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THÓRA HJÖRLEIFSDÓTTIR
Translated from the Icelandic by
Meg Matich
Black Cat
New York
Copyright © 2019 by Thóra Hjörleifsdóttir
English translation © 2021 by Meg Matich
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].
FIRST EDITION
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Originally published in Icelandic in 2019 as Kvika by Forlagid Agency, Reykjavik.
This book was set in 11-pt. Berling LT by Alpha Composition & Design of Pittsfield, NH
The book was designed by Norman Tuttle at Alpha Design & Composition
First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: July 2021
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-5739-3
eISBN 978-0-8021-5740-9
Black Cat
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
This account is fiction, populated by characters who speak to the realities that women have long lived in silence.
Shame and isolation thrive in that silence. If it isn’t broken, this story will continue to repeat itself.
I dedicate this book to those who have spoken out.
Reykjavik 2007
Chlamydia
I didn’t know it would be such a big deal; it’s not like it’s incurable. Nobody’s going to die. We’ll take antibiotics and then, ten days later, it’ll be gone. But now he thinks I’m a total slut. And I must be, since I’ve infected people. But I think he’s being unfair. It shouldn’t matter this much. He acts like I’ve rejected him because I’ve been with other men. We weren’t together when I went to Central America; we’d gone on one date and I hadn’t even slept with him. I was traveling alone, so I slept around because I had nothing better to do and I needed to fill in the gaps. I didn’t know that something would grow between us; in fact, I thought it’d never happen, but I became more and more taken with him as I traveled. He sent me near-constant emails and he was always ready to talk when I went to internet cafés. We just started to connect. When I came home, we clicked; I fell head over heels. He’s beautiful and smart—I don’t know how many books he owns, hundreds at least, and he has this crazy DVD collection.
But the chlamydia kept eating at him. He wouldn’t stop interrogating me about the other boys. I held back at first. I only told him about one guy, a Norwegian in Cuba, and then I added the next one to the list—followed by the third, the fourth, the fifth, fuck, I can’t be expected to remember everything. I tried to explain that my memory isn’t really that great, but he thinks I’m lying. We were gliding on a smooth current, and now he wants nothing to do with me.
Bachelors I
He’s moved into a basement apartment in Vesturbær on the west side of town with a friend who is the very embodiment of a tragic bachelor. His roommate can’t even take care of himself—he’s at least thirty, but he hasn’t learned how to wash his clothes properly. He just leaves his wet clothes in the machine until they dry. The place is a cesspool. Their towels are all sour, and the smell gets pretty pungent when you dry off. And his roommate doesn’t cook, either. On a good day, he might boil a hot dog, but he seems to live on bodega burgers, chocolate chip cookies, and Diet Coke. He’s crazy about Diet Coke; in the morning, he shuffles out of his room in a sloppy navy bathrobe and the first thing he does is swig flat Coke from the bottle. I don’t understand how he can live with this guy. But it’s nice to be able to hang out by ourselves. We aren’t together, but I’m with him all the time.
Vegetarians
I think it’s awesome that he’s a vegetarian, too; none of my friends are, and the girls are always teasing me about it. But we’ve banded together in our meat-free lifestyle—plus, he’s a great vegetarian cook, so I’m learning a lot. I’ve started to eat a much more balanced diet. I’ve graduated from grilled cheese and fries. He thinks it’s offensive when people invite him to dinner and then offer him meat—and all his girlfriends have been vegetarians. He thinks girls who eat meat are repulsive.
The Ex I
He still loves his ex-girlfriend, and they’re still close friends. She’s elegant and clever. She was at the top of her class in classics in school, they both know Latin, and they’re both well-read; they toss Derrida quotes around like it’s nothing. The other day, he asked me to meet him at a coffeehouse, so it was more than a little strange that he was sitting with her when I arrived. I felt humiliated, and I wanted to leave, to turn around and walk straight out, to disappear, but they’d already spotted me and I had to sit with them. It was one of the most uncomfortable afternoons of my life. I was stressed, sweating like a pig, and I got this weird tremor. They were so relaxed together, and so much smarter than me. They talked about movies I hadn’t seen, and they went on and on about things I hadn’t ever thought about. The Ex tried to bring me into the conversation by explaining, among other things, what a strawberry milkshake was—it’s when a man cums on a woman’s face and punches her in the nose, giving her a nosebleed. Snowballing, she went on, is when a man cums in a woman’s mouth and she spits it into his mouth. He’s told me about sex with her—how nice it was, how talented she is at blow jobs. I’m pretty bad at them; I just gag.
