Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube

by Blair Braverman

Then: “Don’t worry. We’re only stopping at the Brygger to steal toilet paper and pick up the bachelor party.”

  It was true: It wasn’t my fault I was nice. I could say whatever I wanted. I wanted to grin, to laugh. Without responding, I walked past Markvard and out on deck, to the back of the boat where Helge Jensen and the Sailor, arms around each other, asked me to take their picture. After I did, the Sailor unbuttoned his pants.

  “He wants to take a dick pic,” said Helge Jensen.

  “Yeah!” said the Sailor. He was drunk.

  I waited with the camera. I could wait all day. The Sailor changed his mind and buttoned his pants again.

  “We were in a shipwreck once,” said Helge Jensen, punching the Sailor’s thigh. “Long ago. The boat was stuffed full of herring and it had trapdoors in the deck. So it ran into a berg, and the pressure made the doors pop open like champagne corks, and all the herring just exploded up and covered the deck. And the captain, he just stood there and fingered his collar. He didn’t even know what was happening, because something was wrong but the boat wasn’t sinking.”

  “But he was jo near death already,” said the Sailor. “He drowned overboard a year later.”

  We were quiet, considering. The back of the boat, where we stood, was full of mess that somehow felt clean in the sea air. A Norwegian flag, tattered into strips, fluttered over the wake. There were two trunks against the back rail for storage, and across from them, against the cabin, a heap of stuff: tarps, ropes, gas cans, a chipped basin, a cardboard box labeled “Eggs” that contained plastic bags and empty Tuborg cans, a broken fishing pole, a broken folding chair, and, resting on the chair, a dryfish, which Helge Jensen occasionally peeled slivers from as if he were peeling threads of string cheese.

  Lily came over and the Sailor pointed at her, beaming. “We’ve been together for twenty-five years.”

  Lily leaned back against the railing. “We’re not together,” she said.

  “Twenty-five years,” said the Sailor.

  “No,” said Lily. “It wasn’t twenty-five.” She turned around to face the water.

  The Sailor caught my eye, licked his finger, and snuck behind her. He jammed his finger up between her legs. Lily jumped, then turned and scowled. “You’re dumb in the head,” she told him.

  “We’ve been together twenty-five years,” he said proudly.

  Helge Jensen watched, amused. “Even if it was twenty-five years,” he said, “you were at sea the whole time. You were constantly at sea. You know”—he turned to me—“we were young, and he was supposed to have all of Christmas and January off, at home, and we even had a Mustang we were going to drive. And it’s not even the first day of Christmas before he says, ‘Oh, they called me, I have to go.’”

  The Sailor smiled.

  “You thrived at sea,” I said.

  “One had to,” said the Sailor. “Anyway, my money grew like grass. When I was in Iran . . .”

  Lily looked at him. He sat down on a trunk and crossed his legs. “When I was in Greenland, I came back after six months with a long gray beard, and I went to Lily’s house and was talking to her father, sitting at his kitchen table, and she didn’t recognize me. We sat there the whole evening . . .”

  “I sat jo and flirted with another guy all night, and then I went home alone,” said Lily. “I still can’t believe you let me do that.”

  The Sailor kicked his feet. One of his clogs half-dangled, exposing a bare heel. Later he’d pull me aside and whisper: I was a spy. Lily doesn’t know. But for the moment they looked at each other fondly. Helge Jensen poured a bucket of guts overboard, which spread in an underwater cloud. We drifted past the far end of the Brygger, empty glass-front cabins lining the shore, and then we pulled into their marina and I clambered up the stone wall and crossed the clean, elegant foyer to the ladies’ room, where I filled my pockets with toilet paper for Abdullah’s depleted head.

  When I got back, there were eight new men climbing down onto the boat, and they were all the same. They were young and sometimes handsome and carried a suitcase and wore things like nautical shirts and high-top sneakers and a pin-striped jacket with shorts. They covered the leather couches and passed around a bottle of cognac and said, “We should fish some dryfish, that’s tasty,” and “This here is jo a fantastic boat. It really is a fantastic boat.” Lily was sitting in the middle of them all and one man kept asking her name.

