by Linn Ullmann
A few years earlier Mamma finished her book, the one she had been struggling to write. I remember she spent every day in the basement of the house in Strømmen, writing and writing, seeing the pile of paper getting bigger and bigger. Her nerves were frayed. We got a color TV. I was seven. Then eight. She danced around and fell down and had to be helped into bed. She cried and said she couldn’t take it anymore. Men—over and out. The telephone kept ringing. Everyone just tugged at her, and finally, the book was finished. When it was published in the United States, she took me with her to an elegant bookstore in New York, where I had to sit quietly behind a big table for several hours while people lined up to buy the book and get her autograph on the title page, some of the people, mostly women, patted me on the cheek, some wept, some took pictures. In chapter one, Mamma writes: “I want to write about love, about being human—about loneliness—about being a woman.” All of which seem like excellent things to write about. She also writes: “It may be the lost kingdom of childhood I am in constant search for.” Which I don’t get. What loss? What kingdom? One day I’ll be an adult, but that’s still years away, unfortunately. I’m twelve. I don’t like being a child. I don’t like other children, I don’t like the way they look at me, their whispering, their pretty hair, their secrets. I miss Heidi. She’s a child, but in a way that I understand. I’ve been in the United States for three days and I already miss her more than I can bear. If only there was a way to make time pass more quickly.
I open the door to what must be the cat breeder’s bedroom. Six kittens lie entangled on an unmade narrow bed, unaware of my presence until I stretch out my hand and try to pet them. The smallest kitten, no bigger than a lemming, sticks its head out of the huddle, hisses and clamps its teeth round my hand, I cry out, but there’s no sound to be heard. I try to pull my hand away, but the cat digs its teeth in again and this time it gets a good grip. It hurts. It’s like the time when Heidi jabbed my hand with a piece of glass from a broken Coca-Cola bottle. But that time I was supposed to bleed, we were both supposed to bleed, we were mingling blood so that we could become blood sisters. When I lift up my hand, the cat follows along and dangles in midair. The other cats move a tiny little bit, barely noticing that the cluster has lost one of its component parts. Heidi said that pain numbs pain. Maybe it’s true. The cat consists of mostly fur and a few teeth, claws, heart and bone. I shake my hand until it lets go.
I make my way back through the smelly rooms and stop in the living-room doorway. Mamma and the cat breeder are sitting close together on the sofa, immersed in intimate conversation as though they’d been friends all their lives. Mamma looks up and sees me.
“One of the cats bit and scratched me,” I say and splay my fingers. A speck of blood seeps from the soft skin between my thumb and index finger.
“Then go and wash your hands,” Mamma says.
“Maybe I’ll get rabies,” I say, “or tetanus. It bit really hard.”
I move a few steps closer.
“See! There’s blood everywhere!”
I make my eyes roll back in my head.
The cat breeder looks at me, then at Mamma. We’re talking Norwegian, so she has no idea what we’re saying. Mamma always tells me to speak English when we’re in the United States. Remember to speak English, sweetie, it’s rude not to. I look at the cat breeder’s ugly green eyes. I don’t think she’s going to give us the cat even though Mamma is paying her a thousand dollars.
My behavior has jeopardized the approval process. Stupid girl!
“My daughter caught her hand in the door,” Mamma says gently, smiling at the cat breeder.
Or maybe she can make it happen after all? Mamma can get clouds to change shape, hearts to beat faster.
Mamma gestures at me to come and sit on her lap. She kisses my fingers, she doesn’t kiss where it hurts, but it’s still nice.
BABYSITTERS MOVE IN AND out of the yellow house. Their job is to take care of the girl. Get her up in the morning, give her food, help her with her homework, take her to ballet class in New York, take her back to the little town, this fucking wasteland, get her into bed at night.
