Big in sweden, p.1
Big in Sweden, page 1
Dedication
For Ben, with Gusto
Epigraph
It occurs to me that I am America.
—Allen Ginsberg
But I would like to spread a general tolerance for human insanity.
—Astrid Lindgren
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One: The Call
Chapter Two: The Casting
Chapter Three: Departures and Arrivals
Chapter Four: Välkommen!
Chapter Five: Vikingar!
Chapter Six: Norden Minns
Chapter Seven: Hjärtat är en Ensam Jägare
Chapter Eight: Herregud!
Chapter Nine: Förloraren Står Liten
Chapter Ten: Ett Mellanspel
Chapter Eleven: Måttet på en Kvinna
Chapter Twelve: Huvudet som bär Kronan
Chapter Thirteen: Det Har Är Min Familj!
Chapter Fourteen: Bumpy Landings
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About Mariner Books
Also by Sally Franson
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
The Call
When the phone rang in the middle of an afternoon coaching session, I thought it was the student-loan forgiveness scammers. They’d been hounding me for weeks, four to six calls a day, always from a different number. Sometimes they hustled me, sometimes I ignored them, sometimes I climbed on a high horse and scolded them about greed and my rights as an American citizen. “There’s more to life than money, you know!” I’d say. “Like love and friendship and travel and pasta—I mean pasta alone could—” at which point they’d hang up.
This particular number had a +46 at the front, which meant nothing to me except my enemies had grown more sophisticated. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have answered, seeing as Tristan’s mother was paying a handsome sum to my employer, Premiere Prep, to get her son into colleges a click or three above his ability level. Tristan, high school junior, was parked on the love seat, wrestling with the fact that he didn’t want to be a dentist. “But my dad’s a dentist, my uncle’s a dentist,” he fretted. “And my cousin’s a hygienist.”
It was one of those days when I thought I might die if I heard another youth declaim on the subject of their future. Normally I adored Tristan. He had beautiful teeth, as white and straight as the rest of him, and a countenance as genial as a Labrador’s. But it was the eighth of January in Minneapolis—gray, subzero, and gloaming at three p.m.—and I was wilting, both from the weather and my New Year’s resolutions. (I’d actually started them on the third; one can’t simply snap to asceticism like a West Point cadet.) Caffeine-deprived, underfed, my brain as fuzzy as the moldy Parmesan in my fridge, I heard myself murmur, “Oh boy, hmm, that is tricky.” Then my phone rang like a bell, and I felt—this is not an exaggeration—saved, even if the source of my deliverance was a cybergang out to steal all my money.
“Sorry, but I better take this,” I said to Tristan. “Hello?”
“Ah, yes, hello, may I please speak to Pauline Johannson?” A female voice, speaking in posh and accented English. Yo-hann-sohn.
“This is she.”
“Pauline! Ja ha, hello, this is Freja calling from Sverige och Mig! How are you doing?”
“Fine.” I pointed to the phone, rolled my eyes, and mouthed an apology to Tristan before swiveling around in my office chair. “Why are you calling again? A number of your colleagues have already been in touch, and I’ve given them at least six pieces of my mind—”
“They have?” The clickety-clack of keys. “I believe I am the only one making these calls. Unless Tocke—Tocke? Hej?” A pause. She must have muted me; all I could hear was my lemon-watery breath. Tristan slid his phone out of the pocket of his sweatpants and started scrolling.
“While you’re waiting, look up Myers-Briggs,” I told him.
Tristan grumped a sigh. “I’m an INTJ.”
“StrengthsFinder then.”
When Freja returned, she said, “Tocke says you have not spoken.”
“Tocke, no, but I have spoken to, let’s see—” I counted them off on my fingers. “Jenny, Debbie, Katie, Tom—I’m assuming these are pseudonyms—”
“I do not know a Jenny, Debbie—you are sure they are from Sverige och Mig?”
“Mike One, Mike Two,” I was saying, not exactly listening as I shooed Tristan off social media. “What’d you call it?”
