“I get it first,” Fleur yelled, and shoved Richard hard.
He shoved her back and said, “No way, French flower,” and laughed in her face.
But Fleur managed to slip past and under him, and sat on the toilet, declaring, “Squatters’ rights!” Then it was her turn to laugh.
I was afraid Richard would unzip his pants, but he left, closing the door, which Fleur locked from her side. Immediately he began pounding the door. “Fleur, are you finished yet?” he called to her. “Fleur, are you finished? Hurry up, will you?”
Well, if that happened to me, I wouldn’t be able to pee for the rest of my life, but Fleur went right ahead even though the door to my room was still open. There weren’t any pauses. When she was done, she called to me, “Kate, do you want to go before Rich breaks the door down?”
I said I had to get some laundry from the basement and ran down there where there is a solitary toilet in the corner behind the water heater. It’s an old thing with brown mineral stains in it, and I’ve avoided it all my life, but right then I was feeling mighty grateful for this odd fixture. I took a clean flannel nightgown back with me. Were they in love, Fleur and Richard? Was this pushing and shoving each other just sexual tension? I didn’t know, but I wanted some.
When I returned, Fleur had changed into a long T-shirt and had picked a book of recent American short stories from my bookcase. She passed my desk and stopped. “What’s this?” she asked, examining the papers on my desk. “ ‘Preliminary thoughts on Desdemona,’ ” she read. It sounded strange to have her reading my stuff aloud.
“I have to write a research paper on Othello, and I was thinking of doing it on Desdemona,” I said. I pulled my arms through the sleeves of my flannel nightgown.
Her index finger followed through a list I’d made. “I wrote about Desdemona for an advanced Shakespeare class,” she muttered.
She was probably an expert. She read more of my notes aloud: “ ‘I hate it that Othello kills her when she’s so innocent.’ ”
I began to wish I hadn’t left the notes on my desk. “Lots of kids are writing about her innocence,” I said. “I’d like to do something different, but I don’t know quite what. I want a different approach.” I pulled back the covers on the bed. “I’ll think of something eventually. I always do.” I sat on the bed.
Fleur turned, leaning back on the desk. “Her innocence has nothing to do with anything,” she said. Her arms were folded loosely on her chest, teacher style. “I mean,” she continued, “what if she hadn’t been innocent? What if she’d slept with Cassio and Brabantio and the entire Italian navy?”
“Yeah?” My mouth probably hung open. I wasn’t sure where she was heading.
“Would it be okay for him to kill her if she’d been sleeping around? What if he’d been right about her?”
“But he wasn’t right—”
“But what if he were? What if she were guilty? Is it okay for a husband to kill his wife for adultery?”
“I’ve never thought about it,” I said. “But no, it wouldn’t be right, and yet we’re all reading the play as if it’s perfectly all right to—”
“Yes, we are!” She bestowed a full, benevolent smile on me. “Welcome to feminist criticism,” she said.
Her smile melted me down like ice statues in a spring thaw. I couldn’t and wouldn’t compete with her in a million years.
“If you want, I’ll write the names of some articles down for you in the morning. Yours will be the only paper of its kind.”
“I’d like that.” I was lying on my bed, propped up on one elbow, my back to the window.
Fleur crouched over me to look out. “It’s still snowing.” She said it kind of breathlessly, as if snow were magic.
I turned to look. “We’re going to have a perfect Christmas,” I said. “It’s supposed to snow for the next two days.”
“A perfect Christmas.” She seemed truly mesmerized by the falling snow. “That’s why I came,” she said softly.
“For the snow?”
“Yes.” Then she seemed to change her mind. “Well, more than that, actually.”
I wondered if she was expecting to get engaged at Christmas. I could not avoid the real possibility. I would have to let the idea of Richard and me go. It was an idea I realized I had built and nurtured in the last four years during his absence. It seemed entirely foolish at the moment.
