Майя Лунде - The End of the Ocean

“Are you coming soon?” I said cautiously.

But nobody answered.

“Hello?!”

I was suddenly afraid they wouldn’t come, that they had gotten the day wrong.

“MOMMY AND DADDY?!”

Or that they’d forgotten all about my birthday.

“HELLO, MOMMY AND DADDY!!!”

But then they appeared, carrying a cake and singing. They stood on opposite sides of the bed and sang in their high and low voices, in perfect unison, and then all of a sudden it was too much, all of it. I had to pull the duvet up over my head and stay in bed even longer, even though I really wanted to get up.

When the song was over, I received presents—a shiny ball and a doll from Mommy, with a mouth that smiled a terribly broad smile.

“It’s creepy,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” Daddy said.

“Yes, it is,” I said.

“I thought it was so cute when I saw it in the store and it was the biggest doll they had,” Mommy said.

“They didn’t need to make it with a smile like that,” I said.

“You have to say thank you,” Daddy said. “You have to say thank you to Mommy.”

“Thank you,” I said. “For the doll. That’s creepy.”

I always spoke my mind, said what I thought, and maybe they were irritated but never enough to try to make me change my behavior. Or maybe it wasn’t all that simple to change it.

I remember the doll and the rest of the presents I received. I am pretty sure that I got all these things on this day: two books about flowers from Daddy; a herbarium, also from him; and a globe that lit up from both of them. I thanked them for everything. So many presents. I was aware that nobody I knew received as many, but nobody I knew had a mother who owned an entire hotel with almost a hundred rooms either. There were eighty-four, but we always said almost a hundred, and we also had our own private wing, we just called it the wing, with three living rooms and four bedrooms and a kitchen and even a maid’s room.

She had inherited all of it from my grandfather, who died before I was born. There were pictures of him hanging everywhere, of old Hauger. Everyone called him that, even I did. Mommy had also inherited his name—Hauger, a boring name, but in spite of that, she kept it. She never took Daddy’s surname, Daddy’s Oslo name, because you can’t just rid yourself of a name like Hauger, Mommy said. Then they would also have to change the name of our hotel, Hauger Hotel, and she couldn’t do that, because our history was in the walls, all the way back to the year it was built, which was written above the entrance in numbers carved out of wood: 1882.

I was given cake, both in the morning and the rest of the day, so much cake that my stomach couldn’t contain all the sweetness. I also remember that feeling, that I was seven years old and so full of cake that it felt like my chest would burst, but I kept eating all the same. Family members came by and they all sat together at a table in the garden—Mommy’s entire family, Grandmother, the aunts, the two uncles by marriage, cousin Birgit and my three boy cousins.

The guests talked and carried on noisily, but I made the most noise because I couldn’t sit still, not then, not later, and I had a loud voice that Daddy said could carry all the way to Galdhøpiggen. He always smiled when he said this, all the way to Galdhøpiggen, Norway’s highest mountain, and he was happy that I shouted so much, he said, proud of it, but Mommy was of another opinion, she said that my voice cut right through to the bone.

I made so much noise that I didn’t hear the truck. It was only when Mommy asked me to come to the courtyard that I realized that something was up. She took my hand and led me around the corner, while she waved at the guests and said that they had to come, too. She laughed in their direction, at me, and there was something unusual about her laughter—she laughed the way I usually laughed, wildly and a little too loudly, and I laughed as well, because I felt that I had to.

I turned around and looked for Daddy. I found him, way in the back of the crowd of guests, alone. I wanted to hold his hand instead, but Mommy was pulling too hard.

Then we turned the corner and I jumped, didn’t understand what I saw. The entire courtyard was white; the light reflecting off it sparkled, making me squint.

“Ice,” Mommy said. “Snow, winter—look, Signe, it’s winter!”

“Snow?” I said.

She stood beside me and I could tell that something about this was important to Mommy, something about the snow, which was actually ice, but I didn’t understand what and now Daddy had also come over to stand beside her and he wasn’t smiling.

“What’s this?” Daddy said to Mommy.

“Do you remember,” Mommy said to me, “that you said you wished your birthday was in the winter?”

“No,” I said.

“That you cried when Birgit had her birthday and it snowed?” Mommy continued. “And you wanted a snowman, do you remember?”

“Have you driven it all the way down from the mountain?” Daddy said to Mommy, and his voice was hard.

“Sønstebø brought it for me, he was going to pick some up for the fish-landing station anyway,” she answered.

I turned around and noticed Sønstebø, the farmer from Eidesdalen, standing beside the truck, looking at me and smiling. I understood that he was waiting for something, waiting for me, and behind him stood his son, Magnus.

There you were, Magnus. I knew who you were before, because your father sometimes came with ice on his truck and then it happened that you were with him, but nonetheless, I think of that moment as the first time I saw you. You stood there, barefoot, your feet brown from the sun and dirt, and you were waiting for something—like all the others, you were waiting for me. You reminded me of a squirrel, with round, brown eyes that noticed everything. You were just eight years old, but you noticed that something was at stake, I believe, something that wasn’t said, that somebody needed you, or would come to need you. That’s how you were. That’s how he was.

“So Sønstebø had to make an extra trip?” Daddy said softly. “All the way from the mountain?”

I hoped that he would put his arm around Mommy, the way he did sometimes, put it around her and squeeze her against him, but he didn’t move.

“It’s Signe’s birthday, she wished for this,” Mommy said.

“And what does Sønstebø get in return?”

“He thought it was fun. He loved that I wanted to do it, he loved the idea.”

“Everyone loves your ideas.”

Then Mommy turned to face me. “You can make a snowman, Signe. Wouldn’t you like to do that? We can make a snowman, all of us!”

I didn’t want to make a snowman, but nonetheless, I said yes.

I slipped in my good shoes and almost fell, my balance was off on the white surface she called snow, but Mommy grabbed hold of me and kept me on my feet.

The moisture and the cold penetrated the soles of my shoes, hard granules of ice spilled across my feet and melted against my thin knee socks.

I bent down, took a fistful of snow in my hands and tried to make a snowball, but it was like pearl sugar, it just disintegrated.

I looked up and everyone was watching me, all the party guests were watching. Magnus stood completely still; only his eyes moved, his gaze went from the snow to me and back again. He had never received snow for his birthday, it was probably only hotel daughters who received that and I wished he wasn’t here to see this.

But Mommy smiled, smiled as broadly as the doll, the largest in the store, and again I tried to make a snowball. I had to manage it, there had to be a snowball, I had to make a huge snowman, because I didn’t remember that I’d wished for a winter birthday, I couldn’t remember that I had ever spoken with Mommy about this, or that I had cried on Birgit’s birthday. But I had, and now Daddy was angry with Mommy. Maybe I had said that I wanted a doll, too, and forgotten about it. It was my fault, all of this, that I was standing here and that my feet were so exceedingly cold, with ice water dribbling through my fingers, that everyone was standing here and behaving oddly around me, that the dry courtyard was turning muddy and vile, that Daddy looked at Mommy with a gaze that I didn’t understand, and that he put his hands down into the pockets of his trousers in a way that made his shoulders narrow, and that Magnus was here. I wished with all my pounding, seven-year-old heart that he hadn’t seen me like this.