The Freezer Chest

When I think about it, the freezer chest, it’s with a sensation of the ferry rocking and the ****North Sea beneath us, black because it was January, and then the artificial lighting of the lounge where they were sitting, Mark and the others—Starling, Henrietta, Poul, and Susanna—and where I was also sitting, with our English teacher, Bo, who found me interesting to talk to, because, as he said, “One would never know that you were so young.” But, in any case, they were sitting together over in a corner, and it was 1989, the d.j. had left, no one wanted to dance, it was late and a long way to Harwich, and then he went to bed anyway, the English teacher, and I was actually friends with Henrietta, so I wasn’t sure what to do. It was then that he called me over to the group, Mark did, and said that he wanted to tell me the story of the freezer chest.

I should have seen it coming, of course, for he made no secret of not liking me. Once he’d said it in the middle of the cafeteria, and he’d said it straight out: “I don’t like you.” It had been a simple statement, and the place had grown quiet, even though Henrietta was there, too, and I thought she’d protest, since you couldn’t just say things like that; we weren’t twelve anymore. This was high school, after all. I was eighteen, most of us were, but there were a few older students who had dropped out to see the world, or to learn a trade, and had now taken up their schoolbooks again, and Mark was one of them; I think he was twenty-five. But Henrietta didn’t say a word, and so I said it myself, I said you couldn’t just sit there and say that sort of thing, but then Mark looked at me and said you certainly could, somebody ought to. He was sitting there with a classmate who was preparing for teachers college, while Henrietta ate her potato salad and got herself a Coke, and the would-be teacher never said boo.

But then Mark decided to come along on the study trip to London, and I knew that it would prove difficult, for not only did Mark not like me but all the others liked him a lot, and even though I was friends with Henrietta I’d have to hang out with the English teacher, who claimed that he’d once flown with the Royal Canadian Air Force, and, as he was telling me how he’d ended up there and how his farsightedness had come between him and re-upping, I sat and looked over at the little group gathered around Mark. Henrietta was there, laughing every time he said something, but then, when the English teacher had gone to his bunk, he called me over, Mark did, and told me the story of the freezer chest.

It began with him explaining how he’d once been a talented guitarist with a promising career that stretched out before him. He was in demand among solo performers, and the reason he was the oldest person in our school was that he’d had a life beforehand, on the road with his guitar. It had been an exciting but hard life, with all the late nights at small clubs, he said. Did I believe him? I shrugged my shoulders. He was difficult to fathom sometimes; you never knew what would come next with him. That much I had learned, because once Henrietta and I had gone to visit him at his flat. Henrietta had been wanting to visit Mark privately—she’d talked about it a lot, just as she talked a lot about incest, since it was around that time that it first became acceptable to talk about it, about the fact that it existed. Henrietta had seen something about it on TV, she said. She used the word “broken”—the broken child, she’d say, the child would never be normal, the child was broken—and I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t a nice thing to say about anyone, especially a kid, but on the other hand I really liked Henrietta’s manner when she said it. She became clearer, in a way, and I’d gone with her to Mark’s.

He lived in a small one-bedroom flat on the edge of town, and he had a girlfriend whose name was Majken but whom everyone called the Switchman’s Shanty, because that’s what Mark called her. She was desperate like that, Henrietta said, riding the bus in from the country every day, but when we got there it was the would-be teacher who opened the door, and when Henrietta asked for Mark he said that Mark would be out in a little while, we could just have a seat, and so we did. I sat and wondered how long we’d be sitting there, and then Mark emerged from the bedroom. He came out and said that he’d just popped into the switchman’s shanty, “And now I’m all yours.” Then they laughed, Henrietta and the would-be teacher, and the Switchman’s Shanty also laughed when she appeared, a little while later.

I didn’t know if I should laugh, too, or how long we were supposed to remain seated, and, since this was after the business in the cafeteria, I really shouldn’t have been sitting there at all. But then we were drinking beer, and I could tell it would be only a matter of time before the wind shifted. And then here it came: “Mette,” I heard, as Mark went over to a wall where he’d hung up a bunch of curios from a trip to Morocco. “Mette,” he said, taking down an oblong object a good yard in length. It looked like beef jerky, and he threw it in my lap and asked if I knew what it was. “Yeah,” I said, “it’s a dried bull pizzle,” and Henrietta howled with laughter. The would-be teacher laughed, too, and the Switchman’s Shanty was apparently out in the kitchen, but Mark’s eyes grew still. Still, but not frozen. More like one of those places that leases farm machinery, after closing time—the plowshares, the leaking grease fittings. Then he said that he hadn’t reckoned I’d know. “Nice job,” he said, and hung the pizzle back up on the wall, while Henrietta laughed so hard that she almost couldn’t get it under control. I looked parched in my face, she said. “You look simply withered, Mette.” A little while later I wanted to go home, and then the Switchman’s Shanty wanted to go home, too. We walked to the station together, and I remember her telling me how funny Mark was when they were alone. He’s a real Teddy bear, she said, breaking twigs off the hedges we passed. I thought of Henrietta, her laughter; I thought of the would-be teacher, his unmoving features, and what sort of person brings a pizzle home from holiday. That isn’t normal, I thought, and then it was right after New Year’s and we were headed to England and Mark was telling me about the freezer chest.

