Page 25 of The Librarians
“They—” Astrid stuffs another sushi in her mouth to buy a little time.
Unbelievably, the sushi still tastes good—clean and sharp, unlike the mess she’s made of her life.
She grabs her mug of wine and takes several sips. But there’s only so much she can do to put off answering a simple question. The old answers, long practiced, long perfected, surface. “Have you ever heard of Malmö?”
“It’s a city in Sweden, right?”
“Sweden is almost a thousand miles long north to south and Malmö is maybe fifteen, twenty miles from the southernmost tip of the Scandinavian Peninsula.”
She stops—she is speaking in her own accent and Hazel, judging by that flicker of bafflement in her eyes, has noticed. But she waits patiently for Astrid to continue.
Astrid lifts her mug, but it’s empty. Hazel unscrews the cap from the bottle and refills it. But the mug now feels glued to the table. Astrid can’t make it budge.
“Most people here think of Sweden as reindeer and snow but in the southern reaches it has a decent growing season.”
She is still speaking in her own accent and Hazel still regards her with infinite patience.
Astrid drags the words past her parched throat. “Potatoes, wheat, and sugar beet all do pretty okay there.”
Oh, God, why did no one ever tell her that she sounds like an AI reading from Wikipedia?
“What about dairy?” asks Hazel. “I seem to recall that the Scandinavian diet is fairly high in dairy.”
Astrid gulps. Not because she can’t answer the question, but because she can. This is where she used to say that her fictional Swedish mother drinks a glass of milk every day at lunch. And if anyone was still interested after that, she could give a mini TED talk on Swedish cheeses, especially the ones people are likely to encounter in IKEA.
“Yes, lots of dairy. Have you ever had Hushållsost? It’s a cow’s-milk cheese and I like using it for quesadillas.”
She laughs shakily.
Hazel takes a sip from her own mug. “I’m always interested in what people eat. Do you make quesadillas as a snack or a meal?”
Holy shit. Have they moved past the question of where her parents live?Thank God. She can talk about quesadillas for days—not that she knows much about them, but she will blather on about anything now.
She opens her mouth and out comes, “Ever since I left home for college, I’ve been telling people that my parents live in southern Sweden, not far from Malmö. But that’s not true. They live—and have always lived—in a tiny little town in Iowa.”
Hazel’s eyes widen. She thinks for a moment. “May I ask why?”
Astrid wishes she had a good answer. “I lost my mind briefly—I mean, figuratively, of course.”
The southernmost counties of Iowa were hit hard by the Farm Crisis, which made her grandparents, formerly prosperous farmers, into paupers overnight and severely limited her parents’ options in life. Her hometown has lost 40 percent of its population in her lifetime. And in spite of being surrounded by agricultural land—or perhaps partly due to the relentless production of corn and soybean—her entire county was—and is—a food desert where most non-meat cooking has to be done with shelf-stable ingredients.
“I don’t want you to think that I was Don Draper, escaping some kind of horrible Midwestern past. I could have been any other small-town girl, leaving home for better opportunities elsewhere.”
Hazel chews slowly. She doesn’t look at all as if she’s been turned off by Astrid’s revelation, but nor is she burning with the sort of curiosity that would make Astrid feel like a monkey in a zoo. She is just waiting for Astrid to reveal more at her own pace.
So Astrid does. “I had a boyfriend in high school. We were serious—at least serious enough to plan to go to the same college. But he was a year ahead of me and two months after he left for college, he texted to break up with me—like he was Taylor Swift’s boyfriend or something.”
And she was so devastated and livid at the time, not realizing that in another decade, people wouldn’t even text to break up anymore. They would simply disappear.
“Not very grown-up of him,” says Hazel.
“No. And I had to find out from his sister that he fell head over heels for a Portuguese exchange student. Years later he would apologize, but at the time it didn’t feel like one teenage boy broke up with me, it felt like thewhole world rejected me. I became obsessed with female exchange students from Europe—they seemed to be everything I wasn’t.
“Next thing I knew, I was spending the summer before college immersed in Swedish writers and Scandinavian travel shows.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It wasn’t. Showing up at college telling people I’m from a little farm outside of Malmö wasn’t bad either, to be completely honest.”
