Adventures with Waffles

by Maria Parr

  All sorts of strange things happen when you’ve got a neighbor and best friend like Lena, but sometimes I think I like normal days best of all. Those days when nothing special happens, and I eat liver paste on bread and Lena and I play around with our soccer ball or look for crabs and talk about ordinary things, without anything going wrong.

  “Do you think ordinary days are better than Christmas?” asked Lena when I tried to explain what I thought.

  “No, but it can’t be Christmas every day,” I said. “Otherwise Christmas would get boring.”

  Lena assured me that it could be Christmas much more often without her getting bored in the slightest, and then we said no more about it. We played soccer out in the sun instead, and while I tried to score against Lena, I thought that this was a nice and ordinary day.

  “I ought to have a dad to play soccer with. One who does really hard kicks,” said Lena after she had saved one of my best shots.

  I sighed.

  We took a break on the lawn, and Minda, who was painting the porch, came and sat with us. Lena and I smiled. Minda is almost as good as Auntie Granny at telling stories and making us feel warm and cozy. She lay down on her stomach and told us why our cove is called Mathildewick.

  “The reason is,” she said, “that there was once a Portuguese pirate ship sailing out in the fjord here, and the prow of the ship was mounted with a magnificent figurehead: the beautiful Maid Mathilde.”

  “A figurehead?” I asked.

  Minda explained that a figurehead is a big wooden figure with flowing hair and a beautiful dress that used to be attached to boats in the old days.

  “Then came a hurricane, just out there,” Minda continued. “A real, deadly hurricane, like they used to have in the old days. The ship tilted from one side to the other, making it impossible to steer, and eventually the whole thing came crashing into our cove. The beautiful Mathilde whacked into the rocks by the shore, sending splinters flying—more or less where we traditionally put out bonfires using the muck-spreader.”

  “Wow,” Lena and I said, almost in chorus.

  “The pirates never got home. They found themselves wives and settled here instead. And they called the cove Mathildewick after the destroyed figurehead of Mathilde that had whacked into the rocks on the beach.” Minda leaned toward us and whispered, “One of them was Grandpa’s great-great-great-great-grandfather. It’s hardly surprising that he’s got pirate blood in his veins!”

  I was speechless for a long while, thinking that if this was true, it would be fantastic.

  “Minda,” I said at last, “does that mean I have pirate blood in my veins too?”

  “You’ve all got pirate blood in you. The whole family does except for me, because I’m an adopted Incan princess.” She laughed. Then she walked on her hands all the way back up to the house to continue painting the porch.

  Lena took the soccer ball and threw it up into the air a couple of times while I sat there, almost feeling like I was a different boy from the one I had been a short while ago. I had pirate blood in my veins.

  “Maybe that’s why I do so many crazy things. I can’t help it. I’m full of pirate blood,” I said to Lena.

  “Hah! You’ve got so little of it that it all runs out of you if you so much as get a nosebleed,” she said sharply.

  Lena was probably thinking she wouldn’t mind having some pirate blood of her own.

  I looked out over the sea. There was Grandpa in his boat. Naturally! He was a pirate!

  “Lena, why don’t we go out in the rubber dinghy?” I suggested. The pirate blood in me wanted to go to sea too.

  Lena gave me a resigned look but took off her goalie gloves.

  “OK. I call Mathilde! I want to be that Mathilde who got whacked on the rocks!”

  When Lena came aboard my bright-yellow rubber dinghy a little later, she was wearing her mother’s long red dress under her life jacket and had a majestic look on her face. I doubted that she was supposed to go to sea in a dress like that, but so be it.

  We rowed around the jetty. I felt like a pirate and was happy and contented, but Lena, who was hanging over the prow, quickly began to feel it was boring being a figurehead.

  “Here comes the storm,” she announced.

  I began to rock backward and forward, making Lena’s hair skim the water below. She remained as still as a chest of drawers. Eventually she turned around and said impatiently, “Are you going to whack me on the head soon or not?”

