“Rune buying fruit,” observed a white-haired woman at the table. “He’s really trying to be healthy, isn’t he?” A snort burst out of her, and she breathed in and sat up straight to hide it. “I shouldn’t laugh,” she admonished herself. But she chuckled into her collar long after Rune was gone.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“HEYYY,” SAID HELGE JENSEN, ON THE phone. “I’m going to build a fire tonight and call some folks. There’s some Muslims coming, some Polacks, and we’ve got dryfish and a few cans of beer.”
I waited.
He waited.
“I’ll come,” I said, and hung up.
That afternoon, He the Rich One told everyone about a squirrel that he’d trained to eat birdseed from his hand. Squirrels were new on Malangen, more exotic than cloudberries, and some of the men competed with each other to tame them. No sooner had he brought up squirrels, though, than He the Rich One took advantage of the opportunity to complain about the cost of birdseed. This Arild took as a cue to chase him from the shop. “Blair,” he said, “why don’t you show He the Rich One where to find some blueberries by the lake?” I took He the Rich One’s elbow and led him out to his sports car.
“I like you too much,” said He the Rich One, pulling onto the road. “It’s dangerous.”
Something inside me froze. “For who?”
“For who?” said He the Rich One. “For me! I’m an old man with an old heart.”
I exhaled carefully. Of course; this was just He the Rich One. I’d spent the summer with him. We were all right. Still, once I’d shown him the berry patch, I offered to walk back to Mortenhals alone. When I got to the shop I borrowed Arild’s twenty-eight-year-old Passat, which had the problem of accelerating spontaneously, and drove the fifteen minutes to Helge Jensen’s house braking all the way.
WHEN THE SUMMER IN ALASKA had come to an end, Dan and I stayed together. For me, entering into a long-distance relationship was the path of least resistance—I was, at that point, pretty done with resisting—and had the major benefit of making me unavailable to date college boys I might have to see, and sleep with, much more often. Dan loved me, he said, like he’d never loved anyone else. He wanted to make it work. He gave me a framed photo of us, one I couldn’t remember having been taken. He suggested that I was only going to school to please my parents, and should instead follow my heart, and live with him in Canada. I pretended to think about it. I put his photo facedown in my desk drawer and covered it with papers.
The truth was, from my new basement dorm room in central Maine—at Colby College, a school I’d chosen in part because of how far north it was—Alaska seemed very, very far away. Five months ago, all I’d wanted was an adventure. Now all I wanted to do was skate in Colby’s dim, empty ice rink and watch America’s Next Top Model on my friend’s laptop. Staying with Dan felt like having a needy tropical fish: I’d send an e-mail every day or two, sprinkle on a few “I miss you’s,” and not think about it for the rest of the time. Later in the fall he came to visit me, sleeping in my twin bed while I snuck off to the library to study for tests that were two months away. My friends thought Dan was handsome and exotic, an older man. I thought my room felt adulterated with his presence. After he left, back to Canada to guide for the winter tourist season, I summoned the courage to tell him we were over.
Dan was patient on the phone, understanding. He explained that he’d known the whole time that this would happen—that the distance would tear us apart, because I was too immature to handle it. Without physical contact, he argued, how could our love survive? Things were just as good as they’d always been; I just didn’t know it. After we hung up, he texted how much he loved me, how we were meant for each other. I looked at the phone in my hand, wondering what was going on.
In the coming months, I broke up with Dan a half dozen more times. Each time, by the next day, he wrote e-mails or left me messages with as much affection as usual—maybe even more. When I tried to clarify things, he was firm: “Look,” he’d say, with the calm patience of a father, “I refuse to talk about this until we’re sitting next to each other. You don’t mean what you’re saying. Just wait.” Eventually I stopped trying, stopped talking to him on the phone. I stopped eating, too, losing forty pounds in two months, until I no longer recognized the body that Dan had fucked. I liked that he didn’t know what I looked like anymore.
But he would, the next summer, once I went back to Alaska. It never occurred to me that I didn’t have to go; it never occurred to me that I might not want to. Of course I’d go back to the dogs, the ice. Without them, who was I? Not the person I wanted to be.
