A Modern Family

by Helga Flatland

  ‘I’ve heard a lot about you too,’ Anna replies, and it’s true.

  I feel a little guilty about how much I’ve already told her about Ellen, the fact that I’ve more or less intentionally used Ellen’s situation to scare Anna into something I’ve not managed myself. I’m just aware that I want her to know that Ellen tried for a long time to have children. But it was too late, I said, yet again drawing my own conclusion, that Ellen’s age was to blame for her issues.

  Nobody has actually concluded anything of the sort, no one but Ellen herself.

  Ellen lived with Mum for two months after her break-up with Simen. She was too unstable to work, and so depressed that Mum and Dad and Liv and I looked after her in shifts. I’m still not sure it was necessary to babysit her in such a way, she was matter-of-fact and controlled, her line of argument was logical: if you don’t view yourself or anyone else you know as anything other than an organism, the only meaning to be found in life is in procreation. When that proves impossible for you, meaning disappears – a person becomes an aberration. I’m abnormal, the kind of thing you’re so averse to, Ellen said, chuckling under her breath. No, this falls way outside of that, I said, though that wasn’t entirely true.

  But Ellen, you believe in lots of other things, I said. You believe in society, in relationships, in everything that occurs between people, there’s meaning in those things, I said, doing my best to recall several of Ellen’s arguments in the past. No, that’s just filler, Ellen said, filler and excuses. You can’t use my old arguments to convince me, nobody has any less conviction in the old me than I do. Anyway, this is the theoretical side of things, but the practical consequences are almost worse, knowing that I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life, she continued. You don’t need to be alone for the rest of your life, even if you can’t have children, I said. No, I know I can probably find a man who’ll make do with me, but that’s a poor consolation. I’m talking about a different kind of loneliness, she said, the kind that could never be understood by those who have become parents themselves – the loneliness in knowing that there’s a deeper kind of attachment and meaning you’ll never come to experience. Those with children don’t ever need to ponder the meaning of life in the same way, she continued. You know, I’m sure that Mum and Dad and a lot of other parents would attest to the fact that what you’re saying isn’t quite true, I said. Then they’re either spoiled individuals or terrible parents, Ellen replied.

  Even though Ellen, strictly speaking, didn’t require looking after in such a way as far as I was concerned, it became a kind of collaborative project that the entire family could contribute towards. I think the others also understood the slightly exaggerated nature of the situation, but everyone, even Ellen herself, seemed to be glad to have a joint task, something collective and reconciliatory. We didn’t have to talk about anything other than Ellen, or to wonder what lay beneath people’s words and actions; self-obsessed hang-ups and accusations were forced to yield, everyone was concerned solely with what was in Ellen’s best interests, exceeding one another in their well wishes. In spite of the slightly contrived nature of this episode, it brought Liv, Olaf, Mum, Dad and me close together once again, returning us to something that resembled what had once been so normal for us.

  Ellen eventually grew tired of being looked after and more frequently decided to deviate from Mum’s schedule when it came to who’d be looking after her – instead she’d organise things directly with Liv, who was only too glad to hear from her, happy to accept the normalisation this signalled. She helped Ellen to move out of her flat in St. Hanshaugen when it was sold. Simen initially offered to buy her out. He came to Tåsen one evening when Mum, Ellen and I were sitting in the living room watching a film. He’d phoned her to talk about the flat, and as she previously would have done, she’d invited him over to talk about things properly – something everyone saw as a good sign – but when he suggested that he could buy her share of the place, she grew frantic. You can’t live there with someone else, she screamed, what will you use the room for? What will you use the room for? And Simen backed off immediately. We can sell it, of course, he said, we’ll do that, Ellen, we’ll sell it. It was a stupid suggestion, he said, and I remembered how much I liked Simen in spite of how little I knew him. The flat was sold, and Ellen rented a place Liv found for her, which was close to her and Olaf. That pulled her out of her hibernation, as if she’d taken stock and decided to forge ahead. Mum’s schedule of visitors became redundant, and one evening when I popped by to check on her only to find that she’d gone out to see a friend – without telling anyone – we grasped with mixed feelings that our project had come to an end.

