The Glitter Scene Read online

  And a few years later Jeanette Lindström had added, stupidly jokingly so to speak but with some sort of warning in it: “But this time we’ll let the strawberry fields go, right? Who knows where the butterfly might flutter off to this time and we don’t want to be party to a flight like that again. Not to mention it gets costly and difficult for the employer to find a replacement on such short notice.”

  Where the butterfly might flutter off to this time. That is how she spoke, Jeanette Lindström, in other words like an allusion, that it was from those miserable strawberry fields up north where Susette had been sent as extra labor from the ice cream stand at the square where she really should have been working that summer three years ago that Susette ran away with a “Pole,” Janos, whom she had met there, while working.

  He was the one who had wanted to get away from there: he had not been happy or grateful in the least about this means of getting a visa to travel to a country outside the so-called Iron Curtain and then under controlled means, like a member of an official friendly exchange between the two countries, earn a little bit of money (actually no money, that is how it was for everyone at the strawberry fields, and Businesswoman of the Year was not exactly someone who drove up the wages).

  Janos—her second love, dull and intense. And besides, he was not from Poland but Lithuania but everyone said Poland so it just stayed like that.

  “Well, this time I was thinking of a real job that you can live on,” Susette had replied, deathly serious, but now in this situation almost four years later, Jeanette Lindström has not grasped the sore spot rather let it go and actually offered Susette a job with a decent wage in her legitimate business activities, which found itself in an expansion stage at this point in time. And so it turned out that during the years that followed, Susette worked for her on different projects: shop assistant in the Little Gift Shop, assistant in catering and so on, up until the point that as a result of an argument she had with her employer, she quit her job and started cleaning for Solveig Torpeson in her cleaning business Four Mops and a Dustpan.

  “With these words I’m transferring things to you, Susette,” on Solveig’s wedding day no less. Jeanette Lindström had pushed Susette Packlén in her server’s apron up to the bride in a puffed-sleeved wedding dress at the bride’s table after Susette, in a hurry and because Jeanette Lindström had been in the way the whole time, managed to drop a few plates from the fellowship hall’s white bone china set on the floor so that they had broken. These words have become legendary, because afterward no one remembers what “these words” were, and in and of themselves, they were unintelligible because by that point Jeanette had pinched some of the wedding cognac. Of course, these types of stories were loved in the District.

  •

  But, as said, there was a time right before, before Jeanette Lindström, before Solveig, before everything: a short period lasting just a few months which, while it lasted, was still as long as an eternity, perpetuum mobile. At home in the house with Maj-Gun Maalamaa. Just her and Maj-Gun who becomes Majjunn again during that time. From the cemetery, the gate, tjii this way tjii that way. “Say Pastor’s Crown Princess…” That Majjunn. A sound from a childhood, a name that has glued itself to your tongue.

  Majjunn sitting on a kitchen chair in the house with Susette’s mother’s old sewing scissors. Cutting old clothes into rags. Long, skinny strips whirling down into a bucket at her feet. At their feet: because Susette has also been sitting there, on another kitchen chair, in her pajamas and she also had a pair of scissors in her hand.

  Crehp crehp the scissors fly through the fabric, rags, clothes. Majjunn’s scissors, and her own. Majjunn talking, humming.

  Silk velvet rag scraps yes I have seen the most I have—

  That song, which becomes Majjunn’s song, like a strange refrain in a silence that when Majjunn does not speak, a humming envelops them in the empty house.

  And the sound of the scissors, as said. Crehp crehp. How they flew through the fabric.

  But then later it passed so to speak and when it was over—yes, why should you, why should Susette think about it then?

  Life has gone on. And besides, it has at least been clear: these thoughts, feelings, they do not get her anywhere.