The mother thought it would be wise to hire two babysitters this time. If one of them jumps ship, the other can take over. The girl is impossible, unruly, simply no longer a mouse, and the mother must find out how best to take care of this cluster of bones and mouth and knees and braces and expenses, this pile of limbs that clings to her and rejects her and that is, and always will be, her sole responsibility. The girl’s mother, long-haired and lovely, has so many things on her mind. So much to do. The year is 1978 and soon she will be forty. She stands in the middle of the floor wearing a long, sheer dress, and everyone comes tugging at her. Kissing her, patting her, poking her, bumping into her, shaking her, stroking her hair, rubbing her tummy, licking her, twisting her nose, lifting her up, setting her down, knocking, ringing, pecking, stinging, swarming, and it’s not as if the girl’s father ever lifted a finger. Not a single goddamned finger to help. Is anyone writing to him about the ship going down? Is anyone asking him where his child is, or where he is? Is anyone pulling and tugging at him? Is anyone taking the liberty of judging him—as a father? No. He’s got enough on his plate already, coping with being a genius and all his bloody demons.
The mother rolls her eyes.
“You and I are on our own, Mouse,” she tells her daughter, and hugs her tightly, “it’s just us two.”
The two babysitters come from Sweden, they are twenty-two and twenty-four and devastatingly beautiful. Mamma promises them lots of money to take care of the girl. There’s no limit to what one must shell out to guard against the ship going down. A thousand dollars a month they are to be paid. Mamma meant to say a thousand kroner, she later confides to her daughter, but said a thousand dollars instead and didn’t dare take it back, at least not once the Swedish girls had thrown their arms around her neck and showered her with kisses. Mamma doesn’t want to disappoint people. It’s difficult, you know. I can’t bear to disappoint people. Sometimes the girl is the only one who listens and the only one who knows how to console. The mother’s women friends tell the mother that she has to stop confiding in her daughter, one shouldn’t try to be friends with one’s child, one should be a mother, say the women friends, and in theory at least the mother agrees and adds this to her list of rules for good parenting:
Children must drink milk.
Children must live near trees.
Mothers should not try to be friends with their daughters, nor should they confide in them, mothers have to remember who is the mother and who is the daughter, who is the adult and who is the child.
In the stories the father told, the girls were always devastatingly beautiful, with emphasis on the word “devastatingly.” This made the stories more interesting. When the phone rings (the telephone in the yellow house is also yellow, with push buttons and a long black cord and a chime so loud that it makes you start) and it’s the father calling long distance from Munich, the daughter tells him that she has moved to a small town outside of New York and that she’s living with two devastatingly beautiful girls from Sweden and that she’s doing very well.
As time passes, Mamma comes home to the yellow house less and less often. Every morning I walk to the end of the street to wait for the school bus. I go to an all-girls school set in its own large, parklike grounds. The school uniform consists of a green pinafore dress, a white blouse, brown shoes, green knee socks, bony knees sticking out below the hem of the dress. I am put into a class of girls younger than me—demoted to a class of little kids, brats, eleven-year-olds. My English isn’t good enough yet, explains the headmistress, a haggard and ravenous lady with pointy breasts.
“You would feel rather lost if I were to put you in a situation in which you were measured against girls of your own age,” she says.
“Lost?” says Mamma meekly, and glances over at me. We’re each sitting in a huge leather chair in the headmistress’s office.
&
nbsp; “Yes,” says the headmistress.
I glare at her.
“Isn’t that a bit extreme?” whispers Mamma. “I mean, she won’t be lost.”
“What matters most is that our students feel safe and secure,” says the headmistress.
The classroom is large and bright with tall arching windows. All of the children politely greet the new student. The teacher’s name is Miss French and her subject is English. She is so beautiful that I understand what Pappa means by devastating, not just a word to spice up a good story, but as a real thing, something palpable, something that certain God-chosen women exude. Miss French materializes in front of the blackboard in all her horrible beauty and so perfectly groomed and alluring that she crackles as she moves around the classroom. She speaks softly, almost in a whisper, and the children must lean forward to hear her every word. I sit in the back row and squeeze my eyes shut so I won’t have to look at her.
