The American Girl

by Monika Fagerholm

  Most of the furnishings on the ground floor were rather half finished, only the sauna area and the dressing room and the den, which was called the “rec room” in the house in the darker part, were ready to be used. But all of that, that was secondary and that was not what the girl was drawn to, but to the hole in the ground that in the future would be tiled in order to become a swimming pool. Still just a raw, black hole in the ground, foul smelling and rather damp. The girl stood at the edge of this hole and looked down into the darkness of the earth. And it suddenly bewitched her, the hole, the silence, the house itself, everything.

  The voices from the upper floor, Mom, Dad, disappeared again. And Sandra immediately understood, completely calm and without drama, that she was going to stay here. That the house in the darker part of the woods was hers, but not like a possession.

  Like a destiny.

  So whether or not she got on well was a trifling matter, just like anything she thought. Because this was about necessity, the inevitable.

  Here comes the night. So cold, so roaring, so wonderful.

  And like a lightning bolt in her head she saw the following with her inner eye: she saw two girls in a swimming pool without water, playing on the green-tiled bottom among silk chiffon, silk satin, and silk georgette. And among all other things, which they would have so many of in their bags. Two backpackgirls among all of their things, the contents spread all over the bottom of the pool, mixed together and with the fabrics. Sandra’s scrapbooks, Jayne Mansfield’s dead dog, Lupe Velez’s head in a toilet bowl, and so on, and Doris with all of her old loose issues of True Crimes. The midwife’s assistant Ingegerd, lacking moral scruples, and the nine incubator babies in her hands. He killed his lover with fifteen hammer strikes to the head. Young love and sudden, violent death. And the Eddie-things, the story about the American girl, Eddie de Wire.

  Death’s spell at a young age. And pang. Sandra also saw how Doris shot the doorbell at the entrance to the house in the darker part to pieces that last summer when everything ended. The last year the last summer the last month the last last last before that moment when the summer has had enough of you and wants to get rid of you for good.

  “Yet every wave burns like blood and gold, but the night soon will claim what is owed,” which were the words of a song that played in Doris Flinkenberg’s cassette player.

  And also, a ways away from the house, in the bushes, an ill-humored one. The boy, always the boy. The same boy as before, at a proper distance, staring at the house as though he was convinced that it would decompose or sink down into the ground like Venice as a result of the power in his eyes when he looked at it.

  “Disappear. Down into the ground. Sink.”

  But alone, she would be and continue to be a while longer, all the way until that day when Doris Flinkenberg got into the house and into Sandra Stigmata Princess of the Thousand Rooms (furnished with aperture windows, almost without oxygen).

  She, the princess, who would nevertheless cease to exist in just that moment when Doris Flinkenberg started asking her stupid questions that she would answer before you had a chance to open your mouth.

  “What are your hobbies? Mine are crossword puzzles, listening to music, and True Crimes.”

  “I don’t know,” Sandra would answer, but carefully, also because she was afraid of saying the wrong thing. “Though I don’t have anything against firing rifles.”

  The house on the inside.

  Sandra’s room. The kitchen. The parlor. The small corridor.

  The Closet.

  The pool without water.

  . . .

  Above all the fact that the house was a work of hatred.

  The Black Sheep in Little Bombay.

  When they came in he was lying on the sofa in the back room snoring.

  He sat up.

  A shiny white Jaguar.

  A red raincoat.

  Little Bombay.

  At first he was a threat.

  On the other hand Lorelei Lindberg was happy when he showed up.

  After the first surprise.

  On the other hand she was also happy when he left.

  So it was ambivalent.

  He was lying, sleeping in the boutique when they came there one morning.

  He had opened the door with his own key, why not, he was the landlord.

  “What do you think of the house?”

  “I thought I would show you what your dreams look like.”

  “Filled with nothing on the inside.”

  “I know WHERE they speak like that.”

  “A matchstick house for matchstick people. Have you thought about that? That it’s about fitting into that shape?”

  Asked the Black Sheep in Little Bombay, he spoke only to her—it was as if the silk dog didn’t exist.

  Huddled over her water bowl, under the table, and heard.

  In Little Bombay, with all of the fabrics.

  Lorelei Lindberg. Pins fell out of her mouth. Ping. Ping.

  Pins with glass heads in different colors.

  And the dog, she picked them up.

  But Lorelei didn’t ask her to help because her eyes were so bad.

  Not that time.

  “It’s never easy to fall into the hands of the living God . . .”

  “GOD?”

  “You know,” the Black Sheep explained to Lorelei Lindberg many times, “the game where the cat plays with the mouse until it gets bored. And becomes a light morsel to chew up.”

  “It’s not a game. It’s serious. It just looks that way.”

  “Exactly. That was what I was going to get to. We were two brothers. We had two cats. One’s cat and the other’s cat . . . but only one mouse came up out of the hole. And the mouse, that was you.”

  Doris Flinkenberg. In the beginning she ran away from her. The strange, slightly plump girl who sometimes used to follow her from the bus stop where she got off by the main country road when she came from the school in the city by the sea. Sandra knew who it was of course, one Doris Flinkenberg, who lived a bit closer to the capes.

