The Glitter Scene

by Monika Fagerholm

  Rita detests the cousin’s papa and feels sorry for the cousin’s mama, just like I do.

  So in that way it would be much easier, with Rita, together, having a plan. But as I’ve said, that thing about the mood, caution…

  And another thing. Up on your toes, in the sun. I want it to be me. Only me.

  “You did that well.” The cousin’s mama will be happy afterward and applaud me and no one else.

  •

  So one day I sneak into the parlor and take the money out of the cousin’s papa’s hiding place in the boot in the closet. I don’t count how much, a wad of bills, I think it’s enough, and I put the money in my underpants which have a strong elastic band, it’s held in place, I tested it ahead of time with ordinary paper.

  In the middle of the day, no one else is in the house. I will also remember that day, maybe more than what I do, that entire business. We had been cleaning the entire morning, I helped the cousin’s mama inside the house and now she’s busy with the rugs outside. It’s almost late summer, the saturation of summer, me in the parlor, that feeling I like. Everyone else somewhere else, me off to the side, yet not alone.

  The others are in the yard, I hear sounds from out there, I stand for a moment and sneak a peek, hidden behind the curtain, of everything that is going on in the yard, like a play. Carefully, so no one sees. The cousin’s papa is throwing darts, the cousin’s mama is beating rugs that she hung over the rug rack that Björn has made for her out of some boards. Rita and Bengt and the cousin’s papa are throwing darts: some sort of mediocre competition seems to be going on. The cousin’s papa has actually gotten out of his chair, which always needs to be dragged out for him so that he has somewhere to sit when it is cleaning day at the cousin’s house. Now he’s dragging himself around in the yard, in the same blanket with holes, like a chieftain.

  In the silence of the parlor this afternoon: the sound of darts hitting the dartboard on the wall of the barn. Plonk, plonk. Rugs being beaten: damp, damp. The voices in the yard. I can’t make out what they’re saying, but ordinary voices, no particular energy or excitement in them, but not anything else either.

  All of this which is going to disappear. I don’t know that yet. But still, I know it, right in this moment. The saturation of summer, the completion. Me in the parlor, off to the side. Sweaty bills in my underpants, but suddenly in my head, me, so exactly in the middle. Everyone who is suddenly looking at me, clapping their hands loudly. The cousin’s papa too, he isn’t impossible either really, Rita and Bengt and the cousin’s papa, in the yard. They’re even laughing at something together, a dart that lands in a funny way with the feathered side first on the dart board. Bonk. Ends up on the ground.

  At the same time. Exactly because of that. The moment that will follow, unavoidable. The summer that throws you away. The ordinary time that disappears. And that is now.

  The cousin’s papa has turned around and thrown a hasty glance at the cousin’s house. Looks in my direction. Doesn’t see me, it is impossible anyway. Turns toward the dartboard again, throws the dart toward the barn, it strikes the ring, right in the bull’s-eye.

  An omen that nothing can become like it is now.

  •

  I’m back out in the yard again. Same day, in the afternoon. Money in my pants. What now?

  Alone at the cousin’s property. I shilly-shally up toward the mailbox where there are rarely any letters addressed to me, except when I got the Lifeguard’s Medal from the Lifeguards’ Club a few years ago, in the winter after the summer I rescued Susette Packlén from drowning at the public beach on the Second Cape—a registered letter that required the signature of the addressee, so the postal worker drove onto the property and came up and knocked on the door to the cousin’s house and I got to sign myself and confirm the delivery. I who had been Solveig in the blue swimsuit, Sister Blue, during the summer.

  •

  Everyone has gone inside except Rita and Bengt who have disappeared off somewhere else. Bengt to the Second Cape probably, where he is spending more and more time together with the American girl Eddie de Wire, especially on the days that Björn is at work. Rita to our cottage, maybe to look for me. “Where’s Solveig?” she had shouted out in the yard while I was still inside the parlor. To the cottage; she thought I was there.

  I stand in the yard and think about my plan. Brilliant. And if you have a brilliant plan then you shouldn’t shout it from the rooftops, everywhere.

