Iceland Review - October/Novermber 2018

We can’t say anything, of course – we just have to wait. The rental market’s awful, and we’re agreed about getting him through these years without him making any financial commitments. Anyway, we’re not concerned about him. He isn’t the problem, wonderful as he is. He picks up after himself and cleans unprompted. Does the shopping and cooks twice a week – last time it was stuffed eggplant with caramelised onions, lemon, and cherry tomatoes. It’s she who is the problem. She puts on a friendly voice when she talks to us, but we’ve heard her through the walls, how her tongue is forked like a viper’s, how she denigrates and imitates and laughs at us.

And then there’s all the damned racket. The thumping. The moaning. Our son has had girlfriends before, but we’ve never heard a peep until now – it’s like he’s grunting in solidarity with her, all things considered, the sounds are coming from him, too. There’s a small bathroom between our bedrooms with wood-panelled walls and floorboards that creak when they’re stepped on, and their lumpen box spring squeaks when they lie down on it. We try to go to bed before them, so we don’t have to read or sleep with that going on. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Below their bedroom is the dining room – the brightest room in the house – two of its walls covered with books, a big window with southern exposure that looks out over the sea. It’s nice to start the day there with a cup of coffee and the morning paper, as we’ve done for going on 30 years. Unless they get going again. Then the white ceramic chandelier starts to sway ever-so-slightly back and forth. It’s a very expensive piece that we received as a gift from the designer, who was a good friend of ours before she unexpectedly passed away, bless her heart.

You can’t hear the thumps or the moans from downstairs, but the swaying is enough to disturb the peace. It’s difficult to drink your coffee in quiet tranquility with your spouse when the chandelier is swaying like that above you, back and forth, back and forth, when we know full well that it’s not supposed to sway like that. We look from the light to each other and say nothing. Try not to picture them – our son’s butt cheeks or her face on the pillows, eyes closed, mouth open, something self-centered and narcissistic about her expression – we would never normally think these thoughts, but it was she who put them in our heads, she who started talking about clits and masturbation and pussies.

The first onslaught came like a crack of thunder from a cloudless sky, this was before she moved in, and the four of us were sitting at the dining room table – we’d prepared a little feast because they’d just gotten home from a long trip. Everyone still friends. She looked like a French actress in a beautiful linen dress with buttons down the front, her thick hair tied up in a bun, her collarbone prominent, her neck long and fragile, like the stem of a bluebell. Our son was sun-browned and beautiful, his hair longer than usual, parted in the middle, and casually combed behind his ears – not exactly what we’d been used to, but that’s not to say it didn’t suit him.

We’re on our third bottle of wine, are done with dessert, and they’re eager to make fancy cocktails with their purchases from the Duty Free. They make us a sour whiskey drink, we laugh, take turns reminiscing about the past – they how they met, we how we met – and comparing the two eras. But then all of a sudden, she’s started to tell us about things we don’t care to hear about, about how she had to take our son to task be -

cause he didn’t continue to pleasure her after he was… finished. Laughing, she told us how she’d just laid there afterwards, like a bump on a log. Had tried to give him physical hints – rubbed up on him, kept on kissing him – but when it didn’t work, she’d had to ask: “Are you just going to sleep now?”

We didn’t know what we were supposed to do with this information and were a bit dumbfounded – understandably? Do any parents want to hear something like that about their child? – which our son noticed, of course, and then he started to criticise us for having never talked to him about sex, for all the misconceptions he’d had as a teen, for the kind of porn he’d watched to satisfy his curiosity, for how his porno fantasies would fade away every night and he’d constantly had to find something more hardcore, something raunchier. How that had been reflected in how he’d treated girls during sex before he’d met her, but that he’d seen the error of his ways and called his former lovers, apologised in case he’d ever performed badly, just to be on the safe side, if he’d ever made his partners feel like bumps on logs, it was just because he didn’t know better. Then he looked at his girlfriend tenderly, like a good little boy, and she rubbed his back and smiled at him like a proud nanny.

We tried, of course, to hang on by our fingernails, explained that times had changed and that this hadn’t been talked about in our homes, ei ther; they had to realise that when we were their age, there wasn’t as much a demand for expressiveness; it was neither customary nor required that parents told their kids that they loved them – it said itself, it was self-evident! When Angantýr was a teenager, the discussion still hadn’t reached this stage, and yes, we were probably sleeping on the job where the Internet was concerned, but the Internet was also so new at the time – can you really be asleep on the job if you were never awake!? How were we to know that you could access those sites so easily?

We can hardly have a drink anymore without the conversation spiralling out into the same kind of accusations. Sometimes she starts, going on and on with no context whatsoever about her parents and the disinterestedness in her home; sometimes he starts; sometimes they both start. The topics of conversation span far and wide: female masturbation and other sex ed subjects, global warming, how one should grapple with trauma, the difference in how boys and girls are raised, refugees, the pollution of the agricultural industry, the consumption patterns of Icelanders. It’s as if they want to punish us for all their mistakes, take everything they learned too late and smear it in our faces; their ignorance is our ignorance and their misapprehensions stem from the

failures of their upbringings – no, negligence, on our parts.

We are left out of the conversation. All doors are slammed the moment they are opened. They don’t have any patience for talking about things like normal people, hearing what we have to say and building up the conversation objectively; now, it’s just interruptions – scold, that’s racist, scold, that’s chauvinist, scold, “Don’t either of you recognise your own privilege?”