  “You look like a Lily,” he said, when she told him. “And you look like your last name is Larsen.”

  “It’s not,” she said.

  “People on Malangen can have whatever name they want,” someone said. Someone else said, “This is really a fantastic boat.”

  It turned out that Helge Jensen had promised to take the bachelor party across the fjord, to a cabin on the other side. But the boat wasn’t moving. Its propeller had caught on a black plastic boom, a thick tube floating around the marina to block waves. This didn’t seem to bother the partiers. Helge Jensen kept gunning the engine, and they cheered and sat on the couches and patted Lily’s shoulders. I stood to the side. The Sailor pointed at me. “You!” he said to the men. “She’s American.” The men looked at me and shook their heads, doubtful.

  “Say something in English,” one of them suggested.

  “I’m American,” I said in English. “I’m not from here.” Then I smiled. I knew that my foreignness was just another drunken idea nobody believed.

  They scoffed.

  “No, really. I was born in California,” I insisted, my American accent harsh against the smooth night. “I’m staying with Arild Kristoffersen”—mispronouncing his name on purpose, the r’s hard and unrolled—“in Mortenhals. I’m not from here at all.”

  I had, in my life, pretended to be a Norwegian, and an experienced dogsledder, and a girlfriend, and an adventurer, and brave—roles to prove my place, to show that I could belong. But tonight, when I could be whomever I wanted, I pretended to be myself. Blair Braverman, the Californian, sitting on Helge Jensen’s boat. The least likely character of the bunch.

  The groom-to-be, in his pin-striped jacket, stood up. “She’s a li-ar,” he announced in slow and happy English. Norwegians liked to speak English when they were drunk; now a few others joined in. But the boat rocked violently and the engine whistled off, distracting them. The groom-to-be peered over the rail. “I’ll take over,” he said to no one in particular. I followed him back to look at the boom, which was caught underwater. When we got close it rose like a whale, sending up a splash, and I ducked.

  Svein and Helge Jensen and several of the men stood regarding it, and after the boom settled Svein climbed down to stand on it in the water, holding the boat for balance. He gripped the rail and leaned back, looking solemn. I thought that standing in the water made him feel important. Helge Jensen tried the engine again, back and forth, but we were still stuck.

  I went to the cabin, where I found Katrin sitting alone. We sat and felt the boat shift with new and fruitless efforts. It was late and the water was gold. The sun was behind the mountains, where it would set for the second time since May.

  After a while the voices outside got excited, so we went to see what was up. A man had rowed to shore and come back with a drysuit, which was yellow and looked unused. He stripped to his boxer briefs to put it on; the Sailor found me and covered my eyes with his rough hand. When the man was dressed again, his wrist and neck elastics snapped into place, he climbed down into the water and everyone leaned over to watch him. It was cold now that the sun was gone. The new theory was that an anchor rope had caught in the propeller, and the man intended to swim under the boat and look for a tangled rope and then cut it with his rusty knife. He went under.

  We waited. The man burst from the water blade first, gripping the knife in his fist. He grinned.

  “I’m cold,” said Katrin.

  There was a scuffling, a collision: Svein and two other men had tried to put their arms around her simultaneously. Svein won, mostly. He sq
uished up behind her, hugging her waist. One of the men satisfied himself by rubbing Katrin’s forearm between his palms, and the other stepped back and rolled a cigarette. After a moment, Katrin shrugged away and came to lean against me, hooking her arm through mine. I took off my coat and wrapped it around her shoulders. I was tempted to catch the men’s eyes, to gloat, but I didn’t even need to rub it in.

  The blond hair of the man in the water was plastered photogenically to the sides of his face; he shook it a little, to reattract everyone’s attention. He urged his friends to take pictures of him in the water, holding the knife, and post them online. Several friends did. But when Helge Jensen tried the engine again, the boat was still stuck. The man had cut the wrong rope.

  Markvard stood off to the side. “Let’s go forward,” he kept urging. “Come on, let’s go forward.”

  “I think that’s the point,” I said.

