The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter (The Ingrid Winter Misadventure Series)

by J. S. Drangsholt

  “Development-challenged? Is that even a term?”

  “Well, I think third world is kind of outdated, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “You get that you’re going to have to apologize, right?”

  “To the au pair?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes.”

  I stared out the window. At our cherry-tree-less yard.

  “Fine,” I sighed. “I’ll apologize.”

  I probably had to.

  Yeah, I had to.

  But only if I ran into her. Because if I didn’t run into her, it would be physically impossible for me to apologize. Even Bjørnar had to concede that.

  5

  The next day I left work directly from the reading center to avoid the meeting room. Just in case. Earlier in the day I had run into Peter, who was all up in arms.

  “Do you know the University of Bergen just lowered the number of credits their courses are worth?” he announced and then made a hiccuping sound, which seemed to have become chronic. “Which is the opposite of what we’re doing. What we’re doing is just a way to cut back on staffing. Mark my words!”

  “What do you mean? Are they going to lay people off?”

  “Lay people off, reorganize, offer incentives . . . Who knows what form it will take? This administration isn’t really calling its own shots, if you know what I mean. They’re going to get a taste of their own medicine, though.”

  “Uh, what do you mean?”

  “Oh, you’ll see,” he said, nodding knowingly, “you’ll see.”

  That exchange created small ripples of uncertainty in my mind. After all, I was one of the most recent hires. If anyone was going to be re-orged, there was a good chance it would be me, especially after my lackluster performance as faculty coordinator. Plus, I hadn’t published all that much since I’d started here, either.

  “Zero point seven points,” the chair had told me. “That might do during the honeymoon period, but it won’t cut it over the long haul. We’re evaluated based on our output, as you know. The bibliometric indicator system may not be the soundest system in the world, but fair or not, it’s how we are assessed right now.”

  I had nodded vigorously, but the fact of it was that after completing my dissertation I wasn’t really up to starting a new research project. My plan was to put off the problem by signing up for conferences now and then. Then at least I would have something to pull out of my hat. Though the conference I’d received a grant to attend was still a few months off, it was already starting to bug me. The plane could crash. I could be raped and murdered. I could get stress cancer from excessive dread beforehand. To put it succinctly, my life could be torn asunder. All in the attempt to score a few idiotic career advancement points with my department chair and a colleague who hardly knew what my name was and certainly had no idea what my research interests were.

  Luckily it wasn’t raining and the bicyclists were back doing their thing again, so there was less traffic. In just under half an hour I was able to carry a beaming Alva off the playground and into the hallway, where I immediately started stripping off her hat, mittens, rain gear, fleece jacket, and wool socks.

  “You came to get me before snack!”

  “Yes, sometimes I pick you up before snack.”

  “But not always.”

  “No, not always.”

  “Not on Saturday.”

  “No, but there’s no school on Saturdays. Now we have to get your bag.”

  Only then, when I looked up into the cloakroom, did I notice Titus’s au pair digging around in his cubby.

  And I’d gotten here early. To be on the safe side.

  I straightened up and took a few steps forward.

  “Hello,” I said, smiling uncertainly.

  The au pair jumped.

  I took another step in her direction and held out my hand. Not to touch her. More to show her that I meant well.

  “Ahem . . . about yesterday. It didn’t occur to me that you were from the Philippines, but of course you are. And they just had a typhoon there, I know that. Is everything all right with your family?”

  Up until the last sentence it didn’t seem like she understood any of what I was saying, but at the word family the muscles in her face started contracting. Her eyes filled with tears and her lips began to quiver.

  “I have no contact,” she said, her voice trembling. “One week. I cannot reach.”

  Wind started blowing inside my head.

  Tears began pouring down her cheeks, and I suddenly felt the need to offer her some helpful advice. Hadn’t they said something about Twitter on the radio? Something about the names of people who were accounted for being tweeted?

  “Do you have a Twitter account?”

  “Who?”

  She had pulled out a tissue and was now trying to mop away the enormous tears still running down her cheeks.

  “Twitter. Social media.”

  “Twitt?”

  “Twitt-er.”

  “Twitt?”

  “T-W-I-T-T-E-R. The Internet. There are lists or something like that there. Ask your family.”

  “I cannot reach.”

  “I mean your host family, Titus’s parents. They can help you. With Twitter.”

  Shut up! a voice in my head was screaming. Stop going on and on about Twitter! But I couldn’t stop, because I didn’t know what to do. Should I hug her? How do people in the Philippines feel about personal space? Is hugging OK?

  So, I just repeated the bit about Twitter while she tried to calm down.

  “Do a search on Twitter,” I said, “not Twitt.”

  “I try to call!”

  “No, you can’t call Twitter. It’s on the Internet.”

  “I pray,” she said.

  “Yes.” I nodded. “Prayer is good. Very good.”

  We stood there for a moment without saying anything, until Titus started tugging her arm and I agreed with relief that it was time to go.

