‘Have your habits changed at all during this time?’ the doctor asks him. ‘Are you eating differently, for example, or have you started using a new type of soap or any other skin products?’
Agnar looks at me. I shake my head. He shakes his head.
‘No new environments or anything else that might have caused you more stress than usual?’
Agnar looks away.
At the end of October, the cold finally sets in. All of a sudden it is as if autumn is in a hurry to catch up with itself: the trees change colour, the leaves wither, and the branches become bare in the space of just a few weeks. At the beginning of November, we wake to frost coating our lawn and windscreen.
I felt certain I was waiting for autumn to come, waiting for normality to set in, but neither the darkness, the cold nor the frost do anything to banish the chaos. Olaf gets on my nerves more and more each day, and I know it’s unfair; I can’t decide if it’s him who’s changed or my feelings for him, but either way I’m seeing him in a new light.
Olaf and I met in our early twenties, and it’s embarrassing, but neither of us remembers where we met for the first time. We just gradually became part of the same circle of friends. I noticed you, of course, Olaf remarked after the fact, but that’s just something he says to be nice, I don’t think he noticed me any more than I noticed him, not until I fell virtually head-over-heels in love with him practically overnight, and quite out of the blue. The worst and least predictable months of my life were to follow, brutal and out of control. I hate being in love, I told my friends, and they said yes, the best and worst feeling there is, and I thought no, actually, just the worst. And even though I felt that being in love seemed to light me up from within, making me all too obvious, almost as if I were standing there waving directly at him, it took a long time for Olaf to see the signs. You never said, he commented afterwards, how could I have known? It was three months before we got together, and that awful sense of freefall gradually morphed into the opposite, the fantastic feeling that I had solid ground beneath my feet.
We got married eleven years ago. We’d already had Agnar by that point, and our lives were so entwined, so mutually dependent, that Mum thought it superfluous for us to marry at all, at least any more formally than on paper. She and Dad laughed when I told them we were planning a church ceremony. Olaf would have been perfectly happy with a civil ceremony in City Hall with a party to follow, but I wanted that framework, as I put it at the time, the framework of church and priest. Now I’m uncertain why that was so important to me, but it seemed more real doing things that way, as if we were making a promise to one another, as if it were worth more if we made it under the gaze of a priest – even though neither Olaf nor I are the slightest bit religious. And I meant what I said with a passion: I promise to love and honour you, and I will be faithful to you until death do us part, and most likely far beyond that if you should die before me. It didn’t seem difficult, there were no alternatives.
Even so, early on in the relationship we agreed on a few fundamental conditions that we’ve lived up to ever since, such as the fact that there could be no threats of leaving whenever we had an argument, no notion of walking out whenever things felt hopeless. I’d done that kind of thing previously, back when I was afraid that he would leave me, I’d beat him to it and threaten him with the idea that I couldn’t take any more. We agreed that any threats to break things off would no longer be allowed to creep into our arguments, something we’ve both stuck to for the most part, and with that the notion itself has grown more obscure, not something to grasp at or console oneself with.
Nowadays that seems very naïve. The knowledge that there is always a way out has been writ large on the walls in my life, and most likely also those in Olaf’s, since our arguments end increasingly quickly and increasingly more often with an unspoken, threatening undertone of if not, then dot dot dot.
The worst part is that the only person I have any desire to talk to about this new feeling is Mum. I want her to tell me about the importance of refusing to give up on something, just as she’s done all through my life; in every phase, Mum has been the one to convey the significance of not giving up on something you’ve started, of making good choices and standing strong, whether through words or actions or a meaningful look. It’s something I’ve passed on to my own children. We don’t give up. We don’t stop. We pull ourselves together and we stick at things.
Dad’s car turns into our driveway late one afternoon. He called yesterday to ask if he could pick up Hedda early from nursery, maybe take her out to a café or somewhere else she might enjoy. I didn’t have the heart to refuse him, and a quiet afternoon to myself was a tempting prospect. Agnar has gone to a friend’s house for a gaming session, something he’s obviously been permitted to do by Olaf in spite of the rules that computer gaming is a weekend activity, and Olaf is out at a meeting.
I stand at the kitchen worktop and watch Dad as he parks the car. He remains inside for a few moments, chatting to Hedda, laughing at something, I can just about make out Hedda’s curls around the edges of the car seat that he and Mum bought when she was born.
He gets out, walks around the car and crouches down beside Hedda’s door. She cranes her neck, looking for him. He can’t bring himself to wait long enough for her to genuinely begin to wonder where he’s disappeared to, and instead leaps up at her window all of a sudden. She jumps at first, then dissolves in such a fit of giggles that I’m sure she must have wet herself. I see her shouting, ‘Again! Again!’ as he opens the door and reaches in to unbuckle her, and he closes the door and crouches down once more, this time creeping around the car and surprising her on the other side. Hedda cries out with delight. Dad laughs, opens the door and lifts her up out of her seat, carrying her across the gravel driveway in one arm. Neither of them has spotted me, and I realise I’m standing there with a smile on my face. I shake my head, go into the living room and wait for them to let themselves in.