  I didn’t realise that I’d spent all of the past year unconsciously imagining that Dad would move back into the house in Tåsen; it was such a fully formulated thought that even I was surprised when the realisation hit me. It almost moved me to laughter, but it was so revealing and painful and raw. I hadn’t realised that my positive feelings around Ellen’s so-called breakdown were a result of such expectations, so I was similarly unprepared for the pain that followed when they gave way.

  The summer that Mum and Dad started living separately, both took pains to demonstrate that everything was to be different, all while taking care to show consideration for one another. Both refrained from visiting the cabin during that first summer holiday, for instance. It’ll actually be quite nice to do something different, Mum told me, to get out of a rut, I can’t recall the last time Sverre and I spent any less than half the summer in Lillesand, it’s funny what creatures of habit you become without even realising it. Dad went to Finnmark on a fishing holiday; it was fantastic, he said when he got back, nothing compares. Even so, last summer they were both extremely keen to spend a few weeks at the cabin. You can arrange it between yourselves, Liv said. It ended with Mum taking Liv and spending the first week there, Dad joining them for the second week, and after a few days together, Mum driving his car back – with Ellen driving Dad back home again the following week. I spent half a week with Mum and half a week with Dad. It reminded me of the previous year’s planning, one of our typical Sunday dinners in the spring during which Dad had pulled out a pen and piece of paper to note down everyone’s wishes and the logistical challenges to be worked out. He’s always had a knack of working things out so that nobody gets their way, but everyone feels satisfied nonetheless.

  Hopefully it won’t feel too forced, Ellen said before leaving. It didn’t, and the days the family spent together were lovely, natural and intimate, perhaps much like they used to be, right up until the night before Mum was due to leave. We sat outside and enjoyed our traditional meal of crab; it was a bright and mild evening, and I felt more agreeable and tranquil than I had in a long time, even managing to overlook the slurping noises Dad had made as he had tried to draw the moist meat out of the crab’s claws.

  Do you remember tipping over the pan of crabs that summer, Liv? Dad asked. It wasn’t me, it was Ellen, Liv replied, laughing. Yes, Ellen was busy trying to kill Håkon, Mum said. Håkon? Liv and Ellen said in chorus, where were you? I was sitting right beside Dad, I replied, but before I managed to point out the striking fact that nobody but Mum had remembered me even being there, Dad interrupted to say he’d had a text message from an estate agent. Look at this, Torill, this is way above what we thought. Have you had a valuation? Liv asked. How much, then? Ellen asked.

  I think everyone assumed that one of the others had informed me that the house was to be sold. I don’t think it was done on purpose, they couldn’t know about the hopes I’d had, I wasn’t even aware of them myself, but suddenly I felt as crushed as the crab’s claw that Liv loudly crunched. I shrank back in the face of both the noise and the realisation.

  Mum and Dad bought the house in Tåsen just before Liv was born. It was white at first, but Mum painted it various different shades at regular intervals over the years after Ellen was born. I needed something to do while I was waiting for you to come along, Mum
said to me once when we were looking through old photos of Ellen and Liv, posing together on various occasions – under the sprinkler on the lawn, on the way to school, with a sled under their arms – and the house behind them changed colour at least three times in five years. Very little changed indoors; they’ve reluctantly switched out white goods when Dad has had to give up on repairing the old ones, reupholstered the sofa and chairs a few times, always in the same colour, and swapped out the yellow curtains with the crocheted linen they inherited from Grandma – beyond that, anything else has been added rather than swapped out, and now it’s full, in truth, I said to Mum as she tried to make space for a lamp Dad was given by Liv on his birthday a few years ago.

  I lived with Mum and Dad until I finished university. Too old to still be living at home, but only in theory and for the purpose of making self-ironic jokes among friends, because in practice it worked like a dream. I can’t recall feeling as if I was missing out on the experience of living by myself; why would I? I had all of the benefits of living at home along with complete freedom to do as I liked. It’s almost like living in a commune, I told Liv, who just laughed and said she’d gladly live in a commune where her cohabitants paid the full rent, cooked all of her meals and did her laundry for her. It’s more like a hotel, I’d say, she added, stroking my cheek condescendingly.

