The Vintage Book of International Lesbian Fiction

by Naomi Holoch

  “Are you Inger?”

  A completely strange lady with gray hair, tweed suit, and large, nervous eyes had suddenly stopped her with this question. Inger had a sudden desire to answer “No” and go home right then. She’d never seen complete strangers before. In Fredrikstad there were no completely strange people. Even the ones you’d never seen before, you had seen. Inger stared at her in terror and hostility. I don’t have anything to do with this lady. “Yes,” she said, intensely unhappy.

  “Is this all your luggage?” the lady asked, still in English. But unlike the others she’d heard, she spoke clearly. “No, it … blirsendt-med-reisegods … it, it, it … comes, I mean … it.”

  Where was her English?

  “Will it be sent separately?” the lady inquired. “Yes,” Inger nodded so hard that her head practically came unhinged, in order to make up for the English she’d studied passionately for seven years and always gotten A’s in. Mrs. Mayfield took her bag and marched on brisk half-high heels three steps ahead of her in the direction of the taxi stand.

  The taxi drove up a hill away from the station and came immediately up into the city. A castle partially obscured by fog rose toward them. They turned to the right into a horde of burgundy-colored buses with white roofs, everything on the wrong side of the street. “This is Princes Street!” She said it as if it were the most famous street in the world. Inger saw it all through a perfectly nightmarish glow. “This is the Scott Monument.” She pointed at a dark sort of Eiffel Tower towering up. “Did you have a good trip?”

  “No,” Inger replied. “I was … was … sjøsyk.”

  “Were you seasick?”

  This was dreadful. Her mouth just wouldn’t cooperate! And the workers in the coal mines during the industrial revolution in Anglo-American Reader I, II, and III had never been seasick. They had been the subject of the Iron Law of Wages. That wages tend to fall to the lowest level that the most desperate man will accept. Should she say that?

  They drove up hill and down on perfectly straight streets, the houses got smaller, they lay in endless rows, in pairs, and all the doors were open. They were green. With a number above. They stopped in front of one with the number 6. They’d arrived! She had reached her goal. Mrs. Mayfield seized her bag and marched ahead of her up the little garden path. Inger had never seen a drearier house.

  A chilly and slightly cloying smell confronted her when she came in. She looked in at a long hallway and a staircase. Mrs. May-field stopped at the end of the hall; Inger followed her. “Inger, this is your room.” And she stood there staring into a closet.

  There she saw: a narrow, dark-brown chest of drawers, two straight-back chairs, a bed with a gray-green blanket, and a margarine crate for a nightstand. Through the window she looked out at a wall where there were two gray garbage cans. The land of her dreams, the Edinburgh of her fantasies, sank down inside her and disappeared in the depths of her soul. A year! she thought.

  A year?

  She was placed behind a mound of mashed potatoes. Now they were to eat “lunch.” In the middle of a smell she had never had in her nose before. The family was sitting around the kitchen table. Sheila stared directly at her from across the table with eyes as big as saucers. She gestured with her fork while she talked at breakneck speed with her mother. “Bt wht kn yu du?” she said. Here they had learned all this time that “but” is pronounced “baht” and not “boot,” and then it was only “bt.” She listened, fascinated. Of all the remarkable things she had seen in this short time Sheila was the most remarkable. She had a prominent mouth, which was red, and small freckles on a nose that was a little bit flat over the root and didn’t look the least bit like any of her classmates who’d stood on the steps of the Phoenix.

  Adam was small and picked at his food, and Sheila teased him. Glen was tall and skinny in a military-colored shirt and ate without saying a word. The smell was coming from him. “Eat your food, Adam!” Mrs. Mayfield yelled. “Just wait till your daddy gets home!” The daddy, and the one called Duncan, weren’t home. They were at the office and at school, respectively. Mrs. Mayfield addressed her son exclusively in the form of threats. Whatever would happen when his father got home was clearly big and terrible. But he continued to pick anyway. “Mummy?” he said, “This meat is rotten.” The little mouth was obviously full of imagination. Mrs. Mayfield exploded. “Adam!” she bellowed. “What do you think Inger thinks of you?”