‘Hello,’ Dad calls from the hallway.
‘Hello,’ Hedda shouts.
I go out to meet them. I stop in the doorway, blocking the way into the living room and kitchen, but luckily Dad hasn’t had a chance to take off his shoes. I try to keep my interactions with him and Mum as brief as possible, want to show them that I’m engaging with them for the sake of the children, but that I don’t want them close to me. I want to show them that things have changed. We only ever talk about Agnar and Hedda or other practical matters. On those few occasions that one of them has tried initiating a conversation either about themselves or about the other – or about me, for that matter – I’ve shut it down. I feel too tentative to trust myself in a conversation of that nature, can’t tell if it would coax out my anger, my sympathy or my grief, and I have no desire to expose any of those sides of myself.
‘Hey there, Heddy,’ I say, bending down to accept a hug from her. Her hair smells of coffee. ‘Have you been to a café?’
She nods and runs into the living room.
‘Aren’t you going to say bye to Grandad?’ I ask her.
‘But he’s coming in,’ Hedda replies.
I don’t look at Dad.
‘No, Grandad’s going home now. Come and say goodbye,’ I say, looking only at Hedda, smiling, my arm outstretched towards her.
Fortunately, she doesn’t throw a tantrum, returning to the hallway instead. Dad crouches down and wraps his arms around her, and she almost disappears in his embrace as he hugs her tight.
‘Thank you for coming out with me, Hedda,’ he says as she wriggles free.
She disappears off into the kitchen and I’m left standing there alone with Dad. I swallow. He looks old.
‘Well, I should be off home, I’ve got some work to do,’ he says, my conscience searing within me.
‘Yes, I’m working on something too,’ I lie.
‘I’d be happy to take Hedda again one day next week,’ he says. ‘Or maybe Agnar, we could go out for pizza or something like that.’
‘I’m at the office on Monday and Tuesday, but I’m free other than that,’ Dad says, and turns to leave, making his way down the front steps. ‘It was nice to see you too,’ he adds, smiling.
‘Thanks for picking Hedda up today,’ I say. ‘Bye.’
I spend a lot of time contemplating memories. I feel the need to call Håkon and Ellen at least three times a day, both of whom I still haven’t spoken to about anything other than the utmost superficial matters, just to have my suspicions confirmed or denied in terms of how I remember things. In my mind’s eye I scrutinise Mum and Dad’s facial expressions, their gestures, their glances and turns of phrase, searching for signs of how unhappy they were, seeking out some sort of foreshadowing of things to come.
I find precisely what I’m looking for every single time. Memories are suddenly no longer tinged with a naïve ignorance and sense of trust, emerging instead with clearly defined contours. Christmases, summer holidays, Sunday dinners, conversations, debates – fresh details, expressions and intonations that I had never previously picked up on surface in my mind.
They’ve never been particularly affectionate with one another, Ellen said when she joined me in the kitchen after Dad’s birthday meal in Italy, passing me a piece of kitchen roll. I wiped my nose and face, embarrassed at the fact I had broken down like a small child. What do you mean? I asked her. Just that, she said, I don’t ever remember them being particularly affectionate with one another, only ever with us. That’s not true, Ellen, I said. You ought to know better than anyone just how much love there was in their conversations, how much trust they share as partners in any discussion, plus the fact that they still have so much to discuss, the way they feel that there’s something at stake when they speak their mind – and how much trust they share as a result of the fact that they continue to make demands of one another. Don’t you see that? I asked, and my voice approached falsetto levels in the realisation that everything that was suddenly so clear to me was no longer relevant in the slightest. Or what about all the small things they remember to do for one another, all the practical things – Mum always leaving a little cup of warm milk out for Dad in the morning, Dad putting the radiator on in Mum’s car before he leaves for work, the books she takes him, the sudoku he saves for her, all the love that exists in the routines and habits they’ve formed and continued over the years, I said. Ellen said nothing, looking down at the floor. She doesn’t know, I suddenly thought to myself. She doesn’t understand, she’s never experienced it for herself. For her, gestures have to be grand and physical, declarations steeped in emotion. In the numerous brief relationships that she’s had, she hasn’t experienced anything other than the highest highs and the lowest lows, and my God, how I’ve envied her, resenting the endless passionate drama, but I’ve never reflected on what she might be missing, all of the meaningful things that lie somewhere in between.
I don’t know why the memory of one summer distinguishes itself so clearly from the memory of all the other summers that seamlessly glide together in my mind, the most fleeting of moments that prove impossible to date. It no doubt stems from the drama that arose when Ellen wanted to rescue the crabs from the giant pot over the open fire outside. I can clearly picture her coming around the corner just as Dad tipped the red bucket of crabs into the pot. The way she ran towards him to knock the bucket out of his hands, and his instinctive leap back out of the way, and Ellen, her small frame emboldened with a force that had anticipated the resistance of Dad’s body unexpectedly coming up against the scorching pot, arms outstretched. The pot overturned, and the half-dead crabs poured out with the water, the littlest ones too stunned to move while the largest scuttled off in every direction, red and steaming.
