But as the men explained, there were dangers with Thai girls, too—dangers with any foreign girls, and maybe the Eastern Europeans were the worst. They only needed to stay married for five years to get residency, and then they could keep it after a divorce if their husband had abused them. So there were all these marriages, and then five years in—boom!—suddenly the girl was calling abuse. And what could the man do? Well, if he was the type to be inclined, he could get himself a new one.
“So that’s what I can do,” I said. The men had talked earlier about getting me citizenship, and with some trepidation I’d joined in the jokes. “Nils, will you marry me and then hit me once after five years?”
Nils was still staring at my breasts. “Yeah,” he said. Then he laughed a lot. He spread his arms wide. “My heart is open to you.”
“Oh, good.” Now I felt shitty.
“Seriously,” said Nils. “Everyone likes you. They think you’re pleasant.”
“I like them, too,” I said. But I wanted out of the conversation. There was some spark in it that I didn’t trust. Nils was looking at me too hard.
I excused myself from the table and walked outside, past the RVs and around the dock, where sheets of slate extended into the water. I sat down on a stone, which was damp enough to be cool without wetting my clothes. Below me, something small trailed rings at the edge of the water, an invisible rock skipping itself. The rest of the fjord was smooth.
I HAD HOPED, IN LILLEHAMMER, that I was more pleasant than Far made me out to be. In his house I was edgy, petty, inclined to disagree with everything he said. I could find no warmth to offer. It might have been a phase, hormones. It might have been homesickness. And maybe it was, to some degree. But I felt trapped in my own bristles.
Early in the school year I had befriended a girl named Sissel, who lived with her mother on the other side of the lake. Sissel was dark haired and authoritative, the kind of passionate explainer I’ve often been drawn to in new situations; she coached my accent tirelessly, and clarified at length any cultural reference that I didn’t immediately understand. She even dubbed me with a Norwegian name—the impenetrably dorky Målfrid—so that I needn’t disclose myself as American when meeting someone. While most of our classmates spent weekends getting drunk and hooking up in barns, Sissel organized small-scale costume parties that involved nonalcoholic punch, treasure hunts, and cake decorating. Of course I adored her.
When I confided in Sissel about my discomforts at home, she told her mom, who insisted that I come stay with them for a night or two. That afternoon I missed the bus, and had to ask my host parents for a ride to Sissel’s house. Mor seemed pleased that I had made a friend, but Far hardly spoke to me on the drive over. He seemed to view the sleepover as a sort of betrayal.
That night Sissel and her mom and I ate lasagna together, and afterward we watched a horror film on a basement projector. In the movie, a group of teenagers was trapped in a cabin in the woods, getting murdered one by one. When it was over we sprinted up the stairs to Sissel’s attic bedroom, squealing, and Sissel’s mom came up and tucked us in. She kissed Sissel and then came over to me, on the trundle bed, and pulled the duvet to my chin. She sat on the mattress beside me.
She opened her mouth and shut it again, and then, after a long moment, she reached out and laid a hand on my cheek. “You’re such a long way from home,” she said, then hesitated. “You can stay here whenever you want to.” Her fingers were cool, like my own mother’s, and suddenly I felt so cared for—it was an unexpected feeling. I fell in love a little bit. Then she sighed and stood up. Her hand was on the lamp when she froze.
The sound of a car pulling into the driveway outside. Now, silence. Sissel’s mom switched off the lamp and, in the darkness, walked to the window. Sissel and I got out of bed and peered from behind her.
In the dim moonlight it was possible to make out the shape of a vehicle in the driveway. The driver’s door opened and a figure stepped out. It shut the door carefully, making only a muffled thump, and stood looking up at the dark windows. Then it turned and walked around the side of the house. Everything was very still.
Sissel’s mom spoke quietly. “Girls, I’m going to get the phone. Stay right here.” Sissel squeezed my hand. Her mom came back up the stairs, holding the phone low so its glow couldn’t be seen through the window.
