The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [146]
“Lavrans says you were not sent off before you were married.”
“But, indeed, I was wed at your age, and, in addition, Gunnars Stead daughters always went off, and then it is not so burdensome to them when they leave for good. It is the way with you that you are always reluctant to begin with, but happy when the beginning is over. I have more faith in you than I do in Helga, who rushes into things and is afterward filled with regret.”
“Helga can’t persuade Kollgrim or Astrid to do their tasks.”
“When you are away, she will learn how.”
Now Johanna, who had been sitting on Gunnhild’s hip, leaned forward and cried to be put down, and so Gunnhild set her on her feet and she took a few steps to the bedcloset and began to walk around it, holding on and looking to Birgitta and Gunnhild for praise. Gunnhild was distracted by this from her thoughts and began to laugh, and Birgitta jumped up and made her escape, for indeed, the plans that they had made for Gunnhild made her somewhat uneasy, and she found it not a little difficult to talk to the child. Since the betrothal and Bjorn’s move to Thjodhilds Stead there had been some visiting back and forth, with feasting and tale-telling and the usual amusements. The case was that Birgitta and her family did their best to show themselves happy and welcoming to the Thjodhilds Stead folk, and Bjorn and Solveig did the same, and yet, when Birgitta and Gunnar went to the other farmstead, they were annoyed by the stiffness of things, and Solveig’s affected manner, and when Bjorn and Solveig visited, Birgitta could see that they, and especially Solveig, were attempting to overlook this and that, out of conscious generosity. Always Solveig’s eyes went around the room with veiled dismay, and then fell upon Gunnhild, and Birgitta could see that the other woman was thinking that at least the girl was lovely to look at. Solveig herself was not, and Birgitta found this increasingly disturbing, for each time she saw the other woman she seemed to see only her jiggling chin or the peculiar way she sniffed and blinked when she was talking. During and after these times, she prayed mightily for the grace to look past Solveig’s earthly appearance to her soul within, for the woman was as kind as she could be, but the next time Birgitta always failed again.
Einar, too, had an unattractive feature which Birgitta saw that others did not see as she did, and this was a habitual squint from reading and writing. Even Gunnhild had not really seen this thing, but a girl does not see with the clarity of a wife, Birgitta well knew. When she herself had been betrothed and then married to Gunnar, she had been aware mostly of Gunnar’s clothes, and the gifts he gave her, and the gifts her father gave her, and her own clothes, and the weight of the sheep against her in the boat as they rowed to Vatna Hverfi, and then again the odd sense of sleeping in a different bedcloset from the one she was used to and the figure next to her that was Margret and not the Lavrans Stead dairy maid, whom she had slept with for some years before moving to Gunnars Stead.
And for a while she had been filled with hatred for all these folk and their ways, and had longed only for visits from her father, but when the first of these came, Lavrans had told her in hard terms, it seemed to her, that it was necessary and proper for a woman to sleep in bed with her husband, and he had chastised her and then himself, and had been very ashamed of the arrangements that had been made at Gunnars Stead. And Birgitta had learned that this thing that they had done after the marriage, fumbling and painful, was not something folk did once, but often, except that it got less painful and somewhat less fumbling. At the beginning she had been pleased with the relief that being with child gave her, and then she had been indifferent, and then between Maria and Johanna, it had seemed a pleasant thing, though rare enough with Astrid and Maria sleeping in the bedcloset between herself and Gunnar.
But it was well known that the years it took to settle into a new family