The Glitter Scene Page 11

  Even though she really does not want to, or maybe that is the wrong way to say it because it is only when she is actually in the newsstand, listening to Maj-Gun talking the hind leg off a donkey (and it is always Maj-Gun who is jabbering away, Susette who is listening), that she simultaneously in some way regrets having come, almost does not understand why she is there, longs to get away from there.

  But then again tearing yourself away without hurting Maj-Gun is not that simple.

  Tearing yourself away at all. Which is a rather strange feeling.

  And she would not have time of course. A bit later, in the fall, she gets a cat too, a white, long-haired abandoned summer cat from one of the houses she cleans, the beautiful Glass House on the Second Cape. Only partially purebred, has difficulty taking care of its coat properly, needs to be brushed regularly every day. And still quite the kitten: starved for attention.

  And thus, of course, there is the cleaning during the day with Solveig. Susette likes her job, that is not it—just you get tired of being on your feet all day long, it sucks the energy out of you sometimes. And this particular summer and fall of 1989, Solveig has taken on, for her part and the company’s, the final cleaning for the newly built residential area Rosengården 2 in the woods rather close to the Outer Marsh where Solveig lives, though to the south, closer to the sea. But still, far too much work for just two people, especially if there are already signed contracts for other places. Joint projects where Solveig and Susette regularly clean together, and individual ones, where each cleans on her own. During the summer, Susette has, for example, been busy with the summer guests on the Second Cape as well; they need to have cleaning done by the company that has been her special area of responsibility for a long time. Such as the Glass House, being rented by a French diplomatic family: mother, father, and three children, two boys and a girl in their early teens, who have a habit of making music together on the veranda—the Winter Garden—in the evenings. A complete small chamber orchestra where all of the members are dressed in the same long red- or blue-and-white-stripped polyester blouses, the evening dress that they change into every evening around six o’clock, a domestic design from the best brand—but still… as if they were sitting there on the veranda in their pajamas, playing calming classical pieces, the sea behind them, wild, in revolt because it is very windy that summer.

  White foam from the waves that crash against the windows and remains there as a stickiness, a hell to scrub away, something that is part of Susette’s work: hang on the windowsill, try and get at the crap from the inside, rig up an A-ladder in the water along the beach, wedge it into place between the rocks, and climb up and scrub, scrub… it is really stuck as said, so you really have to focus, she does not have time to think about much of anything else, such as hating the sea for example.

  Or going to the cousin’s papa in the cousin’s house, which is located right behind the Second Cape behind a copse of trees, farther in toward Solveig’s former home, which Susette was immediately assigned as an individual project when Solveig hired Susette a thousand years ago and Susette had given an account of her work experience in which cleaning was not included but quite a bit of care work with the elderly and the sick, both at the private nursing home in the District and after that in other places.

  “Can you take care of the old man?” Solveig had asked and added, “I’m going to say it like it is. I just can’t be bothered. But that stays between the two of us and for Christ’s sake, don’t ask any questions.”

  And of course, Susette certainly said yes: she is used to old people, likes old people. And so maybe there was not anything particularly lovable about the old guy but there was not anything horrible or repulsive about him either. Tired, cranky, bulging from having drunk too much aquavit in the middle of a mess of shit and gloomy clothes and unwashed pots and pans and a sweet corroding stink of old sweat and alcohol and tobacco that hangs in the air in there. And of course, obviously, it must feel rather terrible to see that decay in person when it is your own home so she understands why Solveig does not want to go there herself.

  But for Susette, who does not have any roots like that—mainly a job among others, and she has a habit of going there once or twice a week. Airing things out and doing the dishes and cleaning and what have you and when the weather is nice she quite simply forces the grouchy old man out into the garden so he will not be in the way while she was cleaning. He goes along with it most reluctantly of course, but in reality Susette has the impression that he protests mainly for the sake of protesting. Because he certainly must like having things cleaned up a bit and maybe he did not have anything against bickering with her; with a glint in his eyes too, “sweet tease,” the loneliness becomes quite lonely, having a bit of company.

