by Diane Zinna
“Siri, come in,” I said.
“What’s it say? I can’t read it. It’s all stretched out.”
“You don’t have to answer him,” I said.
Siri smiled politely and sidestepped him, came through the door by ducking underneath my arm, and I shut it before he could say anything else. He may have thought he knew something about me, but I didn’t want him knowing anything about her.
We stood awkwardly in my foyer. The walls suddenly felt whiter and blanker.
Her hands were clasped before her. She politely made notice of the things nearest her: “I like your mirror. I like your lamp.” There was a stack of books on the coffee table, Asian American writers, the pages stuck with neon Post-its. A stack of blue notecards I sometimes laid out upon my carpet showing a timeline of Chinese writers in America: Sui Sin Far. Onoto Watanna.
“Are you enjoying all these books?” she asked.
She was avoiding asking me about the man.
“I heard there’s a full-time job coming open at Stella Maris next year,” I said. “Professor Trela is retiring, and she teaches a section of Asian American literature.”
“You’re going to apply? They will hire you. I just know it.”
“I’m going to try.”
I felt unsettled. I looked around my apartment. I was afraid of what she’d think of the dust, the childish items on the bookshelves, my old friends’ teenage pictures on my refrigerator, the stains on the carpet. She stepped out of her shoes and put them by the door. “I don’t know anything about Asian American literature, but I’ll sign up for your classes. You’re the only teacher who makes anything interesting. Is that your bedroom?”
Before I could answer, she was walking down the hall to my bedroom door and going in. I felt out of control. I hurried to follow her. I feared the room still smelled of that man, of sex. She went to the window and knelt on my rumpled bed to raise the blinds. I felt tears in my eyes. I was sure my apartment was about to come alive, my closet again a mouth, to swallow her up. I remembered all the men who had been in the bed she now knelt upon. She had pom-poms on the backs of her socks.
“Your view,” she said softly.
“What?”
“You can see into all the other apartments. No wonder you care about all these people.” She waved to someone.
I went to the window to see the ROTC boy was waving back at her.
“Where did you see the lights?” she asked.
“What?”
“The green bouncing lights. You told me that first day.”
It hadn’t been the first day. Only the first day I’d shared something of myself with her. But she thought of that day as the first day, too.
“Out there,” I said, and we both watched, like they might materialize again in the daylight.
* * *
—
BACK IN THE living room, we ate the scones she’d brought. She sat on the edge of my couch and leaned forward, waiting for me, maybe, to say something about the man, but I felt that was an impossible conversation and avoided her gaze.
“I wanted to take some pictures of the horses today for a project. Remember?”
“Of course.” I got up to take our dishes to the sink.
She grabbed my wrist. “No, let’s go now. Before the fog clears. Let’s see them in the fog.”
“All right,” I said, pulling away from her. “I’ll just do these dishes.”
She widened her eyes with impatience.
“Just this dish!” I laughed. I put the plates in the sink, beside two wineglasses from the night before. She was suddenly beside me, reaching for the glasses to scrub them out.
We stood shoulder to shoulder, me washing her plate, she washing the man’s glass. She dried it with a towel and pushed it into the back of my cabinet.
We bundled up and went down the stairs and got in my car. When I started the engine, the radio blasted loud and she shut it off, ready to continue our conversation.
“So who was that?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Just a person.”
“What drew you to someone like that?” she asked, and her question stung me with its earnestness. I was reminded suddenly we were at different stages of our lives. I think she felt it, too, the coming and going of ourselves. I felt so protective of her in that moment, like if I didn’t tell her about him, a man like that would never happen to her. I never wanted her to give any part of herself away.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “I see you’re just going through things. You need to go through things to come out the other side.”
She was talking so quickly, and her words seemed rehearsed. Did she fear that she’d end up like me? When she spoke to me this way, was she also talking to herself?
We drove in silence to the stables and found the two horses we loved standing together in their ring, no one else around. Rockabye and Irish Cloud. In our hearts, they were ours, they were us.
She wanted to take photos of the horses for her art project. We climbed to sit atop the ring rails and they ambled over to us. I looked at Irish Cloud’s snowy face, the gray patches showing through on her muzzle.
Siri adjusted her camera and took a picture of me looking back at her. Then she climbed over the fence and approached Rockabye, who was snorting and waving her chestnut head back and forth. Siri had a leftover scone in the pocket of her coat, and she fed some to the horse.
“Is that man your boyfriend?” she asked. She put her head against the horse’s body as though listening for a heartbeat.
I pretended not to hear her.
“Does he stay with you a lot?”
“No. It was just the one time.”
She nodded, pretending to look intently at her camera.
“I tricked him into staying with me, Siri. I play a game. I do it all the time.”
“What kind of game?”
“I start conversations. I listen. I talk.”
“That doesn’t sound like a game.”
“It is. It’s all made up.”
“You lie to them?”
