When we were just a few paces from the woods, a little white butterfly flew in front of us. A little yellow butterfly joined it.
I squeezed Søren’s hand. “What do you call them in Danish?”
“Sommerfugl.”
“Summer fool,” I tried.
“Close.” He kissed me, his tongue moving in my mouth. When I opened my eyes we were surrounded by falling white and yellow flowers. I blinked and they became butterflies. A cloud of little butterflies. Søren held me against his chest.
“What’s the word for this?”
“I do not know. What is the word in English?”
“I don’t know!”
He took my face in both hands. His eyes were thin, watery. He was fragile. Just a person, made of water. I felt the passage of time and impassability of distance. Our ages, our nationalities, all the things we could not know about each other. All the pain and bad feelings and loss. Couldn’t it be helped, just a little bit? I tried to remember when I hadn’t known Søren, but the past kept stepping back from me. So I had to go into him, closer, to crush my body against his. If there was nothing left to go back to, there was only him to go into.
We walked deeper into the woods and sat on a beach towel Søren spread over the hard dirt.
“Roxana, I want to give you something.” He opened his palm, revealing a thick red cord, a coil of simple embroidery floss, the kind that Sylvie and I had once knotted friendship bracelets from. “For you to wear. If you want. I can tie it on. If you like it.”
There was a rushing in my ears. I thrust my left wrist at him. “Yes.”
He knotted it three times. I fingered the silky cord. “I love it,” I told him. “Thank you.”
“I am happy that you are here with me. You make me a better man.”
He slipped his hand under my dress and into my underwear. Birds sang a strange high song above us. In the periphery, butterflies rushed. I kissed him and palmed his rising cock.
Søren took off my underwear and pulled me onto his lap. Over his shoulder I saw the Viking fort, the circle of raised earth, the reconstructed buildings. I closed my eyes. Søren held his face close to mine as he entered me. “My little Roxana,” he breathed.
I hooked my chin over his shoulder, whispering his name into his mouth and seeking the red cord. I stared at the ground, at the insects moving in the grass. We fell into rocking back and forth, his hand strong at the small of my back, and we came quickly together, or nearly together, each of us giving the little strangled cry, and lay back in the grass. Søren found my left hand and held it, stroking the cord with his thumb.
The day settled on my skin. We dozed in the grass and then ate our picnic. Carlsberg and leverpostej sandwiches. I put my head on Søren’s stomach and looked at the sky. White, white-blue, silver-blue, silver, blue.
When we got home I went to Søren’s computer and looked up the word for a group of butterflies. A flock? A herd? There was no agreed-upon term. Swarm, some people claimed. Or flight, the Internet said. Rabble. Kaleidoscope. Flutter.
“Søren!”
He had been in a good mood since Fyrkat. I wanted to show him the list. Extend it. There was no response. I said his name again, my voice bouncing around the silent apartment like a deflated ball. Had he fallen asleep?
He was not in the kitchen or the bathroom. I found him sitting up in bed, shirtless, covered by the duvet. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t stir when the floorboards creaked under my feet. I sat on the bed and leaned into him. His purple eyelids were seamed with tiny blue veins. His hands lay loosely in his lap, palms up, the tips of his fingers intertwined. I had never seen him so prone. Even in sleep he seemed closed and strong, but in that moment he was open, vulnerable.
He smelled like the fabric of his backpack, the yellowy bar of soap we both used in the shower, and something else ineffably Søren, sharp and austere. I raised my arm. I only wanted to graze the soft skin of his neck. To see what would happen. Søren grabbed my wrist. His eyes opened with a jolt.
“Don’t.” His accent was heavy.
“Sorry.” I tried to take my hand back but his grip was too strong. “Are you okay?”
He glared at me. I tried to withdraw my arm again, but he wouldn’t let go.
“You’re hurting me, Søren, please.”
He released me, narrowing his eyes. “What do you call me?”
“I don’t—”
“You don’t know?”
“Søren. I call you Søren. That’s your name.”
