they got from their teabags. They said that if nothing else worked out then they could get work coming up with words of wisdom for teabags.
‘Live and let live,’ said Vera.
‘Dare more than you dare,’ suggested Cissi.
Cissi studied Vera in the light coming in through the window and got up suddenly.
‘You have to be “fall”, with that skin and your warm, green eyes! You can have this; it’s way too dark for me. Classic shopping mistake.’ Cissi had fetched the hair-coloring kit from her bathroom and put it in front of Vera.
‘Fall?’ Vera thought she had heard incorrectly, but Cissi explained that she was sure that people were right for certain colors, and that colors – and thus even the people suited to them – were divided into groups named after the seasons. Cissi started talking about the debate in color-analysis circles about whether you could be a blend of color groups, and if so how the colors were blended.
Vera smiled at her friend’s complicated theories and let Cissi convince her. She already had brown hair. According to Cissi, the toning would just ‘make your hair shinier and give it little chestnut highlights,’ and it warmed Vera that Cissi was so generous and positive. Sleep, eat, work and study was all she had done for the past few months, and now she felt like it would be good for her work on the welfare project if she fixed herself up a bit. She used to do it, after all. Maybe it was time for the old Vera to make a comeback?
‘Everything in life has pluses and minuses,’ said Cissi philosophically.
Yes, maybe so… Vera thought about Saturday.
‘Can I take out your braid?’
Vera nodded. Her host loosened the hair-tie carefully and freed Vera’s hair. She began to lift and pick at it as she continued:
‘And the trick is to do something about, or downplay, the negative and emphasize the positive.’
But if you can’t do anything about the negative? Saturday’s failure: it hadn’t been so easy then. It hadn’t been a matter of ‘downplaying’ things.
Now Cissi let go of her hair and looked worriedly at Vera.
‘Hey – what is it?’
Vera shrugged her shoulders and smothered a sob.
‘Was it something I said?’
Vera writhed as if in physical pain. ‘No… it isn’t your fault, it’s just that… If it doesn’t work, what then?’
‘If what doesn’t work?’ Cissi sat down on a stool in front of Vera. ‘I would say that you have a lot we can build on, so when we’re done you’ll be…’ She stopped herself. ‘Ah… look even better, I mean.’
Vera shook her head again.
‘It’s my… husband.’ She had to make an effort to get the word out. ‘Adam. I was supposed to be with him in Stockholm this weekend, but I couldn’t stay. I just couldn’t. It felt completely wrong.’
Cissi looked at her sympathetically. ‘You couldn’t bring yourself to stay?’
‘No. First there was a song on the bus that made me… I got off and threw up in a dog-waste bin. And then, in the apartment. I was going to stay, but it was like my body refused. I felt really bad.’ Vera took a shaky breath.
Cissi looked at her. ‘Okay.’
They sat quietly for a while before she continued.
‘But you made the best of the situation, didn’t you? Because, you know, it’s like Gunde says, “you can’t fool your body”.’
Vera smiled palely, remembering the iconic cross-country skiing world champion. She dried her face a little embarrassedly and nodded, ‘Yes, it’s like Gunde says.’
She laboriously twisted off her engagement and wedding rings and put them on the little label that was attached to the teabag. The label’s message encouraged her to be proud of who she was.
Cissi thought they might as well go ahead and do everything at once, so when Vera was sitting in Cissi’s tiny bathroom with her hair, now a worrisome orange, in a sticky heap under a plastic bag, Cissi lit a powerful lamp on the mirror. Vera had washed her face carefully and even put in her contact lenses in honor of the day. But Cissi wasn’t impressed. She pointed to places where Vera’s skin was dry and chapped and where Vera’s thick, dark eyebrows stuck out.
‘Oh, sorry. We’ve only just got to know each other and here I am saying things like that. Flat-out rude. It would be like you coming up to me and blurting out, “well, here’s a muffin-top!”’ Cissi grabbed the fat around her waist.
‘No, it’s okay,’ said Vera, smiling palely. ‘It’s like when my mother-in-law came to the apartment. She cleared off the whole kitchen counter and pointed out all the stains. I actually told her that a lot of daughters-in-law would be offended, but not me. In the first place, it was mostly Adam who did the dishes. But even if I had lived there alone…’ Vera shrugged her shoulders, ‘I’m not interested in competing for “cleanest kitchen counter”. It would be another thing if we were going to operate on it.’
‘Okay. But now you’re taking… a break from Adam?’
Vera nodded and looked at the light indentation that the rings had left in her finger after years of wearing them. ‘Yeah, I guess so.’
Cissi went out to the little table where they had sat drinking tea. She came back with Vera’s rings and placed them carefully in her lap.
‘Don’t forget them. You know, you can’t dump him on me,’ she tried to joke, but went on quickly: ‘Uh, so the mother-in-law cleared the counter. What did she do after that?’
‘She got cracking with the steel wool. And I guess that’s what you feel like doing too?’ Vera asked, dutifully forcing her rings back on.
Vera was surprised at the amount of work Cissi put into the renovation project. She wondered if this was what it was like to have a big sister. They took a break for lunch and then Vera scrubbed the bathtub to get rid of all traces of orange hair dye. Otherwise, it was just simple, goal-focused work, and after four hours in Cissi’s little apartment – after Cissi had curled Vera’s now chestnut-colored hair and made up her face – it was time to go into town and get kitted out for the banquet.
‘Formal attire means long dresses for women.’
‘So what does “formal attire, at a minimum” mean, then?’ wondered Vera.
‘A gorgeous long dress!’ Cissi took a draped, gold-colored creation out of her full closet. ‘This is what I’m wearing.’
Vera glanced at herself in the mirror on the way out. She saw her usual jeans and her favorite sweater, but what was above the beige jacket felt foreign. She struggled with a desire to go back in, wipe off half the make-up, and put her look-at-me hair in a ponytail – that’s what the old Vera would do. But Cissi was already halfway down the stairs. This isn’t even my kind of thing. I hope I don’t see anybody I know, thought Vera as she shut the door behind her.
