The Tricking of Freya (14 page)

In North America the immigrants abandoned the naming system they'd
used for over a thousand years. The first crop of children born in Winnipeg
or Gimli or North Dakota or Wisconsin took the last names of their fathers
instead of the first. And just like that, there were no more Jonsdottirs, only Jonssons, which soon became Anglicized to Johnson. First names changed
too: Bjarni turned to Barney, Olafur to Oliver, Vilhjalmur to William, Ses-
selja to Cecilia, Kristin to Christina. Generation by generation, names that
couldn't be assimilated began to disappear entirely, names that had been in
use since the Saga times and before, men's names like Ingimundur, Sigtryg-
gur, and Steingrimur; women's names like Adalbjorg, Siggurros, and Petrina. Vanished to the land of lost immigrant names.

All this I learned from Sigga, our very own aettfraedingur. Aett (rhymes
with light) means family as in family line, so an aettfraedingur is someone
who studies family lines: a genealogist. Sigga wasn't a professional, but Stefan said she could have been. She was often called upon to help Canadians
and Americans track down their long-lost relatives back in Iceland, or help
Icelanders locate distant cousins in North America. Even strangers who
weren't related to us Sigga helped. Although by the time Sigga got done
with them it usually turned out they were. Related, I mean. In Olafur's
study, Sigga stored four tall wooden file cabinets of family papers. All sorts
of people's families', not just ours. That's what Sigga did in the evenings
mostly, work on her aettfraedi. She had a special project she was doing on
Olaf ur's aett (which was also my mother's nett and your mother's aett, and of
course yours and mine as well). It was called the Blue Book because she
was binding all the pages between two blue leather covers. By the time I
came to Gimli my first summer, she was already in the sixteenth century.
She said one day she'd trace Olafur all the way back to the Viking poet Egil
Skallagrimsson.

I couldn't imagine anything more boring than aettfraedi. Just looking at
Sigga's endless charts made me dizzy. How could I possibly care if Jon
Petursson was the son of Petur Jonsson, who was the son of another Jon
Petursson, if I'd never met any of them and they all lived nearly two hundred
years ago in a country I'd never even visited?

"When you get older," Sigga said. "You'll care."

"Or not." Birdie declared genealogy to be tedious. "Thank God for the
Siggas of the world," she'd say. "Someone's got to do the dirty work."

So there you have it, a typical day in one of my Gimli summers: old folks at
Betel in the morning, midday grappling with Icelandic grammar or stalking the beach like an egret, Coffee with visitors in the late afternoons. In the evenings, each of us had our work: Mama knitting or embroidering, Sigga researching the Blue Book, Birdie composing her Word Meadow. Me, I wrote
verses of my own, and at the end of the summer Birdie would help me bind
them into little books.

No, I can't show you one. They're gone now. I burned them, after Birdie
died. It doesn't matter. They were childish arnaleir, eagle muck. Baboonish
nonsense.

The way I saw it, Mama and Birdie divided me in two: Mama had me in the
mornings, and Birdie had me in the afternoons. Birdie and Mama tried to
stay out of each other's way; when their paths crossed, quarrels ignited between them. I thought badly of Birdie for picking fights with Mama, and I
thought badly of Mama for not standing up to her younger sister. I liked to
imagine that she used to, before her accident. But now she backed down
quickly, growing silent and far away while she absently rubbed at the spot
on the back of her head where she had fallen.

Sigga pleaded for peace between sisters. "What would your father think?
Two middle-aged women squabbling like children." And if that didn't work,
she'd just shake her head sadly and sigh. "Fraendur eru fraendum verstir."
Kin are worst to kin. I knew all about that. Hadn't I nearly killed my own
mother? Every time I saw Mama wearing sunglasses inside, every time I
saw her gripping her cane during a spell of vertigo, every time I saw her run
her fingers through her coarse gray hair, I felt shame. Each time I was introduced to new people in Gimli I'd stare at my shoes, glancing up quickly
without moving my head, searching their faces to figure out if they knew. I
tried to stay as invisible as possible. I figured with my pale skin and whiteblond hair I could easily blend into walls or even air.

