Bitter Bitch Read online

  So I sat there across from him bemoaning January mornings, sleep deprivation and the fact that there were no more sparks. I cursed the emptiness and swore how much I longed to just run away.

  He looked at me with those kind eyes I like so much. ‘What’s stopping you?’

  I looked at him and could not answer. What was stopping me? Nothing really, not my job, not my husband, not the money. My hesitation was because of something completely different, something unspoken, a forbidden feeling, as if I was committing a horrible, criminal act. When I could not tell him what was actually stopping me, I became so annoyed that I started looking for trips that same night.

  I did not want to go far away because I am too much of a coward and my longing for sun and warmth was too great to choose a bustling city. So it became a package holiday to Tenerife, a destination which matches the lame fool that I am. Or have become.

  ‘I have to,’ I explained to Johan, who admittedly did not stop me but was hardly overjoyed.

  ‘It’ll work wonders for our marriage. I’ll come back a new person,’ I continued. I needed his blessing to go, even if it was only for a petty week-long package holiday to Tenerife. Running off alone without my husband and child already felt taboo enough as it was.

  I dreaded Sigge’s punishment, him turning away, his eyes refusing to meet mine. Despite Johan having been away twenty times more than me since Sigge was born, Sigge was simply angry whenever I went away. Johan could be gone for weeks and Sigge missed him, affectionately and generously. He would throw himself in Johan’s arms and seem overjoyed to see him. The few times I was gone more than one night it could take hours before Sigge stopped ignoring me. He had a cold determination that scared me and made me feel even more guilty. I asked Johan once if he knew why Sigge reacted that way. He answered quickly and simply.

  ‘I have a clear conscience when I’m gone, but you feel so guilty it almost makes you sick. He senses your guilt and it confirms that he’s right to be angry at you.’

  I stood quietly for a long time, staring blankly. So damned obvious. The strange thing is that my whole life, the whole world, is filled with this kind of confusing paradox. And I try not to feel such guilt but it is buried fast, deep and unreachable.

  Everything was open at Arlanda Airport and people, including myself, were wandering around in the shops, buying perfume, booze and sweets even though it was only five-thirty in the morning. For a while I thought about sitting down with the men in The Swedish Vodka Bar and ordering a vodka with ice, getting drunk and pretending I was urbane and single instead of a married, sleep-deprived young mother. But the magazines and mineral water in Pressbyrån were more appealing.

  I am constantly reminded about everything I do not feel, everything I do not want. I think about Isadora and wonder what it would be like to be a little more like her, a little more interested in everyone, even if it creates more guilt and anxiety. Better anxiety than this nothingness. Isadora leers at strange men, stares at the bulge in their trousers and fantasizes about what they are like in bed. She sits on a train and fucks the man across from her with her eyes, she is filled with guilt but still wonderfully aroused.

  But what about all those other longings, which after a while marriage did nothing much to appease?

  I do not know. All I know is that I have too much longing shooting off in every possible direction. A longing so immense that it has isolated me completely.

  I stood there in Pressbyrån looking at the magazines until I realized I would be unhappy no matter which magazine I chose. I saw how they screamed deplorable messages about beauty, ugliness, weight, weight and weight. I noted that there was nothing similar among the men’s sports and car magazines, and felt that familiar sting of jealousy, which was slowly and completely transforming me into a bitter bitch. At least four different bridal magazines were crammed together on the stand. I desperately wished it was 1975 instead of 2005. Wished that my name was Isadora and I was a free woman in New York instead of a boring mother from Stockholm, or at least a career woman with a clear conscience.

  We are quite simply deceived. Something confirmed by a magazine queen I once interviewed. She had started several successful women’s magazines and adorned the cover with her image as well as her name, and over a bowl of pasta with chanterelles she happily told me how carefree the 1970s had been.

  ‘We didn’t pay much attention to weight and things like that. We hardly knew what cellulite was.’ She did not understand why I was so upset and I think she used the word bitter about me as she defended the content of her magazines.