  The problem is simply this: money in my pants, I realize right here in the yard, that I don’t have a plan.

  So now what?

  Go straight to the cousin’s mama? No, not that. There would just be trouble. The cousin’s mama is the police commissioner’s daughter and understands the difference between right and wrong—all of these old magazines, True Crimes.

  “HAVE YOU, Solveig?” The cousin’s mama would ask and all the sun cats would disappear, smack, because when the cousin’s mama looks at you in a certain way then you can’t lie.

  “Now you go and return that money to the cousin’s papa and then you say you’re sorry.”

  The cousin’s mama would say that too. Regardless of whether or not all hell would break loose because of it, regardless of the intention and the goal.

  •

  “Cat got your tongue?”

  But there comes someone driving home on his moped.

  It’s Björn, who is shouting.

  No not that!

  Suddenly this power inside me, deliverance, how I become happy! Björn and me: the two of us, we’re the ones who will. There it comes, like a letter in the mail, in just that moment it feels like I’ve known it the whole time. Björn and me. And everything falls into place inside my head.

  “I have something…” I mumble, pulling Björn after me inside the barn where I initiate him in a plan I don’t really have. Afterward it’s uncertain what is said and actually what is agreed upon, if anything at all. I don’t think about that then, I’m just so relieved.

  Not many words are exchanged: Björn is not someone with whom you sit and discuss, so to speak. And I am too shy: suddenly there in the barn with all of that happiness I get the idea that I have a crush on him. That love comes up right then and exactly in that second: maybe we will get married when we grow up. Despite the fact that we’re cousins, we aren’t blood relations and it’s rarely the case that your first love lasts a lifetime. If you lose one you get another thousand! And suddenly I’m one of these thousand, maybe downright already the second one, or the third one, and besides I also have a pretty hard time in a discreet way, back turned toward Björn in the darkness of the barn, getting those damp-with-sweat-bills out of my clothes.

  But something is decided, with the plan, that is to say. For example, Björn’s surprise when he sees the money and when I tell him where it came from and how I found it. And about the cousin’s papa, the cousin’s mama. Doris Flinkenberg. I’m just about to tell him about the parlor too, in a general kind of way, about my own special place that is just mine and no one else’s. Initiate him in the secret too, like when the words can start pouring out of someone who is otherwise taciturn like Bengt with the American girl because you’ve fallen in love.

  But then suddenly before I’ve even gotten started, Björn’s instant surprise about the money and the entire story about the cousin’s mama and the cousin’s papa and Doris Flinkenberg is gone and it turns into pure and simple rage and shortly thereafter the American girl arrives.

  “That idiot,” Björn has time to utter, so furious in the midst of everything, like I have never heard him before. Under ordinary circumstances when Björn gets angry he goes off on his own and comes back after a while and then everything is normal again. “That idiot,” he spits out again and that it can’t go on like this and that’s saying a lot coming from Björn but then both of us see the American girl Eddie de Wire come strolling across the yard in the direction of the barn and there is no opportunity to say anything more at all but he has time
to take the money and say, I think, we are going to take care of the matter and that this will stay between the two of us and that neither of us is going to say anything to anyone—and we shake on it.

  Then Eddie de Wire comes.

  •

  “Hey, girl!” she says to me as I’m leaving all excited and almost rush right into her arms. “Don’t run away.”

  Lights a cigarette. Björn also gets out his pack and lighter.

  I don’t run away. So then I’m there for a while, in the opening of the barn, at the cousin’s property, Solveig, with two teenagers, the three of us together.

  •

  The time it takes for a teenager to smoke a cigarette: that is what I experience of the American girl Eddie de Wire while she is still alive. Eddie, in white pants, white blouse, and a light blue sweater. All three of us sitting in the opening of the barn, silent. Björn and Eddie next to each other, me a little bit farther down on the steps. Eddie is humming a song. Not the song like the messed-up song that Doris and Sandra start singing much later. Just an ordinary one. Ordinary pop music, the kind that’s popular back then. Björn puts his arm around her. They giggle. Not meanly toward me or anyone else, because they aren’t talking about anything in particular, just giggling. The way two teenagers do, quite simply, together; two who like each other in a normal way too. Naturally I understand exactly during those minutes that I’m not going to marry Björn later either, he’s just way too old for me, so I giggle a little bit too.

