would have gone there. I’m not in Iceland because it’s trendy. I’m here because it’s critical to my work.”
Her father sputtered, and Margot braced herself for the flare of his temper—but instead, he handed the phone over to her mother quicker than he usually did.
Margot stood across the dark autumn arch of the planet, staring out her little window into the quickly coming night, and wondered why it had taken her so long to stand on her own two feet.
“What on earth did you say to your father?” her mother asked, muffling the receiver as if she was whispering. She likely was. Margot could see her as easily as if she was in the same house. Her mother was walking through the house from her father’s study, back to the kitchen table, where she liked to spend her time. She read the paper there, listened to the radio and watched the kind of television that made Margot’s father curl his lip in disgust.
Margot had always curled her lip in the exact same way at those shows, just to prove once again that she was nothing like her mother; that she was smart and intellectually curious and was worried about weighty matters, not the latest royal wedding or Hollywood scandal or silly movie-of-the-week.
“I think Dad forgets that he’s not the only academic in the family,” she told her mother, squeezing her eyes shut as if that could keep her from having to look at herself too closely.
Her mother let out a sound that could have been a sigh. Or a laugh.
“Your father forgets he’s not the only academic alive,” she replied after a moment. “It’s part of his charm, really. But, Margot, you should know that no matter how he gets—and you know how he can get sometimes—he’s so proud of all you’ve accomplished. We both are.”
There was no reason Margot should have found herself blinking back tears at that. At another example of kindness from a person who she hadn’t always treated well, so busy had she been trying to earn Ronald Cavendish’s next distracted smile.
“I couldn’t have done anything without you, Mom,” she heard herself say, and it actually hurt as it came out.
Because it was true, and she hadn’t understood that before. It was true, but Margot had been careening around all these years feeling superior to her own mother and the simple, steadfast love she’d always offered no matter the lip-curling or superiority complexes around her. Margot had always been so sure that kind of solidity and certainty was beneath her.
Maybe you’ve been emulating the wrong parent all this time, something inside her suggested. Harshly.
“I love you, too, honey,” her mother was replying, sounding surprised—which also hurt. “Are you all right?”
If that wasn’t an indictment, Margot didn’t know what was.
“I’m perfectly fine,” she told her mother.
And God, how she wanted that to be true, even if she wasn’t sure she knew herself any longer. Maybe the truth was that she was finally figuring out the truth of who she should have been all this time.
No matter how much it hurt.
All in all, it was a full ten days later when she emerged, feeling shaky and strange, blinking her way into the bright, white light of a shockingly clear Reykjavík morning.
It was cold, the way it was always cold. She could feel the wind slice into her despite the fact she was wearing her heavy parka and good, warm boots. The air slapped at her face, making her eyes tear up and her skin feel chapped on contact.
Margot arranged her scarf to cover her mouth, then shoved her gloved hands into her pockets as she headed down her little street toward the busier, more central part of Reykjavík. She took deep breaths of the thin, frigid air and told herself it was time to accept the fact that there was no more avoiding the one subject she hadn’t wanted to address at all.
Not directly.
If she pressed her lips together, she could still feel that napkin there, teaching her a thousand things about herself she hadn’t wanted to know.
And what a funny thing it was that she could be brought so low by a simple bit of fabric and the man who’d offered it to her. She felt humbled, altered, and she couldn’t tell if that was a positive or negative—not even all these days and a new interaction with her parents later. Margot thought that really she should have objected. Surely every feminist bone in her body should have risen up in protest—
But that was the curious thing. She couldn’t think of anything more feminist than locating her own voice, by any means possible. Did it matter how she’d gotten to that point? Or was she trying to complicate her own responses because she thought she should have reached it on her own?
Was what had happened to her problematic—or did she want it to be, so she could dismiss it? Or shame herself into denying the experience had changed her?
If another woman had told her that she’d had this same experience, Margot would have found it hugely concerning that a man had been the impetus for such growth. She knew she would have.
But that was minimizing the experience. And Margot didn’t want to do that any longer. No more airs of intellectual superiority to conceal all her worst insecurities. And all the Bechdel tests and feminist manifestos in the world couldn’t change the fact that it was the sex that had changed her.
And she was unaware of any way that a heterosexual woman could have life-altering sex without a man.
Which meant, of course, that there was no way not to put a man in the center of her own narrative. It was a notion that should have appalled her and yet...didn’t.
Does it matter if we were both there at the center? she found herself asking as she walked down the cold streets. Is sex only problematic when it’s not intimate, or is it intimacy that’s the real problem—because it knocks down all these barriers and leaves everyone both more and less than they were before?
She could almost hear Thor’s voice in her head as she turned that over and over inside her.
But then, the truth of the matter was that she could hear Thor’s voice in her head all the time, and she wasn’t sure she cared how problematic that was.
She hadn’t believed in the kind of casual sex Icelanders engaged in before she’d experienced it herself. She still didn’t. It was just that now Margot knew that it wasn’t just hookup cultures or her generation’s approach to dating that she found curious and flat. She had to look back at her entire sexual history and ask herself why she’d never understood that all the sex she’d ever had before Thor had...not been good.
Of course, she knew the answer.
She’d thought that the idea that sex could be fireworks and earthquakes, natural disasters and the northern lights all in one, were lies told in romance novels for the benefit of the feebleminded.
Margot had never imagined for a second that sex like that was—or could be, or maybe even should be—real.
“You got exactly what you asked for,” she told herself resolutely. “A bit more than that, maybe, but no less.”
Her lack of imagination was her own damned fault.
She
