And Another Thing...

My class gave a (sorta) public reading last night, but I was cut due to shyness and time constraints. I had friends there, waiting to hear me read, and I feel bad I didn't do it. So here's what I would've read if I had been 1) not shy, 2) not sick, 3) not an hour late to my own (group) readings, and 4) not distracted by the old man blowing bubbles on the street. Anyways, here it is. Actually, here's a bit more... it felt like everyone went over their allotted time, so you know what? I'm gonna do it too.

Oh wait. Okay. First I should explain who everyone is. Henrik is my husband. Pia is his mom, Goran is his dad, Daniel is his brother. No, I'm not married to a famous NHL player, just a regular Swede. "Farmor" means "father's mother" in Swedish: "Farfar" means "father's father." Likenes is a small town in Western Sweden.

This is from chapter 1 of that book I keep saying I'm working on. The chapter's called "Christmas Traditions."


Pia points to a yellow farmhouse.
“This house? My uncle used to live there. He hung himself in the attic. He thought he had cancer.”
Goran asks if they have yellow houses in Canada. I say I can’t remember.
Concrete blocks sprout like weeds along the side of the highway. Henrik says they’re remnants of World War 2, preparation against the Nazi tanks that moved through the Swedish countryside. Why didn’t they take them down after the war, I wonder. They look so out-of-place.
Henrik had told me his grandparents lived way up in the mountains. Nothing really there except trees and snow, and maybe some wolves. At night, he said, you could hear the wolves’ howls on the wind. You could hear the sun set, hear the snow fall. The closer we get to Likenes, the more I notice the rusted farming equipment, abandoned houses, and boarded-up shops on the side of the road. Decay with no renewal. Like the land wants to be forgotten. If I had been looking for Likenes on my own, I wouldn't have found it.
We turn left onto a dirt road. By this time it’s snowing, it had been snowing in the mountains for a long time, and the car jolts back and forth over the banks and dips in the road. We pull up in front of a tiny red cabin.
The cabin has a small porch at the front, and there are some decorations hidden under the snow: a metal globe with an arrow on top, some kind of sled, a stack of wood. A wheelchair ramp leads up to the front door. Behind the house is another red building, smaller than the first. Henrik tells me this is the “guest house.” Beside that, a large building that could only be a barn. I wonder if the grandparents ever had animals in the barn. Henrik tells me they used to, but not now, because they’re old and there are too many wolves around.
Farfar opens the front door before we have a chance to knock. He smiles and winks at me in that grandfatherly way, his thick slippers shuffling across the wood floor. He’s a tall man, taller than I expected him to be, and his hand is shaking when I take it in mine. His eyes light up when he sees Henrik. “Heyhey!” he says, and throws his arm around Henrik’s shoulder.
To the left is a tiny kitchen, and everyone in it is doing something: a white-haired man scoops coffee into a coffee maker, a short woman in jeans folds cold-cuts onto a plate. Pia gets to work peeling potatoes. Goran takes a seat at the kitchen table, and Henrik sits down beside him. Daniel and I stand in the doorway. Right in the middle of the room, the elderly Farmor holds court from her wheelchair. There’s barely room for all of us to stand in the kitchen, let alone sit and drink coffee and chat. But it is warm. So warm. And inviting. No-one wants to leave, but the kitchen is too small to hold us, so Henrik, Daniel and I are sent to the grocery store for a Christmas cake.

I’m sure I’ve had happy Christmases, but I can’t remember them anymore. My most vivid Christmas memories are the bad ones, like the time my stepfather almost knocked over the Christmas tree because mom couldn’t find the engagement ring he'd hidden in the branches. He proposed to her by saying “fuck, you’re useless. Do you get it? Do you understand what I’m asking you?”
Or the year I decided to learn how to cook. So instead of giving gifts, I bought a giant turkey and invited the family to mom’s house for dinner. My step-grandpa went on a tirade about the “Jew Conspiracy,” then turned to my grandpa Lyman and said “Lyman, that’s a Jew name, isn’t it?”
Or the year stepfather and his friend helped me move into a new apartment, then drove me home from college. The friend was drinking beer, driving too fast, throwing bottles at street signs. I asked him to slow down.
“Fuck,” he said, “you’re just like your mother.”
In his mind, this was the worst insult ever.