  Then Eddie says something about the baroness, in a low voice, that the baroness is a real shit, says it in a teenager kind of way, who doesn’t leave Eddie alone and let Eddie do what she wants to do. The baroness said that Eddie will have to leave if she doesn’t change.

  Imitates the baroness: “chaange.” Jumps on the word, sounds a bit funny too, I start thinking about the fact that the baroness at Bule Marsh probably does talk a bit in such a way that you become impatient, we’re going to swim, not talk about art and life and Uffizi galleries and then the American girl has that American accent in her Swedish as well, which is due to the fact that she’s actually from America.

  But nothing more about that either. Otherwise, I mean with the baroness. Of course I understand that that’s the way youths can talk when they aren’t in agreement with the adult generation, which is a different generation and doesn’t understand the younger generation’s striving for freedom.

  And most of all I’m not sitting there on high alert putting two and two together, the baroness, Miss Andrews, who has been pretty nervous lately and scatterbrained in a different way than normal in the mornings at Bule Marsh.

  To me the baroness, who is Miss Andrews at Bule Marsh, is mostly a game, at Bule Marsh, sometimes Tobias is there as well. They like each other, he and the baroness, it sometimes is, rather often too, a very pleasant atmosphere.

  And it has nothing to do with the baroness and her boarder Eddie de Wire in the boathouse.

  Eddie’s striving for freedom. I don’t really know anything about that either, I mean, I never will, even after she’s dead. What I know is that the baroness is going to try and send her away a few days later and that things are going to end in a tragic way for the American girl Eddie de Wire, due to all the unexpected circumstances.

  Which have to do with my story, but not cause-effect, in that way, in such a crystal clear way. Circumstances, coincidences—that’s how it is, and remains.

  But now nothing has happened yet, Solveig, a moment in the teenagers’ world. An entirely different world too from Miss Andrews and Rita who speak English with each other at Bule Marsh. Not in the water, where I am, but on the beach. Tobias comes and then at least Rita and I can focus on the essentials again. Swimming, that we’re going to become swimmers, Rita and I.

  The teenagers’ world: it’s peculiar in and of itself and for a moment entirely enough.

  Eddie suddenly asks, “Are you Solveig or Rita?” and adds, as if she’s already lost interest in the answer while she’s asking, which you do when you’re young and your head is full of more important things: “It’s quite difficult to tell you guys apart.”

  But I answer the question politely. “Just Solveig.”

  And that’s the first and only thing I ever say to the American girl, answer a question politely. Because I don’t say anything about the next thing she says, though, in and of itself, she mainly just tosses it up into the air, a bit ironically too.

  “I’m sure it’s fun swimming with the baroness. Splashing around with her in Bule Marsh. She and her boyfriend. What’s his name? Tobias?”

  I don’t answer, as I said. First: I have never thought about it in that way. And if it really is like that, that Tobias is the baroness’s “boyfriend,” what’s so special about that then?

  Personally she, Eddie de Wire, had TWO boyfriends. But you can’t exactly say that out loud since Björn is here and you just can’t gossip about certain things, some things a man has to find out on his own, and besides, Bengt is my brother and Björn and Bengt are friends and I don’t like it when there’s arguing and fighting, who would do that? And then I’m too young to be going around putting two and two together about people in that way.

  And then to start bickering with Eddie de Wire, Björn’s first girlfriend, right here and now.

  And sure enough, it passes. Just something that swished through the teenager’s mind in order to disappear in the next second. Darkness falls, Björn switches on the transistor radio, the cigarettes have been finished. “Hm. It’s cold,” Eddie says in the opening to the barn, pulls her sweater more tightly around herself.

  Björn pulls her toward him, holds her more firmly.

  I get up and leave.

  “Bye,” Eddie de Wire calls after me. Björn too: “Bye, Solveig.”

