by Linn Ullmann
Can the doctor tell me when Mamma will call? Can the doctor tell me what God wants from me? Can the doctor tell me that Mamma is alive? The doctor puts the stethoscope back in her purse and tells Nanna that she sees no other alternative but to give me something calming.
“But pills are not the answer here,” she sighs, throwing her arms up in the air.
When the doctor has left, Nanna positions herself in the kitchen. I walk from room to room and will not rest, the expedition starts in the hallway, then through the kitchen, the dining room, the library and the TV room and then all over again. Nanna stands quietly in the kitchen and whispers my name each time I pass by. She doesn’t think Mamma is dead. Something must have come up, and she hasn’t been able to get to a phone. These things happen. But dammit, she may be thinking. You’d expect my daughter to call on time, knowing the kind of havoc it causes when she doesn’t.
“Come here, darling,” says Nanna, “come, I want to tell you something. Give me your hand.”
I give her my hand but carry on sobbing, albeit a little more softly. I’m exhausted from all the crying and walking.
Nanna pours a glass of water. She breaks the pill the doctor gave her in two and asks me to swallow one half. The other half she slips into her purse.
“We will eat supper now,” she says, “and Mamma will call soon, I promise.”
She looks at me to make sure I swallow the pill.
“Maybe she won’t call this evening, but if not, she’s bound to call tomorrow.”
Nanna strokes my hair, her fingers running into knots and tangles.
“I think we’ll have to trim your hair soon,” she says, but at that I start howling again.
Nanna hushes me, holds me and hushes me, shhh, shhhh, shhhhh, the way you hush a baby. Gently, softly, repeatedly. We stand on the kitchen floor, her arms wrapped around me, until the crying subsides.
“There is a perfectly natural explanation for why she hasn’t called,” she whispers, and then she takes my hand in hers and squeezes four times.
Which means Do you love me.
And then I squeeze Nanna’s hands three times, which means Yes, I do.
And then Nanna squeezes twice, which means How much?
And then I squeeze Nanna’s hand so hard that it hurts, which means THIS MUCH.
“Ow,” she says and pulls back her hand, but she’s not angry. She prepares tiny little banana sandwiches and tells me to fetch the Asbjørnsen and Moe book of folktales. I sit down at one end of the table, she sits down at the other. The kitchen lamp is blue. It’s long past bedtime.
“The sobs last longer than the tears,” she says, and leans over the table and wipes away a few breadcrumbs from the corner of my mouth.
MAMMA BARGES INTO MY room in her long, fragrant silk nightgown, hair going every which way, black makeup smudges under her eyes. She has just watched a news report on TV about young girls and anorexia. She pulls the duvet off me and moans at the sight of my rib cage. In the letter Pappa wrote to me on the occasion of my christening, he said: For the time being I suppose you are entwined with your mother in such a way that everything else, while interesting, is none of your concern. It is not like that anymore. I’m not entwined with anyone, I yank the duvet from her hands and cover myself with it. Go away. Get out. It’s not that Mamma worries all the time, days or months might pass between every time she worries about me. Worries of the what-if-my-child-were-to-die sort. But now that she’s home, she worries all the time. Day and night and night and day and day and night. I think she wants to catch up on all the worrying she didn’t do while she was away. It’s hard to divide worry and spread it evenly over the days, the months, the years. Nothing is ever even. I’m growing up, but without any plan or direction. Am I ugly, am I pretty? Am I a real girl? My teeth and feet are too big, my wrists are too thin, my eyes are those of a child and I don’t want to be a child. And what will I do if she dies? Next time she goes away, I want to slice open my stomach, move the dagger from right to left, let my blood and guts spill out of me, honorably in black and white—until, finally, I offer up my head so that someone can chop it off. I know how it’s done. I’ve seen the film Harakiri together with Pappa at Dämba. Twice. I don’t want to die, I want to live, but if she dies, there is no place for me in this world.
