I go back inside.
There’s no one in the foyer. The flier for the community gathering is still up, and so is the one for the get-together at the senior center. I feel sick again. There are a bunch of new fliers too. “Bodil is lost,” one says. Bodil is a guinea pig, and there’s a picture of Bodil from happier times. The bulletin board is obviously something my neighbors pay attention to, and maybe I should hang a picture of myself with the caption that I’ve gone missing: “Has anyone seen this old woman? Reward offered. Call Mathea Martinsen.” At first I treat the idea like a joke, but then it hits me that it deserves some serious consideration. So I seriously consider it. But then I see Bodil’s picture again, and there’s no way I can compete with Bodiclass="underline" those mischievous, marble eyes of hers guarantee that no one will take any notice of me.
I’m about to leave when a black flier with gold lettering catches my eye. “Attention neighbors,” it says. Apparently, June is celebrating his birthday. A warning: “There’s going to be a party.”
Saturday comes, and I’m still annoyed that June is having visitors. Epsilon and I had a visitor once, a cousin neither of us knew we had. One day he just called us up out of the blue and asked if he could stop by. “Of course you can,” Epsilon said. “We can hardly wait.”
We scoured the apartment from top to bottom, I baked meringue and rolls and then I cut my hair. Using a strip of tape as a guide, I cut my bangs straight across and then diagonally along the sides, and then I trimmed along the edges. “That looks almost too straight,” Epsilon said. “It can never be too straight,” I said.
We were afraid we wouldn’t have anything to say to our cousin, and we spent half the day on the couch brainstorming things to talk about. Worried that he could show up at any time, I didn’t dare go to the bathroom, how foolish to be sitting on the toilet when our guest rings the bell. “We should open the door together,” Epsilon said, “so we can see which one of us he recognizes.” “If he recognizes both of us, at least we can be glad we never had children,” I said. Epsilon got quiet and had a strange look on his face. “If we’d had a son, I would’ve called him Aksel,” he said. “That sounds like ‘acceleration,’ ” I said, “and then we wouldn’t mind if he was a little slow.”
We sprang up when the doorbell rang and then I couldn’t hold it any longer. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. “Right now?” Epsilon asked. “What are the odds?” In the bathroom, I found the perfume Epsilon had given to me for my birthday. I’d never used it before, I was afraid it would cause a stir if such an insignificant woman started smelling so strong, but I took a chance and sprayed my body’s pulse points, just like it said in the women’s magazines — behind the knees, on the groin, on the wrists, on the neck, and behind the ears. I went out again and sat on the sofa with Epsilon and our visitor. “Are you wearing perfume?” Epsilon asked and coughed. I blushed and tried to look surprised. “No, are you?”
We never found out whose cousin he was, but after waiting a week — we didn’t want to seem desperate — we called him to ask if he was planning to stop by again. He wasn’t. “Did he say why?” I asked Epsilon. “No,” Epsilon said. “But I’m sure it had nothing to do with us.”
Out the kitchen window I can see that people dressed in party clothes with presents in their hands are making their way into the building, and June has put on some music: “Hello lamppost, whatcha knowin’? I’ve come to watch your flowers growin’. Ain’t cha got no rhymes for me? Doot-in doo-doo feelin’ groovy. I got no deeds to do, no promises to keep. I’m dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep. Let the morning time drop all its petals on me. Life I love you, all is groovy.”
~ ~ ~
“AT LEAST I NEVER had to put up with the wrong crowd and peer pressure and smoking and drinking,” a pale girl says on TV, a crazy man has kept Natascha prisoner in a little underground cellar nearly her whole life. And it hits me that I could’ve been an alcoholic. If I’d gotten out more, I definitely would’ve been. Never mind the wrong crowd I could’ve fallen in with.
It was unfortunate that the housewives in the building used to get together on Tuesdays, because I was always in a foul mood on Tuesdays. I don’t know exactly why, but Epsilon says Tuesday is named for the war god Tyr, and I’m probably a pacifist, so maybe that had something to do with it.
Whenever I got home from one of those get-togethers, I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote to Epsilon. I always made sure that what I wrote ended on a happy note. If I was stuck, I’d pace back and forth until I found a solution, it was tiring, but I always felt better afterward.
Sometimes I wrote about a friend I had when I was little, but that didn’t happen often, since it was hard to make “she buried me in anthills” rhyme with anything.
“Mathea can’t come out and play today,” I said. “Why not?” she asked. “Mathea isn’t here,” I said. “But you’re standing right in front of me,” she said. “I am? Where?” I asked and looked around. “Don’t be so silly,” she said and laughed.
She was two years older than me and always played the priest, I was the corpse. Sometimes there was a funeral procession, but she was the only one who could see it, maybe those thick lenses of hers were made of some special glass that let her see things no one else could. First she anointed me with saliva and then I had to lay on the north side of the tree. Complaining only made it worse, and the one time I tried to get away, she caught me and then declared it would be a cremation rather than a burial.
“They go crazy when we move them from the south side to the north side,” she said, pouring a shovelful of ants down on me. “Did you notice that?” “Yes,” I said, but I didn’t blame them. I shut my mouth and eyes tight and held my breath, and all I could hear was the ants crying inconsolably, and I tried to think of something comforting to tell them.
The first time it happened, I told my father. He said that anthill therapy was good for rheumatic complaints, he’d heard about a man whose back and hip pain was cured after he’d sat in an anthill for a couple of hours.
I’d put what I’d written into envelopes and stick them in Epsilon’s briefcase, that way he could read them while he ate his lunch. We never talked about them, Epsilon would just start crying. It was enough to see the understanding in his eyes. And the admiration when I came up with really good rhymes.
Now and then I also wrote to strangers — the unlucky few I’d pick at random from the telephone directory. I’d cut out pictures of food from magazines and newspapers and glue them to pieces of paper: “Only five kroner for a box of dates,” I’d write. “Just come to the grocery store at Haugerud.” Imagining the look on their faces when they walked up to the register to pay has saved me from depression time and again.
When June’s mother began to go to the housewife meetings too, I stopped, and now I say to myself how lucky I was to get out before I gave in to so many bad influences.
The policeman who talked to Natascha after she escaped from Mr. Priklopil’s cellar after eight years of captivity said he was astounded by “her intelligence, her vocabulary.” I get chills just thinking about it. I also get them when Natascha talks about her escape, how she dashed hundreds of meters between hedges and yards and streets, hopping over fences and begging passersby to call the police. But they just ignored her.