“Sverige och Mig.”
“Sv-air-hee-ya oak mygg?” Nonsense sounds. “It’s kind of hard to say—though I guess no harder than Navient—”
“The television program. In Sweden?”
“Wait, what?”
“Your application. We liked it very much. Very, what is the word—”
“My application?”
“Unusual, yes. Pauline—”
“You can call me Paulie—”
“We would like to fly you to New York for the next round of casting.”
“Casting?”
While I parroted Freja, Tristan continued to scroll through short videos set to cacophonous pop music. I muted my phone. “Tristan! StrengthsFinder!”
“We would like to meet you in person,” Freja said patiently. Her English had a singsong, nursery-rhymeish quality. “Next month. For the tenth anniversary season of Sverige och Mig. Are you still interested in participating?”
Finally, at the fourth repetition of the name, a rush of memory returned like the roar of the Baltic Sea. Christmas Eve Eve, my best friend, Jemma, and I had each popped an edible, uncorked a bottle of wine, and eaten an entire pan of homemade gingerbread men before indulging in a relatively new form of relaxation: doomscrolling while watching Christmas movies, in our case The Shop Around the Corner.
“Did you see what I posted?” Jemma asked, shoving her phone in my face. A black standard poodle with a voluminous blowout stared balefully from the screen. The caption read Don’t hate me cause I’m bowwowtiful #DOTD. Over thirty-eight thousand people had hearted the picture, and over a hundred had already commented. Forty percent of Africanns [sic] don’t have power u shld be ashamed, said the first. Love it and you!!!!!! said the second. I should explain that Jemma is a celebrity dog groomer. This means she’s become quite famous for dog grooming, not that she grooms celebrities’ dogs, though I wouldn’t put that past her.
I handed the phone back to her. “Some of your best work. Is that Winifred?”
“Prince William. Freddi’s the parti.” Jemma continued to scroll. “Princie’s such a baby. You should’ve heard him cry while I clipped his nails—wait, oh my God, Paulie, look what my aunt just posted.” She shoved her phone back in my face, then snatched it away, laughing. “Some kind of casting call—” Her voice assumed a newscaster’s gravitas. “Do you like to travel? Do you like adventure? Do you have Swedish ancestry and a strong urge to learn about your heritage? Apply now, and don’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!”
“What?” I had guffawed. “Your aunt’s Jewish!”
“Right?!” Then Jemma explained that Orthodox Aunt Cecille had recently gone hog wild for genealogy. She’d joined a thousand online forums dedicated to ancestral self-discovery, including many with no connection to her own genetic line. “Hold on, I’m texting her.” Tap, tap, tap. A moment later: “I guess one of Cecille’s online friends did this Swedish genealogy TV show a while back and loved it.” She reached for the decapitated head of a gingerbread man. We had decapitated all the gingerbread men; we called it dismantling the patriarchy. With her mouth full, Jemma said, “Paulie. You’re Swee-ish.”
“Yeah.” I let out a rather indelicate belch. “So?”
“You could apply.”
I felt my eyebrows knit together. “Um, no thank you.”
“You know,” Jimmy Stewart said from the television, “people seldom go to the trouble of scratching the surface of things to find the inner truth.”
“Why not?” Jemma said.
“I don’t want to be on TV.”
Jemma had laughed at this. “Everyone wants to be on TV.”
“That’s not true.” I raised my voice. “Declan! Do you want to be on TV?”
“No!” came my boyfriend’s muffled voice from his home office.
“Everyone but Declan,” Jemma amended.
I sat up on the couch. Blood rushed through my ears. “I don’t care about being Swedish either.”
Jemma snorted.
“I don’t!”
“Then why do you always talk about it?”
“I don’t!”
Jemma had then rattled off a long list of examples of my supposed allegiance to the motherland, including a holiday party four days prior, where I had declared that if our current president won reelection, I was decamping to Sweden to claim political asylum.
“Oh, phooey, everyone’s trying to claim political asylum,” I said. “Political asylum is the new black.”
