The Tricking of Freya (12 page)

Birdie said nothing, didn't even lift her head out of her hands, but I guess she was listening because she hardly fought with anyone again for the
rest of that summer, not even Mama, not even once. Which was nice except it turned out she was saving it all up for our last day. Somehow Birdie
got it into her head that Mama and I would leave at the end of the summer
and never return to Gimli again. All summer long Birdie would ask Mama
if we were definitely coming back the next summer. Mama would just nod
her head vaguely yes or shake it vaguely no or say We'll cross that bridge
when we come to it. Which I didn't understand because I hadn't seen any
bridges on the way to Gimli.

On the last day of my first Gimli summer, Stefan drove up early in the
morning in his Rambler station wagon to drive us to the Winnipeg train station. Just as he was loading my cherry red suitcase, Birdie came running
out of the house in her negligee wailing. Sigga tried to hold her back, but
she wasn't strong enough. Birdie ran after us as the car rolled down the
driveway, sobbing and banging her hands on Mama's window until Mama
said, "Stefan, stop the car." I was sitting in the backseat. Mama rolled her
window down and said in an unusually definite voice, "We'll come back to
you next summer, Birdie. I promise."

And we did. We went back every summer until the year when there
wasn't a Birdie to come back to anymore.

By now all those summers have blended in my mind. What took place
when I couldn't tell you. It's just one long Gimli summer. Until the last one.
Which strictly speaking doesn't even count as a Gimli summer.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

A typical Gimli summer day? Okay. That's a good idea. I'll take you
through a typical day if you promise to remember that nothing was ever typical. Not where Birdie is concerned.

Sometime after the accident Mama began spending the bright mornings of
our Gimli summers at Betel, the old folks' home for Icelanders (founded by
the Great Dr. Gudmundsson, father of Mama's best friend and Birdie's
archenemy, Vera). Keeping company with the old folks. Every morning before the sun got too high I would walk Mama over to Betel. Sand is uneven
and not good for canes, so instead of taking the beach we went straight
across on Second Avenue, past the cottages brimming over with families
and visiting relatives. Mama knew most of the cottagers and stopped to talk
to anyone we ran into. Betty Vigfusson, who made the best ponnukokur my
mother had ever tasted but don't tell your aroma Sigga that. The elderly
Brandson sisters, who shook their heads sadly from their front porch at the
sight of my poor tragic mother, a widow, and then that terrible accident and
now look at her, old before her time and raising that child all by herself in
the States-then waved at us with their tremulous hands. And the Arnasons, who had a little girl exactly my age and didn't I want to come over and
play with her? Just once?

Five blocks with my mother on a Gimli morning walking cane-paced and
stopping to chat with every single person we encountered could easily suck
an hour from a summer's day. While Mama chatted I would hopscotch in
place and count leaves in Betty Vigfusson's elm or stare into the sky shaping clouds into palaces. By the time we got to Betel, I felt like I might explode from impatience. But inside Betel, inside Betel made our walk
down Second Avenue seem like a speed-of-light sprint to Mars. Inside Betel everything took place in the slowest motion possible. First I'd open the
front door for Mama and we'd stand in the entranceway while her eyes adjusted. Betel was redbrick exterior, dark wood interior, and in the summer
the shades were drawn to keep it cool because, as Mama said, old people
can't abide heat. Which meant Betel was dark inside the way Mama liked
for and needed it to be. Still her eyes behind the sunglasses required a moment to adjust. As we passed the portrait of Vera's father, the Great Dr.
Gudmundsson, Founder of Betel, Mama would say, "Bless that man for his
good works." Every morning Mama said Bless that man for his good works.