“Get up.”
I stared at him.
“Get up,” he repeated.
I stood, covering the cord with my hand.
“Don’t do that.”
The duvet fell, revealing his cock. He was hard. I felt lost.
Søren stood, closing the space between us. He cupped my crotch, prying my fingers from my wrist, revealing the cord. He bent his head and licked a coiling path of X’s back and forth across my throat, biting hard under my right ear. He held my wrist in front of my eyes.
“I gave this to you.” He fingered the red cord. “Why?”
“Because you care for me.”
“Yes.” His efforts between my legs intensified. He gathered my skirt. “It marks you. Shows that you are mine.”
Søren knelt beneath my skirt and took down my underwear with his teeth. Then his tongue was inside me. He burrowed, pinning me back against the wall with the force of his tongue. It felt like he was turning me inside out. The edges of the room pinked. Then he withdrew and sat on the bed stroking himself.
“Turn around. Bend over.” I did as he said. “Lift your skirt.”
I hiked up the long A-line, so tense I was almost laughing, and tucked the bundle of fabric under my right arm.
“Take off your underwear.”
They were already half-gone, slung diagonally across my thighs. I flung them with my free hand.
“Bend over. Farther.”
I thought about nature documentaries. The moment in the mating ritual when the female presented to the male.
“Touch yourself.”
Thrilled, almost nauseated, floating in a ring of terrifying arousal, I reached for the edge of my body. The sensation was more haphazard than pleasurable. I managed to work one finger in. Two. This wasn’t how I masturbated. It was a performance. For Søren to watch, not for me to feel. My embarrassment was part of the performance. What he wanted.
He licked me a few times, stopping just before my asshole, then including it, engulfing it. I pressed into his mouth, speaking words I forgot as soon as they left me. He stood and entered me. When I tried to prop against him, Søren pushed me away.
After a few minutes he withdrew and laid me on the bed, pressing my wrists to the mattress with his forearms, and thrust indiscriminately, not trying to give me pleasure.
“What do you call me?” Søren hissed, his accent heavy.
I said his name.
“No.” Glaring at me, he lifted his right forearm from my wrist and pressed it against my throat.
“I don’t know who you are,” I gasped as his pelvis bored into my crotch. “I don’t know who you are.”
His eyes slitted. He was close. I wasn’t. I closed my hand around the forearm still pinning my wrist and pulled it away, curled my calves around his thighs, pinning him to me, and flipped us so that I was on top.
Søren looked up at me incredulously, panting. We were flush, flat surface on flat surface.
“I don’t know who you are.” I ground against him. “I don’t.”
I put my forearm down against his throat. His mouth opened for my breasts but I took them out of his reach. I rocked back and forth, keeping him down, until it was almost over. Then I threw my head back and let my hips pivot while the vibrations ran through me, my bones pooling into hot fluid. Behind my closed eyes I saw a curved white rise, a pillar or a fin or a tooth. It went up and up into the ceiling. Through it. Even when I turned my blind head I couldn’t see the top.
Below me, distantly, Søren began to orgasm. But I was high above, my head lost. I couldn’t see him.
5
THE NEXT DAY I WOKE EARLY IN A DENSE, STICKY BLOT OF MY OWN BLOOD. My thighs and hands coated in a dry stain, as if they had rusted. Søren’s white sheets and duvet covers bisected by wide brownish arcs dotted with viscous purple. I hoped the blood hadn’t breached the dynes.
He did not wake as I crept out of bed and into the bathroom. I tucked a bundle of toilet paper into the crotch of a clean pair of underwear and returned to the bedroom armed with my toothbrush, the kitchen dish soap, and a small glass of water. I knelt beside the bed, dipped the toothbrush into the water, spread a drop of soap across its bristles, and with a circular motion worked it into the stains, as Mama had taught me. I managed to strip out the dark heart of the stain, transforming it into a pinkish shadow with a hard maroon edge. The sheets would need to be soaked in cold water and washed in a machine with stain remover, but I had gotten there in time. There would be no permanent marks.