I watched from the veranda bannister where I had perched myself; I always found it exciting and endlessly fascinating to see the crabs being cooked, and Dad promised that they didn’t feel any pain, something I was content to believe since they tasted so delicious, but Ellen was less willing to accept this claim. You don’t know that, she replied to Dad’s overly simple explanation of the cabin activities she declared to be animal cruelty; she challenged him on the cooking of live shellfish, the use of the maggots that wriggled on the ends of hooks as bait, the catching of fish that gasped in the bottom of the boat and the killing of flies using sticky paper hanging in the cabin porch.
Ellen suffered a few superficial burns, but otherwise got away lightly. I can remember running to fetch Mum while Dad checked her over, but she was already on her way out after having watched the scene unfold through the window. Lately I’ve also remembered the atmosphere that followed, the discussion that played out between Mum and Dad after Ellen and I had turned in for the night in the room next door to the living room, where they were still sitting at the dining table with our uncle and aunt. I suddenly recall the entire conversation word for word. It was pure instinct, Dad said about the way he had stepped out of the way. Your instinct should have been to protect your daughter against thirty litres of boiling water, Mum said. Now you’re being unfair, Dad replied. But I’m forgetting that you’re infallible, of course. I think we ought to continue this conversation in the morning when everyone has calmed down a bit, my uncle or aunt chipped in, the most important thing is that everything was alright in the end. Dad replied that he was very happy to have the conversation there and then, if that’s what Mum wanted, given that there was nothing she could be called to account for. There was something unusual and unpleasant about the way he said it, and that feeling returns to me now, my own uncomfortable realisation that something was concealed beneath it all, the way Mum got up to leave without a word, and my uncle telling Dad that he ought to go and get some rest too. I’ll wait until she’s gone to sleep, Dad said. I can’t remember anything from the following day, can’t place that summer on a timeline, but Ellen was about eleven at the time.
I’ve obviously thought about Mum and Dad’s relationship before, since becoming an adult, but I haven’t succeeded in shaking off my childish outlook until now. I’ve recognised that they’ve had problems, some that I can remember, others less well defined, but I’ve always seen the way they’ve stuck together all through my life, their relationship a fixed variable. How can I have continued to think that way as an adult, when I recognise all the phases that Olaf and I have already been through ourselves? Everything that has ever driven us onwards, every external force that has affected us, every internal shift, everything we’ve created, Agnar and Hedda – everything that has left its mark on us, events that have divided the past into episodes and taken us in new directions when viewed with hindsight, onwards, backwards, up and down. From a rational perspective, I’ve obviously acknowledged their marriage as something greater than and independent of the framework that it has provided for me, for Ellen and Håkon, and occasionally I’ve marvelled at their way with one another in daily life. On other occasions I’ve felt frustrated by it, but the power of this dawning realisation suggests that I’ve either chosen not to care, or that I’ve failed to penetrate even slightly below the surface.
Agnar asked a few days ago what we’d be doing at Christmas, who’d be celebrating where, unleashing a landslide of more or less coherent recollections of previous Christmases. I lingered on one from Christmas three years ago, when I had stepped into the living room at three o’clock in the morning to find Dad sitting alone in his armchair with a glass of wine in his hand, listening to music. I had forgotten how strained that Christmas had felt, the way nobody had really managed to get into the Christmas spirit, how conversations had faltered and any sense of sincerity had been sorely lacking. I had blamed Ellen, I can’t even remember why, maybe she’d just broken up with a boyfriend and was being fractious or keeping herself to herself, as she was prone to, no desire to pull herself together for anyone else’s sake. Now I look back on i
t, it’s obvious that it all had much more to do with Mum and Dad – the details emerge more clearly to me now, the discussion they had in the kitchen about something trivial, a dish for the sauerkraut, and Dad’s distant, almost resigned tone, as if he were holding the conversation on autopilot, paired with Mum’s silent disdain during the meal when it became apparent that the sauerkraut had been tainted by the flavour of the casserole dish she hadn’t wanted him to use in the first place. That had lasted for the remainder of the holiday; Håkon made no input whatsoever, Ellen was grumpy, and Olaf and I did our best to lift everyone’s spirits for the children’s sake. During the obligatory moments spent together, there was friction and unease, so inexplicable at the time. I remember it being the first time I’d ever felt glad when the daily routine kicked back into action once again in January.
Agnar’s question about Christmas inspired me to send a message to Ellen and Håkon. Fancy a beer? I asked them, after drafting what must have been at least twenty different attempts in my notes app before deleting them all, one by one.
Ellen, Håkon and I meet in a café in Tøyen one cold night in November. We woke that day to the news that Donald Trump had been elected as the new President of the United States, and that ought to make our reunion simpler, having something concrete to talk about, I think to myself on the bus. Days like this are good for seeking out difficult social situations; I picture all the meetings or dates or hospital visits where the topic of conversation is a given, something simple and extraneous, far removed from our own lives and anything that might otherwise prove difficult to discuss.
A Modern Family Page 12