Britt-Marie Was Here (6 page)

It’s just that the smell of vodka reminds her of Kent.

She looks around. The wall is thumping from the outside, and there are rat tracks in the dust on the floor. So Britt-Marie does what she always does when facing emergencies in life: she cleans. She polishes the windows with a rag dipped in baking soda and wipes them with newspaper dampened with vinegar. It’s almost as effective as Faxin, but doesn’t quite feel as good. She wipes the kitchen sink with baking soda and water and then mops all the floors, then mixes baking soda and lemon juice to clean the tiles and taps in the bathroom, and then mixes baking soda and toothpaste to polish the sink. Then she sprinkles baking soda over her balcony boxes, otherwise there’ll be snails.

The balcony boxes may look as if they only contain soil, but underneath there are flowers waiting for spring. The winter requires whoever is doing the watering to have a bit of faith, in order to believe that what looks empty has every potential. Britt-Marie no longer knows whether she has faith or just hope. Maybe neither.

The wallpaper of the recreation center looks indifferently at her. It’s covered in photos of people and soccer balls.

Everywhere, soccer balls. Every time Britt-Marie glimpses another one from the corner of her eye, she rubs things even more aggressively with her sponge. She keeps cleaning until the thumping against the wall stops and the children and the soccer ball have gone home. Only once the sun has gone down does Britt-Marie realize that the lights inside only work in the kitchen. So she stays in there, stranded on a little island of artificial, fluorescent light, in a soon-to-be-closed-down recreation center.

The kitchen is almost completely taken up by a dish rack, a refrigerator, and two wooden stools. She opens the refrigerator to find it empty apart from a packet of coffee. She curses herself for not bringing any vanilla extract. If you mix vanilla extract with baking soda, the refrigerator smells fresh.

She stands hesitantly in front of the coffee percolator. It looks modern. She hasn’t made coffee in many years, because Kent makes very good coffee, and Britt-Marie always finds it’s best to wait for him. But this percolator has an illuminated button, which strikes Britt-Marie as one of the most marvelous things she has seen in years, so she tries to open the lid where she assumes the coffee should be spooned in. It’s stuck. The button starts blinking angrily.

Britt-Marie feels deeply mortified by this. She tugs at the lid in frustration. The blinking intensifies, upon which Britt-Marie tugs at it with such insistence that the whole machine is knocked over. The lid snaps open and a mess of coffee grounds and water sprays all over Britt-Marie’s jacket.

They say people change when they go away, which is why Britt-Marie has always loathed traveling. She doesn’t want change.

So it must be on account of the traveling, she decides afterwards, that she now loses her self-possession as never before. Unless you count the time Kent walked across the parquet floor in his golf shoes soon after they were married.

She picks up the mop and starts beating the coffee machine with the handle as hard as she can. It blinks. Something smashes. It stops blinking. Britt-Marie keeps hitting it until her arms are trembling and her eyes can no longer make out the contours of the dish rack. Finally, out of breath, she fetches a towel from her handbag. Turns off the ceiling light in the kitchen. Sits down on one of the wooden stools in the darkness, and weeps into the towel.

She doesn’t want her tears to drip onto the floor. They could leave marks.

B
ritt-Marie stays awake all night. She’s used to that, as people are when they have lived their entire lives for someone else.

She sits in the dark, of course, otherwise what would people think if they walked by and saw the light left on as if there was some criminal inside?

But she doesn’t sleep, because she remembers the thick layer of dust on the floor of the recreation center before she started cleaning, and if she dies in her sleep she’s certainly not going to risk lying here until she starts smelling and gets all covered in dust. Sleeping on one of the sofas in the corner of the recreation center is not even worth thinking about, because they were so filthy that Britt-Marie had to wear double latex gloves when she covered them with baking soda. Maybe she could have slept in the car? Maybe, if she were an animal.

The girl at the unemployment office kept insisting that there was a hotel in the town twelve miles away, but Britt-Marie can’t even think of staying another night in a place where other people have made her bed. She knows that there are some people who do nothing else but dream of going away and experiencing something different, but Britt-Marie dreams of staying at home where everything is always the same. She wants to make her own bed.

Anytime she and Kent are staying at a hotel she always puts up
the “Do Not Disturb” sign, and then makes the bed and cleans the room herself. It’s not because she judges people, not at all; it’s because she knows that the cleaning staff could very well be the sort of people who judge people, and Britt-Marie certainly doesn’t want to run the risk of the cleaning staff sitting in a meeting in the evening discussing the horrible state of Room 423.

Once, Kent made a mistake about the check-in time for the flight when they were going home after a hotel visit, although Kent still maintains that “those sods can’t even write the correct time on the sodding ticket,” and they had to run off in the middle of the night without even having time to take a shower. So, just before Britt-Marie rushed out of the door, she ran into the bathroom to turn on the shower for a few seconds so there would be water on the floor when the cleaning staff came, and they would therefore not come to the conclusion that the guests in Room 423 had set off wearing their own dirt.

