The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman

by Louise Plummer

  As a novelist, I have many choices when it comes to zapping Fleur. I could have her struck by a minibus while crossing Nicollet Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. The doughnuts, iced with chocolate frosting, she had just bought would be strewn in the street, the angora scarf I gave her still wrapped around her lovely throat. A scene full of pathos and anguish. You’d probably cry.

  Or I could have her commit suicide because of the humiliation of having her mother marry for the sixth time. I, the protagonist, would find her hanging from the light fixture in my bedroom, her face gray and distorted. I’d cut her down and give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for half an hour to no avail.

  Not very plausible for a survivor like Fleur or for a happy genre like the romance novel either. I’ll tell you what really happened. She left to see her mother marry, but not before she took me to the ophthalmologist’s and helped me with my Desdemona paper.

  Fleur. Flower. Not a fragile one either. A sunflower, maybe, or a zinnia. A flower full of piss and vinegar. “Fleur isn’t my real name—it’s Diane. I got Fleur when I was eight and in the habit of stealing flowers in the neighborhood for drying. You know, you hang them upside down and they dry with the petals still open. I had them in baskets and vases and jelly jars—dried flowers all over the house. That’s when my father named me Fleur, and it stuck.”

  It’s the day after Christmas when she’s telling me this. We were seated in the Cherokee, Fleur driving, me in the passenger seat, my pince-nez taped with masking tape to my nose and forehead. My whole head shouted “nerd alert!” But I was tired of holding them. “Fleur fits you better than Diane,” I said. “Thievery fits you too, somehow.”

  She smiled. “Yes, a flower thief, but of course I stole only to preserve them.”

  “Robin Hood of the flowers,” I said. “Sounds very noble. Turn right at the light.” We were headed for the ophthalmologist’s office across from Rosedale. “Was that in Newport Beach? Your life of crime?” I was aware again of the way she sometimes dropped her postvocalic “r’s.”

  “No, we moved there when I was thirteen; before that we were in—”

  “Let me guess!” I shouted it. “Oh, sorry, we were supposed to turn left back there.”

  “I’ll turn at the corner,” she said. “Go ahead, guess. Your dad guessed this morning. Got it right on the first try.”

  We followed a snowplow into the parking lot. “He’s better than I am,” I said, “but it’s East Coast and it’s south of Baltimore. Right?”

  She nodded. She was wearing the angora muffler I had given her loosely about her head, and she looked gorgeous. “Very good,” she said.

  “But it’s not as far south as Savannah—don’t tell me!”

  She laughed. “This close enough?” She pulled into a parking place.

  “As a matter of fact,” I continued, “I don’t think it’s south of North Carolina—”

  “Your dad didn’t need this much speculating.” She turned off the ignition. “Take your best shot, Kate.”

  “Raleigh, North Carolina, or maybe Winston-Salem—no, I’ll go with Raleigh.” I pushed the pince-nez and tape against the bridge of my nose and stared at her face. “Yes?”

  “Yes. It’s Raleigh.” She laughed when I made two victorious fists. “Your dad said it was the diphthongs that gave me away.”

  “Don’t tell him how long it took me,” I said, getting out of the Cherokee.

  Fleur sat in the corner of Dr. Carver’s examining room while I had my eyes checked. “You know,” Dr. Carver said, rolling his stool back, “you might try the contact lenses again—see if you’ve outgrown that intolerance. Most kids do at some point, and contacts are a lot better now than they were even a few years ago. How long has it been since you tried contacts?”

  “Three years,” I said.

  “It’d be nice not to have to wear these Coke bottles anymore, wouldn’t it?” He tapped my knee with his ballpoint pen.

  I retaped the pince-nez to my face. “I don’t know—I think I look pretty glamorous this way, don’t you?” I twisted my head to an odd angle and looked at him cross-eyed.

