Bitter Bitch

by Maria Sveland

  Mum has rough hands, which are red and dry from eczema, and dry flakes of skin fall off when she scratches them. Sometimes when she touches my cheek at bedtime it scratches and almost hurts, but I still do not want her to stop. I love my mother’s hands, they make me feel calm and safe.

  She puts on a pair of yellow rubber gloves when she is doing the dishes, because the dishwater makes her hands sting and bleed. But the plastic gloves are not very good either, because her hands are sweaty and confined, and sometimes she cries because it hurts so much. I go and get the special eczema ointment she buys at the chemist and Mum smiles a little and tries to stop crying.

  ‘Thank you sweetheart!’ she says, and I sit next to her and watch while she rubs it on to her sore hands.

  Mornings are stressful when we go to daycare. Mum starts work at the hospital at 7 a.m. and she wakes me and Kajsa up at six so we will have enough time. She talks about her mean boss who stands there, watch in hand, waiting at the entrance to the unit. The boss is always quiet and does not say anything when she comes in, he just looks at her and then at his watch.

  ‘If he would only say something,’ Mum says as she gets us dressed, ‘but he’s silent. Do you understand?’

  I really do not understand why it is so bad, but Mum gets stressed knowing he is standing there with his watch, waiting, because she dresses us with rough, jerky movements.

  Sometimes we fight. My sister is particular about her white plastic headband being in just the right position and her sleeves being exactly the same length. If Mum is just the tiniest bit sloppy, Kajsa loses it and starts screaming at the top of her lungs. I can see the beads of sweat breaking out on Mum’s forehead while she is pulling on Kajsa’s shirt to get the sleeves the same length. Then it is time to smooth the hair so that each strand ends up in the right place under the white headband.

  I stand there staring and I tease Kajsa because she is being so silly until Mum snaps at me angrily, and says to stop teasing and Kajsa sticks her tongue out at me and then we are ready and we head off to daycare. She lifts us up on the bike, Kajsa in front, and me at the back.

  We eat breakfast at daycare. It is just me and Kajsa and Nelly and Emil who eat breakfast there, the other children are dropped off later. My favourite teacher is Cattis and she and Mum talk in special adult voices. The tone is warm, confidential and a bit secretive. I try to hear what they are saying but they are not talking loudly enough. I carefully creep closer, until I am standing right behind Mum.

  ‘Just relax, you needn’t worry,’ Cattis says to Mum. ‘It’s better if you do the shopping before you pick up the children, then Sara and Kajsa don’t need to go with you to the shop. They’re fine here, you know that!’

  I see Mum wipe a tear away and Cattis hands her a tissue which she uses to blow her nose. I love Cattis because she is so nice to Mum. She is nice to everyone and always has time to read thick story books and she never raises her voice. Mum hugs me goodbye and through the window I watch her bike away, off to her stupid boss and then we sit down and eat porridge with cinnamon and sugar and milk.

  Mum picks us up later in the afternoon. Cattis has gone home and Lena, a new teacher, greets her. She has only been working here for two months and she does not know Mum very well.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ Mum says, and sets down several heavy shopping bags on the floor. ‘I spoke to Cattis this morning and said I would be a little late and she said it was fine.’

  Lena smiles at Mum. ‘Yes, it’s fine. I know it’s not easy being a single mother with two young children.’

  I see Mum grow quiet, she does not know how to answer.

  ‘I’m not a single parent,’ she says after a while, ‘my husband is working a lot at the moment.’

  ‘I see,’ Lena says and looks surprised. ‘I just thought … well, I’ve never met your husband so I just assumed you were a single parent.’

  ‘I understand,’ Mum says, and starts putting on our coats.

  Later that evening, when we are lying in bed and Mum thinks we are asleep, I hear them fighting in the kitchen.

  ‘How do you think it feels?’ Mum says. ‘First my colleague whom I met in the park on Sunday and now Lena at daycare. Everyone thinks I’m a single parent because you’re never here!’

