Wind started blowing inside my head.
Tears began pouring down her cheeks, and I suddenly felt the need to offer her some helpful advice. Hadn’t they said something about Twitter on the radio? Something about the names of people who were accounted for being tweeted?
“Do you have a Twitter account?”
“Who?”
She had pulled out a tissue and was now trying to mop away the enormous tears still running down her cheeks.
“Twitter. Social media.”
“Twitt?”
“Twitt-er.”
“Twitt?”
“T-W-I-T-T-E-R. The Internet. There are lists or something like that there. Ask your family.”
“I cannot reach.”
“I mean your host family, Titus’s parents. They can help you. With Twitter.”
Shut up! a voice in my head was screaming. Stop going on and on about Twitter! But I couldn’t stop, because I didn’t know what to do. Should I hug her? How do people in the Philippines feel about personal space? Is hugging OK?
So, I just repeated the bit about Twitter while she tried to calm down.
“Do a search on Twitter,” I said, “not Twitt.”
“I try to call!”
“No, you can’t call Twitter. It’s on the Internet.”
“I pray,” she said.
“Yes.” I nodded. “Prayer is good. Very good.”
We stood there for a moment without saying anything, until Titus started tugging her arm and I agreed with relief that it was time to go.
6
All the attention I had paid to the pancake party and the au pair had resulted in my being even further behind on my conference paper, so on Monday morning I was up at five. I stacked the books from my office in a big pile next to my laptop and planned to open them as soon as I checked Facebook. I always did this, even though the news feed was only ever filled with birthdays and nuggets of wisdom like, “All the days that came and went—I never realized those were life,” and pictures of people’s kids and Starbucks cups. I sent one birthday greeting and clicked “Like” on three random posts, then moved on to the real estate site, where there were now 289 listings. As expected it was mostly a disappointing mix of “condo in co-op building with large balcony” and “new high-end, modern single-family home.”
Everything looked the same. Everything was the same. All the time.
Which is surely why I didn’t react right away.
Because it didn’t look like anything from real life. So I sat there looking at a picture of a big red imposing house with ivy and crushed white rock in the yard, without really seeing it. “Birdsong in the city,” I read, without really taking it in. “Rare opportunity.”
And it was only after I had scrolled through two more pages of “new construction, beautifully appointed with nice yard” and then came across the house again that I realized it was actually for sale. Here. In the real world.
My brain started tingling as I read the description and then clicked on the photos of everything we were looking for: family room, storage, bedrooms for everyone, a big yard, an office, a dining room, and an attic. This house even had things we didn’t know we were looking for, like an English fireplace, a chandelier, and wallpaper with birds on it. I clicked through the photos again and again, until a bleary-eyed Bjørnar appeared in the kitchen.
“Look,” I said, waving him over with a gesture that felt mildly hysterical, “come here! It looks like it came right out of an Astrid Lindgren book!”
And the instant I said those words out loud, I realized they were true. Not Villa Villekulla from Pippi Longstocking. More like the house in Lotta on Troublemaker Street. True, it wasn’t yellow the way Lindgren described it in the books, but it was every bit as crooked and charming and with just as many nooks and crannies and chimneys and a white picket fence and plants in the yard, and yet cleaned up, with nice tile work, modern bathrooms, and wallpaper. And I realized that deep down inside, even after looking at all those minimalist, modernist places, this is what I had always wanted. Because no one describes a family Christmas like Astrid Lindgren. No one could capture the beautiful, intimate moments between siblings, spouses, parents, and children the way she did. No one grasped what it truly meant to create a home the way she did.
Bjørnar and I read through the description together.
“A showpiece designed by architect Edvard Brochmann, renowned for his dignified homes for those with discerning tastes.”
“A house with a soul,” I said with a sigh. Then, “Birdsong in the city.” (Again.)
I turned to Bjørnar without breathing.
He looked back at me.
“You do understand that that’s not us, right?” he said.
“Not us?” I repeated, confused.
His statement reverberated in my head, until I finally understood what he meant. He meant that a 1919 house was too complicated, too wild, and too much for us to handle. The two of us, who had not mastered practical home repair skills beyond taping and painting. The two of us, who liked to aim horizontally, toward normalcy, routine, and predictability.
The two of us, who had invested everything in not shooting too high or too low.
I knew what he meant.
But this time he was wrong.
“But look at it, would you,” I objected. “Look how nice it is! And a ton of work has already been done on it! Maybe it is us, and we just don’t know it yet? We’re always discovering new facets of ourselves. I mean, for example, I never used to like gjetost cheese, but now I love it!”
He looked at me without saying anything, and I regretted the analogy.
“It’s too risky.”
“But it’s not that expensive. If we got it for the asking price, we’d have a little bit of a buffer, wouldn’t we?”
“Maybe.”
“I mean, we are looking for a house, right? We need something bigger. We do agree on that?”
“Yeah.”
“And there’s never anything available! It’s right where we want to live. Well, almost. And look how great it is! And practical. It has a shower stall and everything!”
He clicked through all the photos one more time. Blue-and-white-patterned Italian tile in the hallway. Wooden ceiling beams painted in light colors. Big bedrooms with wallpaper. There was a ringing in my ears. He was wrong. Despite all the risks and uncertainty this might entail, it was us. We’d just never realized it. We hadn’t known ourselves.
The real us. That’s what this house was pointing to.
“This is a proper home,” I mumbled. “A real one.”
He didn’t respond.
“Surely we can swing by and take a look at it,” I pleaded, “just, you know, go for a walk? Tonight?”
“We’ll see. I have to go now. I have an early meeting. You’ll handle the kids?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll just grab some coffee for the road.”
“Whoops.”
“You didn’t make any coffee?”
“Sorry.”
He buttered a slice of crisp bread, and I used brainpower to make the water boil in record time, waiting for exactly thirty seconds before pushing down the plunger in the French press. Then I filled an insulated travel mug, including maybe a few grounds, and followed him out into the hall.
“I just thought of something,” I said.
“What?”
“If a doppelgänger comes and takes my place, we probably ought to have a sign.”
“What kind of sign?”
“Here’s the sign: I’ll say, ‘To be or not to be,’ and then you’ll answer—”
“‘That is the question’?”