The Glitter Scene Read online

  But stops herself, something else suddenly catches her attention on the other side of the window on the square in the town center. And in the next moment she sighs, almost devoutly: “Think about what Madonna has done for fashion” because at the same time oneofthose girls from the high school or junior high is crossing the square in tight pants, short leather jacket with shoulder pads, curly hair in a ponytail, bow on her head, and a knickknacknecklace around her neck.

  And then she says, in a tone new for the moment, serious, so tender that it is suddenly impossible not to like her: “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 obtrusively, after a small pregnant pause, “not how you look now. But the potential. Come along and change. A bait for life. To life, an invitation.”

  And then she takes her makeup kit out of her purse that she keeps stored under the counter, takes a hand mirror and lip gloss from it. She has several sticky colors in round plastic cases sealed in small crackling plastic bags that she has carefully, so that there certainly would not be any marks, scraped away from the cover wrapping around certain women’s magazines with a knife before setting them out for sale on the shelves. And starts daubing the sludge on her pale, cracked lips, several shades at once. “Starling darling kiss-ready for the evening enjoyment,” then she hisses and smacks wildly at the pocket mirror that she holds up when she is finished.

  “Kiss kiss kiss.”

  And calms down a little, looking around roguely. “Or maybe you just need to color your lips because you’re going out for a smoke. A woman of the world, Susette, always leaves lipstick on the end of her cigarette.” Grandly, quoting from “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings.” “SO,” Maj-Gun explains with an eternal poker face because of course she knows that what she is going to say next is sly, “you can see in the ashtray that a Real Woman was here.”

  “Stop.” Susette is laughing so hard she almost chokes. But today is the first day of the rest of your life. Maj-Gun sits up straight, there is a customer walking across the square toward the newsstand, and she takes her position on the customer serving stool again, meek as a lamb.

  “Look, Susette,” she says just before the door chimes. “Who we have here! Now we’re going to have some fun!” In other words it is that customer, an older gentleman with a lot of lottery tickets. And when he has taken the three steps up to the counter with three quick youthful strides Maj-Gun is sitting ready with a quote she has randomly chosen from “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings” (which, in other words, is the point of the hobby: saying to the first best customer exactly what happens to be on that page in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings” regardless of whether or not it sounds stupid or crazy).

  “Just because you’re a count doesn’t mean you have the right to walk in and out of my life as you please,” Maj-Gun says to the man, with her softest and most beautiful customer service voice.

  And he, the man—incidentally the Manager of Susette’s apartment building—stands there speechless for a moment without knowing how to react. Certainly not angry my goodness, just the opposite. Hums something cheerful, suddenly almost embarrassed because he has a hard time hiding what a good mood this girl has put him in, and most of all, for a second you get the feeling that he might like to stick out his chubby hand and pinch Maj-Gun Maalamaa on the cheek.

  And it is entertaining, of course, both of them laugh heartily, Susette Packlén and Maj-Gun Maalamaa, when the Manager has gone on his way. “Now I seem to have gotten one of those gaffers on the hook again,” Maj-Gun determines, and adds with a bit more irony: “As you can see, Susette, I really am surrounded by a crowd of admirers,” wiping sticky lip gloss from her mouth with an almost ill-tempered sweep of the back of her hand.

  But then she shrugs. “Bother! Forgetabout it. That isn’t love, it’s a hobby. What do you know about love, Susette? And, Susette, what do I know?

  “Love is something bigger… Oh, Susette. Now I’m suddenly getting nervous. Come on. I need a smooooooke!”

  And she hastily snatches a newspaper to use for holding open the door.

  All About Animals in Nature, All About Relationships, A Hundred Years of Psychoanalysis and Personal Development, Everything About Everyday Interactions, Cats’ World, All About Dogs—and of course All About Love.

  Susette and love.

  Because suddenly the magazine that Maj-Gun has stuck under her arm slips from her grasp there where she is standing in the doorway to the newsstand, in the process of lighting her cigarette with a lighter. Falls to the ground, opens to a column, it is just too fantastic, they both stand there staring.

  “Do you see?” Maj-Gun says after a few seconds, in total genuine surprise and for a moment without her usual sweaty excitement. “Your story, Susette. And what it’s called. Oh, oh, oh, Susette. ‘Your Love.’ ”

  Susette and love. A black-and-white sketch of a woman’s face illustrates the story, a car, lanterns, a few trees, and broken fog—and behind her face, in the background but in the distance so to speak, a man. With sideburns, wearing a polo, a blazer.

  “And what is love?” Maj-Gun continues, once they have come inside. “Sharing the everyday and not forgetting to take turns washing the coffee cups?

  “Oh no,” Maj-Gun immediately determines. “That isn’t anything other than ordinary everyday servility. You can have different kinds of arrangements, with or without legal validity.

  “Or a marriage between friends. Two bank directors in a mixed Lions Club who found each other through their mutual interest in charity.”

  And so, Maj-Gun who dives into her book again, “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” her statements.

  “More like this…” Skims, skims until she comes to a suitable place. “‘He taught me to walk’… ‘She made me see’ …

  “‘It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Love means doing everything for love.’ Even dying, not just for show but PANG truly.

