The Girls' Almanac

by Emily Franklin

  His own bloody urine had made him think about the labs Gabrielle could interpret now, the way she could suture incisions with the same deftness she’d had in high school sewing brocade onto the band uniforms or fitting Sky Masterson’s double-breasted blazer for the camp production of Guys and Dolls. As the blood eddied to the sewage pipes, he’d thought less about what it might mean for him and more about Gabrielle. When she had first had her period, she hadn’t said anything but had led him into the bath and hygiene aisle at the grocery store and pointed to a box of Lady Softness pads, saying, “I need these.” Randall admires her surety in this memory, what he perceives as her ability to ask for what she needs, feels pride when he remembers that he didn’t blush, never wished her mother had been there to handle that side of being female.

  On Hrísey, they’d unrolled sleeping bags onto the thin air mats Gabrielle had thought to bring and slept in the echoing dark of the island’s elementary school. Other campers stayed there, too, unwrapping cheese and brown bread sandwiches bought at the ferry port and whispering as if they were all disciplined schoolchildren.

  “Daddy?” Gabrielle had said as she kicked her feet free from the nylon sack.

  “Yes,” he’d said, and before he could wait for her to talk he asked, “Is everything okay?” He did not want her to turn the question back to him; he wanted to appear solid, as capable as Gabrielle.

  “Yeah, fine,” she’d said and watched him turn onto his back, face to the arch of ceiling, and then, when she was sure he was asleep, she’d put her hand on his, watching both palms rise and sink with his breathing.

  After Gabrielle was in her third month of residency, Randall had met her at the Hopkins cafeteria and managed to inform her of his treatment. From her white coat pocket she’d produced for him a photograph of the two of them in hiking gear, smiling widely, shoulders pressed together so tightly they appear to be wearing one giant black-and-yellow plaid shirt. Gabrielle had offered him a copy that he’d had to refuse lest Diane know he hadn’t been alone in Iceland. Before she was paged away, coat flapping like a loose-winged egret, Gabrielle had sighed and shrugged, as if her father had refused traditional medicine of some kind and was waiting to see if the herbal remedy worked—it was his choice not to tell his wife about Iceland, but she didn’t approve.

  This time, with his radiation series completed, Randall had intended to tell Diane about Iceland and Gabrielle, but she’d gone away to Golden Horizons, the spa near Santa Barbara famous for skin peels and hydrotherapy weight loss, before he’d had the chance. Looking out over Reykjavík Harbor, he watches gulls flap close to the water, fishing in the early-afternoon murk.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” he says to Gabrielle. “Maybe this should be an annual pilgrimage.”

  Gabrielle imagines how a pushpin-marked map would look, blue ends sticking out to show out where she has had her father alone, all to herself, how the pins would cluster on this one floating country.

  They walk up the main street toward the hotel to rest before the bus ride out to Landmannalaugar.

  “Me, too,” she says, then feels she needs to clarify. “To meet here annually.”

  Randall wonders if passersby see the resemblance, if they look alike enough to be seen as father and daughter or if he is assumed to be a divorced man dating the woman who would have brushed him off in his youth. Before he’d remarried, back when Gabrielle was still in grade school, they’d go out every Friday night to Fox and Hounds, the fancy restaurant in town. With her in patterned tights and new flats, father and daughter would sit at their table for two and try to guess what other tables were talking about, if the people sitting next to them were sisters or friends, if the hostess was in love with the sommelier. He thinks of her as having been grown-up then, housed in a flat-chested body but already a surgeon somehow, cutting away at the debris that lay between people, figuring out what clues might lead to diagnosing someone’s condition.