  ‘Why are you so bitter?’

  In a way it was fantastic. This woman who, through her magazines, is informing an entire generation of Swedish women about cellulite, and how to get rid of it while losing twenty pounds, was explaining how much more fun it was during the 1970s when they did not have to think about it.

  Yeah, we are definitely bitter. I am in any case. I did not buy a magazine, after all I had my Isadora Afraid to Fly. At least she makes me laugh.

  I am listening to Nina Simone and the captain has just informed us that we are several thousand metres up in the air and the thought of the solitude that awaits me makes me grin. I am definitely not bitter to the core. Despite everything, I am making a small part of my daydreams of solitude and sleep into reality.

  At the same time, my conscience, all the old taboos, are gnawing away at me. Why are egoistical women regarded as terribly provocative, while egoistical men are, if anything, seen as a given? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that our culture’s religion begins with a raped woman?

  A completely self-sacrificing woman, whose lack of ego the Christian Church urges us to worship. Even if you prefer not to literally interpret the conception as a rape, but to focus on the symbolism of a holy spirit impregnating her, how terrified must she have been? She was just a young teenager when she got knocked up with Jesus.

  Not even Rosemary can stop loving her Satan child in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. She becomes pregnant after her husband enters into a pact with their devil-worshipping neighbours. Her husband lets Satan knock her up when she is drugged one night – an inverted version of the Jesus story, but with an unholy spirit. She feels terrible throughout the entire pregnancy and suspects a conspiracy without being able to find any proof. When she finally realizes what has happened, it is too late and she has an agonizing delivery. Yet despite everything her maternal instinct takes over when she wakes up. She is drawn to the child against her will even though she knows that her baby is Satan’s son, with red eyes. Roman, the neighbour who is the brains behind the conspiracy, eagerly urges her to go and see her son. Rosemary hesitates, afraid of what she is going to see.

  ‘You’re trying to make me be his mother!’ Rosemary says to Roman.

  ‘Aren’t you his mother?’ he asks. Yes. It ends with Rosemary picking up the crying child and comforting him. She is his mother.

  Jesus-child or Satan-child, obviously most of us love our children intensely, an emotion so strong it binds us to them for life. Even women who have become pregnant as a result of rape often have an unbelievable ability to love their children.

  I just wish I was allowed to love in the same free way as men. The knowledge of how guilt-laden the maternal role is, how taken for granted and demanding it is when compared to that of the father, makes me a jealous bitter bitch. I want to be a man and have society applaud when I only use two months of my parental leave, while no one raises an eyebrow when my wife takes out the rest. I want to be a man and experience society applauding my love and my sacrifice as something fantastic, extraordinary. I wish I could love my child and still foster pure, egoistical feelings, like dreaming about sleep, solitude, sun and Tenerife.

  They have started showing a movie but Fear of Flying Girl is sleeping soundly against her boyfriend’s shoulder. I hear someone behind me hiss, ‘For Christ’s sake would you stop it!’

  A woman replies inaudibly with a soft, ashamed
voice. I am the only one who is travelling alone. Everyone else is together, mostly families and couples and a few who seem to be colleagues. This morning, when I was buying tickets for the airport train, the cashier told me the tickets were half price if I was travelling with someone else.

  ‘Do you have to be travelling together?’ I asked.

  A stupid question, obviously they cannot check if you are in a relationship or not.

  But I got the point when the cashier said that if I wanted to ask a stranger to buy tickets with me that was fine.

  ‘But then you’ll have to sit together on the train!’

  When you live with someone you rarely think about the fact that society is built around couples. All the thousands of tiny signals. For example, there is always an advertisement for herpes ointment on the personal pages in the newspaper, such a nasty, self-righteous, sad reminder to all singles who are hungering after love.

  My sense of thrift took over, and besides, I wanted to challenge this kind of madness. So I started looking for a suitable person, but there were few people on the Arlanda Express at five in the morning.

