Just write.
Ha! Here you have it, the all and sum of this past month's work: zero zippity zilch. Those first weeks back from Gimli I was on a roll, hiring the detective, starting this letter. Now nothing but glacial stall.
Judge me not, Cuz. I'm no talky Birdie, no teeming word-meadow. Not
these days, anyway. And it's not for lack of effort. I take my scribal responsibilities seriously. Look around my apartment. No, not at the unmade futon on bare floor, the stacks of books leaning Pisa-like against the wall, the
burial mound of unwashed clothes, the great dirty-dish shrine on the kitchen
counter. Kindly avert your eyes from my slovenliness. I meant only to point
out the crumpled balls of paper littering my desk (over there, that unpainted door straddling two file cabinets). A month's worth of false starts.
Ho hum, the storyteller's perennial conundrum.
Just start at the beginning, you say? And what beginning might that be?
I've come to the conclusion all starts are false ones. Tap the fragile shell of
any beginning and you'll find another nested inside.
You want beginnings, I'll give you beginnings:
Ginnungagap. This universe when it was nothing but a grinning gap, this
earth when it was the big nowhere. No sand no sea no ground I tell you no
sky. Grew nothing but nothing upon nothing. The Sun knew not when or
where or how to shine, bewildering to her brother Moon the arts of waxing and of waning, and the planets those lost souls wandered the heavens dazed
and orbitless. Then convened the Aesir-the High Gods, the rulers-and
began to name. To Dawn and Dusk they gave names, and Morning and
Night, and so learned Day to start and finish and start again. And so things
originated, according to Voluspa, the ancient Norse poem that tells us how
the world begins-and how it will end: Ragnarok, the End-Time, the doom
of the gods, when the earth will sink into the sea, the sun turn black, stars
plunge from the sky, everything afire.
Not to worry. As foretold in Voluspa, life then begins all over again, the
earth emerging from its scorched state fair and green, the gods cavorting in
the golden heaven called Gimli.
Cut the cosmic rigmarole? Sorry. Norse myths, Icelandic sagas, skaldic
verses: your mother lived and breathed the stuff, ate it for breakfast, imbibed it at night. Dunked me in it too. And heady it was, for a suburban kid
from Connecticut.
Sure, I could attempt a proper biography of Ingibjorg Petursson. Start
with your mother's birth in quaint little New Iceland and build a grand portrait of her talented and tragic mad-poet life. It would make a good storybut nothing more. When it comes down to it, what do I know, really, of
Birdie's life? My childhood perceptions. Or to be more exact, memories of
perceptions. Paltry, to be sure. You are welcome to try elsewhere, Cousin.
Our grandmother Sigga for one. If she's still alive by the time I locate you,
and if senility has not left her with cheese for brains, you can propose an interview about her star-crossed dead daughter. Or try Birdie's loyal suitor,
our "uncle" Stefan of the Stiff Upper Lip. He lives in Gimli still. I haven't
had much luck with either of them myself. But maybe to you, Birdie's
prodigal child, they'll reveal all. In the meantime, you're stuck with me. If I
were old and a man you could call me a curmudgeon: an ill-tempered person
full of resentment and stubborn notions. Or in another era I'd be known as a
spinster, nearly thirty, childless and unwed. Luckily, no one calls me anything. I keep to myself; attempts at intimacy only lead to disaster. Yes, I'm
bitter. I won't deny it. I like to say-to myself of course, who else would
listen? that Birdie wrecked my life. That if it weren't for Birdie I might
have achieved some semblance of normalcy by now. But bitterness is a long
time brewing. When I first knew your mother I was a mere child, and bitter-free. I'll do my best not to infect this account with anachronistic curmudgeonry.
Okay, I'll quit stalling. We'll start with my beginning, which is as good as
any. Or rather, my birth. I do not suffer from that most American of delusions, that our lives begin at birth. Our People taught me well in that regard.
I may have been named after the goddess Freya but mostly I got called
Frey. Which made me sound less like a deity and more like a drunken
brawl. Or some badly wrecked nerves. Or a thing that is always unraveling
at the edges.