When I landed in Juneau, expecting to be picked up by one of the company’s support staff, Dan stood by the baggage claim. He greeted me with a hug, said he’d taken a day off to meet me. Of course he had. We were going to have a great summer, he told me, without a hint of acknowledgment of our months-long breakup. Though he had told our coworkers that he wasn’t sure if we were together, with me Dan acted as if there was no question. I wondered if I had imagined the whole thing.
That first week, when I tried to be straightforward—“I want to break up”—he’d either bargain or argue. Just give him a month, he said; I needed time to reconnect with him. I was feeling distant after so long apart. We loved each other. Remember how happy we were? Sometimes he took the tone of a compassionate elder: He had to remind himself how young I was. How little he’d understood when he was twenty. I wasn’t even myself yet, and on top of that, college had changed me for the worse. “No one else would ever treat you this well,” he reminded me. “No one else will put up with you like I do.”
“You’re not the nice girl I thought you were,” Dan said. I thought, I could have told you that a year ago. I briefly hoped that he would dump me, now that I wasn’t nice anymore, but he seemed only more determined to fix me. During my first days back in Alaska, I had only one victory: I’d told him that I wasn’t going to have sex with him, and so far he’d acquiesced.
He tried to persuade me otherwise on our first weekend off the ice. We were sitting on a foam pad in the women’s apartment, against one wall of the bedroom, which I shared with a girl named Rebekah. Rebekah was a homeschooled eighteen-year-old from Indiana who had never been away from her family for more than a week, and who lived her life, in her words, guided by Jesus Christ and His teachings. Back in Indiana, she had fallen in love with the idea of dogsledding, the idea of Alaska, and saved up money from working a McDonald’s drive-through to buy a malamute and a husky, which she trained to pull her on Rollerblades. But here in Alaska, she’d never even stood on a sled. Instead she worked as an assistant, tripping over the snow in her oversized rubber boots, fetching this bucket or that shovel for whichever musher called out to her first. She made an easy target for pranks—some friendly, some less so—and I recognized in her earnestness a bit of myself from the year before. We shared a tent. More than that, we shared estrangement and girlhood, but those were hardly traits to bond over. Instead, our friendship was cautious; I wasn’t sure what could be gained, for either of us, by associating too much with each other.
Now Rebekah napped in her sleeping bag, a warm synthetic one from Fred Meyer that I coveted. I’d been making do with cotton blankets, and Dan had suggested that we drive to get a sleeping bag that night, since we were due to the heliport first thing in the morning.
I hugged my knees. Dan put his arm around me and murmured into my hair. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I feel like you’re pushing me away, just because you feel like it. Why don’t you want to sleep with me?”
Across the room I noticed Rebekah’s eyes flutter open, then shut.
Dan petted my shoulder. “Huh?”
The carpet was faded and peeled back from the wall to our left, and from a crack a small brown spider climbed the wall in little bursts. I watched it closely. The harder I watched the spider, the less I could feel Dan’s hand.
“I just don’t like it,” I said. I didn’t have mu
ch left to say. I was just so tired.
Dan, petting my shoulder, reminded me that I hadn’t given him a single good reason.
“Because,” I finally said, “I’m not attracted to you.” That was an understatement—even thinking of Dan’s touch made my whole body freeze up—but it was, at this point, one of the few things I still knew for sure.
No sooner had I spoken than Dan withdrew his arms and stood. His face curled into an expression I didn’t recognize, his eyes narrow, his mouth slightly open. “Why didn’t you say so?” he said. “You could have saved us both a lot of grief.” He crossed the room in three steps, one hand smacking the door frame on the way out.
Was that it? Was he gone? It seemed that the very air around me had changed, grown brighter. I started to grin, hardly trusting my own relief. In the same moment, I felt a pang of regret. Maybe I should have waited until after we’d gone to Fred Meyer.
Then Dan walked back in, something shiny in his fist. With a sharp breath he flung the thing across the room, so that it crashed into the wall beside me. I flinched. The thing fell to the ground. Keys. “Feel free to use my car,” he said, leaving again.
The keys had left a mark on the wall, about a foot from my face. I picked them up and held them in my palm.