People mistook my shame for shyness, and I let them. She never used to
be shy, Mama would say. At least (and here she would rub the back of her head, as if she could draw lost memory to the surface) I don't remember her
being that way.

Only Birdie saw through my act. "You can't fool me, Freya min. With
that Goody Two-shoes business."

I pretended not to know what she meant, but I knew that she knew that
I wasn't myself anymore. And I was glad she knew. Because someday, when
my punishment was over, I could go back to being my old self again. And if
I had trouble remembering exactly who I really was, then maybe Birdie
could help put me back together again. Except of course it didn't work out
that way. When Birdie died, she took the old me along with her.

Sometimes even Mama wouldn't put up with Birdie anymore. If Birdie
said something Mama deemed absolutely unforgivable, Mama would announce she needed to go to Winnipeg for supplies. She would pack up my
cherry red suitcase and her overnight bag, and we'd catch a ride with a cottager heading to Winnipeg, where we would stay with Mama's best friend,
Vera, on Victor Street, at the house where the Gudmundssons had taken in
Sigga and Birdie and Mama after Olafur died. That's when Mama and Vera
had become friends-and when Vera and Birdie had developed a resoundingly mutual dislike. Vera considered Birdie disgraceful, Birdie thought Vera
a horrid snob. But Mama wouldn't put up with Birdie talking badly about
Vera. All of Mama's vagueness would vanish, her eyes would sharpen, and
she'd say in a strangely crisp tone: "Not one more word, Birdie. Not one."

Vera was Mama's haven from Birdie. The supplies Mama needed were
yarn and embroidery thread and fabric, all things she could have bought in
Gimli at Tergesen's General Store. But then we wouldn't have been able to
escape from Birdie. Once we arrived in Winnipeg, Vera would drive us over
to Eaton's Department Store. It was the same store Birdie frequented for
her spending sprees. Vera's husband, Joey, was the general manager of
Eaton's, which is how Vera secretly arranged that Sigga could return the
things Birdie bought-or stole during her sprees. "You're never to tell your
aunt Ingibjorg," Vera warned me. "Or there could be a lot of trouble."

What kind of trouble I couldn't imagine. Except maybe out of spite for
Vera, Birdie would choose a different store for her sprees. Then again,
maybe it was out of spite for Vera that Birdie chose Eaton's in the first place.

At Eaton's, Vera would convince Mama to buy something bright and flowery. "Honestly, Anna, you're letting yourself get a bit dowdy, if you
don't mind my saying." Mama didn't seem to mind, though I never saw her
wear the outfits Vera made her buy.

I too became a target of Vera's improvement efforts. "Honestly, Anna,
you mustn't let that child act so shy. It's becoming odd, is what it is." Once
I recited one of Gisli's verses to Vera in my loudest voice, to prove I wasn't
so shy, but all she said was "Honestly, Anna, I don't know why you allow her
to learn that kind of doggerel." Vera didn't approve of my Icelandic lessons
either. Once when she was visiting us in Gimli, she arrived in the middle of
one of my sessions with Birdie. "Honestly, Ingibjorg, why on earth are you
torturing that child with a language she will never use?"

Vera didn't speak with an accent the way Mama and Birdie did because
she'd been raised not in the rural Interlake area but in urban Winnipeg.
"Daddy," Vera would boast about the Great Dr. Gudmundsson, "never let us
speak Icelandic. He didn't want us to have accents. As far as Daddy was
concerned, we were born Canadians and should sound that way." And then
she would look around her living room, with all its fancy objects from
Eaton's, as proof of how well they'd done for themselves. Vera lived in the
biggest house on Victor Street, but she and Joey were thinking of moving
because the neighborhood was starting to crumble, and other areas of town
were beginning to seem more desirable than Winnipeg's old Icelandic
ghetto, the West End.

Vera always watched me very closely, as if she was afraid I would turn a
cartwheel and bring all her precious knickknacks from Eaton's tumbling to
the floor. If Mama got a dizzy spell and had to lean on her cane, Vera would
look directly at me and shake her head slowly. Pity, or disapproval? I was
never sure.