  Once, in the very beginning, when she had gotten the cousin’s papa out into the garden, she discovered a pistol lying on a pile of newspapers on the refrigerator. She took it, slipped it into her backpack, Fjällräven, among her things for the sauna, because she is going to the sauna later that evening, is planning on going there right after work, but something else comes up, and then the backpack is left hanging on a hook in her bathroom.

  On the other hand, with Solveig, that old man the cousin’s papa is rarely brought up at all.

  “How’s the old man?” Solveig asks now and then, mostly in passing. “Fine,” Susette replies, adding, “Still going strong. He seems to have nine lives.”

  But then he dies after all despite everything, several years later, but still. Exactly in that year, 1989, when Susette starts hanging out with Maj-Gun at the newsstand again. A Thursday in the month of August he is lying on the kitchen floor in the cottage unconscious when Susette arrives there by bus and she calls for an ambulance, calls Solveig, and the old man is taken directly to the District Hospital where he dies that same night from a subsequent heart attack without ever having regained consciousness.

  An old age regardless; he was eighty-two.

  But then, that time, when she sees Maj-Gun again and starts hanging out with her, in the middle of her life—completely occupied with her everyday existence, work and hobbies.

  In her life. In My Life, which she also starts thinking about in a particular way when she starts hanging out with Maj-Gun in the newsstand. Like a newspaper headline or something to write down in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings” (Maj-Gun’s notebook that she sometimes quotes from).

  My life. With contours in other words, so nameable, chiseled.

  “What happened with your admission interviews, Maj-Gun?”

  “I don’t know.” Maj-Gun shrugs on one of those late evenings when they are standing in the doorway to the newsstand, Maj-Gun is smoking. Tosses the cigarette away, a spot of ember lands on the dark sidewalk on the asphalt in the twilight.

  “Lost steam. I guess.”

  “And then there weren’t any good opportunities to study at the new rental place either. Concentrating was difficult, to put it mildly. Motormouths, motormouths in that family. Djeessus, Susette. If you only knew—”

  “Well—.” Maj-Gun holds the door open, they walk in again. “Moss is growing on our heads, years are passing—but, Susette, maybe it is just a way of saying something else. Maybe I’m sitting here… waiting. For, option one, the less likely: that my horrible godmother Liz Maalamaa will die so I can get her money. After having nagged her husband to death at an early age, he drank himself to death on the Sweden–Finland ferry, wasn’t even fifty, maybe he just had to drink aquavit in order to put up with her… If he was DRUNK, Susette, then she has been SOBER all her life. My dad the pastor used to say that a little bit of wine made you NICE but she didn’t listen at all.

  “An old hag with lots of money, mercy me. Millions, you know.

  “And then, Susette, I’ll fly away. Far away from here.

  “Flyyy,” Maj-Gun, sitting on the stool at the newsstand, clarifies. “Fjuuh, Susette.” And she stretches her arms out at her sides behind the counter, gliding in other words
. “What a screamingly funny sight, Susette. With my extra weight—I know what you’re thinking. A giant bee with helicopter wings flidderfladdering away. Djeessuss,” Maj-Gun establishes and grows serious again.

  “Doesn’t seem particularly likely in other words. So, option two, the other possibility. And believe it or not the more realistic one, because she’ll never die of course, for example. My only love, my greatest love. The Boy in the woods. That he will come. Back.

  “And, Susette,” lowering her voice, whispering, “a little crow has whispered in my ear that it will happen soon—the Boy in the woods. Bengt.”

  And Maj-Gun tries to make eye contact with Susette with a meaningful blink blink.

  “I have always been the romantic type, Susette. Feel feel feel,” placing a hand on her large torso. “How it’s pounding. Inside. My heart. My blood. Love.

