The American Girl

by Monika Fagerholm

  She was the Michelin girl, the one in the moon boots, who was so precious and fragile that she stumbled about, fumbled about like a drunk Bengt at the scene of the death. Was missing all feeling for the ground or what it was now called in her absolutely photo-friendly footwear, her absolutely impossible-to-walk-in boots. This was the planet without Doris, namely. And it might as well have been the moon.

  Voices in her surroundings.

  “It’s a pity about her. Her good friend—”

  “These melodramatic kids. If they could just understand that there is a tomorrow.”

  A cool hand on her forehead, “little, little silk dog.”

  But the clock was ticking, time was passing, the swelling in her cheeks and in her throat lessened, though too slowly. And then it finally turned out that Doris Flinkenberg’s funeral and the memorial afterward in the fellowship hall up in the town center, during which the pop version of “Around the Beggar from Luossa,” one of Doris Flinkenberg’s favorite songs, played on Doris Flinkenberg’s Poppy radio cassette player one last time so that everyone heard, took place without Sandra Wärn, her only friend, her best friend, being present.

  Click, Solveig turned it on and off, and there was not a dry eye anywhere.

  What I love is gone, hidden in the distant darkness

  And my true road is high and wonderful

  I am driven in the middle of my turmoil to pray to the Lord

  Take away the earth, then I want, what no one else has

  But that, that was in the month of November when all hope was gone. Now it was still July half a year before, while all possibilities still remained. And there came Doris Flinkenberg now. Walking through the woods in the direction of the house in the darker part. Doris with her small, light blue bag, with her traveling purse, also in light blue with a picture of a bunny’s head with long front teeth, Doris with her passport and part of her traveling money in the beige-colored bag with a string around her neck (the rest of the money she had sewn into different places in the hem of her pants and under her right sock), also with a light blue bunny on it. It was, she later stood and explained to Sandra filled with excitement, the first thing she did when she came inside the door, a set, and that she purchased with the money she had earned by raking the cemetery in the town center as a summer job up until now.

  Doris pulled out the neck pouch also and started demonstrating it and its different compartments and everything that fit into them, all of the zippers and so on, and she did this with an enthusiasm that absorbed her to the point that quite some time had passed before she realized Sandra still had her pajamas on.

  “Aren’t you going to put on YOUR traveling clothes?” Doris Flinkenberg stopped what she was doing, not abruptly, more like taking a pause.

  “Doris,” Sandra started seriously. She was forced to begin with the same seriousness a few times before Doris was properly paying attention, which made the whole thing even more awkwardly drawn out. “There isn’t going to be any trip. Heintz-Gurt called. Lorelei Lindberg. She’s gone to New York.”

  “And then,” Doris objected impatiently as if what Sandra had said was only a few words standing in the way, an almost technical obstruction to the dream still living inside her, which she was living on, floating around in like hanging in a wonderful blue helium balloon, so delightful, that she had butterflies in her stomach—in an instant, and it was gone. “She’ll come later,” Doris added. “And if she isn’t there when we get there then someone else in the family can meet us at the airport!”

  “But don’t you understand? She’s not there. She’s never ever going to come back. She’s left him. Taken her stuff and left. Early yesterday morning. Didn’t even leave a note behind for him. There won’t—”

  Sandra had to stop herself here and prepare herself again in order to finish her last sentence.

  “—be a trip, Doris Flinkenberg.”

  Doris remained standing a few seconds, unmoving as if she had been struck by lightning.

  The balloon filled with gas burst. That is what happened with that mystery: to fly and float freely. It still ended in one and the same way. Crashing to the ground.

  “And you’re saying that just now!” Doris yelled then, at first more angry than disappointed, but it was still as though her body already understood what her head did not. Her hands fell to her sides, the traveling purse that had obtrusively been hanging in the crook of Doris’s arm during the demonstration of the neck pouch fell to the floor with a tumble.

  “I only found out last night. Heintz-Gurt couldn’t know either that she had been thinking about leaving him right now. He was completely crushed—”

  But Doris was for the moment not in the mood for any Heintz-Gurt stories.

  “I’m not starting!” Doris yelled shrilly like a child or a wounded animal. It was disgusting to hear her like that, utterly heart-wrenching. Her face became red, her bottom lip quivered. Doris crumpled down onto the beige wall-to-wall carpet in the narrow hall, legs spread out in each direction, head hanging.

  “I never get to,” Doris whispered while she fought against the tears and the anger slowly growing inside her. Quite simply Damn! Damn all of it! “I nevernevernever get to!” And then, it could not be stopped, the tears came. They gushed forth, in floods. Not ordinary teenager tears either because now they were gushing like springs from Doris Flinkenberg.

