The American Girl (53 page)

“Up and at ’em now,” said Kenny. “I need help.”

And it was with this that Kenny needed help: she had emptied the swimming pool, cleaned it on her own. With Sandra’s help she polished the tiles and admired the result. Later she bought many expensive plants, some tropical, unusual species. It was not for nothing that she had lived together with the baroness in the Glass House (which after the baroness’s death was rented out
under the care of the baroness’s relatives, Kenny said that she had nothing more to do with it). She planted flowers in large, beautiful pots.

They were plants that needed a lot of light. She carried the pots down into the pool, rigged up lines with searchlights along the edges, a pearl necklace of strong lights that made the rectangular pool glow.

When the plants bloomed, which they did in due order—there was never a flower that did not bloom down there, bloomed audaciously and big and strong in different colors, obscene and white, very yellow and with large stamens—she carried down a small garden furniture set: a small table and three old-fashioned chairs with ornamental backs and slender legs.

“Here it is now,” she said. “Our subtropical underwater garden.”

It looked insane, but it was undeniably beautiful. “It’s not underwater at all,” Sandra objected. But Kenny was not listening. She had her eyes on her husband.

“Phenomenal,” he said. “Great.” With a new voice, one that came from somewhere in between passion and artificiality and nostalgia (the attempt at catching an old tone of voice and reproducing it with credibility). It was a voice that had come into being after Kenny. A voice expressly for Kenny. It related to the voice that the Islander once used with Lorelei Lindberg like really nice polyester fabric compared to clean silk. Just the experts, the very clever, can tell the genuine from the fake.

To Sandra he said:

“It will be fine.” But he also had a new voice for her. A strange papa-voice.

Which made him like a stranger.

“Should we go out and shoot?” That time was over. The dad lay his hand on his daughter’s shoulder and they stood there at the
edge of the pool while Kenny filled it with plants so it looked like some kind of specially designed grave.

Sandra thought: I want to go away.

“The miserable garden,” Kenny would say to Rita later in the big, bright apartment in the city by the sea that Sandra and Kenny lived in shortly before Sandra left the picture, went on her way.

“I think it was some kind of sublimation,” Kenny continued, and Sandra was on the other side of the wall listening, eavesdropping. “I so wanted to have children.”

The flowers would gradually wither in the pool. The light would not be enough, despite everything. No light in the world could brighten up the pool section, and yet it was the brightest place in the entire house in the darker part.

“I’m like a cow,” she would say to Rita Rat in the city by the sea. “A barren cow.”

Kenny so bright, so lovable.

Rita over the rooftops
. She had come walking over the rooftops, knocked on the window in the apartment. Personally she lived in the Backmanssons’ apartment on the same block, so the roofs between the two buildings were connected, she had worked that out. And she had looked at Kenny as though it was the most natural thing in the world that she showed up just like this, via the roof, and then she explained that walking over the rooftops was something that she just had to try.

Sure enough. Kenny was enchanted by it. Like all pretty, lovable women Kenny had a streak inside where she saw herself as if in a movie in several immortal scenes. How Rita came to her and they became best friends: this was one of them.

How one day Rita could suddenly be heard like a voice through the open window in the apartment, Sandra and Kenny. Rita from the District. They had looked out and there she was, swinging on the roof of the building next door, and she called
out, “Come!” Kenny had of course immediately responded to the call. Just as naturally, Sandra made a face and stayed indoors.

And then Kenny and Rita continued to be enchanted by each other up on the roof. Two of them under a chimney, and the city below. What a scene, what a story. A story that received wings, and it flew. And Rita and Kenny shone, which they did otherwise as well. In each other’s company, glittering.

Rita had succeeded
. She made no secret of the fact that it should be seen just that way. She lived with the Backmanssons in the wonderful room, Jan Backmansson’s sister’s (the one who was studying dance in New York) former room, and Jan Backmansson was her boyfriend.

