Suspiciously Obedient

Page 17

Standing up for herself was an acquired skill. She knew how to do it with her brothers; that was no problem. But going out into the world, dealing with slights and stares and glances and touches, sometimes grabs, and the occasional outright overt come-on like this…there weren’t any classes for it. At least, none she’d found yet. And she and her friends might gripe and groan and swap stories about being eyed, the wolf whistles, the ass-grabs on the subway, the occasional frottage, being rubbed up against on a very crowded subway or bus car…they narrated their truths but no one had a concrete answer for what to do.

Her masters degree had helped. She knew to confront it face on, but that was easy to write about in an academic treatise and much harder to do on a plane, heading, nervously, for a promotion and a job that she got because she slept with the boss. Ouch.

Piecing it all together like that hit her like being struck between the eyes by a stone, and as the man stood to move she didn’t feel a sense of victory. Not even a sense of righteous indignation. What she felt was her own humanity connecting with his. As he stood next to her, both of them slumped uncomfortably under the overhead compartments and the flight attendant looking at them curiously, she didn’t touch him, she wasn’t ready to connect with him on that level, but she simply said, “Then let’s declare a truce.”

He swallowed hard, his face relaxing, and he nodded slowly. “Thank you, miss. And I really am sorry. I…well, I could give you a thousand explanations and excuses, but none of them really boil down to anything other than I’ve had a few too many and a little too little of something else in my life.”

Still on guard, she settled back in place and so did he. The flight attendant came over, a woman about her own age with reverse coloring, bright blue eyes and pale creamy skin and hair so fine and white it was almost the color of snow.

“Cards,” she said, handing out official forms. Lydia and the man took theirs; completing the immigration and customs paperwork seemed like a relief. The flight attendant went off to help someone else and the man next to her went quiet, lost in his own thoughts. Her victory felt hollow, but nowadays she’d take what she could get.

Regret seeped in as they drove past the Blue Lagoon and she realized that, perhaps, she should have signed up for the tour that was part of the package deal when she took Icelandair. She hadn’t dared do it, considering she was billing everything to her company. The relocation allowance of $8000 was more than enough. Grandma had accepted the fact that she was losing her roommate, for now at least, and Madge had told her, “Go find yourself a hot Viking.”

That was the last thing Lydia was thinking about as the bus rumbled past this amazing resort that seemed to have grown, organically, out of the ground into a steaming pool of beauty and luxury. And in many respects, that was exactly what had happened. The Blue Lagoon was a hot spring filled with minerals that supposedly helped to alleviate pain, and maybe not cure your illnesses but certainly make you feel better from them for a while.

From where she sat on the bus she got a good, long look of the spa, the pools, the parking lot filled with buses just like hers as tourists climbed off, eager to go and soak. She figured she was going to be living here, so she’d have plenty of time for that. Right now, what she needed most was to recover from the flight and figure out the terrain of her new life. A direct flight, five hours out of Boston, who would have thought it? And suddenly she was in Europe. Not quite, but part of the European Union at least.

As the bus brought them closer to the edge of the city, it was as if she had been dropped in a Scandinavian country, or at least the way she imagined it. Sandy and Pete loved to watch travel shows, so over the years she had her fill of one-hour specials on Finland, on Sweden, and Norway and Denmark. Yet, when she thought about it, it was funny they had never watched anything on Iceland or Greenland. She knew from the lines of the houses that the architecture was designed not only to be aesthetically pleasing, but to be quite practical in heavy snow climates, and cold in particular. The long, sloping roofs, the sharp lines, the muted pastels, and then here and there brighter colors, deeper, richer reds and intense turquoise blues made the entire landscape and the planned city so appealing, so smart and rational and well thought out that it was as if she had been dropped into another world. Some sort of utopia out of an Ursula Le Guin novel, one that on the surface looked damn close to perfect, but as you lived it longer and longer it started to unravel.