  •

  But this she remembers, despite the fact that so much else from that time becomes forgotten afterward: that the last thing she and Maj-Gun do together during that time in the house after her mother’s death is go to the movies. Sitting perfectly positioned in the best seats in an otherwise empty movie theater. Maj-Gun ordered the tickets for them over the phone a few days in advance so they would be sure to get a seat. It is, Maj-Gun has been sure to explain, a very popular young adult film they are going to see. “A real young adult movie for young adults like us,” she explains. “I got the best seats!”

  Which, according to Maj-Gun, is important because they are supposed to be celebrating something. “That everything is over now,” she says and not just that it is over but that they have made it out of “all of that” with “lives and youth intact”—that is Maj-Gun’s own illustrious wording too, her emphasis on “youth” as well. Susette, for her part, does not say very much; in and of itself Maj-Gun is of course the one who talks the hind leg off a donkey the most even during that time but also because it actually is not necessary to talk because the house where they have been living together for a while is for sale and a reasonable offer has been made that Susette and her brothers, who are beneficiaries of the estate after their parents, have accepted and Susette herself has rather quietly placed a down payment on an apartment in the apartment complex above the town center and only when it is done does she tell Maj-Gun that she will need to look around for somewhere else to live. “You have to move, you’ll certainly find something.”

  “But where am I supposed to go then?” Maj-Gun says, rapidly, unexpectedly pours out of her there where she has been standing in front of Susette in the kitchen, complete surprise on her face, almost on the verge of tears. Before Susette has time to repeat that Maj-Gun will certainly quickly find a better, not to mention more agreeable, room to rent, Maj-Gun’s mood changes and she excitedly starts planning the farewell festivities that will take place as soon as the “moving work” as she calls it in that moment is “taken care of”—and these festivities will in other words, as said, be crowned with a visit to the movies. “As if,” Maj-Gun says, “welcome back, in other words. The scissors on the shelf: TO youth, life, an invitation.”

  When they get inside the movie theater that predetermined evening it is, in other words, empty; a long long time passes during the minutes before the film starts and no one is there. “Aside from the usual jack offs of course, typical,” which Maj-Gun loudly and expertly but with an awkwardly audible relief in her voice whispers to Susette as she is sitting there, squirming restlessly and glancing around furtively and then finally catching sight of some occasional losers of the male sex who trickle into the theater before the lights dim and the merciful darkness sinks and the movie at last gets started.

  The film is called Skateboarding and is about a boys’ gang in a run-down big city suburb in America, one of those against-all-odds-gangs united by its great passion for skateboarding and a lot of youthful complications along the way to the happy ending that is their own skateboarding ramp behind the apartment buildings and shaking hands with the mayor.

  Not a film to write home about, in other words, and no one other than Maj-Gun and Susette stuck it out until the end. But still, unforgettable. Susette will always remember the feeling of liberation on the bus on the way back home to the District.

  That it was over now, whatever that was: Mom, the Pole, all the rest… Does not even need to be mentioned in detail any longer—AND Majjunn.

  Like a wave that is receding. And the feeling is her own, private. Absolutely indivisible, much less with Maj-Gun Maalamaa. Because that is also what the liberation was about, a small decisive insight: they had not meant the same thing when, be
fore the visit to the movies, Maj-Gun said that they were going to “celebrate” having gotten past “it.”

  On the one hand: yes, it was over. On the other hand: for Susette it means, has meant something else, something more—beyond Maj-Gun too, all of that.

  But: “Skateboarding, to life, then?” It is almost like she is standing there saying it herself, Maj-Gun in the rain after the movie, at a loss outside the movie theater, alone on a rain-covered asphalt road where she suddenly, for a few seconds, just stands and dies. Maj-Gun who is wearing what she calls “going-out clothes” for the disco under her coat but Susette who just says, “I’m going home now,” and leaves.

  Starts walking, rapid steps in the direction of the bus station for the provincial buses. Maj-Gun who trots after her, at a proper distance of course, maybe thirty feet, in silence. Without calling out, without trying to catch Susette’s attention at all.