You did not connect her with the District, the nickname Rat had disappeared. There was, so to speak, nothing in her creature that alluded to it. She was tall and handsome and in all ways, yes, you had to admit it, one of those young women whom you rarely saw even on the streets of the city by the sea.

Sandra, on the other hand, she did not forget.

For example Solveig, Solveig who had stood there in the darkness with the crazy cousin’s mama at Bencku’s barn then not such a long time ago, taken long drags on the cigarette and been very upset.

“The last thing she did was steal my jacket and wreck my car. Drove it into junk metal on Torpeson’s field. She left it there and hitchhiked to the city. Forced herself on the Backmanssons. In the middle of the night.”

Rita, however, did not make her former life in the District a secret, all of that. It was so to speak not pertinent anymore. And when she saw Sandra the first time, she certainly looked at her with something that could be likened to triumph, however furtive. Now I’m here. But that was also mixed with a kind of calm indifference in the presence of everything that had been. Because it did not matter, everything with her and in her seemed to say. It is so different now.

And Sandra remembered Solveig who had puffed with such a nosiness and smoldering indignation that it surrounded her like a veil that you could almost cut through.

“She’s half,” Solveig had said. “We’re twins. And then you’re whole only when you are two.”

But Sandra, when she came to the city by the sea later, she became defenseless. Without skin. But there was no one who was interested in her skinlessness. She lived with Dad and his new wife in a house in the older part of the city by the sea. Dad’s new wife was, as said, Kenny.

She was the one who had picked out the apartment. An exquisite one with many rooms. Rooms rooms rooms and high ceilings, windows facing every direction. Toward the sea, up in the sky, toward the back gardens. But little Sandra. She could not find herself there.

She stamped her way forward on the sidewalk, in heavy hiking boots, stubbornly and without a goal.

She detested the city by the sea. It was not big and it was not small, there was exactly one boulevard in it and a few avenues and a whole lot of people who walked around in shabby clothes, leering at each other.

Sandra went home. She did not want to go home. But there was nowhere else to go.

She came into the apartment, went to her room and closed the door. LOCKED it after her. Still the voices from the next room could be heard.

“Mascot.” They giggled. “The wrong kind of dog.”

And they whispered about her.

Was there one or more? Or was it just her?

Rita Rat, here again. Over the roof. And the worst thing about that story was it was true.

It was Kenny and it was Rita, now Kenny’s best friend, in a big, bright apartment in the city by the sea. And it was Sandra, the
wrong kind of dog. The Islander, her father, had set out to sea. Again. Only about a year after the new marriage had begun. “Maybe he couldn’t stand coming face-to-face with mortality.” That was Inget Herrman’s analysis, Inget, whom Sandra visited quite often in her small studio apartment on the outskirts of the city. There were long afternoons when they drank wine, red earth-colored such that glowed warmly and filled with promise when the sunlight reflected in the glasses. It was beautiful, the only thing beautiful in the city by the sea during this time. “That tends to be one of the negative effects of an intimate relationship between an older man and a younger woman,” Inget Herrman continued. “You rarely talk about those kinds of negative effects, especially not when it’s a question of an older man and a younger woman.”

And Inget Herrman took a deep breath and laughed her distinctive, rattling laugh that Sandra and Doris had once fallen in love with so much that they had spent days trying to imitate it, but without success. Though it was like that with people you liked, you do not remember what they looked like, and the same goes for voices, Sandra and Doris had been able to determine a long time ago. “And a woman like Kenny, that’s even worse. There are only four years between us but she has an ability to make me feel dejected and slightly demented. Like an older person who can get into a bad mood because of her own slowness and sudden difficulties in managing to do even the very simplest of everyday functions. We’re all going to die. But it really isn’t fun to be made aware of it. Remember I’m saying this with good intentions. The young woman we’re talking about is my sister.”

“Or breed it’s called,” someone on the other side of the wall in the big, bright apartment continued. And raised her voice, so Sandra would hear. Yes, it was Rita, Rita Rat. She had an exceptional ability to carry on like that.

