10/18/24: Character Study: Elsa

Author’s note: this is something different - not a story, just a character study. Originally, this was going to dovetail into an adventure through a series of afterlives, in which Elsa looked for her mother, who had wound up in Valhalla because she had died a warrior’s death. But then I got busy with life so it just became a self-contained short instead. I finish boards in a week, and plan to return to regularly scheduled writing/posting after that. Stay tuned!

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When Elsa was eight months old, her mother was on a flight coming back from an East Coast wedding. Mid-flight, somewhere over Cincinnati, one of the doors to the Boeing 747 blew off, leading the cabin to rapidly depressurize. The defect was later found to be a poorly reinstalled panel.

In the minutes just before the plane crashed and killed everyone onboard there was just enough time and, miraculously, cell phone signal for the passengers to call their loved ones and tell them that they loved them. 

Elsa’s father never received any such call. Instead, in that brief window of time before plane became metal, Elsa’s mother managed to transfer every penny of the family’s assets into a trading account which she then used to buy put options against Boeing. The lump of money was considerable, given that they had recently liquidated the entirety of their assets with the intention of buying a house. The profits would later come to total an eight-digit number.

The transaction was titled “elsa’s college fund i love you both so much don’t let her grow up spoiled i love you.”

Growing up, Elsa always said that she would give up the entirety of her inheritance just to spend a day with her mother. But over time she stopped saying this, because it no longer felt true. She couldn’t miss what she never had. Her aunt, one Christmas evening in which she’d had too much to drink, told Elsa that her father had never truly recovered after her mother’s death. Elsa had never known what to say to that. She wasn’t sure whether she should feel guilty about being happy herself.

She was left with a daydream; that of her mother plastered into her seat as the airplane did corkscrews in the air, an oxygen mask strapped against her face, teeth gritted, one hand white-knuckled and holding herself in place, the other typing furiously on her phone trying to complete a trade before she met the ground terminally.

“So, what’s your family like?” the boy sitting across from her asked. 

“I don’t know. Intense?” Elsa said. They were at a small diner, and Elsa had decided she wouldn’t come here again because the eggs had been egregiously overcooked. She hadn’t yet made up her mind about the boy.

“Intense?” the boy asked. “In what way?”

He asked questions too earnestly, she thought. Like he had once been told that he didn’t ask enough questions and thereafter had taken the advice too much to heart. But there were worse things.

“I come from a family of overachievers,” Elsa said. “My dad runs a company. And it’s hard to live up to my mom.” 

She tried not to bring up that her mother was dead because it tended to put a dampener on dates. She was glad when the server came by and interrupted them to pour them more coffee. 

“I know how you feel,” the boy said. “I come from a family of lawyers - sometimes I feel like that’s all they care about, what law school I get into. Not even whether I get into law school, but which one.”

“And that’s what you want to do? Law school?” she said, pushing the eggs around her plate. She should really eat more of the meal - she had a solid block of classes and wouldn’t get another chance at food until the mid-afternoon. Her roommate, who Elsa tolerated, said that on dates she made it a point to eat exactly forty percent of her plate and then complain how full she was, just to keep up appearances. “Ideally, they think you have a well-controlled eating disorder,” she would say. Elsa found this needlessly cynical.

“Well, what I really want is to go into journalism. But there’s no money in journalism,” he said. “Or I would want to be a writer. You know, next great American novel and all that. But I feel like that’s such a stereotype - the liberal arts guy who loves David Foster Wallace unironically and wants to wear a bandanna and do book tours. I don’t know what it says about me that I fit that mold.”

Maybe she would give him a second date, she thought. Maybe even somewhere not a diner. She had a policy of only ever going to breakfast on first dates because 1) there was no pressure to say yes to a drink 2) it filtered out boys who couldn’t get up early 3) both parties had to go to class or work afterwards, so there was an easy excuse for a hard stop.

“Yeah, I think that there’s this tendency for professionally successful parents to worry that their children grow up spoiled,” Elsa said. “My aunt always said that families go through three generation sine waves. The first generation survives a famine, immigrates to a developed country, works flipping burgers or in construction. The second generation is the nurse or office worker, they work hard all their life to be able to send their kid to some fancy school. The third generation are the doctors or lawyers, and raise their kid in extravagance and conspicuous consumption, while losing touch with their roots. The fourth generation grows up spoiled, become artists or god forbid poets, and loses the family fortune on drugs and gambling.” 

“And that’s us?” the boy said with a laugh. “We’re the druggies and gamblers?”

“Sure,” Elsa said, smiling. “We didn’t have to work for our money, not truly. So we take it for granted.” 

The check came, and the boy let her split the check. He gave her a hug as they left. It felt surprisingly familiar. 

“Hey,” she said, as he hopped onto his bike.

“Yeah?” he said. 

“Want to get something on the books for next week?” she said. “It’ll spare us some coordinating.”

“Oh!” he said, surprised. “Yeah let’s do it. Thursday breakfast? I know a pancake place. Ploughburn, down on 3rd street.”

“Pancakes sound good,” Elsa said. “7am?”

“7am it is,” he said, and then he was off, pedaling away down the street, disappearing into the morning fog.