The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman

by Louise Plummer

  “Easy,” she said. “You’re a caretaker.”

  This sounded like a label she’d picked up in a psychology class.

  “What do you mean—caretaker?” And was that good or bad? I wondered.

  “Well, you’re nice. Too nice, maybe. You want her to feel good. You’re willing to overlook a lot And it’s helped that the two of you have absolutely nothing in common—you never had to compete over anything or anybody.” She paused. “Until last Christmas, that is. That’s when you saw her for what she really is—B-I-T-C-H.” When Shannon spelled, it meant her little brother was in the room.

  Was that right? I tried to think.

  “Are you working on your novel?” Shannon asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe you ought to tell about that third-grade birthday party of Ashley’s—the one without the pony. You must have told me that story a dozen times when I first met you in middle school. It was your way of explaining why she had to eat lunch with us. I thought she was a case of strychnine myself.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Write it and see how it feels.” She was quoting Midgely.

  So here goes nothing—the story of how Mr. Cooper left Ashley and Mrs. Cooper forever on Ashley’s ninth birthday: he left without eating any cake and it was his favorite kind, caramel with whipped marshmallow frosting—the shiny kind.

  I was there along with a half dozen other girls from Falcon Heights Elementary School, standing on the porch looking for prizes that had been hidden earlier among the flowerpots and wicker furniture. We were also waiting for Mr. Cooper to arrive with the pony that was to be the event of the party. “Everyone can have a turn riding it,” Ashley had told us.

  But Mr. Cooper arrived in his red Mustang convertible without the pony. He had Tom Cruise good looks: that same easy smile.

  “Daddy, where’s the pony?” Ashley’s voice rose with an anxiety that made my own stomach knot up.

  “Oh, Piglet, I forgot.” He patted her head, his smile bewildered as if he hadn’t heard of Planet Earth, let alone any pony. He seemed surprised to see us. “I’ve got to talk to Mommy, Sweetums,” he said, jumping the stairs two at a time.

  From the porch we heard Mr. and Mrs. Cooper shouting in the kitchen at the back of the house. Ugly shouting with name-calling and blaming. I hunted furiously for the prizes on the porch and found a ball and jacks. “Oh, this is great!” I said to Ashley. I can’t hear your parents was what I wanted to say.

  “This is cool,” Ivy Joy Miles said, turning a yo-yo in her fingers. She too looked at Ashley as if to say I can’t hear them. Honest.

  Ashley, a half-smile creasing her lips, was twitching behind her skin. “I chose the prizes myself,” she said.

  Her father left in ten minutes. Ten minutes that seemed like three hours. He called Mrs. Cooper “one glorious bitch.” It is seared into my memory. Then he left. “See ya, kitten,” he said, his voice completely altered from the loud cursing of seconds before. “See ya, girls.” He even waved.

  “What about the cake? It’s your favorite!” Ashley called to him.

  “Later, Piglet.” He was already in his car, revving it. He spun out, spitting pebbles onto the sidewalk. Happy Birthday, Ashley.

  THIS WRITING BUSINESS can be depressing. I don’t want to think about Ashley and her motives for doing what she does. I don’t really want her to be a rounded character. I don’t want to think about her pathetic ninth-birthday party and the pain behind her eyes when her father left for good. I don’t want to take care of that pain any longer by being her friend. I don’t want readers taking pity on her for one second. I want to damn her to hell. Maybe I could have her murdered—in the novel, at least. It would be a wonderful catharsis for me to have her run over by a semi. I could write it in great detail. Spend paragraphs on it. She’d be flattened roadkill, her blood oozing into the street.

  I thought I was finished emotionally with Ashley, but she’s come back like vomit. I can’t write another word.

  When I returned home from shopping in Chapter Six, Fleur and Richard, both wearing aprons, were fixing dinner. “Your parents went to a party tonight, so we’re baby-sitting you,” Richard said. “Think of us as your parents now.” He threw some scallions into the food chopper and turned it on.

  “I get to be the father,” Fleur yelled over the chopper.