I don’t know how long Søren watched me spot-treat the sheets. He didn’t speak until after I had changed the water in the small glass twice.
“You are quite thorough.”
I jumped, splashing water on him. He swore in Danish, propping himself up on one elbow, shaking a hand like it was diseased.
“What did you get all over the sheets?”
“Blood.”
He sat up. “What?”
“I got my period. While I was asleep. We just need to soak the sheets and wash them with stain remover.” I leaned forward and kissed him.
He peeled the duvet from his body. “Well, you have made quite the mess. And we do not have any stain remover.”
“If you take me to the store, I can find it.”
“No.” Søren pulled his gray sweater over his head. “I will get it.” He left the room.
“Søren?”
His shiny head reappeared in the doorway. “What?”
“Can I come with you?”
Søren rolled his eyes. “I can retrieve the necessary soaps more quickly alone.”
He disappeared again. “Søren!”
This time he called to me from the hallway. “What?”
“I need a new toothbrush. I’d like to go with you. If it’s not a problem.” I hated how small my voice was.
His feet thumped back down the hallway. “Roxana,” he said from the threshold, controlling his voice, “going out should be an adventure. A treat, like our trip to Fyrkat. This is boring. Let me plan our next outing.”
Our trip had been a good time, had settled and rearranged things, I thought. I had a vision of the two of us standing on the deck of a great ship, finely dressed, as a thick wake stretched behind us. Stream upon stream of rich white foam. Yes, I could wait.
“Can I have a kiss before you go?”
He entered the room, leaned over, pecked me dry on the forehead, and left, slamming the front door. I went to the bathroom, filled the glass again, and peeled the sheets apart, removing the cover from the dyne and the cover sheet from the mattress. My blood had seeped into the comforter, the mattress cover, even the mattress itself. I didn’t feel like continuing to clean, but Mama had taught me better.
One sticky August evening just before the start of eighth grade, I went to pee and saw a dark slick in my underwear. I had become a woman.
Since I could remember, Mama had promised that when I got my first period we would have a special day together, just us two. She would take the afternoon off and drive me into the city, to the hotel where she and Dad had stayed on their wedding night. At our lunch there, I could order whatever I wanted. And Mama would give me her rolling ring, the one that was three intertwined gold rings, white, yellow, and rose.
How wonderful it would be to stand beside Mama as she called in. “Can’t make it today, Marnie. I need to spend some time with my little girl. My”—she’d wink at me—”young woman.” Maybe we would go to breakfast first at the nice diner that made Dutch baby pancakes and then fly downtown in her Volvo and look at all the magazines at the fancy magazine rack in the hotel lobby, maybe even shop a little bit in the gift store, which I believed to contain every treasure I had ever desired.
I wanted the magic to start in the moment I told her what had happened, wanted the whole experience to be elegant and open as a dream.
“Come into the bathroom with me now,” she said.
Mama stood against the teal tile, watching me step out of my underwear. She turned them over in her hands, the pink fabric seeming to glow as she studied the crotch with her nurse’s eyes.
“Well, here we go.” She left and returned with clean underwear, a bottle of delicate fabric wash, and a green-wrapped parcel. “Wash your hands, Roxana.”
“You have no idea how easy you have it.” Mama unfolded a long white tongue from its crinkly green covering and pressed it against the crotch of the clean underwear. “When I started my period, you had to wear a kind of belt with hooks to hold your pad in place.”
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“Ew.”
“Not ew. Menstruation is healthy and normal. A sign your body is doing the right things. But you have to keep your underwear clean.”
I put on the new underwear and sat on the closed toilet to watch. She stoppered the sink and filled it with cold water, trailing a stream of opalescent delicate wash into the basin. Then she submerged my underwear. A reddish silt diffused.
Mama lifted my underwear from the water with one finger, draped the crotch across her palm, and rubbed the dark stain hard with a bar of white soap. Then she rubbed the fabric against itself until it foamed.