  “Djeessusss—” she stops herself then when she does not really reach Susette in that way, gets new ideas, new clues, there are always new clues. Starts for example continuing the flight humor, since that association was actually funny, folding paper airplanes using empty lottery tickets, which she throws around wildly and then, more high-spiritedly, starts tearing pages out of certain magazines, The Joy of Motherhood that is lying on the counter in order to get them to fly as well. “Just a few sample issues, Susette,” she shouts with excitement, “so don’t shed a tear over them—”

  Calms down again. “So many men, so little time, Susette. If I looked like you. With your looks I wouldn’t be sitting here, rotting away.

  “I mean,” she adds more officiously, after a small, pregnant pause, “not the way you look now. But the potential. Come along and change. A bait for life.

  “Your eyes, Susette. Those globes. A whole… world.”

  •

  Though there are of course other versions of how things went when Susette started going to the newsstand at the square in the town center and hanging out with Maj-Gun again, Maj-Gun’s own, for example.

  The square, it is empty there in the afternoon and evening, in the summers too, on weekdays when the vacation period is over. An almost ghostlike emptiness hangs over it. Sometimes the only things that break the silence are cars that drive up, around around the square: three–four cars, often the same ones, hayseeds inside them. They roll down the windows, honk, yell, and if you happen to be on the square then you end up in the center, captured, for a few minutes, in a circle.

  Susette ends up in the middle of the circle, maybe one of those evenings, possibly actually the evening after the day when Susette has been in the cousin’s house on the First Cape and found the old man the cousin’s papa beaten and unconscious on the kitchen floor. She cannot say for sure as said but it could have been that evening because it was fairly early after all and for once she was in no hurry to get anywhere.

  She has a clear memory of it—because she had been working almost every day that summer from morning till night sometimes, at the usual places, with or without Solveig and then with Solveig in the afternoons and often later on overtime at Rosengården 2.

  But this evening in particular they are free because they have not been able to go to Rosengården since the old man, Solveig’s relative the cousin’s papa from her childhood home, had died or is dying at the hospital and Solveig has to be there.

  Susette who comes from the cousin’s house after the ambulance and Solveig have left; it is Susette herself who has offered to clean up the house, suddenly felt so sorry for Solveig, which she still has not said directly to Solveig because she and Solveig do not talk to each other in that way and Solveig herself has also been as calm, almost unaffected as usual.

  “I want to,” is all Susette said when Solveig offered to give her a ride up to the town center.

  She remained in the house for a while, but then later still without the energy to take care of anything at all after everyone had left, the exhaustion had suddenly rushed through her body. Left, her as well, walked along the road up to the main country road until the evening bus from the Second Cape came along and she jumped on it, empty that too, and rode it up to the square in the town center.

  Got off the bus at the square, started walking to the other side in order to continue along the walking path through the small town center and then turn off on the pedestrian and bicycle path past the church and the old and new cemetery up to the northern hills and the apartment complex where she lives. But at the square, the cars that were suddenly there, had driven up and encircled her, around around for a few laps so that she had to stand still and wait until they finished. Windows were rolled down, shouts, that she was cute, that sort of thing.

  Stares in front of her, it takes time: suddenly someone else who is shouting, waving—from the newsstand on the other side, right across from her. That is of course whom she is staring at even though she is not even aware of it herself while all of the other stuff is going on around her. Maj-Gun of course. Maj-Gun Maalamaa.

  Susette in cowboy boots, tight jeans, short jacket, her long hair hanging loosely—and big, big eyes. “Djessuss, Susette. You’re totally spaced out. You don’t seem to have a clue about what kind of signals you’re sending out.”

  Naturally it is Maj-Gun who says it, making Susette aware of what she looks like from the outside. When Susette walks up to her after the cars drive off, Maj-Gun true to habit is standing in the doorway, smoking. “My God, Susette.” Maj-Gun rolls her eyes, whistles. “A small poor child I am in farm pants, boots. Djeessuss, Susette. And those eyes. Your eyes, Susette. Like globes. A whole world—

  “But close up like this you can see your age as well. And the fatigue, the wear,” Maj-Gun adds, but Susette does not get mad at her, just the opposite. For a brief moment she thinks “so true” and that Maj-Gun sees it too. Fatigued feet and—so empty, suddenly. All the death, fresh death, the old man on the floor in the kitchen of the cousin’s house, in her body, in her hands.

