The American Girl

by Monika Fagerholm

  The time when the women were living in the house on the First Cape constituted entirely new possibilities, but also for those who were not there at all, that is to say not anywhere. For example, the cousin’s mama now had the chance to expand her moonlighting, that is to say her cleaning business. Suddenly she had an entirely new customer base in addition to the Islander and the house in the darker part and a few of the more well-to-do families in the District. Quite a few of the summer guests on the Second Cape got in touch now too when their houses needed to be picked up after parties, and the word spread, and gradually Kenny was also there and wanted to hire her because when the baroness came out during the summer it was supposed to look like nothing had been going on in the Glass House before her arrival. And besides, all of these people, they also had permanent homes in other places. In the city by the sea, for example.

  This meant that the work now became a real business in one fell swoop. Little by little the cousin’s mama could start her own company and have employees and so on. Employees like Bengt for example. And Solveig. And Rita (reluctant, but still). And Doris sometimes, while she was alive, but more for specific tasks due to her young age (the house in the darker part, in the fall, after the hunting parties; more about that later). The company was christened Four Mops and a Dustpan. “The dustpan, that’s Bengt,” Doris confided to her best friend Sandra Wärn. “But don’t tell anyone—it’s a corporate secret.”

  . . .

  But the parties spread, a tiny, tiny bit more. Finally, when they had carried on and carried on spreading all over both of the capes they somehow found their way to one of the narrowest and darkest paths in the woods, the one that led to the house in the darker part of the woods. There where the Islander was standing, at the top of the stairs, white shirt flapping, sloppily tucked into his pants, the buttons unbuttoned all the way to his navel just about, furnished with sideburns in accordance with the current fashion and with a gold medallion shining against his dark chest hair, glistening with sweat in the sun. Like the captain on a ship—

  “Everyone on board!” is not what he yelled but he could have. And the similarity, no, it was not so crazy after all because look at the women who are coming toward him in masquerade clothes on the path up to the house, how they are drawn to him and the house like sea rats who curiously draw closer to a ship with one, let us say an interesting turn, toward port, down toward the mud—and really, it was Anneka Munveg and Inget Herrman who were in the lead.

  Then, from the back, not the very back of the line of dressed-up people on the path, but in other words even farther behind than where Doris and Sandra were dragging themselves forward, the following could be heard:

  “Sinking. Sinking.” And Sandra turned around instinctively. It was the boy who was saying it of course. Their eyes met. He looked straight at her, but also, in a strange way through her.

  “In other words this is where she died,” Doris Flinkenberg said at Bule Marsh. “Fell down in the water, was sucked down into a dreadful whirlpool, never came up again. Is lying on the bottom, maybe she’ll float up sometime. It’s terribly deep here, the dredging didn’t turn up anything. But you know she’s lying here, that the water became her grave. There were witnesses.”

  In other words it was here, at Bule Marsh, that Doris Flinkenberg finally started her story. Midsummer Eve, still an early one. Suddenly, in the middle of the party that was slowly getting started in the garden on the First Cape, Doris had done what Sandra had been waiting a few weeks for already. Given the go-ahead: The Game starts now.

  “Come,” she had whispered in Sandra’s ear and pulled her away, far out into the woods, and little by little they had turned off on the winding path up to Bule Marsh.

  And here they were now, at the marsh: the branches of hardwood trees hanging in a ring around a dark, still water. Opposite the highest cliff, that was Lore Cliff, there was a small sandy beach like an opening in the woodwork, which Doris Flinkenberg explained had once upon a time been a public beach. It was a short while, shortly after the new houses in the housing exhibition on the Second Cape had been bought up and the strip of beach next to the sea where you used to go swimming had become inaccessible. But later, after what had happened at the marsh only about a year later, no one had wanted to swim at the marsh and the public beach had been moved yet again, now to a real, sweet water lake in the western part of the county.