  At Gabrielle’s fourteenth birthday dinner, when Diane—her hair newly streaked and sprayed—had first joined them at Fox and Hounds, they’d tried to include her in the guessing game ritual, but she’d wanted to know which pattern the plates were, if Randall had a preference for cut crystal or plain. Gabrielle had kept playing by herself, deciding that the man in the blue shirt loved the sad-mouthed lady in the corner but couldn’t tell her. Randall had assumed Gabrielle would comment on Diane, on her invasion into their routines and rituals, and was both guilty and pleased when she didn’t. He did not think her muteness on the subject had anything to do with her own guilt, the knowledge that she would—someday—have to leave her father to take care of himself. If she ever sees him with a stain on his shirt, crumbs flecking a cashmere sweater, she is covered by a tremendous wave of nausea, as if somehow her father is a stroke victim unable to dress himself and she is partly responsible.

  Gabrielle’s hair is coiled into a bun. A couple of twists have escaped and dangle by her ears, so he tucks one back as she looks at the tourist displays in the shop windows. Pulling back out the hair that Randall has just secured, Gabrielle looks at the Icelandic sweaters for sale. Empty of mannequin bodies, the woolens hang on wooden racks, pinned into various positions.

  “What’s weird is,” she says as she points to them, “they’re gesturing, even though there’s no one in them.”

  One sweater arm bends at its elbow, another flops onto its neighbor, two are turned toward each other, headless lovers, while a step or two lower, the kid sweaters frolic with arms posed over the neck holes. One even holds an American football, miming a pass or a victory dance.

  On the bus to Landmannalaugar, Gabrielle falls asleep and wakes to rain slapping the windshield. She looks at the other passengers and decides she and her father are the only non-Icelanders. One woman sits with her purple-tighted legs apart, Achilles tendons stuck into the spaces on either side of the seat in front, and notices Gabrielle looking at her. The woman stands, turns around, and waves at Gabrielle, offering something from a plastic bag. With Randall asleep on his rolled up Gore-Tex coat, Gabrielle feels she has to accept, so she braces herself on the seatbacks and joins the woman.

  “Salted licorice?” the woman in purple tights asks.

  “Sure,” Gabrielle says and unwraps the hard cube, knowing she will want to spit it out. In every country it seemed there was a bitter candy or unusual condiment that appealed only to natives; candied cod or Marmite spread, jellied passion fruit or baked twists of lime rinds. In Ecuador, the gourd seeds weren’t bitter, but they’d been fried in curdled butter. Gabrielle had liked them raw and wanted to bring some back to share with her father, since she knew she couldn’t translate their pungency or the way they recalled her whole time in Manta, but of course they’d never let her through customs with them. She had thought that, if Randall had visited, he would have somehow found a way to sneak them onboard—in his shoe, rolled up in his blue T-shirt, or between their hands. The same thing had happened the last time they’d been in Iceland; she’d wanted to take a cup of skyr on the flight back to start her residency, but the flight attendants, with their tiny red fez hats and A-line navy skirts, had smiled warmly as they’d removed her open yogurt from the plane.

  “Will you look at that?” Randall says when they’ve laced their boots and put their packs on. Ahead, sanded cliffs jut from the black lava ground.

  “I feel like I’m in a sand castle,” Gabrielle says, then feels embarrassed for some reason.

  They walk with the rest of the group until pairs and friends clot into groups, some farther back and others, wanting to be first, trekking faster. Miles later, the first hut appears, a Monopoly house set on the side of lake Alftavatn.

  Each hiker sets his or her pack by the boot room and then claims a bed. Gabrielle gives her father the bottom bunk of one set so he’ll have easy access to the outhouse during the night, even though the sky will be light. She sits near a heater, drying her damp socks while she watches the flat lake water. During the hike they’d passed
bubbling sulfur craters murked with sand and silt. Randall had taken to calling the sulfur-smelling land the Lost City of Flatulantis, and Gabrielle had laughed so hard that later, when she thought about it, she felt despondent, as if her father might evaporate into one of the misted clouds.

  Bleak volcanic ash and rocks had given way to cookie-crumb-textured dirt. Through the black, tiny pink flowers poked through, showing leaves the color of newborns’ skin, mottled and red. Then the lake had appeared, flanked by small, algae-covered hills.

