Mirror, Shoulder, Signal

by Dorthe Nors

  “There,” he says, and lifts his hand. “Now we’ll try it in real life.”

  Mirror, shoulder, signal: Sonja tries to use her body, but the car’s too big.

  “Throw the car, c’mon, throw it!” he exclaims.

  But is it even possible to throw a car? Is it possible to do from the inside? Driving instructor lingo makes Sonja insecure, and she’s insecure enough as it is—with the car, the gearstick, the social aspect of the situation. Her insecurity’s due to an underlying fear of inadequacy, Molly would say. It’s awful being a disappointment to both yourself and others, and Sonja’s solution is to talk. Speech has horsepower and direction. With speech, she can do what she can’t do with the car: she can throw it, and if she just jabbers away, she’ll become a person in Folke’s eyes.

  “I completely forgot to tell you, but it’s me who translates Gösta Svensson into Danish,” she says.

  “Get out of here!”

  “The bag on the backseat’s for you,” she says. “It’s got books. You can give them to your wife.”

  Folke rotates his large body around and grabs hold of the book bag. Back in the front seat, he immediately starts pulling books out of it. Gösta’s novel Black Blood flies up onto the dashboard. Same for The Girl from Riga, “a harrowing read about human trafficking,” as one reviewer’s quoted as saying on the back cover. Folke’s thrilled. He forgets to advise Sonja on her driving. That doesn’t matter, because it’s going better with the gears, while Folke leafs through the books. He wants to know if translating’s hard. He also wants to know if there’s any money in that shit, and he wants to know where Sonja learned Swedish. In this way, she gets a chance to tell him that she’s the first in her family to go to university. Her sister’s a home care assistant, and her brother-in-law works at a wind turbine plant. Sonja also succeeds in saying that her father’s a farmer, and that she comes from a parish that lies so far west that Folke’s probably never been there.

  “Nope, never been that far from Copenhagen. I’ve been to Croatia, Germany, and large stretches of France. But nothing beyond that. I only go places you can drive to in a car. I’m afraid of flying.”

  “I love flying,” says Sonja.

  Folke gives a convincing display of fear on his side of the car, and once Sonja read that men who are unfaithful exhibit an especial fear of flying. They project their fear of being caught in infidelity onto the flying situation. Being unable to escape. Being at the mercy of another man, the pilot. They can walk around and feel reasonably fine about their deceit down on the ground. But at altitude, the consequences dawn on them in a different way. They realize that they don’t have solid earth underfoot, that they risk losing it all. Because you really can; you can risk losing everything when you lie.

  Sonja winds through a chicane designed to slow traffic. Folke claps her on her gear hand.

  “But anyway,” Sonja says, getting her hand back up on the wheel, “where I come from, things aren’t the same anymore.”

  “Oh no?”

  “No, the farming operations have gotten so huge,” she says. “They buy up everything around them. My parents’ farm was bought up by a hog breeder they call Bacon Bjarne. Now my folks live in a house in Balling. My sister too. That’s why the smaller farms stand empty, and when they’re empty, there are no families with kids living there, and when there aren’t kids, there’s no one to go to school. Then the schools close, and when the schools close the whole thing shuts down. Bacon Bjarne doesn’t care two straws—as long as he can make the payments on his outrageous loan from the credit union, it means nothing to him if the infrastructure goes south. My dad always said that people are strange vermin, and he’s right. But the deer are still around. There are so many deer that they have to make exclosures for them.”

  “Exclosures?” asks Folke, indicating with his hand that she’s too close to the other cars’ ears.

  “They’re the opposite of enclosures, like they have for cattle.”

  It’s good to talk and drive at the same time.

  “It’s for keeping the deer out of the crops. They can flatten a field of grain otherwise. You have to imagine two, maybe three hundred animals the size of horses suddenly getting into the grain. They tramp it all down, and once the stalks are bent … It’s the sort of thing that farmers worry about a lot. So they make exclosures. There are hairdressers there who sell farmers the hair they cut from the locals. Then the farmers put the hair in potato sacks and hang them on fence posts by the exclosures. Because human hair scares off deer. They don’t like the smell, and then they go somewhere else, but they’re there anyway, the deer. They’re in the tree plantations and out on the heath, and sometimes a lone deer will wander off from the herd. Pretty soon they’ll be going into rut. Then you can hear them when it starts to get dark.”

