by Diane Zinna
I went to my desk and took out a sheet of paper. I decided—for all the things I’d left unsaid—I would write to him.
Magnus, congratulations on your success with Två Flickor.
Magnus, who would have ever thought that your simple sketch at Vimmerby would amount to something so acclaimed? No, that suggested I hadn’t believed in him then. No, better to just say that I was glad it had come to this. That people had recognized his talent. Because sometimes, people’s talents go unnoticed. Things go unnoticed. I just want to say that you really have an eye for things, and that I feel, beyond the skill of your painting, that you saw me. People don’t often see me. I thought your sister saw me. I was so sad that she didn’t come back to school. Am. So sad. Please tell her that. Please tell her: Siri, I have been lost this fall without you. I miss your cheerfulness, the coffees in the cold classroom before the bell rang. I remember your hejs, which always sounded like you were about to tell me something more, something important. Let’s try again. For all the things we’ve yet not said, for all the ways in which we are similar.
Annie was standing in the middle of my living room, barking as though I were a stranger. I looked across the room at the orange light, the opposite velveteen chairs. Annie was beneath the ottoman Siri and I would share when she’d come to read and drink tea with me. I caught my image in the mirror over the fireplace. My hair, brown again, hung in my eyes. My face was wet from crying. The white sheet of paper shimmered in the light from the television, vacant.
Siri was done with me. I’d trusted her, opened up, given her part of me, and she’d rejected me. Why couldn’t I let her go?
* * *
—
IT WAS LATE enough that I thought I might avoid the other professors. I descended the stairs of Wells, heard voices inside—and turned to leave just as a young adjunct was walking up. He rushed to hold open the office door for me but saw me hesitate to go in.
“You doing okay?” he asked.
Inside, several professors sat talking with Tenny. They all saw me. I had no choice but to go in.
There was an immediate hush.
“I didn’t know you were still here,” Tenny said.
“Did you think I’d been fired?”
“Because it’s evening. You don’t teach in the evening,” she said, looking at the others, sucking in breath, half-laughing.
This was new. This semicircle of professors around her, like she was holding court. The dismissiveness in her laughter. She had never been like that with me. I saw her lean back and slide her hands into two pockets on the front of her dress.
At my desk, my things had been moved again. My tattered blotter was propped against the wastepaper basket on a piece of broken tile.
“I just want to get my papers and get out of here,” I said.
Tenny appraised me. “Yes, your students have been leaving lots of notes for you. And I’m always getting your mail for you—if I didn’t, your cubby would overflow!” She swept the notes on the desk toward her. “These are both from early September,” she said. “Do you even hold office hours anymore? What should we tell your students when they come looking for you and you’re not here?”
I stood waiting until Tenny wheeled back so I could get into the top drawer. I couldn’t bear her oppressive perfume—musk and citrus, like furniture oil.
I noticed her illuminated copy of Dickinson on the corner of my desk, where my lemon vase used to sit. I pushed past her, and she rolled away from the desk to give me more room. I opened every drawer.
“Where is it?” I said.
“Where is what?”
“The little vase. The one like a lemon. I used to keep it on my desk here.”
“It’s stupid to keep something important in a shared space,” Tenny said. “This is a shared space.”
“This desk is my space!” I yelled.
“Lauren, you are the last person who is allowed to take that tone with me.” She turned to the others. “Can you believe her.”
The end of her sentence didn’t go up. It was a question, but she said it like a statement, like she was spitting. She said it like Gwendolyn.
The others in the circle were sitting back, looking away. Not one of them would meet my eyes.
“Lauren, let me ask you something. Can you believe that girl Frida came here? After everything she has been through?”
She knew something. She wanted me to know that she knew.
I rushed from the office. I didn’t go back.
WHEN I FINALLY had my cast removed, and the nurse cracked open its husk, tossing away the short strips of Swedish tape, and the Swedish gauze, stiff with the sweat I’d sweated then, I was shocked at how shriveled my arm looked and how it bore a blue sheen. The doctor reassured me that it would puff up again in no time and that the color of my arm was normal, but to me it was the hue of the flowers at Neptuni Åkrar. Walking to my mail cubby that afternoon, I tugged my sleeve down all the way for fear that people would ask about it.
As I pulled out the books and papers, a plain manila envelope dropped to the floor. No address. If I were being fired, is this how I’d receive the word? I pressed my fingertips against the sharp metal wings of its closures, lifted the flap, and slowly tipped out its contents.
Inside were thin, glossy pages torn from a copy of Kupé, a free magazine given out to passengers on the SJ railway in Sweden. I glanced at the pages and slid them back in. I left the office, my boot heels clopping on the floor as I hurried to the ladies’ room and shut myself into a stall.
I sat down and pulled the pages out again. Two girls, bare chested and reclining on their elbows. They looked out from the painting at the viewer unabashedly. No self-consciousness. Just wide-eyed—could it be called that?—innocence. And then, the incrimination of their nudity.
