On Rereading the Same Book Every Winter

I first read The Salt Ledger at twenty-six, on a bad mattress in a sublet above a dry cleaner, and I told everyone it was a love story, which is the sort of thing you tell people at twenty-six.

I have read it every winter since, starting the week the clocks change. It takes six evenings. This is not a famous book. Marit Solheim published three novels and died in 1971, and this is the only one you can find without hiring someone. I still have the original copy. It went into a bath in 1994, and in 2005 it nearly left in a taxi with a man who had already taken the good lamp.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure: it is the 1880s, in a place called Varnes, far enough north that the sun gives up for two months. Ingrid Aas, twenty-nine, keeps the accounts for her husband’s salt-cod house. A ship’s mate named Halvard comes through, and comes through again, and on page 211 he asks her to leave with him, and she says no. That is the plot. The rest is three hundred and forty pages of fish, weather, and arithmetic. Between the chapters, Solheim prints a page from Ingrid’s ledger, with dates, quintals, and kroner, set in a small gray type that I took for decoration.

Twenty-six

Ingrid was a coward and her husband was a brute. I had evidence. Nils Aas doesn’t speak at meals. On page 211 there is a line in green ink, with an underscore that went through the paper: Why doesn’t she just GO.

Forty-one

That was the winter after my divorce, in a rented apartment with a borrowed table. In chapter eleven, Nils comes in from the drying racks with his hands split open from brine, so badly he can’t work his coat. Ingrid does up his buttons without a word and goes back to her columns. I had read that scene fifteen times and filed it, each time, as an exhibit in the case against him.

That year I read it sitting on the floor. My own husband had not been a brute. He had been tired, and so had I, and each of us had spent some years reading the other’s silence as a plot. Under the green ink I wrote, in ordinary pencil: Oh, shut up. I was speaking to the girl above the dry cleaner.

Fifty-three

My mother was dying that year, at length and with opinions, and I read the book in a chair beside her bed. Somewhere around the fourth evening I noticed Fru Aas.

Fru Aas is Nils’s mother. She has, by my later count, eleven lines. She sits by the stove and complains about a draft, and I had always taken her for comic relief, a little Nordic furniture. But on the nights Ingrid goes down to the harbor, somebody moves the lamp from the front window to the table, so that no one on the road can see who is or isn’t in the room. Nobody remarks on this. There are only the two women in the house. I had been reading past that lamp for twenty-seven years.

It may be that she was covering for her daughter-in-law. It may be that she was bothered by the draft. I looked up to ask my mother what she thought, and she was asleep, or was letting me think so.

Fifty-eight

Now I have to confess something professional.

I have sent books back to the printer over a misdated Tuesday. I once held up a biography for a week to establish the color of a horse. And for thirty-two readings I had turned past Solheim’s ledger pages the way you pass a neighbor’s recycling. Then I broke my wrist on some ice, and it was a slow winter, and I was bored enough to add one up, left-handed, on the back of a receipt.

It was off by three kroner.

Reflex is a terrible thing. I actually reached for a query slip, addressed to a woman dead for fifty years. Then I added up the next page, and it was off by three kroner too. So was the next. I spent that whole night at the kitchen table with my arm in a cast. Every month, for six years of the book’s time, three kroner go missing from the Aas accounts, in Ingrid’s hand. No sentence of the novel mentions it. No character notices. By the final page, she has taken 216.

In chapter four, in passing, in a scene about something else, a shipping agent quotes a fare to a customer on the dock: passage south on the steamer for a woman alone, 210 kroner, and six more for a trunk.

I sat there until the garbage truck came.

So on page 211, when Halvard asks and she says no, she has the money, or most of it. She doesn’t need him. She never needed him. She could have gone any month for six years, and every morning she got up and did his buttons. The last ledger page, the last page of the book, comes up short by three kroner like all the others, so she was still putting it by after she had enough, and that is either the bravest thing I know about anyone or the saddest, and I have now argued it both ways in the same margin.

I don’t have a theory of rereading to offer you. People say that the book stays the same and the reader changes, and I’d have agreed once, but that ledger was sitting there the whole time, and I am the one who did not add it up. Page 211 now holds five handwritings, all mine, none of them speaking to the others. The most recent one says only Check Fru Aas.

I turned sixty-two in October. Fru Aas, by my arithmetic, which I now check, is sixty-four. The book comes down off the shelf next week, and I have already noticed a draft.