Читать книгу Integrity - Anna Borgeryd - Страница 21

14

Reproduction refers to the worker’s daily recreation of his own or others’ labor power. This includes everyday tasks – such as food preparation and laundry – that maintain life and the worker’s ability to show up to work. Much of this household work has historically been the responsibility of women, which is why reproduction is of particular interest to feminist economists.

From Vera’s reading in the university library

Vera refused to buy the brown bra; she said something incoherent about it ‘not being her.’ But she thanked Cissi for her help and bought a simple white bra that fitted properly. She also returned the red dress to Formal Clothes. Cissi didn’t understand. Wasn’t the problem solved? she asked.

Vera tried at first to explain. ‘I felt like I was in costume.’

‘Life is a theatre,’ Cissi shrugged her shoulders, ‘Who isn’t in costume?’

The objection was on the tip of Vera’s tongue. Why should I want to be dressed up like Playmate of the Week for assholes? Vera sensed that Cissi wouldn’t have anything against being looked at the way Peter had looked at her, and she could imagine that Cissi would look like a real bombshell in her low-cut, gold, draping dress at the banquet next weekend. But Vera felt all wrong in the red outfit, and she decided that she would go to the second-hand shop to look for a long dress that was more discreet.

When she got home, Vera put on ‘Enter Sandman’, turned the volume up high, and went into the bathroom. She washed off the make-up, removed her contact lenses, and put her hair up in a ponytail. After carefully wiping her glasses, she put them on. Vera looked at herself in the mirror, changed her mind, took out the hair tie, and arranged her chestnut-colored curls into their usual braid down her back.

She hated feeling like a cliché, and she realized that she had spent half the day doing just that. As much of a cliché as the girl in the endless parade of American films where the premise is that if the smart, boring girl in glasses would just take off her spectacles and go on a crazy shopping spree to buy provocative clothes, she would discover that she could hook up with the most popular hunk in school. It was like they were trying to drum into the ears of girls everywhere the message that happiness lies in trying to live like Paris Hilton. Consume more, thought Vera, and shivered uneasily. She realized that she needed to eat.

Matt and Vera had eaten dinner together and they were still sitting at the table talking when Peter came into the kitchen with a bag from the local grocery store. Peter’s hair was wet and he was carrying a gym bag. He glanced toward the table as he put the milk in the refrigerator, and when he saw that Vera was there he stood up so quickly that he hit his head hard on the cabinet door that he had just opened. Peter smiled tentatively, glanced shyly at Vera and quickly disappeared out of the room with his hand over his forehead.

Although it wasn’t her intention, Vera heard how critical she sounded when she asked: ‘When, in fact, was it his week to take care of the kitchen?’

Matt looked at Vera in surprise: ‘What are you talking about? Did something happen?’

‘No, I don’t know.’ She shrugged her shoulders and bit into her flat-bread sandwich.

‘So you’re just negative for no reason?’

‘I’m not negative!’ Vera knew how unconvincing her answer sounded, and Matt looked at her critically.

‘I didn’t suspect that about you.’

Like you know anything, thought Vera, and immediately felt ashamed of herself. Why am I so touchy? It’s not Matt’s fault! She tried to fix things.

‘No. Well, you know. That girl, Sandra, the one who eats here sometimes. And her, the Asian one…’ Vera gestured with her hands, sweeping them from beside her face downwards in front of her body to illustrate long, loose, dark hair.

‘Aye. Linda,’ Matt nodded.

‘And today, downtown, I saw that he…’ she went silent, looked down at the table, ‘made contact, like he wanted to be with a third one.’

‘Aye. Lots of lasses. But maybe he can’t control his, what do you call it, his charisma?’

‘He is a complete “spaller”!’ Vera exclaimed.

‘Huh?’

‘It’s a north Swedish dialect word but I think it came from English. It means… something unstable. But even such a spaller could at least try to control himself!’ She took another bite.

