But then Solveig who had a highly developed sense of justice immediately became really irritated.
“As far as I’m concerned we still have everyman’s right in this country.”
“Well then, the public beach is HERE,” Miss Andrews grunted happily in response. “Then I’ve come to the right place after all.”
And that was how it started.
Our godmother. Miss Andrews. She said she loved water and water games but she couldn’t swim. Would we have anything against teaching her? In return she would teach us what she knew and that was a lot, for example the English language. With Oxford pronunciation, besides.
“You must understand, girls,” said Miss Andrews where she was standing in her bathrobe and her comfortable wooden sandals, “I am the only one here who speaks proper English.”
And, good God! How that sounded in the silence of the marsh. It sounded exotic. It sounded crazy.
And how us girls stared at her and didn’t know if we should laugh or be impressed. On the other hand, it was though a moose had called in the woods out of laughter, on the other hand the situation was simultaneously so tender, so devout. Miss Andrews was also a person who obviously wanted something from us, just us.
“What’s that?” Solveig blurted out in the typical District dialect she rarely spoke otherwise.
“Now it is I in turn who has difficulty with my hearing.” Miss Andrews tilted her head to the side and peered, eyes filled with humor.
“She says,” I said full of laughter because we used the district dialect for fun, “that now she doesn’t understand anything at all.”
“In other words it means,” said Miss Andrews, “that I am the only one here who speaks proper English. Though soon I do not need to be.” And blinked. “If you want to, that is.
“The language of the future,” Miss Andrews yelled and threw off her clothes. Seconds later she was standing in front of us on the beach cliff in an old-lady bra and enormous underwear.
“Come,” she called to us and slapped her thigh. “Hop in the water.”
And then—we didn’t believe our eyes—she threw off her bra, jumped out of the enormous underwear don’t you say underswear here in the District, and ran stark naked into the water with a scream that echoed wildly in the nature surrounding the marsh where also other eyes might be watching.
In the water with Miss Andrews. And Solveig after. And me. And then we splashed around along the water’s edge and tried to methodically structure the teaching assignment we now had on hand.
“Tomorrow,” said Miss Andrews when she left with the red towel in a turban on her head, “there will be a lesson again.”
We understood right away of course that she was partly bananas. But it didn’t matter. Besides, we were rather easily amused, Solveig and I. It wasn’t every day that strange ladies showed up and wanted something in particular from you. We liked her. To put it mildly. Things would get worse in that respect. Unfortunately.
Cat is running after mouse. Mouse is running round the house.
And we studied. And giggle giggle giggle and giggle. The next morning she was back again. And the next. We carried on like that for some time and everything was good.
“And so, girls, conversation.”
“And so, girls, hop in the water.”
Miss Andrews. We taught her the breaststroke, freestyle, and the butterfly, in any case the basics and for the most part on dry land. It became so messy in the water; when it was a matter of being in the water it turned out Miss Andrews had a hard time putting what she called “theory” into any kind of practice whatsoever.
She probably didn’t try very hard either.
“The current is taking me,” she joked. And up and showing her breasts.
But still, you could remember Miss Andrews this way when she was at her best:
“This is probably a hopeless undertaking, kids,” Miss Andrews called to us from the water when she, oblivious to the learning process, was gesticulating wildly with her arms and legs and her naked butt stupidly popping up piggypaddle above the surface of the water between strokes. Miss Andrews insisted on swimming in the nude due to eurythmic principles.
As I said. It was crazy, she was crazy. But we were loyal to her, very loyal.
We got our own life. It was a life that spoke against so much of the life that existed in the cousin’s house or in the District at all. It was meaningful. Too meaningful to be revealed to any outsider.
So she didn’t exactly need to ask us not to tell anyone about her existence, it was for a time our most important secret.
“Seize the day,” she also said. “You can do what you want.”
She taught us we could break boundaries and do what we wanted. Anything.
And she told us, in English, about Ponderosa, that ranch where you and the others who were her nieces lived, her real goddaughters, she said. She spoke about her nieces, about you and Inget and Eddie, like a story, with that perfect Oxford pronunciation, and we listened, but actually not as devotedly as she maybe thought. I mean America, Ponderosa, it didn’t mean anything to us. But maybe we were also a little jealous of you already back then.
It was completely clear that you, the real goddaughters and nieces, you beat us by horse lengths, we didn’t doubt that.
“We didn’t live on any ranch, Rita,” Kenny filled in then. “Good God, Rita, how that woman could make things up. She just had a lot of ideas about us, from the beginning I mean. Her ideas, in other words. She was so filled with them that she didn’t want to see. Well, keep telling now, I want to hear it to the end. Though I think that I know—”
But then later, Rita continued, it started going wrong. It started with us seeing her in the Glass House and we understood who she was. That she was the baroness. From the Glass House. That damned house. One of the Second Cape’s very finest.
“She’s tricked us,” Solveig said when we saw her there where we were in the garden. “Has she Rita?”
“No,” I said. “She just didn’t want to tell us. Not yet. It’s a game.”
