by Diane Zinna
Siri was soon by my side, rifling through the bathing suits. “He hasn’t seen a Midsommar pole in town. I don’t get it. Usually they are easy to find.” She found a suit she liked and held it up. “I’m going to try this.”
She went into the dressing room and its saloon-door partition clapped shut behind her. “We’re not going back to the campsite until we find a midsommarstång.” I could see that she was barefoot and standing on tiptoes, like the floor was cold.
I knew she wanted me to experience the traditions that made her love Midsommar so much. I was supposed to be feeling carefree, but she must have known that something was off between us now. I needed to find a way to talk to her about Magnus. I started picking through some sweatshirts folded on a table. One had a Swedish word in jagged lightning-bolt script.
Siri hummed to herself, one of the poppy techno songs we’d listened to over and over during the trip. In a mirror, I pressed the sweatshirt against my body. I noticed some young men watching me. I tried not to meet their eyes, but they came over, swift and slick. They were surfers. I could see the wetsuits underneath their plaid flannel shirts, and their faces seemed permanently windburned.
“You shouldn’t buy that one. That’s not for you,” one of them said.
Another pointed at the jagged-lettered word. “Don’t you know what that says?”
“No.”
“Fäbodjäntan. The farmer’s daughter.”
They talked in Swedish. I could see the mean edge of their grins and knew what they were saying wasn’t kind. I looked to the partition of Siri’s little dressing room and saw her still shadow. She was watching through the slats.
I placed the sweatshirt back on the table.
One of them said something else to me, and suddenly Siri threw open the dressing room door to yell at them. She was wearing the bikini she’d gone in there to try on. It was pink, dotted with green robots. I’d been intimidated by the men, but she only had to give them the annoyed look I’d seen her give Margareta, and they skulked away. She went back in to change into her clothes. I stared at the shadow of her body against the door until she came out. She hung the bathing suit back on the rack and hooked her arm in mine.
“What did they say?” I asked.
“Don’t make me translate everything all the time,” she said, glancing behind us and squeezing my hand.
* * *
—
WE LEANED OVER a lot of fences in our search for a midsommarstång, even wandering behind an old stone house to check a family’s backyard, where we saw a long stone table set with bowls of heaped red and white strawberries, silver herring, sour cream. I felt suddenly nauseous and turned to lean against the fence.
“Lauren, you’re so pale. Maybe I should take you back?”
“No. I’ve just been drinking too much.”
“You haven’t been eating.”
I hadn’t had a real meal for days, my appetite held at bay by Bilar and my stomach torn up with guilt over Magnus and over Siri’s distance. She said he’d come to the campsite. With whom? And who did he follow here? Siri or me? Back in the square, Siri bought me a Coke and some roasted nuts from a street vendor. We sat down on a bench with our backs against the wind and shared the nuts from a wax paper bag, soon shiny with our fingerprints.
“I bet we could find a Midsommar pole in the countryside. Or some beautiful väderkvarnar,” she said. She coughed. “The windmills here are hundreds of years old.”
“Siri, your cough is so bad. Should we go back?”
“No, no.” She smiled and cleared her voice. “It’s Margareta and her cigarettes. She doesn’t stop.” She looked down at my sandals, where a piece of straw was caught in the straps. “Hey. Do you know there are Vikings buried right under your feet?”
I smiled.
“Are you all right to walk?” she asked.
“Yes. But I don’t want to go back to the campsite yet, okay?”
“We’ll go into the countryside,” she said.
There was real silence away from the town, away from the campsite, and I basked in it on the walk with Siri. We climbed a path that went from asphalt, to gravel, to trodden grass. There were purple flowers everywhere. Few homes, no cars. The defunct windmills she’d promised peppered the landscape, but despite the strong wind, they didn’t stir. If there was any noise at all, the wind pushed it past our ears before we had a chance to catch it. There was no responsibility to hear, to do anything except be.
This is what it had always felt like to be alone with Siri. When it was just us, I could be confident in the quiet. I could be my slow-healing, mourning self. My sometimes-frightened, sentimental, youngest self. From the top of the hill, I saw the flashing seas that surrounded the island. Rain clouds were gathering, making it look, for once, like it was getting dark when it should. I felt I was standing at the top of a playground slide and gravity was pulling me down, down.
“We’re up closest to the sun now,” Siri said. “We can ask it not to set. Then the day will last. You won’t go home.”
We got down on the ground and lay on our backs. I didn’t know where we were, only that we were close to the sky and the sun might listen to us.
She reached out for my hand and held it in front of her face. “Look at this. When I first knew you, you were self-conscious of your nails being bitten down—remember when you would point to the sentences on my essays with your knuckle so you could hide your chewed fingernails from me?”
Overhead, the sudden sound of raucous birds. They were swans, flying overhead and low, their wings beating like sailcloth.