The apartment was quiet. The spider was gone.
“Rebekah?” I said. “Want to go to Fred Meyer?”
She opened her eyes and glanced at the door, then nodded. Rebekah was wary of both of us. Dan had been kind to her when she first arrived, had driven her around Juneau and helped with errands. But she trusted him less after he asked too many questions about her virginity, after he touched her skin too many times. And anyway, she needed groceries.
Dan wasn’t anywhere in the apartment. He wasn’t on the stairwell outside. He wasn’t in the parking lot, either, where barefoot children tossed pebbles at a bear cub in a dumpster. His car was parked in a far corner. We got in and I drove in silence, across the bridge, out past the heliport and the dump with its circling eagles. Rebekah had a shopping list—food for the days when she worked in Juneau alone. I bought a sleeping bag and a few jars of good peanut butter. I’d learned the hard way that the peanut butter on the glacier sucked.
A STREAM OF WATER LEAKED from Helge Jensen’s driveway, staining a stripe in the road, and I parked the Passat alongside it. The gang sat around a fenced-in campfire in the backyard. There was Helge Jensen with his hair and a mug of wine, and beside him a teenage boy, still baby faced, frowning under a black hoodie. Another man, with a hook nose and a frizzy ponytail, sat on a piece of foam on a wet bench. His name was Zoran, he told me, in an impeccably courteous voice, and he was from Macedonia, and he would be delighted to share his foam with me.
His foam wasn’t very big. I found another piece by a woodpile and placed it beside him. Zoran looked hurt. He reached out and touched a hand to my hair, as lightly as a bird.
I wasn’t sure if the party was over or if it hadn’t started. Nobody seemed to be talking much. There was a pitcher of coffee with grounds floating in it, and another pitcher of wine, homemade from blueberries and black currants. There was a grill on the waning fire with three sooty, wrinkled hot dogs. “Take one,” suggested Helge Jensen, so I broke a hot dog in half and took a bite. It tasted fine, but it stained my fingers black with grease.
Helge Jensen wanted to talk about the Sailor. The Sailor had gone to sea at fourteen, north to Svalbard on a ship of men to spend his adolescence clubbing seals. “He came back, he didn’t know the rules, you understand? Not the rules. He liked girls, but he didn’t know how to talk to them. He asked his friend how he’d got a girl to kiss him, the friend said he just carried her up to the hayloft, she liked it. But when Tormod found a nice girl and tried it, you can bet she squealed. Folks avoided him after that. But he just misunderstood, he thought that was the thing to do, to carry her up to the hayloft. He didn’t know. How could he have? All he knew was boats, and to kill seals.”
Two girls wandered over from the house. They looked maybe thirteen or fourteen. One of them had bleached hair and white-and-silver tiger-striped pants. The other had maroon hair and tight white pants and a pierced lip. They carried an iPod, which played tinny music—“Friday I’m in Love”—from a turquoise speaker, and they sat leaning against each other on the bench across from us. The redhead stared at me with a look of abject boredom, then rolled her eyes into her head until they were closed.
At the graveyard, with Rune. That was where I’d seen them before. Their brother’s grave. The hooded boy went to stand behind them, rubbing each of their necks with one hand.
Helge Jensen glanced at his daughters, then back at me. He seemed to be trying to talk his way toward something.
“Killing seals is fair,” he said. “It’s fair. I don’t mind it. You kill them three times. You kill them and kill them and kill them. You shoot them, then you hit them, then—why? You have to make sure they’re not suffering. It’s much better than what bears do. The polar bears, you see them, they play with baby seals like a kitten with yarn.”
He was watching me closely, and I watched him back. There was a game here, it seemed, and I decided not to play it. Or maybe that was the game: proving I wouldn’t react. In that case, I was a master. I picked up the remaining half of the blackened hot dog and took a bite, just to give my face something to do.
“Can you imagine?” said Helge Jensen. “Can you imagine what it would do to you to spend months at a time of your adolescence living with adult strangers on a sea of ice?”
Maybe I shouldn’t have nodded, but I did.
