by Diane Zinna
I thought of Tenny pushing all those notes toward me on my office desk. I thought of the unheard voicemails I had deleted. Now the guilt was setting in. It was Birgit trying to reach me, to call me home, home to the terrible person I was, the selfish, bleach-haired tourist in her foyer, the person who had let her down by not watching out for her sister.
“Birgit wants you to know that Magnus gained a lot of attention from his paintings since the summer. He is having an exhibition in Stockholm. Birgit thinks you should come and see them when it’s up.”
Birgit thinks.
She started running her black fingernails up and down her forearm, scratching at the tattoos as if to knot and tangle the lines.
“Fine. Forget I said anything,” she said. “But I don’t want to be their messenger anymore. Ring henne,” Frida said, and she went down the stairwell the way the women had.
Ring henne: call her. Why did she say it to me in Swedish? Did she think I knew more than I let on, even a whole language?
* * *
—
I COULDN’T SLEEP that night. Around my apartment, nixes bloomed like fungi, playing violins. There was a scratching sound coming through my wall, and I let myself imagine it was Magnus’s pencil, scrawling flowers that turned into the face of a sow, of a goat-priest, of two mermaids on a beach, of a large, black bird.
The slip with Birgit’s phone number sat on the desk beside my computer. I was afraid to call her. Siri had been sick before that trip to Öland, and she’d begged me to look out for Siri. But Birgit couldn’t control her, Magnus couldn’t—I couldn’t. We were either at the window with worry or bringing her back home like the neighbor woman. I remembered Magnus carrying her off the beach. I remembered the girls holding a cup of warm milk to Siri’s lips.
The day of my students’ speeches came. I had not expected Ana to participate. But that morning she was there early, in the corner, fiddling with my shoddy overhead projector and its lamp.
“Hi, Professor.” She sighed in a cheerful but exhausted way.
Once we got the overhead projector working, I left it on, and it hummed through all the presentations. Two of the students read banned poems from their languages, and I found myself paying attention to the lilt of their speech and remarking on the passion with which they explained the words in English. A girl played a song for us, and though it sounded like a pop song—she said it was an alternative national anthem of her country—it somehow sparked the kind of discussion I used to lead all the time, the kind that changed the room to a place where everyone was safe. I felt almost like my old self.
“Last but not least. You’re on,” I said to Ana, who went to the front of the room, positioned the overhead projector, and drew down the screen. The machine whirred loudly.
Ana’s hand fidgeted before the projector’s lamp and made shadows upon the screen. “I always thought of impressionist paintings as old-fashioned versions of those crazy Magic Eye pictures—where if you squinted really tight you could make out the scene, you know? What I am going to show you is an impressionist picture, and it reminds me of the ephemeral nature of time.”
She slid her transparency upon the glass.
“Okay, that girl is naked,” Adnan said, and the class laughed.
“You can see her breast, but you can’t really see the woman’s face,” Ana continued. “Her mouth is just a slash mark. You can tell it is modern times from the hair, though. She is like a punk.”
The painting was done in light colors like a disappearing Monet. There was a black blotch in the middle, meant to represent the woman’s mouth. There was a cliff wall. A woman reclined on the sand, voluptuous, everything rounded, except the dimensions of her hair: sharp, blunt bangs, hair like a white triangle, black on the ends. Her face was amorphous and bleak, as though it had been smeared away like a mistake after hours of diligent work. Some aspects of the painting were sharp and accurate. Others were mysterious and upsetting. Perhaps it was the beach setting. Nudity again. I stared at the hair of the grotesque woman and drifted closer to the screen.
“I like the woman,” Ana continued. “She is scary and sexy at the same time. I think back to the stories the women in my family told, and they were always about women like this, who ruin things. Can you see what is in the distance?”
There was a white wave beneath the cliff, and upon it, a yellow object strangely suspended in the white paint. I thought, at first, of Magnus’s daffodils in the paintings he’d shown me that day in Gothenburg. Then I noted the shape.
“It’s an inner tube,” I said breathlessly.
“I think it’s a boat,” Ana said. “I think the woman has made it capsize. It is the woman’s fault. I think about in my culture, how it is always seen that way.”
“How did you find this picture?” I asked. I felt my anxiety rising. The students were only looking at me now.
“What?”
“Did Frida Dahlström give this to you?”
“Frida? No. What are you talking about?” She came forward to collect her transparency from the glass, but I blocked her way.
“Sit down, Ana.”
I stared at the picture enlarged on the screen. I could not deny the strange hair and the terrible downward gash that was my mouth. There was something like tar gurgling from it, molasses full of larvae and hair, a representation of lies. I could feel the light of the overhead projector outlining my body.
“Who is Frida?” someone asked.
“That Swedish girl from the beginning of class. The one who was friends with Siri Bergström,” someone said.
A wave rose as they started to murmur to one another.
Someone asked how the last name was spelled.
“B-e-r-g…”
“Shh!” I snapped off the projector.
