thought she would need her daughter’s help. So far, the only thing Pix had done was use one of the meal chits SAS had issued to secure a cup of tea for Ursula. The hamburgers that had been sitting wrapped in foil for many hours and fries from before that had held little appeal for either of them. Well, she could start taking charge now.
“I think the best thing to do is put on these masks and go right to sleep. That way, we’ll be on Norwegian time when we arrive. I’ll tell the steward we don’t want the meal.”
Ursula had been examining the contents of the bag thoughtfully provided to first-class passengers for many hundreds of dollars extra with all the excitement of a child opening a very large birthday present.
“Even toothpaste!” she exclaimed. The Rowe women, besides traveling light, always traveled economy class.
“I’m going to reset my watch now.” Pix adjusted her footrest. They would be able to sleep in these seats, something impossible on every other flight she’d made. Fitting her long, angular frame into an airline seat was like trying to put those springy joke snakes back in the fake mixed-nuts can. Both mother and daughter were tall—and attractive, although Pix had never believed she was, despite a husband given to unrestrained, unlawyerly rhapsodies
about her dark chestnut hair and deep brown eyes. Ursula’s hair was white, a clean white, like new-fallen snow. It too was short, but, unlike Pix’s, it curled slightly. Ursula’s cheekbones had become more pronounced, yet age had not clouded her brown eyes.
Pix reached for the button to summons the steward.
“What are you doing, dear?”
“Calling the steward, so we won’t be disturbed when they serve dinner. We can wear these sleep masks.”
“But I want my dinner. It could be something nice.” Her mother sounded uncharacteristically plaintive.
Pix had heard Faith on the subject of airplane food and thought it unlikely that SAS had whisked a cordon bleu chef aboard especially for this flight.
Ursula persevered. “It will probably be something Scandinavian. You know how much you like salmon. It could be salmon.”
“All right, we’ll have dinner, then go to sleep immediately after.”
Her mother had pulled a menu from the pocket in front of them. “See, smoked salmon to start. Now, you don’t want to miss that.”
Pix was seeing a new side of Ursula: Ursula the traveler. Yes, mother was intrepid, still gardening, living on her own, fiercely independent. She’d asked for a kayak for her eightieth birthday and plied the waters of Maine’s Penobscot Bay with aplomb. In between worrying about her children—Mark, almost twenty; Samantha, a senior in high school; Danny, a seventh grader—all worrisome ages—Pix worried about her mother, despite her self- sufficiency, or maybe because of it. But she knew her, or so she thought. The long wait in Newark Airport had revealed another Ursula: Ursula the outgoing. Pix had spent the time slumped in a tortuous molded plastic seat, trying to read the Fodor’s guide Faith had insisted she bring so she’d know where to eat. Her mother, meanwhile, was making friends, and as they departed for their various destinations, she filled Pix in on the lives of these new ac
quaintances. Ursula’s Christmas card list was growing faster than Pinocchio’s nose.
“I never knew the copper in the Statue of Liberty is Norwegian copper. That interesting man I was just talking to told me all about it when I mentioned where we were going. At the time it was cast, a French company owned the copper mine in Norway and that’s how it happened. I wonder if Marit knows.”
Pix had been amazed. On her own turf, her mother never spoke to strangers and was even known to be reserved with friends. Talk about off the leash.
The plane bumped down the runway and soon they were in the air. Ursula had insisted that Pix take the window seat and was now craning over to see if she could spot the Norsk Lady Liberty in the net of twinkling jewel- like lights spread below, enveloped by darkness as they gained altitude. She leaned back and was soon captivated by the map on the movie screen marked with altitude, speed, mileage, time, and their tiny plane inching along the Eastern Seaboard.