  I cannot hear Dad’s reply because I put the pillow over my head and imagine I have a nice big brother. His name is Fredrik and he gives me lots of hugs, because he likes me so much. He says that I am the sweetest little sister in the whole world and that he is always going to take care of me. We run along the beach together and go swimming every day during the summer. Fredrik’s friends are also there. They like me too and I am allowed to hang out with them as much as I want.

  I spend a lot of time thinking about Fredrik. In my mind, I create a family for the two of us with different parents and no younger siblings. In my imaginary family there is just me and Fredrik and our nice Mum and Dad who never fight.

  I am lying on my bed at home, thinking about Fredrik when there is a knock at the door. Kajsa comes in and wants to borrow my dolls, and I think about how I would rather have a big brother than a little sister. I shoo her out and say that she is never, ever allowed to come into my room like that! Damn brat! I lock the door and go to the playground.

  I see Big Johnny on the jungle gym. He lives in one of the terrace houses on the street behind ours and he is a few years older. He is good looking with brown hair and blue eyes, but I do not dare speak to him. Some days he looks angry and sad and sits alone and swings and swings. His parents are divorced and now he lives with his mum and he doesn’t seem to know anyone in the neighbourhood, but today he sees me walking towards him. He is so good looking, cute actually, and I think that maybe he could be my big brother if he wanted to.

  ‘Hi!’ I say, and stop at the base of the jungle gym.

  ‘Hi!’ Big Johnny says, and looks down at me.

  ‘Want to play?’ I ask.

  ‘Nope,’ he says simply, and jumps down from the jungle gym and walks off. I watch him go, his grey hooded jacket and brown boat-shoes disappear between the houses. I remain standing there for a long time, dragging my foot through the sand before I too go home.

  Dad has woken up and is sitting alone in the kitchen eating breakfast. He is eating fried eggs and bacon and I can tell from the silence that he and Mum are still quarrelling. I can feel tears burning in my eyes and Dad looks up at me and sees that my neck is covered with red blotches.

  ‘Hey! How’s it going?’ he says, sounding strangely friendly.

  The tears come and I sob. I do not know how to explain the emotions welling up inside me, all the sadness. Maybe that is why I hear myself say something incomprehensible.

  ‘Big Johnny hit me!’ I say, and cry even more, frightened by how openly I am lying. I do not know why I said it, or how I dared, but it has been such a strange day, a day filled with sadness.

  ‘He did?’ Dad asks, upset, and he hugs me.

  ‘I’ll be damned if he’s going to go after little girls like that!’

  Frightened, I see him get up and grab his coat to leave. I hear him mutter to himself while he is putting on his shoes.

  ‘I’m going to talk some sense into that Big Johnny!’

  I remain standing in the kitchen for a little while before I rush upstairs to my room and hide in the closet. I am shaking with excitement, from the wonderful feeling that Dad is going out to defend me. I am shaking with guilt, my lie will soon be discovered and I cry a bit out of fear of Dad’s rage and Big Johnny’s contempt when he is approached with my false accusation. After a while I hear the front door open and Dad’s voice booming as he calls my name. I remain sitting in the closet and do not answer. I hear steps on the stairs, and I suddenly hear his heavy breathing filling the entire room.

  ‘Sara?! Where the hell are you?’ He sounds as angry as I feared he would, and for a second, which feels like an eternity, I sit there frozen, without breathing. He finally leaves the room and goes downstairs ag
ain. I stay in the closet for a long, long time, and even though I need to pee and my whole stomach aches, it is worth it. A cheap price to pay for enjoying Dad’s care and protection.

  I wake up at night and try and feel if my heart is beating. I often wake up at night and think I am going to die because my heart beats irregularly.

  When I am little, my dad is the only one who is awake at night. He often sits downstairs in the leather sofa drinking spirits and listening to music.

  ‘Dad is a night person,’ my sister and I used to say.

  I go downstairs and sit on his lap for a while. He listens to my heartbeat and says that it is not anything dangerous. It calms me down and then I can go back to sleep.