“No. It’s not like that. I just know how to talk to men in a way that makes them think they like me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s just hard for me to be alone all the time.”
I think that was the first moment I thought of the coming summer, of being without her for weeks on end.
“Here. Take my picture.” She handed me her Polaroid camera, and I did. When the photograph developed, she gave it to me so I could keep it.
“You’re not alone, you know,” she’d said.
She meant her, of course. But had I tricked her, too, into becoming my friend with the words we traded, the words leading to stories, openings, words that took us down the stairs of a dark cellar? Just two people grabbing for each other’s hand to hold, only thinking themselves friends?
There was a man we always saw mending the same foot of fence across the way whenever we visited the stables. He usually kept his distance and never said anything about our being there or petting the horses. But that day he dropped his gear and called out hey to us. I thought we were in trouble for climbing over the fence and getting into the riding ring, but as he approached, I saw how his eyes were fixed on Siri like a dart thrown from one side of the ring to the other.
“Hello,” Siri said when he came close. “I just wanted to pet them. I’m sorry.”
“I’m Jason.”
“I’m Siri. This is Lauren.”
The young man nodded. I don’t think he expected Siri to be so beautiful up close, for her voice to be that high and silky. He’d lost his confidence. He reached out and pet Rockabye in a rhythmic way, something to do until he could think of something to say.
“You take good care of
the horses,” Siri said, climbing back over the fence. “I can tell that they are happy.”
Jason squinted at her like he was looking into the sun. “You don’t have to leave.”
“We’ll come back,” Siri said, looping her arm through mine. “Take a picture of us, will you?”
He took a picture with her camera, but I saw her discard it after it processed. He’d only taken it of her, and she was a blur because of the way his hands were shaking.
* * *
—
SIRI STARTED COMING to my office hours more and more. Tenny Ryan would raise her eyebrows at me, and there was something in her disapproval that spoke of a usurped state. Tenny had imagined us to be close, allies, and here there was this girl.
But it wasn’t just Tenny. Stella Maris was provincial. The other professors had inordinate standards of propriety. There were no desks arranged in circles in their classrooms. Everything was kept exacting. As long as they could keep everyone in line, they saw their classes as successful. In the café of the student union, afraid of their seeing Siri and me together as friends, I would keep a textbook open on the table between us.
Even when Siri started coming to my apartment, I made sure my grading book was out on the dining room table, as though my colleagues could see us there. I knew they would disapprove of the friendship. They’d say worse things about me than they did about those teachers who graded too easily, to be liked. But when you are suddenly given everything you think you need, how do you turn away from it?
I could see Bisson’s doors from the window above my desk in the adjunct office. When it hit four o’clock, I would gather my things and run up the stairs to meet Siri as she came down the blue-slate path. Then we’d walk to my apartment, which wasn’t far from the school. She made my walk home different. For two years they’d been doing construction on the road between the school and my apartment building, and though the same orange barrels and debris lined the curb every day, she made it feel like things were finally improving.
The Vallapil children loved her. She taught Ravi Swedish words, and he’d recite with enthusiasm the ones he remembered from days before. Khushi would tug at Siri’s shirt, hold out her arms, and ask Siri to pick her up.
She made my apartment different. The things that belonged to my family were no longer souvenirs of grief but the beginnings of stories. They no longer spoke at me; I spoke of them. And when Mrs. Vallapil came to my door with food, she came with two heaped plates.
I would sit on my broken-down couch, drinking tea with honey-sticky fingers. Siri would sit on my mother’s old velveteen chair, under the orange light of the standing lamp. We shared the ottoman and contemplated little Annie as she padded back and forth between us. She was fourteen now, a deep sleeper, with the gait of an old woman and white in her expressive Toto face. Siri would stroke Annie’s ears and coo to her in Swedish. Annie would listen intently, like it was her first love language come back to life, then clamber up to lay her fluffy head in Siri’s lap.
The room smelled too much of coconut lime verbena—the close scent of the candles I burned—Spot Shot rug cleaner, and the Vallapils’ curry-strong dinners cooking on the other side of the wall. I was self-conscious of these things, but Siri just turned the pages of her magazine, comfortable and still. When she wanted something more to drink, she got up and poured it for herself without asking. And she’d bring me another cup, too. I could set aside all my papers and just be.
When we were together, I didn’t need to read something to have a place to lay my eyes, and she didn’t need to say anything to justify staying later than she’d planned. When she was done with her magazine, she would rinse both our mugs in the sink and dry her hands on my dish towel.
“All right then,” she’d say. “I’ll see you soon. Hej hej.”
Hej can mean both “hello” and “goodbye” in Swedish. We would be finishing up a telephone conversation, but then she’d say, “hej,” and I thought she wanted to tell me something else. I couldn’t get used to it. For what felt like the first time in my life, it seemed there was always something more to say.