  Sandra did not know what she should do. She had never seen Doris Flinkenberg like this before. So pitiful, so helpless, so heartbreaking. A real crybaby, and it affected her badly, it did. It embarrassed her as well, and for a brief moment Sandra did not have any trouble at all holding back the big and happy smile that had been growing inside her in the silence of the previous hours and minutes, the entire morning all the way up till now. Ever since the Islander and Inget Herrman early that same morning had stowed their things in the Islander’s jeep and finally driven off. “Toward unknown adventures!” Inget Herrman had intended and in that moment Sandra had in her own mind truly been able to agree with her. And hopefully prolonged ones, had been her own ill-bred addition in the silence. Don’t talk to me anymore now. She really was not interested in where they were going (they were going to go over the seven seas, as Inget Herrman termed the voyage that would last for weeks, down to Gotland, Öland, and so on. And, one could hope, even farther, Sandra had thought in the cheeky and expectant moment that preceded the Islander and Inget Herrman’s departure that never seemed to happen. Leave now already).

  Because now she would get to be alone in the house in the darker part. Alone with Doris Flinkenberg, for an almost infinite period of time. Two whole weeks, fourteen d-a-y-s. That with Heintz-Gurt and Lorelei Lindberg, the Alps, all of that, it was so peripheral in comparison with this, it had been cast into the back of her head and hidden there long ago.

  So why was Doris carrying on like that now?

  When Sandra witnessed Doris’s outbreak, which did not look like it had an end in sight, she finally could not hold back an indignant yell, “But my God, Doris!” And while she yelled the energy came back, the joy burst in her like a flower blooming. “It’s not that bad! Stop sulking! I’ve had my hands full trying to get rid of the Islander and Inget Herrman anyway! I’ve had to do everything in order to get them and the whole world to understand that we can take care of ourselves! Just the two of us! Here in the house! We aren’t kids anymore!”

  But Doris still was not listening; instead she remained sitting on the floor with both legs spread out, moaning slowly as if she had pain in her body. Or, perhaps, a schizophrenic like Sybil who had seventeen different personalities living side by side in the same body which, to say the least, made life unmanageable; Sandra and Doris had read a really good book about it once. A schizophrenic named Sybil on the border between personalities, different lives; in one of her more incommunicable states in that dark area bordering on insanity and unconsciousness.

  “God damn it!” Sandra clarified, who was starting to grow tired of watching D
oris’s fit. “Don’t you get it? We have the house to ourselves for two weeks! We have your traveling money and we have my traveling money and we have the food account at the store and we have color television and a stereo system with speakers in every room except the bathroom and we have all the comforts! Bar! Swimming pool! Marital bed! And NO ONE who’s looking for us because they think we’re in the Alps!”

  Then, finally, Doris Flinkenberg lifted her head, her fingers still fumbling absentmindedly with her neck pouch, pulled thoughtfully at its strings, and for the last time, maybe for the very last time in Doris’s entire life, scenes where the two girls Sussilull and Sussilo, as they were called in the song, were running over mountains and green valleys, Middle European valleys, and behind them a cheery nun in civilian clothing, with the guitar, had fluttered through Doris’s head.

  The hills are alive with the sound of music. That kind of picture. Which was slowly, slowly growing still now. It froze in the imaginary television screen in her head. Became smaller. And even smaller. Became smaller and smaller and smaller until only a small spot remained. An itty-bitty spot that later, little by little, procreated and became several spots. Spots, spots, spots. Black, gray, marbled. And all of these spots received a life and started moving, dancing eagerly around each other and making noise—one of those irritating noises that you usually heard when the television program was over, after the national anthem. It was a sound you could not be bothered to listen to, it was so irritating. And SNAP you had turned off the set and everything was calm, quiet, and empty again.

  The end of that show. That dream—

  “In shambles,” mumbled Doris Flinkenberg. “That dream in shambles,” she continued a little louder, maybe mostly only for herself. But still, even in her inimitable Dorisway, in her very own Dorislanguage, a language that Sandra recognized also as her own because it had also become hers during the long, remarkable time it had just been the two of them and no one else. A language that they had already been in the process of outgrowing for a long time now in this puberty that had just started and that would never lead them back to a fun childhood where there were their own worlds, many lives, many games and personalities. But just the opposite, out into the real world to become grown-ups like the Islander, the cousin’s mama, Lorelei Lindberg, and the Bombshell. And yes, they all had their good sides, but in the grand scheme of things you still had to say, yuck.

  The language had mostly become something used in a game. But now, in this situation, it was a good sign in any case. Because one thing was certain: Doris never used that language nowadays unless she was a little bit in the mood.

  “But,” she later said, sure enough, brightened up and peered cunningly as only Doris Flinkenberg and no one else could peer, “there are others.”

  And in that next moment she got up terribly quickly, with a new energy in her body, her head high again and smiling at Sandra with the smile that had once been so practiced but that now had become an integrated part of her remarkable person, very genuine: our crafty fiendishness, while you could almost see how her mind was filled with everything she suddenly realized lay ahead of them now.

  All the possibilities.

