Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube

by Blair Braverman

  In the afternoon, while the shop was quiet and I worked the counter, two men and a woman came in. City folks. The men wore plaid shirts with pearl buttons; the woman had dyed-black hair. When she walked in the door, she gasped, grabbing both men by the shoulders. “Oh my god,” she said. “Look at how old-fashioned it is. I didn’t know places like this still existed.” She brought a hand to her mouth and bit her knuckle, eyes wide. “Look, there’s even shoes.”

  “And coffee,” said one of the men. He walked to the table and ran one hand over the mugs.

  The woman paced over to the shoes and grabbed some that were purple and suede. “Bjørn, weren’t you looking for new boots?” She turned in a circle, distracted; her fingers grazed the table, the box of sugar cubes, and then she vanished with both men toward the back of the shop. Their laughter rang down the aisles. It sounded like they were taking pictures.

  Finally they came back with two bottles of iced tea, and paid in cash. “We thought this place was closed,” Bjørn said.

  “It’s been open the whole time,” I said. “It’s been here forever.”

  The woman cracked open her iced tea. “You don’t understand,” she said. “Every time we drove by, the building was empty.”

  That evening, when I called the lambs for their milk, they didn’t come. I checked the barn, the shop, behind the RV park. Finally I spotted one in the pasture, standing fat and alone. The other lamb, the one the girls called Grass, lay behind a hay bale, his eyes waxy. I dragged the dead lamb into the barn while the live one trotted after, touching his nose to his brother’s head. He would keep Anne Lill up all night with his moaning.

  In the fall, after I left, Arild sent the remaining nursing lamb to slaughter. He could not shake the memory of the last time he’d given it milk: how the lamb came to him, full of trust, right before he sent it away. But that’s how it was; male lambs were not meant to live. He distracted himself with other animals. A cat chased a young fox around the barn. Arild fed them both. The fox stuck around, and as the first snows fell and gathered it grew tame enough to eat hot dogs from his hand. One day a reindeer showed up outside the shop. It was wary, and startled easily. With patience Arild trained it to come for rabbit food.

  His e-mails to me were brief and informational: It was -30 degrees. He had purchased two rams from a Sami man in Skibotn. He had lost his car keys. Today the Sailor bought twelve beers and Rune bought only six. Maybe Rune is sick. The sheep called Blair had grown fat.

  He wrote: I heard the fox howl but it has not eaten the food I left for it.

  He wrote: There are many who wonder if you’re coming back to Malangen but not me because I know that just as surely as death is coming so too are you coming back to Malangen.

  At graduate school, I scrolled through the e-mails on my phone, feeling as if nothing was quite real. I was so far away. Again. And yet Arild missed me, and expected me back. That my absence in Mortenhals was noticed proved that I had a place there; the news buoyed me. I wrote back, echoing Arild’s minutiae: It was raining; I’d made soup for dinner; I missed him.

  In December, I moved to Quince’s farm in northern Wisconsin, in a town with thrillingly cold winters and a population of eight hundred. We kept horses and bees and chickens, living beside a national forest where wolves loped at dusk and a network of snowy trails stretched hundreds of miles. I started training dogs for a local musher, and my letters to Arild grew longer, more animated, as I recounted long runs and tough tangles. Who was a city-pia now? I teased him. Meanwhile, Arild’s letters grew shorter. Finally he sent one so morose that I could not ignore it:

  Blair has gone to the USA.

  The fox was shot.

  The reindeer went to the mountain village last week.

  I called eight times before Arild picked up the phone. He did not enjoy phone conversations; we spoke for only three minutes. The news was swift. He had lost the court case against his sister, although he planned to appeal; for now, he had to vacate the apartment above the shop. Further, his firstborn son, Henning, was moving to Mortenhals to take over the business. Arild would be retiring early.

  I arrived in April for a five-week stay. Arild greeted me formally at the airport: “Thank you for your last visit. It was very pleasant.” He wore, with his usual faded clothing, stylish blue-soled oxfords acquired during a recent shopkeepers’ convention in Oslo. I threw my arms around him.

