The American Girl

by Monika Fagerholm

  They went into their own world, with their own games, their own talk and allowed themselves to be devoured by them. Maybe it started as a farewell to childhood. During the year that had passed, especially since the Mystery with the American Girl had been solved and left to its destiny, so many of the old games and stories had not had any meaning for a long time.

  But childhood revisited for a few days: you cannot step down into the same river twice as a Greek philosopher and Inget Herrman used to say. It was not the same thing. It did not become the same thing. It started burning. “If you put your finger in the flame, it burns,” Doris once said to Sandra, as a statement. Now she would get to experience it herself. For real.

  At some point during this time with Sandra in the house in the darker part, in the small rectangle, the swimming pool without water (“Little Bombay?” she started saying, bitterly questioning when they had carried as many silk fabrics as possible down in the basement and built Maharajah’s Palace, moreover one of the last things they did before the sexual awakening, and Sandra had jumped, “no,” she had resisted, then tried to laugh it off, do everything like normal, by saying, “no, still not that now, but almost”), it happened that Doris would remember something she had left at home in the cousin’s house, which she had not taken with her, because when she left the cousin’s house she was on her way out into the world, and which she missed a little bit and got the idea that she needed. Certain music cassettes. Not “Our Love Is a Continental Affair” because even Doris Flinkenberg had finally grown tired of that hit (and it was not a day too soon, thought everyone, even the cousin’s mama, who were tired of hearing her play it over and over again on the Poppy tape player), her book for worship of an idol, her little memory book. All those things she had a habit of dragging around with her. But you can’t return home. That is the price you pay. Everything has a price. You have to pay something.

  But: pay for what? That was what would be cocked and loaded, that was what would no longer be clear, after almost fourteen days with Sandra Wärn and just the two of them in the house in the darker part of the woods.

  The world in a rectangle, small.

  When Doris came back to the cousin’s house she would on the one hand probably be thankful for still having all of these things, which she had not taken with her, up there in her room. But they would have lost their meaning, all the meaning they had ever had in their own contexts. The stories about them would be, if not worthless, then shattered to bits. In shards from the crushed window on the floor in the pool section next to the television that was on but the screen snowed and snowed.

  A red raincoat in a photograph.

  “He came in a white Jaguar—”

  “One thing, Sandra. That telephone number. It doesn’t exist.”

  “Let me tell you something, dear, blessed child. That the mercy God has measured out for just you, it is so great that not a single human being can grasp it with their intellect.”

  The old connections did not exist, the ones that together had formed a world you moved in as a matter of course. Now it was a matter of building new worlds.

  But with whom? Sandra. For alleged reasons they would not be able to be together anymore, though it must be seen.

  Sandra and Doris. They had danced on “the wicked ground,” barefoot (in the pool). The dream had ended because true love had ceased to exist, Nat King Cole was playing on the record player, and it was true even though it was only a song.

  But in other words, in the cousin’s house: Doris would be grateful to have her things anyway. They would be needed to the highest degree, as navigation points. Concrete grounds for recognition that would help her find her way back to the best number of them all on the glitter scene. Doris Flinkenberg, everything is like it always is, everything is normal.

  Robot practice. Walk around the planet without a name.

  Look in control, happy. Bring out the best mood you have.

  Pull up the blackout curtain. Discover Bencku and Magnus and Micke Friberg in the yard.

  Say to the cousin’s mama:

  “I’m going out.”

  “Where?”

  “Out.”

  Drink beer with the boys. It was always a solution. If only temporary.

  The world in a small rectangle, 1. This was how it started. First: they were still themselves. They made the house theirs and took up their old games. For fun, on a small scale. Doris Flinkenberg was Lorelei Lindberg who met Heintz-Gurt at the nightclub the Running Kangaroo, and Sandra played the American girl, to the hilt. “Nobody knew my rose of the world but me.” “I’m a strange bird.” “The heart is a heartless hunter.” She recited this until the words had lost almost all meaning. And Sandra crowed, “Look, Mom, they’ve destroyed . . .” at the top of her lungs and made crazy erhm-movements, exaggerated and obscene, with her body, and Doris could not help but try and crawl in the same way . . . though just for a while. Then they stopped. Grew quiet. Felt ill at ease over the sacrilege.

  Because it was too real, in any case.

  Eddie, she had not lost her magical power over them. And Doris could still playfully, easily in her memory call to mind a certain summer day when she had found the body—or what was left of it—wrapped in a red plastic raincoat that was so whole so whole, completely intact. And there was still so much that was dreadful and unclear about that memory.

  So they let the games be for a while and were just like two ordinary teenage girls: got drunk on what was in the bar, smoked the Islander’s cigarillos, taking deep drags that made both of them throw up. That night both of them fell asleep in the pool among the soft pillows from the rec room’s sofa, which had ended up in the pool again, which they always did when the Islander was not there, when only Doris and Sandra were in the house. And wrapped themselves in fabrics from Maharajah’s Palace. “Little Bombay,” Doris Flinkenberg tried again, but Sandra flinched, she did not catch on. “No, not that.” “Why not?” “Stop pestering.”

