Mirror, Shoulder, Signal

by Dorthe Nors

  Sonja’s advanced a cautious distance down the street. Since she’s no longer visible from Folke’s Driving School, she sits down on some steps. There was a long period when she thought she’d escaped the vertigo. For a while she even imagined that moving to Copenhagen had made a difference. That the dizziness was something social, almost a tradition, she supposed, that you could break with. But then one day she was standing in the entry of her flat and went to tie her shoelaces. The moment she bent over it hit her—the positional vertigo. She crashed into the doorframe and on out to the kitchen and into the stove, before she finally got herself situated so that the fridge stopped moving.

  The disorder, she’d thought, and went to see the ear doctor, who proceeded to sling her around. “It’s not dangerous, you know,” he said on cue. “It’s just some tiny stones inside of you that are breaking free.”

  And the stones just had to settle into place.

  Sonja would like to remain sitting there till the sensation of being knocked off course subsides. What she’s done for herself is a good thing, isn’t it, even though she’ll have to get past Jytte now. Sonja’s going to be gasoline on Jytte’s flames. The smallest hint of a problem with Sonja, and Jytte will set the medical officer on her. If it were up to Jytte, Sonja would never be allowed to learn to shift. She wouldn’t even be allowed to drive. She’d be deprived of her right to … yes, to what Sonja doesn’t really know, but in any case it involves some sort of right, flickering in the back of her eyes like a faulty fluorescent light, and she pictures Mom in a gym suit. The gym suit is shiny and blue, and Mom’s feet move swiftly; she’s the star of the team. She can do a kick split and spin like a top. She’s so stunning that Dad can’t take his eyes off her. No way he’d ever get enough of watching a girl like that. Dad takes a running start, he takes a running start and streaks through the gym, his big hands stretching out before him. He wants to get over to where Mom is, and he does. He comes within reach of the girl in the shining outfit. She looks like a kingfisher, he thinks, and kingfishers are rare. They screech as they fly through the air like arrow shafts, and Mom screeches too when Dad’s red hands grasp her about the waist. Then she sinks down; he is gravity itself. “You’ve got strong arms,” she tells him.

  And he did, Sonja thinks, lifting herself up off the steps. Strong arms and good sperm quality, and here stands Sonja, in the middle of the great wide world.

  She’s feeling better, so now she’d like to walk home slowly. She walks down Gammel Kongevej so quietly that she comes to a standstill before the window of a hair salon. Placed in the window are two decapitated heads, a woman’s and a man’s. They haven’t had a change of wigs since the mid-eighties, and the frames of their glasses look creepy. Somewhere behind them, a woman with a silver-tinted perm walks about cutting hair. She’s put coffee in front of her customer. The gown’s a florid orange, and Sonja can see that the stylist is chatting. Her scissors are busy and so is her tongue. There are two days till Thursday. Two days till Folke’s going to teach Sonja to change gears.

  Is he going to hug me every time we go out driving? she wonders. Must I really get more than I bargain for in every single store?

  7.

