The American Girl

by Monika Fagerholm

  “Shall we,” Doris said then in another tone and quite eagerly, “have the wedding kiss later?”

  “What’s going on here?” Suddenly, in the middle of the most intense game of games, Bombshell Pinky Pink was standing there at the edge of the pool in her bright pink clothes, the miniskirt made out of plastic-coated fabric and the light red blouse made out of polyester, which was low cut and so tight that there was not enough room inside and the contents were being pushed up toward her neckline.

  And immediately she, Pinky with her X-ray eyes, caught sight of the ring. “What a rock!” she shouted. “That’s what I call a diamond.”

  And she was already on her way down into the pool because as said, which she had said in other situations, “I have an instinct for rocks, especially ones that are shiny and glittery,” and help, what were the girls supposed to do now? Pinky must not get a closer look at the ring. No. It must not happen. “Erhm,” Doris interrupted her then, got up and stood in her way, but with the indisputable professional authority of someone who is dealing with a very serious matter. “Could I ask a favor? An interview?”

  And then Doris explained as seriously and irresistibly as only Doris could when she pulled out all the stops, that it would be an honor if Bombshell Pinky Pink would assist with “a valuable firsthand testimony” for the research for her group project Profession: striptease dancer in school, a rather solitary group because Doris Flinkenberg had always been so peculiar that no one really wanted to be “a group” with her.

  “It would be a great honor,” Doris Flinkenberg finished and Pinky had forgotten all the diamonds in the world for a moment on the glitter scene and immediately said yes.

  But the ring, Doris kept it on her finger. But only during grand occasions in the pool without water, and of course, only when Sandra Wärn was there.

  Lorelei Lindberg and Heintz-Gurt. It was a story that took off then. Heintz-Gurt became a person, and Doris Flinkenberg, she would be such a perfect Lorelei Lindberg.

  It was madness.

  But one more thing. Lorelei Lindberg. That was Doris’s name for her. Doris’s invention. Lorelei, that was namely the most beautiful name Doris knew.

  Lindberg. That was what you were called, there in the District.

  La vie emmerdante/The cursed life. Sandra’s last essay at the French School, rendered in print.

  The famous movie star Lupe Velez was tired of life. She wanted to die. The man whose child she was carrying had left her. It was not Tarzan who had been her greatest love. To top it all off it was another love, one that had been secondary.

  The famous movie star had partied with Tarzan in Paris, London, Mexico, and in her home in Hollywood, and in the end their tremendous passion had drained both of them of their strength. Both of them had pulled away, millions of miles from each other, like two wounded animals. And once you have burned a bridge it is not a matter of building it up again just like that.

  This man now, who had left her, he was secondary.

  The famous movie star Lupe Velez gathered all the tablets she had in her home. There were quite a lot, enough for a truly fatal dose. Then she called her friends and invited them to a farewell dinner. Though she did not tell them this directly. She ordered her favorite meal from catering. Chili con carne. Strong.

  They ate and drank champagne and spoke badly about men, love, and life. They reminisced about bad days, in order to get in the right mood.

  The guests went home and the movie star was alone. She took one last bath, washed herself clean. After the bath she put on her very finest nightgown of silk, the one Tarzan had given her once. The bed was made with the finest linens, silk these as well. She did her evening ablutions, did not forget to brush her hair with fifty hard pulls.

  And she took out the tablets. Poured them out over the nightstand, sat on the edge of the bed, started popping them in her mouth and swallowing them with champagne. When she had taken all of them she lay down on the bed, adjusted her body in a suitable position, just right, not exaggerated, elegant. And then she closed her eyes and waited for sleep and death to come.

  She woke up and knew right away that it was not heaven. Her stomach was churning, she dragged herself to the bathroom. The chili. She barely had time to get the toilet lid up before it came out. But at the same time she slipped and lost her balance and hit her head on the cold porcelain of the toilet bowl. She lost consciousness, all dams burst. And her head ended up in the toilet bowl. That was how the famous movie star Lupe Velez would be remembered. As the one who drowned in the toilet bowl in her own home.

  Passion, it is just devilry.

  La passion. C’est vraiment un emmerdement.

  . . .

  Sandra turned in the essay, packed up her things, and stopped attending the French School. Then she headed straight to the ordinary junior high school in the town center, in the District, and was admitted as a student in the same grade as Doris Flinkenberg. Not in the same class, as said, but in the classroom next door, in the parallel class.

  Lorelei Lindberg above the small washbasin in the back room in Little Bombay, had grasped the fluorescent lamp above the mirror with both hands and FSSSST for a few seconds the current flooded through her in one great shock. One second, only Sandra saw it, Lorelei Lindberg blinked yellow, hissing, electrical. The world stood still FSST and in one’s memory that second became an eternity.

  No, you’re wrong, she had said to the Black Sheep.

  But I’m afraid.

  Of him.

  There is something strange about the house.

  And the boy, there is a boy wandering around.

  And yet I know that it’s abnormal. That boy, he’s just a child.

  There are rumors—that he’s done something terrible. You don’t know.

