The Nix(84)

“He would get angry.”

“Then what would happen?”

“I’ll tell you a story,” he said. And this was the story he told her: At a farm near Hammerfest, many years ago, there was a beautiful little girl named Freya (and Faye smiled at this, at the proximity of the beautiful girl’s name to her own). One Thursday night, Freya’s father told her to take cream porridge to the nisse. And the little girl was planning to obey her father, but on her way to the basement she grew very hungry. Her mother had made a special batch of porridge that night, with brown sugar and cinnamon and raisins and even thin slices of mutton on top. Freya thought it was a pity to waste all that good food on a ghost. So once she was in the basement and hidden from view, she ate it herself. She licked it from the bowl, then drank the drippings. And scarcely had she finished wiping her chin clean when the nisse rushed out and grabbed her and started to dance. She tried to break free but the grip of the nisse was strong. He crushed her into him and sang “From the nisse did you steal! So dance now until you reel!” and she screamed and screamed, but the nisse pressed her face into his wiry beard so nobody heard. He twirled her around and galloped from one end of the basement to the other. He was too fast. She couldn’t keep up. She kept falling and tripping, but the nisse pulled her up again and yanked her arms and tore her clothes, and he did this until finally she lay on the ground, in bloody rags, gasping for breath. In the morning, when they found her, she was pale and sick and nearly dead. She was bedridden for months, and even after she was well enough to walk, her father never asked her to take food to the nisse again.

“I’m sorry I took those boys to the basement,” Faye said after he finished the story.

“Go to sleep,” her father said.

“Someday I want to see your home,” Faye said. “The farm in Hammerfest, with the salmon-red house. I’ll go visit.”

“No,” he said, and when he looked at her he looked tired, maybe sad, like when he was standing outside, over those dying coals, alone. “You’ll never see that house.”

That night she couldn’t sleep. She was kept awake for hours by every squeak—every little crack, every rustle of wind and she thought there was an intruder or an apparition. The lights outside shined through tossing leaves and phantomed hideous forms on her wall: burglars, wolves, the devil. She felt hot and fevered and tried to cool herself down with the bedside glass of water, pressing it to her forehead and chest. She sipped the water and thought about her father’s story, about the house spirit: Sometimes they’ll follow you around your whole life. It was a horrifying thought, this beast downstairs, watching them, speaking gibberish.

She looked at the floor as if she could see through it, down to the basement where the ghost was prowling, greedily waiting. She tipped the glass and poured out the water. She felt a bolt of panic as she watched what she was doing, watched the water puddle, a dark brown blot on the light brown carpet. She imagined the water as it seeped into the floor, dripped down through cracks in the wood, over metal slats and across nails and glue and slunk its way beneath her, picking up dust and dirt as it washed into the basement and coldly fell on whatever angry thing was down there, lurking in the darkness.

At some point in the night—this is the truth—they found Faye in the basement.

In some dead hour of the morning, they heard a scream. They found her downstairs. She was shaking and shivering, her head rattling on the concrete floor. Her parents didn’t know how she got there. She couldn’t talk, couldn’t see, her eyes rolled blindly into her head. At the hospital she eventually calmed down, and the doctors said she had a nervous fever, a nervous disposition, a case of hysteria, which is to say they had no diagnosis at all. Rest in bed, they said. Drink milk. Don’t get too excited.

Faye didn’t remember a thing, but she knew what happened. She knew absolutely what happened. She had insulted the ghost, and the ghost had come for her. The ghost had followed her father all the way from the old country, and now it was haunting her. This was the moment that would forever divide her childhood, which would set her on a path that made everything that came after—the seizures, the disaster of Chicago, her failure at motherhood and marriage—feel inescapable.

Every life has a moment like this, a trauma that breaks you into brand-new pieces. This was hers.





4


THE PINKEST CLASSROOM in Faye’s high school. The most ruffled and doilied. The cleanest, brightest. The most elaborate, with ovens and sewing stations, refrigerators, banks of saucepans and stockpots. By far the most aromatic, that warm chocolately air spilling into the hallway during their two-week unit on cake-making. The home economics classroom—electric, full of light, cleaning products bright and chemical, sharp knives, soup cans, blazing silver-white skillets made of aluminum, modern appliances of the atomic age. Not once has Faye seen a boy here, not even poking his head in for cupcakes or waffles. The boys stay away, their reasons cruel: “I’d never eat something you made!” they tell the girls, making choking sounds and grabbing their necks and wheezing and dying to howls of laughter. But really the boys are nervous about the posters.

Word has reached them about the posters.

Tacked onto the pink walls, posters of women looking lonely and ashamed, advertising products whose existence the boys deny—douches, pads, absorbent powders and carbolic sprays. Faye sits in her cushioned seat, arms crossed, shoulders hunched, reading them in quiet disgust.