  Liv and Ellen might have a closer relationship with one another than they do with me, but I have a much closer relationship with Mum and Dad. You’re practically an only child, Karsten said to me once, who grew up with three brothers close to his own age. You’ve had your parents all to yourself, while still having siblings, that’s a result if ever there was one. I can see it that way now, but when Ellen and Liv both moved out, it didn’t feel quite so much fun having Mum and Dad to myself – I’d have preferred to have shared them with someone. When Ellen travelled to the US after high school and I could no longer hear a single sound from her room, which was just below mine, I cried myself to sleep every night. After a while I got used to things, and Mum, Dad and I entered into a new day-to-day existence in which I received all of the attention and care that had previously been split three ways.

  It was horrible moving away from home, so horrible that I couldn’t tell a single soul how I really felt. I was a twenty-three-year-old who was sick with longing for his mum and dad – both of whom lived in the same city, no less. I moved out with the greatest reluctance, only because the external pressure proved too hard for me to resist – after a while the stigma of telling friends and partners that I still lived at home without a valid excuse as to why that should be was too much for me to bear. It wasn’t consistent with being a well-informed, independent person with purpose, there must be something wrong with a man my age who lived at home, sleeping every night in his childhood bedroom. I don’t know, it just clashes with everything you stand for, a female friend commented, you fly the flag for freedom and independence while your mother still takes care of your laundry for you. I moved out three weeks later.

  Both Mum and Dad must have been prepared for the fact that I’d move out, we’d talked about it, joked about it, Dad would even show me property listings from time to time, but still it seemed to take them by surprise when I eventually left. They were both still in full-time work at the time, both had a large network of friends and acquaintances and numerous hobbies between them, but still Dad remarked on how the house felt terribly empty, as he put it.

  I suddenly have so much time on my hands, he said to me once when I popped back home – something I did several times a week in those early days. Don’t be daft, I said, it’s not like I took up that much of your time when I lived here. It’s just a feeling you have, I continued with a combined sense of egotistical relief and guilty conscience. In that case I think you underestimate how much time Dad and I have spent on you and in being there for you – wondering where you are, if you’ll be home for dinner, conversations, questions, mealtimes, clothing, keys, noise, all that and more. You have to remember that you take up more space in our lives than we do in yours, Mum said, smiling. I was fairly certain she was wrong about that last part.

  At the same time, my guilty conscience caught up with me. With the privileged, self-centred attitude of a child, I hadn’t thought about how this would affect them. I had only thought of myself and the pain I felt at reluctantly having to tear myself away. Suddenly it struck me that I was also leaving something behind, that naturally this would change something for Mum and Dad, as well as for me. A phase of my life had come to an end, but an even more crucial stage of their lives was over too – something they’d poured virtually every ounce of their effort, determination and love into ever since the moment Liv was born more than forty years ago. The emptiness that Dad spoke of was suddenly so much easier for me to understand, it was about more than just me.

  Such is life, sadly enough; change is painful, Ellen said gently when I tried talking to her about it, and I felt indignant at how unfair it was that both she and Liv had escaped without having to deal with any of this; back then, they’d been able to break away in the knowledge that I would be there for Mum and Dad, small and dependent, entrusted with dealing the final blow.

  All the same, I couldn’t get my head around the idea that Mum and Dad wouldn’t somehow find their way back to one another without Liv, Ellen and me around, or perhaps find something new in one another. I don’t think the thought even occurred to me.

  Neither had it occurred to me that they would sell the house. That they could. Even after Dad had moved out, the thought was completely alien to me. It was my childhood home, my house. Nowhere else felt quite as much like home, even after I bought my own flat and decorated and furnished it with all of my own things. I still called the house in Tåsen home. I’m just popping home for a visit, I might write in a text to Mum. I still don’t know what’s worse, the acknowledgement of the finality of their separation, or the fact that the house itself was gone.