“Tell me what you will do when you go home,” she said.
“I’ll prepare for my class. I’ll get the new roster and go over my students’ names so I know how to pronounce them the first day. I’ll read the new book of essays they want me to teach from this year. At night I’ll write poems about this trip. I’ll make a scrapbook with our pictures.”
“And Mrs. Vallapil will bring you plates of biryani with raisins—your favorite.”
“Yes.”
“And Annie. You will have Annie back with you.”
My beautiful Annie. The Vallapils had been taking care of her all those weeks. I imagined Khushi following my dog around with the little silver whistle her parents made her wear around her neck, hurting Annie’s ears. Annie was arthritic and slow, and the Vallapil apartment was Technicolor, with pungent altars in all its corners.
“Yes. I’ll take Annie down to the soccer field and walk her along the edge of the woods,” I said.
“You should walk her by the stables to see the horses we love.”
“Rockabye and Irish Cloud,” I said.
Siri closed her eyes and breathed deep. I could feel it through the ground. I felt a rush of all the things we knew together, all the ways we’d been good for each other coming back to us now that we were alone. It was like the Siri I had once known was waking up from sleep.
“When I was a child, my father told me that if I blinked, I could miss nighttime. Each Midsommar’s Eve, we would play a game to count the seconds between dusk and dawn. I could never stay up for it. I would awaken to him counting, and the sun would be rising.” She rolled over on her stomach and laid her head upon her hands. “You must come back here when you have your own children, Lauren. Tell them stories like that.”
She said it like Sweden belonged to me, too. I wanted to believe that. I stole a look at her peaceful face, the one I loved.
“How long will it stay dark tonight?” I asked.
“For a little while. The sun will set about ten and come up again around four. In the north, the sun does not set at all this time of year, but we are pretty far south. The day will still be really long.” She sat up. “East of us now is the campsite. And that way to the bridge”—she pointed—“that way to the cemetery. That way to my old s
ummer house.”
“I’d like to see it.”
“No, it’s probably torn down now,” she said quickly. “Lauren, this island…it used to feel more…wholesome.”
“That campsite’s not wholesome,” I said with a laugh.
“No.” She picked at a snag of flowers growing beside her. “You know, the graveyard is not too far from here. My father. My grandfather. My mother’s headstone. I was thinking—would you want to go with me there tomorrow morning?”
Her mother’s headstone.
“That would mean a lot to me,” I said. I’d been hoping she would tell me about what happened with her mom. Maybe there she would finally confide in me. There was still so much I didn’t understand about her. We’d traded words, and we’d traded stories, but it had all been weighed and measured. We needed more. All of it. If she could really confide in me about what happened with her mother and Magnus, our friendship might be real. I imagined her as a child on this island, her family at the top of a hill, her running down it to get away.
“When we’re back in the U.S., we can take the bus to New York. They have those buses that go up and back for twenty dollars. You could show me the places that were important to you when you were small.”
“I guess we could,” I said. “I haven’t been there in years. We’d have to take the train or rent a car to get to Long Island, though.”
“I could see your old house. And meet your old friends,” Siri said.
It struck me that she should know this; that I had told her; that our whole friendship was built on this—that there was no one left for me there.
“I haven’t spoken to many of them in a long time.”
“When were you last back there?”
“I haven’t gone back there.”
“What? Not at all?”
“No.”
“But it would be good to go back, right?”
No. No, it wouldn’t. She knew this. Hadn’t I told her everything? I looked around me at the long blades of waving grass.
“I figure either I’d be talked about all over town—or people would not remember me. And I’m not sure what would be harder.”
We were quiet for a moment.
“Then fuck them. We don’t have to see any of your old friends,” she said defiantly. “I want to see what made you happy. What would make you happy?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
“That’s the problem with staying away from a beloved place too long. You start to forget. We’ll go. You’ll remember the parts that were wonderful.”
That might be possible, I thought. With her by my side. If she could vouch for me. If she could make the way safe. I nodded and looked out again upon our vista. It had been so easy to lose track of time on the island. I didn’t know where any of the paths led or how to get back to the campsite, but the island was already in me, the way a memory is in you, affects you, even though you might remember all the details wrong.
She looked at me seriously. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking about us. How important your friendship has been to me. And how I want to be there for you, too,” I said.
“You are.” She smiled.
I gripped her arm, somehow feeling she was sliding away from me with that smile.
“No, I really want to talk about it. Things have felt off between us, and I hate it.”
“Oh, things could never really be wrong with us, Lauren.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know you did not grow up with other girls like I did. Frida, Margareta, Karin—they are like my sisters, and I am lucky to have them. They are witnesses to my whole life, I think. But, Lauren, they see but they don’t see. You and I…we’ve always understood each other, you know?”
She hugged me. Right out there in the field, my heart against hers and the whole field beating with us. I wanted to believe her. I held on to her.