  It was a strange place, it really was, even in the middle of the warm summer. Half dark and filled with mosquitoes at almost all times of day, and calm even when it was blowing fiercely in other places. You almost needed a storm in order to get the water on the surface of Bule Marsh even to ripple. And it was deep. Doris Flinkenberg looked down in the water. “Probably three hundred feet deep.”

  “That’s impossible,” Sandra Wärn said to her friend.

  “He saw her here,” Doris Flinkenberg continued. “That’s how he drew it on his maps anyway.”

  “That’s impossible,” Sandra Wärn repeated. “Who?”

  “You don’t know?” Doris Flinkenberg asked and it was hard to hear if the question was part of the game or if it had truly surprised her.

  “Well, him. The idiot in the woods of course. Bengt himself.”

  . . .

  “And her name was Eddie,” Doris Flinkenberg continued while the sun set behind the clouds and the mosquitoes crowded around them, two pale girls who, as luck would have it, both happened to be endowed with that rare kind of complexion that mosquitoes were not attracted to so that they could sit more or less undisturbed almost in the middle of the swarm in the small crevice just under Lore Cliff’s highest point, which Doris had chosen for them, two very serious girls also, as said, with their homemade Loneliness&Fear shirts on. “She came from nowhere. You didn’t know much about her. She wasn’t from the District in any case because she spoke with a strange accent that wasn’t familiar to anyone. People referred to her as the American girl.

  “One spring she was just there, in the boathouse below the Glass House on the Second Cape, with the baroness. That’s where she lived. Not like a daughter of the house, or a domestic servant, but like a guest of some sort, no one really knew. A distant relative, something like that. Sometimes the baroness said ‘the boarder,’ especially toward the end. They didn’t really get along, Eddie and the baroness. There were rumors flying around Eddie about this and that, that is to say while she was still alive. Eddie was of the troublemaking kind, you couldn’t rely on her. I heard it with my own ears. The baroness said it to the cousin’s mama in the cousin’s house where I was already spending a lot of time then. ‘That girl is such a disappointment to me,’ she said, many times. And consequently in the end in a rather upset state. She came to the cousin’s house to warn the cousin’s mama about Eddie de Wire. That’s how I understood it anyway.

  “So she lived in the boathouse. She was allowed to be in the Glass House only when the baroness was home. The baroness also explained all of this to the cousin’s mama, so it wasn’t a secret. Not directly. But it wasn’t something that everyone knew. I guess that’s the way it is,” Doris Flinkenberg established worldly and omnisciently at Bule Marsh, “that for some people it’s important to save face. In some way it was extremely important that no one find out about the problems she was having with the American girl. It was after all, she always said, still family.

  “But later, Kenny, Eddie’s sister, came. They were a better fit. I think the baroness became more content then. She stopped complaining about everything in any case. Though she never came to the cousin’s house anymore. But there was a reason for that of course.”

  “Because if you’re wondering what the baroness was doing in the cousin’s house shortly before Eddie and Björn died, yes—so Björn was the cousin’s boy in the cousin’s house. That is to say before I came. They were together, Eddie and Björn, they were going to get engaged, it was very serious. So the baroness was going to do the cousin’s mama a favor, she said.”

  �
�But Eddie, what a fascinating personality,” said Doris Flinkenberg. “She spoke so strangely, not just with the accent, which she lost pretty quickly. But she said a lot of strange things. And it made a real impression on him.

  “On Bengt that is, not Björn. For a while it was the two of them. Bengt and Eddie. Then Björn came and they were three.”

  “But in other words, fascinating,” said Doris Flinkenberg. “You could really fall in love with her. And that’s what he did. Head over heels. So in love that he didn’t know left from right. You know what it can be like, right? We know. Young love. A violent end.”

  And yes, Doris did not need to say any more about it. If there was something Sandra and Doris knew quite a lot about it was that. When the contents of the two backpacks are united . . . It was the bitter midwife’s assistant Ingegerd who had killed the seven incubator babies after being rejected by her lover, it was Lupe Velez who fell headfirst and drowned in a toilet bowl, it was the woman who had murdered her lover with fifteen hammer blows to the head, it was . . .