  A TRAIL LEADS INTO THE GRAIN; it’s rye. The rye extends high overhead. A few stalks have fallen across the trail, a secret trail that started as a tractor’s wheel track. A foot could feel its way forward; and hers did. Afterward, it was a matter of following the rye. You were only supposed to go where it was already bent. If you kept only to those places, you could make a trail so concealed it almost couldn’t be seen. In time perhaps, you could bend a few more stalks, make the trail into a path, and then find your way in, deep into the field of rye. The ears of rye have long bristles. The joints sit so high on the stalks that the ears get in your face, and then at the bottom: the sandy soil. The soil’s hard, and almost stony, and easy to walk on. One yellow clog after the other. The canteen of juice drink, stuffed into her waistband. And Sonja circles around in the rye like a field mouse. She’s made the path herself, and it took her some time. Above her, the sky is endless. The clouds puff upward, the buzzard hangs and quivers. It can hover in the air like a helicopter, and it hangs there with its gaze on the ground. Only its outermost wingtips tremble, and at intervals it straightens its wings. The buzzard hangs like a sketch over Sonja, who’s on her way to the hidey-hole. The hidey-hole’s a trampled-down lair where the rain’s knocked down a patch of vegetation. Even the combine couldn’t lift the stalks there, and Sonja seats herself in the hidey-hole. The world beyond disappears, and Sonja sits there cross-legged, like a tailor. She’s pushed off the yellow clogs so that she sits in stocking feet. Then she digs out the canteen, and the smell of sweet grain settles around her. She feels like she could actually sing a song right now. A short one, if it weren’t that Dad would be able to hear, and she’s not supposed to be in the field. The rye’s there to harvest, each stalk a part of the crop. The only time kids are permitted in the fields is when they’re supposed to find wild oats. “The Devil made wild oats,” Dad says, even though he doesn’t believe in such things. And the wild oats must be rooted out, or else they’ll sow strife with the neighbors. Marie’s father in particular has a problem with weed seeds, and kids are the right height, especially when the fields are planted in barley. The bells of the oats dangle above the barley, and Sonja moves like a shark through the surface of grain. Dad walks hunched over behind Sonja, because her sight is good. She can spot wild oats from one end of the barley field to the other, and then she calls out: “Look, Dad, there!” Dad tiptoes like that ballet dancer Sonja’s seen on television, in through the grain. Every stalk is money, and it’s as if the wild oats might escape. Snap! and he’s got it, root and all, and he places it carefully in the sack. Then he smiles at Sonja. It’s a species of happiness, and once, when they’d come out of the barley, he said, “You’re so clever,” and Sonja said, “I’m like a little field mouse,” and then he placed his warm hand on her head.

  That sort of benediction doesn’t hang on trees, and now Sonja’s sitting in Vesterbro, unable to recall the last time anyone laid a hand on her head. The head’s probably the only place on her body that Ellen doesn’t concern herself with. Other than now and then massaging points on Sonja’s face, but that’s not the same. No, it isn’t the same, and now Molly’s turned up in the chair across from her. The chair rocks a bit, and Molly’s busy fitting a piece of cardboard under one of the legs. She’s taking a break from her family tonight, she says. The population of Hørsholm will just have to manage things on its own for a couple of hours, for she and Sonja are going to sit in the late August sun and eat well.

  Actually, Sonja’s not hungry. If she scrutinized herself, she’d find a spot of queasiness. It’s not late pregnancy, ha! Or the stomach flu. It’s the large quantities of coffee that she ingested during an especially violent chapter of Gösta. All that flesh decomposing; the angry ejaculations, the mutilated vaginas, the ritual adornment of evil. Every summer, journalists ask the members of parliament about the reading material they’re bringing to the cottage. And they’re bringing Gösta. They don’t read anything else, the politicos. In that sense they’re like Kate. Both Kate and the politicians brag about the number of crime novels they read. Even though Kate goes around Balling with no idea of improving herself, she imagines that these books are edifying. That’s why she tells Mom she’s proud that Sonja has a finger in the pie. “Gösta throws light on society from below,” people say. “It’s just like Sudoku,” the politicos say. A crossword puzzle with sperm and maggots, and they’re bringing it to the cottage. Sunk in their wicker chairs, they’ll read about body parts in black plastic bags. They’ll rub themselves in SPF 50 and wallow in evil like it’s a party.

  I’m a parasite on the colossal cadaver of Western culture, thinks Sonja, feeling queasy. Nausea, sore wrists, and a jaw that tenses as if there’s something in there that really wants out, but isn’t allowed to exit. Perhaps it’s the wreckage of Sonja herse
lf. Why don’t I ever hear from Kate? What’s wrong with me? Why the hell can’t she just call?

  Then Molly pops up from her mission under the table. Her small heart-shaped face has logged another quarter century of its journey. It’s not as though Sonja can’t see the high school sophomore in her anymore, for she can. The warmth and the impulses that make up Molly’s particular nature still nestle there, glowing deep within like the coals of a slowly dying campfire. It’s more that her rules have changed, and Sonja no longer respects them.

