Adventures with Waffles

by Maria Parr

  It’s fun to play war. But peace is best. That’s what I thought when I was finally sitting in the yard, eating waffles with the world’s nicest granny-aunt.

  “Why is he so thin and you’re so fat, if you’re brother and sister?” Lena asked midbite, looking at Auntie Granny and Grandpa.

  “She ate all my food when we were little,” said Grandpa, who had to duck as Auntie Granny tried to smack him with her tea towel.

  “I wasn’t this fat in the old days, little Lena.”

  “Exactly how fat were you, then?” Lena wanted to know.

  And so the storytelling began. She had been beautiful, Auntie Granny, like an actress. There were so many young men who wanted to marry her that Grandpa was allowed to lie on the roof and shoot them with his slingshot when they came to see her. Nobody was fat back then, actually, as far as Grandpa could remember, because they ate only potatoes and fish. But at Christmas they were given an orange. Except during the war. They weren’t given any then. . . .

  Just as we were going to bed, Mom called to see how things were going. Grandpa told her that both young and old were on their best behavior.

  “We’ve been telling stories about the old days and eating waffles,” he said.

  Lena and I smiled.

  “Can I have a word with Krølla?” Mom asked next.

  Grandpa gave a little cough and reluctantly handed over the receiver.

  “Don’t tell her we’ve been on the moped,” I whispered to Krølla.

  She nodded and took the phone with an air of importance.

  “What have you been doing today, Little Miss Krølla?” we heard Mom ask.

  Grandpa fell to his knees in front of his youngest grandchild and clasped his hands. Krølla looked at him in astonishment.

  “I haven’t ridden on the moped,” she said loudly and clearly.

  Grandpa dropped his hands, breathing a sigh of relief. Up there at the choral festival, Mom probably did the same thing.

  “That’s good,” she said softly. “What did you do, then, my sweet?”

  “I rode in the box,” said Krølla.

  Lena has her birthday once a year, just like everyone else, but you would think it was more often. She talks about her birthday constantly. Now it was finally getting closer.

  “It’s pretty good turning nine on the ninth of July, isn’t it?” she said, pleased.

  Her mother had come home from the choral festival and was drying some fruit to make art out of. Lena and I were eating.

  “Yes, pretty good. What would you like to get?” her mom said.

  “A dad.”

  Lena’s mother sighed and asked if Lena wanted him wrapped or as a gift certificate. “Wouldn’t you like something else, Lena love?”

  No, Lena didn’t want anything else, but even so, when we went out onto the front steps she stood still for a moment. Eventually she opened the door a crack and shouted back inside, “A bike!”

  Lena invited all of our class to her birthday party. Eight boys, plus me. A few hours before the party, I went over to check if they’d made enough cake for all the guests. Lena’s mom opened the door.

  “You’ve come at just the right time, Trille. Maybe you’ll be able to cheer her up.”

  I went inside, puzzled.

  Lena was lying on the sofa. She didn’t look well.

  “Are you sick?” I asked in dismay.

  “Yes, I’m sick! I’ve got spots on my tummy!” she shouted, almost as if it were my fault. “And nobody wants to come to my party and catch it, because it’s the middle of summer vacation!”

  Lena threw a pillow at the wall, making all the pictures in the living room wobble.

  What a disaster.

  “Oh, Lena,” I said sadly.

  After a while, my mom came over to see if I was getting in the way of the cake decorating.

  “Goodness me, Lena, are you sick?” she asked, sitting down on the edge of the sofa. Mom knows all about illnesses, having so many children.

  “What do you think it is, Kari?” Lena’s mom asked as she brought in some tea.

  Mom thought it was chicken pox. I’d had chicken pox when I was a baby, she said, and as it’s not possible to get it more than once, I could go to Lena’s party after all. If Lena had the energy.