And the stupid thing was that, even though we knew, expectations were stirred in both of us so to speak. In other words that was when we started expecting things from Miss Andrews. Expected for example that she would invite us to the Glass House. Or reveal herself. Confess. We didn’t know, but it hung in the air. Though Miss Andrews didn’t notice anything. Maybe we even started imagining that was the whole idea of the game. That she would take us, show us—yes, shit. Who knows. The frog who becomes a prince, all of that.
“Welcome girls, to my lovely garden.”
Her marvelous garden. That she would greet us there.
Then I made a mistake. It was one time not so long after. I ventured to say to Miss Andrews that Solveig and I knew something. That we knew that Miss Andrews wasn’t really Miss Andrews. That it was a game. I said it like that, so to speak half seriously, as if I wanted Miss Andrews to understand that Solveig and I were rather clever children.
That in other words Miss Andrews could be proud over having chosen such clever children for her friends. “My godchildren,” as Miss Andrews used to say.
So I continued talking and my intention was to invite Miss Andrews to go a step farther in this mutual confidence. It wasn’t like that. Of course. Miss Andrews may have understood, maybe even more than calculated. But what happened? Well, she lost her head completely.
What did the girls think of themselves? It wasn’t something she said out loud but it was certainly the essence of it all. She became so angry, angrier than we had ever seen her, ever been able to imagine her being.
The blood drained from her excited face, her lips turned white and quivered with indignation. Miss Andrews wrapped herself in her bathrobe and said with a tense voice that she had certainly not understood it was two ordinary snoops she had been dealing with the whole time.
Those words, how they fell out of the sky. They would never be forgotten.
And if she had known
that, Miss Andrews continued just as tensely, while her hands impetuously tied the red towel in a turban on her head, and put her feet in her comfortable sandals—the ones she went on and on about how “feet friendly” they were (she was the only one in the whole world who wore real wooden clogs in the woods)—it wasn’t at all certain that the trade between them had existed at all.
“You understand of course,” she said finally, “that it was built on a trust that has now been forfeited.”
And then she marched away, in the woods. We stood and stared at her back, how she disappeared among the bushes and the trees.
And we regretted it SO.
But what did the girls think of themselves, really?
And swish, like a suction in the water in the middle of the marsh, we were sucked down, how should I put it, but “figuratively” speaking, down, down into nothing.
Here we would be, by the muddy beaches—
“Welcome girls, to my lovely garden.”
“Welcome girls, to my lovely garden.”
Well. That would never happen.
And we certainly understood then finally how truly crazy Miss Andrews was—but it didn’t mean anything. We were convinced it was the last time we would see a trace of Miss Andrews and it was terrible. The door to the garden had been pulled shut right in front of our noses even, once and for all, and besides it was nobody else’s fault but our own.
“Look at what you’ve done now!” Solveig said to me, but weakly, where we stood alone by the marsh in our bathrobes because it was really so terribly cold this morning. And alone. Damned. Alone. Of course Solveig understood that she was just as much to blame. I had just been more precocious. With words. Like always. And we, we were two of course.
I said nothing.
The mosquitoes bit. Damn, actually. God, God damn.
But consequently there was no point in standing below the Glass House and looking up at the Winter Garden and imagining something marvelous would happen.
We didn’t talk about it, but maybe it became a watershed between us, me and Solveig, in some way, I don’t know.
Maybe Miss Andrews regretted it. I don’t know. Because she came back. Already two days later. Then she was extra nice, had presents for us. New bathing suits. One blue, one green.
And everything was delightful again. But still. Not at all. Solveig put on the new suit and jumped in extra-high spirits around on the beach and then she took Miss Andrews with her far out into the water and tried to get her to do the freestyle back to land. It was almost a disaster. Both of us had to work to save Miss Andrews again.
“You should receive a lifeguard medal, girls. There’s a strong current out there.”
“We’ve noticed that. It’s just a matter of being able to handle it. You have to have swimming experience. If you have that then you can manage. It’s not that hard,” said Solveig.
She said to me later that in the water with Miss Andrews then she had noticed Miss Andrews really was as good a swimmer as the next person, she had just been silly and pretended. Everything with the trade, it was a game.
Miss Andrews showed up one day and you could tell something had happened. She informed us grandly that she was going to travel, the location was so to speak implied . . . because when she came back she might have her own little niece with her. Next year. It was at the end of the summer, in other words, already then.
“I hope to see you again, girls,” said Miss Andrews. “I have namely become very attached to your company. Same place, same time. I mean in the morning, here at the marsh, next year again. Shall we agree on that?”
We answered yes, of course. She was so silly that you still couldn’t keep from liking her. In any case just a little. But something had changed after her rage. Consequently not just with our dreams, but between us, Solveig and me on the one hand, and Miss Andrews on the other. We didn’t really trust her anymore.
Not in the obvious way, anyway.
And besides, she had effectively gotten us to stop hoping for something new, something different, something amazing.