  I shrugged and rowed carefully toward the jetty. The dinghy drifted slowly forward. But at that very moment, Grandpa arrived on his boat. He made large waves, and one of them gave the rubber dinghy such a shove that we smacked into the concrete with a crack.

  Rubber dinghies don’t go crack. Figureheads, on the other hand, make a tremendous crack. Especially their heads.

  “Lena!” I screamed when I saw her hanging lifelessly over the prow. “Grandpa, Lena’s dead!”

  Grandpa came as quickly as he could and pulled Lena out of the dinghy. “Hey, come on, little lass, wake up,” he said, shaking her gently.

  I sat holding the oars, not knowing what to do. I just cried.

  “Uh . . .” groaned Lena. She opened her eyes and looked at Grandpa as if she didn’t recognize him. Then she groaned some more.

  “There, there,” said Grandpa. “Let’s get you to the doctor. And you, Trille, my lad, you can stop crying. She’s OK.”

  Lena half stood up. “No, just keep on crying, Trille, you smoked haddock! You row like an idiot!”

  I had never been so happy to hear someone say something so mean to me. Lena was all right; she’d only gotten a medium whack to her head.

  But then Lena realized that her forehead was bleeding, and she let out a furious scream. She had to go into town to see the doctor, and as I waved good-bye to her, I thought that there isn’t really any such thing as an ordinary day when you’ve got a neighbor and best friend like Lena.

  Grandpa usually gets up before the early bird farts in the bush, as he says. Sometimes, in summer, I do too. Then I run for all I’m worth down to the water. Often Grandpa’s already gone, and I can see him far out at sea like a little dot. That’s one of the saddest things I know, standing on the jetty with just the seagulls for company early in the morning, though not early enough. But sometimes I manage to catch him.

  “Well, if it isn’t my young lad Trille!” Grandpa says then, delighted.

  That’s what’s so great about Grandpa. I know that he’s as fond of me as I am of him. With Lena it’s so difficult to tell.

  That day I made it in time. Before it turned six, we were far out at sea, Grandpa and I. We drew in the nets and didn’t say anything much. It was good to have him all to myself.

  “Minda says we’re part pirate,” I said after looking at him for a while.

  Grandpa stood up straight, and I told him the whole story about Mathildewick. When I’d finished, he laughed loudly.

  “Isn’t it true?” I asked, beginning to smell a rat.

  “That Little Miss Minda, she tells such good lies, it’s like music to my ears,” said Grandpa, impressed. “We could all learn something from her.”

  “Auntie Granny says that people shouldn’t tell lies,” I said.

  “Mm-hmm,” said Grandpa, still laughing to himself. “Was that why you ran Lena into the jetty yesterday, then?” he asked.

  I nodded and thought about Lena, who had come home with a bandage over her forehead the previous evening. It was Isak who had patched her up. She was pleased about that. What was worse was that she had a minor concussion and would have to take it easy for a whole week.

  “Uh-oh,” Mom had said when she found out.

  The last time Lena had a concussion, everyone in Mathildewick Cove almost went crazy. Lena isn’t good at taking it easy.

  As Grandpa and I approached the shore, I could see Lena standing at the end of the jetty like a small, slender statue.

  “Fishing, fishing, fishing,” she said
flatly as we bumped into the jetty. She was in such a bad mood that the sky darkened above where she stood.

  Poor Lena. I wanted to say something that would make her happy, so I told her that I wasn’t a pirate after all and that Minda had made the whole thing up.

  “I got whacked for nothing!” Lena howled, stamping her foot and sending pebbles flying everywhere.

  I soon saw that it was more than Lena’s concussion that was making her angry.

  “Look,” she said, thrusting a brochure at Grandpa’s stomach. “I went to get the mail, thinking I might get a card or something, having a concussion and so on, and then there’s this ad for schoolbags instead!”

  I looked at the brochure. BACK TO SCHOOL, it said. Lena is so fond of summer vacation. She doesn’t like school at all.

  “I’m going to hibernate,” she moaned, “and sleep until next summer.”

  We felt sorry for Lena. Nobody said a word as we began to stroll up toward the farm with the fish tub between us.

