Wonderful Feels Like This

by Sara Lövestam

  “I imagine that made Anita happy.”

  Alvar smiles from ear to ear. “Happy as a clam.”

  Steffi laughs at his clown smile and takes out her phone to snap a picture.

  He keeps on smiling as he starts to speak again. “I have regretted many things in my life, but I have never regretted marrying Anita. She was the smartest, funniest, and most beautiful girl you ever could imagine. Not to mention the most impudent and bold, if she needed to be. We…”

  Alvar sighs and doesn’t finish his sentence. His smile seems to go out.

  Steffi wonders whether or not she should ask. Then she just asks.

  “When did she die?”

  Alvar looks at her strangely and then scratches his chin. “Oh,” he says. “Oh, she’s not dead. She lives right here.”

  — CHAPTER 34 —

  Their walk through the hallway seems like a walk through time. The gramophone is still playing Lill-Arne’s swing as they close the door, becoming an echo of the forties. But as they reach room 16, Alvar shows his nearly ninety years.

  Steffi holds her breath as he opens the door so she can finally see the woman who’d made Alvar weak at the knees the first time he saw her. It’s as surprising as it is obvious.

  It’s that white-haired lady who mistook Steffi’s broken bass for a dog and who told stories about old toilets.

  Her face lights up when they open the door. When she sees Alvar, she reaches out her hand and Alvar takes it.

  “Hello, Anita.”

  “Hello, sweetheart.”

  Steffi has to giggle. If it was difficult to see a sad four-year-old behind Svea’s angry face, it is easy to see the jazz crazy girl behind Anita’s wrinkles. Steffi should have figured this out weeks ago. She should have figured it out when she heard the old lady speak with a posh Stockholm accent.

  “I have to tell you something,” Anita says, opening her gray eyes wide. “I just saw … something that wasn’t a camel or a horse. It wasn’t a cow, either.”

  Steffi glances at Alvar. Perhaps animals are the only things Anita can talk about these days.

  “It was a llama,” Alvar says. “We saw a llama when we were in America.”

  “I see,” Anita says. She turns to Steffi. “It was such a tall beast, you see. And our little Christina…”

  She begins to laugh right in the middle of a sentence. She laughs so heartily that Steffi had to smile.

  “Christina wanted to pet it, but we didn’t dare let her! Those llamas spit, you know!”

  Steffi laughs. Anita laughs. Finally Alvar laughs.

  “Who’s Christina?”

  Anita looks at Steffi and puts a wrinkled hand on hers.

  “That’s our baby girl,” she says. Then her eyes get worried. “Where is she?”

  Alvar pets her calmingly on the shoulder. “Christina is in Malmö.”

  Alvar turns to Steffi and says, “Christina moved there a while ago to be closer to her grandchildren.”

  Anita’s voice is still nervous. “Is she going to be all right? How will she manage? She’s so slight for her age.”

  “She’s doing just fine. She’s in the best of health.”

  When Anita’s worried look does not disappear, Alvar changes the subject as well as his accent. He speaks as if he were in Stockholm. “Look, Anita! This is my friend, Steffi! She’s wondering how much you remember about Nalen!”

  Anita’s face glows. “How could I ever forget Nalen? Oh, Nalen! What a place! And one day, Alvar was going to play there for the first time! With Seymour Österwall! Erling was so angry! I thought it turned out to be a very pleasant evening.”

  * * *

  It was a very pleasant evening. Of course, it was cold and the snowflakes were as large as quarters and if you turned your face toward them, the snow mixed with the stars and fell on your face in small, damp fluffs.

  The night was magical, and Anita could feel in her whole body that Alvar had an important question for her. When he tried to ask, he was so nervous he turned red. His laugh was so nervous, she couldn’t let him suffer any longer.

  “Come on,” she said and took his hand. “You know how to dance, don’t you?”

  She noticed when they got out on the dance floor that he didn’t know how to dance at all, but she could see he had rhythm in his gangly, tall body. What a sweet boy he was! He was honest; you could see the honesty in his eyes. He had such nice lips and he was so incredibly young.

