Lagom
Lagom (Swedish) — not too much and not too little, but just the right amount of anything.
“Forty dollars?!”
Therese shuffled her feet awkwardly from her place beside the sofa, an incredulous Dannie looking up at her with his mouth agape. She didn’t know why she’d brought it up at all, honestly — they shared everything with each other, sure, but already this encounter with Carol was something she wanted to clutch to her chest and hide from the world as one would an embarrassing dream. It’s not that much, she wanted to say, felt the words prying at the confines of her head… but it was. To them, to their apartment with its peeling walls and the rush they both felt when they found sales at the supermarket, it was.
“I’m sorry, okay?”
She cast her mind back to the look on the cashier’s face, that hanging head, those drooping eyes.
“It was a flash decision.”
Dannie’s expression softened now to one of bewildered pity, shuffling along the sofa in an invitation for Therese to come and sit. She folded into the aged cushions, sighing, before Dannie shifted to slip his arm around her shoulders. Sinking quietly into his embrace, she closed her eyes momentarily before the thoughts of Carol came flooding back in. Had it simply been a ploy to impress her? Therese hated the idea, but it wasn’t exactly far from what the truth could well have been — look at me, look at the money I have to freely spend, look at everything I’m not. The flinch that she hadn’t even tried to conceal as she handed the money over, though; that was the truth. She pitied him. She saw herself. Dannie patted her awkwardly on the shoulder before reaching behind her to grab the remote, pointing it vaguely in the direction of the old TV in the notorious question that often rode the coattails of such a gesture.
“Anything you wanna watch?”
A repressed sigh made its way past Therese’s lips. If Dannie noticed it, he pretended not to, staring resolutely as he did at the TV.
“I’ll probably just get some sleep.”
His brown eyes found hers in the darkness, gaze slipping momentarily to the clock in the corner. It was 1am, Therese knew, and this had to be a reasonable excuse at this hour. Still, there was doubt in his gaze.
“Are you sure? There are some new movies…”
She could see his mind raking through its own archives in search of a film to watch, two hours of anything to keep them both distracted, and coming up empty. There was that familiar droop in his posture; a defeat.
“I’ll be okay, Dannie. I’m just tired.”
With the reluctant nod that came, a few strands of his hair flopped down onto his forehead. She could see the wariness in his features; the ulcered corner of his lip bitten just one too many regretful times, the faint frown lines that caressed the edges of his eyes, the tense set of his constantly grinding jaw. Neither of them had quite recovered from the events of two months ago, and she was fairly sure that it would be a considerable amount of time before either of them ever did. Grazing a hand across his cheek in a platonic action reserved only for her closest friend, she nodded.
“I’ll be okay.”
An hour had passed now and still, Therese’s eyes were plastered unblinkingly open by the memory of her encounter with Carol Aird. She whispered the name again now, savouring the way that air simply seemed to taste sweeter as it wrapped itself around the word. There was that unmistakeable fervour that came with releasing the syllables, trapped within its own confines by the rush of cautionary withdrawal that willed her to keep the words safe — similar, in precedent, to scattered ‘I love you’s that become so abundant in one’s life that the fluttering sacredness of the idea of love itself became ordinary. Familiar. She did not simply want Carol’s name to be familiar. She wanted to be embroiled in the tension between the allure of its owner and the danger of its repercussions; to wring it like a permeated rag in her mind until it dripped with the premise of everything it couldn’t be; to twist it around and around until any derivation that could be drawn from the word was thus drawn, etched into the darkened walls of her head. Carol Aird. Carol Aird. Therese fell asleep with a hand between her legs and a name between her lips, her breaths steep and desperate in the cool night air.
Four days later, and Therese had not yet told Dannie about Carol. The lie that wove itself from the threads of her guilt was one of self-assumed forgetfulness, of a reluctance to tell him what had happened after his outburst at the forty dollars — but the truth was there, certainly, a blade ready to slice at the deceitful tapestry that Therese had put together. Carol was hers. The encounter, at least, was hers. The book rested on her windowsill, pressed golden lettering glinting in the sunlight whenever Therese moved from her place on the bed. Next to it, a card. Her card. Therese pushed herself off of the bed, slipping a nail underneath the card in the action of lifting it off of the window. She cast a silent glance towards her landline, untouched for however many weeks it had been, and then back down to the blue rectangle in front of her. Aird Publishing & Co. The lettering was thin and symmetrical, white on blue proving to be a successful feature of the slogan’s design.
