I quickly shut the window and glance around the room to make sure that everything is tidy. There’s an oval table in the middle of the conference room. There are seven chairs around it. Five of the places also have notepads and pens. On the wall there’s a large, painstakingly cleaned whiteboard with the track lights aimed right at it. To the side there’s a smaller table with mugs, a thermos, tea bags, and instant coffee. At Aina’s and my places at the table there are two copies of the Self-Help Treatment Manual for Women Who Have Been Victims of Violence. Everything seems to be in order. Naturally I wouldn’t want to overlook anything.
I glance up at the big clock over the shorter end of the table. Quarter to seven. The members of the first group will be showing up soon. The only thing missing is Aina. I feel a sense of irritation growing and feel guilty about it at the same time. What Aina has done for me can never be compensated, never be repaid. It is petty and small-minded of me to be upset at her for being fifteen minutes late. Aina comes running through the door with her keys in her hand and a bag containing a box of doughnuts between her teeth.
“Sorry, I couldn’t help myself,” she says through her clenched teeth, alluding to the bag.
“I thought you didn’t want this to be coffee-and-doughnut therapy.”
“No, shit, I know,” Aina says. “But then I changed my mind, because this isn’t therapy. It’s self-help. And we’re supposed to sit here for two hours. And it’s almost seven o’clock. And we’re going to be hungry.” She took the bag out of her mouth and now she’s balancing on one leg, trying to take off her knee-high boots. Then she curses and sits down in the doorway and starts tugging at them with both hands.
“You know from the beginning I suggested coffee—” I say.
She holds up her hand to stop me from objecting, to show that she doesn’t want to have a pointless debate, the one we have for almost ritualistic reasons. We always find some minor detail that we don’t agree on and then agree on all the big issues, the important ones.
The phone rings, alerting us that someone is down at the front door. Aina stands up, grabs her boots and the doughnuts, and runs out to the kitchen. I head out to open the door.
“Well then, now that everyone is here, I would like to start by welcoming you all to this group of women who have experienced violence.”
Aina and I are standing at the whiteboard. I glance over at her. She has her blond hair up in an elaborate knot and she is wearing a beautiful knit shawl around her shoulders. She looks calm and collected, sure of herself, like someone you want to confide in. For my part I feel tired and tousled. The rain and wind have made a mess of my short, dark hair and my clothes are wrinkled. Not that I think it would matter if I were all dressed up; the dishevelment just makes me seem more approachable.
I look for the first time at the women attending the session. There are five women of various ages seated around the table. They are all avoiding looking at each other, keeping their eyes focused on Aina and me or straight down at the table. There’s something helpless and insecure about them all.
The woman sitting closest to me appears to be about the same age as me. She has thick, dark hair, which she has up in a ponytail, and she’s wearing worn jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. I’m struck by how normal she looks. She looks like someone’s sister or friend, a daycare worker or a bank teller. If you saw her in town you would never think she’d been the victim of violence, which makes sense of course. There’s no template for how people like them—like us—are supposed to look. The woman squirms uncomfortably as if she has noticed that I’m looking at her. She looks me in the eye. Her eyes are dark, unflinching. She smiles cautiously, hesitantly, and then looks down at her hands resting on her knees.
Aina starts talking. She discusses the purpose of the group: “not a psychotherapy group, a self-help group led by a professional facilitator . . .”
And the rules: “Everything said here is confidential; you are all bound by an informal confidentiality agreement . . .”
And the guidelines: “once a week for eight weeks . . .”
It feels strange to have two group leaders. I can’t help but study Aina, evaluate her efforts. She’s doing well. The word confident comes to mind. Aina seems confident and secure. You can tell she’s experienced. I think about how insecure I am in my role in this project. I’m a group leader, but at the same time a former victim of violence. A thin membrane separates the two, group leader instead of participant, professional instead of victim.
“I think we’ll start with a little presentation,” Aina says. “It’s unusual that you’re all from the same town. You may recognize each other or have seen each other before. For that reason, we would like to remind you again of our confidentiality agreement. It’s really important that you all feel safe here. None of you need to worry that what you say here in this group will become public knowledge. Okay?” She looks around the table, seeming to make eye contact with each of the participants. I look at the women, who nod earnestly and murmur their agreement.
“Why don’t we go around the room so you can tell us your names, your first name is enough, and then a brief word about why you’re here. Of course you don’t need to say any more than you want. Maybe you could also say something about what you hope to get out of attending this group, what you expect the group to help you with.”
Aina smiles and manages to look both interested and compassionate at the same time.
“I’ll start.” The woman next to me looks around and smiles again, tentatively and a little nervously.
“My name is Kattis. Well, that’s my nickname. It’s really Katarina, but, Kattis, everyone always calls me Kattis. And I work at the Employment Center, as a caseworker slash instructor. Although maybe I shouldn’t have told you that.” She interrupts herself and shakes her head. “Sorry. I’m nervous. It’s hard to talk about this stuff.”
Aina catches her eye and gives her an encouraging nod. Kattis takes a deep breath and starts again.