  The Black Sheep:

  “That it isn’t things you choose for yourself. The mouse doesn’t choose to be a mouse.”

  “I understood what you meant,” she said bitterly.

  And silk georgette.

  And chiffon with polyester.

  My God it’s melting.

  This wasn’t real either.

  But later she was happy again. Silk georgette. Organza. And shantung.

  Shamo silk—it’s too wonderful.

  And chiff—

  . . .

  Then

  Suddenly

  Everything

  Was

  Over

  The store had gone bankrupt.

  The Islander and Sandra emptied it.

  Loaded fabrics into the car and drove them to the house in the darker part of the woods.

  Little Bombay, all the fabrics.

  “We’re leaving because nothing’s happening here,” she muttered and she wasn’t the silk dog any longer. To herself. No. It couldn’t be said like that.

  It wasn’t like that.

  “Let us call her Lorelei Lindberg,” Doris had said at the beginning of the game. “Everyone in the next county over is called Lindberg and since she wasn’t from here you can assume she was from there.”

  Doris’s way of reasoning. But it had helped.

  She could hide other stories in her heart—no stories.

  There were holes in the garden of stories—a well, dark like a cavity in the earth to stare into.

  Belonged to the kind of hard things in the soul from which nothing could be woven.

  Viscose rayon pulp and nothing.

  Little Bombay, all the fabrics—

  And the puzzle, 1,500 pieces, “Alpine Villa in Snow,” half finished, it was still lying on the table.

  “It’s so empty. I shoot flies with an air rifle.” The Islander shot empty rounds with his rifle in the rec room. Drank whiskey. Maybe it was his attempt at building up the courage to load the rifle with ammunition and just make an end to everything. To himself, everything, the little girl in the pool.

  You wanna implode your mind with the Exploding plastic inevitable?

  Little Bombay, all the fabrics.r />
  No. All of that was over now.

  Imaginary swimming.

  The girl ran in the pool. Back and forth between the short ends.

  The Islander had gotten up and walked out to the pool area on unsteady legs, with the rifle.

  The girl who ran and ran as if she hadn’t even seen him, eyes closed, back and forth, back and forth.

  Imaginary swimming. He had raised the rifle and aimed it at her.

  Then she had stopped suddenly. Looked up at him with big, defenseless eyes.

  He had fallen, crumpled together, the rifle had fallen out of his hand, he had started crying.

  Belonged to the kind of hard things in the soul from which stories cannot be woven.

  The most beautiful story ever told

  DORIS WAS THE ONE WHO TOOK SANDRA OUT IN THE DISTRICT. Sandra got to know the District in a new way. Until she had met Doris Flinkenberg, Sandra had mainly roamed around the house in the darker part of the woods without aim or purpose. Maybe followed in the boy’s footsteps, in daylight of course, and when he definitely was not in the vicinity. Come to different places, Bule Marsh for example. She had also seen the cousin’s property before, and a few other places, but they had not meant anything. Her head had been filled with strange thoughts that had nothing to do with the concrete reality surrounding her in the darker part of the woods, so full that she had not really had the energy to see anything outside of herself, or had room for anything else in her consciousness.

  She had, in her aimless wanderings, mostly been occupied with thinking about whether or not someone was following her, if she was being watched. Was the evil eye there, all of that—the boy in the woods, and so on.

  “Ah Bencku,” Doris said when Sandra brought him up, “He’s bananas. As bananas as a . . . BANANA,” she continued. “What do you mean?” Sandra whined, but Doris just shrugged her shoulders. “You’ll probably see later. Yourself.” Which had not exactly calmed Sandra’s anxiety. See what? Though it had not been possible to continue asking questions then because Doris Flinkenberg had, true to habit, bubbled on about a bunch of other conversation topics which, according to Doris in her own opinion, were much more interesting.

  “Behind the marsh.” Doris pointed at an especially brushy direction in the woods. “That’s where I came from. In the beginning. Oh, boy Sandra. You should just know what lunatics I descend from on both my mother’s and my father’s side.”

  And again Doris pulled down her pants a bit and revealed a terrible dark brown but very visible checkered scar on her left thigh. “Do you know what this is?” she asked and Sandra just shook her head. “The work of idiots. They’re over there. Beyond the marsh. Or, were.”

  “We’re not going there, are we?” Sandra asked anxiously.

  “Are you crazy?” Doris fastened her eyes on her. “I’m never setting foot there again. Never ever! Now we’re going to turn off the path here and go in the other direction. To where civilization is.”

  And with these words they came to the cousin’s house, which Doris Flinkenberg exhibited for Sandra like a museum of a happy home. Here was the kitchen, so shiny and clean, with the household assistant who was kneading the dough so conveniently, and there was the transistor radio from which the weather report came, and the Poppy radio cassette player—which could not be used as a radio because the antennas had come off a long time ago—with Doris’s own music: Lasting Love Songs for Moonstruck Lovers, “Our Love Is a Continental Affair,” and all of Doris’s other songs on cassettes, just as unbearable.