  “You can just keep saying that to him,” the Sailor said. “Just tell him again. It won’t help. He’s deaf.” He pointed to his own ear, widening his eyes until they bulged from his face.

  Markvard looked at us looking at him. “Sure,” he said, nodding. “Of course.”

  It took another hour to free the boat, and I’m not sure how they did it; I’d long since stopped paying attention. By the time we started moving, the sky had turned pastel, warm blue and pink that reflected in pink stripes across the rippled water. The mountains were shadows or clouds on every horizon. The party men took turns driving and Helge Jensen sat on a couch with his legs up on the coffee table and directed them with the smallest of gestures, a tipped head or twitched finger that steered the whole ship home. We left the Sailor and Lily back on their beach, and left the bachelor party at a rickety dock across the fjord, where they hoisted their duffel bags and waved thanks and puked into the water. When we finally docked in Mestervik, Helge Jensen gave me a ride to Arild’s car. He kept one hand on the steering wheel and the other wound in his hair. “You and me,” he said, “we’re not some of those mass-produced people, are we. But we recognize that in each other. We don’t even need to say it aloud.” The summer before I would have taken this as a compliment. But now I was just thinking of how to tell the story back at the shop.

  The next morning I recounted it at the coffee table, drawing on Post-it notes to show the route, the stuck boom, the arrangement of boats at the marina. He the Rich One shook his head in wry disapproval. Odd Johnny said, “Helge Jensen was sober, wasn’t he? That’s the kind of thing that would never happen if Helge Jensen was drunk enough.” The Sailor sat beside me and pinched my ankle with two fingers to give it a shake, saying nothing at all.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ALL THAT SUMMER I KEPT THE OLD STORE open on weekends, and all summer people came, travelers from neighboring fjords and families on their way back from church and strangers who liked waffles. A man brought records to play on the gramophone. A woman from Tromsø brought her mother, who had Alzheimer’s. She smiled as she walked through the familiar shop of her childhood.

  Two girls from the RV park showed up one morning, and then the next, and before long they joined me daily, often appearing from across the pasture the very minute that I turned the skeleton key. The girls were almost disconcertingly well mannered, pretty and big eyed and loyal to each other; when an adult addressed them, they would convene—sometimes in whispers, sometimes with a glance—before one or the other stepped forward to answer the question in full sentences. Sometimes I gave them jobs, sweeping the floor or arranging the children’s clothes. But mostly I tried to get them to play. I gave them milk to feed the lambs, whom they called Cool One and Grass. I hid new artifacts on the shelves and promised the girls ice cream if they could spot the additions. At first they drifted about carefully, lifting the ice skates or the bottle of gelatinous orange aquavit, but as the hunt took hold of them they began running around, pointing at random. “This?” they said. “This? This? This this this this this?” I gave them ice cream anyway, and they had the decency to look astounded.

  I enjoyed their company. The younger girl liked to wind the gramophone so that it pulsed a scratchy waltz, and together we’d dance around the room, melting to the floor as the music slowed and faded. The older girl liked to stand before a warped mirror and laugh as her face twisted in strange directions, and to read aloud classified ads from old magazines: “‘Sailor with own car seeks girl or widow, age twenty-eight to thirty-eight.’” She wore a purple sweatshirt with Justin Bieber’s face on the back. “I don’t wear this every day,” she announced regularly, though no one had commented. “I don’t even like Justin Bieber anymore. I like Isac Elliot now.”

  The visitors loved them, these polite children. “You must be interested in history,” they’d remark, and the girls would glance at each other, and one or the other would step forward and say—

  “I am sort of interested in history, but not really. I am more interested in lambs.”

  On rare weekends when the girls didn’t show up, the Old Store felt different. Creaky and shifting. Not unpleasant—just laden. Months later I’d hear a psychic describe haunted places: they were always cold, she said, and seemed to shimmer, and were often filled with the belongings of people who’d passed. It made sense. Ghosts or no, the shop was full of stories, and in quiet times I sat there and tried to hear them. I’d sit on a corpse chair and tear bits of waffle apart with my fingers, listening for car tires, watching out the window at the unchanging sea. I’d flip through the guest book, reading the names of people who had passed through.