The figure appeared around the other side of the house, making its way to the car. It stopped and looked up again, right at us, and for an instant Far’s face caught the moonlight. Then he got in his car—no longer bothering to be quiet—and drove away. Sissel’s mom turned on the lamp again.
Outside, the street was still and shining, moonlight on frost.
The next morning, as we left to catch the school bus, Sissel’s mom gave me a hug. She repeated her words from the night before: “You can stay here whenever you need to.” I thanked her, but I had already decided not to come back. It didn’t feel right to involve her and Sissel in my problem, whatever that problem was.
But the problem had already found them. Far returned in daylight hours with a bouquet of flowers—to apologize, he said, for his behavior. Sissel’s mom, afraid to let him inside, accepted the flowers on the front step.
I wrote to the exchange organization, asking to be switched to a different family. The student liaison replied that Norwegians were notoriously unwelcoming, and thus host families in Norway were in short supply. She reminded me that families weren’t paid, that my family was hosting me out of pure kindness, that their feelings would be hurt if they learned that I wanted to leave them. She suggested that if I let go of my cultural preconceptions, there was no reason I couldn’t stay and work it out.
Far often reminded me, though I never mentioned to him my thoughts of leaving, that it was unlikely that any other host family would put up with me. He accused me of going cold, of refusing to participate in family activities, of failing to appreciate his generosity. These critiques I tried to ignore; anyway, they were mostly true. It was only when he criticized my parents, whom he had never met, that my body tensed with fury. How dare he suggest that they were abusive, or neglectful, or ignorant—judgments he based, he said, on my own ungrateful behavior? I’d stay calm until I was out of sight, then sit on my bed with my hands in fists. My parents were wonderful, and Far had no right to critique them—particularly since, when I tested the waters by griping about him in letters, my parents’ responses struck me as remarkably forgiving. How good they were, even to Far himself! They were beyond indebted to this stranger who had opened his home to their prickly teenage daughter.
Finally, one day, after gathering my courage, I wrote to my mother, explaining that I simply could not make peace with this family. I referred to Far as an asshole. I was not confident enough to articulate what, exactly, felt wrong, but I willed my mother to recognize that her “sheltered” daughter would not use such words lightly. As soon as I sent the e-mail, I felt an intense relief: the problem was no longer mine alone. I spent the next few hours in an impervious, if antsy, state, awaiting a response. When the answer came, I opened it immediately, though my hands were shaking.
I have to say that I am disappointed in you, my mother wrote. After all my host family had done for me, after how generous they’d been, she could not believe that I would describe them so rudely. My e-mail, she wrote, had been childish—even embarrassing. Her letter ended: I hope you are able to shape up.
It had never occurred to me that when I finally gathered the will to ask for help, help might not come; and I felt too shattered to try again, to explain more clearly something I couldn’t even define. My options, as I saw them, were to stay put and stop complaining, or come home and prove that I hadn’t been ready in the first place. There was a third option—changing host families, which my parents would have supported—but between the student liaison’s prior discouragement, my misgivings about moving into a new community and unknown family in the middle of the year, and a sudden fiery desire to prove myself, I hardl
y considered it. What if my new family was even worse—or what if Far was right, and they wouldn’t want to put up with me? At least in Lillehammer I had friends, a few souls watching out for me. My hurt galvanized into stubbornness: I would stay. That evening I took down my father’s bulldog picture and tore it into strips, wallowing in a self-righteous anger that felt, for the moment, a great deal more satisfying than my usual self-doubt and fear. Fuck them. From now on, I would keep my mouth shut. I didn’t need anybody’s help.
