The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman

by Louise Plummer

  Instead Richard stayed at my heels. “Kate, please don’t leave this way.” His fingers grasped my arm. I pried them loose.

  “Don’t touch me,” I said through my teeth. “Don’t follow me and don’t talk to me!” And then I did something that shames me even now; I slugged him as hard as I could across the shoulder with a closed fist. Wearing my black velvet party dress, I slugged Richard. I slugged him hard. Helmut saw it. The man holding my coat saw it. Maybe a few other people as well. I slugged Richard with all my strength. I wanted to kill him.

  He teetered a little and then backed away. “Okay,” he said, his hands up in a gesture of truce. “Not here, not now.”

  “Not ever!” I said and walked out the front door without my coat.

  Without any manipulation on my part, this chapter, filled with disappointment and suffering, turns out to be the unlucky Chapter Thirteen. It’s so appropriate, and I’m pleased with this artistic coincidence, one of life’s tiny miracles.

  It is another of life’s tiny miracles that Helmut and I remain friends to this day. He drove while I cried silently. His voice, kind and soothing, began telling me how American jokes did not translate well into German and vice versa. “For example,” he said, keeping his voice very light, “take the knock-knock jokes—”

  I don’t know if the noise I made was an attempt to laugh or just a sob. His cowlick was now standing straight up. Even when I’m wretched, details do not escape me.

  Helmut continued a soft chatter, moving from knock-knock jokes to Max and Moritz cartoons, until we stopped in my driveway.

  I opened the car door. “Thank you. I’m sorry,” I said.

  He shrugged off the apology. “I will see you in school. Good-bye.”

  On the front hall table lay the Polaroid pictures my mother had taken earlier. Helmut and I, Richard and I, Richard and Helmut, and then all three of us. I went into the kitchen, pulled the scissors out of a drawer, and cut Richard out of the three pictures. Just snipped his betraying body into slivers, which I left scattered on the table.

  Then I went to bed, but not to sleep. I didn’t even bother taking off my glasses. I just lay on my side and looked out to the street, to Midgely’s house, which was dark. He was still clinging to life in the hospital. I cried for him, but mainly for myself.

  The others came home about twenty minutes later. There were no nightcaps. All of them came straight upstairs, said weary good-nights to each other, and separated into their bedrooms.

  I heard Richard in the bathroom. The toilet flushed; the water ran in the basin. Then he showered, which seemed odd. The shower shut off. He went into his bedroom, leaving the bathroom light on. Jerk.

  A few minutes later he was back. “Kate,” he called softly from behind the door.

  I stopped breathing.

  “Kate? At least let me apologize. Kate?”

  Roast in hell, I thought. Eat rocks.

  The bathroom light clicked off.

  In the morning I awoke to hear Bjorn giving Richard advice: “Just talk to her.” They were out in the hallway, their voices low.

  “She doesn’t want to talk to me. I don’t blame her, frankly.”

  “Send her roses; that always works.” Not exactly a surprise suggestion, coming from Bjorn.

  “Roses?” Richard’s voice was full of disgust. “Roses won’t cut it with Kate. She’ll bite the blooms off and return the stems.”

  “I don’t know. Roses always work for me—”

  Their voices grew fainter as they walked toward the stairs. “Roses would make her even madder” was the last thing I heard Richard say.

  You got that right, Buster.

  I could not imagine sitting with Richard at the same breakfast table, could not imagine feigning civility toward him. I couldn’t even think of him without seeing him and Ashley welded together. I knew what it felt like to be welded to Richard. I was not willing to share it.

  Tomorrow morning, early, they would all leave in Richard’s Volvo station wagon: back to Palo Alto. Back to school. I would hole up in my room until then. I went into Mother’s bedroom and took the five-inch black-and-white TV set from her nightstand and carried it into my room, locking the doors. I plugged in the TV and got back into bed. The Rose Bowl Parade was on one station and the Orange Bowl Parade was on another. Very boring on colored TV, but absolutely dorky on black-and-white. I switched channels and decided on Sesame Street on the public station. When Kermit the Frog appeared as a journalist I began to cry over Jim Henson’s death. Kermit the Frog was dead. Ernie was dead. I sobbed out loud.

