It’s early in the morning and the cove outside is still shrouded in darkness. Markus and I squeeze into the tiny bathroom in the outbuilding. He runs the razor over his face and studies me in the mirror. Slowly and perhaps a little provokingly, I rub oil over my naked, freshly showered body, glancing at him furtively as he stands there leaning over the sink.
“Why all the Bowie pictures?” Markus asks, pointing at the collage that covers one of the walls in the bathroom. “Isn’t that a little immature, hanging pictures of your idols on the walls?”
I laugh and pull on my panties. “I’m in love with him, always have been.”
“Isn’t he a little old for you?” Markus asks, grinning as he puts little bits of paper onto a pimple or a nick from shaving. I can see the blood suffusing the thin paper and growing into a little rose on his cheek.
“No, not Bowie as he is today,” I protest. “I love the seventies version of him, you know, the androgynous, wiry, punk guy, the one who wrote cool lyrics and loaned Mick Jagger his women. Or was it the other way around? No, they had sex, Bowie and Mick. That’s how it was, right?”
“You’re insane, you know that, right?”
“I’ve never claimed otherwise.”
We’re having a referral meeting at the practice.
Elin, our receptionist, browses skeptically through the stack of papers sitting on our elliptical birch table. She scratches her tangled black hair a little.
“Well, where could they be? They were right here a minute ago. This is totally nuts.”
Suddenly Elin looks confused and much younger than her actual age of twenty-five. In spite of her extensive makeup and the piercings in her nose and lips, she looks uncannily young and fragile.
She looks unspoiled.
Maybe even innocent.
As if she were trying to prove the opposite, she chooses clothes that make people think about anything but innocence: short, tight-fitting black clothes, fishnet stockings, ragged sweaters, chunky boots, chains and rivets. Every once in a while she seems to get tired of all that black and comes in wearing pink-and-red-striped leggings and a sweatshirt. On occasion, patients have complained, although most of them don’t react to Elin’s appearance.
Sven clears his throat impatiently. As usual, his patience with Elin is very limited. It seems as though her very presence puts him on edge. And in a way maybe that’s as it should be because Elin is charged with an almost impossible task: to fill the space left behind by Marianne, our former—profoundly missed—multitalented receptionist.
So far Elin is still just in training; she was sent to us as a rehabilitation measure. We got her from the employment agency. None of us, not even Elin herself, knows how long she is going to stay, which I imagine must be stressful for her.
Aina and I like Elin for instinctive and perhaps somewhat vague reasons, although even we have to concede that she is not particularly effective. I am eternally amazed at how long it can take her to send appointment reminders to patients, locate patients’ files, or just run down to the bakery on Götgatan and buy cinnamon rolls. Plus she’s in a perpetual state of confusion—not a good quality in a receptionist who’s supposed to manage all the administrative tasks for the whole practice. She misplaces notes, forgets confidential documents like patient records in the waiting room, loses keys, and forgets to listen to the messages on the answering machine so no one has any idea if our patients have canceled or not.
But she’s just incredibly nice and she so desperately wants to please us that we overlook her shortcomings when it comes to organization and especially appearance.
“Isn’t that it in your other hand?” Sven asks, pointing at the paper Elin is holding in her left hand as she flips through the stack of papers with her right.
“Oh,” Elin says, blushing under her makeup and pushing the paper toward the middle of the table. “Sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking. Anyway, here it is. It’s from Fruängen Health Center. Okay, okay, female, born 1975, they write ‘post-traumatic stress disorder—question mark—following car accident in which her sister and mother died.’ Let’s see, it must be three years ago. Trouble sleeping. Hmm, who’ll take her? Sven, aren’t you really good at PTSD?”
Sven takes off his glasses and rubs his wrinkled but still-attractive face with his hand. His wavy hair, almost totally gray now, falls like a curtain across his forehead.
Sven Widelius is definitely the most experienced therapist in our practice and over the years that we’ve worked together he has always generously shared his knowledge.