I found other ways to leave the house. I hung out with Sissel after school, and arranged to stay with a local “support family,” as administered by the exchange program, for one blissful night a week. On weekends I took the train to Oslo to visit my old friend Natasha, who had grown into a passionate, bitter fifteen-year-old. If I’d seen her on the street, I would never have connected this beautiful girl, with her designer jeans and city dialect, to the fiery child I’d once explored the streets with. Now she could walk into any bar, smile sedately, and leave with promises and business cards from the handsome men who gathered around her. And yet she disdained all of it. “These Norwegians,” she would say, lazily burning a business card with her cigarette, “they’re real assholes. Norwegians are such fucking assholes.” One time she came to my host family’s house, but the vitriol between her and Far was so instant and powerful that future visits were clearly out of the question. She never articulated what, exactly, precipitated her dislike, referring to Far only as “a terrible man with a peanut penis.” I envied her certainty.
It was with Natasha, in Oslo, that I first tasted vodka, swallowing the heat in my throat, and when she cheered I took another swig. She wanted to go dancing, and I wanted to do anything that would make me feel like I was in charge of my own risks. So I borrowed a miniskirt and a fake ID and together we snuck into the hottest clubs downtown, or at least the hottest clubs on side streets that weren’t frequented by cops. Natasha owned her body in a way I couldn’t imagine imitating, flirting with bouncers and gulping from bottles that strangers offered on the street. I followed her, trying to look confident, and kept my hand on the door handles of the illegal taxis we took home.
Back at Far’s house, I had stopped sleeping soundly; I startled at the smallest sound. I lay in bed and imagined the door cracking open, a line of light growing and shrinking against the far wall, the weight of footsteps. The sink of the mattress when he sat beside me. I didn’t imagine any further: Far’s presence in the darkness was enough. It was all I wanted. For a few minutes, with the ghost of his body beside me, I could know that he was wrong. I could know that the particular crazy I’d felt all year was justified, was not my fault. At some point my fear had exhausted itself, replaced with an underlying confusion that was somehow much worse. Now I wanted certainty more than safety. I wanted to know.
And then, for one moment of the year, I knew.
We were eating dinner, everybody around the kitchen table. I got up to get more water. As I crossed the room, Far stood and—in the context of some playful remark, which I failed to process, even at the time—he hooked my ankle with his foot, grabbed my arms, and knocked me to the floor. The length of his body rested on the length of mine. He twisted my arm, his elbow pressed into my chest. I caught my breath from the pain.
My dad and I had often wrestled over the years, trying to pin each other down on the living room carpet while my mom muttered about breaking things. We’d try to knock each other off balance, and I had no qualms about head-butting him in the stomach with all my lesser might. But in the thick of the game, the second I expressed hesitation—“ouch” or “stop” or “hey!”—he let go and backed up instantly. I was usually just bantering, and jarred by the sudden change; I never really meant for the fun to end. My father’s caution seemed like an endearing personality quirk, another way he worried too much about his only daughter, like when he wouldn’t let me wear nail polish—too toxic—or stand by the microwave while it was running. But on the occasion that I did want a break from wrestling, I took for granted that my father’s response would be immediate. It did not occur to me that someone wouldn’t stop if I asked him to. Surely Far didn’t realize that he was hurting me.
“Stop it,” I said. “That hurts.”
Far pressed down harder.
Never before had I felt that an adult was trying to physically injure me—and yet, even now, the rest of the family sat at the table, watching. I tried to roll away, to pull out of his grasp. But he was too strong, or I was too weak; I felt I was fighting a wall. Finally I went limp, my wrists still caught in his fist.
He started to laugh. And in that moment, I gave up. Far was too strong. I was too weak. It seemed clear that this was what he’d wanted me to know: that if he wanted, I wouldn’t be able to get away from him. If he hurt me, if he touched me, it would be his choice. And if he didn’t, that would be his choice, too.
My head was twisted, my left cheek pressed hard into the kitchen floor.
The floor was cold against my cheek.
Somehow, in the moment, that single fact crystallized into a clarity that had eluded me for the past half year. My cheek, I thought, should not be on the floor. And like a rising shout, the sentence repeated in my mind: My cheek should not be on the floor. My cheek should not be on the floor.
My cheek should not be on the floor.
