The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman (14 page)

Pretty lame lists. They lack violence. I could tell about the famous fight. The one that has become family folklore. This is the way Mother tells it:

Oh, that fight! It was years ago, of course. Nels and I were both young and hormonal. He said something hurtful to me. I honestly don’t remember what it was. Don’t have a clue. I got angry and raged through the house, slamming doors and kicking things
.

Nels felt terrible immediately and began following after me and saying how he wished he’d never said it, whatever it was, and, please, would I forgive him. I didn’t want to forgive him. I wanted him dead, preferably torn apart by ravenous rottweilers. But he wouldn’t just let me go and cool off. He wanted to fix it right then. Nels gets kind of pathetic and cloying when I’m mad at him
.

Anyway, I locked myself upstairs in the master bathroom, filled the tub with water, removed my clothes, and got in. Nels stood on the other side of the door and begged me to let him in. I told him to drop dead. Then he began to take the doorknob and lock apart. I was shouting, “Get out of here. Can’t you leave me alone?” Really, I was crazy
.

He brought in the desk chair, the one with the cotton upholstered seat, and before he could sit down on it, I took a washrag filled with water and slapped it down onto that seat
.

He looked at the seat. He looked at me. I could see the
wheels turning in his head. And then he stepped into the tub and sat down
—with all his clothes on and he was wearing wool tweed! He was even wearing his shoes!
We were both crammed into that tub
.

What could I do except burst out laughing. And then I cried and told him he had hurt my feelings and let him tell me he was sorry. And we made up
.

When Mother tells this story, Dad always says, “Yes, we did,” with the kind of smirk you don’t like to see on a parent’s face. Who wants to think about their parents doing it? All that flab meshed together. Disgusting. And I’m trying to point out their weaknesses, but they tell this story themselves, dramatizing the details and making fun of themselves. Mother says, “I was being very neurotic.”

The story may be too charming to tell. I told it to Shannon, and she thought it was a very romantic thing for my father to do. She practically swooned at the idea, even though he’s an old man. And that’s exactly what I don’t want to do, tell yet another story that makes them look charming. I’m going to have to think about this some more.

This chapter,
Chapter
Ten
, a short chapter, has nothing to do with romance or kissing or pressing breasts against corded muscles. Nothing at all. But I feel compelled, as Midgely used to say, to tell you. I have been surprised as I write this how often Midgely is mentioned on these pages. How often I quote him. I have made him a minor character in this novel without meaning to. His influence has altered who I am in nearly imperceptible ways. I’m barely recognizing it now.

He had legs like tree trunks before the cancer. He didn’t look like a tennis player at all—too large, too squarely built, more like a wrestler or a tackle. For that matter, he didn’t look much like an English teacher either. Not dapper and sensitive like Mr. Harcourt, or sardonic like Mr. Voight, or owly like Ms. Janacek. He was red-faced and freckled, and he had been losing his strawberry-blond hair even before the chemotherapy.

It snowed all Christmas night, and when I awoke, a Jeep and a Blazer were stuck in the middle of our street,
stuck in what must have been more than three feet of snow. I saw it through pince-nez.

Mary Lou Midgely stepped from her front porch, her parka unzipped, and plowed laboriously through the snow to the Blazer to talk with its driver.

Dad and Bjorn, without coats, made their way from the house to the Blazer as well, for what now looked like a conference.

Something was up. I met Mother in the hallway. “Midge needs to go to the hospital,” she said, placing folded towels in the linen closet, “but nothing can get through—no ambulance, no four-wheel-drive vehicles—nothing.”

“What about snowplows?”

“We’ve called. They’re all on main thoroughfares. The city’s got a crisis on its hands. This is a record snowfall for one night. Better get dressed,” she said.

But I’m so happy today, I thought, brushing my teeth. Midgely can’t go to the hospital today, the day after Christmas, today, when I’m happy. Today when I’m in love and beloved. This is too joyous a day for anyone to be going to the hospital. Time is wrapped in red-and-green taffeta ribbon today.