  But inside, the thought of contact lenses made my stomach churn. The timing seemed all wrong. Richard, my hero, fell in love with me wearing the glasses. It seemed so romance-novel-like to appear suddenly without them, transformed from the geeky-looking schoolgirl into the standard romantic heroine, except taller. It should have been exactly the opposite, but taking the glasses off felt more phony than keeping them. It felt like putting on lip gloss. Ashley would approve fully. Maybe that’s why it all seemed contrived. I didn’t, I realized, even want to be the standard romantic heroine. I didn’t want to be transformed, and especially not for New Year’s Eve. It all seemed too calculated, even though I hadn’t planned it that way.

  “You want to try them? They could be ready in a couple of days.” Dr. Carver nudged me out of my reflection.

  I looked at Fleur, who slouched in her chair, her fingers laced lightly together across her abdomen. Her face showed no opinion.

  “I don’t think I want to—not now. I mean—that is—” Geez, I sounded so stupid. What could I say? I don’t want to be transformed into a raving beauty? As if I even had a chance of that. “I—I’m just not ready.” I was stammering. “Maybe in a couple of months.”

  Was that why Fleur smiled ever so slightly, because I was stammering? Damn her.

  Back in the Cherokee, driving to the university library, she said, “The idea of wearing contact lenses embarrassed you. You blushed.”

  There’s no point in arguing with Fleur when she’s already guessed the truth. No point at all. “It felt too much like a transformation,” I said. “I’m having this romance with Richard at Christmastime and then suddenly I get a chance to look like a real human girl—”

  “A rather pretty girl, at that” Fleur watched the road.

  “It felt like tempting fate—too much of a good thing. Too romantic for words.” I cupped my hands on either side of my glasses as if to keep them lodged against my face for safety.

  “Your whole life has been a romance,” Fleur said, gripping the steering wheel more tightly. “Your parents, your house, your neighborhood, your schooling, your brother, your friends, your tennis lessons, your German lessons, your linguistics lessons, your traditional Swedish Christmas with all the trimmings—everything, even with the cataracts, even if you never loved Rich or he you, your whole life would still be a romance. I feel like the Little Match Girl looking in.”

  That’s what Fleur St. Germaine, the most beautiful, the smartest, the most independent, the everything-I-wanted-to-be girl said to me the day after Christmas. She had given me the briefest of looks. Fleur as the Little Match Girl? I didn’t know what to say.

  At the university library, reading about Desdemona again depressed Fleur. She dropped her forehead onto the wooden table with a mild thud. Her blond hair hid her face. “Totally depressing,” she said.

  I thought she meant the ending of the play, when Othello strangles Desdemona.

  “She reminds me of my mother.” Her voice was garbled behind her hair.

  I laid my head down on my arms next to her. “Who?”

  “Desdemona. Desdemona reminds me of my mother.” She turned her head so that her cheek lay flat on the table. “My mother sees her future husbands’ ‘visage’ in her mind. She consecrates herself to them. All of them. And in the end all of her husbands strangle her—metaphorically speaking, of course.”

  “Even your dad?”

  “Twice.”

  “Twice?”

  “He told her the first time they were married that monogamy was not for him and then went on to prove it to her many times.”

  He sounded much like Ashley’s father.

  “He was also husband number three, because although he had an aversion to monogamy, he was charming and handsome and all of those romantic qualities that my mother falls for and that match her hats.” Fleur blew her hair from her eyes. “He l
ooked like that old movie star Tyrone Power. Do you know him?”

  “A guy with a mustache?”

  “No.” She snickered. “My mother doesn’t like facial hair.”

  “What about the second husband?” I said, whispering because a girl with a huge stack of books had sat down at the end of our table.

  “A Vietnam veteran. Purple Heart. Big and brave. Just like Othello. Nice too, except when he was drunk. He was drunk a lot.”

  “And number four?”

  “An old guy, Foster. Don’t know much about him.” She lifted her head slightly and smirked. “He died of a heart attack on their wedding night.”

  “You’re making it up.”

  “I wish.”

  “Number five?”

  “Had ties to the Mafia.”

  “You are making these up!”

  “No.”

  “Number six?”

  “Haven’t met him. He’s her plastic surgeon. She says she’s found happiness at last.”

  “Maybe it’s true this time.” I didn’t really believe it.