‘Are you sure? That girl today – maybe she is Miss Right?’

Vera thought she heard steps from the hall, as Matt continued.

‘Maybe he’ll be faithful to her for the rest of his life?’ Matt got up and picked up his plate. His brown eyes twinkled mischievously and he suddenly began to sing. An unexpectedly rich baritone filled the dorm: ‘Where do I begiiin, to tell the story of how great a love can beee?’

Vera tried to stop him. She stood up hastily and got a piece of flat-bread stuck in her throat. She shook her head, coughed, sat down again and waved her hands helplessly. Matt stopped singing, sat down beside Vera and thumped her on the back.

‘Oh! Do you want me to…?’

Then Peter came back into the kitchen. He had put on clean clothes and fixed his hair, as if he were going to see someone special. He looked at Vera, who had recovered sufficiently that she was at least getting enough oxygen. She put her plate down on the counter before she hurried out of the kitchen blushing.

‘I’ll wash my plate later,’ she whimpered between coughs.

Vera spent a lot of time at the university library. She had an idea what she wanted to write about, something that was needed to secure future welfare. She surfed online and searched the library catalogue using the words ‘economic reproduction’, ‘care deficit’, and ‘basic needs’. She copied stacks of journal articles and borrowed books. It got dark early, and she hobbled slowly home, leaning against her bicycle up the hill through the rustling pine grove, her head full of things she wanted to have said. It was only when she was going downhill that she carefully rode her bike, because she could not bend her left leg enough to pedal a full circle. Adam wouldn’t like this, she thought as the bike rolled downhill and she exposed her weakened leg to the risk of even greater injury. But do ‘we’ even exist any more? The question pained her.

On Monday she went to the department to see Cissi and discuss her chapter. Cissi was upset. There was some problem with the financing for her graduate studies.

‘They won’t let me finish,’ said Cissi gloomily. ‘Unless I agree to teach more, of course. If I teach full-time then there is money to pay me.’

‘But doesn’t that just delay the problem?’ wondered Vera. ‘How are you going to finish your dissertation if you teach full-time? Isn’t it better to take out a student loan and finish your research?’

Cissi shook her head, ‘Not allowed. No student loan after you’ve been accepted to graduate studies. Maybe I’ll have to settle for making it halfway and finish with a Master’s degree? She wiped a little tear from the corner of her eye and gave a forced smile. ‘But now we’re going to talk about your chapter!’

It still felt only half thought-through and unstructured, but thanks to Cissi’s guidance, Vera sensed that she was beginning to see a pattern. A basic problem with the economy as it exists today is that it is much more profitable to exploit a finite resource and mass-produce completely new stuff than to take care of something old and repair it when necessary, thought Vera as she sat on the bus on the way to the second-hand shop in Ersboda. Not to mention taking care of old people.

The second-hand shop was located in a big warehouse space, and to the right, beyond the shelves with knick-knacks and porcelain, were the used clothes. Vera looked through the assortment of full-length party dresses and found four that she thought might do. But it was more difficult in the changing room; three of the dresses were out of the question. There was only one dress, a green, empire-waist creation, that she could even imagine wearing to the banquet, and that was too big.

She sat down, disheartened, and wondered what she was going to do. She had to wear something, and pretty, full-length dresses didn’t grow on trees. She stood up again and faced the mirror, pinching the back of the dress, with its many shades of green. It immediately fitted better. She liked the short sleeves and the square-cut neckline. The dress reminded her of the ones in Jane Austen films. Vera thought that the dress would work if she took it in at the back. Solveig at Solbacka – she had been a seamstress – maybe she can tell me what to do and lend me her sewing machine?

Vera decided to chance it, so she paid the modest price for the dress – a quarter of what it would have cost to hire the red one. But she knew that, in contrast to the red one, which – with the brown bra – was ready to go, this one would require her attention. So appropriate, thought Vera, I have to devote time to reproduction.

