by Linn Ullmann
The second time Mamma and I flew across the Atlantic to live, I was ten. We went for six months. Mamma’s suitors brought gifts. “The Russian” gave me a big jar of Beluga caviar, which Mamma said he had smuggled out of the Soviet Union. It was left on top of the kitchen counter in a hotel suite in New York. The hotel suite was like an apartment, I had my own bedroom, but in the beginning Mamma let me sleep with her in her bed. The name of the hotel was Navarro. It sounds like a place I’ve made up, but I didn’t make it up. Margot Fonteyn, the ballerina, would glide by in the long, dimly lit, thickly carpeted hotel corridors and was more beautiful even than Mamma and pat me on the head and say, Very nice, dear, very nice. The jar of caviar was blue and gold and all mine.
Often when Mamma talked, she said incoherent things that I pieced together into something even more incoherent. She talked a lot about the Iron Curtain. I already knew quite a bit about the Iron Curtain.
“I can see it from Pappa’s house at Hammars,” I said.
“No, you can’t,” said Mamma.
“Yes,” I said.
“What you see is the horizon,” she said, “not the Iron Curtain.”
She repeated the word several times.
“Horizon. Horizon. Horizon.”
The art of following a train of thought. Mamma immediately went off-piste. The Russian’s appearance in her life and his subsequent disappearance from it were a mystery. Mamma talked and talked. Her blue silk nightgown was as blue as the jar of caviar. Sometimes a bottle of vodka had been left on the kitchen counter as well. That’s what Russians do—they fight their way through the Iron Curtain, bringing with them vodka for their girlfriends and caviar for their girlfriends’ daughters. Mamma said that the Russian was afraid of the dark, and that this was why he always had to stay the night and why I couldn’t sleep in her bed. But since the Russian was a grown man and very proud, he didn’t want anyone to know that he was scared. I didn’t answer. I walked out into the hotel corridor so I wouldn’t have to listen to her, later I came back, and then I left again. Sometimes I took the elevator to another floor, which was like traveling to another country. The broad hotel corridors looked exactly alike, that wasn’t it, they all had carpeted floors and heavy chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, and you could walk on endlessly past door after door after door. But each corridor had its own air. If it had been possible to weigh air, it would have weighed differently on each floor.
I ate all the Beluga, every single little fish egg, slathered it across big slices of bread that I lined up on the hotel kitchen counter. I chewed and swallowed. I liked the salty, sticky, musty taste of black.
WHEN MAMMA IS SLEEPING, you are not allowed to wake her. If Mamma falls asleep and someone wakes her, she can’t go back to sleep again, and then the night is ruined, and not only that night, but the following day, and the next night after that, on and on.
I used to dream about her. It was always a variation of the same dream, which ended with us yelling at each other in such a way that she dissolved and disappeared. In the dream, I would start looking for her. A frantic search through shelves and cupboards, underneath sofas and in the bathtub, is she hiding behind the curtains, maybe, the vermilion ones, or in Nanna’s sewing box, or among the forks and knives in the kitchen drawer?
Mamma is sitting in her bed reading Madame Bovary. She raises her eyes and looks at me and says that it is a novel by a French author.
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about a woman named Emma.”
I stand in the open doorway and nod.
“Maybe you could go outside and play,” she says, “or else find your own book and come up into bed with me and read as well.”
I nod.
“But we have to be quiet,” she adds. “We can’t read if we’re not quiet.”
Her hair is down, and she’s all black around the eyes. Her eye-makeup remover never removes all of her eye makeup. In the evenings and mornings, the area around her eyes is black and smudgy. Once I spat on my fingers and tried to rub it away. She didn’t say gross, even though it was a little gross, she only said I shouldn’t rub so hard.
Years later, when I read the novel myself and try to imagine what Emma looks like, I’m convinced that she too is all black around the eyes. I don’t think Flaubert mentions anything about it, but he does write that “What was beautiful about her was her eyes: although they were brown, they seemed black because of the lashes,” but not a word about the blackness that won’t go away even if you rub and rub.
