The Glitter Scene (42 page)

Her mother had not answered Susette’s question about the loom, she never answered it. It was probably so, that she did not know. She lost the loom, it had become mislaid in some way, but continued, still, maybe just because, due to her forgetfulness, cutting cutting anyway
.

“It is never easy coming to a house of sorrow, Susette.” She had said, for example, admonishingly, at the rag-cutting bucket
.

And then the funerals, the cemetery again. The flowers to the graves. To her father’s grave in the new cemetery where the meadow had once been where they, she and her mother, back when everything had still been normal, picked flowers and brought them to the cemetery. And now her mother was sad about that too: that the meadow was no longer there and her father “was resting” on the new side that she thought was so bare and deserted and she became even more sorrowful because of it, that poor him had to “rest” there, could you even “rest” there, come to peace, which you should be allowed to do after you die?

Flowers on the graves of others as well. Still, like always. But the jars they had with them to place the flowers in were rarely washed and boiled, transparent and clean like before, rather nasty, sometimes just yogurt jars, helpfully washed, made of plastic—

And the funerals, her mother and the funerals. Sitting in the church, listening to the blessings, sorting addresses into neat fans on the tables in the fellowship hall afterward
.

“The grieving have other things to think about.”

All death, Susette had sometimes thought in secret, in my hands
.

But cutting rags with her mother, it had become like a language. Her and her mother’s only way of being together, of communicating. “So ugly,” the brothers said when they, together with their young families, had at some point in the beginning still come to visit their former childhood home. And father’s house of balsa wood that needed to be collected because one of the kids in the family was so “interested in construction” but of course it could not be found anywhere—when it later surfaced it was broken. Balsa is fragile, thin wood: as if someone stepped right on the veneer sheet on which it was constructed. Not Susette, maybe her mother, or otherwise it had ended up under the piles of fabric or other junk, trash, and been crushed under the weight
.

“Susette, maybe you should …” the brothers insinuated, meant clean, keep things in order. “We can see mother isn’t well, that she can’t do things on her own right now.” And snap it had been so that the brothers with their proper wives and proper small children, self-fulfilled in their own lives and business like everyone in the whole
world, would have such an understanding for “the difficult daily life of a young family,” stopped coming to the parental home altogether. Mother had gone and visited them sometimes instead. In office clothes, which she still had. Susette had her job of course and could not get away. On the other hand, she had not actually wanted to go along. Nice to be alone, at least for a few days, now and then. Catch her breath
,
not
cut rags. And when her mother came home again she was usually quite energetic and normal, but after a day or two everything was just like before
.

So yes, it had been clear. She, Susette, had not been able to do anything about it. Powerless. And of course in the long run she had not been able to live there either
.

So she had left, gone to the strawberry fields in the central part of the country and ended up in a wood and it was not until three years later that she came back, but then, as mentioned, her mother was already dead
.

But with the lady, old Elizabeth Maalamaa in Portugal, she had been able to get it back. Well, a kind of reconciliation. The word “reconciliation” was not Susette’s own, she had gotten it from the therapist, therapists, she had regularly seen during her seventeen-year marriage to Tom Maalamaa. “Reconciliation”: but a good word, when she, sitting there at the office, had spoken a bit about her mother and Liz Maalamaa
.

For example, the following: about what it had been like, in Portugal, December 1989, like coming home. Or another possible image, also fitting: from a road in whirling snow in the District to Tom to Portugal—so self-evident. To Liz Maalamaa, who had become bedridden rather soon after Susette and her fiancé Tom arrived then,
in December 1989, and Susette sat at her bedside for hours when Liz Maalamaa was not sleeping, and sometimes then as well, watching over her, as it were. How she liked Liz Maalamaa. And how Liz Maalamaa liked her. “I want to protect you from everything evil,” Liz Maalamaa had even said. “I like you so much
,
my
Susette.”

