American Boy
By M. Mendoza Nilsson
Now here is a memory that lingers, through all the ice and ire:
I am exiting the instrument repair shop, tucking two packets of violin strings into my big man’s leather coat, when I first hear the Stockholm Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s six days after Christmas. All the high-rise apartments in Hörtorget Square still have candles glowing in the windowsills, and the concert house breathes out the music like a giant harmonica: a hundred-part chord humming between its teeth. I stop in the street to listen, strain to hear it in the frigid shadow of its columned facade—and for a moment, I’m paralyzed.
It’s blustery in Stockholm this time of year. The clouds are heavy over Hötorget, but it hasn’t snowed since my family touched down at the airport. Just like our American voices cut the crowds in two here, cleaving dank subways and wet streets, my family’s presence forcibly shoves California right through this gray old town like a bristle brush down the drain—turning heads, breaking silences, stifling even the weather. Perhaps I imagined it, but even at my great-grandmother’s funeral, I felt furtive eyes following us as we all filed silently into the front row of dark oak pews. It’s the wife of Andréas, I heard them whispering. And the two American boys.
And then, always, the next question: Har Andreas inte en dotter?
Doesn’t he have a daughter? That kind of talk sends a shiver of terror and delight up my spine. I’m fifteen, born with a gut full of bramble and a soul that burns in the night when no one else is looking, and I have a lot of things I’d like to be. At night I dream about the scent behind the curtains in old, old opera houses—the rotor oils, the aged wood, the smell of dust burning off the stage lights. In these dreams, I see myself as if through water, lounging backstage in my tuxedo and black leather oxfords and pomade-slicked hair. I can never quite picture my own face. I like it this way.
Earlier in the week, my grandfather had found an old fiddle tucked away behind some musty boxes of Kalle Anka comics that my father had collected as a kid. I’ve been jonesing to fix up that fiddle all week, so Dad and I have come to Hötorget on a mission: hit the instrument repair store and pawn the comics. My family had marveled at the carefully preserved pages over breakfast that morning, wondering at his propensity—even at eight years old—to save and cherish, to seal away and protect these trophies of boyhood even if it meant he couldn’t enjoy them in the moment. I think that the whole thing is desperately sad. After twenty years of languishing pristinely in a garage, the issues of Kalle Anka have been packed up behind the counter of a used bookstore in Gamla Stan. My father’s wallet is a little heavier now, but I can’t stop thinking about all those pages, so carefully tended and never read without fear of contamination. I am fifteen years old, and boyhood is a weight I never learned how to carry.
Dad doesn’t seem to share my sentiment. “We have better uses for four hundred crowns,” he says, and hands me the money for two packets of violin strings.
I will spend the next two weeks meticulously restringing and tuning that fiddle, testing the tension and plucking the gut. It plays well for the first few days, but the strings keep slipping. The bridge is too weak, rotted from age. I coax it all back into place patiently every day, but by the time mid-January rolls around I have to put it away and go home. Dad laments that if he’d known the wood was so bad, he wouldn’t have let me buy the strings. But part of me thinks that I’d fix that thing up again and again if I could—tend to it, love over it, replace every screw, string, and peg until its body no longer sagged under the burden of its brokenness.
For now, though, it’s six days after Christmas and I’ve got the strings in my pocket. I’m standing in the middle of Hötorget square, pointing up at the concert house and hissing to my brother in my reedy American-boy voice, listen!
I don’t know what piece they’re playing. For all my posturing as a musician, I don’t know a lot about the things I want—I just know that they’re beautiful. The thundering roll of the timpani. The violins shivering in the January air. The solemn white columns and a statue of Orpheus reaching up desperately to the sky, straining for something intangible and terrified to look back. I let my gaze travel up his nude stone body, his elegant hand, and feel my bones humming while the band plays on.
Yes, I decide, this is perfect.
In four years from this moment, I will call my father on video-chat and tell him that I want to take testosterone. The violin has been gathering dust in my grandfather’s garage since the day I left Sweden. I’ve all but abandoned the velvet fantasy of stage lights and curtains. But this—this is a dream that I packed up in my suitcase and carried all the way home to California. It lives in my heart and my lungs and in between the grooves of my brain. I will carry it with me until my breathing stops; it will sink into the soil where my body lies; it will only die when I do. And I’m scared, but I know that I have to say it.
He answers the phone and greets me in that quiet, smiling way of his. How is university? How are you? But there’s no time for pleasantries. If I let him talk I will let my love for him creep into my throat and choke me; I will never open my mouth again.
There is an impulse in me to present my case like a lawyer: state the facts, ply him with evidence, stop the conversation if he tries to appeal to my sense of nostalgia (you were such a princess as a child, remember when you loved dresses?). I skip the the gory details about what this will do to my body, and the gorier details about what I have considered doing to my body instead. I tell myself that I am being fair and firm and loving. I am not trying to scare him. I am holding my arms out and telling him to jump. Please understand that I’ve thought about this for a long time now, I tell him. But what I’m really saying is: I’ll catch you. I promise that I will catch you.
But there’s a reason, I know, that I can’t bring myself to do it in person.
Here’s the truth. I know that my father loves me—desperately, earnestly, with hope and with terror. He held me in his hands as a baby and dreamt up an entire life for me to live, then sealed it away and protected it for all the years of my boy-girlhood. For every concert I’ve played, for every ride to band rehearsal, for every packet of violin strings, my father has been there: in the center section of the audience, in the driver’s seat while I rode shotgun, walking with me across Hötorget in his big man’s leather coat. My father films every jazz combo and string quartet he sees, just to show me the videos and tell me that no one’s music could ever compare to mine—not the rival high school, not the San Diego Symphony, not even the Stockholm Philharmonic.
But I don’t make music like I used to.
He’s confused when I tell him. I’m able to see it in his face, shadowed on the computer screen. But you’ve grown your hair out. You like boys now. And it’s true—I am different now. It’s in the way I walk and talk and dress; I was born in the wrong place and traveled the world and back to find a better one. So I’ll tell him about the sharp yearnings I’ve kept hidden under my heart for this, the hands I’ve batted away for this, the research, the statistics. I’m no longer the girl or the boy I thought I was, I explain, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still dream of a body I can live in. And the man who has, for the last four years, clapped me on the back and called me buddy and trimmed my hair with a three guard clipper will swill his snus between his teeth like dream gone sour and say, “I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this.”
I will weep til I’m shaking. I will weep until I gasp. I will weep until it feels like my heart is rending itself across my broken-down rib cage, weep until my gut aches trying to make him understand. How could you say that? I want to shout at him. How could you pretend all this time to love me? Do you want me to go this way alone? Am I not what you wanted all along?
But I don’t know about all of that now. For now, I am fifteen years old, walking across the square in Hötorget. The smell of the marketplace carries the spiced and cured notes of sausage and cheese and fresh fish on the archipelago wind. The strains of the music from the Stockholm Concert Hall compel me to turn around. My father and brother brush past me, but I don’t care; I stop amid the street slush and move my right hand, bloodless from the cold, rhythmically through the air. One, two, three, four, the way I was taught before I even knew there was a word for what I was. For exactly one measure of common time, I conduct my ghostly symphony.
Then I keep walking. They’re getting away from me.
Bio
M. Mendoza Nilsson studied creative writing at the University of Puget Sound.