  “About as true as those TV miniseries that my mother seems to be copying. Life copying TV.” She sat up. “I’m whining,” she said.

  “It’s refreshing to find you have a weakness,” I said. “Come on. I’ve got all the articles I need. Let’s go home.”

  Driving through our neighborhood, looking at the bare branches of elms arching over the streets, heavy with snow, at the windows lit with yellow lights, at the streetlamps glowing softly, I began to see that my life was a romance. And as we pulled into the garage, I realized that I had always expected my parents to be there, together, pleasant, humorous, understanding, and they were.

  Later that evening at the airport, when Fleur’s flight had been called for boarding, she said to us, “Rich told me there was a splendid neighborhood in St. Paul where George Bailey and his family still lived. I thought he was lying his head off, but I believe him now.” She looked fondly at my parents.

  “I do have a striking resemblance to the young Jimmy Stewart,” Dad said.

  Bjorn snorted. “In your dreams, old man.”

  “Pleeze,” my mother said. “I’m no Mary Bailey. I always thought Donna Reed was smarmy—all that patient smiling.”

  “But you’re not Joan Collins either.” Fleur laughed. “I’ll try the recipes.”

  “Call me,” Mother said and hugged her hard. “You have the number.”

  “Memorized,” Fleur said. “Good-bye, handsome.” She pecked my dad’s lips and hugged him.

  “Come back.” He kissed her hand. “Chocolates are waiting in the kitchen cupboard.”

  She hugged Bjorn and Trish. “Next year, let her pick the tree!” she teased Bjorn. Then she hugged Richard. “I owe you,” she said. “Thanks for letting me come.”

  He nodded.

  I pulled a red recorder out of my parka. “Here,” I said, handing it to Fleur. “Something to remember us by.”

  “My own recorder!” She grasped it tightly.

  “Next time we’ll play a trio,” I said. “Or you can find someone else to play with.” “Maybe someday.”

  We held on to each other. “You’re not your mother, Fleur. You’re not Desdemona either.”

  Still holding on to me, she moved her head away from my face and looked at me, grinning. “And you’ll still be the Kate Bjorkman we all know and love even without those glasses.” We laughed at each other then, like girls, hysterical, fluttery, romantic, pleased with our closing speeches.

  “Oh, here,” I said, digging into my pockets. “Some Polaroids to remember us by.”

  “I’ll have more pictures when I can get back to my darkroom,” Trish said.

  The Polaroids put me on the verge of crying, but the final boarding call saved me from myself. Fleur, with carry-on luggage, recipes, her own recorder, and photographs, blew kisses and walked down the jetway. Exit Fleur St. Germaine.

  There’s this old idea that fiction writing should imitate real life, that the situations and the characters must seem plausible to the reader. The trouble I’m having with beginning this chapter, Chapter Twelve, has to do with that idea. See, the problem is that sometimes life is a whole lot more absurd than any imagination can conjure up. Like last year Maren Jacobson wrote this short story for Midgely’s unit on creative writing. In this story, a woman drops fifty floors at high speed in a broken elevator. Not only does the woman survive, but she steps out of the elevator and asks, “Have I passed the mezzanine?”

  When Maren read this aloud to the class, we all just about passed out. “Give us a break,” we said.

  Midgely held up his hand—“Wait”—and, turning to Maren, said, “The class, understandably I think, is having trouble accepting this scene.” The corners of his mouth twitched up slightly, but his voice was kind. “It sounds pretty far-fetched, don’t you think? Especially since the rest of the story is so realistic.”

  Maren, who grasped the pages of her story as if she might fall into a hole, said, “But it really happened!”

  “Be serious,” we said.

  “It did! My aunt LaPriel—”

  That cracked us up—that name, LaPriel. It sounded like a picante sauce.

  Midgely quieted us with his raised hand. He could do that, but he was the only one who could. “Go on,” he told Maren.

  “Aunt LaPriel fell fifty stories in an elevator in the Chrysler Building in New York City in 1947. She worked there as a mail clerk and later married and had three children. It’s true!”

  “We believe you,” Midgely said. “But the question is does this ‘true story’ work in the fiction?”