  “You’re so lucky not having to go to school,” Lena mumbled to Grandpa when we got back to the house. Grandpa stepped out of his wooden shoes and opened his door. Yes, he agreed with Lena, he was incredibly lucky, and he would have liked to make us waffles to cheer us up. “But it’ll have to be fresh fish and new potatoes instead,” he said.

  “I know . . . because you don’t know how to make waffles,” said Lena in a sulky tone, what with her concussion and everything.

  “In actual fact, our cove isn’t called Mathildewick,” Grandpa told us as he was cooking. “We just call it that because years ago a lady named Mathilde lived here. She had fourteen children and a husband who was called Viktor, or Vik, so they called her Mathilde Vik, like they call me Lars Yttergård after the old name of our farm, which has become our surname too.”

  “So was our cove called Mathildewick just because of that?” I asked.

  Grandpa nodded.

  “You can’t invent a game with that,” I said, disappointed.

  “No, luckily not!” exclaimed Lena.

  After we’d eaten, Lena and I climbed up into the cedar tree and sat there without saying anything. I could feel the summer running away from me as I looked at our cove through the branches. It was as if everything had changed slightly. The fields weren’t as green anymore and the wind wasn’t as warm. Lena sighed one of her math-class sighs.

  “Ah, it’s horrible how time flies,” she said eventually.

  The following week, Lena and I began our fourth year at school, as in Norway we start at six years old. I thought it was good to be back, even if I didn’t say so to Lena. We had a new teacher called Ellisiv. She was young and had a big smile. I liked her right away.

  What was not so good was that Kai-Tommy was still just as nasty and teased the rest of us as much as the year before. He’s the one who’s really in charge in our class. He thinks our class would be perfect if Lena wasn’t in it, because then there would be only boys. Lena usually gets so angry when he says things like that that she snarls at him, but this fall she had a good comeback:

  “Smoking haddocks! We’ve got Ellisiv, you circus llama! She’s a girl, isn’t she?”

  I realized that Lena liked our new teacher, even if she had sat looking sternly at Ellisiv for the first four days without answering a single question.

  “Lena’s very nice when you get used to her,” I told Ellisiv when I was last out of the classroom one day. I was afraid she might get completely the wrong idea about her.

  “I think both you and Lena are very nice. Are you best friends?” Ellisiv asked.

  I took a step closer. “One half of us is,” I whispered.

  Ellisiv said that was a promising start to a best friendship.

  Then soccer practice started. What a drama that was. Lena said that she was now the goalie for our team. Kai-Tommy said that was the stupidest thing he’d heard since he last saw Lena. We couldn’t have a girl in goal! Lena became so angry that the mountains trembled, and our coach let her have a trial for one practice. She jumped around in goal like a frog. Nobody managed to score. So Lena became our goalie, and one weekend, in town, we won the local cup tournament thanks to her. Lena was as proud as a peahen.

  I told Auntie Granny about the cup when I spoke to her on the phone. But she doesn’t care about soccer in the slightest. She thinks it’s a load of nonsense.

  “There’s an old lady here with a waffle iron that’s been cold for several weeks,” she complained. “Can’t you two put away that ball and come visit me instead?”

  We were happy to. I asked Dad right away, and he said that would be fine, as he was going to pick up Auntie Granny that weekend to bring her to our house.

  It’s about twelve miles to Auntie Granny’s. Dad was driving, and Lena felt sick, but she didn’t throw up. She just looked very pale.

  Auntie Granny lives alone in a small yellow house surrounded by roses. Dad has asked her many times whether she would like to move in with us in Mathildewick Cove instead. I have asked her too. But Auntie Granny doesn’t want to. She’s perfectly happy in her yellow house.

  We stayed at Auntie Granny’s all afternoon and helped with some jobs she needed to get done outside. The sky had darkened and it had started to rain when we went in. Auntie Granny had set the table, and everything was so cozy and welcoming that I had a lump in my throat. Sitting indoors on Auntie Granny’s sofa and eating waffles when it’s raining outside is the best thing in the world. I tried to think of something better, but couldn’t come up with anything.

  While we were eating, Lena tried to teach Auntie Granny about soccer.