In her essays, too, she found ways to just keep talking to me. At Midsommar, everyone closes their shops, she wrote, and they go out to the countryside to be young again. That’s just how she said it—to be young again. In my office hours, I sat with her, circling the many untenable phrases on her papers. Round and round went my pen, softly asking more of her: “What do you mean it never gets dark?”
“There is the midnattssol—the midnight sun. Have you heard of that?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Come with me to Sweden this summer.”
“What?”
How had we come to this point so fast? She offered the invitation so easily, like we could just walk out of that basement office and up the stairs and be somewhere else in the world together, right now.
“Really,” Siri said.
A noise in the hall. Tenny Ryan was approaching. Soon she would be in the shared adjunct office, filling it with her smell—heliotrope, flowers meant for a casket. I felt our hourglass running out even then.
I’d had to put all of my energy into fending for myself for so long. I’d grown up fast and withdrawn so small. I’d never been Siri’s age, that sparkling and confident eighteen. To be young again? She beckoned me back into the world of the living. It really is that green, that lush, she said. It will all be just thawing out.
I was suddenly overcome with a rhythm in my mind, a beat, the name of a childhood game played by girls on the edge of adolescence: Truth or Dare, Double Dare, Triple Dare. Consequences. Promise and Repeat. I found myself saying it over and over in my mind as she waited for me to answer. What I’d forgotten from having girl friends was that our games always turned darker.
When I accepted her invitation to travel home with her for the summer, I took Siri up on a double dare. That this place I had been reading about all semester was real; that our friendship was real.
RIGHT BEFORE WE left, I found a copy of Per Vikander’s Guide to Sweden on the remainders shelf of my local bookstore. It was a couple of years old but beautiful, with pictures so glossy they appeared wet. I read that people called Stockholm’s subway system the world’s longest art gallery, with paintings on the subterranean walls of most of its stations. I told myself I had to see that. And each time I dog-eared a page in that guidebook I convinced myself that this park, this boulevard, this Viking rune was the real reason I was going to Sweden. Once there, I made detailed notes and drawings beside all the places we went, determined not to forget a thing. In the beginning, how I wanted to remember.
We arrived on a Saturday. Siri’s sister, Birgit, greeted us from the balcony of their cottage among so many pots of yellow flowers their home appeared top-heavy. Birgit was six years older than Siri, and beautiful like her, but with dark hair she wore in a long ponytail that fell like a rope. She leaned over the metal balcony railing, reaching out her arms to me giddily, then rushed down and through the front door to clasp my hands in hers like she’d always known me.
“Var är Magnus?” Siri asked her.
Birgit looked between Siri and me, smiling. “You said no Swedish, Siri! She’s been preparing me for weeks, saying that when Lauren is here, everyone must speak in English out of courtesy for you. And here she is talking in Swedish first thing!”
“Is he here?” Siri asked again.
“He’s at work.” Birgit grabbed my suitcases and pushed open the lavender-painted front door with her hip. “And he’s been better.”
Inside, the house was bright and full of color. The walls were covered with unframed paintings, and as we climbed a tight circular stairway to the bedrooms, I could see the curving wall was full of pencil lines, the skeleton of a mural never completed.
“Siri, are these drawings yours?” I asked. They filled the wall from the second-story c
eiling to the light hardwood floor below. Flowers, faces. Intricate patterns, diamonds and vines, women with faraway expressions.
We passed a darkened bedroom. I could see an easel in each corner, rumpled sheets pulled back from the mattress, blankets draped in lieu of curtains, a pile of records upon a black dresser.
“Our brother, Magnus,” Birgit explained. “He comes in late because of work.”
Siri stared inside his room until Birgit put her arm around Siri’s shoulder and led her away from the door. “Siri and my brother have a love…hate thing,” she said. Light poured through a square window at the end of the hall, making the two girls silhouettes, black and cut out against the light.
They still referred to their home as their father’s house, and I came to understand that was because he’d built it himself a long time before he died, too young, when Siri was just four. Their mother died when she was five.
There had been a series of grandparents and aunts who floated in to help them over the years. “We’re really glad to know you,” Birgit said, as though she were speaking for all the people who might have greeted me for the house in different times, when it was not just the three of them.
In the space of an afternoon, the house felt a part of me, more than my white-walled, white-mouthed apartment of two years ever had. I learned which of the floorboards creaked, found the rhythm for navigating their tight circular stairway, memorized the inlaid floral patterns in the landing step, knew the scent of that bright purple front door. Gravel drive, sloping-down hill, then green fields and no neighbors nearby. It was a dream. No matter which way you looked, the sun was on everything. I kept checking my watch to marvel at the sunlight, the late hour. It was squinty eyes and the feeling that you want to run, to move, to spring; the reminder that your body has parts that need watering.
Her town was fields that went on and on, farms, green, “go” green in all directions. Glints of sun in the trees were shining, distant lakes. The two of us went out in front of her house and she showed me a water garden her mother had made. Sparkling plastic gems still lined its bottom, and it was hopping now with tiny frogs.