On the bus home, Dad talks about the moose.
Maybe the moose wanted to be an engineer, Ninne suggests. Dad laughs and makes up a long story about the moose who wanted to be an engineer; the tale lasts for several evenings. The bus passes Enskede high school, where the moose started its education.
They applied for a place at Enskede, but her grades weren’t good enough.
She didn’t get a place anywhere else either, but she doesn’t care. She and Ninne have been inside the gym at Enskede high school. Thanks to Mom, they attended ballet lessons there. A sour smell of sweat. Lots of girls, all in tulle skirts. Five positions with the feet, and plié!
One evening Mom takes her to a concert. They sit in what Mom refers to as the gods. The seats are so high up she feels dizzy. She can hear the murmur of voices from the audience far below; the people are so small they look like dolls. She can’t even see the musicians.
This is where Mom used to sit with her friends from the Academy of Music. She talks about them. About Jussi Björling, the singer, who walked her home after a visit to the cinema and kissed her. About Dag Wirén, the composer; Mom was in love with him. The only thing wrong with him was the ridiculous belt on his coat.
The musicians are squeaking away down there; it sounds dreadful. She remembers Mom’s comment about Dad’s mom, who once said, They scrape and scrape away with their bows, but do they get anywhere? She is probably as unmusical as her grandmother. When she listens to serious music, that shutter deep inside her ear comes down.
At long last the concert begins. Mom closes her eyes and revels in the experience. The girl is bored to death. Afterward they plod through the darkness to catch the number 4. The blue streetcar passes the Royal Palace. She would like one of the princesses to get on, preferably Princess Désirée, who is older than her. Princess Christina would be okay too. If a princess sat down and started chatting to her, she would end up in a fairy tale. Princesses don’t really travel by streetcar.
So it’s not going to happen. After the palace comes the Stomatol sign, with neon toothpaste squirting onto the toothbrush. It’s fantastic! The whole city is covered in gooey toothpaste. At the last moment the sign goes off, unfortunately.
They change to the bus, then they hobble home along Årstavägen.
She ought to be happy. She has her hand tucked under Mom’s arm, and Mom is leaning heavily on her for support. Beneath the snow the ice is treacherous. Change to the left foot. She changes. Mom hates Årsta and the isolation. She wants to go to concerts, to the theater. Dad isn’t really interested; he often drops off to sleep at concerts.
This evening as they limp home from the concert, she and Mom, making sure she uses the correct leg to keep in time, she feels the self-loathing sloshing around inside her. The concert tried her patience, but she ought to be happy.
Mom took her along, not Ninne.
Over and over again she decides to be happy. I’m really, really happy! Like Pollyanna. It doesn’t work, so she has invented the paper doll. You can dress and undress a paper doll as you wish. She pretends that she is a paper doll. Mom wants to know if she enjoyed the concert.
The paper doll replies, Oh yes! Mom squeezes her arm affectionately and talks about the freedom in the music. Apparently it contains all the emotions for which there is no room in reality. She finds it difficult to understand what Mom means, but she nods anyway.
They turn off Årstavägen and walk under the dark arch leading to the supermarket. The snow is deeper here, and by the statue of the naked woman in the park Mom stumbles and falls. The girl is so terrified that her heart stops.
She manages to help Mom to her feet. Together they brush the snow off her coat. Mom swears; she is furious. Not because she fell; she is cursing her own uselessness. You shouldn’t get ideas above your station.
The stars glimmer high in the sky; the light looks as if it is shimmering through thousands of tiny pinholes. They are small and cold, and yet it shines more brightly than the lights in the windows of the apartment block. It is absolutely freezing. I’m an old cripple, Mom goes on. Good for nothing.
They still have the long, icy hill on Siljansvägen ahead of them. That’s not true, the paper doll replies, you’ll be fine. Come on. They keep on limping. I’m not even any use as a mother. You’re the best mom in the whole wide world, the paper doll exclaims with conviction. The distance between them is just as great as the distance to the stars. How are they going to get up the hill? The paper doll is determined to do it.
