The American Girl (36 page)

And Sandra lay there and closed her eyes because she was dead, and Doris spread flower petals—they were supposed to represent rose petals but they were just ordinary field flowers, but the theme was: nobody knew my rose of the world but me—over Sandra’s body on the bottom.

Nobody knew my rose of the world but me, Doris mumbled. “The heart is a heartless hunter,” she mumbled. And said, “It was a strange bird, now it’s dead.”

And Doris wrapped Sandra in fabric, in more fabric, fabric so she was covered. White and bordeaux red rasgulla crepe, which fell so softly, like snow. “Like snow,” Doris Flinkenberg also repeated. “Buried in snow.”

And Doris went out to the rec room and put on the music so that it flooded on maximum volume into all of the rooms in the house where there was a speaker. And the music, it was beautiful, it was Nat King Cole.

“The dream has ended, for true love died.”

Those were the words in the song and when you listened, it was suddenly true.

Sandra lay in the pool and closed her eyes and was carried away and suddenly one moment she was the woman at the bottom of the pool, she was the one on Bencku’s map. Who was she really?

One moment, just one moment, she brushed against the knowledge, and it was terrible, so horrible. What had Bencku actually seen?

Because she got up again of course. And the Islander had crumpled together on the edge of the pool and let her go, and a car came, and she left. Not even toward unknown fates, if it had only been so easy . . .

But now, fantasizing finished now, because Doris’s dull voice somewhere, “I now pronounce you dead AND resurrected. And therefore we will dance, the very last dance.”

Because the dream has ended now. True love died. And suddenly it was real.

And Sandra stood up, and the music played, and Doris was there and took her in her arms, not in a hug, but like in a dance. A slow slow, slow dance.

To the swaying song and they both, almost, cried.

Somewhere a telephone rang, suddenly Doris was in a hurry, she rushed to answer it.

“Now we’re answering!”

And Doris rushed to the telephone and answered and Sandra was left at the bottom of the pool waiting.

And the one who had been on the telephone was Liz Maalamaa who said she was now going to come with all of the food they had ordered from the store.

“We haven’t ordered any food,” said Sandra.

“Who cares?” said Doris. “We’re going to dance now. Let’s start the song again.”

And they did, they danced.

And suddenly in the middle of everything, a deafening
CRASH
could be heard and glass scattered: it was Liz Maalamaa who had come in, when no one opened she had shattered the window in the door. And where she was standing, Liz Maalamaa, at the lower entrance, standing among shards of glass and with ticks, bullymosquitoes, and insects crawling on her, said solemnly:

“Girls, girls, what are you two really doing here? Girls, Girls, you aren’t hurting each other, are you?”

And then when she had gotten the girls’ attention:

“Jesus loves you. My goodness how Jesus loves you. And he shall have his Damocles sword with which he will cut through the fog.”

And Liz Maalamaa, she had a small whimpering dog in her arms.

Rita Rat
. The summer vacation was in progress on the Second Cape. Sea urchins were sea urchins as usual, true to themselves and their task: to be sea urchins on summer vacation. Dressed
in white, supreme, preferably associating with others in select company, that is to say, only with each other. For the most part Kenny lived alone in the Glass House this year. It was rumored the baroness was sick, but she came out a few times that summer. She was driven out in a taxi and sat in a wheelchair wrapped in blankets, wearing dark sunglasses on the cliff next to the Glass House. If the weather was bad she stayed in her Winter Garden. Then if you really tried you could see her as a dark shadow on the inside. And you saw. Sometimes. Rita saw. She had gone to the house on the First Cape, stood in the unsteady, perilous half-burned-down tower, and looked around.

Then, when the baroness came to the Glass House, there were no sea urchins there. It would be properly cleaned before the baroness was driven out for her visit. Four Mops and a Dustpan was summoned. Solveig and Rita. Earlier she had refused to set foot in that house. That had been a limit. It was not anymore.