I lay there, trapped beneath Far, but everything was different now. He was wrong. This was wrong, and I was right. All my confusion—it hadn’t been my fault. I was not paranoid, malicious, incapable of adjustment—all the qualities that I had, at times, attributed for my unhappiness. No. Far was wrong. Far’s behavior was wrong. I knew. I knew.
I wanted to laugh. I felt a burst of energy, almost joy. Far was wrong. My cheek should not be on the floor. I knew. When Far finally climbed off me, I rose to my feet weightless, as if lifted, and returned to my place at the table.
But the certainty didn’t last. Even that night, lying in bed, I struggled to recall the exact sensation, the conviction I had felt. The feeling of the cold floor on my cheek—that was as real as anything. But was Far wrong? He had been playing, after all, though I couldn’t remember how it had started. Maybe he was just bad at fun. Maybe pinning me down was an awkward attempt to make amends for our past tensions. Far might have meant nothing by it. He might have treated his own daughter the same way. Sometimes family members wrestled, and that was okay. How could I base my whole judgment of a person on—what? A few square inches of cold floor?
I raised my hand to my left cheek. It was smooth.
I hated Far in a soul-deep way, less for anything he’d done than for turning me against myself. Although his interactions with me, his suggestive comments and stolen touches, had escalated over my first months in the household, at some point everything stalled; we settled into barely civil cohabitation. I watched him, poised for anything that would give me an excuse to leave, to know that I had not imagined it all. He took any opportunity to condemn my character, to imply that the problems had been mine all along.
He must have felt my hatred. He must have sensed that he had come close to an edge. And through his easing of intimidation, and his endless criticisms, Far made me my own victim. I doubted myself so violently that I split into two: the part that was afraid, and the part that blamed myself for my fear. What more was there for him to do?
The year passed, if not easily then eventually. There were, of course, moments of grace: holidays at Sissel’s house, skating at the local ice rink, sleepovers with Natasha when we talked long into the dark. Not least of the grace was, for me, acquiring another language, held less in my mind than in my mouth. I became fluent in Norwegian so quickly that it felt more like remembering than learning, so that every sentence I spoke was a tiny thrill, proof that my connection to Norway—whatever it was, whatever I’d sensed—was real. But still, when the year ended, I was too tired to feel triumphant. I celebrated by promising myself that I’d never have to go back to Lillehammer again. I was wel
l aware of the privilege I’d been given, and yet something had failed, and I suspected it was me.
A WIND HAD COME UP while I sat by the fjord, and the water had grown rough. I shivered. It was too cold to stay put, but I didn’t want to go back to Nils and the other men, not yet. So I climbed under the dock and followed the beach toward Sand. The stones beneath me glittered in the light.
As I crossed the bridge over the Sand River, which divided the villages of Sand and Mortenhals, I stopped, as I always did, and gazed to my left. Across an overgrown pasture stood a red building with a peaked glass roof, a barn, a cone-shaped silo. There was nobody there now, and even if there had been, I might not have seen them around; the lives of the folk school students hardly overlapped with the lives of those who lived around them. As I stood there, a single dog howled, and the howl broke off into a series of short yips, then faded altogether.
It was this building, this school, that had brought me to Malangen in the first place. But I felt almost no connection to it anymore.
I turned and followed the driveway that ran beside the river to the front of the school. I passed little red cabins, and then, surrounded by a chain-link fence, the dog yard, which was lined with doghouses and smaller pens. It smelled of dust and urine and the particular faint scent of long-rotten scraps of meat. Through the fence I could see movement, rustling, furred bodies shifting in the cool air, biting halfheartedly at flies. I touched the tall gate, with its ironic yellow signs: Forbidden for Dogs and Contagious Animal Disease. But the dogs started to bark, excited at a stranger, so I stepped back and looked around.
No one was responding. No one had shoved a head out a window to yell Ti stille! Quiet! So I lifted the latch on the gate and walked into the center of the dirt enclosure.
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