  Lena had the energy, and at six o’clock I showed up with her present, wearing my best shorts. Her present was a croquet set. I think Lena liked it. Croquet mallets can be used for so many things, she said. It was a good party. Lena’s mom had set up a bed in the living room, and Lena sat in it, giving orders like a queen. We watched DVDs and had the whole birthday cake to ourselves. Lena only got angry about her stupid chicken pox once, throwing a cinnamon bun at the wall.

  “You’ve got quite an arm on you,” her mother said with a sigh.

  Later in the evening, the birthday girl got worse, and I thought it would be best to go home. But Lena wasn’t having any of that.

  “Smoking haddocks,” she said, “it wouldn’t be right if the only guest left at half past seven when the party’s supposed to last until nine.”

  I ate another piece of cake while Lena fell asleep.

  “I’ve spoken to them at the clinic,” Lena’s mom whispered to me. “The on-call doctor is already visiting this side of the fjord this evening, so he’ll pop by.”

  Just then there was a knock at the door. I craned my neck and peeked out into the hallway. The doctor was younger than they usually are, and he looked very nice. The grown-ups stood there for quite a while saying hello and smiling, and as the doctor came into the living room, he turned around and smiled back at Lena’s mom, causing him to stumble against the door, almost tripping.

  “Are you the one who’s sick?” he asked me when he’d recovered his balance.

  “No, I’ve had it before,” I said proudly, and pointed at Lena over in her bed. If I hadn’t done that, I think the doctor would have sat on top of her, and that would have caused quite a fuss! He sat down next to her instead and carefully put his hand on her shoulder. Lena came around slowly at first, and then woke up like a shot. She looked at the doctor as if he’d dropped out of the sky, rubbed her eyes, and looked at him some more. Then she jumped up, beaming, and shouted, “A dad!”

  The bit of cake I had on my spoon fell onto my plate.

  “But, Mom, you already gave me a bike!” Lena continued, laughing with joy in spite of her spots and fever and everything else.

  “I—I’m a doctor,” the poor fellow stammered.

  “Mom, he’s a doctor too! Isn’t that handy?”

  Lena’s mom came running from the kitchen.

  “Lena, he’s just a doctor,” I explained, worried that I was going to laugh. There was nothing I could do about it, so I just let it come out, even though Lena might have been incensed. But she was probably so worn out with fever and chicken pox that she didn’t have the strength to get angry. She just pulled her blanket over her head and fell back down on the sofa like a sack of potatoes.

  When the doctor had finished looking at Lena’s chicken pox, there was over an hour until the next ferry left, so Lena invited him to stay for her party. His name was Isak, and he told us that he’d only just started working as a doctor, and that he was worried about getting illnesses wrong and things like that.

  “But I do have chicken pox, don’t I?” asked Lena.

  Yes, Isak was sure about that. Lena definitely had chicken pox.

  When he was leaving, Isak saw the motorcycle in the utility room. We found out that he also had a motorcycle, and the grown-ups ended up standing there talking about motorcycles for so long that he almost missed the ferry.

  “That was a pretty good party,” said Lena happily when Isak had finally gone.

  Her mother gave a strange smile and nodded.

  Lena soon got better. And when she got out of bed, she’d decided to become a goalie. She’d been watching soccer on TV while she was sick.

  “It’s the goalie who makes the decisions, Trille. He ca
lls out to all the others, telling them where to run.”

  In that case, I thought Lena was well cut out to be the goalie. She’s the only girl on our soccer team and gets as angry as a hornet over nothing. The other boys on the team often make her angry on purpose, and Lena says that she plays on a team of complete and utter idiots.

  In the summer there are no practices or games but we still play a lot of soccer, Lena and I, especially when the fields are freshly cut. But we had just lost the ball again. I couldn’t find it anywhere. In the end I had to ask Mom if I could have a new one.

  “No, Trille. This is the second ball you’ve lost this year. It’s out of the question.”

  “But I need a ball, Mom!” I said.

  “Then you’ll have to buy your own, Trille dear.”

  Grown-ups always say things like that without realizing that it’s not so easy for those of us who don’t have any money.