When she went to Solbacka that afternoon she filled her backpack with a little food to snack on and the green empire-waist dress. After her shift she knocked on Solveig’s door. The old woman came to open it in her wheelchair and smiled radiantly when she saw Vera. After Vera had given her the fruit and bread and they had chatted a while, she summoned up her courage and asked:

‘Solveig, I wonder, would you be able to help me with something?’

Vera was invited into the small apartment. She looked around with interest at the walls, where bits of fabric and ribbon competed for space with photographs of a younger Solveig sailing, sailplaning and riding elephants. In several of the pictures she was with a happy man with a long, kind face.

‘Is that your husband?’ asked Vera, pointing to a picture in which Solveig and the man were embracing in front of a display window.

‘Yes, that is my Gustav,’ said Solveig warmly. ‘And there is my studio, which he helped me set up.’ She pointed at the picture. Studio Sun was painted on the enamelled plate that stuck out from the well-preserved wooden building.

‘Yes, you used to be a seamstress,’ said Vera. She picked up her backpack and pulled out the green dress. ‘I have a… job you could call it, at the university. And as part of the job I have to go to a party, one where I have to wear a full-length dress.’

‘Ah. Are you going to the fall banquet?’ A professional interest glittered in Solveig’s eyes as she felt the fabric of the dress. ‘Hmm, silk voile with Belgian lace.’ She looked at the price tag and smiled. ‘You got a bargain, I can tell you that!’ Solveig looked at the seams on the inside, ‘Well made. I’m guessing the 1960s.’

‘Yes, it is lovely, but, well, it doesn’t fit properly. It’s too big.’ Vera held the dress up to her body to show her. ‘But am I right that it can be taken in somehow and shortened?’

Solveig told Vera to put on the dress. She took out a pincushion and had Vera stand in front of a full-length mirror. With clever, practiced hands she pinched and pinned the dress. Vera watched her with admiration, but also with growing concern over the amount of work it was going to take to alter the dress. There was no way it could be done in 10 minutes by sewing some simple seam up the back, as Vera, in her ignorance, had thought. It was just as her father always said, If you think something is simple, that’s usually because you don’t have any idea how difficult it really is.

‘You’re still limping?’ asked Solveig, as she calmly concentrated on the job in front of her.

‘Yes, it feels like my leg is a little dislocated all the time. I think the meniscus is torn and a fragment isn’t in the right place, so it chafes and the knee locks up. But I have another appointment with the doctor next week, and then they surely have to understand the problem, because it hasn’t healed even though it’s been six months.’

‘Oh, that doesn’t sound good.’ Solveig looked at Vera with concern and continued working in silence. After a while she asked, ‘How are things with you otherwise?’

There was something about Solveig’s kind tone and the way she gently handled the dress. Copious amounts of salty tears started rolling down Vera’s cheeks.

‘It felt so obvious!’ She said the word as if she had said despair.

Solveig calmly worked on.

‘But now I feel completely lost. Everything is just… like a big black hole. And I chose it all myself!’ Vera’s voice was terribly thin, as if she had lost faith in everything.

‘Yes, you young people today, it isn’t so easy for you,’ said Solveig softly, handing her the roll of paper towels that was stuffed in between the geraniums on the windowsill. ‘You have so much freedom, and when things become difficult you blame yourselves.’

She rolled her wheelchair back a little and leaned her head to the side to study her work from a distance, then she rolled forward and started pinning again.

‘So what have you chosen that is so wrong, do you think?’ she continued softly.

Vera dried her face with a bit of paper, shrugged her shoulders and smiled wanly.

‘No, just small things really. Like my education, my job, and my husband, for example.’

Solveig lifted her eyes from the bodice of the dress and looked searchingly into Vera’s face. ‘Oh my,’ she said at last.

‘Because I can’t handle this,’ said Vera, her voice shaky from the pain.

Solveig looked at her attentively: ‘What is it that you can’t handle?’