  By then, most of the changes were already in place. Henning, his wife, and their two young children had moved into the apartment temporarily, though they would be required to vacate by summer, and planned to move into the Old House at that time. In the meantime, Arild was staying in the Old House with Anne Lill, a situation that suited neither of them. They adapted to the proximity by using the kitchen in shifts and commanding adjacent living rooms with separate television sets. In the kitchen, Arild’s half-thawed meat competed for space with Anne Lill’s low-carb breads.

  Given the cramped housing, I considered staying in the Old Store, then changed my mind. It wasn’t that I believed in ghosts. There were just a lot of stories there, too many to sleep with. That watery cold. That purple dress swinging with no breeze. So instead I moved into a spare bedroom in the Old House, with a window that overlooked the fjord, a soft mattress that nearly swallowed me. Clean and white. The room was almost too comfortable; it made me uneasy, felt rare and undeserved. I did not come to Norway for comfort.

  This shuffling of living spaces gave Anne Lill an excuse to leave Arild, and Mortenhals, while saving face. As soon as the snow melted, she planned to move back to her family’s house in the mountain village. It was bittersweet to leave the shop that she had spent the last decade tending, that she had poured her money and time and sanity into keeping afloat. But shopkeeping required diplomacy, and Anne Lill—unlike some mail-order bride, purchased for her lack of opinions—was happiest when she could speak her mind. She consoled herself with thoughts of the people she would no longer have to be nice to.

  First on the list was Henning himself. Though technically the shop still belonged to Arild, and would for many months, Henning had wasted no time in demanding changes. Over the past year, Arild had stocked three additional wares: smoked whale, seal jerky, and an assortment of birthday postcards acquired below cost from a dead shop. Henning’s tastes were varied, and pricier. He bought crates of pine nuts and fresh asparagus, French meringues and espresso, seamless boy-short panties, sweet-and-sour sauce, and Corona beer. New products crowded the aisles and piled up in the hallway and expired in storage before ever making it onto the shelves. Shipments arrived almost daily; money went out four times faster than it came in. Within weeks, Henning had drained the shop’s savings. But the bills kept coming.

  I passed the doorway of Anne Lill’s living room one evening soon after I arrived. “Blair,” she said, muting American Idol. “Do you think it’ll go all right with the shop?”

  I had seen the shipments but chosen not to think about them. “What do you mean?” I couldn’t help looking over my shoulder, though Arild wasn’t home. This didn’t feel like a conversation I should be having. The shop was supposed to be a solid thing.

  But Anne Lill only shrugged and turned up the volume.

  Later that week, she cemented her departure by paying for her groceries with a credit card. Arild was stunned. The shop was also hers. Regardless of where she lived, he intended that Anne Lill should have free groceries for the rest of her life, and her own shop key in case she was ever in need. But Anne Lill planned to cut the cords fully. If it was just Arild, that was one thing, but she could hardly bear to be in the same room as Henning, whom she regarded as destroying all that they had built. Soon she would abandon Johannes Kristoffersen’s Descendants completely. Of course, she would not get her groceries at the Sand Shop, so she drove all the way to Mestervik for food. For the moment it was awkward to bring her grocery bags into the Old House, but she stood firm, and anyway, it wouldn’t be for long. She could not forgive Henning. She coul
d hardly forgive Arild for not speaking up.

  For his part, Arild believed the best of his son, and denied that he had ever doubted him in years past. He told himself that Henning’s extravagant purchases were part of an ambitious strategy to persuade summer folks to do more of their shopping on the peninsula. Summer folks had expensive tastes; they preferred to bring fancy groceries from the city rather than shop for the basics at their local near-store. Maybe offering espresso and Brie in Mortenhals would draw to the shop a whole new class of customers. Of course, the theory wouldn’t be tested for many weeks, but he held fast to its comfort. As evidence he took Henning’s wife, Tuva, a sweet, overwhelmed woman who had, for the past several years, been ambiguously unwell. Tuva despaired of her new life in the country and drove biweekly to the city for sushi and “coffee from a machine.” If Tuva liked the new wares, it boded well for her absentee peers.