  6

  All the attention I had paid to the pancake party and the au pair had resulted in my being even further behind on my conference paper, so on Monday morning I was up at five. I stacked the books from my office in a big pile next to my laptop and planned to open them as soon as I checked Facebook. I always did this, even though the news feed was only ever filled with birthdays and nuggets of wisdom like, “All the days that came and went—I never realized those were life,” and pictures of people’s kids and Starbucks cups. I sent one birthday greeting and clicked “Like” on three random posts, then moved on to the real estate site, where there were now 289 listings. As expected it was mostly a disappointing mix of “condo in co-op building with large balcony” and “new high-end, modern single-family home.”

  Everything looked the same. Everything was the same. All the time.

  Which is surely why I didn’t react right away.

  Because it didn’t look like anything from real life. So I sat there looking at a picture of a big red imposing house with ivy and crushed white rock in the yard, without really seeing it. “Birdsong in the city,” I read, without really taking it in. “Rare opportunity.”

  And it was only after I had scrolled through two more pages of “new construction, beautifully appointed with nice yard” and then came across the house again that I realized it was actually for sale. Here. In the real world.

  My brain started tingling as I read the description and then clicked on the photos of everything we were looking for: family room, storage, bedrooms for everyone, a big yard, an office, a dining room, and an attic. This house even had things we didn’t know we were looking for, like an English fireplace, a chandelier, and wallpaper with birds on it. I clicked through the photos again and again, until a bleary-eyed Bjørnar appeared in the kitchen.

  “Look,” I said, waving him over with a gesture that felt mildly hysterical, “come here! It looks like it came right out of an Astrid Lindgren book!”

  And the insta
nt I said those words out loud, I realized they were true. Not Villa Villekulla from Pippi Longstocking. More like the house in Lotta on Troublemaker Street. True, it wasn’t yellow the way Lindgren described it in the books, but it was every bit as crooked and charming and with just as many nooks and crannies and chimneys and a white picket fence and plants in the yard, and yet cleaned up, with nice tile work, modern bathrooms, and wallpaper. And I realized that deep down inside, even after looking at all those minimalist, modernist places, this is what I had always wanted. Because no one describes a family Christmas like Astrid Lindgren. No one could capture the beautiful, intimate moments between siblings, spouses, parents, and children the way she did. No one grasped what it truly meant to create a home the way she did.

  Bjørnar and I read through the description together.

  “A showpiece designed by architect Edvard Brochmann, renowned for his dignified homes for those with discerning tastes.”

  “A house with a soul,” I said with a sigh. Then, “Birdsong in the city.” (Again.)

  I turned to Bjørnar without breathing.

  He looked back at me.

  “You do understand that that’s not us, right?” he said.

  “Not us?” I repeated, confused.

  His statement reverberated in my head, until I finally understood what he meant. He meant that a 1919 house was too complicated, too wild, and too much for us to handle. The two of us, who had not mastered practical home repair skills beyond taping and painting. The two of us, who liked to aim horizontally, toward normalcy, routine, and predictability.

  The two of us, who had invested everything in not shooting too high or too low.

  I knew what he meant.

  But this time he was wrong.

  “But look at it, would you,” I objected. “Look how nice it is! And a ton of work has already been done on it! Maybe it is us, and we just don’t know it yet? We’re always discovering new facets of ourselves. I mean, for example, I never used to like gjetost cheese, but now I love it!”

  He looked at me without saying anything, and I regretted the analogy.

  “It’s too risky.”

  “But it’s not that expensive. If we got it for the asking price, we’d have a little bit of a buffer, wouldn’t we?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I mean, we are looking for a house, right? We need something bigger. We do agree on that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And there’s never anything available! It’s right where we want to live. Well, almost. And look how great it is! And practical. It has a shower stall and everything!”

  He clicked through all the photos one more time. Blue-and-white-patterned Italian tile in the hallway. Wooden ceiling beams painted in light colors. Big bedrooms with wallpaper. There was a ringing in my ears. He was wrong. Despite all the risks and uncertainty this might entail, it was us. We’d just never realized it. We hadn’t known ourselves.

  The real us. That’s what this house was pointing to.

  “This is a proper home,” I mumbled. “A real one.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Surely we can swing by and take a look at it,” I pleaded, “just, you know, go for a walk? Tonight?”

  “We’ll see. I have to go now. I have an early meeting. You’ll handle the kids?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll just grab some coffee for the road.”

  “Whoops.”

  “You didn’t make any coffee?”

  “Sorry.”

  He buttered a slice of crisp bread, and I used brainpower to make the water boil in record time, waiting for exactly thirty seconds before pushing down the plunger in the French press. Then I filled an insulated travel mug, including maybe a few grounds, and followed him out into the hall.

  “I just thought of something,” I said.

  “What?”

  “If a doppelgänger comes and takes my place, we probably ought to have a sign.”

  “What kind of sign?”

  “Here’s the sign: I’ll say, ‘To be or not to be,’ and then you’ll answer—”

  “‘That is the question’?”

