The Tricking of Freya (2 page)

Doesn't everyone?

If it's hot at night and the mosquitoes keep buzzing you awake you can
knock on Birdie's door and sometimes she'll let you in and you can lie in
your white cotton nightie on Birdie's four-poster bed watching her fingers
dance along the typewriter keys like your mother playing piano. Except it's
a different kind of music, typing. Like a rainstorm. Or hail. Birdie's been
working on the same poem forever. One poem, years long.

"What's it called?"

"It changes. At the moment I'm calling it Word Meadow."

You smother a giggle with your hand. Birdie could get mad if you laugh
but she doesn't. "Word-meadow is a kenning for tongue," she explains. "And
I suppose now you'll want to know what a kenning is." She sits beside you
on the bed and rubs your head like a pup's. "A kenning is a different name
for a thing. Instead of calling the sun the sun, you can call it a day-star."

"Why not use its real name?"

"It's boring, that's why! The old poets were never content with just one
or two words for a thing. Masters of periphrastic trickery, magicians of poetic circumlocution, tossing kennings right and left." Birdie's speeding up,
the pupils of her eyes widening black saucers, shiny as record vinyl. You're
older now, nearly eleven, but even if you live to be a hundred you'd never
keep up with Birdie, not when she's revving buzzing humming words.

"Kennings were a way for poets to show off, verbal razzmatazz of the
Vikings. A fierce warrior-poet like our infamous forebear Egil Skallagrimsson
could choose from over a hundred kennings for the word sword alone!" Birdie
shakes her curlered head in wonderment. "A marvel, how those Vikings loved
their swords. Problem is, a thousand years later the poems don't make sense,
because most of the kennings reference Norse mythology, and who remembers the old myths anymore? A common kenning for poetry was Odin's mead,
but if you don't know the story of how Odin tricked the giants out of their
mead so he could imbibe the gift of verse, you'd be utterly lost anytime a poem made reference to the All-Father's malt-surf, or the raven-god's holy
drink. That's why our ancestor Snorri Sturluson wrote down all the Norse
myths in the twelfth century, so that Iceland's new Christian poets would understand what the kennings meant. Without Snorri, those myths would be
lost to us for eternity."

Birdie pauses for the barest fraction of a second. She is pacing now,
back and forth in front of the window in nothing but her pink teddy. It
doesn't matter, there is no one to peer in and see her. At two a.m. all Gimli
sleeps save you and Birdie. Her words swirl your mind, a vast Milky Way of
glittery word-stars, most of it far beyond your grasp, but you're used to that,
to being drawn into word-spells that riff like the jazz music she plays on her
phonograph late at night. But sped up, 78 rpm, talking faster than the speed
of light. Getting talky your mother calls it. Birdie's getting talky. Sometimes
Birdie gets so talky she stops making sense. That's when your mother says
Birdie's going over. Over what? But not tonight. You hear logic in Birdie's
voice, even if you can't follow it.

"Today no one but a scholar can wade those kenning-thick verses,"
Birdie continues, curlers bouncing off her shoulders. "Kennings wrapped
within kennings. And translators beware-as your afi Olafur well understood it's nearly impossible to translate skaldic verse into English. Please,
promise me, baby"-she comes and sits on the edge of the bed, turns on
you her vast mental enthusiasm-"promise me you'll never read those poems in translation. Some of the greatest pagan verses, the most magnificent poetry ever written, reduced to drivel!" She looks as if she is about to
weep.

You nod, happy to promise her this, or anything. "What's a scholar?"

"Someone who studies things."

A school-er. "Are you a scholar?"

"Me?" Birdie snorts. "I'm no scholar, baby. I'm a pretender. A dabbler, a
dilettante, heir to the air, a quack of the worst kind, a-"

"Tell me one of the ones for sword."

"One of the what?"

"The kennings. For sword. You said there were a hundred."

"Let's see. There's striker. And lying-striker. And life-quencher. And
wind-bright. And some really gory ones, you wouldn't want to hear those."

You would.

"Okay then! Leg-biter. Pain-wader. Corpse-pain. Skull-crusher. Terrifier.
Pale-maker. Night-bringer. And then there are the bloody ones. Too bloody
for you!"

"No they're not!"

