A Modern Family

by Helga Flatland

  I check my phone for the first time today as I listen in on Simen’s conversation. I open up Facebook and an ad for a private fertility clinic pops up on my newsfeed out of the blue. I hear a rushing in my ears and feel pressure building in my chest before closing the app and putting my phone away again. I hear Simen confirm that we’re still coming on Sunday before he ends the call. I can’t recall us being invited anywhere on Sunday, but then Simen’s we might be a different we than the two of us, him and me. I close my eyes and pretend to be sleeping when I hear his footsteps approaching the bedroom. I hear him pause in the doorway, try to imagine what he looks like, but I can’t do it, can’t envisage his features, I don’t know him. It strikes me how distant we are, and how strongly I’m clutching on to something I can no longer justify. He and I are no longer we, but instead two separate parts, unable to work together.

  He knocks gently at the open door. I open my eyes.

  ‘Are you sleeping?’ he asks.

  He’s changed into the grey jogging bottoms that I’d pulled on earlier today, along with a white t-shirt. The curly hair I’ve always hoped our child would inherit sticks out from beneath a red cap. Suddenly he looks like a small child. I shake my head, sit up in bed. He sits on the edge of the bed and I pull my legs up to make room for him. I don’t know if he interprets it as a rejection or something more positive, but he sighs. He looks down at the floor, then up again at me.

  I hope he’s going to break up with me, inwardly I pray that he’s about to tell me that he can’t do this any more, that he’s leaving me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I was pathetic this morning, I don’t even know what happened, I just had this sudden sense of claustrophobia, like some kind of attack.’

  I look at him. Don’t know what to say.

  ‘It’s a destructive pattern. I can’t live like this, we can’t carry on this way,’ he adds, and now it’s on its way, I brace myself for it, squeezing my eyes shut.

  Simen starts laughing.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asks me.

  ‘Bracing myself,’ I reply without opening my eyes.

  I feel his hand on my cheek. He strokes my hair, my bare arm, not the loaded gesture I had expected, but friendly, almost resigned, then takes my hand, squeezing it hard.

  ‘Bracing yourself for something I’m about to do?’ he says, and I can hear from his tone that he’s still smiling.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Well, so you should,’ he says aloud after a short pause, then climbs on top of me, his every gesture exaggerated, pulling me close in a great big hug, pinching my side, kissing my forehead, and it’s so lovely just to be close to him without any lingering expectation that I laugh and cry in turn. I actively ignore the fact that this conversation hasn’t gone anywhere, that everything remains suspended in the air between us like a cluster of barrage balloons.

  Simen and I met at a party held by a mutual acquaintance. I knew who he was – and I always mention it when I tell anyone the story of our meeting; I don’t know why it’s so important for me to point it out, it just seems so trite to say that you met at a party. I’m convinced that it’s an opinion I’ve inherited from Mum and Dad. They’ve always told us that they met at university rather than at the party it turned out had actually formed the backdrop of their first encounter.

  I’ve been captivated by that story for as long as I can remember. Even though it’s not all that exciting in itself, there’s something mystical and faraway about the idea of the two of them in their younger days, the lives they had before me and Liv and Håkon. Plus, it’s virtually natural law that offspring take an interest in how their parents met; that meeting is the starting point of one’s entire existence, I explain to Simen, who has never asked his parents how they met, telling me he’s either never been told, or that he must have forgotten. That would be a first, I said, you could never forget something so significant.

  Mum and Dad usually say they met at a student debate. Dad tells us that Mum put her hand up and posed several critical questions, and that he was drawn to her engagement and strong opinions. Mum thinks his memory of events is less than perfect, that she was only curious and asked one prudent question, as far as she can recall – she and Dad tend to have rather different views on how politically active they were during their student days, but maybe they were engaged to different degrees, I’ve suggested, though neither of them has wanted to hear it. Either way, for a long time the approved version of events claimed that they had met at this debate, right up until one day we discovered that it had actually been at a party a few weeks later where they’d spoken for the first time. It made a deep impression on me as a fourteen or fifteen-year-old to discover that their starting point, and therefore also my own, had been so different to the story I had initially been told.

