Vera thought it was strange. Hadn’t Åke Sturesson been Cissi’s dissertation advisor for three years? ‘Her name is Åstr…’
Cissi stood up abruptly and the elbow she drove into Vera’s side was enough to silence her.
Sturesson’s voice sounded authoritative: ‘The banquet. Formal attire. At minimum!’ He nodded distractedly at Vera. ‘Yes, that includes you too, of course.’
11
Linda had called, sounding secretive. She and Peter had agreed to meet at the city’s biggest shopping mall. He had combed his hair back and put on the preppy cap that he knew Linda thought he looked good in. He saw her familiar shiny black hair a long way off. As usual, he felt relaxed in the company of the fun-loving girl he had studied business administration with two years ago. They had also enjoyed quite a bit of sex together, and that was what she seemed to have in mind when she dragged him off to the women’s underwear department of the big clothing store chain.
Peter had always felt uncomfortable in the presence of all these intimate women’s garments. So when Linda turned and went further into the underwear section he stayed close to the demure nightgowns and pretended to look for something in comfortable cotton for his mother. He was standing right outside the women’s changing rooms and could see the feet of two girls under the swing doors.
Piles of clothes that they had already tried on were draped over the doors. Peter sighed. They seemed to have spent hours in the changing room. A poor kid of about 15 sat outside, exhausted and gloomy, his schoolbag thrown on the floor and his jacket open. He had baggy jeans, headphones around his neck and big, unruly hair. Maybe a son or a little brother, thought Peter, sharing in his suffering.
He heard a vaguely familiar female voice from inside the changing room on the left. ‘We can fix this relationship crisis.’
What relationship crisis? thought Peter curiously. Whose? The boy’s? The other participant in this marathon session of trying on clothes? Then Linda suddenly appeared, holding up a bra in front of her.
‘Peter, what do you think of this red lace?’
He barely had time to look around in embarrassment before Linda disappeared again into the vast array of merchandise. Peter tuned in again to what the girl in the left-hand changing room was saying.
‘Okay, but you need to ask yourself: what is love?’
Nobody answered. The item of clothing being tried on in the right-hand changing room seemed to be causing a problem, because a pair of gloved hands was stretched upwards in an effort to get something rust-red and shiny to slide on. The girl on the left continued, ‘This is what love is: it’s when you don’t need to say anything. When you just… when you just know. What do you think about then?’
It was the boy outside who answered: ‘I think about football.’
Peter smiled. Linda appeared again and Peter glanced at her, embarrassed by a leopard-patterned thong.
‘Yeah, I don’t know,’ he said uncertainly and pulled his cap further down on his forehead. Linda giggled and turned back to the merchandise.
That was when he saw her. She suddenly stepped out of the changing room on the right wearing a long, red dress that accentuated her slim, hourglass figure. She held up her dark, curly hair, looked down and smiled confidently, waiting for the girl in the changing room on the left to zip her up at the back. It was as if he saw everything in slow motion.
His mouth was suddenly dry, his hands were sweaty, and he could only stare, caught in a strong feeling of being in the wrong place. She was a complete stranger, and yet he was filled with a strange feeling of togetherness. Seeing her felt like coming home. Peter couldn’t help it. His whole being glowed and he felt intensely that I should be the one standing behind her. His pulse raced at the sight of the small, clean lines of her face, her warm complexion and her dimples. She let go of her hair and twirled around once.
When she backed in between the swing doors to her own changing room, she looked up, into his eyes, and it was like an electric shock went through his body. He felt completely defenseless: it was his own happy future he thought he saw in her eyes. She had stopped halfway into the changing room, and he was sure that she also felt that the contact between them was full of meaning. He was enjoying trying to figure out what that meaning was, when the beauty shuddered and the inscrutable gaze transformed into something that looked like fear – or was it distaste? – before she quickly backed into the changing room and the doors cut off their eye contact. The magic was broken.
Peter looked around in a daze, and realized what had happened. The girl in the changing room had seen Linda! She stood smiling beside him with a black corset with stocking-fasteners pressed against her body.
‘Peter. You and me… tonight?’ she said quietly and tried to make eye contact with him through his tunnel vision. Linda’s forthright flirting was something he had always appreciated, but now it felt cheap and tasteless compared to the feelings that still pounded through his body.
He realized that he hadn’t made a particularly good impression. He understood how it had looked, but what could he say? Noooo, this isn’t my wife, just my old fuck buddy. It didn’t really feel like a successful opening line, and there was nothing Peter could do except quickly and discreetly grab Linda and get out of there. Averting her plans for tonight was something he would have to do elsewhere.
His heart pounded disagreeably, stressed by new, uncomfortable feelings, and every step away from the girl in the changing room added to a strange weight in his chest. He didn’t recognize himself. He felt uneasy and his footsteps were unsure, as if he were about to lose something immeasurably precious.
12
Be proud of who you are.
Vera’s teabag
Vera had persuaded Adam to send her favorite jeans, her green sweater and her fall jacket. She thought she had enough clothes, but now there was that banquet. ‘Formal attire, at minimum.’ What on earth did that mean? Vera felt lost. When Cissi offered to help her, she accepted gratefully and went over to Cissi’s apartment on a Thursday morning.
Vera looked out through the bus window at the people out in the fall sunshine. It was windy, and on the long, curved pedestrian bridge she saw a woman in a beret lose her balance as she pushed her overloaded bike up the steep slope. She fell, along with the bike, her grocery bags, and everything. Two teenage boys in baggy-crotched jeans hurried forward to help her. The shorter one helped her up and out of the path of a middle-aged man with a briefcase and a knitted hat who was braking as he biked downhill. The tall one ran after three oranges that were playfully rolling away down the bridge. Vera smiled. She had retreated home to Västerbotten because she hadn’t felt that she had anywhere else to go. Now she realized that if you had doubts about your faith in humanity, this was a place where you just might get it back.
Cissi lived in an attic apartment just east of downtown. Vera had to climb all the steps with her healthy right leg, stamping like a child learning to use the stairs. Three flights up in the old wooden house there was a large studio apartment with dormer windows and mismatched furniture, spiced with a new-age aesthetic. When Vera saw the batik throw and the waterfall with the rotating stone, she felt like the only thing missing was the scent of incense. Otherwise, books, clothes and shoes dominated the apartment. It was messy and cozy, both foreign and homely at the same time. Next to one of the windows there