  Folke emits a deep guttural sound from over on the passenger side. It sounds as if he’s growling. Yes, Folke’s growling, and Sonja swerves around a cyclist.

  “Anyway,” she says, “I didn’t intend on becoming a translator. I wanted to write books—but then again, doesn’t everyone?”

  “You can’t make a living from that sort of thing,” says Folke, and he shows her his fingers. They’re long.

  “Guitar,” he says. “But if everybody played heavy metal, then there’d be nobody to teach you to drive, and if you wouldn’t mind paying attention to the rules about right of way here …”

  He directs her into the parking lot of a supermarket in Hvidovre. Around them, peaceful morning shoppers move about. Folke and Sonja drive slowly, slowly, and as they circulate, Sonja gets more and more of a handle on the distance between second and third. Folke holds forth on the right of way at unmarked intersections, and Sonja says that Gösta isn’t really that tall. He’s a bit bald as well, but he’s got a house on Gotland with big picture windows. Gösta can see the ocean. It stretches like a vast plain all the way to the mainland. Sometimes at night, Gösta dreams that he’s walking out on the sea. He walks, jogs, and runs, all the way to Oskarshamn, where the real Sweden begins. The Sweden where there are forests and stone quarries, moose hunters. The Sweden where weapons manufacturers lie and simmer beneath it all. That’s the Sweden he wants to describe, and Gotland’s a good place to do it from.

  “Part of how I get paid is complimentary copies,” Sonja explains, holding back for a shopping cart on the right. “My storage space is stuffed with crime novels and historical romances and so forth.”

  Folke says he’s sure his wife will be happy to get the bag. She’s a foot doctor in Roskilde, and when she’s off work, she’d rather not think.

  “She’s a foot doctor?”

  “A top-notch orthopedist,” Folke says, smiling, and he flips down his sunglasses.

  The car rolls peacefully along with Sonja and Folke while he fiddles with the ventilation controls.

  “And Jytte’s okay?” asks Sonja.

  “Don’t you go troubling your head about Jytte.”

  “Well, but she probably wasn’t very happy, was she?”

  “That’s all behind us now.”

  Sonja doesn’t know that it is. It might well be that Folke’s not afraid of Jytte. Sonja doesn’t feel so serene, but what he probably would have her understand is that Folke, like the man he is, settles matters as they arise, while women keep them going. And yet Dad still bears a grudge against Marie’s father because Marie’s father lopped branches off the wild apple on Dad’s side of the property line in 1979, while for his part, Marie’s father can’t forgive Dad because Dad threw foxglove seed over on Marie’s father’s side of the brick transformer tower. Nowadays when they walk around Balling, they lift their caps when they pass each other, full of ill will, and that’s the kind of people Jytte comes from. Jytte and Sonja.

  Folke rolls his window down a chink.

  “Bacon Bjarne,” he says, and laughs.

  “He was my sister’s boyfriend once.”

  “Folks are damn funny. We had a fellow we called Stove Hood
, down on Sønder Boulevard. But Bacon Bjarne.”

  “He’s not very funny in real life.”

  “Nah, but who is?” Folke sighs and sticks his hand out the window. “What an August. I tell you the sky was banging the earth like billy-o on Sunday.”

  Now he laughs again. Sonja does too, a bit, even though Folke shouldn’t be saying bang. No, he shouldn’t say bang. But Sonja can hardly control the car, so how’s she supposed to control Folke? She looks down at her hand. Then she discovers something, like some objective finding. On its own, the hand has gone from third to fourth. The distance between third and fourth is a straight line from above to below. A simple distance, thinks Sonja. No diagonals.

  10.

  SONJA CALLS UP KATE but it’s Frank who answers. Nothing new in that, of course, though Kate’s normally someone who likes to talk on the phone. As a teenager she hung out on the phone all the time. Mom would get irritated at Kate for all that chattering. “You and then Dad and all your talk,” she’d say. “What is it that’s so important?”