  When I’m on my way, across the yard in the direction of Rita’s and my cottage on the other side of the field, Bengt is coming, at a high speed. He barely sees me, straight ahead, toward the opening of the barn! Eddie and Björn are there, of course, and as soon as he catches sight of them he starts talking about something learned and silly even before he has made it to where they’re sitting.

  Something from “shopping mall theory,” in order to impress the American girl. She also has a book like that which she lent him but barely read herself, some old birthday present, but he has read it, really studied it now! Bengt, ears aflame, as if it were important.

  Bengt and the American girl Eddie de Wire, maybe we can talk about that here, say something about that as well, a few words, what I know.

  I see it, like a scene: Bengt and Eddie on the veranda on the Second Cape, Eddie with the guitar, Bengt who’s drawing, talking. Eddie who’s trying to sing, nah, she doesn’t have a singing voice, doesn’t remember the song, starts laughing. Bengt who’s laughing. The sea in front of them, blue and foamy, and waves that are crashing, wind, you can’t hear what they’re saying, what Bengt is saying, the American girl, but she’s talking too, they’re talking at the same time. Can see them that way, from some house on the Second Cape where I’m cleaning with the cousin’s mama, lock my gaze on them in the middle of cleaning, see. I don’t know what I’m seeing, as I said, Bengt and the American girl, but I can imagine, Bengt and Eddie, that is also true, it is also, was also, as it should have been. So true. So right.

  •

  “What did the girl want?” Eddie asked Björn there in the yard by the barn when I got up and was almost out of earshot, just before Bengt here, now, is tumbling head over heels with his stupid theories.

  “What did the girl want?” I don’t hear Björn’s answer, almost nothing at all. He’s already in another world, he and Eddie, in their own teenage world. New music on the transistor, trallallaa, new pop song, that’s the way it is.

  Even if the summer will soon throw them away, though they don’t know that, I don’t know that either, yet. My plan: that is something I’ve also completely forgotten for the time being.

  Walk calmly to Rit
a’s and my cottage, let myself be filled with Eddie, Björn, cigarette smoke, the steps. I’ll tell Rita about it. I’m burning with desire and excitement, hurry up the stairs, run the last bit.

  •

  Three evenings later, or it’s almost night then, Björn throws all the bills I gave him in the barn right in the cousin’s papa’s face in the kitchen of the cousin’s house. You can imagine: all of the money flying about, raining down over the kitchen where the cousin’s papa is sitting in a straight-back wooden chair, with his cane. This evening he has crawled out into the kitchen from his room, the cousin’s mama crying, or it’s more than crying. Loud shrieks, sobs, and scream scream, terrible. Björn who hasn’t known what to say but who does that. And rather drunk, so that too. Has been sitting in the shed with beer bottles the whole evening up until now. Björn who doesn’t say things like that, who doesn’t know what he’s going to say, who never knows, he isn’t someone who talks, but the cousin’s papa is someone who talks, can destroy with his talking.

  Doesn’t Björn understand? And me, about Björn—don’t I understand?

  Björn from another landscape. And the cousin’s mama, Astrid. “Children’s mama.” Only the two of them in the kitchen with the cousin’s papa. In that landscape. Exposed.

  Everyone else somewhere else. Rita and Doris Flinkenberg in our cottage, where I should also be. Bengt and the American girl Eddie de Wire where they are now: in Eddie’s boathouse on the Second Cape. Bengt hasn’t been around all day.

  I’m in position. Though still not. Because I’m sitting in the parlor, in the closet. In my closet. The whole time. Shaking, curled up, listening, but I can only imagine what’s going on in the kitchen. In the closet. Like always: no one knows that I am there.

  I have snuck into the parlor and the closet at the beginning of the evening and now I can’t get out. I know what’s going on in the kitchen, I don’t need to see it with my own eyes. But at the same time I don’t know, I have no idea. That it isn’t going according to plan is clear. But as soon as I have the chance to think “plan,” then I also think that Solveig, idiot, there has never been any plan. “What did the girl want?” The American girl’s question, an unbearable question ringing in my ears, hits home, “You did that well.” That was where I was going, the cousin’s mama’s shining eyes on me, but the road there was murky, gave the money to Björn and that was almost a relief, and then it ended up like this.