Ida Marie Hede

Ida Marie Hede
Translated from the Danish by Hazel Evans and Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg

The Yellow House

Four months after moving out of the yellow house in The Village’s middle-class sweet spot, I’ve gotten used to my little apartment. Four walls, a stovetop, a heater, and endless rows of IKEA Billy shelves, the children smushed together higgledy-piggledy in bed and lined up in orderly rows on the windowsill. On the floor: pools of urine, toppled vases.

I’ll never get used to the children leaving to go to their father’s. The unbearable silence. I’ll never get used to waiting for them to return.

Waiting with nervous turmoil inside me, an aching grief—like a missing arm, no: like missing infinite arms. And in the meantime: my girlfriends Heartface, Fleshface, and Assface on my mind, in my blood; the radio on in the kitchen; cottage cheese with hot sauce for dinner; loneliness.

A knock on the door, and the children are promptly returned to me in their cardboard boxes and carry cots. They sit on pillows in the stairwell, fidget spinning and singing—the three oldest girls conduct with firm hands, instructing the others: girls have wits, peaches have pits, guitars make noise, who needs boys. Sssssshhhhhh, I say, not so loud. Their childish, teasing feminism makes me happy, but I worry about the boys, sitting there, wide-eyed and crying. Janus’s small face folds itself around my heart. Their diapers are scratchy in their bunting suits, the weekly exchange of homes confuses them as much as the Scandinavian summer. The children’s father is already long gone. I peer out into the stairwell and catch a glimpse of his longish, jet black hair flying after him down the stairs. He was always quick on his feet. I shout: Hey, is there anything I need to know, did they get their milk yet, how many lice did you find? The front door slams.

His hurried movements follow me inside; I find myself imitating him as I walk through the apartment.

The children have stopped crying, but I keep squeezing them to me, hugging them so tight I start to fear my own strength.

Every morning before the children wake up, I perform the same rituals as back when I lived in the yellow house: My whole body feels exposed in the semi-darkness, even though no one can see me, and I feel goosebumps rising on my skin—goosebumps rising on all the skin in the world, I sing to myself as I spit on the white plastic thing that measures my temperature and rub a little wad of cotton against my clit. Then I seal both thing and wad in a transparent bag with my initials on it and drop the bag in the plant pot by the building’s front door. It contains all the other bags, a count of how many self-identified Females live in my building. Many. Only to be expected. Single singles and young roommates, but especially single mothers—the rent is cheap, the contract ambiguous. The bags are collected by The Village’s CollectSquad: a group of full-time employees on motorcycles, dressed in Rockabilly clothes and big toothy grins. They’re young, and theirs is the monotonous, blue-collar job of collecting temperature and discharge samples from The Village’s Females and delivering them to the Municipal Office. Mindless work. The Municipal Office then analyzes the samples and tracks The Village’s fertility levels by neighborhood and income in order to determine the average time of ovulation. Here in The Village, reproduction is king. I know this because I used to live opposite the Municipal Office. From the yellow house I could see right into the fertility lab. I would watch as the laboratory technicians opened the bags, as they sniffed and licked the things and wads. Why did they do that? Were they trying to positively skew the statistics? The technicians would tilt their heads back like they were gargling, in a kind of ecstasy. Or were they trying to consume the remnants of egg and semen from unfamiliar vaginas?

But now I’m getting ahead of myself. Here, take my hand, it’s not wet. I haven’t masturbated, done the dishes, washed my hands, or taken a shower in days. The dishes are stacked in wobbly columns.

It is a chapped and wrinkled hand, but hold on tight, because my story about The Village is about to begin. It’s two years and four months ago, and I’m living with the father of my children in the yellow house opposite The Municipal Office before everything fell apart, before he and I abandoned our pseudo-monogamous paradise and our attempts to produce a regular nuclear family in eternal return, before we—as I like to say—lost our footing, and long before the appearance of Heartface, Fleshface, and Assface—my three girlfriends, to whom I’d later surrender—but you’ll have to do without them for the time being. At least until you’ve listened to this little rant, which may, or may not, touch on some forms of life you hold dear.

Something inside me is thundering, shaking. Maybe it’s grief, the disquiet in my heart, my difficulty making friends and my codependent tendencies, my morbid narrative desire—it could even be my DNA, some kind of blissful brain damage? Or maybe it’s that I’ve lived in The Village of Megalomania and Precarity for months now, churning out more blood-swollen tampons than I ever thought possible. How did it come to this? There was a housing crisis in Scandinavia, there was a global housing crisis, a universal housing crisis, an intergalactic housing crisis. Having a place to live was like having a rare Monet, whispered the voices of the world to me, or Damien Hirst’s diamond skull, the Secretary of Homeland Security’s heart on a silver platter, Musou Black fabric, belonging to the 1%, licking the crumbs off a dessert plate that belonged to a person who belongs to the 1%. Utterly impossible, utterly incredible.