“My dear Elin,” Sven says, “I thought I told you Monday, and last week as well for that matter, that I just can’t take on any new patients right now. I just don’t have the time for it. Things are incredibly busy right now with this eating disorder study.”
Sven’s voice is hoarse and there’s a hint of irritation in his words that none of us miss despite the fact that he is trying hard to look concerned.
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t know . . .” Elin mumbles, looking confused. She is tugging at her lip piercing, which makes her look like she has a gigantic wad of chewing tobacco stuffed under her upper lip. I get mad at Sven because he’s picking on Elin as usual. We all know he’s busy. His wife of more than thirty years, Birgitta, left him and their big house in Bromma to live by herself in a studio apartment in Södermalm. “She must really hate me to camp out in that rat hole,” was all Sven would say about the matter.
But anyone who knows Sven knows why Birgitta moved out. Sven has been, at least for as long as I’ve known him, notoriously unfaithful. The fact is that everyone wonders how Birgitta put up with him as long as she did. She isn’t exactly a downtrodden woman. She’s a professor of gender studies at Uppsala University—internationally acclaimed, interviewed on TV fairly regularly.
Aina shoots me a rather worried look.
Aina is my best friend and near-constant companion. It’s not an exaggeration to say we share almost everything. We have a sort of intuitive connection and as usual I have an idea of what she’s planning to say before she starts speaking.
“Seriously, Sven,” Aina says, “we all have a lot to do. You know I billed almost two hundred hours last month. And Siri . . . well, Sven, you have to do your part, too.”
Aina, who is wearing her long, blond hair in a braid, tugs at it irritably as she narrows her eyes at him.
“I’ll take her!” I say.
The room is quiet as Sven, Aina, and Elin all turn to look at me at the same time. It’s obvious that they all think I work way too much. Elin nervously runs her hands over her black jeans as she looks to Aina for guidance.
I chuckle and say, “Come on, take me up on it. I’m volunteering my services.”
Aina gets up from her chair without answering, brushes the crumbs off her jeans, and pulls her frayed wool cardigan more tightly around her body. She walks over to the kitchen to get another cup of coffee and says, as if in passing, “And you think that’s a good idea?”
“No worse than listening to you guys argue about the division of labor every time we have a referral meeting.”
Aina is back now, standing in front of the table with a determined, serious look that almost makes me laugh. She says, “Okay, I’m going to say what I think about that. Siri, you don’t do anything but work. You need to get yourself a hobby or something. I simply can’t allow you to take on even more patients while, Sven, you were hardly even here last week. That just isn’t what I call teamwork.”
“And since when does the responsibility for new patients rest solely with me?” Sven asks. “I took both of the patients from the Maria Outpatient Clinic last week. And that guy the Construction Occupational Health Committee sent to us. You cannot seriously think that . . .”
Suddenly Sven throws his crooked, wire-framed eyeglasses onto the table, jumps out of his chair, grabs his brown corduroy blazer, and storms
out of the room, muttering.
Aina stifles a snort. “We are so ridiculously dysfunctional!”
Elin laughs a little now, too. Timidly.
“Anyway,” Aina says, “you’re not taking on any more patients, Siri. Sven can take this one.”
Elin suddenly looks confused again and stammers, “Well, how am I going to . . . Are you going to tell him, or . . . ? Because I can’t . . . He would just get . . .”
“You can just leave that to me. It won’t be any trouble,” Aina says, rubbing her hands together and grinning.
And I don’t doubt for a moment that she’s right.
I don’t usually do couples counseling. On some level I doubt my ability to help people with troubled love lives, maybe because I can never seem to get my own romantic life in order, but at the moment I do have a couple in counseling. They’ve been having trouble in their relationship for a long time, and for the last six months Mia—that’s the woman’s name—has also been on disability leave from her job as a copywriter at a small advertising agency. Her family doctor recommended that Mia contact us: we cooperate to some extent with a number of family practice physicians here in Södermalm.