  They came to a crossroads in their relationship years ago, but no one else in Copenhagen remembers them as they were before that. There’s no one else to nourish their roots; only each other. Sonja’s one of the few people who knows that Molly’s father was a dairyman, while Molly’s fully aware that Sonja’s the product of agrarian party organizations from western Jutland. In the summer, the girls there played outdoor handball; in the winter they went to gymnastics. There weren’t other options unless you wanted to join the Scouts, and Sonja and Molly had more potential. Telling Mom and Dad she wanted to attend the university in Copenhagen was one of the hardest things Sonja’s ever done. The light in Mom’s eyes, the darkness in Dad’s, and after that, Sonja began her language studies and Molly her transformative journey into psychology. She’s always been obsessed with escape routes, Molly has. In others, in herself, in Tisvilde Hegn, because for a while she went to an old folk healer up there, a wise woman who was the one who brought the fortune teller to Molly’s party. Then Sonja stood up against the fridge and had her fortune told. The fortune teller with the curry-colored tunic and wide eyes, and of course Molly’s husband doesn’t know, but for a time Sonja was the cover story for an affair with a Belgian who claimed to be a shaman. Molly ran around at his heels up in Hareskoven. They scampered along the narrow paths, squeezing up against tree trunks, folding into and out of each other. He tossed sage around, the Belgian did, and Molly tossed everything else imaginable, for existential dramas create fertile cleavage planes in her mind. At the same time, the lawyer—Molly’s husband—has a frank and easy nature that she can hold spellbound, and their kids take care of themselves. It’s as if Molly’s face has acquired a barred grille, the sort you see in front of jewelry stores. She can yank down the grille in a trice, so that no one can barge in and help themselves to the wares. The technique frightens Sonja.

  “I’ve brought you something,” Molly says.

  Her chair is standing still now, but Molly on the other hand is rummaging round down in her purse. She finds a small potted plant in there. An aloe vera. It’s not quite mature yet, but Sonja ought to have it, and Molly also offers her a cigarette from her bag, though she knows perfectly well that Sonja doesn’t want to smoke. Actually, Molly doesn’t smoke either, but something needs to happen this evening. I’m past that age, Sonja thinks, and she’s reminded of the woman at Bakken with the wet espadrilles. Of course she was drunk. Drunk, and the soles of her shoes as big as bales of straw.

  “A fine little plant,” Sonja says, rotating the pot.

  “It’s an offshoot from one of mine,” says Molly, smiling, and she tells Sonja about her husband and the kids. They’ve got so much going on, the kids especially always flying in and out, and once Molly said that her own father had difficulty loving.

  He could homogenize the milk in the dairy, pasteurize and prepare it for cheeses that would then ripen into something marvelous, but when he came home, he just stank of buttermilk. He couldn’t be bothered with his kids, couldn’t be bothered with his wife and hardly even with the dog, but at least he’d drag the dog out for a walk in the neighborhood so it could empty its bladder before bedtime. And the mere fact of that hurt, Molly said—that he was quite willing to take the dog for a walk, but not her. “Because he couldn’t love,” Molly said, and in Balling there were lots of adults who didn’t love their kids. People didn’t use the word love either. In Balling, you were “fond” of someone if your feelings ran high. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t any love there. And it didn’t mean love was there. Kalle’s father, for instance, was a socialist, the only socialist in the parish. Everyone else voted for the Liberals or the anti-tax Progress Party, or in a pinch for the Social Democrats, but Kalle’s father worked in a factory and was a dyed-in-the-wool socialist. He was also violent. He would beat Kalle, until Kalle stammered so much that he had to take special ed classes. It wasn’t as if the teachers at school couldn’t see the bruises. Now and then the gym teacher would turn Kalle this way and that in the locker room to examine him. It didn’t change a thing: the father was a socialist, a political tendency that invoked brotherly love. Just like Indre Mission and modern psychology. Yet he beat Kalle all the time, until Kalle’s speech went to pieces. It wasn’t something folks took special notice of; it was worse, they thought, that the father was a socialist. But people did love their kids. Or were fond of them, anyway. No one claimed otherwise, though Sonja knows this much about love: there’s not much of it in practice, but it’s always thrived on people’s tongues.