As if Susette had been her girl and Liz Maalamaa her mother. It had also almost been said: not like a game exactly, but like a silent, mutual agreement. Liz Maalamaa never had a child of her own, and how she longed for a child of her own, she talked about that too. “Susette, my own girl.” And Susette had her mother again, but then what had gone wrong with her mother, for real, everything, everything, in the house, that she personally had left and not been there at the end, not even at the funeral … could in some way be repaired, now. Liz Maalamaa had also told Susette about her careful preparations for her own funeral, neatly written down in pencil in a notebook that she kept in the drawer of her nightstand next to her bed: “Yes. I haven’t thought about dying yet, especially not now when you’re here, Susette, my girl, but you never know of course.” And then when she shortly thereafter had been dead, Susette made sure to follow all of Liz Maalamaa’s funeral instructions to a T, to the point that it was exactly that very expensive porcelain
,
a fine china
that her husband’s family had so cared for, which should be set out and used at the family’s table during the reception in the fellowship hall after the burial
.

“I so like it when you take care of me, Susette. I take my medicine so gladly. It’s almost as if I want to be sick all the time when you’re here. Now I’m finally getting
some peace and rest, it’s been quite lonely, especially after the death of my dog. But now, Susette, here with you.”

And Liz Maalamaa had swallowed her medicine: all obligatory portions according to the doctor’s prescription and more, gradually, which Susette portioned out for her in transparent, colored medicine cups. She, Susette, was used to it, how medicine should be portioned out, had of course worked so much with the old and the sick during her lifetime
.

And she had found more tablets too, consequently, other medicine, hidden away in the medicine cabinet in a special container: bottles, bottles with sleeping pills, calming pills, with a few years under their belt, but medicine as medicine, Liz Maalamaa needed her medicine. “I need my medicine, Susette,” she said as well. And Susette had started placing more pills in the medicine cups, and increasing the dosage and even mashing, discreetly, pills into Liz Maalamaa’s food too
.

“Reconciliation.” Though that, about the medication, she had not been able to say anything to the therapist, therapists, or to Tom Maalamaa or anyone else
.

But the following, as a backdrop to what it had been like to come home to Liz Maalamaa in Portugal, she had certainly mentioned at one therapist office or another:

“I needed protection. Up until then. I went around carrying a pistol without really knowing why.”

The therapist had listened, not moved a muscle. “Yes, it can be like that. We need protection. All of us have a buffer zone that is invisible but cannot withstand being trespassed. And if it has been trespassed upon, it can be the case that you have not been aware of it—especially if it happened during childhood. But it provokes a
disturbance, and often such a disturbance, if it originates in the childhood infantile, can take on an absurd expression in adulthood.”

That therapist used some of her other patients as examples, granted without naming any names. Some director of a large business corporation who walked around with a teddy bear: a large, large teddy bear who had to have his own seat in business class. A day-care manager with a toy gun in her apron. A movie where someone had lost a sled, Rosebud, which was the key to the mystery his entire life had developed into
.

Completely illogical but all of us are irrational beings, especially when we struggle to be the most rational, the therapist had said—but added: “There is understanding. We must try and understand each other. What things say, what language everything we surround ourselves with is speaking … We must listen, be observant, speak, speak.”

The therapist at the office had spoken, one of those therapists who, in addition to listening, liked talking. Because there were therapists like that too, had been, all kinds of therapists, all manner of schools, Susette had, during all the years in therapy, learned. But the therapist who liked hearing her own voice about the movie and the literature and all the patients who visited her who flew business class had been good, in any case. Aside from the fact that Susette of course understood that the therapist took for granted that it had not been a real pistol, which had been loaded to boot and had ended up in her Fjällräven backpack that she had sometimes carried with her in the middle of the day, rather one of those daycaremanagerpistols, toy, certainly plastic, like the yogurt containers at the cemetery
.