All of a sudden, I found myself in such a place, a place that belonged to me, to the father of my children and to my children, too. The house had a roof, doors, windows, a range hood, and recycling. It was in the wealthy, western part of The Village—a place in the world that had, until now, felt unattainable. I signed the miraculous lease and announced to the father of my children that we’d just been upgraded to the next level of middle class. Our eyes met: community, relief. The father of my children kissed me, I remember it well.

The way his mouth impressed itself upon my cheek and burrowed into the deepest part of it.

I moved in with static, dry-shampoo hair and a baby belly and cracked nipples and my family, like a chaotic appendage: plastic boxes and IKEA Billy shelves and a secondhand espresso machine and hanging plants and Moroccan rugs everywhere. Our children everywhere. Screams and wails and withered leaves everywhere. Then, the abrupt darkness in our huge new yard, apples on the grass and old scooters with oversized wheels and squashed plums on the flagstones and tree branches like a rib cage against the winter sky.

The Village of Megalomania and Precarity was part of the deal. Of course it was. It surrounded everything like a thorny fucking bush. Why did it have to be so extra? What was its deal? Where were its borders? I’d moved into the yellow house for a break, for some sun, peace, and quiet. I’d wanted to escape the chaos, to escape my bank, Our Essential CommonBank, which kept leaving messages in its smartass robot voice, repeating the same sentences on a loop: Sign up for a premium PREP account now to claim Your Exclusive Rewards. What did it want, the hypocrite? The bank was the guiltiest of them all, and yet I’d become so accustomed to pleasing it, to saving myself, I acquiesced: Yes, I’ll transfer the money right away, I’ll provide a steady income, I’ll sign the forms. I disgusted myself, I felt cowed. It was as if I’d spent my entire life trying to avoid moving from apartment to apartment in the small, densely populated, increasingly expensive districts, resigned to the inevitable loss of my deposit every time. My bad for menstruating on the wooden floor, I couldn’t help it, the cramps brought me to my knees, the stains wouldn’t come out. Baking soda, salt, Coke Zero, urine, I tried it all, I lay on my knees and cried into the floorboards. A few of the children were born that way too: emergency landings, thumping out onto the untreated floorboards in a pool of water and fat. By the second birth, my body had already started to outpace my inner control freak. Actually, I was grateful for that—it had been a secret desire of mine, when I met the father of my children, and, in a daze and a matter of seconds, got pregnant with my oldest daughter that the baby, the incomprehensible living thing that would soon tumble out of me and set out on its own adventure toward death, that the fact of her life would be enough to eclipse my pulsating neuroses. And so it did; I was a blood-soaked monster, the baby slipped out without resistance: an enormous, blanched almond, soft like a canned pear, bathed in the sauce of my innards. I examined her like a rare crown jewel; I felt exhilarated and insane. My child, my sticky bundle of joy, in my arms at last, coated in blood. Meanwhile, inside me, for the most part: cuts and cracks. Then, a dewy sensation: I was constantly on the verge of tears and simultaneously as solid as a casting mold. And then, a surprise: after becoming a mother, a new kind of indignation started to grow inside me. I became enraged by all the world’s eerie, well-intentioned authorities: real estate agents, landlords, financial advisors, hobby bureaucrats, face readers, life coaches, presenters, influencers, dental secretaries, therapists. I tried to shake it off, to rid myself of this childish contempt, but it was as if the baby in my arms had infected me with its blue-eyed bullshit detector.

As if having children had made me less adult than I’d ever been.

The father of my children watched me, stood in front of me, moved around me. He sat on the floor with the children, a newborn baby stretched full length along his broad forearm.

