American by Day Read online

  In a small black refrigerator she finds tiny bottles of Johnny Walker Red. The price may be high by local standards, but it is far lower than what she’d pay at a bar in Oslo. And this is closer. She takes two.

  Barefoot, Sigrid pads down the hall to a blue room with an icemaker and vending machines filled with chocolate and chips. She places the bucket on a plastic grate and presses the button above it. Ice is hurled into her bucket as though by something trapped and angry. She freights a small mountain of ice back to her room.

  Strutting toward her in the narrow hallway is a dark-skinned girl too young for a bra and wearing jeans that are too tight for her age.

  “Hello,” Sigrid says.

  The girl eyes her quizzically and strides by as if Sigrid has made a lewd remark.

  Back in her room, she tries to connect to the internet on her tablet. It costs $12.95 for four hours. She decides to pay, only to learn she can’t because the software does not allow her to enter a non-American address.

  Sigrid opens her suitcase for a nightgown and realizes she didn’t bring one. What is inside, however, is a book with a faded cloth cover that is so worn, the golden lettering has flaked off. There is a handwritten letter from her father folded and placed inside the cover with the title page.

  “Sigrid: This book was published in 1835 in French. In 1838 it was published by Adlard and Saunders in New York in English. Mine’s a later reprint, of course. It is called Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. He was sent to the United States by the French government when he was twenty-six years old to study prisons, which, at the time, were thought to be among the world’s most progressive and humane. You can read it on the plane over. There’s a new edition with an introduction by the wonderful Daniel J. Boorstin but I don’t have a copy of that. In any case, this book will put your head in the right place.”

  “Oh, pappa,” she says, tossing the book back into the suitcase.

  In bed, trousers off, she drinks her whiskey on the rocks; she uses the ice liberally. The TV is on a sideboard across from the foot of her bed. As she’s looking straight down her body, it appears as though she’s standing on its gray and bulbous screen. She wiggles her toes to the left, and then to the right, and then whatever way she wants, dancing on the little glass moon. Her body is under her complete control but she has no idea how. Her imagination, however, might not be.

  Sigrid spreads her legs a little wider and tries to feel—for a fleeting moment—what a tryst in a place like this might be like. She pictures the kind of man who would probably be here with her. It is not the best way to start a fantasy. She might as well have picked the steward from the airplane because he was beautiful but her own sense of hyper-realism intervenes and produces a more appropriate lover: A man, eyes closed, up on his elbows, old enough to be concentrating on his own orgasm rather than hers, wears an expression of someone trying to hump a refrigerator up a flight of stairs. On her back, the gravity pulls her own cheeks taut, making her appear younger and thinner from his perspective. Unfortunately, from her perspective, that same gravity slides his old and thinning skin down his cheeks, creating jowls. His lips have fallen away from his teeth, turning his mouth into a black orifice from which something scarier than a groan might emerge. His face becomes redder for all the pumping and straining, and underneath it all is Sigrid, who is looking at this man from the same angle that the toilet sees the drunk.

  She crosses her legs at the ankles, shifting her attention to something more productive like wondering who Marcus’s girlfriend might have been and what had happened to them as a couple. In one letter she caught the first name: Lydia. But no last name. No details.

  What kind of woman would attract Marcus? What kind of woman would be attracted to him? Did both of these things even happen?

  Sigrid imagines Lydia with dark hair and brown eyes. She’s attractive but no model. They spend weekends in a rustic cabin two hours from the university, out in the woods by the Canadian border. Not by a lake. They wouldn’t have that kind of money. This place is more simple; a retreat. The walls are covered in books and board games, with blankets on the sofa and logs for a fire that are dry enough to light with a match. Lydia’s smile is more maternal than saucy. It would be no mystery to either of them—smart as they are—that Marcus is attracted to Lydia both for who she really is and who he needs her to be: the mother he lost. The lover he craves. The feel of home that envelops him like a scent and is all-encompassing but also proves elusive and ephemeral.