Fleur sat lightly on the edge of my bed. “I’ve heard Bjorn and Rich talk about their families, and they, you know—” She seemed embarrassed, looking away from me and back to the snow. “Well, their families sounded so traditional and so—” She reached for the right word. “So wholesome.” She glanced at me. “I wanted to spend Christmas around people like that.” Blushing made her even more beautiful, if that was possible.
“Your family are perverts?” I couldn’t help asking.
She snorted. “No!” The blush instantly vanished.
“But they’re not the Brady Bunch either.”
She shook her head. “They’re not like your parents. Bjorn wasn’t even exaggerating about them.” She looked down at her hands.
I moved my legs to make more room for her on the bed. “So you like The Nels and Becca Bjorkman Show?”
She laughed. “And their perfect children, Bjorn and Kate Bjorkman.”
“Bjorn’s not perfect!” I grinned at the implication.
Fleur smiled and sat down on her own bed. “I’m going to read for a few minutes.” She held up the book. “Unless the light bothers you?”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “Really.”
She snapped on the reading lamp by her bed and turned off the overhead light.
I took off my glasses to wipe my eyes. The room became an amorphous haze.
“Why don’t you wear contacts?” Fleur asked from the corner. “You look really nice without glasses.” She stopped. “I mean—”
“It’s okay—I know,” I said. “My eyes haven’t been able to tolerate contact lenses so far, or I would have changed over years ago.”
“How well can you see without them?” she wanted to know.
I laughed. “I know you’re the shadow in the corner, but if I didn’t know this room so well, I wouldn’t even recognize you as a human form.”
“That bad, huh?”
“That bad.”
“Mmm” was all she said.
“I’m used to it,” I said. I put them back on.
Romance readers of America would probably want me to assess my feelings now. I’m well into the third chapter, after all, probably near the end, a good place to assess. The phrase book offers myriad feelings to choose from:
—the pain in her breast became a sick and fiery gnawing?
No, that doesn’t sound like me at all. Although it was sad to know that I had built a fantasy around Richard—I thought I would grow up and he would see the light and marry me—if he got engaged to Fleur, I would have to give it up. And maybe even sadder was the realization that even if he didn’t get engaged to Fleur, it might be time to give the fantasy up anyway.
—her breasts rose and fell under her labored breathing?
I was pretty tired, if you want to know the truth. My breathing wasn’t at all labored.
—mixed feelings surged through her breast?
What is all this obsessive breast imagery? I hardly think of breasts ever, and here they are just bursting out at me from every page of the phrase book. Breasts everywhere: heaving and gnawing and lifting and pointing and panting. It’s disgusting!
Across the street, Midgely’s house was dark, except for one second-story window. Midgely was the one who had made them turn off the tennis machine years before, and had put his arm around my shoulder, asking, “You okay?”
And I had been, of course, especially when Richard had taken my racket and removed the squashed mouse from the strings and thrown it into a bush. “You’re better off playing with balls,” he’d said and had smiled at me in a way that made me feel like a
n equal and not just Bjorn’s little sister.
Of course, then Bjorn had yelled, “Might say the same for you, Bradshaw,” and there was a lot of snorting and chasing around, and the moment was gone. Still, I continually go back to that smile of Richard’s after he pulled the mouse out of my racket.
And I go back to Midgely, who taught all of us to play tennis and insisted that we were all champions.
It hit me that the thousands of lights that usually decorated the trees surrounding Midgely’s house at Christmas were missing this year. The house was the darkest on the block.
I removed my glasses, lay back, and sighed for Christmas past and Christmas present. I wanted Midgely happy at Christmastime.
Finally, I thought about Fleur preferring to spend Christmas with strangers.
None of it made any sense.
Revision Notes
I have just read what I’ve written so far, and already I can think of a thousand revisions I might want to make. I’ve left important things out. Should I go back now? What if I think of other revisions as I’m putting in the revisions? I’ll never make it past chapter three! I think I’ll just note my ideas down on this old stationery of Mother’s in a different font and integrate them into the text later, as writers say. Here’s a list of possible revisions:
1. Chapter one. My name. Even though my name (Kate) ends in an unvoiced dental plosive, that doesn’t mean it’s an unromantic name, as I imply in the prologue. Kate is, in fact, quite a romantic name. It is the female protagonist’s name in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, which is a romantic comedy. And there’s a musical comedy called Kiss Me Kate. And Katharine Hepburn goes by Kate and she’s a romantic leading lady. And so on. And so on.