It is not possible to be entirely truthful.
You can’t transfer what is on the inside to what shows on the outside. When they get home, Dad has fried Falun sausage and saved them some. The chunks of sausage look lonely, sitting there in grayish-white grease. Everyone is like that, she thinks. Each one of us is alone in a pool of congealing fat.
My mother was in a “convalescent home.” For several weeks, presumably. I can’t claim to recall the circumstances. The memory flickers past like a wisp of gray smoke. It was something that was never talked about, but my mother was definitely in something called a convalescent home with her mom and dad. They took her there because of her severe depression. Wasn’t the home in Rimbo?
She turns eleven. She is now expected to look after her sisters when her parents aren’t home. When they have gone to bed she sits on the floor in the study where her father sleeps and finds the section on the sex organs in The Housewife’s Home Doctor.
Then she positions herself in front of the mirror in the living room.
Only the lamp above the green couch which serves as Mom’s bed is lit. Her eyes in the mirror look feverish, gleaming like the eyes of a wild animal deep in the forest. Like the wolves in The Children of Frostmo Mountain. She pulls off her pajamas. A great deal has happened since the last time. Her nipples are no longer small and hard.
Something unknown is eating its way out of her body.
From the inside. That’s actually how it feels.
She cups her hands over the breasts she doesn’t yet have; she can sense a curve, something tender. She touches the bead of flesh between her legs. It brings a wave of heat, a shiver of fear, a stab of anticipation.
She lies down on the kitchen sofa and continues to explore the bead.
Recently she has touched it several times, usually very briefly before practicing her clown skills, such as bringing one leg up to the back of her neck from behind, forming the shape of a bow. But tonight she is obsessed.
Her belly is tingling as if she were on a roller-coaster at the Gröna Lund amusement park. She hasn’t read about this feeling in any book. She is doing something you shouldn’t do. She can’t help it. She can’t talk to anyone about this.
Admittedly she has made some friends by now, like Marianne on Dellensvägen. She talks to Marianne about anything and everything. They found used rubbers on Årsta Field, and Marianne had an explanation at the ready. Some kind of fluid seeps out of guys, which means they have to wear a rubber over their wiener so their pants don’t get wet.
They use a stick to pick up a rubber and examine it carefully.
But there is no way she can talk to Marianne about what she is doing now. She thinks she is the only person in the whole wide world who fiddles with herself like this. She knows she shouldn’t do it. She knows she is doing something forbidden.
Nobody has told her, but she knows anyway.
The punishment comes the following summer.
They have borrowed her grandparents’ summer cottage, and some of the children from next door have come over to play tag. During the game her belly starts aching. She bites her lip to help her cope with the pain.
When she pulls down her panties in the outside toilet, she discovers to her horror that they are stained with something brown. She sticks her finger inside her and it comes out brown too. Like shit. But it isn’t coming out of the hole at the back; it is coming from the front. She examines the bead; thanks to the Home Doctor, she knows it is called the clit
oris. Is that where the brown stuff is coming from? So it seems.
She has contracted a serious illness. She has brought it upon herself. It’s because she rubbed the bead; that’s why she has to keep quiet about it. When the kids from next door have finally gone home, she clambers into the skiff by the jetty.
She takes off her panties and tries to wash away the stains. The skiff bobs up and down in the swell from the boats. She almost falls overboard when the steamboat from town passes by. The water is ice cold. The pain is agonizing.
She scrubs away in despair; the stains are still there.
What is she going to do? Row out to sea, heading toward Finland, and drown. By the time her skeleton is found, the fish will have eaten her panties and no one will be able to accuse her of anything. Will they miss her? She hopes so, and the thought sweetens her misery a little. It is absolutely impossible to get rid of the stains.
What on earth are you doing? Mom is standing on the jetty, wearing those horrible men’s corduroy pants. There is no chance of hiding the terrible thing that has happened. Not a word about the fiddling, never. But she has to come clean about the stains.