  Mom’s world exists within herself. She doesn’t need to ring up the world outside. It’s only if someone’s died or ended up in the hospital that she uncoils the telephone cord. That’s a trait that Sonja’s inherited from her, but it can also get too quiet, and you ought to call your family once in a while. So sometimes Sonja calls home. It’s best if Dad doesn’t pick up the phone, because he’s spent too much time driving farm equipment. Hearing protection’s for big-city farmers and sissies. A whole generation of tough guys is walking around now with batteries behind their ears. They make noise in the theater foyer and the quiet car on trains. They rustle their newspapers and invade conversation. Dad has a hard time hearing what Sonja says on the phone. She has to yell into the receiver. She doesn’t have the energy; she retreats. Then Dad stands there in his lonely majesty and shouts across Jutland. It lacks dignity, and Mom really doesn’t like to talk on the phone.

  But now Sonja’s called Kate. She’s called even though Kate won’t answer the phone. Perhaps she’s gotten caller ID, thinks Sonja. Perhaps Kate goes over to the phone and glances at the display: “It’s Sonja,” she tells Frank. “Can you take it?”

  If Sonja and Kate were apples, you’d say that they’d fallen on two different sides of the tree. It’s true. That it also feels as if someone’s kicked the Sonja apple so it’s vanished deep in the tall grass is another matter. But that’s how it is; the Sonja apple lies somewhat repudiated in the grass. Now Kate doesn’t know what to say to her anymore, which is why it’s good she’s got Frank. He can talk to anyone, and he doesn’t hang back either. He goes right up to people, and he isn’t afraid to get down to the nitty-gritty with Sonja.

  “I suppose you’re going to start looking at cars pretty soon, right?” he says.

  “I just have to get my license first,” says Sonja.

  “You haven’t gotten it yet?”

  “I’ve changed driving instructors.”

  “It was a woman you were driving with before, wasn’t it?”

  Sonja cannot deny that Jytte’s a woman. Frank makes a sound, and she can tell exactly what the sound’s supposed to indicate, but she doesn’t rise to the bait.

  “Yes, I’ve changed instructors, so something should happen pretty soon now,” says Sonja, even though she’s unsure.

  For what if nothing happens? What if it’s the same thing all over again with Folke? Maybe Sonja’s one of those people who can’t drive. It’s not just a question of medical officers and the denial of certain existential rights. It’s also a question of spatial talent. She knows this because she once saw a show about a psychology professor. He had the same name as a certain provincial town, and he liked to put women in a centrifuge. He’d had the centrifuge constructed for his experiments. A woman would sit strapped into the middle, and Gösta would have loved the contraption. If Gösta knew it existed, he would immediately write it into a scene. A woman, strapped tight and preferably naked, with something in her mouth. But never mind Gösta, because then the psychology professor centrifuged these women. The women were spun around, up and down. They spun in ellipses, and yes, they were strapped in while they spun. Then afterward, when the centrifuge had stopped, the women were asked to do exercises. In the exercises, they were supposed to orient themselves spatially. They were supposed to coordinate distances and solve math problems and walk a straight chalk line. The women were terrible at it, and the professor concluded that women were poor at orienting themselves in space. Then he put a black man in the centrifuge. He centrifuged the black man for a long time and achieved the same result: black men were extremely bad at orienting themselves in space. In fact there was only one group of people who oriented themselves worse, and that was black women. Black women were decidedly out of it, the psychology professor declared. White men, by contrast, he concluded after having given himself a ride on the swing, are patently the best, and everyone made the sign of the cross. Garbage in, garbage out! people yelled, and Sonja yelled with them, but who was she to get all steamed up? She with her inability to shift, her positional vertigo?

  “Have you thought about what kind of car you want to buy?” Frank asks.

  Because Frank works in a wind turbine plant, he’s the one in the family who knows about technology. He and Kate drive a station wagon themselves, but he thinks that Sonja has money. Everyone who’s gone to college has money. On the other hand, Sonja doesn’t have a proper job, so she’s probably broke. This uncertainty is lodged deep in Frank, and it arises often in their conversations together. One moment, Frank thinks she should buy a villa on the posh side of Copenhagen. The next, he thinks she’s better suited to a row house in a small town whose residents are starting to flee. Now she should get a silver Citroën.