It was a magazine article about Magnus. There was a photograph of him, a small black and white shot. I didn’t know enough Swedish to read the article, but I could tell he was being celebrated for another painting of two girls.
We looked like mermaids, up on the shore for the first time in our lives. The painting was at turns damning and exquisite. Though the images were more impressionistic, less precisely rendered, the girls were definitely supposed to be me and Siri.
In this painting, our skin was blue in patches. This was Öland—Neptuni Åkrar. The beautiful day, the silent day. It had only been Karin, with her tender cesarean scar; Margareta, with her black hair whipping in the salt air; Frida, looking grumpy even while skinny-dipping; and Siri and me.
The painting suggested Magnus had been right there with us, with an easel balanced on the wide, flat rocks of the beach, telling us a story that had us rapt and interested.
I didn’t want this moment in a picture. This was my last good day with Siri. I wanted it to be just for us. We were innocents there, but no one would look at this painting and see that. I was angry that she had let this be our last day. My heart ached for her.
Neptuni Åkrar—Neptune’s Fields. Blue algae had slicked the horizontal shingles of limestone where the water came in. I had imagined azure flowers were swimming with us. Siri had gotten out of the water right away because of the cold.
Magnus had painted my hair copper and dark again, and it was streaming down my shoulders. From where we lay on the rocks sunning ourselves, we had been able to see all the way up and down the empty beach. There was no one else there. Was he working from a photograph? I didn’t remember taking pictures there—and this, this looked like someone working from feelings. My feelings—of childhood—unencumbered, uninhibited.
I tucked the envelope under my coat and made my way to my classroom at the end of the hall, where all the windows converged into a point of glass.
Frida waited for me there.
She shuffled her boots against the floor.
“Aren’t you late for
your class?” I said sternly, nodding toward Tenny’s room.
“I left you something in your box.”
I stopped, blinked, and pointed toward the back door of the classroom with such force that she had no choice but to follow me.
We went out the metal door. There was an elevated stoop with a few steps that led down to the school’s soccer field. She leaned against the railing.
“Siri looks pretty in it, right?”
I still clutched the envelope beneath my coat, against my chest. I didn’t want her to comment on it. I didn’t want her to have even touched this picture.
“It’s called Sjöjungfruar. That means ‘mermaids.’ It’s a little private, I guess, with you both being naked.” She frowned and boosted herself up onto the railing. “I don’t think people would recognize you in it. You looked a lot…different then. I guess it is the same for me. I don’t recognize myself in the mirror anymore. I have pimples from stress and dark circles under my eyes from bad dreams. Do you have bad dreams?”
How could I tell her I had nightmares? How every day was a walking nightmare, that this moment was a nightmare?
She laughed when I did not answer. She made me feel like a third wheel, though it was just the two of us standing there.
“Magnus keeps painting you with her. All set in different places from the summer. It’s a big deal back home. He wants you to see them.”
I envisioned my office mailbox stuffed with more incriminating pages, paintings of my breasts and my smile. I thought, too, of the embroidered calendar in Magnus’s room—the goat, the sow, the skeleton girl—and my face overlaid all its figures. I felt a twinge of fear. He was blaming me for something. Behind the glass, I sensed my students watching us.
“Why does he want me to see them?”
“Why wouldn’t you want to see them, Lauren?”
Because the painting was an accusation.
“Frida, you can’t leave things like this in my mailbox. I need you to understand…this job…it’s all I have. If people found out about the time I spent with you this summer—”
“This is not about your job. You’re afraid to face what happened.”
A student breezed past, and I crumpled the pages of the magazine against my chest. I hated Frida being this intermediary between us.
“I don’t get why Siri was so keen on you. You act like you don’t even care about her.”
“Of course I care.”
“You shouldn’t be able to function.”
“Is that what you wish for me?”
“I wish you would talk to me!”
“You told people I did something…inappropriate. Didn’t you tell people I make you uncomfortable?”
“I haven’t said anything to anyone about you.”
“You’re lying.”
“I haven’t. I wish I had someone to talk to here. I wish you would talk to me.”
“That’s not going to happen. I don’t trust you.”
“I’ve helped you keep this secret, you know. Yes, people are asking what is wrong with me. It’s not like I haven’t had opportunities to tell many people what happened over the summer. You should be more grateful.”
“Grateful?”
“I thought we could confide in each other.”
“I don’t want to confide in you,” I said quickly. “And I don’t want you coming near my home again.”
“I don’t go by your home,” she said slowly.
“Didn’t you leave me that ticket on my apartment door?”
She was quiet.
“I feel hounded by you. And Magnus. It’s too much.”
“You didn’t deserve her as your friend.”
“Probably not,” I said. “But it’s over now.” I tried to say it with force, to make it true.