  Someone knocked at the door. “Kate?” It was Mother. I unlocked the door. “Oh, Kate,” she said when she saw my face. She carried a tray with muffins and jam and orange juice, which she set on my bed.

  We stood in the middle of the room, my mother and I. She with her arms around me, and me sobbing, “Why did Kermit the Frog have to die? Why couldn’t it have been Pee Wee Herman?”

  Mother laughed then and led me to the other bed. “This is about Rich, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You don’t have to; I can guess. I saw what was going on.” She looked down at her nails. “Looking good is the best revenge,” she said.

  “I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to see anyone.”

  She patted my knee. “Okay.” She stood up. “Eat some breakfast and cry about Jim Henson.” She smiled. When she reached the door, she turned. “I’ll make excuses for you downstairs. Do you want anything else?”

  I shook my head. “Thanks,” I said.

  “I’ll check on you later,” she said and disappeared.

  I sat on my bed. I was pouting and withdrawing. I knew that. But when I thought of Richard, I felt only a hot anger. I began to feel more sympathy for Trish, and for Othello too. I didn’t want to make up. I wanted Richard dead.

  After breakfast, after a long bath, after dressing up in the world’s most sensational bulky sweater and wool flannel slacks, after painting myself with blush and, yes, even lip gloss, I went downstairs and joined the others, who were watching the first of a series of football games in the living room. “Hi,” I said.

  “Cute sweater,” Trish said. She was at the card table working on the million-piece puzzle. I sat with her.

  For the rest of the day I interacted with everyone but Richard. My voice was light. I made jokes about my dad, who snoozed through most of every football game. I did an imitation of Bjorn stammering through his own wedding ceremony; I found puzzle pieces that Trish had been searching for all week, but I would not look at Richard, whom I hated with an intensity that even I couldn’t believe.

  Only at night, coming out of the basement with folded laundry, did I meet him face-to-face in the back hall.

  “Can’t we talk?” he asked.

  What did I ever find attractive about him? I wondered. I moved past him. “No,” I said. “I’ll be glad when you’re out of this house and out of my life.”

  In bed I thought about Jim Henson, about Midgely, about the day Ruffy got hit by a car right in front of the house a few years ago, and I bawled.

  EITHER I HADN’T set my alarm, or it didn’t go off. It was Mother who woke me. “They’re all ready to go,” she said. “Come and say good-bye.”

  I got up, brushed my teeth, splashed water on my face, and went downstairs. They really were ready, all of them standing outside in front of the Volvo with its motor running. Their hot breaths clouded the morning air. I threw on boots and a parka and stepped out. Mother and Dad watched while I hugged Bjorn. “Love you, Boo,” he said.

  “Love you too.” Tears welled. We would never live in the same house again, my brother and I. I hugged him tighter. I hugged Trish too. “I love you,” I said. “Sis.” We both laughed, or cried. I’m not sure which. Then I stepped back in line with my parents.

  Richard stood, his hands in his pockets, and stared only at me. I could not escape his gaze. “Are you going to let me apologize for hur
ting you?” he asked. His voice was steady, assertive. He had lost the air of the pathetic lover.

  “What you do is your business,” I said.

  “This is our business.” He glared.

  I was faintly aware that the others were all shifting nervously back and forth on their feet.

  “There is no ‘our’ business,” I said. “There is no plural possessive adjective ‘our’ where you’re concerned.”

  His eyes bored into mine until I had to look away. I shivered.

  Richard handed Bjorn the keys to the Volvo. “Here,” he said. “I’m not going.”

  “What?” Bjorn’s head jerked.

  “I’m not going.”

  “It’s your car. You’ll be late for school.”

  “Go.” He opened the door for Trish and kissed her cheek as she got into the passenger seat.

  “Are you sure?” Bjorn’s feet seemed frozen to the driveway.

  “Positive. Can I borrow your sleeping bag, the good one?”

  Bjorn moved around the car, looking puzzled. He nodded. “You know where it is.” He stopped. “Rich, we can wait—”

  “No, I’m staying.”