“And, can we ask ourselves, which breed?”

Kenny laughed, but happily. Rita was coarser. Kenny was not coarse. She could not be, she was so bright, so excellent, so lovable.

Little Sandra. Poor Sandra. Poor poor Sandra. Her mouth so dry besides. Wetting her lips with her own wet tongue. Let the tip of her tongue get stuck in the top lip’s imagined furrow. And it was deep.

The process by means of which Sandra was transformed into a mute and a harelip had started again.

It must immediately be said that this and what followed, a description of Sandra’s last time in the city by the sea before she left, originated in an extreme subjectivity. Sandra’s
own
perspective.

Because there were no others. The world diminished.

It is in other words possible that Kenny and Rita were talking about entirely different things. That Sandra just imagined all of that on the other side of the door. In reality it was highly likely. They probably had more interesting things to spend their time on in conversation than on Sandra, who only in her own grandiose fantasies was the interesting center of everything (negative or positive, the harelip’s contemplation of her navel, so it had started again). For example, when Kenny said something friendly to Sandra, asked Sandra if she wanted to come along somewhere (and she actually asked sometimes, in the apartment in the city by the sea, in the beginning anyway), Sandra had the ability to discern undertones and dissonance in what was said.

Says one thing but means another.

“It’s important to her to be everyone’s friend,” said Inget Herrman. “Maybe she is. I don’t know. If you only knew how little I know about my sisters. Should I tell you about Eddie?”

“You HAVE told me about Eddie,” said Sandra who had left all of that behind.

“Yes. But not everything. Not anything at all about how little I understood her. I think she was capable of almost anything. Even murder.”

And you’re saying that now, thought Sandra. But she did not say anything. She finished her wine and reached for the bottle on the desk between them in order to refill it. She drank. Inget Herrman drank.

Both of them were quiet for a while and changed conversation topics. The sun sank behind the rooftops, it became dark, and when the wine was gone it was evening, early evening, unpleasantly early. Inget Herrman was going somewhere, meeting someone, and she started getting ready. Sandra, on the other hand, what would she do on such a night like this when it was too early to go to bed and impossible due to the wine in her body to do anything else? The mere thought of going home—yes, it was unthinkable.

It was in a mood like that, in such a state, that she headed out on the prowl for the first time.

“Eddie,” said Inget Herrman. “We don’t know what happened. But we have good reason to believe that it happened exactly the way people thought. Personally I don’t doubt for a second Eddie was in a position to drive the people close to her insane. That boy, Björn, for example. Or Bengt. Poor little Bengt.

“And I said that to Doris as well,” Inget Herrman continued, “the last time we met. It was in the house in the darker part, incidentally. She was there when I came. And cleaning she said. But she was very upset, completely beside herself, poor thing. If only I had understood . . . But you know what she was like . . . you couldn’t believe, think.

“Because she seemed so desperate about everything I told Doris she should stop thinking about the American girl, all of that. That it was over and forgotten now. Life had to go on. I actually said so too.

“Doris”—and Inget Herrman’s voice caught in her throat—“she . . . yes. And that cleaning. I wondered about that also. Its effectiveness, I mean. Because it was certainly nice and clean everywhere in the house but when I came down to the basement
after our short walk together I saw someone had dragged out a pair of big, muddy hiking boots in the pool section. They stood there a bit fateful at the edge of the pool. And of course I understood it was a joke. They were her boots. You know which ones I mean. No one had boots like her. So later, I took and cleaned them up.”

And Sandra, on the street, on her way to the underground disco Alibi, thought about her, the American girl. How she was, so to speak, surrounded by her now, for real. Her sisters. And she should have gotten to know her better, gotten to know much more about her.

But now when that was not the case. You could say something about a person using her family as a reference point. But the person herself still remained something else, what she was—or had been.
The American girl
.

Walk in her moccasins. That is the only way.

“Sometimes I wonder, Sandra,” Inget Herrman had finally said, “what were you really up to? You two, you and Doris, when you were together?”