Then we would stop by Mrs. Thompson's office. Mrs. Thompson was the
Matron of Betel, and she held a special place in her heart for Mama. "The
good your mother does cannot be underestimated," she would say to me, often and reprovingly. Mrs. Thompson did not hold a special place in her heart
for me. I was convinced she knew about my crime and held it against me. If
I was running an errand for Mama or one of the old people, fetching a book
or a knitting bag, and I saw Mrs. Thompson coming, I'd slink back against
the wall, but she always saw me. She'd sink a bony claw into my shoulder
and say, "Your mother has suffered a tragic accident that will likely debilitate
her for the rest of her life. Do you understand that?"

I did.

Mostly everyone at Betel was nice to me. Mostly they doted on me and
said what a well-behaved and grown-up little girl I was. Which made Mama
happy because no one had ever said anything like that about me before.
Which made me happy because it meant my punishment was working.

Mama and I would settle into the downstairs common room and pretty
soon the old ladies would come sit with us. Runa and Thora, Gudbjorg with
the three chins, and sometimes Margret hobbling along on her walker. And
others, depending on who was feeling well that morning or who was alive
that summer and hadn't died during the winter when we were back in Connecticut. All morning long Mama and the old women knitted things to sell
through the Lutheran Ladies Aid to raise money for Betel, and while they
knitted they talked, sometimes in Icelandic, sometimes English, depending
on who was in the room and what was being said. Runa and Gudbjorg liked to talk about dreams. Not just their own dreams but dreams people they
knew had dreamt and even stories about dreams people had dreamt back in
Iceland. Dreams that came true. Like a woman named Agusta dreamt that
three moons fell into Lake Winnipeg and that summer three men died in
fishing accidents. Once while Mama was in the bathroom I told the old
women about the dream Birdie had the night before Mama's accident, where
Birdie was back at their old farm in Arborg and they had sheep instead of
cows and Mama pulled up in a car and got out and the sheep trampled her.
Runa nodded seriously and said Birdie had the dreaming gift. Thora shook
her head and said, En er petta ekki skritid?But is this not strange? Which
meant yes, things are strange. (Mama agreed with Stefan that dream-talk was
draumskrok--dream nonsense-but I believed in it. I had lots of dreams
myself. And nightmares. My good dreams I told to Mama and Sigga at the
breakfast table, but the nightmares I saved for Birdie when she heard me cry
out in the middle of the night. Birdie knew all my nightmares.)

Mama tried to teach me to knit, but all I produced were tangled messes.

There were old men at Betel too, squinting seriously at the chess board
from behind their thick glasses. It was a slow-motion game where maybe
you moved one piece an hour.

Every once in a while one of the old people would try to send me out
to play. Betel is no place for a little girl on a summer morning. I knew they
were right. Sometimes it felt like I couldn't breathe inside Betel, but I figured it was part of my punishment. What better way to be a not-kid than
to spend my time with people in their eighties and nineties? Some lived to
be over a hundred. Every July we celebrated Runa's birthday and every
July she said it would be her last but it never was. She turned 100 my first
summer and then 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106. Maybe 107, but I can't say
because after Birdie died we stopped going to Gimli. An old man named
Siggi said Icelanders lived a long time because they ate so much cod. Some
of the men chewed on hardfiskur while they played chess. I tried it once
and spat it out. It was stringy and salty. But I guess it was worth it if you
wanted to live to be 100.

Birdie didn't like Mama taking me to Betel with her. "How dreary, Anna."

"Someone needs to visit Our Old People," Mama insisted. "It makes
them so happy, to see a child. And Freya likes to go, don't you?"

I said yes even though I hated it. What I hated most was not how slowly
everyone moved or how boring it was just sitting and knitting and moving
one chess piece an hour. It was seeing Mama there with all those old people. Mama was in her early fifties then, but she could have passed for nearly
seventy with her white hair and her cane. I'd almost lost Mama once. I
didn't want to see her growing old before her time.

All this, while Birdie was sleeping. If she wasn't up by the time Mama
and I came home from Betel for lunch, it was my job to wake her. Carefully. Once Birdie was up, who knew how the day would go?