By the time we moved into the yellow house, I’d already spent years birthing and taking care of the children in all our dark, cramped apartments in the districts. Years of shouting in despair at the telemarketers and gynecologists who surveilled me and admonished my breastfeeding technique—the breast can and must be emptied entirely, that’s the only way the child will get full; never let the child fall asleep on the breast, they’ll become dependent on you, they won’t be able to sleep alone at night, don’t corrupt the child! Or shouting at overworked social workers, who informed me that I no longer qualified for parental support, I’d been out of the workforce for too long—you know, the real workforce with its full-time contracts and break rooms. I spent my days standing in supermarket lines with a baby sling wrapped around my body, just before closing time, staring down the beautiful, older women who laughed their musty, jealous laughter right into my bloated cheeks, as I, in my exhaustion, dozed half off at the cash register, or when my baby wouldn’t stop crying and did backbends while still tied to my body. I thought about those women, I thought: Once upon a time, you were me and soon, I’ll be you and, as if by magic, we’ll have switched bodies. We never thought time would actually pass, that our bodies would be so interchangeable. I thought of those women and their stares: You thought your youth would last forever, that your struggles would live on for posterity, and yet, here I am, a monkey wrench in the works. You haven’t become my role models, and I haven’t become your hope. You’ve been there, done that, fought your way to the top, taken all the blows, been the only woman in a room full of men all too often. And here I stand, propelled into a state of boredom, love, childishness, unruliness, anger, and poverty, fully aware that I’ll never reach the same heights as you, fully aware of the awful things you must have endured. Imagine me saying this in a soft, lazy voice.

For me, the crises would keep on coming, and the struggles I ought to be fighting are fragmented, arduous and everywhere. No wonder I’m so hypervigilant and exhausted. I’m more than meets the eye.

I saw myself through those women’s eyes: baby in sling, items on checkout belt—all with yellow discount stickers and fast-approaching sell-by dates. They probably thought the only card I had to play was a kind of beauty I hadn’t even bothered to invest in, hadn’t even used to secure myself a house, a fortune, status in some line of work, a board position, hadn’t realized I was toeing a thin line over the deep well of poverty’s sewage, hadn’t understood my potential. I could have fucked my way to most places. I hadn’t fucked my way anywhere.

The cashier accelerated, the items almost flying off the belt. With a flick of her wrist, the bananas gathered in bunches and cartons of milk clustered together. It was impossible to catch her eye, her eyelashes were streaked with the remnants of green mascara and she had a matching green stripe in her short hair. A streak of freedom. I looked at her name tag: LYDIA G. I knew the babies had planted me firmly in the category of Woman in a more hardcore and tragic way than ever before. The babies had granted me access to a new club, a seat in the baby-carrying-solidarity box, but they’d also turned my outsides into an emotionally unstable balloon of milk, ready to burst. From now on, women, young and old, would look at me like this, their gazes landing uneasily on my cheeks. They’d project their desires onto the blank slate that I was, onto my dead, tired eyes. I was forever bound to my exterior, there was no way out. Meanwhile, inside me, a new, invisible and uncompromising something was finding its feet, a short, crazy fuse. It was as if I’d crash-landed somewhere between a child’s naive honesty and the male body’s unquestioning right to exist in the world.

Lydia G looked up.

Anything else?
No thanks
Cash or card?
Card
Try again
What?
Try one more time
Okay
Your baby is destroying our card reader
Oh, sorry, it’s her new defiance thing, she likes to headbutt . . .
Your baby has some kind of insider knowledge about the world
What?
I love oracles
What do you mean?
Just try again
Okay
I mean, your baby is doing what the rest of us are thinking. And you, maybe you’re just a bundle of nerves leaking milk, but you’re more multigendered now than you’ve ever been
What do you mean?
It’s like you’ve been split in two, an outside and an inside, and they’re struggling to meet
Okay
All work is hard, honey. Do you want the receipt?

My daughter’s mouth was wide open in a soundless scream, her drool dangling. I grabbed my bags and left the overcrowded store and Lydia G’s impulsive courage and youth behind, headed home to the children’s father and our cold apartment. I looked over my shoulder, listening for the witchy laughter of the matriarchs. I felt oddly attracted to their well-groomed, well-read middle-classness, their vulnerable menopausal reality. What was it like to stop menstruating, to no longer be controlled by hormones, to become divorced from your own bodily functions? From the very thing that had blown my mind since childhood: that I was destined to be a giver of life, a desire machine. I was attracted to these women, to their tragic elegance, their inability to change the world, to become everything they deserved to be. And the sassy bitterness that seemed to come with it.

This much I knew: in the future, I too would be full of memories of all the chances I hadn’t taken because they were hidden from view or didn’t yet exist. In the future, my children would either be eaten by the new world rulers, the rats, or they’d have an easier time of it than I did, or they’d fight the same defiant battles in their infinitely mutating variants with fresh muscles, new weapons, more friends. And I might sigh enviously, I might crave the sight of blood, I might retreat, dig myself a hole deep inside a mountain and be relieved that the blood had finally dried up and disappeared?