“You don’t hear me going around telling everyone how glad I am to be Hungarian.”
“Lies,” I said. “Six months ago you said you were applying for dual citizenship.”
“I was.” Jemma sighed. “Until I realized their president’s even worse than ours.” She sipped her wine. “You know, for someone who always leaves the mall feeling depressed about life’s spiritual emptiness, you’re mighty quick to refuse a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
This was true, I had to give it to Jemma. The thing is, unless you get married, buy a house, build an important career, and/or have children, the narrative arc for a thirtysomething woman sort of sputters and stalls. I had recently turned thirty-five, had no career to speak of, and found myself more or less unfit for marriage, property, and procreation, either despite or because of biweekly rummagings through the subconscious in group therapy. I often waxed nostalgic to Jemma about our twenties and the acute sense of purpose that had defined them—the quests for new jobs, new lovers, new dresses and apartments! The delicious suspicion that one’s real life was lurking around every corner! I even missed my particleboard bookshelf, which had listed so badly—for years!—it finally collapsed on a guy we called Crotchgrabber while he offered me an unsolicited explanation of cryptocurrency. How he had screamed! It was more emotion than I’d ever seen from him, including the grunt of his orgasm.
He was fine, though: they were mostly paperbacks. Point is, I’d been with Declan since I was thirty-one, had toiled away at Premiere Prep since I was thirty-two, and on an average day the most purposeful thing I did was plan my nightly dessert. Don’t get me wrong, I love dessert. I do a lot of baking. But the thrill of chocolate cake is not the same as the thrill of a fresh start, a fresh romance, a fresh pair of shoes one can’t afford but buys anyway.
Jemma tapped away on her phone. “We have till midnight to submit a two-minute video.”
“And then?”
“Then we see if they like you, which of course they will.”
I had poured myself more wine from the bottle. “Give me five good reasons.”
“One, you’re cute and charming, and any producer would be lucky to have you.”
“No, you’re cute and charming!” I threw a throw pillow at her. “You are!”
“Two, you’re a photographer, you love the camera.”
“Was a photographer. Loved being behind—”
“Three, you love to travel. Four, you hate your job and would get to escape for who knows how long, and five—five—”
“My family’s nuts,” I said.
“Five, your family’s nuts,” Jemma agreed.
“No, that’s not a reason.”
“Sure it is.”
I made a sound in the back of my throat. “It’s the opposite of a reason. It’s a red flag, or like a steaming hazardous waste—”
Jemma ignored this. “What if your Swedish family’s amazing? Just because your parents are . . . your parents . . . doesn’t mean you have to slam the door on all things hereditary.” She got a funny look on her face. “Damn, I think I’m getting heartburn.” She thumped her chest with her fist. “It’s like, what if Sweden’s where you belong? With your beautiful, blond cousins and their . . . you know . . . social-democratic ideology?”
Oh, Jemma was good. Like all best friends, she knew just how hard she could press on old bruises without my flinching. Still, I was not giving in so easily. “I belong here,” I said. “You’re my family. Declan too. Craziness is genetic—that’s a scientific fact.”
Jemma took a Tums bottle out of her purse. It rattled like maracas as she fished out a pink tablet. “What if they’re members of the royal family?”
Despite myself, I sat up straighter. “Sweden has a royal family?”
How I wish I could blame everything that follows on royal fever, THC, sugar highs, and red wine: in short, temporary insanity. But I would be lying if I said that Jemma’s urging wasn’t rapping on the door of my heart’s secret chamber, the one that longed for the rituals of happy families (Easter-egg hunts, Thanksgiving turkeys, Christmas hams), the one that wanted a clearer conscience than American citizenship could ever offer, the one that wished to scream by Wednesday night from the stress and monotony of working life. It was the chamber, too, that held my shameful desire to be seen, adored, and deemed extraordinary, to achieve fame and fortune from screen to shining screen. And in the end, who or what could stop me? That Christmas Eve Eve, my dad was dead and my mom was in the loony bin, which she checked herself into every year or so, whenever she remembered how sad life was or she just got tired of working. I’d stumbled upon life’s sorrows, too, and was sick to death of working, but it turned out I was also a gal who’d endure plenty of horrors for the chance to have a bit of fun.