  Magnus was sitting in the hammock, playing on his phone. Magnus always has money. Every day during the summer, he and a friend take their guitars to town, where they play in the pedestrian area and people throw money into a hat in front of their feet. I watched him and made a decision. I was going to go into town as well. But Lena would have to come too.

  “You think we should sing in the middle of the main street, where everyone will hear us?” she asked when I went in and told her about my plan. She’d made her Special Lena Breakfast, which is so unhealthy that it can only be made when you’re at home by yourself.

  “We’ll have to play instruments,” she said between munches. “Otherwise nobody’s going to throw us money.”

  “But we can only play the recorder,” I said.

  “Recorders will do fine,” Lena said firmly.

  And so that was that.

  Now we had to practice. It was so long since we’d played on our recorders that we’d almost forgotten we had them. We began in our kitchen, but after a while, Mom said she had to listen to something really important on the radio and asked us to go elsewhere. In the living room we only played one note each before Dad explained that it was very nice, but his head couldn’t take such loud noises on Thursdays. Then we went downstairs to Grandpa, but his hearing aid began to whistle, so we had to find somewhere else. In the end we went out into the hay barn and sat on the old tractor.

  We practiced and practiced, but there was only one song we could both manage: “Silent Night.” We’d played it at the Christmas concert at school.

  “Ooh, I’m getting goose bumps!” said Lena, who thought our playing was a thing of heavenly beauty.

  The next morning, it was hot, with brilliant sunshine, and the sea lay stretched out like a light-blue sheet. Grandpa’s boat was a little dot in the distance. Lena and I ran all the way to the ferry landing, where we waited ten minutes for the ferry. We hid our recorders under our T-shirts as we got on board, but Dad still saw them. He drummed his fingers on his ticket bag and looked sternly at us.

  “I don’t want to hear a single note while you’re on the ferry. The captain might get distracted and crash into the jetty,” he said.

  We promised. And Dad didn’t ask anymore.

  I’m very fond of our ferry. There’s a slot machine on board that Minda knows how to win on and Lena knows how to lose on, a staircase with a railing you can slide down, and a little shop that sells big pancakes with butter and sugar. Margot makes them. Margot is old and can make toad faces if you ask her enough times. Lena and I are friends with Margot. We mostly sit with her when we visit Dad at work, but now and then we run up to the top deck and spit in the sea, and sometimes we get to go on the bridge, if they’re in the right mood up there.

  This time we hurried straight down to Margot.

  “Well, if it isn’t young Trille and Lena! Bless you, I haven’t seen you all summer!” she said.

  “But you must have heard about us,” said Lena.

  It was true. Margot had heard all sorts of things, about shark boats and manure, she told us.

  “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear,” said Lena at that point.

  Dad didn’t want us to go into town alone, but we badgered him. Magnus was there, and we knew where he went to play his guitar. We could even see him from the ferry! Dad gave in eventually. If we promised to stay with Magnus the whole time, we could stay in town and catch the next ferry, but we would have to go right back down to the dock. We promised. Then we ran up the pedestrian-only street to Magnus. He and his friend Hassan were in the middle of a song and didn’t spot us until they’d finished.

  “What are you doing here?” Magnus asked, not entirely happy to see us.

  “We’re going to earn money for a new soccer ball,” I said, showing him my recorder.

  Magnus and Hassan looked at each other and began to laugh. I could almost feel Lena’s temper rising.

  “Yes, we are—you’ll see!” she shouted at them. “And we have to stay here with you, unfortunately, because Trille’s dad said so!”

  Before anyone could do anything else, she pulled me up onto a bench close by, took off my cap, and threw it down in front of us.

  “Come on, Trille!”

  I’d forgotten how many people there usually are on a busy shopping street. I felt like I was going to pass out there and then.

  “Lena, I’m not really sure I want to do this after all,” I whispered without moving my lips.

  “Do you want a soccer ball or don’t you?”

  “I do. . . .”

  “Play, then, for crying out loud!”

  My knees shook. My best friend counted to three. And there we stood, on a bench in the middle of the street, playing “Silent Night.” Lena got goose bumps from it. I just looked at my recorder. Nobody clapped when we’d finished. People just walked on by.

