Mirror, Shoulder, Signal

by Dorthe Nors

  “Don’t you want to talk about it?” Ellen asks.

  “About what? Where were we?”

  “Your love life.”

  “Oh that,” Sonja says, and then she doesn’t say anything, and it might be that that confuses Ellen, but so be it.

  In a lot of ways, thinks Sonja, Mom did me a disservice in believing I could just be myself. If I hadn’t been allowed to, then I’d be sitting right now with the whole package, but that train’s left the station. And if anyone does, Mom should know that you have to adapt if you’re going to entangle yourself in an intimate relationship. Kate knows that too. And Dad.

  Sonja looks down at the floor; she has no choice. She thinks of how Kate’s always been good at toiling. Just like Ellen, she’s busy making the lives of the disabled easier. She’s got two large boys who’ve flown the nest. She’s got a golden retriever and a membership in a gymnastics and fitness club. She bakes kringles and knits woolen stockings for Mom and Dad’s old feet.

  “You’re tensing up,” says Ellen.

  “Am I?”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “My sister, I think.”

  “Want to tell me about her?”

  Sonja raises herself a bit on her elbows. It’s her neck that’s tensing, and she catches sight of one of Ellen’s angels. This one’s got a string around its neck and hangs dangling in the window.

  “No, not really,” Sonja says. “It was just that business with the gearstick. Have you ever tried driving a car in Jutland?”

  Ellen has, and Sonja can see it before her: how good she is, at forward and reverse and parallel parking.

  “Have you noticed, then, how they drive with their dicks?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No really, they drive with their dicks. Like men: me first, me first, me first. The women too. Up on the ass of the driver in front of them, just perching there, waiting for there to be enough gap to squeeze through. On the long straight highways in Jutland, they drive in clumps with their bumpers a yard apart. There’s plenty of room for all, but still they drive in these little cliques of mutual harassment. My nephews drive that way—with their dicks, that is. All the way forward, hanging and breathing on the necks of their fellow drivers. There are more traffic fatalities in Jutland than anywhere else in Denmark. My mom and I were once overtaken on a side road by a woman who apparently sold Tupperware. It said TUPPERWARE on the car that roared past us anyway. My mom had to pull over on the shoulder afterward to gather her wits. Does it actually bother you that I use words like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like dick, for instance.”

  “Use whatever words you want.”

  Fine, thinks Sonja, face to face with Mickey Mouse on the floorboards. Dick and dick and dickety dick.

  It eases the joint of her jaw a bit when she makes herself vulgar. Coarse words are good for the mouth muscles, and she knows a slew of them too. She could let a torrent of filth gush forth in Ellen’s clinic.

  “I’m like my mom,” says Sonja. “We’ve got these rich, expansive inner worlds. We’re quite intelligent. But as women, we’re not completely fine-tuned.”

  The massaging hands slacken off on her neck. It’s as if she’s said something that could make a pin drop. Like a bolt of lightning, it’s driven all the air from the room, and Sonja lies there waiting for Ellen to throw herself into some interpretation. But she’s evidently passing up the chance.

  “So where at Bakken were you during the thunderstorm?”

  Sonja leaves out The Blue Coffeepot and the musicians from Ballerup. Now she and Ellen are good friends again. Sonja doesn’t need to add her wedge of cake to the mix. She doesn’t know if she enjoyed herself at Bakken, but it was better than following Ellen into the deer park, for the deer park’s not natural. The red deer are too tame, not like the huge herds that drifted across the far part of Dad’s land. They found their way into the root cellars, and it was good to sit out there and watch them ruminate. Their large ears, their gazelle nature, and what a winter’s day to walk among the firs. To wander as far out upon the heath as possible. Someplace out there, the whooper swans were alighting. The yellow bills, the long white necks, and, somewhere on the periphery, Dad’s deer stand awaits like a giant empty high-chair.

  It was a landscape full of power, Sonja thinks. Dad would sit there under the pretext of wanting to hunt. I’d sit there because it was the best place to be myself. But we both wanted the same thing. When you overcame the anxiety, and the boredom, you were alive there. Completely present. That’s how it was for Dad, while Mom had that place inside her, and I wanted both: the innermost and the outermost.

  Sonja regards Ellen through half-open eyes. From this position, she can’t see Ellen’s face with its heavy eyes, only her midriff. Ellen probably doesn’t realize it, but a quiet growling sound is coming from her throat. An agreeable sound, as she rubs away at Sonja, and aside from Sonja’s body it’s that power, the one you’d find in the farthest part, that Ellen wants to sink her fingers into. But you don’t find that sort of thing in a deer park. The name alone! thinks Sonja, and it isn’t something she could explain to Ellen. How would she know that some phenomena require an emptiness, a wilderness, a stillness in which people do not exist?

  “How’d it go with your meditation?” Sonja ventures.

  “We hid in a small thicket,” says Ellen.

  “You see any stags?”

  “Aren’t stags the big ones?” asks Ellen.

  They are, and now Sonja has to flip onto her back. Every time she flips on her back, Ellen starts talking about her dizziness as something psychosomatic.