Once and only once do I find myself alone with Miss French. It is my very first day at the new school. I barely survive it. Well, that’s not entirely true. But I do catch a fever.
She takes me to a small windowless room where the uniforms are kept.
“They’re not exactly the prettiest dresses in the world,” she says softly and all girlfriend-to-girlfriend.
I’m standing in the middle of the floor in my underwear and tights and a white blouse that itches. I’m struggling to pull the green pinafore dress down over my head.
“But you’ll get used to it in no time,” she says, “and in any case, you won’t have to worry about what to wear every morning.”
She laughs a spine-chilling little laugh.
She hands me the knee socks. I sit on the floor and pull them over my tights.
“No, no,” she whispers, “you can’t wear knee socks over your tights. You have to take off your tights.”
“But I don’t want to take off my tights. It’s freezing.”
“Oh, but you’re not allowed to wear tights under your knee socks.” Silky soft voice, creamy smooth skin. Her silk stockings glisten, most likely they’re the kind you attach to a garter belt. Her earrings sparkle, the silver brooch on her lapel flashes. I wonder whether Miss French hates girls. She is so lovely and we are so ugly. Especially me. There is a full-length mirror on the wall of the uniform room. I stand in front of it. Miss French sneaks up behind me like a milky-white frosty mist. The knee socks itch. She puts her hand on my shoulder. We stand there for a moment looking at ourselves in the mirror. My knees stick out from below the hem of my dress, big and blue like globes of the Earth.
Every day a new tailor-made dress more exquisite than the one before. Maybe she does it on purpose? Maybe she needs me, my ugliness, my scrawniness, as yet uninitiated, in order for her to shine?
My cat lives in a large walk-in closet with a window. I move my mattress into the closet and lie down. I feel hot and woozy. I say it’s because I have to wear knee socks in the middle of winter. I forget to brush the cat’s silky coat, and it gets tangled into knots that are impossible to undo. The Swedish babysitters make an attempt, one of them holds the cat firmly on her lap while the other wets her hairbrush and combs as gently as she can. But still she combs too hard, and big tufts of fur are pulled from the cat’s body. When they’re done, the cat is covered with sores and large hairless patches.
One of the two Swedish girls falls in love with a boy with bangs. He isn’t really a boy, he’s at least twenty-five, but the bangs make him look like a kid. He transforms the yellow house into a sweetly fragrant, smoky den with many rooms and voices and music. The smoke and the sweetness envelop us all. The neighbors don’t like what’s going on. In their opinion, neither Mamma nor the Swedish girls nor the scrawny little girl nor the neglected cat are right for the neighborhood.
Single mother with plunging neckline comes and goes.
Questionable Swedish girls come and go.
Scrawny little girl (who squeezes her eyes shut when you talk to her) comes and goes.
Every afternoon before dinner, the two Swedish girls prepare an odd spicy stew that no one wants to eat. I know I don’t. Little white bones stick out of the grainy sauce. The stew is left simmering on the stovetop. One day we’re invited over by one of the neighbors, Mrs. Lyndon, for tea. The next town over has boasted visitors such as Alice Cooper and Bette Davis, so what are two slutty Swedish babysitters and a Broadway star’s scrawny daughter compared to that? Mrs. Lyndon has many children, her oldest daughter is my age and goes to the public school that I wish I went to.
“You’re going to a party,” Mamma says on the telephone.
“It’s not a party,” I say. “It’s tea.”
“Well, whatever . . . this is your chance to make new friends,” she says.
I nod. She can’t see that I’m nodding and gets annoyed when I don’t answer. She says I have to remember to brush my hair and be on my best behavior.
I nod again.
“Can I talk to one of the girls?” says Mamma. “I want to tell them they have to remember to remind you to brush your hair.”
“I can remember it myself.”
“Okay.”