HE WORE A WHITE suit and was much older than her. She had just turned seventeen. Cousin Henry was known as a ladies’ man and a charlatan, and Mamma has told me how her mother, my nanna, hovered by the open window, waiting for her to come home. Cousin Henry was well mannered and handsome to look at, but not to be trusted. What on earth possessed her daughter to go out with him? Why not someone else? Why him of all people?
It was a bitter cold evening. It was just before Christmas. They went to the movies. Maybe they had a bite to eat. Did they drink wine? When was the first time she realized how good it felt to drink? The sense of freedom? The lack of shame. Finally, finally, finally. I’ll tell no one, but I never want to stop doing this.
They walked home through the park, and he suggested they sit down on a bench and talk, even though it had begun to snow and it was far too cold to do any such thing. He slipped his hand under her skirt, fiddled with her garter, stroked her thigh, his hand was clumsy and small and cold. When he grabbed her underpants to pull them off, she said no, but he pulled them off anyway and they had sex there on the bench. It was the first time. She remembers the cold. The cold bench. The cold hand.
When they walked home—he insisted on walking her home—he asked her what she would like for Christmas. The year was 1955, maybe they had danced to “Blue Suede Shoes,” maybe she had pictured the shoes, those blue suede shoes, only she wanted red ones, she could feel the chill in her nose, in her throat, in her mouth, in her eyes, between her legs, and she was afraid she’d get sick and that her mother, who was hovering by the window, would get mad and hit her. I can’t imagine Nanna hitting anyone, but she did, not me, but Mamma, whenever she got angry and couldn’t control herself.
Mamma told Cousin Henry that she’d like a pair of red high-heeled shoes, and when he asked what size she wore, she lied and said 6. Mamma has always been embarrassed about her feet, she has big feet, 9.5, with a small purple protuberance on her right big toe, but she didn’t want Cousin Henry to know that.
On Christmas Eve 1955, Mamma is presented with a pair of red high-heeled shoes, size 6. She squeezes her feet into them and walks around in them all evening even though it hurts. Cousin Henry is smiling at her and she doesn’t want to appear ungrateful.
The red shoes are among the first presents to be unwrapped that Christmas Eve, and the evening is long. When she’s finally alone in her room and can take them off, her feet are red and swollen and there is a hole in one of her stockings. When she gets out her sewing kit and starts sewing—does she do what Flaubert’s Emma did? Does she keep pricking her fingers, raising them to her mouth to suck?
I TELL MAMMA THAT IF she’s serious about us moving to the Unites States again, it will only happen under certain conditions. I am twelve years old and attach conditions.
My conditions are: I want to go to a good ballet school, and I want a cat.
“You can have your bloody cat,” says Mamma, “whatever you want, I’m sick and tired of everything. I’m so exhausted.”
IT’S TOO EXPENSIVE TO call Heidi from the United States, but we can write letters, Mamma says. That’s one thing. The other is that children must live near trees.
Mamma’s rules for good parenting:
Children must drink milk.
Children must live near trees.
Mamma decides that I will live in a big, yellow house in a small town almost two hours’ drive from New York City. The small town has many trees. I don’t know what sort of trees
they are. Big houses, tall trees, and dark green grass. It dawns on me that Mamma won’t be living in the house with me, she will be commuting, she says. Sometimes she’ll be in New York, sometimes in the small town. I’ll be with the trees.
The owner of the house is a corpulent, bespectacled lady of about sixty with tiny feet crammed into even tinier high-heeled pumps. She will show us the house and offer practical advice before handing over the keys to Mamma. Following what turns out to be a tedious tour of the kitchen, the main living room, and the second-floor bedrooms, she takes us down again to the room she calls the drawing room. She opens the door to the veranda and garden and is about to say something. But Mamma cuts her off.
“A garden,” she exclaims, letting out a little cry of joy, “a garden with trees!”
She takes my hand and wants to run outside, I can tell that she wants us to hold hands and run out into the garden and dance around in it and show the corpulent lady and the new neighbors how wonderful everything is. I pull back my hand, make myself stiff and heavy, turn myself into fifty layers of girl blubber. I hiss: “Don’t touch me!”