  “And then”—Doris Flinkenberg suddenly shrugged her shoulders rather nonchalantly—“it went as it went. Death and woe became the result. Björn hanged himself in the outhouse by Lindström’s land, and she, the American girl, drowned. Sank to the bottom of the marsh, like a rock.

  “In any case that’s how people think it happened, and so far there haven’t been any reasons to think otherwise.

  “And this is how it happened: they argued at Bule Marsh, and Björn, who was known for being the nicest person in the world, pushed her in the water out of anger. And by mistake. And then everything happened so quickly, so quickly. There’s a hole in the bottom of Bule Marsh. She was sucked down into the deep. He couldn’t live with it so he went straight to the outhouse and hanged himself.

  “Just eighteen years old and he took his own life,” Doris finally added.

  “Loved her more than himself. That sort of thing is never healthy.”

  “But,” now Sandra joined in with as steady a voice as possible. She struggled to remain calm and businesslike because she had her hands full trying to hold back the images that were popping up in her head again, facts that were mixing with fiction in a horrid way. The boy, who showed up again. A voice somewhere at the very back, Lorelei Lindberg’s voice, from Little Bombay: They say that the boy has murdered someone, I wouldn’t go so far as to believe something like that, but there is definitely something unpleasant about him. How he sneaks around the house.

  So from this marsh a bit of this and a bit of that, old, new, truth and lies, she forced out her own voice and said as clearly and soberly as possible:

  “But what’s so unclear then? How is the mystery, so to speak, UNSOLVED? He pushed her into the water and she drowned. Everything was a mistake: he loved her so much he couldn’t live without her and then he went and hanged himself. There isn’t anything strange about that. I mean, there isn’t a mystery about that, is there?”

  She also shouted the last part and heard how her voice sounded hollow in the emptiness by the marsh.

  “Well, of course,” Doris Flinkenberg said impatiently. “It’s not just that in and of itself. There is a factor X.”

  Factor X. And there he was of course. But not alone. On the beach opposite. They had come up there with their bags of beer and their cigarettes, their talk and their sour teenage excitement, which was now being spread across the marsh and with a slap disrupted all of the excitement and the magic. It was a small group on the tiny beach in the opening, maybe sixty–seventy feet away, but you could almost hear what they were saying to each other across the water since it was so quiet otherwise; Doris and Sandra had quickly crept down lower in the crevice so as not to be discovered.

  Though they had nothing important to say, it was mostly one big raucous. It was Rita and Solveig and the brothers Järpe and Torpe Torpeson who often hung out together as a foursome during this time, and then there were some others in their wake. Rita Rat was in a bad mood as usual, and you could hear it. Rita managed to spread her irritability for miles around. Solveig stayed calmer, that is how it always was. Besides now she and Järpe Torpeson had their arms around each other as if they were married: Järpe daubed her ear with his tongue, lick, lick, and Solveig let out small small cries that were supposed to represent indignation but that expressed nothing other than some kind of bored enchantment. “That crazy Järpe he can never keep his hands in check.” And it was Torpe, off to the side, who was sitting on the sand and drinking beer from a bottle. And Magnus von B. from the Second Cape, former general of the child army the Lilliputs on the Second Cape, but nowadays like grease on bacon with Bengt, and yes, he was there too of course.

  Factor X.

  Bengt was standing a bit off to the side, away from the others. He had walked all the way up to the edge of the water, he was smoking a cigarette and looking around. His gaze wandered about as usual, but suddenly it looked straight over the water, straight to the other side, up against the cliff where Sandra and Doris were hiding, stopped, focused, and saw.

  Rita Rat came up next to him. Rita and Bencku spoke with each other, but so softly that you could not hear what they were saying. Plus Järpe and Torpe and Solveig and so on were talking the hind legs off a donkey in the background. Midsummer Eve. Such splendid fun. Torpe smashed the empty beer bottle against a rock. Crash. Finished another bottle. Crash. Smashed that one as well. And another and another and another.