Therese brushed her finger over the raised sections where the number and email address resided, a decision forming itself in her head before she could put up a single argument against it. Pretend. If Carol had never read the book, what was to stop Therese bluffing her way through the plot? It would be a reasonable excuse, certainly, better than anything else she’d been able to come up with — there simply was no stopping Therese as she sat down next to the desk where the phone resided. She grasped at the dusty plastic of what may as well have been a relic at this point, in the new technological era that was 2015, pressing the first few digits into the keypad before rational thought could get the better of her. With her finger resting over the penultimate integer, Therese paused. She hadn’t predicted this, certainly; this shortening of breath, this parched mouth, these shaking hands. It was now or never, though, she dared to suppose, jabbing her thumb into the remaining buttons. Silence. A muffled click, as the call went through. A ring.
The battle was almost lost, for a moment, her hand darting reflexively to the hang up button with little warning other than a jolt of caution. Don’t get lost in this. It was too late for those kinds of subconscious naggings, though; she was never going to turn off of this treacherous road. Three rings, now, and before butterflies could begin their ordinary routine of dancing around her stomach until she found a way to shut them up, a voice. Her voice. It was all that Therese could do to hold herself upright in the emptiness of her room.
“…Hello?”
Her breath was lost as that same, silken voice dripped down the line. Not even the crackle of the background noise could have quietened the thumping of Therese’s heart; she wouldn’t have been surprised if Carol had been able to hear her pulse quickening, so omniscient as she appeared to be.
“Hi, it’s me.”
It’s me? Is that it? There was silence from Carol on the other end of the phone and for a fleeting moment Therese was worried she’d hung up, tired of the relentless cold calls that tended to plague New York.
“Um, Therese. As in, that’s who’s calling.”
That same crushing mortification that had enveloped her in the bookshop was back, a pleading inner critic begging her to just stop speaking like an embarrassed child at a poetry recital. An agonising few seconds passed, Carol’s breaths now just about audible over the phone.
“Well then, Therese. I was beginning to think you weren’t going to call.”
It had only been four days, hadn’t it? A small flutter of something that could have been hope lit itself upon a spark in Therese’s stomach, butterflies weaving their patterns across her thoughts. The mere idea that Carol had been waiting for this conversation as avidly as Therese had been was enough to set her hands shaking again, the phone trembling against her cheek.
“I was beginning to think you weren’t going to answer.”
Possibly the first cogent sentence that had come out of Therese’s mouth so far, it danced in the air between them both as she leaned back against the wall. She heard the faint parting of lips from Carol’s end of the call; a smile.
“How was the book?”
Shit. The book that she had promised to read and hadn’t read, the only excuse that she’d had to call Carol in the first place. There were two options here; bullshit her way out of this with a vague plot summary and a garbled description, or put it down completely so that Carol wouldn’t read it and figure out her lie. A brief moment passed between them as Therese considered her options, the odds stacking further and further up against her.
“It was alright.”
If Carol sensed her uncertainty, she didn’t comment on it, choosing instead to make a nebulous sound that could have either been passive acceptance or disappointment. Therese’s eyes shut, desperate to make an impression slightly more positive than the struggling millennial she had presented thus far. Sensing the hesitation down the phone, she spoke again.
"I mean, it was good."
Another pause, and maybe Carol wasn't liking what she was saying. When had she ever been so unsure of herself?
"...Not good. Bad. Mediocre."
If it hadn't been obvious that she was bluffing before, it definitely was now.
“Mediocre?”
Swallowing, Therese nodded — as if Carol could see her — the looming face of guilt already tugging its way into her vision, a puppet pulled by her strings. Nothing about this was mediocre. From the corner of her room, the book’s cover leered at her with its golden lettering.
“I was hoping you’d enjoy it. You payed the extra forty dollars for it, after all.”
Why did I throw forty dollars at him, Therese wondered, dwindling on the inherent bizarreness of all that this was.
“What did you think of the characters?”
Therese started, a painfully direct question shattering the defences that were already fraught with their own fragility. They were interesting wasn’t going to cut it because the next line of interrogation would inevitably come — ‘interesting how?’ — and there was no way that she could hold up this lie for so long.
“I haven’t read it.”
The truth was bound to come out eventually, but right now simply did not provide itself to be a great time. What was Carol going to think of her now? A charlatan with nothing better to do with her time than make up reviews for unread books — it certainly didn’t paint the best picture. A small huff of breath came down the line; exasperation, no doubt. Already, this was goodbye to the woman she’d never even seen in daylight. Therese shut her eyes, thunking the back of her head into the wall.
“I know.”
Therese glanced up as if Carol would be standing in front of her, that same knowing look written upon her face. This wasn’t necessarily how she’d seen the conversation going but as long as there was a conversation to be had at all, she would be satisfied.
“I knew as soon as you told me that the novel was alright. For one, it’s quite possible the least specific word that you could possibly have used — average, not too bad, nothing special. For another…”
The words flooded from Carol like water from a burst dam, as if speaking were as easy as breathing, to her. Perhaps it was.