  I’ve always taken it for granted that they’ve been reliable, that they are essentially our witnesses, and it’s never occurred to me until now that there are numerous things they might have embellished over time, kept hidden or quite simply lied about. Even though I’ve always thought they were different, and though I’ve never quite understood their marriage – and never thought too much about it, for that matter – I’ve taken it completely for granted that they found meaning within it, that they’ve had something I’ve never seen or understood, something I couldn’t quite grasp, but which obviously existed beneath the surface. I’ve thought that I just lack the experience required to understand it, as Liv tends to say.

  When they first told us about the divorce in Italy, it was one of the first things to occur to me, the fact that they’d never been particularly affectionate with one another, not like Simen and I are – were – but Liv corrected me, unable to curb her anger. You wouldn’t understand how much love there is in everything they do for one another, everything they are to one another, she said. But she and Olaf have a pretty dull, uneventful relationship; she’s simply copied Mum and Dad’s marriage, leaving her no choice but to dispute my point.

  When I next check my phone, just to see what time it is, Liv has sent me a message. I regret checking, turn the phone over without reading the message, I just want to stay where I am – Simen and I have been lying in bed for a while, minutes or hours, I can’t be sure, just holding one another, talking about the things we used to fill our days with, small anecdotes about our bosses or colleagues, rumours, possibilities. But time sprang back into action when I saw the message from Liv and I can’t leave it any longer than a few minutes before opening it.

  ‘Liv’s wondering if we want to go over for dinner this Sunday,’ I say to Simen. ‘It’s a group message to everyone, Mum and Dad too.’

  ‘Has the day of reckoning arrived?’ Simen asks.

  ‘No, I think it’s more a case of reconciliation,’ I say, but don’t feel in any way certain that what I’m saying is true.

  ‘We were supposed to be going over to Magnus’s on Sunday,’ Simen says. ‘But there’s no harm in us doing our own things. You can go to your family and I can go to mine.’

  I remember it now; his brother had invited us for dinner more than three weeks ago. I want to respond to Simen in the way I would have done before: Look what happens when people do things your family’s way, planning in minute detail way too far in advance; things end up being forgotten about. And Simen would have said: Look what happens when you never plan anything, like in your family, then it clashes with everything that’s already been planned.

  ‘I know it’s a long time since we spent any time with your family, and I do want to see them soon,’ I say. ‘But what with Liv asking, I feel like it’d be hard to say no. Especially after yesterday,’ I add, realising that I haven’t told Simen about what happened, and neither does he ask me to elaborate.

  ‘That’s OK. I think you should go to Liv’s,’ he says. ‘It might be good for us to have some input from elsewhere.’

  Even though I force myself to arrive five minutes late, naturally I’m still the first to turn up. Why is
it that the rest of the family are such incompetent timekeepers when I’m so punctual? There’s been a fault in our make-up somewhere along the line.

  You do know that you’re adopted? Liv said when we were young. She claimed she could prove it by asking Mum and Dad to place their arms across their chest in the shape of a cross. Do it in whatever way feels most natural, Liv said one day as we were standing in the kitchen making dinner, and Liv had brought me all the way downstairs to show me the secret test in action. Look, both of them, and then me, she said, crossing her skinny arms, we do it the same way, with our right arm over our left. You try, she said. I remember deliberating trying to place the same arm on top as they had done, but it just didn’t work, it felt all wrong, and my arms did the opposite of their own accord. Mum and Dad laughed, not realising Liv had told me beforehand that it was an adoption test. Well, well, well, I’m starting to wonder where you came from, Ellen, Dad teased. That would be telling, Mum said, elbowing Dad in the ribs.