“Ström,” Ana finished, looking at me narrowly.
I couldn’t bear the hiss of their whispering. They were all talking about her now, each their fragments—
“That girl who went to school here…”
“…last semester…”
“Quiet, all of you!”
“The girl who died.”
I stood, frozen.
“I heard she drowned,” someone said.
“When she was found, she was blue,” another said.
“Who said that?” I said.
I searched their silent faces, like the words could still be hanging in the air before them. But there were no words hanging in the air and no words inside of me for the feelings now, no words—
“Who said that she died?”
My eyes went to the transparency. The woman held in her hand a bag, a pink bag. I knew what was in the bag. It was candy—Bilar, my favorite. From the sea cliff floated a blotch of blue—the country’s flag that floated from every red barn, every lavender-doored cottage, every place.
I remembered Frida’s words: Everything Magnus does is for Siri now. It was a realization as big as a blue ocean wall, coming toward me with a crash.
But I saw Magnus charge into the water and drag in her inner tube. I saw her friends shake out the moose-skin blanket and wrap her wet body in it. They heated up milk in a pan and gave it to her to drink. They coddled and soothed her, and when they talked about bringing her to a hospital it was just as a precaution. She was okay. She had to be okay. I needed her to be, so she was.
I had last seen her lying in front of the tent. I had last seen her there, so she was there. The moose skin was tucked beneath her chin, a cup of milk being raised to her lips, and she was giggling because it had run down her chin on both sides. Somewhere on the other side of the world, the beautiful girl was still laughing. She never answered my calls because she was still camping. She didn’t come back because she was still swimming.
Heart pounding, I grabbed the transparency off of the glass and rushed to Tenny’s classroom, where Frida sat
in the back row, doodling in her notebook.
“Professor Ryan, excuse me,” I said. “May I see your student Frida Dahlström?”
All the students whipped their heads around to look at me. Frida’s eyes were wide. She gathered her things while I waited in the doorway. Tenny said nothing—just stood there looking shocked.
Near my classroom door, I could see my students gathered in the hall, watching me. Moment by moment, the focus on their lenses was growing sharper. They were beginning to see me for who I really was. I was losing all approval. I was losing hold.
Frida came out into the hall. I jabbed my finger at the transparency. “Is this supposed to be me?”
“I don’t know what that is,” she said.
“Don’t lie to me! You know Ana. You were friends. You gave her this to shame me.” I shook it at her.
“I don’t know what you are talking about!”
“That flag. That yellow spot—it is the inner tube. Siri’s. From that morning.” Now my tears dripped onto it, making the image as hazy as my memories of the real time.
“You think Magnus made this?”
“Didn’t he? To punish me? Someone in the classroom just said—”
“Now, why would Magnus want to punish you, Lauren? It’s not like you’ve gone months without contacting them. Or like you’ve spent the semester telling people you and Siri weren’t friends, or pushed me away—her one friend here, who could also have used a friend here.”
Now the square of blue was actually a circle, now a pool—it wasn’t a flag. It was sky. I tried to make sense of the image. I could only see the scrollwork design of the hallway’s blue tiles through the plastic sheet.
“I—I’m just not remembering,” I said.
This was the black cloud.
“What don’t you remember?” Frida said, standing straighter. “You’re not allowed to not remember.”
This was the nighttime-dormitory-parking-lot desire to explode my long steel bridge to the summer. The feeling that Frida was the bridge. This was the desire to clap my hands over Frida’s mouth, and this was the horror when I pulled my hand back and found my own dark lipstick in my palm.
“We have to accept it,” she said.
I wasn’t ready. I would never be ready. This was the moment she would tell me how Siri had died. This was the moment I’d hear it, and the scenes would be sucked into my ears and into me, and I’d never be able to erase them. I pulled Frida toward me until I had her by the shoulders and she was trying to push me off of her. She opened her mouth, and I felt the vibration of her screaming beneath my hand, the wideness of her mouth stretched out. She yanked her face away.
I watched her wipe her mouth. I watched her tighten her ponytail.
“I will make you remember,” she said. “I will make you feel what I feel.”
We both turned at the same time. Tenny was coming toward us. Frida gave me a final look over her shoulder and raced off.
“You can’t put your hands on a student!” Tenny said.
“Leave me alone.”
“Did you see her face? You’re terrorizing her.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“The hell I don’t.”
“You know nothing about that!”
“About the morning the girl was found? Oh, I know.”
It was like all the blinds in the school crashed down at once.
“I know it all. Frida confided in me. You didn’t think it was possible, did you? You think you’re the only person the students open up to? I must report this.”
“Whatever you say, I’ll deny it,” I whispered. I looked at the lipstick marks on my palm. “And they’ll believe me,” I said. “Because I am a great fucking liar.”
IT SEEMED EVERYONE knew about the day I’d lost it in front of my students, and that the painting Ana had shown was just an early Joaquín Claussell. I’d never heard of the artist before, but now his name was on everyone’s lips. I’d given the Mexican impressionist a modern-day revival, with everyone talking about his work, and about my breakdown.