There are lots of photographs of Mamma and Nanna, they smile and pose for the camera, I, on the other hand, duck whenever someone wants to take a picture. My face is round and pale, I have chubby cheeks. My bangs are heavy and get in my eyes, my legs are too skinny. Mamma thinks I’m a lot of work. Twelve years old and impertinent. Rarely smiles. Pulls away. Impossible. More and more demanding. I’ve been given my first pair of pointe shoes and whirl round and round and round. Pink silk ribbons around my ankle, double crisscross, I’m good at tying my ballet shoes, less so at fixing my hair, making the perfect ballet bun, it’s not tight enough. Dance, dance, dance. Lumps form on my head and strands of hair are sticking out and hanging down, I’m told that I have do something about the hair, I have to strengthen the back, accentuate the pointe, lift the head, extend the arms, fix the gaze, discipline the heart.
Mamma pulls back my duvet. She can’t just come into my room and pull back my duvet. I don’t want the whole world to see my body. My nightgown is torn and she fiddles with the ripped seam. She yells. Sometimes when she’s home, I wish she was out traveling again. You are too skinny, you’re way too skinny, you have to eat more, you don’t eat enough.
I was born skinny, there’s nothing to do about it. Heidi says that she was born skinny too. Heidi and I are friends. Everyone says we look alike, but I don’t think so. Heidi is pretty. Thirteen and a half. Older than me. Shapely. Boys like her. We could have been sisters, that’s how often we are together. She doesn’t worry about her body. Or about her mother. Or about a lack of direction. She worries about what will happen to her if she walks alone through a big room full of people.
I have two pairs of jeans in my closet, two identical pairs of jeans. What if I were to put on both pairs at the same time, one pair on top of the other? Would that create the illusion that there is more of me, a little bit more body? I put on the two pairs of jeans, take them off again and put them back on. It feels clammy and too tight. Will this give me a shape? There are bulges in strange places. I walk with my legs apart, like a wading bird. Like a little kid who’s just peed herself. The girls at school look at me strangely. The boys don’t look at me. When I have to pee, I lock myself in the girls’ bathroom and try to pull the two pairs of jeans down. It doesn’t work, I can’t get them off, one pair is stuck to the other, I’m stuck. I’m more jeans than girl. And now I have to pee so badly that either I’ll actually have to pee myself, or else . . . or else I’ll let out a scream that will blast time itself and this stupid, disobliging, childish little body into bits. There! Now I can pee.
Girls’ voices and running footsteps. Knocking at the door to the bathroom stall.
“What’s happening?”
“Why are you screaming?”
“It’s nothing. Go away.”
Figenschou, the physics teacher, comes into the girls’ bathroom. She has recess supervision that day. I can’t see her, I’ve locked the door to the stall and won’t come out, but something happens to the air when Figenschou is nearby, it darkens, it thickens as if a jumbo jet were coming in to land right where you’re standing. Loopy girls all chattering at the same time.
“She’s in there.”
“She’s locked the door.”
Three loud knocks.
“What’s going on? Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Then I want you to unlock the door right this minute!”
I pull up the one pair of jeans and fold the other into a little pile and hide it as best I can behind the toilet. I unlock the door and open it.
Figenschou is big and stocky and looks like a monkfish. Her husband, Tank, also teaches at the elementary school. He is tall and thin. I wonder i
f they fuck.
“Why were you screaming?”
She snarls when she speaks.
“Screaming?”
“Didn´t you just lock yourself in the toilet and start screaming?”
“Nope,” I said. “Not me.”
Heidi says that some people are fat and some are skinny, that’s just the way the world is. She says it was a stupid idea to wear two pairs of jeans at the same time, it doesn’t make you look shapely, it makes you look as if you’ve put on two pairs of jeans, one on top of the other, and now everyone knows I was the one who screamed in the girls’ bathroom and was sent to the school psychologist.
