“OK,” I said.
“So, I was wondering if you could help me.”
“With what?”
“With my assignment.”
“But help you with what? Finding secondary literature? Understanding the symbolism?”
“What’s secondary literature?”
I sighed.
“Someone said you had written something about The Hobbit,” he said.
“Have you read my article?”
“No.”
“Have you read The Hobbit?”
“No. I thought it was a little slow. But I did watch the movie.”
At 11:05, Bjørnar called.
“Oh!” I said, relieved. “That’s my phone conference.”
He showed no sign of getting up, so I held my hand over the receiver and gestured with my head that he had to get going.
“Good luck with your assignment,” I said.
“I’ll definitely stop by again,” he said. “So you can help me jot down a few things. I’ll call you.”
“Hi,” I said tiredly to Bjørnar.
“This is your own fault,” he said. “You have to man up and say no to this kind of thing.”
I sighed.
“Couldn’t we just fake another phone conference?”
“No, I’m done conducting fake business meetings with you. There’s nothing in it for me.”
I sighed again.
“Anyway, I’m glad you remembered to call, because I’d forgotten he was coming. Are you going to be home early enough for Jenny’s friendship group tonight?”
“I’m going to try. But I have to write that trivia contest for them first. You’re handling the prizes, right?”
“Yup,” I said.
The friendship group. We were this close to not having to do it. When the room parent brought it up at the PTA meeting, I could tell that several people were preparing to say no. But then after Dina’s dad, that annoying broker, started arguing against the friendship group and Emma’s mother brought up online bullying, everyone was suddenly in favor of it.
And now here we were hosting the thing, and already two kids had been dropped off. Twenty minutes early. They ran into the living room without even saying hello, and started chasing each other around the table. They kept that up until everyone had arrived, when I was able to shepherd them all together and seat them at the dining table, along with rolling pins, flour, cookie cutters, and dough.
“Isn’t it a little early in the year to make gingerbread?” asked Matilda, who wore a ponytail high on her head and always adopted a Disneyesque pose in photos.
“No.”
“Did you make this dough yourself?”
“Yes.”
“When did you do that?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“What time is afternoon?”
“Later in the day.”
“How late then?”
“Five o’clock.”
“Do you work?”
“Yes.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m an associate professor of literature.”
“What’s that?”
“That means I work with books. I read books and try to think clever thoughts, and then I write things down, about the books. Read, think, write. That’s what I do.”
“That sounds boring.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Pause.
“Oh, and I also teach. At the university.”
“What do you teach?”
“About books.”
“Just books?”
“Yes.”
“No math?”
“No.”
“Well, your job doesn’t sound that fun. I’d totally rather work in a pet store.”
“OK. Do you want me to roll out your dough for you?”
It was sticky, way too sticky. I had to add a lot more flour, and I struggled to remember why I hadn’t bought ready-made dough from Ikea. I supposed it was just on principle. Although sometimes I suspected I might have a bit of a masochistic streak.
The other kids quickly tired of waiting for me to finish rolling out the dough, and they started making mountains of flour and rolling dough-clump boulders down the sides, or playing catch with the dough across the table.
“You might not want to split the dough up into such little pieces,” I warned, continuing to roll out my own little slab, “if you want to have big enough sections to cut shapes out of.”
“Are you a dwarf?” Kai asked me out of the blue.
“No,” I said.
“You look like one. My mom is a lot taller than you.”
“Should I put on a movie?” I asked.
“We’re not supposed to have any screen time during friendship group,” Matilda protested. “We’re supposed to play with each other and be social.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s fine, just one short movie until Jenny’s dad gets home. Then we’re going to have a trivia contest!”
“Are there going to be teams?” Kai asked, excited.
“No. It’s going to be every kid for himself.”
“Oh.”
“But everyone gets a prize,” I hurriedly added, “and the prize for the winner is awesome!”
“Yippee!”
Immediately they started guessing what the first place prize might be.
“Maybe an iPad!”
“Ooh, or a gift card to the indoor fun park?”
“Or candy!”
The rumble in my head gained strength. Did we have anything that could serve as a prize? I was wondering when a gray car pulled in, and I ran to the door to meet Bjørnar.
“This is painful,” I whispered as he stepped inside, “terrible, awful. I hate this! I hate them. You have to help me!”
Bjørnar smiled the way he always did when he came home. As if he were happy. As if nothing could ruin this, the moment when he was finally reunited with his family. It had occurred to me that I ruined this moment almost daily. Because I couldn’t wait to unload about how idiotic my colleagues were or about all the things that had gone wrong during the day or about how impossible Alva had been because she fell asleep in the car and had been a pill ever since or about how insufferable it was to listen to Ebba and Jenny arguing all afternoon.
I tried to police this inclination, but very rarely succeeded.
He knew that.
And still, he came home with a smile.