A late-in-life child, I arrived long after my parents had given up the possibility of children. Barren, fruitless, sterile: these were the terms against
which they'd had to contend. Eventually they accommodated themselves to
their destiny and moved out of the baby-booming subdivision where they'd
planned to raise a family-with its station wagons, baby carriages, tricycles,
two-wheelers with training wheels, sleds, wagons, slides, and swings to an
older neighborhood inhabited mostly by retirees. Not a tricycle in sight.
The only commotion the occasional wailing of a she-cat in heat. My father
worked as an accountant, my mother a part-time copy editor for the local
paper. He tamed numbers, she tamed words: orderly work, orderly lives.
I've seen a photograph from this pre-Freya era. My mother smiles gently
into her wineglass, no trace of the scowl lines that my childhood would
etch between her brows in the years to come. My father wears a starched
white shirt and skinny black tie, looking thoughtful in his black-framed
glasses. The living room has a museum-like air, and the dining table, which
I would soon mar with Kool-Aid stains and crayon scribblings, gleams like
an ice rink of pure mahogany. If my parents were unhappy with their childless life, the photo does not show it.
And then along I came, a startling splash into the calm waters of my parents' middle age. Out of God's clear blue heaven, my mother would say.
Our grandmother, Sigga, took the train down from Canada, arriving shortly
before my birth, remaining three months after. I have a photograph of Sigga
cradling the infant me, her hair coiled in a precise bun, eyes keen behind
wire-rimmed librarian's glasses. So competent Sigga was, so in command, one arm cradling baby, the other expertly tilting the bottle to my lips. My
mother stands to the side, peering over at me. Her expression looks tentative,
perplexed. It was a look I would come to know well.
I don't claim to remember Sigga from this postnatal visit, and it would
be seven years until I would see her again, seven years before I would meet
my Aunt Birdie, seven years before I would step onto the wide sandy beach
of Gimli. Before I was born, my mother and father had visited Gimli every
summer; once I arrived, my mother kept putting it off. Seven years my
mother remained absent from her people. I don't think your mother ever
forgave my mother those seven years.
The first thing I remember is teaching myself to spin. Red-sneakered feet
planted in the center of our green square lawn in Windsor, Connecticut.
"Mama, look me!" My mother on the front porch, wicker mending basket in
her lap. "I'm looking, Frey."
I twisted at the knees, flung my arms wide as propeller blades, then spun
myself once around, nearly tipping then spinning again without stopping,
one spin spinning into the next-
"Not so fast, Frey!"
Brain whirling quicker than feet, quicker than the twirling trees and the
blur of our brick house, I crashed to the ground and lay on my back clinging to handfuls of grass. The sky swirled around me like a blue tornado.
Then I lurched to my feet and began stagger-spinning diagonally across the
yard, twirling again again again until to my amazement I crashed to my
knees vomiting a creamy mound of vanilla wafers onto the grass.
"See," I heard my mother say. With a hankie she wiped a splotch of
vomit off the tip of my red sneaker. I examined the crisscross marks etched
by the grass on my green-stained knees. "See what happens, Frey?"
I saw. I stood up, I lifted my propeller arms, twisted at the knees. Look
me again: inventor of spin.
Every morning I woke with the urge to climb. My limbs ached for it. A
quick slurp of milk and Cheerios, then I was scaling the maple that shadowed the house. My legs and arms were nimble monkeys fluent in the language of branches, my shins bled from scraping bark, but at the top of the tree I felt no pain. I gazed down at the roof of the house, at my tricycle
tipped on its side in the yard, without fear.
"Frey, come down!"
Frey, come down, Frey slow down, Frey stop Frey now-even when spoken
from two feet away I heard such commands only dimly. From my treetop
perch my mother's words floated lighter than birdsong, and she appeared to
me doll-like as the toys scattered in the yard.
My middle-aged mother could not keep up. I frayed her ragged, pun intended.
Where was my father in all this? Dead of a heart attack before I turned
two. I have no memories of him, except the ones my mother tried to give
me. She recounted these so often it seemed I almost remembered him myself. How I would beg my father to carry me on his shoulders, crying Up Up
Up! How he taught me peekaboo and tickled me until I squealed. When I
learned to add and subtract, Mama told me, "Your father would be so proud
to see you now. He was a genius with num ers.