"Don't tell your mother."

"I won't."

Birdie whispers: "Blood-band. Blood-warp. Blood-eddy. Blood-wader.
Blood-grip. And here's a kenning for tongue: sword of speech."

"And word-meadow," you add. "That's the other one for tongue. Like the
name of your poem. Is it a meadow because words sprout on your tongue like
flowers?"

"On a good day," Birdie says. "On the good days they do."

A bad day: your mother sends you upstairs to knock on Birdie's door because it's past noon and Birdie isn't out of bed yet.

"Go away!" Her voice is scratchy, thick.

You bite your lip. "But the day-star came out from behind the clouds.
Mama says you'll take me to the beach."

A hard silence.

"I want you to."

More silence.

"Please?"

"You know what you are?" The voice has changed now. It's low, a spider
creeping over gravel. "Do you know what you are?"

You hold your breath on the other side of the door.

"You're a pest. No wonder I can't get any work done."

"But you're not even working!" You haven't heard a single drop of
raining -type for days.

"How do you know what I'm doing, you little sneak? You think I don't
know how you lie with your ear to the wall every night? Mama's little spy,
her tattler. So go tell your mother this"-she is speaking slowly now, mean-
slow-"Leave. Me. The hell. Alone."

You try not to cry on the way down the stairs. You can't tell your mother
what Birdie said to say or it'll start a wild fight. And besides, Birdie doesn't mean it. That's what she says afterward. After a week of living in her nightgown, hair lank and snarled, voice rusty and eyes dull. All the beauty saps
out of her and the faults of her face rise to the surface. Her eyes drift too
close together, her mouth slackens, her plump cheeks sink into saddlebags.
She stares at the floor, the wall, nothing. And then one day she emerges from
her room again, blond hair curled and shining, mood sunnier than sun.

"Come here, elskan, and kiss your rotten aunt." Her cheeks high and
apple-bright. "You know I don't mean it, baby, when I say mean things. You
know that, don't you?"

You nod, though you're never sure. Your mother says Birdie's moods turn
on a dime. Whatever that means. You think of Birdie like lake weather
she shifts fast. You learn to keep alert, read the signs: a dark flash of the
eyes, a mean twitch of her lip. You learn when to take cover, when it's safe
to emerge into Birdie's light again.

But this is farce. A masquerade of pronouns. You were not that girl. That
girl was me.

And Birdie? Meet your mother. My aunt. Our mothers were sisters. The
difference being, my mother got to raise me and your mother had to give you
away. Get it?

Sorry. I was hoping that if I recorded for you my Birdie-memories I
could make you me. I'd become a cousin in the shape of an umbilical cord,
reattaching you to a mother you've never known. But I knew Birdie only as
an aunt. An aunt is not a mother. Though Birdie doted on me with a ferocity I suspect was surrogate for you.

So, yes. Meet your mother: Ingibjorg Petursson. Birdie nicknamed herself
early on: she couldn't wrap her tongue around Ingihjorg. Birdie stuck. Because a bird can be so many things. A sadglad bird. A madmad bird. A mockingbird chattering at hummingbird speed. A snarky gull, a brooding raven. A
finch smashing itself against windows. Or a woman who mistakes glass for
air, words for wings.

Our mothers have passed.

Trying to be gentle here, genteel even. But what's the point? Birdie's
manner of death precludes gentle mention: your mother committed suicide. On my fourteenth birthday, no less. The gift that keeps on giving. My own
mother went next, linked like dominoes those sister-deaths, despite seven
years wedged between. Aneurysm was the official cause of my mother's
death; I call it giving up.

Your father? I have no idea. Then again, I have little idea of my own, either. He died before I formed a single memory of him.

It's a lot of death, I know. Believe me, I know. But we'll try not to focus
on that. The point here is resurrection, wordly reanimation. Infuse the dead
with words and they'll spring to life on the page, just for you.

And your name is?

Sorry, can't hear you!

Feeble, I agree. But you see the problem, don't you? I'm writing a letter
addressee unknown. So let's do like the skalds; when a name can't be spoken a kenning will do. Take your pick: Nameless Child, Lost One, Birdie's
Secret, Ingibjorg's Loss, the Unknown Cousin ...

