The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman (3 page)

“I’ll check,” I said.

“I’m going to put Trish and Bjorn in his old room, of course,” she said, pulling out lemons and oranges. “Richard can sleep in the guest room.” She handed me the fruit. “Do you suppose he and that girl want to share a room? He called her his friend. Is that a euphemism? Of course, if they really are just friends, then—”

I shrugged. “Beats me. Her name is Fleur, by the way.” I began halving the fruit with a knife.

“Well, let’s have Fleur”—her lips curved up slightly—“sleep in your room in the extra bed. Do you mind?”

No, I didn’t mind. Better with me than with Richard.

“If the two of them want to get together, they’ll more than likely find each other. Don’t you think?”

I cut myself. “Makes sense,” I said, sucking blood from my thumb. I hated this whole topic.

Mother handed me a paper towel. “Where is Miss Manners when one needs her?” she asked, pulling the
sugar container out of the cupboard above my head. “Fleur St. Geranium doesn’t seem like Richard’s type somehow.”

I snorted. “St.
Germaine
, Mother. She’s pretty stunning, don’t you think?”

She poured a cup of sugar into a boiling pot of water on the stove. “In a Californicated kind of way.” She’s shrewd, my mother is.

I smiled and whispered, “I don’t think she’s California bred. She drops her postvocalic ‘r’s’ ever so slightly.”

Mother looked skeptical.

“No, really,” I said. “I think she’s from the upper South or maybe the lower south Midland—Charleston, Baltimore maybe.”

Mother wiped a spill on the stove. “You sound more and more like your father.”

“Thank you.”

“But”—she held my shoulder—“I hate to tell you this, Ms. Linguist, but she was raised in Newport Beach, California. We established all that before you arrived.”

I checked her face to see if she was serious. Irony is a family trait. “You’re kidding,” I said. “That doesn’t seem right,” and I left to check the bedding.

Mother was right about the bed in the guest room; it had no sheets on it. I chose pale blue ones with striped pillowcases for Richard. Then I made space in my closet for some of Fleur’s things and checked out the bathroom, which was in pretty decent shape. All I really had to do was put out extra towels. I could hear Bjorn and Richard moving up and down the hallway with suitcases, reminiscing together like two old men. “Hey, this is
the closet where we lost your gerbil, Werner von Braun—remember?” Richard asked.

“Probably still in there,” Bjorn said.

“Probably the size of a cocker spaniel.”

Their voices floated into the bathroom, where I looked into the mirror to determine how I’d changed since I was thirteen, when Richard had seen me last. My hair was much shorter, for one thing, and my braces were gone. The glasses remained of necessity. Was I pretty? It’s hard to make judgments about your own face. My dad says I’m intelligent and that’s the important thing. Mother says I’m wholesome-looking. Give me a break. Standing there in the bathroom, hearing Richard’s voice, his “full and masculine laugh”—I copied that from the phrase book, but it’s true—I was willing to drop twenty-five IQ points in exchange for looking exactly like Fleur St. Germaine.

L
ATER WE SIPPED
Russian tea, made with cinnamon sticks borrowed from the neighbors, from Santa Claus mugs in front of a blazing fire in the living room. The first thing Bjorn saw was the Christmas tree, my mother’s tiny, perfect work of art, placed carefully on the grand piano. “
That’s
it?” His voice rose like a boy’s. “
That’s
the tree?” He stood next to it. “It’s pathetic.”

“Feel free to speak your mind, Bjorn dear. Don’t be shy,” Mother said.

Trish, who sat next to Mother on the sofa, said, “Mind your own business, Bjorn!”

Bjorn feigned a churlish look. “Excuse me, but this
is
my business. Tell me if I’m wrong, but didn’t we always have a huge tree with all these wonderful ornaments on it? Wasn’t that the
tradition
in the Bjorkman household?”

“You mean wonderful ornaments like that little sled made of Popsicle sticks that you made in Cub Scouts?” Mother’s arched eyebrows created pleasant lines in her forehead.

Trish, smirking, nudged her.

“No,” Richard said, “he means the boondoggle candy cane. I know that was
my
mother’s favorite.” He grinned at Mother.

“Yes, that was a very good year, the boondoggle year,” Mother agreed.

“Actually, my favorite was the pinecone Santa Claus that we made in fifth grade with Mrs. Seely. Remember?” Bjorn was asking Richard. “We used red and white felt.”