Mom laughs, although she doesn’t sound particularly happy, and tells her that it’s her time of the month. What does that mean? Mom says it’s menstruation, the curse, her period. Unusually early, she says, you’re only eleven, but it probably runs in the family. According to Mom, girls mature more quickly in the tropics, where Granny comes from.
The fact that women bleed is nothing new.
She read about it in the Home Doctor. In The Emigrants some of them actually bleed to death. But is this brown stuff supposed to be blood? Mom digs out something crocheted and disgusting to wear between her legs. After dinner she is drying the dishes when Mom unexpectedly gives her half a bar of Marabou milk chocolate.
Because you’ve become a woman.
Has she? Mom sounds a little sarcastic. She can hear her sisters yelling upstairs. Outside, darkness is falling. Through the half-open door leading to the dining room she can see her father, absorbed in his papers as usual. He is sitting in a warm circle of light from the ceiling lamp, which has a fringe made of tiny glass beads.
He makes her feel safe; he is rarely as impatient as Mom. But at that moment, as she stands in the doorway and catches sight of her father, she is overwhelmed by a sense of shame that is worse than anything she has ever experienced: long, hot waves of shame. Please don’t let him find out. But Mom is bound to tell him, of course.
They will laugh at her behind her back. She is alone and disgraced and more isolated than ever before, at the mercy of the authorities and abandonment.
Before this happens—before she is stricken with the horrors of menstruation—she learns that she has gotten a place at the high school in Hökarängen after all.
She actually receives the telegram while she is staying with her grandparents in the country; her mother sends it on from town. First of all it is read out to her over the wind-up telephone, then the postman turns up on his bicycle with the real thing.
Congratulations to our high school girl! With a picture of a Swedish flag. Mom is obviously delighted. So is Granny. Another new school? She feels like the moose who got trapped and then shot. She doesn’t want to start all over again.
She is standing on the pier waiting for the steamboat bringing her mother from town. Mom has to stop this happening, make sure she doesn’t have to change schools.
The boat is still some distance away when she spots her beautiful mother, standing on the foredeck with her face turned up to the sun, wearing a red jacket that glows like a traffic light. She feels a physical pain in her chest; she has missed her mother so much. The longing is fierce, immeasurable.
Is that the way it was? Yes. That was before I began to menstruate. I dug out the memory of my longing on the steamboat pier much later, when I thought I had never yearned for my mother.
The strength of the emotion within the memory convinced me that wasn’t the case. Feelings have an archaeology; you can dig down, discover new things.
And a child is an hourglass, measuring out the life of an adult. Mom had just turned forty, and was beginning to feel old. She was unprepared for the fact that I was growing so fast, and perhaps a little disturbed by it. We never talked about it. Never.
Menstruation: I avoided the word for many, many years.
The next time it happens is in Årsta. Mom is sitting in the living room, darning socks. She glances up and her expression freezes slightly.
Aha, she says dryly, putting aside the darning mushroom. From her mother’s tone of voice, she gathers that they are both equally embarrassed. Perhaps Mom had hoped that the ordeal wouldn’t be repeated.
This time she is given a sanitary towel made of fabric. She has to wear a cotton belt around her waist, with two thin pieces hanging down that pass through the loops at either end of the towel, holding it in place. It’s very complicated, and the belt keeps getting tangled up. She stands in the bathroom trying to sort it all out.
Outside in the hallway, Mom is getting stressed. There isn’t much time; they’re supposed to be going somewhere. The belt is still playing up, tying itself in knots. Mom gets more and more impatient; she hammers on the door and yells, Haven’t you got that goddamn towel on yet?
Her sisters are waiting out there too, as curious as magpies.
She wants to die right there in the bathroom with that goddamn towel. There is no doubt that Mom is angry about her period, but she has to walk out and face everyone. She holds her head as high as she can. She refuses to answer Ninne’s questions—what goddamn towel, what is Mommy talking about?—as they leave the apartment.
