Free The Glitter Scene by Monika Fagerholm Page A

handbasket, he becomes nothing. And many years later, 1989, then he is around thirty-five, he is completely dried up, kaput. Comes “home,” to the cousin’s property and ends things. Also there, in that cursed cousin’s house. Maybe a logical fate—
    A sad story, a story about the unnecessary.
    Tobias who stands by and watches. Remembers “Karin” too, not often but sometimes. Her desertion, and his. The baroness who soon after the catastrophe said confused, stammering: “That is what you do. First. Insteadof doing what you should be doing. Go to the city with ‘Astrid’ ”—that is the cousin’s mama’s real name, which only the baroness has ever used—“and buy things.” As if it would make things easier. Art supplies for Bengt, a radio cassette player. Yes, it is “Astrid” who suddenly wants it but it is the baroness who pays for it. She tells Tobias about Astrid who had a tin can filled with coins in her authentic checkered milkman shopping bag, which she had insisted on taking with her on their visit to the city; she had suddenly taken the can out in the appliance store and opened the lid and poured the contents out on the counter. “Is this enough?” With tears in her eyes, and the baroness explains that it was first in that moment that she understood how, behind the cousin’s mama’s calm, sorrowful façade, such a daze had been hidden, that she herself had fallen silent. And in some way also understood that she should do something. Not just for Bengt, but for everyone, for everything. Those children, so defenseless. But at the same time she realized the opposite. She could not, cannot—has enough problems of her own: Eddie de Wire and the guilty conscience about her own shortcomings, everything that went wrong.
    The cousin’s mama who had stood in the shop like a child, chasms that had opened for the baroness. But the only thing she had been capable of doing was collecting the coins and getting out her checkbook and paying for that gadget—at the same time as she hated herself, her checks, her money, her possibilities.
    Everything you should have done but did not while there was still time. “Time is the time we do something else, Tobias,” the baroness had said to Tobias on the veranda and said that there was a poem that went like thatwhich had suddenly popped into her head and Tobias never hated her like he loved her in that moment.
    •
    “WHERE IS EVERYONE? I WANT TO PLAAY!” Doris out in the yard again, had become a bit bored with just the cousin’s mama and the crosswords in the kitchen. And the music:
I go up to the mountains with my lonely heart
—a pop song of the day as good as any other, which she hums where she is standing there on the steps, looking around with a hardtack sandwich in hand.
    “WHERE?” Doris yells. Deadly silence. No one answers Doris. But then Doris catches sight of Rita and Solveig and Bengt on the hill on the First Cape.
    “I’m comiiing!” And Doris heads off in the direction of the path that leads up to the hill. But no one stays there and waits for her. Bengt disappears and Rita and Solveig make their way down on the other side, leaving the garden and the house that will soon be occupied by others:
let’s get out of here
as they say in the District.
    Enough of that. But also, enough of the twin-unity. What happens happens there even though no one notices until it is impossible to hide it any longer. A crack that becomes a sore that is widened until it can be seen by day, red and gaping. Doris starts running up the hill.
    Rita and Solveig walk down, as said. You can see them strolling down the hill, out of Doris’s sight, leaving the garden and the house that will soon be inhabited by other people,
let’s get out of here
.
    Lose yourself. Because what you are, have been together, is not good enough.
    And you have started hating what you are
.
    The game. The Winter Garden, on the hill. Can bedetermined. Silly. Realized. The utopia. More fantasy