  “It gets rubbed in your face,” says Molly.

  “Come again?” Sonja’s been far away.

  “The aloe vera,” Molly says, and then she says that someday she’d like to know: where exactly is it that Sonja disappears to?

  Sonja places her napkin in her lap, so that it looks as if she intends to take part in the meal.

  “I really don’t know,” she says.

  Actually, she’d like to tell Molly that the fortune teller at her party had stripped Sonja of any say over tomorrow, but she’s afraid of sharing the story with her. Even though Molly has a master’s in psychology, she’s drawn to colorful takes on reality. Though Sonja longs for everything the fortune teller might have said to be dismantled, she risks Molly enlarging upon the story if she’s given access to it. Clairvoyance! How exciting! It smells of spirits and spooky bedtime stories, and that sort of thing will just stir up the whey that comprises Molly’s bedrock experience of life. But Sonja won’t have any of it, which is why she hasn’t informed Molly of the reading by the fridge. She doesn’t even know the fortune teller’s name, and for God’s sake she’d rather not know. Molly takes a big gulp of wine. The potted plant’s a succulent. Or at least it looks like one of those plants that steals moisture from itself, and then suddenly the waiter’s there with the food. Right under their noses, potato wedges and burgers. A little bowl of homemade mayo lies sweating on the edge of Sonja’s plate. Sonja makes an effort, but she’s got no appetite.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about back home,” she says then. “About Kate, for example.”

  “Isn’t Kate well?”

  “Yeah—at least I think she is,” says Sonja.

  Molly raises her wineglass and lets it rest against her cheek. Now she’s regarding Sonja as if she were a case study, but Sonja would rather not be a patient in her private relationships; she refuses.

  “Remember the day we drove here in the moving van?” Sonja asks.

  Molly remembers well. She nods in any case.

  “When we were driving across Funen, you said the Great Belt ferry would be ‘the point of no return.’”

  “Did I say that?” Molly smiles. “I wasn’t very good at English back then.”

  Then she sinks her teeth into a wedge while Sonja looks at the burger on her plate. It’s been squeezed between two unruly pieces of bread. The chef has run a wooden skewer through beef and bread to keep them under control, but wouldn’t it just be simpler to make the portions smaller? Then Molly leans back.

  “Well in a way it was true enough,” she says. “And besides, who’d want to go back to Skjern anyhow?”

  Molly’s face becomes a mask, and Sonja bends over for her bag. Her cell phone. She wants to see what time it is, but then she straightens up too quickly. Her eyes lose focus, and now two Mollies are sitting on the other side of the table—one with a heart-shaped face, the other looking as if she were assembled with caulk.

  She closes her eye
s, opens them again: still two. She takes a deep breath, because it might have something to do with oxygen. A gulp of cola, and Vesterbrogade buzzes with sunlight. It is what it is, thinks Sonja, and she tells Molly that Gösta’s going according to plan. She doesn’t want to talk to her about back home. That would be like talking to Marie about Indre Mission. That kind of thing’s a waste of time, and Gösta’s engaged in dissecting the Sweden nobody knows with a fine scalpel, diligently strewing the body parts in a decipherable pattern nearly the entire way from the Arctic Circle to Bornholm. Sonja’s a party to the process, she’s deep into its linguistic manifestations, and since Gösta’s publisher is busy launching Gösta every time he’s written something new, Sonja’s also busy editing Gösta, so that the blackbirds he’s conjured on page ten don’t turn into great tits by page fourteen.

  “It’s also important for a novel that a character have the same name throughout the entire work,” Sonja says. “Unless the name change has something to do with the plot, that is.”

  “Can’t you try and translate other authors?” asks Molly. “Some that mean something to you. After all, there ought to be a few Swedish authors who’d like to give readers something besides blood and guts.”