  “Do you want some chocolate? I have a lot of samples today! Hearts, Susette. Small spirited trolls with truffle filling—”

  Maj-Gun holds the door open, they walk in. And yes, it is nice coming into the newsstand, not like having wandered a long way and coming home, but just being able to leave the everyday for a bit. Step out of it, to the newsstand—Maj-Gun’s stronghold, her kingdom.

  “Those boys,” Maj-Gun says, almost motherly, “pistol awakening. The hayseeds in the cars. Are a bit obtrusive but, Susette, you don’t need to be afraid of them.”

  “Afraid?” Susette looks at Maj-Gun blankly.

  But Maj-Gun is not paying attention, Maj-Gun at the newsstand, in the place “pistol awakening,” what she wants to talk about for example and all sorts of other things she has been waiting to share with someone and now with Susette as audience, it pours out.

  “My father the Pastor called it that. They drink milk and don’t watch television and keep their wives on the straight and narrow having babies, strongly believe in Our Lord’s Salvation but then they go out into the backyard and shoot at cans and bottles. They are TRIGGER-HAPPY, pang pang pang.

  “Or however it goes. But when papa Pastor told me about it it was funny, but now, djeessuss, Susette, I’ve been sitting here so long, I don’t remember anything from the rectory and all of papa Pastor’s fun stories at the dinner table, or my brother’s, the human rights lawyer, Tom Maalamaa.

  “Don’t remember anything. Empty slate. Tabula rasa.”

  In other words this is how Maj-Gun will stubbornly claim to remember how things were when Susette came to the newsstand for the first time.

  “… The fear, Susette. Your fear. How I saw it. Your big eyes. And I stood here and reeled it in.”

  “I wasn’t scared—” Susette objected, but futilely, you have to give in, keep your mouth shut, Maj-Gun does not want to hear that either.

  “Well, whatever you were,” Maj-Gun continues, whistling. “When I saw your eyes I thought… like globes. A whole world. Something in them that reflects, so to speak. You can
see yourself in them. That was a compliment, Susette. Hasn’t anyone given you that compliment before?”

  •

  All About Animals in Nature, All About Relationships, A Hundred Years of Psychoanalysis and Personal Development, Everything About Being in a Good Mood and Everyday Interactions, The Nuclear Family and the Dog, Aquarium Fish in Four Colors, All About Dogs, Cats’ World, Everything About the Underwater World of the Sea, and The Joys of Motherhood.

  And then, Maj-Gun, at the newsstand, the fall of 1989. Maj-Gun among all of the magazines and newspapers that she lugs around and lines up on the shelves behind her and in front of her on racks and on both sides of the counter. Separates new issues from old issues that have not been sold; she gathers them in bundles and ties them with sharp ribbon in the back room to be returned to the Head Office from where a car comes and picks them up regularly a few times a week.

  And reads them herself of course: new magazines and old magazines and certain particularly interesting issues she plows through from cover to cover during long, uneventful days before the evening rush hour and what she calls the “weekend whirl,” the hours leading up to the weekly lottery ticket deadline that takes place on Friday afternoon.

  So that she has them memorized. In any case certain sections. “The memorable ones worth remembering,” she says and she writes down the particularly striking ones in her “Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” a small notebook with a black wax cover. “You never get a cavity in a clean tooth,” “Test yourself if you’re borderline,” Maj-Gun quotes. Reads out loud, flidderfladder sentences from here and from there, My statements.

  •

  And yes, there is even a blank page in the notebook, in other words blank on purpose. “Tom’s world,” Maj-Gun has written at the very top in large letters with a blue ballpoint pen. Holds it up for Susette. “My brother, do you remember?” Knowingly, so to speak, not to mention with a silly, childish emphasis. Susette nods, of course, her first boyfriend, of course she remembers, and what about it? “The human rights lawyer,” Maj-Gun clarifies later, suddenly rather bitter. “That’s what he became later when he graduated from law school. And successful. All the raped women and children, djeessuss.”