I have one boob. You would think that when you finally got them, they’d both come at the same time. But no. On the right side you can see it, on the left side—nothing! One nipple glows violet and hurts when you touch it, as if a bumble bee had moved inside. The other is soft, pink and no bigger than a cat’s nose. I’m thinner than a blade of grass. I hate America. I hate my mother.
Mamma runs outside and begins to dance in the garden. The sun gleams in her hair. She doesn’t know how to dance. It’s not as charming as she thinks. The corpulent lady purses her lips. She and I stand next to each other. I have blue sneakers. She has yellow pumps. It occurs to me that she probably likes yellow, since the house is yellow and the curtains in the living room are yellow and her shoes are yellow. She wants to say something, hesitates, but then pulls herself together and calls out to Mamma: “I don’t encourage . . . please don’t . . . I don’t want anyone treading on the grass!”
Mamma stops dancing and gasps for breath. What did the corpulent lady say? Mamma tosses her beautiful hair and tiptoes exaggeratedly back to where we are standing, as though she wants to show us that she has mastered the art of walking and dancing on grass without touching it. She doesn’t dare say that the garden is the reason she rented this house in the first place, doesn’t dare say that it took her forever to find precisely this house and this garden, that everything was supposed to be perfect this time, doesn’t dare say that while still in Oslo, she had sent for real estate brochures, twenty, maybe more, with photographs of houses and gardens and trees and rooms, yes, she had pored over them in bed, looked at all the different properties, and when she came to the photograph of the big yellow house surrounded by all that greenery she had said to herself: This is where we’re going to live. She had a daughter, a child, trees would be climbed.
Mamma doesn’t dare tell the lady any of this, she is intimidated by all that corpulence, doesn’t want to initiate a conflict. Besides, the contract is already signed. Does that mean tree-climbing is out of the question? She doesn’t dare ask. Everything was supposed to turn out well this time around. Children need peace, order, predictability. A nice house, a nice garden, a nice neighborhood. Trees, milk. She feels like she’s losing her daughter. Something’s slipping. They were so close. But now she shies away. Answers back. She was so dear, so full of light. Sunshine in her hair. Now she looks at me and her eyes speak of a thousand accusations. Can’t she just stay my little girl?
The wallpaper in the drawing room has a brocade pattern, the sofa as well, children are not allowed to bring food into the drawing room, says the lady.
THE CAT COSTS A thousand dollars. It is a long-haired Persian with a complicated, finely spun silver-threaded coat and an equally complicated disposition.
“Most importantly you must remember to brush her coat every day,” says the cat breeder.
The cat breeder looks like a Persian cat herself and has not only one cat living at her house, but over twenty. She has a tiny squashed-together face, a pink nose, small dainty ears, and dopey green eyes with a somewhat bewildered or dejected or offended look about them. Her body is gaunt. She has gathered her frizzy, waist-length hair into a high ponytail. For a while it looked as though Mamma was considering ditching the cat and taking the lady home with her instead.
I have decided that the new cat will be called Suzy Jolie, I decided it on the flight over, and now here we are, still jet-lagged from our trip, mother and daughter in the cat breeder’s living room, seated on creaky chairs with pink floral covers. The table and the windowsills are adorned with various white and green cat-shaped porcelain sculptures, and we have been offered lukewarm Lipton tea in small black cups with the tea bags still floating on top. While the breeder is in the kitchen arranging crackers on a plate, Mamma discovers that she doesn’t have a teaspoon. She coaxes the tea bag out of her cup with her pinkie, the bag drips on the tablecloth, and she glances desperately around, looking for a saucer to put it on, can’t find a saucer and drops it back into the cup with a little plop. Mamma likes her tea weak, it has to be scalding hot and not made from a tea bag dunked straight into the cup but from tea leaves brewed in a pot, all this I know. One of the things I used to do when I was younger was to make tea for Mamma when she was tired and had a headache. She’d lie on the sofa and sip the tea while I massaged her brow. You have good hands, Mamma used to say. Hands that soothe frayed nerves.
