The American Girl (34 page)

“That is just . . . crap,” Sandra determined and Doris admittedly agreed with her too, but shortly thereafter Doris Flinkenberg tossed the magazine aside anyway and suggested:

“Should we do it, then?”

“I wasn’t thinking about standing on the steps and yelling if that’s what you were thinking. Besides it’s important . . .”

“. . . that no one sees and hears us so we can be left alone,” Doris filled in.

“Yes, yes, I know. You’ve said that. We have. But I’m talking about something else. A game. How does that sound?”

Interesting. It certainly sounded interesting.

A strange tension already existed between the two of them. There were looks and touching, or fear of touching. The wrong kind of touch. Those who had earlier rolled around all over like two young rabbits now kept themselves at a proper distance from each other, even down in the pool.

Sandra with her business at one end. Doris at the other.

“What are you making?”

“I’m sewing,” Sandra explained, then completely calmly, “glitter clothes for the American girl’s funeral. And the Marsh Queen’s resurrection. It’s almost the same thing.”

Or did Sandra say that, was it a dream?

Whatever. All of this was in some way devoted to increasing the tension between them even more.

“The cat-and-mouse game,” Doris Flinkenberg explained. “But in our own way.

“The game is called Assignment: Master Fear,” she explained further. “Do you follow? I give you an assignment and you give me an assignment, I decide for you and you decide for me. Since
it’s like this, that sometimes, when two people are close, then one sees the other more clearly than she sees herself.

“So now it’s a matter of us learning how to overcome our greatest fears. And we help each other with that. You give me an assignment and I give you an assignment.”

“Now I’m telling you,” Doris Flinkenberg started, “you should go straight to Bencku’s barn and get the American girl’s bag with all her things in it and bring it to me. Or to us. Here to the house. As you know, you said it yourself, it’s important that no one sees you.

“I know you’re afraid of going in there. Now go there and do it. Understand?”

Sandra nodded. Yes. She understood. And the game itself. And suddenly, cold shivers ran down her spine, she not only understood but was also even very interested.

“And now I’m saying to you that you go to Solveig and Rita’s cottage and get their pistol. The one you are always talking about, that inheritance. It’s not the fact that you talk about the pistol, but always when you talk about Rita and Solveig in the cottage you become so very strange. Or not always. But pretty often.”

And the strange thing was it had an effect on Doris.

“How do you know that?” Doris asked quickly, as if she had been unmasked.

“Well. The game starts now. How much time do we have? Half a day?”

And Sandra and Doris carried out their assignments. Sandra shot through the woods to the cousin’s property, she took the long way, which went past the moss where she and Doris had kissed each other for the first time a long time ago. She had butterflies in her stomach, and no, she was not at all scared, not nervous. Not to go into Bencku’s barn anyway. She knew he was
gone. He was gone the whole summer. He had said that to her when she came to him the last time, late in the spring, in May. He was going to live with Magnus von B. in an apartment in the city by the sea.

Sandra out of habit, and without thinking, took the key from its hiding place and opened the trapdoor in the floor and took what she needed, and then shot back through the woods, carefully so no one would see or hear.

And Doris came back with the pistol.

“It was so easy. No one was there.”

“Did anyone see you?”

“No.”

“Did anyone see you?”

“No. At least I don’t think so.”

“Are we less afraid, then?”

“Maybe.” “Maybe.”

They were down in the pool and both started laughing at the same time.

And Doris, on all fours, had crawled over to Sandra who was sitting at the other end of the pool.

The world in a small rectangle, 2. The first time
. Doris, in the swimming pool. “Be quiet, be quiet,” because Sandra was still laughing.

“And now I’m not the American girl. Now I’m myself.”

And then Doris kissed Sandra. And it was NOT factor X or anyone else who was doing the kissing. It was Doris Flinkenberg who kissed Sandra Wärn and Sandra Wärn who kissed back. And Doris remembered the moss, the soft green moss, and Sandra remembered the moss and . . .

