Monika Fagerholm - The Glitter Scene

“Don’t pay her any attention,” says Solveig, who has been standing next to Doris the entire time; and it turns out all right later, because the Pastor comes and apologizes and takes Doris and Rita and Solveig to the kitchen of the fellowship hall where he has sweets that he lets his disobedient daughter Maj-Gun offer them. Especially Doris, who will get the nicest piece, a shiny red chocolate heart with a truffle inside wrapped in paper. “Maj-Gun should apologize,” says the Pastor. And Maj-Gun finally says it, sorrysorry.

The fear, how it had flamed up in Doris’s eyes. The Pastor had also seen it. And probably thinks it is a matter of the old lady mask so he explains to Doris Flinkenberg who has her mouth so full with delicious chocolate that she cannot speak but just makes her eyes wide—that the mask is not dangerous at all but represents the face of a famous actress, Ava Gardner, does Doris want to try it on?

But just as Doris is going to nod yes please there is a furious howl from Maj-Gun Maalamaa who snatches the mask out of papa Pastor’s hand and yells that it is not a movie star but her horrible godmother Liz Maalamaa! And Doris recoils, almost frightened—but Maj-Gun has run away, with the mask, the apple, before the pastor has time to become even angrier with her.

But the fear in Doris’s eyes, you think about it later. That it is still there beneath everything. Under the surface of this that and the other—jump rope jumping, cassette player, song of the day I go up the mountain with my lonely heart in the cousin’s kitchen, crosswords, True Crimes with the cousin’s mama… and the cousin’s mama!—it remains. Like the scars in her skin, the burns from the grill, the cigarettes, under her clothes.

Can pass, but never leave.

A fear that exists there and can be called forth.

Like an omen as well. Because that fear, it disappears for a long time but returns when she gets older and contributes so that she, many years later, in her teens, will take her own life: goes and shoots herself at Bule Marsh.

Just sixteen years old—and incomprehensible. At the same time not. Because by that time there is also another story. Doris’s own, private one. Because what also happens and very soon, already the following spring, after Doris arrives at the cousin’s house, is that she starts going out on her own. On the prowl for a companion of the same age, a friend of her own. Because despite everything, things become a bit humdrum with the cousin’s mama and the older cousins at the cousin’s property.

And she finds her way to the house in the darker part, completely new then. And a girl the same age lives there. Her name is Sandra Wärn and she becomes like fat on bacon with Doris for many years. A friendship that becomes love for Doris and that Doris enters into hook, line, and sinker. But it ceases, a fight, some misunderstanding, as can happen between two who are close, maybe too close—and when it suddenly ends Doris is skinless.

Beaming, smart Doris, who is still so fragile under the surface. It does not disappear even though it cannot be seen.

A betrayal, a love that died: the most important in Doris’s life, the only one that existed. Yes, of course, there would certainly have come more events, and experiences, a new time. But a blow, and it is decisive and fateful, there is nothing for Doris, no real time.

To be sucked into a black hole: then there is all of the old stuff, other betrayals, tattooed into the skin and an unbearable fear then, of everything, which flares up inside her. A betrayal, a love that died, the most important in Doris’s life.

And so then. Doris, conquered by a time that has run away with her—to another time.

And suddenly trapped in that time.

“The folk song. A repetition in time and space. Such a different way of understanding time.”

Maybe it is like that. Because that is what she does during the final months of life, Old Doris who is New Doris: sings folk songs in a band. Her boyfriend at the time Micke Friberg, Micke’s Folk Band —they are together a few weeks that last fall—Doris sings and talks about the folk song in between the songs.

“I’m Doris, this is Micke, and we have a band, it’s Micke’s band, Micke’s Folk Band . We sing old folk songs in modern arrangements, they’re Micke’s arrangements—”

But regardless of how hard Doris tries to devote herself to the music that Micke Friberg talks about, regardless of how she tries to be Micke Friberg’s girlfriend, everyone already knows it is a lie. There was someone else, Sandra, whom she loved.

But that is later, not yet. And Rita and Solveig, this is what happens to them. Turn twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and continue living together in the twins’ cottage on the other side of the field across from the cousin’s house. For a long time anyway, up until Rita, just after Doris’s death, leaves the District for good in the fall of 1976.

But she spends a lot of time in the house on the First Cape as well; where new inhabitants come. First a group of women who rent the house for a few years, have a collective of some sort or another and Bengt and a boy from the Second Cape, Magnus von B., whom Bengt starts spending a lot of time with, running around among them, trying to curry favor, make themselves useful in every way. Yes, yes, Bengt has “a way with women,” but it is still girls from the District who fall for him most of the time—not those women who make fun of him there where he is standing with his “flower power cap” on, talking about big things, about revolution and things like that.

But then the house is bought by a real family from the city by the sea: they are called Backmansson and they have a boy, Jan, the twins’ age, and Rita starts going with him just about as soon as the family moves in. And intensely; gradually Rita is at Backmanssons’ on the First Cape almost all the time when the family is there, more or less moves into Jan Backmansson’s spacious room in the tower. They cultivate mutual interests there, for Rita, new interests—nature photography, for example.

What is it? Real teenage love. Maybe. On the other hand, Rita has other boyfriends too when the Backmanssons are not home and they are not always around because the parents are field biologists and travel quite a bit: boys from the District, ones like Järpe and Torpe Torpeson, for example.

And it is hard to know with Rita, becomes harder all the time, she is not exactly someone who explains herself, in that respect she definitely does not become a speech maker with age. Says nothing about her business, gradually not even to her sister Solveig, not to mention Tobias who continues supporting her and Solveig as best he can. Opens his wallet, “gives scholarships,” just as fair with both of them.

But Rita, she slips away more and more… and there is something wild and unmanageable about her. More and more too, with time, as if Rita in some way is two people. One who spends time at the Backmanssons’ house when they are home and otherwise another who exists in the District, in school, outside class and makes several of her classmates afraid. Rita Rat, she who provokes, allows herself to be provoked, and does not hold back, the one who hits.

But at the same time, despite everything and all of the time: Rita does well in school, has good grades in just about every subject. “The astronaut,” “the nuclear physicist,” it still matters, at least to her. In reality Solveig is the one who starts fading away and it does not turn around either: later when Rita leaves the District in the middle of high school, Solveig becomes pregnant shortly thereafter by one of the Torpeson boys from the Outer Marsh. Drops out of school and it is left unfinished despite the fact that she miscarries after a few months. Starts cleaning full-time for the cleaning company Four Mops and a Dustpan, which the cousin’s mama leaves behind.