  Finally I saw a man my own age and I walked over, even though he had a self-satisfied grin on his face, the type who thinks he is good looking. I started grinning too because I suddenly remembered a boy with learning difficulties Sigge and I met in the park during the summer. He was sitting on the swing next to Sigge’s even though he was too big. He was swinging, and he looked at me and said, ‘There she is wearing a green dress thinking she’s so wonderful.’ I was wearing a green dress and I thought I looked pretty wonderful in it. It was so fantastic that someone saw through me.

  Of course pretty boy took my smile as an invitation and I wished I had learning difficulties so I could say, ‘There he is in his suit thinking he’s so wonderful.’

  But instead I smiled sweetly and asked him if he wanted to buy a ticket with me and of course he said yes. Why can’t I act the way I really want to? On Tuesday, when I was deciding between a red bikini and a sportier military green model for my holiday, I chose the sporty one. I did not want to send the wrong signal. I wanted to be left alone and escape this accursed game!

  Pretty boy grinned the whole way to the airport and happily chatted about the weather in Sri Lanka and wanted to know where I was going and if I was travelling alone, and instead of engaging with him I just sat there and grinned and said yes, I am travelling alone. And I do not know why, but I think it is because I was foolish and sweet when I was fourteen, with a delightfully sick reflex: a treacherous fourteen-year-old’s longing to be adored.

  POPCORN AT NIGHT (1982)

  I do not know what my first image of love was, but I’m quite clear about what it doesn’t look like: when love becomes distorted and ugly, when Dad yells awful things at Mum. I am sitting on the stairs and I can see her standing in the kitchen, her back to me. She does not answer him, instead she continues doing the dishes and his voice sounds strange, a Daddy voice that scares me. I go to my room and arrange things so that my dolls can sleep by my feet at the foot of the bed.

  The dolls are my orphan children and I am their kind, pretend Mummy. There is no Daddy. I pull the covers over them and tuck them in so they will not freeze. My little sister is sleeping in the bed next to mine. I close the bedroom door so she will not wake up. Dad’s angry voice has grown quiet. I do not know what they are doing. When I wake up the next morning, I hear Dad snoring from their bedroom. Mum is cleaning, up in the kitchen and from the stairs I can see her, back to me in the same place as last night, as if she has been standing there the whole night. But she couldn’t have been, could she?

  She is wiping off the counter and when I get closer I see that the cooker, the tiles, the counter, everything is smeared with butter. Dad has done it during one of his drunken rampages. Mum is crying and wiping. I want to comfort her and so I pat her on the back. I try to hug her, but she shakes her head and sets out breakfast.

  When I am little, Dad is the one who knows the name of a Japanese fish so poisonous that one tiny piece killed hundreds of restaurant goers. Then Mum is angry when I won’t eat fish for several months. Dad does not get angry, he laughs and says there are no fish like that in Sweden. But I have learned not to be sure of anything and I continue to refuse to eat fish.

  Dad also knows how to make reservations at a luxury hotel in Stockholm where we go on holiday one weekend during the summer. He drives us there in his new Audi at 140 kilometres an hour. I throw up several times on the way and Mum asks him not to drive so fast. Dad gets irritable and Mum is already cross. She and I trade places so that I can sit in the front seat. Then my little sister gets tetchy because she does not get to sit in the front seat and then Dad gets really angry and tells all of us to shut up.

  We sit quietly and Dad drives dangerously fast and I try to listen to the radio. Carola is singing about ‘Tokyo’ and ‘Hey Mickey’.

  When I am little, my father is the one who knows how to order at luxury restaurants, always fillet of beef with Béarnaise sauce which we agree does not taste nearly as good as the one he makes at home sometimes on Fridays. My Dad also knows why Olof Palme is a shit and why you should vote for the moderates. He says he wants to keep his money. When he gives us our money for sweets on Saturdays he pulls out a thick wad of hundreds which he flips through in front of the lady in the sweet shop.

  ‘Unfortunately I don’t have any smaller notes, I hope this is OK!’ he says, and holds out one of the notes.