Patrik is tall with limp, straw-colored hair and a rough complexion. He reminds me vaguely of a pop musician from the eighties in his skintight jeans, striped T-shirt, and horn-rimmed glasses. He reveals his nicotine-stained teeth when he smiles and shakes my hand, after which he folds himself up like an accordion and sits on the edge of my sheepskin-covered armchair in an improbable position, curled over forward, like a giant insect.
A gigantic grasshopper in skintight jeans.
He has a firm handshake. In some ways it’s like Patrik himself: straightforward, dominant, self-assured, decent handshake, one that knows what it wants.
Mia stands behind him. Expectantly she brushes a light-brown strand of hair from her sweaty face and tugs at her faded cardigan as if she wanted to hide her large breasts.
“Come on in,” I say. “How are you guys doing today?”
Mia glances quickly at Patrik, as if to check her answer with him before she speaks. “Fine, I guess,” she says slowly, still looking at him, but she sounds unsure. As if she were asking me a question, or maybe Patrik.
“Would you like to start, Patrik? What happened since last week?”
“Well, I don’t really know where to start.” He says, crossing one leg over the other, revealing a well-worn shoe sole.
“Has there been a lot of conflict?”
Neither of them answers. Mia glances down at her ample thighs and Patrik clenches his jaws, hard, staring off into space.
“Well, has there been any conflict?”
Patrik clears his throat and stares blankly at me. He says, “You know, I think it’s exactly the same as always. Even though we’ve been over this a hundred times. It’s like it never gets any better. And it’s just so typically Mia—”
“Wait a sec,” I interrupt him. “What never gets any better?”
“You know,” Patrik explains. “We’ve talked about all this. Mia is so unbelievably . . . passive. She just lies around the house watching soap operas all day, doesn’t have any energy to watch the kids. It looks like . . . things look atrocious when I get home. And little Gunnel was eating the dog food again yesterday, hadn’t had her diaper changed in God knows how long. Awful diaper rash. And Lennart bit the daycare lady again. Twice.”
I see how Mia stiffens sitting on the upright chair; Patrik claimed the armchair first as usual. Mia rubs her hands together as if she were cold and were trying to warm herself up.
“Patrik, honey,” her voice is a hoarse whisper, “you know it isn’t my fault that Lennart bites the daycare lady.”
“Yeah, well, that’s exactly my point, isn’t it? You never take responsibility for anything. And now that I have a job, a, uh . . . career, it certainly makes sense for you to help out with some stuff at home, not just sit there like a cow in front of the TV all day.”
Patrik runs a small specialty music business that produces a few Swedish rock bands. I’m guessing that he doesn’t make very much money at it, but his work seems terribly important to him, almost like a natural extension of his identity.
Mia brushes invisible wisps of hair out of her face and gives me a dejected look. And when she speaks it’s to me, not to Patrik.
“I know, I ought to help out more, be a . . . better mother, but I don’t know . . . I just don’t have the energy. I know, I need to . . . get it together.”
“You always say that,” Patrik laments. “I don’t believe you anymore. You know, I’m just so tired of you.”
“I know. I need to,” Mia repeats in a monotone, her eyes still trained on me as if she wants something from me, like she’s demanding that I promise to repair the mortal wound between them. Because that’s what they’re paying me for.
“Wait a sec,” I interrupt them. “Have you been following the responsibility chart we made last week?”
Patrik scoffs, swinging his worn black boot. “Mia was supposed to take care of—”
“But I did!” Mia says, dejectedly. “Three times—”
“Mia didn’t buy bread,” Patrik complains. “Mia didn’t buy coffee—”
“Well, I don’t drink coffee.”
“No, but I do!”
“Yeah, sorry. That was dumb.”