“And a gallon of that white glue. But it was supposed to be an elf,” Richard said.

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Yes, it was.”

“You guys, nobody cares,” Trish said.

“We made pinecone
mice
when I was in third grade.” Fleur startled me when she spoke. We had been sitting in the window seat together and I had somehow—through osmosis, I guess—gotten the idea that she was shy and that we would have to ask her questions to draw her out.

“Mice” was the operative word here. Bjorn and Richard simultaneously clamped their hands over their mouths. “Don’t ever say the M-word in front of Boo!” Richard said.

“Singular or plural M-words make her very nervous,” Bjorn said.

Fleur turned her dazzling head my way. “The M-word?”

“You guys!” I yelled. They were always going to keep me frozen at age thirteen. It was hopeless.

“M-I-C-E.” Richard spelled it slowly. “Or M-O-U-S-E. Never”—he squinted for emphasis—“say those in Boo’s presence.”

“You guys are such dorks. Don’t give them any satisfaction. Fleur,” I said. “Don’t ask a single question.”

Trish held up her hands for quiet. “Better let Tweedledee and Tweedledum just tell the story. Maybe they’ll wear themselves out.” She smiled in my direction. “Tell it, but tell it fast,” she directed.

“It was in early spring,” Richard began.

“Late winter,” Bjorn corrected. “We were having one of those unusual early thaws.”

“Which one is Tweedledum? That’s what I want to know,” Fleur said.

“I’m Dee; he’s Dum,” Bjorn said.

“A judgment,” Richard said, “from a man who doesn’t even know the difference between Santa Claus and an elf.” The fingers of both hands circled the mug as if to keep his hands warm. Very nice hands. “I was there first,” he said, continuing the story. “I heard her screaming her head off out in back.”

“It was early spring,” I said.

“And?” Fleur prodded.

“We were all at Midgely’s house,” Richard continued.
“He was the tennis coach at the high school, but he also taught everybody in this neighborhood how to play—”

“He lives across the street,” I said. I decided not to mention the cancer.

“Anyway, Katie—she wasn’t Boo yet then”—Richard grinned at me, and I felt a “warm glow” flow through me, as the phrase book says—“Katie was there with that ditzy friend of hers—”

“Ashley,” I said.

“Ashley Cooper,” Bjorn said. “She always had the hots for you, Rich.”

Richard winced. “And Boo, I mean Katie, asks Midgely if she can use the Lobster to practice her backhand.”

“The automatic tennis machine?” Fleur asked.

Richard nodded. “Midgely tells her it hasn’t been used all winter and that she’ll have to take it out of the shed and roll it onto the tennis court. So she goes out alone—”

Bjorn couldn’t stand to have Richard telling the entire story by himself, and he picked it up: “She’s gone about ten minutes when we hear this tremendous screaming from the tennis courts—just bloody awful screaming. And Rich runs out to see what’s happening.”

Richard continued: “There’s Katie, screaming her head off, as these baby mice come shooting out of the Lobster at regular intervals. There must have been a nest of them there for the winter. Some came flying over the net and landed at her feet. Some even survived to scurry around. A few landed in the net, and one actually stuck
to her tennis racket and she tried to shake it loose, screaming her head off at the same time.”

“And he just stood there and laughed at me,” I said.

“I couldn’t help it.” He “smiled broadly” at me. “You looked so funny with those mice scurrying around your feet.” He liked the memory, I could tell. “But what was so great was when everybody was out there laughing, she got mad at us and started whopping the mice with her racket as if they were balls and she was playing tournament tennis.” Was it my romantic imagination or was there an edge of tenderness in Richard’s voice when he said this? I remembered he had yelled, “Go for it!” when I began swinging at the mice.

“I don’t think anybody ever did think to turn off the machine,” I said.

“You hit innocent mice?” Fleur asked.

“It was self-defense,” I said.

“We were enjoying it too much to turn it off,” Richard said. “That’s when we started calling her Boo,” he said.

Fleur gripped my knee. “You should have hit him over the head with your racket,” she said, nodding at Richard.

I laughed. “Would you have done that?” I asked.

“I would have hit him with my car,” she said.

