Mirror, Shoulder, Signal

by Dorthe Nors

  Deus ex machina, Sonja thinks, and washes down the cake.

  5.

  A VAST EXCHANGE COMMENCES between the earth and sky. A barrel organ grinds and one-armed bandits prattle away in tongues electronic, but in the background Sonja hears a throb. The sulfur in the sky dissipates and turns purple. The trees behind the rollercoaster glow angrily in the last rays of sun, and then here comes the lightning. It begins with a single bolt farther to the north. Then a couple of strikes out toward Øresund strait. Now and then the lightning bolts lash out sidewise at each other and shoot across the sky. The people squeal and seek shelter under the terrace roofs. They have a hard time not getting in each other’s way with their fries, and the bakery quickly fills with people. They sit down at the tables with slices of layer cake and cream-filled medallion cookies. They say, “Sure is muggy,” and “Lot of water in that sky.”

  Nothing’s as cozy as thunder joe, Sonja thinks. In Balling, they’d sip the black coffee while they watched from the dormer, and it was especially thrilling at their house since they lived at the highest point in the parish. Dad said they were exposed, yet as a rule it was down at the neighbors’ that lightning struck. Marie lived there, and her family was Indre Mission. Indre Mission was some sort of sect, and Dad said she should steer clear of anything that stank of religion. Religions were all about corpses that rose from the grave, he said, and not being able to dance or play cards, and he looked at Kate and Sonja with his lower lip jutting out, so they could see he was worried. One time, Sonja wanted to try going to Sunday school with Marie. At first she wasn’t allowed to, but for the sake of neighborhood comity her father yielded at last. Then she and Marie had sat there in the meetinghouse and looked at small shiny pictures of Jesus. Marie’s dad was there too, and he never said much when they’d sit in their kitchen and press brown sugar into bread. In the meetinghouse, however, he spoke in a loud voice. When the two girls played with Kate in the gravel pit, Marie would often hang upside down from a tree branch. “We can see your panties!” Kate would giggle, but when Marie hung like that she didn’t care if her dress didn’t stay where it was supposed to. When she sang in the meetinghouse, on the other hand, she smelled of the disinfected linoleum in Sonja’s kitchen. But then Sonja’s father got into a boundary dispute with Marie’s father. They argued property lines till foam flecked in the corners of their mouths. Suddenly Sonja wasn’t allowed to attend Sunday school anymore, and that was okay. In a way it was just fine that Dad put his foot down. Indre Mission wasn’t that much fun anyway.

  People stream into the bakery. Soon there won’t be enough chairs, and people begin to steal glances at Sonja’s table. A somewhat tired couple approaches. The wife has short permed hair and gold earrings, while the husband’s a bit plump and wearing a T-shirt. The thingy from his cell phone is firmly installed in his ear. It thrusts down toward his mouth like a little limb. He keeps speaking out into the air, and Sonja can’t tell if it’s his wife or someone on the phone that he’s talking to.

  “All right if we sit here?” the woman asks. Her voice is raspy, her skin gilded with self-tanner and nicotine.

  It’s Jytte to a tee, Sonja thinks. She nods to the woman. “I’m actually finished, but this weather’s for the ducks.”

  “You can damn well say that again,” says the man out into the air.

  Sonja does not react, though the man’s now staring at her.

  “Are you talking to me?” she asks, pointing to herself.

  “Christ yes, I’m talking to you,” he says, and plops down. He sounds raspy too, and he reaches for the coffee on his wife’s tray.

  “We saw it coming when we were driving from Ballerup,” the woman says. “I told Verner, I told him there’d be a thunderstorm, but Verner said that they almost always head east, over Sweden.”

  “‘Thunder in the south, bring in the cow.’”

  “Come again?” says Verner.

  “Where I come from, that’s what we say: ‘Thunder in the south, bring in the cow.’ Meaning thunderstorms move north.”

  The couple from Ballerup regard Sonja uneasily.

  “Awful weather in any case,” Sonja says.

  Ballerup nods. Then they tell her about the torrential rainstorm of 2011, and how much the insurance covered. It’s a convoluted account, and Sonja gazes out at the carrousel in the alleyway. It’s deserted but hasn’t stopped turning. The children have jumped off, and now the horses prance around riderless in the downpour. The carrousel’s a lazy Susan for anyone who seizes the chance. Sonja wouldn’t have anything against taking a ride herself. It’s nice to do things on your own, to become conscious of yourself and to thine own self be true.