  And Doris stopped pestering. Willingly. Since there was something else in the air, had been the whole time. A fragile mood, like a rubber band being stretched, stretched between them. That was the strange thing but also what was in some way most delightful.

  And suddenly Doris seemed to understand that was why they were actually there. That was why there had not been a trip. She thought that Sandra looked at her sometimes, carefully, in hiding. With a new look, or an old one, whatever you wanted to call it. But a look that wanted something from her. That wanted her so much it became shy, looked down or away or just gave way.

  And Doris. She enjoyed it. A memory from one midsummer evening a long time ago floated up more and more often in Doris’s head, but also in Sandra’s, the evening they had started solving the Mystery of the American Girl. Something in the moss, something, which was then aborted. And it was okay like that. But now.

  That was what was lying in between.

  And suddenly, in the middle of a game, Sandra kissed Doris. Or was it Doris who kissed Sandra first? It did not matter. It was beautiful. It was the way it was supposed to be. And they both had the moss inside them, the memory of the moss . . . and when they started kissing nothing—lightning nor thunder—could stop them.

  “No one can kiss like us,” Doris Flinkenberg whispered. Though then it was already after the First Time, with cigarillos and gin and tonics.

  It happened in the middle of a new game, a cat-and-mouse game, their own version of it (it had in other words nothing to do with Rita and Solveig and the others, who broke into the houses on the Second Cape during the fall when the summer guests had left and did what they wanted to there). This was much more innocent, mostly a pastime. A whim, an idea that maybe came about because Sandra and Doris in any case, despite the fact that they enjoyed each other’s company and were probably still themselves, started thinking it was sometimes a bit boring just staying indoors.

  “ ‘The primal scream freed me,’ ” Doris Flinkenberg read out loud from a magazine, an ordinary
women’s magazine, which might have originated from Pinky’s time in the house in the darker part.

  “What is it?” Sandra asked listlessly and Doris explained it was the scream you screamed when you came out of your mother’s belly and many people would feel good by screaming that scream again as adults. It sounded rather vague, so Sandra asked apathetically:

  “When then?”

  “Well, for example,” said Doris, who thought it was important to be able to provide answers to questions in all situations, “if you’re terribly afraid of something it can help you to release it with the primal scream. Face the fear with a scream so to speak.” She added that last part with a tone Sandra had learned meant that she really did not have a clue what she was talking about.

  “That is just . . . crap,” Sandra determined and Doris admittedly agreed with her too, but shortly thereafter Doris Flinkenberg tossed the magazine aside anyway and suggested:

  “Should we do it, then?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about standing on the steps and yelling if that’s what you were thinking. Besides it’s important . . .”

  “. . . that no one sees and hears us so we can be left alone,” Doris filled in.

  “Yes, yes, I know. You’ve said that. We have. But I’m talking about something else. A game. How does that sound?”

  Interesting. It certainly sounded interesting.

  A strange tension already existed between the two of them. There were looks and touching, or fear of touching. The wrong kind of touch. Those who had earlier rolled around all over like two young rabbits now kept themselves at a proper distance from each other, even down in the pool.

  Sandra with her business at one end. Doris at the other.

  “What are you making?”

  “I’m sewing,” Sandra explained, then completely calmly, “glitter clothes for the American girl’s funeral. And the Marsh Queen’s resurrection. It’s almost the same thing.”

  Or did Sandra say that, was it a dream?

  Whatever. All of this was in some way devoted to increasing the tension between them even more.

  “The cat-and-mouse game,” Doris Flinkenberg explained. “But in our own way.

  “The game is called Assignment: Master Fear,” she explained further. “Do you follow? I give you an assignment and you give me an assignment, I decide for you and you decide for me. Since it’s like this, that sometimes, when two people are close, then one sees the other more clearly than she sees herself.

  “So now it’s a matter of us learning how to overcome our greatest fears. And we help each other with that. You give me an assignment and I give you an assignment.”

  “Now I’m telling you,” Doris Flinkenberg started, “you should go straight to Bencku’s barn and get the American girl’s bag with all her things in it and bring it to me. Or to us. Here to the house. As you know, you said it yourself, it’s important that no one sees you.

  “I know you’re afraid of going in there. Now go there and do it. Understand?”

  Sandra nodded. Yes. She understood. And the game itself. And suddenly, cold shivers ran down her spine, she not only understood but was also even very interested.

  “And now I’m saying to you that you go to Solveig and Rita’s cottage and get their pistol. The one you are always talking about, that inheritance. It’s not the fact that you talk about the pistol, but always when you talk about Rita and Solveig in the cottage you become so very strange. Or not always. But pretty often.”

  And the strange thing was it had an effect on Doris.

  “How do you know that?” Doris asked quickly, as if she had been unmasked.

  “Well. The game starts now. How much time do we have? Half a day?”