‘I can’t even keep my own promises!’ When she said it, Vera realized that that was what was most unbearable. Adam had forced her into a corner in which even her own discipline didn’t work.

‘Well, what promises?’

She took a deep breath and her voice was a weak whisper.

‘To love my husband in sickness and in health.’

Solveig paused in her work with the dress and looked up at Vera. ‘Well, I don’t know about that. I don’t know if I think it means that you have to love.’

Vera bit her lip. Solveig started on the hem of the dress and puffed as she bent double down to the floor: ‘One thing I think I have learned in life is that everything we do because we have to, becomes… half-hearted, or even dies.’ She straightened up again, pushing the white curls from her worried, wrinkled forehead.

‘Oh, this isn’t going to work. Should I stand on a stool?’ Vera pointed and Solveig nodded lightly. Vera fetched a wooden, blue-painted stool from the kitchen. She stood on it and soon the pinning resumed, this time with Solveig working at a much more comfortable level.

‘Weren’t you and Gustav married?’

‘Mmm.’ Solveig’s lips were tightly clamped together around lots of pins.

‘But what do you think that you promised him then – and what did he promise you? Didn’t you promise to love each other until “death did you part”?’

Solveig sat quietly until she had used the rest of the pins she was holding in her mouth. Finally, she answered calmly: ‘I love him still, even though death has parted us. But that is not because I promised once upon a time. I saw it more as if we had promised to be kind to one another, to support each other and to wish each other well, even when we faced adversity. Or perhaps particularly then.’ There was a sad look in her eye and she was quiet for a minute before she continued.

‘In any case, I don’t think one can… what is it everyone says these days?’

The old woman thought for a minute as she adjusted some pins and checked that the right and left sides were the same length. Then she found the words.

‘Achieve. I don’t think one can just achieve love. It can’t be forced. It just comes when it comes – and exists when it is nurtured. So! Climb down!’

She reached out with her hand so that Vera could hold it as she carefully stepped down from the stool. What had initially felt like a tent in shades of green that could fall off at any minute had now, with the help of a considerable number of well-placed pins, been formed around Vera’s fine-boned frame and shortened to exactly the right length. Even at this stage, it was an impressively precise piece of work.

Vera took the stool back to its place. She realized that her and Adam’s love had not been nurtured particularly well. Maybe it was my fault? Maybe her mother had been right and she shouldn’t have gone abroad with Basic Needs after Adam changed his mind and didn’t want to? The months apart had definitely not been a recipe for success.

‘It feels like there is something… wrong with my internal compass. I was so sure that I had made the right decision. But then everything turned out wrong. So now I am trying to do something entirely different. The exact opposite of very wrong ought to be at least a little bit right, anyway?’ pleaded Vera.

‘A completely new man?’ asked Solveig neutrally.

‘A different project. A completely different job.’ The reply came fast and Solveig looked at Vera attentively. Then she leaned back in her wheelchair looking pleased. Softly, she turned Vera towards the mirror and caught her eye in the reflection.

‘Look. You look like a siren of the forest.’

Vera saw that it could definitely be called a pretty, full-length dress now. She looked lovely, but still very much herself. She was comforted. She had felt backed into a corner, faced with unacceptable choices. But now, looking at herself in the well-fitting party gown, she actually felt hopeful. Perhaps there are choices that are both possible and not unsustainable after all? Vera sat down on the sofa and gave Solveig a spontaneous hug.

‘Thank you so much!’

‘Oh! Watch the pins,’ smiled Solveig.

Vera wrinkled her forehead, ‘But maybe you can show me? I don’t know, how do I sew all this so that it comes out right?’

Solveig smiled kindly and stroked Vera’s arm lightly. ‘With my old eyes, it’s too dark for me to sew right now, but I can have it done by Wednesday if you come back and try it on.’

‘But that’s too much to ask!’

‘Not too much for you.’