“Watch,” she said. The foam pinked as the bloodstain began to lift. “Here, you try.”
She showed me how to rub the cloth against itself by pushing my fingers against each other, moving the fabric like the paper fortune-tellers Sylvie was so good at making. When the foaming stopped, Mama submerged my underwear again and rinsed the soap out. We repeated the process until the stain disappeared.
“Always soak first,” she told me. There was only one bathroom sink in my house, so after that, when I needed to wash my bloody underwear, I filled a bowl with water and did it in my room. Sometimes I forgot the bowls and they multiplied until I had three or four bowls of dirty underwear floating in cloudy water, like diaphanous fish waiting for their aquarium to be cleaned.
“Roxana,” Mama said, trying not to smile when she saw the bowls. “You are a nurse’s daughter. You cannot be unhygienic in your bedroom.”
Mama was remote and severe, but the bowls made her laugh, and I liked that. The idea that my period was a little funny. Her thoughts often seemed far away and were, I imagined, always on her patients, those kids dying of diseases so rare they didn’t have names. I was probably wrong—when my parents announced their divorce I figured I’d been wrong about pretty much everything—but whatever the reason, it was hard to reach her, harder still to split her moon-shaped face with a smile.
I thought there would be more laughter on our special day. But Mama didn’t mention our plans. When I asked the next morning, she said she couldn’t take the time off in an offhand way, as if she had forgotten, as if she couldn’t imagine why I would even ask her. “It’s a Thursday, Roxana. You know those are the worst.”
Søren returned from the store with a small bottle of purple fluid. When he went to wash his hands, which was the first thing he did every time he returned home, he discovered I had put the sheets to soak in the kitchen sink.
“Roxana, this is very unsanitary. We wash food in the sink. Do you not plan to use the machine?”
“Can you show me how to wash the comforter?”
“What is a comforter?”
“Sorry. The dyne.”
Søren put his hand over his eyes. “My dynes are stained, too?”
He stalked back to the bedroom without waiting for an answer. I didn’t want to follow him, but when I did, I found him in the midd
le of the room, the duvets bunched in his arms.
“I must go buy new dynes and a new mattress cover. Please do your best to remove the blood from the mattress too. It is my uncle’s bed. It does not belong to me.”
“You don’t need to buy new ones. Just show me how to wash the duvet and the cover.”
“I cannot, Roxana.”
“Why not?”
“I have no idea. I have never washed it. The covers have never been stained before.”
I couldn’t see how that could be true. “Will you show me how to use the washing machine before you go?”
“The store will close soon. Their hours are limited today. It is a holy day. You will figure it out, I’m sure.”
A holy day? He left again, his kiss throbbing on my forehead. I couldn’t decipher the settings on the washing machine, so I guessed, pouring the detergent and the purple fluid right on top of the sheets. After a full cycle he still wasn’t back. The stains were only lightened to a dull brown. When he finally came home, he handed me a large packet of sanitary pads and a new toothbrush. I thanked him, hiding them behind my body.
The next day my cramps were bad. I e-mailed back and forth with Dad.
Hey Roxie! What’s new in France? Love, Dad
Every time he wrote to me I was reminded anew of my lie. Every time I remembered, I felt bad, but only for a second.
Dear Dad, Not much. Today we have free time but I don’t really know what to do. Just reading and resting I guess. Sylvie met somebody who wanted to go to the fashion museum with her, so I’m on my own.
I miss you,
Roxana
My e-mails were getting vaguer and vaguer. Søren had gotten tired of helping me make up stories for my parents. “Just use this,” he had said one night, giving me the Parisian Experience brochure Sylvie and I had spent so long studying once upon a time. I could barely stand to look at it.
An hour later, Dad wrote back.
Why not get ice cream with some other new friends? Or is it too cold up there? Love, Dad
I thought about inventing fake friends, a fake ice-cream parlor. But what if Dad asked me about them later?
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