No one can kiss like us
. Definitely not. But it was serious. And one thing led to another. And then they traveled inside each other in Maharajah’s Palace, which they had built for themselves out of the fabrics and pillows on the bottom of the swimming
pool. And moved, two bodies tightly wound around and over each other, on the soft, beautiful ground.

And lightning and thunder could be seen in the television at the edge of the pool, and it was storming.

The soft, beautiful ground.

Follow-up discussion
. “. . . as if I’ve had dykes in the family going back generation after generation.” Doris Flinkenberg sighed happily.

It was afterward, when Sandra had gotten a tray on which she laid out cigarillos and gin and tonics. And they sat naked and smoked, inhaled so their eyes watered and it swirled in their heads, their naked bodies in silhouette in the half darkness, glowing cigarettes, glasses steamy with damp in which the ice clinked.

“You know what?” Sandra held out her glass in order to clink glasses with Doris’s glass,
clink
. “I’ve never seduced anyone before.”

Sandra, playful.

Doris herself: she had no desire to talk or investigate anything at all. She said nothing. She curled up like a happy good-for-nothing as close to Sandra’s body as she could come.

And someone turned on the television. That night, the night after they had been together the first time, they watched television down in the pool without water, where they had dragged mattresses and covers and so on. “A LOVE NEST,” Doris Flinkenberg said maybe a few too many times, for once, thought Sandra. “Don’t talk so much.”

Words. Too many words. That night there was a strange film on television. The film was about a spaceship or something similar, whatever something like that could be called, that was traveling around in a human being’s body. As if the body were space,
or a foreign solar system. Traveling through veins, these yes, could you call them astronauts?

Doris did not know. She did not follow the plot. She would not remember a bit of the story afterward. But she would remember the red, the violet, and all the warmth, the warmth of the images, which were emphasized by the fact that the color television was set on too much red and poor contrast so everything fused together in some way. Doris would also remember the pounding heart . . . which the astronauts, or whatever they were called, were afraid of being sucked up into . . . or however it actually was . . . she would not know . . . she would not have A CLUE because she would lie there like a happy fool, a blessed fifteen-hundred-caliber lover.

Tightly pressed against her loved one’s chest.

Against Sandra’s body, which was warm, almost hot, and smelled keenly of sweat.

AND what was it that the fabrics smelled like? “Maharajah’s Palace,” Sandra had said. “No, Little Bombay,” Doris had said, but she would not repeat it now because Sandra would become upset. Little Bombay, now. Now, thought Doris, which you do when you are stupid and in love and think you are invincible, now I’m starting to understand what it’s about.

The astronauts in the Blood Woods.

In the aorta, the planet’s pulsating guts
.

Allowed herself to go to sleep. A hand on Sandra’s stomach.

“When you told me we weren’t going to answer the telephone because you didn’t want the cousin’s mama or anyone else to come and take me away from you, then I understood,” Doris Flinkenberg squeaked.

“Shh,” Sandra whispered absently from where she was in the middle of the film.

And with this
shh
Doris understood that the time for pillow talk was over. But it did not matter. Talk. All this talk. In reality she was tired of it as well. She was tired too, happily tired and exhausted.

The sexual awakening
.

From the Blood Woods the astronauts traveled in toward a heart that was very dark and red
.

The world in a small rectangle 3. Rain
. Days passed. The moose steak had been finished. The girls ate hard candy and chocolate and chips. It started raining. The rain made everything damp. At first it was a pleasant dampness because the period behind them had undeniably been too warm and dry. But the damp started forcing its way into the pool too, and it was not as pleasant. And with the chill and the damp came the hunger, the real one, the Dorishunger.

“I’m hungry. Warm food,” Doris Flinkenberg squeaked on Sandra’s chest. “The flesh is weak. Real food.”

“Oh God,” Sandra said, bored, “can you really not control yourself?”

“No.”

“I know,” said Sandra. “We’ll call the store and ask them to drive out a bunch of food under strict orders not to tell anyone. We have money. We’ll bribe the lady in the store.”

“Good idea,” said Doris. “I’ll call.”

Doris called the country store in the town center and was laughed at.

“He who does not work shall not eat,” said the lady in the store.