What they didn’t know was that my mind had the capacity to work with a technique like Claussell’s, filling and embellishing, mixing and overpainting to nine layers. I’d told Tenny that I was a great liar, and I was. I had the capacity to black things out if I wanted.
I had spent months pretending nothing had happened in Sweden and that Siri had meant nothing to me. What kind of woman befriends a teenager? everyone would have said. What does that say about that teacher, that person, that she can find no friends her own age?
I’d been afraid that I’d be found out, but I’d done it so well. No one at the school had sought me out. My secret had been safe. As far as the school knew, I had been nothing to her, peripheral, as forgettable to her as she was to me. But once I heard it with my own ears that day in class, I was sawed open by my grief. And I wanted them to see it in me: All the different versions of me are right here, like the rings of a tree. Siri’s was the ring of a sunny season after one of too much rain, but after that, a charred ring, evidence of scorching.
It was not a teaching day, but I came to the school early, before the academic buildings opened, and I wandered the campus for hours, trying to ground myself, to make sense of the last months. I walked past the pit and my body remembered the way it felt to balance on the railing, the way the wind had even wanted to give me a push over.
I felt desperate. I went into Dominican Hall, looking for Dorothy. I stood at the small auditorium door and watched the last minutes of her class. Her students were laughing. They loved her.
“Lauren, Lauren,” came a gravelly voice.
Gwendolyn approached with an open bag of microwave popcorn in her hands.
“What are you doing just watching there like a stalker,” she said. “Come in with us, have a snack.”
I followed her dazedly into the faculty lounge to see some other women professors congregated, sitting deep in plush, nonmatching chairs around the long conference table. I didn’t know their names, but they seemed to be waiting for me.
“Here’s a chair,” Gwendolyn said. “Sit down.”
The vinyl arms of my chair had been picked at, and the crispy yellow stuffing inside was flaking out. Slowly I started to recognize the others at the table. They were the women from the regular English department who were serving on the hiring committee for Professor Trela’s open position.
“What’s the matter with you,” Gwendolyn said. Again a statement, not a question.
She laughed a little when I didn’t respond. I was digging into my backpack, looking for my blue notecards. I tried to remember the names of the writers I’d studied. Sui Sin Far. Onoto Watanna.
“You have another of your headaches? Let me try something.”
She gripped my wrist and turned it over, applying pressure where my blue veins came together. The whole underside of my arm suddenly looked pale and fishlike.
“Close your eyes,” she said.
For a moment I couldn’t do it. I felt that if I shut my eyes I’d lose my place in time. I felt my pulse going beneath her fingers and wondered if she could feel that I did not have a headache.
“I do this for my nephew when he gets them.” Her voice was different. Almost kind.
I tried to relax. The voices of the other professors floated into the background as I concentrated on not crying. I had a sensation that Gwendolyn had stoppered my blood and it was all up in my face, damming against the backs of my eyes.
“So much tension. It’s these students,” she drawled. “But you’re learning, though, this semester, aren’t you. Everyone has to go through a semester like this.”
I tried to pull my wrist away from her, but Gwendolyn held on.
“A trial by fire,” she said. “But tell us. What happened wi
th that girl? Why didn’t you tell us you were going through something like that?”
Because anything else would have been too much. Because my undercurrent was All is not lost. That was what I’d agreed to believe. That was my beating drum. And if my depression was a planet of crushing, continual rain, my faith was the forest that kept growing up despite it. To admit that Siri had died would be a burning down of that forest in my one hour of sun, all the way to the deepest root of me.
“What are you going to do now?” one of the women asked me. She had a big slushie drink and was drinking it with a spoon-straw.
“No, this was only a part-time job for her,” Gwendolyn explained.
“But you were being considered for the new full-time position, weren’t you? Gwen, wasn’t it between her and Tenny?”
“No, I never applied,” I said.
“Well, that’s not what Tenny thought,” the woman snickered.
Another professor asked, “Lauren, you teach somewhere else in addition to here?”
“I’m a technical writer.”
“A technical writer. Oh.”
Gwendolyn said, “Dorothy was mandated to bring on more adjuncts with, how do they say it—real-world experience.”
Another said, “Because we don’t live in the real world, right?”
“She doesn’t seem particularly technical,” the first woman said.
“But how can you say you didn’t know?” Gwendolyn said, pressing me. “Tenny said the sister was calling here and leaving phone messages for you.”
“The sister?” the woman with the slushie asked.
“Yes. Apparently the whole family was very close to Lauren,” Gwendolyn said.
I picked yellow stuffing from the arm of my chair. My thighs felt pressed against the bottom of the table. I shuffled my stack of index cards. One read just MORRIS, $15. Another bore the list of tasks I needed to do before their bodies could be released from the morgue. All of the cards were soft with erasures.
“There were two,” I said, a whisper.
“Two sisters?” Gwendolyn asked, leaning forward.