  I hadn’t ever thought about how happy they were at that point in time until now, the way they teased one another so effortlessly; the memory of just how awful it was to see it confirmed that I was adopted had cast a shadow over their faces and the atmosphere and the looks they exchanged.

  I ring Liv and Olaf’s doorbell for once, rather than walking around the house and looking in through the veranda doors before either making my way in or knocking at the window if it’s locked. It’s Liv who comes to the door; she’s wearing make-up and looks better than she did just under a week ago, despite the fact that she looks even thinner now than before – she’s wearing slim-fitting black trousers and a wide-sleeved, low-cut blouse that I could never get away with wearing without looking cheap and rotund. Liv looks fashionable, almost coolly distant, and I hug her quickly to break the invisible barrier between us created by everything left unsaid since I last saw her. She gives me a quick squeeze then makes her way towards the kitchen, telling me she’s left something in the oven and I should join the others in the living room.

  Agnar is sitting in front of the television in the living room with his back to me, and I place an ice-cold hand on the back of his neck. He jumps and turns around, smiling when he realises it’s me. There’s a momentary pause. A distance has grown between us too, made more obvious by the fact that Agnar looks completely different now – he must have grown ten centimetres over the summer and autumn, he’s had a haircut, his shoulders and jaw look broader.

  He gets up and I hug him.

  ‘Have you been eating magic beans lately, or is it just your extremely good genes to blame for all this?’ I ask him as I let go and realise that he’s just as tall as I am.

  ‘Must be genetic,’ Olaf says from behind me, and I turn around.

  ‘Hmm, you seem to have shrunk since I last saw you,’ I tell him, smiling.

  Olaf laughs. I wonder if I should hug him too, but he maintains a safe distance, his arms crossed over his chest, also with his right arm over his left; after several years working in the field of communications, this no longer calls to mind adoption, as it once did, but instead hints at a person’s need to defend themselves.

  ‘Is everyone coming?’ I ask him.

  ‘I think so, yes. But no Simen?’ he says.

  I shake my head, wonder what sort of input Simen is receiving at his brother’s just now, if he’s holding his three-month-old nephew, making eye contact with him, if he’s stroking a hand over his soft little head, lulling him to sleep and feeling the weight of a tiny person in his arms, the weight of what’s missing from his own life.

  ‘No, he’d already arranged to go for dinner at his brother’s house,’ I tell him. ‘Is Håkon coming alone too?’

  Olaf nods. I don’t know why I asked about Håkon. Perhaps I wanted to underline the fact that there’s something not quite right with him, either, never having a partner, not beyond his odd connections with strange women who, much like Grandma, he never refers to as girlfriends – they’re only ever friends. But that’s where the similarity between Håkon and Grandma’s way of looking at things ends; I think Håkon and Grandma, if she were still with us, would have very different ideas about the kinds of things that friends get up to together.

  Do you think Håkon is gay? I once asked Mum a few years ago. She didn’t need any time to reflect, she’d clearly wondered the same herself. No, she replied quickly, I just think he’s a little immature. Håkon was twenty-five at the time. OK, but he might be immature in the sense that he doesn’t dare come out of the closet, I suggested. What closet? Mum asked, I think Håkon is well aware that none of us would raise an eyebrow if that’s how things were, she continued. We’re not his entire world, Mum, I said, smiling at her. We’re not far off it, she replied, looking as if she hoped that might be true.