  “I am more romantically inclined than you, Susette. In other words, it is just as I suspected—

  “I don’t mean it in a bad way, but… now. I see. That we—might be two. That maybe YOU were also created for a greater love.”

  “My God, Maj-Gun.” Susette Packlén laughs in a girlfriend sort of way. “Isn’t it enough already?”

  “Can you imagine dying for love? Yes, Susette, when I look at you. These globes, Susette. Your eyes. A whole world. I feel it. That your love is great, Susette. So great it can overturn houses. Duel in the sun. Life and death.

  “So that later, afterward you can say that there were two of us who loved. Though,” Maj-Gun adds elatedly, thoughtful, “of course if it happens to go that way for us then afterward, in and of itself, there won’t be so much for us. But”—brightening at the thought—“the memory of the two of us will remain.

  “I remember when I saw you come running across the cemetery, Susette. To the rectory: like a romantic heroine from a movie. A movie with deserted plains, clouds and rain and hard winds. I love you… her whole body screaming, the loneliness inside her, the heavens opening, church bells.

  “It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. It is love, Susette.

  “To the rectory. But yet, it has to be said, love’s representative in that story looked a little pale, so to speak,” Maj-Gun determines with reference to her own brother, Tom Maalamaa. “So the question is,” she says thoughtfully, “Susette and love. If I am going to love the Boy in the woods then who are you going to love—now?

  “Well.” Maj-Gun shrugs after a brief pause. “Should I tell you another story then instead, as an illustrative example? A true story?”

  “I have to go home now, tomorrow is another workday,” Susette says but Maj-Gun anticipates her. “But listen to this now and then maybe you’ll understand me better, Susette. We were at sea, so to speak. Life is a cruise, so to speak, that’s how she said it. And sh
e took out her flask and poured out ‘her medicine.’ Then she also said, ‘My flask.’ Held it up. ‘My medicine.’ A small cute bottle, as it were.

  “You know who I’m talking about. My godmother Liz Maalamaa who had become a widow and wanted to head out to sea and invited me to come with her as a female companion. Didn’t want to travel alone, she whined, and I was a child then and I guess she thought that I needed some entertainment in the sea of balls for example.

  “But the same miserable routes Susette, Sweden Finland Sweden Finland, which her husband, of blessed memory, had often traveled alone in his spare time until his heart, liver, kidneys just exploded inside him and he was found dead under some berth under the car deck by the cleaners when the boat had reached port.

  “The buffet room, the shrimp shells, milk glasses; her talking and her talking; swans in the archipelago that filed past on the other side of the window. TWO swans, that was what she saw even though there were several of course, black swans, white swans, but in other words, she had to pause at just the two of them. Dick and Duck, her and her husband, and crying over the shrimp shells… and how you can long for someplace else, Susette, despite being so young! So I left the restaurant and ran ran out through the ship back to my own normal childhood as it were that I suddenly didn’t know where it was at all, but the sea of balls then, like a hypothesis; to drown myself in the sea of balls, I wanted to DIE! And I tried, I swam in and under the balls and squeezed my eyes shut but nah nah there was no nice sister in a blue bathing suit, for example, who wanted to come to my rescue.

  “There was just one—an older woman: one single lady in the universe. My aunt Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Maalamaa, in comfortable sandals size ten—a reminiscence from her happy childhood on the farm up north where she and her brother dreamed about becoming missionaries, and sometimes you need to walk a long way if you’re going to save heathens, Majjunn, which she always called me, she explained sometime during her bedtime stories for me and my brother Tom when she came to visit at the rectory in order to rest during the time her husband was still alive. Sometimes on unruly ground, Majjunn, and there in the jungle, the conditions and laws of the jungle prevail, looked a bit like she had come from that wilderness herself, bruises on her wrists and a black eye on the left side… But yes, it was those sandals I saw in the sea of balls when I opened my eyes that I had squeezed shut because I thought it would make me invisible like when an ostrich sticks its head in the sand. On the other side of the windowpane that separated the children’s playroom from the ship’s corridor while chubby girl on the run chubby girl on the run echoed from all of the ship’s loudspeakers. I WAS not exactly fat then, Susette, just big.

  “But, no escape, pjutt spit a ball out of my mouth and back to the dining room, the buffet tables from which all of the other people had already excused themselves and we were alone: the swans, Dick and Duck, her and the husband… while darkness fell, Susette. Over all of these lies too. And the archipelago, on the other side of the window. The only thing that could be seen, one solitary lighthouse. A white light, at a distance.

  “And then, Susette, it disappeared too—

  “Do you think this is funny, Susette?”

  Maj-Gun stops in the middle of her story.

  “I don’t know,” Susette replies truthfully. “I don’t think—” She tries, does not know how to continue, she wants to say that she does not really believe what Maj-Gun is saying, that maybe Maj-Gun should not exaggerate so much, but suddenly Susette sees the tears in Maj-Gun’s eyes behind the counter and it pains her.

  “Then I saw hell,” Maj-Gun says and big, shiny tears run down her cheeks. “A life I never want to live.