“The barbarians must be summoned,” Bengt had said once earlier in the spring, with the “class perspective” he pretended to be imbued with. So tired of everything that had half-choked dejection in it. Her siblings, they seemed to be so good at it. Where was it located? In the genes?

And “pretended” was the right word. Regarding Bengt in other words. Altogether. This summer Bengt WAS NOT taking a Nordic course on Marxist theory at the union center’s central summer course center, he was not on peace training in Moscow or at work camp in the German Democratic Republic or in Poland. He made no effort whatsoever, not a one, for the peace-loving people in the world.

But he was not “dustpan” either for that matter.

No. Bencku was adrift. And it was programmatical (he had read a book). Bencku was adrift with Magnus von B. in the city by the sea. Where they were living in an apartment owned by Magnus von B.’s father and working in the harbor when they
needed money. Otherwise they were partying; quite simply loafing about.

Adrift
. It was in and of itself loads of fun. But just about the right amount of fun for someone who was left behind and had all his work to carry out.

But actually Rita was mostly, above all and most of all, angry because he was not there. And it was, in principle, something Rita had a hard time demanding at this point in time.

Everyone who was not there but in other places instead. For example, Jan Backmansson and his family: they were on Fiji. Some particularly interesting reptile spot that existed only at those latitudes needed to be studied and it was persevering. Furthermore, Jan Backmansson wrote in his letters, it is so wonderfully clear in the water here. These damned letters. “Shimmering azure.”

And people who did not keep their promises. She so clearly remembered Tina Backmansson’s: “And of course it’s clear Rita is going to move in with us in the city by the sea. We have a large and spacious apartment and Susanna’s room is empty.”

That had been after the house on the First Cape was damaged in the fire and the family moved back to the city.

“We’ll go over the practical details later,” Tina Backmansson had said. “It’s just a bit messy right now when we’re in the middle of moving.”

“Later, Rita,” Jan Backmansson had said over the phone in the spring. After the summer. “Later.”

“Though you wouldn’t like it here. There are strict Muslims where we’re living. The women have to wear clothes in the shower (or when swimming). Mother has a hard time with it. Greetings. Your J.”

The Second Cape, the Glass House, the sea urchins. Rita found she was fascinated by them too, against her will. Especially Kenny.

•••

Kenny was often with a girl from another house on the Second Cape this summer. Her name was Anna Sjölund or something similar and she had gotten a Nissan Cherry, bordeaux red of course, as a graduation present from her parents and now she was celebrating her “last summer vacation” or whatever it was called before she started studying interior design in the fall, a program she had been accepted into even though it was incredibly hard to get in. Anna Sjölund had some sort of job, she sold records in a store in the city by the sea, but it still seemed she was going to stay away from it enthusiastically because what she was mostly occupied with was driving around at breakneck speeds in her Nissan Cherry on the small roads around the District with Kenny, that is to say when they were not busy being sea urchins who were messing around with their surfboards and sailboats and et cetera on the beaches on the Second Cape.

But this had happened: one time when Rita was walking on the little road that led from the country road down to the cousin’s property she was almost run down by that wretched Nissan Cherry with Anna Sjölund and Kenny in it. They braked on the road several feet in front of her so that the dust swirled, in order to, as they said (but they were laughing loudly, though not a mean laugh, Rita who had the reputation of not being so nice herself understood the difference), apologize.

They waited in the car until she caught up with them.

“That wasn’t our intention,” said Kenny.

“We’re coming face-to-face with death,” said Anna Sjölund.

“No you’re not,” said Rita. She heard herself say it in other words. It was not planned. It just came out. And she found a strange satisfaction in it. And it made an impression, her entire laconic attitude, she saw it. Then of course she did not know how to continue.
That’s nothing
. It was the final line, but you did not say that sort of thing. So she did not say anything. And it
became a bit awkward. But it was in any case Anna Sjölund and Kenny who hesitated more than she did.