It made me sad not to have a father, but I felt my mother's grief more
than my own. I often came upon her holding the photograph of him that
took center place on our mantel. "He's still with us," she would say, reassuring herself. It was to marry my father that she'd left Canada in the first
place-they met while he was at an accountants' convention in Winnipeg
and without him she found herself stranded with a frenzied toddler in a
bland Connecticut suburb. My mother wasn't good at suburbia. The
women of Windsor played tennis in the afternoons, or bridge; my mother
was embarrassingly poor at both. And although she'd been born in
Canada, not Iceland, my mother radiated foreignness, as if she'd come not
only from another country but from another era altogether. Modern America frightened her; her decision not to own a television was as much to protect herself from the world the Vietnam War, with its body bags and
massacres, the hippies with their LSD and free love-as to protect me.
It was an isolated life during those years before I began school. There
were no children in the neighborhood for me to play with, no relatives to
join us on holidays. My father had been an only child whose parents died before I was born, and my mother's family all lived in a place called
Canada. Their photographs were arranged shrine-like on the mantel in the
living room. Keeping an eye on things. Mama's father, my grandfather Olafur the poet, holding a pipe. I wasn't sure what a poet was but I liked the
sound of it, the long oh, the clip of the t. Amma Sigga in her Fjallkona costume: a tall white headdress with a floor-length veil and a green velvet cape
trimmed in white fur. Each year in Gimli, my mother explained, one woman
was chosen to represent the motherland, and there was a big celebration,
Islendingadagurinn. I understood perfectly: Sigga was some kind of queen.
There was also a black-and-white photo of my mother as a child leading
your mother, a toddling Birdie, through the shallows of Lake Winnipeg.
Both in funny one-piece black swimsuits that fell halfway to their knees.
Another photo of Birdie grown up, her hair in layers of soft blond curls
down to her shoulders, her cheeks high and round as apples.
"Birdie is the beauty," my mother would say matter-of-factly.
"No, Mama, you're the beauty," I insisted. But secretly, shamefully, I
agreed. It was hard to say why Birdie seemed more beautiful than Mama
when they looked so much alike. Both were tall, both were blond, and yet
Birdie's face was somehow radiant and Mama's somehow plain. It made my
love for Mama even more fierce.
There were other photos too: Mama's dear friend Vera and Vera's father,
the Great Dr. Gudmundsson, and other names that giggled my ears, like the
Finnbogason Boys and Old Gisli. Collectively, these friends and relatives
were known as Our People. Mama spoke of Our People as if they lived
around the corner, as if she'd seen them just yesterday.
"You and Old Gisli, always joking." As if Old Gisli and I had been swapping jokes that very afternoon.
"You're as devilish as those Finnbogason Boys." Who were by then
grown men in their fifties.
Birdie and Sigga ruled our home in absentia. Sigga was our household's
moral guardian, invoked by my mother to bolster her authority. What would
Amnia Sigga think? Amma Sigga does not tolerate lies. Amma Sigga does not
allow girls to play outside with their shirts off. Amma Sigga expects children
to color only in coloring books and never on walls. Amma Sigga, Queen Sigga, expected so much of me. I tried not to look at Sigga's photo on the
mantel when I raced bare-chested through the living room and out the back
door.
Birdie taught by negation. According to my mother, Birdie forgot to look
both ways and almost got hit by a car on Victor Street. Punched Tommi
Finnbogason and gave him a black eye, which brought shame upon the
family. Got locked in a trunk in the attic and nearly suffocated to death.
Threw her shoes down the sewer because she wanted a new pair and this
was during the Great Depression.
When I learned to read, shortly after my fourth birthday, my mother
said, "You're going to be as clever as Birdie. God help me."
And of course the photo of my father, in the center of it all, gazing out
from behind his black-framed rectangular glasses. "He's still with us," my
mother had said, and so I would often stop in front of his portrait. "Two
plus two is four," I would whisper, hoping to impress him.
My tiny family of two supplemented by a cast of invisible relatives looming from the mantel place: it was all I knew. Yet Mama was the only one
who was real. If I got overexcited she would pull me onto her lap and stroke
my hair while I squirmed to get away. And then, magically, I too would become calm. When I looked up into her soft green eyes it was like entering a
pine forest. If I put my ear to her chest I could feel the gentle steady pulse
of her heart.