And then we also started thinking about that, think if Miss Andrews had known someone was spying in the bushes, and maybe that was why she was carrying on clowning about so, demonstrating her “eurythmic principles.” That maybe she didn’t have anything against standing there like that in his field of vision and in that case all of it was REALLY sick.
Miss Andrews jumping on one leg on the cliff. Just another fleshy tantadara instead of the Queen of the Winter Garden we had painted for ourselves. Miss Andrews, who taught us the world was large and open and that you could walk out in it.
“Seize the day, girls.”
•••
“Yes, girls,” Miss Andrews said at last. “It sounds like you will not be rid of me next year either. Don’t mention it.”
Miss Andrews bowed and curtsied on the beach.
“Don’t mention it. It’s fine with me. YOU are some of the funniest things I’ve experienced. In my life.”
And then it was the next year, that was the year Eddie came and Eddie died. Drowned, sucked up into the marsh. And now I’m going to tell you right away. Kenny. That we saw it. That it was us.
But wait a minute, I’m going to finish telling the story. How it was. Well so. Summer and Miss Andrews again. She came early that year, already in June, and she had that girl with her. The “niece,” in other words, whom she had talked so much about but you could see right away that everything was wrong. If we had been cheated out of our dreams then it was nothing compared to what Miss Andrews had been cheated out of. It really wasn’t a “bright” girl from, one more of Miss Andrews’s favorite sayings, “the great outdoors.”
Eddie de Wire. The American girl. This was one of those real teenage girls, of the worst kind. She didn’t come down to the beach either, just sat extremely reluctantly—you could see that at a distance also—there on Lore Cliff across from the bay with the small clump of reeds where we were swimming. And watched us. Listlessly, in other words. Swatted at mosquitoes and lit a match. When she did that Miss Andrews called to her, her face was unusually sweaty and she couldn’t concentrate on the swimming at all, glancing up all the time, with anger and irritation, but it was also, we understood later, that she was scared—well in any case when Eddie on the cliff lit that match Miss Andrews called to her, saying that the first thing she did in the morning didn’t need to be smoking a cigarette.
Then the girl called back that it was a match she lit, not a cigarette, because of the damned mosquitoes, fire was a way of getting rid of them, they were everywhere of course. The girl didn’t look at us at all.
And when she spoke the very first times, she certainly spoke Swedish, but she had a funny accent. She would lose the accent pretty quickly, surprisingly quickly, later, with Björn. And Bengt. They were together of course, the three of them. Well that’s a pretty ménage à trois or whatever it’s called, she could have said that, Miss Andrews, before, but it was as though she wasn’t inclined to hold that kind of exposition any longer.
Miss Andrews just snorted at Eddie and put on her swimsuit and now we swam a little, but nothing really became of that either because it was rather difficult to concentrate. She sat there on the cliff and lit matches, which she threw in the water, lit and threw. And suddenly we were freezing. We almost never froze but now we did and suddenly all the energy and desire had left all three of us, and then we just sat on the beach for a while and felt like we were being watched. It was time for a little English. But with the girl there, it was too idiotic.
And Miss damned Andrews quoted for us from her favorite quotations. Pico della Mirandola.
“This, girls,” she said, “is Pico della Mirandola: ‘I have placed you in the center of creation so that you will be able to plainly see and judge all that exists in the world. You are neither of heaven or earth, neither immortal nor mortal, but are your own sculptor, freely and nobly fashioning yourself as you would like to be.’
�
��What is he saying, girls?
“He says,” Miss Andrews continued absentmindedly “that it is possible to make up your own life.
“But note carefully, girls, he says famously, ‘One must live one’s life with style.’ And that is what so many people misunderstand. One thinks that style is how things look, or something that exclusively has to do with aesthetics. One can separate . . .”
And point point point. Because then Miss Andrews got going. The girl on the cliff across from them. Suddenly she was gone.
“I must go. She cannot be left alone . . .”
And we sat there alone, Solveig and I, at the marsh. It could have been rather comical, but it wasn’t at all, not in light of what happened later.
Consequently Miss Andrews didn’t come to the marsh very often that summer and when she showed up nothing was like before. There was rarely any swimming, mostly talking. Sometimes she didn’t even get undressed. I mean, the bathrobe. She had entirely stopped swimming in the nude. All of that, the eurythmic principles, belonged to another time.
And one thing and the other was said, but nothing memorable. She didn’t have the peace to concentrate on the English. Sometimes she just came to be sitting there on a rock while the words flooded out of her.
I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. Later came to understand that it was what it was: a person in dire need. Eddie was in the process of taking the spirit out of her.
“That girl is such a disappointment to me,” she said once, but to the cousin’s mama, not to us. That was during the very last time when she suddenly showed up at the cousin’s house because she wanted to “warn” the cousin’s mama about Eddie, “the American girl,” she used that nickname willingly too, which she hadn’t done earlier. Then Björn and Eddie were already in full swing of course. And Bengt and Eddie.
And maybe we also would have thought then, Solveig and I, when she came to the cousin’s house, that we felt for her, but she didn’t tell us who she really was this time either. As the one she was, with us. Miss Andrews, in other words.
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