  But factor X. He looked across the water. Straight at the girls.

  Though Doris and Sandra were no longer there. They had headed off through the woods, Sandra first, Doris after. Sandra ran as fast as she could, heart pounding, temples flushed, when she tripped over rocks and roots way out in parts of the woods where she had never been before. It was the deepest wood, where there were no paths at all, the part that lay closest to the marshlands where the marsh people whom Doris descended from had lived up until only a short while ago—now the area had been fixed up and would become an outdoor area for the county residents.

  “Wait!” Doris puffed behind her. “What’s wrong with you? Stop! I can’t keep up!”

  And little by little actually Sandra calmed down, with Doris safely behind her and with the growing distance to the marsh and Lore Cliff. She slowed down and there, suddenly, the woods opened into a glade. A soft, green moss spread itself out invitingly and she threw herself down on the ground, rolled around on her back and lay there and panted with exhaustion. Doris had ended up a good distance behind but when she caught up with Sandra she threw herself resolutely on the ground and in doing so landed so close to Sandra that she almost fell straight down on top of her. Then, instead of pulling away Doris put her arms around Sandra and they rolled around on the soft mat together, completely entangled like two wrestlers in a match or, well, like two people who are hugging. A completely normal hug. And that was what it was.

  Doris, suddenly so merry and filled with laughter, giggling and soft, and if there was a game then Sandra was drawn into it at once. Also because she wanted to get away from the fear and the panic she had felt at the marsh a little while ago, and this was something else, something important. “Hey, what happened?” Doris laughed, whispering softly while she continued hugging Sandra, not to mention harder, and Sandra, she undeniably hugged back. “What happened?” Doris Flinkenberg whispered again but no longer as a question that should be answered but as a mantra, an affectionate and soft one, she was suddenly a purring kitten, so small and so soft.

  She had hidden her face against Sandra’s neck, nibbled on the Loneliness&Fear shirt with her teeth, sniffed Sandra’s hair and stuck her tongue deep inside Sandra’s ear and played with it there so that she had a prickly and tickling feeling in her stomach. So, what were they doing? What WAS happening? And what was Doris really whispering? Did she whisper happened or hands now?

  Did she mean what had just happened at the marsh, that which had gotten Sandra to take off, or the other, that which was happening ri
ght at this moment?

  But, an end to the puzzling. Because in the middle of the thought that barely had time to be thought, Doris’s lips landed on Sandra’s lips and all the uncertainty was dispersed in one blow. Because what it was could not be mistaken.

  It was a kiss. A wet and true one, teeth against teeth and a rather lively tongue that wriggled in after, not to mention rather determinedly. Bursting from a relatively unorganized mouth to a highly well-regulated one, like a greeting from the one kind to the other. But who was visiting whom? Because what was it that was circling around the Doristongue if not another tongue, a Sandratongue? Not to mention that it seemed happy, just as enthusiastic.

  So, a short moment, but just that, there was seriousness in the middle of the game.

  The seriousness spread between the girls, so proud and, yes, so serious.

  Sandra felt a real sensation and it was both true and interesting and important, but decidedly not amusing, not at all.

  Because what did this mean now? Was this the step into adulthood? That moment when everything changed at once and became something else? The moment when the story about Doris and Sandra took another road? But in that case, then which one?

  Was it the road toward the definite and the limited, which also had a name? That which was not so open to all possibilities like the winding road they were now on?

  If it was like that, in that case, did you want to take that step? Already now?

  Suddenly she felt decidedly that no, she did not even want to think about it now.

  She did not want to grow up. Not yet. Not now.

  But Doris, what would happen to her then, in that case? Would she be alone with the feeling and the d-e-s-i-r-e and so on? In that case it also was not any fun at all. Doris was supposed to come along, wherever you were, whatever you decided to do. That was the idea so to speak, the idea with everything.