  One night when I am on my way downstairs I hear him crying. I see him sitting at the kitchen table, leaning over a bowl of popcorn. His tears fall straight down into the popcorn.

  I become so frightened I forget about my heart.

  ALMOST THERE

  Fear of Flying Girl has woken up and is ordering two double whiskys from the kind stewardess mum.

  ‘You think I’m terrible don’t you?’ she asks me, shamefaced.

  ‘Absolutely not! It’s great that you’re drinking. I would too if I were afraid of flying. I think I’m going to anyway even though I’m not afraid. Or maybe just because I’m not!’ I say happily.

  The boyfriend looks at us irritably as we clink glasses. He is reading Today’s Industry with a serious expression. The economy is the religion of our time. I get the desire to tease him, so I clink glasses again loudly with Fear of Flying Girl, whom I am starting to like more and more. Or feeling more and more sorry for?

  Yep, he really looks like a pastor studying his Bible, with his black jacket and white shirt. The stewardess is smiling at us in understanding. I am convinced that she wants us to drink. The whisky warms my stomach and makes me happy. I am listening to Nina Simone, always Nina Simone, my saviour in times of need. Her and the bathtub. And Isadora.

  My Isadora Afraid to Fly is still sitting on the plane on her way to Vienna. She looks around and discovers that she recognizes several of the analysts. She has spent many hours with them over the years. Isadora and her husband Bennett have been going to therapy for so long they can barely make the tiniest decision without the analysts holding imaginary deliberations on a cloud above their heads.

  Because the fact was that we’d reached that crucial time in a marriage (five years and the sheets you got as wedding presents have just about worn thin) when it’s time to decide whether to buy new sheets, have a baby perhaps, and live with each other’s lunacy ever after – or else give up the ghost of the marriage (throw out the sheets) and start playing musical beds all over again.

  Their marriage feels tired and the world suddenly seems as though it is filled with interesting and available men as a result. Isadora has a constant, burning longing for sex, dry champagne and wet kisses.

  I read this and realize I must try to reconcile myself with the fact that my daydreams are about different things, about loneliness, time and solitude.

  Champagne and wet kisses, delightful fucks with strangers – it is like Dallas. Like the time I bought a thong just for fun and when we saw my bum in the mirror Johan and I laughed so hard we started crying – the little white string cutting in between my cheeks. It looked so fantastically ridiculous. Like a Sue Ellen, or a Lill-Babs.

  The fact is I get just as giggly in the changing room at the gym, where almost all of the women wear thongs. It does not matter how perfectly toned their bums are, I cannot help but visualize small brown stains where the thong cuts in the deepest. Thongs are quite simply nasty and I am anything but a fucking thong-wearing woman right now. Quite the opposite actually: a lonely, cotton underwear-wearing bitter bitch, who will soon be able to sleep for a whole week! Nirvana.

  There is a bus waiting at the airport in Tenerife which will take us to the hotel. A female guide tells us about all of the outings we can go on. For example, tomorrow they are organizing a city tour and I am filled with a kind of joy. I am sitting here on my own, in excellent spirits. I look around at the others on the bus. Most of them are older couples, a bit above middle age, one young family and then me. I know that I stand out, and I try to ignore the questioning looks and remember that this is just a guest appearance. Fear of Flying Girl and her boyfriend are sitting a few rows in front of me.

  They are sitting quietly, looking out of the bus window and their lack of conversation makes me feel how wonderful it is to be alone. How wonderful it is not to sit there with someone (Johan) and struggle to make conversation, while his silence makes me more and more stressed. Why don’t we have anything to talk about? Are we in fact really unhappy, but we just don’t know it?

  At the hotel, I am again filled with joy. From my balcony I can see the ocean and the surrounding mountains. There is space and time for long, endless thoughts here. And there is a bathtub! I am going to take long, hot baths every night this week!