The Bike
He asked me to meet him at the bar one night, but I was home in the suburbs in Grafarvogur with my mom and dad, and I didn’t feel like it. I didn’t say it like that; I just said I was going to be with my little sister, but he got moody and weird. We were pretty much always together, so it felt like we’d become dependent on each other. That night, I noticed I couldn’t stand to sleep alone anymore; I was cold and I missed him. It was hard to fall asleep, I felt off, and I regretted not going out to meet him, but I felt a little guilty, too, for how little I’d seen my parents in the past few weeks. I tossed and turned because I couldn’t stop replaying the phone call in my head. I wanted to meet him, to check on him. Since I couldn’t sleep, I decided that I’d hop into my mom’s car and head to Vesturbær—I was going to surprise him, sneak into his bed, and wake up with him.
The front door to his place is always unlocked, so I showed myself in. In the entryway, I saw his shoes, alongside a pair of expensive heels from Kron. Sexy heels. I knew his roommate wouldn’t have brought home the type of girl who’d own these shoes. I figured that she’d be in the bed I’d gone there to slip into, and I didn’t need to go into the room to confirm it. I knew it. I knew in my gut that I hadn’t been enough. It’s obvious. I really thought we were going to be together—I�
�m a fucking idiot. Another woman always comes along.
I tiptoed into the bathroom and grabbed my toothbrush, my toiletries, my birth control. He’d wake up with this new girl and it’d be as if I’d never been there. My bike was outside the apartment, and I wheeled it over to the car. I was going to disappear from his life with all my stuff, and he wouldn’t even notice. The bike was really heavy, and it took me a while to figure out how to angle the wheel so that it fit into the trunk. I could never lift that bike by myself, but that night, I hardly felt a thing as I flung it over my shoulder and forced it into the car in a rush of adrenaline. I drove for a few minutes, parked the car by the ocean at a stretch of shore called Ægissíða, and howled with tears until there were no tears left, and then, and only then, did I trust myself to drive back to Grafarvogur. Everybody was still asleep. I snuck into my room and never let on that I’d gone out during the night.
I won’t speak to him again. I should’ve known that I’d never be good enough for him. If I’d just gone to the bar when he asked me, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. The girl with the great shoes is probably a vegetarian, I don’t want to know who she is, fucking slut.
Willpower I
He called, left a message, but I was a Teflon woman—everything slid off me.
Willpower II
For about fifteen minutes.
Graduation Party
He invited me to his cousin’s graduation party. I was more than a little excited. This definitely meant that he wanted to be my boyfriend soon. You don’t just take your fuckbuddy to your cousin’s grad party. His younger cousin had passed all her exams, which took everyone by surprise; her mother sprang into action, planning the entire gathering in less than a day. The party was in Selfoss, an hour drive for us, but it’s where his family lives. I borrowed my mom’s car, and as we drove past the lava fields at Hellisheiði, he told me that all his cousins on his mother’s side had competed in the Miss Southern Iceland pageant—it’d practically become a sport in his family. He’s good-looking, too, but he isn’t into these girls who cake on makeup for the county fair. I’m probably the first girl his cousin will meet who still has hair on her pussy.
I felt like a weed among the roses at the party; he didn’t introduce me to anyone, and he didn’t speak to anyone. He’d brought a book, which he read in a bedroom while his aunts and his mom sized me up in the living room. He hates chitchatting at these gatherings, it’s pointless, he says, so he always packs something to read. He says that parties give him time to enrich his internal life, to learn in the midst of mediocrity. He’s had enough of talking about the weather and how school is going.
After a while, his mom settled on introducing me as “a friend of her son.” Then his grandmother, who had sunk into a deep recliner in the living room, called out, “You know he has kids?” as she nibbled creamy cake from a tiny fork.
The aunts waited for the penny to drop. “Yes, I know about that,” I answered, holding my voice steady.
His grandmother continued: “I don’t think he’ll ever finish university. He really loves to read.” She let out a raspy laugh as she bent forward in the recliner, her plate seeming to refill itself with her daughter’s endless pastries.
His Children
He has very little contact with his children, and I’ve never met them. He had a daughter with a friend from high school when they were only seventeen. They were never together, and he put no effort into forming a relationship; he found her parents trying. They seemed to hate him as much as they loved their grandchild. He was a really promising soccer player at the time, and the summer his daughter was born, he rushed from match to match and missed the whole third trimester, including the birth. He had a very difficult time after the baby was born because nobody had put him down as the father, and when Baby Mama #1 finally added his name to the certificate, he was charged half a year of back child support, the first six months of his daughter’s life. He says that even though she’s flaky, the mother is a good person; she settled down in Selfoss and has a husband and more kids.