  When I am little my father is the one who can buy almost anything, and for several years I want a real Barbie house but I never get one. Instead I build a house for one of my Barbie dolls in one of the drawers under my bed. Books become walls and I make a stove out of wrapping paper. Barbie and Ken fight a lot. Barbie is not sure that Ken loves her at all.

  But he does. He loves her more than anything else in the world and he does not understand why Barbie thinks he does not love her. Then Barbie is so happy, so happy and they have sex and more sex until Mum calls that it’s time to come and eat. She serves sausages and boiled potatoes. I say that it is not nearly as good as Dad’s fillet of beef and Mum gets irritated and says that you cannot have fillet of beef every day.

  When I am little my father is the one who comes home on Fridays after having been gone all week, working. He makes fillet of beef and Béarnaise sauce and we eat together by candlelight and Mum and Dad drink red wine. For about an hour, between seven and eight, we are a pretty happy family.

  When I am little, my father is the one who has his own business with its own business cards. He travels around Sweden insulating buildings such as barns. The insulation foam is yellow and about as hard as Styrofoam, and Dad tells me and my sister Kajsa that was the sort of stuff they used to build the fortress in the film Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, and that he and his partner came close to getting the job, but they did not get it, and he travels and travels and he is often gone two or three weeks at a time.

  He is tired and sleeps a lot at the weekend. Mum is the one who gets up in the mornings and sets out breakfast, on weekends, weekdays, summer holidays and at Christmas time. Kajsa and I try to wake him up by jumping around on the bed yelling, ‘Dad! Wake up Dad! Wake up! Wake up!’ But he does not, and we continue dancing around on the bed where he lies like a beached whale. We sing, ‘Fart Daddy, Wake up tooter! Wake up, wake up, wake up now you pee-pee head!’ But he just grunts and turns over and keeps sleeping his heavy sleep, which is filled with snores.

  We finally give up and go and play with our dolls. When Mum yells that lunch is ready, Dad finally wakes up and we nag him during lunch to build us a Ronia the Robber’s Daughter fortress on the small lawn at the back of our terrace house and Dad says Maybe so, maybe. We pester him to build a pool on the little lawn, too, and Dad says Maybe so, maybe.

  And with Dad you never know, because sometimes he comes home with amazing things he’s bought that make Mum angry and irritated. We are the first ones in the neighbourhood to
have a VCR, and a computer and eventually a CD player. We have an over-sized cream coloured leather sofa and two identical gigantic reclining chairs in the living room, and pretty much nothing else will fit in there because it is actually a really small room. All of the rooms in our little terrace house are small, but Mum and Dad have furnished them as if they are part of a large, detached house.

  When I am little my father is the one who barbecues on summer evenings. Mum and our neighbour Gunilla sit on the leather sofa and drink rosé and listen to Agneta Fältskog singing ABBA’s ‘The Heat is On’. Gunilla works in the make-up department at Domus and I always think she looks pretty in her make-up. She is always tanned and has pink nails. When Gunilla is out of earshot, Dad says bad things about Domus, because Konsum and Blåvitt are the most pathetic things he knows. He votes for the moderates and him and Mum only shop at Ica.

  I do not like it when he talks about Gunilla and Domus in that condescending way because I like Gunilla. But Dad uses that voice when he talks about a lot of the neighbours. He puts fillet of beef on the grill and makes Béarnaise sauce and says, ‘That bloke thinks he’s somebody.’

  Gunilla lives with a man named Tommy and sometimes they barbecue together with Mum and Dad. Tommy and Dad drink cocktails from identical crystal glasses like JR in Dallas and we get crisps and Fanta. Dad sleeps heavily in the morning and as usual, jumping on the bed does not help; he barely moves. Mum packs juice and crackers in a basket and bikes with us to the city park. When we get home, Dad is still sleeping. Mum gets angry because breakfast is still on the table and the cheese is all sweaty. She goes upstairs and wakes him up and I hear him yell Stupid bitch! Go to hell! I take Kajsa and show her the dead bird I found under the apple tree next to the rubbish bins.