  She did not want to play with her.

  So she ran away. And she ran fast. She held the girls’ record in the sixty-yard dash at school, a talent for running that surprised even herself. So she certainly got away from the other girl, there was no question about that.

  But the other girl, Doris Flinkenberg, she ran after. It was rather comical but also humiliating, for both of them.

  And up the stairs to the house in the darker part, key in the lock, door open, into safety. Quickly close the door and stand inside the door and take a breather.

  Quiet. Everywhere. Quiet like it could be only in the house in the darker part.

  Until the doorbell started playing.

  Nach Erwald und die Sonne. And playing. The stupid melody, over and over again.

  CAN’T SHE GO AWAY?

  Until Lorelei Lindberg, if she was home, came out into the dark, narrow corridor.

  “Why don’t you open?”

  Sandra shook her head.

  “Oh, you don’t want to?” Lorelei Lindberg just said then and walked off.

  Farther into the house. And Sandra followed her.

  Much later. One Saturday morning in the house in the darker part Sandra woke up late, as she had a habit of doing when it was not a school day and she could sleep as long as she wanted to, but with the distinct feeling that something special was going to happen just this day. With sensual pleasure she stretched in the marital bed, which was hers now. It had been a few months since the marriage between Lorelei Lindberg and the Islander had ended, and the bed, which had been moved into Sandra’s room some time before the absolute end, was still standing there where it had been placed one time after the last waves of passion in anger. It took up almost all of the space in the room, but the arrangement looked as though it would become permanent as the bed was undeniably comfortable. But now, in other words Saturday morning, the beginning of what appeared to be a normal day: t
he Islander at work in the world of business, and Sandra in her bathrobe, a kimono in silk brocade that smelled faintly of Little Bombay still a few months after the boutique had been cleared out. Through the whole day if she wanted. Saturday, the best day of the week. That plus an entire Sunday before it was time to return to the French School, which Sandra was still attending. And she knew as soon as she woke up that now, this Saturday, something new and interesting would happen.

  She got out of bed filled with expectation, cast a glance out the window. No, then it was not the weather that was going to surprise her. A normal November day, gray and low, not to mention unusually gloomy, especially right here in the darker part where, at a certain distance, the high water in the Nameless Marsh this time of year made the house look as though it was floating around among reeds and other rotten vegetation. But it was not at all dangerous, soon the ground would be covered with snow, merciful snow. Sandra shoved her feet into her morning slippers with white muffs on top and three-inch heels (she had gotten them from her mother because they were too small and uncomfortable for her) and pulled her bathrobe a bit tighter, and then it happened, that which still happened during contact with the fabrics, that it ran through her, Little Bombay.

  Lorelei Lindberg. Mom. Whom she sometimes found herself missing so much it felt like stabbing pains in her stomach. A longing that when it could not be stopped had to have a story created around it so that it could be somewhat overcome. And Sandra had created one in her imagination, which she could find herself in when she was alone and the mood was right. She was the child of the knife thrower in the story. A circus girl whose mother succumbed to a deadly illness (a version that she later changed to: fell down from the high wire one rainy circus evening in a provincial hole where no one went to the circus anymore because everyone only wanted to stay inside and watch television; only a few people saw her crash into the asphalt, the story was true, it was acrobat Rosita Montis’s fate) and she was thus the little daughter who became her father’s, the knife thrower’s, assistant at a very young age. The temperamental, unpredictable, and otherwise also crazy father, but after the mother’s passing, practically insane with grief, she allowed knives to be thrown at her every night in the extremely poorly visited circus tent they traveled with from place to place to place.

  In certain moments that was what it was like for Sandra to be without her mother, to miss Lorelei Lindberg. But sometimes, when she was in another mood, missing her mother did not call forth strong emotions, occasionally none at all.

  But an end to the fantasizing. Now Sandra went out into the narrow corridor that led to the kitchen and then she saw that the door to the basement stairs was open. Not ajar, but wide open. She stopped and cocked her ears. Could strange sounds not be heard from the basement?

  Her heart started pounding, the adrenaline shot up into her temples. She was scared, but still at the same time it was a bit strange because the feeling of expectation did not leave her. The door to the basement usually was not open. It was not supposed to be. It was strictly forbidden. Ever since Sandra and the Islander had become alone in the house in the darker part of the woods the Islander was extremely careful about the fact that the basement door should be kept closed, and preferably locked at night. Under no circumstances was it allowed to be open like now.

  “I can’t afford to lose both of you,” the Islander had sniffled by the pool without water where Sandra would sometimes play on the finished tiled bottom, also before Doris Flinkenberg. Sandra had given no response to that, just squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to hear, but she wished so desperately that everything would go back to the way it was.