“Hi!” he exclaimed as Alva ran in and flung her arms around him. “There’s my Alva! You’re so pretty! And so heaaaaavy! Did you guys make gingerbread cookies?”
She nodded seriously.
“Did you make one for me, too?”
She shook her head.
“What, no cookie? Oh, then there’s going to be some tickling!”
She squealed so loud that it distracted the friendship group from their movie and the kids came to check what was going on.
“Can you do that to me, too?” Jenny asked.
“And me!” said Kai.
“No, you guys are too big. Were you watching TV? I thought there was no screen time during friendship group.”
He gave me a look.
“Oh, it was just for a few minutes,” I explained. “Should we eat minipizzas and have our contest now? You did make the contest, right?”
“Oh, I made the contest all right,” Bjørnar replied seriously, “but it’s in written format and the questions are really hard. You guys aren’t going to get any of them right.”
Even Kai got that this was a joke, and with astonishing speed everyone gathered around the kitchen table.
The rest of the time I served minipizzas and tried to stay out of sight so that Bjørnar would handle the contest on his own. I was both envious of and grateful for the good mood he had put everyone in.
It was as if he didn’t find people scary at all. And no one wondered if he was a dwarf.
“Who won?” I asked when the contest was over.
“Jenny actually did.”
>
Jenny raised her hands over her head in triumph, but immediately received a punch on the arm from Kai, who had only managed to finagle his way to second place.
“Ow,” she complained.
“Oh . . . but Jenny can’t win the grand prize, because it’s something we already have. Maybe we could give it to Kai since he came in second?”
“Yes! Give it here!”
I handed him one of Jenny’s books. She crossed her arms in front of her chest and gave me the evil eye.
“A book?” Kai whined. “I don’t want that!”
“What’s my prize?” Alva wondered.
“I don’t have anything for you, honey,” I explained gently. “You’re not actually in the friendship group, you know. These are Jenny’s classmates.”
“You didn’t buy anything for the other kids, either?”
Bjørnar looked at me with his eyebrows raised before taking Alva into his arms and giving Kai clear instructions to stop hitting Markus on the thigh.
“You should bike over to the grocery store and buy prizes,” he instructed. “And a consolation prize for Alva.”
“I don’t want a consternation prize,” she sobbed. “I want a real prize.”
“Yes, yes,” he corrected himself, “a real prize.”
“But what am I going to buy at the grocery store? They don’t have anything. Should I get them candy? That’s not going to go over well with the parents, is it?”
“I guess you’ll find out!”
A few exhausting hours later I was sitting on the edge of Alva’s bed, looking at Alva, who was lying on her side, breathing heavily, her mouth open and a little bit of vomit still on her cheek. The friendship-group kids had left with their candy prizes, which had resulted in a text message from Matilda’s mother letting me know that on principle she was opposed to the practice of handing out candy at events that weren’t birthday parties and that took place on school days.
I wiped Alva’s cheek, tucked her in nicely under her covers, and tiptoed out.
“Can we take a little walk over to that house and then have a glass of wine?” I asked Bjørnar, who was at the sink washing cookie cutters.
“No to the first and yes to the second.”
“Come on! It’s just a quick walk.”
“I’m not up to it.”
“Oh, please. I’ve been thinking about it all day.”
“You can go for a walk.”
“I don’t want to do it alone. Come on. Just a quick walk to take a look and decide if we want to see the inside. They’re having an open house on Saturday, you know.”
He sighed.
“Fine.”
We went upstairs to tell the kids.
“We’re going to go for a quick walk. Could you guys get in bed and just read? We’ll be back soon. Daddy has his cell phone.”
“Can we put on an audiobook?” Jenny asked.
“I don’t want to listen to an audiobook,” Ebba protested.
“Put on the audiobook, but not too loud. You have to be able to hear Alva if she wakes up.”
Jenny nodded seriously, and I stared into her unreadable blue eyes and again felt the thread slowly being pulled through my heart.
We bundled up in our scarves and heavy jackets and walked in silence. I loved the feel of the evening air on my skin. It washed away all the grime the day had stirred up. Made everything smooth and clear again.
I took Bjørnar’s hand and we moved so effortlessly and harmoniously through the world that I almost forgot the purpose of the walk, until he suddenly stopped and pointed.
He was pointing at a house, one that shone so radiantly that it almost took my breath away.
And I knew I’d been right all along.
This was our home.
There couldn’t be any doubt. There sat the house we were going to live in. Not just this year and next year, but when we were so old we couldn’t read the paper without a magnifying glass and had to put our dentures in water before we turned off our reading lights.
“Ours,” I said.
“It’s going to go for way more than the asking price,” Bjørnar said, “and we can’t afford it. But it is a nice house.”
“Ours,” I repeated.
“Not ours,” he corrected me, “but it is nice.”
