His mouth was suddenly dry, his hands were sweaty, and he could only stare, caught in a strong feeling of being in the wrong place. She was a complete stranger, and yet he was filled with a strange feeling of togetherness. Seeing her felt like coming home. Peter couldn’t help it. His whole being glowed and he felt intensely that I should be the one standing behind her. His pulse raced at the sight of the small, clean lines of her face, her warm complexion and her dimples. She let go of her hair and twirled around once.
When she backed in between the swing doors to her own changing room, she looked up, into his eyes, and it was like an electric shock went through his body. He felt completely defenseless: it was his own happy future he thought he saw in her eyes. She had stopped halfway into the changing room, and he was sure that she also felt that the contact between them was full of meaning. He was enjoying trying to figure out what that meaning was, when the beauty shuddered and the inscrutable gaze transformed into something that looked like fear – or was it distaste? – before she quickly backed into the changing room and the doors cut off their eye contact. The magic was broken.
Peter looked around in a daze, and realized what had happened. The girl in the changing room had seen Linda! She stood smiling beside him with a black corset with stocking-fasteners pressed against her body.
‘Peter. You and me… tonight?’ she said quietly and tried to make eye contact with him through his tunnel vision. Linda’s forthright flirting was something he had always appreciated, but now it felt cheap and tasteless compared to the feelings that still pounded through his body.
He realized that he hadn’t made a particularly good impression. He understood how it had looked, but what could he say? Noooo, this isn’t my wife, just my old fuck buddy. It didn’t really feel like a successful opening line, and there was nothing Peter could do except quickly and discreetly grab Linda and get out of there. Averting her plans for tonight was something he would have to do elsewhere.
His heart pounded disagreeably, stressed by new, uncomfortable feelings, and every step away from the girl in the changing room added to a strange weight in his chest. He didn’t recognize himself. He felt uneasy and his footsteps were unsure, as if he were about to lose something immeasurably precious.
12
Be proud of who you are.
Vera’s teabag
Vera had persuaded Adam to send her favorite jeans, her green sweater and her fall jacket. She thought she had enough clothes, but now there was that banquet. ‘Formal attire, at minimum.’ What on earth did that mean? Vera felt lost. When Cissi offered to help her, she accepted gratefully and went over to Cissi’s apartment on a Thursday morning.
Vera looked out through the bus window at the people out in the fall sunshine. It was windy, and on the long, curved pedestrian bridge she saw a woman in a beret lose her balance as she pushed her overloaded bike up the steep slope. She fell, along with the bike, her grocery bags, and everything. Two teenage boys in baggy-crotched jeans hurried forward to help her. The shorter one helped her up and out of the path of a middle-aged man with a briefcase and a knitted hat who was braking as he biked downhill. The tall one ran after three oranges that were playfully rolling away down the bridge. Vera smiled. She had retreated home to Västerbotten because she hadn’t felt that she had anywhere else to go. Now she realized that if you had doubts about your faith in humanity, this was a place where you just might get it back.
Cissi lived in an attic apartment just east of downtown. Vera had to climb all the steps with her healthy right leg, stamping like a child learning to use the stairs. Three flights up in the old wooden house there was a large studio apartment with dormer windows and mismatched furniture, spiced with a new-age aesthetic. When Vera saw the batik throw and the waterfall with the rotating stone, she felt like the only thing missing was the scent of incense. Otherwise, books, clothes and shoes dominated the apartment. It was messy and cozy, both foreign and homely at the same time. Next to one of the windows there was an old-fashioned make-up table with a mirror and, in Vera’s eyes, an unbelievable amount of cosmetics.
Cissi offered her Ayurvedic tea and homemade cookies, and they commented on the sweeping advice that they got from their teabags. They said that if nothing else worked out then they could get work coming up with words of wisdom for teabags.
‘Live and let live,’ said Vera.
‘Dare more than you dare,’ suggested Cissi.
Cissi studied Vera in the light coming in through the window and got up suddenly.
‘You have to be “fall”, with that skin and your warm, green eyes! You can have this; it’s way too dark for me. Classic shopping mistake.’ Cissi had fetched the hair-coloring kit from her bathroom and put it in front of Vera.
‘Fall?’ Vera thought she had heard incorrectly, but Cissi explained that she was sure that people were right for certain colors, and that colors – and thus even the people suited to them – were divided into groups named after the seasons. Cissi started talking about the debate in color-analysis circles about whether you could be a blend of color groups, and if so how the colors were blended.
Vera smiled at her friend’s complicated theories and let Cissi convince her. She already had brown hair. According to Cissi, the toning would just ‘make your hair shinier and give it little chestnut highlights,’ and it warmed Vera that Cissi was so generous and positive. Sleep, eat, work and study was all she had done for the past few months, and now she felt like it would be good for her work on the welfare project if she fixed herself up a bit. She used to do it, after all. Maybe it was time for the old Vera to make a comeback?
‘Everything in life has pluses and minuses,’ said Cissi philosophically.
Yes, maybe so… Vera thought about Saturday.
‘Can I take out your braid?’
Vera nodded. Her host loosened the hair-tie carefully and freed Vera’s hair. She began to lift and pick at it as she continued:
‘And the trick is to do something about, or downplay, the negative and emphasize the positive.’
But if you can’t do anything about the negative? Saturday’s failure: it hadn’t been so easy then. It hadn’t been a matter of ‘downplaying’ things.
Now Cissi let go of her hair and looked worriedly at Vera.
‘Hey – what is it?’
Vera shrugged her shoulders and smothered a sob.
‘Was it something I said?’
Vera writhed as if in physical pain. ‘No… it isn’t your fault, it’s just that… If it doesn’t work, what then?’
‘If what doesn’t work?’ Cissi sat down on a stool in front of Vera. ‘I would say that you have a lot we can build on, so when we’re done you’ll be…’ She stopped herself. ‘Ah… look even better, I mean.’
Vera shook her head again.
‘It’s my… husband.’ She had to make an effort to get the word out. ‘Adam. I was supposed to be with him in Stockholm this weekend, but I couldn’t stay. I just couldn’t. It felt completely wrong.’
Cissi looked at her sympathetically. ‘You couldn’t bring yourself to stay?’
‘No. First there was a song on the bus that made me… I got off and threw up in a dog-waste bin. And then, in the apartment. I was going to stay, but it was like my body refused. I felt really bad.’ Vera took a shaky breath.
Cissi looked at her. ‘Okay.’
They sat quietly for a while before she continued.
‘But you made the best of the situation, didn’t you? Because, you know, it’s like Gunde says, “you can’t