  As if she were doing anything of the kind—having an opinion about his potato eating! “She’s not eating either,” Adam said. Inger’s mashed potatoes were now becoming the center of attention. Crushed, she stared down into the potatoey landscape. The North Sea undulated through her now, the first time in two days that she was no longer in motion. Not since Rakel Jonassen’s blood pudding in seventh grade home ec class had she felt so wretched.

  A disgrace. Here she arrived at a strange house, eighteen years old. And the first thing she did was to not eat up her mashed potatoes. But the alternative was to throw up all over her new family. Mrs. Mayfield removed the potatoes with an expression of disapproval. “H!” she heard clearly. Glen put on some bicycle clips with odd staccato movements. “Cheerio!” he called and disappeared out the door. It was the first thing he’d said. Sheila donned a helmet. Then she disappeared on the motorbike with the same strange word for good-bye. Up to Edinburgh University. She sent Inger a quick glance before she disappeared. Maybe she can’t stand me, Inger thought suddenly. Such things happened. You could look at a face for half a second and know that you couldn’t stand the person. In that case I’m certainly not going to stand her either.

  The first thing Inger did in her new job as maid was to burn a hole in some rubber gloves. She was supposed to put them on to remove a red-hot grate in the stove in the kitchen so that she could rake out the old embers and pour on more coal. This was supposed to be done with the poker, not with your hands. But who had ever heard of a poker? Inger didn’t even know what it was called in Norwegian, and she was certainly not interested in finding out either. But there was a definite possibility it was called an ildrake. At any rate she’d burned a hole, and her forefinger hurt like hell. Mrs. Mayfield stared at the result. “They were brand new!” she exclaimed. The burned finger didn’t interest her in the slightest. “Do you know what?” she continued in a threatening way. “We’ve had eight girls in this house, and none of them have wrecked more than three things in a whole year. How is it going to go with you when you already start wrecking things on your first day? If you wreck more than three things, you’ll have to pay for them yourself.”

  “Wreck” was ødelegge. She didn’t know what the word for salve was. She just stood there smarting.

  At six o’clock in the evening supper was to be eaten in the living room. It faced the street, and through the windows you could look out at all the other gray houses, in pairs, mirror images, just like this one. Mrs. Mayfield couldn’t stand her next-door neighbors. They had dogs.

  The supper table was set—large, dark brown, and polished—with blue-flowered cups and plates on a trolley next to the table. The trolley. “Inger, come here!” Inger was not used to tables. Papa would usually eat his dinner standing—with his plate on top of the refrigerator. Mrs. Mayfield showed her how she should put one and a half teaspoons of sugar in the teacups on the trolley, and three spoonfuls in Daddy’s cup. Daddy’s cup was twice as large as the others and rounder. She looked at it with all the jealousy and irritation it deserved. “How much do you eat for supper?” Mrs. Mayfield inquired. What kind of food? Don’t I just help myself? I eat until I am full. Five pieces of rye-krisp with cheese, thanks. And a cola. “Ah … I … maehhh … what?” she said. “Well, Sheila and I eat three half slices of toast for supper and two half slices for breakfast.” Inger thought that sounded like much too little. “I will … eat … yes … that … thank you, yes, too,” she said. “And you can have butter on one of the slices, and margarine on the other two, and if you have jam, you can’t hav
e butter, too,” Mrs. Mayfield said. “A ha,” Inger said. “‘A ha’ is very bad language in this country, Inger.” “A ha? … I mean … is it that?” “It certainly is.” “But, but.” “You do want to learn to speak properly, don’t you?” “Yes,” Inger replied, and missed the Norwegian word jo, which she needed to answer a negative. A kind of jo-hole appeared. Now she would have to learn to say “yes” through the jo-hole.

  Daddy Mayfield arrived home. With bowler hat and vest and gold watch and long, contented steps across the floor, he stretched out his hands toward her before he even got through the door. “Aaaaaaaah!” he said. “Here’s our new Norwegian girl!” She liked him immediately. He gripped her hand warmly and sat down at the end of the table. “And has she had a good trip?” he asked, to Mrs. Mayfield. “She was seasick, poor thing,” says Mrs. Mayfield, to Mr. Mayfield. Then she looked over at Inger. “Isn’t that so, Inger?” “Yes,” said Inger through her jo-hole.

