Hyggelig I
Hyggelig (Danish) — a warm, friendly, cozy, delightfully intimate moment or thing.
“And you didn’t pick up? Even though you were right there?”
Abby’s voice was fraught with a familiar mixture of exasperation and incredulousness and she leaned back into the sofa, balling up another roll of newspaper and throwing it in the general direction of the fire. Carol shrugged, tipping the last dregs of wine from her glass.
“I was tired.”
A raised eyebrow on her best friend’s behalf, seeing through the excuse as easily as if the blonde had simply held up a cellophane sheet and hoped that would do. She’d been doing this for all of the twenty-four years that Abby had known her, and today was no different. Another façade to draw slowly down.
“Too tired to… pick up a phone?”
The side-eye that Carol shot her was poisonous — all in good faith, of course — and Abby grinned, feigning innocence.
“Yes, Abby, too tired to pick up the phone. It was late.”
The interrogation had begun.
“What time was it?”
“Late.”
“How late?”
“Late enough.”
“And what counts as late enough?”
Carol was failing to mention that it had only been about midday — not late at all — but pigs could only dream of flying if she was going to let that slip to Abby.
“Late enough that I don’t remember, Abigail.”
Abby set both their wine glasses down on the table in front of them, scooting closer to Carol as the fire flickered on.
“Tell me about her.”
“I swear to god, Abby, I will throw you into that fire if you ask me another question.”
“Not a question. An order. Tell me about her.”
The room seemed to shrink as Carol racked her brains for something simple that she could say about Therese that wouldn’t lead to another round of this unorthodox third degree.
“She’s young. Brunette. Green eyes, but they can look darker sometimes in the right lighting. Small. She only comes up to just above my shoulders—”
Abby threw herself backwards, splaying herself exasperatedly out on the sofa.
“Jesus Christ Carol, I’m not taking a police sketch. No offence to Thereese—”
“Therese.”
Abby’s eyes glinted, the speed at which Carol had come to this young woman’s defence a small but rather significant detail uncovered.
“What did I say?”
“The-reeeese. It’s Therese.”
“Fine. No offence to Therese, but I couldn’t give less of a shit about what shade her eyes are in the right lighting. What’s she like?”
She sat up now, staring Carol down in a joyous standoff neither had seen coming.
“She’s… nice.”
Abby shifted as if to say something, a rebuttal against such a mundane word as nice, before she realised how carefully Carol seemed to be choosing the next thoughts to say out loud. For the first time this evening, she held her tongue.
“But nice in a sort of contemporary way. She seems to just exist in perfect time with the rest of the world and it’s not something I’ve really seen much before.”
The fire crackled, and both women started. Abby was worried that the reverie had snapped with the wood, but judging by the look on Carol’s face, worry was not a necessary emotion.
“She collects books, too, in one of the most obscure ways I’ve ever seen before. Twenty-six piles around her house, stacked in alphabetical order but in a fashion that looks absolutely chaotic until she actually explains it to you. You have to be standing in the right place. I think that’s deliberate.”
She’s enthralled, Abby thought, the word eliciting a quiet pang of jealousy from the part of her that was still slightly enthralled with Carol. A small part of her, though. She’d been ignoring it for this long and in the pursuit of her best friend’s happiness, she’d keep on ignoring it until it disappeared. Carol continued, her eyes sparkling in a way Abby didn’t know if she recognised.
“So is everything she seems to do. It doesn’t really seem like it at first but when you get to know her, it starts to show. She’s a different person up close.”
Carol’s eyes seemed to refocus as she glanced back down at Abby, shaking her head in a failed attempt at nonchalance.
“And that’s that, I suppose.”
Her mouth moved unnaturally around the syllables, as if there was so much more she wanted to say. A coaxing silence enveloped them for several seconds, the auburn-haired woman sitting as still as possible so as not to distract Carol from her spiel. The silence stretched, however, and it was clear that someone was going to have to say something to distract from the irony of past lovers discussing present infatuations.