So if I’m pushing myself as an unlikely romantic heroine (too tall, too owly), then perhaps for the sake of artistic continuity (writers say stuff like that) I should change my name in the novel to something a little more awkward—Inge? Ingeborg? Isak? Ingrid? I’m thinking Scandinavian here, since our family is Scandinavian. Gee, I really like the name Kate and find it hard to think of myself as Ingeborg even for the sake of art. I’ll have to think about this.
2. Form. In the prologue, I say I want this romance novel to end with “They lived happily ever after.” Get real, Bjorkman! That phrase comes from fairy tales, not romance novels. I’ll have to find a replacement from the phrase book.
3. Ashley Cooper. Twice I call her my best friend. Is that really accurate? Isn’t Shannon my best friend? We have the same interest in language and poetry. She wants to edit this book for me when I’m done. Am I trying to mislead the reader? On the other hand, if I tell the reader everything in the first few chapters, then why write a book at all?
4. Bjorn and Trish. Nobody’s going to believe that they got married between his junior and senior year in college. Why didn’t they just—you know—do it and wait on the marriage stuff? How am I going to explain Bjorn when he makes up his mind? Stubborn. Even Trish was reluctant, but my big brother is persuasive. My parents tried to talk them out of it. They wanted Bjorn to finish college first.
Poop. Is it my business to explain Bjorn? He does what he wants. I guess I show that in the way he insists on buying a huge tree when we have a perfectly elegant tree in place on top of the grand piano. I could make him older for this novel, but then Richard, as his best friend, would be seven or eight years older than me. Gross. Bjorn got married because he wanted to and that’s the truth. I don’t know how to change it.
Did I mention that Trish is two years older than Bjorn and works as a photographer’s assistant in San Francisco? She wants to be a photographer like Annie Leibovitz someday. Did I say that she brought her Hasselblad with her? Did I say I like her? I do like her. I musn’t forget to show that in the book.
5. My height. Maybe some people will find it too grotesque to have such a tall romantic heroine, but, hell, it’s my story! Besides, there are worse things than being tall: scales, warts, baldness, an underbite, missing limbs, chronic nosebleeds, halitosis, loss of bladder control—they’re all worse. I come from a long line of tall women. My mother’s as tall as I am. So is my grandmother, and none of us has ever been ashamed of it. At least that’s what my mother told me in sixth grade when I felt like a textbook case of anterior pituitary overactivity and thought the top of my skull would burst through the ceiling at any second (and I was only five feet, eight inches tall then). Mother made me stand tall, said it was okay to be tall. I said I felt like an Amazon. She said wasn’t it a nice feeling. Slowly, I began to believe it was a nice feeling.
6. My mother. She sounds like a housewife when she actually runs a full-time interior design business. The trouble is she takes two weeks off at Christmas and New Year’s, so in this book she’s home all the time. Is this even important enough to include in the novel? Artistically speaking, who cares if she’s a housewife or a designer? She does, I’m afraid. It has to do with her as a character. I’d better work it in.
7. Chapter two. It’s in deep doo-doo. I’m supposed to keep track of everyone in any given scene, and I didn’t do a very good job with my father in chapter two. He never said a word through that whole scene in the dining room. But what am I supposed to do? He really didn’t speak another word the rest of the evening. Art copies life, after all. My father is an observer, not a participator. I think he married my mother, who is quite a bit younger than he is, to do the participating for both of them. Still, I should have acknowledged him by showing his reactions to the conversation. I could have had him tilt his head to one side, the way Ruffy, our beagle (now dead as Rin Tin Tin), used to do. Dad reminds me of Ruffy a little that way. Or I could have had him stroking my mother’s arm as he sometimes does, but he was sitting across the room from her in the occasional chair by the fireplace with his feet resting on the footstool. He was, if I’m being truthful, sleeping through the whole retelling about me and the mice. In fact, my dad can hardly sit down socially with a group of people without falling asleep. My mother tells everyone he suffers from narcolepsy, but I think this is just to protect him from others. What else can she say? You people bore my husband, so he’s zonked off? No, I don’t think so. But I’ve never seen him sleeping in his study in front of the computer, with Bach or Telemann playing on the CD. He did sleep through most of chapter two, though. I guess I’ll have to fix it.
