The American Girl

by Monika Fagerholm

  And, yes, at the marsh, in the end, she had also been there with Jan Backmansson sometimes. When they had strolled around a little bit everywhere and examined the flora and the fauna and all the natural phenomena in the woods. Jan Backmansson who had known so much about this and that, for example, regarding the hole in the bottom of the marsh that produced such strong whirling currents that could in no time carry a grown person to the brink and a certain death by drowning, which had happened with the American girl, Jan Backmansson also had a scientific explanation handy.

  “For example. Let’s say,” said Jan Backmansson. For example. That was how he always started: pour water in a coffee cup with a hole in the bottom. What happens with the water? It runs out. But put your finger in the cup while it’s running. Do you feel anything? Doesn’t it pull? Doesn’t it flow? The hole sucks the water in.

  “The hole sucks you to it and you’re helpless. You can also say it that way, but you don’t because it isn’t scientifically valid. But the effect is the same. The water is sucked into the hole, there where it’s filled with nothing.”

  In some way Rita had liked hearing it. That is to say as an explanation. It was so plausible. And so calming.

  •••

  Jan Backmansson. She visited him yet again in his home in the apartment in the city by the sea. Every time she was together with Jan Backmansson in his beautiful home that was so large and filled with rooms with roughly thirty-foot ceilings, it struck her that there was no place else. There was no place else in the world to be. It was another world.

  Yet: she was there less and less frequently.

  And something else had started to gnaw on her lately. That also: how some parts of life were connected and how others hung loosely and that all of it was really rather arbitrary. How certain parts could be linked with each other at all.

  More and more it had become so that on the one hand there were the Backmanssons in the apartment in the city by the sea, her with Jan Backmansson there. And there was also Susanna’s room, where Rita sometimes sat and read at the antique desk. A room that was so high that from its windows you could see out over the rooftops in the city by the sea, toward the city. The wonderful room, that was what she called it, in secret. A secret for Jan Backmansson also.

  On the other hand there was the District. The Rats and Solveig. Solveig, Järpe, Torpe, and so on. There was Four Mops and a Dustpan, and the latter, the dustpan, who was absent for the most part. Bencku with his projects of which nothing ever came of any of them. He just talked. He was going to become an architect; he was going to become a cartographer, for real; he would also start a world revolution, though there had been less talk about that lately. He had also starting talking about “getting himself together,” because there had been a lot of beer lately. And about “the women;” to Rita’s and Solveig’s surprise he did not have a lack of them. He moved from woman to woman and played the lottery. Won unnecessary things. The latest: a water bed. It arrived at the cousin’s property on the bed of a truck and you thought it was some kind of joke.

  And the cousin’s mama with the cousin’s papa in his room, where he had been for almost all of Rita’s conscious life, since childhood. Something inside him has broken, said the cousin’s mama, and yes, for lack of other explanations, you had to make do with that. But on the other hand, “damn it,” as you swore in the District. Damn it.

  It was another world.

  “You might have to decide WHO you’re actually with,” Solveig had said. “And not carry on with this double-dealing.” But Solveig did not understand.

  Torpe in the District, Jan Backmansson in the city by the sea. It was not double-dealing. It was just two sides of life that had nothing to do with each other. At some point in time she had been able to talk to Solveig. Not anymore. Not now.

  Sometimes it was also as if she was afraid of Solveig. She did not know why. There was something so uncontrollable about her. The same uncontrollability she had inside herself. But could nothing change? Must it be this way for all time and for all eternity?

  Jan Backmansson. Again that was something she barely wanted to admit herself, that uncertainty.

  “I knew it,” she had said to Jan Backmansson quite a few times lately, in other words regarding the agreement made a long time ago, after the house on the First Cape had burned and the Backmanssons returned to their apartment in the city by the sea. That she would be allowed to move with them. “It’s clear that you’ll also be coming, Rita. It would be good for you to come out in the world a bit, and go to high school somewhere else.” That is what Jan Backmansson’s mother Tina Backmansson had said calmly and decidedly. They were just going to “take care of the practicalities” first, but later—there was no later.

  “They hadn’t even seriously thought about it,” she had started saying to Jan Backmansson lately. “It was just an idea. One that you throw out when you want to have a good conscience.”

  The creepy thing was that Jan Backmansson had stopped asking her to be patient. He was also no longer talking about everything being arranged, that it would probably happen later. He had become angry and said, very irritated, “Oh. You’re impossible. Talk to them yourself.”

  And Rita had been quiet. She quite simply did not dare say any more. It had also been very humiliating.

  Now Rita walked up onto Lore Cliff. She stood there and looked down in the water, which inspired discomfort, like always. She did not see Doris Flinkenberg, but she knew she was there somewhere in the vicinity. In the silence. In the calm. No clouds; the sun that was shining from a clear blue sky. But it was still so dark, like always, around Bule Marsh.

  Suddenly she had an impulse. Tit for tat.

  “Come out now, Doris Flinkenberg,” she said loud and clear.