  “It’s important to shoot hard, really hard!” she explained.

  “Oh, dear,” said Auntie Granny.

  “Was there a lot of shooting here during the war?” I asked, because Auntie Granny would much rather talk about the war than about soccer.

  “No, Trille, my laddie, luckily not, but there were many other things that weren’t very pleasant.”

  And then Auntie Granny told us that people weren’t allowed to have radios during the war, because the German soldiers were afraid that the Norwegians would cheer one another up with their radio programs.

  “But we had a radio all the same.” She smiled slyly. “We buried it behind the hay barn, and then we dug it out when we wanted to listen to it.”

  Auntie Granny and Grandpa’s parents did a lot of illegal things during the war, because when there’s an invasion, everything’s turned inside out: illegal things actually become the most right thing to do.

  “I wish it was like that normally,” Lena said, but Auntie Granny said that we shouldn’t wish for that. It was very dangerous if you were found out. If anyone had known that her father listened to the radio, they would have sent him away.

  “Then you wouldn’t have had a dad either,” said Lena.

  “No, you’re quite right,” said Auntie Granny, stroking Lena’s head.

  “Where did they send people who listened to the radio, then?” I asked.

  “To a camp,” said Auntie Granny.

  “With tents and trailers?” asked Lena, confused.

  “No, to a concentration camp. The one in Norway was called Grini. And it was a terrible place,” Auntie Granny explained.

  Lena looked at her thoughtfully for a while. “How scared were you?” she asked in the end.

  “Auntie Granny is never scared,” I said before she had a chance to answer. “She has Jesus above her head when she sleeps.” I took Lena into Auntie Granny’s bedroom to show her.

  “There,” I said, pointing to a picture above her bed. In it there’s a steep rock face with a little lamb standing on a narrow ledge, unable to get up or down. The mother ewe is standing at the top, bleating, very afraid for her lamb. But Jesus is there too, and he has fastened his staff to a tree and is leaning out over the cliff edge to rescue the lamb.

  Lena tilted her head and looked at the picture for a long time. “Is it magic?” she asked eventually.

>   I didn’t know. I only knew that Auntie Granny is never afraid, because she has Jesus above her bed. She says that all people are like little lambs and that Jesus looks after them.

  On the drive home, I got to sit in the front and help change the gears. Lena sat in the back with Auntie Granny. She felt more and more sick, and when we were almost home, she threw up copiously on a tuft of red clover.

  “It’s because you change the gears like an idiot, Trille,” said my best friend in a carsick voice once she’d scrambled back into the car. I acted as if I hadn’t heard. It probably didn’t help that Lena had eaten nine waffles with butter and sugar.

  “You’d better get well for tomorrow, missy!” said Dad when we finally got home. “Then you’ll be ready to round up the sheep.”

  Both Lena and I opened our eyes wide.

  “Are we getting to help?” I almost shouted.

  “Yes, I think you must be old enough now,” Dad said in a completely normal voice.

  I couldn’t believe that anyone could be so happy!

  All summer our sheep wander around up on the mountain doing whatever they like. But before winter comes, we have to head up there and bring them back down to the barn.

  “That’s their vacation finally over too, the lucky cods,” Lena usually says. She thinks it’s unfair that sheep get a longer summer break than people.

  This time Lena and I were going to help! I almost couldn’t believe it when we were standing outside on the porch the next day. My whole family was there, minus Krølla. So were Lena and her mom, and Uncle Tor. Dad, wearing his cap, with his backpack on his back, asked if everyone was ready. As we set off up the slopes, Lena and I were able to wave to Grandpa and Auntie Granny and Krølla, instead of standing down there waving up, as we had always done before. Although Lena had never waved up at anyone. She always sat with her back turned when the others went to round up the sheep, as sour as an unripe stalk of rhubarb.

  It definitely wasn’t summer anymore. The air was sharp, and the trees above our heads hung heavy with dew as we passed Hillside Jon’s farm and entered the spruce forest. Lena and I were wearing our rubber boots, and we jumped in all the puddles we found along the path, like two rabbits.