“I’m here because I was abused by my ex-husband. I hope these sessions will help me move on, put Henrik behind me, and forgive myself for being so damn stupid to have stayed with him.” Exhale. Silence. Kattis looks as though she can’t quite believe what she said.
“Welcome, Kattis. I’ll keep your goals in mind,” Aina says, nodding and jotting something down on her notepad. Then she turns to the young girl sitting next to Kattis. She can hardly be much older than eighteen, I think, young, thin, and frail, looks like she might break at any moment. Her long, narrow fingers are incessantly picking at something: her short skirt, her hair, her face.
“I’m Sofie, and I’m here because I was physically abused by my stepfather. Not incest or anything like that. He just used to hit me, when he was drunk or if I did something wrong, mostly. I’m here because I want . . .” Sofie stops talking and stares intently at the floor as if searching for the right words. “I want what she wants—Kattis, I mean.” She smiles a little shyly at Kattis. “I want to move on and stuff, you know?”
Aina nods and makes a note. The other group members also nod. They look touched and interested.
After Sofie there’s another young woman, a few years older but still young. She looks strong and energetic, with short, bleached-blond hair and a sporty outfit. I get the sense she’s an athlete. She looks around and seems to be looking at everyone in the group at the same time.
“I’m Malin. I was raped by a guy I thought I could trust. I’m here because I hope it’ll make me a little less angry. And because I don’t want to feel like a victim. I think talking about it helps. I think things can get better.”
Her voice is strong and clear and she tentatively makes eye contact with Aina. As if she’s challenging her.
Aina writes something on her notepad and then moves on to the next woman. She’s the oldest one in the group, probably in her sixties, permed hair, dyed red, and fingernails yellow from
smoking. Her face is wrinkled and marked with age spots. Everything about her seems tired and downtrodden. As if life hasn’t been kind to her. For a second I wonder what I have in common with these women. Probably nothing, I scold myself silently. I urge myself to focus on them, the women in the group, not on myself. I feel like a hopeless egocentric and keenly long to be outside in the darkness thick with rain.
“I’m Sirkka,” the woman says in a thick Finnish accent. “I’m here because I was abused by my husband. As I have now come to understand, after all these years. He died last winter, and after that I started wondering.”
She sighs, a sigh so deep that it causes all other activity in the room to cease. She has everyone’s attention.
“I wish . . .” Doubt. “I wish I could start over again, like you young girls who are here. I’m too old now, but I guess I still hope that I can . . .” More doubt. “Make peace with myself, maybe.” Sirkka bobs her head to indicate that she’s said what she wanted to.
Now to the last of the participants, a beautiful woman in her forties, short, dark hair that frames her face, green eyes, deep, wine-red lipstick, perfectly applied. She’s impeccably dressed, the kind of woman you notice. She glances up from the table and decides to focus on me instead of Aina.
“I’m Hillevi, and right now I’m living in a shelter with my three kids, my boys.” Hillevi smiles and looks happy, maybe at the thought of her sons.
“I lived in Solgården before I started getting beaten up by the father of my sons, uh, well, my husband.” Hillevi pauses. It’s not an interruption because she’s not sure what to say next, but rather a carefully considered pause, and it strikes me that Hillevi is an experienced speaker, comfortable talking in front of a group. She looks around the table but then turns her eyes back to me.
“I can live with the fact that he beat me. I was raised to believe in marriage. My parents are conservative Baptists and they taught me that marriage is for better or worse, come rain or shine. Jakob didn’t hit me often, and afterward he was always unbelievably full of remorse. He’s not a misogynist. He respects me. He loves me. He’s just so hot-tempered. He just gets so mad. We’ve seen a marriage counselor. Jakob has been trying, working on his behavior. I thought it had gotten better.” Hillevi stops to think. “It did get better. Really. But then he hit Lukas.”
She stops talking again. I look her in the eye and only now do I see the shame.
“He hit Lukas, that’s our oldest son. He’s almost seven.”
Hillevi bursts into tears and lets them flow down her cheeks and down over her thin, pale neck.
“I’m here because I need to accept that I can’t live with the man I love and because I need to forgive myself for not being able to protect our children.”
I nod slowly to confirm that I’ve heard what she said. That I’ve witnessed that her world is crumbling and needs to be put back together in a new way.
Aina’s voice brings me back to the group again and to the evening’s agenda.
“Okay,” she says. “Now we know a little more about each other. We thought we would proceed by describing some of the common reactions in people who have been the victims of these types of things, and also some of the most common phases people go through in dealing with such a crisis. But this isn’t a lecture. It’s intended more as a dialogue, so please feel free to interrupt me.”
I clear my throat and turn around to grab a whiteboard pen. It’s my turn to speak.
“People usually describe a crisis as having different phases. Have you ever heard this before?”
I outline the anatomy of a crisis on the whiteboard in front of us. The group sits quietly, watching me, waiting for my instructions. Suddenly I feel my cheeks burning. I’m not used to this, not used to leading groups this large. Not used to talking about the assault and abuse of women, not used to getting so close to my own fears while I’m at work.