“For another, I don’t think it’s particularly alright at all.”
Therese blinked. The words crowded themselves into her mind, replaying themselves over and over for a painstaking few seconds before they entered a realm that brought them at least some form of comprehensibility.
“You’ve… read the book?”
Carol laughed, then. It was reticent, Therese sensed — this wasn’t that throw your head back and laugh until there are tears streaming down your face kind of guffaw, but the sort of chuckle that you might release at a dinner party surrounded by people you have yet to acquaint. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. Briefly, surreptitiously, she shut her eyes and bathed in the sound as if it was sunlight, a velvet gauze draping itself over every other noise within hearing range.
“I’ve read the book.”
Still wrapped in that robe of euphoria, Therese’s eyebrows knitted together, trying to tesselate the pieces of this ever-stretching puzzle. A silence settled between them until Carol spoke again.
“I gave you my card, Terez-not-Tereese,” she murmured, making an informal mockery of the name’s French-tinged pronunciation, “because I wanted you to call me. That’s all, I suppose.”
I wanted you to call me. This wasn’t about the book. This had never been about the book. Therese’s mouth hung open, her mind reeling from the joint shock of both Carol’s revelation and the way she had said her name. If they were to become more than just familiar faces to each other, she was going to have to get used to it.
“…Oh.”
There was a rustle of fabric from Carol’s end as she settled back into the chair she was most likely sitting in, a deep sigh settling between them.
“So where did you grow up, Therese?”
Hours had passed, and yet not once had either woman glanced at a clock or a phone to gauge the time. It could have been months that they sat there, divulging their own life stories and savouring every new detail one learned about the other. Therese had chosen to step around the more troubled aspects of her childhood — an abusive father, an alcoholic mother, a social worker who did little more than hand her a packet of gummy bears should she come in with fresh bruise on her alabaster cheeks. Each question about her childhood had been answered truthfully, of course, but there were always details spared.
Carol, in turn, had grown up in Illinois; a town called Hinsdale, just west of Chicago. Therese listened as Carol gleefully recounted her childhood, painting these wonderful pictures of ice skating on flooded fields and sitting on the roof of her house with her father until the sun had come up. The smile was almost audible through the phone, and it was with a settling dread that Therese found her eyes beginning to droop shut. For the first time that evening, she flicked out her wrist to pull the sleeve back from her watch, immediately startled by the fact that midnight had long passed. Had they been talking for that long? Involuntarily, she let out a muffled yawn disguised immediately as a cough; but Carol heard. She paused her joyous disquisition on how her mother had always made the best blueberry muffins, releasing a rather startled breath.
“Shit, Therese, have I been keeping you awake?”
Her tone was apologetic almost to the point of pity, and Therese was quick to leap from her reverie in response.
“Of course not! No, it… this has been great. I barely noticed the time passing.”
Carol sighed, just about satisfied with the reply but clearly wound up nonetheless.
“Me neither.”
Therese leaned sideways into the chest of drawers where the phone usually sat, her head resting contentedly on the aged wood.
“I guess this is goodnight, then.”
Therese heard the words coming out of her mouth and hated them with a passion she wasn’t even aware she laid claim to — all she wanted to do was sit here on her numb legs and map out the winding pathways of Carol’s mind, losing herself down the darkened alleyways of joy and recollection.
“Therese—”
Therese was silent, her name on the other woman’s lips eliciting no audible reply but for the quiet gasp that echoed through the room. She waited for Carol’s next words, her heart fluttering in a way that was becoming rather more familiar than Therese was used to.
“Before you go… would it be too forward of me to ask for your address? If, if that’s not too overbearing. If it’s not too much.”
The smile that left dimples in Therese’s pale cheeks was entirely unprecedented on her behalf, so breathlessly euphoric as she suddenly felt. Never once throughout this phone call had she been expecting Carol to make the first move and her mind had been partially distracted by how she would bring up the question all night. A weight, lifted. A grin, broadened.
“It’s not too much, at all. It’s perfect.”
There was a silence that settled between the women, so unlike any silence either had ever experienced before that it was almost startling. This was one fraught with the intertwined sensations of both mutual understanding and a tension that was almost palpable. Therese could almost smell Carol’s perfume already. Carefully, she rattled off her address to Carol, ignoring the pang of doubt that came with the idea of such a sophisticated woman being introduced to Therese’s deteriorating apartment. That would be a problem for tomorrow. And so, trapped in the wintry confines of a December night, Carol took down an address that wasn’t her own, running her fingers over the dark ink as it dried. On the other end of the line, Therese sat, her smile washed slowly away by the inevitable tide of fatigue.
Neither woman could still the pounding of their steadily beating hearts.