We stood there in silence for a little while before continuing down the hill.
I saw a woman in the kitchen of the house doing the dishes. A warm light shone behind her. Yet again I had the thought that it was a model home. Something that didn’t exist in this world. Something that was too good to be true.
It was dangerous to want things like that, things that actually don’t belong anywhere other than fiction. Besides, a little voice inside me said it wasn’t wise to rock the boat, reach for too much, fly too close to the sun. But, as so many times before, I didn’t really listen.
8
In the days leading up to the weekend, my suspicion was confirmed: the house we were living in now wasn’t a proper home.
We had been lying to ourselves this whole time.
And once a fantasy is revealed as fantasy, there’s no going back.
Once you’ve escaped from the chains down in the cave and crawled out into the sunlight, going back in is simply not an option.
The shadows in the cave are just shadows.
Truth and light are in the other direction.
All you have to do is go for it.
There was a knock on the door.
“Yes?”
Ingvill poked her head in, and I rolled my eyes—on the inside.
“Do you have five minutes?” she asked in that plodding way of hers.
“Actually, no,” I mumbled, “but you can have twenty seconds?”
She smiled hesitantly and sat down on the chair I kept for visitors.
“It’s about this course revision,” she began. “I don’t think we should accept them.”
“We don’t really have much choice, do we?”
“I think we do. We’ve set up a committee to oppose it.”
“To oppose what?”
“The course revision.”
“What kind of opposition are we talking about?”
“I can’t tell you today. Our first meeting isn’t until Monday.”
“Who’s going to meet?”
“The committee.”
“Uh-huh. OK.”
“That means anything I tell you now is mere speculation.”
“I see.”
She just sat there and didn’t say anything else.
“Are you here to find out if I want to be on the committee?”
“No.”
“Good. After all, this revision is a departmental matter, so it’s hard to see how a committee would make any difference one way or the other, right?”
“So you say.”
I sighed.
“What’s the point of the committee?”
“To propose countermeasures for the course revision, like I said.”
I regarded her through squinted eyes and tried to see if I could read anything off her sluggish face. Her hair wasn’t in mouse braids today. Instead she had a scarf—in a variety of shades of purple—wrapped around her head. And some dangly beaded earrings, which were also purple. She had obviously put some effort into looking this way. There was something vulnerable and exposed about her attempt, and a little wave of compassion washed over me. Maybe I was being too critical.
“I hear you and Peter are going to Saint Petersburg with Frank,” I said, in a tone meant to signal interest and kindness.
Ingvill jumped with a level of vigor I hadn’t thought she possessed.
“You know,” she said, “I would kindly ask that you refrain from asking me pointed questions and making veiled accusations about conniving!”
“I didn’t say anything about conniving! I was just trying to be nice! Besides, I still don’t even know why you stopped by my office. Why are you here?”
“You’ll find
out soon enough.”
“Great.”
“Fine!”
As she left she made an attempt to slam my office door, but it had a tendency to stick so it just closed on its own with a petulant humph.
9
Saturday arrived with autumn sunshine on wet grass, and Bjørnar got up early and made croissants. Late in the morning I sat in the bright sunlight and spread strawberry jam on the freshly baked goods, with the newspaper and a cup of coffee in front of me. The two older kids were lying on the living room floor drawing, and Alva was on the sofa listening to an audiobook.
In this light, our house seemed just fine.
“We can’t do it,” Bjørnar said, as if echoing my thoughts. He set down the section of the paper he had been reading and looked at me. “It’s going to be too expensive, and there could be way too many unwelcome surprises. I’m sure another house will turn up, one that’s newer and in a better location. This one is practically downtown, you know. Alva would have to start at a different elementary school than the other two. We just can’t do it.”
I looked him in the eye and was tempted to tell him I agreed. A new house was risky. It meant being willing to wager everything: the harmony I felt now, the security of everything and everyone being in place, the familiar sounds, knowing the neighbors were pleasant and upstanding people.
The idea of moving was scary. There were no guarantees that it would go well. It could turn out badly, very badly.
What if our family life was all due to our living in this specific house? People often said that remodeling a house could lead to divorce, but what if it was the move itself that ruined things? What if there was something magical about a certain house that allowed a relationship to withstand reality? And if leaving that house meant stepping outside the magical shield?
Besides, Bjørnar was better grounded in reality than I was, and the problems he was pointing out were probably realistic.
But the memory of the house glowing in the darkness was too strong. And I was thinking about how we were going to get old. Not yet, but soon. And then we would need a home. A proper, solid, roomy home.
“Have you noticed how often Ebba sits in the back storage closet?” I asked. “Every afternoon she gets a pillow and squeezes herself down between the shelves in there, with a book or a sketch pad or the iPad. It’s the only place in the house where she can be by herself.”
The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter (The Ingrid Winter Misadventure Series) Page 4