  And Sandra and Doris carried out their assignments. Sandra shot through the woods to the cousin’s property, she took the long way, which went past the moss where she and Doris had kissed each other for the first time a long time ago. She had butterflies in her stomach, and no, she was not at all scared, not nervous. Not to go into Bencku’s barn anyway. She knew he was gone. He was gone the whole summer. He had said that to her when she came to him the last time, late in the spring, in May. He was going to live with Magnus von B. in an apartment in the city by the sea.

  Sandra out of habit, and without thinking, took the key from its hiding place and opened the trapdoor in the floor and took what she needed, and then shot back through the woods, carefully so no one would see or hear.

  And Doris came back with the pistol.

  “It was so easy. No one was there.”

  “Did anyone see you?”

  “No.”

  “Did anyone see you?”

  “No. At least I don’t think so.”

  “Are we less afraid, then?”

  “Maybe.” “Maybe.”

  They were down in the pool and both started laughing at the same time.

  And Doris, on all fours, had crawled over to Sandra who was sitting at the other end of the pool.

  The world in a small rectangle, 2. The first time. Doris, in the swimming pool. “Be quiet, be quiet,” because Sandra was still laughing.

  “And now I’m not the American girl. Now I’m myself.”

  And then Doris kissed Sandra. And it was NOT factor X or anyone else who was doing the kissing. It was Doris Flinkenberg who kissed Sandra Wärn and Sandra Wärn who kissed back. And Doris remembered the moss, the soft green moss, and Sandra remembered the moss and . . .

  No one can kiss like us. Definitely not. But it was serious. And one thing led to another. And then they traveled inside each other in Maharajah’s Palace, which they had built for themselves out of the fabrics and pillows on the bottom of the swimming pool. And moved, two bodies tightly wound around and over each other, on the soft, beautiful ground.

  And lightning and thunder could be seen in the television at the edge of the pool, and it was storming.

  The soft, beautiful ground.

  Follow-up discussion. “. . . as if I’ve had dykes in the family going back generation after generation.” Doris Flinkenberg sighed happily.

  It was afterward, when Sandra had gotten a tray on which she laid out cigarillos and gin and tonics. And they sat naked and smoked, inhaled so their eyes watered and it swirled in their heads, their naked bodies in silhouette in the half darkness, glowing cigarettes, glasses steamy with damp in which the ice clinked.

  “You know what?” Sandra held out her glass in order to clink glasses with Doris’s glass, clink. “I’ve never seduced anyone before.”

  Sandra, playful.

  Doris herself: she had no desire to talk or investigate anything at all. She said nothing. She curled up like a happy good-for-nothing as close to Sandra’s body as she could come.

  And someone turned on the television. That night, the night after they had been together the first time, they watched television down in the pool without water, where they had dragged mattresses and covers and so on. “A LOVE NEST,” Doris Flinkenberg said maybe a few too many times, for once, thought Sandra. “Don’t talk so much.”

  Words. Too many words. That night there was a strange film on television. The film was about a spaceship or something similar, whatever something like that could be called, that was traveling around in a human being’s body. As if the body were space, or a foreign solar system. Traveling through veins, these yes, could you call them astronauts?

  Doris did not know. She did not follow the plot. She would not remember a bit of the story afterward. But she would remember the red, the violet, and all the warmth, the warmth of the images, which were emphasized by the fact that the color television was set on too much red and poor contrast so everything fused together in some way. Doris would also remember the pounding heart . . . which the astronauts, or whatever they were called, were afraid of being sucked up into . . . or however it actually was . . . she would not know . . . she would not have A CLUE because she would lie there like a happy fool, a blessed fifteen-hundred-caliber lover.

  T
ightly pressed against her loved one’s chest.

  Against Sandra’s body, which was warm, almost hot, and smelled keenly of sweat.

  AND what was it that the fabrics smelled like? “Maharajah’s Palace,” Sandra had said. “No, Little Bombay,” Doris had said, but she would not repeat it now because Sandra would become upset. Little Bombay, now. Now, thought Doris, which you do when you are stupid and in love and think you are invincible, now I’m starting to understand what it’s about.

  The astronauts in the Blood Woods.

  In the aorta, the planet’s pulsating guts.

  Allowed herself to go to sleep. A hand on Sandra’s stomach.

  “When you told me we weren’t going to answer the telephone because you didn’t want the cousin’s mama or anyone else to come and take me away from you, then I understood,” Doris Flinkenberg squeaked.

  “Shh,” Sandra whispered absently from where she was in the middle of the film.

  And with this shh Doris understood that the time for pillow talk was over. But it did not matter. Talk. All this talk. In reality she was tired of it as well. She was tired too, happily tired and exhausted.

  The sexual awakening.

  From the Blood Woods the astronauts traveled in toward a heart that was very dark and red.

  The world in a small rectangle 3. Rain. Days passed. The moose steak had been finished. The girls ate hard candy and chocolate and chips. It started raining. The rain made everything damp. At first it was a pleasant dampness because the period behind them had undeniably been too warm and dry. But the damp started forcing its way into the pool too, and it was not as pleasant. And with the chill and the damp came the hunger, the real one, the Dorishunger.