He smiled indulgently, as if I had forgotten. “Denmark.”
“Yes, but where?”
“Hummingen. A town on an island called Lolland.”
I couldn’t even begin to pronounce the words. “Is that far from here?”
“Three hours south on the train.”
“How can you take a train to an island?”
He looked at me steadily. “Bridges, Roxana.”
“Oh.” What an idiot he must think I was.
We entered a high-ceilinged purple room, a circle of couches at its center. A row of computers stood on tables against the far wall.
“Wait here,” Søren said. “I will find the others.”
I didn’t want to meet anyone. “Can I check my e-mail on one of the computers?”
“Of course,” he said, leaving.
I kept accidentally tapping the extra letters on the Danish keyboard, œ, å, ø. There were six new e-mails, five spam, one from Dad.
Hey Sweetie,
I am sure you are busy. Mama and I loved your message! So glad to know you are doing so well. We miss you! Hope Paris is exciting! Bon voyage!
Love,
Dad
That they had received the voice mail together—loved it together?—but not bothered to call me back made me comfortable perpetuating the fiction that I was in Paris with Sylvie.
Dear Mama and Dad,
All is well. Today Sylvie and I meet the other people in my program. I love and miss you guys! I will write more later.
Love,
Roxana
Nothing from Sylvie. Smoothly, slowly, the bones in my hands gliding over each other, I opened a new e-mail window and started typing.
Hi Sylvie!
No.
Dear Sylvie,
Not that, either.
My dear Sylvie,
Too weird.
Hey Sylvie,
What was there to say? Sylvie had already surrounded herself with newer, more exciting people. She didn’t even care enough to write.
The day after graduation, I had received a voice mail.
“Hello, this is Jennifer Lindsey with International Abroad Experiences calling for Roxana Olsen. Unfortunately, we are not able to include you in the Parisian Experience program, as it is fully enrolled. The acceptance letter you were sent and the processing of your tuition payment were administrative errors. We apologize deeply for these. Luckily, we have had an unusually low number of applicants to our Hoogah Danmark program this year, so we’ve been able to transfer you over. As a sign of our appreciation for your flexibility, we’ve booked you a first-class seat on a direct flight from Chicago to Copenhagen, same day as your original departure. Your ticket to Paris and tuition has been refunded.” She paused, and then added, as if I had won something: “That’s right, this is on us!”
I deleted the message. Dialed her.
“Jennifer Lindsey.” There was laughter in her voice.
“Jennifer, this is Roxana Olsen. I received your message. I have a question. I sent in my registration for the Parisian Experience at the same time as my best friend, Sylvie Elmaleh. Has she been bumped, too?”
I immediately regretted the childish phrase. My best friend.
“Well, now, ‘bumped’ isn’t the language I would use. And we generally have a rule against releasing client information, but I will make an exception.” Jennifer Lindsey’s fingernails clicked against a keyboard. “Sylvia is still enrolled.”
“I can’t believe this.” I said to prolong the period in which this was true. “I’m supposed to leave in six days! Does this have to do with my interview? Sylvie said it was just a formality—”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that. Now, I really need to know if you are interested in our offer of enrollment in Hyggelige Danmark. The program is the same length as the Parisian Experience, eight weeks. You begin in Copenhagen, capital of Denmark, which, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is the happiest country on Earth! You will spend a week exploring the city’s many cultural treasures, eating open-faced sandwiches, and walking along the docks of Nyhavn.” She was reading from a brochure. “Then, after you’ve visited Christiania, the city-within-the-city, and Roskilde, home to the Domkirke and Viking Ship Museum—”
Hyoolee. Neehown. Ross Killed and Dom Kirk, mutinous brothers at sea. The names made my head hurt. I cut her off. “I’ll have to call you back.”
I lay on my bed, imagining I could see myself from above: the shape of my body, or the comforter cover above the dust ruffle. But it wasn’t real. I couldn’t see anything.