  “What colossal dramatics!” My voice was shrill. “You can’t stay here! You can’t stay in my house another five minutes. Don’t even try!”

  “Kate!” Mother’s face drained of all color. “Rich, I’m sorry—”

  “She didn’t mean it,” Dad said, but he looked at me as if he wasn’t sure.

  “I’m leaving if he stays, and that’s it!” My voice had a strange hysterical ring to it. I stomped toward the house.

  “Kate!” My mother, I could tell, was appalled.

  “It’s okay,” Richard said to my parents. To me he shouted, “Relax, Bjorkman, I’m not staying in your house.” He turned back to my parents. “If you’d get me Bjorn’s sleeping bag and a shovel, I’ll be on my way.”

  I sneered and stormed into the house. There was coffee brewing, and I poured myself a cup and sat at the kitchen table, quietly raging. What did he think he was doing? What game was he up to now? An image of Richard’s arms curved tightly around Ashley’s bare back flashed in my head. Whatever game it was, I wasn’t going to buy it. Not a second time. Not ever.

  Mother and Dad had followed me into the house. Dad went upstairs, but Mother came into the kitchen and began putting food into an old backpack of Bjorn’s. She poured the rest of the coffee into a thermos and stuck that in there too.

  I was incredulous. “You’re not packing a lunch for him, are you? Can’t you see he’s just manipulating our whole family? Let him get his own food. Let him eat squirrel! Better yet, let him starve!” I had stood up for more effective ranting.

  Mother turned, her jaw set in a way I rarely saw. “You just calm down,” she said in her most authoritative voice. “If you think I’m going to let one of my best friends’ son leave here on foot without anything to eat, well, then, you have another think coming.” She folded napkins into the pack and began closing it up.

  “You’re taking his side? What about me? What about my feelings? You never support me. You never listen.” I had never made a speech like this before, probably because it wasn’t true, but there I was shouting it. It felt thrilling, to tell you the truth.

  Mother looked up from her project. “If we haven’t listened, it’s because you haven’t exactly been talking, have you?” Her voice was crisp but low. “You seem to prefer suffering in silence like some soap-opera queen.” She turned. “Which is why problems get resolved so slowly on soaps.” She had closed the backpack and set it on the table.

  I thumped my cup onto the table’s surface, spilling coffee. “I can’t believe you’re taking his side. He’s the one playing games, hanging around, asking for shovels and sleeping bags with those great big cow eyes of his—”

  Mother wiped at my coffee spill as if it were an obscenity. “He’d be gone if you had talked to him.”

  I was stampeding around the kitchen now, my boots thumping heavily against the tile. “Me, me, me! Like it’s all my fault. Like I’m the one who betrayed everyone in sight! Nobody cares what I’m going through!”

  “I do care what you’re going through.” The edge in Mother’s voice was gone. “I do.” She picked up the pack. “But I care about Rich too.” She headed out the back door.

  That did it. I grabbed my parka from the back of the chair and followed her out of the house, passed her, and made my way down the street, since none of the sidewalks were shoveled.

  “Where are you going?” Mother stood next to Richard. He was holding the backpack now.

  I turned. “Since you’ve given him all the food in the house, I’ll have my breakfast at Bridgeman’s, thank you very much.”

  That was me, Kate Bjorkman, a potential Ph.D. candidate, a fairly rational young woman—that’s what my dad always said, even-tempered: “If I could only have one daughter, then Kate was the perfect one to have,” he’d say. And my mother agreed. The only bad thing about me was my eyes: blind as Milton without those glasses. But that morning, January 2, I was deranged. I knew it, I guess, but I couldn’t stop it. Didn’t want to. It wasn’t until I sat in a booth at Bridgeman’s that I realized I was wearing flannel pajamas and I had no money.

  THE HOUSE WAS quiet when I returned, except for the soft strains of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, wafting from Dad’s study. It’s one of those bittersweet pieces. Paranoid as I was, I wondered if Dad had put it on when he saw me coming.

  I went up and sat for an hour in a hot bath and got dressed. When I came downstairs, Mother was in the front hall dressed for work. She searched through her handbag as she spoke. “I have to go into the office today. I’d like you to take down the Christmas tree, if you wouldn’t mind. The boxes for the ornaments are downstairs.”