Plain Cousin, you say?

Cousin it is.

And who am I? you'd like to know. Freya Ingibjorg Morris, a.k.a. Frey, the
only child of your aunt Anna Petursson and your uncle, an American accountant named Ed Morris. Prepare for my measly particulars. Despite (to
spite?) Birdie's best efforts, I have not joined the long line of family poets
skating back to Iceland. You have an ear. A tongue. So Birdie gaveth and so
Birdie tooketh away. I've turned my back on words, consort with images instead. Give up? I'm a darkroom hack, a black-and-white printer of archival
photographs, ungainfully employed at Klaus Steinman's Photographic Ltd.,
near the Hudson River piers. Not that I see much river view-the lab is two
floors down, sub-basement. My fellow printer, Frank, calls it the Sub because it reminds him of the three months he spent on a submarine during a
brief stint in the navy. To me it seems more like a mid-Manhattan Hades,
dark and dank, the sound of water running, sloshing, dripping constantly. To
enter my darkroom each morning I pass through a revolving door called a
light trap.

No, it's not the life my mother envisioned for me, hands immersed in
harsh chemicals, daylight spent in blackness. Well, if Mama wanted a different life for me, she should have hung around! It was after she died that I dropped out of college and began spending most of my time underground.
At twenty-one I was too old to call myself an orphan but I certainly felt like
one. Lose your balance for a moment and there you go, the world flings you
off its spinning surface and it's not so easy to scramble back on.

Time gets reduced by a darkroom. It's not only the lack of daylight, it's
the way time itself is constantly slivered: ten seconds here, three minutes
there ... eight years. Eight years. And still I made no move toward the
earth's humming surface. And so life-which as we all know stands still for
no one-made a move toward me.

Last month an invitation arrived for my grandmother Sigga's one hundredth birthday celebration. Our grandmother, I should say. Having outlived her husband and both daughters, she resides at Betel, a retirement
home in Gimli on the shore of Lake Winnipeg. I did not intend to attend. I
hadn't returned to Gimli since Birdie's suicide. Sixteen years Gimli-gone
and Gimli-free. Sixteen years without visiting my own grandmother. Each
the other's only living relative. (The unknown you withstanding.) How
could I do such a thing? You'll understand later. Maybe. The point is that I
succumbed to pressure from Uncle Stefan (no relation to either of us). I
flew to Canada, I attended Sigga's birthday party in Gimli. And that's when
I learned about you.

You think someone told me straight out? Ha! I pieced you together from
scraps. A dream Sigga had about an eagle-swiped lamb. Fragments of conversation floating out the window of the old folks' home in Gimli. I began
investigating. At first no one admitted your existence. I searched for evidence, found none. I hung around Gimli sniffing up false trees and hounding everyone who would speak to me and some who wouldn't. It was a most
unlikely somebody who told me, finally, skimpily-if only to get me out of
town-Yes, Birdie had a child. Taken at birth. Given up for adoption:
closed, blind, and secret.

According to my source, you were born in 1962. That makes you three
years older than me. I don't know if you are a boy or a girl. Or rather, a man
or a woman. You're thirty-three years old, whatever and wherever you are.

Why didn't my own mother adopt you? She and my father were childless
at the time. It's not uncommon for aunts and uncles to adopt a niece or nephew when circumstances warrant. We could have been siblings, you
and I.

It's a good question, but I doubt we'll ever learn the answer: everyone involved in making that decision is either dead or senile. My theory is that
Birdie wouldn't have stood for it. Your mother did not approve of mine.
Then again, Birdie may not have had any choice in the matter. The hospital
where you were born was no maternity ward but an insane asylum. Birdie
was resident there throughout the pregnancy and birth.

Whatever the reason, you were given away to a good home. That's all I've
been told. And suddenly and more than anything else in my life I want to
find you. You raison d'etre, you! In the month since I've returned from visiting Sigga in Gimli I've been busy busy busy. First, I hired a private detective
in Winnipeg to look into the matter of your adoption. A limited search to
match my limited funds. We'll see what if anything he unearths for the fee.

And I've been writing to you, evenings when I get home from the Sub. I
can't seem to stop. It's all I can do for you, Cousin, until I locate you. Just
write.