  Mrs. Mayfield doled out fried ends of sausage and bacon from her end of the table and passed them around. Toast wasn’t the only thing on the menu. Daddy interrogated his family one by one. What had they done today? They only spoke when he addressed them. Finally he drummed his fingers on the tabletop. Little Adam hopped down from his chair, ran over to a cupboard in the corner, and took out a can. Then he dug out a chocolate biscuit. He ran over to his father with it—with great bashfulness and much squirming. Then he darted back to his mother.

  Daddy Mayfield slowly chewed the biscuit in front of the family. It was a chocolate biscuit wrapped in red paper and foil with a tiny jack of clubs diagonally across. Inger used all her strength to keep from looking at the biscuit. Envy crept in from the top of her head to the bottoms of her feet. The biscuit was called “Clubs.” Daddy chewed on. No one else got one.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Mayfield to Inger after they had cleared the table and done the dishes. “You are here as a daughter of the house. That means that the same rules apply to you as they do to Sheila, so I might just as well acquaint you with them right now. You must be home at half past ten at the latest during the week and ten o’clock on Sundays. You must wash your clothes once a week, and you’re not allowed to go to the International Club, and you’re not allowed to go out with Negroes.”

  We’ll see about that, thought Inger. She doesn’t know who she has in her house.

  THE LANGUAGE AND THE GIRL

  If Inger had known beforehand how awful it was to go abroad, she never would have gone. But now she was here. Abroad one had to vacuum on three stories—with “the sweeper” and “the Hoover,” respectively. She surveyed them with deep contempt the first morning when Mrs. Mayfield hauled them out of a broom closet under the stairs. Mrs. Mayfield had a small, round, and distinctly low-sitting rear end. The sweeper was a yellow thingamajig with roller-thingies underneath. The Hoover was a vacuum cleaner with a brown bag along the handle. I’m leaving, thought Inger. She was also given the “mopper.” The mopper was a long handle with a bristle at the end, the type that until now she had only seen in the movies. So she had labored under the misconception that the tool was a joke. Marilyn Monroe dusting her pink telephone.

  There were lots of things she’d thought were a joke that now turned out not to be. She stood in the drawing room upstairs and was filled with a dizzying boredom at the thought of the year ahead of her. The only thing that helped her were the Fredrikstad eyes. They were in the ceiling and in the walls and everywhere and followed her with unbelieving looks. Then they immediately died laughing.

  “Don’t you have an apron?” Mrs. Mayfield said. Inger stared stupidly at her. The Fredrikstad eyes eagerly followed along.

  “An apron?!” Mrs. Mayfield repeated more loudly, as if the very sound of the word indicated its meaning. The appalling fact dawned simultaneously on her and the entire population of Fredrikstad: she’d gone out into the world without an apron!

  “Dust the house every day,” Mrs. Mayfield said. Dust, dust, dust. Dust! If only she could see it! But everywhere she saw nothing but bright, shining surfaces. She was to use the Hoover upstairs on Monday, the sweeper downstairs, the sweeper upstairs on Tuesday, the Hoover downstairs, and the sweeper and the Hoover and the Hoover and the sweeper. But in the attic (a room concealed by a closet door one flight up) she was only to use the sweeper, because the cord on the Hoover wasn’t long enough to reach up here.

  She always knew what date it was. It was one day less until the day she was going home. She missed Mama and Papa. The longing sank down inside her like something heavy and unbelievable as soon as she was alone in her room. They weren’t there. She wanted to go to them and tell them everything. They were waiting. And then they weren’t waiting. She couldn’t go to them. For the first time in her life there was no living room to go into where Mama and Papa were sitting.

  From one day to the next she was reduced to a nobody. It would’ve been much better for everyone concerned if she’d had a little more training in this. But she had no experience as a nobody. There she had stood with her diploma. She knew that Hargreaves had invented the spinning jenny in 1764, she knew what a turnpike road was and that England and Scotland were united in The Act of Union in 1707. But she had no idea what a clothespin was called in English. Or a faucet. Or a garbage can. And in point of truth, that was all she had use for when she came.

  She dusted the twelve bannister posts from upstairs to downstairs, and it was especially in these posts that infinity lay. From now on my value lies in my ability to remove dust, she thought. What a waste! What a waste of me!