  Don’t even think of it, Anita, she told herself. Her heart was pounding as she moved even closer to him. Now there was nothing between them at all, and Mother and Father weren’t at home, and she was supposed to be with Ingmar instead. Didn’t she feel something for Ingmar and wasn’t he far more suitable?

  “Do you play?” Alvar asked her and gestured to the sheet music on the piano.

  “How do you know I play the piano?”

  “I don’t know, that’s why I asked. But you usually—”

  He interrupted himself. His lips were close enough, how would they feel on hers?

  “What do I usually…”

  “You like music so much. Perhaps you play the piano, I thought.”

  Everyone had gone home, except for Seymour Österwall himself, who had gone somewhere to change.

  “You have to try,” Alvar said. “It’s a fantastic experience. You have to feel these acoustics.”

  She looked at the piano on the stage, infinitely tempted. Finally she yielded, lifted the lid, and played a trill. The walls and the ceiling amplified the sound, and it alarmed her and delighted her. Think if she could play here every single evening!

  Alvar started to play a walking bass line on his upright and he laughed in delight with her.

  And then she looked up and it was by a fence, a little beyond where they were standing, and it was the most remarkable beast she’d ever seen. It wasn’t a camel or a horse and she had never seen anything like it.

  Part of the story was that when Alvar had come to Nalen all changed, with his hair slicked back and a suit that actually fit him, she’d said that Alvar had been Erlingified. But she realized that he looked more like a man than a boy now, even though he was still much too young, crazily too young.

  But who was this girl?

  * * *

  “Who is this girl?”

  Anita cocks her head. Alvar bites his lip and hopes that Steffi isn’t disappointed. This Anita is the one who doesn’t remember things, when he’d let her get to know the real Anita.

  “This is my friend, and her name is Steffi. She’s visiting me today.”

  “Oh, hello! Welcome!” Anita says, her gray eyes shining. “Have you ever been to Värmland before?”

  Steffi nods. “Yes, I was born here.”

  “You know,” Anita says. “I saw something so strange. It wasn’t a camel or a horse. It wasn’t a cow, either.”

  Steffi glances at Alvar before she asks, “Was it a llama?”

  “Oh, yes! That’s exactly what is was! A llama!”

  Alvar gets up. He knows the best time to leave is when Anita is happy.

  “I’ll see Steffi out,” he says. “You are such a hard worker, Anita, all your duties here at home and you take care of everything so well! So you just rest while I show Steffi to the door.”

  Anita smiles gratefully and winks. “You’re such a sweetheart.”

  Anita is just fragments of herself, Alvar thinks as he closes the door behind them. Just pieces that have fallen apart, and she keeps trying to put the pieces together every day and they’re all mixed up. She’s the memory of a person, a mosaic, a potpourri. He still loves her, but nobody should think that this mosaic was really her. How can he explain this to a sixteen-year-old?

  “Oh! She’s so sweet!” Steffi exclaims once they’ve left.

  This warms his heart. “Yes, but you should have met her ten years ago, when her head was still clear.”

  Steffi opens the door to his room. The gramophone has stopped playing a while ago. She puts on
a record with Kai Gullmar on the piano and winds up the gramophone. “I still can see the person she is,” Steffi says.

  Alvar doubts this. He knows who Anita had been in real life.

  “You do?”

  “Yes, she’s kind, she’s smart, she’s funny.”

  He watches her concentration as she lowers the needle onto the outer track. Steffi Herrera, what will time make of you?

  She turns toward him as the record starts to play.

  “Does she still play the piano?”

  “You mean Kai Gullmar?”

  “No, Anita, of course.”

  Alvar misses Anita. He says good morning to her every morning and good night every evening. He often holds her hand as her fragmentary memories touch reality. He does as much as he can bear. And yet, even when he is with her, he misses her.

  “We used to live on Klaus Street,” he says. “When my parents got older, we moved back to Björke. We had a grand piano in our house on Klaus Street and Anita used to play it. When Anita started to get really bad, we sold the house and moved in here.”