Just as I was unlocking the door, an older woman poked my shoulder with a sharp nail. Like a mysterious sphinx, she beseeched me:

Be careful not to use my tactics. This is what I did: I took men’s pride, their puffed-up chests, their boasting, and I swallowed it whole. It became mine, but then I had to live with the knowledge that the patriarchy doesn’t only reign outside me, but inside me, too.

Her silver-rimmed glasses fogged up, then she was gone.

I’m telling you about the matriarchs now because later, I came to understand The Village itself as a kind of matriarch. Back when I lived in the dark little apartments in the districts, I still held onto the hope that I might, someday, be able to move on, move up, that there might be something else.

By the time we’d moved into the yellow house, I’d already spent years longing for a little patch of sun where the oleander and lunaria could grow. A patch of sun where the children’s father could kiss me, where he could see my hair shimmer strawberry blonde in the sunshine, see my face smile, catch sight of me like a little Golden Age portrait in the living room, catch a whiff of my body, and realize that I was something other than a hormonal animal in a bathrobe with an immersion blender in my hand. I kept longing for a dishwasher that he and I could fill together as we, in an automated kind of ecstasy, filled our shared life with soft, radiant, glistening children. A patch of sun for the children’s fine, downy cheeks. I started looking for that sun, the big bright rooms, stucco and old rugs, record players and worn old paperbacks stacked on vintage beer crates, lilacs and buttercups. I set out on a romantic quest for the banal version of an idyll I’d seen in films like Love Actually and read about in magazines from 7-Eleven: Your Cozy Home and Our Children, and heard regular women with puffed sleeves and patterned diaper bags discussing so nonchalantly in expensive, incense-infused breastfeeding cafés.

From time to time, the children’s father would put his arm around me. He’d lift me up, spin me around and then set me back down.

He said: Let’s do it

I answered: What, now?

The movers stomped through our dark apartment. They impassively lifted boxes of pots and pans. They were paid by the job: boxes into the truck, boxes out of the truck. Apartments always seemed bigger when they were empty.

I thought: But what is this feeling of loss? A sentimentality we ought to do away with? No going back now.

We left the districts then, maybe forever. We left our lousy, vulnerable, wonderful youth behind and, as soon as I arrived in the dreamlike landscape of The Village, the idyll was upon me. The idyll rose up like bile. I’m not quite sure how to explain it, and it’ll probably take a while, but: a cascade of pesticides in the winter air and apples turned to stone, hanging over my head and over my babies’ heads. Didn’t The Village have an edge, a neatly plowed field somewhere, whose lip you could fall over if you, some dark day, wanted to escape?

The dark days were more plentiful and wretched than before. I walked out of my new door early in the morning, holding my giant baby carrier. I packed the smallest baby bodies in a triple stroller and set off with my tender belly and a thermos of the blackest coffee. With every step, I healed a bit and tore some more. I crossed the front yard, passed the wheelbarrow, and stepped onto my new road, but I couldn’t find a single place to which The Village with its false idyll and predictable forms didn’t follow me. I couldn’t figure it out. Were the apples really apples? What was that smell? What were people doing in their houses? I turned corners with my stroller; there was no one to be seen. The roads were dead, dogs barked in the distance, sharp and unhappy, their owners hidden behind slides and lampposts, gravel covered the paths; the dark blue, unnerving January sky quivered around me, my face turned to hard clay. I walked through streets of large houses in an indolent daze, I was disobedient, I was looking for an emergency lever, a door handle, a pause button. I searched all over. The poplar trees stood tall and pruned, staring at me with deliberate indifference, my hands collided with mailboxes and FedEx pickup points. The supermarket on the corner was empty and its windows dark and shiny. Nothing was open. The streets were deserted. Cracked lids discarded on the steps outside The Coffee Shop. The sun wouldn’t rise here. I turned back in the direction of the yellow house, kicking the picket fences on my way. Loud farts ruptured the silence and I looked down at the children. I changed the three smallest ones in the stroller, who were hidden under a pile of wool blankets. I looked over my shoulder, then rolled the used diapers into tight balls and placed them on the roofs of every Mercedes I passed, making mustard yellow stripes trickling down their windows.

Balthazar was crying more than the others. I picked him up, nuzzled his cheek against mine. He lay on my shoulder; perhaps he needed to be burped. I patted his back, then put him back in the stroller again. His eyelids grew heavy. He slept on his side, his fat cheek squished against the carrier.