“Oh, what the hell,” I’d said to Jemma. “Not like anything will come of it.”
“Pauline? Are you there?” Freja was saying on the line while Tristan laughed at a video that involved someone screaming in agony.
“Sorry, sorry.” I whumped back to the present, and my eyes landed on the framed photograph of Jemma and me in front of the Centre Pompidou, the summer after my mom’s third hospitalization. Both of us were flushed with rosé, joie de vivre, and the giddy thrill of plopping oneself in a foreign country with no attachments save a phone charger. “Yes,” I heard myself say through a weird bubble in my throat. “I’m definitely still interested.”
Beside the photo of Paris was a formal portrait of my Swedish grandmother, or farmor, as I was soon to learn, that had been taken at about my age. She was the person who’d taught me everything I knew about baking, about krumkaker and lefse, chokladbollar and semlor, kanelbullar and kardemummabullar, and—until she died when I was ten—everything, and I mean everything, I knew about the good parts of family and about maternal love.
I cleared the throat bubble with a cough. “What was that about flying me to New York?”
“Dude, I love New York,” Tristan said without looking up from his phone.
“Tristan!” I barked. “Go find your strengths!”
The adrenaline thrill from this news was unfortunately short-lived, and not only because of Tristan’s attention deficit disorder. Though most of Premiere Prep’s clients had applied early to the Ivies and Ivy-adjacents, January 15 was a big deadline for a number of respectable academies, and my boss, Garance, had foisted a pile of procrastinators upon me after returning from holiday break. I spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening breaking my resolutions not once but thrice (potato chips, gummy worms, Keurig K-cup), talking clinically anxious teens off the proverbial cliff, and sending out emails pleading for at least partial drafts of personal statements. It didn’t take long for the replies to start rolling in:
hey Paulie sorry but i need more time. I’m at my dads house in Florida and the frogs and toads are super loud, none of us got any sleep last night.
I know I’m supposed to write about the trip I took to Guatemala but honestly it was pretty boring, could I do my ACL instead? The recovery took way longer than they thought
paulie i dont know if you heard but the prince of S— died yesterday. im not from S— but my friend is and im really upset. ill try to work on my essay but i can’t make any promises
It was hard not to feel demoralized about the future of my job, not to mention my species, as teen after teen bowed out of responsibility due to acute crisis, either real or imagined. Did these rich youths—if not the one percent, then the two-to-five—not comprehend their position on the world stage? Or did comprehension lead to chronic despair and lethargy? How it vexed me to witness them squander their time and good fortune, as if time and good fortune came in bulk from Costco and supply chains never ran dry. But while I would never admit it aloud, not even to Jemma, a tinge of envy commingled with my vexation—if not for their good fortune, for their belief in eternal life.
Just as I was about to throw up my hands and give up for the day, two more emails arrived: one from Freja, with a round-trip e-ticket to New York attached; and one from Sophie, an apple-cheeked dancer desperate to get into Case Western. Paulie don’t be mad I know this is last minute but could you edit this tonight??? My mom and I are going to Joffrey in Chicago tmrw for a training and I want to try to finish my app on the train. Thank you!!!! You’re the best!!!!!!!!
Sighing, I emailed back, No problem, kiddo! and stuck my work laptop into my bag, though I was tempted to throw it out the window. By the time I got to my car, the temperature on the dashboard read negative eighteen—enough to freeze my nostrils together and kill me within the hour. It’s strange to live somewhere so hazardous, or so my college roommate liked to hazard. (She was from San Mateo.) “I could never do it,” she’d say before I’d haul off for winter break. “You’re so brave.” But I did not feel brave when she said this. I felt like I did when I was fourteen and strangers, with a mix of horror and pity, tried to console me about my acne.