“We’ll go to New York,” I said.
“It’s decided. We’ll go.” She nodded. A promise.
“I mean, it’s suburbs. Strip malls and pizza places. Lots of traffic. But you’re never far from a beach. We could drive all the way to the end of the island.”
“I bet it’s beautiful there.”
“Not like this, Siri.” Öland was the most beautiful place I’d ever been—wildflowers everywhere, the all-night sun blurring the edges of everything.
She got up and brushed off her pants. “Allemansrätten. Remember I taught you that word?”
I did remember. It meant “Every Man’s Right.” It was a beautiful word, a beautiful law. People here were free to venture outdoors anywhere they pleased, as long as they didn’t disturb the landowner, steal, or make a fire.
Siri suddenly started running down the hill toward a windmill. I leaned up on my elbows and saw her waiting for me at the bottom. When she called my name, I got up and ran to her, my heart a stone flying from a slingshot.
But really, my heart was flying backward in time—that’s how it felt, to be running, to be free and unafraid. Free, before loss tangles and addles you. To be young again. To have ever been young.
We approached the windmill together and discovered a small door in its back constructed of wooden planks. Slowly Siri opened it and we peered inside. The old stone and wood works of the windmill were awash with the sunlight coming in through the top. And graffiti. Names scrawled into the wood. Names + Other Names: lovers. Hardened bubblegum spots making a mosaic of the grinding stone. Siri and I climbed up inside. I thought of the night on the playground when I’d been stuck inside a structure not unlike this one. I wondered, if I called out for my father here, would he hear me? I closed my eyes and heard the sound of him in the bathroom, shaving before his night job. I heard the click of his razor against the sink, the crumple of my mother setting his brown-bag lunch on the table beside the door, the tinkle of his spoon from his empty teacup being left on the counter. He’d wash it when he returned at daybreak. I opened my eyes and saw Siri looking out across the field. “There’s a house,” she said. “Not too far!”
We climbed down and walked in the direction of the farmhouse she’d seen. Siri pointed at blooms and told each one its name. She showed me a dandelion-like flower and called it backklöver, mountain clover, backklöver…she went hazily between Swedish and English, as if the eyes of the black-centered flowers she was sniffing were poppies. She talked to herself as she walked on ahead of me, and I could only make out every other word. That wind again, scrubbing hard enough that it might erase things. I let it break against my face, my chest. Then I thought I heard her say Magnus.
I caught up with her and tried to listen. She was talking to the giant pyramidal blomsterlupiner. They stood grand and imposing, their petals a knit of riotous fuchsia.
“He told me not to come here, I did anyway, and now he is here to make sure I don’t get in trouble. He is so fucking controlling. Birgit likes to think being with you keeps me safe. But that’s not enough for Magnus.”
She looked at me like she was wondering if I believed her. Another test. The field felt like a place of confessions. All she would have to do was ask me how I felt, and I’d have to say it.
“We should make a midsommarkrans from wildflowers. A crown. Do you want to do that? That’s a special tradition in Sweden. We would need to gather many different kinds of flowers.”
I could hear tension in her voice all of a sudden. She brushed her hand over the heads of some indigo blooms. Their color was so rich, I almost expected her palm to come away dripping ink. She was upset, thinking about Magnus, but she kept talking about the crowns. We needed a bendy reed that would be strong enough to braid, she explained, and then we could tuck whatever flowers we liked into that. Sandklint were bright pink poms. Rödklint had fragile sun-ray petals that turned to dust between your fingers. She showed me the nat
ural depressions in the field. “This is where two roads would have come together a long time ago,” she said. “You always pick flowers at a crossroads.”
But she had brought up his name. She wanted to talk about him.
Siri pulled up bunches of lilac chicory and added them to her bundle.
“And there’s another tradition with flowers,” she said. “For when you are lovesick. Maybe I should teach you that one?”
She knew.
It would be easy to say that my feelings for Magnus came because he was off-limits. But I don’t think that was the reason. The only thing more intoxicating than being with someone you long to be is to be with someone who feels like the misunderstood parts of you. In so many ways that perhaps only I could see, Magnus and I were alike, and it scared me, the idea that Siri might see that and reject me, too. He wasn’t a vial marked “drink me.” He was a looking glass.
“What did you guys do in Gothenburg that day?” she asked.
I took a breath. I told myself I’d tell her the truth.
“We went to see some of the places you and I had talked about going.”
“How did the guidebook get so wet?”
“It rained,” I lied.
“You were with him the whole day,” she said. “How was he?”
“He was fine,” I said.
“I saw the guidebook. I thought maybe he did something to our book.”
“No,” I said.
“He is always complaining about the way I live my life. He complains that he has to work to support me, that he’s not able to spend more time on his art. But I say…so what? You know? He’s not that good an artist.”