  “And yet maybe after all,” he says, thinking aloud, “you might be better off with a used vehicle.”

  Sonja thinks about Folke, centrifugal force, and the fact that perhaps she’s utterly incapable of learning to drive.

  “A lot of them have logged more than 80,000 miles and still drive perfectly fine,” says Frank. “If you’re able to fix them up a bit yourself.”

  Sonja’s quiet on her end of the line. On Frank’s end, the dog’s barking.

  “Turn down that dog!” he shouts into the room.

  So there is someone home, thinks Sonja, and at first the noise continues, and then it grows quiet.

  “What kind of dog do you guys have these days, actually?” asks Sonja.

  “A golden retriever,” answers Frank.

  “Ah, a real family dog.”

  “Yeah, Kate really likes golden retrievers,” Frank says, though in fact it sounds more like a sigh.

  “They always use golden retrievers in movies,” says Sonja. “At one point, I saw so many golden retrievers in Hollywood movies that it got suspicious. Tom Hanks pretty much never appeared without one. But the intriguing thing was that black Americans on screen never had golden retrievers. The golden retriever was a white family dog. The blacks had dogs they could keep in their pockets. Or dogs the size of garages. It was one or the other with black family dogs.”

  Now she’s lost Frank, and she also catches sight of the drawing she’s made on the piece of paper next to the phone. It’s a doodle. Within the doodle, a distinct shape has appeared. Inside the shape sits a little figure, waving. The figure waves at Sonja from inside its handsome helicopter. Soon the ladder’s going to drop, Sonja thinks. Soon they’re going to let down the lines and come to my rescue. Then it’s up to me to clamber up. Not to be scared. To grab hold and let myself be borne away, through the air and over the heath, the plantations, the inland dunes. Someplace below lies Balling and the next-door parishes. Frank in the backyard with a golden retriever. Kate directing her fear into the cold cuts, the septic tank, the water heater, and then into the kitchen with the hand mixer and fondant. A grocer, a feed store, an apple tree that has cast its apples. A trail that leads into the grain.

  “You could also bu
y a Jaguar,” says Frank. “You can get them cheap in Germany, if you fudge on the plates.”

  It’s strange that he says that, for Frank would never be able to fudge anything. A spot of under-the-table work perhaps, but Frank does things by the book. After all, those wind turbines don’t hoist themselves up on their own. Sonja knows that, and now he’s telling her how they raise them into the air. How they place them at the base of the tower. It’s a balancing act.

  “A bit like those Chinese acrobats who spin plates around on sticks,” says Frank. “But just try multiplying that by a couple thousand.”

  Sonja can see it before her: thick columns with immense platters, spinning. The turbine propellers in ellipses, up quick, down quick.

  “The turbines actually look a bit like helicopters,” Sonja says.

  She hasn’t thought about it before, but they do. Frank grows quiet on the other end of the line.

  Then he says, “Kate’s afraid that they’re going to fall down while I’m up inside them. Or underneath them. Of course for me, up there’s often the nicest place to be. It gives me something to tinker with. But Kate’s scared that they’ll be defective, or I’ll get electrocuted, or whatever it might be this time. You know what it’s like, Sonja, it could be almost anything, and then we bought the dog. Having somebody to take care of—it’s good for Kate.”

  It’s true. And Kate’s good at taking care of somebody. But she won’t take the phone when Sonja calls.

  “Is she home there with you?” Sonja asks, carefully.

  “She’s out with the dog,” says Frank.

  Of course she is, thinks Sonja. Out with the dog, and I’m out of the picture. And yet not entirely. For Sonja feels stuck. It’s a strange paradox. She feels like an escaped prisoner with big chunks of concrete under her feet. It’s hard to walk this way. It can’t be good for my balance, she thinks, and then it’s time for them to hang up, her and Frank.

  “Say hi to Kate,” says Sonja.