“That’s that.”
The words were soft enough as they rolled from her lips that Abby wasn’t sure if the blonde had heard her. Not jealousy, so much as the slowly dissipating regret that she hadn’t fought for Carol. Seeing the hope that clouded her countenance at the thought of this Therese, however, the thought occurred that melancholy togetherness wasn’t particularly worth fighting for, at all. This, this almost-happiness, could suffice.
“Call her.”
Carol’s eyes flew up from the hem of her shirt that she’d been toying nervously with, unsure for a moment as to whether or not she’d heard Abby right.
“I’m sorry?”
“Call Therese. Right now. Ask her to come over tomorrow.”
The reticent look in Carol’s gaze spoke volumes. She opened her mouth to decline Abby’s out of the blue offer, interrupted all too soon by an apparent method to her madness.
“Come on, Carol. I bet Sappho has a poem on U-Haul lesbians written somewhere.”
The blonde paused.
"I don't know. What if she doesn't even want to be disturbed right now?"
Abby’s eyes flashed as she tugged Carol up towards the landline that she had so many times referred to as dated and anachronistic, so much clunkier than your mobile. Here, suddenly, it was the holy grail.
“Only one way to find out.”
The line was already ringing. Carol drew her thumb across her neck in the universally appreciated notion of I’m going to fucking kill you, but even she knew it was too late now to simply hang up and pray. Abby stood there, her hands practically clapping themselves together with glee. Be nice, she mouthed, stepping back as if that put her out of either eyeshot or hearing range. It did not.
Therese’s hands fumbled as she went to pick up the phone. The number she had already memorised flashed up on the screen and for a terrifying moment she was convinced that she’d drop it and lose the only conversation she might have for days — she didn’t drop it, however, and all that was left to do was press the accept call button. Three rings passed.
“Hello?”
“Is this Therese?”
Fuck. Carol’s mouth went dry, her tongue hanging like a deadweight against her teeth. Therese answered her question, tentatively — this is Therese, who’s calling? — and she glanced up at Abby, daggers morphing into pleas for help. What do I say?
Abby rolled her eyes, disbelieving that the woman she’d always thought as the very picture of sophistication was this powerfully tongue-tied. Talk to her! She mouthed the words back, miming a chattering person with her right hand. The look she received back was so laced with sarcastic gratitude that it was difficult to believe one person could pack that much of any emotion into a glance, and she grinned.
“Therese. It’s Carol. I—”
Carol hesitated, her mouth half-open, words trapped within. Abby made a surreptitious keep going motion with her fingers as Carol stood, trying to summon up the words which would not come. The pause stretched in the same tense fashion that a rubber band might; much longer and the blonde was certain it would snap.
“I was wondering if… would you like to come visit me, this Sunday?”
Tomorrow! Carol was sure that Abby’s whisper-screech could have been heard in Mexico and she shot a dangerous look in her friend’s direction, shaking her head in a firm no. Tomorrow seemed to soon. Too clingy, perhaps. Their rendezvous could surely wait three more days.
The moment of hesitation that plagued the phone call drew a line of worry across Carol’s pale forehead. Abby watched it happen, engrossed in the effect this mysterious woman seemed to have on the blonde. Not even she had been able to cradle Carol in such hopeful arms as Therese now could.
“Yes.”
One word — more than enough. Therese’s faint chuckle was audible after her ready proclamation, and for a moment Carol paused, deliberating the peculiar certainty of the answer. No I’ll see if I’m free, no give me a minute to check, just yes. Nothing else. What a strange girl she is.
“Wonderful. I can come and pick you up, if you’d like, or you can make your way over on your own terms.”