She tugs again on the gray man’s cardigan and I can see that one of the buttons on the front is missing. As if she could read my mind, she suddenly covers the spot where the button should have been. Embarrassed. As if I had caught her in the middle of some sort of shameful act.
Patrik continues, “Mia didn’t buy cereal for the baby. Mia didn’t buy Colgate.”
“I bought Sensodyne!” Mia protests.
“You know that I don’t use that junk. You know what toothpaste we use. How many times do I need to tell you?”
“I’m sorry. I know, I forgot—”
“Wait a minute, both of you,” I interject. “First of all, Patrik, you’re breaking our rules when you belittle Mia like that. I would like you to apologize.”
Patrik sighs melodramatically and lets his whole long body fall back against the back of the chair with a jerk, studying his wife from below his furrowed brows.
“Yes, sorry. That was dumb,” he says. His voice is so neutral that I can’t decide if he’s being serious or sarcastic.
“Second of all, do you realize that you’re arguing about a tube of toothpaste?” I ask.
Silence.
“Hello?” I continue. “Does it matter if Mia buys Sensodyne or Colgate? Does it make any difference? Is that how you evaluate your relationship?”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Patrik responds heatedly, not aggressively but more as if he were eager to explain to me how it all fits together, explain the situation. “I mean, it’s not that the toothpaste really makes a difference, but it kind of symbolizes everything in our relationship. About Mia. She can never really do anything . . . right. It doesn’t matter how many times you tell her.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Mia repeats as if it were a mantra.
I turn toward her and lower my voice. “Mia, how does it make you feel when Patrik says things like this?”
She hesitates and glances uncertainly at Patrik again. “I don’t actually know . . .”
“Last time we met you mentioned that you sometimes felt like Patrik insulted you. Do you maybe feel a little bit insulted right now?” I prompt.
“I don’t actually know,” she says again.
“You see?” Patrik counters without hesitation. “She doesn’t even know what she thinks. Okay, so I’m a jerk, but at least I can admit it. At least I know who I am.”
I don’t take my eyes off Mia.
“Mia, how does what Patrik is saying right now make you feel?”
> “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know . . .” Mia is visibly frustrated, rocking back and forth in her chair. “I don’t know anything anymore. I just know that . . . that I love Patrik and I want to . . . I want him . . . to love me back. And for us . . . to be a family again.”
Patrik shakes his head and gives me a look of triumph. “What did I tell you?”
Excerpt from Pediatric Health Care Center Patient File
18-month checkup
A boy 18 months old comes in for developmental assessment. The mother thinks the boy is behind, which concerns her. The mother describes the child as having abnormal language and speech development and says he does not always seem to understand her when she talks to him. The child does not speak but is responsive and does not withdraw from his parents. The mother also thinks her son has delayed psychomotor development and explains that he only recently learned to walk. No siblings in the home; the mother admits that she does not have much experience with children and nothing to compare him to.
During the visit the child is pleasant and cooperative. Nothing abnormal detected on his somatic exam. The child makes good eye contact and seems curious and interested. He appears somewhat behind in gross motor skills. Has some difficulties walking without support. His fine motor skills appear to be slightly delayed. He is unable to stack blocks or draw. However, this may be because the child is not interested in the tasks. I explained to the mother that all children develop differently, that speech and motor skills can vary dramatically and still fall within normal parameters. This seemed to reassure the mother, and no further action is currently considered necessary. We also made an appointment for the boy to see Nurse Ingrid for his vaccinations.
Sture Bengtsson, MD
The windows are black and the rain forms narrow rivulets that meander down the glass. I open the window, lean out, and see the neon lights on the complex of yellow brick buildings that house the Forsgrénska Pool and Medborgarplats Library. The light reflects off the wet cobblestones of the square below, and silhouettes of people make their way across the lit-up surface. Fall has taken over the city and the darkness feels both relentless and comforting. Raindrops fall on my face and the cold and damp penetrate my thin clothes.
Strangers: An Exclusive Short Story Page 6
