Then Eddie de Wire comes.
“Hey, girl!” she says to me as I’m leaving all excited and almost rush right into her arms. “Don’t run away.”
Lights a cigarette. Björn also gets out his pack and lighter.
I don’t run away. So then I’m there for a while, in the opening of the barn, at the cousin’s property, Solveig, with two teenagers, the three of us together.
The time it takes for a teenager to smoke a cigarette: that is what I experience of the American girl Eddie de Wire while she is still alive. Eddie, in white pants, white blouse, and a light blue sweater. All three of us sitting in the opening of the barn, silent. Björn and Eddie next to each other, me a little bit farther down on the steps. Eddie is humming a song. Not the song like the messed-up song that Doris and Sandra start singing much later. Just an ordinary one. Ordinary pop music, the kind that’s popular back then. Björn puts his arm around her. They giggle. Not meanly toward me or anyone else, because they aren’t talking about anything in particular, just giggling. The way two teenagers do, quite simply, together; two who like each other in a normal way too. Naturally I understand exactly during those minutes that I’m not going to marry Björn later either, he’s just way too old for me, so I giggle a little bit too.
Then Eddie says something about the baroness, in a low voice, that the baroness is a real shit, says it in a teenager kind of way, who doesn’t leave Eddie alone and let Eddie do what she wants to do. The baroness said that Eddie will have to leave if she doesn’t change.
Imitates the baroness: “chaange.” Jumps on the word, sounds a bit funny too, I start thinking about the fact that the baroness at Bule Marsh probably does talk a bit in such a way that you become impatient, we’re going to swim, not talk about art and life and Uffizi galleries and then the American girl has that American accent in her Swedish as well, which is due to the fact that she’s actually from America.
But nothing more about that either. Otherwise, I mean with the baroness. Of course I understand that that’s the way youths can talk when they aren’t in agreement with the adult generation, which is a different generation and doesn’t understand the younger generation’s striving for freedom.
And most of all I’m not sitting there on high alert putting two and two together, the baroness, Miss Andrews, who has been pretty nervous lately and scatterbrained in a different way than normal in the mornings at Bule Marsh.
To me the baroness, who is Miss Andrews at Bule Marsh, is mostly a game, at Bule Marsh, sometimes Tobias is there as well. They like each other, he and the baroness, it sometimes is, rather often too, a very pleasant atmosphere.
And it has nothing to do with the baroness and her boarder Eddie de Wire in the boathouse.
Eddie’s striving for freedom. I don’t really know anything about that either, I mean, I never will, even after she’s dead. What I know is that the baroness is going to try and send her away a few days later and that things are going to end in a tragic way for the American girl Eddie de Wire, due to all the unexpected circumstances.
Which have to do with my story, but not cause-effect, in that way, in such a crystal clear way. Circumstances, coincidences—that’s how it is, and remains.
But now nothing has happened yet, Solveig, a moment in the teenagers’ world. An entirely different world too from Miss Andrews and Rita who speak English with each other at Bule Marsh. Not in the water, where I am, but on the beach. Tobias comes and then at least Rita and I can focus on the essentials again. Swimming, that we’re going to become swimmers, Rita and I.
The teenagers’ world: it’s peculiar in and of itself and for a moment entirely enough.
Eddie suddenly asks, “Are you Solveig or Rita?” and adds, as if she’s already lost interest in the answer while she’s asking, which you do when you’re young and your head is full of more important things: “It’s quite difficult to tell you guys apart.”
But I answer the question politely. “Just Solveig.”
And that’s the first and only thing I ever say to the American girl, answer a question politely. Because I don’t say anything about the next thing she says, though, in and of itself, she mainly just tosses it up into the air, a bit ironically too.
“I’m sure it’s fun swimming with the baroness. Splashing around with her in Bule Marsh. She and her boyfriend. What’s his name? Tobias?”
I don’t answer, as I said. First: I have never thought about it in that way. And if it really is like that, that Tobias is the baroness’s “boyfriend,” what’s so special about that then?
Personally she, Eddie de Wire, had TWO boyfriends. But you can’t exactly say that out loud since Björn is here and you just can’t gossip about certain things, some things a man has to find out on his own, and besides, Bengt is my brother and Björn and Bengt are friends and I don’t like it when there’s arguing and fighting, who would do that? And then I’m too young to be going around putting two and two together about people in that way.
And then to start bickering with Eddie de Wire, Björn’s first girlfriend, right here and now.
And sure enough, it passes. Just something that swished through the teenager’s mind in order to disappear in the next second. Darkness falls, Björn switches on the transistor radio, the cigarettes have been finished. “Hm. It’s cold,” Eddie says in the opening to the barn, pulls her sweater more tightly around herself.
Björn pulls her toward him, holds her more firmly.
I get up and leave.
“Bye,” Eddie de Wire calls after me. Björn too: “Bye, Solveig.”
When I’m on my way, across the yard in the direction of Rita’s and my cottage on the other side of the field, Bengt is coming, at a high speed. He barely sees me, straight ahead, toward the opening of the barn! Eddie and Björn are there, of course, and as soon as he catches sight of them he starts talking about something learned and silly even before he has made it to where they’re sitting.
Something from “shopping mall theory,” in order to impress the American girl. She also has a book like that which she lent him but barely read herself, some old birthday present, but he has read it, really studied it now! Bengt, ears aflame, as if it were important.
Bengt and the American girl Eddie de Wire, maybe we can talk about that here, say something about that as well, a few words, what I know.
I see it, like a scene: Bengt and Eddie on the veranda on the Second Cape, Eddie with the guitar, Bengt who’s drawing, talking. Eddie who’s trying to sing, nah, she doesn’t have a singing voice, doesn’t remember the song, starts laughing. Bengt who’s laughing. The sea in front of them, blue and foamy, and waves that are crashing, wind, you can’t hear what they’re saying, what Bengt is saying, the American girl, but she’s talking too, they’re talking at the same time. Can see them that way, from some house on the Second Cape where I’m cleaning with the cousin’s mama, lock my gaze on them in the middle of cleaning, see. I don’t know what I’m seeing, as I said, Bengt and the American girl, but I can imagine, Bengt and Eddie, that is also true, it is also, was also, as it should have been. So true. So right.