Helge Jensen raised his eyebrows. I swallowed my bite and explained, in a few words: summers, glacier, dogs, men. When I said it I felt embarrassed; it wasn’t the same at all, no, it was nothing like what the Sailor had done. How arrogant of my heart to jump at the words sea of ice. I looked down, wiped my hands on my pants.
“I got really interested when you said that,” said Helge Jensen. “It means you have a story. You know, if you’re curious, I could get a place for you on a sealing ship. I know a man who owes me a favor. You would be so strong when you came back. Strong physically. Strong mentally. Sealing is fair work.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Maybe,” said Helge Jensen. “But you have to promise, you won’t be some kind of fucking veterinarian.”
I shook my head. My knees were hot from the fire and I rubbed them with my hands.
Zoran was bored. “Say,” he said, bringing the conversation into English. “Dryfish! You like dryfish?” He reached past me, brushing his hand against my back, and felt around the wet woodpile behind us. Then he came back with a dryfish I hadn’t known was there, stiff as wood and as long as my arm. He pretended to take a bite from the side of it, then laughed and peeled off a strip instead. The girls were bent over their iPod, but they looked up, and the blonde held out her palm. The other poured them both another glass of wine.
“Dryfish,” said Zoran smilingly. He pulled off a string of fish for the girl and laid it gently across her palm, then stroked her wrist with his thumb. “It gives you the penis of a twenty-five-year-old even if you’re forty-five.” He lowered his head and spoke into my ear. “I have been eating it every day. Ever since Helge told me to.”
“He ate it and his dick became more heavy,” said Helge Jensen. He seemed pleased with his English.
“Da-ad,” said the blond girl, and the redhead joined in. “Dad. Dad!”
“Hm?” Helge Jensen turned to them.
“There’s no more wine.” The redhead climbed into the blonde’s lap and they put their arms around each other and pouted.
“It’s in the kitchen,” said Helge Jensen. The girls stood and left and the boy followed a moment later. Helge Jensen turned back to me. “I like Zoran,” he said. “I like outlanders. People from here, actually all they want is to eat pizza and watch TV. With them, all of life is a rerun. But some people are searchers. We want new information. We want to hear things de
scribed in a new way.”
“Described in a new way,” I repeated. That was interesting.
Helge Jensen leaned forward and punched me hard in the knee. “Fuck you,” he said. “Who are you?”
I stared at him.
“I like that,” he said. “I touched you and you didn’t jump. I like to be able to touch my friends. That’s fair. I like you. I can tell you, you have a heaviness to you. I can see it. It’s from when you were on the ice. It wasn’t always easy. Maybe some men were interested in you and you weren’t interested in them and they got mean. It gave you a heaviness, which makes you still and stable. You’re very stable because of that heaviness.”
So I was winning the game.
The teenagers came back with a pitcher of wine and refilled their glasses. The blonde sat down on the boy’s lap, distracted, as if she had fallen there by accident, and he rubbed his hands up and down her thighs. The redhead gazed at them a moment, then walked around the fire to Zoran and sat on top of him. His pressed his face into her neck and she took a swallow of wine.
“Bollemusfantomet,” said Helge Jensen, laughing at Zoran. “Heh? All he can think about, it’s puffy pussies.”
“Mmm,” agreed Zoran.
“We always say Greeks are the best lovers,” Helge Jensen told me. “That is, everyone says Greeks are the best lovers.”
Zoran licked his index finger and smoothed his eyebrows one by one.
“But I think I am pretty good,” continued Helge Jensen. “I am a good lover. Women come to me, they go home to their boyfriends and their boyfriends say, ‘Helge, what you did to her? All she wants is to fuck and to fuck.’ But you are a neutral party. Here is my suggestion: that you shall fuck us both and say who is better.”
“Yes, yes,” said Zoran.
I had no answer for that, so I just rubbed my knees.
“That was a joke,” said Helge Jensen. “I wanted to see how you would respond to something shocking. You remained calm and did not get nervous. I like that.” He grabbed the dryfish by the tail and swung it toward me approvingly, then pulled off a new string for chewing. It took him a while to swallow. “Well,” he said, “it wasn’t entirely a joke.”
Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube Page 14