  Is just there, behind her.

  And on the bus, Susette, got on before Maj-Gun, takes a seat at the very front, in a row for just one person and Maj-Gun walks past her to the very back without looking in Susette’s direction. During the journey Susette gets up anyway and goes and sits next to Maj-Gun in the last row and they travel on in silence and when she and Maj-Gun go their separate ways at the bus stop at the square in the town center Susette understands that she and Maj-Gun will no longer be together as friends, or at all, for that matter. And it hits her too when she wanders home to her own, new apartment that she has not asked Maj-Gun where she has moved.

  But she takes a shortcut through the cemetery that night.

  •

  And suddenly, there, she gets an impulse and turns off in the rain over to the new side of the cemetery, a few hundred feet away from the path where her mother is buried next to her father, even though her mother had said many times after her father’s death, while Susette was still living with her mother, that she and father should “rest” on the old side where it was much more peaceful.

  Her mother had thought that the new side was so deserted. Not much in the way of trees or leafiness yet either, from what Susette can make out in the darkness. But fuller now, though certainly none of the vegetation that provides a cemetery feeling of life and death, the passage of time—not seconds, days, but centuries, decades, “generations follow in the footsteps of generations,” as her mother sang toward the end when they still went to church often, she and Susette, in black clothes, “from a house of sorrow,” crowed loudly, her mother with a false and frail singing voice which, if you were not careful, was embarrassing; old silence, dignity.

  But still, despite everything anyway, here now as well. Such a calm, at the cemetery, under a bright red umbrella in the pouring rain.

  And in the midst of everything, all of that exhaustion that had been inside her, or whatever it is, had been, as if she could finally think, just herself, Susette.

  “… It only took a few minutes. I called the ambulance.” Maj-Gun who had stood and said that in the house then, at the very beginning—and how Susette had lost her balance, had pain in her stomach. Maj-Gun’s hand on her shoulder, but the tenderness in her grip too, which had held her. But still: no future—the feeling she had sometimes with Maj-Gun in the house, that they were two children playing while waiting for the mother to return.

  When the mother would not be returning.

  When she came from “Poland” her mother was dead. “Poland,” she had not been there of course, it was just a designation. But it was not a secret or important, in and of itself. In contrast to what Maj-Gun had insinuated at the ferry terminal where she had met Susette, when she asked about the backpack. “Fjällräven, is it new?”

  A long time, somewhere else. Did not come home. Did not keep in touch with her mother in the house in the town center on a regular basis. Cannot say exactly why, not even in hindsight.

  And what has she been up to? Working in different places. Home help, care for the elderly, reading out loud for an old lady. Quite a lot of the type of work she had already done in the District—at the private nursing home for the elderly and infirm where she started working after finishing high school, before selling ice cream, and the strawberry fields.

  And it had been good, nothing special about that either. She was used to old people, liked old people. But then, as said, she called her mother at home one day as she had a habit of doing and Maj-Gun answered the phone. It perplexed her, she hung up. She called again a few minutes later. Maj-Gun on the phone that time too.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’ll be on the first ferry.”

  Maj-Gun’s voice, calm and resolute: “Give me the date and time and I’ll meet you at the terminal.”

  She met Maj-Gun there at the terminal because they had set up the meeting on the telephone, not because she wanted to pull the wool over someone’s eyes on purpose.

  In reality she was coming from somewhere else, much closer. But she stood there at the terminal and made it look like she had come with the morning ferry. Brand-new backpack, Fjällräven, on her back.

  “Your mother is dead. You didn’t make it to the funeral. My deepest condolences—”

  She had been living in another city, in other places. Would have been too complicated to explain. On the other hand, explain to Maj-Gun, why did she have to do that?

  “It’s not that bad, Susette.” But there in the night in the rain at the cemetery as if she suddenly heard her mother’s voice, she does not of course, not really, but—

  If you later come to wander in the valley of the shadow of death no harm will befall you.