  “It’s a case of imbalance.”

  “There is that, yes,” says Sonja.

  “And the imbalance has its origin in something spiritual. There’s something in your life that’s whirling around. Something that doesn’t know how to manifest itself.”

  “My doctor’s more of the opinion that there are tiny stones in my ears that have to settle into place.”

  “But doctors are doctors, you know.”

  And stones are stones, thinks Sonja.

  13.

  ABOVE ELLEN’S CLINIC IN VALBY, the sky has closed itself off. Sonja had been listening to the distant rumble while she lay on the massage table. Near the end she let herself doze off, but now she’s on her feet again.

  “It’s like trying to breathe underwater,” Ellen says, and she suggests that Sonja stay and drink tea until it passes over.

  But Ellen’s cat has entered the picture. The cat’s almost twenty years old and its coat is tufty, its gaze sallow. It must be some kind of Persian. It’s flat in the face, anyway, and sometimes when Sonja swings her legs over the edge of the table, it’ll be sitting in the doorway, staring at her. Sonja likes cats. The affectionate and playful ones, that is, but while dogs mirror their owners’ essence, Sonja doesn’t dare to think what this cat might represent.

  “It’s getting on in years,” Sonja says out in the hall.

  “Yeah, and things are going to start going downhill pretty soon,” Ellen says, looking worriedly at the cat, which is tottering at their heels. Then Ellen repeats her offer of a cup of tea. “I’d like to tell you about going to the States. To Southern California.”

  A light that Sonja hasn’t seen before goes on in Ellen’s face. Like a Christmas tree in the darkness of December.

  “California?” asks Sonja.

  “California, yes!”

  Ellen shelves all talk of tea, and now she’s telling Sonja that she and Anita from the deer park are going to San Diego. They’re going to see this woman with medical intuition. She’s famous, because she can tell what’s wrong with a person just by looking at them. But not only that; she can also tell why the person’s suffering from what they’re suffering. She’s especially good at finding the psychological causes of breast cancer.

  “If a woman doesn’t talk about stuff, it settles in her breasts.”

  �
�But women tend to talk about stuff a lot,” says Sonja.

  “The important stuff. Emotional life, sexuality. Relationships with their mothers and fathers. With kids and boyfriends.”

  “With everything?”

  “Yes, you could say that.”

  Sonja can’t avoid thinking about Kate and the stamped envelope in her bag. Never in her life would she send it. She just pretends that she could, but the notion that not wanting to send the letter might have an effect on the development of breast cancer makes the atmosphere sticky. There’s also something muddy in the cat’s gaze.

  “This intuitive woman works with the relationship between life stories and case histories. We have to get things out in the open. Out of the body, all of it.”

  Ellen’s making dismissive gestures with her hands. She does that frequently. As if the bad things within us could be cast away if only we could grasp them with our hands. Yes, if only they were graspable.

  “I once talked to a fortune teller,” Sonja says without really wanting to.

  “Really?” says Ellen, brightening up.

  “Yes, I didn’t believe what she said of course, but then I began to believe anyway, because—well, because I was worried about the future, and because I have the sense that she promised me that I had one. In fact I can’t remember what she said. I’ve repressed it, I think.”

  A star appears on the top of Ellen’s inner Christmas tree; she smells of fir, light green. Sonja’s going to let her inside now; they’re going to share this.

  “That sounds significant,” Ellen whispers.

  “Maybe,” says Sonja. “She said in any case that I’d be unlucky in love, and then I was. But I’ve forgotten the rest. Sometimes at night I’m afraid she said something terrible, and that’s why I can’t remember it. And then other times, I’m anxious that she might have said something marvelous, and that it’s dangerous to remember because then it won’t happen. I don’t believe in fortune-telling. Not at all. But if you don’t believe in the occult, you can’t guard against it. It’s a strange paradox. Almost a catch-22.”

  Ellen leans her face in toward Sonja’s.

  “The seeress is an ancient figure,” she says.

  The cat attempts to drape herself around Ellen’s foot. It’s an ancient figure too, and now there’s definitely a booming in the distance.

  “Yes, but it’s such a long journey,” says Sonja. “To San Diego, I mean. I imagine you’ll take a little time to look around while you’re there?”

  “We leave on Friday and fly back Sunday evening.”

  Sonja’s obviously not quite getting this.

  “Meaning a bit more than a week?”

  “No, from Friday to Sunday.”

  “You’re going to San Diego for a long weekend?”

  “Yes.”

  Sonja doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t need to say anything either. Judging by her expression, Ellen knows this is utter madness.

  “If you’re really passionate about something, you have to seize the chance,” she says.

  To illustrate, Ellen sticks her hand out and squeezes Sonja’s upper arm. Sonja doesn’t care for this contact and has an urge to yank back her arm, to defend herself.

  “But three days?” Sonja asks, and she rubs her arm where Ellen’s released it.

