Flat Things

Freja had been in Ohio for eleven days when she texted the group chat — six girls, one country, scattered now across a circle of towns none of them had heard of before the agency sent the placement packets — does anyone else's family own a trampoline the size of a football field and also nothing in the fridge except ranch.

Ida replied first, always Ida first, because Ida's family in Bowling Green had wifi that worked and a basement room with an actual door, unlike Freja's, whose door was a curtain on a rod, hung by the host father himself, with visible pride, as if a curtain were a generous and modern solution rather than the bare minimum a person deserved.

ranch is not a food it is a religion here, Ida wrote. also yes. my host mom asked me today if we have "real grocery stores" in Denmark. I said yes we have had grocery stores since before America was a country and she laughed like I made a joke.

They had agreed, the six of them, before they'd even left Kastrup — sitting at the gate with their identical regulation suitcases, the kind the agency recommended, navy blue, as if matching luggage might also mean matching luck — that they would meet once a month, in person, no matter the distance. The Midwest, they had been told, was "very driveable." This had turned out to mean that Freja's host father considered four hours a normal distance to fetch milk, and that the six of them, dispersed across a triangle of small Ohio and Indiana towns with names like Lima and Defiance and Celina, would need a small miracle of scheduling and a borrowed Honda Odyssey to see each other at all.

They managed it anyway, the first Saturday of October, at a Bob Evans off the interstate that Sigrid had chosen because it was, by her calculation, equidistant from everyone's host families, a piece of geometry she announced with real pride when they slid into the booth, as though she had solved something larger than a restaurant.

"I have a complaint," said Clara, who had not yet taken off her coat, "and it is this: nobody here walks anywhere. I asked my host mom if I could walk to the Target and she looked at me like I had asked to walk to the moon. She said, 'Honey, it's eleven minutes by car,' as if that answered the question of whether a human leg could do it."

"Eleven minutes by car is maybe twenty by foot," said Sigrid. "This is not far."

"I know this. You know this. She does not know this. In her mind the eleven minutes by car is the only true unit. Walking does not exist as a category here. I think they have engineered it out."

Freja laughed, too loudly, the laugh of someone who has not heard anyone make her laugh in eleven days, and the waitress — a woman maybe fifty, with a name tag that said DEB and a coffee pot she carried the way other people carry purses, always at hand — refilled cups nobody had finished and called all six of them "sweetie" in a single circuit of the table, which none of them had a translation for, exactly, since sødt meant something else, smaller, and didn't extend to strangers.

"Okay but I have actual tea," said Ida, leaning in, lowering her voice in the specific register reserved, in any language, for gossip. "Mathilde's host dad. The one in Lima. You know how she said he was 'a bit much'?"

Everyone knew. Mathilde was not there — her host family had a thing, a thing, always a thing, usually involving a church potluck or a high school football game with a halftime show that seemed to require, in Mathilde's reporting, more military-grade equipment and rehearsal than the actual Royal Danish ballet — and her absence made her fair game in the particular way absent friends always became fair game, a rule that seemed to hold steady across every ocean.

"He told her," Ida continued, "that she should smile more. At dinner. In front of the children. He said, and I am translating directly so this loses nothing, he said, 'You'll get more tips in life if you smile more,' and Mathilde said, 'I'm not a waitress, I'm an au pair,' and he said, 'Exactly my point.'"

There was a beat of silence at the table, the specific silence of people deciding, together and wordlessly, how offended to be.

"That is insane," said Clara.

"That is America," said Sigrid, who had developed, in six weeks, a habit of delivering verdicts on the entire country as though she'd been commissioned to write its constitution.

"It's not all of America," Freja said, surprising herself with how much she meant it, how much she wanted, even now, even after eleven days of feeling like a curtain hung on a rod herself — present, functional, slightly humiliating — to defend the place. "My host kids. The little one, Caleb. He drew me a picture yesterday of the two of us on a rocket ship. He wrote DENMARK on the moon. Like Denmark was the moon. Like I came from somewhere that far."

"You did," said Ida, gently, and for a moment nobody said anything, because it was true in a way that didn't need defending or attacking, it just sat there on the table between the syrup dispenser and the laminated menu with its photograph of a stack of pancakes so tall it looked architectural, structurally improbable, very much like everything else in this country, Freja thought — built taller and wider than seemed strictly necessary, as if size itself were a kind of answer to a question nobody had asked.