  “But there’s a piano in the dining room.”

  He doesn’t know how he can explain to Steffi about how much he misses Anita. “It’s locked,” he says instead.

  Steffi stares at him. “If it’s locked, someone has a key.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He’s lying even as he’s telling the truth. There is no key to Anita, not any longer, and Steffi cannot comprehend how it feels to lose the key to the one you love. Steffi is still a child, and she’s looking at him with her wise eyes and is speaking right to his old man’s heart.

  “Anita and I are the same. She has a heart of jazz, a heart full of jazz.”

  Alvar thinks so slowly these days, and he wants to make sure everything he says to Steffi is correct. Anybody can say anything without putting thought into it.

  Finally he says, “That’s good. Remember her just like that.”

  * * *

  She has a great amount of remembering to do, Steffi thinks as she leaves the Sunshine Home and the spring weather hits her. Heavenly remembering. She likes the sound of the two words together and writes them on her phone.

  “You have to remember all of this,” Alvar had told her. He looked directly into her eyes. “You must remember Anita.”

  The warm air is tinged with the scent of honeysuckle. The Isakssons have planted honeysuckle all along their driveway. She’s looked up the English word honeysuckle in her dictionary and found the Swedish was kaprifol. The English lyrics she’d heard still didn’t make any sense to her. Still, she hums the song to herself as she reaches her family’s driveway.

  She opens the door and stops. Two white envelopes are waiting for her on the doormat. Silent, magical, addressed to Stephanie Sophia Herrera. Her heart pounds as she picks them up. One is from the music school in Karlstad and the other one is from the music school in Stockholm.

  At first Steffi thinks she’s the only one home, but then her mother calls to her from the kitchen.

  “Hello,” Steffi calls back and then sneaks into her room.

  Which one should she open first? If she opens the one from Karlstad first and knows she’s gotten in, then it might help her over any disappointment if she opens the one from Stockholm. But if she opens the Stockholm letter first and doesn’t get in, maybe she’ll be that much happier when she opens the letter from Karlstad. She waits for a few seconds, trying to decide what will give the maximum happiness and minimal disappointment. Then she rips open the letter from Stockholm. Holding her breath, and as the sheet of paper trembles in her hands, she reads:

  Congratulations on your acceptance into the music school!

  She reads it over and over. Her hands are now shaking uncontrollably. She reads it at least twenty times. Finally she continues to read the rest of the letter. Her eyes are blurry, she’s started to cry. The letter is dated the fourteenth of May. There’s a signature in ballpoint pen. Steffi wipes her nose and rubs her eyes but more tears come. Finally she goes out to her mother.

  Mamma rushes over. “Oh, Steffi!” She hugs her. “Oh, my poor dear! You didn’t get in? Sweetheart, things will work out somehow.…”

  Steffi rubs her nose on her mother’s collar. In the doorway behind her mother, Steffi sees Julia has come out, looking lost.

  “You didn’t get in?” Julia asks.

  Steffi shakes her head, then nods, and then wriggles out of her mother’s embrace. She waves the sheet of paper. They can read it for themselves.

  “I got in!”

  — CHAPTER 35 —

  It’s the last school day for the ninth graders. Half of Steffi is already in Stockholm. Half of the other students are already on the beach. Half of the other teachers have their minds on summer vacation in Greece or Spain. Except for Bengt. He’s 100 percent still in school. Everybody has already received report cards. He believes that the last day of school is the perfect day to give a lecture on the future of the ninth grade class.

  “In every class of twenty students,” he says, “one person will go to jail. Two people will become alcoholics. Seven will complete an upper-level education. Three of you will start smoking and one in ten of all smokers will get lung cancer. Twelve of you will leave Björke, but only three of you will leave Värmland.”

  One of us three will be leaving Värmland this fall, Steffi thinks.

  “Some of you will become Social Democrats and others Moderates. Some of you will be doctors, others welders, and still others business owners.”

  And one will be a musician, Steffi thinks.

  “You have choices. Some of those choices will define the rest of your lives. Think before you choose! And good luck!”