8. Violence against baby mice. That bit about my hitting the baby mice with a tennis racket sounds pretty cruel when it’s all printed out on paper. Somehow I have to let the reader know that I began hitting them to show Richard and Bjorn that I wasn’t afraid. That’s no excuse, of course. I did hit baby mice with my tennis racket. Whacked them senseless. If I write that, will the animal protection people come after me? Could I go to jail? I did it, but I don’t have to tell the truth necessarily. I mean, I could make up some other story—a less violent story. I’ll have to think about it.
9. Chapter three. Bedroom scene with Fleur. It’s undeveloped still. We talked about other things besides Desdemona and my eyesight. I mean, I did ask her about how she met Richard and Bjorn (in a history of civilization class—first year).
Then too, I asked her if she missed living at home. (“Home?” She said it as if it were a foreign word or something. I don’t think she even answered me.)
And sure, I asked her about Stanford and stuff about California, but really, I didn’t hear any of the answers, because I was thinking all the time about the THINGS I COULDN’T ASK FLEUR ST. GERMAINE:
a. Are you and Richard lovers? (Geez, I sound like I’m writing bad subtitles for an Italian movie.)
b. Are you going to be lovers much longer? (duh!)
c. What is the chance that you might find someone else and that Richard will become my lover? (Sounds like a virgin’s fantasy.)
d. If there is a slim chance to no chance at all of your changing lovers, is it possible that you might have some horrific congenital disease that could cause your early (and yes, very sad) demise?
e. D
oes psychosis leading to suicide run in your family?
f. Why is it so hard to hate you?
I’m completely embarrassed by these questions. Is it possible to make writing worse with revision?
10. Should I include in chapter three that I pretended to be asleep to see if Fleur would sneak into Richard’s room? The reason I didn’t put it in is because whenever I pretend to be asleep, I do fall asleep. So I really didn’t learn anything.
11. Richard. Probably I should include more memories of him. Like that time just before he moved when he dropped his chewed gum into the waste can under the kitchen sink, and when he left, I retrieved it and chewed it another hour. It was like French kissing with him, I thought.
No, I don’t think I’ll put that in.
Then there was that time up at Gooseberry Falls near Lake Superior when Richard and Bjorn climbed under the falls and Richard slipped and sliced his chin open. Blood gushed everywhere. He took off his T-shirt and held it wadded tightly against the wound as we hiked back to the road. Bjorn drove him to the hospital in Duluth. When the emergency room doctor began stitching on his chin, Richard laid the bloody shirt down on the table.
“You want me to throw this out?” I asked him, picking up the shirt.
“Yeah, might as well. Thanks, Boo.”
I nodded and left. I hid the shirt under the backseat of the car. I still have it hidden in the bottom of my wicker chest at the foot of my bed.
Geez, I can’t write this kind of stuff. I’ve never told anyone about this. It makes me sound obsessive, like Ashley. I don’t know why I kept the shirt. It’s not as if I ever look at it or anything. I never do, as a matter of fact. But I’ve never thrown it out either.
There’s that time when Richard and Bjorn were making out with these two girls in our living room after the senior prom. Richard was with Madelaine Dusendorf—that was her real name; I’m not changing the names of the guilty. I had gone down in what seemed like the middle of the night and got more than I bargained for. Richard and Madelaine were all enmeshed. Somebody was making wet, sucking noises. Really gross. His tie was nowhere to be seen.
The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman Page 3