Kent snorted at her and said she was always too bloody concerned about what people thought of her. Britt-Marie was screaming inside all the way to the airport. She had actually mainly been concerned about what people would think of Kent.

She doesn’t know when he stopped caring about what people thought of her.

She knows that once upon a time he did care. That was back in the days when he still looked at her as if he knew she was there. It’s difficult to know when love blooms; suddenly one day you wake up and it’s in full flower. It works the same way when it wilts—one day it is just too late. Love has a great deal in common with balcony plants in that way. Sometimes not even baking soda makes a difference.

Britt-Marie doesn’t know when their marriage slipped out of her hands. When it became worn and scratched up no matter how many
coasters she used. Once he used to hold her hand when they slept, and she dreamed his dreams. Not that Britt-Marie didn’t have any dreams of her own; it was just that his were bigger, and the one with the biggest dreams always wins in this world. She had learned that. So she stayed home to take care of his children, without even dreaming of having any of her own. She stayed home another few years to make a presentable home and support him in his career, without dreaming of her own. She found she had neighbors who called her a “nag-bag” when she worried about what the Germans would think if there was rubbish in the foyer or the stairwell smelled of pizza. She made no friends of her own, just the odd acquaintance, usually the wife of one of Kent’s business associates.

One of them once offered to help Britt-Marie with the washing-up after a dinner party, and then she set about sorting Britt-Marie’s cutlery drawer with knives on the left, then spoons and forks. When Britt-Marie asked, in a state of shock, what she was doing, the acquaintance laughed as if it was a joke, and said, “Does it really matter?” They were no longer acquainted. Kent said that Britt-Marie was socially incompetent, so she stayed home for another few years so he could be social on behalf of the both of them. A few years turned into more years, and more years turned into all years. Years have a habit of behaving like that. It’s not that Britt-Marie chose not to have any expectations, she just woke up one morning and realized they were past their sell-by date.

Kent’s children liked her, she thinks, but children become adults and adults refer to women of Britt-Marie’s type as nag-bags. From time to time there were other children living on their block; occasionally Britt-Marie got to cook them dinner if they were home alone. But the children always had mothers or grandmothers who came home at some point, and then they grew up and Britt-Marie became a nag-bag. Kent kept saying she was socially incompetent
and she assumed this had to be right. In the end all she dreamed of was a balcony and a husband who did not walk on the parquet in his golf shoes, who occasionally put his shirt in the laundry basket without her having to ask him to do it, and who now and then said he liked the food without her having to ask. A home. Children who, although they weren’t her own, came for Christmas in spite of everything. Or at least tried to pretend they had a decent reason not to. A correctly organized cutlery drawer. An evening at the theater every now and again. Windows you could see the world through. Someone who noticed that Britt-Marie had taken special care with her hair. Or at least pretended to notice. Or at least let Britt-Marie go on pretending.

Someone who came home to a newly mopped floor and a hot dinner on the table and, on the odd occasion, noticed that she had made an effort. It may be that a heart only finally breaks after leaving a hospital room in which a shirt smells of pizza and perfume, but it will break more readily if it has burst a few times before.

Britt-Marie turns on the light at six o’clock the following morning. Not because she’s really missing the light, but because people may have noticed the light was on last night, and if they’ve realized Britt-Marie has spent the night at the recreation center she doesn’t want them thinking she’s still asleep at this time of the morning.

There’s an old television by the sofas, which she could turn on to feel less lonely, but she avoids it because there will most likely be soccer on it. There’s always soccer nowadays, and faced with that option Britt-Marie would actually prefer to be lonely. The recreation center encloses her in a guarded silence. The coffee percolator lies
on its side and no longer blinks at her. She sits on the stool in front of it, remembering how Kent’s children said Britt-Marie was “passive-aggressive.” Kent laughed in the way that he did after drinking vodka and orange in front of a soccer match, his stomach bouncing up and down and the laughter gushing forth in little snorting bursts through his nostrils, and then he replied: “She ain’t bloody passive-aggressive, she’s aggressive-passive!” And then he laughed until he spilled vodka on the shagpile rug.

That was the night Britt-Marie decided she had had enough and moved the rug to the guest room without a word. Not because she’s passive-aggressive, obviously. But because there are limits.

She wasn’t upset about what Kent had said, because most likely he didn’t even understand it himself. On the other hand she was offended that he hadn’t even checked to see if she was standing close enough to hear.

She looks at the coffee percolator. For a fleeting, carefree moment the thought occurs to her that she might try to mend it, but she comes to her senses and moves away from it. She hasn’t mended anything since she was married. It was always best to wait until Kent came home, she felt. Kent always said, “women can’t even put together IKEA furniture,” when they watched women in television programs about house building or renovation. “Quota-filling,” he used to call it. Britt-Marie liked sitting next to him on the sofa solving the crossword. Always so close to the remote control that she could feel the tips of his fingers against her knee when he fumbled with it to flip the channel to a soccer match.