“Doris Flinkenberg will have to get here on the apostle’s horses then.”

They had in other words been found out.

“And stop being pretentious now. Incidentally, what does Mom think about it?”

“That’s great,” Sandra Wärn said when Doris presented the conversation to her lover. “NOW all hell is going to break loose.

Thanks a lot.”

“It wasn’t my idea.”

“Well, we can go to the store then. Now it doesn’t matter anymore.”

Nach Erwald und die Sonne
. They were in the Closet, shortly thereafter, a day or so later, when the doorbell started ringing. And sure enough, they looked out through the porthole, it was the cousin’s mama there outside at the top of the tall stairway up into nothing.

“Open up! I know you’re in there!” The cousin’s mama rang and rang the bell. The bell played and played and played. Nothing happened. The cousin’s mama changed to knocking, gradually banging on the solid door.

“Doris! Sandra! I know you’re there!”

Inside the house the girls remained frozen. Inside the Closet they pinched their mouths shut and made faces at each other. They saw the cousin’s mama through the porthole. They saw her, but she did not see them.

It was in the rain. The cousin’s mama gave up. She started walking back down the stairs with slow steps. Her back, a blue rain poncho with the hood drawn up, black rubber boots. It was moving. To see the cousin’s mama this way made both of them speechless for real. The cousin’s mama turned around a few times in order to make sure the door had not opened anyway . . .

“Ooh no,” said Doris Flinkenberg and had tears in her eyes.

But in the Closet, Sandra lay her hand on Doris’s chest. And so they started again. Wild kisses, caresses.

And then the first kiss, the second kiss, the third followed . . .

And in the midst of the kisses and the caresses Doris led Sandra out of the Closet and into the bedroom. The Islander’s bedroom. They had never been there, in other words, never been together in that way before.

Lightning and thunder. The soft warm ground. Toward the Blood Woods . . .

• • •

“That bell,” Sandra stated in the bed afterward. “We have to do something about it. Now I’m going to get the pistol.”

When Sandra left, Doris remained in bed. It took quite a while before Sandra was back. Doris became restless while she was waiting. She looked around in a new way, or an old one, the old one. With great attentiveness, in order to obtain information.

Her hands fingered this and that in the vicinity of the nightstand, in the drawer of the nightstand. And there, under a lot of papers and sailboat brochures, she found a photograph. She picked it up and studied it carefully.

The image represented Lorelei Lindberg and the little girl, they were standing in the rain outside a shop. It was a store, a fabric store, you could see that if you looked carefully, which Doris would do at a later stage, but not now.

Sandra with her ugly, fractured lip; cold shivers of tender and loving recognition raced through Doris Flinkenberg. And Lorelei Lindberg. It was easy to see, it could not be anyone else. But at the same time, she looked so different in the picture in some way, not more as a stranger, but it was creepy, more familiar.

Doris’s heart was pounding, and it was a horrid feeling that crept up inside her and with that came the sick feeling, she had to swallow, swallow in order to stop the nausea. While she saw. Because suddenly she understood what it was she saw, and what was familiar.

Lorelei Lindberg in a red raincoat.

Plastic is an eternal material.

The red raincoat was, there was no doubt about it, or was confusingly similar to, the same damned coat that she had seen at Bule Marsh.

Not that long ago. The one that had been on Eddie de Wire. On her in other words. The corpse of the American girl.

•••

When Sandra came back she had the pistol with her.

Doris had quickly shoved the photo back into the drawer and said nothing to Sandra about her discovery.

“Well, should we see who has better aim, then?

“Hey. What’s going on with you? You look as though you’ve seen . . . a ghost? Or what was it now: a phantom? Come on. Nothing’s going to happen here. Now we’re going out to shoot.”

And out in the yard they competed to see who would be the first to shoot and destroy the doorbell. Doris won.

They put on makeup. They were preparing themselves for the moment when the ugly duckling would become a swan, or like this: the moment when the marsh child would become Marsh Queen, also a pun that meant nothing then, yet. That moment did not seem so far away. In any case, not if you looked at one of them.