The American Girl (19 page)

Whom both Sandra and Doris were a little fond of: “I think about her all the time. I think she’s delicious delicious,” Doris said to Sandra, and “jinks” said Sandra, that they were thinking and feeling the same way about something. And Doris rolled her eyes like a striptease dancer is not allowed to do and muttered, “Absolutely exquisite. I could die for her.”

But
Eldrid’s Spiritual Sojourn
on the bus, what did it mean? Not to mention that you would make a fool of yourself by asking. That question and a bunch of other questions, just as stupid. A club? Or: Eldrid, who is she? And so on. Of course you would not get an answer to any of this nonsense, and you would also gradually realize how unnecessary such questions were—such answers. The point was, as Inget Herrman expressed,
it is not a meaning that can be fixed, it just is
.

Trips, for example: trips out into the world, trips in geography, to cities, other countries, out in the world in other words, that which existed, the known and the unknown. But also other trips, the made-up trips, trips in your fantasy. And trips in your physical space—all unconscious outings you could make in feeling, thought, body, and mind, here and there.

Trips to these kinds of places and worlds that were created just because you were traveling through them.

The universe is a new flower
.

Or, as Annukka Metsämäki carefully read in the garden one evening so shyly that it could barely be heard, “Now I’m going to read a poem that I’ve written all by myself.” She started so softly she was almost whispering. “Louder!” someone yelled and so she raised her voice for the time it took to read
I am a white negro, there are no rules for me
whereafter she became so quiet so quiet again because someone yelled, “That’s PLAGIARISM,” and then the exchange of lines was a fact. Saskia Stiernhielm literally
hissed to Laura Bjällbo-Hallberg like a snake, “Then you should always be there and know and decide everything.”

“What do you want it to mean, girls?” Inget Herrman asked the girls. “Here. Take. And write. On the bus.” And she handed them a small bucket with green paint and of course it made you happy, but still, once you actually had the brush in your hand you were really completely drained out of nervousness from the fear of making an even bigger fool out of yourself so nothing got written on that bus at all.

But gradually, slowly, still, with brush in hand, you started understanding what it was all about. A feeling. A power. Possibilities, openness.
That it was moving forward
. And then it was as easy as pie to steal the brush and the small bucket and use them for your own purposes: take them to the house in the darker part and paint Loneliness&Fear on your newly sewn polyester T-shirts for everything you were worth.

But consequently, it was above all the parties that the women in the house on the First Cape would become notorious for in the District. One party after another sometimes without a break in between; a party flowed over into another almost imperceptibly—and gradually the parties started moving to other places too. What had started on the First Cape radiated out over the entire district, even all the way out to the Second Cape. Not to every house of course, but to certain ones, quite a few actually; during the entire time the women were living in the house on the First Cape it was in fact only the Glass House where Kenny and the sea urchins were hanging out that remained so to speak untouched through it all. The baroness came out only a few times that summer; there were rumors she was seriously ill. But the First Cape, the women, anything else—none of it was in the Glass House. For real. Maybe something then, but in that case only as a relief against which the house’s own, the white, would shine clearly and purely.

“Mom’s new bordeaux-colored Nissan Cherry,” Anna Sjölund from the Second Cape said for example. “I would really like one like that.”

Here you find yourself. Ones who were like you. Confusingly similar. Almost yourself. Here you were occupied with each other and with yourself and with each other. The special mood that was created when you were together, skin against skin.

The time when the women were living in the house on the First Cape constituted entirely new possibilities, but also for those who were not there at all, that is to say not anywhere. For example, the cousin’s mama now had the chance to expand her moonlighting, that is to say her cleaning business. Suddenly she had an entirely new customer base in addition to the Islander and the house in the darker part and a few of the more well-to-do families in the District. Quite a few of the summer guests on the Second Cape got in touch now too when their houses needed to be picked up after parties, and the word spread, and gradually Kenny was also there and wanted to hire her because when the baroness came out during the summer it was supposed to look like nothing had been going on in the Glass House before her arrival. And besides, all of these people, they also had permanent homes in other places. In the city by the sea, for example.