I didn’t have the heart at the end of chapter two to reveal to you what I’m going to reveal now in
Chapter
Three
, and that is that when Fleur said she would have hit Richard with her car, instead of “locking eyes” with Richard, as the phrase book says, I locked eyes with Fleur. With a girl! It’s true. We shared a “knowing look.” In the background I was aware that Richard said to her, “You’d run me down with a steamroller,” but it was as if he were speaking from the far end of a tunnel, because my attention was on Fleur’s power.

“I could learn something from you,” I said.

She extended her hand and we shook. She had a firm, confident grasp.

Bjorn said, “Now that’s all we need is Fleur teaching Boo.” I wondered what he meant.

I’ll tell you another thing that’s wrong with this novel besides the fact that the protagonist/antagonist relationship has gone seriously awry—I mean, I could tell the first night she was there that I wasn’t going to hate Fleur at all, and if she was Richard’s girlfriend, well, then,
he was one hell of a lucky guy. Anyway, we decided, with Mother’s blessings, to go out and buy a gigantic tree in the morning so that Bjorn could relive Christmas past and hang all the old ornaments of his recently spent childhood. Then we all went to bed, but not to sleep.

Richard’s room was separated from my room by a shared bathroom. I felt inhibited by this. Even though I had to go pretty badly, I didn’t want to, because, you know, maybe Richard had to go badly too, and I’d meet him in there and he’d say, “No, you first,” and I’d say, “No, you first,” but I’d have to go first, and I can’t go under pressure. Sometimes, when I go to hear the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, I have to go to the bathroom at intermission and I have to wait in line because it’s winter and cold, which means everyone in the place has to go too, but then when I finally get into the stall, I just sit there, stunned, like a moose that’s just walked into a tree. And I’m sure the other women standing in line can see me just sitting there through the gap between the door and the wall of the stall; there’s always a huge gap.

While I was obsessing about bathroom sharing, Fleur said, “My bladder is just bursting,” and rushed in there and sure enough, Richard’s door opened at the same time and they collided.

“I get it first,” Fleur yelled, and shoved Richard hard.

He shoved her back and said, “No way, French flower,” and laughed in her face.

But Fleur managed to slip past and under him, and sat on the toilet, declaring, “Squatters’ rights!” Then it was her turn to laugh.

I was afraid Richard would unzip his pants, but he
left, closing the door, which Fleur locked from her side. Immediately he began pounding the door. “Fleur, are you finished yet?” he called to her. “Fleur, are you finished? Hurry up, will you?”

Well, if that happened to me, I wouldn’t be able to pee for the rest of my life, but Fleur went right ahead even though the door to my room was still open. There weren’t any pauses. When she was done, she called to me, “Kate, do you want to go before Rich breaks the door down?”

I said I had to get some laundry from the basement and ran down there where there is a solitary toilet in the corner behind the water heater. It’s an old thing with brown mineral stains in it, and I’ve avoided it all my life, but right then I was feeling mighty grateful for this odd fixture. I took a clean flannel nightgown back with me. Were they in love, Fleur and Richard? Was this pushing and shoving each other just sexual tension? I didn’t know, but I wanted some.

When I returned, Fleur had changed into a long T-shirt and had picked a book of recent American short stories from my bookcase. She passed my desk and stopped. “What’s this?” she asked, examining the papers on my desk. “ ‘Preliminary thoughts on Desdemona,’ ” she read. It sounded strange to have her reading my stuff aloud.

“I have to write a research paper on
Othello
, and I was thinking of doing it on Desdemona,” I said. I pulled my arms through the sleeves of my flannel nightgown.

Her index finger followed through a list I’d made. “I
wrote about Desdemona for an advanced Shakespeare class,” she muttered.

She was probably an expert. She read more of my notes aloud: “ ‘I hate it that Othello kills her when she’s so innocent.’ ”

I began to wish I hadn’t left the notes on my desk. “Lots of kids are writing about her innocence,” I said. “I’d like to do something different, but I don’t know quite what. I want a different approach.” I pulled back the covers on the bed. “I’ll think of something eventually. I always do.” I sat on the bed.

Fleur turned, leaning back on the desk. “Her innocence has nothing to do with anything,” she said. Her arms were folded loosely on her chest, teacher style. “I mean,” she continued, “what if she
hadn’t
been innocent? What if she’d slept with Cassio and Brabantio and the entire Italian navy?”

“Yeah?” My mouth probably hung open. I wasn’t sure where she was heading.