  Sonja looks at the carrousel. She hasn’t tried one since she was six, maybe seven. Back then, she spoke Jutlandic without irony. Now she no longer knows what language she speaks, noting only how the woman’s glance flits around the room. Her eyes won’t settle on anything, and Sonja’s eyes can’t help following hers. So their gazes wander restlessly among the faces in The Blue Coffeepot, while the Ballerup woman talks about how the insurance company tried to cheat them.

  “We had Verner’s instruments standing in the basement,” she says. “They were a total loss, but you did get compensated.”

  Verner’s mouth is full of cake, so he confirms this by nodding, and Sonja asks what sort of instruments were affected.

  “The Hammond organ and the drum set,” the woman says, using a napkin to wipe around her mouth, and Sonja’s been at parties where someone like Verner was sitting in a corner and played a fanfare as the ice cream was brought in. And Sonja’s clapped at the ice cream and admired the sparklers stuck into it, and she’s sung with Verner’s refrains about the time the chicken coop was on fire and the rooster wouldn’t leave. Kate waited tables at the parish hall for a period, and she probably still does when they need an extra hand. But back then, when Verner played for the entrance of the ice cream, Kate stood there in her starched white shirt, smiling shyly while her face lit up from below. So lovely she was, Kate.

  Bakken rumbles and booms, the bakery engulfed in water.

  “I think I’ll make a dash for it after all,” Sonja says. “I’m actually here with a group. They’re deep in the woods, and it’s not really safe, so I’m just thinking—”

  “Yep, you can sure say that again,” the man says, and then someone apparently calls him up.

  “Yes? Hey there!”

  It can’t be safe having a phone so close to your brain during a thunderstorm. The father of a boy in Kate’s class was once talking on the phone during a storm. That was before telephone lines had been buried in the ground, and lightning struck one of the lines. An inconceivably huge number of volts shot through the handset and into the boy’s father, who keeled over on the spot. They resuscitated him before the ambulance came, but still. Kate went out with the boy for a couple of weeks in ninth grade. Sonja thinks she can remember him sitting with Kate in the corner sofa at home, Kate in a pink blouse (so lovely she was), but now the lines have all been buried, if there are even any of them left.

  All things pass, and every time Sonja reads something about where she grew up, it’s falling to pieces. That way of life is history. Copenhagen’s getting bigger and bigger, the papers say. A lowlife property speculator outlines the situation on TV. The kobold on a sinking ship, a shuttered slaughterhouse. Journalists paint a degrading portrait, and the parks of Copenhagen swarm with baby buggies. They’re dragged around by flocks of mothers with homesick eyes and dogs on leashes. Someone ought to start a resistance, thinks Sonja. Shaming the provinces is just a covert form of deportation, isn’t it.

  Sonja’s made her way to the door, but it’s difficult to get out because of all the sodden people who want to come in. Outside, she joins a knot of visitors under the terrace roof. The alley down to Bakkens Hvile has turned into a creek. A woman in a pair of sopping-wet espadrilles wobbles on the cobblestones. Unattended children have shucked off their shoes and are wading in the
water, and Sonja would join them if she weren’t a grown-up. Or Sonja would join them if her feet weren’t defective. “Your feet don’t want to grab the earth,” Ellen always says, but now Sonja’s bending over. She takes off her shoes and stuffs them in her backpack. She wriggles her toes on the wet cobblestones. They’re not unhappy feet. They’re not feet that durst not. They can so, Sonja knows, and her feet grab hold of the earth. They get a good grip, and then she walks out in Bakken in bare feet. The rain is sluicing down from above and the sewers have thrown in the towel. Yet Sonja walks. She finds it delightful, almost daring, to go barefoot. She walks past carnival wheels and stuffed-animal booths, past shooting gallery tents and vitrines of giant candy. Wasps stick fast to the candy, and the girl who’s supposed to be selling it has concealed herself in a poncho. Only her eyes are visible, and they look away. Behind the girl, directly behind her, are the bumper cars.