This meant that the work now became a real business in one fell swoop. Little by little the cousin’s mama could start her own company and have employees and so on. Employees like Bengt for example. And Solveig. And Rita (reluctant, but still). And Doris sometimes, while she was alive, but more for specific tasks due to her young age (the house in the darker part, in the fall, after the hunting parties; more about that later). The company was christened Four Mops and a Dustpan. “The dustpan, that’s Bengt,” Doris confided to her best friend Sandra Wärn. “But don’t tell anyone—it’s a corporate secret.”

. . .

But the parties spread, a tiny, tiny bit more. Finally, when they had carried on and carried on spreading all over both of the capes they somehow found their way to one of the narrowest and darkest paths in the woods, the one that led to the house in the darker part of the woods. There where the Islander was standing, at the top of the stairs, white shirt flapping, sloppily tucked into his pants, the buttons unbuttoned all the way to his navel just about, furnished with sideburns in accordance with the current fashion and with a gold medallion shining against his dark chest hair, glistening with sweat in the sun. Like the captain on a ship—

“Everyone on board!” is not what he yelled but he could have. And the similarity, no, it was not so crazy after all because look at the women who are coming toward him in masquerade clothes on the path up to the house, how they are drawn to him and the house like sea rats who curiously draw closer to a ship with one, let us say an interesting turn, toward port, down toward the mud—and really, it was Anneka Munveg and Inget Herrman who were in the lead.

Then, from the back, not the very back of the line of dressed-up people on the path, but in other words even farther behind than where Doris and Sandra were dragging themselves forward, the following could be heard:

“Sinking. Sinking.” And Sandra turned around instinctively. It was the boy who was saying it of course. Their eyes met. He looked straight at her, but also, in a strange way through her.

“In other words this is where she died,” Doris Flinkenberg said at Bule Marsh. “Fell down in the water, was sucked down into a dreadful whirlpool, never came up again. Is lying on the bottom, maybe she’ll float up sometime. It’s terribly deep here, the dredging didn’t turn up anything. But you know she’s lying here, that the water became her grave. There were witnesses.”

In other words it was here, at Bule Marsh, that Doris Flinkenberg finally started her story. Midsummer Eve, still an early one.
Suddenly, in the middle of the party that was slowly getting started in the garden on the First Cape, Doris had done what Sandra had been waiting a few weeks for already. Given the go-ahead: The Game starts now.

“Come,” she had whispered in Sandra’s ear and pulled her away, far out into the woods, and little by little they had turned off on the winding path up to Bule Marsh.

And here they were now, at the marsh: the branches of hardwood trees hanging in a ring around a dark, still water. Opposite the highest cliff, that was Lore Cliff, there was a small sandy beach like an opening in the woodwork, which Doris Flinkenberg explained had once upon a time been a public beach. It was a short while, shortly after the new houses in the housing exhibition on the Second Cape had been bought up and the strip of beach next to the sea where you used to go swimming had become inaccessible. But later, after what had happened at the marsh only about a year later, no one had wanted to swim at the marsh and the public beach had been moved yet again, now to a real, sweet water lake in the western part of the county.

It was a strange place, it really was, even in the middle of the warm summer. Half dark and filled with mosquitoes at almost all times of day, and calm even when it was blowing fiercely in other places. You almost needed a storm in order to get the water on the surface of Bule Marsh even to ripple. And it was deep. Doris Flinkenberg looked down in the water. “Probably three hundred feet deep.”

“That’s impossible,” Sandra Wärn said to her friend.

“He saw her here,” Doris Flinkenberg continued. “That’s how he drew it on his maps anyway.”

“That’s impossible,” Sandra Wärn repeated. “Who?”

“You don’t know?” Doris Flinkenberg asked and it was hard to hear if the question was part of the game or if it had truly surprised her.

“Well, him. The idiot in the woods of course. Bengt himself.”

. . .