  “That goes without saying. We all know you’ve had a certain kind of envy all your life and recognize your needs—”

  “You don’t have to speak in euphemisms for me,” I said. “I’ve read Freud.” I placed my packages on the kitchen table and took off my parka.

  “Our baby is precocious,” Richard said. He set a tray of taco chips and bean dip on the table.

  “She takes after her father,” Fleur said, laughing. “Moi!”

  “Ahh, but her beauty comes from me, her mother,” Richard said.

  Fleur turned and pretended to look me over carefully. “She has your thighs, all right.” She laughed harder.

  “My thighs are nothing compared to his thighs,” I said. “His thighs are gorgeous!” They laughed at my imitation, but then I felt guilty. Sort of.

  Bjorn appeared. “What’s all the noise in here?” he said, affecting good humor.

  “Nothing much,” Richard said, “just general admiration for my thighs.”

  “Good grief.”

  “Is Trish okay?” Fleur asked. “Dinner will be ready in about twenty minutes—enchiladas.”

  “Oh sure.” Bjorn shrugged. “She’ll be down in a minute. You guys ready to trim the tree?” He didn’t sound nearly as enthusiastic as he had that morning. “I guess we should wait for Mom and Dad, huh?”

  “They won’t be back until late,” I said.

  “I’m your mom now,” Richard said.

  Bjorn rolled his eyes.

  “Your real mom said to trim the tree without them,” Fleur said.

  Bjorn nodded. “Okay then,” he said. “I’ll go see if Trish is coming down.” He took a chip off the tray and left again.

  Richard whistled softly. “Methinks there is trouble in paradise.” He opened the oven door for Fleur, who lowered the dish of enchiladas into the oven.

  “There’s always trouble in paradise,” she said.

  * * *

  TRISH AND BJORN both chattered through dinner, but not with each other. Their eyes never met. Their conversation was constrained, fake. It was exhausting.

  Trimming the tree was even worse. It visibly depressed Trish to be around Bjorn’s chosen spruce. Mostly she watched the rest of us from the window seat, turning occasionally to gaze at the falling snow, a half-sullen expression on her face. To make up for Trish, Bjorn grew hyper. He talked nonstop: “You know when we were little, I had this Matchbox city built up under the tree—remember that … Rich? And Boo would come around and want to stick those little cars in the tree. She thought they were ornaments. It’d make us so mad. We’d get all the little cars lined up just the way we wanted them, and she’d come along, and, bingo, suddenly all the cars were in the tree again!” Abnormally loud laughter from him. We all smiled and nodded, except for Trish, who looked out at the snow.

  “I never had Matchbox cars of my own,” I said.

  “Boo should have been a boy. She’s tall and pretty athletic and she always liked boys’ games …” Blather, blather, blather. I wished he would put a lid on it.

  Fleur rolled her eyes.

  The tree, which had to be trimmed at the top, reached the ceiling, and when it was decorated, it really was pretty spectacular-looking, or maybe it was just that it was the kind of tree Bjorn and I had grown up with. Bjorn certainly was pleased. “Isn’t it great, honey?” he asked Trish, after turning on the tree lights and turning off the overhead lights. It was the first time he had addressed her directly all evening. He was hoping for forgiveness. I could tell. “Great, isn’t it—hon?”

  Trish turned her head slowly, her arms crossed in front of her as if she were cold. “
It’s perfect,” she said flatly, and then she got up and left the room. The bedroom door closed upstairs.

  So Bjorn decided it was time for Russian tea again and heated some up, ranting the whole time. If I’d had a stake, I would have thrust it through his heart and called it a mercy killing. Sure must be fun to be a newlywed at Christmastime.

  We went to bed early. “I think I’d like to be thoroughly unconscious now,” Fleur said. Amen and amen.

  I awoke to voices. At first I thought it must be Mother and Dad coming home, but soon realized that it was Bjorn and Trish arguing. “Not so loud!” Bjorn was saying. “Do you want everyone in the house to hear you?”

  “I don’t care who hears me.” Trish’s voice rose hysterically. “The only time you ever listen to me is when I yell. You never listen! You never ask my opinion about anything.”