  And it was the beginning of two weeks with just the two of them in the house in the darker part of the woods. It was a summer when great things happened out in the world. Presidents and regents from all over the world gathered in the city by the sea to sign a historic peace treaty. Now all countries were going to support and help each other instead of fighting with each other and spreading hate and discord among their enemies. Even Anneka Munveg, who was a television news reporter, had a splash of emotion in her otherwise so crass and businesslike voice. But there was something in the mood itself and that it was summer too and quite decent weather. Both presidents from the superpowers shook hands for the first time in an eternity and then grand closing speeches followed and the historic document was signed. At the very end the carts with the white glasses and the strawberries were rolled in. It was a late, sunny summer day, the day when Liz Maalamaa crushed the windowpane in the outside door of the basement and stepped in and stood there among the shards of glass and, she had in a way surprised the girls in the pool, in a dance. In a strange dance of hate/love, of union/discord, and of very real distress and evident despair. The dream was over because true love had ceased to exist. But Liz Maalamaa did not understand that. She stood there and quoted the Bible by heart.

  Then she sighed and said that “it was so hot there in Florida you had to take your inner Turk away.”

  She pronounced Florida as if there were two i’s in it.

  But up until then it did not matter what was going on in other places in the world. Because it was in only one place that everything was taking place, everything of importance, in any case. The ordinary was put out of action. The most important things that happened, and it was of decisive importance, they happened in a rectangle. At the bottom of a swimming pool without water, a pool in a basement with panorama windows facing an almost impenetrable jungle of ferns on the outside, toward the marsh. And of course it was that time of year when all the plants in nature were at their tallest and greenest. It was a jungle that blocked all views while also providing protection from the world outside. From the summer and all of the people in it. All other people. And it was effective. In the beginning no one knew what the girls were doing, or where they were. In the beginning no one knew that the girls had not left on their trip.

  The only thing they were not able to hold their own against were all the insects: bullymosquitoes, supersized rainbow flies, fern ticks. Both green fern ticks that did not tick and ticking ticks. These and other marsh insects forced their way into the house and toward the end of the fourteen days you could see them crawling out of the unused ventilation holes in the pool, also forcing their way through the cracks in the mortar, all the more noticeable cracks. During this time there was a period when it rained a great deal; this period occurred just before the sunshine finally came and lasted a few days during which everything had time to become so porous, so porous.

  But at the same time, it was also the case that both of the girls in the house, Sandra Wärn and Doris Flinkenberg, actually had so many other things to think about than rigging up mosquito nets, swatting with flyswatters made of plastic in every room and floor, and bug spraying.

  These days were, in other words, the world in a rectangle, the world in a small rectangle.

  The pool in the basement in the house in the darker part of the woods: zoom in on that now, for the last time. Because when the Islander and Inget Herrman come home from their cruise which, without either of them needing to say anything at all, you would understand it had not gone like either of them had planned, one of the Islander’s first measures will be to have new, better tiles laid in the pool and allow it to be filled, this for the first time during all the time they had lived in the house in the darker part of the woods. With Inget Herrman, whom she personally had nothing against, pointing out in between gulps of wine, as the “instigating factor.” “Can be done,” said the Islander. “Your word is my command,” he said, with all of the feigned enthusiasm he could muster. So fake that not even he, the Islander, who was no thinker, understood that he was standing on the big glitter scene and performing a terrible number.

  The wear and tear started showing on the Islander. It was clear it had been a long, long time since he was a man in his prime, for example in the snow in Central Europe, on the one side of a white field with a certain house on the other side. That was one thing. But another thing, which might even be creepier, was that it really was not all that long ago, almost eons since that night at the end of the hunting season when Inget Herrman had come to the house in the middle of the night and the Bombshell was disposed of. “Over my dead body is she coming into this house!”: Pinky had stood in the hall while Inget Herrman, recently arrived via a taxi, rang the doorbell without being let in. And Sandra, who had gone out in the night because Inget Herrman had wa
nted to talk with her, and then they had sat in the middle of the stairs up to nothing and talked about the importance of following your own star and realizing your dreams. And while they were talking the Islander had suddenly appeared out of thin air with a tray in his hands; there were drinks on the tray and in the drink glasses there were sparklers or falling stars or whatever they are called. And the sticks had sparkled in the night and in some way, though it was not pretty, though nothing was pretty, it had become just that, the Islander with the tray, the sparklers in the night.

  We’re transformed into gray panthers without us knowing it, Islander. It was rather creepy, if you thought about it. And if it was in other words you and your father who needed a lot of . . . protection . . . because there would, starting now, come so many difficult things. How crazy he was, the Islander, he still had his strange, persistent inimitable power.

  What snow conceals, the sun reveals.

  But was it like that, there were things that had happened you could not shake off? That just continued to come back? And about not being able to hold your ground, had he really not considered that?

  But the summer before everything, the world in a small rectangle, maybe there was a storm when they sailed by certain “cliffs of home,” the Islander and Inget Herrman. He did not look to the side. He still looked straight ahead. Straight, straight ahead.

  . . .

  Well. Everything the girls needed was in the house in the darker part of the woods. In the beginning they did not even need to go to the store to buy food. They ate what was in the refrigerator and they found an entire moose steak in the freezer from the previous year. A large forgotten clump of ice all the way at the bottom. It lasted quite a while, until they could no longer eat the moose steak, and they lived for a while on hard candy, chips, and chocolate.