But then of course, almost immediately afterward, the effect of the triumph had become properly disrupted. She had still been working in the two-window ice cream stand then, at the very beginning of the summer. Kenny and Anna had driven up to the two windows at the square and parked a little way away. Then she remained sitting there, on her place on the stool among the ice cream cones and the different ice cream flavors that no one wanted to buy because it was still quite chilly in the air then, in her light green ice cream blouse and with her light green J.L. kerchief on her head, in the ice cream stand and stared like an idiot at Kenny and Anna in the bordeaux red car parked in the evening sun. They were using snuff and had the music turned on high.

“Shit this is so pedestrian,” Kenny yelled with her special accent and stuffed a pinch under her lip and then,
vroom
, they had driven off.

Up in the two windows, in other words. That was how the summer had started. Rita had already decided early in the spring that she did not plan on spending her summer trudging around for Five Hundred Mops and ONE Dustpan—who in other words had not even, after many ifs and buts, chosen to be present, but adrift in the city by the sea. Her intention had been to make an escape, perhaps insignificant, but still.
I’m not planning on walking on your leash anymore
. Something like that.

She had in other words organized a job for herself in two windows up at the square in the town center. Two windows was the ice cream stand owned by Jeanette Lindström, Businesswoman of the Year, who had a monopoly on the ice cream stand business at the square in the town center, not a particularly lucrative business in the beginning of the summer but certainly later, with the
summer guests and, above all, with the traffic passing through on their way farther west.

A window to the left, a window to the right. In other words it looked like a proportionately large stand from the outside, but inside you sat on stools when there were no customers to serve, when the square lay empty and deserted before you, and only the seagulls were flying around and around, next to each other. Almost in each other’s arms, if it was meant to happen, the one employee and the other.

It was a sought-after job because there were not many summer places in the municipality for young adults Rita’s age and Rita had taken it on herself to arrange it. This had been done through the persistent persuasion of Jeanette Lindström, the mother of Daniel Danielsson (notice the last name: Daniel’s father had been “even more unbearable,” this according to Jeanette Lindström herself, they had a rather tough jargon with each other, mother and son), her crazy classmate. And he was in other words crazy, Daniel, there was no doubt about it.

To top it all off, which Jeanette Lindström would really emphasize later, in light of what happened, Daniel was in some way fond of her. Of Rita that is. That was in itself something tremendous. At school you were not fond of Rita, you were afraid of Rita. She had knocked Synnöve Lindbäck’s teeth out a few months earlier, and it had not been an innocent girls’ game but for real.

When Rita informed Solveig she had arranged a job for herself it had taken some time for her to convince herself it was really just jealousy that made Solveig claim that Rita had gotten the job only because Jeanette Lindström had been blackmailed by her son. In the beginning. At first, it had looked good. Susette Packlén was the other employee in the stand that first week, and she was quite all right. She had a lot of stories about her impossible boyfriends you could listen to.

And it had also been very satisfying that it was so obviously clear to Jeanette Lindström that of the two of them Rita was the
one you turned to, the one who carried the main responsibility for the work at the stand when the boss was not there.

“You might become a full-fledged businesswoman one day,” she had said in the spring already when Rita had sought her out and asked for this job because she was so very motivated and had a thousand and one ideas about how they could get zoom on the ice cream sales at the square during the summer months. “I’m looking forward to realizing them.” And etc. she had piled it on.

She did not really have any ambitions whatsoever. There were actually more important things to waste your time and your energy and your mental activity on. She had planned on reading, there in the stand. She had planned—to the extent it was possible, when Susette Packlén kept her mouth shut (slept and kept her mouth shut: she had a phenomenal way of sleeping sitting upright, Susette)—to be alone and think.

“We women need to support each other in sisterhood and entrepreneurial activities,” Jeanette Lindström had raved. Phewt, Rita had thought. All of that chatter had blown away like pollen off a dandelion, away from the house on the First Cape anyway.
Eldrid’s Spiritual Sojourn
. My God. And fallen like “tears on rocky ground,” as it was called in one of the songs that played on Doris Flinkenberg’s radio cassette player.

But with these words Jeanette Lindström had hired Rita as a seller of ice cream in the two windows at the square in the town center.