Heidi is the only girl who can fix broken cassette tapes. She doesn’t give up until she has straightened out the tangles and carefully wound the tape back into place with the aid of a pencil. When a tape gets jammed in the cassette player or slips off the spools in some other way (it always happens very quickly, there’s a low, hissing sound of the tape getting bunched up) it’s as irreversible as being stung by a wasp. If I start fiddling with the cassette, the tape will snap and the cassette will be ruined forever. Heidi’s hands are no more delicate than mine, not that we compare hands, comparing hands is bad luck, we’re pale girls, no one notices us when we walk down the street, who is who, blond hair and small hands; what no one knows, is that Heidi’s hands can undo knots and tangles in a way that mine can’t, whether it’s cassette tapes, shoelaces or girls’ hair. My hair is tangled, and Heidi can undo the tangles without pulling and ripping out a bunch of extra hair.
At night we listen to our tapes. We are neighbors and can have sleepovers as often as we like, and if we don’t get permission, we sneak out once her parents and my babysitters have fallen asleep. When Nanna is in charge, sneaking out is out of the question. Nanna stays awake all night long, pacing back and forth through the big flat. But as a rule, Heidi and I have sleepovers as often as we can, although perhaps I want to sleep over a little bit more often than she does. I’m the eager one. Sometimes Heidi says she doesn’t feel like it, that she’s made other plans.
Heidi’s bedroom has yellow walls, mine are painted white. At night everything is swathed in half-darkness. Sometimes we tiptoe around the different rooms, I live in a flat, she lives in a house, but we know each other’s walls and floors and corners as though they were our own. Nothing has been moved or rearranged, the furniture sits where it usually sits, but everything is different when all are asleep, as if the rooms have caught a fever.
The window in my room is hidden behind long, thick vermilion curtains. Mamma chose the fabric and took it to the seamstress to have them sewn. My bedspread matches the curtains. I have a black cassette player the size of a shoebox. It has a handle on one end, like a purse, I carry it with me when I sleep over at Heidi’s.
If Heidi hadn’t really existed, I would have made her up.
Her father and my father are the same age. Old. Gray. In winter, Heidi’s father wears a green wool coat, my father most likely wears one too. They sit immersed in their own thoughts, one of them in Norway, the other in Germany, behind closed doors. Heidi’s father has nightmares. Sometimes we hear his cries echoing through the rooms. The nightmares have to do with the war, says Heidi, and when her father falls asleep, his dreams run wild. There’s nothing anyone can do. I feel sorry for him.
“Can’t you go inside and hold his hand or something?”
Heidi shakes her head.
The cries are like prayers, but not like any prayer I’ve ever heard. I’ve heard Nanna say bedtime prayers, but that’s entirely different.
A grown man whose dreams run wild.
Does my father have dreams like that? Or my mother?
Apart from the nightmares, the nights are quiet. When Heidi and I sleep over at each other’s houses, our goal is to stay up until dawn. To accomplish this, we place a bowl of cold water under the bed so that we can dip our faces if we feel ourselves falling asleep.
Summer is approaching and Mamma has come home. She is going to have a party. I am going to have a party, she says, all lovely and dewy and full of energy. Heidi will sleep over. We have decided to stay awake and spy on the grown-ups, and for a while we run around and pretend we’re actual guests, but eventually we fall asleep side by side to the sounds of laughter and music and voices. We don’t wake up until late the following morning. There is no one here now. The morning sun lights up all that the night left behind. Dirty glasses and wine bottles everywhere, greasy smudge marks on the windowpanes, as if all the guests had pressed their hands against them in an effort to get out. Heidi says we should open the windows to let in some air. When Mamma dances the way she did at the party, whirling around the living room, I’m scared she’s going to topple over. For a while I follow her around, trying to clear away everything in her path, but I can’t very well follow her around for the rest of my life. At some point you have to lie down and sleep.
Heidi and I get up together in the morning and lie down together in the evening, and sometimes I hold her so tight that she says I’m practically strangling her.