After lunch Mama napped, which Sigga explained was another side effect of her head injury. Sometimes she'd even fall asleep sitting up at the
kitchen table with her sandwich half-eaten, and Sigga and Birdie would
have to move her. Each afternoon she slept for hours and hours, so deeply
that you had to shake her shoulders to wake her. It scared me when she
slept like that. I was afraid she might curl back into her comma.

While Mama napped Sigga went to her part-time job at the library. And
me, I was all Birdie's from then on. If she would have me.

A horse is hestur. Unless you're riding it or hitting it or even just looking at it,
in which case it's no longer hestur but simply hest. Take something from a
horse and suddenly it spells itself hesti. Walk over to it, presto change-o you're
looking at bests. Same horse, many spellings. A horse is a horse of course of
course ... unless it's an Icelandic horse. Icelandic words are tricksters. Acrobats. Masters of disguise. Shape-shifters.

And don't go thinking that if one horse is hestur more than one would be
hesturs. Ha! Icelandic is too tricky for that. Horses in plural are hestar, unless you're talking about them, in which case they're hesta. Sit near them
and you've got to start calling them hestum. Bring some hay to them, they
turn back into hesta.

And that's just if they're horses in general. The horse in particular is hes-
turinn. (You attach the the to the back of the horse like a tail.) But try to pet
the horse, it's hestinn. Take something from the horse, it's hestinum. Bring
water to the horse, it's hestsins. Once there's more than one particular horse,
you've got hestarnir. But watch out: touch them, brush them, look at them,
say anything about them, even one word, they turn into hestana. Stand oppo site the horses and you've got yourself hestunurn. Bring 'em some water and
abracadabra they're hestanna.

"Do you see?" Birdie demanded. We were working our way through The
Primer of Modern Icelandic by Snaebjorn Jonsson, Sometime Translator to
the Icelandic Government, published Reykjavik 1927.

I could see why most people spoke English. Icelandic was clearly a lot of
trouble. I'd never even been on a horse. And that's just one way to decline a
noun. Nouns in Icelandic can decline in nearly 200 different patterns. And
then there are adjectives. One single adjective can have 144 variations, depending. Numbers shape-shift too, and even personal names decline. You
can say Guttormur Guttormsson was a great poet. But if you said a poem
was written by him, you'd have to call him Guttormi Guttormssyni.

Only Icelandic adverbs are spared these gymnastics. As Snaebjorn stated
in his primer, "Adverbs are indeclinable and do not suffer any change." I had
a fondness for Icelandic adverbs. I too preferred not to suffer change.

An hour a day after lunch Birdie and I had our lessons. Sigga approved.
Mama didn't disapprove, exactly. She said, "Don't you think it's a bit much
for a little girl?"

"The older she gets the harder it'll be for her to learn," Birdie insisted. "A
child's brain at this age is a sponge for language."

"If you say so." Despite the fact that Mama questioned everything Birdie
did, especially where I was concerned, in the end she usually let Birdie have
her way. At the time I figured Mama felt sorry for Birdie because Birdie was
childless. Now I wonder if Mama knew about you, the child Birdie gave
away. She must have.

I wanted to learn Icelandic, I truly did. Icelandic was the language of secrets. Icelandic was a code I'd been unable to crack, no matter how much
or how hard I listened. I believed that if I could learn Icelandic I would understand all the things about the world that I didn't understand yet. I
worked hard-Sigga and Mama and Birdie all agreed I was very dugleg-
but I guess my brain wasn't spongy enough because I could hardly manage
to construct a single correct sentence in Icelandic. Even a simple sentence
like I caught one big fish. Because by the time you figure out whether if you
catch a fish it's fiskur or fide or fiski and whether fish is male or female or
neuter-neither (in order to know whether one should be einn or ein or eitt, or maybe einum or einni or einu), there were still all the different versions
of big to choose from (stor or stort or storan or storuvi or storri or storu or stor-
rar or stors), and by that time, the one big fish got away.