“I love you,” I said.
“I love you,” Marxy said, wrapping his arms around me. “Eck anne pear.”
I smiled at my brother.
“Should I keep making balloon animals?” the Viking asked.
“I don’t know,” Gert said. “Ask the birthday girl.”
Marxy had another present for me: a French kiss. We had kissed before, but not the French way.
Since Marxy is the only person I’ve ever kissed, all I know is what the videos on YouTube tell me about kissing, and what AK47 told me about kissing, which is: not too much of anything. Not too much tongue, AK47 told me. Not too much lips. Not too much of anything.
Marxy’s kisses are probably too much of everything, but that’s okay. He put his tongue in my mouth and moved it around. We had talked about French-kissing before. We hadn’t French-kissed yet, though, and Marxy thought that my birthday was the best time to do it.
He put his arms around me and then his mouth went on my mouth.
The kissing was in front of the Viking, who was standing by the stereo, looking at Gert’s huge speakers. He watched for a second before calling out to Gert and saying, “I think you need to come in here,” and when Gert came in from the kitchen he handed his cake to the Viking and pulled us apart.
“French-kissing,” Marxy said, smiling and wiping spit that could have been either of ours off of his face.
“Yes,” Gert said, patting him on the back. “Yes, French-kissing.”
Marxy is tall like the Viking, but has less muscles. He’s taller than Gert too. Even though he’s almost gargantuan, Marxy is frightened of almost everything. I never tell him so, but he would be a terrible Viking warrior. Viking tribes have lots of people, not just warriors or heroes like Gert. Marxy could be a very good farmer because he likes being outside and in the sun, and he works very hard.
* * *
At the end of the night, after Marxy and the Viking left, Gert sat down on the couch beside me and stretched his arms and let out a deep yawn.
“Well, that went all right,” he said, and he opened a can of grape soda, our favorite. He took a drink and handed the can to me. “Right?”
I told him it was a powerful birthday and even though I wanted to mention how it would have been better if he made up with AK47, I didn’t. We sat on the couch for a while, drinking the can of soda. Then I sat up and remembered what I had wanted to do before going to bed.
“Can we watch it?” I asked.
Gert groaned. “It’s getting late, and it takes forever to set up.”
“Please?” I pinched the weird flabby skin on his elbow and gave it a twist.
He said we could, “but only once through,” and put the can of soda on the coffee table, next to his pack of cigarettes and one of the Viking’s balloon-dragons. He came back with a plastic bag with the VCR in one hand and the VHS tape in the other.
I helped him set up the VCR by plugging the cords into their holes in the TV, putting the red cord into the red hole and the yellow cord into the yellow one, while Gert balanced the VCR on top of the DVD player.
Then I sat on the couch and he put in the videocassette.
The TV was fuzzy at first and then everything became clear. Gert turned up the volume so we could hear the laughter.
In the video we are by the beach. Gert and Mom are wearing sunglasses and their blond hair shines in the sun. The wind makes the waves of the ocean lap against the sand. I am very small and wearing a pink bathing suit, and I have sunglasses on too—big green ones that cover half my face.
“Do your handstand,” Mom says to me, and I am doing a handstand and Gert is holding one of my ankles, and Mom is laughing and holds the other and I am upside down. The waves splash into us, and then we are suddenly running down the beach, all three of us, and shouting as the camera follows us.
We are happy and wet. There are seagulls in the air and no clouds, so they look like letters of the alphabet flying through the sky.
“Where was this again?”
“Florida,” Gert said. “Outside of Fort Lauderdale. We went here on vacation in—”
I closed my eyes. “Nineteen ninety-four,” I said. “I was six years old.”
“You got it.”
The entire video is eleven minutes, then a TV show about the Amazon jungle comes on that someone accidentally taped over the beach video halfway through. The last thing the video shows is Mom laughing as Gert takes the camera and puts it right in her face, her teeth white and her lips wide and her hand pushes the camera away while she laughs like a famous person who does not want to be videotaped.
Then Gert hit STOP and the TV became black again. I had been holding my breath without realizing it and had to catch it.
“All right, time for bed,” Gert said, taking the tape out and putting it into its case.
We did not talk about how Dad was behind the camera, the one who was running after us on the beach, or how the only time I can remember seeing him is when the camera looks down at his bare, hairy feet.
* * *
Vikings spend a lot of time talking about people who are dead, especially those who have died bravely in battle. Our mother died of cancer, not fighting other people, though when Gert tells it sometimes it sounds like a kind of battle: her fighting against a tribe of villains inside her body.
He told me that her hair fell out, that she became skinny and died because they were poisoning her. I don’t remember her being poisoned with radiation, which is invisible. I don’t remember much of anything about her. In the pictures around our apartment, she looks beautiful and blond, which is the hair color of all the famous Viking women.
Gert is blond, when he has his hair and doesn’t shave it. I have dark hair, which is almost black. I do not shave it. Gert will not let me. At times I feel like I should have blond hair too, since I am the one who knows everything about Vikings, then I remind myself that hair color doesn’t make anyone a Viking.
Deeds and actions are what will make a person great and legendary.
Our father named Gert Gert because it is a traditional German name. Gert does not know that I found his box of pictures of our father, which he got after our mother died. There is a photo of our father on a bed, without his shirt, smoking a cigarette. He has a shaved head and tattoos and a mustache and looks very much like Gert. There is another one of him on a motorcycle and Mom hanging on to his stomach, with her arms around him. He has a leather jacket and no helmet, even though riding a motorcycle without a helmet is against the rules and dangerous because if you crack your skull your brains could come out.
We do not know what happened to him. Gert says that he was arrested for breaking into houses and then when he got out of prison he did not come back to the family.
“He’s probably six feet under,” Gert said, meaning dead and buried under the ground.
We are not allowed to talk about Dad, and only sometimes allowed to talk about Mom. Gert does not like to talk about either of them very much.
I don’t know very much about our mother, except what Gert told me. I make up stories about her and tell them to everyone. Vikings believe that telling stories here, on earth, will make a person in Valhalla very happy, and the best way to make someone happy is to make them into a legend that everyone talks about.