  Midgely’s question is loud in my ear right now, even though he’s lying in the hospital with a thousand tubes in him. It’s his voice that has kept me from saying more about New Year’s Eve. It’s like Maren’s aunt LaPriel—real life—but you’re not going to buy it. I’m just going to have to ask you to do as Coleridge said: suspend your disbelief.

  Here goes: I have a rich aunt, my father’s sister, who lives in a pink stucco mansion way out on Lake Minnetonka—a house she bought completely furnished after it was showcased one spring for charity. Every year she throws this enormous dinner-dance on New Year’s Eve, and her name is Eve. Get it? New Year’s Eve. It is so incredibly stupid, but the thing is, it’s true. I’m not making this up. But why am I being defensive? This book is not even fiction really; it’s my life. Think of it more as autobiography. I mean if this were fiction, would I make up a name like Eve for a woman whose whole identity comes from throwing an annual New Year’s Eve party? Would I make up New Year’s Eve? Never. I swear it on that Dylan Thomas book with Richard’s inscription in the front.

  Anyway, Aunt Eve married Uncle Lanny, whose family got stinking rich in the grain business a couple of generations ago, which is why we call him the Doughboy. That and because he looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy: cherubic and pale. He also speaks with a high voice and giggles a lot.

  When I say “we” call Uncle Lanny “Doughboy,” I mean Bjorn and me. Dad calls Lanny the “White Eunuch”—behind his back at least. (Lanny and Eve never had children.) Dad’s usually not that acerbic, but Lanny is always taking tacky digs at him, like “I guess a schoolteacher’s salary doesn’t go very far these days,” or “Becca’s probably making more than you with that designing business of hers, huh?”

  So my dad, who loves to dance with my mother, despises this party. Usually his narcolepsy kicks in for the entire New Year’s Eve day and my mother has to wake him to get showered and wake him again to get dressed. Sometimes she has to drive him there herself. “Eve would be so insulted if her little brother didn’t show up for this one party,” she tells him when he rebels.

  But this year there was no sign of rebellion. “I’m resigned,” he said at lunch. “The White Eunuch has won.”

  Raised eyebrows all around.

  It was Richard who lay like a dead slug on the sofa, eyes rolled toward the ceiling. “Tell Ashley,” h
e said as I swung past on the way to Dad’s study, “that I have the mumps. Mumps are dangerous in a grown man.”

  “Could turn you into a white eunuch.” I laughed and pulled my paper on Desdemona from the printer tray.

  “Might be preferable,” Richard muttered.

  “You don’t have to marry her; it’s just one night,” I said, whisking past him again.

  He caught my arm and pulled me down onto the sofa. “What are you doing walking back and forth so efficiently?”

  “Don’t crinkle my Desdemona paper,” I said, holding it up.

  “Is that what you’ve been working on all morning?”

  I nodded. “I just have to pull my Works Cited page together and I’m finished.”

  “Stay here a minute.” He raised my hand to his lips. “Ich küsse die Hand.” He kissed my hand. “That’s what that GQ god from Berlin will be saying to you, no doubt.”

  I laughed hard then. “Maybe he’ll say, ‘Ich küsse die Lippen.’ ” I kissed him lightly on his Lippen.

  “Hell.”

  “Richard.” I laughed. “I’ve never seen you so—so—”

  “Inadequate? Petty? Whiny? Boring? Stop me when I come to it. Feeble? Lame?”

  “Stop.” I couldn’t stop laughing.

  “Imperfect, deficient, sour—”

  “Wow, only Mr. Radio could come up with a string of adjectives like that.”

  He smiled. “That blabbermouth, Fleur.”

  “She said you were a smoothie.”

  “What does she know?” He pulled me down and kissed me, one of those breast-on-chest kisses that I refuse to describe further to you. Faces pleasantly mashed into each other. Arms gripping. All that stuff.

  “Kate, I don’t want to go with Ashley at all, in case you haven’t noticed. She could look like Miss Universe and I’d still feel deprived, because I want to spend New Year’s Eve with you, and I want you with me and not horny Helmut.”