“Do you still want to talk to them?”
“No, in that case I don’t need to.”
“Bye,” I say, “I think we should hang up now.”
I can hear Mamma breathing on the other end.
“I have homework to do, okay?”
“Mouse . . .” her voice wavers.
“Yes, what?”
“Please remember to be nice.”
“I’m always nice.”
Mamma hesitates. She wants to protest. She doesn’t think I’m always nice, in fact, this is something she feels we should talk about before things . . . escalate . . . unravel . . . before there’s another shipwreck . . . but she doesn’t have time now, someone is waiting for her.
“You’re nice when you want to be nice,” she says, her uncertainty all but gone now, and then we say goodbye and hang up.
Mrs. Lyndon has set out cheese and crackers and juice and tea and coffee for the adults. Four squashy sofas are arranged around a large coffee table. The sofas are pink. I reach out and take a cracker. I hope no one notices, because Mrs. Lyndon hasn’t said help yourself yet. The sofas are spruced up with lots of little cushions. You have to wrestle your way through them and lunge forward if you want to get something from the tray on the coffee table. The cracker is good. It’s thin and crispy and salty, like chips, but it’s more like food than chips, maybe it’s an herb or some type of coarse flour that makes it so tasty. I take another one and spread a little cheese on it. Mrs. Lyndon looks at me and laughs and says: “Help yourself.”
“Who would like tea,” she says, “who would like coffee?”
The Swedish babysitters say they would like tea, I ask if I can have a glass of water. The girl who is my age has been instructed by Mrs. Lyndon to ask me about my home country.
“Do you have sidewalks in Norway?” the girl asks, glaring at me and the Swedish babysitters. My mouth is full of crackers and I can’t answer.
The Swedish babysitters laugh and say that we have sidewalks and streets and buildings and cars and summers and winters and cities and fields and birds and cinemas just like here.
“We’re from Sweden,” they say simultaneously, “and this one’s from Norway,” they add, giving me a squeeze.
“Uh-huh,” says the girl my age, turning her attention to an invisible spot on the ceiling.
“That’s very interesting,” says Mrs. Lyndon, and looks like she means it. “But the languages are different, aren’t they? Yet you understand one another?”
“Oh, yes,” the Swedish babysitters say, and give me another squeeze. “And this young lady speaks both Norwegian and Swedish fluently, so it’s no problem at all.”
“Interesting,” Mrs. Lyndon says again, smiling at me. “They’re such beautiful countries, Norway and Sweden. I’ve always wanted to visit Scandinavia.”
; I take another cracker. The girl my age, whose name is Ashley, makes a face, signaling to her mother that she wants to go. She’s due at practice (gymnastics? basketball? cheerleading? drama?) and someone or other (Lisa? Kimberley? Mary? Michelle?) is waiting for her, and now she’s stuck around long enough. Mother and daughter don’t think I notice, but I do. I take another cracker and an extra big dollop of cheese. I’ve decided that after this cracker I’m going to count to a thousand before taking another.
“How do you like being here, then . . . in the United States?” asks Mrs. Lyndon, and smiles at me.
When she smiles, her mouth becomes a necklace of little white teeth. I have crackers in my mouth and don’t want to speak until I’ve swallowed everything, so I smile back and nod and point the way you do when you want to say Just a moment, let me swallow this so I can answer your question. To speed things up, I wash everything down with water and wipe the cracker crumbs from my lips. I have a linen napkin. Everyone has linen napkins. I don’t know where to put mine once I’m finished with it. Sometimes my English sounds worse than it really is. Often when strangers ask me questions, I forget words and start to stutter. To get around this problem I look down at the floor and mumble. Or squeeze my eyes shut.
“Yes . . . thanks for asking . . . I’m sorry for my English . . . I like it very much.”
“That’s lovely,” says Mrs. Lyndon. “Maybe you and Ashley could get together one day. Ashley does gymnastics, perhaps you would like to go with her?”