  And there was the cousin’s mama with her crossword and her dishes and her cooking and all of her True Crimes. And next to the kitchen on the first floor of the cousin’s house was the cousin’s papa’s room, though you were not allowed to go in there. He kept to himself in there and the best thing to do was to walk as quietly as possible past the closed door. Doris snuck by on tiptoe, with her finger to her lips.

  “He keeps company there with his demons and phantoms,” Doris hissed to Sandra on the stairs going up to the second floor when they could speak freely again. “And you’re not allowed to disturb him. Though he’s not dangerous. Not in that way. Not anymore now when he’s past his prime. Meek like a kitten.”

  “What’s a phantom?” Sandra asked when they came up to Doris’s room, the nice and bright and spacious attic room where the daylight streamed in between the clean white apple-patterned curtains and you had such a pretty view over the entire cousin’s garden below.

  “A fantasy ghost,” Doris Flinkenberg answered and sat down on her bed, on the bright yellow bedspread. “Ghosts that come from ancient times. There was a woman he loved but she’s dead now. Anna Magnani, or the breasts from the working class. That wasn’t her name really, but that’s what Bengt says.”

  And when Sandra gave her a questioning look, Doris shrugged her shoulders impatiently.

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s not important. We might get to that later.”

  It was rather cozy, really, in Doris’s room on the second floor of the cousin’s house. Such a pretty picturesque little attic room, perfect for two little girls to play their games in. But still it would never be like that, never a place where Sandra Wärn and Doris Flinkenberg hung out. There was already something else that they were disciples of. The house in the darker part of the woods, and most of all the basement and the pool without water was already theirs.

  This room, Doris’s room in the cousin’s house—it was, yes, too normal. No room for Loneliness&Fear or for Sister Night and Sister Day.

  “Come . . .”

  And then they went out again, and over the cliffs to the Second Cape. They saw the elegant houses that had once been part of the housing exhibition for country living in the future, where the summer guests and the sea urchins now lived and there were Private Property signs almost everywhere. But of course you did not care about that, now in the fall when everything was deserted and there was no season, as the summer guests had a habit of expressing themselves. They saw the Glass House, the most beautiful of all the houses on the Second Cape, and it was one of those fantastic sparkling fall afternoons when the different colors of the trees shone in the sunlight and were reflected in the water that reflected in the glass windowpanes so that a game of colors arose and it actually looked a little like the house was moving, as if it were on fire.

  And finally they went up to the house on the First Cape, which sat on a hill next to it, but a little on its own, surrounded by a pointed beach in three different directions. It was an old green villa with three stories, or almost four because the fourth one was a tower with a tower room.

  And surrounded by a garden, now rather overgrown, which subtly crossed over into the real woods that continued a good way to the west until you came to the end of the woods, to the dark marshlands where a certain alpine villa had been raised.

  The house on the First Cape had been empty for many years now already, and they got inside—it was as easy as pie, it was just a matter of walking in—and they went up in the tower and looked around at everything, everything that was around them.

  And then down to the floor below where there was a large living room still with certain old pieces of furniture in it, not very well preserved but not entirely destroyed. And there, in the parlor, Doris stood in the middle of the room, closed her eyes and opened them again, and then looked straight at her friend meaningfully, as only Doris could, and said:

  “A lucky house, what good luck that I was here.” And made an expressive pause before she continued. “This is namely where the bastard was found. And the bastard, that was me.”

  And Doris curled up on the plush-covered sofa and waved to Sandra that she should sit down next to her.

  “Come and sit here and I’ll tell you about my happiest story. There are many good things about this story . . . but the absolutely best thing of all is that it’s true. All of this happened for real!”

  The story about the house on the First Cape/Doris’s happiest storyr />
  THE HOUSE ON THE FIRST CAPE WAS ONE OF THE FEW HOUSES in the whole of the District that had escaped destruction during the occupation after the war. When the area was returned the house was completely and, to top it all off, almost newly painted; the original furniture was still inside the house and even some of the other things. Some important person must have lived there, people thought, someone who had the power to prevent the vandalization that had otherwise been carried out more or less systematically in order to hide the traces of military and other activity in the area. And someone who had liked the house, someone who had been content there: even the garden seemed to have been cared for.

  This stirred bad blood in the District, especially among those who had their former homes burned down, disrupted, soiled. And that the rightful owners of the house on the First Cape had not been in touch made everything that much worse.

  To leave the house adrift. After everything. That was almost worse than doing what the cousin’s papa had done, just showing up with his clan one day during the first period after the area had become free with that eternal but certainly completely legal document of Baron von Buxhoevden’s confounded bad luck in poker games.

  The house was empty. It would continue to stand empty. During many years it was a place where people came and went and hung out for shorter and longer periods of time. Very nearly every person in the District had either lived in the house on the First Cape or had known someone who had lived there—that is the way it was in the end. But still, the house would prove impossible to take possession of. There were always the original owners who dug their heels in somewhere in the background even though they never showed up themselves in the house on the First Cape. The women who would live in the house a while in the future were the first ones who would have a legal rental agreement to show. And for a time after that when the Backmansson family, descendants of the original owners, would finally move in.