  If I were Frank, Sonja thinks, I wouldn’t hold back. But I’m a woman past forty. Alone in Bakken. Barefoot, and besides, I can’t shift gears.

  Sonja stares at the bumper cars. They’re driving chaotically around the covered track. All the cars are full, the fathers happy and the mothers where it’s dry, clasping prizes.

  No, she thinks. I can’t shift for myself.

  6.

  SONJA’S SITTING IN FOLKE’S OFFICE. It took a long time to get here, as she kept taking detours. She’s been through Frederiksberg Gardens, and she walked down Gammel Kongevej and then back again before taking the side street where Folke’s Driving School is located. It’s five now; she wanted to catch Folke in the narrow window between when Jytte goes home and when students show up for theory. She’d been standing in line outside the office for a while. There’s almost always someone in there with Folke. The youngsters inevitably forget their money and signatures, and the suspended drivers prefer to bring their shame at odd hours, so she feels like a camel looking for a needle’s eye to slip through. But now Sonja’s seated on the chair across from him. She’s asked if they might speak in confidence, and Folke’s closed the door.

  “I can’t change gears,” Sonja says, even though that wasn’t what she wanted to start by saying.

  “I see,” says Folke. “What exactly’s giving you problems?”

  “Everything. Or rather, it’s mostly just Jytte.”

  “Jytte?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure she’s a good teacher for the younger students. But for an old person like me, I don’t think she’s a very good fit.”

  Folke’s leaning over his desk. He’s a tall man with a bald pate and a striking beard. His face is alive, open, and he’s made a concerted effort with the beard. From his chin it tapers to a point, but elsewhere it’s thick and bushy. It’s as if the hair he once had atop his head has slid down under his chin, where it now points toward his other male hair. He extends his legs under the desk. They’re long, and his driving-instructor gut bulges out beneath his hooded sweatshirt. Folke resembles a fat stork when erect and a happy pagan Viking when seated. Or else he looks just like himself, and Sonja likes that.

  “What’s wrong with Jytte? Is it her big trap, or what?”

  “It’s more that she loses her temper. She won’t let me shift gears, and how am I supposed to learn, then? I get so exhausted when I’m out driving with Jytte that I have to go home and lie down on the couch. And the lessons do cost money.”

  “Jytte’s got a mouth like a longshoreman and a heart of gold,” Folke says, leaning back. “You shouldn’t take her so seriously.”

  “But then there was the brawl.”

  “Brawl?”

  It’s now or never. So out comes the story of the cross-cultural encounter in the intersection by Western Cemetery. Sonja remembers to include the detail about how Jytte used the horn. The fear, the adrenaline, the hotheaded outburst; the complaints about wrecking Jytte’s car. Everything. Folke must be told, and he sits there with his face in worried furrows. He looks like someone who’s listening to Sonja, and though she hasn’t really thought that far …

  “I want to drive with you instead.”

  Folke runs his fingers over his impeccable beard. He explains that he doesn’t really drive with that many students anymore. He takes care of theory and administration. He’s also hardly at the school when it’s convenient for students to drive.

  “But I translate Swedish crime novels,” says Sonja.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “What I mean is that I’m my own boss, in a sense. So I can drive whenever it suits you.”

  Folke doesn’t hesitate an instant but smiles and opens a drawer. Inside is his calendar.

  “Let’s do that, then, and don’t you worry about Jytte. I’ll call her. Don’t get your head in a twist. It’s my business, my responsibility. I’m going to teach you how to shift gears.”

  Sonja’s on the verge of tears. It happens unexpectedly; the sob sits in her throat and wants to come out. Folke’s hands move efficiently from side to side across the desk, and she longs to grasp one of them. Squeeze it, say “Thank you,” from the heart. It doesn’t escape Sonja’s notice that she gets red in the face, because this sort of thing rarely happens. It almost never happens anymore—that someone wishes Sonja the best. She’s used to dealing with everything herself, and she’s reasonably good at it too, but that Folke would reach down in his drawer and face the heat—Sonja hadn’t expected that. It isn’t that she’s planning on the emotion to lead to anything. She isn’t. The idea behind getting a license isn’t at all to find someone to drive for her. On the contrary, and besides, she’s heard that Folke’s married to a doctor. She doesn’t understand how he pulled that off. But he’s married to a doctor, and that’s a good sign, Sonja thinks, and now he’s looking up at her and smiling.