  And about the cemetery: “But, Susette, it will surely be fine here too.”

  Now, it is crystal clear. Her mother was not, had never been angry at her.

  And when she had left home, not “run away,” because of the strawberry-picking fields—how her mother had come into her room at night and kissed her on the forehead.

  That kiss remained as well (Susette could almost feel it, in the rain, with her fingers).

  “It will surely be fine here too.”

  And Susette cries a little, her own tears, just her own. Peaceful crying at the cemetery and then she walks quietly back to her new apartment in the apartment complex above the town center.

  Does not need Maj-Gun anymore.

  Several weeks after the visit to the movie theater, when Maj-Gun notices that Susette has pulled away, for example never has time to talk on the phone when she calls, retreats rather quickly. Stops getting in touch, stops suggesting a lot of things. “Don’t we need to get out and get some fresh air?

  And so has it become, without any accusations or talk of betrayal. And Susette gradually also realizes where Maj-Gun is living: as a boarder in another family home in the lush suburbs below the town center.

  •

  But then, it is seven–eight years until the summer of 1989 when Susette Packlén and Maj-Gun Maalamaa become friends again. Or if not friends exactly at least they start hanging out a bit again. In and of itself: they have not exactly lost sight of each other completely or anything during the time in between. During the years that have passed Maj-Gun Maalamaa remained sitting at the newsstand up in the town center. In the end she did not head off anywhere, neither to the admission interviews for various educational institutions nor to any other places. No. Sat where she sat.

  “Sitting where I’m sitting.” That is how she expresses it herself as well, an answer to a silent question Susette never asks her in the years that pass when they only exchange a few words about ordinary things in the newsstand when Susette is buying candy and chips when she gets cravings in the evenings.

  Maj-Gun at the newsstand, behind the counter, the postcard on the cash register. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Worn text, once a glittery silver? Buckled letters on a grayish-blue landscape, rather abstract. Moonlight, spruce forest.

  An explicitness, in other words?

  Oh! Susette does not think like that either. During thos
e years when she sees Maj-Gun in the newsstand sometimes she does not think very much at all.

  Maj-Gun, a doughnut on a tall, three-legged stool on the other side of the counter, the pork pouring over the edges of the stool: one obvious fact is that as Maj-Gun gets older, she puts on a considerable amount of weight.

  And: she has started smoking. A particular brand of cigarette, which she also makes a big fuss about with her customers. How unusual the brand is, so unusual that it is not part of the ordinary selection but needs to be specially ordered from a place, the “Head Office” in the city by the sea from where all of the newsstands in the country are centrally run, something you can also hear her explain with authority in her voice, to whoever happens to be at the newsstand and will listen.

  Maj-Gun standing, puffing on her cigarettes in the doorway of the newsstand, which is eventually turned into a small room with a window facing the square:

  “Had to fight with the Head Office but at least NOW I won’t get varicose veins until I turn thirty. Won’t you be thirty soon, Susette?” she asks, if Susette is the only one there, but as if in passing, without waiting for an answer.

  “Djeessus, Susette!” Maj-Gun sighs, whistling between her two front teeth. “The Head Office!”

  Djessus. Remains in Susette’s head for a little while on her way home.

  Maj-Gun rolling her eyes, at the newsstand, “djeessus” this, that, and the other.

  Maj-Gun on the three-legged stool, beads of sweat along her hairline, like an old woman.

  Evaporated a few seconds later—gone.

  •

  It is sometime during the summer of 1989 that Susette Packlén starts seeking out Maj-Gun at the newsstand again, more than just as a random customer. In some way expressly to see Maj-Gun, talk about this and that, pass the time. And she often stays there, hanging out. Perched on another stool, “the customer’s stool” as Maj-Gun calls it, a little off to the side of the counter behind which Maj-Gun herself is sitting. Or rather, standing in the doorway, as a smoking buddy.