  She looked up in amazement. She’d thought her first English thought.

  Rosenkål was called Brussels sprouts. Who would have dreamed that? Cauliflower was also funny. The “caul” came before the flower. She’d come to learn the language. And already after three weeks she had learned a large number of new words and expressions. She knew now that a klesklype was called a “clothes peg” søppelbøtte a “pig pail,” and she knew that an utslagsvask was called a “sink”—and every Friday the ash bucket was set out on the sidewalk to be emptied, and this was called “to put the bucket out” (not “to put out the bucket”), and vannkran was called a “tap,” komfyren was called the “cooker,” rødbeter were called “beetroot,” and the Hoover and the sweeper, and the sweeper and the Hoover, do the drawing room, do the fireplace, do the potatoes, do, do, do, put, put, put, put the garbage out, put it there, the silver goes in the dining room, thank you Inger, but more than all these things, and beyond them, and from the first moment in this new country, she’d heard one expression, and this expression was: It’s not suitable.

  It’s not suitable. She knew what it meant, and it wasn’t because this expression wasn’t used in Norway, didn’t frequently march triumphantly in all its oppressiveness through Nygaardsgata, but nothing that was said in the small-town gossip there by the mouth of the river could measure up to the reprimanding and eternal expression: It’s not suitable.

  Adam came. He said: “Why, Mummy?” He asked Why about everything, like all children on earth, and his constant protests were a great comfort. “Why do I have to eat up my food, and why is the sky blue?” Mummy heard Adam’s questions, and she said, “Because I say so. Now, don’t be a nuisance! That’s the way it is. Wait till your Daddy comes home. Now don’t argue. It’s not suitable.”

  Inger learned. She was learning English so fast that it made her head spin. And it sent shivers down her spine.

  Glen was sitting there eating. The smell didn’t come from him. It was the gas. She knew that now. She just associated it with him. He shouted his messages across the table: “Bread, please! Tea, please!” with a wavering look, and a blush washed over his face. This boy was not like other boys. He never looked his father in the eyes. In the evenings he’d sit sewing on an enormous needlework project. “What’s it going to be?” Inger asked. “A rug!” he shouted despairingly into the fireplace. Then he didn’t say any more. Inger soon realized that he was backward. That’s what it
was called if someone acted like that in Fredrikstad. “He’s nervous” was all Mrs. Mayfield said. It was not to be discussed. That wouldn’t be suitable. Every morning he ate breakfast by himself in the kitchen, because he went to work early. Inger met him every morning on her way to the coal bin. “Where do you work?” she asked. “In Bruntsfield Park!” he answered. But he was a little calmer now. When his father spoke to him his entire face was aflame.

  Sheila dashed in. “I’m fed up with this house. Hell’s bloody teeth.” Entertaining expressions poured out of her mouth. Hell’s bloody teeth. Inger laughed enthusiastically. “Stop it, Sheila. It’s not suitable,” Mrs. Mayfield said. But Inger thought it was awfully suitable. She suddenly needed Sheila to like her face. It was no use that she’d decided from the start that she wasn’t going to like Sheila one whit more than Sheila liked her. She liked her. She saw her. She stuck her head with its crash helmet and slightly prominent mouth through the door. She had on long, green stretch pants, or a dark plaid skirt, and a multicolored striped scarf from Edinburgh University behind her. The colors indicated the college. She flung the crash helmet onto the table with a bang.

  “Oh bloody hell! I’ll freeze to death on that bike one of these days. Look at these legs! They’re all purple!” Inger wanted to answer. She was burning to answer: “No wonder your legs turn purple when you drive that bike in silk stockings!” But the sentence hit a dead end at the expression “No wonder.” Strange how you could need such a little expression so much. And she suddenly realized that no matter how many English words she might manage to heap up in her mouth, it’d be so clumsy and would take so long that the joke would collapse. She had to face the horrible fact: she was incapable of making her laugh.

  Getting girls to laugh at school during recess, boys to howl over their desktops—that had been life’s greatest and most natural pleasure, in the middle of a life where otherwise you were too fat or had no luck with boys. And there she stood, with “No wonder” like a clump of cold mashed potatoes in her throat.