One thing’s for sure. It has never been as difficult to live with our son. As wonderful as he’s always been. Does the laundry once a week, we never have to ask. Vacuums the house and mows the lawn. It’s she who’s the author of all this. It’s she who keeps picking at scabs so they get worse and worse. We say good morning, and she says good morning, we make a point of saying something nice about something she did online, or her clothes, her hair, shoes, her cooking. She says thank you and says something nice to us in return – we all try to strike a light note, but the strings are so tightly strung that they betray themselves, always tuned too loud, off-key. Because we know that sooner or later, everything will be turned on its head, we’ve heard it through the walls, how she psychoanalyses us, traces our behaviour back to traumas of the past – a miscarriage, yes, we lost a child; alcoholism, sure, well and good, there was alcoholism in both of our families – and so what? Every family has its own history. That’s life. Can you judge us out of hand because we haven’t spent thousands upon thousands of krónur on a therapist? Because we aren’t writing long posts about our traumas on Facebook?

To think that this could be the mother of our future

They planned to find an apartment after their trek around South America, but first, they needed to work for two, three months to save up their pennies. The choice was between moving into our place or moving in with her parents, who live out in Kópavogur, so of course, they moved in here – we’re only a 12-minute walk from the university and Angantýr’s bedroom window looks out over the seaside walking path along Ægissíða and there’s a hot tub in the backyard.

They were grateful, she was grateful, they worked a lot before school started in the fall and took night and weekend shifts once the academic year began. We heard them every now and then in the evenings and mornings. Sometimes we talked about it: “Do they not realise that they don’t live alone? That they live in our house? We’re talking about the bare minimum of courtesy...” But even so, it wasn’t that hard for us to pretend that nothing was amiss. This was just a temporary situation. They’d be

leaving soon. They obviously didn’t realise how much sound carried between our rooms.

By New Year’s, they’d put enough aside that they could pay their rent and living expenses while they were completing their master’s studies and they’d started looking around, put the word out on Facebook with a nice picture that had been taken of them in the garden on a late summer evening, got over 30 shares, and were offered a number of places – a room in another couple’s apartment that they didn’t like well enough, a few apartments of varying levels of appeal in downtown, east side, or west side Reykjavík, which should have suited or sufficed. Except that the rent was outrageous, the absolute cheapest was 170,000 and a basement hovel on Hverfisgata. Her grandmother wanted to put them up in the eastern suburbs, but then they figured they could just as well stay here at our place a little longer.

That was a year ago. It’s looking like it will be at least another year on top of that. They aren’t on their way out, they’ve stopped looking, stopped letting us know where they are on the waitlist for student housing at the university. She’s not going to manage to finish her master’s project in the spring and now it’s come to light that she needs to take another course over the fall term, and then they’re talking about going abroad for doctoral studies the fall after that. If they’re aiming for doctoral studies in a year and a half, they’ll be here while they save up.

They’re 26 and 27 – not children anymore – they ought to know better. When we were their age, we’d entered the job market and had two children and an apartment by Hlemmur. It isn’t comparable. What can you call this variant, these adult adolescents? Quasi-people? Adulescents? It’s gotten to the point that everything we do gets on her nerves and everything she does gets on ours. We’re horribly backwards because we still eat meat and fish – we, who usually make the best of it when they make vegan food for us, even though sometimes, it’s simply a whole lot of nothing. Rice, ginger, and carrots fried in a pan! We get hungry again after an hour! The other day, we snuck out of the house, giggling like teenagers on the way to a school dance, but instead we walked down to the

gas station to buy ourselves hot dogs. If we’d gone to the fridge, she’d have taken it as ingratitude or some kind of meat fixation.

We have far fewer quarrels now – we’ve learned to keep the peace by avoiding various topics of conversation, we don’t want that anymore, but there’s never enough space to regain our composure. The wound tears open with every moan, every thump, every morning we spend under the swaying chandelier. If they had any respect for us, this thought would have fluttered through their heads – that they don’t live alone, but with other people. That sounds could conceivably be carrying through the walls. The lack of respect is total. There’s no gratitude.

We have a lovely summerhouse about an hour and 40 minutes northwest of Reykjavík, not too far from Borgarnes. Before, we maybe went once every two months, but now we drive there almost every weekend: we go straight after work on Friday and then drive straight from there to work on Monday morning. We don’t want to budge, we were born and raised here on the west side of Reykjavík, but sometimes, when we’re up at the summerhouse, we open a bottle of wine and start daydreaming about living somewhere else, without them, what we would cook without having to hear their contemptuous silence – steak with red wine and herbs from the windowsill. Then, completely by accident, we stumble upon a real estate website online, imagine that if we could maybe find a pretty, corrugated iron house in Hafnarfjörður or near the sea in Kársnes, or even across the bay out in Álftanes, then maybe they’d be compelled to start saving for a down payment, or to rent themselves. Then we take a look at more centrally located two-bedroom apartments (they regularly talk about all the other parents who buy a little apartment that their kids pay off), but then we see the sale price, get angry at them for their entitlement, turn stubborn, and refuse to be bigger enablers than we already are. We ex out the real estate page, close our laptop in a pique, and one of us sighs, “We just have to wait,” to which the other answers, “I suppose.”

Author Fríða Ísberg (1992-) is a writer and poet, born and raised in Reykjavík. She studied Philosophy and Creative Writing at the University of Iceland and has written for The Times Literary Supplement. Her book Slitförin (Stretch Marks) was one of the most popular poetry books in Iceland in 2017. She is a member of poetry collective Svikaskáld (Impostor Poets), a group of six women who’ve published two poetry collections, Ég er ekki að rétta upp hönd (I Am Not Raising My Hand ) in 2017 and Ég er fagnaðarsöngur (I Am Applause) in 2018. Her short story collection Kláði (Itch) is due to be published in October 2018.