A few bursts of static, then a voice: “This is Einar Magnusson speaking. I am your captain tonight. On behalf of Scandinavian Airlines, I would like to welcome all of you on board and I’m very sorry for the long wait on the runway. I promise to make up the time. You will be in Oslo before you know it!” His voice was cheerful, sincere, contrite. He repeated the announcement in his native tongue, sounding even more cheerful, sincere, and contrite. Pix was vaguely alarmed. Exactly how did Einar propose to make up this time? Her mother’s thoughts were elsewhere.
“Danish. You can always tell. You know what Marit says. They sound like they have a potato in their mouths.”
Pix wasn’t going to touch this one. Dane, Swede, Norwegian, Hindustani—she didn’t care, so long as he got them to Oslo safely. Mother, on the other hand, seemed to have picked up some of Marit’s intense nationalism—the “Forty thousand Swedes ran through the weeds chased
by one Norwegian” kind, or “The only thing the Swedes have that the Norwegians don’t are good neighbors.” Norway had only been independent from Sweden since 1905 and feelings still ran high.
Dinner arrived. The lox—“roketlaks” in Norwegian, Ursula pointed out—was followed by decidedly non- Scandinavian sirloin tips. Pix passed on the mango mousse and turned her light off. She hadn’t had to supervise Danny’s homework, or deal with dinner. She was missing a meeting and Samantha’s senioritis, which veered wildly from counting the days until graduation to tears at leaving. Pix
“Good night, Mother.”
“Good night, Pix. If you wake up, wiggle around or step over me and walk up and down. They say this helps you with jet lag.”
Ursula read a lot, Pix reminded herself, and she wondered what other travel tips awaited her. Before drifting off to sleep, she lifted her mask to check on her mother. Ursula had headphones on and was watching the movie. Pix pulled the mask down. Mother didn’t get to the movies much.
A horrible reason…The steward had given her two blankets and they actually had some heft to them, as opposed to the tissue-paper ones issued to economy class. She pulled one up around her shoulders and tried to let sleep, so close, claim her. Marit would be waiting for them. Marit, a Scandinavian version of Ursula, tall, poised. Pix had a hard time imagining the two stately old ladies as silly little girls, the way they described themselves when they looked at the old pictures.
The Larsens, Marit’s parents, had emigrated to the United States sometime in the early 1900s. They had been intending to join relatives who had settled in Minnesota, but arriving in New York, Mr. Larsen had mistakenly purchased railway tickets for Hampton, New Hampshire, rather than Hampton, Minnesota. A thorough man, he was conscientiously following a map as they traveled, and upon
hearing the names of places that did not appear on his route, he realized his error and got his wife, great with child, off the train in Boston. At this point, Mrs. Larsen had had enough of travel and enough of the United States. Unlike her husband, she did not speak any English and was already longing for herring. They decided to stay put and see how things went. Norwegians tend to be bodies that do not stay in motion once having arrived someplace. The one thing Mrs. Larsen did do was insist that her husband get on a trolley with her and ride until they found a place enough like home so she could tolerate their sojourn in this foreign land. The place turned out to be Aleford, twenty minutes west of Boston. Of course, Aleford no more resembles the rolling green meadows, deep fjords, and towering mountains of the Larsen birthplace than it does the Amazon rain forest, but it did have some birch trees and red barns. That was enough for Mrs. Larsen. After the birth of her first child, Nils, Marit’s older brother, now passed away, along with her only other sibling, Lars, Mrs. Larsen started doing wash for various ladies in Aleford, who promptly became “her ladies.” And her favorite lady was Ursula’s mother, Mrs. Lyman.
The Lymans lived in a sprawling old house with a backyard that sloped down to the Concord River, a branch of which ran through town. Ursula had inherited the house and it was where Pix and her brother, Arnold, had grown up. It seemed as much a part of the family as the people who had inhabited it over the generations. Pix didn’t want to think what would happen to the house after Ursula died. Didn’t want to think about that at all.
The Larsens’ house also backed onto the river, farther downstream. From the pictures, it seemed this generation took to the water the way Pix and her brother had. Ursula and Marit in a canoe, swimming, rowing. But