  Toward the end of the summer, Arild took me to the city for dinner. I knew, as soon as we entered, why he’d chosen the restaurant. The pizzeria was decorated with old things: skis, records, coffee grinders. The walls were lined with dark wood, labyrinthine with bookshelves that formed private nooks. Couples and friends in well-tailored neutrals murmured to each other by candlelight. When I touched the leather-bound books, I found they were glued together.

  A lanky waiter seated us by the window, under two accordions. Outside, a man threw handfuls of torn-up pastries onto the sidewalk, attracting a cloud of seagulls. “Look at the birds,” Arild said. “Anne Lill would hate that, but I think it’s nice.”

  “It is nice,” I said, and he almost smiled. “Do you come here a lot?”

  “No,” said Arild.

  We ordered a Chicago–style pizza to share, with sour-cream dressing and a Coke for him. The Coke came first but he didn’t drink it.

  A couple in matching raincoats passed the window and took a picture of the Middle Eastern grocery store across the street. “They must be from a cruise ship,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Arild. “That’s what I would have guessed.” He seemed unusually curt, distracted.

  The waiter passed with a pizza, but it wasn’t for us.

  When the pizza finally came, it was meaty and rich and tasted like MSG. “Pretty edible, right?” Arild said. I agreed. For a while we chewed in silence, but then we started to get full. Arild wiped his mouth and exhaled. “Blair,” he said. “I hope you’re not disappointed with your stay in Malangen. I know that it’s not full of excitement every day, and there aren’t as many visitors to the Old Store as we expected. I hope you don’t regret coming. For my part, I think it’s been very pleasant to have you here, but . . .” Arild had recently read a newspaper story about an American student, a girl, who was helping some Sami with their reindeer. She’d called the experience “exclusive.” Ever since then, he’d been worried about the experience he was providing me. He had sheep, not reindeer. His life was not exclusive at all.

  “Arild,” I said. “It’s perfect. There’s nothing I would change. Really.”

  “Well,” he said, straightening a little. “Well, that’s good to hear.”

  I took a sip of water. Our eyes met but we both looked away.

  “One thing that’s nice,” Arild said, “is that other diners might notice us sitting here and think that we’re father and daughter. But if
you were Thai, for example, then they would notice us and think that I was an old man who had bought himself a wife.”

  I thought about that. “In a way,” I said, “you are my Norwegian father.” I was nervous to say it.

  “Yes,” said Arild. “I know.”

  Arild couldn’t pronounce Quince’s name, so he called him Mr. Q.

  I didn’t talk about him much, but that didn’t stop everyone at the coffee table from knowing about Mr. Q, and asking regularly when he would show up. In fact, I had found, as the summer wore on, that I thought about Quince more and more. He came into my head while I walked in the mountain village, when talk at the table grew dull, when I curled into the orange bed and tried to sleep despite the glow through my eyelids. But these weren’t thoughts so much as fantasies, daydreams, more obsessive than pleasant. I ran through them in careful detail, over and over, until I was calmed or satisfied.

  The first was a fantasy. During our trips to the Northwoods—familiar to Quince, but new to me—we frequented country bars in small towns, the kinds surrounded by snowmobiles in winter and four-wheelers in summer. I’d imagine myself entering some new bar, or maybe perched at the counter, and noticing that Dan was there, too. He’d be sitting there, nursing a beer, maybe focused on a game on the screen. I could see it clearly. Although I’d been too young to join Dan in bars while we were dating, I had the idea that he was quite at home in them. Once, early on, he told me that he occasionally got in bar fights in his hometown, usually with visitors who acted too much like they owned the place. He seemed thoughtful, relaying this fact, and the contrast was exciting: a man who punched others and confided in me.

  Which is to say that it wouldn’t surprise me, encountering Dan in a strange bar. It was his terrain, and the Northwoods was not so far from Canada. In fact, the possibility crossed my mind every time I entered such a place, and my antennae grew stronger the closer I was to the border, as the accents thickened and I found myself glancing around at the odd overheard phrase with familiar intonations.