“And her name was Eddie,” Doris Flinkenberg continued while the sun set behind the clouds and the mosquitoes crowded around them, two pale girls who, as luck would have it, both happened to be endowed with that rare kind of complexion that mosquitoes were not attracted to so that they could sit more or less undisturbed almost in the middle of the swarm in the small crevice just under Lore Cliff’s highest point, which Doris had chosen for them, two very serious girls also, as said, with their homemade Loneliness&Fear shirts on. “She came from nowhere. You didn’t know much about her. She wasn’t from the District in any case because she spoke with a strange accent that wasn’t familiar to anyone. People referred to her as
the American girl
.

“One spring she was just there, in the boathouse below the Glass House on the Second Cape, with the baroness. That’s where she lived. Not like a daughter of the house, or a domestic servant, but like a guest of some sort, no one really knew. A distant relative, something like that. Sometimes the baroness said ‘the boarder,’ especially toward the end. They didn’t really get along, Eddie and the baroness. There were rumors flying around Eddie about this and that, that is to say while she was still alive. Eddie was of the troublemaking kind, you couldn’t rely on her. I heard it with my own ears. The baroness said it to the cousin’s mama in the cousin’s house where I was already spending a lot of time then. ‘That girl is such a disappointment to me,’ she said, many times. And consequently in the end in a rather upset state. She came to the cousin’s house to warn the cousin’s mama about Eddie de Wire. That’s how I understood it anyway.

“So she lived in the boathouse. She was allowed to be in the Glass House only when the baroness was home. The baroness also explained all of this to the cousin’s mama, so it wasn’t a secret. Not directly. But it wasn’t something that everyone knew. I guess that’s the way it is,” Doris Flinkenberg established worldly and omnisciently at Bule Marsh, “that for some
people it’s important to save face. In some way it was extremely important that no one find out about the problems she was having with the American girl. It was after all, she always said, still family.

“But later, Kenny, Eddie’s sister, came. They were a better fit. I think the baroness became more content then. She stopped complaining about everything in any case. Though she never came to the cousin’s house anymore. But there was a reason for that of course.”

“Because if you’re wondering what the baroness was doing in the cousin’s house shortly before Eddie and Björn died, yes—so Björn was the cousin’s boy in the cousin’s house. That is to say before I came. They were together, Eddie and Björn, they were going to get engaged, it was very serious. So the baroness was going to do the cousin’s mama a favor, she said.”

“But Eddie, what a fascinating personality,” said Doris Flinkenberg. “She spoke so strangely, not just with the accent, which she lost pretty quickly. But she said a lot of strange things. And it made a real impression on him.

“On Bengt that is, not Björn. For a while it was the two of them. Bengt and Eddie. Then Björn came and they were three.”

“But in other words, fascinating,” said Doris Flinkenberg. “You could really fall in love with her. And that’s what he did. Head over heels. So in love that he didn’t know left from right. You know what it can be like, right? We know. Young love. A violent end.”

And yes, Doris did not need to say any more about it. If there was something Sandra and Doris knew quite a lot about it was that. When the contents of the two backpacks are united . . . It was the bitter midwife’s assistant Ingegerd who had killed the seven incubator babies after being rejected by her lover, it was Lupe Velez who fell headfirst and drowned in a toilet bowl, it
was the woman who had murdered her lover with fifteen hammer blows to the head, it was . . .

“And then”—Doris Flinkenberg suddenly shrugged her shoulders rather nonchalantly—“it went as it went. Death and woe became the result. Björn hanged himself in the outhouse by Lindström’s land, and she, the American girl, drowned. Sank to the bottom of the marsh, like a rock.

“In any case that’s how people think it happened, and so far there haven’t been any reasons to think otherwise.

“And this is how it happened: they argued at Bule Marsh, and Björn, who was known for being the nicest person in the world, pushed her in the water out of anger. And by mistake. And then everything happened so quickly, so quickly. There’s a hole in the bottom of Bule Marsh. She was sucked down into the deep. He couldn’t live with it so he went straight to the outhouse and hanged himself.

“Just eighteen years old and he took his own life,” Doris finally added.