It turns out that some of her classmates from Årsta have been accepted at the same high school as her. One of them is Annemarie, who lives on Siljansvägen; she is to call for her in the mornings. It is still dark as she crosses the street.
She has to wait in the hallway for a long time, sweating in her winter clothes.
Annemarie is an only child, and her parents flutter around her like two anxious butterflies. She must put on a different scarf, change her socks for thicker ones, have Nivea smeared on her cheeks. Annemarie simply lets them carry on.
Meanwhile she waits under a picture of two horses. She hates Annemarie for all this messing around. No one fusses over her. She has to leave home before anyone else. Dad wakes her early with a cheese sandwich. The others are still sleeping, Mom with a pillow over her head.
She is envious of Annemarie, and she feels evil.
Yes. I was extremely envious.
I enjoyed feeling evil.
They plod along in the darkness, all the way up Årstavägen to the stop for the number 77. Annemarie is wearing a Lapp hat with a colorful tassel right on the top. Out of the corner of her eye she can see that ridiculous tassel bobbing around. They have nothing to talk about.
At Johanneshov they change to the new subway. They have gotten into Gubbängen high school, which at the moment is no more than a few classrooms along one corridor in Hökarängen junior school. The schoolyard is rough and noisy and the boys are fighting. During every recess a horde of yelling boys chases some long-legged girl.
Their quarry is yelling too; maybe she likes being chased.
The toilets are in the yard in a separate building.
The cubicles have no doors. The boys hang around outside the windows of the girls’ toilets, spying on them. She hates the toilets. She finds it difficult to cope with the sanitary towel, the white cotton belt, and the embarrassment. At the end of morning recess one day she bumps into the girl who always gets chased. She is stumbling up the steps from the cellar, zipping up her pants.
Her cheeks are bright red and wet. The boys must have dragged her down into the cellar. What have they done to her?
She meets the girl’s eyes, her expression is…flayed. That is the word the memory delivers. Skinned. Flayed. Next recess they are chasing her again.
However, she imm
ediately likes the person sitting next to her in class. She is thirteen—a couple of years older. One of the reasons why she likes Barbro is that she too is having her monthlies. She doesn’t know anyone else in the same position.
During recess Barbro tells her that she was sitting in class at junior school when the blood started pouring down her leg. It was like Niagara Falls, Barbro says, laughing.
Barbro stood up, wiped the chair with her skirt and went home. She finds Barbro uncompromising and courageous. She has large breasts and the boys shout Big Boobs Babs when she walks past, but Barbro doesn’t give a damn. Her father is a cab driver. She travels with Barbro to Skanstull, where he waits in his cab. They are on their way to Åhlén & Holm, the department store, to look for small lipsticks for thirty-five öre.
Barbro taps on the window and holds out her hand.
Her father sighs, grins, and hands over some money. A close family, she thinks as she stands beside Barbro; once again that stab of envy.
She also goes home with Barbro after school. Her classmate lives in a recently built apartment in Hökarängen, several rooms, no furniture apart from six beds, rather whimsically distributed throughout the place. They sit on the kitchen floor in a strip of sunlight eating sandwiches, there are no chairs. Barbro has three older brothers. Between mouthfuls she confides that she got sick of everyone bossing her around, so one day she got into bed with a breadknife, pulled up the sheet, and splashed tomato ketchup all over it.
The perfect suicide.
She was determined to make her point. She waited. The others came home and her mother screamed like a stuck pig. Afterward they all laughed and agreed that it was a cool thing to do. What would have happened if the girl had done the same thing at home?
She admires Barbro for her courage and directness. She also likes Barbro’s mother, whom she never gets to meet.
These are pictures from another life. Tangled up in emotions, still heavily charged. Most are blurred, but some stand out with great clarity. One morning Barbro arrives late. She slinks in during Swedish, slides into her seat.
A Fortune Foretold Page 3