I knew better, of course. It was Midgely, after all, who taught me about logical fallacies last year. Why is it that logic hardly ever makes emotional sense?

It was an hour and a half later that a plow, one of those gigantic yellow cats that can plow half a street at a time, drove through our neighborhood looking like a resurrected dinosaur. An ambulance followed it. I’m sure
everyone in our house was standing by a window somewhere.

I stood in front of the living room window, gazing through pince-nez across the white slope of the lawn, across the white street to Midgely’s house, where the front door was opening. Richard stood behind me, his hands on my shoulders.

The ambulance drivers, probably realizing that a gurney was useless in the snow, carried Midgely out on a white stretcher covered in white blankets. They moved cautiously but quickly down the front walk of Midgely’s house and, reaching the sidewalk, turned toward the ambulance, which did not stand directly in front of the house but was parked at the corner. It was not until they turned that I saw Midgely’s face, yellow as tennis balls against the new snow. Yellow and contorted and unrecognizable.

I think I held my breath until he was in the ambulance, until Mary Lou was in the ambulance with him, until the ambulance followed the giant yellow cat out of our neighborhood. I was left with the white snow, the blue winter sky, and Richard’s warm hands on my shoulders.

None of it made any sense at all.

Sometimes novelists find it necessary to get rid of a character to further the plot. I mean
David Copperfield
would hardly be the bildungsroman it is if Dickens hadn’t killed off David’s mother, leaving David in care of the wicked Mr. Murdstone and his equally wicked sister, Miss Murdstone. It’s then that all David’s problems begin, and they continue for eight hundred pages or so until the resolution.

In this,
my
story, there have been relatively few problems. Ashley has been a pain, but nothing I couldn’t handle. Richard loves me; that’s been well established. Things are running too smoothly. You’re probably getting bored. So I’m going to zap Fleur in
Chapter
Eleven
, because if she stays in the novel any longer, there will be no unhappiness on New Year’s Eve, and that’s what this story needs: a little unhappiness, a little contrast, so that you’ll appreciate the happy resolution. Trust me on this.

As a novelist, I have many choices when it comes to zapping Fleur. I could have her struck by a minibus
while crossing Nicollet Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. The doughnuts, iced with chocolate frosting, she had just bought would be strewn in the street, the angora scarf I gave her still wrapped around her lovely throat. A scene full of pathos and anguish. You’d probably cry.

Or I could have her commit suicide because of the humiliation of having her mother marry for the sixth time. I, the protagonist, would find her hanging from the light fixture in my bedroom, her face gray and distorted. I’d cut her down and give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for half an hour to no avail.

Not very plausible for a survivor like Fleur or for a happy genre like the romance novel either. I’ll tell you what
really
happened. She left to see her mother marry, but not before she took me to the ophthalmologist’s and helped me with my Desdemona paper.

Fleur. Flower. Not a fragile one either. A sunflower, maybe, or a zinnia. A flower full of piss and vinegar. “Fleur isn’t my real name—it’s Diane. I got Fleur when I was eight and in the habit of stealing flowers in the neighborhood for drying. You know, you hang them upside down and they dry with the petals still open. I had them in baskets and vases and jelly jars—dried flowers all over the house. That’s when my father named me Fleur, and it stuck.”

It’s the day after Christmas when she’s telling me this. We were seated in the Cherokee, Fleur driving, me in the passenger seat, my pince-nez taped with masking tape to my nose and forehead. My whole head shouted “nerd alert!” But I was tired of holding them. “Fleur fits you
better than Diane,” I said. “Thievery fits you too, somehow.”

She smiled. “Yes, a flower thief, but of course I stole only to preserve them.”

“Robin Hood of the flowers,” I said. “Sounds very noble. Turn right at the light.” We were headed for the ophthalmologist’s office across from Rosedale. “Was that in Newport Beach? Your life of crime?” I was aware again of the way she sometimes dropped her postvocalic “r’s.”