Self-consciously I rub my hands over my black tunic and look down at the linoleum floor.
“Okay, we have fifteen minutes,” I say. “I was thinking that maybe a couple of you would like to share your stories with us in a little more detail?”
To my surprise someone actually offers to go first. Malin silently raises her hand to indicate that she’d like to speak.
“I’d be happy to go first. It’s not that hard for me—how should I put this—to talk about this stuff. Mostly it just makes me . . . angry.”
Malin stops and looks right into my eyes from the opposite side of the ring of women. The room is completely silent, just the sound of traffic humming by from somewhere outside, out in the autumn darkness.
“Who are you angry at?” Sofie asks, hesitantly. And everyone suddenly turns to look at the slender girl to my left. She says it with such caution that it sounds like an apology instead of a question.
“At myself. Obviously,” Malin says, and then laughs briefly but loudly with her mouth open. From the corner of my eye I can see Aina nodding, picking up her pen and making a note.
“Can you tell the story from the beginning? What happened?” Aina asks.
“It’s really a very . . . pathetic story,” Malin explains. “We met online, this guy and I, in a chat room, not on one of those shady sex sites or anything. It was a website for long-distance runners. I’m a runner, you know. Anyway, I knew who he was. It’s a really small world, you know, those of us who are involved in running on that kind of serious level, and he lives out in Värmdö too . . .”
Malin’s voice fades away and to my surprise I can see that her hands are clenched onto her jeans-clad thighs with a convulsive tightness. On the surface she seems relaxed and open, but I conclude that this is actually very hard for her to talk about. Suddenly she exhales, a deep sigh escapes her, and she shakes her head a little.
“I know you can never really know who someone is online, not truly. I mean not, like, for real. But we used to chat and then, after we exchanged email addresses and phone numbers, we started emailing and texting each other. It was . . . well, it was kind of like flirting, I admit. Although it’s not like there was anything graphic in those emails or text messages, nothing explicit, if you know what I mean. Although, okay, flirtatious and a little suggestive maybe. But there was absolutely nothing that . . . nothing that . . . would explain what . . . what happened.”
Everyone nods, watching Malin, who pulls out a tube of lip balm in silence and holds it in her hand without using it.
“And then one day we talked to each other on the phone and decided we should meet, just like that, at his place. I know, that was a huge mistake,” Malin says, shaking her head so that her short blond hair swishes around the top of her head like a helmet. She brushes her bangs to the side, raises the lip balm, and slowly runs it over her pale, full lips with a vacant expression on her face.
“That was my first mistake, but not my last,” she said. “It was a Friday and I had been out for beer with a bunch of coworkers after work that day. We had just had our big bonus meeting at work. I sell advertising and every quarter we get a bonus check if our sales numbers are good enough, you know? And that day we’d all just found out that we had all made the cutoff, to get our bonuses, I mean. So everyone was feeling really . . . well, celebratory. To say the least. Everyone probably drank at least four, maybe five beers, me included. The problem was that I hardly ever drink. I mean, not that that’s really a problem, but . . .”
Malin stops and looks at each of us one by one in silence as if she’s wondering if she can trust us, if we can be trusted, if we deserve to be trusted.
“So I was drunk,” she admits. “I’m so incredibly stupid.”
Another deep sigh. She lowers her head and clasps her hands around her knee. In a quiet, solemn way that makes me think of a nun or something. And suddenly she looks more sad than angry and there’s something in her facial expression, something in the deep furrow between her eyebrows, in th
e sharp lines around her mouth, that makes me think that she is older than she first seemed. There is something resigned and maybe a little cynical about her revelation.
“I don’t get it, I don’t get it, I don’t get it,” Malin wails. “How could I be so damn stupid? I went to his place, the home of this guy I’d never met, alone, drunk. What the hell was I thinking anyway? Then, when I got there—he lives down in those apartment buildings by the beach, out by the sports field—I had such a strange feeling when he opened the door. He gave me this . . . this really weird look and kind of smiled, but not in a nice way. I had this feeling that he was laughing at me for some reason, like you would laugh at someone who had done something clumsy, you know, spilled a glass on the tablecloth or . . . Whatever, I could have turned around and left then. It’s not like he jumped on me right there by the front door, but I felt so dumb, so I went in anyway. So incredibly stupid.”
The room is completely quiet. Everyone is looking at Malin, sitting there hunched over in her chair. Her muscular arms are wrapped around herself, as if she were cold or looking for comfort from her own body.
“Okay, maybe the way I was dressed wasn’t that great either,” she says. “It was a very, uh . . . short skirt . . . I know, I know, people always say that doesn’t matter. Obviously that didn’t have anything to do with it. Obviously that shouldn’t have had anything to do with it. But sometimes I wonder . . . If I’d have been sober. If I’d have been dressed differently . . . like in something that was just totally unsexy. If I’d gone there after a run, really needing a shower, ugly, with really bad breath. Would that have mattered? Did I contribute in some way to what he did? Even though, obviously, it’s not supposed to matter what you wear.”
Strangers: An Exclusive Short Story Page 7