  “That marriage which wasn’t much of a marriage but she pretended to sit there and miss it when in reality she was just embarrassed because she was drunk.”

  “But you said she never drank.”

  “But, Susette!” Maj-Gun shouts impatiently through her tears. “Don’t you understand anything? Djeessuss! Those three–four thimbles she poured into her milk glass, her medicine, it was her big secret. And it’s her, never me, who talks big. ‘A little bit of wine makes you nice,’ papa Pastor said at the rectory and I say so too. But I had caught her red-handed.” Calmer now, she is no longer crying, dries all the snot and tears from her face with the back of her hand just as determined as she had been with the lip gloss on her lips, sits up straight. “But this is what I want to say, Susette. That the life lie—” Maj-Gun starts with such seriousness that all of the issues of Positive Consciousness she has ever studied pour out of her. “That. The end. Fuck. The end. Never. THERE. Djeessuss. That you can long to get away!”

  And she grows silent again, determines later, thoughtfully, but with great emphasis. “Her life. Her damned shit of a life, Susette Packlén.”

  “Well,” Maj-Gun says then after she has caught her breath, “now we come to the little turn in this idiotic story that happens to be true, to boot. Sorry, Aunt Liz suddenly says there on the boat. In the restaurant where we remain all alone except for the servers because by that time it’s really late. And she looks at me and says that, at exactly the same moment as I get a burning liquid in my mouth that looks like regular milk because what has happened, which she has realized before me even if it was too late for her to do anything about it, is that I have gotten thirsty and taken her glass by mistake instead of my own.

  “Sorry. But she, Liz Maalamaa, is like me—unfortunately we aren’t related for nothing and what belongs to the genetic material we seem to share is that you are never allowed to have a pause in the conversation regardless of whether there is something important to say or not. Babble, it just continues, especially if someone unmasks you, or even worse, you unmask yourself. SEE the life lie shit life: she never loved him after all. And he, yes, he wasn’t nice to her anyway—but she immediately has to jump over to the absolution that happens later.

  “‘Majjunn,’ she says accordingly, taking that babble in her mouth. If Majjunn doesn’t tell anybody about this then when Auntie dies, Maj-Gun won’t get the prince because Auntie doesn’t have a say about that but she will get the whole kingdom.

  “And then, Susette, we go down to the cabin and she writes her will. After my death all of my earthly possessions will go to… and so on.

  “And it was for real. I get to inherit everything. Including the apartment in Portugal where she spends her winters these days because of the varicose veins that also run in the family.

  “Djeessus, Susette. Tom Maalamaa. HE isn’t going to believe his eyes. That miser. That He. Will Be. Left With Nothing.

  “But, Susette, she’ll never DIE of course, and then, well”—Maj-Gun grows quiet as if she has run out of air—“we were back in port again.”

  And at the newsstand now, Maj-Gun who is drumming her fingers on the surface of the counter and suddenly it is really quiet and dark, after closing time, a good while, because neither of them has looked at the clock.

  Dark over the square too: only one solitary streetlamp is lit. A cat who is leisurely moving across the empty square, not even black, an ordinary gray tabby, a fat barn cat.

  “Everything can happen here,” Maj-Gun finishes. “Just that… that… do you think, Susette, that anything happens here at all?

  “You can say anything here. That’s how it is, at the newsstand. In general.”

  •

  “It’s late.” Susette clears her throat, now she wants to get home right away.

  Maj-Gun sighs, gets up as well, is going to start closing up.

  Counts the register first, opens the cash drawer, PLING.

  “Wait, Susette,” Maj-Gun calls when Susette is already at the door. “I think. About your mother. I understand, Susette. More than you know.”

  “What do you mean?” Susette asks quickly, almost spitefully.

  “What I’m saying,” Maj-Gun calmly replies, “your mother. She was for real. Not like my aunt or… like someone else. Your mother, Susette. Was as healthy as could b
e. In some way healthier than everyone else in the world who is healthy. Does that sound like a cliché? But still, what I want to say. It was just a logic. To go along with.”

  “Maj-Gun. Don’t bother—” Susette says, but still, she cannot pull herself away, in some way wants to hear more.

  “Life like a room, Susette. That’s what she said, maybe to you too, there at the rag-cutting bucket in the kitchen—a special mood that never leaves you once you’ve been there. Room after room after room that you enter and leave and then go on to the next one. That house, what it looks like on the inside, you don’t feel but you know… suddenly you’ve just ended up there… Not in a basement or in some dusty attic.

  “But maybe just somewhere where it is… empty.

  “Brown. Nasty. She spoke like that. Cut up her office clothes, they were like that shade you know, you remember. Worn woolen fabric. We cut. For the most part she cut and I listened. I really listened, Susette, because it was touching for real. Listened like I had never listened before and maybe will never listen again either because it hurt, and continues to hurt too.

  “Is that death? It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Is that it? Maj-Gun? Susette? Questions like those. The most terrible or the most comforting, because that is where life and death cancel each other out, laughter grief same thing, there is no answer of course.

  “But she remained sitting there cutting, didn’t give in.

  “She remains sitting there, doesn’t give in.

  “It demanded respect. But on the other hand I understand that you can’t live in it.”