  My theory about Håkon was rooted in stereotypical views. Liv and I had discussed it a few years beforehand, the fact that he was so sensitive and quick to take other people’s feelings to heart, vain and concerned about how we and he looked. Plus, he preferred sleeping in a nightie rather than his Superman pyjamas when he was young, Liv reminded me. Have you considered the fact that he grew up with two rather overbearing sisters? Mum asked. That what he says and how he feels has been influenced by two women he’s spent his life trying to keep up with? Håkon hasn’t tried to keep up with Liv and me, I replied, he’s always done his own thing, thought his own thoughts and made his own decisions. If anything, he’s constantly countering the arguments we make. And what does that tell you? Mum asked me. I know she was getting at the fact that Håkon felt he could square up to us in a debate. Mum considers it a compliment to live in unspoken disagreement with someone, she feels that finding an adversary worthy of engaging in discussion with is a compliment in its own right. You’ve got no patience for engaging in discussion with anyone who’s opinion doesn’t matter to you, Mum often says. I don’t doubt that Håkon thinks the opinions that Liv and I hold are of some importance, but I’m also fairly certain that he feels he grew apart from us both a long time ago, and that any sense of appreciation he has for us lies in the fact that we’re family.

  Why don’t you just ask him? Mum said at the end of our conversation, it’s hardly an offensive question, she added. Ask him yourself, it’s not like it matters, I retorted. In spite of the almost entirely sincere political correctness we were both so keen to demonstrate, neither of us ever did ask Håkon. And a few weeks later he appeared with a new ‘friend’ in tow, which Mum called specially to tell me all about – since it was of so little consequence, after all.

  Even so, Håkon doesn’t come to see Liv on his own, he comes with Dad. Both Liv and I watch from the kitchen window as they pull up in Dad’s car, but neither of us comments on it. I wonder if Liv finds it as surprising as I do. How much do Håkon and Dad actually see of one another? And then I also start to wonder how much contact Liv and Dad have – if the chance visit earlier in the week was actually the result of a pang of guilty conscience after calling on Håkon and Liv in this way.

  I’ve always bragged about the relationship between Liv, Håkon and me. I’ve never felt the same jealousy I’d heard friends or partners talk about, constantly locked in bitter, petty competition with their siblings. I’ve always hoped that Håkon and Liv would do well in life, better than me, if I’m honest, and there’s nothing self-sacrificing or altruistic about that, quite the opposite, in fact: I see us as one and the same entity, so intertwined that if one of us enjoys success, it reflects well on the other two. It’s also liberating when things go well for them, a cause for great relief; I no longer need to worry about them – on the other hand, an almost physical discomfort weighs down upon me when either of them is struggling with something, exposing the disadvantage of such a close bond.

  Even though I’ve never been jealous, I’ve always felt that Mum and Dad have shown the other two a different degree of attention to that which they’ve shown me. I don’t think they love Liv or Håkon more than they love me, but in some sens
e my siblings represent something more important than I do. Liv is the eldest, and the eldest child is, of course, an event unto themselves by virtue of being the firstborn, the one who changed two parents’ entire existence, the child who represents the shift from life as a couple to that of a family unit. Håkon is the youngest, and the youngest in any family is the one who completes the unit, who puts a full stop neatly in place and makes things whole, the one who benefits from all the trying and failing with any previous children, the one who positively gleams in virtue of always being the smallest, and in this case, the deeply longed-for third child. Add a heart condition and an overdeveloped emotional intelligence into the mix and you are left with a recipe for something approaching a child prodigy.

  My role in family life is less well established, in my own mind, yes, but also for Mum and Dad. I’m difficult to place, like a filler between the other two. This might be underlined by the fact that it took so long for Mum to fall pregnant with Håkon; she spent long episodes of the first eight years of my life waiting for him to appear. There was an unspoken conviction that they were waiting for someone. When he finally arrived, he took up so much room with his special needs and his extra special behaviour, as I’ve explained it to Simen. It sounds like jealousy to me, Simen said. But it isn’t. I’m not jealous. It can hurt sometimes, but it doesn’t take the form of anger or bitterness against either Håkon or Liv, it’s more like a painful sense of certainty that flares up from time to time in arguments or other situations, particularly in Mum’s company, a learned recognition that I go unseen, an awareness that Liv and Håkon are more important than I am, and through the years it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as was demonstrated in the article on favourite children that Simen once referred to – I’ve made myself more independent, sought less validation and credit, and in doing so, I’ve also received less than the other two.