  I reached for my glasses, sat up, and peered across the room at Fleur. She was sleeping soundly. I wondered if she’d taken a sleeping pill.

  “I will not be rational!” Trish’s voice filled the house.

  I searched for my robe at the end of the bed and stepped quietly into the hall.

  “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t know it was such a big deal.” Bjorn’s voice was lower, but not low enough. I didn’t want to hear any of this. I wanted them to be like they were last summer on Maui: affectionate, humorous. I wanted them to be the prince and princess again: Trish with orchids in her hair, her bare shoulders glittering, Bjorn weighed down with leis around his neck. Was this just a few months later, this living happily ever after?

  I crept down the stairs, remembering what Midgely had said last year in junior English: “Comedies end in marriage, but tragedies frequently begin with marriage.” He was already sick then, already bald, already too thin. “But”—he had smirked good-naturedly at us—“it’s the tragedy that makes life rich—” His voice had caught slightly. “Worth living.”

  The falling snow combined with the streetlamp outside lit the living room enough so that I could see a figure sitting in the window seat. I turned to go back, feeling too awkward to disturb him. “Boo?” he called.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I just wanted to get away from—”

  “I know. Me too. Come over. It’s quiet here.”

  I sat, my back against the window frame, facing him. He wore a white T-shirt, gray sweats, and white socks. No shoes. I suppose if I were following the phrase book’s lead, I’d have to admit that I was aware of the “muscles rippling under his white shirt” and also admit that it “quickened” my pulse a little. I’d never been alone with Richard before. Never sat in the half-light of the window seat with him. It felt intimate. So intimate that I was afraid to speak and watched the snow instead. When I turned my head, he was watching me. I swallowed hard. “So,” I said, “what’s your tree of choice?” I suddenly knew how Bjorn felt. I needed to hear noise even if I had to make it myself.

  He smiled. “Spruce, but I hope I’m open to other suggestions. You?”

  “Well”—I thought for a second—“I’m quite partial to those aluminum trees with the fluorescent pink balls and pink lights—ones that spin slowly on a pedestal.”

  “I guess you’ll decorate your living room to look like McDonald’s.”

  “I’m very fond of orange vinyl seating, as a matter of fact—with matching oak veneer.”

  “Remind me not to marry you,” he said.

  “Don’t marry me,” I said.

  “And don’t have my children,” he said.

  “Don’t have a rich and satisfying life with me,” I said.

  “Don’t ever kiss me,” he said.

  “Never,” I said.

  “Shake on it.” We held hands longer than was necessary to solidify our pact. Or maybe it was a pact of its own.

  His gaze returned to the street. “I saw Midgely today. I wouldn’t have recognized him.”

  I enjoyed his face in profile. “He isn’t teaching this year, you know.”

  “Your mother told me, but I’m not surprised. I’ve never seen anyone look so sick—didn’t even know anyone could be that sick and alive at the same time.” His voice faltered. “Know what he said about you?” He turned.

  “That I had the world’s silliest backhand?”

  “No. He said, and I quote: ‘Kate Bjorkman is one of the true champions.’ ”

  I laughed. “He says that about everyone.” But I was pleased. “Besides, I’m not that good a tennis player.”

  He drew in his lips thoughtfully. “I don’t think he was talking tennis.”

  “Mouse player?”

  He laughed then. “Yes, that must be it. Kate Bjorkman is a true champion mouse player. That’s what he meant.”

  “Midgely always makes me think of Dylan Thomas,” I said. “I don’t know if he did this with you guys, but he spent weeks on Thomas’s poetry last year—and we were supposed to be studying American lit.”

  Richard nodded. “ ‘The Force That Through the Green Fuse—’ ”

  “ ‘Drives the Flower,’ ” I finished with him.

  “Did he make you memorize the whole thing?” Richard asked.

  “All twenty-two lines.”

  “I miss him already.”

  “Mmm.”

  It had stopped snowing. It was piled three feet high on the lawn and even higher along the curb where the snowplows had pushed it out of the street. Halos glimmered around the streetlamp. My breath frosted the window when I leaned my forehead against it.