For a while I cried, ragged sobs that hurt. Then my tears dried up and my voice went away. I felt my face with my hands, my oily skin, my raised pores, my fuzzy eyebrows. I tried to curl up and go to sleep, but every position was uncomfortable. I leaped from the bed and paced the room, tracing different shapes, S, X, circle, spiral. I pinched the soft skin of my upper arms without my fingernails, then with. Hard. Harder.
I looked at the pictures of Sylvie, of my parents, of Paris. Who were those people? What was that place? If I had ever known, I didn’t anymore.
When I came back to myself it was dusk. Purple outside.
Dad sat next to me in a shirt and tie, staring at his phone. “What’s going on? When I got home you were fast asleep. Are you sick?” Keeping one thumb on his screen, he leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. Did he know?
My shoulders hurt. I peeled up my sleeve and saw yellow blots where I had pinched myself.
“Dad.” My voice caught on the word. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath. “Dad.” It came out a sob.
“I’m sorry, sweetie.” Dad leaned forward, eyes still on his phone. “We didn’t know the news of the divorce would upset you so much.”
The divorce! “I’m not sick,” I said.
Dad’s phone beeped. He returned his attention to it. “Are you sure?”
I slipped my legs out from under the comforter. “I’m going to the bathroom.”
“Try not to worry. Paris is going to be great.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
They told me they were separating a week before graduation, on the porch with Mushi, where I had been reading old copies of National Geographic Mama kept in a wicker basket next to the love seat. A tribe of Mexican Indians who could run faster than anyone else in the world were dying out—eating too much fast food and getting hit by cars. Narwhals jousted in the frozen ocean, but no one knew why. Catholics in Los Angeles had begun inventing their own saints. A saint of death, a saint of violence, a saint of pain. In the alley, kids screamed, “No! You’re killing me, you’re killing me!”
The heat rose and thickened around two. I went inside and ate. I went back out to the porch and took a nap under a photo spread on rare birds. When I woke, the sky had dimmed to a silvered blue, afternoon turning into evening, and my parents stood before me, holding hands.
It was too early for them to be home and they were weirdly dressed up, Mama in a lavender pantsuit I had never seen, Dad in the stiff blue pinstripe suit he had worn to Pawpaw’s funeral. The worst thing was Mama’s hair. She always wore it pulled straight back into a bun at the base of her neck, but it was slung over her left shoulder that day, limply touching her collarbone.
“Sit down, Roxana,” Mama said.
“I am sitting down.” Wicker cracked under me as Mama nodded at Dad.
“Roxie,” he said. “Your mother and I—”
“What, did you guys get all dressed up to tell me you’re getting divorced or something?”
It was an old joke. They were always fighting and making up. But that day their faces flashed and I felt the love seat move under me, like a boat.
They were just back from a lawyer’s office. “This doesn’t mean I don’t still love and respect Mama,” Dad said. He would be living in a nearby apartment while I was in France. No final decisions would be made until the fall, they promised. Not until it was time for me to leave again.
“We’re just ver
y different people,” Mama said.
Shortly after my twelfth birthday, I had realized that my thighs doubled in size when pressed against a chair, and for weeks I refused to sit in a position that flattened them. At school, I suspended my legs an inch above the seat in frantic twenty-second bursts, trying to quiet my panting. Then one day I just forgot about it, a reprieve that lasted six years, until that very moment. I tried to raise my thighs but couldn’t. I was already shaking. Powerful neons ripped through me. Mama had a collection of scarves in these bright colors. Acid green, cyber yellow, electric blue that burned my eyes. The love seat wasn’t a boat anymore but an airplane. I had lifted off into the sky.
I left Dad in what had once been his and Mama’s room and locked the door to my bedroom. From my window I saw that only his car was in the garage. Mama wasn’t home yet. Good. I typed “Denmark” into a search engine. The word “Dansk.” Where had I seen it before? A map appeared: a little mitten jutting out into the ocean above Germany. A series of islands between Scotland and Sweden. It looked cold, just an oven mitt in the sea, kind of like Michigan, where I had spent several childhood vacations. The house we rented there had a dock and a yellow canoe, and there were boats in Denmark too. Sailboats, gray-blue water, castles, a statue of a mermaid, flat food. Pictures of Danes showed tall blonds in skinny pants, their light hair pulled back to expose sharp cheekbones.