  The reason the door to the basement stairs should be closed was moreover Sandra herself. She had said that she walked in her sleep. It was not true, rather something she had made up a long time ago when a lie like that was really needed. It had been during the last turbulent time while Lorelei Lindberg was still in the house and a lot of messing around and fighting grew worse, fights without reconciliation after, fights that were gradually fought without thinking about reconciliation and Lorelei Lindberg who fell down the long staircase and came to lie on the ground below like a dead person, but got up again like a cat with nine lives. The bed was moved into Sandra’s room and the adults themselves slept, when they did that at all, in different places in the house, impossible places, for example one in the Closet, the other on the sofa in the rec room. If you were Sandra on the sidelines, it had been a matter of paying attention then. To be able to move between different places sort of legitimately, but not like a grass snake. And Sandra had seen the bit about her walking in her sleep as a white lie. And after everything, when it became calm again, after Lorelei Lindberg, the lie had remained hanging there anyway and it started living its own life and before you knew what was happening it had become harder to untangle yourself from it than to let it remain hanging, as it was. And besides, it probably would not have been a good idea to start explaining too much about this or that to the Islander. After Lorelei Lindberg the Islander was in no shape for any explanations or protests, either his own or anyone else’s. He was fragile like porcelain that could at the slightest movement fall to the floor and break into a thousand priceless pieces. A thousand small grainy pieces: due to the damp, everything inside the house was almost wet and porous, pieces, not even proper fragments. Piece it together later. Oh no. She could not afford that either. Not in the position they found themselves in now after Lorelei Lindberg and the Islander. Just the two of them, no one else but the two of them.

  The Islander crying at the side of the pool, it had been awkward and terrifying. Sandra had sat on the bottom of the pool among her things, the fabrics, the scrapbooks, the dress-up clothes, and wished she was a thousand miles away.

  And so, when he disappeared into the rec room in order to continue falling apart there, she really did not want to follow him in order to provide hugs or comfort or the like. In the beginning he had stayed there for many days and nights, with his mixed drinks or his pure schnapps, talking out loud to himself sometimes, strange sentences that were horrid not only because of the meaning of the individual words (he talked a lot of crap) but also because there was no point to them, not the slightest. Words and sentences here and there. “I’m singing in the rain,” the Islander hummed. “Our love was a continental affair, he came in a white Jaguar.” The like. The last-mentioned song certainly would not become a better song by being played over and over again also by Doris Flinkenberg in her spinning radio cassette player of the brand Poppy, manufactured in the GDR. “Really great song this one,” Doris would say but Sandra would just roll her eyes. It would be a point, one of the few in any case to begin with, on which Doris and Sandra would not be in agreement.

  The Islander in the rec room, Sandra in the pool without water, hands over her ears, making herself as small as possible, virtually insignificant. The last thing she wanted was to go into the rec room and provide comfort or hugs or the like, which one often did on television when family catastrophes took place. Hug and jug, as if anything at all would become better from it.

  Sandra’s only wish during a long period of time had been that the Islander would become normal again. And start doing normal things like, for example, polish his rifle.

  “Hey. You want to go and do some shooting?”

  One day in October, when the leaves had fallen and it was clear and cold in the world outside the great panorama window again, it had happened. Normalcy was back, the Islander had suddenly been there at the edge of the pool again fully dressed and newly shaved looking down at her. He had the rifle too and pointed it at her but she had not been scared at all, it was just a game after all. She had immediately understood that instinctively, an eagerly awaited mood that she recognized especially because nothing had happened in the house for a long time. And how she had longed for it during the time in between. Longed for monkey magic, tricks, shouting, anything.

  And yes then. Of course! Sandra had jumped up in
the air like a bouncing ball and dropped everything she had been doing, all her solitary stupid playing on the bottom of the pool. Oh, how she was sick and tired of it.

  “Yes,” she had answered with unusual determination. “It’s about time I learn how to shoot a rifle too.”

  Then she and the Islander had gone to the shooting range together and there she learned to handle, in any case be of assistance with, pistols and rifles. And to her own surprise too, she noticed that she liked shooting, even if she was no fast learner. Unlike, for example, Doris Flinkenberg who in a short time sometime later would turn into a master markswoman. But Sandra was also surprised by how much she liked the shooting range itself, being there. That was actually the main thing, what fascinated her most of all. The special mood of concentration, silence, and resoluteness that existed there. Its own world.

  The Islander’s world. Her father’s own world.

  Like Little Bombay, the fabrics and the telephone calls and the particular music (the banana record was never brought to the house in the darker part of the woods), everything that had been Lorelei Lindberg’s world. And it was strange, but that is the way it was: in the grand passion these two worlds had been incompatible.

  It was in and of itself a rather general insight, that passion is often difficult to merge with an ordinary everyday life. But another thing, which was more important and harder to understand and accept, a helplessness, it was only when the contracting parties in the great passion had been separated that you could see them as they were in their respective worlds. That it was then that you could get to know them.

  When Lorelei Lindberg was still there the Islander had not fired at the shooting range or hunted in the woods or sailed the seven seas like he loved to. Nor had he devoted himself wholeheartedly to that playboy lifestyle in the international jet-setter’s life that was one of his goals; when the passion had still been young he had explained to Lorelei Lindberg that he intended to do that. Mostly he had run around and made better and worse business deals, but with a concentration level significantly below the one he would have after Lorelei Lindberg. And Lorelei Lindberg and the fabrics, had she even liked them?