His other baby mama is apparently a complete psycho. She never lets him see their boy. She’s still upset because he asked her to have an abortion when she told him she was pregnant. He tried to visit her after the baby was born, but she berated him and badgered him about the right way to hold a baby. Once, in a snowstorm in January, she threw him out in his socks and refused to give his shoes back. All that drama really took a toll on him; it’s why he and His Clever Ex aren’t together anymore, even if they’re friends. She couldn’t deal with the whole baby situation. I still haven’t told my parents about his kids. He asked me not to mention it, at least not right away.
Hygiene
When I shower at his place, he always wants to get in with me. We’ve showered together so often that he seems quite hurt if I say I’d like to shower alone. The shower is really tight with two people, especially when I wash my hair, but he thinks it’s cozy, and I want to make him happy. Sometimes when we shower, he asks if he can pee on me. Urine feels strange when it runs down your body; it’s colder than the water, and the smell that cooks in the heat and steam isn’t especially pleasant. He usually wants to piss on my back. But sometimes he wants me to rest on my knees while he pees over my head. Once, he peed in my mouth. I didn’t like that. But I don’t mind the other times as much, as I’m already in the shower and can rinse it right off.
Mom
One morning, we woke up to the shrill ring of his cell. “It’s just Mom,” he said dismissively, letting it ring until she hung up. But she called again and again, and he rolled his eyes, switched it to silent, and rolled back over in bed.
“Aren’t you going to answer?” I asked, watching the green light of his cell phone continue to blink. He mumbled something as he fell back to sleep. But I was wide-awake, listening to the buzzing of her calls until well past noon.
His mom always does his laundry for him. She comes all the way from Selfoss to drop off his clean clothes, drives home with a dirty load. She’s obsessed with cleaning. He says that he’s hardly ever sat down to a meal without her coming running with a cloth to scrub a spot or a spill or something. She lives with her new husband in a big house. Everything is impeccable. The furniture perfectly matches the drapes, the figurines. She believes that work dignifies and enriches the soul, and she doesn’t understand why he’s so focused on education. But he’s been at the university for eight years and he’s halfway to a heap of degrees.
He says that people from the South don’t see the point of educating themselves, since they can start working at the slaughterhouse straight out of tenth grade and bring in more bread than most academics with a liberal arts education ever will. I think it’s terrible that he’s so misunderstood by his own family, but I also think it’s a shame that he doesn’t answer his mom when she’s calling so urgently.
Ghosts of the Past
Before I met him, I was promiscuous. I didn’t think that sex was a big deal. I thought it was exciting. So I slept around—with all kinds of guys. But I really regret it now because when we go downtown and a boy says hi to me and then walks out of earshot, he snaps, “Did you sleep with that one, too?” I usually answer yes.
When I was eighteen, I got my first and only boyfriend. He seemed wonderful up until my birthday, when he fucked another girl. That marked the beginning of a long period when we couldn’t bring ourselves to break up, and we flushed whatever good there was left right down the toilet. After that, I started sleeping around, and I acted like a complete jerk more often than not—like the time I had sex with a lanky artsy guy at the party of another friend who had a huge crush on me. Or when I crashed in my friend’s tiny apartment on her cramped couch and brought home some guy I’d known in high school. But I didn’t think any of it was really important. Just two pieces of meat kneading each other, trying to find an orgasm that would make them forget, if only for a fleeting second, how empty their lives are.
&nb
sp; He takes it personally. “What does that say about me?” he asks. “All these guys are so fucking ugly, and you keep adding more and more to the list.” Sometimes he gets so worked up he says, “An attractive man like me can’t be with a girl who’s slept with so many creeps.”
The Ex II
He always speaks so fondly of his Ex. They meet up pretty often, and I’m really uncomfortable with it, but I’m not exactly in a position to interfere. I think she’s still into him. He told me recently that they’d been hanging out, watching a movie, and they’d kissed, and he could have slept with her if he’d wanted, but he didn’t because he knew it would hurt me. It’s all so disheartening—the way he talks about her so brightly, with such warmth in his voice, and how he’s always comparing me to her. He’s already told her everything, including how I’d given him chlamydia, but he guards all her secrets fiercely. I think he still feels bad about the way their relationship ended, back when she was still in high school. After her family found out that he had two kids, they didn’t want her to have anything to do with him, and they tried to come between them. Complete fucking Romeo and Juliet bullshit. Sometimes I try to get him to trash her—but it’s like he thinks she’s some sort of saint, and he’ll concede only that she’s had her problems, she’s sensitive, and she’s never given him an STI.
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