On the other hand, the pistol. If she had started thinking about it too much at the office, the offices, then it would have become too absurd and completely impossible. “We’re here to help you build a story for yourself that has some sort of coherence, context. A story with not necessarily a happy ending, but a story that you can live with. There is understanding. It is always easier to look things right in the eye. Give them words. Then you can go on living. And you deserve to live, Susette. Your life, Susette,” the therapist had said. “You haven’t had it easy, Susette. But now you have so much that is valuable. It’s your turn now. It’s about time you start thinking about the fact that you have a right to be thinking this way.”

So she had forgotten about the pistol. With this therapist and all therapists later. And otherwise. There was a forgetfulness in her, that was also true. She had forgotten so much so much and when she remembered what she had forgotten then it did not come in the form of any coherent stories, it came like breezes, drafts of wind through her head, images pulled loose, sentences
.

But she had cried a lot. There, in Portugal, the crying had started there, already while Liz Maalamaa was still alive. She cried at night, during the afternoon when Liz Maalamaa was sleeping and Tom Maalamaa was sunbathing on the patio. Stood at the window and watched him where he was lying, wearing sunglasses and reading Gandhi’s memoirs in a deck chair in front of a marvelous sea and cried. Out of love, and out of sorrow. Something comfortless in that crying, everything she was—at the same time, when she saw Tom, who calmly accepted and would, during their entire lives together, accept the crying as a part of who she was, a crying filled with leniency, even hope
.

Letting the crying out
.

“The sorrow doesn’t disappear just because of it,” the therapist also said, given the crying, the weight, that word: the Sorrow. It was beautiful, fitting. More beautiful than “a life-long depression,” which became the diagnosis
.

“You can live with depression, as long as you get help … And then there is medication—”

So yes, after Portugal, she no longer needed any protection. But the crying had continued. And there had been the thing she had said to the therapists that had not really come out the right way, not exactly how it had been, not due to the information provided, but otherwise just, because it was unexplainable
.

Maj-Gun Maalamaa. It was that day in November, the last in the District, when everything culminated: Susette had been on her way to the sea, which she hated, but there, for some reason, going out there, a logic, because she could not live. Suddenly Maj-Gun Maalamaa in the boathouse there at the Second Cape where Susette as a child had been saved in the swimming school—so now when she was going to swim it was logical that it was going to happen, without being saved, exactly right here. Maj-Gun, who had been furious and started hitting. And beating and beating and beating Susette black and blue so that she blacked out awhile in the boathouse and when she woke up again it was dark and Maj-Gun was gone. Maj-Gun who had such power in her blows, and she who had not defended herself, just accepted them. But how strange, that she had also wanted to say to Maj-Gun, afterward, if there had not been so many other things, “Thanks to you I found my way back to life.” Maj-Gun saved her life, that had been true. When she had woken
up in the boathouse she knew one thing. Away from the sea, not staying here, away from here
.

She had told the therapist about that “fight” with her friend, as said. But there it has, as it were, been “diminished,” in some way. Become, which maybe it also actually was, of course (there was a lot of jealousy and other frustrations there too), a violent encounter between two friends who were tired of each other and needed to free themselves. “Friendships between women are often like that. You become the other person. A lot of mirroring. And becoming an adult is to free yourself from these reflections. Dare to stand on your own, on your own two feet.”

And it was true, of course. Sounded plausible. But still: all she needed to do was remember the frenzy inside Maj-Gun, Maj-Gun’s blows, yes, she was going to kill, and her own complete lack of will, her total passivity in the situation, in order to become completely perplexed. Going out into the sea was a gentle way of dying; being beaten to death hurt, damn it
.

On the other hand, Maj-Gun, of course you could not tell anybody about her in a way that it would be right. Better said: you did not want to. Maj-Gun at the newsstand, what she had been like there. “We are two Angels of Death, Susette, an eternity.” That she had said that, and all those stories she told, which were about all sorts of things, but inside a message about something else the entire time
.