  “I’m so glad not to be taking care of anyone right now,” Gabrielle says when she and Randall are seated at the communal table for dinner. Slices of salmon, cheese, and hard bread are passed, and Gabrielle bites into a tomato round before adding, “I keep expecting my pager to go off.” She has the anxiety and adrenaline built into her now, the constant waiting for alarms and need.

  “You work so hard, sweetheart,” Randall says. Tomato seeds slip from his lips onto the side of his chin, clinging until Gabrielle collects them in her paper napkin. For a second, she thinks she will cry—it’s so easy to imagine her father having a stroke, unable to walk or feed himself, relying on Diane to interpret his slurred speech and invariably losing something in the translation.

  “I love you, Dad,” Gabrielle says quickly, then reaches for the plate of hard-boiled eggs to cover her words. The slippery eggs wobble and roll like blind creatures bent on suiciding from their platter.

  Randall gives Gabrielle a pat on the back. The purple-tights woman from the bus stands and starts singing in Icelandic. Everyone except Gabrielle and Randall joins in. They sit listening to the indecipherable lyrics as the sun stays high in the sky.

  When the light is dim but still there at two in the morning, Gabrielle climbs down from the bunk bed and goes outside. The outhouse door flaps open in the wind. Inside, when she’s latched it, she sits on the cutout circle part of a wooden plank and tries not to listen to the sounds of waste slushing beneath.

  By the lake, Ragnus, the cabin master, sits with his knees splayed out, each one pointing to a hill. Gabrielle goes over and sits down near him.

  “What are you doing awake?” he asks her.

  “There’s a lot of snoring going on in there,” she says.

  “The big sisters?” he asks, referring to the kneesocked twins, heavyset and wet-lipped, who’d arrived after dinner and taken the last empty bunks.

  Ragnus runs his fingers through the silty, dark sand and looks at Gabrielle. “Are you having fun with your boyfriend?” he asks.

  “Oh—no. That’s my dad,” she says.

  “I know,” Ragnus says, laughing. “I was just making a joke.”

  The whole scene is fogged, barely lighted and mellow at the edges in the unsetting sun, and when Gabrielle moves in to kiss Ragnus, it’s as if she’s watching herself from the other side of the lake, hardly able to make out what’s happening. She finds his tranquillity appealing, then wonders if maybe she has taken his lack of language skills for poetic quiet. Ragnus kisses her back and then leans her into the sandy ledge. Gabrielle can feel her undone boots about to come off and wonders what she’d do if one slipped from her foot and into the lake. Above her, Ragnus grins, mouths her neck some, and then he leads her to his small room at the back of the cabin.

  Over coffee the next morning, Randall asks Gabrielle how she slept. “The snoring’s quite something, isn’t it?” he says.

  “Tell me about it,” she says.

  “Maybe tonight we’ll be in a different cabin than they are,” he says quietly, gesturing with his head to the twins.

  Right then, Gabrielle has the urge to stay at the lake, to sleep and laze in the gritty sheets with Ragnus, to eat tinned fish and walk barefooted on the algaed hills. She can see living here, the simplicity of the food, the hikes, the shared cabin, her father available.

  “Should we stay another night here?” she asks Randall.

  “I don’t think that’s an option,” he says. “We have to stay with the group. Besides, today we’re heading to the glacier. You have your gloves, right?”

  Gabrielle nods and goes to pack up her things. When she’s slung her pack on, she finds Ragnus by the breakfast table.

  “You should sign the guest book,” he offers. “That’s where everyone puts their name and address—to show they’ve been here.”

  Gabrielle looks at the comments people have written in other languages. In one column she writes her name. Since she doesn’t have an address yet where she’ll be in London and doesn’t think to give her father and Diane’s address in Baltimore, she has to leave that column blank. In the comments section she writes “lovely,” then hands the pen back to Ragnus.

  “Come back soon,” he says to her when the group is out, scattering over the green rises like Gore-Tex ants.

  “I’d like to,” she says.

  When the glacier is in sight, the group stops to reoutfit in snow pants, extra fleece vests, mittens, rainbow-knitted hats. Randall is set.