  Why would it have ended? Sigrid lies there and wonders. The obvious answer would be that Lydia wanted to be more than a projection of Marcus’s needs. She would have been happy to fill that void for him also, but not only. She was too mature, too much of an adult, to assume the role of savior or mother. She would have known, and perhaps even said, that she didn’t need a forty-six-year-old son. At her age—at Sigrid’s own age—she would have treated time as precious. And even if she were resigned to not having children, she would not have dismissed a chance at long-term happiness founded on a mutually appropriate relationship. Sigrid surmised that it would have been Lydia who raised the topic. Gently, perhaps, but with certainty. Marcus would only be truly attracted to a smart woman. And if she was smart, she would have taken seriously the obstacles rather than try to overcome them with romantic ideals and short-lived passions.

  And now, Sigrid thinks, Lydia is gone. Maybe she works at the university too. If she does, it means that every day she passes by his window on campus. He possibly glimpses her—purposefully, to hurt himself—at the café nearby where she likes to grade papers at a round table in the corner that no one else likes because once you sit there you’re stuck. Lydia, though, finds the crowd comforting.

  Sigrid places the spent whiskey glass on the end table by the ugly lamp. Really, she concedes: Who knows? She has nothing to go on. As far as she knows Lydia is a blond trucker shaped like a turnip.

  Sigrid falls asleep on top of the blanket without brushing her teeth.

  Not Home

  Copernicus knew the world was round. So did Galileo. Ferdinand Magellan actually circumnavigated the earth. But none of these men ever experienced jet lag. Not one. They couldn’t have possibly imagined it.

  Brussels and Geneva are both in the same time zone as Oslo: no jet lag. Sigrid also made two trips to Britain, which sets its clock a mere hour earlier than Europe. But a six-hour time difference after a day flight and a nearly sleepless night filled with whisky? This is something new.

  Sigrid wakes at four a.m. and, instead of feeling tired or hung over, is wide awake, her mind revving up like a motorbike.

  The hotel room is hot. She looks to the wide ivory air conditioner mounted near the ceiling; it’s producing noise but neither moving nor cooling the air. The curtains are hanging still, and a thin shiv of pre-dawn light cuts the fabric.

  For twenty minutes she pretends she might go back to sleep and she does try before suffering defeat.

  The shower is powerful and hot but the water itself is too soft and leaves her hair limp. Raw and steaming, she dresses in civilian clothing; no badge, no tie, no identity, no authority. It is the same as being naked.

  Breakfast is not served until seven and she doesn’t want to wait. The man at the checkout desk—a man with the right character to nightshifts—does not ask her about her stay. He processes her without looking up.

  It is shy of five in the morning as she walks the gray, perpendicular streets. This is not small-town America or even a city. She is in the outskirts. On every corner is a franchise. Each rises from the concrete in its own corporate colors and logos, architecturally oblivious to those around it, not unlike the train sets that Marcus would build when he was ten. She remembers how each one of them was a microcosm of happy people working at some establishment: a gas station, a police station, a fire station, a freight mover, a hospital.

  Here, at full scale, are the same institutions only grittier. As she pulls her suitcase behind her, lights are co
ming on at the places that serve coffee. Arby’s, Roy Rogers, Dunkin Donuts. None of these exist in Norway.

  Dunkin Donuts sounds familiar, as she’d passed one once in London. She also knows what a donut is because they sell them at the co-op supermarket near her apartment in Gamle Oslo. Whoever Roy Rogers might have been, his fame hasn’t crossed the ocean. And Arby, absent a family name, sounds too casual in his approach to food.

  She crosses the empty street to a parking lot where a pickup truck squats long and empty beside an eighteen-wheeler with too much chrome.

  Inside the white, orange, and pink dream of the donut hall, a fat man in a nylon jacket silently eats at a table affixed to the floor while a black girl pours cooking oil into a vat from a plastic jug almost too heavy for her to lift.