Girls faint in ballet class. First a thud. A crash. A collapse. It’s not unlike a natural disaster. Utter chaos ensues. When a girl faints, everybody rushes over with water and napkins and towels and tutus and magazines and flapping notebooks—anything that can be used as a fan. Competent female hands lift, rescue, stroke foreheads, resurrect. Collapse and resurrection. It happens all the time. The city returns to itself after the earthquake. The girls come around, pull themselves shakily onto their long spindly legs, and life goes on.
Mamma has received an offer to sing and dance on Broadway. She who can neither sing nor dance.
“Would you like to move to the United States?” she asks.
“Again?”
“Yes.”
“No! I really don’t.”
THE FIRST TIME MAMMA and I lived in the United States, I was five years old. We moved into a large house in Los Angeles and I was taught how to swim by a wiry female body with a long nose and a rubber swim cap. She never smiled, but gave me a popsicle after each completed swimming lesson. Mamma had a suitor who refused to use soap, “The Frenchman,” she called him, he didn’t want to cut his hair either, or brush his teeth with toothpaste, it was political, Mamma explained. When I sat on his lap, I could wrap his hair around my face. It was black and bristly and smelled like the ocean floor, and Mamma said he was the most brilliant man in the world. She had another suitor too. His name was Dick, I think, or John. I’m not sure. Names are difficult. Difficult to give, to have, to remember, to live with, to get rid of. Bob, maybe. He took Mamma and me along to what he called the world’s biggest toy store, and said I could have anything I wanted. He wore wide shirts and bell-bottoms and told me that he loved me. I knew it didn’t mean that he actually loved me, Mamma said that in Los Angeles everyone says I love you even if they don’t mean it. Mamma tapped her big nose and said: You have to learn how to sniff out the difference between what people say and what they mean and not let things go to your head.
Dick (or Bob) turned to Mamma and me. His face was one big smile. He loved the toy store. I could see his mouth and both his ears, but not his eyes. They were hidden behind large sunglasses that he never took off.
We were just getting started.
“What about this?” he said, and showed us a kind of pan or pot made of aluminum foil.
“You put it on the stove, and a few minutes later, pop-pop-pop-pop, the pan expands into a pot full of popcorn.”
Mamma and I looked at the pan.
“We want a couple of these, right?” His voice was impatient.
He put six popcorn pans into the cart.
The toy-store suitor smoked nonstop. Cigarettes, cigarillos, pipes, glass tubes. In the toy store he smoked candy cigarettes that looked just like real cigarettes, but tasted sweet. Mamma and I each got one. It was hard keeping up with him. Mamma took my hand.
“What about this?” he cried out. We could hear him, b
ut not see him.
One moment he’s here, the next he’s gone. Now he’s holding a fair-haired doll in his hand. She has blue eyes and long black eyelashes like cat whiskers, chubby wrists, chubby thighs, and when you press her tummy she starts to cry.
The toy store is divided into long, narrow aisles with shelves from floor to ceiling. The lamps in the ceiling emit a green fluorescent light. We fill two carts with toys, mostly dolls and doll clothes, but also a big fish that I can play with in the bathtub. Mamma’s suitor lifts me up into the shopping cart and runs as fast as he can down the aisle with tanks and popguns, it’s like sailing underwater. Mamma is also running, following right behind us, laughing.
In the days of the beautiful Helen of Troy, lists were made of her suitors. One such list was compiled by Pseudo-Apollodorus (thirty-one suitors), one by Hesiod (eleven suitors), and one by Hyginus (thirty-six suitors).
Mamma says in her little-girl voice: “I can get anyone I want just by looking at them.”
She often called men them and girls us.
They don’t like us when our voices are shrill.
We shouldn’t be too eager—it scares them away.
I have notebooks with stiff red covers, I don’t keep a diary. I make lists. Among them lists of:
The number of babysitters.
The number of boyfriends (Mamma’s).
The number of times I’ve moved house.
What I will buy once I have my own money.
The prettiest girls in class.
Books I’ve read.
Films I’ve seen.
The number of days until I’m thirteen.
The number of days until I’m sixteen.
The number of days until I’m eighteen.
The number of times I’ve lived in the United States (lived for a period of time, as opposed to just visited).