“Afraid?” Susette looks at Maj-Gun blankly.
But Maj-Gun is not paying attention, Maj-Gun at the newsstand, in the place “pistol awakening,” what she wants to talk about for example and all sorts of other things she has been waiting to share with someone and now with Susette as audience, it pours out.
“My father the Pastor called it that. They drink milk and don’t watch television and keep their wives on the straight and narrow having babies, strongly believe in Our Lord’s Salvation but then they go out into the backyard and shoot at cans and bottles. They are TRIGGER-HAPPY, pang pang pang.
“Or however it goes. But when papa Pastor told me about it it was funny, but now, djeessuss, Susette, I’ve been sitting here so long, I don’t remember anything from the rectory and all of papa Pastor’s fun stories at the dinner table, or my brother’s, the human rights lawyer, Tom Maalamaa.
“Don’t remember anything. Empty slate. Tabula rasa.”
In other words this is how Maj-Gun will stubbornly claim to remember how things were when Susette came to the newsstand for the first time.
“… The fear, Susette. Your fear. How I saw it. Your big eyes. And I stood here and reeled it in.”
“I wasn’t scared—” Susette objected, but futilely, you have to give in, keep your mouth shut, Maj-Gun does not want to hear that either.
“Well, whatever you were,” Maj-Gun continues, whistling. “When I saw your eyes I thought… like globes. A whole world. Something in them that reflects, so to speak. You can see yourself in them. That was a compliment, Susette. Hasn’t anyone given you that compliment before?”
All About Animals in Nature, All About Relationships, A Hundred Years of Psychoanalysis and Personal Development, Everything About Being in a Good Mood and Everyday Interactions, The Nuclear Family and the Dog, Aquarium Fish in Four Colors, All About Dogs, Cats’ World, Everything About the Underwater World of the Sea, and The Joys of Motherhood.
And then, Maj-Gun, at the newsstand, the fall of 1989. Maj-Gun among all of the magazines and newspapers that she lugs around and lines up on the shelves behind her and in front of her on racks and on both sides of the counter. Separates new issues from old issues that have not been sold; she gathers them in bundles and ties them with sharp ribbon in the back room to be returned to the Head Office from where a car comes and picks them up regularly a few times a week.
And reads them herself of course: new magazines and old magazines and certain particularly interesting issues she plows through from cover to cover during long, uneventful days before the evening rush hour and what she calls the “weekend whirl,” the hours leading up to the weekly lottery ticket deadline that takes place on Friday afternoon.
So that she has them memorized. In any case certain sections. “The memorable ones worth remembering,” she says and she writes down the particularly striking ones in her “Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” a small notebook with a black wax cover. “You never get a cavity in a clean tooth,” “Test yourself if you’re borderline,” Maj-Gun quotes. Reads out loud, flidderfladder sentences from here and from there, My statements.
And yes, there is even a blank page in the notebook, in other words blank on purpose. “Tom’s world,” Maj-Gun has written at the very top in large letters with a blue ballpoint pen. Holds it up for Susette. “My brother, do you remember?” Knowingly, so to speak, not to mention with a silly, childish emphasis. Susette nods, of course, her first boyfriend, of course she remembers, and what about it? “The human rights lawyer,” Maj-Gun clarifies later, suddenly rather bitter. “That’s what he became later when he graduated from law school. And successful. All the raped women and children, djeessuss.”
But stops herself, something else suddenly catches her attention on the other side of the window on the square in the town center. And in the next moment she sighs, almost devoutly: “Think about what Madonna has done for fashion” because at the same time oneofthose girls from the high school or junior high is crossing the square in tight pants, short leather jacket with shoulder pads, curly hair in a ponytail, bow on her head, and a knickknacknecklace around her neck.
And then she says, in a tone new for the moment, serious, so tender that it is suddenly impossible not to like her: “So many men, so little time, Susette. If I looked like you. With your looks—I wouldn’t be sitting here rotting away.
“I mean,” she adds more obtrusively, after a small pregnant pause, “not how you look now. But the potential. Come along and change. A bait for life. To life, an invitation.”
And then she takes her makeup kit out of her purse that she keeps stored under the counter, takes a hand mirror and lip gloss from it. She has several sticky colors in round plastic cases sealed in small crackling plastic bags that she has carefully, so that there certainly would not be any marks, scraped away from the cover wrapping around certain women’s magazines with a knife before setting them out for sale on the shelves. And starts daubing the sludge on her pale, cracked lips, several shades at once. “Starling darling kiss-ready for the evening enjoyment,” then she hisses and smacks wildly at the pocket mirror that she holds up when she is finished.
“Kiss kiss kiss.”
And calms down a little, looking around roguely. “Or maybe you just need to color your lips because you’re going out for a smoke. A woman of the world, Susette, always leaves lipstick on the end of her cigarette.” Grandly, quoting from “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings.” “SO,” Maj-Gun explains with an eternal poker face because of course she knows that what she is going to say next is sly, “you can see in the ashtray that a Real Woman was here.”
“Stop.” Susette is laughing so hard she almost chokes. But today is the first day of the rest of your life. Maj-Gun sits up straight, there is a customer walking across the square toward the newsstand, and she takes her position on the customer serving stool again, meek as a lamb.
“Look, Susette,” she says just before the door chimes. “Who we have here! Now we’re going to have some fun!” In other words it is that customer, an older gentleman with a lot of lottery tickets. And when he has taken the three steps up to the counter with three quick youthful strides Maj-Gun is sitting ready with a quote she has randomly chosen from “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings” (which, in other words, is the point of the hobby: saying to the first best customer exactly what happens to be on that page in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings” regardless of whether or not it sounds stupid or crazy).
“Just because you’re a count doesn’t mean you have the right to walk in and out of my life as you please,” Maj-Gun says to the man, with her softest and most beautiful customer service voice.
And he, the man—incidentally the Manager of Susette’s apartment building—stands there speechless for a moment without knowing how to react. Certainly not angry my goodness, just the opposite. Hums something cheerful, suddenly almost embarrassed because he has a hard time hiding what a good mood this girl has put him in, and most of all, for a second you get the feeling that he might like to stick out his chubby hand and pinch Maj-Gun Maalamaa on the cheek.
And it is entertaining, of course, both of them laugh heartily, Susette Packlén and Maj-Gun Maalamaa, when the Manager has gone on his way. “Now I seem to have gotten one of those gaffers on the hook again,” Maj-Gun determines, and adds with a bit more irony: “As you can see, Susette, I really am surrounded by a crowd of admirers,” wiping sticky lip gloss from her mouth with an almost ill-tempered sweep of the back of her hand.