  “You ready?” he says to Gabrielle, who has put a long-sleeved T-shirt and oversized wool sweater on underneath her jacket.

  “Yeah,” she says. Randall hands her one of his folding ski poles.

  “You might want this,” he says, looping a strap around her wrist. “Where are your gloves?”

  “I guess I don’t have them after all,” she says.

  This annoys Randall more than it should, and he shakes his head at her. “All this time you said you had them. Let’s see if someone has an extra pair.”

  “Dad, I’m fine.”

  “It’s freezing over there. It’s a glacier, for God’s sake.”

  “Dad—I will be fine.” Gabrielle speaks each word slowly.

  Randall looks at her again, then faces the path. The ground is covered in ice so thick and pure it gleams blue, and the group members duck and lean into the ice caves. Randall stands inside one, dwarfed by the cavern’s mouth. Gabrielle takes a photo. Her hands are cold, and she puts them against her belly to warm them.

  The purple-tights woman lies flat out on the ice, looking up at the blank sky. The hefty twins take identical Polaroids with the white caves as backdrop.

  “Fantastic,” Randall says, sweeping his pole arm past the ice mounds. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Isn’t it amazing?”

  Gabrielle nods. She looks at the unfamiliar landscape, how one sledge of snow slips into another until there aren’t any clear lines of which hill or cave is on what surface.

  “So, Gabs,” Randall says, taking off a glove and giving one to her, “how do you feel about babies?”

  “What?” Gabrielle balls her fist up into the too-big palm slot. “I like them, of course. Why?”

  “Well, you know I never planned on having children—after you, I mean. But since this”—Randall gestures in the direction of his groin—“the treatment and everything, Diane’s been talking about having one.” His words are practiced enough that Gabrielle can tell he has thought about when to say this.

  She is tempted to ask, “One what?” But she knows. “You’re actually considering having a baby?” She immediately flashes forward to Diane puttering through the layette department at Saks, decorating the nursery with a theme. Then, in a much smaller image, she sees her father holding a newborn and wants to shake him—it should be Gabrielle’s baby in that image, his grandchild.

  Randall leans on his pole. “Probably not a baby—you know Diane. Can’t really see her wiping anyone’s bottom. Anyway, she’s been thinking about adopting.”

  “She or we?” Gabrielle says, and it comes out tight. She detests herself for being able to cope with blood, feces, cancerous ovaries, and unable to express how she feels about this: the imaginary baby, the secrecy of this trip, the feeling her father is somehow hers only in the barren landscape of this country.

  “We, I guess. It will make her happy, and I have to say, it’d be pretty nice to have a little one around again,” Randall says and looks around as if he expects to see a
toddler bobbing and snow-angeling in the ice. “I did love taking care of you then.”

  “I know. You did a good job.” Gabrielle nods.

  “So, you’re okay with it?” Randall asks.

  “You know, Dad, what can I say?” Gabrielle takes off his glove and hands it back. “I don’t need it. Here.” Then, when they’ve stood a moment in the cold quiet, she adds, “There are a lot of people in medicine who go back and forth between ob-gyn and pediatrics—you know, who can’t decide which to specialize in.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. But eventually, you have to look at a delivery and see where your instincts are—when the kid is born, do you want to go with it to the warming table or do you want to stay with the mother?” Gabrielle adjusts the laces on her boot with her red fingers. “I always want to stay.”

  They don’t talk much more about it. Gabrielle never knew what was a reality for Diane and what was an ephemeral desire, and sometimes she found that if she didn’t object to something—say, a kitchen renovation or turning her childhood room into a huge walk-in closet—nothing happened. Soon Gabrielle would be in London, lecturing, examining women on their sides instead of on their backs, using terms like general practitioner instead of primary care provider, and using a postal code when she wrote an unsent postcard to Ragnus back at the lake.

  “How often do you need to get checkups, anyway?” Gabrielle asks, as if they’ve just been talking about his prostate.