  I nodded listlessly.

  “See you tonight,” she said, pulling on her gloves. Our eyes avoided each other. “I’m going, Nels,” she called to my dad.

  “See ya tonight, babes,” he called back.

  Her lips turned up at the corners. Fleur was right. They were still in love. I couldn’t stay in love for a week. Depressing.

  It took a couple of hours to clear away the tree and vacuum up the needles. I took down the one on the piano too, took down the wreath from the dining room table; the holly and the mistletoe, all dried and curled, fell in broken scraps onto the floor. I allowed time, like a ribbon, to curve back on itself to Christmas Eve and saw Richard’s face close to mine. He had used my name for the first time. “Merry Christmas, Kate,” he had said. He had kissed me lightly on the lips, not once but twice. Had that been real? Had Christmas morning on the ice been real? I filtered back through the whole week, the whole precious week. And then Ashley. I tried to press down the gnawing emotion that hovered and coiled in my stomach. What was real? What was true?

  When I was finished, I went to sit in Dad’s study and listen to Faustus, an opera in which the hero gets slaughtered by devils in the end. Perfect.

  That’s when I saw Richard out the window that faced the back. I stood in front of it. “What is he doing?” I asked.

  My dad, hunched over his computer, looked up at me and then out the window at Richard, who was shoveling snow on a mound already five feet high and several feet long.

  “I’m not sure,” Dad mused, “but I think he’s building himself a snow cave.”

  I stared. Richard shoveled with an intense, steady rhythm, the hood of his parka thrown back, his breath a floating cloud of steam in front of his face. He never looked up.

  “A snow cave.” I was trying to recall.

  “He and Bjorn made them when they were Scouts—remember?”

  I didn’t.

  “They’re supposed to keep you from freezing to death when you’re caught in below-freezing temperatures.”

  “You mean he’s going to live out there?” I looked at my father.

  He shrugged. “Don’t know, but it sure looks like it.”

 
“Well,” I said, collecting myself. “Maybe he’ll freeze to death.”

  Dad gazed out at Richard. “I think that may be a real possibility,” he muttered, turning back to his computer. “I wouldn’t spend five minutes in one of those things.”

  It irritated me that Richard was visible from all the south windows of the house, that I couldn’t escape his presence. “Can’t we make him get off our property?” I asked Dad.

  He looked at me wearily. “Technically, he’s not on our property. He’s on the common, but”—he looked over his reading glasses at me—“even if he were, Kate, I wouldn’t bother. I’m too old for these confrontations.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said. I left to find a place to sit on the north side of the house. I worked on the puzzle, which was nearly done except for a couple of dozen stubborn pieces. It was hard to concentrate. I went upstairs and stood in my bedroom waiting for inspiration. None came. I crossed the hall to Bjorn’s room and stood back from the window. Richard was scooping out the center of the snow cave, using the shovel, sometimes his hands, sometimes his feet, kicking aside clods of snow. Two squirrels scurried along a branch over his head, paused to watch him, and then scrambled up the trunk of the tree. I moved closer to the window, my warm breath forming icy patterns on the pane. I tried to wipe them away with my fingers, and when I looked down again, Richard stood leaning on the shovel, looking at me, his chest heaving from exertion. My hand was still on the glass. Across the shadowed snow of the backyard, our eyes held. Nobody smiled. It seemed like hours. Then he returned to his shoveling.

  I went to the Video Mart and checked out three movies that I hoped would relieve me of the utter sense of loss I felt. The first one, which I watched before dinner, was a Stephen King horror movie in which a three-year-old returns from the dead to kill his mother and everyone else in sight. It had my complete attention, believe me.

  After that I ate dinner with my parents, Mother chatting brightly about a new client she had from White Bear Lake, a Mrs. Duvander, who had one leg shorter than the other. Outside, it was already dark. When I carried my dishes to the sink, I stole a glance across the backyard. An impoverished light glowed dimly from the front of the snow cave. Some kind of lantern, I supposed. I watched the news with my parents, interested mostly in the weather report. Eighteen degrees below zero. That was the night’s forecast. None of us looked at each other.