  “If you’re really passionate about something, you seize the chance,” Ellen says again, and Sonja takes a small step back toward the doorframe. She’s afraid that Ellen will take it into her head to throw her arms around Sonja and pull her into an embrace. She’s afraid of the light in Ellen’s eyes, the door behind her that might spring open any moment and reveal how things actually stand, and Sonja really doesn’t know her. She doesn’t want to know her either. She wants to have Ellen’s powerful hands on her, not around her, no, she doesn’t want to be captured, and she manages to avoid being touched again. Instead, Ellen’s telling her how, by placing people in a circle around her, the medically intuitive woman can see the future in their connective tissue.

  “See the future?”

  “Yes. Connective tissue is a kind of network that weaves in and out between all your organs, bones, and joints. The connective tissue connects everything. They’ve discovered that connective tissue can resist cancer cells, even though cancer always starts in the connective tissue. It’s got that strange duality, but that’s only because it’s also connected to spiritual conditions. The connective tissue’s like a sheet of paper where we write down everything that’s unsayable, and then it develops into cancer for instance. Traumas reside in the connective tissue; they never leave the body. And when you get dizzy for example, it’s because your connective tissue is trying to tell you something.”

  An intriguing theory, thinks Sonja, holding her breath as Ellen’s eyes look searchingly at her. Sonja’s supposed to let herself be carried along. Then they can rise from the ground together, and maybe Ellen’s just as capable of crying as she is of standing there lighting up. Sonja doesn’t know, she only knows she doesn’t want to be involved. She’s not paying four hundred crowns an hour to be involved.

  Sonja grasps the doorknob. The relief she got from saying dick on the massage table has dissipated; her jaw’s tense again.

  “Medical intuition’s the future,” Ellen says. “Modern medicine is bankrupt.”

  Sonja glances down at Ellen’s cat. It looks like the seed head of a cattail that someone’s begun to pluck the down from.

  “So now Anita and I are taking off,” Ellen adds, following Sonja halfway out the door. “I’m telling you this only because you won’t be able to come to massage next week.”

  It’s rumbling over Valby, and Ellen’s inner Christmas tree has burst into flame. Sonja says that, thunder or no thunder, she’s got to get biking. Ellen can’t persuade her to have a cup of tea, no. They take their leave out on the patio, Sonja wishing her happy trails, and a moment later she’s on her bike. She’s still in the residential area when the first drops fall. A short time later the sky lashes out, and a vast exchange commences between the earth and sky.

  14.

  THERE’S A SPOT among the fashionable boulevards of Ellen’s neighborhood where someone’s erected a shelter. Inside the shelter is a bench. The idea is for locals to sit there and share a cold one. But the sort of locals who’d like to sit in the open with a cold one can’t afford this neighborhood, so they live elsewhere. Sonja’s bike leans up against the shelter while she sits within, listening to the thunder.

  Medical intuition and cosmic forces, she thinks, feeling a tad soiled. As if she’d gone home with a charlatan, yes, as if loneliness had made her a salesman’s easy mark. A trace of incense is clinging to her, but it might as well be Magic Tree air freshener, bad cologne, a backseat blanket, and gunk between her thighs.

  San Diego?

  The things that drive people.

  That shaman that Molly ran around with for a while, the Belgian, was as white and spindly as a tapeworm and nearly as voracious. He trotted around Hareskoven, beating on drums and tossing sage around. The son of a civil servant in Brussels, yet utterly capable of casting a curse in the Danish suburbs. A narrow margin of uncertainty about the true nature of everything can create all manner of anxiety in the world, thinks Sonja, for Molly wanted the shaman to take her from behind. He should come when she called and take her for a good canter. The lawyer might be a good father, but Molly was more into magic pokers. It was passion, she’d claim at the time, and yet she’d grow fearful when she broke it off. Then she’d hasp the windows tight, or sit with Sonja at a café and whimper. She’d wonder how the shaman could have seduced her. Her, a psychologist, and Sonja found it peculiar as well. Yet who am I to judge, thinks Sonja, recollecting the fortune teller’s curry-yellow presence in Molly’s kitchen.

  I wish I could remember my future, she thinks. But I also wish I could forget that she gave me one. If she did give me one.

  The heavens thunder and lighten. One strike after another, rolling in from the so
uth. The rain hammers the asphalt, and the more it rains, the more Sonja’s sense of discomfort from over at Ellen’s dissipates.

  Thunder’s a good thing. While Mom sat with her and drank thunder joe up in the dormer window, Dad preferred to run around down in the living room. He’d pull the plugs from the TV equipment and make sure to keep away from windows. It was no good to put him out in the car and assure him it was safe. “I’m still in contact with the ground,” he’d say. That four radial tires stood between him and the big shock meant nothing to his intellect. In Dad’s head, he was always touching the ground. If they were lucky, Mom and Sonja, and he wasn’t home when there was lightning, they’d shuck off their shoes. Then they’d wade around in the pond that the rain formed in the courtyard while Kate screamed at them to get out.

  It’s strange, actually, that we dared to, thinks Sonja now. As if we couldn’t die from that sort of thing, but then of course we didn’t die.