  Besides. It was the job of the older generation to know when to step aside.

  Luckily, springtime was full of diversions. In addition to being available at the shop whenever Henning wanted him to take over—usually for several hours a day, on short notice—Arild had a flock that needed shearing, and expected upward of a hundred lambs to be born in the next four weeks. The other farmers had their sheep sheared in winter, when traveling Icelandic shearers passed through the region, but Arild was proud to shear his sheep himself. Sure, it took him thirty minutes per sheep to the professionals’ three, but that wasn’t so bad given that he worked alone. He saved money. More important, the sheep knew him. To be sheared, roughly and rapidly, by a team of strangers? That, he thought, must be torture.

  It was still too cold to open the Old Store, so on this visit I had no guise of a role. I was in Malangen because I should be, because I could not imagine a future in which I did not come back and continue to come back. I wasn’t here as the museum director. I was here as myself. And for the month, myself was assistant shepherd.

  The shearing was fraught with problems. The clippers were rusty, the first lambs came early, and the sheep were stupid. We sheared the oldest and calmest first, wrestling them into a neck vise in the center of the barn. Arild peeled back the mass of wool inch by inch as the animals blinked and flicked their tongues, affronted. I gathered clippings off the ground, plucking out berries of shit, and stuffed the wool into feed sacks by assorted quality. When Arild got tired, we took turns. The handheld shearing machine was heavy and vibrated hard enough to numb my arm. He showed me how to dip into the fleece along the animal’s neck and press my hand into the hot greasy pocket between skin and wool, pushing forward blind. I clipped cautiously, afraid of cutting the sheep, and as a result left behind a sloppy underlayer of fleece. Then, when Arild wasn’t looking, I gave a few of the sheep Mohawks. By then we’d moved on to younger ewes, who kicked and struggled against their restraints. “Don’t worry,” Arild reassured me. “They’re just ticklish. And afraid for their lives.”

  With ten sheep down, we went to the shop for a snack, collapsing at the coffee table. The Sailor crept up behind me and pinched my waist, chortling. He the Rich One was still in Spain for the winter, but Nils was there, dirty and flushed, and he looked on in amusement. I got him an ice-cream sandwich as a peace offering for our failed marriage, which he accepted graciously. Nils was in a good mood. He was keeping the news quiet, but he had a second date that night with a girl from the city.

  As Arild and I finished our ice creams, Henning mopped his way across the shop. He stopped beside us and wiped his hands on his shirt, which featured a picture of an orca whale and the words “BARBECUE WILLY.” Henning’s homecoming had not been triumphant—I heard he’d been fired from his job driving trucks down south—but he was determined to do things right this time around. He glanced over me—despite efforts I’d made to get to know him, Henning seemed to find me largely invisible—and turned to regard his disheveled father.

  “I don’t know why you shear yourself,” Henning said. “Everyone else gets sheared when the men come through, and it’s so much faster.”

  “The men come through in January,” said Arild. “Then the sheep have to spend the winter in the barn.”

  Henning frowned. “But it’s such a waste. It takes ten days. Look, I don’t care about the money for hiring someone. It’s the time. In two days you could clean the barn and have a clean, sparkling barn. But instead you spend ten days shearing.”

  Henning’s four-year-old son, Joar, ran down the aisle. He wore gardening gloves and a bike helmet loose on the back of his head. He shoved me with both hands. “You wear diapers!” he yelled, before sprinting away.

  “Ten days,” Henning said. “That’s so much time. Think of all you could do. Like, if you mopped the shop, it would only take twenty minutes. Twenty minutes a day.”

  “It’s better for the sheep,” said Arild, but his voice lacked conviction. He caught my eye, and together we stood to leave.

  The weather that day was strange, thick flurries alternating with bright sunshine. The nearest mountains glowed, but a gray mass was sliding up the north end of the fjord. I zipped my coveralls high on the neck and followed Arild to the barn, where the sheep had enjoyed our absence.