  “With you in a minute,” she says, not looking over.

  “Take your time,” Sigrid says.

  The girl places the jug below the deep fry and flicks some switches over the donut display, illuminating a palette of Disney-colored frostings.

  The girl does not look any sleepier than Sigrid feels. She must be accustomed to these hours.

  “Latte with sugar,” Sigrid asks. “And whatever he’s eating.” It is something with eggs and a bread product. It looks hot.

  “That’ll take five minutes.”

  “Got a newspaper?”

  The girl takes Sigrid’s money. “Down the block on the right. Otherwise, I think someone left one here last night on that back table there. I’ll call ya when the food’s done.”

  Sigrid sits herself at the table with the Sunday edition of the paper dated 10 August, which means no one cleared the table Monday, Tuesday, or this morning, either. She reads old news about Russia and Georgia going to war and one hundred and forty people being crushed to death in a human stampede at a Hindu Temple in Northern India; at least forty of them were children. Leading the headlines, though, is the U.S. presidential elections. Many are saying that Barack Obama will win. This strikes commentators as extremely important.

  Outside, fed and caffeinated, Sigrid pulls her luggage behind her and over the pitted streets as the first light of dawn rises behind the neon lights of the pawn shops and check-cashing offices. Trucks in the westbound lane pass her bearing Canadian plates. That country is even more of a mystery to her. Her only association is with Katarina Witt winning the figure skating Olympics in Calgary in ’88. As a young woman Sigrid thought that she’d never have a body like that; grace like that; be beloved like that. They were the thoughts of an adolescent. They turned out to be right.

  The bus station smells of urine. The ticket counter is closed, so Sigrid sits alone on a bench beside Gate 4. There is a taste in her mouth from the food or the milk that isn’t going away. Something she’s eaten since arriving has made her feel bloated.

  Two men approach and sit on the bench and Sigrid watches them. One wears beige trousers and a shirt that could never have been white. The other is late middle-aged and wears shorts and sneakers and a gym T-shirt over skinny shoulders and a round stomach. They don’t engage with her or each other. They didn’t look at the gate number or check their tickets. Their motion is routine, learned, and performed in the muscles. When they stop moving they look painted into place.

  The bus arrives. It halts with a hiss and shuts down so thoroughly, it becomes immediately derelict; the engine doesn’t even crackle from the heat.

  The driver looks like rotting fruit. Sigrid can tell she is in the last job she’ll ever have. She leaves for her break.

  More people arrive. Ten minutes later the driver is back looking twenty minutes older. She fires up the bus, which rumbles to life with the enthusiasm of an old man passing gas. The hydraulic doors seem to suck the passengers inside; a giant vacuum it clears the platform and removes all traces of humanity except the lingering smell.

  Sigrid, together with the accompanying passengers, sits like a convict looking out the window at places she hadn’t known existed before and even on seeing them, somehow, still doesn’t believe that they actually do.

  The bus ride lasts thirty-five minutes. She arrives with the sun flooding through her window, glinting off the step as she descends to the sidewalk. The morning is up now. The day is on. There is a glare from the map she will follow to Marcus’s home to find whatever might be waiting there.

  As far as she knows, Marcus has never had any real money. He didn’t come from it, didn’t respect it, and hadn’t pursued it. He has no special head for business and he considers the stock market a seductive playground of legalized gambling. He always rented an apartment or house and generally wasted any financial cushion he built from years of steady work on long periods of unemployment or underpaid idealistic efforts. He was not against material pleasures but he had no space for them in his life. Everything came and went. There was no point in becoming attached to a cup, to a vase, to a painting. Sigrid has always suspected that a steady relationship with a sensible woman might change all that—both by contributing to the household and also by holding him accountable for acting in a mature manner.