  And strangely, strangely: Doris came. Showed up, true to form, from just the direction you least expected, that is to say from a few bushes directly behind Rita. If Rita became a bit frightened by it she did her best not to show it.

  Doris came up beside her, there, on Lore Cliff.

  Doris, inside her old usual show with Rita, the one she had been busy with ever since the corpse of the American girl had been found. Not that it was noticeable of course, not to others, but when it was the two of them, alone. She always had to come to the part about Rita not having told the truth. That time a long time ago. That Rita had tricked her.

  “And they were going to come and get her,” Doris Flinkenberg mumbled slowly, in her evasive and soft way, true to habit. Threatening and mildly irritating and insinuating: and then she enjoyed the fact that Rita was at a loss for words. That she, Doris, as it were, had the upper hand.

  It was like a game, that too.

  But there was something else with Doris now. Something new—and not only that that way of being, threatening and silly, so poorly matched her new so elegant looks, the big faintly red shimmering blond hair that you could become so crazy about!

  And so on, with Doris’s looks.

  Though it could not be heard in what she said. But there was something else now. A real anxiety, a real hesitation.

  “But they didn’t come,” Doris Flinkenberg continued. “It doesn’t look like they’re going to come. And she’s . . . alone.”

  “Who?” Rita interposed as calmly as possible even though she knew exactly whom and what it was that Doris was referring to.

  “She got the boot,” Doris continued. “Was forgotten. Poor Rita.”

  And suddenly, thought Rita, it is do or die. She could not go on anymore. Not one second.

  “Oh! You mean the Backmanssons? And me? That they didn’t end up keeping their promise? That I didn’t get to go live with them, even though they promised. That it was shit for manners, so to speak. Well,” Rita continued, more self-confident, also fired up in some way over finally getting to say everything, a clean slate, “it’s true. Shit for manners. A damn shame. Are you satisfied now then? When you get to go around and remind me about it all the time?”

 
; Doris did not answer. She stood and looked at Rita, with the same insidious facial expression that she had the whole time, but she did not say anything. And her face twitched a bit, it did.

  “And what it is you want, anyway?” Rita asked. “Say it, then. Once and for all and then it’s over.”

  And then the strange thing happened: Doris sort of collapsed. She did not start crying or anything, did not lose her head either so that it was obvious. You just saw the energy ebb out of her, that she sank together as it were, her face grew slack, there was nothing Doris-like about her at all in those seconds; and it was in some way nasty as well.

  “I don’t know,” Doris said suddenly, completely perplexed, “when I don’t know.”

  And it came out so desperately so to speak. And then in the middle of it all Rita saw all of the sadness in Doris, the great and terrible and bottomless sadness—and it was among other things that would lead Rita, one and a half weeks later when Doris shot herself, to immediately understand that Doris had shot herself. That damned pistol! She should have at least made sure she got it back!

  “When I don’t know!”

  And Doris had sat down on the cliff and not said anything. And in that fraction of a second Rita thought about sitting down next to her, but nevertheless did not.

  Doris just sat there and ached and Rita, slowly, groping, she started, it was do or die.

  “Now Doris it’s just as well you should know everything. The cousin’s mama, she was the one who said you should be protected. You had been through so many terrible things. And we . . . I. It was such a hell then, Doris. You don’t understand. We were so young.

  “Solveig and I, we were completely shocked—a long time afterward.

  “But Doris. I haven’t forgotten. I’m not going to forget. The American girl, you don’t know, that face—it’s like it was in you. The cousin’s mama, she—”

  “Don’t you understand I don’t care about how it was!” Doris suddenly shouted.

  “I don’t care. I don’t want to hear it! That doesn’t mean anything!”

  “I don’t know anything about anything!”

  And Doris stood up and rushed away through the woods—later, yes later. Rita had not seen her again. At all.

  That was how it had been. She should have looked for Doris, she would think afterward. She should.

  But she did not. One thing after another happened. Everything went on.

  Shortly thereafter it became fall for real. You know how it is: someone suddenly just turns off the light regardless of whether or not the snow has come. Suddenly everything is just gray and hopeless. But weather here and weather there, actually you did not bother about any sort of weather, but now, just this fall, the days before Doris shot herself, everything harmonized in such a strange way.

  Crapweather. Craprats. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap.

  Shortly thereafter, a few days before Doris’s death, the Rats demolished the Glass House. Or, it was an exaggeration to say that. Demolished and demolished. There was actually only one spot where the Rats went crazy and that was the Winter Garden, the veranda extension where the baroness had once cultivated her fantastic flowers and been unreachable. Now there were only a bunch of half-dead potted plants because Kenny, who was actually the one who had been living in the house most, had not had the same thoughts and ideas as the baroness, you could see that. Behind her flower cultivations. My lovely, lovely garden . . .

  On the other hand she had tried. And later maybe given up or not followed through either or new things had come along to interest her or the summer had been over and it was time to pack things up, yourself and the sea urchins, and go away, away, to the city by the sea and there, another life. Another life there.

  You saw that: the attempt in other words.