Denmark was a nation of five and a half million people, the oldest monarchy in Europe, and, indeed, had been declared the happiest country on the planet. I watched an American talk show host walk through a sleek modern apartment, sunlight streaming through its wide windows. “Mostly everyone lives like this,” a woman in a fluffy orange sweater said in perfect English. I read about pork meatballs, boiled potatoes smothered in brown sauce, spherical pancakes, rye bread spread with pork liver, all to be washed down with beer or schnapps. My family never ate pork.
Elderly Danish people danced in funny outfits on the dark sand of cold beaches.
A famous painting appeared: two women in long dresses walking along the seashore at twilight, their backs to the viewer. Friends.
I imagined Sylvie walking down a Paris street alone, smiling. I typed in “hyoolee.” No results.
I went down to the kitchen and made a paste of cocoa powder, sugar, and a little water in the bottom of a tall glass. Then I filled it with milk and mixed. If I kept my thoughts and perceptions in the sensory world, I wouldn’t be able to feel sad. I would only pay attention to what I could see, hear, taste. Touch. The cold glass in my hand and the rich cocoa on my tongue. I stared out the window, listening to the sounds of summer as they came through the screen, trying to focus on the sweetness of the drink, the smooth milk. I could tune out the ambient bug song and just hear the cicadas screeching smoothly above the lawn mowers and cars, the kids playing, the sizzle of meat on a grill. It was like learning to separate instruments on a recording: at first, I was only aware of my ability to segregate sound, of the silence behind all the noise, and for a moment I thought that was what I was hearing. But then my ears adjusted again, and I realized there was no true silence, just the high cicada vibration, a hum so shrill it was the silver lining of quiet.
Sylvie’s mom answered the phone.
“Please,” I said. “I just need to talk to Sylvie for a second.”
She sighed. “Does it have to be right now? We’re doing yoga.”
I could see her in her white leggings and big T-shirt. Probably a French one, from her huge collection, advertising an exhibit at the Pompidou or a gallery show. Sometimes I thought she wore them just to annoy me.
“Sorry, Mrs. Elmaleh, but yes.”
Then Sylvie’s voice was there in my ear. “Hello?”
“Don’t take too long, Rox! Let Sylvie get back to her inner peace!” Sylvie’s mom shouted, before I could say anything. I hated that she had adopted Sylvie’s nickname for me.
I closed my eyes and tried to get it out quickly. “Sylvie! Sylvie I’m not going to France!”
She laughed again. The spa music in the background got louder. “I totally promise I will call you back, Rox!”
“Sylvie, listen. The woman from International Abroad Experiences called me and said there had been a mistake. There isn’t a place for me on the trip.”
“Sure. Sure, I believe you.” The music changed to something more frenetic.
“It’s not a joke. I have to go to Denmark instead. Or stay here. But I can’t go to Paris with the program. I have no say in it. I’m not kidding.” I hadn’t wanted to cry.
Sylvie hissed at her mom. The music stopped abruptly.
“What?”
“They said I can’t go. They changed my ticket.”
“What do you mean?”
“They fucked it up, Sylvie. I’m supposed to go to a program in Denmark instead. I don’t want to go.” A tiny hope flickered in my chest. “I think I’ll probably just end up staying home.”
I waited for Sylvie to say that she would stay with me.
“Rox,” she said. “This sucks.”
“They would give you back the money if you stayed. We could save it for college. Get better jobs here this summer. It could be fun, in a different way.”
Sylvie laughed. “I am not staying in Creek Grove and working some shitty summer job instead of going to Paris.”
I skipped to my second tiny hope. “I was also thinking maybe I could just go to France with you anyway. Maybe I could stay with your aunt and watch her kids?”
There was a long silence before Sylvie said, “Her apartment is really small. Really, really small. I don’t know where they’d put you.” She coughed. “Plus, if you had to reschedule your ticket right now it would probably be really expensive and use up a lot of the money. So, you know.”
“Know what?”