  That week, on the twenty-eighth of April, Arild turned sixty-five. In the middle of the night, before his birthday, I tiptoed downstairs and decorated the living room with crepe paper and balloons that I’d brought from the States. I wanted to make something cheerful for him. We ate a breakfast of bread and boiled eggs amid the balloons while snow fell outside. The windows were half-covered with the dark shades that Anne Lill favored. “When she leaves,” Arild said, “those will be the first thing I get rid of.”

  Though he tried to be positive about the separation, anger sometimes crept into his voice when he spoke of Anne Lill. Arild was no great romantic, but he liked the idea of a functional partnership, and with Anne Lill’s move to the mountain village and retirement from the shop went his last real hope of such a companion. The couple would not divorce. There was no point; neither intended to marry again. And although both husband and wife remained fond of each other, neither would admit it to the other’s face.

  Anne Lill took full responsibility for the separation. Her treatment of the matter was characteristically brisk: she had simply lived too many years of her life alone to be happy living with someone else. Now, without adequate space for the couple to live separately, they could not be together at all. Sometimes she wondered what was wrong with her, that she was so incapable of sharing domestic life; but the fact seemed such a fundamental element of her character that questioning it did little good. “Arild’s done nothing wrong,” she told me one day in the kitchen, as she re-cleaned the stovetop that she had already cleaned the day before. “He’s kind. He doesn’t beat me.” She hoped he would stay a friend, and for his birthday gave him a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream, his favorite, which he could sip from a teacup as he watched the evening news. But that night, when Anne Lill joined Arild for his birthday dinner, a meal of meatballs and béarnaise sauce that represented a rare break from her careful diet, a bitter weight settled over the table and snuffed out all polite attempts at conversation; and, by the end, the couple’s only words were to ask the American in the middle to pass the potatoes from one end of the table to the other. “I hope you’ll take these things down soon,” Anne Lill remarked, upon clearing her plate, about the streamers and balloons that adorned the dining room. Arild responded, with sudden conviction, that in fact he intended to leave them up indefinitely.

  The decorations remained in place eight days later, when I turned twenty-six. As a surprise, Arild enlisted Jeanette to bake me a cake of Ritz crackers—newly popular in Norway—which she mixed with meringue and topped with whipped cream and berries. She delivered the cake to the coffee table midmorning, covered with lit candles, to the delight of the regular crowd. “Make a wish,” Jeanette announced. Her oldest son, blond and shy, sat cross-legged on her lap, and when he looked up at her she poked him on the
nose: “No, you felt ball. Not you.” Her own dearest wish fulfilled, Jeanette’s contentment seemed to spread around her. The court had returned her children. The judge, she claimed, had been so horrified by the dissolution of a family that should clearly have remained intact that her case was now used as a cautionary tale in the training of child services workers, a reminder of how impressions could go wrong.

  I had a lot of wishes, too many to pick a favorite on the spot, so I settled on the one closest to the surface: let the shop be okay. When I took a deep breath, and blew out the candles, two remained lit.

  “You have two boyfriends!” crowed Jeanette, in accordance with tradition, and when the table erupted—“Only two? Let’s see who they are!”—I decided it was high time to cut the cake. The crackers had fused into a chewy, salty crust. Everyone ate seconds except the Sailor, who preferred coffee, and Rune, whom nobody had seen—or missed—in weeks. Rumor had it he was hanging around Martha at the Sand Shop.

  After a while the crowd dispersed, and I slipped away to the back room of the shop, where I found an e-mail from Quince.

  Happy birthday to my favorite person in the world. I wish I could be with you.

  I stared at the screen for a long time, thinking about how to respond. We had talked, for a while, about Quince joining me on this trip. Bringing him to Norway seemed like one of the most intimate things I could offer, more private than any secret, more vulnerable than my body. It meant everything. I wanted him to stand in the landscape that felt better to me than anywhere else, and for the people I cared for to meet each other. But money was tight, and Quince, who worked freelance, was offered a job in May that he couldn’t afford to skip. Now, looking at his e-mail, I felt a flash of anger. So he wished he could be with me. Well, what if I didn’t need him?