Butterflies in November

FORTY-NINE

The sun sets over the harbour in the mid-afternoon, as the boats unload their catch. There isn’t much to see, travellers passing through here would say. But they’d be greatly mistaken, because they don’t know what goes on behind closed doors.

I’m beginning to be able to picture myself living here with my boy and to be able to imagine that, in fact, I’ve been living here for the past thirty-three years and that, even though I may have gone away for brief spells every now and then, my life is rooted here. This creates a new feeling in me that grows in these surroundings.

Bare-footed in my plimsolls, I await my fisherman on the pier. I spot his blue sailor’s sweater in the wheelhouse of the boat heading for the harbour. The yellow fish glisten, yes, that’s right, the fish and sea water are soaked in oil. He stands at the bow, as the boat pulls into land, coming home, smudged in fishy scales and slime.

The men look at me in wonderment. The other women are at home preparing dinner and getting the children ready for bed. I don’t have to prepare my child for bed, he’s big enough now and rehearsing with his band, I think.

“You’re lucky to have a man like him,” says another sailor’s wife to me, “when mine’s not at sea, he spends most of his time down on the shore.”

That’s how I picture it all.

A man walks off the boat and crosses the gangway in two steps. He reeks of fish and his fingertips are salty when he slips them into my mouth, one after another, to make me lick them. A slightly odd ritual to an outsider’s eye, but that’s how it goes.

Afterwards we draw the curtains his mother made for the windows. The teenager is still practising on his bass guitar in the garage, I imagine, which is why we allow ourselves to draw the curtains.

“Are you going to eat bare-chested?” I ask the man of my life, once we’re seated at the table with the freshly pan-fried catfish.

“Hang on, does it matter? It’s just the two of us, you and me, right?” He’s forgotten the teenager, just like I have.

“Yes, but I was brought up to expect people to come fully clothed and combed to the table and to talk together. Dad often told me, my mother and brother stories at the table and we’d also take it in turns to tell each other how our days went. One day Dad told us the story of an unemployed pianist, who often lay awake at night. On one of his sleepless nights he invented a special screw for the propeller of an airplane, or a bolt or something simple like that, that made him filthy rich. And not just him, but three generations of the Jack Wilson family.”

“You don’t have to tell me all the stories in the world just to get me to put a shirt on.”

“And Mum used to doll herself up before he came home for dinner, put on lipstick. Then she’d put me in front of her so that I’d run over to him. She always let my brother be. I sometimes felt it was a bit unnecessary to be pulled out of a game and to be appointed as my father’s welcoming committee. It wasn’t that my joy was faked, since my days were pretty uneventful anyway, and it was always better to get a visit from Dad in the evening and night than nothing at all.”

“Would you like a little house reading maybe, to read from the Bible?”

First row. It’s the conflict of opposites that keeps life going. I admit that I find it difficult to get the adolescent to help out at dinner time. Nevertheless, I clear the plates and keep the food warm, in case he re-emerges from the garage before we go to bed.

Afterwards, my husband empties the washing machine, stretching socks and shaking T-shirts before hanging them up on the line. We laugh a lot, though, on most evenings and sometimes into the night. Too bad if we sleep in an unmade bed at night. The boy hasn’t come back by the time we turn in. Sometimes we also have a giggle in the morning, except when we say goodbye; he’s always surprised to see how sorry I am to see him go.

We’ll be seeing each other again this evening, at seven-thirty, he says, trying to lighten the separation. The boy isn’t up yet. I’m not even sure he ever left the garage last night.

I lean back in the deckchair under the porch and put down my book. It’s four o’clock and darkness is falling again. Tumi is in view puttering about on the side of the deck in his rain gear and balaclava with four baking moulds. I’ve got the fourth pair of dry stockings ready in my hands. He smells of cold, wet clay when he comes in, the scent of stripped soil. His mouth is smudged in brown, but he shakes his head when I ask him if he’s been eating clay. He opens his mouth as evidence. There’s also sand and soil on his molars, maybe he needs iron or magnesium; I must remember that when I do my shopping tomorrow.

I’m beginning to be able to imagine that I went away for seventeen years and have now come back to settle here, that this is where my home is, that I have a life here. I’m alone and move into my sailor’s place on Monday.

Everything at his place is in shades of yellow and brown and his Sailor’s Day badge from two years ago is still pinned to the beige curtains in the kitchen, which his mom sewed for him when he moved in. On the living-room floor there’s a log of driftwood, which is used as a stand for a bottle and four glasses. Bit by bit, I discreetly begin to make changes, move things around, putting some into boxes, and use the opportunity when kids come around to collect things for a raffle to give them the Christmas gifts he received from his mom. The last article to go is the intertwined porcelain hands holding a flame. But I still don’t have the courage to move the ship in the bottle yet.

For a long period, he makes no remarks about any of this, but then one day, after three months, as we’re eating chicken in coconut milk with corn, beans and rice, because he’d rather not have fish, he says between mouthfuls:

“Feels a bit empty around here, have you changed anything?”

It has taken me four months to muster up the courage to mention the kitchen curtains, and I tread carefully.

“What’s wrong with those curtains?” he asks. “Mom made those and it was enough hassle getting them up. She went all the way to Reykjavík to buy that material and had to extend her stay by two days. My brother Daddi had to drive her all over the place until she finally found the fabric in Mjód. Then she insisted on sewing them here, so she moved in with the sewing machine and took over the entire living room. Two of her friends helped her to put them up. What’s wrong with the curtains?”

I stroke him like a cat, gently running my fingers over his tummy until he becomes totally docile. Afterwards he tells me that I can change the curtains if I want to, but that I needed to explain this to his mom, who already views me with plenty of suspicion because I’m skinny, boyish-looking and divorced and I make a living correcting papers.

“I feel there’s no need to have curtains in the kitchen,” I say. “Besides, there’s nothing but the sea in front of us. I feel I lose sight of the horizon with those frilly drapes up there.”

“So you want the place to look like a building site?” he says.

He’s gradually changing.

“What are you reading?” he asks. I tell him about the subject matter of the book as he looks back at me with an unfathomable air.

“I don’t see any point in reading a book that you’ve read before me, because then I’d be experiencing it after you, but I’d be willing to try being a woman and to see what it’s like to give birth to a child. I think it must be a totally unique experience to split into two,” says my muscular, macho sailor as he slips into a blue salt-beaten sweater that his mother knitted for him and must never be washed. He’s going off to sea.