The stench of cat pee hits us as Mamma parks the rental car outside the cat breeder’s house. Mamma sticks her big nose in the air—a nose that paradoxically both spoils and emphasizes her beauty—sniffing and saying: “Nothing smells as bad as cat pee! Are you sure you want a cat?”
Talk. Tea. This will take time. On an overseas call between the United States and Norway, the cat lady had insisted on meeting the mother face-to-face. She doesn’t sell cats to just anyone. You can be as much of a movie star as you like, her only concern is the well-being of her cats, and in order to ensure this, she has developed her own cat-owner-approval process. It is not a given that you will be allowed to take the cat home after the first interview, or ever, for that matter. She doesn’t breed cats for the money, she repeats, once we’re all seated around the table having tea and crackers.
“A little bit for the money,” I mutter in Norwegian. Well, I know the cat costs a thousand dollars.
Mamma doesn’t like that her girl has become so sarcastic. It’s getting worse all the time. And rude. That’s gotten worse too. Mamma says nice things to the cat breeder about her living room and all the cat sculptures, about her long, frizzy hair, which Mamma calls wavy, about the fat cat that has jumped up on Mamma’s lap, curled itself into a ball, and gone to sleep. She says nothing about the stench or the lukewarm tea, or about the stained tablecloth. Mamma can bend an iron rod just by looking at it, making it feel seen and loved. I hold my tongue. I don’t have the same effect on people as Mamma does. My teeth are much too big and my mouth is too full of braces to make it worthwhile to say anything at all, and I completely lack the ability to make people feel seen and loved. Persians in assorted stages of cat lives lie sprawled in the overfurnished room—on the sofas strewn with cushions covered in the same cat-nose-pink fabric as the living-room chairs, on the fur-infested carpets beneath the sofas, on the windowsills, coiled round the largest porcelain figurines, under the giant radiator that breathes and pants and crackles and oozes heat. The breeder says to the mother that she is generally opposed to selling her cats to families with children. I shove the big cat away from Mamma’s lap so I can sit there myself. Strictly speaking, I’m too old to sit on Mamma’s lap, I know that, but I don’t care.
“I want to leave,” I mumble in Norwegian, “let’s just go. She’s weird.”
Mamma’s rage erupts without warning. She’s still smiling at the cat breeder, but I can feel the anger by the goose bumps on her skin. This child who has become so big and
heavy, who has climbed onto my lap, who whines and puts on airs and makes everything so difficult.
“It’s not easy being a woman,” my mother says, partly to herself and partly to the cat breeder. The cat breeder nods in agreement.
Every time Mamma utters the word woman, she speaks in italics. It is obvious to everyone, including me, that when Mamma speaks about being a woman, she is talking about something much more complicated than simply being female. I, for example, am nowhere near being a woman. I am the opposite of woman. I am a girl, but not in italics. I remember learning about distillation in school and thinking that if you boiled Mamma at a thousand degrees you would be left with the distilled essence of woman. I get up from her lap and walk into the kitchen. Maybe I’ll find the cat I’ll be taking home with me? My cat. That was the agreement. Mamma will make it happen. She usually keeps her promises except when she has promised to call at a particular agreed-upon time.
Your mother is the most sincere liar in the world, Pappa says, with a certain measure of admiration.
They are like prodigal sons, the two of them, the mother and the father, each in their own way, each in their own world, the beloved younger child who expects the fatted calf to be brought hither and killed for him, who wants to eat and make merry and be dead then alive again, to be lost then found, and who doesn’t want the fun and games to ever end.
And the agreement with Mamma was: I will leave Heidi and move to the United States with you if you let me have a cat. I don’t want a fatted calf, I want a cat. I don’t want to be a child, either, but I have no choice but to be one for a few more years.
The kitchen floor crunches under my feet, there is cat litter everywhere, a big white cat is shitting in the litter box over by the door and kicking the litter over the edges, a half-eaten ham sandwich lies forgotten on a plate on the counter. Mamma and the strange woman are talking in the living room. I wander from room to room, and maybe it’s the jet-lag, maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s the smell of cat pee, but it feels like I’m wandering around inside an early morning nightmare—the glaring lights, the crawling surfaces.