  “Crime novels, you say? Did you translate the Stieg Larsson books? They’re great. Or that guy Gösta Svensson? My wife’s nuts about Gösta Svensson.”

  Sonja opens her mouth. Her skin stops glowing, but she can’t manage any more than that. Folke gives her a yellow note with a date and time for her next driving lesson.

  “It’ll be Thursday, then.” He smiles. “And I’ll take care of Jytte. You just go home now and rest.”

  Then he’s towering over her, there in the driving instructors’ office. He’s taller than Sonja, standing before her in his hoodie.

  “Come here!” he says, opening his arms.

  Sonja disappears into Folke’s arms, his arms like a father’s pressing her to his chest. She cannot speak, as she’s on the cusp of crying. She also feels bashful. And she hasn’t answered about Gösta, but now the moment’s passed, and Folke’s pushed her away again.

  “Thursday,” he says.

  “Thursday,” she echoes, and she decides to take a couple of Gösta’s books along when they see each other next.

  Then he’ll be happy, and so will his wife. Then the lines will be clearly drawn. Then no one will get confused out in the car.

  It’s the embrace; it was a smidge too intimate, yet pleasant at the same time. It caught her napping. Now she doesn’t know how to comport herself, and her cheeks are prickling. She feels like a confirmand, and there’s a line outside the door waiting to come in. A long line of youngsters with course papers and passports. Folke lets the door stand open and asks them to move closer, closer. Sonja floats through the theory classroom, painted royal blue. She can smell Jytte in the furnishings, and it won’t be long before Jytte knows that Sonja’s ditched her for the boss. It won’t sound pretty. Then she’ll let Sonja have it with both barrels. Then it’ll come out that Sonja was never approved by the medical officer, and she claims it’s something with her ears, but you can bet it’s something else.

  Something else?

  Sonja steps out onto the front steps and into a cloud of cigarette smoke. The rougher students stand around, grabbing a smoke before class. Jytte does the same when she’s there during the day, but right now one of the students is describing a driving lesson. The student demonstrates ho
w she turned the wheel too fast. It’s an exaggerated movement, and Sonja has to duck quickly to avoid being struck by her cigarette. And in a flash it’s there: the positional vertigo.

  It’s triggered by the dentist position and by bending over too fast, and Sonja has to grab hold of the banister while she restores her head to its proper position. When she gets her head back into place, the world rights itself. The world’s where it should be, but it’s been shaken. Sonja takes a couple of steps out onto the sidewalk. She doesn’t want any of the smokers to see that anything’s wrong, and after all, it’s not the dizziness itself that creates a problem for driving. She’s able to orient herself just fine, as soon as she gets her head out of the angle that triggers the episode. It’s more that, for the next couple of hours, she’s a tad out of focus. That’s not so great in an automobile, but then again it could be worse. And her grandmother could drive a car; her mother too. The first time that Mom got dizzy, she went to the ear doctor, and he had her lie on the examination table and rolled her head around. That triggered a violent attack. Mom’s eyes centrifuged and her hands clawed the air while the doctor held her down. He told her she had to lie there a few minutes and “just let the stones settle down.”

  That helped for a time, but then of course the dizziness returned. It returned when Mom hammered her head against the car’s doorframe on the day Kate and Frank were getting married. This was in the parking lot up by the church, and thank God they’d arrived there good and early. Mom got Dad to drive her home with the excuse that they’d forgotten something. Sonja wasn’t aware that anything was up, but that might have been due to the dress Kate had stuffed her into, tubular and lemon yellow. Meanwhile, Mom thought she could take care of the positional vertigo herself. Surely the maneuver the doctor had used on her could be performed at home, she thought. She removed the cloth from the dining room table, then took a running start and leapt up on the table so she’d land on it prone, with her head tilted back slightly. The tricky part was catapulting her body up there just right. If she failed, she’d smash her head on the tabletop. Or worse, she’d continue over the table and onto the floor on the far side. But if she succeeded, she’d just have to let her head loll backward over the edge of the table. So she took a running start in her heather-colored dress and lifted herself onto the table, landing perfectly. Dizziness assailed her “but the stones had to settle,” she explained as she stood in the church later and watched Kate walk up the aisle toward Frank.