"Can I say something," Clara said, "and you cannot make fun of me."

"We will absolutely make fun of you," said Sigrid.

"I miss biking in the rain. I did not know I would miss this. I complained about biking in the rain my entire life in Aarhus, every single autumn, the wind coming off the harbor sideways, and now I would give—" she paused, doing the math of homesickness, trying to find a stake high enough "—I would give a year of this trampoline-and-ranch life for fifteen minutes of biking home in the rain with my hood blowing off."

"There's a bike route by my house," Freja offered. "Sort of. It's a painted line on the side of a road that has no sidewalk and the cars go ninety kilometers an hour. My host mom looked at me like I had a death wish when I asked where the bike lanes were. She said, 'We have a bike lane downtown,' like it was a museum exhibit. One bike lane. For a whole town."

"This is the thing nobody told us," said Ida. "Not the agency, not the brochure. The brochure had a photo of a girl on a porch swing looking at a sunset with a golden retriever. Nobody put a photo of four hours to get anywhere. Nobody put a photo of you standing at a window at eight p.m. because the whole town goes dark and quiet by then and you don't know what to do with the rest of the night, because there's no čde — no, what's the English—"

"Cozy," said Sigrid. "Hygge doesn't translate, everyone always says, but I think it's not that it doesn't translate. I think it's that it doesn't exist here, not in the same shape. They have a version. Fireplace, blanket, football on the TV. But it's not the same as five people on a couch with candles and nowhere to be. Here there's always somewhere to be. Or there's nowhere to be and no one to be there with, and that's worse."

DEB came back with the check, unprompted, set it in the middle of the table with a "no rush, sweetie" that contained, as far as Freja could tell, both genuine kindness and a clear municipal ordinance that they should, in fact, rush, eventually, because there were other tables.

They split it the Danish way, automatically, no discussion, MobilePay reflexes firing uselessly in a country that had never heard of MobilePay, so they did the math by hand instead, dollars instead of kroner, the numbers feeling slightly fake in their hands, like Monopoly money, like none of this — the booth, the bottomless coffee, the eleven-foot ceiling of a Midwestern Bob Evans at two in the afternoon — was quite real yet, was still somehow a placement packet they hadn't finished reading.

"Can I tell you the actual tea," Freja said, as they stood to go, "the real one. Not Mathilde's host dad. Mine."

They waited.

"I thought I would feel different by now. I thought — I don't know what I thought. That eleven days in, I'd already be somebody who knows things. Who has a favorite diner and a route she runs and people who call her by a nickname. In the brochure girl, on the porch swing — I thought I'd be her by week two. And instead I'm standing in a kitchen that smells like a candle called 'Autumn Harvest' that isn't a smell that exists in nature, watching cartoons with a six-year-old who is, genuinely, the best part of my day, and I keep waiting for the part where this becomes my adventure, and some days I think it already is and I'm just too tired to notice, and some days I think it's not coming at all, and this is just — "

"Logistics," Sigrid offered. "Laundry. A curtain on a rod."

"Yes."

"I think," said Clara, pulling her coat tighter as they pushed through the door into a parking lot the size of a small Danish village, flat in every direction, the sky enormous and indifferent above the Bob Evans sign, "I think the adventure is not a thing that arrives. I think we keep waiting for it to start, like a movie, and it's not going to start, because it's not a movie, it's just — this. Deb's coffee. Caleb's rocket ship. The four-hour drive for milk. Mathilde's terrible host dad. This is already it. We're already in it. We just don't recognize it because it doesn't look like the brochure."

Nobody answered right away. The Odyssey beeped twice as Sigrid unlocked it, the four of them folding into a car too big for any street they'd grown up on, and somewhere behind them, eighty kilometers east, Mathilde was at a potluck not smiling enough, and somewhere west, Ida's host mother was telling someone else's host mother about the Danish girl and her quaint, old-world ideas about grocery stores, and all of it, every flat mile of it, was the only adventure currently on offer, whether or not it had been the one promised.

"Same time next month," Freja said, already half-homesick for this exact Saturday, this exact booth, before it had even finished ending. "Bring Mathilde. We'll teach her to smile less."