  So Rita went after all of it, she was drunk of course. And she was surprised with what energy she had; she broke quite a few windowpanes before anyone was able to stop her. And she was rather pissed off, rather ill-tempered as well.

  Solveig really had to do her best to calm Rita down.

  And—here, another thing. Which was also false information. It was not the Rats who did all of that. It was Rita, and a bit Solveig, and Järpe and Torpe were present, but they were mostly watching. With surprise. Understanding nothing.

  No, it was not the Rats, it was not that kind of game (it was not a game, that was probably in some way the worst part). It was just Rita, Solveig and Rita, but mainly Rita. Because she, for a moment, could not stand it any longer. Any of it.

  And it was actually, and it was not constructed in hindsight because she had already thought that before Doris’s death, when everything happened, something with Doris and all of this too. Somewhere in the back of her mind the image of Doris desperate at the marsh, also somewhere in the back of her head the pounding knowledge that you really should go looking for her and once and for all explain everything, and the frustration over not having done so. And it was in earnest. You had, in some way, understood that Doris was desperate, that she could have done anything.

  But such a strange thought that you had not dared think it through to the end.

  But what Rita had seen when it went amiss for her in the Glass House on the glass veranda that at one point in time was Miss Andrews’s beautiful Winter Garden, was an image in her mind. An image of a rat running in a wheel, around around around around, and it was her. And an image of another rat, in another wheel, which was also turning. And it was little Doris Flinkenberg. And why why must it be this way? There was no opportunity in that moment.

  That is how it tends to be in certain situations when you are drunk.

  Of course Rita became normal later, and calmed herself down before she had time to demolish everything.

  And of course, ha-ha, besides, they were the ones who cleaned up afterward. Four Mops and a Dustpan. “On behalf of my work.”

  Though of course no one knew it was Rita—and Solveig, a little—who had gone crazy in the Glass House like that. Run amok.

  A few days later Doris Flinkenberg shot herself at Bule Marsh. When Rita heard the shot she knew immediately what had happened.

  That is how it was, in light of all this. In light of all this is how it was.

  Four Mops and a Dustpan. And a few days after Doris’s death Solveig came home after a day working in the city by the sea, among other things in the baroness’s bright apartment (where Rita never set foot).

  “She’s dead now,” Solveig said calmly. “She died. I’m afraid it wasn’t very peaceful. But”—and Solveig had shrugged her shoulders—“you can’t always choose how you’re going to die.”

  It was the baroness she was speaking about. Who had given up the ghost after being sick so many, many years.

  Doris’s death

  I walked out one evening, out into a grove so green

  There I met a girl, so fair and so beautiful

  There I met a girl, so fair and so beautiful beautiful beautiful

  There I met a girl, so fair and so beautiful

  “It’s over now,” the cousin’s mama said to Doris Flinkenberg on her return home after fourteen days in the house in the darker part. “Now you’re home again. None of that has happened. Sleep now.”

  Or maybe she did not say it in those words exactly, but that was the essence.

  Everything was over, forgiven. Doris had come home again, now everything would go on.

  None of what happened in the house in the darker part was a subject of discussion.

  And you could SEE it on her.

  “We have to clean there,” Doris Flinkenberg said to the cousin’s mama. “Sandra . . . she’s going to Åland. Or what do I know about where she’s going, maybe New York. And change windows . . . anybody can get in . . .”

  “Later,” said the cousin’s mama calmly. “Later. Go up to your room now and sleep. I’ll come up with the pills.”

  But Doris did not want to have the bottle with pills. She could not sleep. She did not want to sleep. And
Doris red in the face like a summer crayfish.

  “My goodness, child, it looks like a third-degree burn.”

  The cousin’s mama gave her a cream to smear on the red places. Doris smeared.

  • • •

  Ritsch she pulled up the blackout curtain that the cousin’s mama had pulled down when she left.

  Movement in the yard. She looked out and discovered the boys with bags of beer in the barn. She changed and went out to the barn and there she met Micke Friberg. The guys’ guy, or whatever it is called.

  “Where have you been all of my life?” Micke Friberg whispered in her ear just a few hours later.

  “What do you mean?” Doris had whispered back, tenderly and devoutly.

  And that was of course the story that was now starting, which should have been the main one. The summer I met Micke. And she had enough time. It was actually still summer. A few days still until school started.

  And still she had already experienced everything.

  And she was an older Doris now, another Doris, but most of all, sadder. A Doris who was alone and afraid, for real. Scared of life, scared of death. Could you see it?

  KNOTS in her stomach.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here,” Micke had whispered, and they had left the barn. They walked over the Second Cape to the boathouse and sat on the veranda in front of the open summer sea that was suddenly so calm.

  Earlier in the day . . . was it really the same day?

  Liz Maalamaa and the presidents.

  Sandra the-dead-American-girl Wärn.

  Someone has destroyed my song, Mom.

  Had it actually been the same day? When the world could be so beautiful also, so calm, like now. So right, Doris had thought, on the veranda of the boathouse, with Micke.

  “I think I’m also a bit in love with you too,” she then whispered to Micke.