  Semlan starts to applaud from a corner of the classroom. The whiteboard has the message: Have a Happy Summer and a Wonderful Future!

  Semlan walks up to Bengt and shakes his hand. “And now,” Semlan says. “We’re going to hear from a girl with talent! She’s been admitted to the Karlstad Music School and she’s even sung with our local band, Lard Heroes! Perhaps ‘singer’ should be added to our list of careers? Let’s give a warm round of applause to Sanja Eriksson!”

  Class 9B applauds for Sanja. Karro squeals as if she were at a rock concert, and two guys whistle.

  Using the interactive whiteboard, Sanja selects the backup music and starts to sing “Umbrella” into one of the microphones from Jake’s music room. Steffi thinks about all the times she’s fantasized about standing there and showing everyone else what she can do. She realizes now it would be all wrong. They’re not really celebrating the shining future of these people. They’re thanking the retiring queen bees. She applauds for Sanja when she finishes. Bravo. Tomorrow you’re a nobody.

  Everyone receives the gift of a sketchbook and a rose. Semlan is crying. The girls are wearing white dresses that barely cover their thighs. The boys have tried to wrestle their gangly bodies into suits. Steffi’s wearing dress pants and a vest. She feels Björke School losing its hold on her the way she loosens a string on her bass. It already feels like the school I used to attend. One day she might walk past the building and say: Once there was a school here.

  Karro is hugging all the other girls. Soon she’ll be lying on the beach. “Now our lives are really starting!” she’s probably saying to them, and it’s like she doesn’t even notice Steffi at all. Finally, she picks up her sketchbook and her rose and is ready to go home. She stops right in front of Steffi. “Bye forever, you stinking rat,” she says.

  Steffi looks right at Karro. Right into Karro’s mean soul.

  “I know everything about you,” she says. “I know what your pretend father does to you. I know you invite yourself to strange boys’ houses on the Internet.”

  Karro stares at her, but Steffi can’t stop. “Your mother gambles and your cousins back in the woods are all alcoholics,” she says. “I know who taught you how to say slut and whore.”

  Karro collects herself and is about to
say something nasty and call her a pathetic liar, but she isn’t fast enough.

  “Don’t you recognize this?” Steffi takes out her fedora from her bag. “Yeah, that’s right, I’m Hepcat.”

  People start to gather around them. Karro’s face is white, and for once she can’t say a word.

  Steffi is on fire and all the words she has built up inside come out and she has to raise her voice. “I could spit on you, because you never had trouble spitting on me,” she says. “But you’re not even worth my spit! Go to hell, we’ll never see each other again.”

  At least, that’s how things play out in Steffi’s imagination.

  In reality, she looks right back at Karro. She looks right into Karro’s mean soul.

  “You’re a rat’s cunt,” Karro says.

  Steffi can see Karro in the Sunshine Home seventy years from now. She’ll be shaking her cane and hissing at all the visitors walking in the door.

  Steffi hears her heart beating inside her vest. “I hope you have a pleasant summer,” she says.

  Then she turns around and walks down the hill, away from the schoolyard, for the last time. She glances back. Nobody is following her. As she walks away, she notices how the rosebush has started to bloom.

  * * *

  She’s going to tell Alvar what happened with Karro. What she wanted to say and what she really said. How it felt nice and also irritating not to confront her. Perhaps Alvar would say, “You’re a good human being, a mature person.” And she’d just say in return, “No, I really just didn’t care anymore.”

  Outside the Sunshine Home buildings, roses are growing along the supports. When she reaches Alvar’s room, she can’t hear any swing music through the door. He’s usually in his room. He’s always in his room at this time of the day. And he knew this was the last day of school and she was going to come by.

  On the table, the magnifying glass is lying beside a folder and a small calculator, and an envelope with the words MISS STEFFI HERRERA is propped up. She puts down the rose she’s still carrying and takes up the envelope. A frightening thought churns through her stomach. Perhaps she has no reason to be frightened. Perhaps it was like the last time, when he was in the dining room. But when did Alvar ever make the bed?