  But honestly, didn’t you realise that’s what would happen, Mum asked over our crabs last summer, after I fell silent and felt the blood drain from my face. My cheeks and lips prickled. Her reaction wasn’t sufficiently strong, none of the other faces around the table revealed the slightest hint of the bottomless pit I felt open up within me. I get that it’s sad, Håkon, Dad said, I find it distressing on a personal level, you know how much I love that house. But you’re grown adults with your own lives now, Mum and I can’t keep the house for the sake of memories of things that have passed, he carried on. And we still have those memories either way, Mum added. I couldn’t answer.

  Don’t you at least think they ought to have asked us first, I said to Liv afterwards, and she gave a slight shrug. It’s their life, Håkon, she replied, and Dad’s right, neither of them can or want to stay in the house by themselves. I couldn’t understand how she could take it so lightly, not given that this time last year she’d been out of her mind over the divorce – and that made it all the worse for me. There had been something comforting in Ellen and Liv’s reactions and the ensuing turmoil, it had made it simpler for me to distance myself and to be the one to maintain a mature, matter-of-fact approach to the whole affair, bolstered by sound arguments. Without Liv and Ellen’s resistance, my arguments lingered as if suspended in mid-air, suddenly aimless.

  ‘This is from Paul and me,’ Ellen says once she’s said hello and hugged everybody present, looking around as if there’s a hug she’s forgotten to give before placing a gift on the table in front of Dad.

  ‘Thank you,’ Dad says. ‘How’s it going with your chap in…?’

  ‘Dubai,’ Ellen says. ‘It’s fine, just six days to go now.’

  ‘And what about…?’

  ‘Thea? Things are slowly improving,’ Ellen replies.

  Ellen started seeing Paul around New Year, two weeks after meeting him through a dating app. Liv had downloaded it onto Ellen’s phone against her will six months after things had ended with Simen. It’s time you got back into dating, Liv
said, nobody’s saying you need to get married to the first man that comes along. It’s the most superficial thing I can imagine, Ellen said at the time, swiping right and left and judging people’s appearances in that way without speaking a word to them. How can you make that judgement without hearing their voice? Not to mention everything that you can tell about someone from observing their body language, she said. Two months later, she told us over a few beers that she’d met Paul. There was something about his expression, Ellen said, and it turned out that in addition to this expression, Paul had a deceased wife and three young children.

  To begin with, Paul’s eldest daughter Thea made things hard for Ellen. Liv was worried and she called me, afraid that Ellen would have a relapse – that Thea’s rejection would trigger new, irrational thoughts in Ellen about her ineptitude as a mother. But Ellen did everything right, she allowed Thea to take the lead on things between them, she didn’t put any pressure on her, she kept her distance and asserted the fact that she wasn’t trying to be her mother in any way. I’m not trying to be your mother, Thea, I told her, Ellen said to us, a new warmth in her voice and her cheeks and her expression.

  ‘Have you spoken to Mum?’ Ellen asks me now, as Dad laboriously unwraps his birthday gift from her and Paul.

  Dad straightens up, his good ear in our direction quite by chance. I don’t know how to respond, what the right thing to say might be. I have spoken to her, she’s on a singles holiday in Hardanger organised by the Norwegian Trekking Association, but you don’t need to tell the others that, Mum said to me before leaving. Especially not your father, she added. You’re divorced, you’ve got the right to meet other people, I said. Yes, but you know, it’s Dad, she replied. He’ll take it personally, she added. I don’t think so, for all you know he might have met someone himself, I replied. What are you talking about, who has he met? Mum asked. I don’t know if he has, I’m just saying he might have done, I replied with a smile. I was still childishly pleased to see she was so concerned about Dad. He might have done, of course, Mum replied. That’s nothing to do with me, she added. But this is still new to us, isn’t it? Well, it’s been two years, it can’t really be called new any more, I said, but maybe the years feel shorter when you get to your age. Don’t be so ageist, you cheeky so-and-so, Mum retorted wryly.