There was nothing Birdie loved more than to imitate Vera. "Honestly,
Anna," Birdie would say, mimicking Vera's faux British accent, "I don't know
what you see in Vera. Is it that her father, the Great Dr. Gudmundsson, was
the first Icelandic doctor in Canada? Or her husband is the manager of
Eaton's? Maybe it's just that she doesn't have a crazy sister. Or that her boys
don't speak a word of Icelandic. Do tell."

"At least," Mama replied, "I have people I can call my friends."

"I have friends."

As were many things Birdie said, this claim was an exaggeration. Your
mother had exactly one true friend in the world: Stefan. Stefan in his oldfashioned cardigans and old man's pipe, though he was the same age as
Birdie. "Like one of those elderly bachelor farmers in Arborg," Birdie would
tease.

"Why don't you marry him?" I asked once. It was clear even to me that
Stefan would marry Birdie in a moment, if she would have him.

"Marry Stefan?" When Birdie stopped laughing she explained, "Stefan's
a square, that's why."

"Then what are you?"

"I'm a ... trapezoid."

"And me?"

"You're a little ovoid."

"What's that?"

"Like an egg. Ready to hatch."

Into what? I didn't want to know.

Square or not, I adored Uncle Stefan and his kind, steady presence in my
Gimli life. He taught history and English at the Riverton High School during
the school year, but summers he was free to pursue his life's work: a history of
the New Iceland colony. Sometimes Birdie and I would tag along with Stefan
on his research expeditions. Once he took us to the plot of land, on the lake
north of Gimli, where my grandfather Olafur's family had first settled. There
was nothing left, just empty scrubland and an old grave site. Inside a wobbling wooden fence, several headstones leaned in the high grasses. The
graves, Stefan explained, belonged to an Indian family, the Ramseys. The
Ramseys had been living on the land the Canadian government had given to
the Icelanders.

"You mean land the Icelanders stole from the Indians," Birdie interrupted.

"The Indians ceded the land. It was a legal transaction." Stefan sounded
irritated.

"And then the Icelanders killed them off with smallpox," Birdie continued. "Entire Indian families, like the Ramseys, wiped out."

"On purpose?" I asked.

,,of course not," Stefan answered. "Many Icelanders died too. Your
grandfather was lucky, his family was vaccinated. Otherwise you wouldn't
be here today."

"I'm sorry," I whispered to the Ramsey gravestones before we left that
day. "I'm so sorry."

Our summers in Gimli always came to an end in the same way, with what
Mama referred to as Birdie's god-awful scenes. Other families marked their
end-of-summer leave-takings with hugs and kisses and best wishes; our departures were marred by tears and accusations, silences, even threats. No
matter how well a particular summer had gone, Birdie always seemed to
think the worst of us when we were on the verge of leaving. My mother,
Birdie raged, exploited her as an unpaid babysitter. Mama's symptoms were
all an act to prevent her from facing the meaninglessness of her life. Me, I
was a pest whose presence rendered Birdie completely unable to work. If it
weren't for me, she would have finished her Word Meadow long ago. Sigga's
crime was treating Anna as her favorite, when she, Birdie, was a poetic genius and the true heir to Olafur's legacy. Anna was nothing but an American housewife. Zip-zap: Birdie's tongue could lash you like a stroke of
lightning.

Once I woke on the morning of departure to find my cherry red suitcase
lying open and empty on the bedroom floor. During the night Birdie had
snuck in, removed all my clothes, and replaced them in the dresser drawers.
All this, while I was sleeping.

Other times Birdie ruined our last days in Gimli by refusing to speak to
us. Birdie could emit the loudest silence ever heard. If we passed on the
stairs, she looked right past me, like I was less than a ghost. At the time I
figured she was preparing herself for what it would be like at Oddi once
Mama and I were gone. Looking back, I wonder if it wasn't me she was
preparing, for the huge silence I would face once she was dead.