“God, I can’t believe you’re not coming.”
Maybe she closed one eye and put her thumb over my face; maybe she used a big pink eraser to smudge me out of her future memories. Whatever she did in Paris, she was alone now, at cafés, in clubs.
“So, what’s in Denmark?”
“White people and potatoes.”
Sylvie didn’t laugh. My face was so hot. I blinked once, twice.
The spa music started up again in earnest. Tinkly bells and soothing synths. Sylvie’s mom had turned the yoga back on.
“Rox, I should probably go,” Sylvie said. “Okay? I’ll call you later.”
I stayed up until two that night, but she didn’t.
The next day I woke to Mama in the doorway of my room. Her gold hoops caught the sunshine peeking through my blinds. She came and sat on my bed.
“Roxana.” Her face was soft. She kissed my forehead and found my hands. “Sleepyhead. Time to get up.”
“Is it?”
“It is now. You’re awake.”
Mama steered me over to the mirror and stood behind me. How many times had I searched photographs of us together for resemblance? My face was round where hers was long and angular. My eyebrows were straight feathery lines over my eyes; she shaved hers off and drew new ones on, thick and sharp. Her hair was neat and small in its bun; mine got in everything. Mama and Dad sometimes found it in their food.
“Remember,” Mama said. “College is your real goal. Paris is just a reward. College is your future. Paris is just a vacation.”
A vacation, after all the trouble Sylvie and I had gone to find an educational program our parents agreed to. After all the jobs we’d worked at to pay for it. I avoided her eyes in the mirror. “Yes.”
“Don’t get it mixed up.” She closed her arms around my shoulders and pressed me in a hug so hard it almost hurt. “I have to leave for work. Clean up your room, please.”
Her face hung behind me in the mirror, a mirage.
Sylvie didn’t pick up when I called. Mama and Dad had a late meeting with their lawyer. “Order a pizza,” Dad suggested on the phone, but I didn’t want to spend any of my money.
I walked t
o the dresser and ran my hand along the lid of my jewelry box, watching in the mirror. I twisted a curl of my hair around my index finger.
Mushi clawed at the doorknob to be let in, but I ignored him. I dialed Jennifer Lindsey’s number.
Yes, I told her. I would go to Denmark.
3
I STOOD AT THE UNIVERSITY COMPUTER LAB IN COPENHAGEN, MOUTH COCKED. Opened a new window.
Dear Sylvie,
Fuck off
“Roxana?”
At the sound of Søren’s voice, I closed everything. I felt dizzier than I had the night before. Dizzier than when I had woken that morning to the black drumbeat of sunlight through the chintz curtain and the screaming alarm clock. I did not want to start the program today. I turned, trying to make my expression presentable.
Søren was alone. He took off his hat and rubbed his scalp, a gesture I was beginning to recognize as a tic. “I am sorry to tell you, but we have missed the group’s departure for Roskilde.”
A reprieve. I could have kissed him.
“It is my fault. My error.” Søren squeezed his hat. “There are trains leaving every hour. We can catch them, but we must hurry.”
He turned and began walking quickly toward the door. Let’s not, I don’t want to go, I almost told him, but then I heard Mama reprimanding me for not appreciating the opportunity to visit a new place. I followed Søren outside and back down into the subway. We boarded the train like strangers and rode three stops in silence before disembarking and crossing a square dotted by thick cement pillars that marked the distance from Copenhagen to Stockholm. Rome. Paris.
Then we were underground again, on another train, the commuter rail to Roskilde. Sets of four seats faced each other across small tables beside long windows on either side of a wide aisle. Søren sat curled over a book with a blank red cover, head bent almost to his chest, his lips moving. Mama would have reached between the chair and his body to poke the small of his back, make him sit up straight. The train passed through fields occasionally interrupted by towns of ranch-style houses. A tall woman in a neat burgundy suit with a gray scarf tied around her neck appeared in the aisle behind a concessions cart, her brown leather pumps soft on the carpeted floor. She stopped beside our table and repeated a litany in Danish. Søren didn’t look up.
Open Me Page 5