He told me that at one time he’d been a good guitarist. “Do you believe me?” he asked, and I could tell I was supposed to say yes. I didn’t actually care, but there was a mood around the table that expected me to say yes, and so I said yes. We would be in London for a week; I was already feeling homesick, and Henrietta was sitting next to me, so I said yes, I believed he’d been talented on the guitar. Mark smiled, and I smiled, and he smiled back at me, and I thought how much easier it was this way. For all I cared, he could have been a virtuoso. He could have been Eric Clapton. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the others. I had to allow him inside, even though one time, out in the hallway by our classroom, Mark had said, “Mette isn’t chubby, she’s fat,” so that everyone could hear. Henrietta had been there that day, too, Henrietta and the would-be teacher, but sometimes you have to eat shit, I thought, and I said, “Yes, I believe you when you say you were a talented guitarist.” I said it so that everyone could hear, and then he got to the freezer chest.

He said that, unfortunately, he had been robbed of his great talent, because he’d been rummaging around one day in his grandmother’s freezer chest, whose hinge mechanism turned out to be broken, and, just as he was standing there about to grab some cinnamon kringles, the freezer lid had slammed down on his fingers. The freezer chest had crushed them. “See for yourself,” he said, waving his stumpy fingers in my face. “See, I’ll never barre a chord again.” There was a silence, Henrietta smiled, and I said, “That’s really a shame,” and he said, “You think so?” “Yes,” I said, “I do think so,” and then he paused deliberately, before saying, “But it’s all just bullshit, you little fool.” He said it easily, and then our corner dipped as the ferry to England hit a wave, and Henrietta, in particular, with her special insight into evil, could barely keep her seat.

It was as if a heavy lid had slammed shut within me. That’s how I recall it, a great lid, and beneath it a frozen darkness that was all my own. While Mark held forth on my naïveté for the others, I fell back into the dark and thought of things that were impervious—cement floors, Plexiglas, ice packs—and that the safest way to avoid people like Mark was to seal yourself off, and then, when you were sealed off, it was about your face and getting it back in position, getting it to close over the darkness and everything you have stored inside. So, when he raised his beer with the others, I said that if he thought I was so dumb we could make a bet about who’d score highest on the graduating exams, and he said, “Sure, no problem,” and I said, “All right then, no problem,” and he laughed, saying, “Fuck yeah,” and I got to my feet, and he said we’d bet a pizza, and I said, “No problem.” He wanted to shake on it. I slapped my right hand against his chubby, outstretched fingers, and walked straight out onto the deck, and I’d like to think I stared out toward England. It was, in any case, ocean that I was staring across, and there isn’t much more to say about that week in London other than that I spent a week in London when I was eighteen.

It wasn’t very hard to do better on the finals than Mark. I just got up every day and took care of my schoolwork and took care of myself. I also let Henrietta think what she wanted to whenever she said that if you compared the story about the freezer chest with something like incest I was being hypersensitive, and then she’d look self-important, while one month led to the next and in June we graduated. I got the second highest marks in the school. Mark did well enough that he was going to go to teachers college, Henrietta told me, as we rode around on the back of a decorated flatbed truck from one set of parents to the next, little Danish flags waving in the wind, most of us drunk from all the drinks they were serving, and it was at one of those receptions, when everyone had had enough and someone had finally turned down the stereo, that Mark came over to me.

He tapped me on the shoulder and said that a man was a man, and that he was a twit. He wanted to admit that he’d lost our bet. I’d actually gone and done really well on the finals, he said. I didn’t say anything, but somebody clapped, and he said, “There was something about a pizza, wasn’t there?,” and I said, “No.” And he said, “Yes, there was,” that he wanted to spring for a pizza, and I said I didn’t want a pizza. “Yes, of course you do,” Henrietta said, but I didn’t want a pizza. “You can take your pizza and stick it up sideways,” I said, and I said it so everyone could hear, for at that point I’d already found the room in Copenhagen, university lay ahead and Jutland behind, so fuck what they thought. It got quiet. Mark said, Well, if that was the way I felt about it. “That’s the way I feel about it,” I said, and Henrietta said, “Now stop it, Mette, of course that’s not the way you feel,” and Mark said that I was obviously bearing a grudge, and Henrietta said that it was embarrassing, and Mark said something about small minds, and Poul said, Well, he’d be happy to eat a pizza, and Starling turned the stereo back up, while somewhere on the periphery our English teacher put his glasses on. I placed my hands on my knees and gazed at them—the nails on my fingers are glossy now, whereas then they were blue—and what I remember most after Mark left was Henrietta leaning over me. “Shame on you,” she said, and I’d like to know if she ever did anything about it, the incest. ♦