  I go down to the restaurant and order paella and a mineral water. A German couple, a bit over middle aged, is sitting in front of me. She is wearing a light pink outfit, has dyed blonde hair and the kind of mouth that makes you suspect she is an alcoholic, along with a pair of high heels which make her wobble even more. He has glasses and grey hair, looks dissatisfied and a bit intellectual. Are they here to drink or maybe to try and cure her alcoholism? Her speech is slurred and when the waiter comes to take their order her dissatisfied husband tears the menu away from her and orders. It is an aggressive gesture but she ignores it, smiles at him instead and crosses her legs. He does not smile back and after a while she stops smiling and suddenly looks endlessly sad. I cannot stop looking at them and I am so curious. How long has she felt unloved, maybe that is why she started drinking too much?

  One October, when several of my friends seemed more than usually unhappy in their relationships, I occupied myself with asking all of my male friends whether they felt loved. All but two said they felt very loved. The answer among my female friends was not as predictable. Doubt was constantly present, even if they felt they were loved most of the time. But the difference between always and most of the time means some thing. Why did the men seem so much more secure than the women?

  This counts for me as well. Regardless of how big the crisis between Johan and myself has been, he has always been more stable, convinced of my love for him as well as his for me, something which has sometimes provoked me excessively.

  ‘Don’t you understand that I’m about to leave you!’ I screamed once last autumn when everything was so awful. I really was about to leave him. I was daydreaming about living alone with shared custody of Sigge. Still, it was as if it did not really sink in.

  ‘I know that we’re good for each other,’ he repeated, over and over again.

  I have to admit that as much as this exasperated me, it calmed me down. If someone (me) wants to be benevolent they could interpret this steadfastness as an expression of the secure home environment in which Johan grew up. A solid security he left home with, a certainty that he is enough just as he is, that he is loved for who he is. If someone (me) were more conspiratorial it could be seen as an expression of a patriarchal upbringing – an inflated self-righteousness which so many men seem to have picked up along the way.

  I realize this is the sort of thing I need to work out. What is blasted structure and what is private angst? How much of an excuse do I have for being a bitter bitch? A pretty strong one if I listen to myself. Experience tells me that. I even keep a list of conspiratorial facts which I sometimes read to remind myself, bitter bitch statistics created from small news items and articles I have read and been upset by over the years.

  1. A report from The National Board of Health and Welfare shows that when women become ill the risk of the marriage ending is much greater than when men become ill. The divorce rate for women diagnosed with uterine cancer was twice as high as that of healthy women. For men with prostate cancer on the othe
r hand, the relationship was the opposite. They ran a smaller risk of getting divorced.

  2. More women than men donate their organs, but more men than women receive donor organs. This fact was so disheartening that a researcher in social medicine is going to investigate whether this is the same type of gender discrimination that results in a higher proportion of men receiving costly medical care.

  3. A sociological study has shown that more married women suffer from severe mental illness than unmarried ones, but for men it was the opposite: mental illness was greater among unmarried men, while the married men felt just fine. Marriage benefits men and harms women.

  4. All injustice: abuse, rape, prostitution, salary discrepancy, a list so comprehensive it can be likened to a form of global apartheid.

  The list is endless and that is why it is so hard not to be a bitter bitch even if I didn’t want to be one. I think about this a lot: how can I not be a bitter bitch when patriarchal dominance of the world is so incredibly universal, down to the tiniest particle?

  Dissatisfied man and his pink alcoholic wife have their food. He takes big bites out of a piece of meat while she pokes at her shrimp salad and drinks even more white wine. I must be staring, because she suddenly raises her glass as if to say cheers to me. I smile and mouth cheers back. The man grunts something in German and continues to eat.

  I cannot stop staring at their marital unhappiness. I carefully note it down, letting it grab me for eternity. I never want to lose hold of certain images, certain events, certain knowledge, while some other knowledge will never disappear no matter how much I would like it to. Like this study which found that married women were unhappier than unmarried ones. We know this, and yet hope refuses to die among the millions of hungering women out there, hanging on to a tiny dream that their love is bigger and stronger than damned statistics and bloody culture. But the suspicion is there and it never leaves us alone, the gnawing feeling that I am slowly but surely being drained of my vitality, time and energy.