  “Correct.”

  “OK, but that’s not a sign. Everyone knows that verse. Anyone else would respond the same way.”

  “Incorrect. Most people would just say, ‘Huh?’”

  He looked me in the eye and said, “You know we’re not going to buy that house.”

  I smiled and handed him the travel mug.

  He sighed and shook his head.

  “We can talk about it later. I’ll crunch the numbers a little tonight.”

  “Great!”

  I followed him with my eyes, out into the snowflakes, which had started fluttering down even though it was only October.

  “To be or not to be!” I yelled.

  He didn’t hear me. Or at any rate there was no response.

  I should have realized that even that was a sign.

  But I guess I wasn’t really paying attention.

  7

  There had been an accident on the highway, and it took me forty-five minutes to get to work. Once I was there I stuck the “Testing in Progress” sign on my door and closed it again. It was risky to repeat this trick. If people saw the note too often, they usually started to ignore it, assuming that I’d probably just forgotten to take it down. Then you run the risk of people completely ignoring it for weeks to come.

  But it had been a few days since I last put it up, so I chanced it. I had to finish my conference paper. The organizers had already sent out several reminders. They also wrote, “Based on the information already provided, your paper on ‘Tehom’ will be part of the Postmodern Feminist Theology panel.” Several words in that sentence concerned me. Postmodern, for example. Even though the word had been in circulation for several decades, no one really knew what it meant, and conversations about it generally ended up in belligerent bickering. Plus nine times out of ten, academics who used that word in their own writing were obfuscators, filled with hot air.

  The other word that made me nervous was theology. Although there were several areas in literary-studies circles that utilized theological concepts, theologians were blissfully unaware of this, to the extent that they became indignant every time we used a word they believed they had a monopoly on. The term amateur had been lobbed at me several times as a result of just this type of cross-disciplinary terminological misunderstanding.

  And then there was the whole feminist thing. Nothing in this whole world frightened me as much as feminists. Even though I was a feminist. And not just in theory, either. For example, I’d been buying my girls clothes from the boys’ department for ages in order to avoid the overly tight jeans with all the glitter and bows. Plus, I was concerned about semantics and was always careful to use gender-neutral terms like letter carrier and firefighter. And I tried not to immediately picture a man when I heard a title like professor or doctor. Plus, I rarely shaved my armpits or legs. And besides, I had devoted large tracts of my dissertation to examining the inherently gendered nature of epistemology and deconstructing and reconceptualizing the materiality of sexual difference.

  So I was definitely a feminist.

  But it was like that wasn’t enough.

  Maybe I just wasn’t angry enough.

  Or political enough.

  Or concrete enough.

  Anyway, I got the impression they didn’t like me. They usually regarded me coolly and then misunderstood everything I said:

  What do you mean ‘post-Tehomic’?

  Why did you refer to Butler, when Braidotti would have been a more natural choice?

  Can you elaborate on why you refer to water as being associated with femininity? That seems to be a relatively essentialist statement.

  Associate Professor Winter, are you perhaps an amateur? (Again.)

  To be completely honest, all this was nothing compared to the main thrust of my paper, the subject I had spent countless years writing my dissertati
on on: Tehom.

  “The Great Deep,” which can also mean “abyss, sea” or “to agitate, destroy, confuse.” It comes up right at the beginning of the Bible, as early as verse two. When the earth is a wasteland and a void, and darkness lies over the deep, over Tehom.

  Because the Spirit of God may have moved over the formless earth, a void. But there was something that wasn’t empty. Something that was already there.

  Something that either comes ex nihilo or that is ex nihilo per se.

  Which rests there as itself, in complete darkness.

  Which has always rested there, and which is resting there still.

  Which slumbers.

  Waiting.

  Waiting for chaos or nothingness to take over again.

  There is no time in Tehom.

  No order.

  No sense of good or evil.

  There is only Tehom.

  And it is the scariest thing in the whole world.

  I had no idea why I wrote my dissertation about it. Maybe it was an attempt to gain control. Maybe it was an attempt to tackle my worst fear head-on.

  The result, though, was that I never got away from Tehom, away from my awareness that it was there waiting for me, the presence of an absence. Or, an absent presence.

  The first time there was a knock on the door, I ignored it. But the knocker, who clearly couldn’t read, didn’t give up.

  “Yes?” I said, irritated, to a pimply face.

  “Sorry I’m late,” the face said, “but I didn’t quite understand where it was.”

  I peered at the unfamiliar face and was trying to send him back out into the hallway when I realized who he was. A persistent high school student who was writing a term paper on The Hobbit and who had told me over the phone that he needed “considerable help.”

  “You can stop by at ten thirty,” I had heard myself say, “but I have a phone conference at eleven, so I’m afraid you’ll have to leave then.”

  And now, here we were, trapped in a conversation I understood less and less the longer it went on.

  “As you know, Tolkien has written a lot of other famous books,” he informed me, “but I want to focus on The Hobbit since it’s so short. Well, that and I like dragons.”