  “One more time,” Lena ordered mercilessly.

  And so we played one more time. People were very hot and busy, it seemed. But suddenly a lady took hold of her husband’s hand and said, “Gosh, look, Rolf. Aren’t they sweet?”

  She meant Lena and me. We played again, and then the lady and her husband named Rolf left twenty kroner in my cap. After that, more than seventeen people stopped at once, all wanting to hear our Christmas carol. Again I felt a bit like I was going to collapse, but I closed my eyes and thought of the soccer ball. Everyone was clapping and laughing and shouting, “Encore, encore!” A crowd had gathered around the bench. Lena and I were almost like pop stars. There was even a lady taking photos, who asked what our names were. Lena gave a deep bow every time we finished playing. And I bowed both to the right and to the left, like Dad does when he conducts the mixed choir.

  “We must have enough now,” I said eventually.

  My hands were all sweaty. Lena peered into the cap and nodded. We said good-bye and climbed down. The cap was heavy with coins. We smiled smugly at Magnus and Hassan and ran up the road to the sports shop next to the local law offices. We’d completely forgotten about Dad.

  “You’re forty-two kroner short,” said the man behind the counter once he had counted our money.

  His hair was all over the place and looked really stiff. His lower lip was sticking right out too. I could see Lena leaning forward, wanting to know what he had under it. He was a grumpy man.

  “Pff, we can make forty-two kroner quicker than you can say ‘stinky sneakers,’” Lena said.

  We set up on the steps outside the sports shop. There weren’t as many people there as in the main street, but we kept on playing. Eventually we could play “Silent Night” in nineteen seconds.

  After a while, the grumpy man came outside.

  “Stop that racket! It’s scaring my customers away!”

  “We can’t stop. We still need . . .” Lena looked at me.

  “Twenty-seven kroner,” I said.

  The man rolled his eyes. Then he stuck his finger under his lip and pulled out a big glob of snus, a kind of tobacco that’s sucked instead of smoked. He flung it down in front of our feet and slammed the door
as he went back in.

  “He could do with a trip to the principal’s office,” Lena said strictly, and then we began to play again.

  We only got halfway through before the shop door reopened, and the grumpy man shouted, “Put a sock in it! You can have your ball, you wretched children!”

  We were standing outside the shop with our new soccer ball when I remembered about Dad.

  “Oh, no!” I shouted, and we started running. The ferry had made three journeys, and Dad was more or less as angry as I had feared. He somehow gets all big and red when he’s angry.

  “We’ll never do it again,” I promised, all out of breath.

  “Huh! Never do it again indeed! You and Lena never do the same thing twice. You only come up with more insanity!”

  Lena looked at him kindly and took his hand.

  “Have you seen our ball?” she asked. “It’s a professional one.”

  I saw that Dad was starting to look slightly proud of us. He thought it was a nice ball and wanted to try it. But it’s not easy to do tricks wearing a ticket bag and wooden shoes. All of a sudden, both his shoe and the ball flew in a beautiful curve overboard. I slapped my forehead. There we’d been, playing “Silent Night” almost to death, and Dad had sent the ball flying into the sea before we’d even had a chance to try it!

  “Well, now you’ll have to dive in and get it!” Lena shouted angrily.

  Dad didn’t really like the idea of diving into the sea. Instead, he ran up onto the jetty and borrowed a net from a German man who was fishing there and managed to lift the ball ashore. His shoe disappeared out to sea.

  When Dad had sold tickets to all the passengers, he came down to Margot’s shop, where Lena and I were.

  “Let’s not tell Mom that you and Lena have been into town by yourselves today, OK, Trille?”

  I promised.

  But that didn’t help much. The next day there was a big picture of Lena and me in the newspaper. The lady who had been taking photos of us was a journalist.

  “You’re a sneaky one, you are, Trille, my lad,” said Mom, peering up from behind the newspaper.

  I promised to play “Silent Night” for her one day when I had time.