  “Guess who else we visited?” Richard slapped the now famous thighs. “Dr. Bybee!”

  “You’re kidding. I didn’t know Mother gave him tulips—”

  “I don’t think she does normally, but I was telling her how unusual it must be to have a guy with a doctorate in music teaching in elementary school, and I was carrying on about learning to play the recorder in third grade—”

  “I still have mine!” I couldn’t help saying.

  “And about the annual spring concert—we did a whole Gershwin program when I was in fifth grade.” He grinned. “Anyway, your mother took me to see him and he made me play recorder duets with him. Not only that, he made your mother and Fleur play too.”

  I shrieked and then covered my mouth. “Mother and Fleur? Really?”

  He laughed at the memory. “He had them playing ‘Jingle Bells’ within ten minutes.”

  I jumped up. “Come on, we have to play.” I grabbed his arm and led him across the living room and into Dad’s study, where I turned on the overhead light. We both squinted in the brightness. “They’re over here.” I pulled out the bottom drawer of Dad’s credenza and pulled out two wooden soprano recorders—mine and Bjorn’s. “Here,” I said, handing Richard one. “There’s music in here too.” I pulled out “Easy Christmas Songs for the Recorder,” along with an old folded-up music stand my mother had bought at a garage sale years ago, and set it up in front of the love seat, where Richard was already sitting. I sat next to him. “What do you want to start with?”

  He smacked his lips and tried a scale and then grinned at me. “Just start at the beginning,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “ ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.’ ” I turned and looked at him. “Ready?”

  He nodded. His foot began to tap. “And one and two and three and four—”

  We began. I felt a giggle rising in me and struggled to restrain it. We played most of three measures and then, caving into each other, broke into loud guffawing. We made these involuntary pig snarking noises in the backs of our throats, which made us laugh even harder. Snark, snark, gasp and snark.

  That’s how my parents found us: collapsed and howling.

  “You kids been in the liquor cabinet?” Dad asked.

  I shook my head. “We’ve been p-p-playing the r-r-r—these.” I held up the recorder and continued snorting.

  “You sound like Porky P-P-Pig,” Richard snorted and got hysterical all over again.

  Then Fleur appeared, wearing paja
mas with feet in them.

  “Did they wake you up?” Mother asked Fleur.

  “As a matter of fact, no. Believe it or not, something louder is going on upstairs.”

  Remembering Bjorn and Trish’s fight, Richard and I sobered up to some degree. We explained the situation to my parents.

  “Oh dear,” Mother said. “Well, we might as well stay down here until they’re finished. Newlyweds should be left to themselves for the first fifteen years, don’t you think, Nels?”

  “I think they should be left alone for twenty-five years.” My father slung his arm around Mother’s shoulder.

  “Don’t you think you should go up? Talk to them or something?” I asked. “They might get a divorce over a stupid Christmas tree.”

  Mother, removing her overcoat, said, “It’s hard to be newly wed.”

  “My experience with newlyweds is that they should be gassed,” Fleur said.

  Mother struggled to find the appropriate expression.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” Fleur’s fingers covered her mouth when she saw Mother’s sagging jaw. “I didn’t mean Trish and Bjorn. My parents—that is, my mother is going to be newly wed for the sixth time on New Year’s Day. One of her husbands once called her a silver-lined slut. My father’s third marriage is breaking up even as we speak. His last wife broke his head open with a blender. I was thinking about them.”

  “Oh dear,” Mother said again. “And poor Bjorn and Trish upstairs bludgeoning each other over a tree. We’d really better go up and knock on the door.”

  My father nodded. “Good night,” he said, taking Mother’s arm.

  “Do you guys want to go back to bed?” I asked Fleur and Richard.

  Fleur shook her head. “I’d rather give them a little time.” She sat down in Dad’s desk chair. “You guys play. I’ll enjoy.”

  Richard and I, after a half dozen false starts, interrupted by fits of giggling, mostly mine, played peaceful songs of a town called Bethlehem, a baby called Jesus, and winged singers called angels. Silently I prayed for peace upstairs.