Abby cringed, noticing the deliberate use of wonderful rather than just great, or nice. Was Carol putting up some sort of façade for Therese? In all the time — twenty-five years, now — that Abby had known her, despite Carol’s decidedly patrician upbringing, she’d never been one to mince words. They’d studied Orwell at school and the blonde had always stuck by one of his six rules of English — never use a long word where a short one will do. Wonderful. It was strange; her fascination.
“Oh no, it’s okay. I can just drive myself over. What’s your address, again?”
As Carol rattled off the location that Abby knew all too well, the auburn-haired woman stole from the room, all too suddenly aware that perhaps this call was far more… precious, perhaps, than Carol was letting on. Outside, she grabbed the two wine glasses, tracing her finger around the rim of the one which — judging by the faint lipstick stains — was not her own. A small part of her — a jealous part? — deliberated warning Carol against this relationship. She was clearly in deep, now, after only having met up in person twice with this Therese, and that same small part wondered who she’d really be protecting. Carol, Therese, or myself?
“Do you reckon you can keep out of my way for the whole of Sunday?”
In the time that it had taken for Abby’s existential crisis to both find its roots and reach its climax, Carol had slipped back into the room. Her question was quite clearly a joke, delivered as it was with that familiar twinkle of those cerulean irises, and yet the phrasing still pricked a little as it stomped ungracefully across the carpet. Keep out of my way.
“I’ll try my best.”
Abby grinned, the sarcastic drawl that she was so used to dropping into sentences lingering around the syllables. It was futile, she knew, to try and get in the way of anything Carol wanted — for now, it was all she could do to sweep her reservations under the rug. The desire that she had once felt so desperately for Carol was morphing now into desire to see her happy, and it was all she could do to hope that Therese would be the solution that Abby had so yearned to be.
Therese’s car sat, stationary, in a foreign driveway. She’d stopped paying attention to the radio long ago, and it was only now that she tuned in to Katy Perry’s voice echoing quietly in through the speakers. I kissed a girl and I liked it…
Fitting. She twisted her keys out of the ignition, cutting the music off before she could hear any more about the cherry chapstick of the girl in question. Carol’s house loomed in front of her, a vast cream-bricked mansion that must have been at least a dozen times the size of her now-dwarfed Manhattan flat. The towering front door sat under three mullioned windows, a crenelated ‘porch’ of sorts that was just as likely to adorn this building as it was Baskerville Hall. The house — mansion, castle — was, in so many ways, Carol; as mysterious as it was powerful, as timeless as it was bold. In the silence that the ticking engine left, Therese gawped. She’d known Carol was rich, but she hadn’t quite understood the reality of quite what rich meant in this scenario — she was loaded. The kind of person Therese might have once taken a dislike to based solely on the sheer extent of her wealth. The gap between her and Carol seemed ever stretching and Therese ignored the tugging feeling that she had now grown accustomed to at any mention of the juxtaposition between Carol’s money and Therese’s… lack thereof. This house seemed not worthy of doing much but making her feel worse. And she lives here alone?
Sunday had come far quicker than anticipated — in between searching for jobs, Therese’s hours had found themselves stocked full of daydreams, and minutes seemed to pass just as quickly as seconds ever could. As an ironic reminder, the notification pinged through on her iPhone, flashing up at the top of her screen. CAROL!!!!! (6pm!!) She smiled at the recollection of how efficiently she’d slammed down the landline and typed the date into her mobile, switching between phones as if it were an ordinary thing to do. The abundance of exclamation marks had simply seemed necessary at the time and as her stomach flipped now, it appeared that they still were.
Heaving a sigh, Therese pushed open the car door, strangely conscious of not making too much noise as if a ruckus might send the entire mansion tumbling down like an avalanche. Now that she was out into the open air, though, she realised just how still the atmosphere actually was — her seven month stint in New York had gotten her used to a constant background hum and here, without one, it came close to physically disturbing her. Not a single horn resounded through the silence. Not a single voice tore the thread. Her footsteps echoed as she made her way to the door, heartbeat the loudest thing for miles. She knocked, and the world startled with her.