There I was, minding my own business, one hand on the stroller, the other holding my phone, trying to read the news, when someone walked past me. Very close. A raincoat brushed my leg. Every morning, without fail, I slid into my worn-out Kim Kardashian leggings—the loose elastic seams the most comfortable casing for my belly fat and its frequent abdominal aches. I felt unsure of myself, but I looked up in surprise and anticipation: a woman’s pussycat eyes were elevatoring up and down my face, casting a shadow. I wasn’t quick enough to log her features. It occurred to me that she might have spotted that I, at that moment, wasn’t making eye contact with my children, but was lost in a sensationalist article about Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster, the car the crazy billionaire had sent into space to become an artificial satellite orbiting around Mars or the sun, a space-suited mannequin in the driver’s seat. I could almost hear Adele’s Hello wafting out from the car radio as the absurd Tesla sailed its macho course through the universe, meanwhile I, having briefly immersed myself in something other than my children’s eternally beautiful eyes and the soft rivers of familial love, had apparently committed an act of cruelty. I glared into the darkness, heard the crunch of gravel. The woman slithered off into a laurel bush. Everything went quiet again. I assessed my surroundings: Was this where I belonged now, where I had to make a life? What was worse, the passive aggression or being left alone with my own thoughts? In my frustration, I threw my phone onto the ground and a long crack split the screen. The children’s wide eyes were like buttercups in the morning light: ARE YOU HAPPY NOW, I shouted at them, and they started gurgling. Was there a megaphone somewhere, so I could rouse the local residents, announce my arrival, have someone tell me what exactly my new home was trying to infect me with?

My hands, eyes, and jaw hurt. Adam woke. The two smallest children cried loudly; milk streamed through my blouse and leggings, dripping out at the ankles. I might as well be pissing in The Village’s darkest hour.

piss, piss, piss
into the idyll’s throat

I sang quietly to myself.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that The Village didn’t have an outside: there was no place I could go some forlorn Monday morning to meet

a shaman/my childhood/happiness/trust/longing
for freedom
like irrefutable fortune cookies
a tweet with 10,000 retweets
an enlightening conversation with a zealous life coach
or a sensitive cosmetologist
or a temperamental shaman
or a Rihanna with rhinestones glittering all over her.

If there was an outside, it was somewhere within, somewhere on this mansion-lined street, somewhere between The Village’s heart and my own. Somewhere within the people I avoided, who avoided me. Of course it was. This wasn’t a fairy tale; every protest came from within. Escape routes are always made of the very material we wade in, of the stiletto blisters on my feet. I’d been to school, I knew this wasn’t The Truman Show, The Matrix, another world is possible, a dream, or the playful hope of ‘90s anarchism. This was hardcore. The world is here and now, and I was living in an excerpt from the future, an excerpted version of everything.

I looked up at the sky. The unambitious clouds. The cracks in the mansion-lined street’s asphalt spread longer and deeper, Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites shone like tears and his Tesla split in two. Then the unease began to engulf me and the children, like the throbbing suburban darkness of the shadows cast by the moons of Uranus, like the throbbing in my pelvis, like Adam’s shit. The universe was large. The claustrophobia inside me was nothing out of the ordinary; I felt the claustrophobia because it was already a feeling that pumped through the whole world, and maybe always had.

That this claustrophobia could be softened, softened from within, through little pockets of love, I knew like the shudder down the marrow of my spine. That this claustrophobia could be released by euphoria—yes, even the kind that comes from grief—I had yet to discover.

A figure in a shabby, meteor-print jacket leaned against a tree, one arm resting on the bark, the other plunged into a pair of dark leggings. The other arm was moving fast. A black bag lay on the ground, half open. In the bag was a shiny telephone, a pack of pale gray menstrual pads, lying open, and a pack of dark chocolate covered rice cakes.

I walked home with my sleeping children.

I was the kind of person who gave everything a chance, and that was my problem, if such problems could even be said to come from within. It was unfortunate that no one had told me about The Village’s centrifugal force. It wasn’t until my encounter with The Village’s loving and clandestine communities that I started to get it. And to this day, I still don’t really understand what The Village is, still don’t know where its limits lie, still don’t know how to get out. We’d moved in five weeks ago and I hadn’t spoken to a single local. My discomfort had yet to be explained to me, but eventually the blackbirds started chirping, the mornings became brighter and I swiped myself back to my original, naïve trust. I went about my daily chores, tried to settle down, put up shelves, water the oleander, mix the right kinds of low-sodium porridge with the right amount of organic formula, and neatly pack the diapers in double-zipped diaper bags and throw them in the right containers.

The garbage truck came early, the lampposts were yellow and blue in the dark. The garbage men weren’t interested in what was in the diaper bags. They picked up each one like it was a bundle of beets.

I tried to think kindly of the dark shadows that loomed behind the windows of the other houses or retreated behind tree trunks and cars when I took my cold, hell-heavy morning walks.