  Sigrid tried to be that sensible woman, if from a distance. She was more than prepared to vacate the position for a fresh candidate.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t want to help him. They corresponded once a month or so and spoke a few times a year. The tempo never increased, though, and the easy talk of their youth never returned. Yet she persisted because she loved him and because the strained relationship between Marcus and her father meant she must ensure their cohesion.

  If he married, Sigrid reasoned, all that might change. She could befriend the wife and a new alliance would form of adult women managing their childish men. It was a popular model.

  Now it’s a broken one.

  These days, Marcus is earning meager pay from the state university and he is subsidizing this new life choice with prior savings. As a financial strategy it is a death spiral and there is no indication about how he plans to turn this around. Sigrid doesn’t see a path for Marcus, middle-aged and without a doctorate or a list of published books and peer-reviewed articles, to a stable academic career. And if this is not his aspiration by working as an adjunct lecturer . . . what is he doing there?

  He had sent photos of his house to her by email about two years ago when he moved to teach the courses. She called him when the pictures arrived.

  “Why don’t you come home?” she’d asked him immediately.

  “You don’t like my new place?” Marcus had asked.

  “What are you doing over there? It’s been . . . how long?”

  “Eighteen years.”

  “You were planning to go for three.”

  “I got stuck.”

  Reaching the house from the bus stop involves a charmless walk over roads of rubble and stone, cigarette butts and beer cans. The houses lining the streets look condemned. Many have boarded windows and graffiti tags that are as indecipherable as hieroglyphs. Most of the children in the neighborhood are black and Latino, which she hadn’t expected from upstate New York, but then . . . she knows nothing of the place. This is a poor neighborhood that is adjacent to a better one, which abuts the state university—so says the map. She is being given odd looks as she drags the suitcase behind her. None seem threatening, only curious; as though her presence might portend something.

  Sigrid arrives on the corner near Marcus’s house and it is as bad as she’d feared. It is not the sort of place one is meant to stop because it is not the sort of place one is meant to be at all. This is a place you scurry past like a mouse hoping not to be noticed.

  As best as she can tell, the house was once white, but any proof of its original color has been covered over or long since flaked off. It is an achievement in ugly, whether by intent or negligence. The front is too narrow and the sides too wide. The slope of the roof is too severe and the windows are small and don’t align. The entire structure sits awkwardly on its own lot—not facing forward, as such, because there is nothing left to face.
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br />   The house has no immediate neighbors. Sigrid suspects that the other owners sold their land to developers or the city and only this guy had held out for the American dream, which is always one business deal away.

  Is this indicative of his state of mind and the condition of Marcus’s life? Is he inhabiting someone else’s failed dream? Or it is a waypoint—a stop to catch his breath before settling someplace where life could settle into a new permanence? Marcus has encamped, in this case, in a place where the streets and buildings around it clearly don’t want the house anymore. Whatever neighborhood it had once belonged in is now gone. A gray and concrete world has been erected around it, oppressing it, as though the city itself is a circling beast and is preparing for a slow kill.

  “Everything has potential,” Marcus had insisted when she questioned him about the house.

  “Well . . . to change, sure,” Sigrid had answered, “but not necessarily improve.”

  Having come this far, though, Sigrid has no choice but to approach it. As she pulls her black suitcase a small stone from the sidewalk wedges into the well between the top of the wheel and the frame.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” she says to it in English, as it’s an American stone.

  Sigrid half rolls, half drags the luggage behind her. Reaching the curb, she makes an effort to dislodge the pebble by first backing it up the other way—with the expectation that it might fall out—but on seeing how this does not work, she opts to assert herself by picking up the whole damn thing and thumping it on the ground. This works. However, it’s more abuse than the beast can take, and the suitcase surrenders the wheel along with the pebble.

  She drags the handicapped luggage, now irreparable, behind her as she approaches the house; the shade from the nearby overpass blocks the sun and bathes her in semidarkness.