We had to drive to the next town over, Susslebeck, to find a grocery store. On the drive, I asked Henrik and Daniel about their grandparents.
“Have they always lived in Likenes?”
“I think so,” says Henrik, “they grew up across the street from each other.”
He points out the car window. “Right over there, that’s where grandma lived. And grandpa grew up across the street from her. And when they got married, they built their house… well, yeah, they’ve always been here.”
The Klarälven River winds parallel to the road, thick with ice, yellow and cracked and dangerous. It doesn’t look like ice at all. The road is muddy. In the distance I see plumes of smoke rising from chimneys.
“And up there is the ski resort,” Henrik says. “It’s, like, brand new. All the German tourists come here.” I look up, but the sky is cloudy, and I can’t see anything.
The grocery store is empty save for the cashier. Ours is the only car in the parking lot. We buy a marzipan cake with a picture of Santa on it, but it doesn’t really look like the Santa I know.
By the time we get back, dinner is almost ready. A smorgasbord has been set out with fish, meatballs, sausages, cheese, boiled potatoes, pickled beets, and more things that I can’t remember. No turkey except for some cold cuts. No gravy. A giant dining table has been set up in the living room. Henrik, Daniel and I (the “kids”, they said, though I was the youngest at 27) move all the chairs into the living room, leaving a path for grandma’s wheelchair to get to the head of the table. Then we take the fancy china from the cabinets, grab our plates, and get in line for food.
The pickled beets are surprisingly good. The homemade potato sausages take some getting used to. Farfar winks at me across the table as he eats. He does his best to communicate with me through smiles and hand gestures: a small bow of the hands for “thank you,” a tip of the wrist for “would you like a drink?” and so on.
Henrik’s family have so many questions about Canadian Christmas. Do we eat fish at the Christmas table? Do we drink julmust? Do we get a visit from Tomte, the Christmas elf? Do we exchange gifts? I do my best to answer each question as simply as possible, with “yes” or “no”, so Henrik doesn’t have to translate for me. Sometimes he still does, though, when they look at me with that blank gaze. I wonder if that’s how I look to them too.

There’s a photo of me at the house in Likenes. I don’t know where it came from, but when I see it, tears spring to my eyes. On the wall above it, there’s a family portrait from the last Christmas Henrik had been there.
“Every year we take a Christmas picture. It’s a silly tradition, but it’s kind of nice too,” Henrik said.
“Why didn’t they take one without you?”
“I don’t know. And they should have. That one, up there, was a really bad Christmas. No-one’s smiling in that picture.”
Pia is in the kitchen washing dishes. I want to be helpful, so I offer to dry. After drying, I hold up each dish so Pia can point to its home. Farmor occasionally says something from her corner of the room, an occasional mention of my name followed by extra syllables.
The woodstove is raging. We open the window to let out the heat, and I notice some blue birds frolicking in the snow. They are the bluest birds I’ve ever seen.
Once the dishes are put away, we take a new family portrait. We position ourselves around a small plaid couch. I sit on one of the arms. Pia and Goran sit next me on the couch. Henrik and Daniel stand behind us. I make sure to smile.
The five of us pile back in the car for the drive back to Hogboda. It starts snowing outside of Torsby, and we have to go very slow through the mountains. I fall asleep on Henrik’s shoulder, and he on mine. In the background, Goran quietly hums along with the radio.
When we get back to Hogboda, everyone changes into his or her pajamas. Pia makes a pot of coffee. Goran turns on the TV. The parents and their children gather to watch ski jumping, or a hockey game, or an Agatha Christie movie: I’m not sure which, because I’m upstairs, saying I need to sleep. But I don’t need to sleep. I just need to be alone, because I don’t want my new family to see me cry.

My mom used to tell me I pushed the wrong buttons. She worked fifty hours a week, commuted an hour and a half each way. She didn’t have the time or energy to argue with him every single night. She never said it, but it was implied: he’s wrong, but it doesn’t matter. Do what he says and don’t question it. Don’t make things harder on her than they already were.
Sometimes, no matter what I did, he yelled at me. Sometimes even when I agreed with him, he called me names. “Bitch” was a favorite: “Twin Peaks,” because of my large chest, a close second.
It’s strange to sleep in a house where you know you’re not wanted. It’s even worse to know you have nowhere else to go.
My mom used to tell me when I moved out of the house, everything would be better.
“We’ll all be happier when he has me to himself,” she’d say. “That’s what he wants. That’s how much he loves me.”