Let me give you some background. The year is 2002ish. The setting: Ari’s hot pick bathroom. (It was a new upgrade from her pale blue, Oriental wallpaper and we couldn’t get enough of that new bathroom. We just hung out in there.) Ari’s childhood bathroom had three doors. One led to her bedroom. One led to the next room, a dark in-home movie theater room where Rusty kept foreign artifacts that I worried I would destroy just by being too close to them. The third door, well that was THE door. Behind that door was every tweenage girl’s best imagining of a tweenage bathroom dream. It was a closet. A sept-shelved masterpiece of neon colors, hair ties, nail polish, costume jewelry, floral perfumes, sparkly barrettes, and little items I didn’t even know about because I was too swarthy and introverted to realize the grooming and self-décor potential that lay in the hands of consumer America.
Ari hung avant-guard posters and magazine pages on the door that led to the museum room. That door was usually closed so really it served as a large frame for the muses of a young genius. I think Ari read Vogue (for the articles) as a middle schooler. One day, as I sat on the floor in front of the dream closet tinkering with Ari’s hair pins, Ari was strewn across her new fluffy bathmat, flipping through a magazine with her legs crossed and her little foot swinging from side to side.
“Look at this girl.” she said, sitting up and folding her legs like a graceful movie star from the forties. I put down some nail polish and did a Rambo-esque somersault over my shoulder and washed up next her on the bathmat.
It was a pretty blonde girl, a fashion model of some sort, wearing some bizarre getup but she was attractive and different-looking. In the margins of the page was a blurb about the girl and that’s where we read that she was from Tallin, Estonia. I’m not sure either of us really knew what that meant but we decided everyone from Tallin must be exceptionally beautiful and graceful and we felt an air of superiority for having seen an Estonian person and knowing of such a place because surely the average Joe doesn’t know there is a place called Estonia. We hung the Estonian girl on the inspiration door next to a picture of shirtless fella to whom Ari’s friends had given BBQ themed tattoos.
Since that day on the bathroom floor, I have fancied Tallin, Estonia as a far and exotic land, mostly unheard of and talked about, and a place I wanted to visit for the sake of that twelve year old me. Twelve year old Laura would have felt very special to visit that enigmatic landscape. If you have told me then that I would go there someday, I’d have imagined that I would be much cooler at twenty-eight years old than I have turned out to be. I hate to break it to little Lu that I arrived to Tallin on a well-lit cruise ship full of fat, lethargic tourists during a period of unsophisticated happiness and therefore would not be as introspective and inspired as that swarthy little twelve year old would have liked me to be.
We arrived in Tallin on a cool, rainy day, purchased bright yellow ponchos, and were perhaps more entertained by that translucent plastic than we were the magnificent old town that has been my definition of 'world traveler cool' since middle school. We donned our neon yellow rainwear and giggled at an embarrassing rate. Bystanders smiled at our amusement. “We’re the trash bag family!” Mom said.
Despite the interesting setting, we listed all the things the ponchos made us feel. “We look like exterminators.” said Ellen. “City maintenance worker.” I suggested. “I feel like a duck.” Dad said and then he crouched into a perching position on a city curb and he bocked and clucked at people as they walked by. “I’m nesting.”
We laughed very hard at this and Mom was embarrassed so she made sure to wander away from us slightly and then doubled over laughing once she got some distance.
I have few good depictions of Tallin to share with you. I did not feel inclined to pull out my camera while it was rainy and due to said rain, I’ll gently suggest that it was not as picturesque as it would be on a sunny day. Here's the neat thing though, Tallin is especially cool. It looks like a medieval movie set except that it’s real life. Cobblestone streets, wooden barrels, old wagons, twisty staircases, stone walls, narrow streets. I felt like I was on set for an episode of Game of Thrones…and then a lexus would drive through and a fat tourist would fall down and you’d be snapped back to reality. They also take pride in fancy front doors and I took too many pictures of them. It seems very strange to me that people exist in such a time warp of a place. There is nothing all that modern about it. I’m not sure the mindsets of the locals even really exist in 2018 and I mean that in a nice way. Those Estonian people are like some far off folks you’d hear about living in a place called Estonia or something.
I thought about the beautiful girl from the magazine page on Ari’s door and I wondered if she wandered through the same little market in the rain just like I was doing. I realized she’s probably in her forties now and I couldn’t imagine living the international life of a young model and then moving back into a stone cottage in a medieval town and having two kids (probably on dirt floor by a fireplace) and then sauntering outside to feed your goats. I wonder where that girl lives now and how she would feel knowing that she’s the reason for many abstract, Estonian concoctions by a dreamy little girl from South Carolina.
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