“No.” She flipped up her hoodie and tightened the strings. “It’s not over.”
“Are you threatening me?”
She walked off.
“Frida!”
I looked across the soccer field. Frida was already on the other side. I pushed open the metal door to the classroom, letting it shut behind me with a clang. My students were all there waiting for me, staring back quietly. I knew they’d been watching the argument through the window.
I gave the class a new assignment, a speech on a topic of their choosing. I thought it would help. In my bag, my pile of ungraded papers was getting out of control—this would be one fewer written assignment for me to grade. I tried to explain the project, but I couldn’t focus. I made notes for them on a transparency, but the plastic sheet grew damp from the heel of my hand and I smeared it all. I kept having to stop and consciously breathe. One by one their hands went up, but I couldn’t bear to call on them. I snapped off the projector and told them to freewrite.
I could see Frida was still walking the perimeter of the soccer field, a white marble against the green pitch. I watched her for too long. I went to the blinds and snapped them shut.
“Professor Cress, this is bullshit.”
“Excuse me?” I turned back to the class. Ana was staring at me with an indignant look.
“This wasn’t on the syllabus, and we haven’t even gotten all our papers back yet.”
“You’ll get them back next class,” I said. I tried to use the voice that sounded like the previous semester’s version of me. “You all have given me a lot to work with. Lots of good ideas. They’ve been taking me longer to grade. The comments I give you on these papers…I really want you to take them to heart, okay?”
“And you still want us to do a speech?”
“It can be about anything you choose.”
“You’re not even giving us topics?”
“If anyone wants a topic, come to my desk, and we’ll discuss possible topics.”
The students all got up at the same time.
I put my hands up. “Okay, okay. I’ll assign one general topic. Just give me a minute to think.”
The envelope containing the pages from Kupé sat on my desk. Frida was still visible beyond the glass. Sjöjungfruar. I stared down at my hands, bunched into fists. I remembered the slice on Magnus’s hand from where he’d punched out Birgit’s bedroom window. They’d been fighting about his paintings. She’d told them some things should be off-limits because they could be torture. I went to the blackboard, picked up my chalk, and wrote in letters that took up the whole wall.
Should anything be off-limits in art?
“For those of you who need a topic,” I said.
The students wrote it down and looked back up at me for further explanation. I wanted to go further, to say the answer was yes, because some things are torture, some things should be buried.
“What if we have a problem speaking in public?” Ana asked.
“You obviously don’t,” I snapped.
She slid down in her seat and crossed her arms. Someone leaned over and tried to reassure her. She shouted out, “Bullshit,” one more time before I assigned them pages for reading and turned to stare at the closed blinds.
THE WEEK’S DEPARTMENTAL meeting was a den of women professors. They all stopped talking when I walked in. Lately I would see Tenny whispering in the hallway with Gwendolyn. People were saying she was a shoo-in for the new full-time position. I hadn’t even applied. I was losing my footing. She was coming into herself.
The hands of those women moved across their students’ papers in unison. Marking splices, missing apostrophes, V’s for where the student should add an article, but never more information. Instead they drew long lines through sentences, whole paragraphs, X’s through pages to indicate this is tangential; this is not interesting; this is not even your original thought. But what student would offer up any part of themselves in their straight-rowed rooms?
When the meeting ended, there was the chair-scrape
of all the professors getting up at once, filing out. They walked down the hallway ahead of me. There were no footsteps, just a swishing sound, maybe all their floor-length skirts dragging. Then they all slowed down together, turning to look at me. Their mass parted, and I could see Frida at the end of the hall, sitting in a too-small orange chair, her thin legs splayed, her arms at weird angles. Her blond hair was pulled back from her face in a tight bun, her eyebrows so light, it just looked like bone there.
I could see it. Plainly. I recognized Frida’s desperation as my own. I could see from her face she had the same hot, black cloud inside of her that was always full and ready to burst inside of me.
“There’s that girl,” one of the professors whispered.
Frida approached me.
“Du måste ringa Birgit,” she said.
The other professors grew quiet, wondering if it was possible I spoke her language.
Frida pulled off her long sweater, revealing a sleeve of tattoos on her arm. A web of them. A spider on her bicep. Mostly black lines, the outlines of tattoos waiting for color. But there was one long red line, an unraveling ribbon, that went from her bony shoulder to her elbow. And the outline of a girl on her forearm, moving as Frida moved.
The women, now on either side of me, stiffened. They snaked around us and went down into the stairwell, leaving us alone in the corridor.
I took in Frida’s gaunt face. Siri had once described her as fragile, and I felt I was seeing it for the first time. Her normally steely demeanor was now a clay urn, fissured with grief and ready to burst. I pushed down that part of me that wanted to embrace her.
“Birgit has been trying to reach you. She says you’re not picking up, so she has been calling the school.” She handed me a slip of paper with a long stretch of numbers. It was the phone number for the house in Olofstorp.