“No, we moved there when I was thirteen; before that we were in—”

“Let me guess!” I shouted it. “Oh, sorry, we were supposed to turn left back there.”

“I’ll turn at the corner,” she said. “Go ahead, guess. Your dad guessed this morning. Got it right on the first try.”

We followed a snowplow into the parking lot. “He’s better than I am,” I said, “but it’s East Coast and it’s south of Baltimore. Right?”

She nodded. She was wearing the angora muffler I had given her loosely about her head, and she looked gorgeous. “Very good,” she said.

“But it’s not as far south as Savannah—don’t tell me!”

She laughed. “This close enough?” She pulled into a parking place.

“As a matter of fact,” I continued, “I don’t think it’s south of North Carolina—”

“Your dad didn’t need this much speculating.” She turned off the ignition. “Take your best shot, Kate.”

“Raleigh, North Carolina, or maybe Winston-Salem—no,
I’ll go with Raleigh.” I pushed the pince-nez and tape against the bridge of my nose and stared at her face. “Yes?”

“Yes. It’s Raleigh.” She laughed when I made two victorious fists. “Your dad said it was the diphthongs that gave me away.”

“Don’t tell him how long it took me,” I said, getting out of the Cherokee.

Fleur sat in the corner of Dr. Carver’s examining room while I had my eyes checked. “You know,” Dr. Carver said, rolling his stool back, “you might try the contact lenses again—see if you’ve outgrown that intolerance. Most kids do at some point, and contacts are a lot better now than they were even a few years ago. How long has it been since you tried contacts?”

“Three years,” I said.

“It’d be nice not to have to wear these Coke bottles anymore, wouldn’t it?” He tapped my knee with his ballpoint pen.

I retaped the pince-nez to my face. “I don’t know—I think I look pretty glamorous this way, don’t you?” I twisted my head to an odd angle and looked at him cross-eyed.

But inside, the thought of contact lenses made my stomach churn. The timing seemed all wrong. Richard, my hero, fell in love with me wearing the glasses. It seemed so romance-novel-like to appear suddenly without them, transformed from the geeky-looking schoolgirl into the standard romantic heroine, except taller. It should have been exactly the opposite, but taking the glasses
off
felt more phony than keeping them. It
felt like putting on lip gloss. Ashley would approve fully. Maybe that’s why it all seemed contrived. I didn’t, I realized, even want to be the standard romantic heroine. I didn’t want to be transformed, and especially not for New Year’s Eve. It all seemed too calculated, even though I hadn’t planned it that way.

“You want to try them? They could be ready in a couple of days.” Dr. Carver nudged me out of my reflection.

I looked at Fleur, who slouched in her chair, her fingers laced lightly together across her abdomen. Her face showed no opinion.

“I don’t think I want to—not now. I mean—that is—” Geez, I sounded so stupid. What could I say? I don’t want to be transformed into a raving beauty? As if I even had a chance of that. “I—I’m just not ready.” I was stammering. “Maybe in a couple of months.”

Was that why Fleur smiled ever so slightly, because I was stammering? Damn her.

Back in the Cherokee, driving to the university library, she said, “The idea of wearing contact lenses embarrassed you. You blushed.”

There’s no point in arguing with Fleur when she’s already guessed the truth. No point at all. “It felt too much like a transformation,” I said. “I’m having this romance with Richard at Christmastime and then suddenly I get a chance to look like a real human girl—”

“A rather pretty girl, at that” Fleur watched the road.

“It felt like tempting fate—too much of a good thing. Too romantic for words.” I cupped my hands on either
side of my glasses as if to keep them lodged against my face for safety.

“Your whole life has been a romance,” Fleur said, gripping the steering wheel more tightly. “Your parents, your house, your neighborhood, your schooling, your brother, your friends, your tennis lessons, your German lessons, your linguistics lessons, your traditional Swedish Christmas with all the trimmings—everything, even with the cataracts, even if you never loved Rich or he you, your whole life would still be a romance. I feel like the Little Match Girl looking in.”