grow warm and I take a step forward and he pulls me to him.

  We kiss each other, a deep, long kiss, and I feel sparks.

  At home all three of us crawl under the covers and we read Gittan and the Grey Wolves. It is almost ten o’clock and Sigge falls asleep exhausted just when the grey wolves are climbing up and getting stuck in the tops of the spruce trees.

  ‘I need to take a bath,’ I say.

  ‘Do that, I’ll come in a bit,’ Johan says.

  I let my body sink down into the hot water. I feel myself slowly relax and become warm. I want to read the last page in Fear of Flying.

  Isadora is lying in the bathtub in Bennett’s hotel room in London. She is waiting and wondering what she is actually going to say when Bennett comes in.

  ‘If you grovel, you’ll be back at square one,’ Adrian had said. I knew for sure I wasn’t going to grovel. But that was all I knew. It was enough.

  I ran more hot water and soaped my hair. I thought of Adrian and blew him bubble kisses. I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?

  I hummed and rinsed my hair. As I was soaping it again, Bennett walked in.

  The end.

  I put the book on the wet bathroom floor and watch the paper absorbing the water, becoming lumpy and damp.

  I see my body floating, weightless and warm. I run my finger over the bluish-purple scar from the Caesarean, from where Sigge, in another time, in a completely different world, was pulled from my body with strong hands. I wonder what Isadora’s open ending actually means and realize that I strongly doubt whether their marriage will last, despite Bennett’s entrance on the last page. Maybe it will last six months but not longer. Or maybe it is just wishful thinking, a compensation for my own Spartan ending.

  Maybe it is like what Erica Jong writes in Fear of Flying, that you married in the nineteenth-century novel and got divorced in the twentieth-century one. In that case, I think, do you become heteronormative in the twenty-first century novel? It does not look better than this being a classic, heteronormative twenty-first century ending.

  To my surprise this does not irritate me. I gently pinch my left nipple as I register this. I simply know that the bitter bitch inside me is going to make its presence known if I make a mistake. I run my index finger under my unshaved armpit and feel strong and determined, convinced about all sorts of changes that I want. I see my brown, curly triangle of pubic hair floating like an island of seaweed in the middle of the bathtub. I am happy there is no tampon string there, happy about the new life growing inside me.

  And I am scared, scared that the carousel is going to start spinning again too soon. We just got off it, dizzy and ready to puke.

  Johan comes in and crouches down next to the tub. He runs his hand along my cheek and I take his hand and place it on my belly. We look each other in the eye without saying anything and I realize that it does not stop here. It is a sudden and clear insight, a true revelation actually, that this crazy, disgusting, wonderful life is made up of crossroads. Not simple, often painful. But still, a number of chances to start again.

  I guess life is made up of the grand and the magical, as often as it is made up of small-mindedness and everyday boredom. And then, when everything is unbearable, when it is January and you are distant and frozen, it is a matter of getting away to Tenerife for a week, or wherever, as long as you have the peace and quiet to think things through.

  Am I living the life I want to? Never again am I going to apologize for wanting to own my own soul, my own life.

  It begins now. There are no endings.

  Thank you for the love and the friendship! Olof, Sonja, Bella, Carro, Daniel, Lise, Johanna, Kattis, Katja, Pål, Jonna, Anna, Micke, Inga, Claes, Lo, Karin, Jocke.

  Thanks to all of those who inspired me: Nina Simone, Maria-Pia Boëthius, Hanna Olsson, Suzanne Osten, Gudrun Schyman, Carin Holmberg, Suzanne Brøgger, Märta Tikkanen, Susan Faludi, Kerstin Thorvall, Jane Fonda, Joyce Carol Oates, Martha Wainwright, Erica Jong.

  Thank you to the Helge Ax:son Johnsons Foundation for the contribution which made it possible for me to continue writing.

  Thank you to my brave publisher Eva and my devoted editor Tulle.

  About the Author

  Maria Sveland was born in 1974 and graduated from Dramatiska Institutet (University College of Film, Radio, Television and Theatre) in 2000 and has since made a number of acclaimed programmes for Swedish public radio and television. Bitter Bitch is her first novel.

  Copyright © Maria Sveland, 2007

  Translation © Katarina E. Tucker, 2011

  Extracts from Fear of Flying by Erica Jong, published by Secker & Warburg.

  Reprinted by permission of The Randon House Group.

  Extract from Our World is Our Weapon: Selected Writings by

  Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, edited by Juana Ponce de Leon

  (Seven Stories Press, 2002).

  Reprinted by permission of The Permissions Company

  on behalf of the author.

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